Lessons learned by IT in 2009 #1: 'Net neutrality' is a myth
Betanews begins its transition to the new decade with an examination of the critical issues that taught us valuable lessons in the past year. If you're old enough to remember 1999, you may remember the sense of wonder, possibility, and dreams yet to be fulfilled that was drummed up by what used to be called the "media," during the much-celebrated rollover of the odometer. The first decade of the new millennium hit us squarely between the eyes, awakening us to the colder, more tangible reality that before we start cultivating new problems for our descendants to solve, we have to resolve all the old ones we've been sweeping under the rug.
Time Magazine thought the past decade sucked. We were all saddened to hear how disappointed the editors at Time were by the performance of the 2000s, especially when compared to brighter, livelier, more dramatic decades such as the 1940s, 1960s, and that harbinger of great times and cool tunes, the 1060s.
Microsoft loses i4i appeal, faces Word injunction in three weeks
The US Circuit Court of Appeals in DC has today denied Microsoft's appeal to overturn a court injunction preventing it from selling copies of Microsoft Word (or Office with Word). Those copies contain a feature that a jury last May found infringed upon patents held by i4i, a former Microsoft partner that built Word add-ons for editing XML.
Now, Microsoft says it will be ready to sell revised versions of Word 2007 and Office 2007, beginning next January 11 -- the date the court injunction takes effect.
The once and future king: Test build of Opera crushes Chrome on Windows 7
Download Opera 10.5 "Pre-alpha" for Windows from Fileforum now.
How's this for a Christmas miracle: We've been saying that if Opera wants to get back in the game -- if it truly wants to earn a place among the Top 5 positions on Europe's forthcoming "Choice Screen" -- then it has to pick up the pace in the performance department. Apparently while we were writing that, the developers at Opera Software were a little ahead of us on that count.
Statistics: Firefox 3.5 surpassed IE7 in global usage share last week
At some time during the middle of last week -- quite possibly, on the very day that Microsoft announced its settlement with the European Commission -- Web analytics firm StatCounter registered more Web site hits coming from Web browsers announcing themselves as Mozilla Firefox 3.5 than from either Internet Explorer 7.0 or IE8.
According to the fairest interpretation of StatCounter's data, that means Firefox 3.5-branded browsers are more actively used, on all platforms including Linux, than any single version of any other browser, including IE. As of Monday morning, FF 3.5 was responsible for 21.93% of HTTP requests tracked by StatCounter, versus 21.2% of requests from IE7, 20.33% from IE8 (buoyed recently by Windows 7's success), and 13.89% from IE6.
Microsoft's interoperability pledge not free enough for Free Software
The agreement between the European Commission and Microsoft announced last Wednesday did not mention "Free Software" by name. There is no corporation or partnership by that name, at least not officially, though up until the resolution of the dispute last week, there had been occasional hints from outgoing Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes that any agreement with Microsoft must take "free" into account, almost as though it were "Free Software, Ltd."
It's a very serious issue for many European developers, as Free Software had been treated as a worthy-of-all-caps entity in drafts of the European Interoperability Framework from last year. But recent discussions on revising the EIF have included suggestions from many sources, including a controversial one from the Polish government, that strike references to Free Software as a legal entity, especially as one that deserves equal protection as a limited legal body.
Live Poll: Are we done with Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft?
With Microsoft promising to abide by new interoperability standards for PCs, while losing ground in mobile, should it remain the focus of our interests in 2010?(opinion)
We exit 2009 with what appears to be the first sign of a plate-tectonic shift in both consumer and business technology -- specifically, a shift in interest and focus. It's a broader world out there, full of new and old companies with different names and real technology agendas that suddenly seem very realistic. Could we really be emerging into that competitive playing field that so many technologists had been seeking for so long?
It's not that we're emerging into a world without Microsoft (some of us technology journalists wouldn't be able to continue breathing). But even Microsoft's successes in 2009, Windows 7 being the biggest among them, have helped take the focus away from Vista as a roadblock to evolution. And Microsoft's biggest failure in 2009 -- the lack of a new Windows Mobile -- has helped turn consumers' attention toward Google as the biggest perceived threat to Apple's iPhone in the mobile space.
Apple's iPhone carrier woes extend to the UK with O2 3G outage
2:30 pm EST December 21, 2009 · UK-based carrier O2 is now saying, through its Twitter feed, that the fault related to iPhone data service outages throughout Britain has been fixed. Customers may continue to see some delay, however, before their service is fully restored.
As of late Monday afternoon in the UK (late Monday morning in the US), a data network outage continues to impact O2 network customers -- specifically those using Apple iPhone 3G and 3G S models. O2 acknowledged the problem yesterday via Twitter, and once again this morning.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 moves ahead, but more work to be done
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Betanews tests with the latest Beta 5 release of Mozilla Firefox 3.6 show some respectable performance improvements, in the race to catch-up to Google Chrome. One of those improvements -- the full impact of which we'll see over time, as Web servers improve their scripting to support it -- is asynchronous scripting. It's a feature added to the HTML 5 standard, and Firefox 3.6 will be the first browser to support it.
Slow performance may have triggered Visual Studio 2010 delay
A delay of what Microsoft Developer SVP S. Somasegar calls "back a few weeks," in the final release of Visual Studio 2010 and its accompanying .NET Framework 4, is the apparent result of performance issues that beta testers would not let rest.
Somasegar's post yesterday afternoon started out by saying, certainly you've noticed how VS 2010 Beta 2 is faster than Beta 1: "As you may have seen, we significantly improved performance between Beta 1 and Beta 2." But then he transitions smoothly into an admission of just the opposite: "Based on what we've heard, we clearly needed to do more work. Over the last couple of months, our engineering team has been doing a push to improve performance. We have made significant progress in this space since Beta 2."
Live Poll: Should Facebook give you your privacy?
Now that Facebook has altered its privacy policy for users, what statement best reflects your personal stance on social networks' privacy policy?(polls)
Last week's change to Facebook's privacy policy resulted in tens of thousands of users being directly confronted with a choice over how Facebook should change its stance. The initial result was confusion, but as folks worked out what the question really meant, they came to a discovery that they were not only being asked, but encouraged, to turn off their privacy settings altogether as a benefit to "Everyone" -- Facebook's new default class.
Now, the group that helped focus the US Federal Trade Commission's attention on Google has turned its sights on Facebook, initiating a complaint action yesterday that could lead to a federal investigation of the subject. Expect Congress to follow suit at some point, perhaps calling Facebook executives to the witness stand. In advance of the coming debate, where do you stand on the subject? That's Betanews Live Poll for this Friday.
Privacy group urges FTC to stop Facebook from sharing 'Everything'
When Facebook implemented changes to its privacy system last week, users were invited by way of a "wizard"-like control panel to change their current privacy settings. But the only option they were given besides leaving privacy where it was to begin with, was an option called "Everyone." And what many users may not have been aware of, was that the "Everyone" setting effectively turned privacy controls off.
"Facebook's 'Everyone' setting overrides the user's choice to limit access by third-party applications and Web sites," reads the text of a complaint today filed before the US Federal Trade Commission (PDF available here) by the Electronic Privacy Information Center -- the same group that filed a complaint against Google's cloud-based privacy policy last March. EPIC is urging the FTC to charge Facebook with unfair and deceptive trade practices -- perhaps emboldened by the FTC's unexpectedly bold charges against Intel, filed yesterday.
Betanews Podcast: Apple's Lala cloud visions vs. AT&T's cloudy prospects for 3G
Listen to What Are We Learning Today? on Yahoo Media Player -- Today's topic: Apple, Lala, the cloud, and the AT&T roadblock.
In an apparent effort to appear as though the company is reversing its stance on a minority of customers consuming a disproportionate chunk of bandwidth, AT&T Mobility Chairman and CEO Ralph de la Vega is quoted by The Wall Street Journal yesterday as saying the company has "not made any decision" about implementing a tiered pricing structure.
Such a structure would have served as a sort of penalty for users who consume what AT&T may consider too much bandwidth, however much that is. As of Wednesday, de la Vega's position has changed, saying now that his company is considering "incentives" for customers to use less data, though declining to go into further detail...other than to enable the WSJ to spread the term "incentives" around.
FTC: 'Intel fell behind' against AMD, used unfair tactics to catch up
Clearly choosing the path of minimum compromise, the US Federal Trade Commission this morning voted to press antitrust charges against Intel, in an action that now parallels that of the European Commission, as well as the state of New York.
The principal charges are those we've covered here before, and which are also at the root of the EC's case, among them that Intel entered into near-exclusivity or exclusivity arrangements with Dell and Hewlett-Packard. According to the terms of those arrangements (which may or may not be legally considered "agreements" since they apparently were not entirely on paper), the OEMs promised to purchase mainly Intel parts in particular market segments, in exchange for preferential pricing and rebates (or programs that had the same effect as rebates).
FCC could bypass CableCARD on the way to spurring broadband adoption
Is there something about set-top boxes that make consumers not want to subscribe to cable? In a sparsely covered request for public comments two weeks ago, the US Federal Communications Commission asked the general public for comments on several questions related to whether there's something wrong with the design or functionality of the set-top boxes to which customers subscribe, that make them reluctant to embrace cable and satellite TV.
Embracing cable and/or satellite, the FCC sees, is critical to embracing broadband, as the FCC's request indicated. But taking the matter one big step further, FCC Media Chief William Lake -- in a remark first noticed by Reuters' John Poirier -- suggested that regulation on the content of set-top boxes (STBs) themselves may be necessary in order to drive broadband adoption.
Live Poll: Is this the last we'll hear about IE stifling competition?
In January, a new European Commissioner for Competition takes his post: JoachÃn Almunia. His position on the global economy and Europe's role in it is crystal clear, but his take on the role individual companies -- including American firms such as Intel, Microsoft, and Google -- play in that economy, is an absolute blank slate at this point. Reliable news sources all over the European press (including those that don't publish centerfolds) openly state they are clueless as to which way Almunia will lean.
While the active pursuit of charges against Microsoft may at this point be closed, the investigation of the company by the European Commission -- and thus the case itself, at least on the books -- remains open. Given what we've seen before, what do you believe will be the next headline in this ongoing story, assuming there is one? This time around, you can add your own alternative and let others vote on it.
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