News

NeoHide would like to take this opportunity to wish all readers a Happy New Year in 2012!

Last year was a great year as we delivered news articles from all around the world in the interest of our readers. We hope to continue exceeding expectation this year. Looking forward to a better and stronger 2012.

UK Chancellor, George Osborne, has announced that extra £103m of funding, from Fossil Fuel Levy, will be pumped into renewable energy in Scotland. Such projects include, but not limited to, wave and tidal schemes, onshore and offshore wind energy, and hydro projects.

Scotland is a strategic location with abundant of natural resources; and it has the capability to become the green energy powerhous in Europe.

Whilst this funding is a welcoming move towards meeting Scottish and UK carbon reduction targets, the Scottish government also highlights the need to significantly increase energy efficiencies and demand reduction measures.

In November last year, SAP was ordered by a California court to pay Oracle $1.3 billion in an allegation that a SAP subsidiary has infringed Oracle's intellectual property by downloading millions of Oracle files.

A few days ago in San Francisco, Judge Phyllis Hamilton has overturned this decision saying that the amount "was contrary to the weight of the evidence and was grossly excessive". It follows that she said Oracle should accept only $272 million, or else seek a retrial.

SAP spokesman expressed his delight for the decision; Oracle has declined to comment.

Sources: BBC News

According to latest news sources, an Apple employee has lost an iPhone protoype in a bar; this time, thought to be an iPhone 5. Embarassingly, this is the second time Apple has lost a prototype - previously was the case of iPhone 4, which happened last year.

Four police officers, accompanied by two Apple employees, visited a home in San Francisco, led by the GPS technology through the device. Unfortunately, they found nothing.

Cupertino, California-based Apple began selling iPhone 4 last year and is expected to unveil the latest generation of iPhone 5 this year in September or October.

In a news release by Skype today, it was reported that the widely-popular Internet telephony company is currently facing downtime today, affecting millions of users online.

Skype isn’t a network like a conventional phone or IM network – instead, it relies on millions of individual connections between computers and phones to keep things up and running. Some of these computers are what we call ‘supernodes’ – they act a bit like phone directories for Skype.

It is believed some of these supernodes were taken offline due to problems with some versions of Skype. However, it is stil uncertain as Skype is still investigating on it.

Basically, Skype engineers are trying to rectify the problem by creating "mega-supernodes" as quickly as possible, which may take a couple of hours. In the meantime, Skype recommends user to stay tuned to updates on Twitter (@skype).

According to Domometer, the site analysis has scored Neohide.com better than 89.488% of 2120341 domain names in the Domometer database. This is rated "A" in their grading system.

Not bad for a simple website like this.

Art Technology Group (ATG) is to be acquired by US software maker, Oracle for US$1 billion in cash. After the release of the news, share prices rose for both Oracle and ATG, by 1.38% and a massive 45.12%, respectively.

The acquisition is expected to be concluded by early 2011, although no exact date is given. In acquiring ATG, it provides merchandising, marketing, content personalization, automated recommendation and live-help services to Oracle's existing businesses.

As most acquisition, such a move will result in a few rounds of cuts; which analysts foresee that it is most likely to hit Asia and Europe employees. Once again, no exact figure is given for the number of employees to be laid off.

At Neohide, we have just upgraded to the next version of Drupal 6.17, a maintenance release fixing issues reported through the bug tracking system. Although it was reported that there was no security concern, upgrading to this latest version is still recommended.

Some of the changes include improvements of session cookie handling, better processing of big XML-RPC payloads, improved PostgreSQL compatibility, better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility, improved Japanese support in search module, better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation and improved logging for login failures.

Interested users can download Drupal 6.17 version here.