IPTV groups forms, minus Microsoft and Alcatel ... BenQ chairman offers to resign over mobile troubles

HIGHLIGHTS
News: BenQ chairman offers to resign over phone troubles
News: IBM, Cisco release crisis response service
News: IPTV groups forms, but without two key players
News: FTC stays part of Rambus case
ITwhirled: Bad idea of the week: Selling drugs on Craigslist
Unix Tip: Power outage 2007


NEWS UPDATES

BenQ chairman offers to resign over phone troubles
The chairman of BenQ Corp. offered his resignation on Tuesday over losses caused by the company's inability to make its former German mobile phone subsidiary profitable. BenQ's board of directors refused to accept the offer, however, demanding that he remain in his role and turn the company around.

IBM, Cisco release crisis response service
IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday announced a new one-stop service designed to help businesses and government agencies respond to and recover from disasters, the companies said.

IPTV groups forms, but without two key players
Several big telecommunication carriers and equipment suppliers hope to accelerate the deployment of Internet-based television services by agreeing to a set of interoperable technology specifications. Two key suppliers of IPTV technology are absent from the group, however: Microsoft Corp. and Alcatel-Lucent SA.

FTC stays part of Rambus case
A U.S. agency has modified its own ruling, freeing Rambus Inc. to collect royalties for past uses of its memory chip technology despite charges that the company holds a monopoly in the industry, the company said Monday.

Dynamics users: Microsoft is listening more
Microsoft Corp. is spending more time soliciting and responding to feedback from users of its Dynamics business applications, according to attendees at the vendor's recent Convergence show in San Diego.

Vista's tunnelling protocol poses risk
Windows Vista's implementation of a tunnelling protocol called Teredo can be added to the list of security problems posed by the operating system, according to recent research from Symantec Advanced Threat Research.

EMC partners with NIIT to bridge storage training gap
EMC Corp. has partnered with Indian training company NIIT Ltd. to train storage professionals in 32 countries. The alliance is the first of its kind by EMC, and aims to fill a shortage of storage and information management professionals worldwide, Manoj Chugh, EMC's country manager for India, said on Tuesday.

Dell opens Chinese blog, lauds Taiwan
Dell Inc. opened its first Chinese language blog on Monday in a bid to make sure its communications keep pace with its growth and enable it to better serve customers, the head of the new blog said in the first entry.

Microsoft offers small-business promotions
Microsoft Corp. is offering small businesses promotions for free software trials and business tools, as long as they are willing to ensure that they are running genuine copies of Windows.

MySpace politics site: Large potential audience
MySpace launched a U.S. presidential campaign site Monday, and it has the potential of reaching millions of people who don't otherwise go to political Web sites, one analyst said.


UNIX TIP

Power outage 2007
By Sandra Henry Stocker, ITworld.com

The power was gone and the UPS was keeping the systems up, but without
air conditioning, the computer room was already heating up. "What", I
asked myself as I surveyed the computer room that morning, "are my
priorities?". I could wait for the auto-shutdown script, set to be
triggered by a low-battery event issued by the UPS, to kick in and
begin the graceful shutdown of servers. "But how hot", I
wondered, "will the room be by then?" Better to run the script
manually and the sooner the better.

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ITWHIRLED

Bad idea of the week: Selling drugs on Craigslist
If you were a drug dealer, you probably wouldn't advertise on TV, or in the newspaper, or in some other venue where law enforcement would be likely to see it, would you? But surely the Internet is a whole different story! A New York man decided that Craigslist would be a great way for him to sell some crack cocaine in his possession, with predictable results.

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