Stories about: URS

An online retailer is selling a 12-core Opteron server processor from Advanced Micro Devices ahead of the product's official launch by the chip company.

The carbon footprint of a search query is nowhere near the estimate concluded by a Harvard academic, Google said late Sunday.

Although the BlackBerry Storm needed a firmware upgrade just two weeks after going on sale, business users are still expected to warm up to the touch-screen handheld.

Google's leadership on the Web stems partly from its powerful data centers, which allow it to provide lightning-fast search results while keeping energy costs to a minimum. The company has been mostly secretive about what goes on inside these giant computing factories, but on Wednesday it offered a peek at what it has been able to achieve -- on the energy side at least.

The Controller Area Network (CAN) specification describes a networking stack aimed at a specific environment: embedded, realtime controller networks. At the physical layer, it uses a differential serial technology which is intended to be highly resistant to electrical noise. The higher-level protocols use short datagrams (eight bytes maximum payload) and extensive checksumming to minimize the effect of errors. The protocols are simple in the extreme, placing the smallest possible demand on embedded controllers. CAN will be found in relatively small and hostile environments -- inside automobiles, for example. So it makes sense that an automobile manufacturer--not the sort of company known for leading-edge Linux kernel development--is working to get a CAN implementation into the mainline kernel.

It's hard to imagine the online ad market cooling off, but when it eventually does, companies that make their living from it would do well to have a back-up plan.

Climate Savers has defined a series of standards for power supply efficiency in servers and PCs that it suggests members adopt between now and July 2010.

IBM and HP, in separate announcements, have each used words such as "simple", "reliable" and "affordable" to describe how each of their new products serves the small-to-medium business market.

The days of tossing out corporate electronic waste like common trash are pretty much over. Environmental concerns and data security regulations are driving more companies to develop rigorous disposal policies. Yet there's more to the proper interment of IT equipment than many executives realize, and many companies still fail to handle their electronic waste wisely. Even those who think they're doing the right thing could find their technology trash coming back to haunt them in unexpected ways.

DRM (digital rights management) technology may actually be good for consumers because it could give them more choices for downloading or buying copyrighted content, some speakers at a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) event said Wednesday.