Computer News

The attempt to set a world record with the number of downloads for Firefox 3 today seems to have caused a crash to all Mozilla websites.

Microsoft has big plans in store for its Windows Vista operating system. The company released a release candidate version of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Vista in mid-November. SP1 is supposed to address a number of performance-related issues with Vista and includes a number of security update and bug fixes that have been rolled [...]

Microsoft Corp. is pulling back from a system that disables programs on users’ computers if it suspects the software is pirated, opting instead for a gentler approach based on nagging alerts.Microsoft said late Monday it will roll out the new version of Windows Genuine Advantage with the first “service pack” for Windows Vista, due in [...]

In the most shocking and important news of the year publishers Activision and Vivendi have merged, dethroning Electronic Arts as the world’s biggest games publisher.
The shock power-shifting deal is worth $18.9 billion and sees the two form into Activision Blizzard, ‘the world’s largest pure-play online and console game publisher’.
This deal comes a few weeks after [...]

Yahoo! and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe’s Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.
The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter [...]

Microsoft Corp. is raising its Silverlight rich-media delivery software to a new level — in name, at least. Instead of calling the next release of the cross-platform browser plug-in Version 1.1, as previously planned, Microsoft will bestow a Version 2.0 name on the upgrade, according to a blog posting today by Scott Guthrie, a general manager [...]

Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP operating system is about to get faster and Windows Vista isn’t, according to a report that caused a stir online this week as industry watchers speculated that a zippier XP could keep customers from upgrading to Vista.
Microsoft, however, said it’s too early to evaluate the two service packs it plans to [...]

In a brief submitted to federal court, state antitrust regulators dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla, and technologies such as Ajax and software-as-a-service, as piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft’s monopoly in the operating system and browser markets. Ten states and the District of Columbia made the unusual claim to try to [...]

Windows XP Service Pack 3, the update scheduled to be released next year, runs Microsoft Corp.’s Office suite 10% faster than XP SP2, a performance testing software developer reported Friday. Devil Mountain Software Inc., which earlier in the week claimed that Windows Vista SP1 was no faster than the original, repeated some of [...]

Rambus Inc. plans to announce this Wednesday a new memory signaling technology initiative targeted at delivering a Terabyte-per-second of memory bandwidth, which the company touts as a solution for next-generation multi-core, game and graphics applications.
Rather than simply increasing the clock speed of memory to achieve higher output, Rambus looks to boost bandwidth with a 32X [...]