Bing swing: New search engine ups Redmond's share

SEATTLE — In the week since Microsoft Corp. launched Bing, its new search engine, the software maker's share of U.S. Web searches has crept into double digits for the first time in two years. But Bing's early gain is no predictor of future success. After all, the last time that happened, Microsoft had resorted to paying people to use Bing's predecessor, known as Live Search.

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Microsoft ads say search is sick, Bing is the cure

SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp. is inventing a new malady for which its new Web search site, Bing, is the only cure.  That's the premise of the $100 million, four-month advertising campaign Microsoft hopes will turn Bing into a verb and give the software maker a fighting chance against search leader Google Inc. — unlike its last redesign, Live Search, which launched four years ago to such little fanfare that many Web surfers still don't know where to find it online.

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After declaring web of objects, Yahoo Inc now plans to venture into social networking to refurbish its line of products.  Yahoo is looking to acquire companies that will support it to become a bigger player in social networking, as provided by Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh. He told the Reuters Global Technology Summit that this is the good time for buying. Balogh referred to the valuations the have fallen over the past few months. The giant web company seems all set to revive its fortunes after an unstable period that affected a decline in sales due to recession and competition from Internet heavyweights like Google Inc.

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Come summer, the movies blockbusters and music tours would peak the entertainment carts. The video game industry might loose its charm in summer.  At least this is what Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter apprehends. Well, things doesn't seem heading the same way for the fans of Nintendo Wii touching a trifecta this week.  Normally the video game sales inflates in the last quater of the year. However, the big titles can survive at any time of the year.  With potential hits like Atari's Ghostbusters: The Video Game(june 16) and Activision's Guitar Hero Smash Hits (June 16) to make the market, there can be few reasons for the video game market to go for a slog. There are some good reasons to expect the video game market stay cool this summer.

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Utilitarian gadgets are of one kind and the gadgets to dream of are into a separate league altogether. When we have always wondered about the cheapest or most profitable deals for ourselves, the news of the richie riches haven't fallen into deaf years either. The obsessive love for opulent gadgets have made us look for the newest models of Merc, Porsche, diamond studded iPhones, gold plated Macbook pro etc. So, today, gadgetophilia has tried to bring in the most expensive mobile phones that will leave you gasp for breath coz of the price tags as well the beauty.

Here is the list of top 10 opulent mobile phones which includes:

• Le Million Mobile Phone valued at $1,300,000
• Pieces Unique Mobile Phone valued at $1,298,000
• Sony Ericsson Black Diamond valued at $300,000
• Nokia 8800 Sirocco Limited Gold S Edition valued at $16,000

So if you are a person who loves getting into the glitz and glamors of gadgets, here is your chance to peek in and sneak in one deal perhaps? Do tell us if you have some news which are worth a few more pennies.

NEW DELHI - Accusing oil companies of committing a Satyam Computers-like financial fraud, striking truckers Thursday demanded 'thorough audit' of the oil firms and asked the government to issue a white paper on the matter.

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Cuil is a search engine website (pronounced as Cool) developed by a team of ex-Googlers and other top notch people from institutions like Altavista and IBM. Cuil, termed as the 'Google Killer' was launched on 28th July, 2008 and claims to be world’s largest search engine, indexing three times as many pages as Google and ten times that of Microsoft's. I have been following Cuil right from its birth and it surely has come a long way in case of accuracy and proper indexing of search results. So let us take a look at Cuil and decide if it can really be an alternative to Google.

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Nearly one in 10 people in UK believe they have fallen victim to identity fraud, according to a survey of 2,200 adults by YouGov.

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Dr. Stallman in his article Free but shackled - Java Trap expresses his concern that Java developers may be unknowingly falling into an expensive trap. In his own words:

If you develop a Java program on Sun's Java platform, you are liable to use Sun-only features without even noticing. By the time you find this out, you may have been using them for months, and redoing the work could take more months. You might say, "It's too much work to start over." Then your program will have fallen into the Java Trap; it will be unusable in the Free World.

This is baloney, plain and simple. The statements are wrong on multiple counts.

Richard Stallman> If you develop a Java program on Sun's Java platform, you are liable to use Sun-only features without even noticing.

Sun-only features are clearly marked and are strongly discouraged to use by Sun. In case you didn't notice they are also in packages under com.sun.* or sun.* or sunw.* (package name starts with com.sun. or sun. or sunw.). Even extensions to Java, which are not part of the core is identified by placing them under javax hierarchy.
The sun.* packages are not even in the source zip file (src.zip).

Moreover Sun packages are not even documented in the API documentation, making them harder to find, let alone use. In fact they aren't documented anywhere. To use them you have to actually open the source code in src.zip, where available, and in most cases decompile the class files from rt.jar! And then make sense of them.

There is no way a developer can mistake them for standard Java software/classes. If he is using them then he is making a conscious decision.
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