Sony announces cheaper PS2 as expected
This morning, Sony has officially reduced the price of the PlayStation 2 to $99.99, confirming rumors that the nine-year old console would finally hit the "sweet spot" in price on April 1.
In Sony's announcement today, the company noted that the PlayStation 2's library of titles will grow to almost 1,900, an impressive total by any metric. The fact that it is still able to grow is especially remarkable when considering the console's proximity to retirement.
Former music industry lawsuit target Seeqpod files for bankruptcy
Music search engine provider SeeqPod filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US Bankruptcy court in the Northern District of California yesterday. Not a large company by any means, it listed a modest $2 million in assets and $1.6 million in debts. Five percent of the company is owned by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory.
SeeqPod is most easily remembered for being sued by Warner Music Group early last year based on the record company's belief that the search engine was built to make money off of advertising in its built-in Web player, even though it did not even advertise.
Google to share (some of) the wealth with venture-cap arm
William Maris and Rich Miner are living the dream: They've got $100 million of someone else's money and a year to spend it on interesting projects. Maris, an experienced venture-capital hand, will be joining with Miner (formerly of Google's mobile branch) to head Google Ventures, a new albeit long-rumored VC endeavor for the company.
The project, announced in the corporate blog, will focus on early-stage projects -- anywhere between seed and mezzanine-level, in the parlance of the VC tribe. The project's fledgling site states that it's "studying a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care," and says explicitly that it's not merely seeking potential acquisition targets.
Ericsson launches always-on mobile broadband chip for Windows 7 machines
Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson today has announced its newest mobile broadband module, which offers promising wireless features built specifically for upcoming Windows 7 devices.
Ericsson's Vice President of Mobile Broadband Modules, Mats Norin, told Betanews that the F3607gw module consumes half the battery of its predecessor. With this decreased battery consumption, the module's HSPA/GPRS/EDGE radios can remain connected even when the equipped device (notebook, netbook, MID, etc) is asleep.
Microsoft to discontinue Encarta encyclopedia
Tip a cap, tip out a beverage, tiptoe to your CD-ROM shelf and pay your respects: Microsoft has announced that its venerable Encarta encyclopedia is to be discontinued later this year. First released to great acclaim in 1993, the shiny reference guide fell victim to the march of time, the explosive growth of the Web... and, yes, possibly to Wikipedia and its ilk.
Sixteen years isn't a terrible run for a non-headlining product, though, and Microsoft's announcement was sanguine about Encarta's legacy. "Microsoft's vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education," reads the statement announcing the change, "and we believe that we can use what we've learned and assets we've accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions." As for the editorial vision guiding the product -- the main Encarta page on microsoft.com boasts that its 60,000-plus articles were written by actual experts, "in contrast to many web encyclopedias" -- well, you've got until October 31, 2009 to enjoy it. Go.
Acer's US arm responds to Android phone reports
Acer's US arm isn't saying either 'yes' or 'no' right now about rumored plans to introduce an Android phone purportedly dubbed the 'A1.'
"At this time, no comment from Acer," echoed Alison Williams, a US-based Acer spokesperson, when asked by Betanews to either confirm or deny reports that Acer will roll out a phone based on Google's Android platform.
Intel's latest energy-saving CPUs: 'As revolutionary as Pentium Pro'
In practical simultaneity this afternoon, AMAX, Cray, NEC, HP, and Dell all announced brand new products. The common link? They're all based upon the newly available Intel Xeon 5500 processors.
In fact, Intel says more than 70 companies will be announcing new products based on the Xeon 5500 processor, based on the company's energy-saving branch of its Nehalem architecture. Intel introduced the 5500 series today, touting it as its most revolutionary server processor since the Pentium Pro nearly 15 years ago. (Those who remember the Pentium Pro may be scratching their heads at that.)
Nokia updates the questionable 5800 XpressMusic's software
Sales of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic were halted in the US after less than a week of availability due to unspecified issues. While those issues could have included poorly assembled handsets, users' complaints indicated that performance was foremost on their minds.
Today, Nokia announced a software update for the 5800 that adds a handful of new features, but lists "faster user interface and faster download times" as the first, and arguably most important, aspect.
MySpace to be bathed in a Silverlight
MySpace may not need any more chaos on its festively designed pages, but with traffic numbers down it could probably use some good news on the apps-development front, not to mention some good apps. To the rescue: Microsoft. On Monday MySpace announced that its Open Platform will support Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework. (This runs the table for MySpace, by the way, putting it on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Sidekick, Palm, Nokia, and now Windows Mobile phones.) The SDK will be available from Microsoft's CodePlex site on Thursday.
Virginia anti-spam law now dead after Supreme Court rejects appeal
After losing a unanimous decision by the state's Supreme Court last September, the State of Virginia appealed to the US Supreme Court to breathe new life into an anti-spam law that was intended to put serial spammers behind bars. A constitutional rights appeal by convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes, convicted in 2005 and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment, met with overwhelming victory, but state lawmakers saw the nation's highest court as their last chance.
It was not to be. Though the high court's Web site has yet to carry the news (sometimes it takes a few hours or even a day to update), the Associated Press is reporting that the court has refused to hear the State of Virginia's appeal. The State Supreme Court had earlier ruled that the Virginia law failed to explicitly distinguish between "commercial spam" and "personal spam," and in so omitting, traversed the boundaries of professional conduct by limiting free speech.
Found: An Achilles heel for Conficker
A few of the folks scrutinizing Conficker realized something mighty interesting on Friday: The malware not only changes what Windows looks like on the network, if you ask a server whether it's got a case of the Conficker, it will tell you -- remotely and without authentication, even. One insanely hectic weekend later, there are multiple brand-new enterprise-class scanners available for netadmins' network-protection needs.
So far on Monday, versions are being integrated into scanners from Tenable (Nessus), McAfee/Foundstone, nmap, ncircle and Qualys. There's also a proof-of-concept tool available as well. The charge was led by the Honeynet Project's Tillman Werner and Felix Leder and moved along by Dan Kaminsky at Doxpara, along with Securosis' Rich Mogull, and the Conficker Cabal Working Group.
Now Western Digital enters the SSD market with SiliconSystems buyout
Last spring, Western Digital -- which duels with Seagate for top market share -- began pushing hard disk drives with very fast RPM speeds (20,000, versus the conventional 5,600 and 7,200 RPM) as a way of answering the challenge of solid-state drive technology. See, even though sustained transfer times for HDDs have surprisingly stayed competitive with SSDs (which are made of flash memory, after all), what's always impressive about SSDs are their seek times -- how fast they can access the first bit of data.
Meanwhile, catering specifically to the enterprise market, Aliso Viejo, California-based SiliconSystems had been countering WD and Seagate with an argument that truly does have some weight to it: the idea that mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) estimates for HDDs showing them more reliable than SSDs, didn't take real-world operating conditions into account.
T-minus two days...Ready or not, here comes Conficker
The computers -- over a million of them at last count, it is believed -- are in place. The Microsoft vulnerability making it all possible has been patched by, presumably, everyone who's going to do so. The poisonous code itself has been upgraded. We've seen the effect of the early tests, we've pondered the bounty on the developers' heads, and yet we've got to start asking ourselves: What's going to happen when Conficker lights up on Wednesday?
Wouldn't you like to know. Wouldn't a lot of people like to know.
Subsidized netbooks on the way, say Verizon representatives
Verizon will reportedly begin selling subsidized netbooks next month, like AT&T began doing late last year with the Acer Aspire One. Representatives of the company note that netbooks could begin selling as early as the next quarter in Verizon stores.
Like the AT&T deal, Verizon's main interest is getting customers to subscribe to the company's mobile broadband network. AT&T subsidizes the netbooks until they can be sold for $99, and then the mobile broadband service costs roughly $60 a month for two years.
New Nvidia GPUs geared to work with multiple physical, virtual systems
The one thing you typically cannot do well with a virtual system is graphics, mainly because the GPU's typical channel to the outside bus is through the physical CPU. Getting 3D accelerated performance to pass through to the virtual level is practically impossible, because there hasn't been a way for the physical graphics driver to cede some performance time to a virtual graphics driver.
Beginning today for business users, that changes with Nvidia's refresh of its Quadro FX professional graphics card line. As a feature that distinguishes Quadro FX from Nvidia's GeForce consumer graphics line, SLI Multi-OS will be a firmware/driver combination that enables systems using Intel's VT virtualization technology to push graphics processing to virtual systems. The GPU maker listed Parallels as the first hypervisor producer to take advantage of this functionality.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.