World’s Highest Internet Cafe Opens On Everest

April 22nd, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Internet, World No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

everest

A cybercafe aimed at tourists has set-up shop near the Everest base camp in northeastern Nepal, providing the world’s highest internet access.

The cybercafe is 5,180m above sea-level and has turned into quite the hit for tourists and climbers, who wish to make contact with their families before setting out to conquer Mt. Everest – the highest mountain in the world (8,848m).

The Sherpa International Cafe is just about an hour’s walk from the Everest base camp, situated in Gorakse.

Apparently two more of these cafe’s are on the way, according to Chhetan Sherpa – the owner.

Looks like high-altitude connectivity is quite the lucrative business with every climber wanting to bare the good-luck wishes from friends and family.

Amazon Video On Demand Goes HD

April 22nd, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Internet No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

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Amazon’s Video on Demand service has finally started offering videos in high-definition.

Pricing will be in-line to that of Amazon’s competition for HD films / tv episodes. HD film rentals will cost you anything from $3.99 to $4.99 and standard definition TV episodes are available for purchase at a price of $2.99 per episode. There has been no word when HD TV episodes will be available.

Owners of a PC, Mac TiVO HD/Series DVRs, Roku Digital Video  Player, Panasonic VieraCast TVs and the Sony Bravio Internet Video Link will be able to choose from the 500+ HD films after an initial software update (Windows and Mac users will only need to visit Amazon’s website)

Oracle Buys Sun for $7.4 Billion

April 20th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Industry No comments - Tags: , , , , , , ,

oracle_logo

Following Sun Microsystems’ decline of around $7 billion from IBM, the company has accepted an acquisition offer of $7.4 billion from Oracle.

The deal was announced today between Sun and Oracle that Sun will be purchased at a premium price of $9.50 per share in cash, valuing Sun Microsystems at a grand total of $7.4 billion. It was speculated that IBM also offered Sun $9.50 per share a few weeks ago.

Safra Catz, the president of Oracle said the following in a statement regarding the takeover:

We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined.

The Sun-Oracle deal was unanimously agreed on by the Sun board, which means that Sun Microsystems is a lot more comfortable with the terms and agreements offered by Oracle. You may recall that the licensing agreements presented by IBM in their acquisition offer resulted in the deal falling apart at the last minute.

Oracle is planning to monetize Sun as much as possible in a bid to turn around the $209 million quarterly loss and 11% year over year drop in profits Sun has been suffering from. The acquisition boosted Sun’s shares by 35% to $9.07 per share.

With the Sun acquisition, Oracle has also managed to get its hands on both MySQL and Java in one move – something I’m sure their very pleased about. In 2007 Oracle reportedly offered Sun $850 million for MySQL, which Sun ultimately turned down. What’s worrying users is Oracle’s intent to make money from MySQL, which has been freely available (and has gained incredible popularity) as a web database, which powers the website you’re reading right now.

Windows 7 RC Open To Public On May 5

April 19th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Software 2 comments - Tags: , , , ,
windows7rc

Image Credit: Neowin

Earlier today on the Microsoft Partner website, it was stated that the official public launch of Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) will be May 5.

The website initially stated that MSDN and Technet users could download the release candidate immediately and that the public would have access on the 5th of May, but after clicking through only Beta downloads were available from the download page to both forms of users.

The page has since been taken down, displaying only Beta information.

The May 5 release date seems to coincide quite nicely with a Technet page that Microsoft put up a little too early, which hinted at a May RC release. The page has also since been taken down.

Intel Ships 1 million Nehalem Processors, 32nm Chips Coming Early

April 18th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware No comments - Tags: , , , , , , ,

intel_westmere

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini announced at the Intel Q1 2009 earning’s call that over 1 million Nehalem processors have been shipped worldwide since their first inception in November 2008. Otellini also announced that the the new 32nm “Westmere” processors will be available “earlier than expected”.

Paul Otellini claimed that the milestone was reached thanks to the introduction of it’s brand new Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 server processors, which made up for around 50% of the 1 million Core i7 / Nehalem based chips:

“the real interesting is what happens on the dual-processor server product. About half the volume that I referenced was in servers, about half of it was in the desktop machine.”

This comes as great news, considering Intel has been feverishly reducing its workforce in an attempt to curb expenses.

Other great news for OEMs and customers is the unexpected announcement that Intel’s 32nm processors (and Nehalem’s successor), codenamed “Westmere” are expected to ship early, or more precisely in Q4 2009:

“We have pulled in Westmere, our fist 32-nanometer product family, and will now be shipping those products later this year,”

said Otellini at the event.

This caused a bit of confusion however. Intel announced that the Westmere chips will be shipped in Q4 2009, but when asked about an official introduction / launch, Intel maintained the notion that that is a completely different story – yet the Westmere chips are slated for a 2009 introduction – leaving everybody a little confused.

Minor announcements from the event include an update on Intel’s Larrabee GPU, which should be ready in 2010 and is currently in debugging.

IT Pay Drops Slightly In Q1 2009

April 17th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Industry No comments - Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

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Photo by Cayusa

A recently released study reveals that there has been a 0.5% decrease in the amount of money IT experts are being paid for services in the first quarter of 2009.

The study was conducted by Foote Partners, a research firm that actively monitors IT skills payment.

The main casualties are C++, AIX, dBase and AIX, which saw a 25% drop in pay when compared to Q1 2008. This isn’t as bad as PowerBuilder however, who’s coders’ pay declined by 50% when compared to a year before in the uncertified skills category.

Not all is looking down however – 46 skills actually rose in value in Q1 2009. Linux skills grew a whopping 28.6% in the uncertified skills category. As did Apache Web server skills and Java skills, whom also saw significant gains to 25% and 20% respectively.

The certified skills pay tell a similar story, with both major gains and losses. Pay for HP/Certified Systems Engineers grew by a solid 14.3%, with Sun Certified Java programmers and HP/Accredited Integration Specialists got a comfortable bump of 13.5% and 12.5% respectively.

On the other end of the spectrum, Prosoft Master CIW Administration payment fell by 25% – which is rather significant.

The full report is available here.

Intel Releases SSD Fix

April 14th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware No comments - Tags: , , ,

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Intel has released an updated firmware, fixing an internal fragmentation issue on its X25-M and X18-M solid-state drives.

Intel announced yesterday that the end-user firmware is available to OEM customers and those who purchased the drive separately.

This firmware update has several continuous improvement optimizations intended to provide the best possible user experience with the Intel SSD.

The flaw in the current firmware was first detected by PC Perspective in mid-February this year, whilst doing a long-term performance analysis. Although this may sound like a serious issue, Intel stated that most customers won’t ever be affected by the bug,

Keep in mind that the risk of a typical PC user experiencing this issue is very low.

Said Intel in the announcement of the release.

Grab the updated firmware here.

Brooklyn Teen Claims Responsibility for 2nd Twitter Worm

April 13th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Internet No comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

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A second twitter worm began circulating Twitter on Sunday, with responsibility being claimed by a teenager.

Michael “Mikeyy” Mooney, has taken credit for the creation of a second variation of a worm that hit micro-blogging service Twitter, less than a full day after the first StalkDaily worm infected multiple Twitter accounts. Luckily Twitter managed to plug the security holes that were being exploited by both variants of the StalkDaily worm fairly rapidly.

Michale Mooney, a 17-year-old from Brooklyn, claimed responsibility after an interview with CNET. He says he created the worm out of boredom.

“I thought about it later and basically did it because I was bored”

Luckily Twitter stated that no personal information had been revealed as a result of the worm, which fits directly in with “Mikeyy”‘s persona, who claimed that his worms aren’t harmful in nature. This is his latest creation stemming from around 3 years experience coding various worms to exploit security flaws. It might also be his last worm, according to the interview:

“I’m done with Twitter. I’ve been getting too much attention lately.”

Michale Mooney hopes to become a security analyst one day – which I think would fit the bill perfectly.

The first varient of the StalkDaily worm took control of user’s accounts and posted tweets promotion the website Stalkdaily.com. Once the user visited the website, their account became infected and started promoting Stalkdaily.com

“I didn’t think it would spread as far or as fast as it did.”

The second variant, referred to as the “Mikeyy” worm by some, acted in the same way, except it posted tweets asking Twitter to fix the security hole and stating how “Mikeyy” was claiming responsibility for the worm.

He hasn’t been contacted by Twitter authorities yet.

Twitter Hit by StalkDaily Worm, Recovers

April 12th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Internet No comments - Tags: , , ,

twitter_status

A worm appears to have infected Twitter on Saturday.

Twitter employees have been urging users not to visit StalkDaily.com, or to link to the website in any form to prevent further accounts becoming infected. DO NOT visit the website if you don’t want your Twitter account hi-jacked. It also appears that simply by viewing an infected user’s account could cause your own to become infected as well, thanks to the worm modifying your “About Me” section.

Infected users are currently busy spamming links to Stalkdaily.com all over the place – so be wary.

That was the story, at least before Twitter plugged the hole and fixed the problem a few hours after the attack.

Earlier today we were informed of a malicious site that was spreading links to StalkDaily.com on Twitter without user consent via a cross-site scripting vulnerability. We’ve taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this “worm” to spread.

No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack.

The Twitter Spam account also states that if you’re unable to log-in to your account, simply do a password reset.

UPDATE:

It seems that a variation in the worm has been made, but Twitter seems to have it under control this time.

We’re aware of the variation this morning and it should be under control shortly. Thanks for all your messages!

512GB SSD Debuts

April 11th, 2009 · Michael Struwig · Featured, Hardware No comments - Tags: , , , , , ,

512gbssd

Super Talent, a new data storage start-up, has released a 512GB Solid-state drive (SSD) – allowing SSDs to compete directly with traditional hard drives.

There has always been one glaring reason not to switch to SSDs. Despite faster seek times, less battery usage and reliability there was always the issue of space. 1TB hard drives were readily available, but 128GB SSDs weren’t even on the horizon. Well, that’s all about to change thanks to the release of Super Talent’s  MasterDrive RX range, which comes in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB flavors. Sequential read performance for the new range is rated at a maximum of around 230MB/s.

Don’t expect to be able to plug one into your PC or laptop soon though. The large-capacity SSDs are aimed at high-end data storage options. The 512GB version will force you to shell out around $1,500 per drive in a batch of 1,000. That’s roughly enough to buy 17 terabytes of data with a traditional HDD.

Looks like SSDs still need to overcome the price factor, but the capacity gap is getting smaller and smaller all the time.