Microsoft is withdrawing its offer for Yahoo after talks between the two companies broke down on Saturday. Microsoft hiked its offer to $33 a share, but Yahoo was holding out for $37 a share. The two sides met face to face again Saturday, but remained far apart
British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives. Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby. Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets
Microsoft has withdrawn Vista SP1 from automatic delivery in the wake of news that XP SP3 can cause data corruption in business apps
Amazon.com has filed a lawsuit challenging New York state’s new law forcing online retailers to collect sales tax on shipments to state residents. On Friday, Amazon filed a complaint in the trial-level state Supreme Court in Manhattan objecting to the law, which was approved as part of the $122 billion state budget that Governor David Paterson signed last week. The law is expected to raise about $50 million
Even criminal hackers want to protect their intellectual property, and they’ve come up with a method akin to copyrighting — with an appropriate dash of Internet thuggery thrown in
This week, the world marks an anniversary that has changed the face — and other anatomical regions — of e-mail inboxes everywhere: the first known spam e-mail was sent 30 years ago on Saturday
Computers that boot instantly to the exact place where you left off and mobile devices that don’t need recharging for weeks. These are only some of the possibilities resulting from Hewlett-Packard research that proves the existence of what the company described as the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering
Yet another NSW Government infrastructure project has bit the dust, with the Minister for Commerce today announcing the promised free wireless broadband network for the Sydney CBD and other major centres would be scrapped
A substantial hunk of IP address space has apparently been taken over by notorious mass e-mailing company Media Breakaway, formerly known as OptInRealBig, via means that are at best questionable. The block in question is 134.17.0.0/16, which has been documented in depth in an independent investigation — via Slashdot
PC giant Dell has turned to Officeworks to help unseat its closest rival Hewlett-Packard in a bitter market share war in Australia. After months trying to woo the the retail gods, Dell has found its match in Officeworks. Officeworks will start selling Dell computers, laptops, printers and flat panel displays next week. The PCs will cost between $999 and $1800
Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows. Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today’s technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road
MySpace has won a legal decision against so-called spam king
Sanford Wallace after he failed numerous times to turn over documents or attend hearings
Microsoft on Tuesday said it is delaying the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 because of a newly uncovered glitch. The software maker said there is a compatibility issue
between the XP service pack and Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, a retail chain management program for small and midsize businesses. Microsoft finalised the code for Windows XP SP3 last week and had planned to make it broadly available starting Tuesday
Cray and Intel announced Monday a multiyear agreement to develop new high-performance supercomputers with future Xeon and other Intel processor technologies. Cray will still use AMD chips
A University of Arizona (UA) team is working with NASA to design self-healing computer systems for spacecraft. The UA engineers are working on hybrid hardware/software systems using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to develop these reconfigurable processing systems. As the lead researcher said, Our objective is to go beyond predicting a fault to using a self-healing system to fix the predicted fault before it occurs
— via Slashdot
The sharp acceleration of speculation in Internet names, a practice known as domain tasting
in which names are registered by the millions and tested for their advertising prospects, is under scrutiny
A new Australian green search engine seeking to capitalise on web surfers’ eco-guilt has been barred by Google from using its search technology and advertising platform. Ecocho.com.au, launched just a week ago, promises to buy carbon offset credits that will result in two trees being planted for every 1000 searches made through the site. It gives users the option of searching through either Yahoo or Google and serves up their ads alongside search results. But like other green search engines, it is questionable whether Ecocho really is any more environmentally friendly than regular Google search. Furthermore, Ecocho’s founder, Tim Macdonald, is also the co-founder of Found Agency, a high-profile search engine optimisation company that has been penalised by Google for breaking its rules in the past
InfoWorld confirms that Dell will sell and support Windows XP to consumers beyond the 30 June Microsoft sales cutoff date that Microsoft reaffirmed today, after comments from CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday seemingly indicated it might reconsider that decision. Dell will take advantage of a licensing option in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate that lets PC makers provide XP under the Vista license, which Microsoft calls a downgrade
license. (Enterprises with site licenses have these same rights with any version of Vista.) In essence, the user is buying a Vista license that it can apply to XP, and Microsoft can still claim a Vista sale
Sky One is hoping to continue the successful reinvention of the genre with a multimillion-pound remake of the 1970s British favourite Blake’s 7. The broadcaster yesterday announced that it had approved the development of two new scripts from the production company that holds the rights to the series
The FBI has called for new legislation that would allow federal police to monitor the Internet for illegal activity
. The suggestion from FBI Director Robert Mueller, which came during a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, appears to go beyond a current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks. Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad omnibus
authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well
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