Ill solar winds blow nobody any good

A study funded by NASA has flagged up yet another terrible hazard for those no longer able to get excited about nuclear war, global pandemics, terrorism, climate change, economic meltdown and asteroid strike. Top space brainboxes say that even if the human race survives all those, there is a serious risk of civilisation being brought crashing to its knees by a sudden high-intensity solar radiation storm.?

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Contractors and permies to go

Barclays is laying off another 400 IT staff whose "roles and responsibilities are unclear".?

Like having a TV on your wrist

A US firm has developed a OLED display that?s flexible enough to be worn like a watch, yet large enough to display good quality images on.?

Prison inmate sues Chipzilla for $5bn

An American prison inmate has sued Intel for $5 billion, insisting the chip maker's Core 2 Duo chip and its virtualization technology are based on trade secrets pilfered from him by way of Apple supremo Steve Jobs.?

'We own the touchy, feely internet'

An IP-squatting firm is suing Oprah Winfrey's production company and Sony Electronics over patent infringement for using and promoting software that displays books on the internet.?

First among equals

Bob Muglia's New-Year ascension from "vice" to full "president" of Microsoft's server and tools business is an important milestone in the company's online transition.?

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Banking on Nehalem

Motherboard and server maker Super Micro Computer said today it was not going to make its expected numbers for its fiscal second quarter ended December 31. The economic meltdown is the culprit - of course. But the good news is that Super Micro says that business picked up in December - just not enough to offset a bad November.?

Software as a (dis)service

Exposing the dark side of cloud computing, Salesforce.com suffered an outage that locked more than 900,000 subscribers out of crucial applications and data needed to transact business with customers.?

Fore!! - the new sound of fear

Golf isn't exactly known as a sport of deafening noises, but a provocative (albeit suspiciously anecdotal) study is making the rounds claiming golfers may risk losing their hearing by using newfangled thin-faced titanium drivers.?

Jobs-free keynote fails to inspire

Macworld Expo In one of the least eventful keynote speeches in recent memory, Apple's SVP Phil Schiller, filling in for the ailing Steve Jobs, announced upgrades to iLife and iWork, an upgraded 17-inch MacBook, and iTunes Store pricing-structure changes and DRM-removal plans.?

Sanity check 09?

Besides providing some of the biggest technical innovation of 2008, the cloud also wins the award for most amorphous product definition. Few people define "the cloud" or "cloud computing" the same way, leading to market noise and a wealth of misinformation.?

Answers AT&T, Wal-Mart

Following in the footsteps of AT&T, US electronics retailer Best Buy is now selling resurrected Jesus Phones at a discount.?

$30bn will create 900,000 jobs, healthy IBM

If you were the incoming president of the United States, and you wanted to gauge the effect of an economic stimulus package geared to information technology as a means to create jobs, who would you ask for advice? The economists at the Labor Department? The hot shots at IDC and Gartner? Or maybe the economists at MIT, the University of Chicago, or Stanford University? Nah. Forget that. President-elect Obama's transition team went right to the source: Sam Palmisano, chairman and chief executive officer at IBM.?

Schiller keynote makes $1.29 the new black

Macworld Expo Take your pick - the iTunes Store is going 100 per cent DRM-free, or Apple is whacking 30 cents onto the price of each song and encouraging you to upgrade your whole iTunes library to iTunes Plus, at 30 cents (UK 20p) per song. Apple prefers the 100 per cent DRM-free line, naturally, but there's a price being paid to the record labels, and with "high-quality audio... that?s virtually indistinguishable from the original recording" defined as 256-Kbps AAC, there seems to be headroom for another bite in a year or two.?

The perils of open source

One of the side effects of Adobe Systems releasing code under open-source, the company said last year, has been to let competitors into its Rich Internet Applications (RIA) back yard.?

Blasphemy on Jobsian high holy day

As unfounded as they may be, reports of Steve Jobs's demise have spread to a live feed of Macworld Expo provided by Apple gossip site MacRumors after griefers managed to breach the website's security.?

Macs to join PCs in the cloud

Macworld Expo Microsoft has announced two products designed to provide users of Office 2008 for Mac with improved access to existing server-based Microsoft services.?

Chipmaker joins HP in Atom challenge

AMD has mushed out its new 'Yukon' mobile platform today, which is set to indirectly compete with Intel's Atom platform in slim, low-cost portable PCs.?

Tipping point approaches?

SanDisk has announced new netbook and USB thumb drive flash products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.?

Stars align for services buy

Comment Back in December 2007, a confident GlassHouse Technologies, sensing good prospects in its services and consulting area, filed for an IPO. In the spring of 2008, it entered a strategic partnership with Dell, made another acquisition - and then the recession happened. The company has started firing people as it cuts costs and drives towards profitability in the words of Curtis Preston, one of the world's most influential bloggers about backup technologies and procedures. What is going on??

Up to 16,000 jobs could go

The rumor mill, being stoked by IBM employees talking on a pro-union web site, has it that Big Blue is getting ready to lay off up to 16,000 employees, or about four per cent of its 400,000-strong global workforce, thanks to the slowing of the economies in the United States and Western Europe.?

Beyoncé's not your friend, you berk

Bogus profiles on social networking website LinkedIn are punting malware to the credulous and starstruck.?

Watch films whilst typing emails

Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes. But are two laptop screens better than one? Well, if you want to find out then your pockets had better be deep because the price of Lenovo?s dual-screen ThinkPad has now been confirmed.?

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Donors required to combat 'dire' research shortage

UK scientists have appealed for people to donate their brains to researchers facing a "dire" shortage of grey matter, the BBC reports.?

Scum-burning 737 to debut in Texas

US airline Continental says it will carry out "the first biofuel flight by a commercial carrier using algae as a fuel source" tomorrow. Previous airliner biofuel trials have used controversial "first-generation" feedstocks, seen as contributing to world hunger and deforestation, apart from a recent New Zealand test involving jatropha nuts.?

I'll be your email mirror

Silicon Valley startup Xobni, which develops MS Outlook plug-ins, has raised a $7m series B round of funding led by network giant Cisco.?

Blogspot exploits and Gmail scams slammed

Google has leapfrogged Microsoft to reach third place in a blacklist of spam-friendly ISPs and hosting firms, compiled by anti-spam organisation Spamhaus.org.?

Scareyourself.com

All 43 police forces across England and Wales are now offering online crime maps showing offences broken down by area.?

Hello? I'm on the trolley

England is catching up with Scotland and Wales in liberalising mobile phone use in hospitals, a mere five years after it was established that such use didn't present a significant risk to medical equipment.?

Cameron to do what civil servants decide

David Cameron has pledged that a Conservative government would seek connections to high speed broadband networks for all parts of the country within ten years.?