OS media centre goes public

Previously only available as a closed beta, the Boxee developers have announced the public availability of a new beta of their cross-platform open media centre with social networking and community features, states The H.

Boxee is a fork of the XBMC Media Center that includes several customised additions, including Web 2.0 services integration with Twitter, Tumblr and Digg, as well as major audio, video and photo portal integration (such as YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, Shoutcast, Flickr and Picasa).

Boxee also includes a BitTorrent client so users can easily download media over the Web from within the application. Users can add extra functionality through App Box, an add-on App Store that lets users select and install a variety of new applications and plug-ins.

Yahoo has helped the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to set up a Hadoop cluster lab in Mumbai by donating a cluster of servers running the open source Hadoop software, reports PC World.

Apache Hadoop is an open source distributed-computing project of the Apache Software Foundation. “Yahoo runs a large number of its critical operations using Hadoop, and it cannot do all the research required around Hadoop within the company,” says Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice-president and head of Yahoo Labs.

The cluster lab at Mumbai will help researchers at the institute study areas such as searching and ranking techniques, information extraction and natural language processing.

Microsoft is looking to help unify scalable vector graphics (SVG) on browsers when it took a seat on the SVG working group at the World Wide Web Consortium, reports SD Times.

Since 1999, the W3C has been working on a way to bring scalable vector graphics to the Web. After 10 years of work, the specification has become part of the HTML 5 starting line-up. Microsoft has remained outside of the SVG development process, choosing to largely ignore the technology.

Microsoft's Patrick Dengler, senior programme manager of the Internet Explorer team, has joined the SVG working group, in which he says, “We recognise that vector graphics are an important component of the next-generation Web platform. As evidenced by our ongoing involvement in W3C working groups, we are committed to participating in the standards process to help ensure a healthy future for the Web. Our involvement with the SVG working group builds on that commitment.”