Epic failures: 11 infamous software bugs 9 Sep 2010, 7:59 am

Mark your calendars! Sept. 9 is hereby declared Debugging Day. It's been associated with removing bugs for more than 50 years now but is rarely formally celebrated. So let's start the tradition this year.

It all began with a log entry from 1947 by Harvard University's Mark II technical team. The now-classic entry features a moth taped to the page, time-stamped 15:45, with the caption "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay" and the proud boast, "First actual case of bug being found."

HPC meets cloud computing with Dell's new server 9 Sep 2010, 7:03 am

With a new range of hardware announced Thursday, Dell's is targeting high-performance and cloud computing environments that share similar hyperscale characteristics.

MobileIron updates its mobile management platform 9 Sep 2010, 6:29 am

Software vendor MobileIron announced the release of version 3.0 of its Virtual Smartphone Platform today, giving IT shops the ability to integrate mobile management with other enterprise-based systems.

The new version costs the same as version 2.0, which is $4 per user per month, MobileIron CEO Bob Tinker said.

How Obama's tax credit helps, hurts IT spending 9 Sep 2010, 4:38 am

WASHINGTON -- Among the proposals President Barack Obama made this week to boost the U.S. economy is one that will allow businesses to write off all of the investment they do in 2011. But there's a lot of uncertainty ahead for IT managers interested in this tax break.

In a speech Wednesday, Obama was specific about when he wants the tax break to apply -- "in 2011," he said. There was initial expectation that the White House would ask Congress to approve a tax break that applied through 2011, with a retroactive start date to this month.

Arm's new chip stretches from smartphones to servers 9 Sep 2010, 4:31 am

Arm Holdings has taken the wraps off its next major chip design, promising a five-fold increase in performance that the company hopes will take it beyond smartphones and into new types of equipment such as high-performance routers and servers.

Arm's top executives launched the Cortex-A15 MPCore at a press conference in San Francisco Wednesday evening. The name is supposed to reflect how much of an advance the chip represents -- Arm's current designs are the Cortex-A8 and the Cortex-A9.

The wild west of third-party iPhone development 9 Sep 2010, 3:00 am

While Apple has been unequivocal in banning Java and Adobe's Flash from the iPhone and related devices, third-party iOS application development tools have been allowed to flourish. Uncertainty over Apple's stance toward third-party toolmakers, however, has left at least one such vendor -- Novell -- anxious about the future of its iOS development platform.

Oracle bolsters former Sun Unix platform 8 Sep 2010, 5:06 pm

Oracle detailed on Wednesday upgrades to the Solaris Unix OS it inherited from Sun Microsystems, offering improvements in such areas as virtualization.

The company announced Oracle Solaris 10 9/10, Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, and Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2. Oracle emphasized that Solaris is designed to leverage large memory and multi-core processor/thread systems as well as offer high performance, security, and scalability.

HP targets small business with latest product rollout 8 Sep 2010, 2:05 pm

HP expanded its IP phone and wireless LAN offerings for small and medium-size businesses on Wednesday as part of a broad set of product introductions for those customers.

Oracle board against sustainability proposal 8 Sep 2010, 1:49 pm

Oracle's board of directors has weighed in against a shareholder proposal calling for the creation of a board-level committee on sustainability, according to the proxy statement for the vendor's upcoming annual meeting.

Google speeds up search with Google Instant 8 Sep 2010, 11:04 am

Google raised the stakes in the search space on Wednesday with the introduction of Google Instant, which will provide faster, more intelligent searching and results on the company's site.

The intelligence built into the Google Instant service responds to predicted queries based on just a few keystrokes. Google Instant will become part of the core Google search service, with initial rollouts today in the United States.

SAP partner launches cloud-based mobile app service 8 Sep 2010, 7:18 am

Leapfactor, an SAP partner and startup, today announced a cloud-based system to support mobile applications, including back-office custom applications for accounting and customer support.

HP introduces low-cost alternative to blade servers 8 Sep 2010, 5:48 am

Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday announced a low-cost, entry-level server for small businesses that bundles advanced features in a small package.

HP's ProLiant MicroServer is targeted at small businesses and is an inexpensive alternative or even complementary product to blade or rack servers, said McLeod Glass, director of marketing in HP's Industry Standard Servers and Software group.

Firefox among first browsers to fix DLL load hijacking bug 8 Sep 2010, 5:11 am

Mozilla on Tuesday patched 15 vulnerabilities in Firefox, 11 of them labeled critical.

One of yesterday's patches addressed a problem found in scores of Windows applications, making Firefox one of the first browsers to be patched against the DLL load hijacking bug that went public three weeks ago.