Stony Stevenson writes “IBM has announced an initiative to offer smaller versions of its high-performance personal to enterprise customers. The first new machine is a QS22 BladeCenter server powered by a Cell processor. Developed to power gaming systems, the Cell chip has also garnered interest from the supercomputing community owing to its capability to handle big amounts of floating point calculations. IBM hopes that the chips, which currently power climate modelling and other traditional supercomputing tasks, will also appeal to customers ranging from financial analysis firms to animation studios.”

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bsk_cw writes “Today, many Linux users are getting blasé about the ease with which they have the ability to install Linux. Possibly, they’ve been spoiled by distributions such as Ubuntu, which is actually easier to install than Windows. Unfortunately, Fedora 9, the latest version of this community edition of Red Hat, was a bit too much of a blast from the past for Computerworld’s James Turner.” (Except for bits about the installation, the review is actually quite positive.)

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That’s What She Said writes “I am a long time Mac user and, as most people like me, I’ve some particular problems with Microsoft technologies. I need to develop applications for the PocketPC platform (Windows CE and Windows Mobile), some easy data collection applications for barcode-enabled portable data terminals. Every device manufacturer on the market offer SDK’s for .NET, so I believe this is the way to go. I already tried Microsoft Visual Studio and I’m having serious problems using the IDE. I simply don’t understand it quite well. My programming experience comes from PHP and JavaScript, where all I needed was a simple text editor and to keep my work as tidy as I could. So, it seems that a full-fledged IDE is kind of scary to me or Visual Studio is not very good for beginners. I also want to keep my costs low and free alternatives are welcome.” Read on for a bit more (below) on why TWSS is thinking about Mono as a development environment, and is seeking advice.

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Filed under: Internet, Security, Utilities, Web services

There are hundreds of on the web file storage alternatives available now, ranging from the very sketchy to the expensively professional. With such a crowded field, Irish startup PutPlace is playing a slightly different angle to win your business: they’re making it personal. The service is designed to be a secure, “future-proof” place to put your important family and business documents.

PutPlace is currently in beta, so you can test it for free. When it launches, they’ll offer annual subscriptions, presumably with rates varying based on the amount of storage used. This really isn’t huge news for advanced users who are already on the offsite backup bandwagon, but there are still plenty of people who haven’t gotten there yet. If backup were easier, fewer novice users would have to go through the traumatic experience of losing everything to a hard drive failure. PutPlace might be able to help them by putting on a friendly, trustworthy face.

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Stony Stevenson writes “IT staff are ‘overwhelmingly’ happy to suggest their profession to their children, a survey has found. Three-quarters of nearly 1,000 IT professionals surveyed said that they would ‘definitely recommend’ a career in the business to their offspring. Around 70 percent also felt that their jobs are secure, and that they’re anticipating a salary increase next year. The survey also found that 86 per cent of respondents expect to move jobs voluntarily in the next three years.”

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Filed under: Internet, Security, Utilities, Web services

There are hundreds of on the internet file storage alternatives available now, ranging from the very sketchy to the expensively professional. With such a crowded field, Irish startup PutPlace is playing a slightly different angle to win your business: they’re making it personal. The service is designed to be a secure, “future-proof” place to put your important family and business documents.

PutPlace is currently in beta, so you can test it for free. When it launches, they’ll offer annual subscriptions, presumably with rates varying based on the amount of storage used. This really isn’t big news for advanced users who are already on the offsite backup bandwagon, but there are still plenty of people who haven’t gotten there yet. If backup were easier, fewer novice users would have to go through the traumatic experience of losing everything to a hard drive failure. PutPlace might be able to help them by putting on a friendly, trustworthy face.

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Filed under: Productivity, Web services

If you’ve been to college sometime in the past decade, you might have run up against Blackboard. It’s an online assignment system that students generally dread logging into, because it usually means new work or more brown-nosing questions from that showoff in your class. That’s not Blackboard’s fault, though. To show they want to make things easier on their user base, the students, Blackboard is now on Facebook with an app called Blackboard Sync.

A quick Google search shows that some colleges have been hacking together their own mashups of Blackboard and Facebook, which recommends to us that there’s already a demand for this product. Allowed, the move could have come sooner: now that Facebook is increasingly used by middle-aged PR officers who want to network — heard of LinkedIn, guys? — a lot of users are going to pass this by. For the college kids who still log into Facebook each day and use it as a primary mode of communication with friends, this is great. While you’re making plans to go out drinking at the nearest fraternity, take a quick look at the Blackboard app to make sure you won’t wake up with a last-minute assignment to finish.

The business of Facebook application development has been dying off because nobody wants to lace their profile with annoying pirates, ninjas, mummies, or whatever the latest trend is. Applications that actually have value to Facebook’s natural demographic are scarce, so we hope Blackboard will turn out to be useful for students and set an example of what Facebook apps could be doing.

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ancientribe writes “Security suites and on the internet Web scanners detect only a little more than half of all rootkits, according to new tests conducted by independent test organization AV-Test.org. Many of today’s products struggle to clean up the ones they find. AV-Test.org also found that a few huge name AV scanners had serious problems finding and removing active rootkits, such as Microsoft Windows Live OneCare 1.6.2111.32 and McAfee VirusScan 2008 11.2.121.”

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smooth wombat writes “Apparently some people just don’t take the hint. The latest story in the Sanford Wallace spamming saga is a $230 million verdict against Wallace and his partner, Walter Rines, when they failed to show up in court. Wallace and Rines were accused by MySpace of creating their own accounts and taking over other accounts through phishing scams, and then using those accounts to send out bogus emails to other members. The emails sent would indicate a video or web site but when people would go to the link, the two would make money through the number of hits generated or they would try to sell something such as ring tones. According to MySpace, the pair sent over 730,000 emails to members which resulted in bandwidth and delivery-related costs as well as complaints from hundreds of members. The 2003 CAN-SPAM Act allows MySpace to collect $100 per violation or triple that amount when the spam is sent ‘willfully and knowingly.’”

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schliz writes in with research out of Sweden in which researchers showed that, looking at a quantum cryptographic system as a whole, it was possible for an eavesdropper to extract some information about the QC key, thus reducing the security of the overall system. The team then proposed a cheap and simple fix for the problem. “The advanced technology was thought to be unbreakable due to laws of quantum mechanics that say that quantum mechanical objects can’t be observed or manipulated without being disturbed. But a research team at Linköping University in Sweden claim that it is possible for an eavesdropper to [get around the limitations] without being discovered. In a research paper, published in the international engineering journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (abstract), the researchers propose a change in the quantum cryptography process that they anticipate will restore the security of the technology.”

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