Stories about: Rock

Bargain hunting was all the talk of the 451 Group event this week in Boston, where one security pro quipped that vendors should be paying customers to install their software and where anyone remotely smelling of money became suddenly quite popular with other attendees looking to sell things.

As Microsoft releases its Silverlight 2.0 media player tomorrow, it is claiming strong momentum for its free, would-be Adobe Flash-killer.

With the increasing use of multicore CPUs in computers, programmers have to learn new techniques for parallel processing. One very promising approach is transactional memory.

For the past two-plus years, Microsoft has stood by while Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" TV commercials treated Windows Vista like a punching bag.

Fujitsu is developing an eight-core version of its Sparc64 processor, which should give a performance boost to the Sparc Enterprise Servers that Fujitsu jointly develops with Sun Microsystems.

The original Asus Eee PC took the hardware world by storm. Small, lightweight, inexpensive, yet running a full-fledged OS, this tiny device offered laptop capabilities at near-PDA pricing. Asus has since expanded its Eee PC line with models of varying capabilities, and competing devices are now arriving from other manufacturers, including Acer, Dell, HP, and MSI, among others. Collectively, these devices have come to be called "netbooks."

For a long time, Google has led a largely blissful existence, fostering a widespread perception -- sometimes in direct contradiction to the facts -- that it can do no wrong. Yet the company's controversial Android mobile platform venture threatens to seriously dent this notion, at least with some of the people it needs most.

Ticketek Tuesday afternoon issued a formal apology to the individuals whose emails it exposed in a botched newsletter mailout.

Microsoft's impending announcement at Black Hat on the 7th of this month, titled "Secure the Planet! New Strategic Initiatives from Microsoft to Rock Your World", being delivered by some of the best security names inside Microsoft, has already gained the attention of many in the wider community.

It's like that classic Folgers Coffee commercial: "We've secretly replaced their regular coffee with dark, sparkling Folgers crystals. Let's see what happens." Only instead of some food conglomerate sneaking around restaurants replacing coffee grounds, it's Microsoft that's pulling the big switcharoo.

It's 10 o'clock on a sunny April morning in Balboa Park. In a spacious Girl Scout cabin tucked away amid lush green palm trees, 20 girls ranging in age from 11 to 14, most wearing jeans and pigtails, are gearing up for today's camp activities. But there are no sit-upons or s'mores, potholders or paper crafts -- just 21 laptops, two color printers, 10 digital cameras, two scanners and a palpable abundance of preadolescent energy and creative enthusiasm.