Sales of Windows-based servers has pulled even with those of Unix-based boxes for the first time ever, according to first quarter 2005 sales figures from researcher IDC.

In an overall up server market, IDC counted $4.2bn worth of Microsoft Windows server sales on the back of 12 percent growth. Total Unix sales also hit $4.2bn in the period, IDC said, on 3 per cent revenue growth. Those totals left Microsoft and Unix systems holding 35 per cent of the server market each.

Dialcom’s Spontania video plug-in is designed to be integrated with any 3rd party Internet-based communication solution.

Dialcom selected Skype, the leading VoIP solution, as the first integration candidate.

Spontania video4skype is Firewall, NAT and proxy friendly it has End-to-end encryption and supports Full-screen mode.

Borland has announced their technical roadmap for JBuilder. Later this year Borland will ship JBuilder 2006 which will add shared code and shared debugging features. In the first half of 2006, JBuilder will ship a new version, code-named “Peloton”, which will be completely Eclipse-based and add better dependency analysis features.

The shared code and debugging will allow developers in different locations to participate in shared coding and debugging, as though they were sitting down together in the same room.

Source: The Server Side

Google gave journalists a glimpse of its next generation machine translation system at a May 19th Google Factory Tour. “Google Blogoscoped” offers an excellent overview of the presentation. The system has been trained using the United Nations Documents as a corpus. This corpus is some 20 billion words worth of content. It uses existing source and target language translations (done by human translators at the U.N.) to find patterns it then uses to build rules for translating between those languages. Apparently it was successful where the current version had failed in translating certain phrases.

Source: Slashdot

Intel today formally committed itself to bringing its EM64T 64-bit processing extensions down into the Celeron D line of low-cost desktop chips.

At the top of the list is the all-new 351, clocked at 3.2GHz, while the 326, 331, 336, 341 and 346, clocked at 2.53, 2.66, 2.80, 2.93 and 3.06GHz, respectively, supersede the current LGA775 Celeron D line-up, with a ‘1′ added to the model number to indicate the effect on EM64T. Intel is expected to ship a 3.33GHz Celeron D 355 next quarter.

Source: The Register

Advanced Micro Devices plans to release its dual-core desktop chips in Taiwan on Tuesday, and manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Lenovo Group will discuss how they will use them in their product lines.

At the Computex trade show, AMD plans to launch four dual-core Athlon 64 X2 processors–the 4800+, the 4600+, the 4400+ and the 4200+. Dual-core chips, which contain two separate processing cores, can run more than one application at once, or run many single applications much faster.

Source: News.com

Doctors who fail the American Board of Surgery written exam are no longer allowed to review their tests privately after one man wrote down the answers to dozens of questions and offered them for sale on the Internet.

The board found out last summer that 86 questions used on its 290-question multiple-choice exam were listed on eBay.

Board officials said it took just a few anonymous e-mail exchanges with the auctioneer to reach the doctor who had obtained the questions.

Source: AP

The uneven skills of driver programmers have left a legion of holes in software that ships with Windows and Linux, security experts say.

Operating system vendors and hardware makers should commit more resources toward systematically auditing Windows and Linux device-driver code for flaws, security researchers say.

While buffer overflows, a type of memory flaw that can lead to serious vulnerabilities, are quickly being eradicated in critical applications, the flaws are still easily found in device drivers, said David Maynor, a research engineer for Internet Security Systems’ X-Force vulnerability analysis group.

Source: Security Focus

Since Windows 95 Microsoft helps you restore deleted files by moving them to the Recycle Bin. You can access these file easily from the graphic environment, but you can also access the Recycle Bin from the Command Prompt.

In order to do that follow these steps:

• Go to Start->Run
• Type Cmd and press ENTER
• Change your drive to the appropriate one (C:, D: etc.)
• The Recycle Bin is a hidden directory but you can still go in there by typing CD\Recycle
• Also all the files in there are hidden, thus we need to change their attribute, so we can see them with the DIR command. In order to do that type ATTRIB -S -H –R *.*
• Now all the files in the Recycle Bin are available to you. Type DIR to view them

Yahoo showcased a new search technology on Yahoo Next, an experimental site devoted to the latest services from the company’s research and development lab, but which aren’t ready for prime time, similar to Google Labs.

Mindset is a new twist on search that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice: View Yahoo! Search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).

Sometimes you want to buy stuff and sometimes you just want to do research. In a typical search page, results point to commercial pages that are mixed together with non-commercial pages, so it’s harder to find the type of information you’re looking for. Mindset is Yahoo’s attempt to help solve that problem.

Through the use of machine learning for text classification, Mindset try to classify each web page in the top 100 search results for a query. Then it sorts those results according to the preference you set. Mindset uses an intuitive slider in the interface, so you can set the bias for commercial vs. non-commercial results. Often, we come across a web page that hasn’t been classified yet. In those cases, Mindset tries to classify that web page in the background, so it’ll be classified along with the rest of the results next time you do the same query.

IBM demonstrated a blade server board based on the Cell architecture at the E3 show this week, and reportedly plans to sell the boards in rack-based server systems.

The board carried two Cell processors running at up to 2.8Ghz, as well as 1GB of DRAM split across two chips, according to Nikkei’s TechOn service. The demo box ran on Linux.

The massively parallel architecture has been jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, and so far they seem to be pitching it at every market that comes to mind, from consoles, to PDAs, mainstream computers, and digital home appliances.

Source: The Register

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Broadband over Power Lines in the Real World: Early Commercialization in Manassas, Virginia to their offering.

Broadband over power lines (BPL) promises faster, cheaper, and more accessible Internet service via the local electric utility system. To shed light on how BPL is faring in its early stages, we took a close look at Manassas, Virginia, where the municipal utility was the first in the nation to advance BPL from a pilot program to a commercial offering.

Manassas missed its goal of having the entire city — 12,500 homes and 2,500 businesses — wired for BPL by mid-2004. Even so, without any advertising, BPL has attracted substantial interest: There are a few hundred users on the system and a backlog of 1,300 requests for service.

Early adopters in Manassas say the system is easy to set up, reliable, and fast. Some customers are being won over from competing broadband Internet options, all of which carry higher prices. Download speeds are comparable to digital subscriber line (DSL) service, although not as fast as the peak speeds achieved over cable modem.

BPL received a green light in an October 2004 technical ruling from the Federal Communications Commission. Nevertheless, substantial challenges may impede BPL from achieving its full potential. Amateur radio operators are fighting BPL deployments over the issue of interference. System economics are still uncertain, especially in rural areas that are often seen as the biggest natural market for BPL. And utilities that were burned in the last big wave of telecom investments are moving slowly and cautiously.