PC World Business

Sanyo Electric has developed a blue laser diode that will help lay the ground toward higher capacity and faster Blu-ray Disc systems.

June 25, 1998, and June 30, 2008, marked two important milestones in Microsoft's evolution of the Windows OS -- the passing of the torch from Windows 95 to Windows 98, and the less seemly transition from XP to Vista.

Apple doesn't need Steve Jobs, an analyst argued Monday.

Toshiba is close to launching its first commercial direct-methanol fuel-cell device, which promises a faster way to recharge portable electronics products.

Apple boosted its share of the US consumer smart phone market by 55 percent after cutting the price of its iPhone and rolling out a 3G model this summer, a research firm said Monday.

Telstra (ASX:TLS) has confirmed that the Enhanced HSPA (eHSPA) addition to the Next G wireless network is compatible with Next G devices, clearing the way for the world's first 21Mbps national network.

High-tech rides

The Sidekick 2008 has the best cell-phone keyboard I've ever used, and its trackball lets you whip through messages at lightning speed. Even so, that isn't quite sufficient to sway me to T-Mobile's newest hipster smart phone. Why? I blame the poky EDGE network, the phone's limited productivity uses, and the fact that I'm apparently not young enough.

For its asking price, ASUS’ DSL-N13 offers a fair whack of value. It is easy to set up and maintain, but poor local throughput and Internet speeds are big deterrents.

Text chats conducted using the Chinese version of Skype that contain keywords such as "Taiwan independence" and "Communist Party" are logged along with identifying IP addresses and usernames, then stored on insecure servers, a Canadian researcher said yesterday.

IBM is targeting retail security with a package of software and services designed to prevent physical loss of merchandise, protect against electronic threats and comply with credit card industry regulations.

With built-in Wi-Fi now a regular feature of the latest PCs and notebooks, the role of the humble USB adapter is somewhat diminishing. However, with the expansion of 802.11 draft-n Wi-Fi into homes over both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, chances are your computer isn’t transferring files at the fastest possible speeds. D-Link’s DWA-160 solves this problem with a fairly quick dual-band USB adapter capable of connecting and communicating with the latest high-end draft-n routers.

Not long ago, the powers-that-be detected an impending crisis. To resolve it, they rushed into action crafting a proposal that represented an unprecedented upheaval of existing infrastructure. On the grounds that "something needed to be done" to avert the crisis, they brushed aside objections that the upheaval was too convulsive and might nonetheless fail to address the underlying issues that had created the crisis in the first place.

Microsoft has extended the availability of Windows XP on new PCs by six months, the company confirmed Friday.

The rumor mills have been running at full capacity to figure out the mystery behind a new Apple product called the MacBook Brick. Over at 9to5mac an (undisclosed and unspecified) Apple insider revealed that the Brick is in fact a new manufacturing process. This new manufacturing process is based around using lasers and water-jets to carve a single block of aluminum into a MacBook chassis.

Lawyers in the "Windows Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit against Microsoft have asked a federal judge to force the company to use its Windows Update service to notify potential class members, court documents filed Thursday revealed.

Investing in desktop virtualisation systems can save organisations swathes of money, according to a recent IDC case study.

It’s not every day that new mouse tracking technology comes along. With laser optics doing the job, there hasn’t been much of a need. Nevertheless, Microsoft hopes to turn the tables with BlueTrack, the tracking technology behind its new Explorer Mouse.

June 25, 1998, and June 30, 2008, marked two important milestones in Microsoft's evolution of the Windows OS -- the passing of the torch from Windows 95 to Windows 98, and the less seemly transition from XP to Vista.

Symantec has developed a new online service to protect children from Internet dangers.

What Gates, McCain and others have said about those pesky, unwanted e-mails.

Users should be on guard for spam touting the guilty verdict of former professional football star O.J. Simpson, a security company warned.

The Unified Threat Management (UTM) market has already started to outgrow the point security solution segment, said analyst firm IDC.

Sanyo Electric has developed a blue laser diode that will help lay the ground toward higher capacity and faster Blu-ray Disc systems.

Microsoft Monday laid out its road map for SQL Server and a complement of add-ons it hopes will eventually redefine business intelligence and data warehousing.

A small business is not necessarily a simple business. That rather basic lesson has taken much of the computer industry far too many years to learn. Successful SaaS vendors have realized that small businesses need the same sort of functions and support that large enterprises get -- just in smaller quantities. Clearly Microsoft has come to the same realization with the release of Small Business Server 2008.

Red Hat Thursday released a Linux software stack for compute-intensive IT environments that it said costs less than Microsoft's price for its comparable Windows offering.

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 Mono Project, which develops an open source implementation of the .Net Framework, released the long-awaited 2.0 version on Monday.

Thirteen members of Norway's International Standards Organisation (ISO) body, Standard Norway, have resigned over the country's approval for the controversial Microsoft OOXML document format.

If Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the State Board of Education have their way, soon every California student will have to pass an algebra test to graduate from the eighth grade.

Microsoft on Wednesday is revealing an updated platform strategy to support composite applications in Windows Server and the .Net Framework programming model.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed a few details on Wednesday of a forthcoming operating system that will help developers write Internet-based applications.