When the economy slides into a recession, layoffs are inevitable. Whether it’s three or four people laid off, a massive downsizing or a company that has been forced to shut its doors, the layoff experience is nothing short of a nightmare for most workers.

Years and even decades of valued work, input and influence on a company comes to a screeching halt in a surprisingly formal and succinct process. Rarely are the pink-slipped given time to download personal documents from their computers or say goodbye to peers. If severance is involved, there will be papers to sign. HR might want an exit interview. And that’s all there is. The process happens so quickly, most are too stunned and shaken to consider what rights or entitlements they do or do not have.

Will there be an Eclipse version of Silverlight? At the EclipseCon 2008 conference, Sam Ramji, the director of platform technology strategy at Microsoft, said among the technologies he could see Microsoft working further with Eclipse on might be Silverlight.

Microsoft pledged to support two Eclipse projects during Ramji’s keynote at the EclipseCon conference on March 19. One project Microsoft has pledged to support is the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit and the other is the Eclipse Higgins identity management project.

In recent months, the awareness about people unable to connect from technology for even a short period of time has gotten a lot of attention.

Last November, The New York Times ran an article on a Korean boot camp to cure kids of their computer addiction. South Korea, a country where 90 percent of homes are connected to the Web, feels that it has a responsibility to deal with the effects of this, holding the first international symposium on Internet addiction in September.

U.S. psychiatrists appear to be taking Internet addiction more seriously as well, proposing that this"compulsive-impulsive" disorder be added to the next release of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-V in 2011.

Security vendor F-Secure has warned of multiple critical vulnerabilities in its own and other vendors’ products. The vulnerabilities exist in the way the products respond to malformed archive files, and were discovered by researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland.

F-Secure products affected include F-Secure Internet Security 2008, F-Secure Anti-Virus 2008, F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus for Windows Mobile 2003/5.0/6, and F-Secure Anti-Virus for Linux 4.65 and earlier versions, according to an F-Secure security bulletin. Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities could result in remote code execution.

Microsoft has released a service update for all versions of its Windows Vista operating system. The computer giant claims that the update improves the stability, security and performance of the software.

The update, or service pack, includes some fixes released before now and adds many new ones as well. Microsoft has warned that the update could clash with some security software and other programs customers may have installed on their machine.

The Internet has profoundly changed journalism, but not necessarily in ways that were predicted even a few years ago, a study on the industry released Sunday found.

It was believed at one point that the Net would democratize the media, offering many new voices, stories and perspectives. Yet the news agenda actually seems to be narrowing, with many Web sites primarily packaging news that is produced elsewhere, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual State of the News Media report.

Sybase is looking to bolster both performance and productivity for users with the release of the latest version of Advantage Database Server.

Version 9.0 of the product, announced March 17, is one of two embedded database offerings from Sybase. It includes a number of enhancements aimed squarely at application developers. For starters, the company has built in what officials say is a more efficient way to optimize multi-segmented filters by evaluating the most restricted segment first.

A man once described as one of the world’s top email spammers pleaded guilty Friday to federal charges of mail fraud, wire fraud, and failure to file a tax return. Robert Alan Soloway, 29, was dubbed "the spam king" by prosecutors who said he used networks of compromised computers to send out millions upon millions of junk emails since 2003.

He was arrested last summer and charged in a 40-count indictment. He agreed to plead guilty to the three charges and the rest were dropped, including email fraud, aggravated identity theft and numerous other counts of mail and wire fraud.

On the opening day of Novell’s BrainShare conference comes the news that the U.S. Supreme Court won’t block Novell’s antitrust suit against Microsoft over WordPerfect.

WordPerfect, for those not steeped in industry history, is a word-processing product that used to be a credible competitor to Microsoft Word back in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

In 2004, Novell settled one potential antitrust suit with Microsoft involving NetWare for $536 million. But Novell refused to settle with Microsoft over WordPerfect and filed an antitrust suit against the company that just handed it a half-billion dollar check, seeking unspecified damages.

Sperry Software announced their newest add-in, Incoming Mail Organizer for Outlook. This add-in utility for Outlook 2000 or better (including Outlook 2007) allows you to dynamically file your incoming emails in Outlook folders other than the default inbox folder. They can be saved according to who the email is from, keywords in the subject or body of the email, or it can be set up to prompt you where to save each time–or all three. This add-in helps to reduce the number of Outlook rules you have, and keeps you organized by keeping related mails together in one folder.

In addition, Sperry Software announces significant improvements to their existing Sent Items Organizer. This add-in works similarly to the Incoming Mail Organizer but for the send side. New in version 2.0, the add-in now puts up a button when composing emails that allows for an immediate send and file ability. In addition, filing the email now is made easier with the addition of the last fifteen most recently used folders constantly displayed.