IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Digital Trends) 29/09/2009

Dell Settlement Has Tougher Accounting Oversight

Dell Inc. says it will beef up accounting and corporate governance rules as part of a settlement tied to an investigation into past financial practices. The PC maker will also pay $1.75 million in legal fees. After a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Dell's accounting was made public in 2006, several shareholder groups filed lawsuits saying Dell misrepresented its financial health while officers and board members sold stock

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Retired NFL Players Seek to Join EA Lawsuit

Two retired NFL players on Monday asked a judge to let them formally support a former college quarterback's legal fight with video game maker Electronic Arts Inc. Hall of Famers Herb Adderley and Jim Brown asked U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken to let them file the legal document in support of former Nebraska Cornhusker Sam Keller, who sued EA and the NCAA in Oakland federal court last year. Keller, who also played for Arizona State University before transferring, accused the Redwood City, Calif., company and the NCAA of unfairly using images of college basketball and football players in its NCAA Football and NCAA Basketball games.

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A Winter Coat to Charge Your Phone

Mountain Hardwear has displayed its new multitasking jacket just in time for fall. The Mountain Hardwear Refugium Jacket is powered by an Ardica portable power and heating system that will heat the coat and charge your gadgets at the same time. Ardica’s portatble, warming power pack can supply your cell phone with up to 11 full charges and your iPod with up to 20 full charges. You get up to 8.6 hours of heat with limitless charging time. Charging the Ardica pack will take 3 hours, but you can get to 80% capacity in 1.5 hours—not too bad.

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Preparing Your iPhone for International Travel

An inventory for a trip to a tropical beach could read like this: Swimsuit, check. Sunscreen, check. Passport, check. And iPhone, check. Well, make that a possibly giant check, drawn from your bank account. Unaware travelers can blithely rack up eye-popping bills on their iPhones while traveling abroad. The international roaming calling rates are bad enough, but data usage is what really delivers the sting. The root of the problem is that the iPhone, with all its apps, positively inhales data. Because domestic plans feature unlimited data, few users bother to track the amount they send and receive. When you travel to a foreign country, this cheap smorgasbord of bits and bytes become

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Satphone Operator Iridium Goes Public Through GHL Acquisition

Satellite-based phone services has always been one of those seemingly-great ideas that never really took off—although the technology holds out the promise of offering real-time communication from anywhere in the world, there have been several stumbling blocks, not the least of which is the cost of designing, launching, and maintaining a global network of satellites to support the service. Motorola gave the idea a go back in the late 1990s, and spun the business off into its own company, Iridium—but the company racked up billions in losses and declared bankruptcy a little over a decade ago, though the expensive network and service kept operating, buoyed by government, maritime, and milita

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Xerox Gets Into Services with $6.4 Bln ACS Acquisition

The trend has been developing for a while, but leave it to Xerox to put a nice big punctuation mark on things: the document management and printing company has announced a deal to acquire Affiliated Computer Services for some $6.4 billion in stock and cash. Xerox says teh acquisition will enable the company to triple its services revenue to an estimated $10 billion next year, and comes as the company is seeing revenues decline from printer sales and equipment leasing. "By combining Xerox'

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TomTom Looks to Google to Offer Mid-range Connected GPS Navigation

GPS maker TomTom has announced its latest navigation offering, the TomTom XL 340S Live, a new connected GPS that hooks into the AT&T mobile network and which features local search capabilities powered by Google. The XL 340S Live represents the first time TomTom has brought connected GPS services to the middle range of its product line—and that includes fuel price information, local real-time traffic, and weather. "With the new TomTom XL 340S LIVE, we are bringing unrivaled quality and truly connected navigation to the mass market," said TomTom president Jocelyn Vigreux, in a statement. "Now backed by the strength of AT&T's network, we're giving drivers the very best

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What's Government's Role in Making the Web Secure?

There is no kill switch for the Internet, no secret on-off button in an Oval Office drawer. Yet when a Senate committee was exploring ways to secure computer networks, a provision to give the president the power to shut down Internet traffic to compromised Web sites in an emergency set off alarms. Corporate leaders and privacy advocates quickly objected, saying the government must not seize control of the Internet. Lawmakers dropped it, but the debate rages on. How much control should federal authorities have over the Web in a crisis? How much should be left to the private sector? It does own and operate at least 80 percent of the Internet and argues it can do a better job. "We need to prepare for that digital disast

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Orange Breaks O2's Lock On The iPhone in the UK

When Apple rolled out the iPhone internationally, it mostly made exclusive deals with single mobile carriers for individual markets, mirroring its deal with AT&T in the United States. However, as the market has matured, Apple is showing signs of ending those exclusive arrangements: today Orange UK announced it will start selling the iPhone 3G and 3GS in the United Kingdom later this year, ending 02's exclusive deal on the iPhone that's been in place since 2007. Orange hasn't announced any pricing information or specific dates when it plans to put the iPhone in its shop

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EU To Order Volume Limits on MP3 Players

For years, consumer and health advocates have warned about the dangers of pumping loud music into our heads using personal music players like iPods and cell phones: health and safety experts have long warned that most music players can put out music volumes that, over time, can lead to long term hearing loss—especially for folks who insist on tapping into their tunes for hours at a time. Now the European Union is doing something about it, revising its safety requirements for personal music players to reduce the risk of hearing damage from prolonged use: by default, music players will be li

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Games Journalism 2.0

Getting paid to review games for a living sounds like a dream job, but as many veteran games journalists have discovered, slapping a number on every game that shows up on your desk while dealing with the pressure of deadlines and advertisers is no easy task. And no one’s ever happy. Which may explain, as this week’s episode of Players Only explores, why the field is quickly changing. “As the industry has matured, the journalism has some as well,” says Raph Koster, president of Metaplace. “Now that it’s moved onto the Web, we’re starting to se

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iTunes App Store: More Than 2 Billion Served

Apple announced today that iPhone and iPod touch users have downloaded more than 2 billion apps from its iTunes App Store since it was launched a little over a year ago. All told, Apple's App Store sports more than 85,000 applications for its portable devices—many of which, admittedly, are utter tripe—but perhaps more importantly the company boasts more than 125,000 developers in its iPhone Developer Program, meaning the concept has serious momentum and more and better apps are on the way. "The rate of App Store downloads continues to accelerate with users downloading a staggering two billion apps in just

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Microsoft's Courier vs. Apple's iPad Tablet: Who Wins?

Microsoft's Courier vs. Apple's iPad Tablet: Who Wins? - While people are going gaga over leaked photos and videos of Microsoft's Courier tablet, and whispering about Steve Jobs working nonstop to launch the iPad tablet, another viable tablet has been slipping under the radar. The Archos 9 tablet will hit store shelves this month, running a full version of Windows 7. The panel critiques the specs on this early entry, talks timetables for both the Courier and iPad, and speculates about what kind capabilities all three tablets will need to have to make it in this fickle market.

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Best Voice Recorders Reviewed

With all the portable audio-video devices floating around today, it seems surprising – nay, downright annoying – that so few of them offer support for voice recording. Sure, they'll load and play a kazillion songs in any format you want, display photos, play movies, and probably pour you a frosty beer, but should you want to do something as seemingly simple and as natural as recording the human voice, you'll have to look far and wide. And even fewer of them feature line-in jacks for direct feeds from hardwired outside sources or external mics. But have no fear – we've found a few that'll do the trick. Moreover, we've also dug deep into the world of standalone voice recorders – a far better

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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

IT News HeadLines (Digital Trends) 29/09/2009

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