Key Windows exec splits

Brian Valentine, a project leader on Windows Vista, has left Microsoft for Amazon.com, only months away from the operating system hitting the shelves, says Seattlepi.com.

In previous versions of Windows, Valentine played a key leadership role in the final stages of release, and had been employed by Microsoft for 19 years.

A series of executives left Microsoft over the past year, but Valentine`s position and long tenure make him particularly noteworthy.

An Associated Press poll found only one in five video viewers have watched or downloaded a full-length movie or television show.

More than half of the respondents have downloaded or watched video, and video clips were the most popular, followed by short movie and TV clips, music videos, sports highlights and user-generated amateur videos.

The poll`s findings come as a result of major Hollywood studios and television networks increasingly making their old and current programmes available online.

Google has jumped in to help revive an old HP indexing engine it developed and retired in 1995, reports News.com.

Google helped fix software bugs in the old Tesseract, an optical character recognition engine whose code was released to the open source community in recent months.

The project aligns with Google`s overall goal to index and organise the world`s information.