Articles by Walaika Haskins

Microsoft rolled out the first service pack for its latest operating system, Vista, on Tuesday Those eager to download the update can do so via the Windows Update site; Vista users in no hurry to get the service pack can wait until the software maker pushes the update out to users via its Automatic Updates tool in mid-April....

Researchers at IBM have moved a step closer toward the creation of an on-chip optical network, the tech giant said Monday. Calling it a "significant advance," IBM announced the development of the world's tiniest nanophotonic switch designed to route optical data between cores on next-generation high-performance multi-core microprocessors With the t...

Consumers sent the video game hardware and software industry a US$1.33 billion valentine for the month of February, a 34 percent increase over sales during the same time period in 2007, according to figures released by the NPD Group, an independent market research firm The Wii's reign continued as the No. 1 video game console, while Sony's PlayStat...

The relationship between Activision and Gibson Guitar went off-key Tuesday. The two companies had until now worked in concert with one another after the hugely successful release of the third installment of the "Guitar Hero" series. Recently, however, Activision filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for Central California asking a judge to settle a dispute over alleged patent infringement...

Nortel debuted a new optical network technology designed to provide four times the capacity of current systems and as much as 10 times the capacity in the future The 40G/100G Adaptive Optical Engine boosts transmissions from 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to 40 Gbps, and will go as high as 100 Gbps by the end of 2009, Nortel said, using the existing...

Hulu, the video Web site from NBC Universal and News Corp., will open its virtual viewing rooms to the public Wednesday Announced nearly one year ago, the free video streaming site launched in October 2007 with an invitation-only beta....

Paramount Pictures and developer FanRocket have teamed to bring Paramount movie clips to Facebook's user profile pages. Using the third-party developer's VooZoo application, available Monday, subscribers to the social networking site will have access to clips from a gamut of films including "Forest Gump," "Mean Girls" and "Zoolander." "Facebook is ...

HP head Mark Hurd on Thursday announced big changes for the company's research division, HP Labs The reorganization will see the research facility concentrate its focus in five core areas: information management, cloud computing, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability....

Americans would rather give up their televisions or the Internet rather than do without their mobile phones, according to a report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project Wednesday Researchers found that a little more than half -- 51 percent -- of respondents who use wireless phones said it would "be very hard to give up" their cell ph...

Google has announced that it's taking Google Gears to the road, a move the company said is intended to make sense out of the dense and complex process of developing for the mobile Web Google Gears, previously only available for desktops, is software that enables device users to access online services when they are not connected to the Internet....

AMD on Tuesday introduced its latest motherboard GPU (graphics processing unit), the AMD 780 Series, in Hanover, Germany, at CeBIT 2008 Styling it as the most advanced motherboard GPU in the industry, AMD said the platform is intended to provide a "rich computing experience" for both casual gamers and multimedia enthusiasts running mainstream, low-...

Employees who regularly use company computers to surf the Web, sign on to business accounts for personal e-mail, make calls from company phones or use the corporate car to run errands run the risk of losing their jobs, according to a new survey released by The ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association (AMA) More than 58 percent of t...

Sprint Nextel announced a new voice and data pricing plan Thursday, offering customers access to a bevy of services for US$99.99 a month. The Simply Everything plan gives users unlimited access to voice, data, text, e-mail, Web surfing, Sprint TV, Sprint Music, GPS (global positioning system) navigation, Direct Connect and Group Connect As handsets...

HP launched a new virtual storage disk array targeted for midsized businesses Tuesday. The HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA4400) provides medium-sized organization users with a combination of features normally found in systems for enterprise-class businesses The EVA4400 is a solution for businesses with a need to reduce the costs ...

Microsoft launched Windows Server 2008 in Los Angeles on Wednesday With its new features and enhanced tools, Windows Server 2008 has enjoyed a better reception than Windows Vista and has been deployed by a number of companies in beta, Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld....

VMware announced Tuesday the upcoming availability of servers from a variety of manufacturers that will include a fully integrated preinstalled version of VMware's virtualization software Within the next 60 days, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP and IBM will begin shipping servers with the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor embedded, the company said....

San Jose, Calif., startup MetaRAM has launched new technology it says can quadruple the memory capacity of servers and workstations The DDR2 (double data rate 2) MetaSDRAM technology boosts performance and at the same time decreases the cost of high-performance systems, the company said....

A surge in server shipments during the fourth quarter helped HP gain ground against IBM in server sales revenue and extend its lead in server shipments, according to a report released Thursday by Gartner Overall for the year, worldwide server shipment sales grew in 2007, increasing 7.4 percent from 2006, while server revenue rose by almost 4 percen...

Just as Microsoft began grappling with a glitch in the installation of a file required for its Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) download, another Vista SP1 hiccup has bubbled up. The company has confirmed that some applications may experience "a loss of functionality when they run on a Windows Vista Service Pack 1-based computer." In other words, SP1 bre...

Intel rolled out its latest offering for gaming enthusiasts Tuesday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Formerly code-named "Skulltrail," the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop (DSED) platform brings gamers wickedly good performance with eight processor cores and support for multiple graphics processors Originally unveiled at the 200...