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A multi-university research team, including an Indian-origin expert, is testing the live broadcast of surgeries using the advanced networking consortium ‘Internet2’.

The technology, which allows for the transmission of high quality video to multiple locations in real time, may enable doctors from different hospitals across the world to collaborate on a surgery, without having to actually be in the operation theatre.

The technology was recently tested by a team led by the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, which has now been joined by researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology.

An endoscopic surgery at the University of Puerto Rico was broadcast to multiple locations in the U.S. with the aid of a high-speed network.

The experiment also included a multipoint videoconference that was connected to the video stream, allowing for live interaction between participants.

“The University of Puerto Rico has been performing this type of transmission between two sites for more than a year, but we are now able to utilize a combination of technologies that allows us to transmit to multiple sites simultaneously,” says Jose Conde, director of the Center for Information Architecture in Research at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus.

“Being isolated geographically from major research centers, we need to use information technology to foster research collaborations with scientists around the world,” Conde adds.

Gurcharan Khanna, director of research computing at RIT and a member of the research team, says: “Previous efforts in telemedicine have been hampered by the quality of the video stream produced and the potential for network interruptions. This test demonstrates that by using the speed and advanced protocols support provided by the Internet2 network, we have the potential to develop real-time, remote consultation and diagnosis during surgery, taking telemedicine to the next level.”

The research team used a 30-megabit-per-second broadcast quality video stream so as to produce high quality images, and configured it to be transmitted via multicast using Microsoft Research’s ConferenceXP system.

They also used a Polycom videoconferencing system to connect all parties.

The results of the test were presented at a meeting of the collaboration special interest group at the fall 2008 Internet2 member meeting in New Orleans.

The team is currently preparing for additional tests with different surgical procedures and an expanded number of remote locations.

Their objective is to ultimately transfer the technology for use in medical education and actual diagnostic applications.

“Today, physicians often need to travel to both examine patients and conduct consultations. Given the growing capacity of Internet technologies, the development of live remote consultation with high quality video could revolutionize medicine and greatly enhance the care patients can receive while reducing overall costs to the health care system,” says Khanna.

China’s gov’t has begun to levy taxes on virtual assets. Gamers who get magic items, gold or other assets in virtual worlds are being taxed at a 20% rate. Thanks in large part to the popularity of multiplayer online games, China’s virtual goods market has grown into a $1.45 bil industry. Some firms hire young Chinese to play games, and then they sell their players’ winnings online. The tax in part takes aim at this practice, which is called “gold farming.”

Twisters at night remain deadly

Tornadoes that hit between midnight and dawn are 2.5 times more likely to kill people, says a new Northern Ill. Univ. study. The study says improved forecasting technology and warning systems have reduced overall tornado-related deaths in recent decades, but the drop in the nighttime tornado death rate has been relatively slow. At night, spotters can’t see twisters as easily, plus people are often asleep and miss warnings. In 2007, tornadoes killed 80 in the U.S., with night-time deaths accounting for 59.

Preschoolers whose parents were deployed to war zones were more likely to show aggression than other young children in military families, a military study found. The study suggested 1 in 5 children, whose ages are between 3-5, with a deployed parent, had behavior problems such as hitting, biting and hyperactivity. Marine fathers had been away on average about four months, the study suggested.

Eating meat from wild game killed with lead bullets could elevate lead levels in the blood, a N.D. Health Dept. study concluded. The study said those who ate wild animals killed by lead bullets had higher lead levels than those who ate little or no wild game. It said pregnant women and children under 6 should avoid eating venison harvested using lead bullets. Vitamin B supplements do not seem to protect against cancer, according to a new study. Women who took a daily supplement that included vitamins B6, B12 and folic acid, known as vitamin B9, for more than seven years were no more or less likely to develop or die from cancer than women who took a placebo, the researchers said.

With support for three of the major pillars of application development and deployment — Oracle 11g, Microsoft SQL, and open source MySQL — under its belt, Amazon.com appears to be anticipating a major move by the enterprise into the cloud.

Plus, Amazon.com provisions Microsoft Windows Server, Oracle Fusion middleware, three Oracle backup and data recovery tools, and the open source LAMP stack.

[ Confused by cloud computing hype? Get the facts from InfoWorld's cloud computing primer. | And find out more on cloud computing's risks. ]

When announcing Microsoft’s own cloud platform, Azure, this week at the Professional Developer Conference, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie tipped his hat to CEO Jeff Bezos and crew at Amazon for leading the charge into the cloud. And both IBM and Oracle have announced their versions of a cloud computing center. Oracle will use Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) infrastructure, while IBM will deploy based on its own in-house development.

Why IT is wary of the cloud: Mission-critical fears
Yet CIOs and CTOs that InfoWorld has spoken to typically describe the cloud as not ready for enterprise-class applications. So why are Oracle and Microsoft putting enterprise platforms and apps on Amazon.com’s cloud?

David Mitchell, senior vice president for IT research at Ovum, says enterprises are simply not ready to deploy mission-critical apps in the cloud. “Would you be comfortable having taxation records online in the cloud? I wouldn’t,” he says.

When it comes to security, “with the cloud model the bar goes up dramatically,” says Vince Biddlecombe, CTO of Transplace, a logistics provider for the transportation industry. “Everybody’s concerned that their data gets protected.”

Transplace does use cloud-based applications from Salesforce.com as well as HR on-demand and hosted expense management, but that’s because these apps aren’t mission-critical operational systems and don’t hold sensitive data, Biddlecombe says.

“It’s all about protecting the data. We want to hold onto it. It’s proprietary and we want to maintain control over it,” says Glenn Trommer, director of e-commerce and implementation services for Office Depot. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable with cloud computing on a large scale at this point in time.”

Just what is cloud computing’s role?
Cloud computing is usually sold as a way to dramatically reduce costs by outsourcing both the infrastructure and the management of that infrastructure. And it’s true that the average IT department has a great deal of wasted equipment. For example, the load of doing the books in the fourth quarter requires a certain capacity that will largely sit idle the rest of the year.

But are the savings of shifting to cloud computing big enough for the enterprise to risk relying on an external provider, especially when deploying complex business processes that require data to go in and out of the cloud, back behind the firewall, and back again to the cloud?

For some applications, this would require a lot of reengineering, says Ovum analyst Mitchell. “If you have a custom-built CRM application in the cloud and an in-house ERP application, it may require some expensive integration that would be more than the cost savings,” he says.

Many enterprise adopters of cloud computing thus use it either for fairly separate, low-risk applications such as expense reporting and contact management, or for trial and peripheral projects where it makes more sense to rent someone else’s infrastructure than to stand up and maintain your own. The New York Times and Nasdaq OMX have both experimented with Amazon.com’s cloud services this way.

Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services, acknowledges that most cloud users today are startups and small businesses looking for a quick, easy way to ramp up infrastructure, or experimental, non-mission-critical projects at larger companies. “We provide a customer with a base-level infrastructure.”

But Selipsky says enterprises are moving, albeit slowly, to doing more with the cloud. He cites Eli Lilly, which uses EC2 to process research data. That’s why Amazon.com will continue to ramp up its cloud services, Selipsky says. In the coming months, Selipsky predicts, customers can expect the release of applications for load balancing, EC2 environment monitoring, and automatic scaling.

Over time, as Amazon.com, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft all have cloud offerings, they may become commodities with enterprise-level security, service levels, and compliance requirements baked in and proven. That appears to be the bet the major enterprise providers are taking by making their technology available over Amazon.com.

The time has come and Microsoft has finally unveiled the latest version of its Windows operating system.

Windows 7 follows Vista, which
Microsoft claims has been a success, but which has been subject to fierce criticism from a number of
users.

It promised that it will deliver a better experience for
users when it arrives sometime late next year. The system was demonstrated at the company’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

When Vista launched in January 2007, many users complained that it ran slowly and failed to work at all with some programs and devices. Corporate customers have been slow to switch from Windows XP to Vista, although
Microsoft said that the
operating system had an unfair press, and has enjoyed record sales.

Among the new features promised in the latest
operating system is Windows Touch, which introduces support for multi-touch technology. This will enable
users to zoom in on an image by moving two fingers closer together - a technology first introduced to millions of
users by Apple’s iPhone.

Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie defended Vista and indicated that
Windows 7 would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. “Vista is a great
operating system, it’s tremendously functional,” he told.

Here’s the one thing that makes “Max Payne” comparatively painless: Unlike most movies based on video games — the entire filmography of German director Uwe Boll, for example — it doesn’t try to replicate the sensation of playing. It doesn’t make you think you’re controlling the characters, doesn’t place you in the middle of their nausea-inducing world.

Instead, “Max Payne” is just a straight-up action picture, and a rather bombastic, familiar one at that.

Director John Moore (”Behind Enemy Lines“) rips off John Woo with endless, hyperstylized shootouts, all in slow motion with shattered glass showering everything in a million little pieces. All that’s missing are the strategically placed doves.

That’s not all that’s coming down, though: It seems to rain or snow constantly in the movie’s darkly gothic vision of New York, an attempt at emulating classic noir style. Some of the lighting, shadows and camera angles at the beginning are sufficiently evocative of the genre, but after a while it all feels dreary and smothering. Then again, “Max Payne” the video game was inspired by film noir, and has now, in turn, inspired a movie of its own. It’s so meta.

Mark Wahlberg looks like he’s in perpetual agony as the title character, an NYPD detective still searching for the killers of his wife and infant son years later. The return to action isn’t a horrible fit for Wahlberg, but after his Oscar-nominated performance in “The Departed” and his behind-the-scenes work with the hugely successful “Entourage,” he doesn’t need this kind of dopey gig anymore.

“I don’t believe in heaven,” Max says in the opening voiceover as he’s about to drown in an icy river. “I believe in pain. I believe in fear. I believe in death.” He doesn’t exactly lighten up — or develop much as a character — from there.

Max teams up with Russian mob assassin Mona Sax (Mila Kunis), whose sister (new Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko) was killed in a way that may tie her to Max’s family. Kunis is incredibly sexy with her luxurious, dark hair and knee-high black boots, but it’s impossible to take her seriously as a machine gun-toting enforcer. When she screams at Max in a dark alleyway, “Kneel the (expletive) down!” it sounds like her “Family Guy” character, Meg, yelling at younger brother Chris for embarrassing her at the mall.

Among those who cross Max path’s in his search for the truth are his former partner (Donal Logue), an internal affairs agent (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, woefully underused in just a few scenes) and a longtime family friend and former cop (Beau Bridges) who’s now the head of security for the pharmaceutical firm where Max’s wife worked.

Somewhere amid the noise and the homicidal valkyries — oh yes, “Max Payne” has those, too — there may be a just-say-no-to-drugs message. There may also be an anti-war message. The valkyries may be real, or they may be a hallucination, the result of taking too much of a highly addictive blue liquid substance. Hard to tell — or care — even once the game is over.

“Max Payne,” a 20th Century Fox, is rated PG-13 for violence including intense shooting sequences, drug content, some sexuality and brief strong language. Running time: 100 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

___

Motion Picture Association of America rating definitions:

G — General audiences. All ages admitted.

PG — Parental guidance suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children.

PG-13 — Special parental guidance strongly suggested for children under 13. Some material may be inappropriate for young children.

R — Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian. NC-17 — No one under 17 admitted.

Electronic Arts Inc. is turning to online games to boost its limited presence in Asia, the regional president of the U.S. video game maker said Tuesday.

EA’s main business in the West comes from packaged games software for consoles and personal computers, but online games are more popular in Asia, EA President for Asia Jon Niermann told The Associated Press in an interview.

“It’s night and day,” Niermann.

Niermann was attending the launch of “Need for Speed Undercover,” which features a character played by actress Maggie Q.

The executive says EA hopes to increase its market share in Asia by launching more online games, with 12 editions of different games expected to roll out this year.

The company has already launched online versions of “FIFA,” “NBA Street,” “Warhammer Online” in the region, with “Battlefield Heroes” to follow. The online version of “Need for Speed,” which was developed in Singapore, will launch next year.

The executive said Asia revenues account for only about 6 percent of EA’s total revenue. The Redwood City, California-based company reported $3.67 billion in revenue for its 2008 fiscal year.

“It’s nowhere where it needs to be. We need to get that growth significantly higher,” Niermann said.

In the coveted China market, EA’s market share is in the single digits, but the company hopes to change by that by launching online versions of “FIFA” and “NBA Street” with local partners, he said.

EA is launching “FIFA” with The9 Ltd., which operates “World of Warcraft” in China, and “NBA Street” with game operators Tencent Inc. and T2CN.

The company is also developing games in Asia for the Asian market, Niermann said.

EA has offices in 16 Asian cities, with game developing sites in Singapore, Hyderabad, India, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo.

Filing tax returns just isn’t a fun activity. You pretty much have to go through all of your financial records to try and play a game with really complex rules and some stiff penalties for the losers. There is a bit of good news that’s come about in recent years. It is now possible to fill out your tax return easily through online filing.

This is possible through the development of some great software. It basically takes the role of your major chain accountant. The software goes through a list and prompts you for all the necessary information. You then just go through each item and punch in the numbers as prompted. It will suggest deductions that you could probably take and then ultimately produce a finished return. Once it’s done, you can have it use efile to send it straight to the IRS.

The best part about this is the cost. You are getting the service for just the price of the software. The filing and the accounting is then free. You should make your money back after its first use. Just think of how much better free tax filing is. Is there a good reason you shouldn’t do it?

Mozilla is doing its part in the battle against clickjacking. The open-source company is offering an updated plug-in for the Firefox browser that blocks what security researchers call one of the most dangerous problems on the Web.

Clickjacking occurs when a person browsing a Web site clicks on an invisible link that leads them to a malicious site without their knowledge. Some never realize it even happened. A design feature in HTML that lets Web sites embed content from other sites makes it possible, which means nearly everybody is vulnerable.

The Firefox add-on, NoScript, is a well-known security plug-in. It is used to block all sorts of content types within Web pages. It is not a security scanner in the sense that it does not scan content with any form of signature database to look for specific known threats. Rather, it is a tool that enables you to block certain types of content. An update to NoScript includes a feature dubbed ClearClick to combat clickjacking.

Combating Clickjacking

According to Fraser Howard, principal malware researcher at SophosLabs, the new feature in NoScript is specifically designed to combat the user-interface redress attacks known as clickjacking and should help. However, there is a potential downside.

“Enabling the feature will result in some degree of false positives,” Howard warned. “This is not a criticism of the product; more a reminder that given the widespread legitimate use of similar techniques, some false positives are inevitable.”

Of course, the NoScript add-on alone isn’t enough to solve the problem. That’s because it only covers Firefox. The other 70 percent of the browser market is still open to clickjacking.

“User discretion is still an important factor in the defense against these attacks, just like any other,” Howard said. “The usual common-sense guidelines apply to this, just like other forms of malicious Web attack.”

More Fixes Expected

Security researchers expect other browsers to follow Mozilla and release some form of defense against clickjacking. In fact, Howard said some may already have this built in, though Mozilla has so far been the only one to announce it in the wake of the recent alerts about user-interface redress attacks.

“The problem is doing this without breaking sites and Web applications we have come to rely on,” said Howard, noting that defending against clickjacking is a complex problem. “There is no silver bullet.”

Web applications could also be targeted. Howard noted proof of concept demos he’s conducted that abuse the Web page Adobe uses to administer a user’s Flash security settings. In one proof of concept called “the clicking game,” victims are encouraged to click in the right places to reconfigure the security settings that allow access to a Webcam or microphone.

In a similar way, Howard said, imagine an attack that woos victims to click on the necessary objects within their favorite Webmail application to delete all their mail. There are numerous ways to envisage an attack targeting an application you are already authenticated to when you happen across a malicious page, he noted.

“The owners of those applications can take steps to eliminate or minimize risk. For example, Adobe added a simple block of JavaScript to prevent a site being able to frame in their security settings config page,” Howard said. “Other fixes could be to ensure there are additional steps, such as a CAPTCHA [distorted image] or password, involved in any actions that are potentially dangerous.”

As we’ve seen time and again, in an increasing number of enterprise software categories, open source has become a promising alternative to commercial software. But there’s no free ride.

Support from developers is often problematic, and you need to find products with a large enough following so that programmers have an incentive to build add-on modules. When the Test Center reviewed open source CMSes (content management systems), these two factors often broke the tie between otherwise robust solutions and gave Alfresco the advantage.

[ For InfoWorld's comparative review of Drupal, DotNetNuke, Plone, Joomla, and Alfresco Community Edition, see "Open source CMSes prove well worth the price." For the Test Center's top picks of free and open source software for business, IT, and personal productivity, see "Best of Open Source Software Awards 2008" ]??

Yet if you take support out of the equation, Drupal emerges as the better solution for many enterprise Web projects. That’s because this social publishing solution starts with a mature Web CMS, adds a blog system, and then offers discussion forms, community features, and extensibility through 1,800 add-on modules ??? many of them also open source. Given this flexibility, it’s not surprising that Drupal powers about 250,000 live sites ??? including big names such as Federal Express, The Onion, and Popular Science.

But big organization or small, there’s a dark side to Drupal: You’ll probably need the services of an experienced support staff or a costly consultancy that has mastered a complex setup and knows how to assemble all the building blocks into a workable system. Now, for those with limited resources, Acquia is stepping in with a commercially supported Drupal distribution along with a network that delivers patches and security updates.

Laying Web tracks
I looked at Acquia Drupal 1.0, which includes the Drupal 6.4 core distribution, network modules for communicating with the Acquia Network, and the Acquia Network itself. The last item complements an easy deployment experience with support, online documentation, and performance monitoring.

The process starts when you sign up for an account at Acquia’s Web site and download its hardened Drupal distribution. You’ll still need to have hardware already set up with PHP, MySQL (or PostgreSQL), and a Web server, such as Apache. Don’t underestimate the work to get this running — especially in a large production setting. It took me about a day to set up and troubleshoot this stack on my Windows Server 2003 server.

However, when you get to loading Drupal, things get much easier. Acquia’s engineers have created the necessary customized settings files and configured a suite of contributed add-on modules. After just 30 minutes, I had a running Acquia Drupal site with blogs, forums, social networks (people could publish their profiles), articles, mashups, and Web content management.

Another big timesaver is Acquia’s set of pre-integrated add-on modules. Acquia looked at some 1,800 modules available for Drupal — then selected, fully tested, and integrated the essential ones you’d need for building a modern Web site.??

Without detailing every add-in, I think Acquia made very good choices. For example, Content Construction Kit (CCK) lets me create custom content types using a simple wizard. Image creates picture galleries for your sites. Mollom protects sites from spam. And the VotingAPI gives developers a standard way to let users vote for and rate Drupal content. To add any of these modules to your site, you simply select them from Acquia Drupal’s administration menu, which renders drop-down choices at the top of the browser for controlling the site.

So without having to play around installing and configuring any extra modules, I went right to the content section of Acquia Drupal’s admin menu. After part of another day, I came away with a polished site that had a custom look, populated articles, a blog, video, discussion forums, and a tag cloud. Based on my earlier test of the community Drupal download, Acquia saved me at least a day of work integrating and preconfiguring the various components.

Taking the long view
While deploying a major site quickly is a big accomplishment, keeping the site running, day in and day out, is much more important. The standard Drupal core already has decent management, accessed from a page available to administrators. But several Acquia network modules, installed during setup, take administration a few steps further. These enable your Acquia Drupal installation to communicate securely with the Acquia Network and exchange configuration, operation, and profile information.

In particular, Acquia Heartbeat monitors your site’s uptime and sends an alert when unexpected outages occur. Other network services promise to be just as valuable, though I didn’t have Acquia Drupal running long enough to fully test them. Code Modification Detection, for instance, automatically senses if you change code that would make future updates difficult or that introduce security holes.

Status of all network services is available from the Acquia Drupal portal, which I found easy to navigate and to use. As an example, the main page alerted me to software updates based on my system profile. I also got a lot of mileage out of Site Usage Statistics, which provides an at-a-glance view of user activity, including newly created content and comments; this is updated daily.

In addition, from the portal, I set up Remote Cron so that Acquia would periodically perform self-maintenance tasks, including caching operations.

A big part of what you’re paying for with Acquia Drupal is support; the portal offers a simple way to log support incidents and track your tickets. Depending on your purchase level, Acquia’s guaranteed response time can vary from a few hours to the next day. During my testing, Acquia did meet the specified response deadline — and resolved my questions satisfactorily.

There’s also a subscriber forum and documentation. Again, the service was fairly new during my tests, so these areas weren’t deeply populated. Still, in scanning the posts from other users, Acquia staff did seem responsive and offered solutions to users’ questions.

Time will tell
Although Acquia Drupal was too new to completely evaluate some of the support options (such as discussion forums), the technical underpinnings of this service were solid. Setup and remote management of my Drupal Web site proved to be simple and uneventful. The Ticket Management system worked well. What’s more, I believe there are enough subscription levels and support methods (including by phone) for managing production Web sites of many sizes.

As a first version, Acquia has more work to do, too, which company representatives acknowledged. In a briefing, they indicated the staff is looking to integrate more modules, provide better documentation, have simpler deployments (cloud packaging and redistribution through shared hosts), and include more analytics.??

Based on a week of testing, I can’t offer a meaningful assessment of Acquia’s technical support services, nor can I determine whether Acquia will live up to its promise to provide timely updates to Drupal that don’t break things. I can say that Acquia makes the deployment of Drupal considerably easier and adds valuable management tools. If the support network follows suit, Acquia Drupal will be a tempting option for organizations that lack the time or staff to deal with the patchwork of a raw Drupal environment.

Roaming fees for mobile phone users in Southeast Asia making calls outside their own country may be cut by half early next year, according to report Sunday citing a Malaysian minister.

Energy, Water and Communications Minister Shaziman Abu Mansor said a reduction was necessary as charges were exceptionally high.

“We plan to reduce roaming charges with Singapore first,” he was quoted as saying by the Sunday Star newspaper.

Shaziman said his counterparts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) had agreed to the plan during a meeting on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali last month.

“Reducing the roaming rates will also reduce the burden on the tens of thousands of Malaysians who commute to Singapore daily,” he said.

“We do not want them to be paying exceptionally high roaming charges when their workplace (Singapore) is only a few kilometres (miles) away from their homes in (neighbouring) Johor,” he added.

Shaziman said his Singaporean counterpart Lee Boon Yang had hailed the proposal.

Malaysia’s top mobile operator Maxis charges 1.50 ringgit (0.43 dollars) per minute for a local registered cell phone user when he uses his phone in Singapore and as high as 9.00 ringgit per minute in Cambodia.