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Is Microsoft scared of Google? We thought we we'd ask Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that on Monday. Steve was shrill, initially. "Microsoft is not scared of Google!" declared the man Bill Gates has handed his company's reins to. It was apparent that our inquiry had taken the usually brash Ballmer offguard. But not for nothing is he the commander of the world's top software company. Shaking Steve, he certainly isn't. He quickly pulled himself together and went on record. Check out the video on Rediff IShare and see what Steve Ballmer had to say about his company's famed feud with Google. Source:Rediff

Source:Rediff

They say there is no place like home, but it is beginning to look as if there is a place sort of like home 41 light-years from here in the constellation Cancer. Astronomers reported Tuesday that there were at least five planets circling a star there known as 55 Cancri, where only four had been known before, making it the most extensive planetary system yet found outside our own. It is also the one that most resembles our solar system, with a giant planet orbiting far out from the star and four smaller ones circling closer in. The new addition to the system circles 55 Cancri at roughly the distance of Venus in our own solar system, in the so-called habitable zone where it is warm enough for liquid water. But, with 45 times the mass of Earth, the planet is more apt to resemble Neptune or Saturn than Earth, and thus would be a deadly environment for any kind of life that we know. “It’s a system that appears to be packed with planets,” Prof. Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University

Apple's knack for generating fanatical customer loyalty was clearly on display in London Nov. 9, as a line of plucky fans braved inclement British weather outside the company's Regent Street store. They wanted to be the first to get their hands on the iPhone, which finally launched that day in Britain and Germany. Bracing himself against the cold, student John MacGregor, 23, says he has been looking forward to the iPhone's British launch since the device was first unveiled in January, 2007. "There's nothing quite like it out there at the moment," he says. Despite the hoopla surrounding the iPhone—more than 1.4 million units already have been sold in the U.S.—Apple's bid to grab a share of the European mobile-phone market is no sure bet. The European market is home to well-entrenched locals Nokia (NOK) and Sony Ericsson, which enjoy dominant market share and offer their own multimedia music phones. European consumers also could turn up their noses at a phon