Computing

Oracle is building a third data-center in the UK, to service the British administration’s G-Cloud plans right next to the sweet smelling Mars Chocolate factory. According to the company, the new data-center, opening in July, is located in Slough. It will offer cloud services and infrastructure as a service, to government bodies as well as to independent software vendors working on state contracts. Oracle president Mark Hurd said in a press release that the new Equinix Slough data center,... 

Dell reported another quarter of anemic profits and falling revenue on Thursday as CEO Michael Dell continues his fight to take the company private. Dell’s profit for the quarter, ended May 3, was $130 million, down 79 percent from $635 million in the same quarter a year earlier. Revenue declined 2 percent to $14.07 billion. Dell’s PC division was particularly hard hit. Sales for the quarter were down 9 percent to $8.9 billion, Dell said, and the group’s operating profit skidded... 

IBM has opened an office in Beijing that will help developers port Linux applications to its Power architecture. IBM has been pushing its Power architecture for over 20 years, with its RISC chips intended for use in mission critical systems. Now the firm is working with Red Hat and Suse to help Linux developers port applications to the Power architecture by opening an office in Beijing. While the firm has pushed its AIX operating system, IBM’s proprietary variant of Unix, as its favored operating... 

Microsoft research is showing that there has been a spike in malware targeting Java vulnerabilities since the third quarter of 2011. Much of the activity has focused on vulnerabilities which are already patched. This suggests that attackers are hitting vulnerabilities that are in multiple versions of Java, rather than just one specific version. Jeong Wook Oh of Microsoft said that in Q3 and Q4 of 2012 two new vulnerabilities, CVE-2012-4681 and CVE-2012-5076, were found. “But we didn’t observe... 

ARM has announced collaboration with Logmein to offer developers access to the Xively Jumpstart kit based on ARM’s Mbed project. ARM’s notable success in smartphones and tablets can obscure the fact that most of the chips using its designs are microcontrollers for using the input of sensors. The firm has announced collaboration with Logmein to push its Mbed project with developers that sign up to the Xively Cloud service. ARM’s Mbed project aims to bring a standard workflow to hardware... 

Video codec VP9 is nearing completion according to the WebM project, which said it’s “putting the finishing touches” on it. The WebM project is sponsored by Google and uses the VP8 video codec, which has been embraced by Google in its Chrome web browser and perhaps most importantly on its video sharing website Youtube. Now the project has said it putting the final touches its replacement VP9 and is working on launch plans. Senior business product manager for the WebM project Matt... 

nVidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang mentioned a concrete reason of Tegra 4 delays during the company’s latest earnings call. The chip was announced back in January, but Jensen told the investors that Tegra 4 was delayed because of Nvidia’s decision to pull in Grey aka Tegra 4i in for six months. Pulling Tegra 4i in and having it scheduled for Q4 2013 was, claims Jensen, the reason for the three-month delay in Tegra 4 production. On the other hand, we heard that early versions of Tegra 4 were... 

As we draw closer to the launch of Intel’s 4th generation Core CPUs, or Haswell, it is no wonder that we are starting to see more leaks and one showing Intel’s Core i7 4770K overclocked to 5GHz at 0.9V certainly drew a lot of attention. An impressive overclocking achievement was spotted by Ocaholic.ch and shows a CPU-Z validation of Core i7 4770K overclocked to exactly 5005.83MHz at just 0.904V. As far as we can tell, Hyper-threading was disabled and it is not clear if the CPU is actually... 

Western Digital and Sandisk have teamed up to create Western Digital’s first hybrid storage device that uses Sandisk’s iSSD and Western Digital’s Caviar Black hard drive. Western Digital, which has dabbled in solid state disks (SSDs) for the enterprise market, has stayed away from hybrid drives that use relatively small SSDs to act as cache for hard drives. Now the firm has teamed with Sandisk to create its WD Black Solid State Hybrid drives with 500GB capacity. Western Digital... 

Intel is rather slow when it comes to the adoption of new wireless standards. Most, if not all, notebooks based on Intel platforms today feature 802.11n capable wireless and with the help of a few antennas it can get you between 150 and 450Mbits. In reality 802.11ac is usually much slower than 150 to 450Mbits but since the middle of last year 802.11ac routers started to show up all around the world. This new standard can get you to 866Mbits and even higher, but Intel has been rather slow to adopt... 

Adobe has alerted users of its ColdFusion application server platform of a critical vulnerability that could give unauthorized users access to sensitive files stored on their servers. The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2013-3336 and affects ColdFusion 10, 9.0.2, 9.0.1, 9.0 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, Adobe said in an advisory published Wednesday. The company credited Marcin Siedlarz of Symantec’s Security Response team with reporting the issue. “There are... 

Games publisher EA believes things will turn around for the company next year. This year has been pretty unpleasant for the company after its trusted DRM sunk its flagship SimCity release. But Electronic Arts seems to think that is all behind it and has forecast fiscal 2014 earnings above Wall Street’s expectations. EA has been cutting staff and reorganizing studios in recent months to embrace new game platforms. It is preparing a new batch of games including the latest installment of its... 

According to latest ABI Research figures, Qualcomm is still top dog in the LTE market. The American chipmaker dominates the LTE market with more than two thirds of shipments in 2012. Smaller vendors are making inroads in the LTE market, but they aren’t about to erode Qualcomm’s dominance anytime soon. Philip Solis, ABI Research, says the LTE market will grow to over 850 million units for handsets alone by 2018 and he sees challengers on the horizon. “We expect Broadcom and Intel to be significant... 

Two U.S. senators will propose that Congress or President Barack Obama’s administration should pursue trade and immigration sanctions against China and other countries that allegedly support cyberattacks on U.S. government agencies and businesses, the lawmakers said Wednesday. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, called on the administration, including the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation, to step... 

Anti-virus software for Android is easily fooled, according to insecurity experts from Northwestern University and North Carolina State University. The university tested ten of the most popular AV products on Android, and discovered that they were easily fooled by common obfuscation techniques. AV software from Symantec, AVG, Kaspersky Lab, Trend Micro, ESET, ESTSoft, Lookout, Zoner, Webroot, and Dr. Web was tested as part of an evaluation of mobile security software. Using a tool called DroidChameleon...