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Member states of the European space agency (Esa) have agreed a 10bn-euro budget at their meeting in The Hague.

The figure, which covers the next three to five years, represents a substantial increase in funding.

Ministers said the investment in space would help European industry pull through the current economic downturn.

The new money will help build new Earth observation satellites, maintain Esa’s participation in the space station, and fund probes to the planets.

“The decisions of this ministerial conference are very important just in the middle of an economic crisis,” said Peter Hintze, the minister who led the German delegation.

“Because money paid for high technology is good money for the European economy; and I think it will help us to leave the economic crisis [behind] and to gain new economic strength,” he told BBC News.

It took the science ministers from Esa’s 18 member states two days of intense discussions to arrive at the budget figure.

Agency officials had drawn up a “wish list” valued at 10.4bn euros and hoped to get at least 90% of that figure. It the end, their expectations were exceeded, with the meeting approving a budget line of 9.9bn - over a billion more than the commitments made the last time the ministers met in Berlin in 2005.

“I never expected that,” conceded Esa director general Jean-Jacques Dordain.

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In a surprise move, Microsoft has announced it will offer a free anti-virus and security solution from the second half of next year.

It will stop selling OneCare, its all-in-one security and PC management service, from the end of June 2009.

The new software, code-named Morro, will be a no-frills program suited to smaller and less powerful computers.

The software will be free to download and will support Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

The move comes as sales of the OneCare subscription service are flagging - reportedly because the anti-virus marketplace is already flooded with big-name players such as Symantec and McAfee.

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More supercomputers than ever are using Intel Corporation processors, according to the latest TOP500 list. The high performance computing (HPC) community is especially enthusiastic about quad-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors, which are driving the research and analytical capabilities of more than half the systems on the list.

The 32nd edition of the TOP500 list shows that 379 of the world’s top 500 systems, including the third-fastest system in the world, now have Intel inside. According to the list, Intel is powering 49 systems in the top 100.

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Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, is to stand down as the internet portal’s chief executive officer.

His departure follows lengthy criticism of his stewardship of the company, which has seen its share price collapse to about $10.

Earlier in the year he fought off a hostile takeover bid from Microsoft which offered $33 a share.

Mr Yang also told the workforce that he would be participating in the search for his successor.

“I will always do what is right for this great company,” Mr Yang wrote in an e-mail to employees.

The BBC was told that Mr Yang made the decision to leave as chief executive officer last month. No names were given as to who will succeed him.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, California, said it is interviewing candidates inside and outside Yahoo in a search led by chairman Roy Bostock.

“Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,” said Mr Bostock.

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Mobilink, that has announced the commercial launch of Mobilink Infinity, a wireless broadband and telephony service for residential and enterprise consumers based on the mobile WiMAX standard, estimates the service will attract 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year.

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Chips based on ARM designs power the majority of smart phones

Mobile phone chip designer Arm has announced an alliance with the makers of the Ubuntu open source software.

The deal will produce a version of the operating system for small net-browsing computers known as netbooks.

It marks a departure for Arm, which before now has been best known for designing the chips inside smartphones and feature phones.

The new operating system for Arm-powered machines looks set to be available in April 2009.

Battery power

Rob Coombs, director of mobile marketing at Arm, said he expected to see the first devices running the version of Ubuntu by the time of the Computex show in June.

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Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) has come up with yet another new flair to facilitate its customers and make them “feel the difference”. Fittingly, this new facility has come in the “Year of Customer Care” for PTCL. This state of the art solution comes in the form of PTCL Self Service Bill Payment Kiosks to be installed by Wavetec Pvt Ltd. Adel Rashid Soufah, Etisalat and Abdul Baseer Tahir, SEVP Business South while giving the details said these kiosks work in a manner very similar to that of ATMs but the basic difference is that while an ATM dispenses cash, these kiosks provide services and accept bill payments through cash and credit cards in a very user-friendly manner through an intuitive touch-screen interface. continue

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Warid Telecom (Pvt) Ltd. and Trafco Group renewed their agreement and signed another contract through which Trafco Group will utilise voice and data communication services of the GSM and Edge network of Warid Telecom.

Warid Telecom (Pvt) Ltd. is providing voice and communications services through its state of the art GSM and Edge network to Trafco since May 2006. Both Trafco and Warid have enjoyed and benefited from the partnership and has decided to strengthen the business relationship by extending the service contract for another year.

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A text conversation has revealed a big problem with the G1 mobile phone - powered by Google’s Android software.

The newly discovered bug causes the phone to restart when owners type in the word “reboot” soon after starting up the device.

Google hurried to repair the problem, which causes the phone to interpret any text entered just after the phone was turned on as a command.

Google has rushed out a fix for the bug which will soon be available in the UK.

The bug was discovered when an owner of the phone typed the word “reboot” into a text message after restarting the phone.

“I was in the middle of a text conversation with my girl when she asked why I hadn’t responded,” said a user called jdhorvat in the description of his discovery that was posted to Google’s problem reporting website.

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ZONG has launched a simple, smart and elegant USB GPRS/EDGE modem that is capable of catering to all consumers needs including mobile professionals, laptop computer users and frequent travellers due to its efficiency and affordability elements.

Zong, Internet USB card will facilitate fast Internet browsing, instant access and the uninterrupted ability both to upload and download data. Combining cutting edge technologies with sleek design, ZONG’s customers can look forward to enjoying high-speed wireless access, both at home and on the go.

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NASA says the Phoenix Lander

A dust storm and the onset of Martian winter have brought the Phoenix Mars Lander’s mission to an end, NASA announced Monday.

“We are actually ceasing operations, declaring an end to mission operations at this point,” project manager Barry Goldstein with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told reporters in a teleconference.

Mission controllers last heard from the vehicle on November 2.

Despite ongoing efforts to re-establish contact using NASA satellites in orbit around Mars, the spacecraft is silent.

“We’ll constantly turn on the radio and try to hailPhoenix to see if it is alive, but at this point nobody on the team has any expectations of that happening,” Goldstein said. “But we do hope the vehicle will surprise us once again.”

The Phoenix team knew when it selected a landing site on Mars’ arctic plain that the spacecraft would not survive a winter there. But researchers picked it anyway because satellite observations indicated vast quantities of frozen water were in that area, most likely in the form of permafrost.

They thought such a location would be a promising place to look for organic chemicals that would signal a habitable environment.

Phoenix landed on May 25 — mid-summer in the Martian year — and conducted five months of research, scooping up soil samples for analysis in onboard scientific instruments. The sun never sets on the arctic region during the summer, so the solar-powered craft had plenty of power for the first few months of its mission.

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