Microsoft promises its Windows 7 operating system will be an improvement on the much-maligned Windows Vista.

Microsoft has unveiled the latest version of its Windows operating system.

It promised that it will deliver a better experience for users when it arrives sometime late next year.

Windows 7 follows Vista, which Microsoft claims has been a success, but which has been subject to fierce criticism from a number of users.

The system was demonstrated at the company’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Senior vice-president Steven Sinofsky described it as an “exciting new version of Windows” and claimed it would deliver a more personalised experience.

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When Vista launched in January 2007, many users complained that it ran slowly and failed to work at all with some programs and devices.

Corporate customers have been slow to switch from Windows XP to Vista, although Microsoft said that the operating system had an unfair press, and has enjoyed record sales.

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When I joined the Gmail for mobile team a year ago, the mobile client worked like a web application designed for networks that were always available. This was fine on a fast and reliable network, but when you hopped on the subway, network reliability could be a big problem.

Today, we’re happy to announce Gmail for mobile 2.0 for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. For this version, we changed our fundamental assumption about the network. We re-thought every action that you might perform with the app and tried to solve for the case where there is no signal. We wanted to make the mobile client faster and more reliable and added some other new features along the way.

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Mozilla has asked internet users everywhere to get involved designing the next generation of browsers. So far it has three ideas on the table: a next generation browser dubbed Aurora, better ways to visualise bookmarks and browsing history and a new mobile version of Firefox. It has posted videos showing early versions of the Aurora browser, designed by Adaptive Path.

“Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web,” said the organization.

“You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate.”

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Apple Inc. Senior Vice President Eddy Cue is now in charge of the computer maker’s newly-overhauled “MobileMe” iPhone service, which had a rocky debut. Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in a recent memo to employees that the four- week-old feature was launched too early and was “not up to Apple’s standards.”

Apple has already apologized to those who signed on and gave customers a free month of service. Now it appears the problems have led to a shakeup among those in charge. An Apple spokesman had no comment, and it wasn’t clear who Cue is replacing. Apple Senior Vice President Rob Schoeben had been in charge of the MobileMe launch. He reports to Apple’s Senior Vice President for Applications Sina Tamaddon.

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Chinese consulting firm BDA also says that China has the world’s largest number of mobile phone users, with about 560 million subscribers. More people connect to the Internet in China than in any other country in the world, a Chinese consulting and research firm announced.

BDA reported Thursday that China surpassed the United States to rank first among nations for its number of Internet users. The firm said that the China Internet Network Information Center counted 210 million Internet users in China at the end of 2007.

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Is having calendar information online, on the desktop, and on a mobile phone too much to ask? Google apparently doesn’t think so anymore, as the company has quietly enabled sync for Google Calendar, complete with instructions on how to plug into Apple’s iCal.

Thanks to the flexible wonders of WebDAV, or more specifically, CalDAV, Leopard users can now plug their Google Calendar account (including those run on Google Apps) into iCal via this simple set of instructions straight from the Big G’s Help Center. Setup involves plugging a few settings into iCal’s Accounts preference pane, after which the initial sync should happen in a matter of minutes. After that, any changes made on either end should sync almost instantly, though this ubiquitous calendaring doesn’t come without some drawbacks.

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The leader of a youth movement that swept the world this past year by encouraging Web users to share bits of their lives with selected friends spoke on Wednesday of spreading his service across the Web, even while apologizing for past excesses.

Mark Zuckerberg, 24, told an audience of 1,000 industry executives, software makers, media — and his mother and father — at Facebook’s annual conference of how the company’s features will run on affiliated sites outside its own.
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At Facebook’s f8 developer conference, the company announced some initiatives to improve the quality of applications on its site, but it may have disappointed developers by making no significant new additions to the platform. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Wednesday’s event by acknowledging that Facebook has made mistakes in the year since it threw its site wide-open to third-party developers.”We haven’t done enough to reward the good applications or punish the applications that have just been abusive,” he told a crowded hall of developers in San Francisco’s South of Market district. “We’re going to have to find a way to ensure the applications that provide the most long-term value are the ones that are succeeding.”

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A little more than a week after the release of Apple’s iPhone 3G, an unofficial development team has announced the release of software that “jailbreaks” the new device, allowing unauthorized third-party applications to be loaded.

In a post titled “Thanks for waiting,” the iPhone Dev Team announced the release of Pwnage 2.0, which also allows unauthorized third-party applications to be loaded on older iPhones and iPod Touchs running the iPhone 2.0 operating system. In hacker jargon, to “pwn” means “to compromise” or “to control.” continue

Will implement selected manufacturing solution projects as part of Wonderware-managed, solutions delivery teams.

Geometric Limited has partnered with the Wonderware business unit of Invensys, a supplier of industrial automation and information software solutions. Through this agreement, Geometric will work with Wonderware as both an endorsed systems integrator and as an endorsed industry solutions provider.
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The LinuxWorld conference programme will feature over 100 top-tier, educational sessions covering seven tracks that go deep into Linux and open source industry trends.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.

The technology breakthrough was accomplished by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the IBM Corp. on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.

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