App dev: As the final version of its next Office suite moves forward, Microsoft issues a beta of Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Office Second Beta Edition. I’m guessing they didn’t run that name by any focus groups, but the tools, previously code-named Cypress, “give developers the power to take advantage of the 2007 Office System as a development platform and create scalable Office-based solutions,” in Microsoft’s own words. Storage: There are those celebrating the hard disk drive’s 50th birthday. But not Mario Apicella. “Maybe it’s because I am not much for celebrating anniversaries, especially those related to unanimated objects, but isn’t all the hubbub around the disk drive hitting the big five-o getting annoying?” A clever invention, indeed. Then again, so were printers, monitors, keyboards. “Aren’t those machines at least equally important, not to mention more reliable, than disk drives, those irritating recycling bins for bits of data?” For those of you wondering what the first hard drive looked like, Apicella includes a link to it in Fifty years of hard drives: It’s time to move on. Test Center review: Genuitec has just released version 5.0 of its MyEclipse product. Yes, as in the Eclipse open source Java IDE. “This productized collection of plug-ins smoothly expands Eclipse functionality at a competitive price. I found few things to complain about, save for the fact that many of the plug-ins provide only basic functionality,” Andrew Binstock writes in the full review. “As much as I was impressed by MyEclipse 5.0’s range of plug-ins, however, I was disappointed with their lack of depth.” Senior editor Stephanie McLouglin, meanwhile, counts the ways in which MyEclipse 5.0 benefits consumers. The news beat: Google is losing users in China, a report by the China Internet Network Information Centre states; indeed, 62 percent of Chinese users typed their way to Baidu for search, up from 52 percent in 2005. The FBI floats a wide-ranging wiretap proposal under which foreign ISPs and application providers would be legally required to base servers they use for U.S. customers inside this country. And the FTC shuts down four illegal spamming operations. Software Development