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Stories by Bob Brown

  • Experts scrutinize 2009’s most notable IT apologies

    We asked Peter Goolpacy and the team at Perfect Apology to rate the quality of the apologies issued by top tech companies and executives this year for their assorted mistakes and misdeeds. The following contains their reviews of the apologies and their ratings of the apologies on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best.

  • Intel, CMU add muscle to wimpy processors

    Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh have built an experimental energy-efficient computing cluster that combines flash memory and the sort of processors used in netbooks. Their name for it? Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN). 

  • Google ReCAPTCHA acquisition latest of many buyouts

    In light of <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/091609-google-buys-recaptcha-to-boost.html">Google's buyout this week of Carnegie Mellon University spinoff ReCAPTCHA</a>, it seems like a good time to take a spin back through Google's more notable buyouts over the years. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google">Wikipedia lists 55 of them</a>, and given Google's sometimes mysterious ways, there are no doubt a few that didn't make the public list.

  • OnLive video game service: "In a lot of ways, we've solved cloud computing"

    Steve Perlman, CEO of a company called OnLive that's readying an on-demand video game service, cringes whenever Google's gmail or other high profile Web services conk out. After all, his company's bold plan is to offer streamed access to a slew of brand name video games via the cloud in such a way that users at their PCs and TVs get performance they're used to experiencing on consoles.

  • Feature breakout: Cool cloud computing research projects

    esearchers from the University of Minnesota have outlined a way to use “distributed voluntary resources – those donated by end-user hosts – to form nebulas” that would potentially complement today’s managed clouds from companies such as Amazon, IBM and Google.

  • Red Hat virtual desktop technology heads into beta tests

    Side-by-side Windows displays might be the last thing you would expect to see taking center stage at Red Hat's booth at the recent Interop show in Las Vegas. But it makes sense when you consider they were part of a demo showcasing the company's pursuit of what it sees as a huge opportunity: the emerging virtual desktop market.

  • One way to build mobile-friendly apps for all devices

    Adam Blum, CEO of startup Rhomobile, says 90% of the programs being written with his company's open source mobile application framework are by ISVs and the other 10% by enterprises, but over time he'd like to see those percentages reversed.