What?

Let’s be fair, the tech industry doesn’t have great ‘green’ credentials. Just consider these areas:  power consumption, the use of toxic ubstances, over-packaging, air conditioning and product life cycle. Dismal, eh? But times are changing. More and more, companies recognise the need to go ‘green’ to save the planet (and avoid being taxed to the hilt!).

Unified Threat Management.

What’s that got to do with the environment? More than you think. UTM places a number of security appliances into a single package. This reduces infrastructure requirements thereby reducing power consumption, hardware and all the other bits that go with it. The ability to add futher components to UTM increases its ‘greeness’. Just think, virtualised UTM - save yourself some big bucks.

Will companies ‘get it’?

Probably. The virtualisation of whole environments saves huge sums of money. Add UTM to the mix and any company/person specialising in these areas is onto a winner - time to brush up on your skillset?

Popularity: 2% [?]

White van man knows where you live!

Navevo, the UK’s leading specialist GPS oftware developer, has today unveiled its sat-nav solution for drivers of heavy goods vehicles and vans.

The NAVTEQ Transport, ProNav GPS uses dynamic routing and
navigation optimisation based on a vehicle’s dimensions and legal restrictions
to avoid incidents such as travelling down unsuitable narrow roads or crossing
bridges with vehicles that break weight restrictions.

Key Features:
-    Enhanced GPS navigation for HGVs, vans, horse transporters, caravans or
trailers
-    Dynamic routing and navigation optimisation based on
-    Vehicle dimensions (e.g. height, width, length, weight)
-    Legal restrictions (e.g. no HGVs allowed, carrying hazardous goods)
-    Other warning data (e.g. cross winds, steep hills)
-    London unloading and parking penalties database
-    POI data for professional drivers

Navevo will be extending its ProNav software to work with commercial fleet
mobile market solutions in the near future. Here’s your oppurtunity to set up an outsourced white label tracking system!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Little cash in the pot.

Without Bletchley Park the Allies Forces probably wouldn’t have won the second world war. Sadly, it would seem that many people overlook the contribution made by the organisation and people who worked there during WWII. The park is in desperate need of funds to for the running and upkeep of the buildings and exhibits. The Bletchley Park Trust has appealed to many donors for aid but it would the requests have fallen on deaf ears. The National Lottery Fund said no. I wonder if the NLF has considered that without Bletchley Park we’d all probably be speaking German and goose stepping around the country. Oh, that’s not a problem is it? Because, we won so why should Bletchley Park get any money? Our should be preserved. Without people like Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, we’d live in a far harsher world.

Bill and Melinda Gates to the rescue?

Err, no. Apparently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation only funds internet-based technology projects. Hmm, I doubt Microsoft would have existed without the advances made by Bletchley Park. Ever thought about that one Bill?

Hey, look on the plus side: I bet the government would just to see another great piece of history bulldozed for housing!

Popularity: 1% [?]

It’s not only the UK government having ‘problems’.

It looks like the governments of other countries are experiencing issues with data protection, in this case: Chile. A hacker managed steal personal information relating to 6 million people and post the data onto a technology blog. Details included: ID numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, emails and academic records. A report suggests that the theft was designed to highlight the poor security of Chilean government systems (or maybe the hacker was just having fun!).

The announcemnet prompted Graham Cluely, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, to state;”Chile may be on the other side of the world, but the scale of this data breach should not be ignored,”. “No matter how moral or ethical the motive, this prank was irresponsible and has left almost 40 per cent of Chile’s population at risk of identity theft.”

I wonder who’s next?

Popularity: 1% [?]

That’s a really fat pipe!

Do you remeber the Virgin 40Gb trial? On the back of this success Virgin have announced the launch of a 50Gbps network service.

The test, using Juniper’s routers and Nortel’s Adaptive Optical Engine, was the first of its kind in the UK. No date has bee announced for the launch of the new service but Virgin have stated that there will be four levels of service with corresponding speeds: 2Gbps, 10Gbps, 20Gbps and 50Gbps.

Virgin meda now has about 3.5 million customers with the number growing at about 80,000 - 90,000 per month.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tech giant in the making.

HP has announced that it’s interested in buying EDS. Now there’s a headline. The acquistion would create a technology company of epic proportions. The deal is expected to cost HP between $12 - $13 billion and would see HP pick up a huge number of outsourced projects that EDS currently has on the books.

The talks are ‘advanced’. This isn’t the biggest buyout for HP - the company paid $20 billion to acquire Compaq back in 2002 but would certainly prove very profitable. Take the UK as an example; EDS has a huge number of projects running for the government.

Popularity: 1% [?]

RIM takes the lead.

The BlackBerry 900 has landed. And don’t think this is a half way measure to bolster sales. The device, BlackBerry Bold, comes with a range of connectivity options: tri-band HSDPA, integrated GPS and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi. Admittedly, the BlackBerry 8707v had 3G back in 2006 but actually getting a 3G connection was another matter.

What do you get for your money?

Well, it’s a nice looking handset but here’s the technical details in brief:

• 624MHz processor
• Full Qwerty keyboard
• 1Gb onboard storage - expandable via microSD/SDHC
• 2-megapixel camera
• “half-VGA” screen — a reference to the dimensions of the display, not the resolution, which are a VGA-quality 480 by 320 pixels.

So how will it fair? I’ve been using a BlackBerry for about a year now (yes, I’m planning to buy an iPhone soon). It’s good. Push email, calendaring, messenger, Google maps, ssh and a whole range of other add-ons make it ideal for my needs. The one downside is, as stated earlier, 3G connectivity - my handset seems to want to use Edge over 3G. The improved connectivity in the Bold should make the handset a real winner. Edge is here to stay and has huge future potential but for now I’ll stick to 3G.

Given many peoples love of the web the speed and capabilities of this new device it should be a hit with both day to day users and businesses.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Cyborg drones stack shelves!

Well, not quite. You know what it’s like, you had a hard weekend. That long mountain bike ride through the forest and over the hills was a killer. Or maybe you had a backlog of 3 months work to do on the garden? So, come Monday morning, you wake up feeling like you’ve been hit by a train. Easy, have the day off or go into work a little later. Just call up your pal and ask him to clock on for you. Now have the rest of the day in bed relaxing.

Not so fast.

Those days may be coming to and end. Budgens have announced the introduction of biometric based clocking systems. Finger print checking software is to be trialled in six stores extending to a furhter 20 franchised outlets. The system, provided by Nivid, is expected to save the first two trial shops around £10,000 per year.

Oh well, there’s no avoiding the work now unless…are you prepared to lose a finger for a day off work?

Popularity: 1% [?]

The word according to PC Tools.

Yes, you read it right. It looks like Vista is more susceptible to malware than it’s younger version, Windows 2000.  Not good news for Microsoft.

Using ThreatFire security service, PC Tools found that Vista lets through 639 threats per 1,000 compared to 586 for Windows 2000. Windows 2003 comes in even lower with 487 but XP does not fair well: 1,021 - I’m not sure how that works based on a figure of 1,000 analysed threats! Working on those figures, 64% of the Vista installation base is infected and 100% of XP - can’t be right, I’m clean (I think).

Microsoft bites back.

What else would you expect? According to a spokesman from MS, statistics from the Malicious Software Removal Tool show the figures to be far lower - but didn’t give any figures. MSRT ran on around 400 million Windows machines in November 2007 and, apparently, the figures returned do not show the same level of vulnerabilities found by PC Tools.

Just to be safe, I’m going to fire up my Ubuntu laptop.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Skype told to play the GPL game.

Last July Skype was convicted of failure to comply with the GPL v2 for it internet messaging service supplied on Linux devices. As part of the licensing requirements, vendors have to provide source code for Open Source products which Skype refused to do  with its WSKP100 phone.has abandoned its efforts to avoid complying with an open-source licence that requires it to provide source code with Linux-based VoIP phones. Skype had appealed saying that Germanys antitrust rules made the GPL invalid - nice try! Skype lost.

The appeal was dropped after German courts hinted that Skype would lose the case. The previous judgement has now been accepted by Skype. There was some hope that Skype could come to an agreement but Harald Welte, head of gpl-violations, is only interested in seeing GPL upheld - rightly so. The GPL is a license just like any other, proprietary or not, so there’s no dodging the terms. Skype thinks users don’t need access to the source code  but the company must abide by the licence requirements, the judges said.

And Welte is not backing down. He is determined that the agreement will follow the GPL v2 license to the letter. “We’re not interested in settling for anything less than full GPL compliance,” he said.

Message to the proprietary vendors.

It looks like the GPL will defended to the last. Can you blame them? Personally, I’m on the side of Welte. Look at it another way; what would Skype do if someone infringed their license? Enough said.

Popularity: 20% [?]