Andy Patrizio

UPDATED: A consumer group has found that the XBox 360 has five times the normal use failure rate as its competitors in the home videogame market. SquareTrade, an independent warranty provider, ran a test of more than 1,000 units and found a failure rate of 16.4 percent. By contrast, the PlayStation 3 is at around […]

I’m about to break dance in a minefield, but at this point, keeping quiet would bother me more. I’m also going to come right to the point. A lot of people in the press owe AMD an apology for their sloppiness in a desire to be first. Numerous stories on a variety of sites, tech […]

Most of the emphasis around virtualization has been geared toward the server side, but Sun Microsystems is also interested in the desktop. On Tuesday, it announced plans to acquire innotek, a German company that develops desktop virtualization software. innotek’s product, VirtualBox, is a GPL-licensed, open-source platform that allows a single desktop or even laptop PC […]

Even though Microsoft unleashed a flood of patches yesterday, there was one biggie missing. Last month, Microsoft warned of a zero-day vulnerability in older versions of Excel (pre-Excel 2007). Microsoft rarely issues alerts in between monthly patches, so when it issues one, there’s a good reason for it. The company did say that the vulnerability […]

Investigators for the European Union antitrust office on Tuesday conducted a series of surprise raids at Intel offices in Germany and at the offices of three European computer retailers as part of its ongoing investigation into the chipmaker’s business practices. EU officials visited Intel’s offices in Munich as well as the offices of Media Markt, […]

Can sales of $400 MP3 players be a good measure of economic trouble? A research note from FBR Capital Markets, concerning a precipitous drop in iPod and iPhone component orders, could be a sign of broader worries about the economy. The report from FBR’s Craig Berger, centered around the cut in build rates of iPods […]

Following its meager security updates in January, Microsoft came back with a huge release for February. The company released 11 security bulletins containing 17 fixes. If there’s any good news in this haul of fixes, it’s that only six of the 11 bulletins are listed as “critical,” and the five other fixes as “important.” Of […]

HP has added a new blade to its its portfolio that offers twice the capacity and potentially twice the performance over its older models, which could make it much more capable of handling business critical applications. The HP Integrity BL870c is the same size as previous HP BladeSystem blades, although it occupies twice as many […]

February 11, 2008 may well be known as Black Monday for backers of HD DVD because it received a double dose of bad news that’s as devastating as last month’s decision by Warner Bros to abandon the format. The day started when Netflix, the leading DVD rental by mail company, announced it would no longer […]

The clock is ticking on HD DVD. Ticking down. Netflix today announced it would no longer carry HD DVD titles, only Blu-ray. This comes almost a year after Blockbuster made the same decision. So if you want a high definition movie, it has to be Blu-ray. I had long figured this would happen as more […]

From the Let’s-See-How-Long-This-Lasts Department: The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) at the University of Wisconsin sued Intel last Wednesday for patent infringement, claiming a technology that Intel used a technology in the Core 2 processor that UW researchers first created in 1998. The technology is for code prediction technology, allowing instructions to be broken into […]

Paul Ferguson, a network architect with antivirus vendor Trend Micro, summed up Web 2.0 as thus: “We’re basically training our online users to be exploited.” He’s not the only security expert who feels this way. Researchers who live and breathe malware told InternetNews.com in multiple interviews that the very nature of Web 2.0 technology and […]