eldavojohn writes "While other companies are marrying the obvious functionalities to cell phones (calendar, MP3 player, GPS, etc.), Microsoft is aiming for it to be your next computer. Microsoft Research chief Craig Mundie said that, "Microsoft has a research project called 'Fone+' that would allow the phone to work with a TV as a secondary display, and one that could allow video stored on the device to be played back on the television.""

CGISecurity.com writes "NASA officials say the space agency is capable of finding nearly all the asteroids that might pose a devastating hit to Earth, but there isn't enough money to pay for the task so it won't get done. 'We know what to do, we just don't have the money,' said Simon 'Pete' Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center." But hey, it's just the potential end of the world, so nothing much to worry about there.

Rob writes "The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March 14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms. RHEL 5 has been cooking for more than two years and includes changes to the Linux kernel. In addition to the support for the Xen hypervisor, RHEL 5 also has an integrated version of Red Hat Cluster Suite, the company's high availability clustering software, as well as support for iSCSI disk arrays, InfiniBand with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and the SystemTap kernel probing tool."

GREYCstoration is an open-source tool able to de-noise, inpaint, or resize 2D color images. This is a command-line program developed by the IMAGE team of the GREYC Lab in France and is available for Unix, Mac, and Windows systems under the CeCILL license. The algorithm is based on anisotropic diffusion partial differential equations. These equations are able to smooth an image while preserving its main structures. The demo page presents interesting examples of color image de-noising and reconstruction. This is a serious free alternative to commercial products like Noise Ninja or Neat Image that perform the same kinds of operations. The tool is still a little bit hard to use (command-line based), but I hope the simple C++ API will ease the integration of the algorithm in more user-friendly interfaces. Previous versions of GREYCstoration are already available in Digikam and Krita.

Overly Critical Guy writes to mention that more documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considered dumping the Mac Office Suite entirely in a move to harm Apple. "The email complains at poor sales of Office, which it attributes to a lack of focus on making such sales among reps at that time. It describes dumping development of the product as: 'The strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately.' The document also confirms that Microsoft at the time saw Office for the Mac as a chance to test new features in the product before they appeared in Windows, 'because it is so much less critical to our business than Windows.'"