US Dept. of Defense forges an open source path

disa seal

Ongoing efforts to modernize the Department of Defense's thinking about tech issues brought the Defense Information Services Agencies (DISA) to the cusp of launching forge.mil, DISA's own version of the SourceForge open source model.

It may seem a little surreal to have the IT support team for the Department of Defense working closely with a company with the motto, "Where subversion meets the enterprise," but here we are: DISA last year took up talks with CollabNet, which bought SourceForge Enterprise Edition from sourceforge.com back in 2007. The company already works with a number of government entities (including the US Air Force and the State of New Mexico Department of Corrections).

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Search engine Sagoon launches in beta

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Sagoon is a newly-launched search engine that joins the race to provide a semantic search with the elegant screen layout made famous by Google. The company calls its semantic technology the "Random Vector Model," where traditional keyword searches are paired with algorithms and formulas that analyze content between sites, finding their hidden similarities.

Sagoon is based out of Washington DC, but the underlying technology comes from New Dehli, India's Elixir Web Solutions

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Copps: 'We cannot have a seamless DTV transition'

FCC building in Washington

Facing the prospects that US broadcast stations may make the switchover to all-digital on February 17 regardless of what Congress does, the acting FCC chairman told an advisory panel last week it may be too late to undo the damage.

The state of chaos regarding the US' national switchover from analog to digital TV broadcasting may not be something a delay can remedy. This from the man currently heading the FCC while a permanent chairman -- one emerging from an administration said to be favoring a delay -- has yet to be appointed, despite the likelihood of a nominee.

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TringMe proves Silverlight-based VoIP (sort of)

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In a crafty bit of coding, TringMe has unveiled a demo of a Silverlight widget that allows outgoing VoIP calls to be made. The India-based IP telephone software company says that Silverlight does not provide microphone support, so this widget uses Flash to access the microphone for the exchange taking place in Silverlight.

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Wi-Fi: Comcast enters beta in NJ, while BART leaves beta in CA

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With the as yet unannounced test of Wi-Fi at 100 commuter rail stations in New Jersey, Comcast follows Cablevision's lead into testing Wi-Fi among commuters in areas adjacent to New York City.

A spokesperson for Comcast today acknowledged that the company is in "early, early beta" with a Wi-Fi test at rail stations in New Jersey, while San Francisco's BART announced plans to expand its own recent trial into a full commercial rollout.

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Google Earth 5.0 shows ocean floor, Mars

Planet Earth

Download the new Google Earth from Fileforum now.

Google today announced new additions to Google Earth which include Ocean, Historical Imagery, Touring, and Google Mars 3D.

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TiVo ranks top ten Super Bowl Commercials

TiVo HD XL

Based on its second-by-second Stop||Watch audience metrics, DVR maker TiVo has released its figures ranking the most watched television commercials during yesterday's Super Bowl.

TiVo found that the highest viewership spikes in the first half of the game actually took place during the commercials; while in the second half it was during crucial moments in gameplay. In descending order, the top ten highest rated commercials were:

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Pong turns 40, gets own museum

pong

A site celebrating the 40th anniversary of the invention of Pong, pongmuseum.com, has opened. With the museum comes a rare gem: a video directly from inventor Ralph H. Baer featuring himself and chief engineer Bill Harrison playing a demonstration model of their invention in 1971.

In addition to explaining the origin of the home video game console (which even goes into the basic schematics of the General Instrument AY-3-8500 chip, the common "pong" chip), Pong Museum includes a collection of international pong machines, from the breakthrough Magnavox Odyssey to the rare Heathkit GD that required users to open up their TVs to connect the game's wires directly.

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Will Motorola veer away from Windows Mobile?

Motorola's Q 9c smart phone running Windows Mobile 6.0

In the face of a gloomy financial report expected on Tuesday, some analysts are voicing concerns that Motorola's previously announced strategy of focusing more on high-end phones can remain viable. Last fall, then recently appointed Co-Chief Executive Sanjay Jha rolled out a company restructuring that cut Motorola's number of supported smartphone platforms to two: Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Google's Android.

But as recently reported in Betanews, Motorola recently added 70 workers at its Windows Mobile unit in Plantation, FL to a tally of 4,000 job cuts announced earlier in January. Pink slips also went out in January to long-time Mobile Devices vice presidents Yvonne Verse and Tracey Koziol, according to a report today in The Wall Street Journal, which cited "people familiar with the situation."

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Adobe Flash on iPhone: A one-sided coin

Adobe

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen spoke yet again of the company's continuing interest in porting Flash to the iPhone.

"It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating," Narayen said to Bloomberg Television, "The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver."

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As Palm crawls back, the Centro gets another carrier

Palm Centro

The smartphone that was supposed to save Palm last year has actually sold very well. The problem up to now has been pitifully low margins -- Palm can certainly sell Centros, but not enough to substantially profit from them.

While the world awaits the Pre -- a phone whose margins will hopefully be higher for Palm -- the Centro has finally made its way to one more Canadian carrier today: Bell. This will apparently end the phone's exclusivity with Rogers in the region, which has been selling the phone for $299 (with a three-year contract) since its introduction there last June. Bell's price has yet to be announced.

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Who picks the badware? Dispute erupts after Google glitch

Google as Pac-Man

For about 40 minutes early Saturday morning, a URL with a single forward slash was inadvertently checked into a list of potential malware sites operated by Google, with some help...maybe...from StopBadware.org.

As a result, its search results partner, Google, was flagging nearly every Web site on the planet as a potential conveyor of malware, from about 6:40 am to 7:25 am PST.

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Analysts: IPTV to keep thriving despite financial meltdown

Intel demonstrates an interactive program guide on its media processor hardware

Even the ravaged economy can't hamper the growth of IPTV on a global basis, according to an analyst report released today.

In spite of the global economic crisis, worldwide subscriberships to "telco TV" -- a category encompassing TV delivered by telecom operators through IP in addition to other technologies -- will more than triple by 2012 to 71.6 million, according to the report from In-Stat.

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Woolworths to be resurrected as an online retailer

Woolworths logo (square)

If you're an American, imagine if you will the sudden disappearance of a retailer whose brand is as big as Target. The recent loss of Woolworths in Great Britain is at least proportional. The great five-and-dime retailer -- the namesake of an institution that was actually founded in Pennsylvania in 1879 -- filed for bankruptcy (administration) last November, and began shutting the doors on all its UK retail outlets soon afterward.

Now, that nation's largest online retailer -- which also happens to operate conventional retail stores -- is gearing up to resurrect "Woolies," at least for now as a direct online merchandiser.

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Report: Panasonic may post an historic loss Wednesday

Panasonic

The press service AFP this morning is citing reports in the Asian press as stating that Panasonic will report an operating loss this past quarter of ¥350 billion (about $3.9 billion USD) on Wednesday, partly due to the bad economy and partly to its ongoing acquisition of Sanyo. This would be the first quarterly loss for the former Matsushita in about seven years.

However, the exact source of the AFP's news this morning is uncertain. In what could be a possible rewrite error, the name of the newspaper ("Shimbun") was attributed by the AFP to two different cities. The Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun are two different sources entirely, and the Web sites for neither paper are carrying any such news this morning.

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