Business Tech

In a blog Wednesday, an AMD executive provided a long explanation about why AMD has quit the BAPCo industry consortium, which develops and distributes the SYSmark benchmark.

"Customers need clear and reliable measurements to understand the expected performance and value of their systems," Nigel Dessau, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD, said in a statement. "AMD does not believe SM2012 (SYSMark 2012) achieves this objective. Hence AMD cannot endorse or support SM2012 or remain part of the BAPCo consortium."

Graphics chip supplier Nvidia has also quit the group. The company confirmed to CNET that it has quit but declined to comment further.

AMD's argument revolves around the lack of emphasis on what is called general-purpose computing on graphics processing units, or GPGPU. This is

Returning a laptop to Staples in Canada also means handing over personal data in some cases, according to a government audit.

(Credit: CC Ian Muttoo/Flickr)

Canadian Staples stores are failing to fully wipe customer data off returned laptops and storage devices before reselling them, thus violating Canada's privacy laws, the CBC News reports.

More than a third of the 149 storage devices tested by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, including laptops and USB hard drives, still had customer data on them--despite undergoing a wipe and restore process to be readied for resale. Some of the lingering information was reportedly pretty sensitive, including things like tax and ID records and passport numbers.

"Our findings are particularly disappointing given we had already investigated two complaints against Staples involving returned data storage devices and the company had committed to taking corrective action," commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a press release. "While Staples did improve procedures and control mechanisms after our investigations, the audit showed those procedures and controls were not consistently applied, nor were they always effective, leaving customers' personal information at serious risk."

Ford, Nuance: Voice recognition will identify intent
The Sync system could ultimately interpret what drivers are looking to do by understanding the meaning of words and phrases they say and then coaching them to correctly complete tasks. More

Apple scores broad patent on touch screens
Patent describes how a touch screen is used to interact with contents on a display. And given Apple's recent history with patent lawsuits, it could prove to be another tool in litigation. More

Report: Apple launching new iPhone in September
Citing unnamed sources, Bloomberg says that Apple's new iPhone will launch in September with a faster processor and better camera. More

Best Buy launching cloud music service
Retailer joins the rush to the cloud, offering customers a way to store

Tilera has introduced the 40nm 64-bit Tilera Gx family of processors. Click to enlarge.

(Credit: Tilera)

Tilera has introduced a range of processors with up to 100 cores, aiming to take on Intel in servers that handle high-throughput Web applications.

The chips in the 40nm 64-bit Tilera Gx family, announced yesterday, have between 36 and 100 cores and are intended by the Silicon Valley-based chip design company to compete with Intel's Sandy Bridge range of processors.

"The reason we can go against Sandy Bridge architecture is [Intel's range] was designed for general-purpose [applications], so it has to account for single-thread performance and power-point performance and Windows," Ihab Bishara, Tilera's head of marketing, told ZDNet UK.

Read more of "Tilera's 100-core processors take on Sandy Bridge" at ZDNet UK.

After undisputed tablet market leader Apple, Samsung and Acer are vying for the No. 2 tablet slot worldwide, according to market researcher DisplaySearch.

Samsung's Android 3.1-based Galaxy Tab 10.1

(Credit: Samsung)

While Apple shipped about 4.7 million 10-inch class tablets last quarter, Samsung is shaping up to be the closest competitor at about 850,000 units shipped worldwide in the same quarter, according to Richard Shim of DisplaySearch, which pegs its numbers to vendors' public statements.

Close on Samsung's heels is Acer. The new kid on the block, Acer appears to be making gains with its 10.1-inch Iconia Tab A500 tablet. Acer has shipped 800,000 units in the current quarter, the first financial period to reflect meaningful numbers, according to Shim.

But that number masks some bad news. Acer cut its 2011 tablet shipment forecasts dramatically to between 2.5 million and 3 ... Read full post & comments

Google today released an open-source tool called DOM Snitch that tries to flag Web site software that would be dangerous to run in a browser.

The software is an experimental Chrome extension that examines how Web site code executes to see if commands could lead to cross-site scripting or other attacks used to deliver malware to computers via a Web browser.

DOM Snitch (download) "enables developers and testers to identify insecure practices commonly found in client-side code," said Google security test engineer Radoslav Vasilev in a blog post. He elaborated:

To do this, we have adopted several approaches to intercepting JavaScript calls to key and potentially dangerous browser infrastructure such as document.write or HTMLElement.innerHTML (among others). Once a JavaScript call has been intercepted, DOM Snitch records the document URL and a complete stack trace that will help assess if the intercepted call can lead to cross-site scripting, mixed ... Read full post & comments

Microsoft's IE team congratulates Mozilla on every Firefox release with a cake. Here's the cake, complete with the updated IE9 logo, for Firefox 5. "We have streamlined our cake release process to keep up with Mozilla's schedule," quipped Microsoft's Sylvain Galineau about the cake.

(Credit: Damon Sicore/Mozilla)

Mozilla delivered two things today: Firefox 5 for personal computers and Android phones, and the promise to complete the new browser just a few months after its predecessor.

The organization, once the leading challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, faces new challenges--notably Google's Chrome, new versions of which arrive every six weeks. Adopting a similar philosophy, Firefox now revs on a three-month cycle, and today Mozilla met its first deadline.

"The world of the Internet is moving at a faster pace than ever, so we realized we had to start innovating faster," said Mozilla Chief Executive Gary Kovacs in an online chat today to announce the product.

New features in Firefox 5 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux | Android) include the following:

• Support for CSS animations, a technology that lets Web page elements move around the screen. That's useful for more dynamic Web pages and Web apps.

• Firefox's new Add-on SDK, formerly called Jetpack. This foundation lets programmers build extensions out of Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript rather than the older XUL technology. The expected advantages: extensions will be easier to write and won't break when new browser versions arrive.

• In beta testing is the Add-on Builder, a Web-based tool designed ... Read full post & comments

Final Cut Pro X running on a MacBook Pro.

(Credit: Apple)

Apple today released Final Cut Pro X, the latest version of video-editing software geared for professionals from a company increasingly focused on mainstream consumers.

Final Cut Pro X is a follow-up to Final Cut Pro 7, software Apple released in 2009 as part of Final Cut Studio. The new $299.99 version is a complete 64-bit rewrite of Final Cut, absorbing abilities from several of the software programs that are included in the Studio suite.

Like Apple's upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion, Final Cut Pro X will only be available to customers through the Mac App Store, the digital storefront the company rolled out to Snow Leopard users back in January. That means any new updates get delivered through the Mac App Store app, and users can install a copy on any of their authorized computers. ... Read full post & comments

Heads up, Skype.

Shortly after releasing software for audio and video chat as an open-source project called WebRTC as open-source software, Google is beginning to build it into its Chrome browser.

The real-time chat software originated from Google's 2010 acquisition of Global IP Solutions (GIPS), a company specializing in Internet telephony and videoconferencing.

The obvious beneficiary for the project is Gmail, whose audio and video communications ability today requires use of a proprietary plug-in. Gmail chat is getting more important as Google's VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) efforts mature and integrate with the Google Voice service.

But Google has higher hopes that WebRTC will be used well beyond Gmail. Rather, it hopes WebRTC will become an incarnation of a nascent Web standard for videoconferencing and peer-to-peer communications and for the necessary underlying network communication protocols. In an introductory blog post, Google said it released the technology as open-source, ... Read full post & comments