Today in Globe Business

After a virus invades, Genzyme scrubs down

The virus hunters have arrived at Genzyme Corp.

Dozens of decontamination specialists are busy stripping insulation from pipes at the company’s biotech drug plant overlooking the Charles River in Allston. Their prep work involves dismantling equipment, peeling gaskets from the lids of 2,000-liter vats called bioreactors, and scrubbing down every surface in sight with spore-killing bleach.

When everything is ready, they will wheel in the “vaporizers.’’ The squat machines, which look like industrial versions of the Star Wars robot R2-D2, will disperse clouds of vaporized hydrogen peroxide throughout the 185,000-square-foot production area. But first, the workers will be evacuated.

“It kills all known living things,’’ said Mark R. Bamforth, senior vice president for corporate operations at Cambridge-based Genzyme.

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Kindle, iPhone upgrades not worth the hefty price

They’re superbly engineered marvels of technology, and I couldn’t imagine buying either of them.

They’re the two coolest gadgets that have recently come this way: Apple Inc.’s iPhone 3G S and the Kindle DX electronic book, from Amazon.com. Both are upgrades of highly successful products; neither is enough of an improvement to make sensible people grab for their wallets.

Consider the Kindle DX, an upgrade of an upgrade. Just three months ago, Amazon replaced the relatively chunky, first-generation e-reader with the sleek new Kindle 2. As with the original, a user could instantly download electronic books from Amazon. The then-new Kindle boasted a particularly slick new feature: text-to-speech software that would read your downloaded books out loud.

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Globe's offer softens pay cut but still stings

Members of The Boston Globe’s largest union got their first look at a new package of deep pay and benefit cuts last night, and many still don’t like it. But given the alternative - a 23 percent pay cut that appears for the first time in today’s paychecks - union members and officials say they expect the $10 million in concessions to be ratified next month.

Fewer than 100 of the nearly 700 members of the Boston Newspaper Guild attended a meeting at which they were briefed by union leaders on a tentative contract agreement reached late Tuesday night. That agreement came a little more than two weeks after Guild members narrowly rejected a contract offer, and 10 days after the Globe’s owner, The New York Times Co., imposed a 23 percent pay cut to gain savings it says it needs to right the money-losing paper.

That sharp salary reduction will end if the contract is ratified.

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Twitter software applications prone to crashes, tests show

What if you had a really good Tweet and got cut off in mid-sent . . .

A Southborough software testing company evaluated the reliability of programs that allow users to participate in the social-networking world by turning to another social phenomenon of the 2.0 age: “crowd-sourcing:’’

UTest Inc. asked professional software testers to spend a week vetting programs that allow users to Tweet from other applications. More than 600 testers from 29 countries took part.

The results? Testers found more than 300 software problems, 20 percent of which were serious enough that uTest said they required immediate attention, because they could crash the programs.

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