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Microsoft shocked the global technology industry yesterday with the revelation that it tried last year to buy SAP, the German software giant. Though SAP said the talks had been abandoned this spring, the pursuit of such a big merger represents a radical departure for Microsoft and could herald a new phase of consolidation in the fast-maturing technology business.SAP, with a current stock market value of $51bn (£27.7bn), is the world's third biggest independent software company, after Microsoft and Oracle. A deal with Microsoft would have threatened the balance of power in the market for selling technology to large companies and...

Innovative software offers clues to age-old puzzle BY K. OANH HA Knight Ridder Newspapers SAN JOSE, Calif. - (KRT) - It's the world's oldest and largest jigsaw puzzle - an ancient map of Rome in 1,200 fragments of marble. Archaeologists for centuries have tried to painstakingly piece together the sculpture, fragment by fragment. Now, computer wizards at Stanford University say they have created a software program that holds the key to the puzzle and the ancient city. At the heart of the program are three-dimensional scans of the fragments and algorithms to find possible matches. Already the work has produced...

A professor at Tokyo University in Japan has been arrested and charged with copyright offences after developing a computer program that promises to let users share files with anonymity. Isamu Kaneko, a 33-year-old academic, wrote a file-sharing program called "Winny". This promises users the ability to share audio and video files through a network built on top of ordinary internet traffic, but without revealing network address of their computer to other users. Kaneko was arrested on suspicion of offering copyrighted material for download through the program himself. In Japan, violating copyright law can be punished with a maximum sentence of...

I recently signed up for a seminar to learn how to use a newly developed investment analysis tool. The tool is a database search software that allows for very comprehensive and fast fundamental and technical analysis database searches on practically every stock and mutual fund traded in the US. There are dozens of pre-packaged searches, or you can develop your own. It's much better and far more comprehensive than anything I've seen that is available for free. Here's the catch: The course is $1000 and the software is $50/month. You can't get the software without attending the course. So my...

Delta Air Lines says all of its flights have been grounded by a computer glitch.A company spokeswoman says, 'Right now, there are no flights going out.'She adds, 'We are working as fast as we can to get our passengers back in the air.' The spokeswoman did not say how many flights were being held at the gates or what time the computer glitch occurred.She did say that 'this is not a security issue.'Atlanta based Delta is the nations third largest carrier.

CHICAGO — Days after an embedded-industry CEO stirred up a firestorm by charging that Linux poses a threat to U.S. security, two prominent computing-security experts said last week that some developers are already inappropriately using Linux in critical security applications where it isn't suitable. Purdue University professor Eugene Spafford and Cynthia Irvine of the Naval Postgraduate School warned that the highest-level, but little-understood, security concerns are sometimes ignored during the development of control systems for tanks, bombs, missiles and defense aircraft. Linux, Windows and Solaris operating systems should not be used in such applications, Spafford said. "An awful lot of...

<p>Check this out: Yesterday Europe's antitrust czar, Mario Monti, ordered Microsoft to offer a version of its Windows operating system without the currently included Windows Media Player, which allows computers to play music, movies and the like. Oh, the commission also fined Microsoft $612 million for "bundling" Media Player into Windows. But that's not the weird part.</p>

Despite urging from competitors and open source advocates, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., will not open the source to its Java programming language anytime soon, said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during a news conference at the 2004 FOSE conference. “We’re trying to understand what problem does it solve that is not already solved,” McNealy said. Last month Eric Raymond, noted open source programmer and president of the Open Source Initiative advocacy group, posted an open letter to McNealy calling for Sun to make Java open source. “Sun’s insistence on continuing tight control of the Java code has damaged...

Outsourcing: A New Occupational Hazard Paul Craig Roberts Wednesday, Mar. 10, 2004 Who does Bill Gates think he is fooling? Microsoft's chairman spent the last week of February on the college stump trying to talk up computer engineering. But nothing he can say can overcome the fact that students have been reading announcements from every American high-tech company, including Microsoft itself, about thousands of engineering and research jobs being moved to Asia. On Feb. 16, The Associated Press reported that Siemens announced that the firm will move most of the 15,000 software programming jobs from its offices in the...

Microsoft, eBay hook up software and auction data Companies EBAY MSFT Topics Online United States Advertising SEATTLE, March 1 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people) and eBay Inc. said on Monday that they would link software and Web data to make it easier for auction sellers to manage their virtual storefronts on eBay's online auction Web site. The effort between the world's largest software maker and online auctioneer will allow parts of Microsoft Office software to exchange real-time data with eBay's vast Web site, which allows buyers to bid on items posted by other sellers. Ebay...

An Open Letter from the USENIX Association Regarding SCO's Position on Open Source Software The SCO Group, Inc. (SCO), has recently sued IBM and Novell and launched broad attacks on the legality of and the economic justification for so-called open source licensing, including the free licensing of Linux (see SCO's open letter to Congress). As an organization dedicated to advancing the skills and contributions of computer researchers and developers, the USENIX Association is compelled to address and refute the position SCO has taken regarding open source software. USENIX is sending this letter (PDF) to Congress. SCO letter link http://www.osaia.org/letters/sco_hill.pdf Usenix...

<p>Half a world away, in the western Indian city of Nagpur, a 19-year-old named Deepa Paranjpe was having an argument with her father. Sure, computer science was heating up, he told her. Western companies were frantically hiring Indians to scour millions of software programs and eradicate the much-feared millennium bug. But this craze would pass. The former railroad employee urged his daughter to pursue traditional engineering, a much safer course. Deepa had always respected her father's opinions. When he demanded perfection at school, she delivered nothing less. But she turned a deaf ear to his career advice and plunged into software. After all, this was the industry poised to change the world.</p>

The FBI says it will give the movie, music, and software industries a digital anti-piracy seal, an analog to the FBI's warning displayed at the beginning of videotapes. Joined by execs from the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Software and Information Industry Association, and the Entertainment Software Association, FBI officials said during a Thursday press conference that the seal not only will deter individuals engaging in piracy, but that it would aid in the prosecution of piracy rings by ensuring a particular work's status as copyright-protected could not be disputed. How the seal...

... Despite the above, the quality of the code is generally excellent. Modules are small, and procedures generally fit on a single screen. The commenting is very detailed about intentions, but doesn't fall into "add one to i" redundancy. There is some variety in the commenting style. Sometimes blocks use a // at every line, sometimes the /* */ style. In some modules functions have a history, some do not. Some functions describe their variables in a comment block, some don't. Microsoft appears not to have fallen into the trap of enforcing over-rigid standards or universal use of over-complicated automatic...

Simonyi's notion of pushing programming upstream is a PowerPoint-like design tool that allows stakeholders to describe an application in their own terms and then hand it off to the programmers to write a "generator" to produce the machine-readable code. His company will develop tools, taking advantage of recent innovations in aspect-oriented development, design patterns, model-integrated computing and other programming methods. In our interview, Simonyi explains some of the concepts behind intentional software development and how it will pave the way for more adaptable, reliable programs.

A previously-unknown software flaw in a widely-deployed General Electric energy management system contributed to the devastating scope of the August 14th northeastern U.S. blackout, industry officials revealed this week. The bug in GE Energy's XA/21 system was discovered in an intensive code audit conducted by GE and a contractor in the weeks following the blackout, according to FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility where investigators say the blackout began. "It had never evidenced itself until that day," said spokesman Ralph DiNicola. "This fault was so deeply embedded, it took them weeks of pouring through millions of lines of code and data...

Some antispyware companies are using deceptive practices and "hijacked" Web browsers to scare Net consumers into buying their products, a leading Internet public interest group told federal regulators on Wednesday. In a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) said software developer Mail Wiper and its marketing affiliate Seismic Entertainment Productions have misled consumers in promotions for antispyware software. The Washington, D.C.-based privacy rights group asked regulators to launch an investigation of Mail Wiper, which produces a product called "Spy Wiper," and Seismic. It wants them to block the companies from using deceptive...

Title: "US Firms That Outsource are Traitors: Kerry" Outsourcing of hi-tech jobs to India, China, Russia, the Philippines, and elsewhere has become an issue which is being debated in the Democratic primaries and in the US Congress, with current Democratic frontrunner in the presidential race, Senator John Kerry, calling companies which outsource 'Benedict Arnolds.' The name refers to an American 'traitor' who defected from the ranks of American revolutionaires to join the British colonists. Kerry was quoted by Contra Costa Times on the West Coast as denouncing the Bush Administration for 'rewarding Benedict Arnold CEOs who move profits and...

A proud US father and self-confessed engineering "geek" has named his son after a computer software term. Jon Blake Cusack, from Holland, Michigan, told local newspapers the US practice of adding "Junior" or "II" after a boy's name was too common. So, when his son was born last week, he decided on the name Jon Blake Cusack 2.0, as if he were a software upgrade. Mr Cusack admitted that it took months to persuade his wife, Jamie, to accept the idea. 'Cool' Mrs Cusack said she asked several friends if they approved of the name. All the men, she...

COMMENTARY--On a rocky plateau 300 million miles from here, The Mars Exploration Rover A--known to its friends and PR operatives as Spirit--sits quietly, conserving its strength after a near-fatal computer breakdown. As it was not named the Mars Static Nervous Wreck A, you may assume that things are not going exactly to plan. Much closer to home, gaggles of geeks sit with furrowed brows as they work out exactly why the machine went mad just a third of the way through its mission, when everything was looking spotless. Instead of preparing to drill into a large and tempting rock, the...