IBM announced that the DB2 9 Viper data server is now available for System z customers. Featuring hundreds of new features for mainframe customers, DB2 9 for z/OS will provide unmatched security, enhanced data storage compression and, for the first time, allow the seamless management of relational and XML data in the same database.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will receive a $1 annual salary for 2007, the company disclosed in a regulatory filing Monday.

Schmidt, Brin and Page first requested that the company reduce their salary to $1 during the second quarter of 2004, just prior to the company’s initial public offering in August of that year. All three own a substantial amount of Google stock.

As of last year’s proxy, Larry Page owned 32.1 million shares of the company, worth about $14.2 billion at today’s closing price. Sergey Brin held 31.6 million shares valued at $13.9 billion. Schmidt held 12.5 million shares worth $5.5 billion.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini said the chip giant isn’t going to upgrade to Vista until it gets the first service pack from Microsoft. Speaking at the Bank of America Technology conference in San Francisco, Otellini was asked about his take on Vista and whether it could drive demand.

For those road warriors who actually have a need to create PDFs on their Microsoft-based device, there’s a new application from Rain Effect called FluidPDF that will allow you to do just that.

Available for Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PCs and Smartphones, FluidPDF allows users to scale, stretch, set dpi, and rotate images; compose, set font, set font size, and rotate text; embed voice notes with captions; embed file attachments with captions; secure a PDF document through encryption; and, according to the company, save storage and wireless data transfer costs because of the size efficiency of PDF.

Desktops have traditionally been more popular than laptops because they cost less. But in May 2005, laptop sales outpaced desktop sales for the first time. The growth of wireless Internet is the main cause, says John Edwardson, CEO of giant computer reseller CDW. With Wi-Fi, a laptop owner can work almost anywhere, he says.

The PC industry is shifting faster than some companies can adapt, Gateway CEO Ed Coleman says. Laptops are replacing desktops as the PC of choice. Consumers are choosing computers based on style as well as speed. Business sales growth in developed countries is slowing, while developing nations such as India, China and Brazil are taking off. PC makers now must chase both markets if they want to thrive, HP CEO Mark Hurd says.

HP is making a gradual comeback from years of market share losses to Dell.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says American consumers generated nearly 2 million tons of electronic waste in 2005. Gartner estimates that 133,000 PCs are discarded by U.S. homes and businesses each day. Only 10 to 15 percent of electronics are currently recycled, industry analysts say. The rest collects dust in people’s homes or gets dumped into municipal landfills, where environmentalists worry toxic chemicals can leak out.

The computer industry is ramping up its campaign against electronic waste, a dangerous byproduct of technology’s relentless expansion. HP and Dell, which together sell more than half the country’s PCs, are earning praise from environmentalists for using more eco-friendly components and recycling their products when consumers discard them.

Users who have downloaded the 2.1.1 version of the open-source blogging platform WordPress should upgrade all files to 2.1.2 immediately, since they could include a security bug injected by a cracker who gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, according to a release posted on WordPress’ site on Friday.

WordPress received a note on the project’s security mailing address Friday morning regarding "highly exploitable code," the release said. After investigating the issue, the WordPress developers found that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original site. The Web site was taken down immediately for further forensic analysis.

Building good rapport with your boss is essential to your career success. After all, he or she decides which projects you take on and how quickly you advance. But not all workers see eye-to-eye with their supervisors.

Here are some common types of managers and tips for working with each of them.

Microsoft’s Live OneCare security software has failed tests which check how well it spots and stops malicious programs designed to attack Windows. OneCare was the only failure among 17 antivirus programs tested by the AV Comparatives organization.

Microsoft’s software only spotted 82.4% of the 500,000 viruses that the independent group subjected it to. The test is the second in less than a month that Microsoft’s anti-virus software has failed.

Unless you were at Black Hat on Feb. 28, you probably woke up safe in the assumption that if a rootkit hit your system, reimaging would remove it. You probably also thought that the best way to search a PC’s volatile memory, or RAM, was by grabbing it with a PCI card or a FireWire bus.

You were wrong.

At the Black Hat Briefings on Jan. 28, two breakthrough hardware hacks were demonstrated. One shocker was Coseinc Senior Security Researcher Joanna Rutkowska’s demonstration of a way to subvert system memory through software–in essence, the shattering of our long-held belief that "going to hardware" to secure incident response is a security failsafe.