Articles by Susan B. Shor

IBM has taken an experiment -- Blue Gene/L, the world's fastest supercomputer -- and turned it into a commercial, albeit expensive, off-the-shelf product The Blue Gene project began five years ago with the goal of creating a family of supercomputers that could have more commercial applications because they were tuned to bandwidth efficiency, design...

Tesco, the UK retail giant that sells everything from groceries to insurance, has opened its own online music market The download site contains about half a million song files in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format....

Another entertainment industry group has decided to try to staunch the flow of file-sharing by suing those who participate The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced Thursday that it will go the route of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which since September 2003 has sued more than 6,000 people it claims have il...

Amazon.com, the owner of the "1-Click Shopping" patent, is no stranger to either side of patent infringement battles. Now it finds itself in yet another dispute, this one against Cendant Publishing Cendant filed suit in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Del., Oct. 29 against the e-commerce giant claiming that Amazon is using Cendant's patented pro...

Intermec Technologies has cleared the path for retail companies to test second-generation radio-frequency identification (RFID) products and move toward wide-scale adoption, analysts said The company announced that it would suspend for 60 days its intellectual property (IP) licenses to stimulate RFID manufacturers to create and test systems. A next...

Nokia is betting on device convergence with three new gadgets with multiple functions. The announcements were tied to the annual Nokia Mobility Conference in Monaco and Destination Nokia in Bangkok The company announced the 7710, a smartphone PDA; the 3230 camera and video recorder smartphone; and the 6020 camera phone, geared toward a business aud...

Gadget geeks got a rush today when PalmOne officially announced its latest smartphone, the Treo 650, a year after its Treo 600 debuted and a week after it accidentally leaked its own press release on the product Despite the interest in the new device -- rumors of its features began popping up on Web sites months ago -- analysts and aficionados agr...

Finally, there's an end in sight PeopleSoft stockholders have until November 19 to tender their stock for Larry Ellison's "best and final offer" of US$24 a share -- cash -- or $9.2 billion for the whole enchilada....

A new flavor of the Bagle worm that reared its head Thursday is spreadingrapidly around the Internet through e-mail and file-sharing programs The difference between Bagle.bb and the other variants that surfaced since theinitial attack is the way they are packed or which files drop onto the machine,Gregg Mastoras, senior security analyst at the anti...

Computers are becoming pervasive learning tools in K-12 education, whether in individual classrooms or in a shared media center Both Apple and Microsoft have donated millions of dollars worth of equipment to schools in order to aid education and spread their doctrine. But what about the growing influence of Linux? Are students exposed to the open-s...

An investigation coordinated by the U.S. Secret Service netted 28 people suspected of operating an international cybercrime clearinghouse. Authorities made 21 arrests in the United States; seven others were arrested in six different countries The suspects allegedly operated a sophisticated identity-theft marketplace that trafficked in counterfeit c...

Chipmaker AMD is taking its "50x15" plan to India in a partnership with telecommunications company Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL) in a move analysts said blurred the lines between consumer and computing devices. VSNL will market AMD's Personal Internet Communicator (PIC) to Tata Indicom Broadband customers as part of a bundled Internet service, beginning in five Indian cities...

The holiday gaming season officially opened yesterday with the release of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." The third in the immensely popular line of video games -- all of which have been both praised for innovative play environments and vilified for violence and their portrayal of minorities and women -- is expected by analysts to sell at least 4....

SAP and Hewlett-Packard announced today they will jointly offer a business management tool that they say brings enterprise-level best practices to small and medium-size businesses The hosted software will be priced on a per-user basis, starting at $325 per month. SAP's software will sit on top of HP hardware in an HP data center. The cost includes ...

Users of Transaction Processing Facility (TPF), IBM's mainframe operating system, seem to have both pride in the OS and an inferiority complex, often referring to it as "IBM's unknown operating system." Even IBM called it "little known" in a press release for its latest version of the system, z/TPF IBM in early October announced that it was taking ...

Scientists have found direct evidence that massive objects in space do pull the space surrounding them, a phenomenon called "frame-dragging" that was first predicted in 1918 using Einstein's theory of general relativity. The findings were reported in the journal Nature Einstein believed that massive objects such as the Earth pull the space and time...

Intel said today it has shelved plans to design a LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) chip for flat-panel televisions. Intel first touted the chip nine months ago, saying it would drop the price of flat-screen TVs to under $2,000 ...

Just days after dropping prices on its line of Centrino mobile processors for notebook PCs, Intel has added an incrementally speedier chip: the Pentium M 765. Analysts said the new chip is no big deal ...

NEC has upped the high-performance computer ante, launching today what it called the world's most powerful vector supercomputer. The company said the SX-8 has a peak processing performance of 65 teraflops. That speed, however, which would require 512 nodes running together, has not yet been tested IBM's Blue Gene scalar supercomputer reached speeds...

The hack into a UC Berkeley computer that compromised the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people may not be uncommon, according to analysts. The amount of information compromised, however, is huge "University computers in general are notoriously open to attack," Steve Hunt, vice president and research director for Forrester Researc...