Microsoft tests out rival to AdSense

Paul Mah — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:04:26 -0400

Microsoft is running a private pilot to allow smaller publishers to use contextual advertising. Publishers can sign up for the trial here. Article

Airport radar meltdown blamed on faulty NIC

Paul Mah — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:04:07 -0400

A faulty network interface card (NIC) was blamed for a radar system meltdown last week at the Dublin Airport. Because of the unexplained system failures on displays showing codes identifying incoming aircraft, air traffic controllers manually shut down the display. This resulted in days of travel chaos in which tens of thousands of passengers were left stranded or delayed. The company that developed the hardware for the air traffic management, Thales ATM, was brought in to carry out a technical examination of the system. An Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) spokeswoman noted that the entire problem stemmed from "an intermittent malfunctioning network card which subsequently overcame the built-in system redundancy." Have you ever experienced system issues that were later traced to malfunctioning NICs before?

To read up more on this airport radar malfunction:
- check out this Irish Examiner article

Mozilla releases patches for Firefox

Paul Mah — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:03:23 -0400

Mozilla has released patches for both versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the Firefox web browser. The updates patch two security vulnerabilities that have been rated as "critical" by Mozilla, including a variant of a vulnerability that could be exploited to do what has been termed as a "carpet bombing" attack. The second patch fixes the way Firefox handles references to CSS objects, which can be exploited to force a crash that can lead to malicious code being executed. A third patch resolves a security hole that applies only to Firefox 3.0 running on the Mac OS X, which was discovered by a security engineer at Apple.

Mozilla took the opportunity to issue a reminder that Firefox 2.0 will only be supported with security updates until mid-December. Users are encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.

For more on the new Firefox patches:
- check out this ComputerWorld article

Samsung, Sun joins forces to bring SSDs to servers

Paul Mah — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:02:40 -0400

Samsung and Sun Microsystems announced Tuesday that they have co-developed a new 8-GB single-level-cell (SLC) flash memory for use in solid-state drives (SSD). According to the companies, the new memory gives a five-fold increase in terms of the number of write-and-erase cycles over current products available on the market today. What is so unique here is that the breakthrough is implemented at the level of the flash chips themselves, with no changes necessary in the controller. With the market for SSD projected to reach as many as 2.2 million solid state drives by 2012, it is not hard to see why everyone is eager for a slice of the pie. In fact, Sun has earlier said it expects to offer flash drives as an option across the range of its servers and storage.

For more about the report:
- check out this InformationWeek article

IBM, Sun both lay claim to developing first 1TB tape drive

Paul Mah — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:02:03 -0400

On Monday, Sun announced its StorageTek T10000B Fibre Channel-based tape drive. With a storage capacity of 1TB, it comes in at twice its previous top capacity of just 500GB. Interestingly, IBM followed-up Tuesday to release the "world's first" 1TB tape drive in its System Storage TS1130. As analyst George Crump noted, "I was kind of laughing that two people were claiming to have the first at the same time."

As many companies tend to prefer announcing new products on Mondays, it is not inconceivable that IBM quickly pushed an announcement that originally was scheduled for a later date forward. This will help explain the fact that IBM will only be shipping its drive in September, compared to Sun's availability in the latter part of this month.

For more information on this report:
- check out this NetworkWorld article

Microsoft announces record revenues of $60 billion

Paul Mah — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:01:09 -0400

Microsoft has announced an 18 percent growth in revenues from fiscal 2007, earning a historic $60 billion for its fiscal year of 2008 that ended on June 30. Increased demand for Office, Xbox-related sales, server software, and even Windows Vista were said to contribute to the glowing figures. To date, over 180 million Vista licenses have been sold, according to Microsoft.

While noting that "It was an outstanding year for the company," Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell expressed disappointment that the stock price failed to reflect Microsoft's strong financial results. Moving ahead, Microsoft is projecting to achieve between $67 and $68 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2009.

For more on Microsoft's revenue for 2007:
- check out this InternetNews article

Is Facebook spying on you?; VMware hikes prices in EMEA and ANZ;

Paul Mah — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:05:14 -0400

> Yoggie packs hardware firewall appliance into an ExpressCard. Article
> Information on new AMD "many-cored" processor leaked. Article
> Facebook continues to monitor users even after they log out. Article
> San Francisco case highlights dangers of insider threats. Article
> VMware hikes prices in EMEA and ANZ. Article

And Finally... MessageLabs: 81.5 percent of all emails sent out in June were spam. Article

Jupiter unveils faster WAN application accelerators

Paul Mah — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:57:19 -0400

Jupiter has unveiled new WAN application accelerators it says will deliver better performance than earlier models. As its name suggests, WAN application accelerators are designed to deliver a consistent LAN-like application response across the WAN. The WXC appliances here perform various optimizations to speed up network performance between remote sites using a plethora of methods such as eliminating redundant transmissions, applying protocol or application specific optimizations, or even simple prioritizing of bandwidth, among other tweaks. In addition, repeated data patterns are stored by on-board hard drives, resulting in anything up to a 100-fold increase in effective WAN capacity, according to Jupiter.

For more on Jupiter's new WAN accelerators:
- check out this Network World article