The Site Weavers

After two years of waiting, Gmail's plug-in for voice and video chat is finally available for Linux users. "Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon," says Tristan Schmelcher, from Google.

Justin Uberti says that adding Linux support was really difficult. "This release required significant engineering to develop an all-new video rendering solution and an all-new PulseAudio-based audio handler, along with work to support 64-bit and countless webcam compatibility tests. We spent a lot of effort to make it fully feature-complete, with all the same goodies as the Windows and Mac versions, and we're happy to now support Google voice and video now on all major desktop platforms."

Now that video chat is available on Windows, Mac and Linux, when will it be ported to Android?

Source...

If proprietary companies like Oracle can buy up open source projects and then take back their open source status, how can an enterprise depend on open source software?
It is with the aim of creating this kind of FUD that Oracle has made its moves against Java and OpenSolaris. Most analysts now expect similar moves against mySQL and OpenOffice.
(To the right, a proprietary Dana, not the open source one. All will be explained.)
Why would Oracle destroy assets it just paid good money for?
Two reasons.

1. It didn’t really pay good money for them.
2. It pushes enterprise buyers away from all open source.

Oracle paid $7.4 billion for Sun. Even with recent drop-offs in revenue (which can be made up) the company should easily clear $2.5 billion in hardware sales this year. If you can buy a viable computer hardware business for three times sales you’re doing pretty well. Oracle got the software assets for free.

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By now, I’m sure you’ll be aware that there’s a New York man named Paul Ceglia who claims he owns most of Facebook, which would turn him into an instant multi-billionaire if we were living in his Utopia and not planet Earth.
The wood-pellet entrepreneur filed suit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last June, claiming 84% ownership of Facebook as well as additional monetary damages based on a web development project contract signed back in April 2003. The company calls the lawsuit ‘frivolous’ and without any merit whatsoever, so that story is to be continued in court.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg tracked down Ceglia for a fascinating face-to-face interview.

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And thats how to live life

Microsoft got some bad news this week when it found out that Yahoo Japan, unlike its U.S. parent company, will be partnering with Google, rather than Microsoft's search engine, Bing. The decision means that most of the Internet searches originating in Japan will use Google's search engine rather than Bing. Yahoo Japan is currently the leading search engine in Japan and handles over half of search activity.

Yahoo Japan CEO Masahiro Inoue said in a press conference that, "At the present time, we feel there are quite a few areas where Microsoft is not yet ready. Google is one step ahead in Japanese-language services."

In 2008, Yahoo proposed a partnership in the U.S. with Google, but dropped that effort after the Justice Department said it would block such a partnership due to antitrust concerns. Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith declared that the move would be even more anticompetitive than the U.S. partnership, saying that "Google will end up controlling all personal search information for all Japanese consumers and businesses."

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SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 27, 2010 – Intel Corporation today announced an important advance in the quest to use light beams to replace the use of electrons to carry data in and around computers. The company has developed a research prototype representing the world's first silicon-based optical data connection with integrated lasers. The link can move data over longer distances and many times faster than today's copper technology; up to 50 gigabits of data per second. This is the equivalent of an entire HD movie being transmitted each second.

Today computer components are connected to each other using copper cables or traces on circuit boards. Due to the signal degradation that comes with using metals such as copper to transmit data, these cables have a limited maximum length. This limits the design of computers, forcing processors, memory and other components to be placed just inches from each other. Today's research achievement is another step toward replacing these connections with extremely thin and light optical fibers that can transfer much more data over far longer distances, radically changing the way computers of the future are designed and altering the way the datacenter of tomorrow is architected.

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Ron Bowes has been accused of hacking Facebook. But when he put the information for over a 100 million Facebook users into a 2.8 GB torrent stream on his website Skullsecurity.org, he didn't need to hack anything to get it - it was already publicly available on Facebook. All he did, he points out, was "compile public information into a nice format for statistical analysis."

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