The controversial "Fresh Start" option --the option to pay Sony $50 to not include superfluous programs on new computers-- which was made free after an immediate consumer backlash, may expand to more Sony units, but for now will remain with its TZ series.

Currently, only two Vaio notebooks in the TZ series offer Fresh Start. The configure-to-order TZ2000, and TZ2500. however, the SZ, CR, FZ, NR, and AR series do not.

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During a half-hour conference call with investment analysts this morning, Motorola CEO Greg Brown provided very few more details regarding his company's plans to become two companies.

"Today's announcement that we are creating two new businesses will create many benefits...As separate, publicly traded entities, the Mobile Devices business and the Broadband and Mobility Solutions business would each have global scale and leadership in key markets," Brown told analysts. "Each company would benefit from improved flexibility, a capital structure more tailored to its individual business needs, and increased management focus. Investors will have a more targeted investment opportunity, and employees and management will be more closely aligned with each company's goals and objectives."

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Xerox has created new "Sustainability Calculator" software that allows customer businesses to evaluate the impact of their printers, copiers, and other devices from any manufacturer, on the global environment.

A quick glimpse at Xerox's calculator reveals a basic input screen that asks users to select the cartridges used in their printers and copiers, whether their devices are black-and-white or color, how fast they print, the number of pages they produce per month, and whether those devices are Energy Star certified. It then proceeds to calculate how much energy and the amount of waste created by the machines.

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UK-based company Velocix (formerly CacheLogic) has begun offering live streaming television content with a hybrid P2P live streaming client.

Live streaming offers a challenge to content providers not present in on-demand delivery. Live streams face a concentrated audience all attempting to access the video feed simultaneously, putting a significantly larger strain upon resources than if the same amount of viewers spread out that demand over a protracted time frame.

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With Windows Vista Service Pack 1 out the door, Microsoft was largely expected to release Windows XP SP3 last week or this week. It didn't, instead making public a Refresh build of SP3 Release Candidate 2.

Microsoft says it "made this release candidate available in order to receive further user feedback prior to the release of Windows XP SP3." But many users are wondering what's taking the company so long, as SP3 is largely a roll-up of existing updates and includes no major new features.

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Several tech companies along with some analyst groups have been asked by the plaintiffs to testify as part of the class-action lawsuit against Microsoft over Vista.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Todd Bishop has dug up the list of 28 companies that have received subpoenas as part of the case. Former Windows chief Jim Allchin is the only individual listed in this list that has been asked to appear.

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For the second straight year, the search giant is silently opposing a proposal to shareholders that would prohibit it from housing personally identifiable data in countries whose human rights policies could be detrimental to its customers.

It's a publicly known, if not well known, fact that part of New York City's many pension funds are invested in the stock market. Among the city's teachers, firefighters, police, and administrative employees, their pool of ownership of Google stock alone now totals nearly $383.3 million, according to the city's comptroller-general, William C. Thompson, Jr. So it seems only fair that those employees should have a respectable voice with regard to the policies of the companies in which they invest.

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After an accusatory finger was pointed at Bell Canada for shaping traffic before it even reached ISPs, the company has admitted to the act, saying it has the right to do so.

Bell Canada says it implemented "load balancing to manage bandwidth demand," but did so without informing ISPs or customers. Canadian ISP Teksavvy, a service reportedly popular among P2P users because their traffic is not throttled, first noticed the "load balancing," and confronted Bell.

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As a new perquisite for customers of its Linux OS or database support, Oracle today announced free downloads and support for Oracle Clusterware, a systems management package for both Red Hat Linux and Oracle's "Unbreakable Linux."

Up to now, Clusterware has only been offered to users of Oracle's RAC (Real Applications Clusters) database management solution, said Monica Kumar, Oracle's senior director for Linux and open source product marketing, in a briefing for BetaNews.

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Earthlink paid Houston $5 million after failing to meet contractual obligations to build the network last August. That money may be used to jumpstart the municipal Wi-Fi project once again.

Houston was an unfortunate casualty of Earthlink's sudden exit from municipal Wi-Fi, a initiative it once considered the future of the company. It was said that the entire network would require approximately $50 million to build out.

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Mozilla issued its 13th update to alternative browser Firefox 2, fixing six issues, two of which the company called critical.

"Some vulnerabilities and weaknesses have been reported in Mozilla Firefox, which can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions, disclose potentially sensitive information, conduct cross-site scripting and phishing attacks, and potentially compromise a user's system," security firm Secunia said of the fixes.

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There will be two Motorolas, once all this is done, and both could very well retain the same brand, logo, and parent or co-parent company. But they will be two companies, and the Mobile Devices business will have new leadership.

Former CEO Ed Zander stepped down last November, leaving his replacement Greg Brown to execute a systematic executive housecleaning, with "execute" being the operative word. But when that's done, Brown himself won't be the leader of the future company currently being referred to as Motorola Mobile Devices.

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Friendfeed, a service that turns updates to sites such as YouTube, Yelp, Flickr, and Twitter into one single feed, announced that its blog headlines will now feature Disqus' comments from users' friends.

Disqus is an enhanced comment system for blogs, allowing the user to track comments and replies, and categorize them. Every time a user posts a comment, a new thread is started in his own forum, and replies posted in that thread are linked to the original. While it may seem like recursive commenting, the result is a structure supporting more visible comments.

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Fully 41 percent of TV owners in the US now possess a high definition TV, yet only 56 percent of those same consumers subscribe to an HD programming package, according to a new survey by ABI Research.

Together with other analysts' statistics, ABI's findings about HDTV ownership seems to indicate that interest in HD is finally on the rise in the United States. In research released last summer, for example, In-Stat discovered that interest in HD had actually fallen over the previous year among US consumers, while increasing in other countries, particularly France and South Korea.

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It's the language that Microsoft's opponents in Europe claim the company is using as a possible proprietary bypass of HTML. But now, that opposition will have to face the fact that nearly every scintilla of detail about XAML is in the public record.

The second bit of news emerging from Microsoft today on the interoperability front comes from its release of complete documentation for its existing 2006 implementation of Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML): both the object mapping specification and the vocabulary specification for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). (Complete ZIP file with both specs available here)

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