Latest Technology News

According to an account from a pool reporter assigned to Vice President Biden yesterday, and covered in its entirety by Time Magazine's Mark Halperin, Mr. Biden told a Washington gathering of both senior senators and motion picture industry leaders that he plans to accelerate the search for an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC).

Though the role has been treated as a creation of the Obama administration, it was President Bush who signed into law last October the controversial PRO-IP Act, stepping up enforcement provisions against intellectual property infringement and piracy, and creating the role Mr. Biden likes to refer to as a "czar." But it was Biden himself who coined the usage of the term "czar" to apply to policy leaders with authority over specific issues, who report directly to the President -- in this case, in 1982 when then-Senator Biden helped create a drug policy enforcement administrator.

Another Apple earnings report, another vacation from dreary recession news in the Cupertino Reality Field: The company reported on Wednesday its best non-holiday quarter in history this afternoon, with year-to-year sales of iPods and iPhones up 3% and 123% respectively. The company posted Q2 '09 revenue of $8.16 billion and a net profit of $1.21 billion, working out to $1.33 per share.

The company reported 9% year-over-year revenue growth, and an operating margin of 20.4%.

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Bugs in versions of Firefox before 3.0.9 can lead to memory corruption -- a problem that might, in theory be used by bad people to run arbitrary code on your machine. The problem is also present in versions of Thunderbird before 2.0.0.22 -- if you've gone and enabled JavaScript in e-mail -- and of SeaMonkey before 1.1.16.

In February, the US Senate cut nearly $250 million in aid to the motion picture industry from the economic stimulus bill. Legislators determined that Hollywood studios didn't need the "bailout" after enjoying several months of record-breaking sales.

Yesterday, however, the Motion Picture Association of America attempted to show lawmakers how important the entertainment industry is to the global economy, releasing a study (PDF available here) which suggests, "The production and distribution of motion pictures and television programs is one of the nation's most valuable cultural and economic resources," and therefore worthy of hefty tax breaks.

The European Commission's quest to end "roaming ripoffs" on text message and data charges incurred while roaming in the EU has come to a triumphant end.

The European Commission's proposal (PDF available here) to cap wholesale data roaming rates and roaming text costs was approved by the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council in December and was approved yesterday by the European Parliament.

Already, AMD has a low-power segment to its Opteron server processor line, the HE series. With Intel Xeon processors still holding a measurable performance lead -- especially with models that command a comfortable premium -- AMD needs to be able to compete efficiently and maintain that goal of 40% gross margin (it made 43% last quarter). And to do that, the company feels it needs a new product category for a certain segment of customers who may be willing to pay a bit extra for something particularly useful.

If that's not performance, then for now, maybe it can be very low power consumption. This afternoon, the company announced a new and exclusive segment of Opteron EE quad-core processors that are intentionally turned down, drawing 40 watts of average CPU power (ACP, which is AMD's own metric) versus 75 watts for the standard Opteron and 55 watts for the company's Opteron HEs -- which will continue to exist as an in-between choice.

Dell first launched the Studio 15 at

For your Earth Day reading enjoyment, the folks at Retrevo (that indispensable source for the product manual you were just sure you'd never need to open again -- you know, the one you tossed two days before you desperately needed page 47) have a nice PDF guide to greening your electronics usage without tearing your hair out.

And if 30 pages is too much greenery for you -- a real possibility according to a recent Retrevo survey -- we talked them out of one tip that everyone should be able to handle.

During a press webcast Wednesday afternoon, AMD server business unit VP Pat Patla verified yesterday's news revealed during the company's quarterly earnings call yesterday, but then added one big component: In addition to six-core "Istanbul" Opteron server CPUs for 2P, 4P, and 8P servers available as soon as this June -- moved up from the second half of the year -- the first of AMD's 45 nm 12-core Opteron server CPUs will become available next year.

The "dodeca-core" processor will be made possible through an upgraded version of AMD's Direct Connect Architecture, now numbered 2.0. Patla showed off an accelerated roadmap for future server CPUs, which from here on out divides Opteron series into two families -- the general-performance 4000 series and the higher-performance 6000 series -- featuring 16-core "Valencia" and "Interlagos" architecture 32 nm CPUS, respectively, as soon as 2011.

Today, DivX and LG Electronics announced that the upcoming line of HDTVs from LG will carry the DivX Certification for full 1080p DivX playback. LG says its new line of TVs will be available in late May in the United States, and within the next eight days in Europe.

With the DivX 7 software package, users can compress a full HD movie onto a USB stick or SD card, or several on a standard DVD. The company says a 2-hour 1080p feature film (H.264 .mkv) can fit on an 8GB SD card. The companies mentioned that these TVs will be able to play back DivX content "from the PC or the Internet through the USB slot."

The big news from AT&T's first quarter earnings report is that both revenue and profits dropped; revenue fell $1.7 million, and profit dropped by $4 million, or 9.7%.

While the company continues to suffer drain from its wireline services, AT&T's wireless business is booming, adding a net 1.2 million subscribers in the quarter. Of that 1.2 million, some 875,000 signed new contracts. Industry researchers at Changewave recently found that of all the mobile operators, AT&T consistently manages to attract and keep the most new subscribers, and many suspect the iPhone is responsible.

On this Earth Day, a number of manufacturers are releasing their "green" product announcements, some believing they're either capitalizing upon, or trying to jump-start, a social trend in smarter engineering. But PC builders and OEMs don't need peace rallies and protest signs to tell them how important it is to make systems and data centers run cooler and with more energy efficiency.

For them, the news from Seagate today about a new class of lower-power Barracuda hard drives that makes an effort to squeeze out a little more performance than low-power drives have before, will make them skip over the whole Earth Day part and go straight to the details. The company's new Barracuda LP series will be unique in that it won't reduce drive rotation as much as other brands and as Seagate's own brands have in the past.

Sugar Labs, makers of the icon-based GUI for the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 announced today the first beta of Sugar on a Stick, a live version of the operating system that can be booted from a USB stick as small as 1GB in size.

While One Laptop Per Child continues forth despite the crushing blows dealt by the economy, Sugar Labs has found that a Live distro of its linguistically-unencumbered interface will help it grow outside of the confines of the "$100 laptop". Based on Fedora LiveUSB, Sugar on a Stick boots to the Linux distribution, and stores all usage data on the USB device without any alteration to the host system.

Better late than, um... what took so long, again? Never mind: Microsoft's release this week of a Web interface to its Windows Live Messenger instant-messaging service is good news for users in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the UK and the US. (The rest of you are going to have to wait.)

The interface can be reached from one's Windows Live Hotmail or People pages -- in other words, from any computer that can get online. (It worked fine from my Mac and Linux boxes, and from within Firefox.) Sign in as usual and there's a Messenger option in the upper-right corner; you can sign in or, if you need your privacy at the moment, you can ignore it.

No surprises in the Yahoo earnings call on Tuesday, but not much joy either: EPS for the search giant for Q1 weighed in at a feather-light 8 cents, down 29 cents (or 78%, if you prefer) year-over-year. Net income was $118 million on revenue of $1.58 billion.

Also: CEO Carol Bartz dropped the f-bomb near the end of the call. It may not be the most upbeat hour of the earnings-report season these days, but under Bartz's charge Yahoo's calls are, heaven knows, never dull.