Solar subsidies are being reduced to around half the level of before a government consultation was launched last year, with a drop to 21p/kWh as of April this year.

In July, these could further drop to 13.6p/kWh, while the government stated its aim to change subsidies regularly in accordance with market pressure as part of new plans. It is hoped that this will remove the need for emergency reviews, which have seen the government dragged into court over its premature cuts.

“Today we are announcing plans to improve the Feed-in Tariffs scheme,” Barker said in a statement.

“Our new plans will see almost two and a half times more installations than originally projected by 2015 which is good news for the sustainable growth of the industry.

“We are proposing a more predictable and transparent scheme as the costs of technologies fall, ensuring a long term, predictable rate of return that will closely track changes in prices and deployment."

Energy Minister Greg Barker claimed that new plans would pave the way for a solar boom, with 22GW of installed capacity by 2020.

The optimism has not been shared throughout the solar industry.  Solar Trade Association boss Howard Johns said the plans would destroy the industry, labelling them a “disaster” on Twitter.

Solar industry analyst Ash Sharma at IMS Research also highlighted the negative effect cuts are likely to have, and doubted the ability to reach targets set forth by Barker.

“This seems very optimistic to me,” Sharma told TechEye. “Our best-case forecast shows cumulative installation capacity of less than 15GW by the end of 2020.

“Regardless, is 22GW really that much? That would still be less than what Germany had installed by the end of last year, but a step in the right direction.”

In fact, Sharma believes that the UK is set to fall further behind other leading solar nations with the subsidy cuts. “The UK will definitely play a much smaller role in the global industry in 2012 and beyond,” he told us.“I suspect we may well see a small boom in installations in the next month or so, followed by a real slowdown.”

“In the longer-term we'll see some more gradual growth but I'm not sure we'll see 22GW installed by 2020," Sharma said.

Oracle's big idea rests with Taleo's cloud-based talent management software, which Oracle hopes will allow it to further build on its own cloud business. Bloomberg reports that Ellison, in addition to arguing about cutting down trees, has been on a $40 billion buying frenzy in what has been a cloud software variety of Supermarket Sweep. 

Buying over 70 companies to put it on its way, Oracle is hoping to bolster its operational cloud strategy to help it provide services which manage staff and keep corporate cogs turning. Much like others wheeling and dealing in enterprise software, Oracle's grand vision is to win over customers by pushing management up into the cloud.

Taleo says that after the acquisition, the collaborative efforts of both of the companies will create a cloud service for customers to manage human resources, and "improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media".

The entire enterprise management space is spending right now. Analyst Tim Jennings, at Ovum, says rivals like SAP and Salesforce have also been picking up companies in the Human Capital Management sector. They acquired Success Factors and Rypple, respectively.

HP, meanwhile, paid arguably over the odds for Cambridge-based company Autonomy - with a price tag at $10 billion. 

Ovum believes the string of buys is indicative of a larger trend. The enterprise is increasingly accepting Software-as-a-Service. More visibly, Jennings suggests, the industry is aggressively battling against each other to appear like it is the top dog on cloud nine. They aren't interested in migrating their own services to the cloud, and are instead happy to splash out on companies so they can supply their own flavours.

Taleo's board of directors unanimously approved the deal, which is expected to close in the middle of this year, as long as it jumps through the hoops of all the regulatory approvals. Which it most likely will.

Jason Gorss, spokesperson at GlobalFoundries, told TechEye: "It's a pretty unique partnership and the event should exemplify that. The Common Platform alliance has existed for almost a decade now and has enabled several generations of semiconductor technology for mobile, computing and data management applications.

"The alliance is based on a unique shared R&D model, where customers benefit from world-class process development and deployment.

"At the forum, we'll be discussing advanced technology nodes and the innovation pipeline to 14nm and beyond. We'll be hosting technical deep dives and discussions on the increasingly complex manufacturing and design processes for the 20nm and 14nm nodes. We'll also be talking about the challenges of lithography and what we are doing there to address issues such as double patterning and EUV.

"And attendees will get a glimpse into the future through an executive panel on the next key drivers of semiconductor innovation beyond 14nm technology, from FinFETs to nano-wires to 450mm wafers."

The latest figures are showing that PC sales in the UK are falling fast. This is partly due to economic woes and partly because no one wants to buy a PC if they will have to upgrade at the end of the year.

According to Gartner, UK PC sales dropped 20 percent in the final quarter of 2011, with only Apple and Lenovo increasing sales. Last year, UK PC sales dropped 15.9 percent, or 2 million units.

The market seems to be contracting so much that while Apple's sales are not growing by much, they are now sitting at 10 percent of the market, up from just four percent a few years ago.

But other brands really suffered. Acer lost nearly half of its market, while HP nearly 16 percent, and Dell nine percent. Only Lenovo increased by 14 percent.

Part of the problem is that netbook sales have collapsed and this has held up unit sales since 2009. This may not be a bad thing. They did take sales from more profitable laptops.

Meanwhile, the industry is waiting for Intel's pricier Ultrabook portables to make an impact, but we do not expect this to happen until Ivy Bridge arrives -which should also coincide with Windows 8.

It seems that the channel, then, is holding its breath until that is happening. It could be a long 2012 as suppliers hope that it will be the old Wintel alliance that will bail it out. 

Swagg Security said that it was "considerably disappointed" with the inhuman working conditions at Foxconn, although that did not appear to be the main reason for the hack.

It said that it was a hacktivist group but was a Greyhat organisation.

SwaggSec alleged that it had bypassed Foxconn's firewall "almost flawlessly." They dumped "most of everything of significance," including usernames and passwords which "could allow individuals to make fraudulent orders under big companies like Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Intel, and Dell."

According to Apple Insider, Foxconn administrators took down services.foxconn.com. SwaggSec said on Twitter it guessed "you guys made one too many orders".

We had been expecting more hacks to target Foxconn after Apple fanboys the New York Times started to question if the company was an Apple sweatshop.

Today, protesters are expected to hold a demonstration outside of Apple's Grand Central Terminal store. They will hand out petitions calling for Apple, one of Foxconn's biggest clients, and Foxconn to improve working conditions. 

It seems that while they think that the rest of the world should not have access to whatever they like online, it is OK for them.

According to Reuters, three politicians from a morally conservative party, including a women's affairs minister, have resigned after being caught watching pornography on a mobile phone during a session of state parliament.

Karnataka state minister for cooperation, Laxman Savadi, even shared a porn clip with colleague C.C. Patil, the minister for women and child development, while sitting in the state assembly.

The state minister for ports, science and technology, Krishna Palemar, who owned the phone with the porn clip also quit.

Patil requested the speaker of the house to conduct an inquiry and they will come out with a "clean chit". We admit that we had to read his quote twice before we twigged he was not saying something rude.

The three said they did not want to cause any embarrassment for their party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the state and is in opposition at a national level.

It appears a bit late for that. It seems that by looking at porn they angered the right-wing Hindu groups and by calling for it to be banned they have miffed rights activists.

Renuka Chowdhary, a former federal minister for women's development and a member of the Congress Party, said that India is seen as a country where there already is a social mindset that women are disposable commodities and transferable properties.

People in positions of power have the responsibility to change things clearly have the same mindset and are busy watching porn, she said.

Instead, Microsoft thinks that its customers are having their accounts hijacked by cyber criminals.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the situation is being watched closely because insecurity experts have been waiting for another PlayStation Network security breach to happen. In that case, millions of customer accounts were made public and the network was shut down for a month.

While it might have been a bit tighter on security than Sony, Microsoft has been slow to publicly address hijacked Xbox Live accounts.

But Xbox Live users who have had their accounts compromised and facilitated to make unauthorised transactions have been moaning for months. They say Microsoft has been slow to assist customers and restore access to their accounts.

Last month, Redmond improved security on its Xbox.com website, which seems to have been how hackers got access to user account information.

The general manager of Xbox Live Alex Garden penned an open letter about security on Xbox Live that acknowledged "account hijacking across the internet continues to grow".

Garden described how there was a surge of personal information being compromised and sold but Microsoft said that there was no evidence of a security breach in the Xbox Live service.

Microsoft says the most common sources of security attack are social engineering, phishing, malware and using the same passwords. 

While we have reported before how AT&T did not do as well from the iPhone as many had expected, it turns out that the other telcos who subsidise Jobs' Dream are also suffering.

CNN has looked closely at the effect that iPhone subsidising has had on Verizon, AT&T and Sprint and come to the conclusion that they would have been better off in a pact with Mephistopheles than cutting a deal with Apple.

Since Apple's iPhone debuted on Verizon's network in February 2011, Verizon's EBITDA service margin, which measures their core profit as a percentage of their sales, has tumbled according to CNN.

In its pre-Apple days Verizon had a EBITDA service margin of 46.4 percent per quarter. In the first quarter that the iPhone went on sale, that fell to 43.7 percent. Last quarter, when Verizon sold a record 4.2 million iPhones, its margin plunged to 42.2 per cent.

Tellingly, Verizon did very well in the third quarter, when its margin bounced back up to a record 47.8 percent. This is the same quarter in which iPhone sales stalled.

AT&T has a 28.7 percent EBITDA service margin last quarter, compared with 37.6 percent a year earlier. AT&T sold nearly twice as many iPhones as Verizon last quarter.

Sprint sold two million iPhones last quarter, and its adjusted wireless margin fell to 9.5 percent, down from 16 percent a year ago.

Mike McCormack, an analyst at Nomura Securities, told CNN that the iPhone was bad for wireless carriers. If you look at the direct and indirect economics that Apple has managed to extract from the carriers, the carrier-level value destruction is quite evident, McCormack said.

All smartphones are subsidied to some extent but those on the iPhone are the highest in the industry. It is estimated that for every iPhone sold, the carriers have had to give Apple $450.

Sprint has committed to paying Apple roughly $15.5 billion in up front costs over the next four years, and the carrier does not expect to make money on the deal until 2015.

The hope is that somehow the companies will make money out of Apple, but everytime Cupertino has a success, the carrier's results suffer.

At the end of the day, part of this problem is that they have refused to back away from their lock-in deals with Apple or at least force the company to be a little more reasonable. Apple has no reason to give way. An unsubsidised iPhone would have to be unlocked, and besides, it would cost about $800-$1000. 

The outfit has just penned a letter to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and other global bodies with the promise. The non-profit ETSI, which has members from 62 countries, produces standards for telephony and internet technologies globally.

Reuters said that Google will licence Motorola technology on fair and reasonable terms.

It quoted a Google spokesperson saying that since it announced its agreement to acquire Motorola Mobility last August, it had heard questions about whether Motorola Mobility's standard-essential patents will continue to be licensed on FRAND (fair and reasonable) terms once the deal is closed. The answer is that it will.

He said that standards-setting agencies typically require members to offer licensing access to standards or patents on such terms.

It is the second commitment that Google has had to make since it bought Motorola. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt told reporters in November last year that the group would not favour Motorola once it had completed the acquisition.