AT&T in iPhone hiring spree

AT&T, the biggest US wireless service provider by customer numbers, will be the country`s only carrier to offer the iPhone when it goes on sale at the end of June, says Australian IT News.

Company spokesman Mark Siegel said AT&T had hired extra staff for its 1 800 stores in anticipation of "significant demand" for the device.

The iPhone was first announced in January and combines a music and video player with a Web browser and a touch-sensitive screen in place of a keyboard.

A computer backup device that was stolen last week from an Ohio state government intern`s car contains identifying information on more than 60 000 state employees and 225 000 taxpayers in Ohio, says Information Week.

Ohio governor Ted Strickland announced this week that the device contains the names, Social Security numbers, and cheque amounts of up to 225 000 taxpayers with uncashed state personal income tax refund cheques and school district income tax refund cheques that were issued between 2005 and 29 May 2007.

The list, he noted in an online statement, did not contain mailing addresses or bank account information.

Although there was a time when Microsoft would vigorously resist any court-imposed restrictions on Windows, the company has agreed to a court order to make it easier for consumers to choose Google`s popular desktop search on Windows Vista computers, reports Indystar.

The concession came after Google began alerting state attorneys general that Microsoft appeared to be violating a 2002 consent decree banning it from hindering rival software from working as designed on Windows.

"This agreement - while not perfect - is a positive step toward greater competition in the software industry," says California attorney general Edmund Brown, one of 17 state attorneys general who, with the Department of Justice, brokered the settlement.

For the past year-and-a-half, Nvidia has been putting together the product strategy for the company`s high-performance computing (HPC) platform, says HPCWire.

On Wednesday, Nvidia announced Tesla, a GPU product line targeted at HPC customers. The new products are designed to act as computational accelerators for workstations and servers that host high-performance technical computing applications.

Tesla represents an evolution of Nvidia`s thinking about serving HPC customers. Last year, the company entered the arena of general-purpose computing with GPUs in earnest with its high-end GeForce and Quadro GPUs.