Good Times

T-Mobile To Introduce 'G1' Google Android Phone Sept. 23

2008-09-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

T-Mobile has made it official: It plans to introduce the first mobile phone running Google 's Android software at a Sept. 23 press conference in New York. T-Mobile's phone, an HTC Dream, is expected to be available to consumers at the end of October. Its arrival after months of anticipation among technophiles promises to reinvigorate the smartphone market and to provide a mobile application platform to rival Apple's iPhone. Last November, Google announced the formation of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 hardware, software, and telecom companies, to promote open standards for mobile devices. The group includes Google, HTC, Intel, Motorola, and T-Mobile. In August, after several rough spots, Android's prospects brightened considerably, thanks to the FCC's approval of the HTC Dream, Google's delivery of the Android 0.9 SDK beta, and T-Mobile's confirmation of its plan to ship an HTC Android-powered phone. The availability of T-Mobile's Android phone and a functioning application store may prompt Apple to re-evaluate its controversial exclusion of certain iPhone apps from its iTunes App Store, behavior that Apple's detractors have characterized as anti-competitive and capricious.

Researchers focus on forestalling 'Digital Dark Age'

2008-09-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

Digitization was hailed as the savior of information, able to preserve and make accessible everything from the contents of the Library of Congress to old radio shows. But experts now say much of that information could be lost—or at least impossible to retrieve—due to changing technology and standards.

"Today, we can read and interpret the Dead Sea Scrolls written almost 2000 years ago, but we cannot do the same with information generated 20 years ago and stored on a 5.25 inch floppy disk," said Dalit Naor, manager of Storage Technologies at the IBM Haifa Research Lab. "Ironically, as the world becomes digital, we may be entering a 'Digital Dark Age'. We need to plan for and manage the obsolescence of software and formats, for example by transforming the data to a newer format or ensuring we have the ability to emulate the software."

Researchers at IBM's Haifa, Israel, lab say they've found a way to solve that problem. They're working on the Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR) project, launched as part of the European Union’s program to preserve cultural and scientific resources. The project covers cultural data, scientific data, and contemporary arts.

IBM Research's role in CASPAR will center on a new storage concept called Preservation Datastores. This technology uses open standards and the Open Archival Information System to provide a common storage interface. The IBM approach encapsulates not only the data being preserved, but also metadata with information on context and format, the type of software or operating system required to access the information and other details.

In short, it saves everything needed to interpret the data hundreds of years after it is stored.

Researchers link instant messaging with virtual environments

2008-09-08T19:46:00.001-07:00

IBM researchers have linked Lotus Sametime, an instant messaging program, with several virtual environments. Called "Sametime 3-D," the project showcases what virtual environments can bring to the future of unified business communications.

With Sametime 3-D users can instant message a colleague and instead of merely chatting with one another, launch into an immersive 3-D environment directly from within the chat session.

The program creates a virtual meeting space that can include presentation tools, fully functional avatars (virtual stand-ins) and access to 3-D objects in the avatar's inventory. The virtual meetings can also be recorded as text or video.

"The ability to easily integrate existing communication and collaboration tools in 3-D environments will allow businesses to clearly realize the ROI of virtual environments," said Colin Parris, vice president of Digital Convergence. "Extending the real-time connection between people into a 3-D medium enhances the experience and productivity of teams located across the country or the world."

Researchers link instant messaging with virtual environments

2008-09-08T19:46:00.000-07:00

With Sametime 3-D users can instant message a colleague and instead of merely chatting with one another, launch into an immersive 3-D environment directly from within the chat session.

Oracle Makes Its Seventh Acquisition Of 2008

2008-09-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

Oracle acquired Silicon Valley startup ClearApp on Tuesday, a move that compliments both its stated focus on service-oriented architectures and its $8.5 billion acquisition of BEA Systems earlier this year.
ClearApp, founded in 2002, makes software that manages and monitors composite applications that are brought together via a SOA approach. ClearApp will become part of the Oracle Enterprise Manager software family.

As Oracle's seventh acquisition of the year, the ClearApp buy keeps Oracle in tempo with previous years' pace: it acquired 11 companies last year, and 13 companies in both 2006 and 2005.
ClearApp clearly plays into Oracle's BEA Systems strategy, as evidenced by how the ClearApp customer case studies. TransUnion uses ClearApp for the credit services it extends to consumers via Web-based applications that were implemented using SOA and BEA's WebLogic platform, according to ClearApp's Web site, and Accredited Home Lenders uses it for loan processing apps implemented via SOA and BEA's WebLogic integration, portal, and server software.

Google's Chrome Goes For Maximum Speed

2008-09-03T06:59:00.001-07:00

Google on Tuesday said it sees its new Chrome Web browser more as a way to improve its search, ads, and apps business than as another horse in the browser race.

The company officially launched its open source browser this week after company engineers accidentally (purposefully) lit up tech blogs with a cartoon explaining its features.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin echoed that point, saying, "Our business does well if there's lots of health internet usage."
Chrome, in other words, is about making Web usage and Web applications more competitive with the desktop application experience. It's the beginning of a transition similar to Apple's migration from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, which included technologies like pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection as a way to make the computing experience better. With Chrome and its new multiprocess architecture, Google hopes to bring the stability of modern operating systems to the browser.
But as much as Chrome is about reliability, it's also about speed.
For Google, speed, rather than time, is money. As Google co-founder Larry Page suggested, faster Web browsing leads to more searches, which shows up on Google's bottom line.

Chrome aims to minimize that wait. In a test of static Web page load times conducted during the press conference, Chrome's average per-page rendering time clocked in at 77.28 milliseconds. Microsoft Internet Explorer averaged 220.64 milliseconds per page. (Google didn't immediately respond to a request to clarify whether IE 7 or IE 8 was used.)

R&D journal focuses on storage of electronic 'stuff'

2008-08-31T22:08:00.000-07:00

The electronic storage of data continues to grow exponentially. But as the late George Carlin pointed out, having a lot of "stuff" brings its own set of challenges.

The latest issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, now available online, focuses on hardware and software approaches that help keep these repositories reliable and scalable, as well as ways to manage storage and the energy needed to drive it.

Entitled "Storage Technologies and Systems," the issue describes new storage technologies ranging from ultrahigh density data stored on chips and tape to methods for managing enterprise-scale storage systems.

Researchers also share their belief that many of the technologies and innovations described in the issue will drive the industry in the years to come.

Nations Respond To Google Earth Threat

2008-08-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

To deal with the "Google threat," as Google's geospatial mapping application Google Earth is characterized in the July 30, 2008 report from the Director of National Intelligence's Open Source Center, foreign governments have offered five main responses: negotiating with Google, banning Google products, developing similar products, taking evasive measures, and nonchalance.
The report, obtained by the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News site, recounts how nations have dealt with perceived privacy violations arising from the images Google makes available through its software.

Asking Google to have imagery removed or blurred has gotten easier since terrorists were confirmed to be using the software to plan attacks in 2006 and 2007, the report says. Following news reports in January 2007 that terrorists attacking British bases in Basra, Iraq were using Google Earth as a planning tool, Google "seemingly became more open to dealing directly with foreign governments to assuage their security concerns," the report says.

But some governments prefer banning to negotiating. Bahrain blocked access to Google Earth servers for three days in 2006. Earlier this year, China began cracking down on unapproved mapping sites. And the United States has banned Google Earth in Sudan in accordance with export restrictions and sanctions.

The report cites an article from a Chinese military journal in 2006 to convey China's perception of Google's eyes in the sky. The military journal article acknowledges the futility of trying to stifle Google Earth as an act that would be "not only out of keeping with the times but is also unnecessary and baseless."

To minimize the impact of Google Earth, China, India, and Norway have explored ways to camouflage sensitive areas and structures from satellite cameras, the report says.
China, India, and Thailand have each said they're developing their own versions of Google Earth, the report says.

Aircell Signs Up Fourth Airline For Wi-Fi Service

2008-08-27T20:26:00.000-07:00

Aircell, the company that provides the new Gogo Internet service on some American Airlines flights, will soon announce that another airline has signed on for its service, said CEO Jack Blumenstein in an interview Monday.

American Airlines has installed Gogo on 15 airplanes for flights between New York and Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco, and Delta says it'll have Gogo available across its domestic fleet of 330 commercial jets within a year. Delta is expected to expand that service to Northwest Airlines flights if the merger of those two companies goes through as planned, Blumenstein said, and Virgin America is also outfitting flights with Gogo.

Yet there's another airline that has just signed with Gogo, Blumenstein said, and the companies plan to make the announcement within days.

But what is Aircell, and where did it come from? The company is privately owned and backed by venture capital; Blumenstein did hint that it's open to considering a public offering of stock at some point. But you can't call it a startup: Aircell began providing analog-based voice communications on private business aircraft in the early 1990s, by partnering with cellular providers that primarily served rural areas. In the late '90s it shifted to satellite-based systems to support voice communications on overseas flights.

In 2006, Verizon began to get out of its failing Airfone business, since commercial airline passengers never warmed up to the idea of spending $20 to make a brief call from seat-back phones. That freed up a 4 Mhz slice of publicly owned spectrum, which the FCC decided to put up for auction. The FCC split the spectrum into two licenses; one for broadband use at 3 Mhz, and another for a narrower use at 1 Mhz.

Then Aircell got lucky. Verizon was expected to bid on the 3 Mhz spectrum, but suddenly and unexpectedly bowed out, citing other corporate priorities. Aircell -- called AC BidCo LLC at the time -- got the spectrum at what Blumenstein considered a bargain: $31 million.

Aircell spent the next year building out its cellular network across the U.S., setting up 92 cell towers

What Linux Will Look Like In 2012

2008-08-27T20:22:00.000-07:00

What will desktop Linux be like four years from now?
In the time it takes most college students to earn an undergraduate degree -- or party through their college savings -- Linux will continue to mature and evolve into an operating system that non-technical users can fully embrace.

The single biggest change you'll see is the way Linux evolves to meet the growing market of users who are not themselves Linux-savvy, but are looking for a low-cost alternative to . That alone will stimulate enormous changes across the board, but there are many other things coming down the pike in the next four years, all well worth looking forward to.

Over the course of the last four years, Linux has taken enormous strides in usability and breadth of adoption. Here's a speculative look forward at what Linux could be like a few years from now -- or, maybe we could say what Linux ought to be like.

For-free Versus For-payExpect to see a three-way split among different versions of Linux. Not different distributions per se, but three basic usage models:
1. For-pay: Ubuntu's in-store $20 boxes are a good example. For a nominal cost, you get professional support for Linux as well as licenses to use patent-restricted technologies (e.g., codecs for legal DVD playback).
2. Free to use: This is the most common model right now -- a free distribution with support optional, and additional optional support for closed-source components: proprietary, binary-only device drivers.
3. Free/libre: These distributions contain no components with patent encumbrances or other issues, in any form. Distributions like gNewSense or Blag Linux already do this, and an upcoming version of Ubuntu (8.10 / "Intrepid Ibex," due in October) will also feature a wholly free installation option.

Apple MobileMe Reportedly Vulnerable To Data Loss

2008-08-24T06:39:00.000-07:00

Apple's MobileMe online service, which has been beset with problems since its launch in July, appears to have a new threat -- some user data may be at risk.

Apple has reportedly made the service, which provides data syncing between a user's home computer and an iPhone 3G, easy for hackers to harvest subscribers' e-mail addresses. According to security researchers, this could lead to a lot more spam and phishing scams.

To exploit MobileMe, hackers can use a Web crawler to sniff users' public file sharing folder called iDisk to harvest the entire MobileMe user name list, the blog TechCrunch reported Thursday. Once the list is in hand, spammers only have to add @me.com or @mac.com to convert a user name to an e-mail address.

The potential exploit, however, amounts to more of an annoyance for subscribers than a serious threat, since spammers can't gain access to personal information, such as credit card numbers. A far more serious threat is a report earlier this week that Apple encrypts MobileMe login information, but not data that it moves for users over the Web. Not using Secure Sockets Layer, cryptographic protocols for secure communications on the Internet places subscribers' personal data at risk.

Microsoft Targets E-Mail Overload With Outlook Plug-In

2008-08-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

Swamped with e-mails? Microsoft wants to take the burden off your mind.

Tuesday, the company introduced Email Prioritizer, a plug-in for Outlook 2007 that automatically prioritizes e-mails and allows users to pause e-mail delivery.

Email Prioritizer affixes e-mail with between zero and three stars to represent the urgency or importance of a given message. The program uses a number of algorithms that take into consideration things like the name of the sender and whether the receiver is on the "To" line or the "Bcc" line of an e-mail to determine priority, though at this point Microsoft isn't forthcoming with a full list of exactly what Email Prioritizer takes into consideration.

Users can also set e-mail priorities manually by changing or assigning a star ranking themselves. These user settings can inform automatic prioritization: for example, if someone always sets e-mails from his manager to three stars, those e-mails will eventually begin to arrive already bearing the three stars.

Email Prioritizer also comes with a "do not disturb" feature that allows users to tweak Outlook's settings so that no new e-mails arrive until set periods of time between 10 minutes and four hours have passed. Email Prioritizer comes out of a Microsoft Research project and is a collaboration between Office Labs and Microsoft Research's Eric Horvitz and Mary Czerwinski.

Intel Partners With Yahoo To Enhance Digital TV

2008-08-20T18:58:00.000-07:00

Intel on Wednesday launched a system on a chip (SoC) for digital television, and said it has partnered with Yahoo in building software that brings the Web to the TV screen.

Media Processor CE 3100, launched at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, is the first of a line of SoCs for consumer electronics

The CE 3100 goes beyond TV, and is adaptable to other consumer electronics, such as high-definition DVD players and cable set-top boxes. The SoC includes Intel's new media processor, formerly code-named Canmore, which handles HD video, home-theater quality audio, and 3-D graphics. Consumer electronics makers Samsung Electronics and Toshiba will be among the first companies to use the new technology.

While other chipmakers build competing products, Intel claims its offering is better for software developers, since they can use the same tools available for building applications for Intel's other x86 processors commonly found in the PC world. Intel plans to ship CE 3100 next month.

Yahoo is among the first companies to build software on top of the new SoC.
The software is essentially a framework for accessing Web content while watching TV. Developers can use JavaScript, XML, HTML, and Adobe Flash for building widgets, which are small Web applications that run on the framework.

"T-Mobile to launch first Android-powered Google mobile

2008-08-18T20:41:00.000-07:00

T-Mobile plans to launch a mobile phone powered by Google Inc's Android software, making it the first operator to do so and posing a direct threat to Apple Inc's (AAPL) popular iPhone.

This phone is expected to hit the US markets in October.

The new device will have a touch screen like the iPhone and other smartphones that use software from firms like Palm, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Nokia Corp. (NOK) to allow users to access the Internet.

Canada to host top-20 supercomputer

2008-08-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

The University of Toronto’s SciNet Consortium and IBM say they’ll build Canada’s most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputer. The machine is expected to be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world -- 30 times faster than Canada’s current largest research system. It will be largest supercomputer outside the United States.
The SciNet consortium, which includes the University of Toronto and associated research hospitals, will use the machine for research in aerospace, astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical physics, climate change prediction, medical imaging and the global ATLAS project, which is investigating the forces that govern the universe.
Capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second, the supercomputer will pioneer a hybrid design containing two systems that can work together or independently, connected to a massive five-petabyte storage complex. (A petabyte is one quadrillion bytes.)
Construction will begin immediately at a facility just north of Toronto. The main computing systems are expected to be fully operational by next summer.

Software eases pain of legal discovery process

2008-08-09T09:43:00.001-07:00

Software from IBM will help companies meet the challenging requirements of legal discovery. The new eDiscovery software lets companies automate the collecting, searching and classifying of information across multiple sources, while maintaining security and the ability to track changes.

"The explosion of electronic content presents challenges for organizations to retain and produce information efficiently and accurately when needed," said Ken Bisconti, vice president, product and strategy, IBM Enterprise Content Management. "Our eDiscovery offerings enable customers to have insight into knowing what information exists, where it is stored, how long it must be kept and how to locate it."

The new software integrates with IBM's auto-classification and records management technology to proactively manage electronically stored evidence. It will be available at the end of August.

Software eases pain of legal discovery process

2008-08-09T09:43:00.000-07:00

The new software integrates with IBM's auto-classification and records management technology to proactively manage electronically stored evidence. It will be available at the end of August.

Japan's Mobile Phone Makers Under Pressure To Exit

2008-08-04T07:19:00.000-07:00

An abrupt contraction in Japan's mobile phone market is clouding the outlook for phone makers Sharp, NEC, and Fujitsu, and some may face a stark choice to band together or get out.
Japanese phone companies have adopted a new strategy that lowers usage rates but charges consumers more to buy new phones, prompting users to hold onto their old sets longer and slashing sales in the world's fourth-largest handset market by 20 percent.

Tired of mounting development costs, Mitsubishi Electric pulled out of its loss-making phone business in the spring, and other makers may make a similar decision in the next six to eight months, analysts said.
Some may be forced into the arms of rivals in the face of tough overseas competition from the likes of leading mobile phone maker Nokia.
"Some companies are just not going to be able to keep up with R&D costs" in the race to develop more popular handsets, said Hideaki Yokota, an analyst at MM Research Institute Ltd. "If the current situation continues, things will only get worse."
He and other analysts said Japan's No.1 phone maker Sharp and No.2 Matsushita Electric Industrial were likely to weather the downturn on the strength of their brands, but companies with small market share were vulnerable.
These include Hitachi (NYSE: HIT), Kyocera, and Casio Computer Co.

But he said they could consider mergers to counter the potential threat from foreign makers such as Nokia and Apple, which now hold less than 1 percent each of the Japanese market, but which enjoy bigger economies of scale.

Japan was the world's fourth-largest market for phone handset sales in 2007, after the U.S., China, and India, according to IDC. Some 51.5 million handsets were sold in Japan last year, up 4.4 percent from 2006.

Sony is the only Japanese mobile maker with a substantial global presence through a joint venture with Sweden's Ericsson, but that posted a second-quarter operating loss as demand for more expensive phones weakened.

IBM expands its cloud computing

2008-08-03T02:15:00.001-07:00

IBM will invest almost $400 million on cloud computing centers in the U.S. and Japan. Cloud computing lets organizations remotely access a vast network of computers that can be tapped on-demand.

In the U.S., IBM will spend $360 million to build a state-of-the-art data center at its facility in Research Triangle Park, N.C. The company will renovate a building on its campus, aiming to reuse 95 percent of the original building's shell and recycle 90 percent of the materials from the original building.

The new cloud computing center in Tokyo will provide large companies, universities and government agencies immediate access to experts who can help them deploy cloud computing environments. Both new centers will link to seven other IBM cloud centers around the world."Cloud computing is fundamentally about re-engineering the world's computing infrastructure, to enable game-changing -- even life-changing -- applications," said Willy Chiu, Vice President, IBM High Performance On Demand Solutions. "To IBM, cloud computing is much more than the normal evolution of a data center."Data centers are the backbone of information technology (IT) infrastructure for businesses and other organizations, with powerful servers and storage systems running technology including software applications, email and web sites. IBM owns and operates more than 8 million square feet of data center space -- more than any other company in the world.

Software harnesses mobile devices as memory aides

2008-07-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

Cell phones and other mobile devices may soon offer help to faltering memories. New software technology created in IBM Research Labs uses the images, sounds, and text recorded on the devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and other important information.

The technology, nicknamed "Pensieve" by the IBM team in Haifa, Israel, uses associative recall to make connections between pieces of related data. A big advantage of the new technology is that it can understand the context in which data is captured, connect various data, and use this knowledge to help bring the correct information to a person when it is needed.

"This is like having a personal assistant for your memory," said Dr. Yaakov Navon, the lead researcher and image processing expert from IBM's Haifa Research Lab. "Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general web search to find that information, Pensieve helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget."

Today's mobile devices have a number of functions that can record data in real time. IBM's new software blends techniques from image processing, GPS information, smart clustering, optical character recognition, speech recognition, and information retrieval to index and tag the information.

For example, if you meet someone at a conference and use your phone to take a picture of him or her and another picture of that person's business card, the new technology will associate the two pieces of data because they were taken at the same time and location. It then creates a virtual briefcase of data that includes the person's image, the name of the conference where you met, the date and time, and any other relevant data.

Research on browser weaknesses triggers attacks

2008-07-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

IBM's X-Force says cyber-criminals are using public research on Web browser weaknesses to launch attacks before most users are even aware of their vulnerability. The mid-year report from the security group indicates that organized criminals are adopting new automated techniques and strategies that allow them to exploit vulnerabilities much faster than ever before.

According to the X-Force report, 94 percent of all browser-related online exploits occurred within 24 hours of a vulnerability being officially disclosed. These attacks, known-as "zero-day" exploits, are on the Internet before people even know they have a vulnerability that needs to be patched in their systems.

Many security researchers have routinely posted the code needed to exploit a weakness as part of a security advisory. According to the X-Force report, these disclosed vulnerabilities are twice as likely to trigger zero-day exploits.

"The two major themes in the first half of 2008 were acceleration and proliferation," said X-Force Operations Manager Kris Lamb. "We see a considerable acceleration in the time a vulnerability is disclosed to when it is exploited, with an accompanying proliferation of vulnerabilities overall. Without a unified process for disclosing vulnerabilities, the research industry runs the risk of actually fueling online criminal activity. There's a reason why X-Force doesn't publish exploit code for the vulnerabilities we have found, and perhaps it is time for others in our field to reconsider this practice."

The latest X-Force report also found that browser plug-ins are the newest target-of-choice. In the first six months of 2008, roughly 78 percent of web browser exploits targeted browser plug-ins.

Dell Launches Rack Workstation

2008-07-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

Dell on Tuesday introduced a rack workstation that the vendor claims is a better buy than blade workstations.
In unveiling the Precision R5400, Dell also introduced a PC-over-IP remote access device called the FX100, which the company said offers hardware-based encryption and compression that doesn't compromise system performance.

The Precision R5400 lets customers place data and applications in a secure central location or data center. In addition, the remote system removes the heat and noise desktop systems add to workspaces, such as financial trading floors, according to Dell.
Compared with similar blade systems, the rack product offers greater flexibility in system configuration, the vendor said.
"By not putting the solution on a blade, we were able to add more functionality and high-performance OpenGL graphics cards, to achieve the caliber of performance workstation customers want," Antonio Julio, director of Dell's product group, said in a statement.

OpenGL is a standard specification for an application programming interface for writing software that produces 2-D and 3-D computer graphics.
Features of the R5400 include the option of dual- or quad-core processors and support for up to two PCIe x16 OpenGL graphics cards with dual 150-watt slots on the motherboard. The system supports standard systems management tools.

The FX100 is a combination host card and remote portal device that connects the R5400 to a remote user and peripherals, including displays, keyboard, mouse, audio, and USB devices, such as printers.
The Precision R5400 starts at $1,869, and the FX100 is $800.

Get Ready For Google Gadget Malware

2008-07-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

"Gmalware" may be coming soon to your iGoogle page.
In two weeks, at the Black Hat Conference on Wednesday, Aug. 6, Cenzic senior security analyst Tom Stracener and security researcher Robert Hansen, better known as "RSnake," plan to demonstrate a zero-day vulnerability that affects Google Gadgets.

"At the core of the talk is the concept of Gmalware, which is basically a malicious gadget," said Stracener. "The idea is that gadgets are supported by the gmodule domain and security architecture. And with the current security architecture, it doesn't protect individuals from malicious gadgets very well. Nor does it protect gadgets from one another."

Google Gadgets, said Stracener, are vulnerable to information theft, deceptive practices, content spoofing, and authentication issues.

A Google Gadget, for example, can log you into an account without your knowledge and monitor your Google Search queries, Stracener explained. It can also be made to attack another Google Gadget and steal information.

Microsoft Becomes Official Apache Sponsor

2008-07-27T08:49:00.000-07:00

A Microsoft official said Friday that the company has agreed to provide monetary and technical support to the Apache Software Foundation, an open source effort that promotes community-built tools and services.

Apache officials welcomed the move, despite the group's sometimes rocky relationship with the world's biggest commercial software developer.
"We thank Microsoft for their generous sponsorship that goes towards supporting The Apache Software Foundation and the over 60 top level projects in use and development within the ASF," ASF chairman Jim Jagielski said in a statement.

Microsoft also pledged to make more of its own code available to open source developers.
"Microsoft is putting a wide range of protocols that were formerly in the Communications Protocol Program under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). This guarantees their freedom from any patent claims from Microsoft now or in the future, and includes both Microsoft-developed and industry-developed protocols," wrote Ramji.

By cooperating with open source developers, Microsoft may be hoping to ease pressure from U.S. and European regulators, who have charged the company with using monopolistic practices to protect its software franchise.

The European Commission, which already has imposed more than $1 billion in fines on Microsoft, earlier this year said it's eyeing the possibility that the company is still violating monopoly laws by failing to make its products interoperable with competitors' offerings and by illegally bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with the Windows operating system.

Software goes to bat for major league umps

2008-07-25T10:03:00.000-07:00

The old taunt, "Hey ump, are you blind?" may soon be replaced by "Hey, ump, are you off line?" Major League Baseball (MLB) is now using software from IBM to give umpires more information and improve the way the game is officiated.

With IBM collaboration software umpiring crews get improved intelligence and historical data. Using MLB's Umpire Desktop officials can get advanced insight into players' behavior, based on historical issues or likely tendencies. The Umpire Desktop also incorporates Google Gadgets to supply up-to-the-minute weather views, statistics and other key information.

"The Umpire Desktop provides significant, real-time information to our crews, and is a valuable resource with respect to the overall Major League Umpiring effort. It is assisting not only in training and development, but also every other aspect of what game officials do," said MLB's Vice President of Umpiring, Mike Port.

Technology is also helping to certify the authenticity of sport memorabilia, which drives a multi-billion dollar industry. When a fan catches a home run ball, a security guard will link up with the lucky person and place a unique hologram on the ball. Relevant information also will be up-loaded wirelessly to MLB's data server. If the fan decides to sell the ball to a retailer, potential buyers can verify its authenticity immediately online.