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A report by Ofsted in the UK has said that some of Britains design and technology classes are lagging behind.

It said that too many teachers in England are failing to keep pace with rapid technology innovation around the world. Teachers are making too little use of modern technology in their classes according to the report, which was constructed from inspections of 89 primaries, 89 secondaries (high school) and two special needs schools.

The report wasn't all that bad, marking D&T success in 60 percent of primary schools and 50 percent of secondary schools as good or outstanding. In the best environments, the teaching was challenging with interesting tasks that are relevant for the pupils. In such cases, the students could benefit from up-to-date information and communication technology.

Unfortunately, in a quarter of primary schools and the other half of secondary schools, there wasn't enough opportunities for the students to develop knowledge of electronics, computer aided design and other high-priority areas. That being said, no school was found to have an "unsatisfactory" level of its teaching in the curriculum.

Reports suggest that Motorola Mobility is working on a web-based operating system for mobile devices.

A report by InformationWeek cites a source close to the company in claiming that Motorola Mobility has amassed experienced mobile and web engineers to work on a new web-based operating system platform. The company could use it as an alternative to Google's Android operating system in its products.

Motorola has hired ex-employees from Apple and Adobe. Gilles Drieu, VP of software engineering at Motorola Mobility, formerly of Apple, joined Motorola five months after leaving Apple. He has worked with WhatWG and W3C, and is reportedly a good candidate for heading up the OS project.

Motorola Mobility has not denied that it is working on an operating system, but did reaffirm its support for Android. "Motorola Mobility is committed to Android as an operating system," a company spokesperson told InformationWeek.

"Google is shooting itself in the foot," the source said, citing concerns about Android fragmentation and product differentiation.

China's search heavyweight is said to be testing a new web browser internally.

Baidu has confirmed that it is testing a web browser internally, designed for use with desktop PCs. Spokesman Kaiser Kuo said that the browser "dovetails" with Baidu's "box-computing" technology. Baidu emoployees are currently testing the new software.

This could put Baidu in direct competition with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google's Chrome browser.

Baidu shares rose to their highest level on the Nasdaq on Friday since trading began back in 2005. In the past year, the stock has surged 40 percent. Google's scale back of operations in China in a dispute over a cyber attack on its services has helped Baidu to continue capturing search share from the U.S. company.

There has also been talk about Baidu being involved in the development of a mobile operating system that would directly compete with Android and iOS. The company has been asked about such rumors, and neither confirmed or denied them.

IHS iSuppli shows how Intel kept itself right on top of the processor market in 2010, much to the pain of rival AMD.

Both companies are the top two manufacturers of microprocessors in the world, but the gap between their market share is sobering for anyone looking to take on Intel. Intel claimed 81 percent of sales during 2010, representing a small increase of 0.4 percent over 2009.

AMD on the other hand claimed 11.4 percent of the market, a decline of 0.9 percent over the previous year. Focusing on just the fourth quarter, there was a 12.2 percent drop for AMD in Q4 2010 compared to the same time period a year earlier.

The overall revenue in the market for microprocessors jumped 25 percent in 2010, weighing in at about $40 billion.

It will be interesting to see how the market changes over the coming years as analysts expect millions of tablet devices (and other portable technology) to ship. iSuppli expects that by 2015, 240 million such units will ship. The tablet market reached 17.4 million in 2010, mostly driven by Apple.

Popular digital music service Spotify will soon broadcast its first live gig for its users.

The first ever live gig broadcast by Spotify will be from Koko in London, featuring a headline DJ set by Elly Jackson from La Roux, with other acts including Pony Pony Run Run, The Naked and Famous and Delphic. The event is part of the Nissan Juke "Behind the Hit" campaign.

The show is set for April 5 at Camden's Koko. "Giving our users access to great live music in their own home is the next step in the Spotify experience," said Jonathan Foster, General Manager, Europe, Spotify.

The DJ set will include a track "Helly" by Ben Daniels, a winner of Nissan Juke's Behind the Hit competition.

"The aim of the 'Behind the Hit' competition was to find an uplifting song that sets the mood when you're driving for a night out. We feel we've done that with Helly and look forward to the first public hearing at Koko and through Spotify," said Andy Jackson, online marketing manager for Nissan GB.

The NPD Group reported earlier this week that P2P piracy in the United States declined significantly in 2010.

The market research firm said that the rate of users sharing pirated content on P2P networks dropped to 9 percent during 2010, down from 16 percent reported in 2007. This is a dramatic reversal in the trend of increasing Internet piracy over the last few years.

NPD argues that online piracy is not a fundamental problem for the media industries, because the rates are so low. That opinion clashes violently with the declaration in the IFPI's Digital Media 2010 report that the industry will struggle for its very survival unless piracy is dealt with. However, it mirrors a tone from Warner Music which estimated in a presentation to the FCC that only 13 percent of American's piracy music.

The record label said the actions are harmful, but admitted that pirates do spend money on content too and tend to "drive discovery for others."

The decline in P2P use is strongly linked to the shut down of LimeWire in late 2010. "Limewire was so popular for music file trading, and for so long, that its closure has had a powerful and immediate effect on the number of people downloading music files from peer-to-peer services and curtailed the amount being swapped," said Russ Crupnick, NPD analyst.

Rome Research Lab completed construction of, and is using, a "supercomputer" composed of off-the-shelf PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles.

The lab linked together 1,716 PS3 consoles and exploited the OtherOS functionality (I guess they didn't update then) to build what they are describing as one of the world's fastest and cheapest supercomputers. They claim it is in the top 40 most powerful supercomputers.

Dubbed, The Condor, the system is intended to provide analysts with new levels of detail from pictures gathered from spy planes. It is part of military developments aiming to achieve constant and detailed surveillance over a wide area.

The Condor will enable 24-hour real-time surveillance of a roughly 15 mile-wide area, allowing video processed from radar signals to be viewed in real-time or played back. Such a system can help to investigate the moments before an event such as an explosion or an ambush on military units.

"You can literally rewind or predict forward (in the future), based on the information you have," Mark Barnell, director of high-performance computing at the Rome research lab, said.

The project was started when Richard W. Linderman, then senior scientist at Rome's Air Force research lab, bought a PS3 and played around with OtherOS at home. Out of curiosity, he told his research team to attempt linking eight of the Sony console's together, and was impressed with the result. So then he decided to get 336 and see how that would work out.

Users of the popular Spotify music service were hit by malware on Thursday.

Only users of the ad-supported version of Spotify were affected, while Premium users were not reporting any problems. The malware attacked through advertisements that were displayed, attempting to take advantage of a Java-based exploit to deliver a Trojan to vulnerable Windows installations.

Spotify responded to the problem promptly. "We're currently investigating and have pulled all third party display ads that could have caused the problem until we locate the specific advert," the company said.

The malicious third party adverts were probably region-specific, and so the threat is unlikely to have been very widespread and should easily be dealt with. Avast Anti-Virus and AVG are capable of detecting the exploit if attempted.

Game-maker wants same treatment as heavyweight microblogging site in San Francisco.

Zynga, a game developer potentially worth around $10 billion, is seeking to gain tax breaks in order to keep its headquarters in San Francisco. It said it is optimistic and encouraged by talks that have been ongoing with local government.

The developer, which is responsible for the Farmville game that gained worldwide popularity through Facebook, has threatened to leave the city unless it is treated the same as microblogging giant Twitter, which has already received tax exemptions.

The company only moved into the premises, which has space for about 2,000 emloyees, last September. A spokesperson said the firm is in serious discussions with local government over its tax requests, but did not give any specific details on where the situation is right now.

Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play, the world's first PlayStation-certified smartphone, will hit UK networks on April 1, but O2 is opting out for now.

O2's device testing team rigorously tests each handset the network operator offers to the consumer. When they find problems, they work with the vendors to see how to resolve them and usually this is done easily. Bugs appear in every form of software and we all know full well that mobile phones are definitely not immune to that fact.

Unfortunately, the team has found problems with the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY. "We've been testing the phone non-stop for weeks and have found some bugs in the software that, if they're not fixed, means customers won’t have a great experience," a blog post from Stuart Hibberd, head of O2's testing team, reads.

"We've been working with Sony Ericsson to get these bugs ironed out, but haven't been able to get them fixed in time for us to be able to launch the phone on April 1st as we originally planned."

While its bad news for folks hoping to use the device on the O2 network, you cannot deny it is impressive that the operator would take this step, especially when you consider that they managed to get themselves an exclusive white version of the handset for the market.

A firm in China is accused of planting malware on new phones.

NetQin, a Chinese security firm, has found itself denying that it has conspired to plant malicious software on users' handsets in order to entice them to buy its security software that is capable of removing it. The situation came to light after a report by 3.15 Gala, a Chinese consumer rights programme broadcast on state television.

Applications are often installed on phones in China by dealers who are modifying the phones firmware to work in the country. One such application for Symbian handsets is Feiliu, which attempts too download and install components from the Internet when a connection becomes available.

The software is designed to remove security software installed on a phone, and is also causes the phone to run slow and unstable. Here's where NetQuin comes in, with a solution that can remove the annoyance from a handset and all just for 2 Yuan a go.

Where things start to smell bad is the fact that NetQin is the second largest investor in the firm that developed the Feiliu software in the first place. Not suspicious enough? What if co-founders of both firms worked on their PhDs together? Well, they did.

Reports suggests Apple may snub Spring iOS 5 unveiling.

The company so far has announced new major updates of the iOS mobile operating system for Apple devices in Spring, following up with a launch in the summer. For this reason, a lot of onlookers expected Apple to cram some iOS 5 goodies into the iPad 2 announcement event, but that didn't happen.

Now TechCrunch is citing two sources that say Apple is pushing back iOS to the Fall, and that it will be a major revamp of the operating system. It could also be previewed at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but it will not be released then.

Interestingly, sources suggest that the new iOS iteration will be built around the cloud, and will lead to several new cloud-based services launched by Apple that could include a music locker, for example. Another service would be based on location and focuses on finding family and friends.

Highly-anticipated game is set back yet again by developer.

Duke Nukem Forever was given new release dates earlier this week. The title will launch on June 10 internationally and in North America on June 14th. Back in January, 2K Games and Gearbox Software turned heads by announcing a May 3 release date for the game.

The delay is certainly not that long, but considering the title was first announced all the way back in 1997 and has become something of a running joke (Duke Nukem Whenever, Duke Nukem Fornever, Duke Nukem IfEver etc.) in the business over the past decade, yet another delay is just not what gamers want to hear anymore.

2K Games finally lost patience with original studio 3D Realms in 2009, suing it and linking up with Gearbox Software instead to develop the title. After Gearbox' major success with Borderlands, the developer used the cash to buy up all Duke Nukem Forever assets and Intellectual Property last year.

The title will be available as both a standard edition, and a "Balls of Steel Collectors Edition", available for PC and on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 console platforms when it launches.

A federal judge has given a boost to rights' holders looking to sue thousands of file sharers in the United States for copyright infringement.

Efforts to sue thousands of people who downloaded and shared movies illegally on the web were challenged by several groups, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Public Citizen. The group has objected to new litigation campaigns that lump thousands of alleged pirated together.

They believe that the mass jointing of multiple defendants violated federal rules of procedure, and that the plaintiffs had inadequately established jurisdiction. Also, they contend that the First Amendment to the US Constitution protected the defendant's right to anonymity.

U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell dismissed all three arguments, contending that the mass-joining of defendants benefits the plaintiffs and the defendants alike.

"Given the administrative burden of simply obtaining sufficient identifying information to properly name and serve alleged infringers, it is highly unlikely that the plaintiffs could protect their copyrights in a cost-effective manner. Indeed, Time Warner urges the Court to sever the defendants for this very reason. Time Warner asserts that, if joinder were disallowed, its burden of complying with subpoenas would be diminished because the plaintiffs would not be able to proceed against all of the putative defendants individually At this procedural juncture, the plaintiffs have met the requirements of permissive joinder under Rule 20(a)(2). The putative defendants are not prejudiced but likely benefited by joinder, and severance would debilitate the plaintiffs’ efforts to protect their copyrighted materials and seek redress from the putative defendants who have allegedly engaged in infringing activity."

She ruled also that it was premature to even bring up questions of jurisdiction before the defendants are even identified, and in these chances when an ISP hands over the details, an individual is dropped from the lawsuit if he/she does not reside in the jurisdiction. The plaintiff can file a new lawsuit in the defendants home state.

Sony has revealed that PSN services will be taken over by Sony Network Entertainment America.

The switch will be made on April 1, and the impact of the change on end users should be minimal. Gamers digital wallets and funds will be transfered over to SNEA. Users will be required to accept a new Terms of Service and User Agreement with SNEA.

Failing to accept the new terms will result in the closure of accounts and funds being refunded to the user.

The switch of online services from Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) to SNEA has been expected for some time now as SNEA already manages the online operations of other Sony products such as Bravia, Blu-ray Players and Dash.