U.S. and Russian satellites destroyed after collision

In today's podcast: U.S. and Russian satellites destroyed after collision; Qualcomm, Nvidia shore up support for netbooks; and Windows 7 upgrade won't be easier than Vista.

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A commercial Iridium communications satellite and decommissioned Russian satellite both appear to have been destroyed after an unprecedented collision in space. The collision took place on Tuesday and was verified by U.S. government organizations that track satellites and other orbits. The in-orbit collision will mean brief service outages for some customers over the next few days but Iridium said it expects to have the issue largely resolved by Friday. Within a month, the company expects to have one of a number of in-orbit spare satellites moved into position to replace the one that was lost.

Chip vendors Qualcomm and Nvidia have thrown their support behind the Windows 7 OS for netbooks, announcing efforts to bring better graphics and continuous 3G connectivity to the devices. Qualcomm on Wednesday announced it was sampling chips that enable Windows 7 netbook connectivity to multiple 3G networks. Separately, Nvidia announced beta drivers for its netbook platform that could bring full high-definition video to Windows 7. Qualcomm said it had updated its Gobi2000 3G embedded chip, designed to let netbooks and laptops access multiple 3G networks like HSPA or EV-DO. The chip supports Windows 7 and improves data speeds and frequencies at which devices can connect to 3G networks.

Microsoft warned enterprise customers this week that the migration path from XP to Windows 7 won't be any easier than it is to Vista, and offered recommendations for how companies can move from older versions of Windows to one of its newer client OSes. To no one's surprise, Microsoft recommends that business customers still running XP or older versions of the OS upgrade as soon as possible, citing security and remote-management capabilities in both Vista and Windows 7 that weren't baked into the original XP release. However, enterprise customers who would have had to replace applications in a move from XP to Vista will still have the same task when they move to Windows 7.

Yahoo is enhancing its service for building custom search engines with access to structured data, and is also introducing fees for using its BOSS search service in order to support its plan to offer developers service-level agreements and increased daily query limits. Developers will use the BOSS API to access SearchMonkey, which can make search results more useful and attractive using structured data, Yahoo said Wednesday. Once Yahoo introduces BOSS fees toward mid-2009, it will also increase the number of search results an engine can obtain via a single API call to 1,000 from 50. The fees vary depending on the type and quantity of search result involved. Yahoo will also offer SLAs to promote the creation of more sophisticated BOSS search engines.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.