Dell Adds Intel Core 2 Quad, AMD Athlon 64 X2s to Lineup
While it's clear Dell is no longer exclusively supplying Intel CPUs to its customers in the server, mobile, or desktop segments, it's just as clear today its former lockstep partner won't be counted completely out. This afternoon, Dell confirmed it's readying Core 2 Quad-based desktop systems and quad-core Xeon-based server systems.
The news comes just hours after the official announcement of the addition of AMD Athlon 64 X2s to the company's OptiPlex mainstream business desktop line, completing the permeation of AMD processors throughout the Dell product catalog.
nVidia DirectX 10 Graphics Cards Do CPU Work
While laboratories and hobbyists have been actively experimenting with the notion of putting graphics processors’ multiple pipelines to work in executing more general computing tasks, such as number crunching and statistical analysis, nVidia today became the first GPU producer to officially pursue the use of GPU co-opting as a feature.
With the release this afternoon of its first series of DirectX 10-oriented graphics cards, the 8800 GTX, comes the announcement of a software development environment called CUDA, exclusively dedicated to building C++ programs especially compiled to take advantage of GPU parallelism.
Will Voting Machine Integrity Decide the Senate?
Control over the agenda of the United States Senate remained up in the air on the day after Election Day, as the margins for the vote counts in Senate races in Virginia and Montana remained razor thin on Wednesday morning.
According to the Associated Press vote count, with all but one Montana precinct reporting, challenger Democrat Jim Tester led incumbent Republican Conrad Burns by 1,729 votes -- about two one-hundredths of the state's population.
Deutsche Telekom Won't Deploy WiMAX in Germany
It had been generally assumed since March of last year that a wireless broadband network that Telekom was building for its native Germany, would employ WiMAX technology, of the flavor being developed by Intel. But last week, the German press noticed that Telekom wasn’t accepting the German government’s invitation to bid on licenses to use WiMAX frequencies.
Late last week, the parent company of US telecom carrier T-Mobile confirmed to reporters that it is not really interested in developing WiMAX, and that it would prefer to use “other technologies” to extend wireless broadband service to rural areas, especially within Germany’s mountainous terrains.
Calculation 2006: Are the Voting Machines Doing Their Job?
UPDATED November 7, 2006 3:50 pm ET
12:00 pm ET As morning ended on Election Day in the US, voting precincts throughout the country are, as expected, reporting sporadic problems with newly installed electronic voting equipment. There are no outright disasters reported just yet, though heavier-than-normal turnout for a mid-term election may be increasing pressure on volunteers to make certain systems work flawlessly.
SEC Chairman Considering Blogs as Disclosure Vehicle
In response to a request referenced on his personal blog last month, suggesting that a company should be able to abide by US Securities and Exchange Commission requests for public disclosure of corporate statistics by posting that information to their blogs, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz received an official disclosure of interest, if you will, directly from SEC Chairman Christopher Cox.
But a thorough read of Cox' five-paragraph response did not, despite reports, make any promises that the Commission will necessarily accept blog postings as acceptable media for public disclosure of company information.
AJAX Beta 2, .NET 3.0 RTM Announced
With Windows Vista's release to volume licensees just over three weeks away, Microsoft spent this week accelerating the rollout of what will become the company's key development tools going forward: not the old-school, monolithic Visual C++ and Visual Basic, but instead the newer, leaner, revitalized suite empowering modern applications and Web services.
The .NET Framework 3.0 runtime package has been released, which only makes sense, since Vista development is now essentially done. If you blinked, you missed how Microsoft's marketing scheme was altered: The .NET common language runtime hasn't changed at all: .NET 3.0 actually contains .NET 2.0.
Customers 'NotForSure' About Stand-Alone Zune
Although it's been public knowledge ever since Microsoft first reversed its stance on whether it was producing an MP3 player of its own, retailers and consumers are just now learning that Microsoft's upcoming Zune player will not be utilizing the PlaysForSure DRM format the company had previously been promoting with independent partners.
It's not news. But with the official launch of the device just weeks away, and with Microsoft having announced its intention to shut down its major PlaysForSure music source, MSN Music, just prior to Zune's launch, the stage is now being set for a potential customer backlash. Even sites launched in advance to make way for praise of the device are starting to show signs of skepticism.
NVidia Now a Supplier for MP3 Players
In a move that may very well have saved the assets of a once-venerable US media chip producer from being auctioned off, graphics chip maker nVidia announced this morning it is acquiring San Jose-based PortalPlayer, a producer of embedded media processing chips for devices such as SanDisk's Sansa MP3 player, in a stock purchase plan totaling $357 million.
PortalPlayer had been struggling to regain its footing as a producer of multimedia processing chips after the customer that essentially put it on the map, Apple, dropped it last April without much warning as its key supplier for its video iPod. Up to that point, Apple had reportedly accounted for 95% of PortalPlayer's business. Its replacement was Samsung, which apparently offered Apple a discount on flash memory to sweeten the deal; PortalPlayer is not a flash producer.
Counsel Predicts Red Hat to be Last Linux Vendor Standing
A TechTarget interview with Red Hat general counsel Mark Webbink, published late last week, remains the talk of the Web on Monday. In it, in response to the alliance forged by Linux competitor Novell with enterprise competitor Microsoft, Webbink made the almost un-lawyerlike prediction that, now that Novell has taken what he characterized as a divergent path, "there won't be any other Linux players" by the end of next year.
Webbink punctuated this prediction with the phrase, "We will have succeeded once again."
Vulnerability in Microsoft XML Control
The latest twist on a redirection vulnerability believed first spotted in one of the controls in Microsoft XML Core Services in December 2001, was uncovered by Microsoft Security over the weekend, and reported to US-CERT.
The Homeland Security bureau responded on Sunday by posting an advisory stating it has seen evidence of the vulnerability being actively exploited. Microsoft has also issued a separate advisory.
What Microsoft + Novell Means Going Forward
NEWS ANALYSIS Where there has been an argument about the rights of vendors and suppliers of Linux to produce their various distributions, it has been about whether originators of technology have just as much right to give it away as they do to claim it as their own. It has lately become about whether software is something that can be claimed at all, about whether intellectual property is, by definition, without definition - something so abstract that it cannot be attributed to just one source, to whom fees and revenues should flow.
But in the enterprise data center, there has been no such argument. All this time, in the most influential places in the world where Linux is installed, the arguments which have defined Linux as a movement have had surprisingly little bearing upon how it's implemented. Linux, for them, has never been free anyway - many reputable sources say it's actually more expensive for businesses to own and maintain than Windows.
Microsoft to Promote Linux: The Details
IN DEPTH The photograph alone is monumental: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, sharing a podium with their companies' respective logos adorning the wall behind them.
What they announced was nothing less than a redrawing of the battle lines in the operating system market. What could be a boon for enterprise system administrators may, at the same time, be a nightmare for Red Hat and IBM, the latter of which may not have felt this kind of sting since Microsoft first licensed DOS to another manufacturer.
FTC Asked to Stop Microsoft's AdCenter
UPDATE November 2, 2006, 8:45 pm ET: Thursday evening, Microsoft's senior attorney for privacy, Mike Hintze, provided this comment to BetaNews on the Center for Digital Democracy's petition to the FTC:
"We welcome the opportunity for a discussion about innovations in online advertising and how Microsoft’s adCenter works in a way that protects consumers’ privacy. Consumer trust is essential to the success of online business, and helping protect consumers’ privacy is a top priority for Microsoft in our development and implementation of online services. We are very open about our privacy policies and practices across all of our online services and advertising products because we believe that providing consumers with this type of transparency and control is extremely important, and it will continue to be a central focus of how we design and deliver online services both now and in the future.”
WSJ: Microsoft and Novell to Announce Linux Partnership
UPDATE: In a surprise move that left many jaws on the floor, Microsoft and Novell held a joint press conference Thursday afternoon announcing a broad partnership to make sure Windows interoperates with SUSE Linux, and includes promises not to sue over parents. Click here for the full details of the announcement.
The day after Novell's announcement of continuing corporate shakeup, which left the company's vice president for sales boosted to the role of President of the company's Americas division, comes word from The Wall Street Journal this afternoon that the company is about to enter into a strategic partnership with none other than Microsoft.
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