Software

Microsoft is reportedly considering paying Rupert Murdoch a substantial amount of money to remove all News Corp. content from Google's search results, and instead have them listed on Microsoft's Bing search engine. Of all the bad ideas floated by Microsoft through the years, this is one of the worst. Microsoft will have spent a lot and gained very little, Murdoch will once again pick the pockets of a partner, and Google won't even notice a revenue drop.

Does the world need a new beginner's programming language? In the 1960's BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP and ALGOL were the primary introductory programming languages. In the 1970's and 1980's Pascal, C ad Scheme were the teaching programming languages of choice. In the 1990's with object-oriented extensions to the C language, C++ took over from C as the lingua-franca for students.

The holidays are once again upon us. And every year I'm asked by various friends and family what kind of computer they should buy. Being an Apple fan, I always direct them to the Apple product line. Yes, they are a bit more expensive than their PC brethren but to me they are worth the extra cost. Before anybody jumps on reliability issues, I've seen hardware problems on both sides of the PC/Mac war. But hardware aside, at the core of every Apple lies OS X which was designed by Apple to work flawlessly and seamlessly with its hardware.

Some people are disappointed that Google's Chrome plans don't include a head-to-head fight for the desktop with Windows. They shouldn't be. Google has a far more interesting way to battle Microsoft in mind.

Google's vision for Chrome OS isn't going to replace what is on your desk now ... unless you are working and reading this on a netbook, that is.

Google took the wraps off their Chrome OS yesterday. The OS will be a big deal. Here are some observations that you might not have considered.

With all the industry buzz around disk based data protection and deduplication, many companies are rethinking their current investments in tape infrastructure. The problem is, many have spent years perfecting that tried and true method of data protection, and have invested substantial sums in people, training, and money in doing so.

In today's podcast: Google offers detailed look at Chrome OS; Dell sees Q3 revenue and profit slip; and US blames China for cyberattacks.

Facebook and Zynga are facing a class-action lawsuit over their 'scam' advertising strategy. It's alleged that they 'cheat' users of games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers re-arrange the furniture to watch the show.

No doubt they're breathing a big sigh of relief at Microsoft right now, after the world has had a first look at the Google Chrome operating system. Chrome represents absolutely no threat to Windows for the foreseeable future, just at a time when Microsoft is vulnerable.

Google and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, have been working together on Chrome since before the project was announced and they'll continue to do so.

Google today will make available automatic speech recognition captioning for its YouTube video selection.  You can also add captioning manually by following directions on YouTube's site here.

Starting at 1 PM EST, Google will be unveiling its Chrome desktop operating system. Follow the blow by blow here.

After applying some updates to a Windows 2003 virtual server, this pilot fish comes in the next morning to find the server unresponsive. Then it happens again a few days later -- and soon it's happening every morning.