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Everyone in the digital music "value chain" needs enough compensation, said Ted Cohen, managing partner of TAG Strategic and a long-time observer of the music scene. Cohen spoke today on a topic that's becoming an ongoing theme at the Digital Music Forum East in New York City.

Taking the stage soon after the conference opened this afternoon, Cohen divided the digital music constituency into several groups: artists, content owners, and service providers. Artists "want music to be their day job," said the music industry veteran.

In just one week's time, tack two more wins onto Rambus' column. After what appeared five years ago to have been potentially company-crushing scrutiny into its intellectual property practices -- truly the heart of the company -- the US Supreme Court decided Monday not to review last year's ruling of a DC Appeals Court panel that cleared the company of charges from the US Federal Trade Commission of unfair monopoly practices.

Specifically, the FTC, using evidence supplied by Rambus' competitors, had accused it of participating in memory technology standards committee JEDEC, while at the same time deceitfully withholding disclosure of having applied for patents for the same technologies JEDEC was standardizing. An FTC panel unanimously came to that conclusion in 2006. But the DC Court of Appeals unanimously overturned that conclusion, on the basis that JEDEC's bylaws didn't exactly specify that members must disclose their patent interests...and that if Rambus behaved the way competitors say it did, it may not have been alone.

In keeping with Google's habit of giving its search fields multiple purposes, the new Google Toolbar 6 beta for Internet Explorer is just a little more than its name lets on.

Packaged with the toolbar is what is known as the Google QSB (quick search box) which appears as a Google logo next to the Windows Start Menu when it is installed. Clicking on it opens a search field that doubles as an application launcher which remembers your most frequently used apps.

It's a tough game job creating a new search engine. Trying to break into the market with Google, Yahoo, and MSN is sort of like trying to start your own baseball league to draw fans away from MLB. Three-month-old search engine LeapFish isn't trying to start a new league, it's just trying build a better stadium.

LeapFish takes the indexed results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and does what what CEO Ben Behrouzi calls "the heavy lifting." That is, it gives a selection of results that include web entries, related statistics, videos, and other such relevant information rather than the same information you'd find if you were to use those individual search engines.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that the first release candidates (without numerals) for Service Pack 2 for both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 will be released to the general public for testing next week. This after private testers with the MSDN and TechNet services receive their copies first.

For the first time, the SP2 standalone package will be delivered to users not according to operating system build, but to byte length. So the 32-bit standalone service pack (302 MB with the basic five languages, 390 MB for multi-language) will update both 32-bit Vista and 32-bit Windows Server 2008. Then there will be two 64-bit standalones, including one which covers x64 architectures (508 MB / 622 MB) and one for Itanium 64-bit (384 MB / 396 MB). The RC will represent a kind of dress rehearsal for this new method of distribution.

While the PlayStation 3 continues to be regarded as the runner-up in online console gaming, the system's growing library of free to play online titles has helped PlayStation Network (PSN) grow to double every year, and the growth continues.

Last year, Microsoft said it had reached the 17 million subscriber mark for Xbox Live, but more recent numbers are not yet available. The company made a strong push early this year to attract more users to the online gaming service by dropping the price of an annual subscription to $30 from the customary $50.

The company responsible for Second Life, the once-fashionable-now-beleaguered virtual realm, has gotten an F from a Bay Area branch of the Better Business Bureau. In its writeup, the BBB cited the number of complaints filed against business, the business' failure to respond to complaints, and the length of time the business has taken to resolve complaint(s).

According to the BBB, Linden has received 43 complaints in the past three years, 25 of them closed in the last 12 months (and 31 in all). Ten were administratively closed by the BBB, and 2 went unaddressed by Linden.

I've always been a fan of technology that makes it easier for me to consume media. I bought the Diamond Rio PMP-300 the day it came out in 1998, was an early customer of TiVo, and can't imagine renting movies from a physical store after being a Netflix subscriber for over 8 years.

That's why I pre-ordered the first Kindle the moment it was announced in 2007. I had previously tried out electronic book readers from companies such as Sony, but they all lacked the complete ecosystem that makes it actually worthwhile to switch to digital books. The Kindle seemed to have it all: a fairly slim form factor, great screen, and a huge library of books easily downloadable with a single click.

Download Safari for Windows 4.28.16.0 Beta from Fileforum now.

After writing for Betanews for a couple of years, there's something you may not know about me. If there is one company that I approach with favoritism (but never fanboyism!), it's Google. Yes, Google's omnipresence is enough to make you want to don a tin foil hat, but it's hard to argue with a company that gives everyone such powerful research tools at no cost.

The first release candidate for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, released last month, addressed a number of technical behavioral issues that, according to IE8 Program Manager Herman Ng yesterday, included some serious crashes and system hangs. That's normal for even a public beta like IE8 Beta 2, and the new Crash Recovery feature in RC1 addresses 94% of these "reliability problems," Ng said, albeit with what could be for many testers a very well-used safety net.

But what about Windows 7 beta testers? The IE8 release candidates currently available are for Windows Vista and Windows XP, separately. Microsoft decided it would be a good idea to address their concerns as well, so yesterday, it begain issuing a "reliability update" for its version of IE8. This doesn't make its IE8 a "release candidate for Win7," though it does roll up the various fixes implemented in the Vista and XP RC versions.

Adobe has released an update (11.0.1) to Photoshop CS4 which includes a handful of significant fixes. Performance issues have been tweaked, the pen barrel rotation feature on Wacom tablets has been fixed, 3D textures edited by plug-ins are now properly recognized, and the quality of Stacked (auto blend) images has been improved. Also, attempting to paste formatted text, or open a corrupt font no longer result in a CS4 crash.

The update is available directly from Adobe.

It's the dream of graphic artists to be able to use a program that emulates -- not just simulates -- the texture, the behavior, the luminance of pigment...while at the same time preserving all the conveniences of digital editing, such as layering and selective blending and the ability to "undo."

The latest Corel Painter 11, whose availability for download begins today, adds a little more of that much-desired flexibility between the two universes. For example, once you've blended a paint on one layer with a paint on another layer (imagine those paints being wet, if you will), what happens to those intermediate colors created during the blending process? In a demonstration video on Corel's Web site today, you can see how the latest incarnation of the Magic Wand tool enables separation of blended pigments between layers. So you can move a layer around and thus effectively "re-blend," a process not unlike ciphoning off wet paint from a fresh canvas.

Marvell yesterday debuted its Plug Computing initiative, which seeks to strip the always-on PC down to the smallest form possible while still retaining its functionality. The result is the SheevaPlug development platform, a 1.2GHz Sheeva CPU with 512MB of Flash memory and 512MB of DRAM jammed into an oversized Glade Plug-in. It's compatible with most Linux distributions running the 2.6 kernel.

The unit has a gigabit ethernet port and one USB port and is meant to be hooked up to the home's main router and network storage device. From there, Marvell says it consumes one tenth the power of a PC being used as a home media server.

Amazon's Kindle 2 has not been in consumer hands for 24 hours, and already it's been torn apart to show every conceivable mystery that could be contained under the e-ink display.

iFixit disassembled the device today and found an empty outline of a SIM card on the left side of the logic board. Also identified among the guts of the Kindle 2 was its 532 MHz ARM-11 processor, 32MB of Samsung DDR, and the 2GB Samsung moviNAND flash memory. A SIM reader will likely be included in Kindle 2 builds destined for overseas markets, where it will simplify wireless connectivity.

The Microsoft Business Division is responsible for about 29% of that company's revenue -- at least it was during the last quarter -- and 90% of that contribution comes from the sale of Microsoft Office-branded products, including its principal applications suite. Though it continues to be the world's dominant platform for everyday document production and management by a comical margin, and though a key element of the company's interoperability strategy relies on that platform's latest update, CEO Steve Ballmer not-so-inadvertently revealed earlier today that Office 14 will not be released during the first half of this year as originally "leaked" to journalists, but instead, potentially as late as the second half of 2010.

So is user dependence upon Office stable enough to carry the 2007 edition -- which did, after all, include a strikingly complete makeover -- for another year or longer?