(Credit:
TheSmokingGun)
Click image to view our collection of Web news publishing gaffes, including the time Vice President Dick Cheney’s obituary made its way onto the Web.

The story was published by Xinhua, China’s official news agency, in an apparent moment of clairvoyance. It was taken down after being up on Xinhua.com most of the day, the [...]

Chip equipment maker Applied Materials is cutting 12 percent of its workforce after posting declining profit numbers and receiving quite the scare from Intel.

The company announced that 1,800 jobs will be cut from its ranks by this time next year, which could save it $400 million a year. Applied Materials makes the complicated and expensive [...]

Since we last checked in, Paglo has also introduced a monetization system. Paglo was free during its beta period, but now it has a monthly subscription model in place. Users pay based on how many devices they want to index and also how long they want to store data for reporting.

Managing 50 devices and [...]

The redo of the Options window as a whole should make the program safer by not confusing newbies.

The new interface is very Web 2.0ish, with two search bars on top and two left-side navigation bars. The uppermost search bar is the global search that scans what everybody is sharing over the P2P network, while the [...]

That’s largely due to an increased use of methods people use to obscure the domain by constantly mapping to different bots within the network, according to a recently released study (PDF).

The study’s authors, Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks and Thorsten Holz of the University of Mannheim, tracked the traffic of 900 fast-flux domain names used [...]

Immediately after the Sony films disappeared, the blogosphere began accusing Sony, the maker of the
PlayStation video game console, of trying to stick it to rival Microsoft, the maker of the Xbox. What really happened was Netflix didn’t have a licensing deal with Sony that covered the Xbox and several other boxes that offer Netflix’s streaming [...]

Part of the idea behind Viveri, Imig said, is to recognize that one answer doesn’t fit all search queries.

In an effort to help sort that out, Microsoft has created a second search site, aimed at testing out new ideas. Known as Viveri, the site is being made available this week to all Microsoft employees, and [...]

You can’t determine who to lay off until you understand what your needs are. When you analyze who to cut, you have to say, “Do I need four people in sales or is the one consultant who has better connections better for me?” And do you need full-time salespeople? Some start-ups try to have too many full-time employees when they don’t have a full-time business. You have to look at what everyone is doing and how they integrate.

Over on PEHub, Connie Loizos has an interesting interview

The company posted good but not stellar earnings and forecast a conservative near-term outlook.

commentary

Microsoft is suggesting that it will weather the downturn better than most, as CNET’s Ina Fried reports. It’s almost certainly right. Microsoft, for all its problems, tends to make software that is cheaper and easier to use than that of many of its proprietary peers.

And open source? Well, open source tends to be all about higher performanc