Microsoft on Wednesday extended support for its Windows XP Home and Windows XP Media Center operating systems through 2014 to match policies already in place for the business-oriented Windows XP Professional.

The addition of a five-year “extended support�? phase to Windows XP will take effect in May 2009. In Microsoft parlance, extended support is the period when all support is fee-based and non-security hotfixes are produced only for corporate customers. Until April of 2009, Windows XP Home and Media Center will remain in what is called “mainstream support,�? which offers some no-charge support and free updates that don’t deal with security issues.

Source: Lifehack

Borland’s wholly-owned spinoff CodeGear is releasing Delphi for PHP, claimed to be the first RAD visual PHP development environment. PHP 5.0 is required. The product is jointly developed by CodeGear and qadram software and is essentially the first production version of qadram’s qstudio, which never made it past pre-beta.

The IDE is a Delphi lookalike, built with Delphi but distinct from CodeGear’s BDS (Borland Developer Studio). The main point of interest is the component library called VCL (Visual Component Library) for PHP, formerly called WCL (Web Component Library), which is a set of PHP components modelled after Dephi’s VCL, supporting drag-and-drop form editing and customization with a property editor. Existing PHP libraries can easily be wrapped as new VCL for PHP components. You can create event handlers by double-clicking an event name in the property editor, just as you can in Delphi for Windows or Microsoft’s Visual Studio.

Source: Reg Developer

A federal court has ruled that search engines have a First Amendment right to reject ads as part of their protected right to speak or not speak. The U.S. District Court in Delaware has effectively shut down a lawsuit filed by Christopher Langdon, who had attempted unsuccessfully to sell ads on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s search Web sites.

Source: News.com

SanDisk is set to launch later this year what it calls “the new digital film” - a write-once medium it hopes will replace all the memory cards its been persuading us to buy for our digital cameras for last five years or so. The new product may use holographic memory.

Source: Reg Hardware

Google Inc. has enhanced the way it notifies webmasters that their sites contain malware, improving on a service the Mountain View, California, company launched in November of last year in a partnership with The Stop Badware Coalition .

Google has begun providing more detailed alerts and to send these notifications via e-mail to webmasters, according to a posting Monday on an official Google blog.

Previously, Google only informed webmasters that their sites had been identified as having malware and made generic suggestions for fixing the problem. Now, the company also points webmasters to specific offending pages from their sites that Google has determined contain malicious components.

Source: Yahoo

The Valentine’s Day breakup of two North Carolina college students that featured singers, hundreds of spectators and a profanity-laced tirade was a hoax after all.

Ryan Burke confessed Monday that the confrontation, which became an instant hit on YouTube.com, was all a stunt to show the power of Internet communities and the amount of money that companies make from them. The pair weren’t even dating.

The fake breakup garnered plenty of attention, including more than 747,000 hits on YouTube, where users post video online, and local and national media coverage.

Source: AP

Internet giant Google plans to open its first Southeast Asia research and development centre in Singapore.

The company chose Singapore because of its “very vibrant” info-communications and technology environment, Tuesday’s edition of ‘The Straits Times’ quoted Richard Kimber, Google’s Southeast Asia managing director of sales and operations, as saying.

Source: Yahoo

In a reversal of the trend of distributing branded TV programming to the Internet, Comedy Central is bringing original Web programming to late-night television viewers, the cable network said Monday.

Dubbed “Web Shows,” the half-hour weekly series, which will air at 2 a.m. ET/PT and premiere Monday, will include a mix of animation, live-action narrative and comedy programming from Comedy Central’s Web site, Motherload. The network has ordered six episodes.

The programming block will also feature the AtomFilms webisode “The Punk Group: Fat Girls on Bicycles,” marking the first collaboration between the network and the short-film Web destination that its MTV Networks parent acquired in August.

Source: Reuters

Ning, the latest startup of Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, is looking to get a jump ahead of MySpace and Facebook by giving consumers free tools to create and operate specialized online social networks of their own.

The two-year-old Silicon Valley-based company said the new service, to be introduced on Tuesday, allows casual Web users to create, within a matter of minutes, a highly customized social network for one’s friends, family or acquaintances.

Social networks have caught fire in recent years among active Web users who use them to connect to people with shared interests. Popular sites range from hangouts for teenagers and their friends to video game fans or business professionals.

Sites like MySpace offer Web users individual profile pages they can use to connect to friends, but typically keep control of the underlying network, including advertising sales.

By contrast, users within each Ning network can select the latest Web features for watching videos online, creating a photo slideshow, listening to music or publishing a blog. Members have far greater flexibility over the look of their personal profile pages, buddy lists and site color schemes.

Source: Reuters