FCC commissioner: Deregulation promotes big media breakups
As the FCC considers a plan being devised by its chairman to offer channels 'a la carte' in an effort to promote diversity, opponents in and outside the Commission are arguing it should leave big media alone.
The opposition is growing to US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin's proposal to invoke a clause in the Cable Communications Act of 1984 to open up cable TV channels to consumer choice. Chairman Martin's aim would be to ensure a more diverse programming lineup is available to customers, rather than the usual slate of basic channels that CATV services typically select for them.
Macrovision to acquire Blu-ray's BD+ for $45 million
Already the provider of a key element of the copy protection schemes in Blu-ray and HD DVD, the content protection software company will acquire the embattled BD+ from its creator.
Cryptography Research, Inc., the R&D firm that developed a virtual machine environment protected by a layer of encryption -- the tool whose viability was one of the catalysts for the split between the HD DVD and Blu-ray camps -- has agreed in principle to sell BD+ to Macrovision for $45 million in cash, plus stock warrants.
Visual Studio 2008 released today, .NET 3.5 now available
With a few years of noticeably hard development work now complete and with the next Visual Studio now being downloaded by MSDN subscribers, work can finally begin on the next edition.
Today, the curtains rise on the final release editions of Visual Studio 2008, and MSDN subscribers are looking forward to being able to use the new features they've actually been testing for about 18 months...and have an official reason to complain if this time they have problems. Once again, Express editions of VS 2008 that concentrate on individual development languages are available for free download.
AMD and ATI head for uncharted territory with 'Spider'
In an effort to make its investment in ATI pay off, AMD is rolling out its first comprehensive PC platform today, aimed carefully at the lower half of the high-dollar enthusiast market.
The Spider platform aims to accomplish for the enthusiast market what Intel's Centrino accomplished for the mobile connectivity market: to specify components that are certain to work together without fuss. In this case, it's a three-way combo consisting of its long-awaited RV670 chipset family, now called its "7-series;" its ATI Radeon 3800 series graphics cards, unveiled just last Friday; and its Phenom series quad-core (not tri-core) processors, announced last May.
House passes FISA amendments without telecom immunity
By a vote of 227-189, the US House of Representatives yesterday passed its version of the RESTORE Act, in an attempt to strengthen foreign intelligence surveillance restrictions while preserving individuals' rights, including the right to sue.
H.R. 3773 seeks to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), with the principal aim being to prevent the Justice Dept., the CIA, or any other intelligence-gathering source from obtaining communications from "non-United States persons" without a warrant from an exclusive FISA court.
ATI's latest GPU targets the mainstream first
The latest holiday graphics card line from the company in red has a distinctively green feeling to it, maybe for the first time.
When AMD acquired graphics card producer ATI in July 2006, the executives who brought the two titans together told a two-part message: First the fusion would benefit both brands; second, the ATI identity won't be going away.
Is cable TV 'a la carte' actually being considered?
The FCC is considering invoking a legal clause that lets it squeeze more diverse programming into cable TV systems, but CATV's leading advocates are resisting.
Last week, US Federal Communications Chairman Kevin Martin indicated he may at last succumb to requests submitted throughout his tenure, to use a legal tool to help wedge more diverse programming into cable TV lineups. The tool is the so called "70/70 clause" of the Cable Communications Act of 1984 - a part of federal code that predicted a future time when cable programming would be more commonplace.
Microsoft refreshes Vista's value proposition
Vista's Software Assurance customers need more value from Vista more often, and now the company has a plan for addressing their needs come next spring.
A growing number of Microsoft's business customers for Windows Vista are subscribers - customers who've signed onto the company's Software Assurance program. As such, they want their money's worth, which means Microsoft finds itself in the position of having to deploy noticeable improvements to the operating system at least every eight to ten months...as opposed to every five years.
OpenDocument Foundation Dissolves, Leaving Projects in Disarray
After warning just two weeks ago that the conversion of workplaces' information infrastructure to XML "must not be disruptive," the open source group that helped catalyze that conversion has apparently ceased to exist.
The OpenDocument Foundation has disappeared, taking with it its Web site and having deleted pages Google had been hosting for it, including news on its Compound Document Format translator project.
Microsoft Embedded R2 OS to Extend PC Networking to Devices
In a news conference slated for tomorrow morning, Pacific Time, Microsoft plans to introduce the R2 release of its Windows Embedded CE 6.0 operating system for embedded devices. Prominent among its new features, according to the company this afternoon, will be a new implementation of Web services on devices, whose aim will be to enable small devices to serve as networked clients in a localized PC environment driven by Windows Vista.
This part gets misinterpreted quite often, and Microsoft is withholding many details until tomorrow. But the early impression the company is giving is that small devices will act as network clients when connected to a Vista-based PC, in a miniature form of the relationship between a Vista PC and a Windows Server.
Yahoo Settles With Shi Tao, Chinese Dissidents' Families
Twenty-one months after a Yahoo senior executive admitted to Congress his company probably should not have turned over private information on one of its customers in China to the Chinese government without first having checked to see what that phrase "State Secrets" meant in the telegram, Yahoo has settled a dispute with that customer's family, along with the families of two other dissidents with claims against the company.
"Plaintiffs and defendants hereby jointly stipulate to dismissal with prejudice of all claims made in this action," reads a company statement this morning, "based on a private settlement understanding among the parties." Not much else was said other than that Yahoo also agrees to pay the families' court costs.
Sweeping EU Telecom Reforms Proposal Will Include Telco Breakup Option
As BetaNews reported yesterday, the European Commission did indeed take up the matter of the creation of a centralized European Telecom Market Authority. Though despite evidence of what was believed to be at least substantive opposition, the proposal was apparently adopted after only hours of discussion.
Included in the proposal will be the option for regulators to force large incumbent telcos within a region or member country to split their business units, if necessary, to create an environment that encourages competition among alternative providers.
EU Opens Formal Inquiry Into Google + DoubleClick Merger
Having concluded a preliminary review into the ramifications of search engine and contextual ad provider Google merging with display ad and campaign management system provider DoubleClick, the European Commission has decided it will now open its formal "in-depth investigation" into the matter.
In a statement this afternoon, the EC stated its preliminary review concluded the merger, proposed last April, "would raise competition concerns in the markets for intermediation and ad serving in online advertising."
Next Windows for Supercomputers Enters Beta
Demonstrating it can indeed rename a product with something that sounds pleasing and not so euphemistic, Microsoft took the wraps off its replacement for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 this morning. It will be called Windows HPC Server 2008, and today, the company taped it out for the second half of next year.
In its announcement, the company invoked the phrase "Top 500" as though Windows had any claim to it. This morning's performance rankings from the University of Mannheim were less than stellar, with Compute Cluster Server only taking six slots. So Microsoft this morning emphasized not only the change of name, but a change of tune, gently positing the theory that perhaps the Top 500 test doesn't gauge real-world performance.
AMD, IBM Lose Ground to Intel in Latest Top 500 List
The news last year at this time from the University of Mannheim was the surge of supercomputers with relatively simple 2.4 GHz AMD Opteron processors, among the school's list of the world's Top 500 Supercomputers. So if big shifts qualify as news, then AMD has to face the music this time around with the release this week of the November list: Its fastest supercomputer on the list no longer rates #2, but #6; and instead of 113 AMD-based systems on the full list, there are now just 79.
Meanwhile, the mighty BlueGene/L from Lawrence Livermore Labs not only retains its champion status but surges into the stratosphere. Since last year, it's only gotten bigger, adding to its Power-based processing bulk by more than 39%, to 212,992 simultaneous cores. The payoff was swift and immediate: BlueGene/L turned in an Rmax rating of 478,200 gigaflops per second - a 30.3% speed gain over last year and the year before, and nearly halfway to the cherished teraflop goal post.
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