Dave Bailey, IT Week, Thursday 31 January 2008 at 00:00:00
Government agencies could release a large amount of their spectrum holdings
UK comms regulator Ofcom has released plans for government agencies and public organisations to share, trade or release radio spectrum they currently use solely, a development which could boost the...
read moreMicrosoft faces financial and legal hurdles in its unsolicited bid for Yahoo. CNET News.com walks you through the potential steps. read more
A Croatian college student has created a utility that installs a seriously stripped-down Windows Vista, saying the heft of Microsoft's biggest desktop OS was just too big to believe. "Who can justify a 15GB operating system?" asked Dino Nuhagic, a fifth-year student from Split, a Croatian city on the Adriatic. Not Nuhagic, or the uncounted users wh... read more
Microsoft offers to buy struggling Yahoo for $44.6 billion to better compete against Google. Also: Vista's one-year anniversary. read more
Lenovo, Fujitsu to use Intel's MacBook Air chip
Lenovo and Fujitsu are in the process of putting together systems based on the special Core 2 Duo ch...
Charlotte Baxter, IT Week, Friday 1 February 2008 at 00:00:00
Icann has rejected the top shelf top level domain for the third time
A proposal has been rejected to give adult websites their own top-level domain. This is the third time that Icann, the agency which regulates web addresses, has said no to...
read moreWASHINGTON - The Justice Department on Friday said it is interested in reviewing antitrust issues associated with Microsoft Corp.'s nearly $45 billion buyout bid for Yahoo Inc. and analysts...
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Mozilla Corp. bumped up the threat ranking for an unpatched Firefox bug to "high" Tuesday, but promised a fix is coming in Version 2.0.0.12, now slated for release on Feb. 5. The company's head of security, Window Snyder, confirmed that the browser, when running any of more than 600 add-ons, can be exploited to steal "session information, including session cookies and session history."
Snyder's acknowledgment followed an update by Gerry Eisenhaur, the researcher who first reported the Firefox problem. "There seems to be some confusion about what exactly the severity of this vulnerability is," Eisenhaur said on his hiredhacker.com blog. "This is not a chrome privilege escalation, but it [is] worse than just leaking some variables. I created another demo to read the sessionstore.js file. This will display information regarding your current session, [including] windows, tabs, cookies, etc."
View: The full story @ PCWorld
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Desktop Notebook Found Under A Rock
Desktop notebook found under a Rock Februray 1, 2007 TAKING ADVANTAGE of the green team’s recently announced 8800 SLI graphics card for notebooks, Rock has been beavering away to create a notebook that not only has dual-chip graphics, but a quad-core processor. Yes, the chassis is an absolutely behemoth and ugly as sin, saved only by its [...]
Desktop notebook found under a Rock
Februray 1, 2007
TAKING ADVANTAGE of the green team’s recently announced 8800 SLI graphics card for notebooks, Rock has been beavering away to create a notebook that not only has dual-chip graphics, but a quad-core processor. Yes, the chassis is an absolutely behemoth and ugly as sin, saved only by its glossy black stylings. There’s no Penryn - this is old-school 65nm quad core, no less.
In fact, its an X6800 desktop chip, which harks back to the old Pentium 4 laptops of old. Buyers can also have the system outfitted with a pair of 500GB drives for a total of 1TB of storage. Optical duties are handled by an HD-DVD drive. The Rock Xtreme SL8, as it will be called, will be available in late February for between £2500 and £3000. If you’ve got the backbone to match your wallet size, then we wish you the utmost enjoyment. And we mean actual physical backbone - you’re going to need it to haul this thing anywhere.
Zap to do three-wheeled car in 2009
Three-wheeled cars may make a comeback with the craze over electric cars coming to a boil.
Rosalie Marshall, IT Week, Wednesday 30 January 2008 at 00:00:00
New report recommends Indian providers focus on domestic market
UK firms could find it more difficult to obtain offshored IT services as the Indian national software body this week advised local firms to shift their focus to the domestic...
read moreNew 802.11n AP works with legacy PoE 
Dave Bailey, IT Week, Wednesday 30 January 2008 at 00:00:00
Siemens is offering firms a route to 802.11n that does not involve a costly PoE upgrade
Comms vendor Siemens announced plans earlier this month to release 802.11n equipment that is designed to make deployment of the high-speed wireless networks easier and more affordable....
Amazon to acquire Audible for $300 million
By the second quarter of 2008, Amazon.com Incorporated plans to acquire Audible Incorporated, the leading online provider of premium digital spoken word audio content. Through its web sites in the US and UK and alliances in Germany and France, Audible.com offers over 80,000 programs, including digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, television and radio programs and original programming. Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon.com will commence a cash tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of Audible.com for $11.50 per share and will assume Audible.com's outstanding stock-based awards, for an aggregate transaction value of approximately $300 million.
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Techconnect Review Round-up 31/1/08
CPU & Motherboard
- Contemporary Dual-Core Processors Shootout @ X-bit labs
- MSI P7N SLI Platinum (NVIDIA nForce 750i SLI) @ HardwareZone
- abit AN52 vs. MSI K9A2 Platinum @ Digital-Daily
- MSI X48 Platinum @ AnandTech
Memory
- Corsair CM2X4096-6400C5DHX @ TrustedReviews
- G.Skill 2x1GB DDR3 PC3-12800 Review @ Hardware Canucks
Storage
- ASUS BC-1205PT Blu-ray Combo @ CDRLabs
- LaCie Hard Disk Design by Neil Poulton 500GB @ Digital Trends
Graphics cards
- VVIKOO 8800GT-MAX 1024MB GDDR3 Zalman Copper Heatsink Graphics card @ OCWorkbench
- ECS GeForce 8800GT Accelero S1 512MB @ TweakTown
- Inno3D Arctic-Cooling iChiLL 8800 GT Accelero X1 @ Legion Hardware
Enclosures & PSUs
- Antec True Power Quattro 850 Watt Power Supply @ HardwareLogic
- Origen S21T Motorized 12.1 inch touch screen HTPC enclosure @ Madshrimps
- Zumax 950 Watt X4 Review @ Overclockers Club
- Antec Truepower Quattro 1000w ATX PSU @ OC3D
Displays
- Samsung PS42Q97HDX 42in plasma HD TV @ RegHardware
Cooling and modding
- Thermaltake Duorb @ Tweak.dk
- Scythe NINJA Copper CPU Cooler @ 3dGameMan
- CPU Cooler Roundup on C2D – 12 Compared @ Dragon Steel Mods
- Sleet VGA Cooler @ Fusion Mods
- Thermaltake NBcool T2000 Notebook Cooler @ Techware Labs
- Akasa revo Universal Bubble Pump cooler @ XtremeComputing
Computers and laptops
- Acer Veriton M460 @ TrustedReviews
Sound
- Saitek Cyborg 5.1 Headset Review @ 3DXtreme
Other
- Rosewill RHUB-310 7-Port USB 2.0 Hub @ OCModShop
- OnAir USB HDTV-GT @ Viperlair
- AutumnWave OnAir HDTV-GT USB ATSC/NTSC Tuner/Receiver @ ThinkComputers
- Booq Mamba Sling Laptop Bag @ ThinkComputers
- Samsung HT-X30 - 5.1 DVD System @ TrustedReviews
- Loc8tor Lite @ TrustedReviews
Stick with HSUPA for faster downloads 
Dave Bailey, IT Week, Thursday 24 January 2008 at 00:00:00
The UK's fastest mobile connectivity can now be accessed via a handy USB modem stick
Launched earlier this month, Vodafone's USB modem stick is a neat little device for accessing the operator's High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) service....
Online merchant of common folks, Amazon.com has now announced that it will be buying Audible Inc., the company behind audiobook shop Audible.com. The acquisition is set to be worth about $300 million and consist of cash money and short-term investments and will provide Amazon.com with a bigger piece of the audio content market. Audible.com already offers over 80,000 programs, either 'classic' audiobooks or spoken-word audio content.
As planned Amazon will be paying $11.50 per Audible share and, if everything goes well, the deal will be closed by the end of Q1. read more
Amazon to acquire Audible.com
Online merchant of common folks, Amazon.com has now announced that it will be buying Audible Inc., the company behind audiobook shop Audible.com. The acquisition is set to be worth about $300 million and consist of cash money and short-term investments and will provide Amazon.com with a bigger piece of the audio content market. Audible.com already offers over 80,000 programs, either 'classic' audiobooks or spoken-word audio content.
As planned Amazon will be paying $11.50 per Audible share and, if everything goes well, the deal will be closed by the end of Q1.
Russia's Comstar to build WiMax network in Armenia
Comstar UTS said it had started to build a mobile broadband network using WiMax technology in Armenia.
Video games give actors second chance
Games help resuscitate careers of many film and TV actors, whose distinctive voices can make them a hot commodity the game world.
The first month of Spring will be rockin' if you own Rock Band as Harmonix is planning to make available for purchase and download three new rock packs plus a few more 'hardcore' tracks. The first release will be the Thrash Pack (on March 4th) which will include At The Gates' Blinded By Fear, Evile's Thrashes and The Haunted:'s Shadow World.
On March 11th the added songs are The Police's Message in a Bottle, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Simple Man and a cover of Bad Company's Shooting Star. Next up, on March 18 it's the Nine Inch Nails pack which will include March of the Pigs, The Perfect Drug and The Collector. Last but not least, on March 25th the Metal Pack will feature Metallica's Fuel and covers of Black Sabbath's Supernaut and Iron Maiden's Wrathchild. Rock on? read more
This is bound to please Apple [quote]More than a quarter of iPhones sold in the US have been "unl... read more
Microsoft Tuesday announced that the latest revision of its premier development suite – Visual Studio 2008, or VS2008 for short – is now generally available. Developed under the code name "Orcas," the package was actually completed in mid-November, ahead of schedule, and made available to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) subscribers for download ... read more
Amazon.com profit up, margins squeezed
Shares fell about 3.5 percent after quarterly earnings came in ahead of Wall Street targets, but profit margins declined.
Fame and fortune seeker, Linspire together with free Linux software delivery service CNR.com have now announced their intention to launch a 'Pimp my OS' (operating system) program. The idea behind the program is to build Debian or Ubuntu-based custom desktop OSes based on what customers need and want.
"With desktop Linux, more and more partners are asking for customization so they can take control of the OS," stated Larry Kettler, President & CEO of Linspire, Inc. "This service will not only provide the feature sets they want, but cut the time it takes to get to market with their products, as well as greatly reduce the overall cost to deliver a custom desktop Linux operating system."
Based on an initial idea to make the release management process for Linspire's partners more resource efficient and less prone to defects, the Custom OS Build Service tool set will now provide the ability to quickly produce 'new' OSes, with customizable software stacks and features. Linspire has yet to announce when the program will become available but we're betting it won't be too long until we hear someone saying - "Thanks Linspire, for pimpin' my Linux." read more
A federal judge ruled on Tuesday to extend the U.S. government's antitrust oversight of Microsoft Corp for two more years, but stopped short of granting a five-year extension sought by...
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