Cheap commodity PCs aren't so much news as the are ubiqouitous. However, news that Wal-Mart is set to offer a cheap Windows PC with OpenOffice pre-installed could strike fear into the hearts of the Microsoft OFfice development team, already losing market share in minor ways to the open source competitor.

Ars Technica reports that Wal-Mart will soon offer a $298 PC built by Everex which will come pre-loaded with the Open Office productivity suite, something geeks have been log recommending as an alternative to Microsoft's overpriced and bloated MS Office.

Anything that puts quality open source software in the hands of the great unwashed has to be a good thing, right?

It's often argued that the U.S. is lagging behind in broadband adoption compared to other first-world countries around the globe. With broadband becoming an important tool for work, play and communication, that's a statement that could bode bad times ahead for a country which has always taken somewhat of a lead in technology; If it's true.

A new study which looks at the numbers in a different way, weighing in price, average income, education levels and population density tells a slightly different story. According to CNet, The Phoenix Institute claims, "we find that the United States generally meets expectations in its conversion of its national endowments into broadband subscriptions"

Comforting news or creative accounting?

With it getting harder for U.S. companies to recruit foreign nationals for jobs in the programming and engineering, could they all start a shift towards opening facilities in Canada?

Microsoft has announced that they will be opening a software development center in Vancouver. This will be set up due to the fact that it's getting extremely difficult to employ skilled workers with the present immigration quotas in place. U.S. businesses have been urging Congress to lift quotas on the number of visas issued by the government, making room for more skilled professionals especially in the software engineering field. And there is a big battle brewing over that between business owners, middle class Americans, and the Government. Bill Gates has been striking at engineering careers, saying that more American students could be convinced to enter the field if engineers from other countries are imported. However others see it as a threat to their country, and wage protections for U.S. workers. Is Microsoft really having trouble finding employees, or are they just having problems finding employees at the wage they are interested in paying?

Why the move to Canada? Canada does not employ such strict quotas on the number of visas it issues every year, with an emphasis on skilled laborers that are focused on starting a life in the country.

Microsoft is planning to open its Vancouver facility by the end of the year, with 200 employees, expanding to 900 within a few years.

[via eWeek]

Yahoo is once again directing its talent towards the online search world. This time around they are bringing their oneSearch technology to over one hundred million phones in the U.S.

oneSearch initially launched through Yahoo's successful Go for Mobile 2.0, providing its users an easy way to access and find information as quick as possible, and as of today its available to U.S users. Yahoo oneSearch drops in relevant content alongside search results. For instance, if users search for Pizza in New York, they are send back results for their destination, as well as other category suggestions, Flickr images relating to pizza, as well as pizza related websites, news articles, mobile pizza websites, web images, pizza products, and movies relating to pizza. With this comprehensive list, users are bound to find the content they are after quicker.

The oneSearch offering is currently only available to US users, but will be rolled out in additional countries and languages over the next few months. To use oneSearch on your mobile device, simply visit m.yahoo.com.

Full screen shot of a search result after the jump.

Google has launched a Patent Search beta project. The new patent search allows users to look up and search the full text of US patents. You can choose to either search by patent number, inventor, filing date, or try your luck in the search box. Patents come from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and can be viewed as both text and original images which are great to look. Some of these documents on record date back to the 1790's. There are patents for everything listed here. Including one for a 1914 popcorn machine, a 1999 Jumping snail, and a 1920's Ouija board. Searching patents on the patent search beta is smooth. The inner workings tie in with and utilize a lot of the features that come from Google's Book Search. So if you have the need to search for patents, Google has you covered in one quick and easy location.

Don't forget to check out patents for the Artificial leg, and the Pocket Protector.

Google has made it in the online advertising market, so what about offline? Google has tested the waters with newspaper ads and magazine ads, and now they are ready to go full force by allowing bidding on over 50 major newspaper spots across the US. Google Print Ads is scheduled to officially launch this week, allowing advertisers to place bids in the newspapers. The lists of the newspapers that have teamed up with Google Print Ads include the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune. Bids for this iteration of the project will begin this week and run through January 2007. The big news, however, is that Google does not expect to make a profit? They why are they entering this arena? It's all about testing new revenue streams, and advertising ideas.

I just got back from some much needed R & R, and since I left before the most recent Homeland Security PR campaign terror scare, I spent a lot of time on the TSA website the last few days of my vacation trying to figure out the ever-changing array of prohibited items. It wasn't much help. It seemed like they were updating the regs hourly, but the website only every couple of days, and then in English taken from a Chinese takeout menu. "These items are permitted, but to physical inspection" was a particular favorite that seems to have stuck. It's okay, though, TSA love you long time.

Now they seem to have redesigned the site, which was badly in need of an overhaul. Unfortunately, there aren't many changes, and they seem to have given the job to FBI programmers. They certainly haven't made the site more useful to travelers, or anyone else for that matter. It features the same contradictory information--beverages are not permitted except when they are. Unless you're a diabetic who needs juice; then juice is permitted except when it isn't--now in a new, less user-friendly layout. Every single page is now one huge iframe centered in a useless striped gray background, guaranteeing that you will have to scroll not once but twice to access any useful information. Assuming you even notice the information you want has scrolled off the bottom of the iframe. And, of course, the navbar is in the iframe, so it scrolls off the top any time you scroll down the page. Add to that some of the usual Firefox and Safari rendering errors, and you can have the full airport checkpoint experience without ever leaving your keyboard.

There are some improvements, though. We now have a new slogan--"TSA...Vigilant, Effective, Efficient"--some nice pics of mountains to remind us the TSA is "strong" and "formidable," a puppy gallery, and a nice graphic of the layered security model that implies the most important site for security is the airplane cabin. That's right folks. All that fancy new screening is wonderful, but when it comes right down to it, in-flight security is up to the overworked, under-trained flight crew, that woman next to you with the screaming toddler, and "YOU--THE PASSENGER."


[via 27B/6]

The Google puzzle championship is over. The contest that started Saturday June 17, contained 23 challenging puzzles. Google highly doubted that any one person could finish all of the puzzles in the aloted time frame of 2.5 hours.

Points from the contest were allocated based on the time the specific puzzle was completed in. Some of the puzzles in the list were deemed more important by Google, thus, more point value was assigned to them. Even though they were presented from easiest to hardest, some might have been valued more then others. Incorrect answers were docked 5 points.

The official puzzles are located online now, along with answers.

This was an awesome way for Google to scout the talent of people in the US who think differnet, and at a level that could benefit Google's development.

Let's face it: Government web site are, as a rule, a pain to navigate. In an effort to remedy that, Google has launched usgov.google.com, a specialized search engine for searching U.S. government web sites. The new site is modeled after Google Personalized Home, and indeed has most of the same features, but with an emphasis on widgets that help you keep track of government updates. For more details, check out the Washington Post's article on the new service.

When the U.S. government launched Grants.gov to make it easier for people to find grants and apply for them without killing any trees, the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent on the system apparently weren't enough to buy support for Mac users. Fortunately, though, the University of Wisconsin has come through for the Mac crowd by releasing a package for OS X that lets them access Grants.gov's Citrix server. Thanks, UofW!