Articles by Jay Lyman

A newInternet venture that screams "too good to be true" is testing users' taste for gamesmanship in the online auction space, offering electronics, jewelry and other luxury items at a fraction of their retail prices The idea is that UniqueAuction.com, launched in September, makes up for the loss on the item by charging bidders fees -- US$2 per bid...

The U.S. House Committee on Government Reform this week issued its most recent grades for IT security among government agencies, and once again, the division charged with ensuring cyber security for the nation got an F The Committee said despite investment and improvement efforts, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was not passing the test o...

PChardware upgrades ushered in withMicrosoft's forthcoming Vista operating system should deliver a bump in year-end shipments and revenue for vendors, according toSamsung The electronics giant stressed the advantage for users of making a US$100 to $250 upgrade of flash memory and other hardware versus incurring the expense of a new computer. A tota...

After weeks of speculation and to no surprise, Sony confirmed this week its next-generation Playstation 3 console will not ship this spring, but instead it will be delayed until the end of the year The announcement means added pressure for the electronics giant, since the postponement lengthens Microsoft's lead time with its Xbox 360 console releas...

South Korean electronics giantSamsung announced that it will mass produce DDR2 DRAM memory using the smaller-scale, 80-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process. The move promises to boost efficiency both for Samsung and its DDR2 customers, who use the computer memory mainly in PCs The shift comes as the demand for DDR2 increases, Samsung said, driven ...

Europe is feeling pressure to boost its efforts to speed the global adoption of radio frequency identification (RFID), a wireless technology already used by U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart for much of its merchandise and shipping operations European Commission officials indicated at the CeBIT technology conference in Hannover, Germany, this week that th...

Intel used its Developer Forum event in San Francisco this week to debut new computer chip technology that the company said boasts energy efficiency alongside performance gains Intel unveiled a quad-core processor configuration that some have referred to as a processor with two dual cores. The firm also highlighted its new Core microarchitecture, a...

Emulation and translation software company Transitive announced on Tuesday it's collaborating with Intel to drive the migration of older, RISC environments and applications that previously ran on non-Intel hardware to Intel's Itanium 2 and Xeon processors Although the companies do not yet have products for sale, they expect the QuickTransit Hardwar...

Tech giant Cisco is looking to serve up what could be the holy grail of today's enterprise communications, announcing on Monday its Unified Communications System, a suite of voice, data and video applications aimed at wrangling Internet Protocol (IP) communications Cisco said the new suite is built upon its Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SO...

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed this week it is investigating possible price fixing among the major recording labels for online music The probe is similar to action taken by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who last month continued an investigation of digital download collusion and price fixing....

Viacom is planning to get into the social networking game, the company announced this week, with CEO Tom Freston telling attendees at an industry event in New York that the company has designs on a portal of its own to compete with the likes of News Corp.-owned MySpace.com, the personal Web page service that has become wildly popular among Internet users, especially teens...

The Chinese government this week indicated it was tired of waiting for the U.S.-controlled International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to come up with Chinese character versions of .com and other top level domains (TLDs), and instead will create the domains on its own News of the strategy was a cause of concern among some who a...

More mobile video is slated to come to the consumer marketplace via a service dubbed "Mobizzo" announced by News Corp.'s Fox Mobile Entertainment this week. The service will offer games, music, mobile phone wallpaper and ringtones, including Fox programming such as episodes of "Family Guy" and films like "Napoleon Dynamite." The venture, along with...

The Internet search player formerly known as Ask Jeeves has decided that the butler just didn't do it, announcing today that it will drop "Jeeves" from its name in a massive rebranding effort where it will become, simply, Ask.com Ask.com said the butler became outdated when Internet searchers started undertaking "more sophisticated searches," inclu...

Chinese PC giant Lenovo has made its first set of self-branded computers for sale worldwide, promising worry-free computing in new desktops and notebooks intended for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) The Lenovo 3000 family will feature built-in virus recovery, simplified network connectivity and automatic updates in order to cut down on dis...

Television fans are getting more and more TV to go from Apple's iTunes and other services, including access to exclusive online offerings such as the broadcast-TV first announced Thursday by NBC The network said the pilot episode of its new series "Conviction" will be available for free on iTunes until the show's debut on television March 3. After ...

Law enforcement officials in Belgium and Switzerland raided the headquarters of a key portion of what has been described as "the world's largest peer-to-peer facilitator" this week, shutting down eDonkey's Razorback2 file-sharing server on the grounds that it allowed more than a million users to illegally access copyrighted music, movies, games and other digital content...

Big Blue is heading off the tiniest transistor boundaries with a new way of extending today's chip-manufacturing technology to generate smaller chip circuits, the company said this week Indicating its technology may postpone a "high-risk" conversion to difficult and expensive alternatives for the semiconductor industry, IBM said its scientists have...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has so far been most successful in its fight against cybercrime when it has involved major technology industry players. Cooperation between corporations and the feds must continue in order to keep up with ever-changing and evolving threats, FBI Director Robert Mueller told an audience at the RSA Security Conference in San Jose, Calif. this week...

Microsoft is making significant changes to the next version of its Office software, bringing a new file format and new user interface to users who have not seen such dramatic changes in 10 years Microsoft renamed its software suite Office 2007, a change from the former Microsoft Office 12, and highlighted productivity gains and improved suites and ...