The Business Centre

"Dollar for dollar you'll get more power and features in a PC assembled by a big company than in one you build yourself." That's the conventional wisdom. But new standards and improved component integration that packs more functions into fewer parts now allow you to build a modern system for the same cost as a similarly equipped retail PC.

I'm constantly seeking out new hardware that can help me spend less time at my desk. Here are my top five recommendations.

There are two types of businesses: those which have experienced the gut-wrenching loss of valuable computer data, and those which will.

The federal government will pour $270.7 million into regional broadband incentives, [[artid:58489466|two weeks|new]] after it attempted to use the funds for its National Broadband Network (NBN).

Engineers testing a recently launched Japanese data communications satellite have succeeded in establishing a two-way Internet link running at 1.2G bps (bits per second) each way, they announced this week.

Trademark-holders have until May 20 to register their company and product names under the new .me domain, which is being marketed as a generic top-level domain by the country of Montenegro.

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has called on government to enforce rigid privacy laws on organisations which intercept employee e-mails.

A technical dispute between BigPond and PayPal has been resolved after BigPond cable users had been unable to login to the payment site for over a week.

According to French language Swiss news site LeMatin, not only will the 3G iPhone hit the mountainous country in June, but it will be sporting some interesting new capabilities.

What's this, a hip new TV ad for BlackBerry smart phones?

Microsoft and Research In Motion (RIM) have announced an agreement to provide Microsoft Windows Live services on RIM's BlackBerry smartphones, expected to be available by Winter.

Research in Motion has unleashed its latest smartphone for the business-minded with the BlackBerry Bold. The Bold represents the first product of the BlackBerry 9000 series. It has several key features which push the device to the head of its competition.

Microsoft is aiming to capture 40 percent of the smartphone market with Windows Mobile by the year 2012, an executive said this week.

"Dollar for dollar you'll get more power and features in a PC assembled by a big company than in one you build yourself." That's the conventional wisdom. But new standards and improved component integration that packs more functions into fewer parts now allow you to build a modern system for the same cost as a similarly equipped retail PC.

I'm constantly seeking out new hardware that can help me spend less time at my desk. Here are my top five recommendations.

Anybody who has spent any amount of time working on the road has probably witnessed their share of notebook disasters: dropped from a hotel desk, shaken beyond repair in the trunk of a rental car or doused by a knocked-over cup of coffee. Too often, the result is a worthless chunk of plastic, glass and metal.

SP1 may not give your system much more oomph, but there are other ways to speed Vista up.

When Gordon Moore made his prediction in a 1965 issue of Electronic Magazine (download PDF) that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year (eventually updated by Moore to two years and then updated again by Intel to 18 months), it was just a "lucky guess" based on a few points of data, he recalled in an interview in 2006. But the idea, which has grown to encompass ever cheaper, ever smaller, ever more powerful components, has so captivated the IT industry that you can't attend a technology conference without seeing at least one PowerPoint presentation displaying the Moore's Law graph.

Apple will showcase the OS X iPhone 2.0 platform at its annual Worldwide Development Conference scheduled to occur in San Francisco next month.

The iPhone is out-of-stock "company wide," Apple sales representatives said Sunday. The outage has fueled rumors that the next-generation 3G model will be released shortly.

This week's annual conference for BlackBerry users comes at a critical time for the device's creator, Research in Motion.

UK stealth mode startup Cellcrypt has started touting a new encryption system that sets out to solve a security problem most companies would rather not think about -- insecure mobile phone calls.

The lack of certainty surrounding exactly who will bring the iPhone to Australia, and what model will be released here, has been clarified a little further today with an announcement by Optus that it too has signed an agreement to bring the iPhone to Australia.

Sony Australia has added four new micro-portable business projectors to expand its E-series line of video projection systems.

Microsoft is synonymous with the ubiquitous Windows operating system. But its Microsoft Office productivity suite pulls in more revenue than any version of Windows. Competition from Web-hosted productivity applications like Google Docs, and Zoho Office has changed the rules of the application-suite game, however, threatening Microsoft's desktop application revenues and forcing it to address the growing popularity of Web-hosted applications with new features and products.

Microsoft on Friday said it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the Office Open XML (OOXML) file-format standards process.

Microsoft said it has made technical information about all of its Office binary file formats openly available to outside software developers, while promising never to sue them for patent violations.

Microsoft's Office Live Web service was designed for small businesses that needed an easy, low-cost solution for creating and hosting Web sites and business-branded e-mails. When it was first introduced in November 2006, there were three versions: Basics (free), Essentials (US$19.95 per month) and Premium (US$39.95 per month). The latest, reconfigured version -- now called Microsoft Office Live Small Business (MOLSB) -- simplifies things by offering a single service with a number of for-pay add-ons.

In the not-too-distant future, people could use computer printers to make simple medicines as part of a do-it-yourself model of health care, a top Microsoft executive said Friday.

The long-awaited, Web-based and free version of Adobe Photoshop is now available as a beta, Adobe announced this week.

Hewlett-Packard Monday offered a peek into future printing technologies, introducing a new inkjet printer that prints thousands of pages per minute and ink that retains its shine even when exposed to extreme elements.

Imagine the last time something in your house broke - a cup or plate, a bracket, a door handle, a component in an electrical appliance or mechanical device, a hinge, a switch - the list can go on and on. But instead of tossing the entire device out, or heading to the local hardware or electrical store to find an often costly replacement, imagine if you could recreate that object or component in your home on a 3D printer. Now imagine if the 3D printer you use to make that part could recreate itself as well.

As printer prices decline, consumers will continue to pay for supplies like cartridges and services like digital photo prints, which will ultimately generate larger revenues than units shipped, a Hewlett-Packard executive said on Monday.

A botnet is now using a SQL-injection attack tool designed to hack legitimate Web sites, a move meant to add more hijacked PCs to its collection, according to a security researcher.

More than half a million Web sites have been compromised in a new round of attacks that hacked domains in order to infect unsuspecting users' PCs with a variety of malware, a security researcher said today.

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has called on government to enforce rigid privacy laws on organisations which intercept employee e-mails.

Hackers now have their own social network, backed by GnuCitizen, a high-profile "ethical hacking" group.

Security researchers have developed a new type of malicious rootkit software that hides itself in an obscure part of a computer's microprocessor, hidden from current antivirus products.

There are two types of businesses: those which have experienced the gut-wrenching loss of valuable computer data, and those which will.

IBM Tuesday unveiled a new blade server based on the Cell chip that was originally designed to run a video game console.

Iomega has announced the availability of its new REV 120GB backup drive, the third generation of its REV technology.

Seagate announced Tuesday that it has shipped 1 billion hard drives since pioneering an industry that shows no signs of slowing down 29 years later.

Although VMware is the current leader in the Virtualisation market, a number of other companies are giving them a run for their money. Who will emerge victorious in the virtualisation war? We take a look at the competitors

Almost one year ago Facebook announced the Facebook Platform, unleashing an assault of applications on unsuspecting users. At first those applications were silly, even bothersome. But now they are beginning to provide real value to groups of connected users. Currently there are approximately 15,000 applications, and 350,000 developers have signed up so there will probably be more on the way.

The Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco's Moscone Center West, doesn't take up a huge amount of space: Startups predominate, and most don't have money for big flashy booths. But there's more cool new technology per square foot here than at many big trade shows.

Google is introducing a Web site tool called Friend Connect today that promises to extend the reach of social networks such as Facebook to any site that wants to use the tool. Those sites that decide to use Friend Connect can give visitors a much richer Web experience allowing even the smallest of Web sites the ability to leverage the enormous popularity of social networks.

More than half a million Web sites have been compromised in a new round of attacks that hacked domains in order to infect unsuspecting users' PCs with a variety of malware, a security researcher said today.

Like many people, I "own" a few personal domains for my blogs and a few old business ideas that never got off the ground. And, like many people, they have been parked at Yahoo Small Business, partially because I already had a Yahoo account when I registered them a few years ago, and partially because I was lured by the US$1.99/year offers for new domains that they had running at the time. The rate increased to $9.95 after the first year, but I was OK with that. I was able to reserve the domains and set up redirects to my blogs, and have the option of building real sites if I ever get too frustrated with Google's Blogger service.