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update IBM is set to lose over 2500 workers across Asia-Pacific as the economy continues on a downward spiral.

ERICSSON Australia and New Zealand will halve its contractor workforce and slash 100 permanent positions over the next six months.

THE Australian Taxation office will shut down its IT operations for almost a fortnight to conduct data centre maintenance.

Oracle has contributed data-integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday.The code helps maintain "comprehensive data integrity" as information "moves from application to database, and from [the] Linux operating system to disk storage," according to a statement. It also lowers the possibility that erroneous data will get written to disk.[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage report newsletter. ]The companies' effort is meant to help datacenter administrators track and address corrupted data quickly, lowering costs and downtime, said Scott McIntyre, vice president of product marketing at Emulex, in a statement.Oracle and Emulex, which makes products for connecting servers, networks, and storage systems, are developing an early-adopter program that will help customers start working with the new features.When a lot of information

Microsoft has released a new wave of Windows Live services that adds more social-networking qualities to its set of online services.The company unveiled last month a plan to add Facebook-like qualities to its set of online services, which include e-mail, calendaring, instant-messaging, photo-storage, and sharing and collaboration services, among others. At the time, the company said the new services would be available to users before the end of the year.[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]Microsoft first revealed the Windows Live brand for its online services and a plan for a major overhaul and to add new services in november 2005. The services are aimed at competing with Google by making Windows Live web users' entry point into the Web and ultimately allow Microsoft to sell more online advertising.The new version of Windows Live services lets people users have designated as "friends" s

VMware released on Tuesday VMware View 3, new software aimed at providing desktop virtualization, application virtualization, and management of virtual desktops in one product.VMware View is a reworking of the company's VMware Desktop Infrastructure product that adds other components to solve the problem of managing virtualized desktop environments, said Raj Mallempati, a group product manager of desktop products for VMware.[ Find out how VMware ThinApp 4.0 fared in InfoWorld's Test Center review | Keep up with the latest virtualization news in the InfoWorld Virtualization Topic Center | Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]VMware View is part of an initiative that VMware is calling vClient, which it unveiled at its VMworld conference in September. Mallempati said with the vClient strategy, VMware hopes to solve the "desktop dilemma" of not only virtualizing applications and desktops, but also managin