May 2010 Newsletter

Information

Actually, Software should work.

Red Sky software has lost its battle in the High Court that it was not liable for faults in its product. The software company should have alerted its customer to problems with the product when demonstrating it and chosen more demonstrations for it that more closely matched the customer's own business requirements, the Court said. Red Sky sold hotel management software to London's Kingsway Hall Hotel but the Hotel found problems with it almost straight away. It eventually rejected the software and found a replacement, then sued Red Sky because of the business it said it had lost because of the software's faults and because of the extra staff it said it had had to employ to cover for its failings.

Becta is no more.

The Government has closed schools IT agency Becta as part of its plans to cut 6 billion of public spending. Becta was charged with promoting the use of technology within education, providing "independent" advice to schools on which hardware and software to buy. However, it was deemed surplus to requirements in the recent announcement on Government spending cuts. Some comments suggest no one will notice the closure.

Memory chip cartel receives huge fines!

The European Commission has fined chip makers several millions for their role in operating a price-fixing cartel in the PC memory market. "The overall cartel was in operation between 1998 and 2002", the Commission said in its ruling. "It involved a network of contacts and the sharing of secret information, mostly on a bilateral basis, through which they coordinated the price levels and quotations for DRAM sold to major PC or server manufacturers."  One company involved in the case, Micron, "was not fined because it revealed the existence of the cartel to the Commission". It is not the first time Europe has taken action. Last year, the EC fined Intel almost $1.5bn for keeping competitors out of the market.

Google Celebrates Pac-Man

The Pac-Man re-creation may have disappeared from Google's home page, but the game is still available if you know where to look. If you missed the Pac-Man 30th anniversary Google doodle the web recreation of the classic game has found a permanent home on Google's site. If you've got time on your hands, go to www.google.com/pacman and click the Insert Coin button to start the game.

PS3 Customers Outraged.

Many Play Station 3 owners were suprised to find features removed from there system after installing the 1st April (!) firmware update from Sony. An option to run extra operating systems was removed. Sony made the change on purpose claiming the feature was a security risk. First reports said some US Air Force research programs were affected, and then a huge community of Linux users felt the pain. A group of irate users have now taken a class action out against Sony. Meantime a well known hacker has published a back door into the system to re-enable Linux. Sadly that hack means the Sony PS3 is far more vulnerable than the original feature that Sony removed.. As a measure of how damaging this is to Sony Amazon have already refunded one customer £84 for the loss of the features. Details here: www.playstationuniversity.com/ps3-owner-refunded-without-return-for-missing-other-os-3555/

Software

Fastest Browser on Earth?

Opera have announced the release of their latest and greatest browser. Download and try it for free at www.opera.com. Opera started in 1994 as a research project inside Norways largest telecom company, Telenor. Today, Opera Software develops the Opera Web browser product for a wide range of systems including Mac, PC and Linux computers, mobile phones and PDAs, game consoles, and other devices like the Nintendo Wii, DS, Sony Mylo...

Tips of the Month

3 Free (non commercial use) Tools for PC Maintenance.

  1. Ccleaner - www.piriform.com
  2. Spybot - www.safer-networking.org
  3. Adaware - www.lavasoft.com

Together they help to remove the unwanted dross that clogs a Windows PC. Ccleaner primary scanner identifies and removes old cache files and can improve browser speed. The Spybot scanner removes the extra programs which report your your PC activity. Mostly these programs are actually harmless but some are badly coded and slow down the system. Adaware is scans and removes malicious software - malware. malware is the evil programs looking for your bank details! I recommend running the manual scanners regularly - turning on the on-demand features will slow the system down just a tad.

And Finally

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