The San Francisco Bay Area has embraced Shai Agassi's Better Place vision, announcing a "sweeping plan" to drive public and private investments in electric cars and the infrastructure needed to run them.…

A Ohio-based technology company is suing Facebook for patent infringement, claiming it invented the platform the insanely popular social networking site uses to store and manage information.…

If you were looking for some good news out of Dell today as it reported its fiscal 2009 third quarter financial results, you will probably be disappointed. But not as much as you might think. That's good news of a sort considering the miserable week the global economy is having.…

Canada's telecom regulators gave Bell Canada the OK to throttle peer-to-peer Internet traffic on pipes it leases to third-party ISPs.…

While supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics was showing off its existing Altix lines of Xeon and Itanium servers at the SC08 supercomputing show in Austin, Texas, this week, the most interesting thing the company touted was not yet a real computer, but a concept system, called Molecule.…

The "standards-compatible" next edition of Internet Explorer has been bumped into 2009 by Microsoft.…

PayPal, the online payment service that is a major target of phishers, has been caught sending customer emails that confuse its own login page with a third-party landing site that offers spyware protection and a bevy of other products.…

Online dating service eHarmony.com has agreed to create a new website for matching same-sex couples, as part of discrimination settlement with New Jersey's Civil Rights Division.…

QCon 2009 Agile development practices may be growing in popularity among developers, but agilistas aren't getting much love from software architects.…

Comment When you are recovering from a long period of hard times and light appears at the end of the tunnel and gets closer and closer until you emerge into glorious daylight, you get a spring in your step and start making plans. Now you're back on your feet, the world becomes an oyster again, and you go off in different directions pursuing pearls. That's the feeling I get talking to Hitachi GST.…

Antitrust 2.0 Why did Google leave outgoing Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang heartbroken at the search engine altar? If you believe the words chief ad broker and CEO Eric Schmidt funneled through The New York Times, Google chafed at the prospect of winning a Department of Justice (DoJ) antitrust suit.…

SC08 Architectures can change quickly in the supercomputing space, and slow-moving vendors can get left behind or at least find themselves out of step with the next big wave of sales in the HPC area. This has happened in the past with Silicon Graphics, and the company is determined to not let it happen again.…

In brief Sun Microsystems has added a query analysis tool to MySQL, but for paying customers only.…

The New Xbox Experience (NXE) has barely been out for 24 hours, but gamers have already claimed that it’s messing with their consoles. Some have even said the update’s caused the dreaded Red Ring of Death (RRoD) to rear its ugly head once more.…

SC08 When it comes to parallel supercomputing, and indeed any kind of parallel processing, the hardware is the easy part. The systems software, including a tuned software stack and middleware for managing data, visualization applications for turning datasets into something human beings can use to make decisions or understand some phenomenon, is a bit trickier.…

Endeavour mission specialists Shane Kimbrough and Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper are getting ready for the second mission STS-126 spacewalk outside the International Space Station this afternoon, scheduled to get under way at 18:45 GMT.…

The Scottish Parliament has voted against the government's proposed ID cards, in a gesture of Phythonian futility.…

Formula 1 champ Lewis Hamilton is planning to stump a cool £625,000 for five seats on a Virgin Galactic flight, according to the Evening Standard.…

A day after Nominet decided to sue one of its own directors, a senior civil servant warned that the domain industry must be better behaved to avoid government intervention.…