Wed Tech News

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IBM will bundle a six-month evaluation version of VMware's ESX Server product and other software with its blade servers, the companies plan to announce Wednesday. The software lets a single server run multiple operating systems simultaneously in separate software foundations called virtual machines. Other VMware software included in the promotion lets one virtual machine be paused, transferred from one computer to another, then restarted, a handy feature for blade servers, which are grouped together in a shared chassis.

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A W3C committee recently recommended that the group address the problem by moving away from the traditional way of saving XML data--in text format--and instead create a standard for a binary format. W3C working group recommendations are generally taken up as formal standards efforts, which means the group is one step closer to a major change in the XML standard.

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Yahoo said late Tuesday that it will provide 1 gigabyte of storage for each free e-mail account. The current limit is 250 megabytes. The expanded storage will be available in mid-April, said Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's vice president of communications products.

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ISPs in Utah have the option of blocking sites or providing customers with third=party filtering products unless they want to risk felony charges under the new law. The law states that: "Upon request by a consumer, a service provider may not transmit material from a content provider site listed on the adult content registry." Internet content providers that create or host data in Utah must properly rate the data or risk possible criminal charges.

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A Swiss company accidentally sold unapproved genetically modified seed corn in the US for four years. The mistake resulted in about 133 million kilograms of the corn making its way into the food chain. Officials for the company, Syngenta, and the US Environmental Protection Agency insist there is no danger to human health. But the EPA and the US Department of Agriculture are investigating to see if any laws or regulations were broken. The EPA confirmed the investigation was underway in a statement to the journal Nature.

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The two planets were detected in infrared light, an emission of heat that is not visible to the human eye. There are no conventional photographs, but astronomers are ecstatic nonetheless. The gas giant worlds, each around a different star, were discovered previously by indirect methods. Both are roughly Jupiter-sized and hot, orbiting very close to their stars. Each completes a "year" in less than four days.

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During inflation, space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. As it did so, random quantum fluctuations that popped into being produced ripples in space-time. These swelled to fill the entire "global" universe, which is about 10^100 times as large as the universe we can see.

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Better still, the machines could evolve to be more efficient and develop new capabilities, says Bowyer. Once he has the software to guide the self-replicating process, he plans to make it freely available online, allowing users to contribute improvements, just like the open-source Linux computer operating system, he says.

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But the deal is also an extraordinary development signaling a possible detente between the two companies vying to control the market for software to power smart phones. Those devices make up an indiscernible percentage of today's 1.2 billion cell phones, but they're expected to become more prevalent by the end of the decade. For now, Symbian dominates the market, mainly because Microsoft has had trouble generating interest for its phone software at No. 1 handset maker Nokia and others.