Microsoft signs up publishers to expand Live Search Books

Microsoft has announced a major expansion of its Live Search Books feature. Dozens of major publishers have agreed to allow Microsoft to make their titles available, the company said today. It hopes that the new content will enable it to grab some of the book search market that Google pioneered when it unveiled its Print service, since renamed to Google Book Search, in 2004. ...more

ICANN to trial international characters in domain names

Internet domain names containing non-English characters such as ?, ? and ? may be commonplace within a year after the body that oversees the domain name system (DNS) announced that it will begin trials in July. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, accepts that current restrictions on character usage are no longer acceptable. It notes that the geographic extent of the Internet is constantly expanding, with a corresponding increase in linguistic diversity. ...more

Intel rolls out Lindenhurst chipsets for Xeon servers

Intel has introduced its dual-processor 'Lindenhurst' chipsets - the Intel E7520/E7320 - for the Xeon server platform. As well as supporting the 64-bit extensions in the latest 3.6GHz Xeon processors, there is support for DDR2 400 memory, a 800 MHz system bus and PCI Express. ...more

A tiny Flash player for Intel's micro-architecture

Macromedia is working with Intel to bring a Flash Player to Intel's XScale micro-architecture. The idea is that devices based on XScale will be able to support the rich content of Flash via reasonably sized files. The optimised system will apparently take advantage of Intel's Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) - assembly code for improved audio and video. ...more

OSDL strengthens links with developer community

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has set up a technical advisory board to beef up its communications with the developer community. The OSDL, which employs the likes of Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton, is a vendor-funded non-profit organisation pitched as a centre of gravity for Linux technology. The technical advisory board will help ensure the OSDL has a handle on what the developer community is focused on. ...more