eBay suffers from poor IT

eBay reported its first quarterly sales decline amid industry fears it may not be able to compete with its peers due to an inferior IT set-up, says Computing.co.uk.

Total sales increased 12.1%, to $2.12 billion, in the third quarter of 2008, but that is also a dip of 3.6% from the quarter before, which is a first in the company's history.

eBay CEO John Donahoe said the business was engaged in a cost containment plan, but would continue to “stay focused” on the connectivity of its various e-commerce platforms.

Searching the Internet may stimulate and help improve brain function more than reading a book, reports The Register.

Researchers at the University of California (UCLA), Los Angeles, found that searching the Web triggers centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning in middle-aged and older adults.

"Our most striking finding was that Internet searches appear to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading - but only those with prior Internet experience," said principal investigator Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at UCLA.

Proposals for a central database of all mobile phone and Internet traffic have been condemned as "Orwellian", says The BBC.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith said the police and security services needed new powers to keep up with technology. She promised the content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of messages and calls.

But the Liberal Democrats slammed the idea as "incompatible with a free country", while the Tories called on the government to justify its plans.

Nvidia has released a graphics accelerator for Adobe Creative Suite 4, giving professionals the option of higher performance when adding graphics and visual effects to video, reports Information Week.

The release of Quadro CX comes a day after Nvidia introduced the GeForce 9400M, a graphics processor for notebooks.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs this week praised the performance of the GPU in announcing it would be in Apple's new MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. The announcement was a big win for Nvidia, whose product was chosen over Intel's integrated graphics chipset.