27
November
2007
|
05:05 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Newswatch 11.27.07: G-Drive coming?

Greenpeace says Nintendo, XBox too toxic

Nintendo Co. became the first company to score zero out of a possible 10 points in the Greenpeace ranking of 18 leading electronics companies. It provided no information to consumers on the substances it uses in manufacturing or on its plans to cut hazardous materials, the environmental organization said.

Cranking up the g-drive

[WSJ] Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

MSFT looks to Siberia for data center

[NYT] "Though Microsoft Russia is working on potential data center construction in Russia, we are still far from final site selection," said Evgeny Danilov, Microsoft Russia's director of public relations, in a statement.

ABC News, Facebook in campaign deal

[ZD Net] I don’t think Facebookers will provide better questions. I see no evidence that the mass of Internet users are more thoughtful or insightful than journalists. Just the opposite. But it does serve as a sort of polling center; reporters can watch concerns bubble up and catch fire. They can see how people respond to campaign ads and on-the-stump accusations. And if ABC is streaming a lot more political content Facebookers’ way than they would see otherwise that’s probably a good thing.

Tiger upgrade causing 'catastorphic' failures

[InfoWeek] Users of Apple's Tiger operating system -- predecessor to the more recent Leopard OS -- are reporting that the software grinds to an unrecoverable halt when upgraded to the latest version. According to posts appearing in the discussion forum on Apple's support Web site, Macs upgraded to version 10.4.11 of Tiger are freezing up and refusing to reboot without a clean installation.

OLPC lashes out at governments

[BBC] "You've got to be big, you've got to be bold. And what has happened is that there has been an effort to say 'don't take any risks - just do something small, something incremental'. It feels safe but by definition what you are ensuring is that nothing happens."

NASA posts high-res map of Antarctica

[Wired] Piecing together about 1100 images, the mosaic shows the Antarctic continent in true-color, high-resolution, largely seamless detail, with only the only gap at the central South Pole region, NASA officials said.