Microsoft made a slew of virtualization announcements today, affecting both current and future products. Arguably the most important tidbit is that the company has removed the virtualization layer's hardware requirements for the XP Mode available in Windows 7. Those already running XP Mode don't need to bother updating since they already have it working, but users who were unsure of their PC hardware can grab the update and try out XP Mode on Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Enterprise, or ..
Intel has launched its next-generation Xeon 5600 line, the 32nm "Westmere-EP." The new lineup brings more cores, more threads, Turbo Boost, and more instructions, all in the same socket format and thermal/power envelope as the older Xeon 5500 line. At the top end of the 5600 family is the six-core, 3.33GHz X5680, and at the bottom end is the quad-core, 2.40GHz E5620. All of the parts in the 5600 range are hyperthreaded, have 12MB of cache, and support Intel Turbo Boost, the AES new instructions ..
Intel's announcement last week that the company is planning two versions of its Atom processor specifically for the NAS market was easy to overlook. After all, there are a few Atom-based NAS options on the market already, and the new single-core D410 and dual-core D510 aren't really different from their netbook counterparts in anything other than their target platform. But the roster of vendors that has already signed on to produce Atom-based NAS devicesQNAP, Synology, and LaCie, among ..
So there was this article on the Internet recently about how ad blocking is devastating to sites that you love. You may have read it and there's a good chance that you participated in the frank and lively discussion that took place afterwards. One of the things we learned from all of this is that not all people who use ad blockers are actually out to block our ads, and that many of you didn't realize that blocking ads hurt us and the other sites you love. Many care deeply about their privacy, ..
Cisco's Internet-changing announcement is a new router with "12 times the traffic capacity" of its rivals. Read More: Marketwire , Ars Technica Read the comments on this post
Some Vodafone HTC Magic devices have come pre-infected with a Mariposa bot client, Confiker, and Lineage password stealing malware. Read More: PandaResearch Blog , Spanish Mariposa Arrests , Lineage Read the comments on this post
Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why. There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one ..
Since the rise of the Web, SQL-based relational databases have been the dominant structured storage technology behind online applications. The past few years have seen the emergence of the cloud as a compelling environment for online application development, bringing true utility computing into the infrastructure pantheon. But the cloud and SQL do not mix well, and multiple efforts are now underway to offer viable alternatives to the venerable database. In this article, I'll review the forces ..
Intel has announced a $3.5 billion plan to boost US job growth and innovation by investing alongside 24 of the country's top venture capital firms in industries like bioinformatics, clean technology, and IT. The program also includes a commitment by Intel and 17 other tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, Cisco, CDW, Dell, and others, to increase their hiring of US college graduates. The overall plan has been dubbed the "Invest in America Alliance," and Intel itself is putting up $200 ..
Online blogging tools that are designed to make things as easy as possible for anyone to publish online have been around at least a decade and, by now, "blogging" is well-established as a popular form of one- or few-to-many publishing. But a new crop of tools aims to make things even easier by enabling individuals to quickly share several types of common content with others. There isn't an accepted name for this type of content. If Wordpress et al are used for what we traditionally think of as ..
Recent events are causing tech companies to feel less welcome, and they're "finding it increasingly difficult to do business in China." Read More: Financial Times
The recent Google hack has brought security to the top of every IT admin's mind, if it wasn't there already. But securing a network is a huge investment of time and money, to the point that many best practcices are out-of-reach for many small and medium businesses. Nonetheless, there is hope. Windows shops can get a good, cheap head-start on security by simply ensuring that their domain security policy is solid. In this article, Ars shows you how to create a group policy that will secure Active ..
Even if you're a compulsive tweeter, you probably didn't know what Twitter was a year ago. The 140-character broadcast machine has gone far beyond updating your friends about dinner plans, and, for those who use it, Twitter is slowly melding with the fabric of life and work. Turning the simple Twitter mechanism to creative uses has created a whole new toolkit, and I'm routintely surprised at some of the Twitter-based collaboration methods that users have come up with. Of course, for many ..
About 3 billion malicious spam messages are sent per day , according to researchers, a number that spiked during the second half of 2009. Read More: M86 Security , ThreatPost , /.
Cloud computing is one of the most hyped technology concepts in recent memory, and, like many buzzwords, the term "cloud" is overloaded and overused. A while back Ars ran an article attempting to clear some of the confusion by reviewing the cloud's hardware underpinnings and giving it a proper definition, and in this article I'll flesh out that picture on the software side by offering a brief tour of the cloud platform options available to development teams today. I'll also discuss these ..
SAN FRANCISCOMicrosoft's Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) announced during the 2010 Macworld Expo more information about the upcoming Office 2011 for Mac, and users are excited despite the lack of details. Scheduled to be released before the holiday season this year, the revamped Office suite is bringing more parity than ever to the Mac version while still being as Mac-like as it can be. The bit of news that generated the most questionsat least to those of us in the Ars Orbiting ..
Virtualization is a key enabling technology for the modern datacenter. Without virtualization, tricks like load balancing and multitenancy wouldn't be available from datacenters that use commodity x86 hardware to supply the on-demand compute cycles and networked storage that powers the current generation of cloud-based web applications. Even though it has been used pervasively in datacenters for the past few years, virtualization isn't standing still. Rather, the technology is still evolving, ..
Launchpad is a Web-based platform for collaborative software development, and it's designed to enable collaboration among programmers, users, and the wide spectrum of other kinds of contributors who participate in the process of building and deploying software. It provides free project hosting for open source software developers and offers a number of important features, including a bug tracker, a version control system, a package building service, mailing lists, and an integrated framework for ..
In years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip's microarchitecture (pipeline, instruction fetch and decode, execution units, etc.), along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks (the decoder, the floating-point unit, the load-store unit, etc.). This year's ISSCC is well into the many-core era, though, and with single-chip core counts ranging from six to 16, the only elements you're ..
Reuters Pope Offers Apology, Not Penalty, for Sex .. - Reuters VATICAN CITY - Confronting a sex abuse scandal spreading across Europe, including his native Germany, Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday apologized directly and personally to victims and their families in Ireland, ...
The Malaysian Insider Ku Li Claims Petronas Makes Big .. - Themalaysianinside KUALA LUMPUR, March 20 (Bernama) -- Gua Musang MP Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah Saturday claimed he was told that the national oil company, Petronas, ...
Malaysia Star Tom Jones wows crowd with hits spanning .. - Thestar KUALA LUMPUR: Veteran singer Tom Jones proved he still had it during his concert at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre yesterday. He had the 2000-strong audience singing and clapping along to his hits spanning four decades.
Globe and Mail Google aims to retain China unit - Theglobeandmail Google hopes to retain a substantial business presence in China even if its standoff with Beijing over censorship forces it to close its flagship local search engine, local employees and industry experts say.
