Cody Taylor

An anonymous reader tips news that Micro Focus is in the process of buying Borland Software for million. They also picked up Compuware’s application testing and automated software quality business. Quoting ZDNet: “The boards of both companies agreed to the deal, which is expected to complete around mid-2009. … In 2008, Texas-based Borland made a pre-tax loss of 4m, almost four times the size of the previous year’s loss. It had revenues of 2m, part of a consistent downward trend since at least 2004. … Borland was one of the oldest software companies in the PC software business, having been founded in 1981. Its most successful era was in the late 1980s via massive sales of Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application, and development tool Turbo Pascal, which challenged Microsoft’s dominance in the application-development market.”

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A key goal of every IT department is to reduce the time and effort needed to deliver value to the business. Agile practices enable teams to build less, but return the same value by focusing on early delivery of the features that have the highest business value and not wasting money on the features that don’t…

theodp writes with news that details for the Kindle DX are now available. “Specs-wise, the big changes are a larger 9.7-inch screen that rotates to landscape display, a PDF reader, and more storage space. The Kindle DX carries a 9 price tag (compared to the 9 Kindle 2).” Engadget has a series of pictures from Jeff Bezos’ presentation, and the Amazon product information page has further details and a video. According to the press release, Amazon has worked out a deal with The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post to “offer the Kindle DX at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available.”

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coondoggie writes “The Federal Trade Commission and Distributed Computing Industry Association locked horns over a proposed law that would govern how peer-to-peer networking technology would be used and regulated. Before the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection, the Federal Trade Commission expressed its doubts about companies protecting sensitive consumer information (PDF) or sensitive data over P2P internet file-sharing networks. It doesn’t help the P2P cause that the technology continues to pop up in bad practices. Recently a company that monitors peer-to-peer networks said it found classified information about the systems used onboard the president’s helicopter in a shared folder on a computer in Iran, after a file containing the data was accidentally leaked on a peer-to-peer network last summer. Meanwhile the DCIA said any laws would likely be ineffective and stifle the business opportunities P2P can generate.” An article on CNet points out that the wording of the bill would make it apply to just about everything related to communications on the internet.

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An anonymous reader writes “Evidence has been growing that Apple is developing a new gaming console. Now, there are some possible details about how a combined media/game console might work, based on patent applications filed by Apple in late 2007 and early 2008. Here is some what we can look for: having your personal music integrated into a title, a ‘natural’ gesture multitouch interface, and a single online store that sells games, media, and video.”

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Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his idea for mass adoption of anti-virus software: “If the US government did more to encourage people to keep their computers secure — by buying TV ads to publicize free private-sector anti-virus programs, or subsidizing the purchase of anti-virus software — we’d all be better off, on average. That’s not just idealistic nanny-statism, but something you can argue mathematically, to the point where even some libertarians would agree.” Read on for the rest of Bennett’s thoughts.

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An anonymous reader writes “Viviane Reding, Information Society Commissioner of the European Union, is calling for the United States to hand over control of ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers). She said that the organization running ICANN needs be free of control by a single nation, and rather controlled by a private entity and governed by multiple nations. ICANN, headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, was created in 1998 to oversee a number of Internet related tasks. Reding said, ‘In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world.'”

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