Ed Oswald

If you're already sick of the chirp-chirping of push-to-talk phones, you'd better get prepared to hear a lot more of it.

Cingular on Friday put to rest months of speculation that it would offer a push-to-talk feature by confirming to the Wall Street Journal plans to launch the service on Monday.

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AT&T has indicated it would be open to allowing cable subscribers to purchase TV channels on an a la carte basis, however it would be dependent on whether the company would be able to obtain programming contracts that would allow it to do so.

The FCC recently indicated that providing a la carte cable and satellite programming would not cost cable providers extra, and could help parents shield children from programming they do not want them to see. For quite a long time, the industry has resisted offering such an option, citing cost and the death of niche channels as a possible consequence.

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The future of .xxx became uncertain Thursday after ICANN chairman Vint Cerf announced that plans to approve a proposal for the domain were removed from the agenda for a board meeting in British Columbia.

Approval had already been delayed once before in September. That delay came at the request of the Bush Administration, who said it had received 6,000 complaints over the proposed addition. According to ICANN, more time is needed to review a 350-page report concerning the creation of the domain.

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Microsoft says that social networking information already present on our computers could help us better organize cluttered e-mail inboxes. Thus, the company's research division has developed a new application called SNARF, short for Social Network and Relationship Finder.

The SNARF interface will allow a user to order their unread mail in the way that makes the most sense to them. "People use a variety of strategies to handle triage; there is no single 'best' ordering of email messages to produce an optimal outcome," Microsoft says.

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Samsung accepted terms of a plea agreement Thursday that finds the electronics company guilty of conspiring with other manufacturers to artificially inflate the cost of computer memory, thus unnecessarily increasing the prices consumers paid.

As part of the agreement, Samsung would pay a $300 million fine in exchange for prosecutorial immunity for both the company and most of its employees. Seven people, including president of the semiconductor division Y.H. Park, were excluded from the settlement and could still face prosecution.

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A study released earlier this week by the OSDL Desktop Linux Working Group indicates that a general lack of application support is holding back Linux from making inroads into the desktop market.

E-mail was rated as the most critical application to computer users regardless of platform, followed by office productivity tools and the Web browser. The organization said that without a quality e-mail application, it could be surmised that, "Linux on the desktop is not feasible."

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Gamers eager to get their hands on the Xbox 360 should rest assured that new shipments of the console will be arriving at retailers by the end of the week. Microsoft has said it remains on track to ship up to 3 million 360s in the first 90 days of launch.

The company also spoke to the rumors that it was holding back inventory in order to keep demand high and create media attention for the console. "Believe me when I say we aren't holding units, and we're not creating hype for hype's sake. There's no good economic justification for that," Microsoft marketing manager John Porcaro wrote in his Web log early this week.

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AOL on Thursday introduced a new set of search services for mobile devices that it says will make searching the Web on smaller screens as useful as searching from the desktop. Three services will make up the new service: AOL Search, Pinpoint Shopping and AOL Yellow Pages.

Through technology provided by InfoGin, the service formats both the search results and the Web sites visited from those listings to fit the smaller screens of mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs.

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TiVo has begun a rollout of several online services that will allow customers to access information and even purchase movie tickets directly through their DVR boxes. The new features will be included as part of the standard TiVo service for those with broadband-connected Series2 devices.

To support the new initative, TiVo announced partnerships with online movie site Fandango, Internet radio service Live365, and Yahoo. Yahoo and TiVo had previously joined up in early November, when the two companies said that a new TiVo scheduling feature would be added to the Yahoo TV service.

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Skype on Thursday launched a beta of the second major revision to its popular PC calling software, adding video support and announcing partnerships with Logitech, Creative and Web log software maker Six Apart.

The company plans to use these partnerships to both promote the software as well as enhance the user experience. Logitech will jointly market Skype with its QuickCam Fusion and QuickCam for Notebooks Pro webcams.

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A federal judge refused to enforce a $450 million settlement between Research In Motion and NTP on Wednesday. Also, a request by the BlackBerry maker to stay proceedings until the U.S. Patent Office rules on the validity of NTP's patent was denied, which could mean trouble for the popular wireless service.

U.S. District Judge James Spencer had indicated earlier this month that his patience was running thin in the dispute between the two companies, and planned to rule swiftly on whether the settlement could be enforced.

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VMware released the latest version of its VMware Workstation product on Wednesday, adding better support for 64-bit operating systems and hardware, experimental support for two-way SMP, and enhancements to the virtual machine importer and command line interface.

Virtualization is useful to software developers and testers because it allows them to mimic the setups of several different computers on a single machine. This gives users the capability to test a program across a variety of production environments.

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Since it's last revision of the GPL over a decade and a half ago, the software landscape has changed dramatically. Thus, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) on Wednesday released guidelines for revising the GNU General Public License. Version 3 of the GPL is currently in the works.

The organization hopes to have the first draft of the license available for review at a conference scheduled for January at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The GNU GPL is one of the most widely-used free software licenses; it is estimated that three-quarters of free and open source programs use the license.

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Acting on a promise first made in July of this year to take action against violent and lewd video game sales, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday announced that she would introduce a bill to protect children from such games when congress reconvenes in two weeks. The bill is being co-sponsored by Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.

Clinton led the call in July to ask for a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the discovery of lewd content in the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas video game. The FTC began an investigation later that month. The game was then recalled and a version without the questionable scenes was released in September.

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Testing has begun on a new service being offered by Cingular that would allow its customers to make unlimited phone calls to at&t local telephone customers, the company disclosed on Wednesday. The service, called Mobile2Home, will be available until February 25 to customers in Connecticut who combine their at&t and Cingular bills.

Cingular is a joint venture of BellSouth and at&t, formerly SBC Communications. The service would cost $5.99 USD per month, and is an effort by Cingular to retain wireless customers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. If successful and expanded nationwide, other carriers with local telephone service divisions such as Verizon and Sprint Nextel could follow suit, analysts say.

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