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Tom writes "The court has spoken in Microsoft's case against the EU anti-trust commission, and the result is even more damaging to the monopoly company than analysts expected.
The court upholds all major decisions of the commission, including the record half a billion Euro fines. Most importantly, it smacks down MS entire defense line of "we can't make interoperability possible because we need to protect our copyrights and patents"."
http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/gettext.pl?lang=en&num=79929082T19040201&doc=T&ouvert=T&seance=ARRET

Police hacked into Downing Street computer systems during their investigation into allegations of cash for honours against the Labour Party. Officers were authorised to break into the network. The search was made before the arrest of Ruth Turner, a top Blair aide, on suspicion of perverting the course of justice on Friday. The Sunday Telegraph reported that the Met team, headed by assistant commissioner John Yates, became frustrated with the "very slim" file of documents handed over by Number 10. More here.

rafael_es_son writes "The application of a genetic algorithm, even when met with fitness function criteria as simple as the application of the golden-rule ratio, and a genome composed of rectangles, lines and circles, produces varied graphically and volumetrically interesting compositions. The modeling, implementation and evaluation of additional criteria, such as functional, contextual (existing natural and human-made landscape) and human factors (see "Four Story Limit" for an example) into more comprehensive fitness functions for product design -from toothbrushes to cities- appears to continue to be a promising line of research."

BillGatesInABikini writes "APC Magazine has an interesting counterpoint [http://www.apcmag.com/5049/10_reasons_not_to_get_ vista] to the hype leading up to Vista's consumer launch — reasons to not get Vista. Most of the points will be familiar to the /. crowd, but it's a good summary of the key issues for those unaware, and includes some being down played by Microsoft. Interestingly, it looks like Aussies are going to pay through the nose for it too."

BlueVoodoo writes "Google Web Toolkit makes building a rich Ajax browser client interface even easier than building traditional Java GUI interfaces. Learn the basics of GWT in this first article in a series, including how GWT lets you create an Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) application and still write your code in the Java language. Discover how to create and run a small sample GWT application — a hot new Web 2.0 business called Slicr, which sells pizza online.

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An anonymous reader writes "With the winter holidays approaching, the developers of PostgreSQL have released version 8.2 as a present to us all. Tests really do prove that this is a performance release. With this release will PostgreSQL finally shed it's slow reputation? PostgreSQL 8.2 is trouncing MySQL with query optimization improvements, indexing without blocking INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations, and more...

Yet how does it compare to the big boys, Oracle and DB2? This release of PostgreSQL it is still missing SQL:2003 Window Functions so critical in business reporting. That means Oracle and DB2 still reign supreme in the OLAP/Data warehouse market. Even without many of the SQL:2003 features, this is good release. Get PostgreSQL 8.2 and take it for a spin!"