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Virtualisation becomes enterprise critical - Gartner

According to analyst firm Gartner, Virtualisation will be the most important IT technology for the next three years. According to the company, the number of virtual machines will increase from 540,000 at the end of last year to more than four million by 2009. "Several things will make virtualisation critical to most enterprises in the next few years: the need to consolidate space, power, installation and integration, and providing server resources which are capable of responding to unpredictable workloads," Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman told a conference in Sydney yesterday. ...more

Amazon leaks Windows XP prices

Amazon.com accidentally leaked the prices of the forthcoming Windows XP last week when it mistakenly started taking pre-orders for the second time in just six weeks. Amazon's error came just as Microsoft released Windows XP to PC manufacturers, ready for its 25 October release date. ...more

Typing style is the new fingerprint claims US academics

According to Forbes, researchers at a US university have discovered a unique property of humans that could be used to identify users and authenticate them on computers: their typing style. Researchers at Louisiana Tech and Penn State have successfully completed a five-year project that analysed the periods between keystrokes, and the time it took to hit a key. So impressed are security specialists BioPassword that it has signed a joint licensing agreement - the first such commercial agreement for the university. ...more

Audio masters announce new chip

Creative Labs, manufacturers of the SoundBlaster range of sound cards, have announced a new audio DSP, the Audigy processor. The new 32bit chip is claimed to be four times as powerful as the current EMU10K1 processor. It's capable of simulating four audio environments simultaneously and morphing and panning between them. ...more