Four Years Later, Alereon's Wireless Device Chipset Tries to Be 'Universal'
It has been a very long road for the development of a wireless device connectivity standard that could go global - that would let, for instance, a Bluetooth device in one continent pair with the same computer over the same frequency, when it travels to another continent.
Four years ago, the electronics industry standards body IEEE first convened a task group to develop a worldwide standard for ultra wideband (UWB) wireless devices. A year and a half ago, the group literally gave up trying, and its various members went three separate ways.
Microsoft's Mediaroom Tests the Grounds Beyond IPTV's 'Walled Garden'
Video over the Internet is one more major market where Microsoft finds itself a major player but not the only player, and certainly where the entrenched players are very wary about its capability to muscle in and potentially control key segments. But Microsoft's recent successes in the IPTV field have thus far failed to guarantee its seat in that market, especially in Europe where digital video is far more widely deployed.
So this morning's announcement of Microsoft's new brand for IPTV services - now called Mediaroom, its fourth sixth brand to date after "WebTV," "UltimateTV", "Microsoft TV," "TV2," and "Microsoft IPTV" - is undoubtedly being dissected in Europe, with every sentence being re-examined to glean any hint of the company's long-term plans.
Blockbuster to Expand Blu-ray Retail Titles First, HD DVD May Wait
For over a year now, the retail high-definition market has been looking for a signal from places on high of any tipping of the scales, any crack in the dam that will help consumers make the ultimate choice in high-definition movie format investment: Should they invest in Blu-ray or HD DVD? This morning, such a signal may have finally come: US movie rental giant Blockbuster announced that 18% of its retail outlets will expand their offerings to include Blu-ray titles only, at least for now.
For retailers like Blockbuster, the problem has been one of real estate. Blockbuster and its online competitor Netflix can continue to expand their virtual storefront to include as many Blu-ray and HD DVD titles as studios decide to produce.
Dueling Spyware Bills Weigh Down an Indecisive Congress
Certainly no one likes spyware -- perhaps not even its creators, if they also happen to be its victims -- so since mid-May, a trio of bills have been introduced. All three will face the Senate next week, including two competing versions passed by the House, and an entirely new Senate bill whose ink isn't even dry enough for its prototype language to enter the Congressional Record.
With Americans' approval levels of Congress' job performance at 23% and plummeting, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released earlier this week, both houses are looking to assume a leadership role on smaller, easier to swallow issues than funding the war in Iraq and heading off inflation at home.
Microsoft's Interop Chief: People Should Choose Their Own Standards
In an interview with BetaNews earlier this week, Microsoft General Manager for Interoperability and Standards Tom Robertson volunteered to present his company's present stance on the perennially controversial topic of interoperability, and the degree to which it can be reasonably achieved without giving away trade secrets.
While discussion continues among members of the International Standards Organization over whether to ratify ECMA's recommendation that Microsoft's Office Open XML format be adopted as an international standard, Robertson told us in response to a question about who truly determines standards, that Microsoft believes people make the final decision - not companies, not countries, and perhaps not really agencies.
Microsoft Will Support ODF If It Doesn't 'Restrict Choice Among Formats'
In a policy document specifically timed for release this afternoon, Microsoft's general managers for interoperability, Tom Robertson and Jean Paoli, make a play for ownership of the standards issue facing users of competing document formats, by saying the company would support ratification of its own Open XML format along with OpenDocument Format (ODF) as ISO standards, if and only if doing so would promote choice among the world's consumers.
"We should expect the creation of new formats in the future as technology evolves, and, as has always been the case, users should be able to choose the formats that work best for them," reads the team's open letter this afternoon. "Microsoft has consistently supported choice, so it took no steps to hinder ISO/IEC's ratification of ODF 1.0 and supported ODF 1.0's addition to the American National Standards list. Microsoft will continue to support recognition of ODF 1.0 and other formats on such lists around the world as long as doing so in no way restricts choice among formats."
Evidence of 'Counterattack' Lacking as Linux Conference Convenes
You probably already know the secret to getting a headline broadcast louder through Google News: take the main subject lines and pair them with a verb that denotes violence or tragedy. I discovered this myself with headlines that contain mix "Microsoft" or "open source" with the verb "derail."
Yesterday, Reuters scored an aggregation coup by pairing "Linux" and "Microsoft" with the verb "counterattack," resulting in a story that rocketed to the top of the hit list without a beat or a melody to it, and whose inaccurate derivatives were snatched up even by local television.
FBI Campaign Combats Malicious Attacks with New 'G-man' Lexicon
If anything's been lacking in US government agencies' ongoing fight against malicious Internet use, it's a good, old-fashioned public awareness campaign. Yesterday, in an effort to turn up the volume and give local TV news writers a more tangible vocabulary for malicious users, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced interim results of its ongoing efforts to track down and arrest suspected "bot-herders."
It's a term that may have appeared only once before in BetaNews: Essentially, it refers to malicious users who deploy payloads on remote computers that can then unleash attacks - whether by programming or through accepted instructions from a central source - upon targeted systems.
Kodak Makes New Plans to 'Redevelop' Consumer Photo Market
Throughout the entire consumer digital photography revolution that has reinvigorated even the market for PCs, the two biggest names in consumer photography during the 1980s - Kodak and Polaroid - have been largely out of the loop. Now Kodak has unveiled a new technology which could put it back in the fight, the old-fashioned way: by making better photographs, just like it used to do.
This morning, Kodak confirmed the readiness of a technology with multiple patents apparently attached, that will add a panchromatic element to the single image sensors mass-produced for digital cameras. Such cameras typically use charge-coupled detectors (CCDs) that feature a trio of sensors for red, green, and blue channels.
Cost of Vista Business License Offset by Savings, Says Microsoft
For a great many large businesses, "the move to the next Windows" has been an ongoing, daily affair for at least well over a decade. And up until recently, the reasons why this migration tends to proceed so slowly have been, to Microsoft, a complete mystery.
If the company can just get Vista pushed out to the corporate desktop, its foot will be in the door just enough, it believes, to make enough of a clearance to push through its more profitable business services: SharePoint, BizTalk, Office Communications, Exchange, audio and video.
Microsoft, Former 'Lindows' Vendor Reach New Covenant
The company which at one time blatantly attacked Microsoft's position on the consumer desktop with what was then called "Lindows," a Linux distro aimed at low-price systems sold in major department stores, announced today a 180-degree change of tack.
Adding its name to those of Novell and Xandros, Linspire becomes the third Linux distributor to reach a patent covenant agreement with Microsoft. In finding the courage to shake hands with the enemy, Linspire's president and CEO this morning publicly compared himself to Steve Jobs.
Microsoft's .NET Evangelist Spells Out Future Role for Dynamic Languages
In a very real sense, Microsoft may have had more to do with the creation of the so-called "dynamic language" than most any other company. Back when the BASIC language interpreter shipped as part of the ROM of machines like Radio Shack's breakthrough TRS-80, I and many other novice developers first experimented with the prospects of code that changes itself to suit the specific needs of users. It involved statements with terms like "POKE," which was exactly as dangerous as it sounds.
Today, the re-emergence of dynamic applications through Web-oriented languages like Python and Ruby has awakened an old spirit within Microsoft, which is rediscovering a concept it helped create decades ago...and after years of denying its presence and usefulness, has now come around to embracing it.
AT&T, Viacom to Jointly Deploy Anti-piracy Technology
During a seminar at the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles this morning, AT&T Senior Vice President James Cicconi disclosed that his company began meeting with Viacom last week to discuss the deployment of technology that somehow will combat the spread of piracy over its digital networks, the Los Angeles Times revealed this afternoon.
Transcripts from the seminar have not yet been made available, and the Times account of the talk was vague on detail. From what we know at present, it isn't even clear whether AT&T's new anti-piracy technology would be limited to just the Internet, or would extend to its own private digital fiberoptic lines as well.
Windows Home Server Reaches RC1
One of Microsoft's most ambitious new projects is taking off more rapidly than many expected, perhaps due to popular demand. Windows Home Server -- one of the stars of WinHEC last month and a surprise standout at TechEd last week -- has officially moved to Release Candidate 1 status.
Essentially, WHS is a retooled Windows Server 2003, with new services including one that pools multiple hard drive spaces together as an easier-to-manage partition, and browser-based management software whose ambitious goal is to be easy enough to be understood by the same guy who loses his remote under the couch every week.
Yahoo Shareholders Defeat Human Rights, Censorship Resolutions
This afternoon, Reuters reports, shareholders of Yahoo defeated two resolutions offered by representatives of New York City's pension funds, one of which would have mandated it would no longer store personally identifying data on servers housed in any country where Internet use among citizens is monitored by its government. An identical proposal was defeated by Google's shareholders last month.
The data storage policy and anti-censorship proposal was defeated by a vote of 15% in favor to 74% in opposition, with the remainder abstaining. A separate proposal advanced by a single shareholder - a John C. Harrington of Napa, California - that would have established an independent human rights committee of the Board of Directors, went down in something less than a blaze of glory: 4% in favor, 80% opposed. Both proposals were argued down by Yahoo annual proxy statement, whose recommendations shareholders do tend to follow.
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