Spansion's Chapter 11 signals the erosion of the flash memory market
The company that was at one time the world's principal provider of NOR flash memory -- the more non-volatile variety -- had its own plans to go "asset light," to use a now familiar phrase, and to concentrate on licensing its intellectual property to companies with the muscle to do the heavy lifting. It sounds like a plan AMD just executed last month. As it turns out, Spansion had also been planning to license others to produce its designs.
Whether that remains the plan after a few months' time is now completely unknown. This morning, the company's Sunnyvale-based American arm announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a month after its Japanese division applied for similar protection there.
The plan for Sirius XM may wait another two weeks
Sirius XM shareholders may already have reached a boiling point in their efforts to learn how it is working through a mountain of financing debt, the first stage of which came due at the end of last month. Now they will have to wait at least another two weeks, as the satellite radio broadcaster let the US government know this morning that its annual report for last year will be delayed until then, at least.
Sirius XM spokesperson indicated to Betanews this morning that the sole reason for the filing delay is to give the company more time to examine its refinancing plan. "The Company noted that senior management has been focused on the recent refinancing transactions and needs additional time to complete its Form 10-K," reads a corporate statement this morning. Sirius XM has filed the necessary 12b-25 forms for both the company and its XM Satellite Radio divisions, it says, so it's following the rules.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic hits a brick wall coming out of the gate
Though Nokia has yet to issue a formal confirmation, a representative of the New York City flagship store where Nokia phones are sold confirmed to Betanews this morning that Nokia corporate officials have ordered the store to cease sales of its 5800 XpressMusic phone, which only premiered in the US last Friday.
The sales halt comes after apparent customer complaints about 3G connectivity issues, the store representative told us, though no details about those specific issues were given. This would be a separate issue from the defective construction complaints also mounting about the device. The mobile device news source Mobile-review.com on Friday reported that, of ten shipping units its reviewers had tested, all ten had serious defects in which the casing loosens over a short period of time, causing the earpiece connection -- essentially the whole point of having a music phone -- to give way.
A fond farewell to Computer Shopper in print
This is not, so thankfully, the story of the passing of a great publication. Computer Shopper is not going away; in fact, its latest owners at SX2 Media Labs have some plans to expand the brand, while keeping its classic look and feel. I'd actually go so far as to say that SX2 is finally doing with Computer Shopper what its previous two owners failed to comprehend how to do, and its first owner could only dream of.
But a chapter has closed in the history of this great publication, and it's a personal one for me, and I'll say more about that in a bit. This week, in a memo to his employees obtained by PaidContent.org, SX2 CEO David Sills announced that the April 2009 issue would be the last bound edition of the US version of Computer Shopper.
Another Google service outage makes its cloud look more like Swiss cheese
A Google spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that soon after the company's Gmail service outage Tuesday, but in an unrelated incident, customers of the company's AdSense network were notified of a service outage.
"On February 25 in the morning Pacific Time," the spokesperson said, "there was a 90-minute AdSense outage that affected a small number of AdSense customers. All affected publishers were notified, and the problem was quickly resolved."
Bartz: 'Look for Yahoo to kick ass again'
There was no all-lower-case text, an absence of apology, not a single metaphor, and a definitive lack of "peanut butter" in yesterday's appearances, both in public and online, from new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. Upon assuming the post from Jerry Yang, Bartz said she would clean house, and analysts were told to expect fireworks. She absolutely delivered.
"Our brand [is] one of our biggest assets," Bartz wrote in her premiere on her new company's old blog yesterday. "Mention Yahoo practically anywhere in the world, and people yodel. But in the past few years, we haven't been as clear in showing the world what the Yahoo brand stands for. We're going to change that. Look for this company's brand to kick ass again."
Dell's Q4: 'Flat' is not a bad place to be
When former CFO Don Carty left Dell Inc. to rejoin his retirement, after having pulled one more rabbit out of his hat and perhaps saved the company, it was last May, and the first signs of the economic crisis (the collapse of the housing market) were only just now upon us. It looked as though Dell would ride a gradual wave of slow redemption, if not overall prosperity, having emerged from an accounting crisis the likes of which would have crippled almost any other US company in the public mind.
But did Carty exit at the wrong time for Dell, not knowing what lay ahead? Late this afternoon, the world's #2 PC maker revealed the answer: It's weathering the storm pretty well, thank you very much, with Michael Dell actively manning the tiller, and former GE Plastics CEO Brian Gladden in the CFO's chair.
Confirmed: Time Warner Cable users impacted by DDoS attack
When users of Time Warner Cable systems report issues concerning slow broadband performance affecting a wide region, they've been happy to see prompt responses from JeffTWC -- one Jeff Simmermon, who's the company's New York-based Director of Digital Communication. In recent days, though, Simmermon's Twitter feed has been exploding with complaints.
As it turned out, there's a serious reason for concern, as Simmermon explained in a longer-than-Twitter post late yesterday: Time Warner Cable systems are the apparent target of an orchestrated denial-of-service attack.
Can Lenovo afford to take the Dell route for product support?
Just like every other major player in the PC industry these days, Lenovo is having to rethink the way it has already rethought its short-term business plan. After already having shuffled its executive ranks earlier this month, the company's reassigned CEO Yang Yuanqing announced yesterday an additional 450 job cuts, in addition to the 2,500 the company already decided to make, with the new cuts affecting workers in Lenovo's native China.
But the part of Yang's message that rang the loudest bell yesterday was this: "While our business in China remains very strong, many of our global support functions have employees based in China," an indication that the latest round of additional cuts will impact Lenovo's product support team first.
Apple Safari 4 beta raises the bar for speed, compliance
Download Safari for Windows 4.28.16.0 Beta from Fileforum now.
We've been hearing quite a lot from every browser manufacturer, including Microsoft and Mozilla, about the incredible speed increases that eventually, pretty soon now, right around the corner, will be realized the moment one of them bites the bullet and installs a new, faster JavaScript interpreter. Well, consider the bullet officially bitten. Betanews tests of Apple's new beta of Safari for Windows, using a freshly cleaned Windows Vista SP1 virtual machine "white box," demonstrates significant speed improvements even over previous Safari versions, which were already quite fast.
Rambus continues to turn the tables in remaining patent disputes
In just one week's time, tack two more wins onto Rambus' column. After what appeared five years ago to have been potentially company-crushing scrutiny into its intellectual property practices -- truly the heart of the company -- the US Supreme Court decided Monday not to review last year's ruling of a DC Appeals Court panel that cleared the company of charges from the US Federal Trade Commission of unfair monopoly practices.
Specifically, the FTC, using evidence supplied by Rambus' competitors, had accused it of participating in memory technology standards committee JEDEC, while at the same time deceitfully withholding disclosure of having applied for patents for the same technologies JEDEC was standardizing. An FTC panel unanimously came to that conclusion in 2006. But the DC Court of Appeals unanimously overturned that conclusion, on the basis that JEDEC's bylaws didn't exactly specify that members must disclose their patent interests...and that if Rambus behaved the way competitors say it did, it may not have been alone.
SP2 for Vista, Windows Server 2008 coming next week
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that the first release candidates (without numerals) for Service Pack 2 for both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 will be released to the general public for testing next week. This after private testers with the MSDN and TechNet services receive their copies first.
For the first time, the SP2 standalone package will be delivered to users not according to operating system build, but to byte length. So the 32-bit standalone service pack (302 MB with the basic five languages, 390 MB for multi-language) will update both 32-bit Vista and 32-bit Windows Server 2008. Then there will be two 64-bit standalones, including one which covers x64 architectures (508 MB / 622 MB) and one for Itanium 64-bit (384 MB / 396 MB). The RC will represent a kind of dress rehearsal for this new method of distribution.
Windows 7 testers should upgrade their IE8
The first release candidate for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, released last month, addressed a number of technical behavioral issues that, according to IE8 Program Manager Herman Ng yesterday, included some serious crashes and system hangs. That's normal for even a public beta like IE8 Beta 2, and the new Crash Recovery feature in RC1 addresses 94% of these "reliability problems," Ng said, albeit with what could be for many testers a very well-used safety net.
But what about Windows 7 beta testers? The IE8 release candidates currently available are for Windows Vista and Windows XP, separately. Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to address their concerns as well, so yesterday, it begain issuing a "reliability update" for its version of IE8. This doesn't make its IE8 a "release candidate for Win7," though it does roll up the various fixes implemented in the Vista and XP RC versions.
Corel keeps the paint wet for new Painter 11
It's the dream of graphic artists to be able to use a program that emulates -- not just simulates -- the texture, the behavior, the luminance of pigment...while at the same time preserving all the conveniences of digital editing, such as layering and selective blending and the ability to "undo."
The latest Corel Painter 11, whose availability for download begins today, adds a little more of that much-desired flexibility between the two universes. For example, once you've blended a paint on one layer with a paint on another layer (imagine those paints being wet, if you will), what happens to those intermediate colors created during the blending process? In a demonstration video on Corel's Web site today, you can see how the latest incarnation of the Magic Wand tool enables separation of blended pigments between layers. So you can move a layer around and thus effectively "re-blend," a process not unlike ciphoning off wet paint from a fresh canvas.
Gauging the impact of the Office 14 delay
The Microsoft Business Division is responsible for about 29% of that company's revenue -- at least it was during the last quarter -- and 90% of that contribution comes from the sale of Microsoft Office-branded products, including its principal applications suite. Though it continues to be the world's dominant platform for everyday document production and management by a comical margin, and though a key element of the company's interoperability strategy relies on that platform's latest update, CEO Steve Ballmer not-so-inadvertently revealed earlier today that Office 14 will not be released during the first half of this year as originally "leaked" to journalists, but instead, potentially as late as the second half of 2010.
So is user dependence upon Office stable enough to carry the 2007 edition -- which did, after all, include a strikingly complete makeover -- for another year or longer?
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