Web 2.0 is built on Open Source

Amazon uses Linux. eBay uses Windows. But what OSs and webservers run Web 2.0? We tested 17 of our favorites and found out. The script is included below to check for yourself. Read more

	Site	Webserver	Operating System
		Apache httpd	Linux
		Apache httpd	Linux
		Apache httpd 1.3.33	Linux
		lighttpd 1.4.13	Linux
		lighttpd 1.4.11	Linux
		Unknown	Linux
		Apache httpd 2.0.52 ((Red Hat))	Linux
		Apache httpd	Linux
		Unknown	Linux
		Apache httpd 2.0.52	Linux
		Microsoft IIS webserver 6.0	Windows (although OS responding is Linux, this is a caching service).
		lighttpd 1.4.15	Linux
		Apache httpd	Linux
		Apache httpd 2.0.55 ((Ubuntu) DAV/2 PHP/5.1.2)	Linux
		Mongrel 201.0.1	Linux
		Apache httpd	Linux
		Squid webproxy 2.6.STABLE12	Unknown (while OS responding is Linux, this is likely a caching service).

Google's Postini Buy Threatens Microsoft

Google's July 9 acquisition of Postini is another clear sign that the search giant is staking a claim in the on-demand enterprise applications market and ratcheting up the heat in the already sizzling software as a service sector, especially against Microsoft.

With Postini, which began as an e-mail filtering company and evolved into compliance technology that enforces a company's communications policies, Google can now address the perception that its nascent portfolio of e-mail and messaging applications aren't quite ready for prime time. More>>

List of Google acquisitions in 2007

Date Company Name Category Amount January, 2007 Xunlei (partial acquisition) Network, file-sharing. undisclosed February, 2007 Adscape Video game advertising $23 million March, 2007 Trendalyzer Software undisclosed April, 2007 Tonic Systems Presentation software undisclosed April, 2007 Marratech video conferencing software Video conferencing undisclosed 5/11/2007 GreenBorder Technologies Desktop enterprise security undisclosed 6/1/2007 Panoramio Geospatial Photo-sharing Service undisclosed 6/3/2007 FeedBurner Online RSS Feeds $100 million 6/5/2007 PeakStream Parallel Processing undisclosed June, 2007 Zenter Presentations Software undisclosed 7/2/2007 GrandCentral VOIP Phone Aggregation $45 million 4/13/2007 DoubleClick Online Advertising $3.1 billion 7/9/2007 Postini Communications Security $625 million

Kalam gets science museum in his honour

As President APJ Abdul Kalam prepares to demit office, his scientist friends have come together to start a museum that showcases his contribution to India’s space development — and also has a silhouette of his famous mane as its logo.

The Mission of Life Museum in the capital’s cantonment area is the brainchild of Kalam’s friend and Managing Director of BrahMos Aerospace Pvt Ltd, A Sivathanu Pillai.

Through Kalam’s achievements, the museum also highlights the country’s milestones in rocketry, space and missile technology using 3-D holography and even a simulated nuclear explosion.

As Pillai sees it, there could be no better tribute for India’s first scientist president, who was the founder of BrahMos, an India-Russia joint venture for making the supersonic cruise missiles.

“We have reached a stage when the BrahMos missiles have been inducted into the Indian Navy and the Army, so we decided to exhibit the important milestones in our space, nuclear and missile technology (which are closely linked to Kalam),” Pillai said. “It is designed in such a way that the children, who come out of it after visiting it, should have a vision about their life.”

The timing is right too. The museum opens on July 15 exclusively for schoolchildren during weekends, just four days before the new president is elected.

“It has come out as a fantastic museum,” Pillai, who has collected all the medals, honours, certificates and awards Kalam had received, said.

The museum was inaugurated by Kalam himself last month. He has donated his original Bharat Ratna, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan awards, his 27 doctorates apart from numerous other awards to it. Several dozen mementos and gifts Kalam received during his presidency and earlier are also featured. Besides, the president’s personal ‘Rudraveena’ and Mahatma Gandhi’s marksheet, which was gifted to him by the father of nation’s old school in Gujarat, are there too.

Wipro acquires Singapore firm for $256 m

FOR A LARGER REACH: Vineet Agrawal (right), President, Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting, and Gavin D. Welman, Managing Director, Unza, displaying Unza products at a press conference in Bangalore on Friday.

Wipro on Friday announced the acquisition of Singapore-based fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) company, Unza, with revenues of Rs. 683.30 crore (for fiscal year ended April 30, 2007), in a cash buy for 100 per cent stake for the equivalent of $256 million. The deal is to be closed by July-end.

Vineet Agrawal, President, Wipro Consumer Care and Lighting, which will now own the 48 brands under Unzo, told reporters here that “This will add to our consumer product portfolio and geographical reach. Unzo has a strong presence in Southeast Asia and China.

For now, the Unza brand will be retained in those markets, including parts of West Africa.” Wipro’s Consumer Care and Lighting business had revenues of Rs. 818.20 crore in 2006-07, with a 36 per cent growth.

Gavin D. Welman, Managing Director of Unza, who will continue with the combined new entity, said, “We have 48 brands, including skin care products, male fragrances and two large selling detergents. Most products have been developed for the Asian markets and are expected to do well in India as well. Wipro now access to a much larger market where our revenues have averaged 24 per cent annual growth in dollar terms.”

Wipro would also acquire Unza’s manufacturing plants in China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin - #1 in The 50 Who Matter Now from CNNMoney.com

Why they matter: For consumers, Google is one of the world's most beloved companies. For competitors, it's a force to be feared. The task of maintaining that balance of love and fear falls to the triumvirate of Schmidt, Page, and Brin. The trio has steered Google past $10 billion in revenue with nary a financial hiccup -- and with profit still growing an average of 40 percent every quarter, they've more than earned their place at the top of this list.

But what makes Schmidt, Page, and Brin really matter is the fact that they seem determined to disrupt every digital business in existence, from software to video to telecommunications. When Google eyes a new market, it always tries to change the rules of the game.More>>

Steve Jobs - #2 in The 50 Who Matter Now from CNNMoney.com

Why he matters: Apple's co-founder has started to channel his inner Wayne Gretzky. "I skate to where the puck is going to be," Jobs said as he introduced the iPhone in January, "not to where it's been."

Given the continuing strength of both the iPod (100 million sold) and the iTunes store (2.5 billion downloads), it's a credible boast. But will millions of Americans really pay $500 to replace their Razrs and Treos with iPhones? And will they come around to the Apple TV, a device so far ahead of its time that nobody's quite sure what it's for?

Jobs's genius as a designer, product manager, and pitchman is that he's never comfortable unless he's pushing the envelope. And like an athlete at the top of his game, it's hard to take your eyes off him.More>>

Arnold Schwarzenegger - #8 in The 50 Who Matter Now from CNNMoney.com

Why he matters: Officially, the Governator presides only over the Golden State. Unofficially, Schwarzenegger is also setting the national agenda when it comes to big issues like climate change and universal health care.

The five-time Mr. Universe is transforming the state into a green giant, launching a series of wide-ranging initiatives to improve air and water quality and reduce carbon emissions. Along the way, Schwarzenegger is prompting many of his fellow Republicans to conclude that good environmental stewardship is also smart economic policy. Al Gore may still be the green movement's favorite spokesman, but Schwarzenegger has emerged as the environment's real-life action hero.More>>

Firefox Partners With EBay For Branded EBay Browser

Mozilla has released another branded, use-specific version of Firefox, this one as part of a deal with eBay. For now the eBay optimized Firefox (which really just amounts to the eBay toolbar pre-installed) is available for users in Germany, France and the United Kingdom with other countries “possible at a later date.”

Branded versions of Firefox are nothing new, Google has long offered a version with the Google Tools pre-installed and we looked at an AllPeers version a while back, but the EBay deal could be a sign the Mozilla sees this as Firefox’s future.

The Ebay toolbar, which has been in testing for a while now, includes the following features designed to improve your buying/selling experience:More>>

Azim Premji in 30 all-time great list

India's IT Mogul Azim Premji and Bangladesh's micro-credit leader and Nobel Prize winner Mohammad Yusuf are among the all time top 30 entrepreneurs identified by leading business magazine BusinessWeek. The modern heroes find themselves in the illustrious company of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Benjamin Franklin, John D Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and Michael Dell.

The 30 selected include a Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He who lived 15th century to fast food titans to contemporary computer whizzes.

Among them are Mayer Amschel Rothschild, John Jacob Astor, Milton Hershey, W K Kellogg, Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart Ray Kroc, Madam C J Walker, Estie Lauder, Ernest Gallo, Thomas Watson Sr, Thomas Watson Jr, Sam Walton Earl Graves Andy Grove, Ralph Lauren, Martha Stewart, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos and and Pierre Omidyar.More>>

Introduction to JavaFX

The JavaFX Scripting Programming Language (JavaFX) is a new family of Sun products based on Java technology and targeted at the high impact, rich content market.

JavaFX is a highly productive scripting language that enables content developers to create rich media and content for deployment on Java environments. JavaFX is a declarative, statically typed programming language. It has first-class functions, declarative syntax, list-comprehensions, and incremental dependency-based evaluation. It can make direct calls to Java APIs that are on the platform. Since JavaFX is statically typed, it has the same code structuring, reuse, and encapsulation features such as packages, classes, inheritance, and separate compilation and deployment units, that make it possible to create and maintain very large programs using Java technology. Using the JavaFX language it is possible to create GUI using swing GUI components. This document gives a description of the JavaFX programming language.read full article

What's next for the Internet?

After taking one of the first Internet companies -- EarthWeb -- public in 1998, Nova Spivack joined some friends at a weedy airstrip deep inside the new Russia for a trip into Earth's stratosphere.

Having space travel on your resume is de rigueur for Internet entrepreneurs these days, but this was 1999, and not even the Russian pilots were sure how the flight would turn out. As Spivack was being strapped into a MiG-25 and prepped for his trip at Mach 3, about 20 miles straight up, he looked around for an ejection button or lever in case things went south.More>>

New Features in WebLogic Server 10.0

There are a lot of changes and new features in Weblogic Server 10.0. This new release gets better and efficient in terms of performance, in terms of the supported APIs and in terms of the supported external libraries. Almost all of the updates in the Java EE are reflected in the WebLogic Server 10.0. In the following sections we will discuss 18 of these new features.read full article

Introduction to Spring's Aspect Oriented Programming(AOP)

One of the major features available in the Spring Distribution is the provision for separating the cross-cutting concerns in an Application through the means of Aspect Oriented Programming. Aspect Oriented Programming is sensibly new and it is not a replacement for Object Oriented Programming. In fact, AOP is another way of organizing your Program Structure. This first section of this article looks into the various terminologies that are commonly used in the AOP Environment. Then it moves into the support that is available in the Spring API for embedding Aspects into an Application . Finally the article concludes by giving a Sample Application.read full article

Is Big 'G' Planning for Mobile domination?

Anyone can get the Web on their cellphone these days. But now it seems Google is interested in so much more than that. It has reportedly approached the Federal Communications Commission recently about obtaining wireless spectrum, the base upon which mobile-phone networks are built, in the U.S. agency's next auction.

Never mind the potential buyout of Bell Canada Inc. or Apple Inc.'s much-hyped introduction of the iPhone yesterday, there's a much larger, game-changing force in telecommunications lurking just around the corner.

Search engine giant Google Inc. has been putting together a massive cable network to provide customers around the world with telecommunications services ranging from broadband Internet to home and mobile phones.More>>

ILoveIM.com

ILoveIM.com is less sophisticated than many of the other Web-based IM apps I tested. From its advertising-heavy home page to its limited features, this service lacks broad appeal.
You can login ILoveIM.com
ILoveIM provides the service for the following a/c's,

• MSN
• OLD MSN
• Yahoo
• AOL
• GTalk

When you log on to ILoveIM, the service informs you that you may have to wait as long as 30 seconds to access your information. That may not seem like a long time, but it's significantly longer than for other services we tested. Once you're logged on, you learn that you may have to wait another 15 seconds for your buddy list to appear.

ILoveIM.com is a bare-bones service that you could use to access your IM account in a pinch. More>>

How to setup Virtual Hosting with Apache

Web servers are hosts that deliver files to applications or web pages to browsers via the HTTP protocol. The interaction of the web server with the browser is termed as host-client relationship. If the web server is used only to host a single site it is called a dedicated server. Dedicated servers are used for hosting big websites which handle a large amount of traffic.More>>

Server Side Includes in Apache

Server Side Includes (SSI) directives are a type of HTML comment that instructs the web server to generate data dynamically for the web page or the client when it is requested. SSI directive is an effective method in case of adding small amount of dynamic contents to HTML pages.More>>

Introduction to Spring MVC Web Framework - Web Tier

The Spring MVC provides rich functionality for building robust Web Applications and it is available as a separate module in the Distribution. As a pre-requisite, readers are advised to go through the introductory article on Spring Framework http://spring.javabeat.net/articles/2007/06/introduction-spring-web-framework. The Spring MVC Framework is architected and designed in such a way that every piece of logic and functionality is highly configurable. Also Spring can integrate effortlessly with other popular Web Frameworks like Struts, WebWork, Java Server Faces and Tapestry.More>>

100 Top MBA employers

1	Google
2	McKinsey & Company
3	Goldman Sachs
4	Bain & Company
5	Boston Consulting Group
6	Apple
7	Microsoft
8	General Electric
9	Nike
10	Bank of America

See the Full List Here>>

HCL Info, Wipro for dealerships with iPhone

Friday 6 pm U.S time. As the world gets ready for this deadline to grab one of the most sought after handsets - the iPhone - two Indian companies are also getting ready to register gains from this revolutionary offering of Apple Inc., the makers of Macintosh computer (popularly called Mac) and the iPod.

Noida-based HCL Infosystems and Bangalore-based Wipro Technologies are close to becoming the exclusive Indian distributors of the iPhone. Analysts are expecting 1-3 million handsets to hit the shelves on Friday.

A luxury product costing $499 for 4 gigabytes memory and $599 for 8 gigabytes memory, iPhone will have a large touch screen minus the conventional keypad. It will also double up as an iPod, video player and will come equipped with a digital camera.

Despite some of its flaws, the iPhone has bagged rare reviews and is being branded as a 'breakthrough handheld computer' as it automatically syncs all contacts from a PC, a MAC or internet service.

The good response is seen helping Apple Inc's head, Steve Jobs, to meet his goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008. Such sales will automatically catapult iPhone to third major revenue garner for Apple along with Mac and the iPod. More>>

Lots of new features in Firefox 3

Mozilla has started to leak snippets of information about what new features will be included in Firefox 3 , which is due sometime in the autumn.

An entirely new graphics engine that can handle more feature-rich web pages will be added to Firefox 3, according to Mozilla . So will better options to upscale and downscale images, and the ability to zoom in and out on web pages

Another major addition is SQL Lite, which makes it possible to 'tag' your favourite websites instead of bookmarking them. Similar tagging features can already be found in Gmail and Google Reader. The most frequently visited websites will automatically be accessible at the top of the web browser window.More>>

Infosys could bid for Capgemini

Shares in Paris-based consultancy Capgemini and Indian software firm Infosys Technologies have jumped on reports of a possible merger.

Infosys declined to comment on "market speculation" that it planned to bid for the European group, bolstering its position in the technology market.

But investors chased the Bangalore firm's shares up 2.5% in India. Shares in Capgemini rose 4.61% in Europe.

A tie-up would help Infosys prepare for an outsourcing slowdown, analysts said.

Outsourcing slowdown

Infosys has grown exponentially over the past five years, capitalising on the demand for IT outsourcing from India's large and well-trained English-speaking engineering workforce, whose wages are on average a fifth of those in the West.

Margins are very high in consulting business as compared to other commoditised business Infosys has Tejas Doshi, Sushil Finance

Infosys said its fourth quarter net profits leaped 70% to 11.4bn rupees ($267m; £134m) in the three months to 31 March, from 6.73bn rupees a year earlier.

But it recently said it expected earnings growth for the coming financial year to be more modest amid rising wage pressures and a strengthening rupee, which makes India a less attractive bet for outsourcing.More>>

How to setup PHP module into Apache server

Apache web server is an open source web server that can be freely downloaded from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi . A web server is a program that delivers files to the application or web pages to the browsers via HTTP protocol.

PHP, an acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, is a open source server-side scripting language that is designed for creating dynamic web pages. It can be freely downloaded from http://www.php.net/downloads.php. read full article

Introduction to Ajax4Jsf

Java Server Faces provided a Component Based Architecture for building User Interface Components for the Web Application. Ajax aims in providing Faster Response to the Client Applications by reloading only the needed Data. Wouldn't be nice to take the advantages of both Jsf and Ajax for developing Robust Web Applications. Ajax4Jsf provides solution for this. It is the integration of Java Server Faces with Ajax (which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and Xml), thereby providing Ajax Support to the Jsf UI Components. This article attempts to provide an overview of the Ajax4Jsf Framework which is now an open Source Project in the JBoss Community. read full article

First Release of Seam Plugin for NetBeans!

Petr Pisl of Sun has just released a first-look Seam Gen plugin for NetBeans. It allows you to generate complete Seam CRUD applications in NetBeans much the same way Red Hat Developer Studio allows you to do in Eclipse. I am extremely excited. So, here is a mini tutorial with some screen shots (taken from a Vista box — NetBeans look pretty good on Windows Vista).

Tutorial

1. Download and install the Seam module in NetBeans 5.5.1. We recommend you to install the Facelets support modules as well. Use “Tools -> Update Center -> Install Manually” to install those nbm files.

2. Install JBoss AS 4.0.5 with EJB3 support and set up a database with some existing data. Register the JBoss server and database connection in NetBeans. This is standard NetBeans stuff. If you are not familiar with that, read the Notes at the end of this post. You should see something like this in the Runtimes window after you are done. read full article

What is nofollow attribute?

Excerpt from Wikipeida

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of spamdexing, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

rel="nofollow" has come to be regarded as a microformat. Microformats reuse existing attributes but extend the standard values for the attribute. "nofollow" is a custom attribute value.

The concept for the specification of the attribute value nofollow was designed by Google’s head of webspam team Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen from Blogger.com in 2005

More>>

Apple's iPhone casts big shadow on cell industry

If the device—a melding of phone, Web browser and music and video player—is a hit, analysts say it will cut into market share of major phonemakers, including Schaumburg-based Motorola

As if struggling cell phone-maker Motorola Inc. doesn't have enough to worry about: Here comes the iPhone, heir to the mighty iPod, brainchild of tech golden boy Steve Jobs—and riding a tidal wave of hype to boot.

Due in U.S. stores Friday, the iPhone promises to stir up the mobile phone business. Apple Inc.'s first phone isn't expected to take much business from Schaumburg-based Motorola or anyone else in the short term, but it will change the industry landscape nonetheless, analysts say.

"It will not be a financial disrupter, but it will be a psychological disrupter, a research and development disrupter," said Roger Entner, senior vice president of IAG Research's communications sector. "That's because everybody will say [to competitors like Motorola], 'Why can't you do that?' " More>>

Do You Know Your Web 2.0?

Do you know your Web 2.0? Take the eWEEK Emerging Technology Web 2.0 quiz.

WEB 2.0 Quiz

Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaks - Personal search is the next big phonomena

Eric’s talk begins now. “Search was, and is, and I suspect will be for many years, the killer application,” Eric says. “We have more engineers working at google on search than we do anything else.” And: “As the web gets bigger, you need a bigger index ... It’s like looking for more needles in larger haystacks.”

Personal search is the next big phonomena, Eric says. The best search is a personal search – one that we arrange, we control, etc. This is going to become the theme of Google as they move forward, Eric proclaims, stating that (and this surprises Eric) iGoogle is exploding in its use. Eric likens iGoogle to a ringtone as people love to personalize it. More>>

What is Second Life?

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 7,482,213 people from around the globe.

• From the moment you enter the World you'll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you've explored a bit, perhaps you'll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
  
  
• You'll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents.
  
  
• The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges.

View Second Life

Introduction to Spring Web Framework

Today, the Principle of Inversion of Control has gained much popularity and Spring is a Light-Weight Framework that adopts this principle extensively for Building Java or J2ee Applications. In most of the times an Application never wants to gain access to all the services provided by the heavy-weight J2ee Container, but still will use it. In such a case, an Application can depend on the light-weight services provided by the Spring Framework/Container. How this is possible is detailed in brief in this article. Anyway Spring is not a complete replacment for J2ee Container. This article provides an Introduction over the Core features of the Spring Framework like how to Declare and Initialize Beans Declaratively, how to establish Dependencies among Beans etc. The later part of the article explores more on the various stuff available within the Bean Xml Configuration File along with plenty of sample snippets. read full article

Go, Go, Google Hybrid!

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has been known to shake things up in the transportation realm. There's the indispensable Google Maps, and the much-ballyhooed carpool system the company offers its employees. But these initiatives are small potatoes compared to the search giant's latest aspirations.

Through its nonprofit arm, Google.org, the company is taking up the cause of electric vehicles. Appropriately enough, its approach is two-pronged. Google is pursuing both plug-in hybrid technology, which lets you charge your car from a wall socket, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which sends energy generated within your car back into the electrical grid. The company has pledged $10 million in grants, and it's stocking its corporate fleet with plug-in hybrid vehicles to demonstrate the technology's effectiveness.

Plug-in hybrids aren't quite like the technology found in vehicles like the Toyota (NYSE: TM) Prius or the Ford (NYSE: F) Escape Hybrid. In those cars, advanced battery technology boosts the efficiency of a gasoline engines, but the car's a closed system; power can't get in or out. It's still not like the way we power, say, our Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) MacBooks or our iRobot (Nasdaq: IRBT) Roombas. It might just take an industry outsider like Google to really revolutionize the nation's transportation system.

I can see both great benefits and challenges to tying together our power and transportation systems. On the plus side, electric car owners would never have to drive to the Chevron (NYSE: CVX) station to refuel; in addition, all those parked cars feeding electricity back into the grid during the daytime would help smooth out power delivery during periods of peak demand.

However, such a system would also make our vehicles dependent upon electrical networks that, in some regions, are strained enough at it is. A world running on plug-in hybrids could even compound the damaging effects of blackouts on the economy. If Google's aiming to change the way we use our cars, perhaps they can overhaul the electric grid while they're at it.

Unified Expression Language in Java Server Faces(JSF)

One of these is the UI component framework, JavaServer Faces technology. To support its powerful features, this framework needed its own expression language (EL). However, this EL presented some problems when used with some JSP tags. Therefore, the specification writers and expert groups of the Java webtier technologies collaborated on a new, unified expression language to help align these technologies by adopting the features offered by the JavaServer Faces expression language. These features include the ability to use expressions to set the value of external object properties as well as get data from them and to invoke methods. At the same time, the webtier team made the language pluggable and extensible so that advanced developers can add custom resolvers able to evaluate expressions not already supported by the expression language.read full article

Introduction to JBoss Seam

Yet another Web Application Framework! This time it is from JBoss Community. JBoss provides a new Web Application Framework called "JBoss Seam" which combines the advantages from the two rapidly growing technologies Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 and Java Server Faces. JBoss Seam, by sitting on top of J2EE provides a nice way of integration between JSF and EJB Components with other great functionalities.read full article

Google Stares Down Microsoft And Wins

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to Vista in response to a complaint by Google alleging that Vista’s inbuilt search functionality competed unfairly with Google Desktop Search.

According to a NY Times report, Google’s complaint was made confidentially in line with rules established as part of a previous settlement over anti-competitive behaviour by Microsoft. The settlement between state prosecutors, the Justice Department and Microsoft will avert the prospect of litigation over the matter.

The changes Microsoft will make to Vista have not yet been made public.More>>

Semel out as Yahoo! CEO

Yahoo!, the No. 2 search firm that has struggled in its battle with Google, said Monday that Terry Semel was out as chief executive officer, to be succeeded by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.

Susan Decker, who heads a relatively new group that deals with the company's advertisers and publishers, and until recently was also chief financial officer, was promoted to president.

Shares of Yahoo surged 3 percent in heavy trading on Nasdaq Monday as speculation mounted that Semel might step down - and the stock rallied another 4 percent in after-hours trading.

Wall Street seemed to welcome the promotion of Yang since he is viewed as being far more tech-savvy than Semel, who had a background in traditional media before joining Yahoo.

"Hopefully, Jerry still has much of his entrepreneurial zeal. He is much geekier and you really need to be that rare combination of a technologist and a marketer. Is it the perfect choice? I don't know if it's a perfect choice but it's a good choice," said Kevin Lee, executive chairman of Did-it.com a search marketing firm based in New York.

Last week, Semel faced questions from several disappointed investors at the company's annual shareholder meeting about the Yahoo's strategy as well as the fact that Semel, despite only receiving a salary of $1 last year, had a compensation package worth more than $70 million due to stock grants.More>>

Spring IDE 2.0 RC2 released

An excerpt from the Spring Blog,

Before we all head into the week of SpringOne, we are pleased to announce that the second and last release candidate of Spring IDE 2.0 is available. As usual the release is available immediately form our developer update site.

Please don’t forget: This is our last chance to get things straight before we are going Final. Therefore take some time for testing and provide feedback on any errors, bugs or problems you might find.More

No wonder so many people are afraid of Windows Vista

A colleague from across the hall came into Tech Talk's offices one recent day to blow off steam. He said he had to unload on someone about his maddening experience with Vista, Microsoft Corp.'s new PC operating system.

He picked us because he somehow got it into his head that we have the slightest clue about computers, and Vista in particular.

This colleague admits below-average tech shrewdness. And he's not adventurous, purchasing gadgets only after they lose their cachet.

Nonetheless, about a month ago he decided to buy a fancy new laptop outfitted with Vista.

Most laptops in stores these days have one of Vista's nine editions already installed, so he had little choice. Our colleague bought a device containing Windows Vista Home Premium, the multimedia-friendly edition Microsoft wants most home PC users to have.

Three malfunctioning laptops later, our esteemed colleague is back where he started: shopping for a new computer. This time, he wants one without Vista.More>>

Introduction to Groovy - Scripting Language

Groovy is an Object Oriented Scripting Language which provides Dynamic, Easy-to-use and Integration capabilities to the Java Virutual Machine. It absorbs most of the syntax from Java and it is much powerful in terms of funtionalities which is manifiested in the form Closures, Dynamic Typing, Builders etc. Groovy also provides simplified API for accessing Databases and XML. Groovy language is large in terms of functionalities and concepts and this article provides only the basic Introduction and Information about Groovy. The first section of the article concentrates on the very basic concepts and theories of Groovy like Declaring Variables, Flow Control and Looping Structures. Then the next section focusses on Declaring Classes, Objects, Methods and the different ways of accessing them in Groovy. Covered in depth are the most exiting Groovy Closures. Finally the article explored the Groovy Distribution along with the various available Utilities.read full article

Five things you didn’t know about Google search

Google continues to have a strong focus on search

All the time I hear things like “If Google doesn’t pay attention to search…” or “If Google loses its focus on search.” That’s not likely to happen, but let me explain why people might worry that Google will lose our focus on search.

- Something like Street View is splashy, cool, and easy to understand, so launches like that tend to get more coverage. It’s much easier for someone to write about a new product or feature than about how Google has improved its semantic understanding of the web, or when we get better at scoring documents. I love Street view, Google Gears, and mobile Calendar, by the way. I’m just using them as examples because they’re easy to understand and recent.
- We don’t always talk a ton about core search quality. Part of the reason is that some reporters are less interested in changes that can’t even be seen (”Google’s search just got a little better in Thai. You can’t see it, but it did!”). Sometimes core search is hard to get other people excited about — kinda like it’s hard to make a picture of someone working on a computer exciting. And sometimes as a business you don’t want to give hints to competitors about how you do things. I’ve got a funny story about “url.host” that I’ll tell someday. Maybe someone will ask me about it in the Q&A tomorrow at the conference.

What happens when you put these two trends together? People see media coverage on neat/wild/fun things that Google does, and they don’t read many stories about core search quality. From those two facts, they extrapolate to what seems like a reasonable conclusion: Google is focusing less on search. But that’s just not true. Hundreds of engineers pay attention to our search quality in ways big and small. Google is practically designed from the ground up so that we can’t lose that search focus. It’s natural to combine these two trends and come to the wrong conclusion. By giving a glimpse at what our search quality engineers do on a daily basis, this article dispels that misconception. read full article