Business Tech

Aiming to keep pace with Microsoft and advance the computing frontier, the group behind OpenGL has announced a new version of its interface designed to make advanced graphics easier for programmers to handle.

OpenGL 4.0 adds more support for using a graphics processing unit (GPU) for other computing chores and for tesselation, which subdivides a region on a graphics object into many smaller patches for more detailed imagery. The technology got its start as a graphics library at pioneering Silicon Graphics but has grown into a standard that works on many different computer systems and overseen by the Khronos … Read more

LONDON--Jane Silber has been chief executive of Canonical for 11 days.

But she's no outsider swooping in to take over Ubuntu Linux's corporate sponsor. She joined Canonical in June 2004, two months after previous CEO Mark Shuttleworth founded the company with a few programmers he recruited from the Debian Linux project on which Ubuntu is based.

Since then Canonical has grown to about 320 employees and has made Ubuntu a major presence in the world of Linux--version 10.04, one of the important "long-term support" versions that arrives every two years, is due in April. It'… Read more

Intel has officially introduced its six-core monster for high-end gaming boxes--its first desktop chip packing that many processing cores.

As previously reported, the Core i7- 980X Extreme Edition processor was introduced at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

The chip is based on Intel's newest 32-nanometer process technology. Generally, the smaller the manufacturing process, the better the performance. Most Intel processors still use "fatter" 45-nanometer technology.

Like other Core i series processors, it features Hyper-Threading, which can double the number of tasks--or threads--a processor can execute. The technology, which is not offered on prior-generation … Read more

The latest cases of uncontrolled acceleration in the Toyota Prius point to software glitches that the car industry needs to address with more rigorous testing, according to a company that specializes in software integrity.

The most recent high-profile incident happened on Monday when James Sikes called 911 around 1:30 p.m., saying the accelerator in his Prius was stuck and he couldn't slow down, according to a CBS News report.

At one point, the car hit a speed of 90 mph. A California Highway Patrol officer inserted his car in front of the Prius and applied the brakes to try to get the Prius to stop. It stopped after about 20 minutes.

"I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car and it did something kind of funny...it jumped and it just stuck there," Sikes said at a news conference, according to the CBS News report. (See video below.) He said he tried the brakes but this didn't stop the car.

Dave Peterson, chief marketing officer at Coverity, said: "There are two things that are clear about the latest Prius incident. One, nobody knows where the problems are inside of these types of automobiles. Two, the days of blaming floor mats are coming to an end." Coverity provides software analysis to help electronics companies build high-integrity software. Its customers have included France Telecom, Siemens, Mitsubishi Electric, Research In Motion, and Broadcom.

Peterson asserts--as have other experts--that "drivers should not be software beta testers for automobiles." Sophisticated drive-by-wire cars like the Prius demand more exacting analysis, as is practiced in the airplane industry. "It is time to see the auto industry learn from the avionics sector and apply rigorous integrity testing for all software components and all combinations of integrations between these components," he said.

In a statement, Toyota said it sent a technical specialist to San Diego to investigate the Monday incident. Generally, the automaker has maintained that mechanical flaws, not electronics, are to blame in cases of unintended acceleration, though the company does investigate select incidents when drivers claim electronic failures. … Read more

Ten years on, Mozilla has concluded that its open-source underpinnings are due for a refresh.

The Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail software are governed by the Mozilla Public License, which determines what rights and restrictions apply to programmers who want to use the software in their own projects, extend it in various ways, or just peek at the programming instructions that underlie the software.

"Version 1.1 of the Mozilla Public License has been in use by Mozilla and other projects for over a decade. The spirit of the license has served us well by helping to communicate some … Read more

Reinforcing what we learned last fall, iSuppli's PC market numbers for full-year 2009 show Acer mounting a serious challenge to Dell for the title of world's second biggest PC company.

Last year Acer shipped 38.5 million PCs, a gain of 21 percent over 2008 that helped it win a 12.7 percent share of the market, just a hair's-breadth behind Dell, according to results released Tuesday by iSuppli. Dell's 2009 shipments totaled 39.9 million PCs, a drop of 9.9 percent from the prior year that was good enough for a 12.9 percent … Read more

A decade ago, on March 10, 2000, it seemed almost difficult to find someone skeptical about the dazzling future of dot-com stocks.

An undeniably prescient strategist at Warburg Dillon Read, now part of UBS, told the New York Times that "I don't see the end in sight." The Los Angeles Times quoted a Banc of America Securities analyst as saying that, before "too long," the Nasdaq index would double.

It was exactly 10 years ago that the Nasdaq index reached its all-time peak of 5,048.62, and the tech-heavy index has never come close … Read more

Apple-owned FileMaker on Tuesday unveiled the next major version of its database product, FileMaker Pro 11.

In a recent study, the company found that 80 percent of the people who look at FileMaker already have a task in mind. With this type of feedback, FileMaker set out to make the new version faster and more productive for new users.

"It's very much a back to basics release for us," Ryan Rosenberg, vice president of marketing and services at FileMaker, told CNET. "We think ease of use is the core proposition in a database."

To help … Read more

As the case of reseller Newegg demonstrates, typos are usually the most visible sign that a chip--or any product purported to be supplied by a reputable company--is fake.

Newegg said Monday that it is conducting an investigation of recent shipments of "questionable" Intel Core i7-920 processors from Newegg. The news was first reported by [H]ard|OCP.

"Initial information we received from our supplier, IPEX, stated that they had mistakenly shipped us 'demo units.' We have since come to discover the CPUs were counterfeit and are terminating our relationship with this supplier," Newegg said in a … Read more