internet.quillem.com

Just when it looked like the JAVA vs. .NET wars were about to seriously take off, a company named MainSoft has launched Visual MainWin, a product that allows .Net programmers to create fully compliant, Java 1.4 specification bytecode without learning the Java programming language.

Mainsoft's Visual MainWin for the J2EE platform integrates with (and requires) Microsoft Visual Studio.Net, and allows developers using Visual Basic .Net or C#, as well as ASP.Net and ADO.Net class libraries, to create, deploy, and debug applications on J2EE application servers, including IBM WebSphere 5.1, BEA WebLogic 8.1 and Tomcat 5.0.

MainWin compiles Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) into Java bytecode. According to Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen, Microsoft's intermediate code is very similar to Java bytecode, and the company will be able to maintain compatibility as Java bytecode changes.

ZDNet is carrying this story.

ZDNet India is carrying an interesting story on Intel's expanding investment and development interests in India.

In India Intel does not have a lot of advanced technology partners but wherever an opportunity turns up, it invests. In the Silicon Valley tradition, there are startups that work with each other, with larger companies and together they bring about monumental technology shifts.

A prime example of funding futuristic research at an academic institution is the Tenet group at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai, which is well on the way to delivering low cost connectivity and internet access to India's rural masses. Intel is funding the Tenet group's research in the digitisation of radio.

A good example of that would be its investment in Sasken. "We have designed silicon for high-end cellphones, smart phones. Sasken does work in global system for mobile (GSM) general packet radio switching (GPRS) communication protocol stacks. This is very complementary to our silicon roadmap."

The full story is available here.

Chetan Bhagat, best-selling author of 'Five Point Someone - What not to do at IIT', has been kind enough to agree to an email interview for Quillem. The interview can be viewed in its entirety here.

The Economic Times is carrying a report that states that India is significantly short of skilled manpower.

Though brain drain from the leading institutes and stagnant output of engineering colleges definitely contribute to the manpower shortage, the software industry itself has contributed to the state of affairs.

A good portion of the exports of software industry can be attributed to "body shopping", in which people are placed on-site overseas for long periods of time. Body shopping inevitably leads to brain drain. When people are sent for a long period in the US, it is inevitable that most such people will end up staying in the US, given our almost blinding attraction to the West. The software industry knows this quite well, but to meet the short-term targets and to make easy money it continues the practice.

Now, who'd have thought..

A new Windows worm, that goes by the name Korgo, is able to auto-infect unpatched systems with a keylogging trojan, steal online banking information, and secretly transmit data back to its creators.

Anti-virus firm F-Secure says there are a number of variants of the worm, all of which exploit one of the vulnerabilities which was patched by Microsoft in April.

Hypponen advised those who had infected by Korgo, to change their passwords and cancel their credit cards. "Especially the ones you've used during last week. This is not a joke," he said.

Symantec has more information including a removal tool. The Sydney Morning Herald is carrying this story.

The Economic Times is carrying a story on recent trends in the Indian Pharma Industry, that indicate that a significant number of scientists are leaving their overseas posts to come back to work in India's booming Industry.

As salaries in India have shot up, more and more pharma scientists are giving up lucrative jobs in the USA and other adopted countries to return to India and join research institutes and hospitals, reveals a study by the Charities Aid Foundation of India (CAF).

Of some 250 research scientists working at Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, 20 have returned from foreign shores. They are involved in new drug research. At Lupin Laboratories, four scientists came from the USA to join research in natural product chemistry. Ten of the 80 researchers in Nicholas Piramal have come from abroad and Wockhardt has weaned away 10 scientists for biotechnology, new drug research, chemistry and pharmacology.

Also has a nice overview of the current state of the Indian pharma Industry.

Internet service providers (ISPs) continue to fall like ninepins leaving their customers in lurch. The latest one to drop dead is the retail ISP business of New Delhi-based Data Access (which had been running ISP operations under the NOW brand).

With around 20,000 dial-up users, the company has ceased its retail ISP operations last month. The ire of the ISP users, especially in the case of Data Access, has been triggered by the fact that users not only have to do away with the ISP connection but also email services that come free with the connection.

According to officials at Data Access, post-paid users can only receive and not send emails from NOW accounts till July 31, 2004 while pre-paid users can use the balance hours before November 22, 2004.

The Financial Express is carrying this story.

Network Associates Inc. has been granted a broad U.S. patent for technology covering "various computer program products, systems and methods" for filtering unwanted e-mail messages.

The antivirus software company said that U.S. Patent No. 6,732,157 encompasses use of multiple spam-filtering techniques such as compound filters, paragraph hashing and Bayesian rules. These techniques have been proposed and used by a number of antispam technology proponents, and it wasn't clear from the filing how the patent would affect competitors to Network Associates' McAfee for Consumers antispam offerings.

Antivirus software vendor Symantec Corp. also made a recent patent play. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company paid $62.5 million last year to acquire a patent that covers computer hardware or software that scans data in transit between two "mediums."

I wonder if there's a patent on the patenting process.. :S The full story is available here.

The Financial Express is carrying a report on plans by Communications and Information Technology Minister, Dayanidhi Maran, to increase the penetration of the broadband and dial-up markets in India.

In its recommendations, the Trai has expected that India can achieve 20 million broadband and 40 million Internet subscribers by 2010 which would translate into penetration level of 1.7 per cent and 3.4 per cent respectively.

India currently has 0.4 Internet connections and 0.02 broadband connections per 100 persons, while Korea has 25 and China has 1.4 broadband connections per 100 persons, with its current level of 50 per cent was higher than what it was just six months ago.

The report also states that Internet growth has sometimes been on the decline in India (over the past three years)..