Stories about: NEC

The cable is part of an advanced monitoring and alert system that could provide warning should a destructive earthquake occur close to Japan.

After all these years I am willing to admit that Microsoft has won the desktop and server wars. Thanks to VMWare Windows is spreading throughout the datacenter. And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel. While I have joined the chorus of security folks who rail against the Microsoft Monoculture I still cannot believe some of the uses for Windows. Some of them are just downright silly, some you may claim are criminally negligent.

Microsoft announced on Thursday that Hyper-V was released to manufacturing, and then about two seconds later the media frenzy began.

The global battle to control the smarts in your smartphone escalated this week when some of the combatants redeployed their forces in two big moves.

Look around at people talking on their mobile phones and, almost without exception, they are chatting on familiar-looking small rectangular boxes with glowing screens. However, this cookie-cutter approach to mobile phones will change dramatically in the next few years as phone designers get more daring and more personal.

The release of Intel's 8086 microprocessor in 1978 was a watershed moment for personal computing. The DNA of that chip is likely at the centre of whatever computer--Windows, Mac, or Linux--you're using to read this, and it helped transform Intel from merely one of many chip companies to the world's largest.

Last week's announcement of a standard for femto cells took a lot of people by surprise. How did it happen so fast, and how important will it be? And are there other issues that might cause problems in future?

Toshiba on Wednesday introduced laptops powered by the new Puma-based processors recently announced by Advanced Micro Devices.

At the logic level, MacBook, the benchmark for success in mainstream notebooks, is unremarkable -- indistinguishable from every PC notebook built on Intel Core 2 and its chipset-integrated graphics. Why, then, can't anyone with the same parts list emulate Apple's growth in an otherwise stagnant notebook market? Because Apple painstakingly hand-optimized its OS for a tiny variety of hardware architectures, presently Intel Core 2, while Microsoft wrote Vista to run on absolutely everything. No PC notebook maker can take the proprietary route that Apple plays to such advantage.

Similar to its famous "developers, developers, developers" rant, Microsoft is chanting "software, software, software" as it lays the cornerstones of its unified communications platform.

Intel will start shipping a quad-core version of its Itanium processor to system vendors in about six months, with the first servers based on the chip due in early 2009, Intel said Monday.