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Microsoft

Microsoft Agrees to Release Work Group Protocols 143

Posted by Zonk from the kind-of-a-big-deal(tm) dept.
UnknowingFool writes "Groklaw is reporting that the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) has signed an agreement with Microsoft to release their protocols relating to Windows Work Group Server. The Foundation agrees to pay MS $10,000, and the agreement does not cover patents. This agreement apparently was made to somewhat satisfy the EU Commission complaints. With PFIF's objective to aid open source, this agreement means that the Samba Team may finally get the information they need to fully interoperate with Windows AD servers."
Google

Submission + - Google returns bad results in top 10 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Aravind Ranganathan
Aravind Ranganathan writes: "Google consistently returns bad results in the top 10 if the search keywords happen to be in the text of a blog post even though the blog (or that post) is on a totally irrelevant topic. I found this first hand when someone Googled "flight from cincinnati to mumbai" and was directed to one of my blog posts on the problems I once had during my travel from Mumbai to Cincinnati. Google returned my post as the 2nd in its search results!! The question is, is this a flaw in the page ranking algorithm? Or is Google just giving more importance to Blogger pages than necessary?"
Software

Submission + - Predicting drug side effects

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "It would certainly be nice for the pharmaceutical industry to identify potential side effects of a drug before it starts to be tested on humans. Now, a research team at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) might have found a solution. They have developed a new computational technique to predict drug side effects. Besides identifying adverse effects of a new drug before human clinical trials, this method can also be used to explain the known side effects of drugs already on the market. But read more for additional references and pictures showing how drugs can bind to several proteins."
Censorship

Submission + - Wikipedia COO was Convicted Felon (theregister.co.uk) 4

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: From the Register:

"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon. When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality. Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."
Media

Submission + - Why are some HD shows S T R E T C H E D? (newteevee.com) 1

Submitted by
Chris Albrecht
Chris Albrecht writes: "There's some science behind some TV networks distorting their shows to fit a widescreen format. TBS uses an algorithm to determine where the action is taking place. It keeps that ratio normal and stretches the rest of the image to fit the screen. Research also says people prefer the stretched image to the original. What do you think?"
Networking

Submission + - Time Warner Cable Wins State-Wide Cable Franchise (state.oh.us) 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Time Warner Cable has received the second state-wide franchise agreement, covering 260 communities, in 60 of Ohio's 88 counties, for 10 years. AT&T was the first to earn a state-wide franchise contract, after a law was passed in September that allowed operators to negotiate a single state-wide agreement. Normally operators negotiate franchise agreements at the local level.
Businesses

Submission + - The Epic Battle between Microsoft and Google 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "There is a long article in the NYTimes well worth reading called "Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft" about the business strategies both companies are pursuing and about the future of applications and where they will reside — on the web or on the desktop. Google President Eric Schmidt thinks that 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the Web-based cloud and about 2,000 companies are signing up every day for Google Apps, simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft's lucrative Office business. Microsoft faces a business quandary as they to try to link the Web to its desktop business — "software plus Internet services," in its formulation. Microsoft will embrace the Web, while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine, a smart strategy for now that may not be sustainable. Google faces competition from Microsoft and from other Web-based productivity software being offered by start-ups but it is "unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating." David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the Google model is to try to change all the rules. If Google succeeds, "a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.""
Cellphones

Submission + - The Twitter/T-Mobile Battle (bibleboy.org)

Submitted by
bblboy54
bblboy54 writes: "Starting Sunday December 9th, many T-Mobile customers began having issues sending SMS messages to the Twitter service. Initially this was thought to be a bug but customers began investigating and received very strong e-mail responses from T-Mobile's President's office. On Thursday, AlternaGeek reported the speculation. It was then later confirmed by the emails customers were receiving from T-Mobile and TechCrunch picked up the story. After a huge outcry from the Twitter community, it was just reported by a representative of Twitter that the problem was found to be technical and not political but this is not only after the direct emails from T-Mobile but also Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, announced T-Mobile was blocking Twitter. The motives and actions of what happened are up for debate but, at the very least, T-Mobile owes their customers and explanation for the way they were treated."
Networking

Cisco To Develop Third-Party APIs For IOS 129

Posted by kdawson from the letting-a-little-light-in-on-the-crown-jewels dept.
MT628496 tips a Computerworld article on Cisco's announcement that it plans to build IOS on a UNIX kernel, in modules, and allow third-party developers to access certain parts of it. IOS has traditionally been a closely guarded piece of software without any way for anyone to add functionality. No timetable was given for when APIs will be available. A Forrester analyst said, "...the network is one of the least programmable pieces of the infrastructure. The automation and orchestration market is far more oriented towards servers, storage and desktop environments. The ability to dynamically change the network is a missing component." The article mentions that Juniper Networks had announced on Monday its own developer platform for Juniper routers, and it's available now.
Networking

Submission + - Broadband over Power Lines under pressure (mybroadband.co.za)

Submitted by
slash-sa
slash-sa writes: "Power Line Telecommunication (PLT) is the official terminology for what elsewhere in the world is referred to as PLC and BPL. Its proponents claim it to be the answer to provide cheap broadband to the masses. But will it ever materialize? Can we liken it to a cheap alternative drug which has huge side effects that makes its use undesirable? Is it not a question of too little too late?"
Cellphones

Submission + - Japanese phone technology coming to North America

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper brings us an article on a hot Japanese technology poised to break into the US and Canadian cell phone market.

QR codes look like a cross between a Magic Eye picture and a poorly-played game of Tetris, but they are actually scannable bits of information that function much like traditional bar codes. QR codes can appear in printed matter, such as newspaper or magazine ads, or on business cards or letterhead, or on actual objects. For example, McDonald's restaurants in Japan have been using QR codes for more than a year on their food wrappers, providing a link that sends customers to a website displaying nutritional information.

When a cellphone user snaps a picture of a QR code, it automatically triggers a response in the phone that can open a link to a website, dial a phone number or download an application. A Canadian company, Luna Development, is finally bringing this technology to the US and Canada.
The Military

Submission + - Wired: How Tech Almost Lost the War 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Blame the geeks for the mess in Iraq? Wired says so. Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies. But the Pentagon got their network theory all wrong, with too few nodes and a closed architecture. Besides, a more efficient killing machine is the last thing you want in an insurgency like Iraq.
Windows

Submission + - More evidence that XP is Vista's main competitor (computerworld.com) 3

Submitted by
Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: "Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is "considerably faster" than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn't scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista: 'Vista's biggest competition isn't Apple or Novell or Red Hat; it's Microsoft itself, it's XP, [Forrester Research analyst Benjamin Gray] said. So enamored of XP are businesses that Microsoft may feel obligated to extend the operating system's mainstream support past its current April 2009 expiration date. ... He attributed the lowered expectations to a lack of detailed information about Vista in 2006; too-high prices for PCs with 2GB of memory, which is essentially the minimum needed for Vista, according to company managers; and a larger-than-expected number of incompatible applications.'"
The Internet

Submission + - Web Traffic Snarls Sites on Black Friday (eweek.com)

Submitted by
eweekhickins
eweekhickins writes: "A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macys and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. In fact, almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance. The site run by Victoria's Secret also slowed, but users seemed more tolerant about waiting for the site's "exclusive" pictures to download. Go figure."
Linux Business

Submission + - Torvalds on where Linux is headed in 2008

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: In this new interview, Linus Torvalds is excited about solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualisation despite his personal lack of interest in the area.

From the article: "To get some perspective on what lies ahead in 2008, we caught up with Linus Torvalds via email. His responses touched on the Linux development process, upcoming features, and whether he's concerned about potential patent litigation."

Torvalds on Linux biggest strength: "When you buy an OS from Microsoft, not only you can't fix it, but it has had years of being skewed by one single entity's sense of the market. It doesn't matter how competent Microsoft — or any individual company — is, it's going to reflect that fact. In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cellphones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn't even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility. And it stems directly from the fact that anybody who is interested can participate in the development, and no single entity ends up being in control of where it all goes.

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