News

New Year Delayed by Extra Second
Revellers ushering in 2009 will have to literally wait a second this New Year's Eve. The world's official timekeepers are adding a "leap second" to the final day of the year to help match clocks to the Earth's spin. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has to occasionally add an extra second to keep our clocks in sync with solar time used by astronomers. That's because, sometimes, the Earth's rotation on its axis can take longer or shorter than 24 hours, depending on factors such as the breaking action of tides, snow or the lack of it at the polar ice caps, solar wind, space dust and magnetic storms. "The difference between atomic time and Earth time has now built up to the point where it needs to be corrected, so this New Year's Eve we will experience a rare 61 second minute at the very end of 2008 and revelers... will have an extra second to celebrate," Peter Whibberley, a senior research scientist at Britain's National Physical Laborator told the British media. The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon's master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world's atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

Windows 7 beta leaks to Internet
Pirated copies of a Windows 7 build pegged by many as the beta Microsoft Corp. will release next month have leaked to the Internet, according to searches at several BitTorrent sites today. A search on the Pirate Bay BitTorrent site, for example, returned two Windows 7 Build 7000 listings, both of which had been posted Friday. As of Saturday afternoon, one torrent on Pirate Bay showed more than 1,800 "seeders" -- the term for a computer that has a complete copy of the torrent file -- and about 8,500 "leechers," or computers that have downloaded only part of the complete torrent. The torrent is a disk image of the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate, Build 7000, according to users commenting on the site and elsewhere on the Internet.

World Computer ownership

Source TheEconomist

Merry Christmas to All My Readers!
To all my readers who celebrate Christmas, a very Merry Christmas to you, hopefully you will be enjoying this time of the year with your family and friends. All the best!

Notebook shipments past desktops
WORLDWIDE SHIPMENTS of notebook PCs overtook desktops during the third quarter for the first time, industry markets tracking firm Isuppli reported Tuesday. Fully 38.6 million notebook PCs were shipped in the quarter, up 40 per cent from the same quarter last year, versus shipments of only 38.5 million desktops, a decline of 1.3 per cent. This development has been expected, because notebook sales have been posting double-digit gains while recent growth of desktop sales has been flattening, down in the low single digits. The global economic downturn had some effect in the third quarter, but total worldwide PC shipments still increased 15.4 per cent to 79 million boxes. The recession is expected to have an impact on PC sales in 2009, though.

China set to change punishment levels for hacking
Chinese hackers could face steep fines and even prison under new reforms. A draft amendment, under review by the standing committee of the National People's Congress, would impose steep fines and prison sentences of three-to-seven years, depending on the severity of the offence. Under the current criminal law, most hackers would not be charged for breaking into a bank or business's computer system, according to Prof. Yu Gang from the College of Criminal Justice under China University of Political Science and Law. Existing criminal law only imposes penalties on hackers who break into government, military and scientific research institutes' computer systems.

World of Warcraft Reaches New Milestone, 11.5 Million Players are Now Playing
Blizzard Entertainment today announced that World of Warcraft, its award-winning subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game, is now played by more than 11.5 million subscribers worldwide. This new high was reached following the November 13 release of the game's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Within its first 24 hours of availability, Wrath of the Lich King sold more than 2.8 million copies, making it the fastest-selling PC game of all time. In addition to winning a number of editor's choice awards from major gaming publications, the expansion has now gone on to sell more than 4 million copies in its first month, setting a new record for monthly PC-game sales. Both sales records were previously held by World of Warcraft's first expansion, The Burning Crusade. "We're pleased to welcome the new and returning players who have helped World of Warcraft reach these new milestones, and we appreciate the enthusiasm and support that the game's global community has continued to show," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We look forward to providing all of them with an excellent entertainment experience for a long time to come."

Latest search numbers not good for Microsoft
ComScore published its November search-query share numbers on December 19. The news wasn’t good for Live Search. ComScore’s data is for the U.S. market. Of the 12.3 billion core searches done in November, Google sites had 63.5 percent share (up 0.4 percent from October). Yahoo sites had 20.4 percent. Microsoft sites had 8.3 percent. Yahoo and Microsoft both lost share in November; Yahoo was down .1 percent and Microsoft, .2 percent, according to comScore. In terms of number of queries performed, all three of the top search-engine vendors were down compared to October 2008. (ComScore attributed this to November having fewer days than October.) Google sites handled 7.8 billion core searches; Yahoo sites handled 2.5 billion and Microsoft sites about 1 billion. Microsoft, .2 percent, according to comScore. In terms of number of queries performed, all three of the top search-engine vendors were down compared to October 2008. (ComScore attributed this to November having fewer days than October.) Google sites handled 7.8 billion core searches; Yahoo sites handled 2.5 billion and Microsoft sites about 1 billion. Via

XP Death sentence postponed
MICROSOFT has told its system builder partners that they will be allowed to continue to sell XP after the January 31, 2009 cut-off date. January 31 was listed as the last day that anyone could buy XP and Vole wanted system builders only to sell its Vista product after that date. Now, according to ChannelWeb, Vole is allowing them to obtain XP licenses through distribution after the deadline. In what Vole is calling its "flexible inventory programme" distributors can place their "last orders" for Windows XP OEM licenses by January 31, 2009, and take delivery against those orders through May 30. Until then distributors would have to buy as many XP licenses as they could afford before January 31st, 2009, and sell them after the deadline.

Lenovo Announces Dual-Screen Mobile Workstation - ThinkPad W700ds
Lenovo this weekend officially announced its ThinkPad W700ds (ds stands for dual-screen), a mobile workstation with two fully functional LCD displays. Inside and round the back of the main 17-inch display is housed a second one, 10.6-inch in diagonal that can also be tilted up to 30 degrees like a car's rearview mirror. The secondary WXGA display (768x1280), allows users to own a workstation notebook with dual-monitor support for the first time. Wes Williams, product marketing manager for ThinkPads, said: "People that use high-end computers, whether they are professional photographers or work in other fields, all use two displays at their desktops ... What we were trying to do in building a mobile workstation is give them the same experience. Not only do you need a great display, great graphics, great processor and RAID hard drive with a workstation, but it is hard going back to a single display mode." The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is said to make its first appearance at CES, starting January 5, 2008. Among the other cool features that will be integrated inside the W700ds are the latest Intel Core 2 Quad 45nm processors, NVIDIA Quadro mobile graphics, up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, and a pair of hard drive/solid-state drive bays for up to 960GB of storage. The W700ds' starting price is expected to be $3,600 upon availability.