Yahoo apologizes for Cyber Monday commerce outages
One very non-economic reason for small businesses perhaps receiving less of the glory from Cyber Monday comes from Yahoo, whose Merchant Solutions hosting service suffered severe outages throughout the day.
Yesterday afternoon, Yahoo representative Rich Riley found himself confessing a serious problem with the commercial hosting service it provided for some 40,000 small business customers on Monday -- arguably the most important online shopping day of the year.
XP SP3 speed lead over Vista SP1 narrows under similar workloads
A heavily promoted performance test by an evaluation software firm appeared to situate Windows Vista SP1 performance against Windows XP SP3. But the initial workloads were actually different due to the Office software used, testers admitted to BetaNews today.
Devil Mountain Software's test results comparing similar workloads on systems with varying editions of XP and Vista -- including the latest service packs or their equivalents -- show the Vista system performing astonishingly more poorly, by a staggering 144%.
Verizon Wireless' open access move: The historic details
"We will allow customers to connect any device that meets our minimum technical standards, and be activated on our network," announced VZW CEO Lowell McAdam this morning.
It finally happened, either the inevitable or the impossible depending on your point of view: A major US carrier has committed to opening up its existing cellular networks to access by the customer's choice of devices, assuming they comply with basic technical requirements. With that comes the customer's choice of applications, and the mobile operating system on which they run.
PriceGrabber traffic up 54% on Cyber Monday, shoppers want Wii, Zune
Though the final data for Cyber Monday retail sales have yet to be projected, more early indications point to a sharp rise in online spending.
The online retail price tracking service PriceGrabber.com reported 54% higher traffic yesterday over Cyber Monday 2006. Customers who purchase products from online retailers and who go through PriceGrabber to do so, get their purchases recorded; so for the first time, we know what it is that consumers appear to want most.
Verizon Wireless to open access to consumer's choice of handsets
Calling the move a "new paradigm for the entire wireless industry," Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam told reporters this morning the entire CDMA and PCS spectrum of his cellular network will open access to the customer's choice of handset equipment.
As McAdam explained, the company will be providing the full technical specifications for access to its network, as an open document, early in 2008. Manufacturers will be given the opportunity to bring their devices up to speed, and VW will institute a testing process for hardware, apparently whose manufacturers are interested in meeting those specifications. There will be no preference applied to which hardware gets tested.
Some Cyber Monday traffic triples, Yahoo reports commerce outages
Early indications from the National Retail Federation and elsewhere are revealing positive sales traffic this Cyber Monday, as the headquarters site that coined the phrase triples its hit count by 1:00 pm EST.
CyberMonday.com serves as a portal site, comparing online shopping deals for the season's big-ticket items from its 550 member stores. Its hosting service reported the rollover earlier this afternoon.
One California county asks to use questionable voting machines anyway
Election officials in Marin County, California have asked the state's Secretary of State for permission to go ahead and use voting machines that are the subject of a lawsuit filed against their manufacturer last week.
Last Monday, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen filed a $15 million lawsuit against Election Systems & Software, Inc., for selling some 972 voting machines to five counties as upgrades to equipment that had already come under suspicion, without giving the State an opportunity to test and certify the new systems first.
New QuickTime exploit triggers the same old stack overflow
It would appear a January fix that supposedly protects against malformed URLs to the RTSC protocol of Apple's QuickTime wasn't a complete fix after all.
The US-CERT office of the Dept. of Homeland Security confirmed this morning that an intentionally malformed header sent to the Real Time Streaming Protocol handler of Apple's QuickTime for Windows, and presumably for Mac OS as well, will cause a familiar stack buffer overflow problem that could be exploitable from the outside.
Lower retail sales per person could mean higher online sales
Initial data from the National Retail Federation point to higher retail sales traffic and higher overall sales for last weekend, but less spent per person in stores - implying more consumers may be hunting for online bargains.
The National Retail Federation's initial report for US consumer spending patterns over the Thanksgiving holidays, released this morning, show some surprises for both optimists and doomsayers: While traffic for retail stores rose 4.8% over the previous year to 147 million active shoppers, a survey conducted by the NRF and BIGresearch estimated shoppers were likely to have paid less per person in retail stores over the weekend, and more online.
Can an upbeat 'Black Friday' help float 'Cyber Monday'?
Despite some gloomy predictions for a bleak sales season, the early numbers from US retailers shows a robust post-Thanksgiving retail weekend.
The initial data from leading retail market intelligence firm ShopperTrak is encouraging: Retail sales for US stores on Friday, November 23 topped the $10 billion mark, coming in at $10.295 billion - up 8.3% over the previous year, and meeting that firm's expectations.
Microsoft's next XNA Game Studio beta supports multi-player
An expedited beta period is planned for the artistic development environment upgrade, which will now enable programmers to build multi-player games for Games for Windows Live.
For the better part of the 1980s, it was the reason young people entered the realm of programming: to have the opportunity to build something worthwhile on their own on a computer, that's as much fun to make as it is to run, and to exploit that real chance of making it commercial. The greatest game programmers of the 20th century entered this industry through a back-door flung open wide...one that was shut throughout the last decade, as commercial games became multi-million-dollar productions by design.
Nokia case against Qualcomm in ITC declared 'finished'
It would appear infringement cases against Qualcomm by Nokia are unraveling all over the world, as a judge upholds a decision last month to dismiss an ITC proceeding in the US.
US International Trade Commission spokesperson John Greer is quoted by Reuters this afternoon as saying, "The case is finished at the ITC," referring to an administrative judge's ruling today effectively upholding last month's dismissal of Nokia's infringement claims against Qualcomm.
Senators urge FTC to turn up the heat on Google + DoubleClick
Citing the possibility that DoubleClick's and Google's massive databases of personal behavior tracking and identifying information could be merged along with their businesses, two Senate leaders are asking the FTC to proceed cautiously.
The Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Herb Kohl (D - Wisc.) and Orrin Hatch (R - Utah), wrote US Federal Trade Commission Chair Deborah Platt Majoras on Monday, urging caution and restraint in her investigation of the ramifications of the mergers of contextual ad provider Google and display ad provider DoubleClick.
HP charges ahead with phenomenal fiscal Q4
If there's a recession on the horizon, someone forgot to tell HP. It had an extraordinary quarter and shows every sign of reinvesting its wealth into success for 2008.
It was bad economic times for the US economy that were blamed for the initial downturn in Hewlett-Packard's fortunes back in 2002, back when it seemed improper to lay blame at the feet of the company's then-esteemed leadership. But with a repeat of the economic chughole predicted by many economists, HP appears to be doing quite well, thank you, reporting that in its fiscal quarter ending in October, it earned 21% higher net profit on 15% higher revenue, with $2.3 billion in earnings.
Warner's high-def combo 'Total HD' project is unlikely to resume
The president of WHV made a statement to a reporter indicating his company would most likely not resume its ambitious hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD combo disc project, though he didn't shut the door entirely.
Warner Home Video President Ron Sanders is quoted by Home Media Magazine today as saying that since his is the only studio remaining that is willing to support both formats, it may be unable to go forth with its plans to produce high-definition titles on its hybrid "Total HD" format.
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