By Yoko Kubota and Liana B. Baker Feb 1, 2012

Sony Corp named Kazuo Hirai as chief executive, succeeding Howard Stringer at the helm of the iconic gadget maker as it struggles with persistent losses and stalled efforts to re-energize its once-dominant brand. 

Hirai, a 28-year company veteran known for overseeing the phenomenal rise of the PlayStation gaming system in the United States, takes over as CEO and president on April 1. Hirai, 51, was effectively anointed as Stringer's successor last March when he was promoted to head the company's consumer products and services businesses, which produce the bulk of Sony's $85 billion in annual sales. "They've been grooming him for a while," said Dan Ernst, Hudson Square analyst. "I think he will carry on the plan for Sony — as difficult as it is." That plan hinges on turning around the company that has come under fire for losing the innovative edge behind products like the Walkman and Playstation, and ceding ground to rivals such as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics as consumers snapped up their iPhones, iPods and Galaxy gadgets. A chief concept in the strategy hinges on merging Sony's robust roster of entertainment properties — including singers Kelly Clarkson and Michael Jackson, and the "Spider-Man" and "Men in Black" film franchises — with its Vaio, Bravia and other electronics brands, in an effort to boost sales. "He is fully on board with that plan," Ernst said of Hirai. "He implemented a lot of that in the PlayStation group and probably more than anyone at Sony."

Read more here –>reuters.com

By usatoday 2/1/2012

Microsoft slammed search rival Google with full-page ads Wednesday, saying that recent changes at Google that allow it to internally merge the data it collects on user activity across services such as YouTube and Gmail are meant to allow advertisers to better target customers. 

Google has touted the overhaul it announced last week as a simplification of detailed but obtuse policies and a way to provide a better user experience. Microsoft offered up its own Web-based alternatives, saying for instance that users of its free email service, Hotmail, don't have to worry about the content of their emails being used to help target ads. The attack ads appeared in papers including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. "Every data point Google collects and connects to you increases how valuable you are to an advertiser," Microsoft says in the ad. In response, Google published a blog post in which it refuted what it called "myths" about its new privacy policy, saying, "Our privacy controls have not changed. Period." The company does not dispute that it serves up ads based on words in private e-mails written by users of Gmail, but says such scanning is automated and is similar to how many e-mail providers filter out spam. It has operated that way since Gmail's introduction in 2004.

Read more here –>usatoday.com

By Nancy Gohring, Feb 1, 2012

As promised, Microsoft on Wednesday shipped version 1.0 of the Kinect for Windows SDK and runtime and said partners have started selling the Kinect hardware.
The Kinect motion and voice sensor was initially designed for use with Microsoft's Xbox gaming console. But it soon became clear that developers wanted the chance to build new kinds of applications using the sensor. Microsoft has been letting people build Kinect apps for PCs, but only for non-commercial use. This release of the SDK (software development kit) means that developers can launch commercial products using the sensor. The SDK and runtime include a few improvements over the most recent beta version, Craig Eisler, general manager of Kinect for Windows, wrote in a blog post. They enable support for up to four Kinect sensors plugged into the same computer, include improved skeletal tracking of users and have a "near mode" for tracking movement as close as 40 centimeters in front of the device. They also have the latest Microsoft speech recognition technology and an installer that developers can use in their application set-up programs. Eisler wrote that the company expects to release updates to the SDK and runtime two to three times a year. He didn't name who is selling the Kinect hardware but said the suggested price is US$249. Amazon.com is selling it for that price. Microsoft plans to soon offer a special academic price of $149 for qualified educational uses.

Read more here –>pcworld.com

A patent troll is going after Apple for patent infringement of an "electronic alignment system".
By Douglas Perry January 30, 2012

Calibrait, LLC, a company with no history and apparently has been founded with the sole purpose to acquire a patent and sue for patent infringement, 

claims that Apple directly and indirectly infringe its patent 7,447,265 by offering accelerometers in its mobile devices as well as software that turn iPods, iPads and iPhones into electronic alignment devices. Calibrait also alleges that Apple engages in indirect infringement by enabling others to violate Calibrait's patent. The patent in question was filed in 2005 and granted in November 2008 to John Cerwin, founder of Cerwin Tools in Illinois. Calibrait, headquartered in Irvine, California, acquired the patent from Cerwin in May of 2011. According to USPTO records, Calibrait does not own any other patents. Back in 2005, it appears that John Cerwin envisioned mobile devices to integrate "at least two accelerometers" that are mounted "mutually perpendicular to one another" and are employed to determine "the angle of rotation of the device about an axis." He mentioned that two accelerometers can determine one angle, while three would be necessary to calculate a second angle. There is also a note of distance sensors or a gyroscope to determine a third angle.

Read more here –>tomsguide.com

Pushing up to 384GB per socket
By Timothy Prickett Morgan 30th January 2012

It looks like Advanced Micro Devices is first to market with support for load reduced DIMM DDR3 main memory for x86 and quite possibly all kinds of servers, and is trotting out Inphi, the maker of the isolation memory buffer chip that is at the heart of this technology. 

With LRDIMM memory, you take out the register on a DDR3 memory module and plunk in a buffer chip that allows the memory chips on the module to run at a higher clock speed and also allows for more memory chips to be put on each channel. When the Opteron 4200s and 6200s were launched last November, AMD said that it would support unregistered, registered, and load reduced DDR3 memory modules with the chips. To add LRDIMM support, the main memory controllers on the Opterons had to be tweaked so they could talk this new chatter and support the higher clock speeds on the memory. What might not have been obvious at the time was that the extra memory that AMD was offering was only available through the use of LRDIMM memory. As it stands, says John Fruehe, director of product marketing for server, embedded, amd FireStream products at AMD, if you use unregistered DIMMs, you top out at 64GB per socket, and registered DIMMs are at the 256GB per socket upper limit, twice the maximum memory as the prior generation of Opteron 6100 processors. By moving to LRDIMMs, you can boost that memory capacity to 384GB per socket without having to resort to special memory extender electronics that add costs to the server.

Read more here –>theregister.co.uk

By Richard Adhikari 01/30/12

Fifteen leading email service providers and tech companies have announced a joint effort to fight phishers. 

Google, Facebook, PayPal, Yahoo and Agari are among the companies behind the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) spec. DMARC is a technical specification that standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication using well-known mechanisms. "The inspiration behind DMARC was PayPal's and Google's attempt to stop phishing together, but they quickly realized the model they were pursuing could not scale," said Daniel Raskin, vice president of marketing at Agari. That led to the formation of DMARC. "For years now, cybercriminals have been leveraging brand content such as formatting, content and logos from the marketing emails of companies to create messages that attempt to drive users to sites where they will give up sensitive information such as usernames and passwords," Sam Masiello, general manager and chief security officer at Return Path, told TechNewsWorld. What Does DMARC Do? DMARC standardizes how email receivers authenticate email using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). SPF lets administrators specify which hosts are allowed to send mail from a given domain by creating a specific SPF record in the domain name system (DNS). Mail exchangers use the DNS to verify that mail from a given domain is being sent by a host approved by that domain's administrators. DKIM provides a method for validating a domain name identity that is associated with a message through cryptographic authentication.

Read more here –>technewsworld.com