Reuters – U.S. shoppers awaiting the day they can wave their cellphones at the check-out counter to buy everything from books to shoes should hang onto their wallets a while longer.

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Last year we ran a little series called Ask the Experts where you all wrote in your virtualization related questions and we got them answered by experts at Intel, VMWare as well as our own head of IT/Datacenter – Johan de Gelas.

Given the growing importance of IT/Datacenter technology we wanted to run another round, this time handled exclusively by Johan. We've got answers to two of your questions from the original post – read on to see Johan's responses to questions about cloud computing!

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Oracle customers this week expressed concern about the effort and cost of upgrading IT infrastructures after the software maker said it would stop development for Intel’s Itanium chip architecture.

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AFP – NASA’s inspector general warned Monday that computer servers used by the US space agency to control spacecraft were vulnerable to cyber attack through the Internet.

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Reuters – Online auction site eBay Inc moved to bolster its ability to take on No. 1 Web retailer Amazon.com Inc with a $1.96 billion takeover bid for e-commerce service provider GSI Commerce.

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jfruhlinger writes “Some months after leaving Oracle in a huff, father of Java James Gosling has joined Google. It’s not clear what his job responsibilities will be there, but given some of his past statements about Google projects — that Android has no adult supervision, for instance — it will be interesting to see what develops.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Back on Tuesday NVIDIA put out a quick teaser about a new video card that would be launching today. As virtually all of you correctly guessed, it was the GeForce GTX 590, NVIDIA’s latest dual-GPU monster. Coming only two weeks after the launch of the Radeon HD 6990, NVIDIA wants their spot back as the single card king, and it’s the GTX 590 that will fight for it. But does the GTX 590 have what it takes to dethrone the 6990 so soon? Let’s find out.

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EBay has agreed to acquire for about US$2.4 billion GSI Commerce, whose suite of e-commerce and digital marketing tools and services are expected to boost eBay’s online marketplace and PayPal e-payment businesses.

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eldavojohn writes “Test-Driven JavaScript Development by Christian Johansen is a book that thoroughly guides the user through some of the more advanced aspects of the JavaScript language and into Test-Driven Development (TDD). Throughout it, Johansen introduces great methods and utilities like libraries to accomplish all aspects of TDD in JavaScript. The book begins with Johansen demonstrating and teaching the reader some of the more advanced aspects of JavaScript to ensure that the following lessons in TDD are well understood. The best part of the book is in the last half where Johansen builds a chat client and server completely out of JavaScript using TDD right before the readers’ eyes.” Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn’s review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The game of musical chairs continues at Twitter, where co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams will step down as product development leader, a role that will be taken over by Jack Dorsey, another co-founder who had distanced himself from the company’s daily operations.

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Mashable – Patrick Kerley is the senior digital strategist at Levick Strategic Communications. He is also a contributing author to Bulletproof Blog™ and can be found on Twitter @pjkerley.

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Reuters – Prison inmates are letting their fingers do the walking by orchestrating crimes with contraband cell phones, as states scramble for ways to fight back despite budget woes that limit their options.

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Although Apple today announced that its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will begin June 6, analysts are starting to question whether the company will introduce its next iPhone at the event.

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As many of you no doubt suspect, NVIDIA is in fact getting ready to launch their next flagship video card. The NDA does not expire for another 48 hours (March 24th at 6am PDT), but in an effort to build up suspense NVIDIA has gone ahead and posted a very brief teaser video about the card and when the NDA expires.

We'll have more in a couple of days, so stay tuned.

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Google, you were so owned.
Speaking at a tech panel in Silicon Valley last Friday, Yahoo senior director of corporate development Steven Mitzenmacher promised an aggressive acquisition strategy in 2011 following the relatively quiet past three years.

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I don't exactly remember when I stopped using the iPad, but it wasn't without me trying to use it. We reviewed the WiFi version on AnandTech last year but it was the AT&T 3G version that I ended up using most of the time. For short trips around NC I'd carry it with me. It was the perfect car companion. Smaller and lighter than a notebook but functional enough to get me through any short trip. I tried carrying it to lunch and meetings around town but for the most part it wasn't portable enough for that to make sense. A smartphone was a far better companion.

For several trips around the country I remember trying to take just the iPad, but I always needed to work on an article or publish something extensive while I was gone. For months I boarded every plane with the intention of bringing only the iPad but I always ended up bringing a notebook as well. Even when I went on vacation last year I had to finish a review and ended up bringing a notebook just for three days of use. Eventually I just gave up completely and left the iPad at home. As I mentioned in our review of the first iPad last year, this is a device that augments your existing setup – it replaces nothing. You'll still need a computer of some sort and you'll still need a phone, you just get to have another device that's more convenient than both of those occasionally.

These days my iPad sits docked at my desk doing nothing more than charging and receiving updates. Yet every time I'm at an airport I look around and see tons of passengers with their iPads. It's the new ThinkPad. I see it everywhere and people seem to be happy with it. In fact, last quarter 17% of Apple's total revenue came from iPad sales. 

Will a new iPad be enough to make me a tablet convert? Read on for our full review of the iPad 2.

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Oracle may reap a tidy profit from reselling the about-to-expire Sun.com domain name

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AT&T plans to acquire T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $39 billion, the companies announced Sunday.

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AP – AT&T Inc. said Sunday it will buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom AG in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $39 billion that would make it the largest cellphone company in the U.S.

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We try not to bring you too much news about product announcements unless there's something particularly intriguing about them; we get inundated by them and most of the time it's the most generic of refreshes. Happily that's not the case with Lenovo's shiny new ThinkPad X220 notebooks.

Inexplicably Lenovo is opting to label these two very different notebooks under the same X220 header: one is a tablet clocking in at 3.88 pounds with a 4-cell battery; the other is an ultraportable that weighs less than three pounds. Both come with support for either SSDs or mechanical hard disks (with a 4GB SSD option as a special order).

We'll start with the ultraportable X220. Lenovo is shipping it with a 12.5" 1366×768 LED-backlit screen, but you can upgrade to an IPS panel. It maxes out at 8GB of DDR3 and has a strong spread of Sandy Bridge mobile processors to choose from, starting with the Core i3-2310M at 2.1GHz and going all the way up to the i7-2620M at 2.7GHz. Strangely, only the i7-equipped models come with USB 3.0 connectivity. Reviews of the X220 are already popping up on the internet and the IPS screen is proving as impressive as you'd expect, but not nearly as impressive as the battery running time: Lenovo claims up to 15 hours on a 9-cell battery, a hyperbolic figure to be sure but not as crazy as you'd think. NotebookReview's test model came with a 6-cell battery and was pushing nine hours.

You can see and eventually order the ultraportable X220 here, and MSRP is expected to start at a not-unseemly $899.

The other X220 is the tablet model. Again it ships with a 12.5" 1366×768 LED-backlit screen, but in this case the only choice is the finish you want on the IPS panel: Infinity Glass or Corning Gorilla. Yes, the X220 tablet comes with an IPS panel standard, proving that Lenovo understands what ViewSonic couldn't figure out with their tablet: that viewing angles are really important. Unfortunately the X220 tablet is nearly a pound heavier than its ultraportable cousin and doesn't come with an option for USB 3.0 connectivity. Lenovo quotes nine hours of running time with the 8-cell battery.

The X220 Tablet isn't up on Lenovo's site yet, but MSRP is expected to start at $1,199.

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mikejuk writes “Which cities around the world produce not just the most but the best scientific papers? Using a database and Google Maps the answer is obvious. A paper at Physics arXiv describes how two researchers combined citation data with Google maps to create a plot showing how important cities around the world were in terms of their contribution to physics, chemistry or psychology.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AP – You’ve heard of “.com” and “.org.” Joining them soon will be their bawdy cousin: “.xxx.”

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We can not say that we are dazzled by the amount of new products at CeBIT. Most demonstrations we saw and documentation we found of the tier-one OEMs were in German, a clear sign that CeBIT is getting a little bit less international each year.

As we also visited this event only for a few hours, we focused on a few extraordinary products of the more international oriented companies like Tyan and Supermicro.

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Once Firefox 4 is out the door next week, Mozilla will likely shift to a faster development cycle for its browser, one that resembles the way Google rolls out a constant line of updates for Chrome.

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Earlier today, Apple made the iOS 4.3 available to its customers via iTunes, two days ahead of its previously announced March 11th release date.

The new iOS revision, which will also come installed on the iPad 2 when it begins shipping this Friday, is a modest update to the mature iOS 4 operating system. It drops support for some older devices and speeds up some newer ones, but I don't think there's any one feature here that will fundamentally change the experience for the iOS userbase. Read on for details!

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Last year we ran a little series called Ask the Experts where you all wrote in your virtualization related questions and we got them answered by experts at Intel, VMWare as well as our own head of IT/Datacenter – Johan de Gelas.

Given the growing importance of IT/Datacenter technology we wanted to run another round, this time handled exclusively by Johan. The topics are a little broader this time. If you have any virtualization or cloud computing related questions that you'd like to see Johan answer directly just leave them in a comment here. We'll be picking a couple and will answer them next week in a follow up post.

So have at it! Make the questions good – Johan is always up for a challenge

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Samsung SDI has agreed to plead guilty and pay a US$32 million fine for its involvement in a price-fixing controversy related to color tubes used in computer monitors, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Friday.

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Hugh Pickens writes “Steve Green reports in the Las Vegas that US District Judge James Mahan has ruled that the Center for Intercultural Organizing, an Oregon nonprofit, did not infringe on copyrights when it posted an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal story on its website without authorization and that there was no harm to the market for the story. Mahan stressed that his ruling hinged largely on the CIO’s nonprofit status and said the copyright lawsuit would be dismissed because the nonprofit used it in an educational way, didn’t try to use the story to raise money, and because the story in question was primarily factual as opposed to being creative. ‘The market (served by the CIO) is not the R-J’s market,’ says Mahan. This is the second fair use defeat for Righthaven and is significant since it involved an entire story post rather than a partial story post. Green says that Righthaven’s strategy of suing 250 web site and demanding $150,000 in damages plus forfeiture of the web site’s domain name has clearly backfired and now Righthaven, the self-appointed protector of the newspaper industry, has left the newspaper industry with less copyright protection than if they never filed their lawsuits at all.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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airfoobar writes “This seems like a good week for libre culture. The first part of an surprisingly well-made cyberpunk thriller called Zenith has just been released as a torrent download through Vodo, and the third episode of Pioneer One is being released on the 28th.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Reuters – Facebook has agreed to buy Snaptu, an application developer for mobile devices that are less sophisticated than smartphones, as the world’s largest Internet social network focuses on expanding its mobile services.

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Appolicious – And then there were three.

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Throughout the lifetime of the 400 series, NVIDIA launched 4 GPUs: GF100, GF104, GF106, and GF108. Launched in that respective order, they became the GTX 480, GTX 460, GTS 450, and GT 430. One of the interesting things from the resulting products was that with the exception of the GT 430, NVIDIA launched each product with a less than fully populated GPU, shipping with different configurations of disabled shaders, ROPs, and memory controllers. NVIDIA has never fully opened up on why this is – be it for technical or competitive reasons – but ultimately GF100/GF104/GF106 never had the chance to fully spread their wings as 400 series parts.

It’s the 500 series that has corrected this. Starting with the GTX 580 in November of 2010, NVIDIA has been launching GPUs built on a refined transistor design with all functional units enabled. Coupled with a hearty boost in clockspeed, the performance gains have been quite notable given that this is still on the same 40nm process with a die size effectively unchanged. Thus after GTX 560 and the GF114 GPU in January, it’s time for the 3^rd and final of the originally scaled down Fermi GPUs to be set loose: GF106. Reincarnated as GF116, it’s the fully enabled GPU that powers NVIDIA’s latest card, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

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AP – Islam Dunn updates his Facebook page with a phone like so many other 19-year-olds, only he must hide the device so the prison guards don’t notice.

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The DMA (Digital Media Adapter) aka media streamer market has been dominated by Sigma Designs, Realtek and of late, the Intel CE 4xxx series. The low end market is catered to by the Boxchip and Amlogic based media streamers.

Having got the codec compatibility right (at least on paper), the choice for the media streamer manufacturers was to either go the 3D route or add extra non-core functionality in the next-gen products. 3D is yet to go mainstream despite the best efforts of the top tier manufacturers.

In 2011, you can expect a slew of media streamers running Android. The TViX Xroid A1 has already been announced and demonstrated to be running Android on the SMP8656. Read on for our coverage of the launch of another Android-based media streamer, the Nixeus Fusion XS, which also happens to be Marvell's debut vehicle in this product space.

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AFP – Two of the world’s richest men, software pioneer Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, are set to visit India this week to persuade the country’s super-wealthy to part with more of their cash.

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Peterus7 writes “I’m a student teacher in an 8th grade science classroom, and have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online. After realizing that, I’ve been looking for ways to incorporate internet resources into my teaching, and trying to find cool citizen science projects, activities, and simulations that would be appropriate for a grade school science class, such as galaxyzoo and fold.it. So, I’m asking slashdot for more resources that could help bring science to their lives. Thanks!”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Digital Trends – Do not worry: Tonight’s supermoon, which will appear larger than any moon in the North American night sky since 1992, will not cause any natural disasters, NASA reassured everyone today. They’ve even go so far as to produce a YouTube video to explain the super moon’s effects.

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An anonymous reader writes “Police in Michigan have arrested 34-year-old Richard Leon Barton Jr. on charges of polygamy, thanks to incriminating wedding photos on Facebook. The man unfriended his first wife on the social network before marrying his second wife, but unsurprisingly that wasn’t enough.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Earlier this morning we published our first impressions on Apple's iPad 2, including analysis on camera quality and a dive into the architecture behind Apple's A5 SoC. Our SoC investigation mostly focused on CPU performance, which we found to be a healthy 50% faster than the A4 in the original iPad – at least in web browsing. We were able to exceed Apple's claim of up to 2x performance increase in some synthetic tests, but even a 50% increase in javascript and web page loading performance isn't anything to be upset about. We briefly touched on the GPU: Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX 543MP2. Here Apple is promising up to a 9x increase in performance, but it's something we wanted to investigate.

Read on to see just how fast the new PowerVR SGX 543MP2 really is.

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