Copyright board leaves rates unchanged, iTunes lives for another day
The recording industry's efforts to compensate for lagging CD sales by promoting hikes in royalties rates, suffered another serious setback yesterday in the US as a panel of judges ruled mechanical royalties rates should stay put.
Apple's threat earlier this week to shut down its iTunes service cast a brighter spotlight on the Copyright Review Board's royalties review process than at any time since 1909. As of this morning, the CRB hasn't actually publicly announced its decision yesterday, although the Associated Press learned from sources who participated in the meetings with the three-judge panel that it decided not to raise the rates for mechanical reproduction royalties above the current base rate established in January 2006.
Analysis: HP's growth slows, Dell picks up steam in Q2
You can't keep a good Dell down. After having paid the price two years ago for surrendering its leadership position, it's now clearly rejoining the battle with HP and is inching its way back toward market leadership, according to iSuppli.
It's fair to say that the resurgence of Hewlett-Packard under the leadership of CEO Mark Hurd has been one of the more incredible success stories in the emerging annals of 21st century American business. There were other prospective leaders who could have taken the helm when Hurd did, who might not have led the company away from what seemed certain catastrophe.
Sirius adds a la carte, 'Best of XM' options
The chief question in most satellite radio listeners' minds has been, would XM and Sirius subscribers always remain separate? Today, the official answer has changed from "Yes" to "Sorta," with the emergence of new "best-of" selections.
In a potentially acceptable compromise with what legislators had sought prior to the merger, Sirius XM Satellite Radio announced this morning it will be making some XM channels available to Sirius subscribers as an add-on package, and that one of its Sirius radios available now can accept a la carte programming selections.
Hyper-V Server now available as a free download
Download Hyper-V 2008 Server Stand-alone from FileForum now.
It isn't like Microsoft to give away an entire operating system for free, but beginning today, it will: A stand-alone server whose sole purpose is to be a hypervisor platform for virtualized guest operating systems, is now available free of charge.
.NET Framework 4.0 to become less SOAP-centric, embrace REST
It was surprising enough when four years ago, Microsoft made an historic decision to ditch its own Web services architecture attempts and go with the flow. Today, it announced its next version of Windows will go with a different flow.
For the last four years, one of the most prominent signs of Microsoft's change of thinking with regard to the division of labor in programming, has been its embrace of Simple Object Access Protocol (now just called SOAP, after too much deliberation over the acronym) in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It was Web standards organizations, not Microsoft, that initially drove the widespread adoption of so-called WS-* services that use SOAP, but Windows' embrace of SOAP later cemented the standard as a fixture of Web development.
Amazon's cloud to host Windows Server
After tests are completed sometime this fall, the cloud provider announced this morning, customers will be able to deploy complete Windows Server-based machine images to Amazon's high-capacity computing cloud, eliminating hardware costs.
In what could be a waterspout moment, if you will, for cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer Jeff Barr announced this morning that his operation is currently hosting a private beta of hosted Microsoft Windows Server instances. Within the next three months, AWS customers will be able to deploy machine images with 32- or 64-bit versions of Windows Server -- including high-performance packages -- to Amazon's cloud, to be hosted remotely.
Tech stocks ride a roller coaster while Congress deliberates
One moment it's all doom and gloom, and the next it's brighter days ahead. But with Congress actually uttering the "D" word in place of the "R" word as debate on the bailout bill continues, the market now consistently lacks stability.
With Congress having taken yesterday off for the Bank Holiday, investors saw opportunities and potential bargains everywhere they looked, especially with Apple stock trading at a 16-month low. So injecting a much-needed dose of confidence back into the markets, the buyers came back yesterday, giving Apple an 8% boost, responding to what was the single largest Dow 30 point drop in history by looking forward to better times.
GSMA leaders aim to endow notebooks with built-in HSPA, LTE
This morning London time, 16 members of the GSMA Association, including Microsoft, jointly announced the formation of a Mobile Broadband initiative, whose goal will be to endow notebook PCs in 91 countries with 2G and 3G.
The new marketing push appears to be an attempt to sheath a set of abbreviations that has yet to become part of the common vernacular -- namely, HSPA (formerly HSDPA and HSUPA), the software-upgraded "HSPA Evolved," and the GSMA group's hand-picked 3G successor, LTE -- into a more palatable brand name "Mobile Broadband" that consumers can accept. What it may also be is an effort to subtly distinguish HSPA from WiMAX -- a goal which would certainly please Qualcomm, a leading member of the new initiative, with a long record of opposing WiMAX.
New Microsoft support for jQuery makes part of its platform open source
One of the most exciting innovations in JavaScript is a tiny little open source library that makes functionality directly assignable to objects rather than to events. The surprise is that Microsoft has signed on as its key distributor.
It is now an established fact that JavaScript is the functionality language of the Web; and although it was Netscape that introduced us to it, and although those responsible are now at Mozilla, it's Microsoft that has taken the lead in recent years in accelerating its evolution. One major step was its embrace of AJAX two years ago. Another step, announced yesterday, may be just as big: the inclusion in its standard JavaScript of a very small, very potent library called jQuery that alters the dynamics of how Web pages work.
Washington State launches anti-scareware suits with Microsoft's help
Perhaps the most malicious act that malware could possibly do -- even more than wreck your system -- is separate users from their hard-earned cash. Now, a new campaign in the state of Washington has named its first anti-hero.
If you've ever perused our FileForum looking for a Windows System Registry cleaner or an undelete utility, even if you tend to trust our posts (and you should), there's a good chance you've found yourself wondering beforehand whether what you're about to download is legitimate. There's a growing industry in fake anti-malware, and many are now saying it's capable of doing as much damage, if not more, than malicious software to begin with.
Legislation would force all new US radios to include digital 'HD'
More digital radios, especially those installed with new automobiles, include the capability to pick up digital "HD Radio" broadcasts over the air. But should the government mandate that satellite radio sets include HD Radio capability?
Demonstrating that there actually were at least a few spare minutes for Congress after all, during the debate over the financial bailout plan, House Telecommunications Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey (D - Mass.) introduced a bipartisan bill that will require all future AM/FM radios or satellite radio receivers made or sold in the US to also receive digital HD broadcasts.
Tech stocks slammed amid House rejection of bailout plan
Last summer, companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Apple showed buoyancy amid a gathering economic storm in the US, giving investors confidence they could weather the storm. This afternoon, the storm was upgraded to a 'Cat-5.'"
In the clearest indication to date that the US technology industry cannot sustain its position as the fortress in the storm forever, a precipitous drop in stock values slammed values of shares in technology firms perhaps worst of all. Falling off of a cliff today are shares of Apple Inc., which at one point lost as much as 28% of its value at about 1:50 pm EDT, before recovering slightly to an 18% loss by 2:30 pm EDT at $105.48 per share -- still a 52-week low.
Microsoft shares early videos, screenshots of Visual Studio 2010
With the next edition of Microsoft's development tools suite, every commercial edition will feature some type of architectural tool that competes directly with a slew of UML-based add-ons, including a major revenue center for IBM.
Though Visual Studio 2008 was only formally introduced last January, the betas of Microsoft's development environment were often found in full production use as early as late 2006. Now with Windows 7 looking to be a reality for around this time next year, Microsoft finds itself accelerating the pace of its rollouts and tightening the beta schedule.
Latest WebKit build gives Safari a 100% score on Acid3
Download Safari for Windows version 3.1.2 from FileForum now
BetaNews has verified through its own testing that the latest build of the open source WebKit rendering engine, version r36882, makes Apple's Safari for Windows pass the Acid3 rendering test from the Web Standards project: 100%.
A response to Vint Cerf: Enough of the content, already
A recent essay by Google's chief Internet evangelist has BetaNews' Scott Fulton thinking about the meaning behind all this content, and whether the evolution of the Internet has made its creators forget the need for meaning.
One of my favorite movies of any genre made in this decade has been Pixar's Wall-E, and one of the reasons is that it depicts skillfully, though gently, the exact nature of a world that has become chock full of content. The title character's world became overrun with stuff, but devoid of people. In fact, the people got so sick of it, they left.
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