Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, once bitter rivals, are growing ever closer through interoperability agreements that aim to make life easier for their respective customers. On Wednesday, Microsoft and Sun announced a new facet to their relationship: Sun is now a Windows Server OEM. What's more, Sun and Microsoft will collaborate to facilitate deployment of Windows Server on Sun x64 systems....
On Wednesday, Yahoo inked an exclusive pact with Bebo, a social-networking site with a significant European footprint. The deal puts Yahoo's display advertising in front of the Bebo audience. Yahoo will sell the majority of Bebo's display advertising in the UK and Ireland. That gives Yahoo advertisers the potential to reach about 11.6 million users -- and not just any users. This deal opens the...
What do you get when you cross the producers of hit shows like Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life with MySpace? The answer is Quarterlife, a new online series from Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick. Beyond My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething, the dynamic duo produced Legends of the Fall and Blood Diamond. Now, they'll try their hand at Web television with the launch of the Quarterlife...
It can now be stated plainly: Sun Microsystems has officially lost its old-time religion. Thanks to an expansion of its three-year-old alliance with one-time nemesis Microsoft, Sun will now resell and install Windows on its x86-based servers. In other words, the company that was famous for its scrappy David vs. Goliath war with the forces of Wintel will sell servers built around Intel chips and...
Despite some progress, the government's climate change research program is threatened by satellite and other cutbacks, a study says. A major problem, the National Research Council said Thursday, is the program director's lack of authority to organize spending and research among the 13 different agencies that study the impacts of climate. Nonetheless, the report said, the U.S. Climate...
The most common type of gorilla is now "critically endangered," one step away from global extinction, according to the 2007 Red List of Threatened Species released Wednesday by the World Conservation Union. The Ebola virus is depleting Western Gorilla populations to a point where it might become impossible for them to recover. Commercial hunting, civil unrest and habitat loss due to...
People with heart disease may want to steer clear of heavy traffic when exercising or simply take their workout indoors to avoid breathing polluted air. Exercising in areas with high levels of diesel exhaust and microscopic soot particles is especially risky for people with heart disease, according to the first study in which heart patients were directly exposed to pollution. European...
Eating less meat could help slow global warming by reducing the number of livestock and thereby decreasing the amount of methane flatulence from the animals, scientists said on Thursday. In a special energy and health series of the medical journal The Lancet, experts said people should eat fewer steaks and hamburgers. Reducing global red meat consumption by 10 percent, they said, would cut...
WEDNESDAY 12. SEPTEMBER 2007
If you're fed up with using an iPhone on AT&T's network, you now can download software to unlock your Apple handset. One package, developed by iPhoneSimFree, is now available from resellers in the U.S., the Middle East, and Europe. It'll set you back $99. Once installed, though, the app allows you to use your iPhone with another carrier. The world's hackers have been obsessed with unlocking the...
Bebo, which describes itself as the No. 1 social network site in the UK and Ireland, has struck a deal with Yahoo that marks the Internet portal's first major agreement with a social-networking site. The ad deal includes direct sales for a majority of Bebo's display ads. Bebo was founded in 2005 and has an audience of some 11 million users. Yahoo will continue providing the search features on...
Microsoft and Novell have unveiled their new Interoperability Lab, which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Interoperability Lab was announced last autumn as part of a five-year collaborative agreement between the two companies. The 2,500-square-foot workspace will serve as a test bed for resolving the interoperability issues that currently inhibit the capabilities of SUSE Linux...
Dell is planning to be the first computer maker out the door with a server that will include VMware's ESX Server 3i hypervisor for virtualization, embedded in hardware. The new server, highlighted during the keynote address Tuesday at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco and scheduled to ship by the end of November, is codenamed Veso. Optimized for virtualization, the two-socket system will have twice...
Seven states have banded together to challenge Microsoft. California led the charge in seeking to extend the government's antitrust oversight of Microsoft until 2012. That would mean adding five years to a federal court's original judgment. Microsoft reached its antitrust settlement with the federal government and 17 states in 2002. The oversight is scheduled to expire November 12. But...
Palm has announced its first non-touchscreen smartphone for Windows Mobile 6. Beginning in October, the Treo 500v will be available to Vodafone customers in Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and South Africa. Plans for other countries have not yet been announced, although Current Analysis analyst Avi Greengart said a "similar-looking phone" with Palm OS is planned...
After its fair share of zero-day vulnerabilities and scores of patches over the past few quarters, Microsoft's September Patch Tuesday might seem uneventful for I.T. admins. Still, there is some work to do this month with four patches in the hopper. One critical patch fixes a bug in Windows Server 2000 that potentially allows a hacker to take control of a victim's computer from a remote...
A massive earthquake hit Indonesia on Wednesday, triggering a tsunami in the town of Padang and warnings for much of the Indian Ocean region, meteorological officials said. At least one person was killed and dozens injured. The 8.2-magnitude quake off Sumatra island caused tall buildings to sway in a least four countries. It struck at a depth of around 10 kilometers (six miles), the U.S....
The life expectancy for Americans is nearly 78 years, the longest in U.S. history, according to new government figures from 2005 released Thursday. That age, based on the latest data available, was still lower than the life span in more than three dozen other countries, however. More bad news: The annual number of U.S. deaths rose from 2004 to 2005, a depressing uptick after the figure...
Africanized honeybees, a fierce hybrid strain sometimes referred to as "killer bees," appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the state agriculture commissioner said. A swarm of the bees was captured about five miles from where demolition workers found a colony of Africanized bees in January, commissioner Bob Odom said Tuesday. The most recent find was close enough...