Supreme Court Debates Patentability of Software
A seemingly simple case regarding whether Microsoft had the right to replicate speech recognition software it had licensed -- or rather, thought it had licensed -- from AT&T, and then sell that software abroad as a component of Windows Vista, has exploded into what is now extremely likely to become a landmark case in US patent and copyright law.
The US Supreme Court today took up oral arguments in Microsoft's appeal of a judgment against it in AT&T v. Microsoft, which has now become Microsoft v. AT&T in view of the appeal.
UK Rejects Citizens' Anti-DRM Petition
An electronic petition of the UK Prime Minister’s office that garnered 1,414 signatures calling flatly for a ban on the use of digital rights management techniques in all digital content, was not as flatly - though quite clearly - rejected on Monday. A December report commissioned by Her Majesty’s Treasury may have prompted the rejection, having assessed the state of the global intellectual property system, and having acknowledged its fitness for purpose with “a qualified ‘yes.’”
Clearly taking a stand on behalf of content rights holders, the PM’s office stated, “Many content providers have been embedding access and management tools to protect their rights and, for example, prevent illegal copying. We believe that they should be able to continue to protect their content in this way. However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.”
IBM Shops Cell to Indie Game Developers
Cell BE processor co-manufacturer IBM may be eager to find new channels for exploiting the CPU that currently resides at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 3 - but few other places. This morning, IBM, in conjunction with Vivendi game developer High Moon Studios and Canadian high-performance developer RapidMind, launched a coast-to-coast event for the remainder of this week, taking place simultaneously in Armonk, NY, and Carlsbad, CA. Their intention is to interest developers into building a new gaming platform around the Cell.
High Moon produces a first-person shooter for PS2 and Xbox, set in a hybrid vampire/Western theme, called Darkwatch. Meanwhile, RapidMind has already been managing a series of what it calls "hack-a-thons," in conjunction with the Colorado-based producer of Yellow Dog Linux, Terra Soft Solutions.
HP Takes a Minor Hit During Holiday Quarter
History will show the resurgence of Hewlett-Packard continued during its first fiscal quarter of 2007, which ended January 31. But if Michael Dell, the newly reappointed CEO of Dell Computer, has been practicing his "last laugh" just in case he should need it, that practice may yet have reason to pay off. While last year's scandals didn't sink HP, they did hit the company in its weak spot: US revenues.
The big news reported on the wire services this afternoon is HP's 26% year-over-year net revenues gain to $1.54 billion on just over $25 billion in revenue, which remains impressive, even though fiscal 2006 marked the beginning of HP's comeback. But it's also a 9% revenue drop over the previous quarter, at a time when the holiday season normally boosts sales, and when Windows Vista should have provided some extra uplift.
Vista Hardware Assessment Tool Addresses Upgrade Dilemmas
Perhaps the most oft-asked question by consumers with regard to whether they should adopt Windows Vista is whether their six-month-old or older hardware is too obsolete for Vista to make good use of it. Users have already been told to expect to say, "Wow!" but is this necessarily a good kind of "Wow?" This morning, Microsoft released for free download the XP version of its Vista Hardware assessment tool, whose aim is to tell consumers what they may need to upgrade in order to put the best polish on those heavily anticipated exclamations.
As a "bonus," the Windows Hardware Assessment tool installs SQL Server 2005 Express, which is its database tool built on the .NET Framework. It isn't SQL Server 2005; if you've already installed that, Express will still need to be installed separately.
New AMD Desktop Processors Trigger Price Drops
The introduction this morning by AMD of new dual-core desktop processors, including the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, and the company's subsequent lowering of prices of existing processors, may have nearly or completely equalized the price/performance balance between AMD and Intel processors, according to an updated performance model using newly published data balanced against this morning's average street prices for CPUs.
Last July's introduction by Intel of Core 2 Duo processors enabled that company to effectively wrest the price/performance crown from AMD, which it had previously held for several years. In the intervening months, AMD has held a slim lead in the value segment - meaning that for about the same $100, you'd be likely to get a slightly better performing AMD-brand processor than an Intel. But Intel's mid-range Core 2 Duo E6600 proved a better value than comparable AMD products by as much as $200.
The Vista Sales Numbers: Anatomy of a Wash
The abundant mix of both upward and downward slopes that have characterized Microsoft Windows Vista sales projections since last September, and the strangely dichotomous co-existence of expectations exceeded and fears realized, has led many experts to start asking serious questions about the role the operating system plays not only in the markets but in our lives: Has Windows evolved out of its shell as a consumer product, into the homogeneous commodity that Microsoft simultaneously hoped and feared it might become?
In other words, does Vista really matter?
Jupiter Analyst: Interoperable DRM Won't Solve Music Industry Dilemma
The lead analyst of last week's JupiterResearch report showing a majority of music industry executives in the EU agreeing that a world without digital rights management would be a world with greater revenues, told BetaNews in an exclusive interview this afternoon that his firm believes the interim solution supported by 70% of executives polled - a single, open, interoperable, standard DRM scheme - would still be rejected by consumers in a market where Apple's iTunes continues to reign supreme.
JupiterResearch vice president and research director Mark Mulligan told us he feels the problem surrounding DRM concerns whether the consumer of digital music feels trusted by an industry that seemed to trust him well enough in previous years. When the right to use music as one wishes is impeded technologically, consumers reject the technology. In fact, this could be why the downloadable segment of the overall music industry is not growing as fast as it could.
Co-opting GPU for CPU Tasks Advanced by NVidia
Earlier this week, engineers at nVidia put the finishing touches on version 0.8 of its Compute Unified Device Architecture system for Windows and Red Hat Linux. CUDA's objective is to enable C programmers to utilize the high-throughput pipelining architecture of an nVidia graphics processor - pipelines that are typically reserved for high-quality 3D rendering, but which often sit unused by everyday applications - for compute-intensive tasks that may have nothing to do with graphics.
Today, the company announced its first C compiler - part of the CUDA SDK, which will enable scientific application developers for the first time to develop stand-alone libraries that are executed by the graphics processor, through function calls placed in standard applications run on the central processor.
Vista Sales Perhaps Not as Dire as Feared
This morning, NPD marketing manager David Riley offered to clear up some potential discrepancies with regard to how previous NPD launch week data for Windows operating systems has been reported, and how it's currently stated. Accounting for a change in tabulation strategies, what yesterday looked like a 58.9% decline in first-week retail sales for Windows Vista over Windows XP, might actually even out.
The problem, Riley said, is that over the years some retailers surveyed provided NPD with monthly sales data rather than weekly. As a result, NPD decided to no longer extrapolate weekly volume numbers, though for comparison's sake, the company continues to calculate weekly trend numbers, which is what NPD reported yesterday.
Most European Music Execs Agree with Jobs on DRM
A report issued last week by JupiterResearch lead analyst Mark Mulligan, just two days after Apple CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter advocating the end of digital rights management for downloadable music, revealed that in a continental survey of European music industry executives, more than half agree with the statement that DRM measures are "overly restrictive," and an astonishing 62% agree that dropping DRM measures altogether would drive consumer adoption of downloadable digital music.
Among the subset of those executives who produce records as well as downloadable music, that figure is 48%, though it rises to 58% when only counting executives of "major record labels." For the remainder, the figure is 73%.
First Blu-ray HD Recorder Needs Dedicated TV
Sharp officially released to the Japanese market yesterday the first Blu-ray Disc recorder console to record high-definition TV content directly. But Sharp's solution to the problem of securing the digital connection between the recorder and TV tuner could become controversial: It requires a dedicated link to the company's own Aquos brand HDTV units.
Sharp's dedicated connection, called Aquos Fami-Link, uses a four-pin derivative of FireWire for connecting components, called i.LINK. The connection has been deployed for quite some time in Sharp's HDTVs and DVD-R consoles capable of high-definition recording.
Technology Shakeout after 3GSM as Intel, Nokia Abandon HSDPA Plans
10:00 am ET February 15, 2007 - An Intel spokesperson told BetaNews late Wednesday that Intel and Nokia both plan to continue pursuing new communications technologies (plural) to include with Intel's forthcoming Centrino Duo platform, but that they came to the joint conclusion that HSDPA wasn't one of them.
HSDPA, the spokesperson said, was "one particular program that was canceled," though Nokia and Intel remain committed to driving all other technologies forward, including their joint effort with WiMAX.
NVidia Demonstrates Platform-Agnostic 3D UI for Cell Phones
One of the under-appreciated events at this year's 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona was the demonstration by graphics component manufacturer nVidia of a theoretical user interface programmed using a 3D library evolved from OpenGL. The Khronos Group industry consortium - of which nVidia is a member - used the company's demonstration to highlight the public release of version 1.0 of the OpenKODE specification, which incorporates the OpenGL ES library for embedded systems, along with other open standards specifications for streaming media.
The hope is to get handset manufacturers interested in the notion of a kind of unified interface, incorporating functions that could be enabled on several brands of phones and portable devices regardless of whether they're running on different infrastructures, such as Symbian, Java, or Windows Mobile. AMD, now the parent of ATI, is also a Khronos Group member, as is Intel, along with phone producers Nokia, Motorola, and Apple, and portable game console maker Sony. Microsoft is not a member.
Mobile IPTV Experiment in Korea Could Compete with DVB-H, MediaFLO
While admittedly, two of the big attractions at this year's 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona were DVB-H and MediaFLO technologies - both of which generated huge news in the portable digital video fields this week - a smaller and perhaps nimbler set of technologies may quickly evolve into a real challenger: A company with offices in Palo Alto and Seoul called Thin Multimedia Inc. demonstrated a possibly disruptive concept: a kind of embedded IPTV that could endow handsets with the capacity and functionality of living-room set-top boxes.
Last week, a Seoul-based startup called Ubicode, according to press sources there, won a huge contract with handset providers in that country to develop their mobile IPTV service platform. Their bet is that handsets that already have HSDPA broadband capabilities (and HSDPA is already big in Korea) may only need software to render them capable of receiving digital, streaming signals. IPTV platforms do have one conceptual advantage over DVB-H and MediaFLO: Based on Internet technology, they enable unicasting on-demand rather than adopting the broadcast metaphor made prominent by analog TV.
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