Posts for 'Software' Category

MICROSOFT HAS launched the latest version of its Office software suite with new features allowing for easier collaboration and multimedia editing in documents. According to the company, its Irish offices played a significant role in the product’s development, sharing responsibility with Microsoft Seattle for bug fixes in the months leading up to its launch.

In Dublin, 230 people worked on the release over the past few months, also developing different language versions and features, like the Setup process through which users must go to install the software.

Read the complete story

For those of you worried that Hewlett-Packard is short on solutions, the company this week moved to assuage those concerns. On Thursday, the tech giant — which is in the process of laying off more than 24,000 workers as it integrates services company Electronic Data Systems Inc. — informed employees that it would also be reorganizing its software division and renaming it H-P Software and Solutions.

While the name change is jargony (this blog has long lamented the word “solution,” especially the “end-to-end solution,” as meaningless tech gobbledygook), H-P’s software restructuring does have a point: The changes, which were first reported by Internetnews.com, will focus the software unit more on services so that it works better with the newly combined H-P and EDS.

H-P’s business intelligence software unit, for example, will merge with a consulting practice that has a similar focus. H-P also combined its media consulting group with a division that sells communication software to entertainment companies. There will also be some reshuffling of executives, including the departure of H-P software executive Ben Horowitz, the former chief executive of Opsware.

Read the complete story

Verdict-Microsoft's Hyper-V is a solid virtualisation platform that's compatible with a wide range of modern server hardware... Read Full Review.

Pros-Easy to install
Compatible with a huge range of servers and I/O adapter cards
A simple option for organisations wanting to test server virtualisation
Cons-VMs could be affected by software problems with the host Windows server
All VMs must be temporarily halted if host server needs a reboot following patching
Need to buy extra software to manage Hyper-V server farms
Requires a 64-bit Intel VT- or AMD-V-compatible CPU

Nine members of a gang alleged to have been involved in a multi-million-dollar counterfeit software scam went on trial here Thursday.

The gang, led by Shanghai native Ma Jingyi, is accused of selling 677,000 pieces of pirated computer software to buyers in the United States at a price of $10.48 million, the Shanghai No 1 Intermediate Prosecutors' Office said.The men were arrested in July of last year following a joint investigation codenamed "Summer Solstice" that was launched in 2005 by authorities from China and the US.

Ma, 50, pleaded guilty to the charge but denied he had made such high profits, prosecutors said.He told the Shanghai No 1 Intermediate People's Court that he went to the US in 1993 and co-founded a computer company with an American man named Wu Kai.

Read the complete story

Nine members of a gang alleged to have been involved in a multi-million-dollar counterfeit software scam went on trial here Thursday.

The gang, led by Shanghai native Ma Jingyi, is accused of selling 677,000 pieces of pirated computer software to buyers in the United States at a price of $10.48 million, the Shanghai No 1 Intermediate Prosecutors' Office said.The men were arrested in July of last year following a joint investigation codenamed "Summer Solstice" that was launched in 2005 by authorities from China and the US.

Ma, 50, pleaded guilty to the charge but denied he had made such high profits, prosecutors said.He told the Shanghai No 1 Intermediate People's Court that he went to the US in 1993 and co-founded a computer company with an American man named Wu Kai.

Read the complete story

A security flaw in the iphone's latest software could let others read your email, even when the device is locked.

Internet technology sites "Mac Rumors" and "Gizmodo" say unauthorized users can access email, private contact lists and even the dial keypad on iphones running the 2.02 software.

A spokesperson for Apple says the company is aware of the problem and is creating a software update to fix it.Apple recommends users set the home button to open an ipod music collection rather than the phone's favorites menu.

The offer has already been approved by the Ilog board, and IBM will pay a 56 percent premium to buy the company, which makes business rules management systems software.

Ilog will "strengthen our BPM [business process management] and SOA [service-oriented architecture] position by providing customers a full set of rule management tools for complete information and application lifecycle management across a comprehensive platform including IBM's leading WebSphere application development and management platform", IBM said in a statement.

Ilog will not be alone in this task. In the past five years, IBM has spent $21bn (£10bn) on buying 70 software companies, of which the biggest was Cognos, according to Reuters. IBM bought the business intelligence company for $5bn in January.

Read the complete story

IBM on Tuesday said it wants to free desktops from Microsoft software, announcing an alliance with Linux vendors to preload its middleware on Linux distributions.

IBM said it has reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software -- which includes Lotus Notes, Sametime and Symphony -- to preload on Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu and Novell's Suse Linux. The repackaging makes the middleware easier and cheaper to install on Linux PCs, IBM said.

The easy availability of collaboration tools could trigger businesses to switch to Linux, considering Windows Vista adoption has been stagnant, IBM executives said in a press conference at the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco. Citing Linux as a low-cost operating system compared to Windows, IBM hopes that preloading the tools on Linux could also help break Microsoft's stranglehold on the SMB market with its Small Business Server software.

Read the complete story

A software industry trade group said Friday it could sue eBay for failing to do enough to prevent the sale of pirated software on the online auction site. The Software & Information Industry Association said eBay has refused to take several steps recommended by the group to help reduce sales of illegal software. Despite a few years of discussions, eBay refuses to do more than just take down auctions of software that the SIIA has identified as pirated.

"Once notified, they will do something," Keith Kuperschmid, senior VP of intellectual property policy and enforcement for SIIA, told InformationWeek. "What they won't do is what we consider pre-emptory, proactive measures." Those measures include placing a notification in the buyer feedback section that the seller has had pirated items removed from the site; penalize sellers of illegal software, even if it's their first offense; and develop technology to try to find repeat offenders who use multiple identities on eBay.

Read the complete story

D6, the sixth annual All Things Digital conference, kicked off yesterday with a session starring Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Discussion spanned topics ranging from the failed Yahoo acquisition to the lukewarm reception Windows Vista has had to the impact that Gates' imminent departure will have on the company. It was for another reason, however, that this session was so keenly anticipated: it was to contain the first public look at Windows 7. Recent revelations from Microsoft have suggested that Windows 7 will be far more evolutionary than its radical predecessor; this was confirmed by last night's demonstration.

Related StoriesGates: Windows 7 will "take less memory, be more efficient"
Whereas Windows Vista had a huge amount of public build-up, Microsoft has so far kept pretty quiet about Seven. Details about Vista were talked about in public seemingly non-stop from about 2003 until its eventual release in late 2006. As is now well-known, Vista didn't deliver all of the features promised during its extended development, and the widespread negative perception of the OS has undoubtedly hurt both the Microsoft and Windows brands. The tack being taken with Seven is very different. Microsoft is deliberately keeping quiet about Windows 7 to attempt to ensure that the company can actually ship everything it promises in late 2009/early 2010.

What was shown at D6 was rather less than hoped. The big feature in fact, the sole feature demonstrated was multitouch, the same technology as found in Microsoft's multi-thousand-dollar Surface table and Apple's iPhone. The demonstrated software was more or less the same demos we saw with Surface photo scaling, finger painting, splashing about in water along with a Virtual Earth/Google Earth-style mapping program. And that's the extent of it. That's all that was demonstrated. The demoed software appeared to have a new taskbar, but no details on this were forthcoming; when quizzed on it, the demonstrator replied, "It's something we're working on for Windows 7 that I'm not supposed to talk about right now."