Not enough votes to approve AMD spinoff until maybe next week
What was expected to have been a hassle-free affair, with shareholders likely approving AMD's risky "asset-smart" reorganization move, had to be postponed until next Wednesday due to the absence of a quorum.
An AMD spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that the measure to issue new shares of the company -- a measure necessary to effectively create the basis for the entity still being called The Foundry Company -- had to be postponed since not enough shareholders showed up at the Hilton Austin Airport hotel for the meeting.
Nokia flails, announces cuts at smartphone plant
The double whammy of a rough economy and a weak product lineup is rocking Nokia's Salo plant this week. The company announced on Wednesday that it'll slow production at the last major handset factory in Europe, instituting a system of rotating idle time for staff there.
Juha Putkiranta, a senior Nokia official, said that the plan -- which includes instituting a system of rotating idle time for Salo staff -- will keep things moving there, reducing the impact on employees while addressing...the obvious. "We aim to scale down Salo production to reflect reduced market demand, while operations in the factory continue uninterrupted," Putkiranta said in a company statement.
Red Hat updates its JBoss portal environment
Major Linux and open source software distributor Red Hat today released JBoss Enterprise Portal Environment 4.3, an update designed to make it easier for Java developers to deploy rich applications and portlets on corporate Web portals. In one new feature, the 4.3 release brings support for JBoss Portlet Bridge, an implementation of the JSR-301 specification aimed at letting developers get JavaServer Faces (JSF), Seam and RichFaces apps up and running quickly without concern over underlying portlet development or the API.
Portal Environment 4.3 is also the first release of the environment to support the Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286) standard for improved management of portal-to-portal communications, caching, and the Ajax frameworks often used for composite applications, or "business mashups," in service-oriented architectures (SOA). At the same time, Red Hat announced that its upcoming JBoss Developer Studio 2.0 will contain portlet plug-ins and wizards geared to simplifying portal development for both Portlet 2.0 and Portlet Bridge environments.
Mozilla: Yes, there is a Fennec for Windows Mobile
Mozilla contributor Brad Lassey announced on his blog yesterday that a "pre-alpha" (we need another Greek letter for these things, apparently) of his organization's Fennec mobile browser experiment, based on the Firefox engine, has been released for the Windows Mobile-based HTC Touch Pro.
With Nokia scaling back its production of the N810 tablet, the team experimenting with Fennec has been searching for new target platforms, and the Touch Pro may be the one. It's supported in the States by Verizon Wireless and AT&T.
Blockbuster Total Access to include video games
While the main difference between Total Access and Netflilx was the ability for Blockbuster subscribers to return their movies to a physical store if they chose, today the gap between the two services increased.
Blockbuster's Total Access program is the video store's answer to Netflix's by-mail DVD trade. Today, Blockbuster announced it will be renting video games in the Total Access program, putting them in competition with not only Netflix, but Gamefly as well.
Report fuels speculation that Sirius XM may find a suitor in EchoStar
Spokespersons for both Sirius XM and EchoStar Communications are declining comment to Betanews this morning after a New York Times story last night cited unnamed sources as saying the two are in business negotiations.
According to the story which only cites sources "involved in the process," the satellite radio broadcaster is considering filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, after which it may consider being bought out by satellite TV provider EchoStar. The CEOs of both companies, the Times sources state, are personally involved in these talks.
Nvidia in trouble: 60% lower revenue, will reduce chip starts
In one of the most dramatic representations yet of the downturn in the global economy, GPU maker Nvidia's entire fiscal 2009 dove deep into the red ink, turning a banner year into a red flag in just one quarter.
If it hadn't have been for the economy, Nvidia's year would actually have turned out okay. But a $147.6 million loss for just the quarter ending last January -- its fiscal Q4 2009 -- dipped the entire year into the red to the tune of $30.
Level 3 posts overall improvement
Level 3 Communications, owner and manager of one of the Internet's largest backbone networks, announced in December that it would be laying off 450 of its employees, or roughly eight percent of its total workforce. However, it managed to finish out the year in a better place than it previously was.
Today, the company reported that its full year earnings have improved by 20% against 2007. Level 3 posted a net loss of $91 million in the fourth quarter the previous year, but in 2008 was $44 million in the black.
Facebook founder paid $65m settlement to classmates
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg paid $65 million to two former Harvard classmates who claimed he stole their idea for a social networking site, a law firm has revealed.
The settlement amount in the suit waged by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Zuckerberg's ex-classmates, was supposed to be confidential.
Dell expands computer recycling program
Number one U.S. computer maker Dell has been building a nationwide recycling program for nearly five years, and efforts look to have picked a considerable amount of steam.
Today, Dell announced that its partnership with Goodwill Industries called Reconnect has been expanded into six more states: Arkansas, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon and Vermont. The program now counts over 1,000 Goodwill locations as recycling centers and is actually expecting to add jobs to handle Reconnect's growth.
Amazon Kindle: not a gamechanger...yet
Digital distribution has infiltrated media. We saw MP3s take over the music business, and we're seeing streaming take over the film and TV business, but will it happen to the book business too?
Who better to ask than an executive at a site dealing in the trade of good old fashioned paper books? Betanews spoke with Eric Ginsberg, the VP of marketing at startup Bookswim.com, a company whose business model is identical to the one pioneered by Netflix. At Bookswim, subscribers build a queue of books, receive them in the mail, and send them back when they're finished reading.
Data flies out of breach at FAA
Maybe it's a bigger story when a government agency isn't breached. This week's hacked federal database is property of the Federal Aviation Administration, and it holds among other things records on 45,000 employees and retirees connected with the FAA as of the first week of February 2006.
The FAA issued a statement describing the breach in very general terms, noting that the compromised computer didn't have anything to do with any air-traffic control systems or other operational system. The agency has called in "appropriate law enforcement agencies," it says, and says that the employees and former employees whose records were breaches will receive individual letters with more information about what may have happened and what can be done.
What recession? Oracle support provider quadrupled its customer base
In a year when a lot of other companies floundered, Rimini Street, Inc. -- a services provider for PeopleSoft and other Oracle-owned software products -- picked up 150 new business customers in 2008, four times its 2007 number.
How did Rimini Street pull off that feat? A "significant number" of new customers came to Rimini from Tomorrow Now (TN), a SAP business unit which disbanded last year in the wake of an acrimonious lawsuit with Oracle. But other customers, fed up with Oracle's high software maintenance and upgrade fees, migrated to Rimini directly from Oracle, said David Rowe, Rimini's senior VP of global partnerships and alliances, in an interview this week with Betanews.
New DDoS attack based on deluge of dots
A technique for worsening the effects of a distributed denial-of-service-type attacks uses a feature in the DNS system that was once designed to be helpful. Patching it could involve reconfiguring millions of domain-name servers, or even rethinking how the system works.
A DDoS attack, of course, involves bombarding a target site with garbage so no other traffic can get through. Some attackers, especially the ones who do these attacks for a living (think extortion), amplification techniques that increase the flow of packets while further disguising the true source of the onslaught. One of these, which SecureWorks is currently examining, leverages a feature in the domain-name system, making it appear that the victim's computer is lost and in need of a list of all the root domain nameservers. That's a long list, and the forged command is quite short -- in fact, it's "." . A tiny effort on behalf of the attacker, therefore, is leveraged into a significant amount of DDoS distress.
Adobe: Microsoft's Silverlight 'has really fizzled'
Addressing attendees at a tech-and-telecom conference on Tuesday, Adobe EVP and CFO Mark Garrett spoke of the challenges ahead. Microsoft's software doesn't appear to be one of them.
Speaking at a fireside-chat style event at Thomas Weisel Partners Technology & Telecom Conference 2009, Garrett noted that "if you set the economy aside, there are a lot of tailwinds" acting to boost Adobe's reach online. Those tailwinds are coming from many sources, including the warm front centered around the fever for online video (the company estimates that four-fifths of all video online plays through its software) and the hard, cold drive to digitize information stored in printed media.
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