Adobe has expressed interest in making the movement of digital document files more open, and having their format (PDF), being the popular standard. PDF's will soon become the international standard for electronic documents after Adobe handed over the copyright to ISO.

"By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness", says Kevin Lynch, CTO at Adobe.

Most businesses use PDFs as the main way of transitioning from paper to electronic documentation, and now a slew of new readers, writers and development tools for the format will likely be unveiled in the near future thanks to the move.

The new PDF standard is called ISO 32000-1.

View: TechRadar
View: ISO Press Release

Nvidia Corp., the world’s largest supplier of graphics processing units, has issued a warning regarding lower sales during the ongoing quarter. The company blamed issues with its chipsets as well as low prices of graphics processing units for its fiscal results.

According to Nvidia, second quarter revenue and gross margin are expected to be lower than guidance provided during its first quarter financial conference call and be from $875 million to $950 million. The company said that the estimated decrease in revenue and gross margin is due to several reasons, including the delayed ramp of a next generation core-logic set, price adjustments of the graphics processors to respond to competitive products as well as “end-market weakness around the world”.

This is the first time in years when Nvidia admitted that it has to lower pricing of its graphics processing units to respond to a relatively successful product launch of its main rival, ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices.

View: The full story @ Xbit-Labs

President Bush’s economic stimulus plan, which involved sending out checks of up to $1,200 to every taxpayer, has provided a boom to the online porn industry, according to market research. Research by the Adult Internet Market Research Company (AIMRCo) has found that since the checks were sent out there has been an uncharacteristic increase in spending for online pornography sites.

According to Kirk Mishkin, head research consultant for AIMRCo, "Many of the sites we surveyed have reported 20-30 per cent growth in membership rates since mid-May when the checks were first sent out, and typically the summer is a slow period for this market." The checks were suppose to be used to provide a stimulus to the flagging US consumer sector but the research found many people were using them for a different kind of stimulation.

View: The full story @ vnunet

Apple's MacBook Air - still the world's slimmest laptop; VoodooPC's Envy isn't shipping yet - just got cheaper. Well, sort of. Apple's knocked £300/$500 off the price of the solid-state drive model.

Launched at £2028/$3098, the Air with the 64GB SSD now costs £1719/$2598, undoubtedly thanks to tumbling Flash memory prices. The sub-notebook's other specs remain the same.

View: The full story @ The Reg

A new undersea fiber-optic cable linking Japan and Russia went into service this week providing the first direct link between the two countries and an alternate cable route between Europe and Asia.

The Hokkaido-Sakhalin Cable System (HSCS) runs between the two islands, Japan's Hokkaido and Russia's Sakhalin, and has a capacity of 640G bps (bits per second). Construction of the 570 kilometer cable was carried out by Japan's NTT Communications and Russia's TransTeleCom Company and started and completed last year.

Until now traffic between Japan and Russia, which share a sea border in the Russian Far East, had to run via traditional cable routes through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to Europe.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

Microsoft will release four security patches for its Windows, Exchange, and SQL products next Tuesday, all rated "important."

The Exchange and SQL flaws are "Elevation of Privilege" bugs, meaning that an attacker could theoretically exploit them to get administrative access to a PC. One of the Windows flaws is labeled a "spoofing" bug, meaning that it could help hackers trick the user into doing things like visiting malicious Web sites.

The fourth update fixes a Windows flaw that could allow an attacker to run unauthorized code on a victim's PC, Microsoft said. Normally, this type of flaw is rated "critical" by Microsoft, but in this case the bug was probably given a less-severe rating because it doesn't work without the user first taking some extra actions or adding special software or drivers, said Eric Schultze, chief technology officer at Shavlik Technologies.

This remote code execution flaw affects Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

Although Intel is aggressively pushing MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) and its Centrino Atom platform, PC vendors still feel pessimistic about the market's future. The increasing demand for 7- to 10-inch netbooks and declining worldwide economy impose great threats toward MID products, noted sources at PC vendors.

In addition to the above factors, Nvidia's ARM-based Tegra is also creating pressure toward MIDs.

View: The full story @ DigiTimes

Hitachi has announced plans to have a commercial 3.5-inch hard drive on the market that can hold 5TB. They hope for this to be available by 2010.

Hard drive specialist Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is continuing to push HDDs to the limit, with a strong emphasis on increasing capacity and with a clear goal in mind.

The space will be achieved using 'current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance', or in short, CPP-GMR.
CPP-GMR pushes data density above 1TB per square inch, a long-awaited threshold that promises drives many times larger than those available today.

View: TechRadar

Intel expects to see Moore's law continue for the near future and also plans for its x86 processor architecture to extend across everything from small embedded devices right up to supercomputers, according to the head of its Digital Enterprise group, Pat Gelsinger. However, programming techniques are going to have to evolve to make better use of many-core chips.

Speaking at a briefing to mark Intel's 40th anniversary, Gelsinger gave his predictions for the future of computer technology, focusing on the key areas of Moore's law, many-core chips, the Intel architecture (IA), and visual computing. Gelsinger said that Moore's law would continue to extend into the future, and said that Intel has a roadmap for 32nm, 22nm and 10nm chips.

"I can recall in the past we thought reaching 1 micron (1 micrometre) would be hard," he commented, adding that as each milestone was reached, the way ahead became clearer, despite predictions that Moore's law was running out of steam.

View: The full story @ vnunet

The BPI has written to 800 Virgin Media customers warning them to stop sharing music files or risk losing their broadband connection. The letters came in an envelope marked: "Important. If you don't read this, your broadband could be disconnected." But Virgin told Radio 1's Newsbeat that the phrase was a mistake and the letters were part of an education campaign. Virgin said it was not making any kind of accusation and that it was possible someone other than the account holder was involved.

When the Virgin campaign was revealed last month the company assured us that the letters were not part of a "three strikes" process. The BPI has pushed ISPs to warn users three times for copyright infringement before cutting off their broadband

View: The full story @ The Reg

Nvidia has uncovered a problem with some older graphics chips that shipped in "significant quantities" of laptop PCs, the company said Wednesday. Nvidia hasn't determined the exact cause of the problem but said it relates to a packaging material used with some of its chips, as well as the thermal design of some laptops. Modern processors generate considerable amounts of heat.

To tackle the problem, the company is releasing a software driver that will cause system fans to start operating sooner and reduce the "thermal stress" on the chips. The driver has been provided to laptop makers directly, said Derek Perez, an Nvidia spokesman.

View: The full story @ PCworld

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects to introduce its first Energy Star rating for servers by the end of the year, although a more comprehensive system that measures actual workloads will take longer to develop.

The Energy Star program is designed to make it easier for customers to identify the most energy-efficient products on the market. It is already offered for more than 50 kinds of products, including desktop PCs, monitors, ceiling fans, and even windows, but the rating system for servers has been much harder to develop.

"This server program is one of the most complicated we've tried to deal with," said Arthur Howard, an associate with ICF International, which provides technical consulting to the EPA for its Energy Star programs.

View: The full story @ InfoWorld

Following the recent launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 GPUs, AMD plans to introduce the high-end dual-GPU HD 4870 X2 by the end of July, according to sources at graphics card vendors.

Evaluation samples are schedule to be available in mid-July, and AMD will begin shipping reference design boards with 2GB GDDR5 memory at the end of the month, the sources detailed.

View: The full story @ DigiTimes

Secunia researchers detected numerous security vulnerabilities in the Mozilla Firefox 2.0x Web browser, many of which enable malicious attackers to hack into vulnerable systems and either shut down or take complete control of a user's computer. Researchers at Secunia, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based security company specializing in vulnerability assessment and management, issued a security advisory Wednesday, warning users of multiple errors they deemed "highly critical."

If exploited, the critical vulnerabilities could potentially allow remote attackers to conduct cross-site scripting and spoofing attacks, bypass security restrictions, disclose sensitive or system information, potentially compromise a user's system, access a user's system or launch a denial of service attack, according to the advisory.

View: The full story @ CRN

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for Firefox 3.0 took place in June with parties in over 25 countries. "The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen" said Marketing head Paul Kim. Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it "an extremely impressive accomplishment".

The official figure was confirmed after logs from download servers were audited and checked to ensure duplicate and unfinished downloads were not counted. Mr Kim told the BBC: "The notion of going for a world record, as gooky and nutty as it may have sounded, was a really sticky idea. "It was an idea that translated really well across national borders and to all different kinds of people around the world."

View: Full Article @ BBC News