The BlackBerry maker is betting on the Bold 9700 and Storm2 to reassert its leadership in smartphones.

NewsFactor - Microsoft formally introduced Exchange Server 2010 Monday at the company's Tech-Ed Europe 2009 conference in Germany. According to Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop, customers already using the new e-mail platform are reporting significant cost savings, thanks in part to new support for low-cost attached-storage options.

High court takes on the question of just what is patentable with business method patents coming under scrutiny. The court's ultimate opinion -- due in June -- could invalidate thousands of software patents.
- The Supreme Court heard arguments Nov. 9 in a case the technology industry is closely watching to clarify the patentablity of business methods. The case -- Bilksi and Warsaw v. Kappos -- specifically involves a method of hedging the risk associated with commodities but it has implications that...

InfoWorld - Microsoft on Monday unveiled Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform, enabling use of Microsoft technologies such as Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in conjunction with the Facebook social platform.

Apple's second update for Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6.2, was officially released Monday afternoon, fixing a number of issues including a guest account bug that could potentially delete a user's account data.

PC World - On its fifth birthday, Firefox must be considered both an incredible success and somewhat of a failure. The open source Web browser is a great product and quite an achievement, but has not tremendously advanced the cause of "free" software.

Showdown between Droid and iPhone could spur a 'Mac vs. PC'-like battle in the mobile world, according to one industry watcher.

PC World - Mozilla's Firefox Web browser turned five years old today, and as I took it for a celebratory spin (I'm a recent Chrome convert), it was easy to notice how similar all the major browsers have become in terms of basic functionality.

Intel Atom support is confirmed to be missing in the final release of 10.6.2, citing multiple prominent Hackintosh sources.

Why is New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo suing Intel?

Bradley Kuhn, the technical director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), has published a helpful set of guidelines about the most productive way to respond to a suspected violation of GNU's General Public License (GPL). The guidelines caution against jumping to conclusions and encourages free software enthusiasts to give violators the benefit of the doubt. GPL violations are extremely common, he says, but most of them are accidental. The SFLC, which was founded in 2005 with the aim of providing legal support for the free and open source software development community, has played a key role in resolving numerous GPL enforcement conflicts. Its approach to GPL enforcement is typically instructive and non-confrontational. Lawsuits are used as a last resort and have consistently resulted in out-of-court settlements. The organization is perhaps best known for litigating a series of high-profile GPL violation cases on behalf of the developers of the open source BusyBox embedded tools.

Sprint Nextel plans to shed 2,500 jobs from its workforce by the end of 2009. Sprint Nextel is the latest technology company to have layoffs in a series of job cut in the past week that included Microsoft, Real networks, and Nokia Siemens.
- Sprint Nextel plans to layoff between 2,000 to 2,500 jobs in the fourth quarter of 2009. The Overland, Kansas-based wireless technology carrier wants to slash about $350 million in internal and external labor force annualized, but will spend between $60 and $80 million in severance packages for ...

Two studies say smartphone shipments surging, while a third says result will be lower average selling price.

UPDATED: The EC, antitrust arm of the 27-nation European Union, informed both Oracle and Sun about the decision because the deal includes the freely available and popular MySQL Web database. The regulators see a major conflict of interest in the world's largest commercial database company owning its largest open source competitor.
- It wasn't much of a surprise to people following the progress of the Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems that a formal objection to the $7.4 billion deal was handed down Nov. 9 from the European Commission. The EC, the antitrust arm of the 27-nation European Union, informed both Oracle and S...

xp65 writes "NASA scientists studying the origin of life have reproduced uracil, a key component of our hereditary material, in the laboratory. They discovered that an ice sample containing pyrimidine exposed to ultraviolet radiation under space-like conditions produces this essential ingredient of life. 'We have demonstrated for the first time that we can make uracil, a component of RNA, non-biologically in a laboratory under conditions found in space,' said Michel Nuevo, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. 'We are showing that these laboratory processes, which simulate occurrences in outer space, can make a fundamental building block used by living organisms on Earth.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.