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Google may not be an established name in the business services market but the inroads it’s making have some of the more established players noticing. IBM, one of the biggest names in enterprise software, is launching a new product for its Lotus suite that will compete with Google Apps at least when it comes to price. The product, called LotusLive iNotes, is a bare-bones email service that will sell for $36 per user per year.

“Remote employees, retail workers and anyone who doesn’t work behind a desk will appreciate the easy access to company e-mail. With web-based e-mail, all of your employees will have real-time e-mail access from a Web browser and Internet connection,” IMB describes the product. “LotusLive iNotes gives you the best of both worlds. It simplifies e-mail administration but still offers robust, flexible services. You’ll have access to all the essential messaging features – previously only found in desktop software – via the Web browser.”

On the face of it iNotes doesn’t really offer any advantages over Google Apps and only competes on price. The professional version of Apps costs $50 per user per year, a premium that rapidly adds up at large companies. However, iNotes just offers a web email client and nothing else. As an email client though, it is a fairly complete application and the service supports POP, authenticated SMTP and IMAP capabilities allowing it to be accessed through IBM’s own Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook.

Google Apps on the other hand comes with a complete set of applications like a word processor, spreadsheet editor, an instant messenger, calendar and others, all completely web based. IMB though has one very big advantage over Google, its name. The company has been in the business for decades and has built a lot of trust from most companies. Google on the other hand is a newcomer and has just entered the business sector. What’s more, problems like the Gmail outage last month, which left all users, including business ones, without access for a few hours, aren’t doing it any favors.

Source: Reuter

News Corp, which is trying to stem newspaper revenue declines, could charge for access to its news websites by the middle of next year, and might break off its relationship with Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle e-reader if it cannot get better terms.

Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of the global media empire, said on Thursday that he is unhappy with the Kindle’s control of relationships with newspaper subscribers, and might seek a better deal with rival e-reader maker Sony Corp.

Amazon officials did not return calls seeking comment.

Murdoch’s comments come after News Corp, whose properties include The Wall Street Journal, cable programmers, local TV stations and movie studios, reported a 10.7 percent drop in quarterly revenue to $7.67 billion, which was in line with expectations, according to Reuters Estimates.

It forecast operating revenue for fiscal 2010, which ends next June, would rise in the high single digits on 4 percent revenue growth.

“I think it looks reasonable,” said RBC Capital Markets analyst David Bank. “They gave a pretty realistic view of where the growth is coming from and where it is not going to come from, particularly the advertising-supported businesses.”

Source: Reuters

Bill Gates, one of the most powerful men on the planet, appears to be taking on one of Mother Earth’s most fearsome forces: the hurricane.

An application filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Jan. 3, 2008, lists Gates and 12 others as the inventors of a number of methods to control and prevent hurricanes.

“Billions of dollars of destruction and damage is regularly attributable to hurricanes and hurricane-like tropical storms,” the document says. “Thus, great interest has arisen in controlling these powerful storms.”

The document goes on to describe a process of using fleets of vessels to mix warm water from the surface of the ocean with colder water from greater depths in an effort to cool the surface of the water.

Hurricanes draw their strength from condensation driven by heat. That condensation leads to higher wind speeds. By cooling the surface of the ocean, the plan attempts to sap energy from growing hurricanes.

The filings were submitted by Searete LLC, a sub-entity of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based invention acquisition and development firm founded by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.

A spokeswoman for the company declined to elaborate on the patent application but confirmed that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was involved in the weather modification plan.

She said Intellectual Ventures, which holds about 27,000 patents for technologies spanning multiple industries, didn’t expect the patent to be approved for at least another 18 months.

But Gates and his partners are hardly the first to set their sights on the sky.

“Some people sometimes don’t have a grasp of the magnitude or the power of hurricanes,” said Moshe Alamaro, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The power of a hurricane is at least the power of all the electric power plants in the world combined.”

Still, despite the probable impossibility of actually stopping a hurricane, Alamaro doesn’t criticize those for trying. (In fact, he has proposed his own plan for taming hurricanes.)

Source: AP

Just when you thought you were done with IE 6 and its hacks and exceptions, now you’ve got a new browser to consider: Google’s Chrome.

The good news is that Chrome is a lot more compatible with web standards than IE 5 and 6. However, Chrome has its own idiosyncrasies and bugs.

No one knows if Chrome is here to stay, but it has already captured a surprisingly decent share of the web browser market in a short period of time.

Here are some tips to get your web pages working in Chrome and hopefully looking the way they were designed to look.

As of February 2009, Chrome is still a browser for Microsoft Windows PCs. If you use a Mac, you will need to run Microsoft Windows through Bootcamp, or one of the virtualization products for the Mac (Sun’s VirtualBox, Parallels, VMWare Fusion). If you are really daring, you can try and get Chrome to run using Darwine. Google promises to have a native Mac version of Chrome available in the coming months.

Pop-Up blocking is great unless your website really needs pop-up functionality. If you have a web page that must use pop-ups, you won’t see them in Chrome. By design, Chrome only displays the title of a pop-up and minimizes it to the bottom right corner of the browser window. Users will need to click and drag the pop-up’s title in order to view its content.

By design, Chrome will only certify a valid SSL (secure sockets layer) page with the padlock icon if all the elements on the page are served via SSL. In other words, if your page is served via SSL but it calls elements via non-secured HTTP, Chrome will give your page an exclamation point icon indicating that it considers your page to be an inconsistent SSL transmission. To get around this, make sure that all the resources loaded by your web page, including all images, are prefaced with HTTPS.

Source:  Reuters

Amazon.com  has cut ties with Rhode Island Web sites that make referrals to the online retailer because a law designed to collect sales taxes on these transactions will soon come into force, the Providence Journal reported Tuesday.
Seattle-based Amazon  wrote to Rhode Island Web site operators, telling them its “Associates program” ended Monday. Web sites that posted links to the company about its products have received up to a 15 percent cut on sales.
On June 17, the Rhode Island legislature passed a budget provision that would force Amazon to collect 7 percent in sales taxes on these so-called “click-through” transactions.
Amazon argues the law is unconstitutional, so eliminating the commission would prevent the company from having to collect the sales tax most consumers pay on purchases at in-state stores.
Rhode Island taxpayers currently must pay sales taxes for out-of-state purchases on their annual tax return, but it’s an honor system.
Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith did not immediately respond to an Associated Press e-mail seeking comment Tuesday.
She, however, told the Providence Journal on Monday that “The government in Rhode Island is attempting to go about tax collection in what we feel is an unconstitutional manner.”
Amazon’s decision will have no immediate effect on Rhode Island’s revenues because the state didn’t project any new tax income immediately, according to House Finance Committee chairman Steven M. Costantino.
Amazon’s announcement is the latest in a legal fight involving states trying to get out-of-state companies that perform commerce largely online with their residents but have little or no physical presence in the state to collect taxes.
The stakes are large. Governments could generate $3 billion in new revenues if Web retailers had to collect taxes on all sales to consumers, according to Forrester Research.
Amazon sued New York in 2008 over a law similar to what Rhode Island lawmakers passed because it argued it unlawfully imposes tax-collection obligations on out-of-state entities. A trial court judge dismissed the case in January.
“It should be noted that while Amazon is fighting this measure in New York, they have not stopped doing business with the affiliates in New York state,” Gov. Don Carcieri’s spokeswoman, Amy Kempe, said.
On Friday, Amazon pulled the plug on commissions for North Carolina Web sites because a similar law could soon be enacted.
The company currently collects sales taxes from customers in states in which Amazon has a bona fide physical presence, including Washington, Kentucky and Kansas.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: Reuters

The second Linux kernel of 2009 is now out, sporting a long list of improvements — and at least one regression.

New filesystem support, security and driver improvements are all part of the new Linux 2.6.30 kernel release, although one of the most noticeable elements in the new release is the kernel inclusion of fastboot, an enhancement designed to speed startup for Linux-based systems.

Linux 2.6.30 also marks a step back, reinaugurating Tux the penguin as its official mascot after a one-release hiatus, during which Tuz the Tasmanian devil held the reins as a effort to raise awareness around the plight of the Tasmanian devil.

“I’m sure we’ve missed something, and I know we have some regressions pending,” Linux creator Linus Torvalds said in his mailing list announcement for the new kernel. “At the same time, we do need the coverage of a real release, and on the whole it looks pretty good.”

The release follows the 2.6.29 release by just under three months, and the features included in 2.6.30 will end up in the next round of Linux distributions as they face off against Windows 7 later this year.

Fastboot’s inclusion in the kernel is one of the release’s key elements, providing a mechanism for faster startup times within the mainline kernel itself. That’s a something of a new approach, considering that Linux distributions have already been implementing their own approaches for faster startup times. The Ubuntu Jaunty release, for example, claims a 25-second boot time while Red Hat’s Fedora 11 claims a 20-second boot time.

According to Red Hat, there is a difference between the aims and process of the new mainline Linux kernel’s fastboot — which was contributed to the community by Intel — and the approach to faster startups taken in Fedora 11.

“They’re solving a different set of problems,” Fedora kernel maintainer Dave Jones told InternetNews.com. “The Fedora work has been almost entirely done by improving init scripts in userspace, and by making applications more intelligent about the I/O they are doing.”

Jones adds that the fastboot patches are valuable, but there larger problems remain in userspace that can be addressed in Fedora.

Another key addition in the 2.6.30 Linux kernel release is Ftrace, a framework for tracing system calls.

“The Ftrace tracing infrastructure should make debugging certain problems easier,” Jones explained. “Previously, we would need to recompile the kernel with debugging patches added. Now, we have the ability to turn on certain types of profiling dynamically at runtime.”

Security also gets a boost in the kernel with the addition of the Tomoyo framework, which offers an alternate approach to SELinux (which stands for “security enhanced Linux”). Tomoyo, like SELinux is an access-control solution. According to the Tomoyo project site, the most distinguishable feature of Tomoyo Linux is its real-time policy learning feature.

Whereas SELinux operates in either permissive or enforcing modes, Tomoyo Linux also has a third mode — learning mode — in which it “generates definitions of domains and ACL (access control lists) for each domain … automatically,” according to the project site. “This policy-learning functionality covers from the system boot to shutdown.”

Tomoyo is a project that had been begun by Japan’s NTT, while SELinux is an effort that originally sprouted out of the U.S. government’s National Security Agency (NSA).

NTT also has another contribution that made it into the 2.6.30 with the NILFS2 filesystem (short for “New Implementation of a Log-structured File System”).

“NILFS is a new implementation of a log-structured file system (LFS) supporting continuous snapshotting,” according to the NILFS project site. “In addition to versioning capability of the entire filesystem, users can even restore files mistakenly overwritten or destroyed just a few seconds ago.”

There is also support in the 2.6.30 for a number of technologies that have not yet been finalized in standards. Linux 2.6.30 adds preliminary support for the under-development IEEE 802.11w standard for enhanced wireless security.

Preliminary support for NFS 4.1 (define) is also being included ahead of the final standard being ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force.