As a clarification, Microsoft previously had a Google News competitor, named MSN Newsbot, which no longer exists.

As a part of its Rome release, Microsoft’s Live Search team has launched a new Live Search News, a direct competitor to Google News.

Packetized voice is now available on the Apple iPhone, thanks to the development efforts of Fring, which on Wednesday made a beta version of its app available as a free download for mobile devices.

Fring, which describes itself as a mobile Internet community, enables “Fringsters” to communicate with contacts from AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN, Skype, Twitter, and Yahoo lists. In addition to iPhone support, Fring also works with more than 500 mobile handsets, including Nokia Symbian Series 60 devices, Sony Ericsson UIQ Smartphones, and those that use Windows Mobile, the developer said in a statement.

Sometimes your Java application will need to execute an external process which you do not have any control over. Executing external applications from Java is problematic since you do not know when they end, you need to capture their output and parse it and also make sure that they will not hang and causes your program to wait for them forever.

There are several ways you can execute external applications while protecting your program. The following example will show you how to execute a process, get the response as a string and specify a timeout period in which the external application has to finish. In case the process did not finish after the timeout period we’ll abort the process and throw TimeoutException

(more…)

In their ever continuing battle to free the Internet, The Pirate Bay has now launched an uncensored blogging service, called Baywords. The service is intended to be a safe haven for bloggers who want to be able to write whatever they want, without being afraid to get shut down by their blog host.

The Pirate Bay is known for defending people’s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service.

Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, told TorrentFreak that the idea to start a blogging service came up when the weblog of one of his friends was taken down from Wordpress recently, for linking to copyrighted material.

This, of course, goes against the “uncensored web” philosophy of The Pirate Bay team, and they didn’t hesitate to start their own blogging service, Baywords, using Wordpress as their blogging engine.

Red Hat has no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market, but will continue to place its bets on a desktop for commercial markets.

“We are focused on infrastructure software for the enterprise market, and to that market we are offering the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop,” said Michael Chen, vice-president of corporate marketing at Red Hat.

“You need a different support ecosystem and applications for the consumer desktop,” Chen added.

Among the company’s desktop goals for 2008 and 2009 is to ensure that its desktop products complement its server and middleware products, Red Hat said in a company blog post Wednesday.

The first draft of Charles Darwin’s “On The Origin Of Species” is among a wealth of papers belonging to the intensely private man who changed science being published on the Internet on Thursday for the first time.

Comprising some 20,000 items and 90,000 images, the release on darwin-online.org.uk is the largest in history, according to the organizers from Cambridge University Library which holds all the Darwin papers.

“This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,” said John van Wyhe, director of the project.

“His publications have always been available in the public sphere - but these papers have until now only been accessible to scholars.”