Huge Xbox 360 Sales Boost Microsoft Revenue
When Reuters sounded alarm bells that Microsoft net income may have fallen by as much as 28% (if it had done the math correctly, it should have come up with 25.5%), it was a bit premature: Microsoft chose to defer about $1.64 billion of revenue from sales of Windows Vista during the last quarter, which came in the form of coupons that customers will redeem this quarter.
As a result, a company whose operating income gains would probably come in at about 10%, in line with estimates, ended up looking like one whose income had plunged in the wake of last year’s Vista delay. Microsoft stock traded generally lower on the day, experiencing a hump followed by a lull in late trading after earnings numbers were reported, ending the day down over 2% in value on the NASDAQ.
Report: Apple IPhone Not a Smartphone
A report from wireless industry analyst firm ABI Research released today proclaims that the new Apple iPhone does not fall within the firm’s standard definition of a smartphone, due to restrictions Apple has placed on the phone against the inclusion of third-party applications.
By ABI’s definition, a smartphone is “a cellular handset using an open, commercial operating system that supports third-party applications.” Apple’s announcement two weeks ago that its iPhone would run OS X – essentially an adaptation of its Macintosh edition of Unix – led many to believe the iPhone could open up a world of possibilities for consumer-conceived functionality.
Crafted IPv6 Headers Plague Cisco Routers Again
Yesterday, the US-CERT security awareness team from the Dept. of Homeland Security posted a warning that it had been notified by Cisco that certain of its routers running IOS do not process specially crafted IPv6 headers properly, leading to a potentially exploitable condition.
The warning has ominous echoes of Cisco router vulnerability from the summer of 2005, the precise details of which were divulged in a Black Hat demonstration by an ISS security researcher who got maybe more than five minutes of fame, but paid for them with his job.
eEye's Marc Maiffret: Threat 'Motifs' Make Security Confusing
In a recent interview with BetaNews, the chief technology officer of the company that discovered history's most expensive worm -- the "Code Red" worm that exploited a wide-open buffer overflow vulnerability in Microsoft's IIS -- stated he believes when security companies give multiple dramatic names to known threats, rather than accept a single, common identifier, the result simply confuses users.
The naming of Code Red, eEye Chief Technology Officer Mark Maiffret told BetaNews, was originally supposed to be a "one-off," "part of our normal course of business." By contrast, among today's anti-virus vendors, Maiffret believes there's too much fighting over who gets to christen the latest virus, worm, or zero-day exploit for the press.
ODF Toolkit Could Radically Restructure OpenOffice
Since last June, Microsoft has been actively courting independent developers who might have an interest in building what the company calls "line-of-business" applications - essentially, functions that extend the Office applications platform into new niches.
Analysts perceived Microsoft's drive toward Office Business Applications (OBA) as one component of its Office Open XML campaign that was without equal in the open-source, OpenDocument realm. Today, the ODF community answered in kind, with the creation of a "toolkit" that beckons developers to build new functionality around the ODF platform.
Toshiba Sees Samsung's Bet in 16 Gb NAND Flash
The demand for smaller portable components with higher storage capacity is only growing faster, and as soon as this year, miniature devices residing on keychains may be able to boast the storage capacity of what can now be described as "larger" iPod nanos.
Toshiba announced today it's on schedule to produce 16 Gb flash memory components, in a new 300 mm fabrication facility just completed as a joint project with flash competitor SanDisk. Mass production of 8 Gb flash memory at 1 GB capacity will begin this month, to keep up with #1 producer Samsung's introduction of 8 Gb components last July.
Could the 802.11n Logjam Finally Be Broken?
Last Friday, in a vote even some veteran observers of the networking industry weren't expecting, members of the IEEE 802.11 Working Group voted unanimously -- 100-0, with five abstentions -- to advance what's currently being called Draft 1.1 of the 802.11n high-speed WiFi standard. A subsequent vote in the spring could move the draft to 2.0 status, even though as recently as last November, the ratification of Draft 1.06 left behind, by one official count, 370 outstanding catalogued technical issues for further discussion.
With so many issues on the table, what's expected to be the final ratification of a Draft 3.0 standard, in which those issues are resolved, is tentatively scheduled for October 2008, according to a report in InfoWorld. The WiFi industry can't wait that long, and is apparently allowing last week's vote to serve as the starting gun for a new wave of "Draft-N" equipment.
AMD Takes Big Hit in Servers in Q4 2006
In the first two years of its business in the server CPU space, AMD was able to capture about 20% market share. But in the wake of tremendous competition from Intel, AMD's executives Tuesday afternoon were forced to admit that revenues from servers fell and unit shipments remained flat in the prior quarter over the end of 2005.
With Intel having answered the challenge, the company whose language at this time last year evoked images of a high-noon duel on a main street in old Texas, sounded a lot more cautious, measured, quiet. Even CEO Hector Ruiz, who said he opted this time to speak to shareholders "from the gut" with a speech ostensibly reaffirming his enthusiasm for his company's coming year, ended up mocking his competitor, promising to focus only on innovations that are "truly relevant," to follow Moore's Law "in an intelligent fashion," and taking credit for forcing Intel "to become more efficient."
XQuery Database Language for XML Achieves 1.0 Status
After its inception among members of the World-Wide Web Consortium as early as September 1999, their proposed crown jewel of the XML toolkit had been scheduled for formal adoption five years ago. Software vendors have already been selling Web services database development kits using primitive versions as a reference. Now, at long last, the W3C has formally adopted version 1.0 of XQuery, an XML-oriented query language that, a very long time ago now, seemed poised to change the history of Web applications.
The W3C catalogs some 48 commercial implementations of XQuery in commercial software. But years have passed, and many of the contributors to the XML Query Working Group - including IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft - have drifted apart in their concepts of online database architecture. Has time already run out for what had been one of the Web's most ambitious projects?
Cisco Says It Will Resolve iPhone GPL Violation
Late last week, Cisco acknowledged on its corporate blog that a contributor to the GNU Violations Project notified the company that its VoIP iPhone -- up until last November known as the WIP300 -- may violate terms of the GNU General Public License. Since it's a Linux phone, full source code for its implementation must be made public to comply with the license terms.
Armijn Hemel, who co-manages the GPL Violations Project with Harald Welte, notified journalists and bloggers, before notifying Cisco itself, the company said, that certain of its technologies in its Linux-enabled phone had not been made public. According to IDG News Service, Hemel told reporters he had reverse-engineered firmware for the phone, and then discovered certain features whose source code had apparently not appeared on existing public source code inventories.
Jobs Options Grant Worth $20.3mn Comes Under Scrutiny
The Washington Post broke the news this morning that the US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Apple Inc.’s practice of options backdating is -now focusing on why the company’s accountants waited until very late -– though still within deadline – to report CEO Steve Jobs’ receipt of 7.5 million company stock options in 2001. That particular issue, the company admitted publicly last month, was backdated.
What this means is, if Jobs had exercised those options even immediately after receiving them, he would have received some $20.3 million, according to estimates published this morning by Bloomberg. In other words, by backdating the exercise date of the options, Jobs was given the right on December 18, 2001 to purchase as much as 7.5 million Apple shares valued at $21.01 per share, at the October 19 closing price of $18.30.
Analysis: With Sun, Intel Wins, but AMD Doesn't Lose
The top four server providers globally - HP, Dell, IBM, and Sun - all now have Intel-based as well as AMD-based options, thanks to Sun's agreement this morning with Xeon manufacturer Intel. The move is very interesting since Sun, like IBM but unlike the others, manufactures its own CPUs and competes with its own partners. But today's move could signal the rise of Sun as an equal player in the server space, says Insight64 principal analyst Nathan Brookwood.
"For the first time in my memory, you can go to any of the top four server companies - IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun - and buy boxes with AMD chips or boxes comparably configured with Intel chips," Brookwood commented to BetaNews. "So if you, the end user, have a reason for wanting one or the other, you don't have to compromise any more. And that's huge, that's just huge."
LG Hybrid Disc Player Not Licensed for HD DVD Logo
UPDATE January 22, 2007 4:00 pm ET: A spokesperson with close ties to Microsoft’s interest on the DVD Forum – which steers the direction of the HD DVD format and marketing – told BetaNews this afternoon that the reasons behind LG’s BH100 hybrid disc player not being approved to bear the official HD DVD logo alongside the official Blu-ray logo, may run much deeper than the player’s lack of support for the HDi interactive layer.
For a device to bear the HD DVD logo, the spokesperson told us, it must also feature a network connection for so-called “networked community scenarios;” support for persistent storage features such as saving bookmarked scenes from a video, or downloading a trailer; and a secondary decoder for picture-in-picture support of concurrent commentary tracks and other features. “HD DVD discs take advantages of these guaranteed hardware features,” he said, “[which] are required if a player wants an HD DVD logo.”
Sun to Sell Servers with Intel Xeon CPUs
With his usual candor, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz this afternoon revealed, in a joint press conference with Intel CEO Paul Otellini, that 70% of Solaris licenses are for x86 processor-based installations. While Sun's 2004 agreement with AMD may have been one catalyst for that, Sun announced this morning it will now be building Intel Xeon-based 1P, 2P, and 4P servers for the first time.
"Nearly 70%, seven out of ten downloads of Solaris, were not running on Sun hardware," pronounced Schwartz, the astonishing part really being that he finally admitted it. "They were running on Intel innovations, on systems built by HP and Dell and IBM; and clearly, if there was going to be an indication of opportunity for us to work together, it looked an awful lot like, here's a great motivation."
HP CEO Defended Sale of Options Prior to Board Leak Revelation
In a response dated December 21, 2006, to two incoming congressional committee chairpersons, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd stated the sale of 100,000 stock options on August 25, just days prior to the public revelation of possible improprieties on the part of HP directors in investigating an information leak from its boardroom, was a well-planned trade that took place during a regularly scheduled "trading window."
Last December 12, incoming House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D - Michigan) and incoming House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairman Bart Stupak (D - Michigan), sent Hurd a letter inquiring as to the curious timing of the stock sale. "A key issue in the Subcommittee's investigation," the letter read, "is how much Hewlett-Packard Co. management knew about the board-leak investigation, when they knew it, and what actions they took in response."
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