Join the
discussion: 4comments, last by
DeathWish187
Breaking through years of tension, Microsoft and the One Laptop Per Child project have reached an agreement to offer Windows XP as an option for the OLPC initiative. Apparently the Redmond-based software giant is even willing to participate alongside the project's existing Linux advocates by potentially leveraging a dual-boot configuration.
It is the same basic Windows XP implementation that runs on the Intel Class Mate, ASUS eeePC, and other products in this emerging class of ultra low cost laptop PCs. As I have posted earlier, we had to write multiple custom drivers and a BIOS to get Windows to boot from an SD card in order to do the Windows port to the XO. This is the initial implementation customers will be able purchase when the product RTMs and will be a "Windows only" XO that Nicholas Negroponte himself has described as running "really fast." Customers can also choose to buy the existing Linux/Sugar XO. Longer term, the OLPC plans to write a new BIOS and increase the amount of flash storage on the XO to support a "Dual Boot" option that would enable children to use either Linux or Windows on the same machine. This is fine with us as long there continues to be an excellent Windows experience on the XO.
A federal court jury has awarded Texas-based firm Anascape Ltd. with a $21 million settlement for Nintendo of America Inc. infringing upon patents related to the Wii Classic, WaveBird, and Gamecube controllers. Nintendo plans to appeal the decision.
Tyler-based Anascape also sued Microsoft Corp. for patent infringements on game controllers but reached an agreement with the company before the start of the trial against Nintendo, The Lufkin Daily News reported. Microsoft said in a statement that terms of the settlement reached May 1 were confidential.
Citing continued technical issues with attempting to deploy Windows Vista, General Motors is considering a future migration to the next-generation Windows 7 platform instead.
Vista taxes all but the most modern PCs with hefty processing and memory requirements. Many of GM's PCs can't even run the system. "By the time we'd replace them, Windows 7 might be ready anyway," Killeen says. Then there are compatibility problems with all the software that needs to run on Windows. GM's software vendors still haven't ensured all their programs will run on Vista trouble-free. So the company is sticking with Windows XP for now. Killeen figures GM could install Windows 7 in three or four years.
Cnet Networks, founded in 1992, owns many sites including Cnet, ZDNet, Cnet news.com GameSpot, TV.com, UrbanBaby, Chow, Search.com and MySimon. CBS, based in New York, will combine Cnet's sites with its own, which include CBS.com, CBSSports.com and CBS Radio upon the deal's closing, which is expected in the third quarter.
CBS CEO Les Moonves said in a conference call with analysts that Cnet offers his company a platform to boost existing interactive businesses as well as launch new ones. He said it will also increase online advertising and international opportunities, particularly in China.
Along with shuffling around executives, Advanced Micro Devices is forming a Central Engineering group tasked with developing corporate roadmaps and coordinating plans with both externals customers and internal company units.
Changes have been long expected at AMD, which has lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the past year and a half while it struggled to get Barcelona, a quad-core server processor, out the door. As leader of the chip group, Rivas appears to be taking the fall for the Barcelona debacle. Earlier this year, Phil Hester also left AMD after serving as chief technology officer.
Faced with the resource bloat otherwise known as Windows Vista, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates suggests the next-generation Windows 7 operating system will deliver "lower power, take less memory, be more efficient, and have lots more connections up to the mobile phone."
Many have therefore turned their hopes to Windows 7. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft will not increase the minimum requirements as it did from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Considering that Microsoft hopes to get Windows 7 out the door faster than it did with Vista (which came out six years after XP, compared to the typical three) this is entirely possible, and Bill Gates has all but confirmed that Windows 7 will focus on performance improvements.
Video game retailer GameStop reports Grand Theft Auto IV enjoyed a nearly two-on-one advantage for Xbox 360 versus PlayStation 3 during the first week of sales.
We won't have a complete answer about how things shook out here in the United States until later this week, when the NPD Group releases its sales data for the month of April. But thanks to the kind folks at GameStop--North America's largest specialty videogame retailer--we've got a partial answer. According to sales information that GameStop has released exclusively to Level Up, 64 percent of the copies of Grand Theft Auto IV sold during the first week were for Xbox 360, while 36 percent were sold on PS3. Put another way, that's a roughly 2 to 1 sales advantage for Xbox 360.
For those into bleeding edge software development, Microsoft has issued fresh beta releases for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Framework.
Earlier today we shipped a public beta of our upcoming .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 releases. These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since we released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better (see below for details on some of them). We plan to ship the final release of both .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 this summer as free updates.
Research in Motion is gearing up the Blackberry Bold smartphone, also billed as the BlackBerry 9000, to compete with the upcoming 3G Apple iPhone model.
The Bold is RIM's first BlackBerry to support tri-band HSDPA (3G) networks, which complements its built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. The half-VGA screen features 480x320 resolution, which is twice the resolution of the most recent BlackBerry Curve. The Bold, of course, continues with RIM's commitment to the "real" QWERTY keyboard along with a trackball located just under the screen. The built-in 2MP camera has video recording capabilities, built-in camera flash that is common on BlackBerry devices, and 5x digital zoom.
Join the
discussion: 1comments, last by
twistedbrntucker
Microsoft has somehow managed to move two million Zune portable media players, which barely puts even a scratch into the competing Apple iPod market share. At this point the Zune is more or less competing with offerings from Creative, SanDisk, and similar.
While Apple is being beaten up by pundits for only selling 52.7 million new iPods in the last year compared to the 48.4 million it sold over the year prior, those figures also exclude Apple’s "best iPod," the iPhone. Add those in and Apple sold 58.1 million units over the last four quarters, an increase of 20% over its own sales a year ago. That’s ten million new sales over its previous record, or ten times as many new sales as the Zune managed to find this year.
IGN is serving up a top ten list of classic Atari 7800 games. The model 7800 gaming console was ill fated following a three year launch delay, but even more so when confronted with the Nintendo NES and the Sega Master System.
It can be argued, though, that the 7800 never exactly got a fair shake. Atari actually listened to all complaints about the 5200 and address many with the 7800, such as the return to digital joysticks and near-complete 2600 compatibility. And the machine actually turned a profit since it was cheap to manufacture and sales were decent, thanks to consumers readily identifying the brand. And while the overall 7800 catalog does not even belong in the stadium as the NES, there are still several charmers in there that were fun in 1986 and are still enjoyable today.
A proof of concept crafted by the Information Security Research Team (INSERT) demonstrates how a security flaw in Google Gmail can turn the free email provider into a bulk spam distributor. The flaw remained exploitable as of Monday afternoon.
As of 3:00 PM (GMT -0400) today, the flaw we have reported remains unpatched and exploitable. We have ran a new experiment where we were able to use our attack to send 2,000 messages using one Gmail account. We would like to clarify to the security community that we have contacted Google about the issue more than a week ago and no response was provided despite our clear intent of cooperation regarding this matter.
The Motion Picture Association of America suggests popular Bittorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay pay $15.4 million in damages for aiding in the public distribution of four movies and thirteen television episodes. Add the amount to $2.5 million in damages already requested by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, plus another $1.1 million by Sweden's Anti-Piracy Agency.
Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde (Brokep) is not impressed by Hollywood's claims, he told TorrentFreak in a response: "They know they are losing, and try to make us look like big criminals by adding some zeros to a claim for a made-up crime."
"The worst thing is that I lost 100 kronor on a bet on the number they would come up with," Sunde added. "And, it sucks that they didn’t claim more than for Napster and the other sites. It’s cooler to break the record."
Regardless of whatever Microsoft ultimately decides to do, many feel Yahoo! could still benefit from an immediate cash infusion. One asset of particular interest is Flickr. Yahoo! acquired the photo sharing site for an estimated $40 million in 2005. Given the current, albeit somewhat disturbing uptake in dot come valuations, Flickr could now potentially be worth billions of dollars based upon monetization from proven traffic growth and already established premium accounts.
If Flickr could get $5/CPM, that would generate $10-million in advertising/year based on the assumption it’s getting about 100 million global pageviews/month. It’s not a lot of revenue given the conservative approach to how much advertising Flickr would present and how much it would charge but, nevertheless, it would give Flickr an additional $250-million based on Blodget's formula. Then, you're looking at a company worth $1.75-billion to $3.25-billion. Add on a takeover or IPO premium of perhaps 25%, and you’re looking at a valuation of $2.2-billion to $4-billion.
Looking to sell a piece of high-end electronics? As Timothy has found out the hard way, there could be better venues than attempting to secure legitimate bids for a notebook computer via an eBay auction. The online auction house remains a strong player in cheap merchandise and even profitable niche market items, but these days one could perhaps be just as well off posting truly big-ticket items on Craigslist or similar.
The cool thing about eBay's support system is it will always answer your question; unfortunately, that answer will always be a form letter on how to reset your password, as Timothy discovered when he tried to figure out how to sell his laptop to someone who wasn't a Nigerian scammer. [....] Timothy's email went on for about two weeks, so we've tried to edit it for length.
Join the
discussion: 4comments, last by
lost-and-found
Nearly all of the data on a Seagate 400GB hard drive discovered following the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster was recovered by Kroll Ontrack specialists, enabling NASA to obtain important data about gas flow in microgravity.
The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing. Now, a few years on, Berg and his team have analysed the data and reported the experiment and its results in the April edition of the Physical Review E journal. These showed that, rather liked whipped cream which changes from a fluid to a near-solid after being whipped or stirred vigorously, the gas Xenon change its viscosity from gas to liquid when similarly treated in very low gravity. The phenomenon of a sudden change in viscosity is called shear thickening.
While the core enthusiasts among the Linux community are unlikely to migrate any time soon, Sun Microsystems is poised to increase market share among the corporate sector of the open source community by today launching the first official release of the OpenSolaris operating system. The platform has been in preview status for quite awhile, but going gold could attract the interests of companies. Either way Sun Micro is learning from the Linux crowd, and OpenSolaris could be a compelling corporate solution given the company's well earned track record with the UNIX platform in small business and enterprise-class environments alike.
OpenSolaris is based on the Solaris kernel and uses many of its features like the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), which offers predictive self-healing capabilities. Although Sun’s Solaris OS is most often associated with large business clients, OpenSolaris is aiming for a different audience, one that has traditionally used Linux — startups and developers working with popular new web technologies like Ruby on Rails. OpenSolaris ships with the new image packaging system, which works much like apt-get on Linux, making it easy to download and install Solaris packages like Apache, Ruby on Rails, PHP and other development tools.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Technorati