Microsoft slashes its software licensing prices
The Enterprise Agreement (EA) product promotion is one of a wide range of customer pricing incentives for businesses of various sizes now highlighted on the Microsoft Incentives Web site.
Under the EA promotion, customers can get 25% off the cost of the License and Software Assurance (L&SA) contract on subscriptions to the enterprise editions of Windows Server, Exchange Server, Office Communications Server (OCS), and Server Management Suite. Microsoft is also offering 15% discounts on the L&SA for standard editions of nine server software products.
MIT's Liskov wins Turing Award
The first American woman to earn a Ph.D in computer science has won the Association for Computing Machinery's AM Turing Award. Barbara Liskov, who currently heads the Programming Methodology Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has helmed innovations in software design that provide the underpinnings of every significant programming language introduced since 1975 -- not to mention much of the Internet as you know it.
Dr. Liskov's earliest work brought the concept of data abstraction into a central role in software engineering, making development and maintenance a much easier proposition; she created the CLU proto-OOP programming language as part of her teaching workload at MIT in 1974 and 1975. Her later work on distributed system design makes possible scalable systems with millions of concurrent users -- a crucial component of the very largest Web sites (think search engines). Currently, she's pondering ways of improving system fault tolerance, especially as it relates to arbitrary failures, including such problems as errors and intrusions.
Helmut Buhler's big day: An everyday programmer finds a critical Windows hole
The typical security vulnerability and patching story paints security researchers as the good guys in the white hats, the straight shooting style, and the soda pop. But on this particular Patch Tuesday (a lighter one than most) Microsoft is crediting not some white-hat researcher but a really good guy -- a fellow who's the author of a simple Sidebar gadget that displays the contents of your clipboard -- as having done the right thing and notified Microsoft of a critical hole.
German developer Helmut Buhler, whose other claim to fame is a portable wrapper function that makes dialog boxes in Windows 95 and XP look like those in Vista, was credited by Microsoft today for discovering one of the critical vulnerabilities being addressed by the March edition of its Patch Tuesday bug fixes.
'Overpriced' BlackBerry apps spark renewed skepticism over PayPal links
An undue amount of attention is being paid to BlackBerry App World's "overpriced" $2.99 minimum charge in the soon-to-be-released app store, when there's the specter of PayPal and eBay lurking just behind it.
And where they go, dissatisfied users follow.
Hitachi pleads guilty in US LCD price-fixing bust
This afternoon, the US Justice Dept. announced that Hitachi would be the fourth company to plead guilty in a TFT-LCD price fixing investigation that has already seen LG, Sharp (now becoming part of Panasonic), and Chunghwa pay collectively over half a billion dollars in fines.
Hitachi would pay the least of the four companies thus far: $31 million. In turn, the Antitrust Division said today, it will agree that it participated in meetings with representatives of its competitors in which they conspired to set the price that Dell Computer would be charged for TFT-LCD displays. From April 2001 through March 2004, Hitachi then quoted Dell the agreed upon prices, the DoJ said, and then reported its progress back to other cartel members.
NASA to stream daily video feed from ISS
Streaming digital video showing activities inside and outside the International Space Station and the view of Earth from up there will now be available for about twelve hours every day, according to NASA. The feed will also contain audio of communications between Mission Control and the astronauts, including (for instance) live video of maintenance activities outside the station during today's prep for the incoming space shuttle.
The ISS is 200 miles up and moving at 17,500mph, posing a unique assortment of problems not encountered in the average video stream. Satellite coverage can occasionally drop out as well. (On the upside, there's a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes, and many views of activity outside show the Earth below looking ridiculously lovely.) When no spacewalks are underway, video will originate from inside the station during on-duty hours. Don't expect The Real World: ISS from the video setup, though; off-camera time is expected to run about 12 hours each day, from 2pm to 2am EDT. During those hours, the familiar location-and-path map will be streamed from Mission Control in Houston.
Under a new CEO, Clearwire keeps its two-year, 80-city WiMAX goal
The appointment of William Morrow -- a former executive at Vodafone and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) -- as Clearwire's new CEO comes at a time when the company badly needs to gain industry traction to offset financial losses and retain an early market lead in the US over LTE, a rival 4G technology set for deployment in 2010 by both Verizon Wireless and AT&T.
Morrow said in a statement on Monday that Clearwire now intends to deploy WiMAX in over 80 markets -- to as many as 120 million people -- by 2010.
YouTube blocks music vids in UK, says 'not economically sustainable'
In YouTube's
blog yesterday, Patrick Walker, Director of Video Partnerships (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), announced that premium music video content would be blocked from view in the UK.
Citing a failure in negotiations with the publishing, composing, and songwriting organization PRS for Music (Performing Rights Society), Walker said, "The costs are simply prohibitive for us -- under PRS's proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the license they can provide so that we can identify those works on YouTube -- that's like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it."
Nvidia offers to invest something in GPU-interested startups
In a statement this morning, graphics chip maker Nvidia said it is willing to join with others in investing in early-stage companies that seek to produce general computing software products that leverage graphics processor technology. It's the manufacturer's latest step in drumming up support for CUDA, the library that enables developers to offload heavy mathematical functionality away from the CPU and onto the GPU.
"These companies are the innovators that will fuel the continued growth of the GPU platform," reads a prepared statement this morning from Nvidia VP for Business Development Jeff Herbst. "Through this program we will provide financial, marketing and other support to help start-up companies realize their full potential and we strongly encourage interested entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others to reach out to us with their ideas."
What he meant to say...Palm scrambles to correct its own investor's comments
Elevation Partners' Managing Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee -- whose firm has a big stake in the restoration of Palm -- was interviewed by Bloomberg last week, both for television and print, discussing the upcoming launch of the Palm Pre. This morning, Palm issued everything short of a full retraction of McNamee's statements, in a statement filed with no less than the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
McNamee's casual and plain-spoken rapport with Bloomberg interviewers raised eyebrows in the tech community and has led Palm to print a disquisition of McNamee's statements.
Obama: White House will no longer ignore established science
A memorandum published by the White House this morning made good on a campaign promise by President Obama to discontinue the Oval Office practice of disregarding or even suppressing certain scientific and technological information when crafting executive policy.
"Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security," reads the President's memorandum this morning. "The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public."
Android Developer Phone catches up to G1, gets Android 1.1 system image
Owners of the Android Developer Phone (ADP1) found themselves unable to obtain protected apps from the Android Market because of the device's innate ability to sidestep protection measures. Today, the Android development team announced an update to the Android development system image that addresses this problem, along with other compatibility issues the unlocked device had with its locked counterpart, the G1.
Android Developer Advocate Dan Morrill said, "Many developers are concerned about the unauthorized redistribution of their applications, so they make use of the copy-protection feature (known as 'forward locking') which prevents applications from being copied off devices.
Panel weighs impact of $7.2B broadband stimulus on competition
As three federal agencies prepared for an initial meeting on Tuesday in Washington, DC about implementing a sweeping new broadband program, public advocates gathered on Monday to give their ideas on how to use the funding to stimulate jobs and extend high-speed Internet communications throughout the US.
Signed into law last month by President Barack Obama, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act allocates $4.7 billion to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for broadband deployment to "unserved," "underserved," and low-income communities, plus another $2.5 billion to the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS), while also directing the FCC to develop a "national broadband strategy."
Opera CEO von Tetzchner: Microsoft's IE8 'turn-off' is not enough
Over the weekend, Microsoft revealed that in its latest private beta build of Windows 7, it will allow users to uninstall the Internet Explorer 8 Web browser front end -- a choice it has never offered to consumers since version 3.0. The fact that since 1996, the presence of IE in Windows was elevated to such an extent that users could not completely uninstall it, nor could they ever entirely avoid it, has been credited by many as the real reason for Microsoft being perceived as having won the browser war against Netscape.
While Microsoft credits "user feedback" as having driven the need for this feature -- or actually, something like this feature but maybe more up-front -- the truth is, users have been supplying that feedback now for more than a decade. Most likely, it was the European Commission's latest objection which finally drove Microsoft to institute what some are seeing as the first crack in the dam. But is it enough to let any light break through for the other browser manufacturers desperate to gain more than a toehold on the Windows desktop?
Windows Market Place, Blackberry App World take shape
Windows Mobile Marketplace was announced at 3GSM in Barcelona in February, noting that it would be available when Windows Mobile 6.5 is released before Christmas this year.
A site related to the app store, http://client.marketplace.windowsmobile.com/ has gone up, causing speculation that the shop could actually be Web-based instead of a standalone application. The page and its code give very little away other than its obvious mobile phone screen formatting.
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