Andy Patrizio

We know there are black holes in space, but would you believe there are black holes on the Internet? We’re not talking about the customer service inboxes of certain firms. We’re talking about darknets. Network security firm Arbor Networks has introduced ATLAS, an initiative allowing ISPs to monitor darknets for whatever wanders into them. Darknets […]

P.A. Semi today announced the release of PWRficient (cq) 1682M processor, a stripped-down version of IBM’s POWER processor designed for embedded systems with a significantly lower power draw. POWER processors are high-performance chips, used in System i and System p machines as well as BladeCenter machines. As such, it would be the last chip to […]

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Hidden away in the southern section of this city, surrounded by little more than farm fields, 2,200 researchers are building technology ideas into reality at the largest of IBM’s  seven West coast labs. During a tour yesterday, IBM Research demonstrated some of those technologies under development, and provided a peek at […]

Tradition has always held that a new Microsoft operating system meant upgrading your CPU and memory. With the release of Vista this week, you’ve got one more component to consider: your video card. With past operating system releases, video performance wasn’t an issue because the desktop was always 2D. Although there were attempts to fudge […]

UPDATED: Just months after Apple  was left red-faced over a virus found in its iPods, portable GPS device maker TomTom is in the same embarrassing predicament. A pair of viruses have been found in what the company describes as a “small number” of its TomTom Go 910 dashboard-mounted models manufactured between September and November of […]

The latest version of 6th Sense Analytics, announced today at the DEMO conference, offers an improved automated method for gathering performance metrics in development projects, without requiring the developer to do a thing. Other than their job, that is. The new “6th Sense Analytics January 2007,” the formal name for the product, is a plug-in […]

Arguing that Web applications are nowhere near as secure as the firewalls behind which they operate, Cenzic today announced an alliance to bundle its Hailstorm application risk controller software with Borland Software’s Gauntlet version control software. Hailstorm performs security assessment of applications either already deployed or being built. The goal here is to check applications […]

Intel has announced a breakthrough in chip design involving the use of new metals for the manufacture of 45 nanometer transistors. Try to curb your enthusiasm. On the surface, the high-k and metal gate developments may sound like items only an electrical engineer would be interested in, but it does have considerable impact for the […]

Malware  has changed radically since the days when John McAfee first set up his BBS and offered VirusScan for download at 2400 baud. It is rapidly becoming a certainty in life, right up there with death and taxes. And like death and taxes, malware seems to find new and horrible ways to attack you. Antivirus […]

Windows Vista won’t be in the public’s hands until next Tuesday, but Microsoft is already preparing for the first service pack. The company has confirmed it is submitting customer feedback for, among other things, what should be in the first service pack. The customer feedback is being solicited through the Technology Adoption Program (TAP), which […]

Reporter’s Notebook: When Scott McNealy stepped down as the head of Sun Microsystems last April to make way for Jonathan Schwartz in the CEO role, skeptics didn’t give the ponytail-sporting executive much of a chance. Eight months later, Sun  is pulling out of its earnings spiral, and, though it’s not soaring at the same altitude […]

UPDATED: If Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz sounded rather upbeat on today’s conference call with analysts to discuss the company’s second fiscal quarter numbers, he had good reason. Analysts were predicting profits of a penny, but Sun  beat that handily with a net profit of $126 million, or 3 cents per share for its second fiscal […]