Ou's Low-tech Vista Exploit
Inspired by an online discussion where the question was raised, could Microsoft's Windows Vista's new vocal command feature inadvertently respond to a word spoken by an audio file played remotely, perhaps through a Web site, ZDNet blogger George Ou discovered through his own tests that a well-recorded voice command could be played back through the speakers of a Vista-endowed computer, and that the computer would respond as if commanded by its own user.
Ou reported the details on his ZDNet blog on Tuesday. "I recorded a sound file that would engage speech command on Vista, then engaged the start button, and then I asked for the command prompt. When I played back the sound file with the speakers turned up loud, it actually engaged the speech command system and fired up the start menu."
AMD Renews Antitrust Rhetoric, Reopening Intel + HP Complaint
As the San Jose Mercury News reported this morning, AMD Executive Vice President for Legal Affairs Tom McCoy, speaking yesterday before a gathering of technology executives at the University of California at Berkeley, told the moderator -- a lawyer with the US Federal Trade Commission -- that he believes the US Government has been lax in its antitrust enforcement in recent months. As an example, McCoy re-ignited an old quarrel with Intel, addressed in of its federal antitrust complaint that has not been dismissed by Judge Joseph Farnan, and which some observers say may still have legs.
McCoy reminded the gathering of two substantive parts of its complaint, one of which resulted in the type of enforcement response in Japan that McCoy says is lacking from US officials.
Google Growth Continues with $1 Billion Profit
You sometimes know the news isn’t all good about a company’s earnings when it casts a bright spotlight on its revenues; a company can make a lot of money without necessarily earning it. Google is the antithesis of such a company, earning an astonishing one-third of its revenues while still sharing nearly a billion dollars with its traffic generation partners.
Google closed out its fiscal year 2006 having reaped just over $3.2 billion in revenues for the final quarter, a gain of two thirds over the fourth quarter of 2005. Of that $3.2 billion, just over $1 billion of that is net earnings, an 86% annual gain – meaning Google is even more efficient now than it was last year.
Desperate Search at Sea for Microsoft Researcher
A Turing award-winning scientist who leads Microsoft Research's eScience Group, and whose seemingly spontaneous innovations have touched nearly every aspect of technology, including financial databases, astronomy, and geography in a career that spans four decades, remains missing at sea since having signaled home from his sailboat last Sunday night.
US Coast Guard search vessels and aircraft have thus far been unable to locate any trace of the 40-foot craft belonging to Jim Gray, age 63, who set out alone for the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco on a personal mission to scatter his mother's ashes.
Former WaSP Interoperability Advocate Hired by Microsoft
The lady who in September 2005 called Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's claim in a BusinessWeek article that his company would eventually "win the Web" "deplorable in the light of what the Web means to the world, to users, to designers and developers and to put it into Microsoft parlance, customers," now finds herself working for him.
Molly Holzschlag, the former group lead of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and still contributing expert to the W3C, announced on her new MSDN-hosted blog this morning that she has joined Microsoft on a contractual basis, to provide expertise to the Internet Explorer group on matters of interoperability.
PS3 Owners Report Blu-ray Problems After 1.5 Upgrade
An unusually high number of reports of intermittent playback freezes during Blu-ray movies and some games have been posted to Sony's PlayStation 3 forum, as well as to the AVS Forum and other sources, after PS3 owners upgraded to version 1.5 of the system firmware.
Tests run by these users since having noticed the bugs appear to eliminate Blu-ray discs themselves as the cause of these freezes, most of which are said to be momentary and not terminal. Time codes displayed at the time of freezes are dispersed, indicating that the discs are not defective.
IBM Also Reinvents the Transistor
On the very same day that Intel announced to the world it had developed the critical formula for the material that will replace silicon dioxide as the dielectric gate in transistors for metal oxide semiconductors, its biggest arch-rival in the research and development field, IBM, announced the very same thing.
The still secret material, for years considered the "Holy Grail of semiconductor science," will enable transistors to scale down to the seemingly impossible levels Intel requires to feed the monster that is Moore's Law.
Water-cooled Graphics Card Represents Vista's High-end
The hope of computer vendors and OEMs everywhere is that Windows Vista's graphical capabilities, which include the performance of its DirectX 10 drivers, will drive PC sales to the point where market growth resumes the comfortable 12% growth pattern from which it's fallen in recent months. Part of Vista's appeal is that it's the first Windows edition in well over a decade to show off the capabilities of what the processing power of its host computer can actually do - not even XP, for all its value, quite managed that feat even at launch.
In hopes there's a trend to capitalize on, graphics card manufacturer BFG is adding onto its add-on: specifically, tacking a water cooler onto its top-of-the-line nVidia 8800 GTX-based graphics card, then leveraging the water cooler's presence as an excuse to crank up the volume even further. If a BFG 8800 GTX OC-equipped system ranks a "5" on the new Vista WSPR scale, then maybe it's the company's hope that your computer currently ranks about a "2."
PSP Shipments Decline 72%, Hurt Sony Q3 Earnings
The sharp rise in demand for high-definition televisions and steady uptick in digital cameras more than offset what would otherwise have been bad news for Sony Corp. yesterday, precipitated by its computer gaming division: Over the holiday quarter, the company shipped 71.7% fewer PlayStation Portable units and 23.3% fewer PlayStation 2 consoles worldwide than during the 2005 holiday season, while at the same time it was ramping up PlayStation 3 shipments to North America, Japan, and Asia.
Sony's PS3 shipment goals may have been adjusted once or twice, but the company finally did manage to ship 1.84 million units before the end of the year.
Adobe PDF Standardization Effort Not So New
While news of Adobe's submission of its Portable Document Format standard to an agency that works with the International Standards Organization (ISO) is being interpreted today as a response to Microsoft's move to standardize its Office Open XML suite of document formats, Adobe's efforts with the AIIM group to entrench PDF extend back to 2002.
And today, the company's Director of Product Management confirmed to BetaNews that the actual PDF standardization process - requests, meetings, submissions, discussions, revisions, etc. - actually began in 1995.
AMD's First Catalyst Drivers for Vista Will Support HD DVD, Blu-ray
They're still being called the "ATI Catalyst" drivers - the reference drivers containing the latest programming and techniques for graphics cards bearing the ATI logo. But today, one day ahead of Microsoft's consumer edition Windows Vista rollout, the first Catalyst drivers for Vista are being released. They're officially numbered 7.1 (version 8.31 for XP is already in the field). But for the first time, they're being released by AMD, and this afternoon, AMD is accepting a great deal of the credit.
"One of the biggest reasons that AMD aligned with ATI for the future of computing where graphics and the orientation becomes a more meaningful part of everybody's experience," AMD Vice President for Global Marketing Pat Moorhead told BetaNews, "not limited to the enthusiast or the high end or the mainstream, where you typically find discrete cards."
eEye Enters Antivirus Business with Blink Suite
The security research firm known that first came to prominence in 2001 after having discovered the gaping security hole in Microsoft Internet Information Services exploited by the worm it dubbed "Code Red," has thrown its hat all the way into the security software ring. This morning, eEye becomes an anti-virus company, going to bat against Symantec and McAfee, and integrating Norman anti-virus technology into its Blink Professional security suite.
What will distinguish the new Blink from its competition is Norman's approach to evaluating executable program behavior before it runs. As eEye Chief Technology Officer Mark Maiffret explained to BetaNews, the new Blink system will actually run executable files in a protected virtual machine, which the company says will still be called the Norman SandBox.
Intel Reinvents the Transistor
In a presentation to exclusively invited reporters Friday morning, Intel announced a breakthrough development in microprocessor manufacturing that may be given historical significance in decades to come: the discovery of a new molecular compound material that will replace silicon dioxide in microprocessors using 45-nm and smaller lithographies.
It is what both wide-eyed engineers and anxious executives have described as the "Holy Grail of semiconductor technology," and Friday morning Intel revealed it has developed working 45-nm processor samples running Microsoft Windows Vista, Mac OS X, Linux and other operating systems, where this material - a compound based on the element hafnium, atomic number 72, a frequently occurring impurity in zirconium typically found in fake diamonds - serves as the dielectric gate between the current source and the current drain.
Microsoft Slashes Xbox 360 Sales Estimates
As BetaNews first reported early yesterday evening, during its regular quarterly earnings call, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell stated he's cutting unit sales projections for Xbox 360 game consoles for the first calendar quarter of 2007, by as much as three million units.
While vigorous sales of about 10.4 million total units worldwide by the end of last year helped Microsoft recoup the enormous, though anticipated, costs of having built Xbox 360 in 2005 -- added to the costs of launching the Zune MP3 player in 2006 -- Liddell's warning seems to be a signal that the video game market may be in for a slowdown in general.
ECIS Accuses Microsoft of Plotting HTML Hijack
An industry coalition that has represented competitors of Microsoft in European markets before the European Commission stepped up its public relations offensive this morning, this time accusing Microsoft of scheming to upset HTML's place in the fabric of the Internet with XAML, an XML-based layout lexicon for network applications.
In a prepared statement this morning, ECIS Chairman Simon Awde connected XAML with Windows Vista, the system that will next week be the predominant deployment system for Windows Presentation Foundation. XAML can be used to lay out pages and controls for programs that WPF produces using the .NET Framework.
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