Google Seeks to Jump-start Gadget Industry with Grants
In an attempt to invigorate developers large and small around Google's XML-based runtime Desktop platform, it announced this morning it will give $5,000 grants to individuals, and invest as much as $100,000 in companies, willing to produce popular "Google Gadgets."
Google calls it the "gadget ecosystem" - the segment of software development centered around the production of small accessory programs typically referred to as "gadgets" that usually run in the background and perform some useful (or not) function.
MPAA Sues YouTVpc, Peekvid for Copyright Infringement
Two more distributors of allegedly -- if not obviously -- unlicensed content are facing civil prosecution by the Motion Picture Association of America this afternoon. YouTVpc and Peekvid are the subjects of civil suits in US District Court in Los Angeles, not only for hosting unlicensed content but linking to other sources for unlicensed content as well.
It's that second part of the claim which could be the most telling of the MPAA's current strategy: We had never seen these two sites for ourselves before today. In pulling up YouTVpc for the first time, we found links to movies and TV shows, some of which were actually being hosted on YouTube. Some of those links - including, most notably, the one marked "Spiderman 3" - were inoperative today, perhaps on account of this lawsuit.
Apple, Microsoft, Intel Urge Patent Reform Act Passage, IBM Stays on the Fence
Tomorrow morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a new round of hearings continuing the debate over language in S. 1145, the Patent Reform Act of 2007. While outside support for the bill appears to be evenly balanced with opposition when you take the technology industry as a whole into account, computer and software firms largely favor the bill, with Texas Instruments one prominent exception.
But this morning, a coalition of firms ranging in stature from the Guymon, Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce to Apple, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft urged Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D - Vt.) to pass the bill and get the debate portion over with.
After 'Day of Silence,' Was Webcasters' Message Heard?
On the day that most American webcasters fell silent in protest of scheduled performance royalties rate increases to be imposed by the US Copyright Royalty Board, the key sponsor of House legislation to override those fees finally got one minute of floor time, to speak on behalf of his bill.
"Mr. Speaker, many of the 70 million Americans who enjoy music over the Internet woke up and their music was silent today," stated Rep. Jay Inslee (D - Wash.). "And the reason [is] because of an outrageous decision by a federal agency that caused outrageous increases of 300 to 1200% of the copyright fees that Internet Web broadcasters have to pay.
T-Mobile Rolls Out UMA Phone Nationwide, Blending WiFi with EDGE
After an apparently successful initial test run in parts of Washington State, T-Mobile USA today is ready to roll out its first hybrid WiFi/EDGE phone service: its UMA-based Hot Spot @ Home. The idea is to enable customers to drop their land lines altogether, without picking up someone else's bundled service that would usurp those savings.
We first started hearing word of Unlicensed Mobile Access technology two years ago when Nokia first introduced it to the US, and we wondered whether it would be cellular carriers who would first leverage it to offer combination cellular/Internet packages, or ISPs who would use it as a way to resell phone service from smaller carriers. As it turned out, neither was the case: In T-Mobile's nationwide rollout of what it's calling "Hot Spot @ Home," it's practically giving customers a WiFi router, but letting them choose their own ISP.
IBM Still Leads Top 500 Supercomputers
Yesterday, amid all the news emerging from the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, IBM claimed it had already developed a new BlueGene model that had surpassed the one petaflop barrier - one quadrillion sustained operations per second. But it may be another five months before that fact is verified by the University of Mannheim, which today recorded the 65,536 x2-core BlueGene/L as holding the lead in its Top 500 Supercomputers list, with an unchanged rating of 280,600 gigaflops per second.
During that time, others are seeking to beat IBM to the one petaflop milestone, including Sun as BetaNews reported yesterday. In the meantime, the pecking order among the world's fastest processing clusters hasn't changed much.
Can BizTalk Convert Ordinary EDI Apps Into Web Services?
If you were blinking during the keynote presentations earlier this month at TechEd in Orlando, you might have missed this - for some in the audience who weren't blinking any more than normally, it still appeared to go right over their heads: In one demonstration, Microsoft's technical group product manager Mike Woods demonstrating something his boss, Bob Muglia, referred to as "service-enabling an application."
It sounds like one of those false-existential things you find Microsoft claiming it can do all the time, a sort of service-empowerment that enables people wherever they are to extend their connectivity while simultaneously expanding productivity in efficient, participle-producing ways. Remove that thin veneer from the subject, and you would have seen a guy condensing three years' worth of IT department development time into about one minute, forty seconds of busy work.
Sun: We Can Build a Faster Supercomputer Than IBM
Sun Microsystems announced this morning it has developed an architecture for supercomputing which, as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, will drive a data cluster capable of a sustained processing rate of 1.7 petaflops. That's six times faster than the machine perched atop the most recent Top 500 supercomputers list today...and IBM has already reacted.
IBM doesn't like to be beaten in the race to a milestone, by Sun, Intel, or anyone else. When Intel announced it had discovered the long-sought-after formula for high-k-plus-metal-gate semiconductors, IBM made pretty much the same announcement just a few hours later, claiming it had actually reached that goal a few hours before.
Antitrust Judge to Google: Let the DOJ Decide If Consumers Are Harmed
Reuters reported this afternoon that US District Judge Kathleen Kollar-Kotelly - who nearly five years ago was at the center of the spotlight as the second district judge in the Microsoft antitrust trial - stated Google is not a party to that case. In response to an amicus brief Google filed yesterday, pleading with the judge to extend the term of Microsoft's antitrust provision decree by two years, she reportedly advised Google to deal directly with the Justice Dept.
It's the DOJ, not the district court, Reuters quotes Judge Kollar-Kotelly as saying, which represents the consumers in this case. As BetaNews reported yesterday, a memo to the public written on the day of her 2002 ruling explained that the Justice Dept. would be commissioned to monitor and enforce Microsoft's behavior, especially since the two parties at that time were willing to reach a settlement. Since the court doesn't monitor Microsoft's behavior, the judge said today, it's the wrong party to complain to.
Seagate Ushers In the Terabyte Era with Barracuda ES.2
It's one of those inevitable events that still sounds incredible when you finally hear it for real: Seagate announced yesterday it's preparing to deliver 1 terabyte (TB) consumer-grade internal hard drives during the third quarter of this year.
But at a $400 price point, the introduction may not actually have that big an impact on the hard drive market, where prices were said to have bottomed out last year, though they've been melting down steadily ever since. Today, 500 GB models average around the $100 mark, and Seagate's existing highest-capacity 750 GB Barracudas are selling at about $225. A suggested retail price of $400 will mean you'll probably see terabyte drives at $350 on the street before the end of the year.
Webcasting 'Day of Silence' Heard Worldwide
In protest of royalties fees which take effect next month, the amount of which has been recently estimated to surmount their revenues by nearly four times, America's largest and best-known streaming music sites, plus others worldwide, have gone silent for the day.
The sound of silence could grow familiar, some streamers are saying, if the US Copyright Royalty Board's recently imposed rate structure fails to be stayed by bills that are still before Congress.
UN Broadcast Treaty Negotiations Fail, Parties Agree to Disagree
In the field of international diplomacy, many measures appear designed to fail from the outset, and yet the parties involved with it go through the motions of trying to implement those measures, either in the interest of courtesy to fellow diplomats, or perhaps just to keep themselves busy.
To that end, talks toward the formation an international treaty on the intellectual property rights of broadcasters over the signals they transmit, broke down today as almost everyone involved predicted.
Google Moves Vista Desktop Search Complaint to New Venue
In what could be the company's only option for prolonging its complaint about Microsoft's deployment of its Windows Desktop Search component in Windows Vista, Google - which many believed had actually won a concession from Microsoft last week - has filed an amicus brief with the US district court overseeing Microsoft's compliance in its antitrust settlement with the US Justice Dept.
As first discovered by Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Todd Bishop, Google's brief asks the court to effectively compel the Justice Dept. -- which is charged with overseeing Microsoft's conduct with regard to compliance with court order -- to reveal more information about what Microsoft agreed to do.
Samsung Boosts Solid-State Disk Capacity to 64 GB
A little over a year after it premiered the first commercially available solid-state hard disk drives at about 32 GB capacity, Samsung said it's now mass-producing a package announced last March at an electronics show in Taiwan, that clusters eight 8 GB flash components together, while still maintaining the 1.8-inch form factor needed for portable devices.
The announcement shows Samsung is marching right in lockstep with its solid-state roadmap outlined in May of last year, which it reiterated at CES last January.
Microsoft VP: Interoperability, Cross-Platform Efforts Go Back 30 Years
Two weeks ago, Microsoft tested its "four toolsets for interoperability" message on the public and the press, which included an interview with BetaNews. That message has apparently been given the green light, as Corporate VP for Emerging Business Dan'l Lewin fired a shot across the bow last Thursday, in a blog posting directed toward Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen.
In April, Chizen made an oft-repeated comment in response to Microsoft's debut of Silverlight, its graphical front-end tools platform that was the culmination of its WPF/E ("Everywhere") project. At that time, Chizen stated, "Microsoft, historically, has never demonstrated a commitment to maintaining a cross-platform solution."
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