Archive

Second Life is no place for kids, a Republican congressman declared Monday. U.S. Representative Mark Kirk has sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting a consumer alert warning about the dangers of Second Life, which he charges could expose kids to child predators and registered sex o...

IBM plans to launch an initiative that centers on a Linux-based platform and a Web-based marketplace tailored for small and medium-sized businesses. Set for later this year, the rollout will provide users with a range of products and services from independent software vendors. It will also allow the...

Sun Microsystems and the OpenSolaris community it created a few years ago have officially released the Unix-based OpenSolaris operating system into the wild. The two organizations shared the news at the CommunityOne Developer Conference Monday in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is based on Sun's Solaris ...

Two technology industry heavyweight CEOs -- Google's Eric Schmidt and IBM's Sam Palmisano -- took the stage together at IBM's PartnerWorld conference in Los Angeles Thursday to talk up their companies' cloud computing efforts, first publicly introduced last fall, which they say are still going stron...

Adobe Systems has assembled a group of industry leaders in an effort to put its Flash-based rich Internet solutions and content on most every screen -- PCs, mobile phones, MP3 players, televisions and any other consumer electronic device that might have a screen worthy of delivering content. The eff...

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday brought new how-to guides and services to the community of more than 3,000 developers using its OpenSolaris-based open storage platform. Two how-to recipes aim to help developers build solid storage systems quickly and efficiently, while the new service capabilities are d...

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for a murder case to go forward if a body has not been found. It is even rarer for the charge to be first-degree murder -- and less common still for the defendant to be found guilty. Those were the exact circumstances, though, under which Hans Reiser was convicted ...

No less true today than it has been since the notion of private property became one of the main pillars of Western society, investing in real estate is one of the most popular means of amassing wealth. Now, a new breed of "virtual" real estate investors and developers is emerging. Massively multipla...

The ideas blend together so well. Open source has been around for a long time and is built on the concept of developers working together and sharing software. Social networking has broken into the headlines as a new generation uses MySpace and Facebook as a whole new means of sharing their life expe...

While Wikipedia may be the best known example, wikis are not only becoming the first place people turn when conducting online research, but also when they're looking to build specialist online communities. It's not surprising, then, that wikis dedicated to real estate are emerging. InmanWiki -- part...

Months of eager anticipation came to an end Thursday with the long-awaited release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Both desktop and server editions of Ubuntu 8.04 were released as free downloads, and both are Long Term Support releases, meaning that they come with commercial support for five years on the ser...

The former president of the One Laptop Per Child project stepped down from his position earlier this week as the non-profit continues restructuring and faces competition from the private sector. Walter Bender directed the MIT Media Lab for six years before joining Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC project ...

Japanese Linux computer firm Plat'Home has released a palm-sized, full-featured Linux-based server dubbed "OpenBlockS." This tiny marvel is no lightweight wanna-be replacement for a real Linux server. It can run most server applications that you would expect to run on a "normal" full-sized Linux box...

Google has opened up a new sandbox for developers designed to entice them into building richer social networking gadgets for iGoogle. iGoogle is basically a customizable home page for individuals that uses Web-based "gadgets" to deliver content to the page. The new sandbox will let developers contin...

Sony Computer Entertainment pushed back its open beta test for the launch of Playstation's Home, a 3-D virtual world, from the summer to the fall, marking the second time the company has delayed the launch of the product. Unlike traditional games, Home is a sandbox world designed to allow players th...