Judgment: Apple is a patent infringer
A patent infringement suit filed against Apple by California integrated circuit company OPTi two years ago has been decided, and Apple has been declared the loser.
The suit was filed in the heartland of patent litigation, the Eastern District of Texas, where Microsoft was sued over its JPEG patent, Sony was sued for its Cell Chip technology, Google was sued for its Database technology, and countless others are sued every day.
It's finally settled: Broadcom and Qualcomm lay down their swords
The mobile communications industry can now pursue 3G technologies without fear of being caught in a whirlwind patent dispute. That's the outcome reached last weekend when Qualcomm agreed to settle its remaining disputes with Broadcom, in a deal which (at least at first glance) will net Broadcom $891 million over four years.
Qualcomm's incentive to settle was becoming obvious. In the current economy, a business plan built on the hopes of revenue from a big settlement from Broadcom or an unprecedented judgment in its favor, were becoming untenable. That point was driven home this morning when the company released its quarterly revenue numbers: Though revenue only declined by a mere 5.8% annually -- actually a noteworthy achievement -- net income could have ended up as high as $702 million, a decline of 22%. But the cost of putting this case behind it -- which only includes its initial payment to Qualcomm -- cost Qualcomm $748 million in this quarter alone, forcing it to post a net loss of $46 million.
Finally, a non-HTC Android phone
Samsung today announced its first Android mobile handset, becoming the first company since HTC to come forth with a completed piece of mobile hardware supporting the open source operating system.
The I7500 is a GSM and HSDPA touchscreen phone that includes most of the same accouterments as HTC's G1, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS, and the full host of Google tools. However, it ups the ante on HTC's products considerably by supplying a 5-megapixel camera, 8 GB of onboard memory expandable to 32 GB via microSD, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a microUSB port.
The Broadcom/Qualcomm war is over
The Hatfields and McCoys of the wireless chipmaking industry, Qualcomm and Broadcom, today announced that they had laid down their long legal feud and entered into a multi-year patent agreement.
Since 2006, the two companies have been bouncing in and out of U.S. Courts and U.S. International Trade Commission hearings over patent infringement and licensing of WCDMA technology.
Confirmed: Windows 7 RC to the public on May 5
Leaving not much time for folks to stew in the rumors over the latest "leaked" builds (plural) numbered 7100 of the Windows 7 release candidate -- one of which may have been legitimate -- Microsoft decided late Friday night to officially confirm that May 5 is the official public release date for the Win7 RC.
"I'm pleased to share that the RC is on track for April 30th for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th," wrote Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc in a corporate blog post late yesterday.
Windows 7 to include 'XP mode' virtualization
The news that Windows 7 -- release candidate on track for April 30, thank you very much -- will have available a virtualized version of XP that will run right right alongside 7 apps is exciting stuff for those of us who have shaken our heads at Microsoft's backward-compatibility problems over the years. It means very nearly 100% compatibility with current Windows apps; it means side-by-side XP and 7 apps (dogs and cats living together!); it means that Vista was all just a bad dream. (Okay, maybe not.)
News of "Windows XP Mode" hit on Friday afternoon more or less simultaneously with Microsoft's post on The Windows Blog announcing that the RC is looking good for next Thursday. Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, who are hard at work on Wiley's Windows 7 Secrets book and were briefed on the tech back in March, describe XPM as host-based virtualization, and suggest that this might mean that going forward, client versions of Windows may include a Hyper-V-based hypervisor.
'Deep packet inspection' could become the target of legislation
The two biggest threats to Internet users' privacy, from the point of view of Rep. Rick Boucher (D - Va.), come from behavioral advertising technology and from deep packet inspection (DPI) -- the ability for an ISP to scan the contents of IP packets, and make determinations as to their handling based on those contents. But the specter of another company using both of these technologies together, like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, spelled out a more explosive danger. Chairing hearings of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet yesterday, Rep. Boucher made that clear:
"What services that consumers consider essential to the safe and efficient functioning of the Internet are advanced by DPI?" asked Boucher during his opening remarks yesterday. "Since the death of NebuAd's DPI-based behavioral advertising service last year, are other companies using DPI to deliver behavioral advertising? What, if any, safeguards are in place to ensure that consumers are giving meaningful consent to the tracking of their activities on the Internet?"
Apple lays off 1,600 workers but keeps stores afloat
Ten percent of the full-timers in Apple's newly mushroomed total of 250 stores got handed pink slips between January and April, according to Apple's latest 10-Q filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Apple dubbed the laid off salespeople "full-time equivalents," reporting a headcount of 14,000 Apple store employees. That's slashed from the 15,600 number listed in its 10-K filing just last January.
Twitter more of a siren in March, says comScore
It has been experiencing double-digit growth for months now, but in March Twitter Web traffic went boom in a big way, jumping 131% to 9.3 million unique visitors. It was the fastest growing Web property last month according to comScore, which released its March numbers this week.
(Remember this as we wait for next month's comScore numbers. Those will reflect April's strange celebrity infatuation with the service -- Ashton Kutcher's competition with CNN to garner a million followers, not to mention Oprah's imprimatur -- yes, other people care about Oprah even if you don't.)
Red Hat: France is the most 'active' open source country, Moldova the least
Landing ahead of the US for "activity" in Red Hat's Open Source Index this year were these countries, in the following order: France, Spain, Germany, Australia, Finland, the UK, Norway, and Estonia. Also among the 75 countries surveyed by Red Hat and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Denmark took tenth place.
At the opposite extreme of the open source spectrum, the study found these ten countries to be the least active, in descending order: Algeria, the Philippines, Morocco, Cameroon, Yemen, Latvia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Kenya, and Moldova.
Adobe builds a social network around Photoshop
Today, Adobe has introduced Photoshop Marketplace a site that is part e-commerce, part social network, and part knowledge base for the company's famous photo editing software.
Adobe hopes to create the definitive site for Photoshop-related resources, tools, and services. To populate the Marketplace by its scheduled launch later in the summer, Adobe encourages partners to sign up and contribute their plug-ins, extensions, educational resources, communities, or event listings to the site. Once launched, users will be able to review and recommend these submissions based upon functionalism and popularity.
Irony, thy name is Nvidia
The Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius H270 promises "No more compromises on graphics performance" (PDF available here) That is, unless you're running Linux.
This week, Nvidia and Fujitsu released an alert that some Linux graphics drivers for the Celsius' Nvidia Quadro FX 770M cause a corruption of the notebook's Extended display identification data (EDID). Basically, the EDID tells the graphics card important information about the computer's display, such as its size, pixel mapping data, filter type, and supported timings.
The debate over DVD backups begins, with RealNetworks in the courtroom
Within a month of its release, RealNetworks' RealDVD was involved in two simultaneous lawsuits with the MPAA, who sought an injunction on the DVD ripping software they farcically called "StealDVD." Sale of the software was halted in October after only a few days of commercial availability.
Today, the software comes up in court before Judge Marylin H. Patel, the same district court judge who presided over the case late last year, and is most famous for her decision to shut down peer-to-peer music swapping service Napster nearly nine years ago.
Apple counts 1 billion app store downloads
It's not every day that Apple throws numbers around. The company only sparingly uses them, and when it does, it's only to illustrate its most distinguished achievements. Today, the company dropped a couple: Nine months, and One billion downloads.
In the nine months that the iTunes App Store has been open, more than a billion applications have been downloaded, according to the company. That means iPhone/iTouch owners were downloading an average of 3.5 million applications per day, or roughly 33 applications per user.
Nvidia's licensing situation with AMD is just as bad as with Intel
During yesterday's unveiling of its accelerated roadmap for 12- and even 16-core processors, an AMD executive said he did not believe the licensing situation between his company and Nvidia would enable Nvidia to produce chipsets that support future AMD platforms. Specifically, it appears Nvidia is not yet licensed to produce motherboard chipsets that support AMD's next-generation processors, reducing the likelihood for multi-GPU SLI support for AMD's "Istanbul" and future generations.
"For 2010 moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time," stated server business unit vice president Pat Patla. "We don't expect to see new chipsets from Nvidia or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010. But they will continue to support all existing platforms moving forward through 2010."
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