There’s a saying that greatness doesn’t happen overnight. Well, the same can often be said for great flops. Technology flops go through their own stages, from promising new technology to overhyped beast to oblivion. Here’s a look at the six stages of technology flops, using the rise and fall of push technology as an example.

Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology so called "IITians" told Evalueserve that India was fast catching up with the US for the range and quality of career prospects. Between 1964 and 2001 the number of IITians staying in India was 65 percent but this jumped to 84 percent between 2002 and 2008.

The survey of 667 IITians found this was being fuelled by shifting attitudes, between 1964 and 2001 60 per cent believed developed countries offered the best employment prospects but this fell to 51 per cent between 2002 and 2008, with 49 per cent believing India now offered better opportunities.

Software developer Hans Reiser was found guilty today of first degree murder in the death of his wife in late 2006, a conviction that carries up to 25 years in prison and a possible death sentence for the Reiser4 file system.

ReiserFS (File System) is incorporated in the Linux kernel and is used in many top Linux distributions, although EXT3 has succeeded it a the leading file system. The Reiser4 open source project, the successor to ReiserFS also conceived by Hans Reiser, continues to be developed and supported by a group of open source programmers. In an e-mail interview over the weekend, Edward Shishkin, a top developer of Reiser4, said work continues on the file system but the fate of the open source project long term is uncertain.

Avalon Business Systems, developer of mail management utilities for use with Lotus Notes mail systems, will be demonstrating its ReduceMail Pro suite of products at the Admin 2008 trade show in Boston. Avalon’s initiative, Go Green with ReduceMail Pro highlights how using ReduceMail Pro can help your organization save energy by off-loading old mail from energy-consuming high-availability clustered servers to lower-energy consuming secondary servers.

All of the ReduceMail Pro products can help an organization save energy and money by improving email efficiency. ReduceMail Pro Archive/Delete removes email completely or off-loads old email to lesser availability storage, allowing you to minimize the backup resources and reducing the need for energy-intensive server tasks such as compaction and view index updates. ReduceMail Pro Audit helps you ensure that the email system is used only for appropriate emails and allows you to delete large unnecessary attachments. ReduceMail Pro Attach helps you compress and consolidate attachments and move large attachments to more energy efficient lower availability servers.

IBM announced it has acquired InfoDyne Corporation, a privately held software company based in Park Ridge, Illinois. InfoDyne is a leader in high-speed platforms and data feed connectors which combined with IBM’s WebSphere technology will help clients extend transactional integrity to low-latency environments. Financial details were not disclosed.

InfoDyne provides software that is designed to enable today’s highly competitive trading firms and other venues to process exploding data volumes at microsecond response rates. InfoDyne’s market data delivery platform and rich feed handler portfolio take data from hundreds of sources and deliver it in a standardized format, helping customers to control escalating data feed costs.

Less than a year after unleashing its "Cheetah" data server, IBM is set to release a new version of its software with enhanced availability.

IDS(Informix Dynamic Sever) 11.5, code-named "Cheetah 2," builds on the failover-recovery capabilities of its predecessor by now supporting full read/write transactions across all nodes. The last version of IDS only supported reads on secondary nodes, the company said. The latest version of IDS will be available worldwide beginning on May 6.

Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz rightly gets credit for pioneering the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others. But pretty soon the novelty of his methods will wear off, he predicted.

"At some point the word ‘blogging’ will be anachronistic," Schwartz said at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. "I communicate."

And he predicted, in effect, that the rest of the executive world will catch up. "Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it," he said in an on-stage interview with O’Reily Media chief Tim O’Reilly. "You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet."

A judge tells the Bush administration to collect and preserve all email in .pst files; millions are missing.

Concerned over contradictory White House statements about the government’s controversial email archiving efforts, a U.S. district judge April 24 ordered the Bush administration to collect and preserve all emails in .pst files for individuals employed at the White House between March 2003 and October 2005. Millions of White House email are missing from the period.

The White House admits emails are missing but insists the emails are on back-up tapes and drives that as yet haven’t been located. Federal law requires the preservation of all White House email. The period of time covered by the order includes the start of the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame affair and the White House response to Hurricane Katrina.

Statistically, men make more money than women do for doing the same job. It’s called the "wage gap" and it is considered one of the last bastions of gender inequality in the workplace.

The wage gap hit its all-time low in 1973, when women could be expected to earn 56.6 percent of what a man would earn for the same work, according to the U.S. Women’s Bureau and the NCPE (National Committee on Pay Equity). This was a decade after the Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who held the same job and did the same work. (The percentage was 58 percent in 1963.)

In 2007, women could expect to be paid 80 cents on the dollar across all occupations, an improvement of less than half a penny per year, with numbers even further depressed among minorities: 64 cents per dollar for African-American women and 52 cents for Hispanic women.

IT professions faired better than most in 2007. Computer support specialists appeared closest to closing the wage gap, with women earning 87 percent of what men did in the same occupation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers beat the national average in other categories, including computer and information systems managers and computer programmers (85 percent) and database administrators, computer scientists and systems analysts (84 percent).

Anti-virus companies are angry at a planned new event at a major security conference in the US.

Called Race-to-Zero, the contest will invite visitors to the Defcon hacker conference to find new ways of beating anti-virus software.

Contestants will get some sample virus code that they must modify and try to sneak past the anti-virus products.