Forbes is reporting on comments made by Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, concerning the corporate search business. At a company conference in Boston, Turner referred to the enterprise search business as 'our house', and warned Google to stay out. From the article: "Those people are not going to be allowed to take food off our plate, because that is what they are intending to do ... Enterprise search is our business, it's our house and Google is not going to take that business"

markmcb writes "While the world is working to solve energy and environmental issues with today's petroleum fuels, some vehicles simply don't have good alternatives, namely off-road platforms. For those not willing to give up their gas-guzzling habits, Matt Vea offers an innovative alternative. Using the OBDII interface in his Jeep, a laptop, and the infinite power of Excel, Matt conducts some performance tests and uses the results to tweak both his vehicle's engine and his personal driving habits for optimal fuel consumption both on and off road." Rigorous testing and good use of available technology; nice work.

GameDaily is running an interesting opinion piece running down the ways in which the gaming industry is just broken. The author cites soaring costs, huge risks, a reduction in creativity, and a stagnation in market growth as just some of the signs of this crisis. From the article: "The next-gen systems require publishers to place very large bets with each title. This will mean decreased risk taking and just regurgitated sequels of big brand franchises. How many publishers will take risks with multiplatform original IP? This is clearly not good news for the consumer as innovation has driven our industry from the beginning. The irony is that the amazing tools, capabilities and quality of the new systems may very well doom what is most important, which is the game itself. Reconciling what a creative team wants and what the executive suite needs in terms of profits will be a growing challenge for many companies."

Reuters is reporting that the shuttle has been prepping for a return to Earth, stowing gear and checking systems. Their expected return is tomorrow morning, around 9am EDT. From the article: "During tests on Sunday a leaking power unit for the shuttle flight control system appeared to be in good enough shape for landing and the jets that steer the spacecraft worked fine, NASA engineers said. The shuttle crew was still awaiting word on whether Discovery's heat shield had passed a final inspection performed on Saturday, but scans conducted with cameras and sensors throughout the flight had so far turned up no damage."

An anonymous reader writes "News.com is running an interview with Neelie Kroes, the competition commissioner for the EU. She confirms that the massive fines to Microsoft are absolutely necessary, and goes into some of the commissions reasons for slapping the giant down." From the article: "Microsoft has claimed that its obligations in the decision are not clear, or that the obligations have changed. I cannot accept this characterization--Microsoft's obligations are clearly outlined in the 2004 decision and have remained constant since then. Indeed, the monitoring trustee appointed in October 2005, from a shortlist put forward by Microsoft, believes that the decision clearly outlines what Microsoft is required to do. I must say that I find it difficult to imagine that a company like Microsoft does not understand the principles of how to document protocols in order to achieve interoperability. "

InformationWeek is reporting that, during the same week that Microsoft announced the free price for Virtual PC, VMWare 1.0 was released for free as well. Though there were already many free options for virtualization available, these major products signal a shift in the industry. From the article: "There are many ramifications here. Obviously, the slew of products means network managers can now adopt virtual servers into their overall strategies and don't have acquisition costs providing a justification to avoid it. Other than the very-high-end VMware ESX and the midline Microsoft Virtual Server on mainstream XP platforms, virtualization is essentially free wherever you might want to use it."

Your grandparents will be watching golf tonight, so why not watch some sports of your own? If golf isn't your thing, then perhaps multi-ton space vessels slamming each other with lasers and missiles might be more entertaining? Virgin Worlds is carrying some details for the riveting EveTV. Today, the channel is in reruns, but tune in anyway to see some matches from the last few days. Footage from ongoing PVP matches in the space MMOG EVE Online will make your Sunday go by much quicker. From the article: "The commentary is just like a traditional sports cast and the fellows calling the matches seem quite knowledgeable not only on the technicals of play, but also the backgrounds of the competitors. If you have an opportunity to check it out, I recommend it. Kudos to CCP for organizing this event."

kbrosnan writes "Are you a fan of Firefox? Want to spread the word to a friend who hasn't heard of it yet? If you can convince just one person to switch to Firefox before September 15th, you'll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.0's source code."

gihan_ripper writes "Recently released open movie Elephants Dream found itself in hot water with Catalonians after accidentally using an offensive word instead of 'Català' in the subtitle menu. The cause? Designer Matt Ebb had used Wikipedia to look up the Catalan word for Catalan on a day when the entry had been vandalized. He writes about this experience on the Elephant Dream blog. We may have scoffed at John Seigenthaler over his criticisms of Wikipedia, but it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."

Steve Kerrison writes "Thecus' new N5200 NAS can hold five SATA drives, which with currently available drives means up to 3.5TB (or 2.75TB in RAID-5) of storage before formatting. From the review: '£600. That's roughly what this will set you back, minus hard drives. Add in five 750GB drives and you'll be forking out a number closer to two thousand. However, act a bit more modestly and you can still have a terabyte (even in RAID-5) for under a grand.'"

theodp writes "eWeek reports that the big fear of offshore outsourcing customers has become a reality: a major bombing attack in an outsourcing hub. In the wake of the attack, companies are considering their resources and preparedness. Despite understandable fears, people on the ground don't seem to think these latest attacks will have a long-term effect on the growth of India's tech sector." From the article: "The terrorist attack in Mumbai--and conflict between Israel and Lebanon for that matter--raise a series of questions for companies sourcing technology globally. Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers? "

whitehatlurker writes to mention a WashingtonPost.com article about another unpatched flaw with Microsoft Office. The bug, part of the PowerPoint software, has already been used in the wild, and may be connected to an industrial espionage case. From the article: "This undocumented flaw does not appear to have been addressed in any of the 13 security updates Microsoft shipped this week to mend a variety of problems in Office software. As Security Fix and others have noted, some of the work Microsoft has done in hardening the security of the Windows operating system has forced the bad guys to look for lower-hanging fruit in applications that run on top of Windows, so we may see more Office flaws under attack."

Anonymous 49'er writes "Nature is reporting that bacteria found in Australian gold mines are capable of extruding tiny invisible 'secondary grains' from soil and alluvial systems. From the article: "Potential applications -- from sensing the bacteria as a way to look for gold mines, to using them to help make industrially useful particles of gold -- may be some way off. But Southam is keen to exploit the bacteria's natural trick. 'I want to make a gold nugget one day,' he says. 'Gold nuggets grow in nature, so why shouldn't I be able to make one?'"

Roland Piquepaille writes "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced that a new experimental atomic clock based on a single mercury atom is now at least five times more precise than NIST-F1, the U.S. standard clock. This mercury atomic clock 'would neither gain nor lose a second in about 400 million years' while it would take 'only' 70 million years to NIST-F1, based on a 'fountain' of cesium atoms, to gain or lose a second. But even if this new kind of optical atomic clock is more accurate than cesium microwave clocks, it will take a while before such a design can be accepted as an international standard. A ZDNet summary contains pictures and more details about the world's most precise clock."

Horar asks: "There's been a lot of recent fuss over freedb. My position is that freedb was just not free enough, and I would like to find a way to bring all the data into the public domain, just as MusicBrainz has done with much of their data. I had not thought that this would be possible until I received advice from various parties suggesting that it was. So now I ask Slashdot if this is true? Can the freedb data legally be brought into the public domain at this time, and if so how? Most importantly, would it be 'The Right Thing To Do'?"