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AT&T announced its new cloud computing service on Tuesday, dubbed "AT&T Synaptic Hosting." With the new offering, the telecommunications company joins Amazon, Google and IBM as a service provider in the nascent application hosting market The service is aimed at providing companies with greater flexibility, improved performance and cost savings by e...

AT&T announced its new cloud computing service on Tuesday, dubbed "AT&T Synaptic Hosting." With the new offering, the telecommunications company joins Amazon, Google and IBM as a service provider in the nascent application hosting market The service is aimed at providing companies with greater flexibility, improved performance and cost savings by e...

Microsoft will begin sharing technical details with security partners about vulnerabilities addressed in its monthly security updates, known as "Patch Tuesdays," the company announced Tuesday at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas The move, according to the company, was prompted by a growing but undesirable trend associated with Patch Tuesdays th...

Sony has acquired German media giant Bertelsmann's 50 percent stake in Sony BMG Music for US$900 million. Bertelsmann gets another $300 million for its share of the cash on Sony BMG's books Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that Sony BMG will buy back part of Bertelsmann's stake for $600 million, with another $600 million com...

A new discovery made on Mars throws a curve ball at the question of whether life ever existed on the Red Planet. NASA's Phoenix Lander has uncovered a harshly reactive salt called "perchlorate" in soil samples taken from the ground The finding stands in stark contrast to the original belief that Mars's soil was in many ways similar to Earth's and ...

Dell has successfully navigated through a considerable stretch of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office maze in its quest for ownership of the ubiquitous technology industry term "cloud computing." On March 23, 2007, Dell filed an Intent to Use application with the PTO; its request was published and went unopposed. Earlier this month, the company r...

We've all done it. The holiday season was crazy, the busiest ever. We missed feature lockdown by a mile, cramming in every last bit just as things began to seriously ramp up. The servers went down on Black Friday. A database crash prevented us from processing returns for four agonizing days. Somehow we managed to survive, adding more chewing gum and baling wire to an e-commerce system than has been stuck to the underside of a third grade desk.

The latest enhancements to Landslide's sales application sparked the interest of Chris Bucholtz, who blogged about it at InsideCRM. "Here's what Landslide provides in the new release: a single-screen interface that walks its users through the standard tasks that CRM fulfills -- gathering data on customers and leads -- and then beyond that into a s...

HP announced Monday a new round of open source utilities for data center operators. The expanded portfolio increases support for HP Serviceguard for Linux, HP's clustering and disaster tolerance products, to include Novell Suse and Red Hat Xen virtual machines HP also introduced its HP Strategy Workshop and Migration Assessment Services. These offe...

Firing up a brand-new PC is a magic moment that can never be recaptured. The flawless performance, the lightning-fast speeds, the uncluttered desktop -- they're a thing of beauty. In time, though, just about all PC users will have to cope with their share of problems, from sluggish download speeds to out-and-out system failures For anyone with the ...

Intel on Monday released technical details about its upcoming line of microprocessors, codenamed "Larrabee" in advance of the company's presentation at the SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) conference, to be held in Los Angeles next week. The family of chips will be the springboard for a many-core -- as few a...

IBM has sharply increased its commitment to cloud computing by slotting US$400 million for new data centers in North Carolina and Tokyo. The bulk of the investment, $360 million, is earmarked for a center in Research Triangle Park, between Durham and Raleigh A new $40 million data center planned for Tokyo is the company's ninth cloud computing proj...

Wireless technology giant Motorola has landed a top Qualcomm executive to run its mobile devices unit, which is expected to be spun out in the second half of 2009 Sanjay Jha, former chief operating officer at San Diego-based Qualcomm, is now co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of the Schaumburg, Ill.-based company's mobile devices unit....

The latest ICANN plan to allow the global populace to assemble an entire domain name like www.yourname.yourname as their free choice is a revolutionary and timely decision. This now opens doors to cyber-brands like "my.ibm," "hotel.chicago," "it.jobs," "play.poker," "fly.usa" or "go.dell." Applicants will submit a non-refundable fee of US$100,000 to $500,000 for each name idea, and businesses are already jumping to get started...

Mozilla is making a move toward open Web standards with its upcoming Firefox 3.1 release. The software -- now available in test builds -- will support the Ogg Theora video codec, the company revealed at its summit in British Columbia last week The inclusion of the Ogg Theora codec means users will no longer have to download plug-ins or use JavaScri...

Enterprise virtualization provider 3Leaf Systems announced Monday the release of its V-8000 Virtual I/O (input/output) Server version 2.0 This software, part of the 3Leaf Virtual Compute Environment, is designed for disaster recovery, streamlined management and enhanced availability for large x86 server deployments. The V-8000 version 2.0 software ...

When it comes to the preferred avenue for information access, the Internet continues to be the medium of choice. From news to commerce to entertainment, our always-on culture is constantly finding new ways to satisfy its digital fix, placing unknown and sometimes intensive demands on enterprise networks. Although you may be blind to the next performance-impacting service capitalizing on the pervasive connectivity of the Internet, there are top-down and bottom-up approaches to ensure "the next big digital thing" doesn't cripple your business' productivity along with your network...

By a vote of 3-2, the Federal Communications Commission has sharply rebuked Comcast for its network management practices. It found not only that Comcast's practices were invasive, but also that the company was likely motivated by anticompetitive issues "The Commission found that Comcast monitors its customers' connections using deep packet inspec...

The poor enterprise portal. It has had more lives than a cat and more personalities than a summer stock theatre troupe. After a decade of wandering from fad to fad (remember intranets, knowledge management and corporate taxonomies?) the enterprise portal is back, and in a big way. But this time the enterprise isn't leading the way, it is following ...

It's been an interesting week. As if to prove the point of last week's column, Steve Jobs used his impressive skills to trick a New York Times reporter he didn't like into giving him a clean bill of health. This was brilliantly done, and there are some real lessons here that dovetail with last week's piece. The Wall Street Journal got wind of ...