Roy Mark

IBM introduced Aug. 14 its System z Solution Edition Series with seven integrated hardware, software and services packages to help mainframe customers deploy new enterprise workloads such as data warehousing, risk mitigation and disaster recovery. The Solution Edition offerings are designed to make the cost of deploying new workloads on System z competitive with alternative […]

Hollywood studios scored two major legal victories this week in their efforts to keep consumers from being able to make hard drive copies of DVDs. The studios maintain that designing hardware and software to accomplish the feat is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Content Scramble System license.In the first case, […]

The White House responded Aug. 11 to critics of a proposed policy change that would allow federal Websites to use tracking cookies. Since 2000, the government’s policy on tracking cookies has been to simply ban the use of them, but a July 27 notice in the Federal Register sought comment on reversing the policy.Since the […]

Overall mobile phone sales were down 6.1 percent in the second quarter, but smartphone sales surged 27 percent from the same period in 2008, according the latest worldwide sales numbers from Gartner. Overall, second-quarter mobile phone sales totaled 286.1 million units, down from 304 million sales in the second quarter last year. But it was […]

The American Civil Liberties Union is opposing an Obama administration proposal to reverse a nine-year ban on the use of tracking cookies on federal Websites. In an Aug. 10 filing with the Office of Management and Budget, the ACLU said the policy would allow the mass collection of personal information about every user of a […]

Wireless in a heartbeat took on a new meaning with the first U.S. implant of the Accent RF pacemaker. Combined with remote sensoring capabilities, the Accent allows doctors to more efficiently monitor patients, while patients enjoy the convenience of care from home.Thanks to the device made by St. Jude Medical, a patient’s clinic can be […]

WiMax provider Clearwire Aug. 11 added Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies to its vendor mix. Huawei will supply WiMax radio-access network equipment, including base stations, element management system components, and related network hardware and software. Clearwire also named several other strategic suppliers for the company’s ambitious WiMax network rollout plans that will bring 4G […]

The Federal Communications Commission lacks the legal authority to enforce its network neutrality principles approved in 2005, a Washington think tank said Aug. 10. The Progress & Freedom Foundation Aug. 10 filed a legal brief supporting Comcast’s appeal of the 2008 FCC ruling that the cable giant violated those principles by throttling traffic from peer-to-peer […]

The 170,000-mile-wide ring system around Saturn will appear to disappear Aug. 11 as the planet’s equator will be directly in line with the photons of light streaming in from the sun. On earth, the phenomenon is known as an equinox and it occurs every year about March 21 (spring equinox) and Sept. 22 (autumnal equinox). […]

Five months after its March 6 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, in Florida, “NASA’s new exoplanet-hunting Kepler space telescope has detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet,” NASA said in a news release. Exoplanets are planets beyond our solar system.Kepler’s find is based on only “10 days of test data collected […]

Online poker advocates upped the legislative ante Aug. 6 with the introduction of a bill in the U.S. Senate that would legalize online poker and other games of skill. Virtually all forms of online gambling are illegal under the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, which prohibits financial institutions from accepting payments from credit cards, […]

NASA and the Department of Energy are encouraged by recent testing that could enable possible use of nuclear power on the surface of the moon or Mars. According to NASA, a fission surface power system could use a small nuclear reactor to produce 40 kilowatts of energy, enough electricity to power a future space outpost.The […]