Today's Microsoft and Nokia strategic alliance is important for both companies, but probably not for the reasons many people will write about. Mobile Office is no big deal. Most people don't need it. Nokia already supports Exchange Sync, which matters more. For Microsoft, the deal's big bang is Office Communications and SharePoint servers support on Nokia handsets.

Microsoft casts the deal as being for enterprises, which is shortsighted. Based on the announcement, axiom "doing the right thing for the wrong reasons" applies here. The Nokia deal is potentially quite good for Microsoft, but for other reasons than Mobile Office. But, for Microsoft, Mobile Office must be the strategic priority, because the company needs to extend Office desktop software's relevance to the handset and the cloud. As I've written many times before, a new applications stack -- mobile device to the cloud -- challenges Microsoft's dominant Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack.

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Nokia's Symbian S60 today became the first non-Windows Mobile platform to receive support for the Microsoft Office Mobile suite of applications and services. Microsoft and Nokia today announced their long-term partnership to collaborate on the design, development, and marketing of mobile productivity solutions.

Beginning next year, Nokia's E-series handsets will ship with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile built in, and later, other Office applications and software will be added to the Symbian platform, such as mobile versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote, as well as SharePoint Server and Microsoft System Center.

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The technology used to thwart DVD ripping software such as Slysoft's AnyDVD includes mechanisms that place intentional errors and even false logic, such as navigation menus that lead nowhere, on studios' DVDs. Ordinary DVD players would ignore this false information, but rippers may copy it and, in producing better images of it in the copy, produce DVDs with errors that ordinary players would not ignore. It's this technology which RealNetworks engineers actively worked to overcome, in their creation of a system enabling owners of DVD movies to create archival backups of their collections onto hard disk drives.

Yesterday, US District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that this act -- the creation of error-correcting code that does not discriminate between accidental errors such as scratches, and intentional errors used for copy protection -- is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This in her decision yesterday which upholds a lower court ban on the sale of RealDVD, and future Real products based on that product, imposed last October.

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The US District Court in Eastern Texas, the hotbed of patent litigation where everyone from Apple to Nintendo has been found guilty, has granted an injunction on Microsoft Word on account of willful infringement upon patents held by Canadian software company i4i.

That's right. Judge Leonard Davis yesterday said that Microsoft can no longer sell Word 2003, Word 2007, or "Microsoft Word products not more than colorably different from Microsoft Word 2003 or Microsoft Word 2007," and must pay $200 million in damages to i4i.

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Just shy of two days after announcing it couldn't afford to keep URL shortening site Tr.im open, The Nambu Network says public demand for the site is far too great to simply shut down.

Tr.im will stay alive instead.

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The principal architecture of HTTP, the transfer protocol for the Web, is by definition sessionless. That means that once a browser has completed loading a page from a server, the communication between the server and the browser is broken. So any illusion of a connection between the browser's user and the server is produced by the server creating a record of the session that inevitably terminates, and referring to that record later. The only decision a Web publisher has to make is where to store those records -- on a local database, or using remote cookies stored on the client.

For most publishers, that decision takes less than two seconds to make -- cookies are practically ubiquitous among Web sites. But for the United States Government, storing any record about a person using a government service is a privacy concern; and the decision of storing and retrieving government-generated data on a citizen's private computer raises the irresistible specter of conspiracy.

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At the beginning of 2009, Seagate had to deal with a firmware bug affecting 21 different hard drive models which caused widespread failure. For the second time this year, a Seagate internal HDD is causing problems that may necessitate a firmware upgrade.

The model in question is the 500 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4 hard drive (model# ST9500420ASG), which causes the system to pause for as much as 10 seconds as the drive audibly hiccups.

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After our initial tests of Google's experimental Caffeine search engine versus its existing stable one, we're still in something of a fog as to what the differences mean. So for our third heat, we decided to implement a purposefully botched query:

Joshua Schachter, the founder of social bookmarking site Delicious who sold that site to Yahoo a few years ago, is in the news today for a remark he made on a public forum about regretting that move. His name is a difficult one for some Americans to remember, let alone spell, so we're going to implement a query that confuses the poor fellow with IndyCar driver Tomas Scheckter. And just to show how stupid we can act when we're getting paid to, we'll misspell poor Scheckter's name while we're at it.

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Joshua Schachter, founder of social bookmarking site Delicious, said in a forum posting yesterday that he regrets selling Delicious to Yahoo.

The discussion centered around Apache Hadoop creator Doug Cutting, who announced this week that he's leaving Yahoo to join Cloudera, an enterprise support service for Hadoop users.

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SlingPlayer Mobile is an application for mobile devices that lets Slingbox users stream content from their television to their phone regardless of their location. Sling Media created apps for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian, PalmOS, and most recently, iPhone OS. The app for iPhone and iPod Touch was released in May, costs $30, and works with Slingbox Solo, Pro, and Pro-HD set-top boxes.

Unfortunately, there have been a couple of major complaints about the app by users. Firstly, it doesn't work with older Slingboxes and secondly, it can only stream content to the iPhone or iPod over Wi-Fi.

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Of the three most recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, the one used by more individuals and businesses worldwide, according to recent analytics, is the oldest: IE6, which is notorious for interpreting Web pages in the manner that seemed most convenient to Microsoft at the time. Many Web sites anxious to support newer and more efficient rendering standards remain reluctant to drop support for IE6 rendering entirely, simply because it may still be in use by as much as one-third of the Web-browsing public.

Now that the movement by Web architects to engineer a collective dumping of IE6 has generated its own Web site, the move is on to spur Microsoft itself to join in. After all, the success of IE8 could depend on businesses' willingness to dump IE6. But in a plea to Web architects to understand the difficulties those businesses face in dumping any old software and adopting any new ones (and avoiding Firefox in the process), Microsoft IE8 product manager Dean Hachamovitch wrote for his team's blog that Microsoft simply cannot drop support for IE6 while support for the operating system that delivered it -- Windows XP -- continues.

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After Facebook announced that it would be acquiring social sharing service Friendfeed, Facebook engineering manager Akhil Wable announced that Facebook was in the midst of improving its in-site Search features as well.

Users can enter the term they want to find in the search field, then results can be filtered to include posts by friends, fan groups, or pages viewable to all users, as well as events, applications, and the Web as a whole.

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Until today, there were only a couple of important bits of information about Microsoft's new multi-touch Zune that were left unknown: the price and the date of availability. Now, thanks to a Best Buy Leak, even those mysteries have been exposed.

On September 8th, the 16GB Zune HD will be available at $220, while the 32GB model will cost $290 (versus $299 and $399 for the 16GB and 32GB iPod Touch.)

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Last week's monumentally scaled denial-of-service attacks -- more recently attributed to a massive attack on a Georgian professor and part of the ongoing dispute between Russia and Georgia -- once again showed just how soft Twitter's soft underbelly is. And for a service used by 44 million people last month, getting hauled to its knees by a bunch of political/cultural enemies intent on opening up a new front in a simmering regional conflict isn't exactly a sign that all's well on the security front.

If Twitter were a bank, the angry mobs would have already descended on Capitol Hill, pitchforks in hand, calling for someone's head. But since Twitter's just an itty-bitty message service, and since it's free, it gets a pass. It shouldn't.

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Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 code-name "Namoroka" for Windows from Fileforum now.

Last April, Mozilla gave the first public indication of the feature set it was planning for the version of Firefox that could be released in the fall of this year. Among them were the following: a thumbnail preview mode for tab switching using Ctrl+Tab; an integrated, if limited, version of the Ubiquity command line tool; live theme changes without reboots; a new and more fully loaded "New Tab" feature; a complete status window that answers to the URL about:me; and integration of the desktop Web application platform Prism.

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