News

As part of a new push to weed out piracy in the country, China will inspect central and local government computers to ensure all the departments are using copyrighted software. The government made the announcement on Tuesday, adding that the inspections will be completed before the end of October 2011. It follows a six month government campaign to crack down on intellectual property infringement in a country where pirated and counterfeit tech good such as DVDs, ...

PARIS (Reuters) – Contributions from wireless companies to the Linux operating system have increased rapidly, underlining the success of the open source software platform in smartphones, a report from the Linux Foundation said. The report, to be unveiled later on Wednesday, shows the role of traditional top contributors - Red Hat, Novell and IBM -- is slightly decreasing, while companies with a strong mobile Linux focus are becoming increasingly important ...

The first version of SAP's HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) software is now shipping, the vendor said Wednesday, and it also announced the first in a planned series of specialized applications that sit on top of the technology. Unveiled in May at the Sapphire conference, HANA employs an in-memory computing engine, wherein data to be processed is held in RAM instead of being read from disks or flash storage, providing a performance boost. ...

It's a rare day when proponents of free and open source software are rooting for Microsoft in court, yet that's exactly what's going on with regard to the software giant's battle against Canadian i4i, which specializes in collaborative content technologies. A judgment was actually made in the case last year, when i4i won support for its charge that Microsoft was infringing a patent i4i holds on custom XML capabilities. Microsoft subsequently ...

Here is your daily warning of the coming technological singularity: Robots have begun creating themselves with no direct human intervention. And, shockingly, it’s even weirder than it already sounds. These robots aren’t just built independently of humans using a 3D printer; they’re designed independently by a software algorithm that creates its own best robot for a given task. Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute calls its creations "genetic robots." ...

Startup Navajo Systems is targeting Salesforce.com customers who face regulatory hurdles involving data privacy and cloud computing with a new service it calls Virtual Private SaaS (software as a service). The service works by encrypting any data considered sensitive before it is transmitted to the Salesforce.com system. While residing there, the data is "completely unreadable (and therefore meaningless)," according to a Navajo document. "Database ...

TORONTO (Reuters) – Shares in Research In Motion jumped more than 5 percent on Tuesday morning after an analyst praised its new QNX operating system as flexible, portable and likely to be integrated into its smartphones faster than expected. A Chinese consumer service and the global popularity of its BlackBerry Messenger texting service are boosting RIM's international growth and should carry the Canadian company until it launches new QNX-based product ...

Enterprise open-source software vendor Red Hat has acquired cloud software provider Makara, Red Hat announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Red Hat plans to use Makara technologies as part of its Cloud Foundations portfolio. "Cloud Foundations is about enabling customers and developers to have an easy on-ramp to the cloud. With the addition of Makara, we aim to further simplify application deployment and management," ...

BEIJING – China's government announced a new crackdown Tuesday on rampant illegal copying of products from software to music that is adding to tensions with Washington and other governments over trade and currency complaints. Trade groups say Chinese piracy of software and some other goods is growing despite repeated promises to stamp it out. The World Trade Organization sided with Washington in January in a complaint that Beijing was failing to enforce pat ...

Just under a year after it went on sale, Nintendo's "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" has become the first Wii software title to sell 4 million copies in Japan, a market data provider said Tuesday. Sales of the popular title reached 4,001,276 copies in the week ending Nov. 28, according to Enterbrain, which collects point-of-sales system data from thousands of retailers across Japan. Nintendo has sold 10.8 million Wii consoles in Japan, ...