As an unusual Christmas present to the world, Russia sent the last three of its GPS-compatible GLONASS satellites into space on Tuesday, whose missions range from global military tracking to keeping an eye on civilian-owned pet dogs and cats.

While most nations sat practically still during the traditional late December lull, Russia sent the rest of the world a present on Christmas Day by shooting the last three of its GPS (Global Position System)-compatible GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System) satellites into space.

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The two parties in one of the most recent patent lawsuits concerning Vonage's VoIP technology waited almost two months to tell the public they had actually settled their dispute just days after it was filed.

Last November 7, just over three weeks after AT&T jumped on the patent suit bandwagon, filing a claim against voice-over-IP provider Vonage, the two companies settled AT&T's claim for an undisclosed amount. The admission of that settlement came just before Christmas, when fewer folks would have been paying attention.

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An experiment started two weeks ago by Google to leverage its Talk application as a way of sharing news feeds from Google Reader, has been met with some derision. What may be more surprising, though, is the company's response.

On the surface, it might seem pretty straightforward: If you've opted to share portions of your Google Reader feeds list with selected friends, then friends on your Google Talk and Gmail chat will be able to receive what you're sharing. That was the intention of the company's introduction on December 14 of an interoperability feature that links shared friends on one Google application to shared friends on another.

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With competition ever more fierce in the LCD TV market, some retailers are finding the most viable option is to join forces.

Toshiba and Sharp this morning announced the expansion of their pre-existing accord in production, in a further effort to advance their market positions in the sector. As one example, Toshiba will use Sharp's LCD panels in its 32 inch and larger sets, while Sharp will use Toshiba's computer chips in its own televisions.

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In a shocking turn of events, Matthew Szulik suddenly stepped down this week as the head of Red Hat. With his company in solid financial shape, will its new CEO -- a former top exec at Delta Airlines -- change course in mid-flight?

Red Hat's long-time guiding light Matthew Szulik this week unexpectedly stepped down from the top spot at open source software company Red Hat, announcing that James Whitehurst -- a former Delta Airlines executive but also a computer programmer and Linux hobbyist -- will fill his shoes.

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Chinese courts handed the world's recording industry a significant victory Thursday, finding the search giant's Chinese music service was committing copyright infringement.

Under new laws passed by the country last year, a Beijing court found that Yahoo China violated copyright by allowing users to search, download, and play pirated music from its Web site.

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The man seen by many as representing the future of Cisco has announced a Christmas shocker: He's leaving the company, apparently having spotted a brighter opportunity for himself on the other side of the revolving door.

Network equipment edifice Cisco Systems seems to be melting down from the friction coming from its more and more revolving door this year. Charles H. Giancarlo, once widely seen as the top choice for Cisco's next CEO, abruptly announced that he is leaving his job as chief development officer.

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It's the start of a new era for the company that once argued that giving away the keys to its protocols would somehow reveal the secret of Windows itself: Microsoft has made its first obligatory agreement with a key open source provider.

Complying with its European Union obligations to make Windows interoperability information completely available to companies and organizations that it might otherwise consider to be competitors, Microsoft yesterday executed an historically important agreement with Samba, a major provider of open source interop tools for network administrators.

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Essentially ceding its battle for subscribers to Netflix, the company said it planned to raise rates as much as 40 percent.

While it had been performing adequately by some estimates for at least a few years against its larger competitor in the online movie rental space, storefront giant Blockbuster has fallen onto hard times financially, recently overhauling its leadership.

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Oracle may be willing to spend a record sum -- over $6 billion -- to acquire a middleware provider it believes will give it a permanent leg up on Microsoft's SQL Server. Does it still take a huge M&A like this to stay on par with Microsoft?

Database and applications software giant Oracle is trying hard to buy BEA Systems, a big-time middleware maker -- and Oracle is willing to shell out $6.6 billion for the privilege. Business customers could stand to gain by getting a robust and integrated alternative to the Microsoft SQL Server environment.

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In the latest incident of a now-chronic problem that has been bugging Microsoft all year, a recent security patch now causes IE6 to crash in Windows XP...again.

In a classic Tim Conway comedy sketch, he plays a corpse being prepared for a funeral by mortician Harvey Korman. But one limb of Conway's body simply insists on sticking up in the air, and whenever Korman finally retracts it, another one pops up elsewhere.

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Microsoft's Windows support forum found a throng of users yesterday complaining of their Windows Live OneCare subscriptions inexplicably showing up as having been terminated.

This left many scrambling to find out whether OneCare was still providing them with updates, firewall, and antivirus protection, or if Microsoft had forgotten about them.

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After a screenshot on MSDN appeared to show an IE8 beta passing an accepted Web standards test, some came to the only conclusion they could: that the test had to be broken.

A test created by the Web Standards Project advocacy group for visually gauging the compliance of Web browsers with published standards, appears to have been passed by a beta of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, according to a recent post on the IE developer team's blog. And a test this morning by BetaNews of Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 for Windows Vista, released on Wednesday, clearly shows it passes as well.

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The company is looking to reach out to the community of users of its software by building a mailing list of those interested in beta testing software.

Mozilla is currently in the midst of testing out its next release of Firefox, however the company is apparently planning ahead for future products. Testers will be responsible with putting release candidate and developer builds through their paces before shipment.

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The three largest Internet advertising firms will pay a total of $31 million to the US Government, settling allegations by the Justice Dept. that they provided advertising services for online gambling sites.

In the terms of their settlement released today, Microsoft has agreed to forfeit $4.5 million, and Yahoo and Google will each pay $3 million.

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