Latest Technology News

As of this week, ten percent of the members of Mint.com's personal-finance site are gaining beta access to a slick new tool that evaluates their financial picture and guides them through the months- or years-long process of getting financially fit. Meanwhile, for those for whom financial fitness requires some help, one of the Web's first microloan sites is back in the saddle after a six-month quiet period.

The Financial Fitness feature works as much like a personal trainer as a financial advisor -- not just suggesting wise paths down which you can take your money, but standing there with a clipboard and a checklist and a scale. The model's deliberate, according to fonder and CEO Aaron Patzer: "Like any goal -- from weight loss, to video game domination, or getting a promotion -- specific, actionable plans help people stay on track in the short term, and achieve more in the long term."

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Within the short "tradition" of open source lawsuits, users have typically needed to worry their heads only about breach of contract concerns. But last summer, in a case called Jacobsen v. Katzer, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit opened up copyright claims as a new route for people looking for financial damages.

Open source developer Robert Jacobsen sued Matthew Katzer and Kamind Associates, producers of commercial software used with model trains, alleging that Katzer and his company violated copyrights around the Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI), an open source software project licensed under what's called the Artistic License.

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This morning, Microsoft issued its formal, sealed response to the European Commission's January Statement of Objections, which was the EC's first step toward formally charging the software maker with objectionable conduct by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. But in a correction of press accounts early this morning, both Microsoft and the European Commission confirmed to Betanews today that the company only issued a request for a hearing before the EC in order to preserve its right to be heard at a later date, and that Microsoft has not decided whether it actually will present its case orally.

"Parties responding to a [Statement of Objections] are required to indicate by that response whether they will request a hearing or preserve their right to one," Microsoft corporate spokesperson Jack Evans told Betanews. "That doesn't mean Microsoft will ultimately press for a hearing...The company has requested a hearing to preserve its right to have one at a later date, but has not yet made that determination."

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Last month, Microsoft published a white paper suggesting that, as first adopters installed the final build of Internet Explorer 8, they judge the real performance of the new browser based on what they feel when they use it. Specifically, the authors of the paper (PDF available here) advised users to load their favorite Web sites and feel how much less time it takes to see results. But since many Web sites take only microseconds to load anyway -- perhaps beyond the range of everyday human feeling -- they went on to suggest that folks take videos of their Web sites loading, and use the time index cues to tell the story of whether they should feel pages loading faster or not.

Betanews took Microsoft up on its suggestion...kind of. No, we didn't set up a video camera. But we did set up a clean virtual machine with an adaptation of WebMonkey's Browser Load Time Stopwatch, to see just how many microseconds we should be feeling if our feelers felt that sensitively. At the time, our tests concluded that the latest edition of Mozilla's production release of Firefox available at that time, version 3.0.7, could load 25 selected pages from comScore's Top 50 Web sites (plus Betanews thrown in for good measure) 13% faster on average than the final IE8, and Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 loaded those pages 31% faster than IE8.

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Acer has been quite candid about its move into the smartphone sector, and is expected to launch around ten new handsets this year, many of which will be rebranded E-Ten designs from the mobile phone maker Acer acquired in late 2008.

The company launched eight phones at a conference in Singapore last week, almost all were powered by Windows Mobile, but Acer has expressed increasing interest in Android-powered handsets, causing speculation that the company would be coming forward with one in the near future.

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Thanks to the fine-toothed comb that the Mac faithful run over their updates, readers of MacRumors noticed a passage contained within the iTunes 8.2 beta "About iTunes" window that references DVD and Blu-ray.

Because iTunes does not support the playback of DVDs or Blu-ray discs, the rumor mill's first train of thought went directly to Blu-ray Macs, and then to DVD ripping in iTunes. But before you too head down that bumpy road, let's look at the context of which the discs were mentioned.

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In what's turning out to be a busy week for Microsoft, the company announced last night that the code has been finalized for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 -- a unified code base that upgrades both operating systems. This after the only release candidate for SP2 was released for final testing on March 4.

In a Betanews check Wednesday morning, SP2 was not yet being distributed to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, although we can probably expect to see it turn up there in the next few days.

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The twenty people named to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) bring together hundreds of years of research, four MacArthur grants, the most interesting guy at Microsoft, the most interesting grownup at Google, experts on geriatric medicine and evolutionary biology and the Stock Exchange and climate change, and three Nobel laureates. And some astronomers, because those guys have all the fun.

PCAST, founded in 1990, exists to advise the President and Vice President in matters of science, technology, and innovation. President Obama announced the lineup this week at the National Academy of Sciences. Brief biographies of all twenty are available on PCAST's site, but a few groupings are worth noting here:

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Last week, after AMD's conference to reporters last Wednesday updating its roadmap for server CPUs, we reported that the licensing situation for Nvidia and Broadcom chipsets for use in AMD-based servers looked bleak. This afternoon, AMD spokesperson Phil Hughes contacted Betanews to say that the company made no comment with regard to licensing, and continues to make no comment.

"We haven't made any comment with regard to licensing," stated Hughes. He reiterated Server Business Unit Vice President Pat Patla's comment that AMD has only made a decision to go with AMD-branded chipsets for use in motherboards built for new Opteron processors. But when we asked Hughes whether licensing played any role in AMD's decision to only use AMD chipsets and not extend licenses to Nvidia or Broadcom, Hughes repeated that the company has made no comment with regard to licensing, only that it has chosen to use AMD chips for this purpose.

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What can you say after you've said "Oracle made us an offer?" Nothing worth saying to analysts, apparently, as Sun on Tuesday canceled its Q3 earnings call. Still the earnings reports must be released, and one feels one ought to look.

Shall we start with the good news? Billings were up a combined 4% year-over-year in the Total Software, Open Storage, Solaris-based SPARC CMT Servers, and X64 Servers categories, and those billings in turn accounted for 40% of total billings, up 10%. Total Software and Open Storage billings were up 28% and 63% year-over-year respectively, and SPARC CMT Servers billings were up 3%.

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As we inch closer to the anticipated marketing launch that will reveal to the public exactly what the project code-named "Pink" is, Verizon has reportedly been in talks with Microsoft to secure a contract for the device central to the project.

Rumored to be the touchphone that will finally catapult Windows Mobile into competition with the Apple iPhone, HTC G1, BlackBerry Storm, and Palm Pre, "Pink" is believed to be the product of Danger Inc. makers of the Sidekick OS and part of Microsoft's new Premium Mobile Experiences team. The team is led by Roz Ho, formerly the General Manager of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit, which developed and marketed Office for Mac.

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Download Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 from Fileforum now.

Now all Office users will have the option to load and save OpenDocument files, with today's distribution of Service Pack 2 of Office 2007. In something of a surprise -- contrary to what many at Microsoft led us to believe -- upon installing SP2 on our test systems, we immediately located an option for saving files in ODF by default. That means you don't have to "Save As" and export to ODF if you don't ever want to use Microsoft's OOXML or Office 2003 "compatibility mode;" you can at least try to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as substitutes for OpenOffice.

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It's another loss for Yahoo as Hulu in March rose to the #3 spot in total number of videos served, according to comScore numbers released Tuesday. Hulu served up 380 million videos during the month, or 2.6% of videos viewed. Yahoo continues to hold down the #3 spot in total unique users with 42.6 million, with Hulu just a million behind in fourth place.

Google, of course, continues to rule the video category as a whole, with 100.4 million unique viewers and 5.9 billion videos viewed. Fox Interactive holds down second place in both categories. But Hulu's growth -- it has been on a tear ever since their Super Bowl commercial -- has a couple of noteworthy angles. According to comScore, the service accounted for just 2.6% of videos viewed, but a very respectable 4.9% of all minutes spent watching online video. And with a deal with ABC-connected Disney Online (#9 in total videos, #10 in unique visitors, but they've got Lost) reputedly all but inked, expect continued good times for the video upstart. (Because that's how they roll.)

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A few weeks ago, Microsoft made indications that it would be delivering Office 2007 Service Pack 2 and Internet Explorer 8 as important automatic updates to Windows users on the same day. That day ended up being today, and now many Windows users are being prompted for the first time to install IE8 as an update to their operating system. Since the product's release last month, upgrades have only been voluntary.

Though two-thirds of the world's Web traffic is attributable to browsers identifying themselves as Internet Explorer, according to the latest up-to-the-minute data from analytics firm NetApplications, under 5% of that traffic comes from IE8. In fact, only in the last week has IE8 traffic by NetApplications' measure eclipsed HTTP requests hailing from Apple Safari version 3.2, which runs on Mac, iPod Touch, and iPhone. Requests from Mozilla Firefox 3 accounts for nearly one-fifth of analyzed traffic; but now, with IE8 becoming an "in-your-face" update for the very first time, Internet Explorer traffic in total may experience a bump.

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I'm in the market for a bike, but as a skateboarder of more than twenty years, bicycling has been something of a taboo subject for me. Bikers were the guys who destroyed skate spots with their pegs and caused horrific skatepark collisions that could have been easily avoided if both parties involved were riding skateboards.

But now that I'm older, those prejudices have faded and I find that I know practically nothing about bicycles. I'm clueless about the kind of bike that will suit my needs, much less what brand would be best. However, I do know that I plan to ride more on paved roads than off-road, that I'll be riding for exercise, and that I plan on spending between $500-$900. I will take my case to hunch.com.

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