While the DTV Delay Act, passed unanimously in the Senate yesterday and likely to be passed on the House floor today, moves the official DTV transition date for the nation from February 17 to June 12, it specifically allows US broadcasters to throw their own switches at any time they see fit in the interim.

"Nothing in this Act is intended to prevent a licensee of a television broadcast station from terminating the broadcasting of such station's analog television signal (and continuing to broadcast exclusively in the digital television service) prior to the date established by law," reads the text of S. 328 released this morning to the Library of Congress. Should broadcasters within a given region vacate the analog spectrum prior to June 12, the FCC may determine whether public safety officials may be granted access to the vacated frequencies...evidently in separate determinations per region.

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A representative for Microsoft told Betanews Monday evening that a site intended to enable recipients of promotional copies of Windows Vista Ultimate -- folks who are guests at Microsoft-hosted seminars and conferences, for instance -- to register and activate their copies, will be reinstated later this week.

Guests who received copies of Vista can still install them, for the meantime, though without the all-important product keys, they'll time out after 30 days. Promotional copies are sent with special promotional codes inside, which recipients are asked to enter on the company's promotional Web site. But that site was built to go offline on December 31, even though many folks received their copies after that date.

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In Mozilla's weekly project meeting yesterday, updates to mobile browser Fennec were discussed, and the M1 milestone release target for Windows Mobile was noted.

According to the meeting's minutes: "We are targeting a Milestone release for the first week of February, targeting the HTC touch pro. We are two patches away from the meta goal of building from trunk. The tools changes have review from dougt, and are waiting for review from ted, who has promised review by the end of the week. NSPR changes are waiting for review from Nelson, who asked for and received a patch against NSPR trunk."

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The bad news for the technology sector appears to have stopped short of Verizon's door, with nicely rising revenues, hope for future quarters, and words such as "confidence." It's almost nostalgic.

6:40am PT: "We are exhausted from all these questions here," Seidenberg quipped during his concluding remarks.

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A bipartisan compromise bill drawn up over the weekend by Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D - W.V.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R - Tex.), which would delay the US' transfer date for over-the-air TV broadcasts to digital to June 12, passed the Senate early Monday evening. A bill with similar language being debated in the House, could pass there as early as tomorrow.

The ink on the bill is so fresh that the Library of Congress' online reporting service does not yet have the text. So it is believed that the matter of how Congress would appropriate the money necessary to extend the deadline, was actually left up in the air. Prior to the other important transition that happened in Washington -- the change of administrations -- government accountants reported the coupon program was running dry of funds.

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As Senate hearings for the new Administration's cabinet members continue, tech folk are eagerly awaiting word on the status of the brand-new CTO position. So who's it going to be?

Speculation at this point seems to alight on candidates who already hold the job in other organizations. In the public service sector, the name that seems to come up most frequently is that of Vivek Kundra, currently serving as CTO of Washington, DC and a recent veteran of Obama's transition team.

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Texas Instruments on Monday delivered a quarterly report showing a drop in quarterly profits -- but it's not as bad as some were expecting. The nation's second-largest chipmaker also announced plans to cut 12% of its workforce over the next two quarters, and said that factory utilization is expected to dip to 35% during the current quarter.

The cuts are expected to include both layoffs (1800 people) and voluntary retirements (1600 people, or so the company hopes). The firm estimated on its earnings call that the effort will cost around $300 million in severance and related expenses.

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It appears that last week's Inauguration Day uproar over Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd's health has ended Jimmy Wales' patience with not having the Flagged Revisions options switched on at Wikipedia.

During a post-Inaugural luncheon, Senator Kennedy was taken ill and Senator Byrd left the room in obvious distress. Both men subsequently recovered, but for a few minutes, Wikipedia said they had died -- much to the chagrin of Wales, Wikipedia's founder.

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Last week, Motorola told the State of Florida that it's handing out 77 pink slips in Plantation, FL, only about a week after its mid-January announcement of 4,000 job layoffs company-wide. Motorola also intends to shut down all Windows Mobile development in Plantation. Earlier, a Motorola executive in Spain told European press that Motorola intended to tail down production on Symbian devices this year so as to focus on a new family of Android phones for the 2009 holiday season.

Even last year, Motorola had already announced plans to build some sort of Android device in 2009, although details remained hazy. With Motorola now in dire financial straits, and a still economically thriving Google readying a multitouch interface for Android, speculation is rampant that Motorola will now embrace Android as its only smartphone platform, to the exclusion of both Windows and Symbian.

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RIM CEO Jim Balsillie may wish he'd stuck to texting and gesturing last week. A statement to the press that buggy new hardware is just a fact of life isn't engendering much love from consumers who invested hundreds in that "new reality."

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Balsillie described the mad rush to get the new touchscreen BlackBerry Storm out the door before the holiday "Black Friday" shopping frenzy. When queried about the fairly widespread reports of weird and/or sluggish behavior from the handsets, Balsillie called the bugginess and necessary subsequent fixes part of the "new reality" of smartphones.

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The US geographic market for the G1 Android phone is now expanding a second time, while also this week, T-Mobile USA lobbies the US Congress for new funding around broadband wireless.

Extending across only 95 US cities on the G1's launch date last October, availability of the Android smartphone grew to 130 cities by the end of 2008 as T-Mobile USA further built out its 3G wireless network.

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Download Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 from Fileforum now.

In the clearest sign to date that the company's roadmap really is being fast-forwarded, Release Candidate 1 of Internet Explorer 8 -- a critical component of Windows 7 -- was released this morning.

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The .tel top level domain, which strives to become the standard for virtual contact information will finally be available for public purchase on February 3, more than two and a half years after it received ICANN approval. A .tel domain is intended to be a virtual rolodex card, a place where a business or individual can store phone numbers, addresses, userIDs and even GPS coordinates that launch appropriate communications protocols when clicked.

Corporate launch for the domains took place on December 3, and the global consumer landrush will begin on February 3. During that time, it will be around $300 to purchase a .tel domain for three years. Normal pricing will then go into effect on March 24, when it will be about $10 to $20 for a name per year. Pricing will vary by registrar.

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Symantec today opened the first beta of its GoEverywhere service, a browser-accessible cloud workspace that centralizes user data from a variety of cloud services and makes them available through a single interface and single user ID and password. GoEverywhere features more than 100 of the popular communications and productivity apps available on the Web today, and it could be described as something of a cloud-based virtual machine. Interested users can sign up on goeverywhere.com to participate in the free beta.

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It looks as though the UK won't cut off music pirates from the Internet after all, even though the global music industry is now promoting this form of punishment over fines and prison.

UK Culture Secretary Andy Burnham stated last year that the government had "serious legislative intent" to force ISPs to sever the Internet connections of music pirates. But in a recent interview with The Times of London, Intellectual Property Minister David Lammy said the UK government has now decided not to forge laws that would disconnect pirates.

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