Toshiba Delays Second-Gen HD DVDs
What Toshiba is calling, in a statement to the British electronics publication Pocket-lint, "a minor reliability issue with an outsourced LSI component," is being blamed by its UK division for the delay of its second-generation HD DVD players in Europe. US dealers were apparently also informed of the delay of the American versions HD-A2 and HD-XA2 until at least the second week of December, though Toshiba US has yet to issue a formal statement.
In the UK, Toshiba announced its upper-tier player, the HD-XE2, will most likely be released there in January, thus pushing back the premiere of Dolby TrueHD 5.1 sound for that model until the first of next year.
EU Threatens Microsoft With New $446 Million Fine
In what was probably an inevitable ultimatum, the only question surrounding which may have been when it would come, the European Commission today publicly issued a warning that Microsoft must turn over what it describes as the “complete documentation” regarding interoperability protocols for Windows, or else face a fine retroactive to last July totaling €348 million (USD$445.7 million), plus €3 million per day thereafter for continued non-compliance.
The EC’s statement today did not say anything in particular was missing from the documentation turned over thus far by Microsoft, which the EC did acknowledge it had already received. Working under an agreement with the EC’s appointed monitoring trustee, Dr. Neil Barrett, Microsoft turned over documents in seven stages, the final one having been received on July 19.
AMD Opterons Help Power #2 Supercomputer
The Cray-based supercomputer built for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, many of whose 26,544 processors are actually AMD Opteron 2.4 GHz dual-cores, leapt from the #9 to the #2 spot on the semi-annual list of the Top 500 performing supercomputers, published this week by the University of Mannheim in association with Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Twice each year, the rankings of 500 of the world's supercomputers are judged by their maximal observed peak performance, in gigaflops (GFlops, or billions of floating-point operations per second). This performance is called the "Rmax rating," although Mannheim does publish theoretical mean performance as a comparison.
Slow MP3 Player Sales to Blame for Dampened NAND Flash Outlook
The first indicator we usually see with regard to retailers’ prospects for the MP3 player market this holiday season is sales for NAND flash memory, one of the principal commodities on which MP3 units depend. Today, the first indicators from industry analyst iSuppli were released and the news isn’t good.
It had predicted revenues for the third quarter for the industry’s top eight suppliers combines at $3 billion. They came in at $3.058 billion, which represents a decline in the annual growth rate of 16.8%, to 4.2%.
Intel Defends Against AMD's 'Global Misconduct' Allegations
In a legal document filed yesterday in conjunction with the ongoing antitrust case brought against it by AMD, Intel defended its right not to turn over certain documents regarding its business with customers outside the US.
While much of its defense cites in detail language from Judge Joseph A. Farnan's ruling stating AMD can only seek redress for Intel's alleged exclusionary conduct within the US, Intel added another compelling argument as a backup: that AMD's decision to stop producing CPUs from one of its fabrication facilities in Austin, Texas, took place prior to the time of Intel's alleged misconduct, as framed by the case's own statute of limitations.
Interop Alliance Links Microsoft, Sun, Novell, AMD
In Europe, at the heart of the global controversy over whether Microsoft and interoperability are incompatible, the Redmond company announced it is funding a global consortium of software and hardware manufacturers in the name of interoperability itself.
The stated goal of the new Interop Vendor Alliance is to listen to customers’ needs for interoperability, promote collaboration among vendors to address those needs, test solutions that might require interop, and then jointly promote those solutions once they’re discovered.
Samsung BlackJack Takes on Moto Q
The battle lines in mobile connectivity devices are clearly being drawn, with the early leader in the coolness category -- Motorola's sleek, miniature Q, available under an exclusive deal with Verizon Wireless -- now facing a serious threat from a similarly-equipped device from Samsung, being offered through Cingular Wireless.
When you place a new Samsung BlackJack device side-by-side against a Motorola Q, at first, there doesn't appear to be much difference. Both have a QWERTY layout keyboard, of the style popularized by BlackBerry devices (don't think we didn't notice the similarity in names). Both run Windows Mobile 5.0.
Vista RTM Build 6000 Leaked to Usenet
BetaNews has confirmed that a build of Windows Vista giving clear indications that it is the final release-to-manufacturing version of the operating system, appeared in .ISO form on a Usenet binaries newsgroup over the weekend, appeasing the interests of folks who can't wait just a few more days.
However, since the final release of Vista requires online activation, and no such beast exists prior to the product's launch, one can basically think of this leaked DVD image as a 60-day trial version. A crack program was supplied with the image, presumably to retrofit the OS with the "time bomb" from Vista Beta 2, which locks down the system from running sometime in March.
Vista, Antivirus: What If Allchin's Right?
PERSPECTIVE Let’s start by clearing up the most frequent mis-perception that emerged from our story last Thursday regarding Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin’s comments. As you'll recall last Wednesday, Allchin held a telephone conference to announce Windows Vista’s release to manufacturing.
At that time, he never advised Vista users not to use antivirus software. What he did say was that he was so confident in Vista’s new "Defense-in-Depth" architecture and failsafes that, under limited circumstances, he would allow a family member to run the operating system without active anti-virus software. Thus, he implied that the operating system might not need antivirus software – at the very least, not in similar limited circumstances.
PowerPoint Flaw Not a Vulnerability
It may seem ironic, imagining Microsoft breathing a sigh of relief upon discovering it's only a bug that takes down PowerPoint. But a proof-of-concept routine pointed out to Microsoft last October turned out not to be something exploitable for planting malicious code onto a system remotely.
As the company explained today on its security blog, a Perl script is capable of generating a malformed PPT file that, when run in PowerPoint 2003, will create a pointer that points out of bounds. The null address returned by this out-of-bounds pointer is then executed as though it were a function call, thus generating an exception.
New Congress Could Reboot Net Neutrality
When the Democratic Party pulled off what television commentators were earlier referring to as the "equivalent of an inside straight" by recapturing majorities in both houses of the US Congress, expectations quickly arose for a sharp U-turn in the legislative agenda. Multi-year funding for the wars on terror and in Iraq, continuations of Republican tax relief plans, and hard-line policies against assistance for illegal immigrants, seemed to lose all momentum, as the entire agenda of the country's foreign and domestic policy would now come under intense public scrutiny.
With critical issues affecting the safety and economy of the nation taking center stage -- pushing flag-burning and pledge-speaking back behind the curtain -- it may be hard to spot the issue of telecommunications reform, which in a normal year might actually garner enough attention to be a campaign issue.
Rootkit Revealer Absorbed by Microsoft
The little software utility that uncovered the presence of Sony's stealth DRM hiding like a rootkit inside a security engineer's computer, and that triggered the chain of events that eventually led to the annulment ruling of a multi-billion-dollar merger between Sony and BMG Music, is now a Microsoft product.
Mark Russinovich's Rootkit Revealer, along with a multitude of his other Sysinternals tools, are now available for download as Microsoft products. The transfer of Russinovich's many assets from his original, independent Sysinternals blog to his new home on Microsoft TechNet is now complete, having begun last July. New documentation for Rootkit Revealer 1.7 was posted earlier this week.
Broadcom Next with Hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD Chip
Last month, NEC made the announcement that it was shipping an LSI chipset that incorporated all the codecs and system firmware needed for a console or component to play and record both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats. But at that time, NEC appeared to be marketing its system-on-a-chip (SoC) toward manufacturers of single-format systems on both sides of the bond, as a low-cost alternative.
Today, Broadcom steps into the arena, hoping its customers haven't been checking out the NEC product catalog. It announced its own single-chip hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD controller, but this time, it's marketing the chip squarely at companies interested in producing components that support both formats. As the scoreboard currently stands, the number of companies committed to such development is zero, and counting.
Allchin Suggests Vista Won't Need Antivirus
During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system's new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed.
Allchin's statement came in response to a question about his relative level of confidence that Vista would be more secure than Windows XP SP2. In response, he noted there were key security features added to Vista which could not be added to Windows XP SP2 even though, he said, his people apparently tried to do so.
Universal Music to Get Cut of Zune Sales
UPDATED November 9, 2006 2:00 pm ET In a formal statement issued this morning, Microsoft and Universal Music Group –- one of the "Big Four" music publishers worldwide -– announced they have reached a licensing deal, which would allow for royalty payments to be attributed to the new Zune MP3 player, to be launched next week.
A UMG spokesperson, in a discussion this afternoon with BetaNews, flatly denied elements of a story published this morning by The New York Times, which sought to clarify elements of this deal. While UMG is not willing at this time to discuss the royalty schedule itself in detail, what it did provide to BetaNews does contradict most of what has been published since a Microsoft spokesperson first confirmed the existence of the deal during a Merrill Lynch investment analysts’ conference call yesterday.
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