Printers aren't exactly synonymous with pizazz, and that can be a drag for a tech company that wants to be known as more than just a printer maker. Which brings us to Hewlett-Packard's new marketing campaign.

The company, which also happens to be the PC market leader, is embarking on a new effort designed to juice up its image among people who may see it only as a traditional printer manufacturer.

Developed by the ad agency 72andSunny, HP's new tagline 'Let's Do Amazing' will drive a new series of TV spots and digital media ads set to debut March 13. The ads are being geared not just toward consumers and businesses but also to HP's employees, many of whom are new to the company.

Aiming to keep pace with Microsoft and advance the computing frontier, the group behind OpenGL has announced a new version of its interface designed to make advanced graphics easier for programmers to handle.

OpenGL 4.0 adds more support for using a graphics processing unit (GPU) for other computing chores and for tesselation, which subdivides a region on a graphics object into many smaller patches for more detailed imagery. The technology got its start as a graphics library at graphics pioneer Silicon Graphics but has grown into a standard that works on many different computer systems and overseen by the Khronos Group.

'OpenGL 4.0 exposes the same level of capability of GPUs as DirectX 11,' the competing interface from Microsoft, Khronos said in a presentation. The company announcd the new standard, along with the 3.3 update to the earlier version, at the Game Developers Conference on Thursday.

LONDON--Jane Silber has been chief executive of Canonical for 11 days.

But she's no outsider swooping in to take over Ubuntu Linux's corporate sponsor. She joined Canonical in June 2004, two months after previous CEO Mark Shuttleworth founded the company with a few programmers he recruited from the Debian Linux project on which Ubuntu is based.

Since then Canonical has grown to about 320 employees and has made Ubuntu a major presence in the world of Linux--version 10.04, one of the important 'long-term support' versions that arrives every two years, is due in April. It's an unusually sustained effort to make Linux a force on desktop and laptop computers, and among Canonical's accomplishments is a mainstream foothold on Dell PCs.

Canonical CEO Jane Silber

Intel has officially introduced its six-core monster for high-end gaming boxes--its first desktop chip packing that many processing cores.

Dell Alienware boxes are expected to use the Core i7- 980X six-core processor.

(Credit: Dell)

As previously reported, the Core i7- 980X Extreme Edition processor was introduced at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

The chip is based on Intel's newest 32-nanometer process technology. Generally, the smaller the manufacturing process, the better the performance. Most Intel processors still use 'fatter' 45-nanometer technology.

Ten years on, Mozilla has concluded that its open-source underpinnings are due for a refresh.

The Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail software are governed by the Mozilla Public License, which determines what rights and restrictions apply to programmers who want to use the software in their own projects, extend it in various ways, or just peek at the programming instructions that underlie the software.

'Version 1.1 of the Mozilla Public License has been in use by Mozilla and other projects for over a decade. The spirit of the license has served us well by helping to communicate some of the values that underpin our large and growing community. However, some of its wording may be showing its age,' Mozilla said in an announcement of the license refurbishing Wednesday.

The latest cases of uncontrolled acceleration in the Toyota Prius point to software glitches that the car industry needs to address with more rigorous testing, according to a company that specializes in software integrity.

The most recent high-profile incident happened on Monday when James Sikes called 911 around 1:30 p.m., saying the accelerator in his Prius was stuck and he couldn't slow down, according to a CBS News report.

At one point, the car hit a speed of 90 mph. A California Highway Patrol officer inserted his car in front of the Prius and applied the brakes to try to get the Prius to stop. It stopped after about 20 minutes.

'I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car and it did something kind of funny...it jumped and it just stuck there,' Sikes said at a news conference, according to the CBS News report. (See video below.) He said he tried the brakes but this didn't stop the car.

Exactly 10 years ago, the Nasdaq reached its all-time high of 5,408.62. It has never recovered.

(Credit: Yahoo.com)

A decade ago, on March 10, 2000, it seemed almost difficult to find someone skeptical about the dazzling future of dot-com stocks.

An undeniably prescient strategist at Warburg Dillon Read, now part of UBS, told the New York Times that 'I don't see the end in sight.' The Los Angeles Times quoted a Banc of America Securities analyst as saying that, before 'too long,' the Nasdaq index would double.

It was exactly 10 years ago that the Nasdaq index reached its all-time peak of 5,048.62, and the tech-heavy index has never come close to recovering. It closed Tuesday at 2,340.68, 54 percent below its dot-com bubble high on March 10, 2000.

Reinforcing what we learned last fall, iSuppli's PC market numbers for full-year 2009 show Acer mounting a serious challenge to Dell for the title of world's second biggest PC company.

Last year Acer shipped 38.5 million PCs, a gain of 21 percent over 2008 that helped it win a 12.7 percent share of the market, just a hair's-breadth behind Dell, according to results released Tuesday by iSuppli. Dell's 2009 shipments totaled 39.9 million PCs, a drop of 9.9 percent from the prior year that was good enough for a 12.9 percent share of the market.

In the fourth quarter, according to iSuppli, Acer actually did outpace Dell in PC shipments, winning a 13.4 percent cut of the market over Dell's 12.2 percent share. And the shift didn't start then: last October, market researcher IDC reported that in the third quarter of 2009, Acer overtook Dell for the very first time.

Apple-owned FileMaker on Tuesday unveiled the next major version of its database product, FileMaker Pro 11.

In a recent study, the company found that 80 percent of the people who look at FileMaker already have a task in mind. With this type of feedback, FileMaker set out to make the new version faster and more productive for new users.

'It's very much a back to basics release for us,' Ryan Rosenberg, vice president of marketing and services at FileMaker, told CNET. 'We think ease of use is the core proposition in a database.'

To help users get started, FileMaker added a new 'Invoices' template, a task many new users want to get up and running with quickly. FileMaker now has 31 starter templates included in the application.

Creating an invoice in FileMaker Pro 11

As the case of reseller Newegg demonstrates, typos are usually the most visible sign that a chip--or any product purported to be supplied by a reputable company--is fake.

Newegg said Monday that it is conducting an investigation of recent shipments of 'questionable' Intel Core i7-920 processors from Newegg. The news was first reported by [H]ard|OCP.

'Initial information we received from our supplier, IPEX, stated that they had mistakenly shipped us 'demo units.' We have since come to discover the CPUs were counterfeit and are terminating our relationship with this supplier,' Newegg said in a statement.

Want better games on your Android phone? They may be coming sooner now, at least for Android 2.0 models.

Google has let programmers tap directly into mobile phone graphics power by releasing a third version of its Android Native Developer Kit (NDK) on Monday.

Android applications typically run in a variation of the Java programming environment, a move that aids in making applications that move more easily from one hardware system to another. But Google also lets those applications bypass the Java layer for some direct communications with the hardware through the NDK interfaces. And the big change in the third revision, or r3, is support for a standard graphics interface called OpenGL ES--in this case version 2.0, the same technology supported by newer iPhone 3GS.

The online retail trade in both the U.S. and Western Europe is in store for double-digit growth over the next five years, according to Forrester Research.

The U.S. online retail business is likely to grow 10 percent a year compounded annually, reaching $249 billion by 2014, according to the report 'US Online Retail Forecast, 2009 To 2014,' released Monday. Online firms in Western Europe, meanwhile, are eyeing an 11 percent annual gain over the next five years, hitting 114 billion euros ($155.7 billion) by 2014, according to a second Forrester report out Monday, 'Western European Online Retail Forecast, 2009 To 2014.'

(Credit: Forrester)

Jeff Jaffe, W3C's new chief executive

(Credit: Tony Scarpetta)

The World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees development of Hypertext Markup Language and several other standards related to the Web, has a new leader who wants to streamline some of the group's standardization efforts and beef up its ties with outside programmers.

Jeff Jaffe, Novell's chief technology officer until late January and a former executive at IBM and Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, was named W3C's new chief executive officer on Sunday. In his new position, Jaffe will work with W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, who first proposed the idea of the Web more than 20 years ago.

W3C Chief Executive Jeff Jaffe

(Credit: Tony Scarpetta)

The World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees development of Hypertext Markup Language and several other standards relating to the Web, has a new leader who wants to help streamline some of the group's standardization efforts and beef up its ties with outside programmers.

Jeff Jaffe, Novell's chief technology officer until January and a former executive at IBM and Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, was named W3C's new chief executive officer on Sunday. In the post, he'll work with group director and Web founder Tim Berners-Lee.

Best Buy is showing a MacBook Pro page with an Intel Core i7 chip logo. Is Best Buy trying to tell us something?

Though undoubtedly a mistake, it may also be telegraphing products to come. The Web page is here as of 6:30 p.m. PST on Sunday.

Intel Core i7 label appears on Best Buy page for 15-inch MacBook Pro.

(Credit: Best Buy)

Apple aficionados have been waiting patiently for Apple to update its MacBook Pro line with Intel's latest and greatest Core i series of processors, including the mobile Core i5 and i7, which were rolled out at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.