Gov announces new open source technology initiative by Oregon universities

Google Contributes $350,000 to Joint Oregon State, Portland State
University Program.
Governor Ted Kulongoski today announced the contribution of $350,000
by search technology leader Google Inc. to a joint open source
technology initiative of Oregon State University and Portland State
University.

With the grant, the universities will collaborate to encourage open
source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula
and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects
worldwide. The universities will also help provide a bridge between
Oregon's universities and Oregon's growing open technology industry.

"Oregon is home to many of the leading companies, institutions and
executives driving the global market for open source software and
hardware," Governor Ted Kulongoski said. "Google's support will
strengthen the leadership role of our universities in fostering the
next generation of open source technologies, projects and experts in
Oregon and enhance our aggressive efforts to bring jobs and investment
to Oregon's burgeoning open technology cluster."

Google's contribution demonstrates its continued commitment to
advancing open source software development. This summer, Google funded
a $2 million "Summer of Code" program, which gave grants of $4,500 to
more than 400 students performing work on open source projects,
including several hosted by the Oregon State University Open Source
Lab (OSUOSL).

"Google leverages open source software in its development efforts and
strongly believes in supporting the open source community," said Chris
DiBona, open source program manager at Google. "Supporting the
projects and institutions advancing open source software and hardware
helps ensure the continued success and advancement of open source
technologies. The teams at Oregon State and Portland State have done
great open source work in the past and we're excited to back their
joint efforts."

The new open source initiative will create a joint-university open
source technology center and organization in early 2006 to: design and
coordinate curricula across the Oregon University System; offer
student internships and expand its technology capacity for the growing
number of open source projects and communities it supports; further
the commercialization of open source innovations by facilitating
linkages to the region's network of venture capital firms, technology
companies and incubators such, as the Beaverton-based Open Technology
Business Center; and partner on key educational events, such as the
inaugural Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) recently held in
Portland.

Ed Ray, president of Oregon State University (OSU), and Daniel O.
Bernstine, president of Portland State University (PSU), expressed
their appreciation to Google for its commitment to support innovation
and economic growth in Oregon, as well as for this sizable
contribution.

"Google's support to Oregon State University and Portland State
University signals their commitment to Oregon's knowledge economy and
we're pleased to welcome a new partner in our contributions to the
state's growing technology research and development industries," said
OSU President Ed Ray.

"Our universities are committed to strengthening teaching and research
to enhance the open source community and we will continue to provide
industry with well-prepared graduates," said PSU President Daniel O.
Bernstine.

Leading the university collaboration is Scott Kveton and Bart Massey.
Kveton is the Associate Director of the Oregon State University Open
Source Lab in Corvallis, which provides custom open source software
development and offers facilities hosting some of the world's largest
open source projects, including the Linux(r) operating system, the
Mozilla web browser and the Apache web server.

Massey, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Maseeh
College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State
University, is a long-time open source developer and a leader in
academic open source research and teaching. Kveton and Massey will
coordinate with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science at OSU, also a recipient of funding from Google.

The Growing Open Source Industry

Open source software, including the Linux(r) operating system, is among
the fastest growing technology sectors. Developed using a
collaborative process often involving commercial vendors and
communities of enthusiasts and students, open source generally gives
users the rights to use, copy, modify and redistribute the software
created.

Increasingly, open source technologies are being used across the gamut
of computing systems, from desktops and servers to telecommunications
infrastructure and embedded devices. Analyst firm IDC estimates that
the Linux(r) hardware and software markets will grow to $38 billion by
2008, with annual growth rates topping 25%.

"Back in 1997, IDC anticipated the impact of open source technologies
and predicted the Linux operating environment would be a mainstream
choice by the end of 2004," said Dan Kusnetzky, IDC's VP of System
Software research. "Our survey data indicates this occurred even
earlier and by the end of 2003, this technology was found worldwide,
in organizations of all sizes and in every vertical market. This
partnership between Google and important research universities is yet
another indicator of the continued evolution and maturity of the Linux
and open source markets."

www.bend.com

Michigan Senate approves business tax cuts

The Michigan Senate approved a plan Tuesday to cut business taxes by
$1 billion over six years and tie the potential for even more tax
relief to limits on state spending.

Over Democratic objections, the Republican-controlled Senate sent the
legislation to the state House, where Republicans passed their own tax
package in August.

One bill would reduce the state's main business tax rate from 1.9
percent to 1.84 percent in January, saving companies about $50 million
over nine months. Other bills would create a nonrefundable credit for
property taxes paid on industrial equipment and base a company's taxes
solely on sales rather than the current combination of sales, payroll
and personal property.

Another $1.4 billion in tax cuts would be tied to a measure that would
limit the annual growth in state tax revenues to no more than the
inflation rate plus 1 percentage point. Business would get the
additional cuts if tax revenues exceeded that rate plus another $50
million. Some of the extra money would go into the state's rainy day
fund.

In the last 20 years, revenues have gone above inflation plus 1
percentage point 11 times, though the last increase occurred in the
1999-2000 budget year. Most increases came during the boom years of
the 1990s.

www.freep.com

Health inequalities between ethnic groups persist but reducing

Ministry of Health reports show a reduction in inequalities between
ethnic groups in suicide rates, smoking rates and infant mortality
rates, director-general of health Dr Karen Poutasi said yesterday.

The Ministry of Health's annual report for 2004/05, was released
yesterday with the annual Health and Independence Report.

The reports reveal that initiatives such as low cost access to primary
health care and the meningococcal B immunisation programme are
expected to further reduce health disparities.

By September 22, over 2.5 million doses of the meningococcal vaccine
had been given. More than 960,000 children had been given the vaccine,
of whom more than 600,000 had completed the three-vaccine schedule.

The annual report is the ministry's key accountability document, while
the Health and Independence Report is the director-general's report on
the state of public health and focuses on the progress the health and
disability system is making toward strategic goals.

Key findings of the independence report include:

Research shows that acceptance of people with mental illness increased
between 1997 and 2004;

The Government spent on average $1959 per person on health in the 2003/04 year;

The number of patients waiting longer than six months for their first
specialist assessment has decreased slightly;

Smoking has dropped significantly over the past five years;

The percentage of diabetics enrolled in the national Get Checked
programme increased from 33 per cent in 2001 to 59 per cent in 2004;
and

Smoking among adults has declined from 24.5 per cent in 2001 to 23.4
percent in 2004. Cigarette consumption dropped by 26 per cent over the
five years to December 2004.

The annual report reiterates that health inequalities persist,
affecting mostly Maori and Pacific people and those economically
disadvantaged.

The suicide rate in 2002 of 10.7 per 100,000 is the lowest since 1985,
however the suicide rate continues to be higher for Maori than
non-Maori.

In 2002, there were 19.7 deaths per 100,000 for Maori males, compared
to 15.6 for non-Maori, and 5.9 deaths per 100,000 for Maori females
compared to 4.8 for non-Maori.

The infant mortality rate decreased from 22.8 deaths per 1000 live
births in 1961 to 5.6 deaths per 1000 live births in 2004 - lower than
that of the United States (7.0 in 2002).

In 1996 the infant mortality rate for Maori was 11.5 deaths per 1000
live births compared with 7.1 for the total population.

In 2004, the infant mortality rate had declined to 7.2 for Maori ,
with 7.1 for Pacific people.

The report says despite the low proportion of Maori and Pacific people
in the health workforce, the numbers employed are increasing overall.

In 1992, Maori made up just 3.7 per cent of nurses and midwives. By
2004 this had doubled to 7.5 per cent. Of Pacific people, there were
1.4 per cent in 1992 working in nursing and midwifery, and by 2004
this was 2.9 per cent.

In 2003, 2.7 per cent of medical practitioners were Maori, with most
practising GPs.

However the number of Maori health providers has grown from 20 in 1992
to 286 in 2005.

The annual report says the total net result of all District Health
Boards (DHBs) has substantially improved from 2001/02 to 2004/05, with
the net total deficit falling from $286.7 million to $15.2 million.

"There has been increased government funding over this time, but DHBs
have made significant efforts to operate within their funding," the
report says.

www.stuff.co.nz

Intel Changes CPU Road Map

Intel has announced several changes to its road map for server
processors, delaying its first dual-core Itanium 2 processor and
replacing a future multicore Xeon processor with a new design that
eliminates the performance penalty of shared connections to a chipset.

Montecito, the dual-core version of the Itanium 2 processor, will not
be available in large volumes until the middle of next year, instead
of the early part of next year as originally planned, said Scott
McLaughlin, an Intel spokesperson, on Monday. While preliminary
shipments of the processor are already under way, Intel decided to
make a few changes to the chip in order to reach the company's
standard for "production level quality," McLaughlin said, declining to
specify the nature of the changes.

But Montecito will no longer ship with Foxton, a sophisticated
power-management technology, and the speed of its front-side bus
connection to memory will run at 533MHz instead of the 667MHz speed
originally scheduled for the design, he said.

Chips Killed
Intel also has killed Whitefield, a multicore Xeon processor for
servers with four or more processors, McLaughlin said. It is being
replaced by a new processor code-named Tigerton that will appear in
2007, the same time-frame in which Whitefield was expected to arrive.

Tigerton processors will use a high-speed interconnect technology that
will allow each processor to connect directly to the server's chipset,
McLaughlin said. Current Xeon processors in multiprocessor servers
must share a front-side bus connection to the chipset in order to
access data from system memory or I/O, a bottleneck that industry
analysts have blamed for the current performance gap between Intel's
server chips and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processors.

Intel's next-generation architecture, announced by President and Chief
Executive Officer Paul Otellini in August, will be used as the
blueprint for Tigerton. This architecture is based on low-power design
principles used to build Intel's Pentium M processor for notebooks.

Whitefield had been expected to help tip the performance battle back
toward Intel in 2007, but Tigerton should be even more powerful,
McLaughlin said. AMD has enjoyed favorable reviews from industry
analysts, and even companies such as Hewlett-Packard, for the
performance of its Opteron server processors as compared to Intel's
Xeon chips.

Intel is not specifying exactly how the Tigerton processors will
connect to the server's chipset, such as whether they will use
integrated memory or I/O controllers or a next-generation interconnect
technology that Intel has vaguely discussed at previous Intel
Developer Forums.

Socket Compatibility Sought
The Caneland platform, or the combination of Tigerton and its related
chipset, is not the design that will bring socket compatibility to
Intel's Xeon and Itanium processors, McLaughlin said. Intel wants to
make a chipset that can accommodate either a Xeon processor or an
Itanium processor, which will help reduce product development costs
for both Intel and its partners. That compatibility is slated to
arrive along with Tukwila, a multicore Itanium 2 processor now
scheduled to arrive in 2008 as a result of the Montecito delay, he
said. Intel is still evaluating when its Xeon processors will be
designed for that compatibility.

Intel had been expected to introduce an integrated memory controller
design at the same time it engineered the compatibility between
Itanium and Xeon, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst with
Insight 64 in Saratoga, California. Intel had never publicly confirmed
those plans, but the company has spoken in general terms about the
need for integrated memory controllers at some point in the future.

An integrated memory controller means the logic responsible for
coordinating the exchange of information between the processor and
memory is built right onto the processor, allowing it to run at the
same speed as the processor and improving overall system performance.
Since Intel would have had to make significant changes to its
processor and chipset designs in order to make the Xeon and Itanium
processors fit into the same chipset, it was considered a logical time
to introduce an integrated memory controller, he said.

Cache Changes to Come?
AMD's Opteron uses both point-to-point interconnects like Tigerton's
and an integrated memory controller. But Intel has been reluctant to
embrace integrated memory controllers, said Dean McCarron, principal
analyst with Mercury Research in Cave Creek, Arizona. Leaving the
memory controller on the chipset allows Intel to more easily
accommodate changes in memory standards, because it's much easier to
change a chipset design than a processor design, he said.

One reason for moving out the common architecture target date, and
therefore the potential integrated memory controller, could be that
Intel plans to increase the size of cache memory on its future
processors, McCarron said. Cache memory stores frequently used data
right next to the CPU where it can be accessed much more quickly than
data stored in the main memory chips.

The combination of larger cache memory and the direct connections
between Tigerton processors and chipsets could provide a significant
performance boost for Intel-based servers in 2007, McCarron said. It's
very early to know for sure, with even sample chips still far away, he
said.

However, Tigerton will certainly be more efficient than Whitefield
because of the new interconnect design, Brookwood said. "What happens
on the chip matters a lot, obviously, but ultimately the performance
of these chips is constrained by how fast you can feed them data," he
said.

www.pcworld.com

Group angered by billboards linking cancer to abortion

The Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation is upset that an anti-abortion
group is linking the procedure to breast cancer, and appropriating the
foundation's pink ribbon trademark to do it.

Life Canada has put up three billboards in Alberta that display a
large pink ribbon and the words "stop the cover up" along with the
address of a website that claims that having an abortion is a factor
in getting breast cancer.

Jim Hudson, with the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, says the
website is misleading, and that they are looking at whether Life
Canada has infringed on their trademark by using the pink ribbon.

"The best piece of evidence that's been published was actually quite a
large, 2004 Oxford study that is a re-analysis from 53 studies,
including 83,000 women from 16 countries," Hudson said. "And they
concluded abortion did not increase a woman's risk."

Joanne Byfield, president of Life Canada and who also belongs to
Pro-Life Alberta, says more than 70 studies "have looked at the
relationship between the two and about 80 per cent of those studies
have shown some sort of link between the two."

Hudson says Life Canada is sending the wrong message to women.

"We are concerned about this campaign, the evidence that they're
presenting about a link between abortion and breast cancer is not what
we would accept as the current evidence for a relationship between
abortion and breast cancer," he said.

The Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation estimates that 21,600 women will
be diagnosed with the disease this year, and about 5,300 will die from
it. Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women,
and the second-most deadly, after lung cancer.

October is breast cancer awareness month, following the annual CIBC
Run for the Cure fundraising event held in September. In August,
almost 2,300 people participated in the Calgary Weekend to End Breast
Cancer 60-kilometre walk-a-thon, which raised more than $7 million.

www.calgary.cbc.ca

Ericsson Buys Marconi: $2.1B

U.K.'s iconic telecommunications equipment supplier is finally gobbled
up as the British press applauds a surprisingly good deal. Ericsson,
the Swedish telecommunications equipment supplier, announced on
Tuesday it would acquire roughly 75 percent of its British rival
Marconi for $2.1 billion.

Ericsson will acquire Marconi's network products businesses,
including its optical networking, broadband, radio access, and
softswitch units. It will also acquire Marconi's related services and
research arms, along with its trademarks and brand names.

In addition, Ericsson will purchase Marconi's data networking
business based in the United States.

What's left of the old, iconic Marconi will be a small local services
business that will be renamed Telent plc. The new company will gain a
major customer in Ericsson, which passed on buying Telent's assets.

Shares of Ericsson were up $0.79 to $33.71 in recent trading, while
shares of Marconi were up $0.05 to $13.25.

Ericsson will gain a solid presence in the United Kingdom and the
benefit of Marconi's long experience with BT Group, a major Ericsson
customer

"The acquisition of the Marconi businesses has a compelling strategic
logic and is a robust financial case," said Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric
Svanberg. "As fixed and mobile services converge, our customers will
substantially benefit from this powerful combination."

There will be some overlap between Ericsson and its new Marconi units
so the company expects to shed between 15 to 20 percent of Marconi's
6,500 employees.

Ericsson was one of two players rumored to be sizing up Marconi since
it began dressing itself up for sale back in April after it was shut
out of BT Group's lucrative $19-billion construction of its broadband
network.

Ericsson and Chinese equipment supplier Huawei both showed interest in
Marconi, but Huawei may have stumbled over Marconi's complex pension
liabilities.

As part of the Ericsson deal, Marconi will retain its U.K. pension
plan and its net cash, which amounts to approximately $491 million.

Gaining Scale
"This deal strengthens Ericsson in a number of areas," said Bill
Owens, a London-based vice president of the consulting firm Adventis.
"Marconi just did not have the scale to continue as an independent
business, but they are well-known for solid products, very good R&D,
and technical expertise."

For Ericsson, the acquisition also takes a European competitor out of
the market and adds to the Swedish company's scale as one of the top
global players.

"Marconi now gets the benefit of scale and a true global brand, which
it truly needed," said Mr. Owens.

Marconi's management wowed the British press with the size of the
deal, which was larger than generally expected, according to Mr.
Owens. The trials and tribulations of Marconi, the U.K.'s largest and
most successful telecommunications equipment supplier, have been
playing out very loudly in the U.K press.

"The press is patting [Marconi CEO] Mike Parton on the back for
achieving a good deal. That seemed difficult not too long ago," said
Mr. Owens. "It is a good deal for Marconi's shareholders and most of
its employees."

www.redherring.com