Technology

Rackable received bankruptcy court approval on April 30 to close its purchase of SGI, although it had to raise its original $25 million offer to $42.5 million. On Monday, Rackable announced that the deal had closed and that the combined company would be called SGI — short for Silicon Graphics International instead of the original Silicon Graphics Inc — and continue to use the Rackable brand on some products. It’s a curious turn of events, considering that Rackable has come to represent the new guard in the server market, while SGI has struggled for years

Google first implemented a basic task management service as a Gmail Labs feature, then it developed an iPhone version and an iGoogle gadget. Now you can manage your tasks from Google Calendar. There are two ways to view your tasks in Google Calendar: in the right sidebar, where you can also manage your tasks, and as a built-in calendar

Baby monitors and wireless TV transmitters are responsible for slowing down Wi-Fi connections in built-up areas, according to an Ofcom-commissioned report. The regulator commissioned the report to evaluate the effectiveness of the unlicensed 2.4GHz band that Wi-Fi operates over. The report smashes the myth that huge congestion on overlapping Wi-Fi networks is responsible for the poor performance of Wi-Fi in urban areas. Instead, it points the finger of blame at the raft of unlicensed equipment operating on the 2.4GHz band

A new approach developed by Philips now offers fresh hope for colour e-paper displays that are so bright and clear that even traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) will pale in comparison. According to Kars-Michiel Lenssen, who headed the work at Philips Research, based in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, the new approach has the potential to create colour images that are three times brighter than displays that use colour filters, including LCDs. This is the closest an electronic-paper technology ever got to printed paper, he says

Solar company Konarka has developed a transparent solar cell that it hopes will be built onto electricity-generating windows. The company said it has reached an agreement with Arch Aluminum & Glass to use Konarka’s plastic solar cells in building materials, including windows. Under its Arch Active Solar Glass development, the company has built prototypes of windows with the solar cells between two panes of glass. The photovoltaic cells can be tinted different colours

Last week, we learned about Elsevier publishing a bogus journal for Merck. Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of advertorial publications. Excerpta Medica, a strategic medical communications agency, is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other journals. Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies — via Slashdot

The recent revelation that Intel’s consumer-class solid-state disk (SSD) drives suffer from fragmentation that can cause a significant performance degradation raises the question: Do all SSDs slow down with use over time? The answer is yes — and every drive manufacturer knows it

Many companies restrict the use of colour printers because of high costs — up to eight cents a page, compared to a penny a page for black and white. Xerox hopes to loosen up the colour purse strings with a new $20,000 printer that is says will sharply cut those costs. Xerox says printing colour using the new machine, which uses a proprietary solid ink technology, will be up to 62% cheaper than the price of current laser prints. The machine, called ColorQube, is expected to be unveiled Thursday. It’s a multi-function device that prints, copies, scans and faxes, and is designed to be shared over a computer network by several dozen people in an office

Highly sensitive details of a US military missile air defence system were found on a second-hand hard drive bought on eBay. The test launch procedures were found on a hard disk for the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) ground to air missile defence system, used to shoot down Scud missiles in Iraq. The disk also contained security policies, blueprints of facilities and personal information on employees including social security numbers, belonging to technology company Lockheed Martin — who designed and built the system

Just a few days before their court appearance, Mininova, the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, has started to filter content. The site is using a third party content recognition system that will detect and remove torrent files that link to copyright infringing files

Twelve million computers have been hijacked by cyber-criminals and detected by security vendor McAfee since January, the firm has said. It reports there has been a 50% increase in the number of detected so-called zombie computers since 2008. The true number of newly hijacked PCs is likely to be higher than those detected by McAfee alone. The figures come as a report from Deloitte said a global approach to cyber-security was needed

Enterprise content management maker Open Text plans to acquire rival Vignette for approximately $US310 million ($414 million) in a cash and stock deal. Vignette shareholders will receive $US8 in cash plus 0.1447 of an Open Text common share for every Vignette common share. This equates to approximately US$12.70 at close of market on 5 May. According to Open Text, the offer represents a premium of around 74 per cent above the 30 trading day average closing price of Vignette’s shares and approximately 41 per cent above the most recent closing price. The Vignette buy is the latest in a string of acquisitions for Open Text that have included e-documents provider Captaris

Each April, the US releases the Special 301 Report, which examines the intellectual property laws of its main trading partners. The release generated international headlines last week as countries such as Canada and Israel found themselves on the “Priority Watch List” of countries that the US claims are the world’s worst piracy offenders. In all, the US targeted 46 countries. In addition to the usual suspects such as China and Russia, Europe came in for heavy criticism with Finland, Norway, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland all on the Watch list

A little over a decade ago, archaeologists experienced a collective nightmare — the emergence of eBay, the Internet auction site that, among other things, lets people sell looted artefacts. The black market for antiquities has existed for centuries, of course, with devastating consequences for the world’s cultural heritage. But we could at least take some comfort that it was largely confined to either high-end dealers on one end of the economic spectrum or rural flea markets on the other. The sheer physical constraints of transporting and selling illegal artefacts kept the market relatively small. But the rise of online auction sites promised to drastically alter the landscape. And so it did, just not in the dire way we had anticipated

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging. This is perfectly sufficient, he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. Perfectly sufficient