Stories by Joab Jackson

Microsoft: Vista paved the way for secure Windows

Despite being widely derided (even by Microsoft executives), the Vista OS was instrumental in finally bringing to the world a secure version of Windows, at least if a presentation by a Microsoft security expert at the Usenix Security Symposium, being held this week in Washington, D.C, is any indication.

HP, Sybase team to offer DIY BI blueprint

Hoping to undercut the prices of business intelligence (BI) appliances offered by other vendors, Sybase and Hewlett-Packard have posted a reference architecture for building a BI system that could cost significantly less than most pre-packaged BI appliances, the companies claim.

Linux Foundation offers open source compliance checklist

Organizations that are interested in using open source in their own products but are wary of intellectual property issues might want to examine a new, mostly free, assistance program just launched by the non-profit Linux Foundation.

Tire tags reveal driver whereabouts

Researchers from Rutgers University and University of South Carolina have found that wireless communications between new cars and their tires can be intercepted or even forged.

HP researcher claims to crack compsci complexity conundrum

While Hewlett-Packard reels from the fallout of its CEO Mark Hurd stepping down, the company can bask in the glory of at least one potentially positive accomplishment: An HP researcher has offered up what he says is a solution to one of the hardest problems in computer science.

Google: 129 million different books have been published

For those who have ever wondered how many different books are out there in the world, Google has an answer for you: 129,864,880, according to Leonid Taycher, a Google software engineer who works on the Google Books project.

Google drops Google Wave

A little more than a year after the service was launched, Google is pulling the plug on its Google Wave social-networking service, the company said Wednesday.

Windows Phone 7 to excel on speech

Hoping to leapfrog over Google and Apple's successes in the smartphone market, Microsoft plans to use cloud-based speech recognition and natural language processing technology to offer user interface capabilities not found on the iPhone or Android devices.

Microsoft simplifies Visual Studio

Microsoft is gearing up to release a version of its Visual Studio integrated developer environment that it promises will be easy enough for even business managers to use.

SAP warms to open source

Although not traditionally known for its contributions to the open-source community, the German-based SAP is adopting more open-source software, as well as contributing more of its own code back into the community, company officials said in an interview.

Could Facebook be the next AOL?

Last week, Facebook announced that it had amassed 500 million users, a formable portion of the global Internet audience. But even as Mark Zuckerberg and company celebrates, others are busy trying to uproot Facebook's popularity by establishing a set of open standards to share Facebook-like features across the Internet.

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