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Reduction of spending in the IT department is more art than science. Metri consultant Paul Michaels offers some advice on how to get it right. For the past few months everyone was hoping the IT industry might be saved the worst of the credit crunch fallout, on the...

Two new pieces of malware affecting Mac OS X appeared this week, a Trojan horse and a hacker tool for creating backdoors. Two pieces of malicious software affecting Apple's Mac OS X appeared this week: a Trojan horse with the ability to download and install malicious code of an...

Version 6.5 of the open-source NetBeans IDE has support for the PHP scripting language and a preview of Python support. Sun Microsystems on Wednesday introduced a version of the open-source NetBeans integrated development environment IDE, with expanded support for web and Java software development. The...

Stability and security releases for the browser will end next month, despite ongoing problems with Firefox 3 The Mozilla Foundation is planning to end support for the Firefox 2 browser in mid-December, despite the persistence of significant flaws in the most-recent version of the popular browser. ...

The GSM Association has called on manufacturers to build technology for contactless payments into their handsets by the middle of next year The GSM Association has called on phone manufacturers to build RFID technology into handsets from mid-2009, in a bid to kick start the mobile-payment industry. ...

Rising costs of energy - along with limited availability of energy in some areas – are forcing the IT industry to take a new approach in designing and managing data centers, says IBM's Christopher O'Connor. Commentary--Energy efficiency is a significant global issue today, and is expected to be even...

Two systems, including one based on x86 chips, have become the first ever to break the petaflop/s barrier in the latest Top500 supercomputer list. Cray's XT5 Jaguar supercomputer has narrowly missed displacing IBM's Roadrunner system as the world's fastest supercomputer, according to the results of the bi-annual 'Top500' supercomputing...

The final specification for so-called SuperSpeed USB, which is said to be 10 times faster than USB 2.0, has been published by the USB Implementers Forum. Version 3.0 of the universal serial bus specification has been released. Unveiled on Monday by the USB Implementers Forum,...

The analyst house warns that, although take-up of open-source software is widespread, most companies do not have formal procurement or governance policies in place for such software. Eighty-five percent of companies are already using open-source software, with most of the remaining 15 percent expecting to do so...

Canonical and the chip designer are to collaborate on a version of Ubuntu tailored to ARM's architecture, with a focus on low-cost subnotebooks. Canonical has announced it will be developing a version of its Ubuntu Linux desktop operating system specifically for ARM's Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 processor architectures. ...

Online networks suffered their heaviest brute force attacks to date this year, with more sites than ever coming under sustained assault. Online networks suffered their heaviest brute force attacks to date this year, with more sites than ever coming under sustained assault. IP networks were...

Apple's iPhone has half the failure rate of RIM's BlackBerry in the first year of use, a study carried out by a mobile-phone warranty firm has found. Apple's iPhone has half the failure rate of RIM's BlackBerry in the first year of use, a study carried out by...