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Best known for its ZoneAlarm firewall, Check Point Software has announced updates for ZoneAlarm’s more full-featured security suites. Available in two versions, ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2010 gives users a robust firewall, antivirus and antispyware, and parental control package for $50, while ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2010 adds Web browsing protection, system tune-up tools, backup options, and anti-phishing technology for $70.

ZoneAlarm is still best known for its firewall, but it currently offers users much more than that. See what’s available in ZoneAlarm Extreme Security 2010, which is similar to but has more features than ZoneAlarm Internet Security 2010.

A huge announcement this morning - Disney is going to acquire Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion!

Building on its strategy of delivering quality branded content to people around the world, The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment, Inc. in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced today.

The Boards of Directors of Disney and Marvel have each approved the transaction, which is subject to clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act, certain non-United States merger control regulations, effectiveness of a registration statement with respect to Disney shares issued in the transaction and other customary closing conditions. The agreement will require the approval of Marvel shareholders. Marvel was advised on the transaction by BofA Merrill Lynch.

UPDATE #1: In a conference call, the companies said that the deals for movies for characters at other studios (Spider-Man, X-Men, etc.) will stay in place under the terms set by Marvel and the other studios.

UPDATE #3: The deal with Paramount Pictures to distribute “Iron Man 2,” “Thor,” “Captain America” and “The Avengers” stays in place as well, but Disney would like to self-distribute down the line. “When the time comes we’ll take a closer look at it.” It was actually stated that the deal still included five films, so that is one more film after “The Avengers.”

Source :

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=58547

The Walt Disney Co. has agreed to acquire Marvel Ent. in a stock and cash transaction worth $4 billion.

Under the terms of the deal, Marvel shareholders would receive $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own. Based on the closing price of Disney stock on Friday, the transaction value is $50 per Marvel share or approximately $4 billion.

Disney will acquire ownership of more than 5,000 Marvel characters, including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor.

The boards of both companies have approved the pact, which is subject to antitrust review and the approval of Marvel shareholders.

Robert A. Iger, Mouse House prexy and CEO, said in a statement: “This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories.”

Disney will acquire ownership of 5,000 Marvel characters, including Iron Man.

Source :

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118007932.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&nid=2562

Food waste is one of the least recycled materials in municipal solid waste systems, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But at least one organization in the San Francisco Bay Area is trying to change that.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District is experimenting with innovative techniques to convert raw food waste into usable energy, taking some of the massive amounts of food waste generated by local restaurants and using it to power its operations in Oakland, Calif.

In 2007, EBMUD was awarded a $50,000 grant from the EPA as part of the Resource Recovery Program to explore new ways of digesting food waste to produce methane gas.

Today, the facility is home to a million-dollar facility that is generating usable methane and producing nearly 100 percent of the power needed to operate the regional wastewater treatment operation.

Full Story :

http://news.cnet.com/2300-11128_3-10001426.html?tag=rsspr.6250028&part=rss&subj=news

OS X 10.6 includes Boot Camp 3.0, a new collection of software drivers that make Windows run much better on Mac hardware.

(Credit: Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

Every time I see the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads on TV, I can’t help but wonder, “Why not both?” And it has never been a better time for that.

It’s been a three weeks since I first got my hands on Apple’s new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. (If anything, this means lots of hard work benchmark testing the product while trying to keep my mouth shut about it till now, which was even harder.)

Overall, personally, I found that while the new Mac OS doesn’t warrant a “wow,” it’s still definitely worth the $29 upgrade price.Mac users can read more about Snow Leopard in my colleague Jason Parker’s full review. On the other hand, for Windows users, especially Windows 7, the release of Snow Leopard is straight-on great news.

Full Story :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10315168-1.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

How would you like a single-chip microprocessor with more than four times the performance (on some applications) of Intel’s best Core i7?

Then consider that up to 32 of these chips can be directly connected to form a single server, achieving four times the built-in scalability of Intel’s next-generation Nehalem-EX processor.

That’s IBM’s widely anticipated Power7, which it described at last week’s Hot Chips conference. But if you’re interested, you’d better be prepared to spend a lot more than four times as much per chip. IBM isn’t talking about pricing, but large Power servers can cost more than $10,000 per processor.

IBM’s forthcoming Power7 server processor has eight cores, manages 32 threads, and includes 32MB of on-chip embedded DRAM cache. Power7 also has the highest levels of off-chip bandwidth ever achieved by a microprocessor.

Apple began shipping Snow Leopard on Friday, but the true importance of the Mac OS X update likely will emerge well afterward.

That’s because Mac OS X 10.6 begins a longer-term Apple attempt to get ahead by cracking a problem facing the entire computer industry: squeezing useful work out of modern processors. Instead of stuffing Snow Leopard with immediately obvious new features, Apple is trying to adjust to the new reality in which processors can do many jobs simultaneously rather than one job fast.

“We’re trying to set a foundation for the future,” said Wiley Hodges, director of Mac OS X marketing.

Apple shed some light on its project, called Grand Central Dispatch at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, but most real detail was shared only in with programmers sworn to secrecy. Now the company has begun talking more publicly about it and other deeper projects to take advantage of graphics chips and Intel’s 64-bit processors.

The moves align Apple better with changes in computing. For years, chipmakers such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices had steadily increased the clock rate of their processors, and programmers got accustomed to a performance boost with each new generation. But earlier this decade, problems derailed the gigahertz train.

First, chips often ended up merely twiddling their thumbs more because slower memory couldn’t keep the chip fed with data. Worse, the chips required extraordinary amounts of power and produced corresponding amounts of hard-to-handle waste heat.

Full Story :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10319839-264.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system, released Friday, by default loads with a 32-bit kernel, despite running 64-bit applications.

While Mac OS X version 10.6 ships with a number of 64-bit native applications, the kernel itself defaults to 32-bit, unless the user holds down the “6″ and “4″ keys during boot time, at which point the 64-bit kernel is loaded. Only Apple’s X-Serve products, using Snow Leopard Server, boot into a 64-bit kernel by default.

“For the most part, everything that they experience on the Mac, from the 64-bit point of view, the applications, the operating system, is all going to be 64-bit,” Stuart Harris, software product marketing manager at Apple Australia said.

Harris said that at this stage there were very few things, such as device drivers, that required 64-bit mode at the kernel level but the option is available.

“But we’re trying to make it as smooth as possible, so people don’t end up finding that ‘oh, that doesn’t work’ because it’s not available yet,” he said.

Full Story :

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10320314-37.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20