News Items

The motor that rotates Mars rover Spirit's front right wheel seems to have stopped working according to NASA officials. Only 779 days into its 90 day mission.

Bridging the gap between application developers and Web designers has always been a problem for companies building high-impact Web sites. Now Microsoft Corp. thinks it has the answer through its use of an XML-based language called Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML).

Samsung has begun selling their new flash-based hard drive. Silent and fast, but only 32GB. (Pricing not mentioned)

Now everyone's favourite search engine has a finance page. Beta, of course.

Is is part of the longest ever translation exercise for The Code Project, or just curiousity by the code-frog?

Still love Netware? Don't worry, Novell does too -- at least until 2015.

Reviews of cool stuff by geeks like us.

The EclipseCon 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week will highlight Eclipse projects in ALM (application lifecycle management), as well as endeavors in rich-client technology, PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), and VoIP.

Want to know how to build a game? Microsoft has released the source code for MechCommander 2 to show you how XNA Build will help. (Caution: download is over 1GB)

The news of COBOL's death is exaggerated.

News for Monday, March 20 2006

Bangalore, India, is a booming, sprawling metropolis. You can find almost anything here. You can even find a piece of Cincinnati if you know where to look.

The March Community Technology Preview of XNA (Microsoft's upcoming gaming API) is now available.

Is C++/CLI gaining momentum, or do more people leave C++ for unmanaged development? Discuss.

Why can one book continue to be published, while other useful books end up on the remainder shelf? My guess -- goat entrails and chicken bones.

A Federal Judge has ruled that Google's archiving of Usenet posts does not constitute copyright infringement, even if the posts themselves contain infringing material. In another ruling, a federal magistrate has upheld an earlier decision ordering Google to turn over all messages from a user's Gmail account, include those that were deleted.

Microsoft realizes companies employ people, and they intend to do something about it!

A new study seems to show beer has anti-oxidant properties, and is a good source of B vitamins and some minerals. Need any more reasons?

Team Foundation Server was released to manufacturing on Friday, and is now available to MSDN subscribers.

The March Technology Preview of Atlas (Ajax for ASP.NET) is now available. In addition, they have a mash-up contest for people building stuff with it.

InstallAware 5.3 is the first installer to split the burden of a build across multiple CPU cores for faster build times.

News for Friday, March 17 2006

The latest search engine to hit the Web, Accoona offers additional business info and a nice filtering ability. But is that enough?

Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang.