Latest Technology News

Since last July, Intel's defense against a Statement of Objections filed by the European Commission has been that it isn't privy to all the evidence. Now, a court has concluded that time to find what that evidence is, has run out.

A last-chance petition by Intel before the European Court of First Instance in Brussels last month, pleading for enough time to gather information it believes may be exculpatory in charges against its anti-competitive conduct against AMD, was turned down this afternoon.

Yesterday evening, Apple released the Nvidia Graphics Update 2009 which deals with video smoothness issues on Macs equipped with GeForce 7300 GT or GeForce 9600M graphics cards.

The primary fix involves cursor movement and visibility when a Mac (MacBoook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air) with one of these Nvidia cards is using a Dual-link DVI adaptor connected to the Mini DisplayPort. This particular piece of hardware was a requirement for anyone who bought an updated Mac in October and wanted to use it with a 30" external monitor. Unfortunately, the $99 product wasn't available until the end of December.

An "Employee Information Package" sent to IBM employees reportedly gives 2,850 as the approximate number of pink slips, in a round of job cuts originally confirmed by Betanews. On an IBM employee union Web site last week, IBM staff posted entries stating that layoffs were already happening in IBM software and distribution divisions in the US and Canada, and estimating the loss at 16,000 jobs.

Last Thursday, Betanews received and reported the first word from IBM that reductions in force were indeed under way. An IBM spokesperson told Betanews that some job layoff notifications had been sent, although he wouldn't comment on the number of layoffs.

Consumer storage space continues its intrepid climb today as Western Digital announced its WD Caviar Green Drive, a 3.5" SATA drive that offers a 2 TB ceiling. Caviar uses WD's 500 GB/platter technology with 400 GB per square inch areal density and 32 MB cache.

The 2 TB WD Caviar Green (WD20EADS) has a suggested retail price of $299.99 and is available immediately.

Under the NSA's Secure Mobile Environment/Portable Electronic Device (SME PED) program, President Obama will have two candidates to choose from: the Sectera Edge and the L-3 Guardian.

Obama's BlackBerry reliance ("They'll have to pry it from my hands!") has caused a great deal of speculation recently about which device will replace his beloved smartphone. Under the NSA's SME PED (Secure Mobile Environment/Portable Electronic Device) program, two devices are being considered the likely candidates for replacement.

Conducted by Texas-based Credant Technologies among dry cleaning establishments, a study determined that 9,000 USB sticks got forgotten in customers' pockets last year in the UK alone. One dry cleaner in London said he comes across an average of one USB stick every two weeks, whereas another estimated he's encountered 80 of them within the past year.

Other items mistakenly dropped off at the laundry inside people's pockets included money, keys, credit cards, a gold Rolex watch, and an envelope filled with diamonds.

Muxtape, the music-playlist site that launched to general acclaim in March 2008 only to run afoul of the RIAA by September, has relaunched as "a minimalist platform for bands to promote their music and listeners to create mixes." Twelve bands have contributed tracks to kick things off.

The old Muxtape allowed anyone to upload a playlist of MP3s, sequenced and titled in the fashion of a mixtape. The site was not searchable by artist and didn't allow for downloading. It was nonetheless an Internet and social-networking sensation, with nearly 98,000 signups in just its first month, and its mid-August shutdown prompted blog posts and articles about "the gaping void in your soul where Muxtape used to be" and such.

The US Patent Office has granted "Jobs, et al" a patent for multitouch techniques. The patent is entitled "Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics."

Heuristics is a commonly used term in computer science, and here refers to a set of loosely-defined parameters that can be applied to numerous situations, and the important thing to note here is that it's not the commands themselves being patented, rather the device and its associated GUI and methods for recognizing those commands.

"It's very clear that streaming is energizing our growth," said Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings, in announcing a 45% leap in quarterly profits for the online video rental service despite a declining overall economy.

With consumers relying more on home entertainment during the financial crunch, Netflix is taking obvious advantage of the trend, closing the fourth quarter with 9.39 million subscribers, up 26 percent from the same quarter the year before.

Yesterday, Angela talked about one of the new Obama administration's few unresolved appointments: the new "Chief Technology Officer," and even made a nomination of her own (not a bad pick).

I know a lot of folks are looking forward to having someone who personally represents the nation's technology policy the way, say, Hillary Clinton will represent the nation's foreign policy, or Joe Biden will represent the nation's...foreign policy. But given the sorry state of technology in just the White House itself, as reported last week by the Washington Post's Ann Kornblut, I'm not entirely certain that's top priority right now. What Mr. Obama needs in a CTO today, in my opinion, is someone who can give the Executive Branch the bandwidth it needs to conduct its business in the transparent and auditable way that he promised during his campaign.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.