An anonymous reader writes "News.com is reporting on analyst predictions that Web 2.0 has begun meeting up with enterprise software in the business world." From the article: "Buttoned-down IBM, which mainly sells to businesses, on Wednesday detailed QEDwiki, for example. The project is meant to let people assemble Web applications using wikis, really simple syndication (RSS) and simple Web scripting. Similarly, the grassroots direct-marketing techniques of the consumer world are starting to be used to tout enterprise software, analysts said. The enterprise software market, once the hotbed of innovation, is starting to catch up to the consumer Web, where people are becoming used to melding data from their desktop with services online. It's a shift that could shake up the traditional enterprise-software model, experts predicted. "

Next Gen has two more articles featuring titles they're hoping to see from Konami and LucasArts. From the latter article: "Indiana Jones - Talk about secretive - LucasArts has not breathed a word of Indiana Jones to the press since last year's E3. Even then, that announcement was pretty bereft of the typical content you'd expect, without a video, a screenshot, or even a plot point to get the mind racing at the possibilities. Basically, all we know about Indiana Jones as a game coming into E3 2006 is that Indiana Jones will be in it, and that he will probably wear a hat."

AnInkle writes "Though hard drives are allegedly the fastest advancing high-tech product, most laptop manufacturers persist in saving a buck by outfitting their units with a low-end, low-cache, low-capacity, low-spindle-speed HDD. The Tech Report takes a different angle from other mobile hard drive reviews by including one of those maligned 4,200 RPM, 2MB cache models in their roundup of 2.5" hard drives, which includes 'a 160 GB perpendicular monster and a couple of 7,200-RPM speed demons.' The results are clear that most of us would see a tremendous boost in performance by upgrading this one component."

1up reports that Valve is apparently developing a title for the Xbox 360. From the article: "In addition to enhancing their custom Source engine with improvements taking advantage of the Xbox 360 hardware, Valve's focusing on incorporating future releases into Microsoft's Xbox Live service. Xbox Live sure would make an enormous amount of sense with the studio's episodic content plans for Half-Life 2." As the article notes, this is a big turnaround for outspoken developer Gabe Newell.

Nick Johnson writes to mention a new twist on phishing. From the article: "The spammed message warns of a problem with a bank account and instructs the recipient to dial a phone number to resolve it. The caller is connected to a voice response system that is made to sound exactly like the bank's own system. The phone system identifies itself to the target as the financial institution and prompts them to enter account number and PIN."

An anonymous reader writes "Dell has followed up and put their money where their mouth is after HardOCP panned them last year for selling 'gaming systems' that you could not even install some popular 3D games on due to the bloatware on the system. You can now get clean installs on some XPS Dell systems. Dell is running a 'You Spoke, We Listened,' header on their site." From the article: "It seems that Dell has taken our criticism (and our readers as well) to heart and has made the much sought after move to offer select XPS systems with "limited" pre-installed software. We phoned a Dell sales representative late Monday, and he confirmed that the installation is completely clean, except for the included anti-virus program. As explained to us by Dell, There is no AOL installation, no "media jukebox", and no ISP offers to weigh the supplied operating system down."

An anonymous reader writes "Whitedust is running an article which claims that lobbyists for Wal-mart have successfully waged a war against a fair viewpoint on Wikipedia's Wal-mart page. From the article: "Although Wikipedia maintains a 'Neutral Point of View' (NPOV) policy, the Wal-mart page is highly biased. Additionally, all criticism has, contrary to policy, practice, and the general opinion of those concerned, been moved to a Debates Over Wal-mart section. Even that page has noticeable resistance to negative points of view about Wal-mart."

abb_road writes "As part of Chinese President Hu Jintao's recent visit to Redmond, Microsoft is announcing plans to invest $900 million dollars directly in software and hardware companies in China. The announced goal of this investment is to reduce software piracy and establish Windows-dominance in the region; what's not clear is if they expect the reduction to come from local business pressure or more direct government intervention." From the article: "To now, Microsoft's investment efforts have made little headway in reducing piracy. The company should be booking about $1 billion on annual sales of some 20 million PCs in China, says Paul DeGroot, an analyst at consultancy Directions on Microsoft. Instead, sales there are about $100 million, he says."

Yesterday Nintendo released the official name for their next console. Formerly the Revolution, and now simply called Wii, reaction has been strong among gaming fans. A Brian Crecente article in the Rocky Mountain News looks at why Wii is bad, from a marketing perspective. Chris Kohler, over at Game|Life, looks at why Wii is good because of its iconoclastic nature. And, always happy to help with the irreverent, Games.net examines why Wii is weird. From that article: "We don't think Nintendo Wii is a truly terrible console name, but it's an uncharacteristically risky choice, even for Nintendo. We admire its simplicity and its playfulness (the two i's represent multiplayer action, you see). But on the flip side, parents will have a hard time pronouncing it ("Nintendo...why?") and hardcore gamers will slam it ..."

gambit3 writes "What happens when pirating a movie, an application, or a game is not enough for you? Well, you take the next step and pirate a whole company. It happened to Japanese electronics giant NEC. Counterfeiters had set up what amounted to a parallel NEC brand with links to a network of more than 50 electronics factories in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan."

maxzilla writes "An artificial insect eye that could be used in ultra-thin cameras has been developed by scientists in the US.The dimpled eye, contains over 8,500 hexagonal lenses packed into an area the size of a pinhead. The dome-shaped structure, described in the journal Science, is similar to a bee's eye. The researchers, from the University of California, Berkeley, say the work may also shed light on how insects developed such complex, visual systems. Darpa is also funding this project with applications expected for digital cameras and high speed motion detectors."

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices is reporting on a cool new multimedia technology that's slated to be incuded in KDE 4.0. The two key components are Phonon, a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware, and NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), a distributed multimedia architecture whereby multimedia content can be readily shared among networked devices and even 'handed over' from one device to another. Potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, and large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, according to the article, which includes some interesting photos and diagrams. Phonon and NMM will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany."

Ana10g writes "Business Week provides a look at the recent vote by the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, in which the FCC would have been given the power to prohibit discrimination of Internet traffic. The battlefield seems to be centered around which group has the better funded lobbyists, with companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and many others competing against the well funded Telecommunications lobbysts. The committee voted the amendment down, 34 to 22."

SomethingBig asks: "The BBC is asking people to redesign their homepage, with the best design winning an Apple laptop. With news websites becoming ever more crowded and cluttered, what is really the most important information for a news organization's homepage? Should it contain local news? Traffic? Weather? What type of information would you want on the BBC's homepage (or CNN's if you're in America)?"

Yetihehe writes "New Scientist is reporting about a new speech recognition tool that promises to let programmers write clean code without ever having to lay a finger on their keyboard. 'The tool, called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers with repetitive strain injury (RSI). This is a common affliction for people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse and causes pain in muscles, tendons and nerves in a sufferer's arms and back. Some estimates suggest 22% of all US computer programmers, or 100,000 people, suffer from the condition.'"