Software

NEW YORK — Knight Capital Group lurched into the weekend with executives scrambling to find a buyer or secure emergency funding needed for survival. The battered trading firm was said to be meeting with private equity investors and rival financial firms about putting together a deal. Knight has been left cash-strapped after a software glitch caused $440 million in losses from erroneous high-speed trades this week. The brokerage did get a few boosts. Shares skyrocketed 60% on unconfirmed reports Knight secured a line of credit to stay in business through late Friday.

A California judge has ruled that Oracle Corp. is contractually obligated to continue developing software for Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Itanium-based servers. The decision Wednesday by Judge James P. Kleinberg in San Jose advances Hewlett-Packard's lawsuit to a jury trial to determine whether Oracle broke the contract and what, if any, damages should be awarded. Both sides have 15 days to file an objection to the decision, the judge said. The judge agreed with Hewlett-Packard that Oracle made a commitment to support Intel Corp.

NEW DELHI - A few years ago, Ankur Suri saw a friend beaten up by fellow classmates after he emailed pornography to female friends - or rather, his computer had. In desperation, the friend went to authorities, who declined to investigate because they didn't really understand the problem of how his computer had been infected by malicious spam. "I'd rather go to Google or Facebook than deal with the Indian law," said Suri, 25. India recently notched a dubious distinction, beating the U.S. to become the leading spewer of spam email, according to the British Internet security firm Sophos Ltd. Nearly 10% of such emails is now sent from Indian computers, up from 7% in 2010, and many of the spammers don't even realize they're doing it. "This is one record India doesn't want so much," said Sanjay Katkar, chief technology officer with Quick Heal, a security firm.

A year ago I might have said the Sony Xperia ion is a good phone. Now it's just outdated. The main problem with the phone is its software. It's got an awesome design, good hardware and a nice size, but because it runs on the Android Gingerbread operating system, now two generations outdated, the phone is simply not a good purchase. The Xperia ion is the first Sony-branded smartphone to arrive in the U.S. It has a 4.55-inch, 1,280 by 720 HD LCD screen. That's pretty good, but it's not the best.

Microsoft Corp. will record a hefty $6.2-billion write-down in its fourth quarter, mostly related to the disappointing performance of an online advertising business it acquired five years ago. The charge will probably mean a loss for Microsoft in the quarter, which ended in June. The company plans to report its fourth-quarter and fiscal-year earnings July 19. Analysts polled by Bloomberg had estimated that Microsoft would earn about $5.3 billion for the quarter. The Redmond, Wash., software behemoth said the accounting adjustment, known as a goodwill impairment, was "substantially the result" of buying Internet advertising firm aQuantive for $6.3 billion in August 2007.

Computer giant Dell Inc., facing falling demand for personal computers, made one of its biggest moves yet to bolster its software business. Outbidding rivals, Dell said Monday that it agreed to acquire Orange County software developer Quest Software Inc. for $2.4 billion. The acquisition will boost its software offerings to businesses and governments, Dell said. The deal ends a months-long bidding war that saw offers for Aliso Viejo-based Quest rise from an initial bid of $2 billion from a private investment firm.

The bidding war for Quest Software Inc. continued, this time with a mystery buyer making a more than $2.3-billion offer for the company that makes software for businesses and governments. The latest bid of $27.50 a share came from a "strategic bidder," Quest said, and is nearly $2 higher than the June 15 offer of $25.75 from private firms Insight Venture Partners and Vector Capital. Quest, which is based in Aliso Viejo, declined Monday to say who the new offer was from. It marked the fourth bid since Insight started the bidding at $23 a share in March.

Twitter says its intermittent outages Thursday have been caused by a software bug. The microblogging service has been crashing frequently throughout the day as a result of a "cascaded bug," which is a glitch "that isn't confined to a particular software element," a spokesman for the company said. "Its effect 'cascades' into other elements as well," he said. At one point, I was unable to access the site for more than half an hour, and throughout the day it seemed to be running slower than normal.

Quest Software Inc. accepted a sweetened $2.17-billion bid from Insight Venture Partners and agreed to the addition of Vector Capital to the buyout group. Insight's new cash offer of $25.75 a share topped a bid of $25.50 that Aliso Viejo-based Quest received last week. That offer came from personal computer maker Dell Inc., a person familiar with the matter said. The deal's termination fee was increased to $25 million from $6.3 million, Quest said. Quest said March 9 that it agreed to be acquired by Insight for $23 a share, and two months later said it received several other proposals that it anticipated would lead to a superior offer.

Composers, look to your laurels: A mere computer program can transform a racket of clangs, hums and beeps into a pleasing melody, and all humans have to do is offer feedback with the click of a mouse. The program, by a British bioinformatics expert whose day job involves tackling biomedical problems, employs the same principles of natural selection that guide the evolution of living beings over many generations. The software - dubbed DarwinTunes, of course - creates 8-second collections of notes and puts them through the evolutionary wringer.