Usually when a new online product unveils an upgrade, its audience numbers see a bump for the first month, before subsiding and evening out. Last month, Bing's first usage share numbers from analysis firm comScore showed a little bump, but not much of one -- yet Microsoft made as much out of it as it could.

The news this month -- the first to show month-by-month progress since the changeover from Windows Live -- may actually be more encouraging for Microsoft: It gained half a point of usage share among US users for the month of July over June, at the same time when Google and Yahoo combined lost about as much.

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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority announced yesterday that the project to improve cellular service in Washington DC's Metro stations and tunnels began construction over the weekend, and will be completed on October 16.

The bill to expand wireless coverage in Washington DC's underground Metrorail stations was passed in October 2008, and broke the exclusive contract Verizon Wireless had with the DC Metro Transit Authority through its acquisition of Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems. Bell Atlantic Mobile signed the exclusivity contract with Metro in 1993.

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Almost everyone who has been observing the patent infringement case in US District Court in Eastern Texas surrounding Microsoft Word (Betanews correspondents included) have predicted that this is the opening round in a very long dance whose steps are pretty much pre-determined: The merits of Canadian software firm i4i's case seem questionable at the very least, and cases like this are typically either overturned on appeal or settled out of court. But one can't help feeling that there's an ever-so-slight chance of this being not really a dance but a train wreck in progress, the slim possibility that the ironically named i4i has found the one loophole in US patent law just waiting to be exploited: the notion that a heretofore unclaimed function that should seem obvious on its face, may not qualify as prior art for the sake of a patent challenge.

Yesterday, as first reported by the Seattle P-I, Microsoft filed its emergency motion for a stay of injunction, with the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. It could have filed a boilerplate appeal, simply saying the company has a viable case but needs time to present it. It didn't. Instead, it gave everyone including i4i a peek at the big cards it's willing to play, an advance look at the Supreme Court argument it's willing to make if the case should go that far.

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After CEO Mark Hurd led Hewlett-Packard through the aftermath of Carly Fiorina and then the boardroom scandals, you'd think it would have been prepared for the downturn in the global economy. But more than one factor surprised analysts today, in reading the early numbers from HP, the first one being this: Shipments of personal systems in the company's fiscal third quarter, ending last July, increased by 2% over Q3 2008, but revenue fell 18% in the same interval to $8.4 billion.

Conceivably, shipment rates overall should be permitted to slip between 8% and 10% this year. But that's for the overall market, which includes servers. In Enterprise and Servers, a key revenue category, revenue was down 23% to $3.7 billion. But you can see from the disparity between the two revenue figures that HP these days does more than two-thirds of its systems business with consumers, not businesses individual unit sales as opposed to volume business sales [an HP spokesperson asked Betanews for that clarification]. While HP omitted server shipment figures from its early numbers (those will probably have been squeezed out of the company by tomorrow morning), server shipments would have to have fallen by as much as 10%, we estimate, for HP's performance to be in keeping with the average overall shipment decline that analysts expect, assuming costs stay flat (and they're not -- they declined a bit in this last quarter).

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Even though T-Mobile continues to deny it, the Android community has resigned to the fact that the T-Mobile G1 (also known as the HTC Dream) will not receive any significant upgrades beyond "Cupcake," the Android software update from last April.

The simple fact is that there is not enough memory on the G1 to support a much bigger OS, and even equipping the device with Cupcake was reportedly problematic. "We knew that internal flash space was going to be very tight on the G1 and we kept the system partition tight on purpose," Jean-Baptiste Queru, a software engineer at Google said on Twitter last week.

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Download Google Chrome Dev channel build 4.0.201.1 from Fileforum now.

With Google, one tends to learn the meanings and intentions behind the many events in its development programs pretty much as they happen. For example, the distinctions between what goes on in the Chrome browser's development channel ("Dev") and what happens in the beta channel, have frequently been explained to us after the fact.

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As Blockbuster gets slowly buried by rivals Netflix and Redbox, it has pulled out a number of noteworthy streaming partnerships: TiVo in March, Samsung in July, and according to the most recent reports, Motorola. But Blockbuster OnDemand is reportedly not coming to Motorola set-top boxes, just phones.

Kevin Lewis, Senior Vice President of Digital Entertainment for Blockbuster today said, "People are increasingly relying on their mobile phones to stay connected to the things they love the most -- including their favorite movies and TV shows. The integration of our Blockbuster OnDemand service into Motorola's mobile phones will provide access to thousands of movies from the moment someone initiates their service."

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Today, the European Commission announced it will invest a total of €18 million into researching the deployment of LTE and LTE Advanced.

The EC says it will begin laying down the details of its LTE projects next month, and intends to begin in January 2010. The projects are expected to cost more than €700 million by the time they're completed in 2012.

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Yesterday, Leichtman Research Group (LRG) released its quarterly study of the nation's cable and telephone providers and found that net broadband additions last quarter were the lowest they have been in eight years, dropping by almost 30% from last year.

"The second quarter has proven to be traditionally weak for broadband growth, but with the market becoming more mature, broadband adds further waned in 2Q 2009," said Leichtman Research Group's President and principal analyst Bruce Leichtman.

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Since September of last year, Betanews could barely do a story about one or two specific, related Microsoft technologies, code named "Oslo" and "Dublin," without getting a call or comment from the department responsible for the other technology saying our perspective was all wrong. This despite, at one point, providing the transcript of most of a complete interview with the product manager responsible for Oslo, which includes Microsoft's very innovative M modeling language, and which will become a core component of Visual Studio 2010.

Yesterday morning, company engineer Douglas Purdy, a product unit manager on the Oslo project, acknowledged all the confusion that had been generated over associating the modeling language with Dublin, arguably a very different technology for Windows Server, giving it the ability to deploy cloud services. In a blog post, Purdy explained that the company now intends to treat these separate technologies as separate, and to stop extending the boundaries of Oslo into Ireland and Dublin into Norway.

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At Sony's big press conference scheduled today in Germany for Gamescom, the long-rumored PS3 Slim, a much cheaper, much smaller PlayStation 3 with a 120 GB HDD and requisite Blu-ray player, was finally unveiled. However, it wasn't too much of a surprise for eager potential buyers, as several online retailers prematurely posted product pages for the device.

It is similar to the situation with the PSP Go! at E3 this year. Just days before the new, smaller PlayStation Portable was slated to make its big debut, Sony's own Qore magazine leaked a picture of it.
Sony Computer Entertainment's President and CEO Kaz Hirai called it the "Worst-kept secret of E3."

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Download Exchange Server 2010 x64 Release Candidate from Fileforum now.

This morning, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company will be making available the first public release candidate for its Exchange Server 2010 e-mail server today. As of late Tuesday morning, the links still pointed to the last ES 2010 public beta.

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Mozilla Firefox users awoke this morning to the news in their RSS feeds that the organization had dared to send push notes to its users urging them to upgrade to a Web browser version that was, as the report put it, ".NET incompatible." Hopefully, Firefox veterans knew what was really going on.

Users who upgrade their Firefox versions a few times per month anyway have seen this all before, and have long since discovered there's no need to panic: Microsoft's .NET Framework Assistant add-on has a habit of showing up in users' Firefox plug-ins list without them even asking for it. Its purpose is not to make Firefox compatible with .NET -- anyone who's installed Silverlight 3 in Firefox knows that. What it does is give .NET apps designed to be run through the browser a kind of hook to the .NET runtime -- a hook that Internet Explorer includes by design -- so that these apps can check their servers and update themselves.

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Though it's been in private testing for some time, the Silverlight 2.0 work-alike system for Linux built by the open source Mono Project is now ready to present itself to the general public. This afternoon (after a few fits and starts), Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1 was released for general testing, with one of the runtime module's ambitious new features being the enablement of different media codecs, including Mono's own rendition of open-source Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and BBC Dirac.

Although multiple video codec support is slated for inclusion by Microsoft in Silverlight 3, Mono team lead developer Miguel de Icaza said today that he decided to implement the media pipeline feature from Silverlight 3 into the 2.0 specifically "to play back media files that use the open codecs or to plug your own media codecs." De Icaza only expressed his interest in tackling this bit of functionality just last March.

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Today, the US Department of Justice announced that a 28-year-old hacker and former Secret Service informant named Albert Gonzales is being indicted for the third and, by far, the largest crime of his short career: participation in the theft of more than 130 million credit and debit card mag-strip data dumps, in attacks between 2006 and 2008.

Gonzales was already in federal custody for several major data breaches. He faces trial in New York next month for the first, which involved hacking restaurant Dave and Busters' payment system. Then the second case will be heard in Boston in 2010 for Gonzales' involvement in the theft of data off of more than 40 million credit card mag-strips from OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, BJ's Wholesale Club, and many more.

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