Sun Microsystems is targeting Borland Software’s corporate developers in its campaign to encourage JBuilder users to migrate applications to NetBeans.

Sun is offering a special NetBeans migration workshop for JBuilder users that companies can make available to teams of developers, along with up to 60 days of free programming advice from its Sun developer expert assistance program.

Source: The Register

Fair Use advocates, take notice. Circuit City is apparently putting its neck on the line to provide customers with DVD transfer services. The company is offering a “DVD video transfer service” that for all intents and purposes is illegal. The company will take commercial DVDs and rip them for use on portable devices for $10 for 1 DVD, $20 for 3 DVDs or $30 for 5 DVDs. That is, until their legal department hears what’s happening.

Source: arstechnica

Andrew Morton has started working for a new company, but his day job as the Linux 2.6 kernel maintainer will remain exactly the same.

The new company is none other than Google, the Mountain View, CA-based company that has favored Linux in its operations and lately in its software development plans. Morton started his employment on Monday, shifting into a new environment to do pretty much the same work he has been doing.

Source: Linux Today

Sun Microsystems notified hundreds of employees Thursday that they’ll be losing their jobs, a second phase in a plan to cut 4,000 to 5,000 workers.

About 950 employees were notified in the United States, and approximately the same number elsewhere in the world, Sun spokeswoman Stephanie Hess said. The cuts spanned a range of Sun operations, she said.

The first wave of cuts took place in June, and the overall layoff will be finished by the end of June 2007, the end of Sun’s first full fiscal year with new Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz at the helm.

Source: ZDNet

After what it calls a successful test under its belt, ABC is poised to relaunch its streaming video service in the fall with a tweaked broadband player and more shows available online for a shorter period of time per episode.

The service will feature several more shows than the initial four, though ABC executives declined to discuss it until all the details were settled. Two of the shows in this year’s test, “Alias” and “Commander in Chief,” have been canceled. “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” could be joined by some of the network’s new dramas and perhaps at least one half-hour comedy.

The player created by the Disney Internet Group will get a minor change here and there since the test in May and June. There will be slightly longer commercial inventory but Albert Cheng, executive vp digital media for Disney-ABC Television Group, said it wouldn’t hamper the “great consumer experience” that the service was.

Source: Yahoo

AMD rolled out their Personal Internet Computing (PIC) device to two new countries this week: Uganda on Friday and Mexico last Monday. Both countries are part of AMD’s 50X15 Initiative, which is their effort to bring Internet access to 50 percent of the world’s population by 2015.

Friday’s announcement is a demonstration deployment so no revenue is involved, although AMD expects that the project will evolve into a revenue stream over time. Ultimately, NEPAD will be responsible for completing the project in Uganda and aims to expand it to 16 additional African countries. The organization’s goal is to connect 600,000 schools with 31 million PIC devices.

The PIC is essentially a PC without a monitor. It is based on a modified version of Windows CE and is a closed system so it is virus and spyware-resistant. It comes preloaded with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation viewer, e-mail, media player, and instant-messaging software. It is also made to withstand extreme conditions such as temperature and dust.

AMD is not providing monitors as part of the PIC packages.

Source: Yahoo

A Chinese journalism professor has won a lawsuit against a blog hosting site that refused to remove remarks criticizing him by one of its users, state media said Friday.

It was believed to be the first time that a person in China has sued a blog host for defamation. Winning shows “personal dignity outweighs freedom of speech,” the professor, Chen Tangfa, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The site, Blogcn.com, was ordered to pay Chen 1,000 yuan ($126) in damages and post a formal apology on its home page in a ruling handed down Wednesday by a court in the eastern city of Nanjing, Xinhua said.

Source: AP

Microsoft Windows Live Spaces users are up in arms over poor performance, HTML rendering problems and other difficulties they have encountered since Microsoft rolled out the latest iteration of the platform on August 1.

Microsoft’s August 1 launch of its Windows Live Spaces blogging/social-networking platform has not been a smooth one.

Customers of Microsoft’s successor to MSN Spaces are reporting a variety of performance, publishing, rendering and browser-compatibility issues since Microsoft rolled out the final version of Windows Live Spaces on August 1.

Windows Live Spaces Program Manager Greg Phipps acknowledged on the Space Craft Live Spaces blog that the Spaces team “disappointed a bunch of you with the issues we had in our rollout last night.”

Source: microsoft-watch

AJAX technology is rapidly being adopted by online businesses to help boost the interactivity of their Web sites, but a long list of potential vulnerabilities introduced by inexperienced programmers could create a troubling security landscape for Web 2.0 technologies.

Speaking at the ongoing Black Hat security conference being held here July 31 - Aug. 3, Billy Hoffman, lead research engineer in the labs division of Atlanta-based security software maker SPI Dynamics, outlined a range of shortcomings he sees in the current development process for most common AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications.

Source: eWeek