Exchange Used Phones for Cash on the New EcoATM

Today, recycling your used and old phones is as simple as withdrawing cash from your bank’s ATM. With the new EcoATM, companies have found an easy way of getting people to practice gadget recycling through a familiar and popular method.

All one has to do is insert a used or old phone in the EcoATM machine slot. The EcoATM will then determine what value your used phone has and will make you an offer that you can refuse or not. Once you decide to trade in your old phone for cash, it will dispense the corresponding amount you agreed to and the transaction is complete. In the event that your phone doesn’t garner any value at all, you also have the option of letting the machine consume it for refurbishing or recycling later on.

The EcoATM is intended to be installed in stores where electronics are sold. People who do trade in their phones at certain electronics stores may also have an option of trading up to a better phone or availing of store credit in selected electronics stores. For those phones without value, the customer depositing it may redeem a freebie from the electronics store or even get a tree planted in their honor as a symbol of their act of lending a hand in the environmentally-friendly practice.

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Windows Mobile 6.5 Receives A Chilly Welcome

The new Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft’s latest mobile operating system, is now being reviewed. Unfortunately, those reviews are not good. The general consensus is that rather than truly upgrading the OS to compete in an increasingly cutthroat industry, the new mobile Windows has gotten little more than a facelift.

“Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t just a letdown,” says Gizmodo’s John Herman. “It barely seems done.” He expresses very little surprise at this, noting several times in his review that the OS is playing an unsuccessful game of catch-up. Looking at the nuts and bolts of the system showed, in his observation, that the Windows Mobile OS “hasn’t been fundamentally changed in years.” It also bears a “strong resemblance” to the 6.1 version, and suspiciously significant similarities to PocketPC 2002.

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IBM To Offer Virtual Desktops

A new subscription service, being released by IBM, will make desktop virtualization more available to large companies. Virtual desktop technology has been slow to catch on, but many are saying it has more potential than it initially seemed.

The technology enables companies to use virtual machines on a central server to host the applications and desktop operating systems of their employees. The apps and desktops can then be accessed from a desktop or thin client PC, using a web browser.

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Intel’s Efforts To Save Big Bucks On Data Center Costs

Intel now has a goal of saving nearly $250 million in data center costs within the next eight years, according to a statement made Tuesday by a company executive. Diane Bryant, chief information officer for Intel, announced at an event that Intel has already halved the number of data servers used by the company, and Intel continues researching ways to consolidate further. At its height, 147 data centers were in use, whereas today’s number hovers near 70.

The four year refresh cycle for data center servers is one way that Intel plans to cut data center costs. The refresh cycle was initiated in 2007, and has already made a difference in Intel’s budget, according to Bryant. The costs of maintaining data centers include support, system maintenance, and cooling.

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Stolen Hotmail Accounts Reveal Many Simple Passwords

Bogdan Calin is a security researcher, who made that discovery after obtaining about ten thousand Windows Live Hotmail usernames and passwords last week. The data had been stolen, presumably by a phishing scam, and posted to PasteBin, a public website.

The scammers who posted the data also raided Yahoo Mail, AOL, and Gmail, in a study undertaken by the BBC. Their report disclosed that over twenty thousand accounts had been taken from the various providers, including the ten thousand Hotmail accounts that Calin investigated.

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Potential Phishing Attack Exposes Hotmail Accounts

On Monday morning, Internet pirates posted more than ten thousand Hotmail accounts online. In a demonstration of their ability to obtain sensitive information, the attackers displayed the usernames and passwords needed to access a Hotmail account, for accounts listed in alphabetical order and beginning with ‘A’ and ‘B.’

About 5,500 accounts were revealed for each of the two letters. An extrapolation of this data presents a surmise that a total of approximately 143,000 accounts were violated, if the attackers have similar numbers of account numbers for all 26 letters of the alphabet.

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Girls Gaining Interest In Science

Every scientist starts somewhere. For twenty-five teen and pre-teen girls, that somewhere may be placing microchips on a handful of Monarch butterflies, and tracking their fright from Toronto to Mexico. One of these girls may grow up to design her own micro-RFID chip, thanks to the IBM Toronto Lab.

The Markham, Ontario tech company has been running an annual summer program called EXCITE, or Exploring Interests in Technology and Engineering. EXCITE is geared toward girls from twelve to thirteen years old, encouraging them to expand their interest in engineering and technology, and causing the momentum of inspiration to keep them engaged in the sciences in high school and beyond.

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Adobe’s New LiveCycle Ststem

Adobe Systems announced Monday that an update to LiveCycle, its document-based workflow system, is being developed. The new LiveCycle ES2, for Enterprise Suite, will be accessible from smartphones, as well as being hostable in the Amazon computing cloud.

LiveCycle ES2 will also have the new advantage of LiveCycle Mosaic, a portal-esque technology that uses “tiles,” or a series of desktop windows. The purpose for the tiles is to allow employees to customize their digital workspace with instantly-available contextual data and processes from back-end systems.

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