Microsoft in an IP deal with manufacturer that brought DMCA case
Early this afternoon, Microsoft and printer maker Lexmark jointly announced that they had entered into a cross-licensing agreement, which gives both companies access to each other's portfolios. Their statement basically said that such agreements are necessary in tough economic times, in order to shorten their own development lifecycles.
Conceivably, Microsoft could use this deal to craft better printer drivers for Windows, especially drivers that are capable of testing such statistics as cartridge fluid level, without relying on printer manufacturers to craft the software for themselves. Notoriously, Lexmark's biggest competitor Epson produces its own printer drivers, but to this day has yet to resolve issues concerning its photo printers and 64-bit Windows Vista.
A phishing scheme may have exposed 700 Comcast customers
A document that appeared on the online sharing service Scribd appeared to show thousands of comcast.net accounts, along with their passwords. It was probably posted there as a display of somebody's phishing prowess, though it would appear it took two months or more before anyone finally noticed.
Well, someone finally noticed. As it turns out, only about 700 of those 4,000 or so addresses were for real Comcast subscribers, the company confirmed to Betanews this morning, which creates some doubt as to whether the would-be phisher stole these account names from Comcast itself or from a really bad screen-scraper routine.
AMD to Intel: We'll come clean if you will
Yesterday in an interview with Betanews, Intel corporate spokesperson Chuck Mulloy requested that AMD lift its veil of secrecy regarding the redacted portion of a cross-licensing agreement between the two companies. The unseen portion, we're told and Mulloy believes, includes the list of technologies that AMD is currently licensing to Intel -- Mulloy himself has not seen that list.
It's the list of technologies whose licenses AMD is threatening to cancel if Intel goes through with its plan to cancel its part of the cross-licensing agreement.
Microsoft: If Vista buyers knew so much, why would they sue?
In all the confusion that arose in 2006 over whether lesser-grade editions of Windows Vista was "real Vista" and whether existing PCs were ready or capable of running it, consumers probably downloaded a lot of information about different ways they could get their hands on the new product. In a motion filed last week by Microsoft in the "Vista Capable" suit in US District Court in Seattle, and first reported on by our friend Todd Bishop at Seattle's TechFlash, the company argues that the wealth of such information that former plaintiffs unearthed during their purchasing research should have been enough to tell them that Vista Home Basic wasn't the same as Vista Home Premium.
For that reason, the company claims, prospective plaintiffs can't exactly say they were harmed in the same way, so they don't deserve to be re-enlisted as class action plaintiffs. The judge in that case threw out the class action distinction last month.
No more Hitachi monitors after July's restructuring
After suffering the shame of pleading guilty in the US Justice Dept.'s ongoing investigation of price fixing in the TFT-LCD monitor industry, Hitachi announced this afternoon, Tokyo time, that it had gone about as far as it could in the present economy, in its current structure. Beginning this July, the division responsible for engineering and building those monitors probably won't even be known as Hitachi.
Spinoffs of the Consumer Business Group and the Automotive Systems Division are now fully underway, with the current executive vice president slated to take charge of the new consumer products manufacturer. That group will still downsize -- or, as Hitachi's statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange calls it, "rightsize" -- to about 750 employees, and will outsource some of its development to Panasonic, so the new company will start out small.
Intel fires a warning shot across AMD's bow on Global Foundries
When AMD spun off a huge chunk of its manufacturing operations two weeks ago, creating a new and instantly major chip making firm called Global Foundries, it was with the idea of enabling the new entity to manufacture CPUs using AMD's designs. But a good portion of the intellectual property for those designs comes to AMD by way of a cross-licensing agreement between the two companies, that Intel fears AMD may be breaching.
This morning, Intel announced it has formally informed AMD of its opinion that Global Foundries is not an AMD "subsidiary," and therefore does not qualify to make use of Intel's x86 intellectual property in building chips for AMD or anyone else.
Maybe it really is over: New Broadcom suit against Qualcomm tossed out
Southern California District Court Judge William Q. Hayes last Thursday dismissed without prejudice the latest claim brought by handset chip maker Broadcom against its principal rival in that market, Qualcomm. That claim was that Qualcomm, by means of its Subscriber Unit License Agreements (SULAs) passed on to reseller customers who purchase handsets made with Qualcomm chips, charges a second time for the use of patents it already charged the manufacturer for once.
It's a serious double-dipping claim, which if true, could hurt Broadcom and other competitors in the following way: A company that would double-dip in this manner wouldn't have to set its prices too high for the first dip in order to make a big profit. That could result in such a company undercutting its competitors who may only (assuming no one else double-dips as well) be profiting from the initial patent license to manufacturers.
It has come to this: A claim that patent reform threatens the environment
Much of America's ability to once again play a contributing factor in the restoration of balance in Earth's natural environment depends on the continuing creation of new technologies, both for replacing other technologies that damage our planet and for simply curing the problem at hand. Some of these technologies are being created at the grass roots level, by entrepreneurs and experimenters, often with the intention of licensing or selling that technology once it receives its US patent -- its assurance of originality and viability.
But the value of that patent in the modern market is determined by its defensibility -- literally, how much it can rake in, in infringement cases. Without that market value, much of the incentive for trying to build new technologies in the first place, may be lost.
Intel's Atom and the return of the thin client
Decades ago, one of the most viable arguments for major enterprises holding onto their "big iron" -- their aging mainframes -- was that they could still provide processing power for thin clients, the smaller and less expensive terminals that didn't need the speed to crunch numbers. Today, in the era of virtualization, the concept of shifting processing power back to the data center has been reborn, especially with the deployment of lighter-weight, single-core processors that only provide the power needed to render results.
With that, a thin-client manufacturer named Devon IT this week announced it's shipping a little PC called the TC5 that frankly isn't much smarter than many smartphones these days...but it doesn't need to be. It's shipping with Intel's single-core Atom N270 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, which isn't much; it uses Intel's GMA 950 embedded graphics, which also isn't much; and it has Windows XP or Linux on board rather than Windows Vista, and you know the drill there now.
So what's its purpose? To serve as a wired or wireless network receiver and to pump data to the screen as fast as possible...and besides gathering user input, that's about it. Its design enables it to run one program -- maybe the only one it ever has to run: a desktop virtualization host.
Tests: Firefox 3.1 JavaScript outpaced by Safari 4, Google Chrome
Download Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Internet enthusiasts today are getting their first glimpse of the TraceMonkey JavaScript interpreter that Mozilla claims will be one of the principal reasons to own and use Firefox 3.5 -- what the latest Firefox will inevitably be called once the numerology gets sorted out. A fresh round of comprehensive Betanews tests Thursday afternoon indicate that Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 will demonstrate close to eight times the general JavaScript calculation and rendering performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 -- a clear performance gain.
Microsoft silent on whether version 8 will be the last Internet Explorer
This week, elements of the blogosphere drew speculative conclusions about a Microsoft Research paper released last month in time for TechFest, which concerned a prototype Web browser constructed expressly for the purpose of testing new concepts in Web browser user authentication. Cross-site scripting has, after all, been a security plague for nearly every browser at one time or another -- the ability for a script launched by one page to intentionally take control of a page in a completely different window.
Perhaps without even reading the paper itself (PDF available here), speculators concluded that it pointed either to the architecture of the next version of Internet Explorer, or that it somehow signaled the end of the Internet Explorer product line -- that somehow Microsoft, or Microsoft in conjunction with someone else (maybe the University of Washington?), would be making Web browsers for future editions of Windows but without the IE logo. It's a far, far extrapolation of a conclusion that could not possibly have been reached through any logical process.
Amazon EC2 customers can pay up front to drive down hourly costs
In a move that could help cloud computing leader Amazon realize much of its revenues almost a year earlier, the company this morning announced an alternative payment structure for users of its EC2 cloud-based hosting service. For subscribers willing to pay up front for a one-year contract between $325 for a standard virtual machine instance and $2,600 for a CPU-intensive instance, their per-hour usage charges can be reduced around 75% - 80%.
The typical usage charge for a standard hosted Windows Server 2003 instance is $0.125 per hour, or $0.10 for Linux. Those charges will both decline to $0.03 per hour for subscribers who pay up front $325 for a one-year contract, or $500 for a three-year contract. "Extra Large High-CPU" instance usage charges drop from $1.20 per hour ($0.80 for Linux) to $0.24 per hour, for up-front payments of $2,600 for one-year, or $4,000 for three-year.
Final preparations under way for Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 public rollout
Download Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 for Windows from Fileforum now.
The rollout of what's still being called Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is now under way, although Mozilla's official announcement to the general public is still forthcoming. In the meantime, the organization has been actively calling upon its contributors to give one final round of tests, for what it's calling a worldwide test day.
New toolkit makes Eclipse into a Silverlight IDE
When Microsoft first introduced Silverlight a few years ago, it was with the stated promise of becoming a truly cross-platform development system for graphic interactivity and video. The full extent of that promise is still being delivered, in ways that many at the time hadn't really anticipated. The latest such crossover was previewed yesterday: a release candidate for an open source development toolset for the Eclipse development environment -- which itself is available in free and commercial versions -- that enables programmers to build applications that use Silverlight front-ends without having to rely on Visual Studio or Expression Studio.
Up to now, Silverlight has been considered a UI toolset that's made to be developed using Visual Studio. Now, Eclipse4SL from Soyatec -- a company that has received funding from Microsoft for this project -- gives developers tools for creating and deploying Silverlight panels, including the accompanying C# functionality and XAML interface code, that are very similar to their counterparts in Microsoft's commercial Visual Studio versions. All this in an environment that's better known as the IDE of choice among Java and JavaScript developers.
Dell confirms new layoffs, may number hundreds
A spokesperson for Dell Inc. confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that the company is undertaking a new round of staff reductions at locations worldwide. This in response to an official with the Dell desktop computer manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, confirming some 300 staff reductions there today, to the local NBC affiliate station.
Though it was couched as not an official announcement, the spokesperson told Betanews, "We did make some staff reductions today in North Carolina and in other Dell locations globally. Today's actions are consistent with the streamlining that has been underway in our business for more than a year as part of our ongoing initiative to remain competitive by enhancing our efficiency and underlying cost structure."
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