Scott M. Fulton, III

HP and Sony get into the DVD printing business together

It may be the first of a series of content agreements between a prospective technology provider for video rental outlets and a major studio. But what's even more interesting is what the agreeing parties refuse to say about it.

In an unusual partnership between two corporations that, in other markets, are direct competitors, Sony and HP yesterday announced they will be getting into business together in a new and unique way: Sony will be the first studio owner (with Columbia and Tri-Star, and with major stakes in MGM and United Artists) to provide HP with content for what is being described as a "manufactured-on-demand" (MOD) DVD service.

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Last.fm's free, on-demand music could reshape all of radio

In what may later be recorded as a milestone development in the music industry, CBS-owned Last.fm has reached a deal with record labels enabling it to stream music of the listener's choice, from its entire library.

Last May, analysts were asking what CBS Corporation could possibly want with an online streaming media provider in the UK called Last.fm -- enough to have paid $280 million for it. Today, everyone got his answer.

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FCC tightens its guidelines on DTV transition extensions

Less than thirteen months remain for US television stations to move off the old analog VHF and UHF spectra, into their new digital allotments. But even now, the FCC has to deal with stations that have yet to finalize their construction plans.

The zero-hour for the US' transition to an all-digital broadcast television system remains February 17 of next year. But only now has the Federal Communications Commission set what it hopes will be a hard and fast timetable for potentially hundreds of stations that have yet to begin even constructing or re-constructing their transmission facilities.

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IFPI: Music CD sales continued sharp decline in 2007

In what could be perceived as a signal of a thaw in relations between the recording industry and digital music technology, this morning's annual report from its chief international representative points to a turnaround in the piracy problem.

In its annual report on the state of the global music industry released this morning, IFPI, the trade representative for the recording industry worldwide, appeared to embrace digital music as the future backbone of the music trade, rather than as a problem that needed to be combated and overcome.

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Digg overhauls its definition of 'popular' articles

The social networking and news sharing site has always kept the precise details of its popularity algorithms a secret. But today, Digg did announce the nature of a change which could alter the entire meaning and purpose of the site.

Up to now, the way any online news publisher got one of its articles publicized through the Digg social service is by hoping enough people were interested in it to vote in favor of moving it up the Digg scale -- of giving it enough "Diggs." Starting today, however, that changes: The secret to a heavy publicity on the Digg service won't be having enough people, but having the right kind of people.

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AT&T may follow Comcast in monitoring Internet traffic

Addressing the issue of global piracy on the Internet, the head of one of the world's largest telcos told no less than Earth's biggest economic summit that some kind of technological solution may be necessary.

At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum yesterday, during a roundtable of world business leaders, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was apparently speaking to the issue of Internet service providers' responsibility with regard to the theft of intellectual property. There, according to the Associated Press, Stephenson said he would not be opposed to his company filtering the types of traffic where intellectual property theft more commonly takes place, implying P2P.

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Baidu expands to take on Google in Japan

The dominance of Google in the search space is almost written in stone in North America, but there may yet be some populous spots in the world where the market is wide open. Now its main Chinese competitor has launched a new assault.

While the US market looks to Yahoo as perhaps the sole competitor in the Internet search space capable of mounting a serious challenge to Google in 2008, there's one area of the world where Google has yet to gain a stronghold: Asia. Now the Chinese market leader, Baidu, is mounting its first strategic mission to capture Google users from outside its home base, setting up shop this morning with a new portal aimed at Japan.

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Next Microsoft Office will continue to support VBA

It has been the "macro" language for Microsoft Word since Office 97, even while Microsoft has moved Office developers toward .NET. But now members of the Visual Studio team are saying Visual Basic for Apps isn't going anywhere.

In response to reports that cropped up last week saying that Microsoft is finally shutting down support for Visual Basic for Applications, the COM-based macro language for customizing Office 97 and subsequent versions, members of the team whose product would presumably replace it are saying VBA support will remain in the next edition of Office, code-named either "Office 13" or "Office 14" on account of squeamishness over the earlier number.

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HD DVD, Blu-ray playback added to new entry-level ATI cards

For years, ATI played itself as the performance leader in the graphics space. But now as part of AMD, which is having a difficult time of late making its case for CPU performance, ATI may have to make like its new corporate parent for a little while.

It was not a premium feature of high-end graphics cards for very long: This morning at a rollout event in Beijing, AMD is announcing its ATI division has added DirectX 10.1 support to two new Radeon cards at the low end of the price spectrum, with the new HD 3400 model expected to retail for as low as $49.

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Apple's attention shifts to Mac as iPod growth slows

In the last few weeks, its biggest news has been the deals it's made with movie studios for streaming content over iTunes, and its having deflated the bulk of a notebook computer to a razor-thin profile. Didn't Apple used to sell those little song gadgets?

A public corporation always puts its best foot forward for its quarterly earnings report, and in that case, Apple Inc. is no different. But when a seasoned performer has become accustomed to always entering the stage with his right foot, as many have trained themselves to do for whatever reason, you take notice when one enters the stage with his left.

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Internet Explorer 8 to feature 'super' Web standards mode

If the next edition of the world's most distributed browser expects all Web sites to pass the Acid2 test, one of its key architects said yesterday, an unfortunate irony might be that many sites could break in that browser.

In one of the stranger admissions yet to come from a Microsoft developer, Internet Explorer 8 platform architect Chris Wilson acknowledged on his team's blog yesterday that one of the quandaries his team has faced to date is meeting the simultaneous challenges of embracing Web standards to a greater extent than ever before...while not breaking Web sites that tweaked themselves years ago to comply with IE6.

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EU leaders clash with Google over the meaning of 'personal data'

With the EU crafting new laws governing how data collectors such as Google protect users' personal data, lawmakers there are clashing with US business leaders over how far that protection can and should extend.

A document currently being drafted by a group called the Article 29 Working Party (Art. 29) may extend the formal definition of "personal data" with regard to legal protections granted by the European Union government to its member states' citizens. Specifically, despite arguments by its own authors to the contrary, the document would extend the definition to include any kind of data that can be traced back to an individual.

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Layoffs at Yahoo likely to come next Tuesday

A rumor brought to light this morning by notorious financial insider and blogger Henry Blodget may this time be true, as Yahoo's response appears to warn of bad news ahead in its next restructuring move.

A Yahoo spokesperson's statement to BetaNews this morning appears to indicate that the company may be preparing to announce some tough news during its upcoming quarterly analysts' call next Tuesday. Specifically, the spokesperson declined to deny a rumor posted to Henry Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider blog yesterday evening, saying the company was preparing to dismiss as many as 2,500 employees -- about 17% of its present workforce.

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Virtualized 3D GPUs, platform heterogeneity part of Microsoft strategy

What Microsoft characterized this morning as a "new" virtualization strategy looks curiously like its existing one, only now it has a new partner and an acquired company to help bring it about.

As BetaNews reported yesterday would be likely, today's announced acquisition of Calista Technologies by Microsoft will give a future virtualization product the capability of producing server-based 3D graphics for network clients that don't have 3D cards. And as a key Calista official confirmed today, that graphics capability will be DirectX-compatible.

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Maryland governor plans to drop electronic voting, buy optical scanners

Making good on a campaign promise to overhaul Maryland's suspect electronic voting system, the governor there proposed an initial outlay in the state budget toward the purchase of scanners to replace its $65 million touch-screen voting systems.

As the Baltimore Sun first reported on Saturday, in his state's budget officially submitted to the Maryland legislature this morning, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) has proposed an outlay of $6.8 million toward the purchase of optical-scan voting machines which utilize hard-copy paper ballots.

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