Ask.com using Google?

Ask.com is rumored to be switching to Google to power its search. This would be a little odd, as Google is one of Ask’s largest competitor (the other being yahoo). Ask currently uses Teoma to power its search’s which it bought in 2001. In the same move Ask would lay off 100 employees. This follows a 2007 100 million dollar ad campaign that helped Ask out a little, but not as much as they had hoped. Google already provides Ask with its ads and recently the struck a 5 year 3.5 billion dollar ad deal.

Wikileaks is back

A few weeks after the whistle blower site wikileaks was take down; a judge has allowed it to have its domain name back. Technically it was never really off the web; you just had to type in its IP address because its domain name had been shut down. The judge claimed that it was a first amendment right, and that a company couldn’t shut down the site just because it released embarrassing information about said company.

Vista getting cheaper

 

Windows vista is getting cheaper, a little cheaper anyway. You can now get ultimate for 320$ instead of 400$, the upgrade is 220$ instead off 260$. Home Premium went from 160$ to 130$.this is still WAY to expensive… but it’s going in the right direction. of course these box versions of vista account for less that 10% of all vista running computers. Since its launch it has sold 100 million copies.

Wiii kicks PS3’s ***… again

In the moth of February the Wii outsold the PS3 four to one. In Japan. There were 331627 Wii’s sold and only 89131 PS3’s sold. Still the xbox only sold 14079.

open source people make a lot more money

 

According to Bluewolf Consulting many companies use opensource software on internal computers. And how much do these open source programmers make? apparently a 30 to 40 percent premium over others. Non-opensource programmers make between 112500 and 80250. Which is a 7.6 increase from last year. Open source people make 30-40% more.

Dell takes on EEE pc

Dell is currently the second largest computer maker in the world. To help themselves they are introducing a new line of low end low cost computer into the Asian markets. This from a senior dell exec. They are apparently designed to compete with the ASUS EEE pc and the OLPC. The first of these will be like the Vostro 1000 which is 561$ in china. It has  2GHZ AMD mobile processor, it also runs Linux. Hp is also expected to introduce its own low end computers.

Google helps out the little people

Last year Google bought a company called Grand Central. Grand Central’s goal was to provide the homeless of California with phone numbers and voicemail accounts. Grand central was started in 2005 and bought by Google in 2007. In the 1990’s AT&T tried a similar program that did not really get off the ground. Roughly 40% of the homeless in the US are children, this means that there teachers of doctors have no way of contacting them if they need to. Or the children have no way of contacting their parents if they need to.

Apple’s #10

Even though the iPhone has only been on the market 9 months, and is only available in four markets, (US, Germany, France, UK) Apple has become the world’s 10^th largest mobile phone maker. Apple has .6% of the world market, RIM has 1.2%, Motorola has 11.9%, Nokia has 40.4%, and Samsung has 13.4%. There are others like ZTE which I have never heard of and left out.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9065418&source=rss_news10

Pirates on campus? well then, no funding

A proposed law in Tennessee would make state funded universities responsible for tracking down and eliminating piracy on their networks. If they did not then they could loose their state funding. The MPAA and RIAA are behind these laws as one would expect. They claim that the University of Utah alone could save 1.2 million a year in bandwidth costs by cracking down on piracy. Of course no one knows how much it would cost to crack down.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/28/2323257

“brainstorm” Ubuntu site

Brainstorm has been launched. This site is based off of dells ideastorm. The site brainstorm allows people to submit their ideas for Ubuntu. The most popular are on the front page. You can log in and submit your own ideas. You can vote once per idea up or down.