Articles by Tim Gray

Hewlett-Packard has redesigned three versions of its desktop PC line to meet new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency energy standards The EPA's Energy Star 4.0 regulations, which take effect on July 20, 2007, require PC manufacturers to convert 80 percent of incoming electricity into usable computer power in order to be declared "energy efficient....

Samsung Electronics is putting the finishing touches on an 8-gigabyte chip -- a high-density embedded flash memory device capable of storing up to 2,000 songs on a mobile phone The South Korea-based company expects to begin mass producing the line of flash memory and firmware chips, called "moviNAND," by the end of the year....

Oracle has joined the board of the Eclipse Foundation, an open source consortium, and says it will donate its Java persistence framework, Oracle TopLink, to help grow the new Eclipse Persistence Platform Project The Eclipse software is already widely used for writing applications in Java and other programming languages, and TopLink is one of the pi...

Microsoft plans to skip its monthly round of security patches scheduled for release next Tuesday, despite at least five zero-day vulnerabilities waiting to be fixed Redmond is working on patches for known vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007's Publisher 2007 and Windows Vista OS, but is not ready to release any fix at the moment, acc...

Microsoft plans to submit a new photo format to an international standards group that it claims offers the highest quality images available with improved compression techniques The format, dubbed "HD Photo" -- formerly called "Windows Media Photo" -- is taking aim at the JPEG format, a 15-year old technology that is still the most popular format us...

Connecticut lawmakers are pushing a bill that would require social networking sites such asMySpace.com to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent for minors who want to post profiles Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, along with Democratic and Republican leaders of the General Law Committee, introduced the legislation on Wednesday, a day a...

Microsoft is putting search at the forefront of its future plans, and is demonstrating its increasing prowess in that field at the company's annual TechFest this week The software giant unveiled nearly 100 new innovations at its Redmond campus, including several key research projects such as the highly anticipated Mix, a new search-based authoring ...

Red Hat andExadel announced a partnership on Monday that will bring Eclipse-based developer tools to Red Hat's JBoss suite of middleware The tools, which are geared toward developing service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 applications, will be made available as open source under the auspices of theJBoss.org community, according to Red Hat....

Cisco Systems is now offering customers an upgraded version of its software and network equipment that links desktop computers to cell phones and other mobile devices The new wireless client software extends desk phone functions to a variety of smartphones and handheld devices, and supports BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems, ...

In its relatively short life online, reference Web site Wikipedia has endured numerous shots from corners ranging from the generally staid Encyclopedia Britannica to a former aide of the late Robert F. Kennedy. Now it's lined up in the sites of a new foe -- a group of high school students with a conservative and religious bent A new Web site called...

A new computer virus targeting antivirus vendor Symantec's security software has hit a division of at least one big U.S. corporation this week and is still considered a threat to other networks The virus, which has reportedly infested CNN and its parent company Turner Broadcasting System, is the latest strain of the Rinbot computer virus, which hij...

Google plans to provide Web advertisers with more data and tools to combat click fraud, a damaging practice that costs advertisers an estimated US$16 billion a year The new tools are part of an effort to crack down on click fraud and dull its impact on the otherwise highly profitable pay per click online advertising model....

Verizon Wireless became the first U.S. carrier to deliver a service that streams television to mobile phones with the Thursday launch of its new Mobile TV on the MediaFLO network The service is available in three separate packages: four channels for US$13 per month; eight channels for $15; or eight channels plus unlimited access to the mobile Web a...

Open source database vendor MySQL and business intelligence (BI) software providerJasperSoft are teaming up in a joint reselling agreement to deliver solutions for the burgeoning ISV/OEM (independent software vendor/original equipment manufacturer) market The two companies announced the availability of Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition, a suite of oper...

Advanced Micro Devices has announced the availability of its AMD 690 chipset, the first integrated chipset that includes the recently acquired ATI Radeon X1250 graphics processor Integration of the Radeon processor means that PCs based on the 690 chipset will not require any additional graphics cards, according to AMD....

A pair of hackers arrested last year for trying to extort US$150,000 from MySpace.com have struck a deal that will spare them jail time. The two pleaded no contest in a Los Angeles court to the lesser charge of illegal computer access Prosecutors agreed to drop extortion charges that could have resulted in four-year jail terms. Instead, the defend...

IBM is offering no guarantees that its Linux-based applications are compatible with Oracle's new version of the Linux operating system As a result, users of the recently released Oracle Enterprise Linux OS who have problems integrating IBM applications will have to call on Oracle -- or sort out the issues themselves....

Swedish wireless equipment giant Ericsson is hoping to boost its multimedia services for the Internet with the purchase ofTandberg Television The buy could push Ericsson to the vanguard of IPTV, or Internet Protocol Television, which is likely to be one of the major markets for the telecom industry in the near future. IPTV uses a broadband Internet...

Eric Raymond, a key figure behind the Red Hat Linux distribution, has sparked a storm of controversy by shifting his allegiance to the rival open source platform Ubuntu The influential developer and cofounder of theOpen Source Initiative used a popular Linux mailing list as his platform this week to slam Fedora, Red Hat's free distribution, levelin...

Tiny computer chips with myriad applications -- from scanning concert tickets to tracking the family dog to monitoring travelers as they cross international borders -- are shrinking, and have now have caught up with the imaginations of science fiction and spy novel writers Japanese electronics maker Hitachi unveiled this week the world's smallest r...