John Lister

A major video games producer says it will begin phasing out printed manuals in a bid to cut down on waste. Ubisoft, makers of the acclaimed Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell series, say the move will save both paper and the energy used in ... production. Beginning with the next Shaun White Skateboarding game sometime before the end of 2010, Ubisoft will include the manual, along with safety and legal information, within the game itself. The company says this will offer an easier and more intuitive way of accessing the information. (Source: gamespot.com ) That will certainly be easier to achieve ... (view more)

Toshiba says it will be launching its own line of tablet computers to rival the Apple iPad later this year. That follows on from a similar announcement by netbook specialists Asus earlier this month . Toshiba may be working on more than two tablet ... machines, one running Windows 7, the other Google's Android operating system (OS). It says that as well as considering a 10-inch screen model, it's also looking at producing a dual-screen device, though the dual-screen version would run Windows 7 only. (Source: reuters.com ) That sounds similar to Microsoft's Courier project, which involves a ... (view more)

Google has announced it will ask all users to reconfirm their preferred privacy settings on its social networking site 'Buzz'. It follows a controversial launch in which many believed, correctly or otherwise, that their privacy had been compromised. ... Buzz is Google's rival to Facebook and Twitter. It's integrated into Gmail and allows users to follow and reply to posts made by people they decide to follow on the service. The service also allows users to share information from other Google-owned services such as Google Reader (an RSS newsreader) and picture-sharing site Picasa. It was clearly ... (view more)

Microsoft, like competitor Apple before it, has become embroiled in a scandal over the treatment of its foreign workers. But it's arguably more embarrassing, as the details continue to emerge via third-party investigation. When stories broke about ... labor violations among staff working overseas on Apple products, the negative publicity was tempered by the fact that it was Apple's own program which uncovered the abuses. That's not the case with the Microsoft allegations, however. The claims come in a report by the National Labor Committee, an independent pressure group which aims to uncover and ... (view more)

Google has unveiled several changes to its cloud-computing based office application service, Google Docs. Changes include the ability to collaborate on documents in real time and improvements to the spreadsheet editor. While Google Docs is a free ... service, and meant as a more basic edition of Google's paid Apps package, it is used by many business users -- particularly those on tight budgets. That explains today's launch of the Docs updates at Google headquarters, which was attended by chief information officers from 400 companies. Google Docs Allows for Collaborative Editing The big update ... (view more)

This month's security updates from Microsoft will cover every currently supported edition of Windows. That means home users should check carefully if they don't have automatic updates switched on, while businesses will need to plan how they will ... apply the patches. As happens on the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft will release its Patch Tuesday security fix for issues affecting the Windows operating system (OS). This month, though, there was an exception: an emergency patch released on March 30th for a serious security flaw in Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7. At the time, several ... (view more)

Microsoft has released a revised beta edition of Windows High Performance Computer Server (HPC Server), in its effort to crack the supercomputing market. The new edition makes several changes which improve integration with Linux machines. ... Supercomputing is all about processing speed: the idea being to produce computers capable of performing as many calculations as possible. The types of employed tasks tend not to be technically complicated, but instead involve a great deal of detail. A typical example of supercomputing would be data modeling, in which a computer simulates future events where ... (view more)

Taiwan computer manufacturer Asus has announced it will release at least two tablet PCs in the next few months. They'll join a growing list of potential rivals to the much-hyped Apple iPad. Asus is better know for producing netbooks: indeed, it can ... be argued that its Eee PC, released in 2007, helped establish the market for the slimmed-down notebooks designed mainly for Internet browsing and light office tasks. Chairman Jonney Shih told Forbes that Asus is still committed to netbooks, but believes there is a gap in the market between netbooks and smartphones which can be filled by tablet- ... (view more)

Warner Bros. (WB) Entertainment, Inc. is offering British students the opportunity to spend a year helping with a new anti-piracy campaign. The job will involve finding pirated content online and even going undercover. While the role is advertised ... as an "Anti-Piracy Internship", it actually pays an equivalent to $26,000 US dollars. It's only open to students on a computer-related course and is designed to be filled by somebody on a "sandwich" course, which involves a year-long industrial work placement. Given that the post is based in London, that's about the going rate for such a placement ... (view more)

Microsoft's share of the web browser market has dropped since the release of the " browser choice " screen in Europe. But the decline is not significant enough to draw firm conclusions that the ballot is making a serious difference. The browser ... ballot is the result of a settlement between Microsoft and the European Union (EU) over antitrust concerns related to Internet Explorer's packaging in the Windows operating system. The screen has been appearing gradually since March 1, 2010 to all users in EU countries who have Internet Explorer (IE) set as their default browser. It prompts ... (view more)