The 'fast-lane' debate resumes over Google and tiered access
What could be a "non-story story" in this morning's Wall Street Journal which some are saying strays too far from the truth, was met with a "non-denial denial" response from Google indicating it may not be too far from wrong.
The chatter this morning is about whether Google, a company whose name actually means "big," is approaching cable companies about possible partnerships that could give certain customers higher-speed, premium access to higher-bandwidth content such as YouTube and Google Apps. This after a Wall Street Journal story painted Google as two-faced, advocating so-called "net neutrality" principles in public while making exclusivity deals with carriers in private.
Bush administration urges FCC to vote against free broadband mandate
Sure, the US government has been in favor of expanding access to free "broadband" service to the masses. But the current administration is opposed to mandates, and there's still enough time to make that opposition stick.
In an open letter to US Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin yesterday, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez repeated the current administration's opposition to the idea of mandating that a portion of the Advanced Wireless Services AWS-3 spectrum being auctioned off next year, be exclusively set aside for businesses that wish to operate no-fee nationwide broadband services.
What we suddenly don't know about the new IE exploit
One of the only sources of hard information yesterday about an IE remote code exploit that Microsoft only knew about circumstantially, now says not only is the Web full of misinformation about it, but it blames itself.
Just how many online news sources have to repeat a piece of information before it becomes, by default, true? That's the question faced by literally everyone, including BetaNews, who reported on Microsoft's revelation earlier in the week of what was believed to be the existence of new attacks affecting its Web browsers.
Google Chrome, now minus the 'beta' part
Download Google Chrome for Windows XP and Vista from FileForum now.
Perhaps in response to a wave of blog posts commenting about how many Google products have remained officially in "beta" for so long, its Chrome browser release no longer has that moniker attached.
Is there a new remote data execution exploit for IE7?
All that anyone knows for certain as of today is that there are some browsers that appear to be the victim of new attacks using a very old profile: embedded binary code for graphic objects appearing in IE7 Web pages.
In a security advisory issued yesterday, Microsoft acknowledged that its security team is investigating reports of a new data execution prevention exploit in Internet Explorer 7 that was not addressed during the previous Patch Tuesday cycle, though it stopped short of explicitly saying such an exploit actually exists.
Yahoo's CEO: So sad to see you go, in all lower-case
Citing a need to "better align costs with revenues," the Chief Yahoo couldn't sound less cheerful, as he told 10% of his workforce that their exit would have a greater positive impact on the company than a negative impact on them.
It hasn't been a week for cheerleading at Yahoo in quite some time, but this week, CEO Jerry Yang -- for whom "outgoing" now has new meaning -- finds himself in the painful position of seeing hundreds of his colleagues out the door for the last time, prior to his own exit.
Sun gives a cloudier picture of its cloud platform
This week, the company that at one time led the way in developing grid computing -- purchasing processing time remotely from a massive system -- made it seem its people were very excited to have the opportunity to take it all down.
Yesterday was supposed to be a day when many prospective Sun Microsystems customers were expecting to hear a major announcement about the company's next step in the field of cloud computing. But on the same day that engineers and company representatives on yesterday's webcast told attendees there actually were no major announcements, and spent 90 minutes telling them essentially to "stay tuned," the company disengaged its marketing and some of its support pages for Network.com, Sun's front-end for its Grid Compute Utility that premiered in early 2005.
Sun's JavaFX: Is it Java? JavaScript? Or something new?
Download JavaFX for Windows (all versions) from FileForum now.
We're told that the future of applications relies on app servers and rich, graphical clients. But will market share or common sense determine which method of building RIAs that developers choose most?
European availability zone opens for Amazon EC2
In a move that will extend the Web's biggest cloud to encompass much of the globe, the company that began as an online bookstore is opening its commercial server hosting platform to the EU.
The basic Amazon EC2 cloud services platform is now open to customers in the European Union. While this will bring Amazon's managed hosting alternative closer to potentially thousands more customers, they'll be paying slightly higher fees than in the US.
Parallel programming model adopted by AMD, Nvidia, among others
The graphics processor that's typically relegated to the process of filling triangles in geometric space with color, took a huge step closer to becoming an all-purpose code execution tool today, with the ratification of OpenCL 1.0.
Most PCs today have a minimum of two extraordinarily powerful processing mechanisms, and I'm not talking about "cores." The first is a compilation of multiple cores -- today, more often as many as four per unit, for 16 in a four-way server. The second uses a fundamentally different architecture, designed for pipelining identical instructions that are repeated tens of thousands of times, to be executed in parallel, in a process that on paper resembles the stretching and folding of taffy.
Microsoft open-sources a chunk of its Channel 9 code
Proving its refreshingly serious intent to become a truly contributing member of the open source community, Microsoft this week is releasing part of the engine for its own development blogs.
A recent incarnation of MSDN's very popular Channel 9 blog (one of Microsoft's best ideas in its history) remodels its ASP.NET infrastructure to take advantage of Microsoft's model-view-controller architecture. ASP.NET MVC is the system where the software components responsible for creating, assembling, and requesting data are kept separate from one another, resulting in simpler, faster code.
Now, it's Sony's turn to take the hit: What it means, and why
Sony was already suffering from internal issues, but now the global economy is forcing the CE giant to consider not only scaling down, but scaling back its innovations for next year.
That the global economic predicament should impact Sony, headquartered in one of the hardest hit countries, should surprise no one. This morning, the company admitted that it, too, is taking its medicine. It will cut 8,000 jobs in its electronics divisions worldwide, which is bad but not catastrophic news, and it will reduce temporary or seasonal employees as well.
Leaks indicate Microsoft is un-rethinking the Win7 taskbar
During last week's touring WinHEC conference in Beijing, attendees were treated to the latest Windows 7 build running in a virtual machine. Trouble is, someone apparently pilfered a copy of the VHD, and now it's loose.
The security around uninstalled copies of Windows 7 is fairly tight. But the security around a copy that has been installed to a PC's virtual machine, might not be tight at all. So an attendee at last week's Beijing WinHEC conference was apparently able to copy the VHD file for the virtual machine to a thumb drive, before uploading it to a Web file host, and providing the link to a very popular Chinese beta news site (not affiliated with BetaNews).
Mozilla makes Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 available
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 for Windows (all versions) from FileForum now.
The public beta of Mozilla's first Web browser to incorporate a private browsing mode, is being made available to the general public today, although as before, the organization has yet to make it official.
On fifth thought, maybe Microsoft is interested in Yahoo's search
So which is it? Last week, the candle in Carl Icahn's window appeared lit, while Steve Ballmer's was snuffed out. This week, after Icahn put out his candle publicly on nationwide TV, Ballmer appears to have lit his again.
In an exchange of semi-counter-proposals that has seen more flip-flops than a 2004 Republican campaign rally, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made it clear this morning through his mouthpiece of choice, The Wall Street Journal, that his company may be interested after all in a deal with the search engine component of Yahoo.
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