Latest Technology News

Ending speculation that it would follow NBC Universal's lead in pulling its programs from Apple's iTunes, News Corp president Peter Cherin said the company had no plans to do so. He did, however seem to agree with NBC on one thing: that networks should have more control over what is charged for their programming. Cherin's comments were made to Reuters during a stop in Poland, where the media conglomerate is relaunching a television channel.

"Right now, we have a perfectly good relationship with Apple," he told the news wire. Cherin's comments are no doubt good news for Apple, and may help stem the tide of content provider discontent Apple has been riding over the past several months. It began last year with Apple's insistence to keep 99 cent music pricing, which may have led to Universal's canceling of its long-term contract. This was soon followed by NBC Universal's announcement that it would pull its television programming from the service.

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Preparing itself for the eventual release of Apple's iPhone in the UK, Vodafone on Tuesday unveiled a new music store that allows the unlimited download of tracks to compatible phones. While the British cell phone carrier was thought to be an early favorite, it now appears that O2 has won the contract for the country. Vodafone's service includes about one million tracks and is available for $4 per week.

According to the carrier, most users will not need to upgrade their phones in order to take advantage of the service. However, it features new phones in its store including Nokia's N81 and N95 devices. Other devices will also be offered from Samsung and Sony Ericsson, and most will support the music store and other interactive features such as eBay, MySpace, and YouTube access.

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News is only now leaking out that the three-layer, single sided format for HD DVD engineered by Toshiba was given the green light by the DVD Forum, official backer of HD DVD, on August 31. Though no statements were released by either party (the DVD Forum rarely makes public pronouncements), journalists including DVDTown's Henning Molbaek - who originally broke the news of 51 GB last January - had at least enough information yesterday to declare the format ready for production.

BetaNews has asked Toshiba for comment and verification on this matter, though we have not yet heard back.

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Take-Two investors that may have been looking for some good news got it late Monday as the company reported a narrower-than-expected loss.

Most recently, the company announced that it would be delaying the next release of one of its highest grossing titles Grand Theft Auto IV. The resulting fallout caused the company to trim its expectations and project a loss for the year.

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A web applications company is hoping to legitimize the web operating system concept with the release of ajaxWindows, an application that behaves much like its Microsoft counterpart.

The OS acts as a centralized location for the various web services created by Ajax13. When running in full screen mode, any evidence of the underlying operating system is erased, and the Web OS itself becomes the desktop.

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After a few years of flirting with the idea of developing its own suite of applications, perhaps under the Lotus banner, that support the OASIS OpenDocument format, IBM has decided to join Sun Microsystems in the development of OpenOffice.org, the principal open source ODF applications suite.

In announcing its move today, IBM acknowledged that it had been developing some ODF components for use with Lotus Notes, but will now roll them into its contributions to the open source community. Sun currently produces the commercial ODF-supporting suite StarOffice; and since late 2005, when Sun and IBM openly courted development groups to meet at IBM's Armonk headquarters to plan the future of ODF together, observers speculated IBM could be working on an "Office killer" to go up against Microsoft.

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SanDisk solidified its music player lineup on Monday, introducing the Sansa View, which is the cheapest video-enabled player in its category.

Two models will be made available, an 8GB version for $149 and an 16GB model for $199 USD. Memory could be further expanded up to 24GB by using an optional 8GB microSD card. The players are expected reach stores in October, according to SanDisk.

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While Altavista has largely disappeared from the minds of most Internet users since the emergence of Google, the Web property does still have a very popular service: its Babel Fish translator. Now, Microsoft is testing its own translation offering under the Windows Live umbrella.

Like Babel Fish, Windows Live Translator is based on technology from Systran. Users can input a block of text to translate, or select a Web site to translate. There is an option for "computer related content" which keeps the service from translating technology-related words. Little else is known about Live Translator, but Microsoft frequently tests new offerings under Windows Live, some of which survive while others don't.

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With today being AMD's turn at the center stage spotlight, Intel is doing its best to keep its brand presence and its recent performance gains - both in terms of hardware and finances - in the public mind. For once, a company that may have spent more of its history restructuring than being well-structured may be finally experiencing some payback time, as Intel announced this morning it is dramatically upgrading its third quarter revenue forecast.

During its last fully completed fiscal quarter, Intel's revenue was already up 8% over the same quarter in the prior year, with $8.7 billion. In late July, it forecast revenue for this quarter (which ends at the close of September) at between $9.0 and $9.6 billion.

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French technology consultant company Capgemini will recommend Google's online office suite to its enterprise customers, giving the software a huge boost against competitors such as Microsoft.

The move should also put to rest once and for all the argument that Google is not attempting to compete against Office, and instead has its sights set squarely on grabbing a portion of the lucrative enterprise software market.

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Looking for new ways to keep sales of CDs afloat, the music industry will begin selling "ringles," which combine three songs with a ringtone from a specific artist.

The original version of the song, plus a remix and an older song would be combined with a ringtone download for a single price. While the RIAA has approved the "ringle" term and plans to push for it industry-wide, only Universal and Sony BMG have signed on so far.

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Sony has unveiled a palm-sized digital audio player that combines the typical features of an MP3 player with robotic technologies to allow it to spin, flash lights and move forward and backward to the music.

Called the Rolly, a combination of the words "rolling" and "friendly," Sony says it is meant to make listening and sharing music a more entertaining way. It includes 1GB of internal memory, measures 6.5 centimeters (2.5 inches) in diameter and weighs about 300 grams (10 ounces).

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Skype users should be wary of a new worm that is making its way through the network via the application's chat feature, the company said Monday. The worm spreads when users click on a link sent via IM either from an unknown user, or a contact who has been infected. The link appears to be a .JPG image, however when clicked, it asks the user to run or save a .scr file. When run, the program then accesses the Skype application in order to infect others.

F-Secure and Kaspersky Labs have issued updated definition files to detect the worm, Skype said. "We would like to encourage our users to ensure that they are running anti-virus software on their computers and to download the latest anti-virus updates in order to provide the best protection against this and other viruses," Villu Arak wrote in the Skype blog on Monday. Additional instructions on handling the worm can be found in the post.

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Apple said it sold its one millionth iPhone on Sunday, some 74 days after its debut. The sales numbers for the device make it the best selling phone model debut ever, and ranks near the top debuts of any electronic device in history. In comparison, it took the iPod two years to reach the same milestone. Brisk sales of the phone are likely to continue: last week the company reduced the price of the 8GB model to $399, while discontinuing the 4GB version.

"We can't wait to get this revolutionary product into the hands of even more customers this holiday season," CEO Steve Jobs said. Not everybody is in agreement about the numbers, however. iSuppli estimated about 500,000 units were sold as of the end of July. In order for Apple to reach that one million number, it would have had to sell 500,000 phones in the past six weeks.

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The latest batch of 8300 series and 2300 series Quad-Core Opteron processors, formally announced by AMD today, will feature hardware-based library support for software to be able to run virtualized environments.

The AMD-V virtualization layer, as the company will call it, will provide virtual machine environments from VMware, Microsoft, Xen, and others with direct channels to memory and system resources, enabling them to bypass operating system drivers and go straight to the source. The result is something almost, but not entirely, quite unlike virtualization as we have come to know it before. Typically, a virtual machine establishes an intentional layer of indirection between a guest environment and system hardware. Now, these systems will have the option of addressing memory directly, rather than indirectly.

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