San Francisco - An unidentified 18-year-old was the author of an internet posting that sent Apple shares tumbling earlier this month with a false report that company co-founder Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack, Bloomberg News reported Friday.

The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation into the report to discover whether it was motivated by investors hoping to drive down the company's stock and make a profit by short- selling it.

Washington, October : A team of Indian-origin researchers in Penn State''s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) says that small hospitals in rural areas can provide patients with the benefits of modern equipment and technology by sharing an IT infrastructure with larger hospitals in the same geographic area.

Assistant Professor Madhu Reddy, Associate Professor Sandeep Purao, and graduate student Mary Kelly conducted interviews with administrators at a regional hospital and three small, rural hospitals in central Pennsylvania.

The researchers said that the three smaller hospitals relied on the regional hospital to manage such things as software, laboratory information, and technical support.

San Francisco - Microsoft on Thursday reported first-quarter results that exceeded analysts' expectations, with profits up 2 per cent to 4.37 billion dollars.

Sales rose 9.4 percent to 15.1 billion dollars in the quarter that ended September 30, the company said in a statement, spurred by the demand for Office programmes and the Xbox video game console.

The world's largest software maker said sales for the full fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009, would be between 64.9 billion dollars to 66.4 billion dollars.

San Francisco - Microsoft issued a rare emergency patch on Thursday to fix a critical bug in its Windows operating system, which could be exploited by online criminals to take over individual and corporate computers.

It was the first time since April 2007 that the software giant has issued a patch outside its schedule of monthly updates.

Microsoft said the critical flaw affected computers running Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, with less danger posed to computers running Windows Vista and Server 2008.

On Tuesday, a System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 was launched by Microsoft. Through the launch of this Virtual Machine Manager, Microsoft added another key component to its virtualization arsenal. 

All important virtualization management pieces of Microsoft's strategy can be handled by Virtual Machine Manager 2008, and it has been learnt that Microsoft has spent much of 2008 deciding as to how the software could manage both Hyper-V and VMware's ESX hypervisor, as well as physical servers, through a single interface. 

Strasbourg - The European Parliament on Thursday criticized the