IBM today announced a new plug-in for its enterprise search technology that will allow it to integrate with Google Desktop for Enterprise, so that corporate employees can search for a wider range of information on their computera.IBM is to integrate the Google Desktop tool with its WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition. The announcement means that corporate users will be able to use the Google Desktop for Enterprise tool to seamlessly search and retrieve various types of content held on their personal computer.
Google Desktop for Enterprise can already search the full text of Lotus Notes mail messages stored on a user's local computer. This feature provides Lotus Notes customers the capability to search all Lotus Notes databases and mail servers in addition to their local mail files. However, more importantly for many of IBM's customers that are not a complete Big Blue shop, it adds search facilities for a wide range of Microsoft documents such as Word, Excel and Outlook.
Resource:
PCpro
Meet Dr Robot: about the size of a lipstick case, it's able to drive around inside your body and serve as the eyes or hands of a surgeon who could be thousands of miles awayUniversity of Nebraska researchers have developed the tiny machines, which they say could allow doctors to remotely conduct surgeries on the battlefield or even in space.
The tiny, wheeled robots, which are about 7.6 centimetres tall, can be slipped into small incisions and computer-controlled by surgeons in different locations.
On battlefields, the robots could enable surgeons in other places to work on injured soldiers on the front line, said Shane Farritor, a university engineering professor who helped design them.
A robot capable of doing biopsies is in the works and another is being designed that can be inserted into a person's stomach via the oesophagus.
Researchers said they will be able to create smaller robots once they start making them in larger quantities.
Resource:
News24
The search giant is poised to jump into e-commerce with a service called Google Base.Google on Tuesday appeared close to launching a service called Google Base that would pit the search giant against eBay, Amazon, and Craigslist by allowing users to list everything from used cars to real estate. A screen shot of the service appeared on several web sites, although Google appears to have blocked access to the page shortly after it was discovered. The service invited users to “Post your items on Google” and appeared online at base.Google.com.
Analysts said the service could be linked with a long-anticipated payments service, pitting Google against eBay, Amazon’s auction service, and Craigslist, the popular community listing service. eBay acquired 25 percent of the equity in Craigslist in August 2004Google shares fell $1.74 to close at $346.91 during Tuesday’s trading session, but rose $0.18 to $347.09 in after-hours trading as speculation about the service spread. eBay shares fell $1.41 to close at $38.01, then lost another $0.07 in after-hours trading. Amazon shares fell $0.76 to $46.17 during the regular session, then tumbled $3.57 to $42.60 in after-hours trading as the e-tailer warned its sales won’t meet analysts’ expectations in the fourth quarter.
Tie to Payment Service If the service becomes a reality, it would likely be linked to the new payment service that Google is expected to launch any day. Analysts said the service could be supported either by ads or linked to the payment service.
By allowing users to post real estate listings and used cars, it could create new rivals for Mountain View, California-based Google. However, it could also go beyond that by providing a common repository for descriptions of all sorts of information, from calendars to scientific data.
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Herherring
Microsoft Corp. reported in a quarterly antitrust update to the U.S. government that it recently scrapped an exclusive licensing proposal for its Windows Media Player that asked device makers to snub competing multimedia applications.In its quarterly report, filed with the Department of Justice on Thursday, Microsoft said it quickly withdrew the draft licensing agreements after receiving at least one complaint regarding the exclusive deals that the company had forwarded to an unspecified number of portable hardware makers.
The Redmond, Wash., company submitted that it moved quickly to nix the contract provision, which would have affected companies seeking to distribute a CD containing Windows Media Player and other software along with their audio devices.
The Department of Justice labeled the incident as "unfortunate" and said that it didn't plan to pursue any further action regarding the complaintMatt Hines
Resource:
PCMag
APPLE is expected to launch its iTunes music download service in Australia sometime before the end of the month.Recording industry sources said the service will kick off by October 31, following media and industry briefing sessions in Sydney next Tuesday that will feature Apple executives from the US.
Rumours of the local launch of the Apple branded MP3 download service have been swirling around for more than a year. They descended into high farce in April when sometime rock singer Russell Crowe told broadcaster John Laws that the Australian iTunes launch date was April 28.
iTunes is already online in many countries around the world. However, Australians have been blocked from using these services as they require a local address and credit card.
Apple has had difficulties getting record labels to sign licensing agreements that would allow the online Apple store to sell their artists' songs. If the site does launch locally this month, it would need these agreements in place.
A local iTunes launch could only help the fortunes of Apple's latest iPod players, the iPod nano and video iPod.
Marketing maestro and Apple boss Steve Jobs launched the company's portable video and music player earlier this month and has since managed to get himself and the new widget on the cover of Time Magazine.
US customers can buy TV episodes from hit shows such as Desperate Housewivesthrough iTunes and watch them on the video iPod.
But the video iPod copped plenty of criticism here for launching without any content back-up.
Stuart Kennedy
Resource:
Australian IT
Big Mac, fries, and ownage: McDonald's plays host to wireless Net for DS; nearly 6,000 burger joints will participate. Nintendo said the WiFi Connection creates a community where gamers can log on wirelessly and begin playing favorite franchise games.Traditionally, the idea of seeing anything toad, turtle, or donkey related in a McDonald's would put people off eating the fast food chain's mass-produced edibles. However, the Golden Arches are welcoming Toad, Koopa Troopas, and Donkey Kong into their establishments with open arms.
Today, Nintendo announced an agreement with wireless Internet provider Wayport to set up free access to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection in almost 6,000 McDonald's. The deal will allow Nintendo DS owners to walk into a McDonald's and play Wi-Fi-enabled games with others on the service, whether they are in the building or around the world.
There will be no setup required--users simply launch a game that supports Wi-Fi, and play against others while sucking down shakes. The first games that will support the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection are Mario Kart DS and Tony Hawk's American SK8land, both of which are scheduled to ship on November 14. Metroid Prime Hunters and Animal Crossing: Wild World will also be playable over wireless Internet.
McDonald's has now franchised more than 30,000 eateries across the globe. According to the McDonald's Web site, more than 50 million people eat at the fast food chain per day. By Tim Surette
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GameSpot
Astronomers say the mysterious, massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way helped give birth to new stars, challenging earlier theories that black holes are solely destructive forces. Their observations, announced Thursday, will be published in a future issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"Massive black holes are usually known for violence and destruction,"Black holes are believed to be the invisible remains of collapsed stars. Their gravitational pull is so powerful not even light can escape.
Astronomers believe the gravity of the gas disks helped offset the tidal force of the black hole in a tug-of-war that allowed the stars to form.
Scientists have ruled out the possibility that a star cluster formed far away and somehow migrated near the black hole. Some 10,000 low-mass stars formed near the black hole. If there had been a migration, scientists surmised they would have found at least a million such stars.
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ABCNews,
Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA
He left his camera behind and the accommodation was smaller than expected, but Gregory Olsen said Thursday his excursion was still worth every bit of the $20 million he reportedly paid - after all, it was in outer space.It was everything I had expected," Olsen, a U.S. scientist and businessman, told The Associated Press two days after returning to Earth from the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule.
Olsen is the third private citizen to make a paid trip into space."I enjoyed the feeling weightlessness, just floating around and seeing the outside world," he said. But the enjoyment may have distracted him from keeping track of his personal belongings - he admitted that a small digital camera floated out of his jumpsuit pocket and went missing.
During his training, a medical problem cropped up that forced his trip to be postponed, but to his relief he later got the go-ahead. "The biggest thing I was nervous about was not being able to go. You know, it's a fear we all have: 'Here's the test, I'd better not fail it.'"
Olsen returned with Russian Sergei Krikalev and American John Phillips, who had been aboard the station six months. They were replaced on the ISS by William McArthur and Valery Tokarev, who were with Olsen when he blasted off for the station on Oct. 1.
Resource:
AP Wire
Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have agreed to make their two instant-messaging programs work together, a partnership that could threaten market leader America Online, people familiar with the situation said. A Yahoo-Microsoft partnership, allowing users of the competing services to exchange messages seamlessly, would give the two companies nearly as many users combined as AOL has in total.
Microsoft already has a product that lets business users send and receive messages from Yahoo Inc., AOL and Microsoft's instant messaging systems.
Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL, a division of Time Warner, Inc., all declined to comment.AOL's instant-messaging product, AIM, had some 51.5 million unique U.S. users in September, compared to about 27.3 million for the competing MSN Messenger and 21.9 million for Yahoo's Messenger, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
Redmond-based Microsoft has long sought to forge some sort of deal to boost the profile of MSN Messenger. The company also has been in talks with AOL over possible partnerships with Microsoft's MSN online unit, although it's not clear where those talks stand now.
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News14Caroline
Microsoft has announced a comprehensive overhaul of its virtual machine licensing as part of its push to get its customers moving towards a dynamic systems network model. Self-managing dynamic systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in the larger scale enterprises where resources are allocated dynamically through virtual machines. The deployment of dynamic systems not only saves on hardware costs as many virtual machines can run on a single physical box, it also cuts down the time spent by IT staff in maintaining the plethora of computers linked together in the network.
Microsoft says that when it releases Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, the licences will allow customers to run up to four virtual instances on one physical server for the price of one.
In addition, existing Windows Server System products that are licensed per processor, such as Microsoft SQL Server, BizTalk, and Internet Security & Acceleration Server, customers will be allowed to stack multiple instances on a machine by licensing for the number of virtual processors being used.
Initiative Microsoft is offering its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format royalty free to third party developers. For its customers, Microsoft is promising that the VHD format will offer an upgrade path to future Windows virtualisation technologies.
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pcpro
VeriSign buys Weblogs.com for $2.3 m
Internet services company VeriSign Inc. said Friday it acquired Weblogs.com, a "ping server" that alerts subscribers to new blog and Web postings, for $2.3 million in cash from Scripting News Inc.VeriSign said it will continue running Weblogs.com, which supports thousands of daily feeds from bloggers and other publishers a day, as an openly available service. It uses really simple syndication, or RSS, a format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content.
"The Internet has experienced an explosion in both the number of bloggers and the number of daily RSS feeds from bloggers over the past 12 to 24 months, but the infrastructure to support that level of Internet communications has not kept pace," Mark McLaughlin, senior vice president of VeriSign's naming and directory services, said in a statement.
McLaughlin said VeriSign is uniquely positioned to provide the infrastructure that the blogosphere needs. VeriSign already handles several billion Internet interactions a day in operating the Web's .com and .net infrastructure.
Resource:
BusinessWeek
PlayStation Portable users looking to modify their gaming system so it can run software that has not been approved by Sony Corp. may find themselves running nothing at all. Ever.According to researchers at security vendor Symantec Corp. a new Trojan program, called, Trojan.PSPBrick, has begun circulating on online gaming sites. Once installed, the software will delete important system files in version 2.0 of the PlayStation Portable’s firmware, turning the hand-held games into inoperable machines, called “bricks” by gamers.
The Trojan masquerades as a nifty software hack that can be used to disable the PlayStation Portable’s software protection mechanism, said Dean Turner, senior manager with Symantec’s Security Response team. “Once a user installs that Trojan, it deletes four critical
Symantec rates the attack a Category 1 threat, its least serious rating. The company has heard of no confirmed cases of PlayStation Portables being taken down with the software, Turner said.“Attackers are going to start looking at gaming platforms because more and more of these devices are becoming interconnected,” Turner said. “It’s an evolution that we think has been coming for some time. The sky isn’t falling, but it’s certainly a natural evolution.”
Resource:
MacWorld
Organic chemists Yves Chauvin, Robert Grubbs, and Richard Schrock have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their groundbreaking research on a reaction called metathesis, which breaks the bonds of carbon-based molecules so that they can be combined with other elements including hydrogen, oxygen and chlorine to form new molecules.Not only has the process resulted in new compounds used to make everything from living tissue to plastics to therapeutic drugs for treating Alzheimer's disease, arthritis and HIV/AIDS, but it also produces fewer environmentally hazardous byproducts than previous methods did.
Organic chemistry is based on the multitalented carbon molecule, which has the ability to break apart and bind with a host of other elements. The process that makes it happen, called metathesis, was first reported in the 1950s and slowly gained notoriety as more and more chemists began to realize its potential. But metathesis requires a catalyst that can break apart specific molecular bonds while leaving other connections intact and involves many steps that produce wasteful by-products.
In 1971 Chauvin, now honorary director of research at the French Institute for Petroleum, outlined for the first time a streamlined recipe for how metal compounds could serve as those catalysts.
It was Schrock and Grubbs who came up with the actual ingredientsIn a relatively short amount of time, the work of these three scientists has launched the development of new compounds that affect the lives of millions of people each day. --Tracy Staedter
Resource:
Sciam
Google's internet library project will face competition from Yahoo!, but also from a less predictable rival: the European Commission announced its own plan on Friday. And it has an advantage: if copyright laws interfere with its plans it can change the laws.The Commission wants to put Europe’s cultural heritage on the internet by turning books, photos, records and films into a massive digital library. It has launched a consultation that invites suggestions for legislative measures that could facilitate the digitisation and subsequent accessibility of copyright material while respecting the legitimate interests of authors.
Google's library project takes the book collections of several research libraries – about 15 million books – and makes this content searchable online. According to the Commission, Google's initiative "triggered a reflection on how to deal with our European cultural heritage in the digital age."
The scale of the project is ambitious: there are 2.5 billion books and bound periodicals in European libraries and millions of hours of film and video in broadcasting archives.
Current copyright restrictions will limit the collection to works from the early 1900s or before, depending on the year of death of the author, and those works for which agreement has been obtained.
Resource:
TheRegister
Speculation has immediately centered around another change to Apple's line of iPod music players, and the company has precedent on its side. It was almost exactly a year ago that Apple used the same venue to debut the iPod Photo and U2 iPods at an event that featured Bono and The Edge of the band U2.Industry analysts believe Apple is set to show off a long-awaited video iPod that can play music videos and other visual programming. Performance upgrades to Apple's line of Macintosh computers could also be on the agenda.
Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said that a video iPod would definitely have a "wow factor" upon its release but that it would need to cost less than $400 and have a sizable library of downloadable videos available when it launches in order to avoid becoming a niche product.
Munster, though, added that a video iPod would "open the door for future product innovations as the company continues to branch out" into other areas of digital and mobile entertainment products.
Apple shares rose 10 cents to $53.85. The stock has risen 70% since starting the year at a split-adjusted price of $31.65 a share.
Resource:
MarketWatch
IT firm Sun Microsystems and internet company Google have announced an agreement to promote and distribute their software technologies globally. The agreement aims to make it easier for users to freely obtain Sun's Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office suite. Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on its Java website. The companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org suite.
The Java software for the desktop, also known as the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), is a software package that needs to be installed on a machine in order to run Java technology-based applications. Some 700m desktop users employ Java technology.
The Google Toolbar is a search and web surfing utility that integrates with users' web browsers. It's available in 34 languages and supports a built-in word translation that translates English words into other languages. The Google Toolbar is scheduled to be available as a Java Runtime Environment download option in late October.
Resource:
Digital Media Asia
