Mobility

Google Inc. has improved its enterprise Search Appliance so that it can now index documents that aren't accessible via the Web protocol HTTP, thus significantly expanding the range of data the product can search for and retrieve. Google plans to announce the improvement Thursday.

The move comes less than a week after AMD said police had seized a number of its chips from an illegal re-marking operation in Taiwan.

Scott Spanbauer, our veteran watcher of all things WebBloatware. It's an ugly term for an ugly phenomenon: the tendency of software developers to cram in every imaginable feature, including some that shouldn't have been imagined in the first place. Creeping featuritis rarely results in better programs. It often makes them harder to use. And it can leave them sluggish, insecure, and unreliable.

IBM Corp.'s personal computer business racked up US$965 million in losses between Jan. 1, 2001, and June 30, 2004, the company said last week in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, detailing the planned sale of the business to China's Lenovo Group Ltd.

Charlie Todd, the founder of New York

Microsoft Corp. has joined the desktop search fray with its release Monday of the beta test version of a suite of tools designed to let users find information stored in their PCs.

Every new Linux distribution, particularly from an established vendor such as Novell Inc.'s SUSE division, brings with it the question "Is it ready to take on Microsoft on the desktop?" We recently got a copy of the Novell Linux Desktop, which was created to offer an alternative corporate desktop operating system that meets the needs of most structured task workers.