Latest Technology News

Those hoping to get a discount on Sony's PlayStation 3 game console by snapping up the discontinued 60GB model better act fast: Sony says it has completely depleted inventory in its warehouses, which means what's on retail shelves will be the last units available.

In announcing the price drop and the new $599 80GB PS3, Sony said it expected to continue selling the $499 60GB models through the fall. It's not clear what Sony will do once no more 60GB PS3s are available, but analysts speculate the company will lower the 80GB price to $499 to keep sales up at current levels.

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Last May, Intel and STMicroelectronics - with the world's #6 and #5 market shares, respectively, in NAND flash memory - announced they would be joining together with venture capital firm Francisco Partners to create a new consumer-grade flash memory manufacturer, to be called Numonyx. This week, the US Federal Trade Commission is apparently not yet satisfied that Intel has adequately addressed its standard antitrust concerns. Today, Intel announced it received what is formally called a "second request" notice from the FTC.

While that's not nearly the same thing as being notified you're under investigation, a second request notice is typically bad news. It does not mean the FTC has any reason to suspect something in particular, or that it has any specific evidence of malfeasance or wrongdoing.

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Sony said Thursday that it will begin shipping its latest Blu-ray disc player in October, the BDP-S500 in Europe, the higher-end cousin to its BDP-S300 model which will also be shipping in the region. The S300 will retail for £399 (599 euros) while the S500 would retail for £599 (899 euros). The players come bundled with the Spiderman trilogy in the UK, Sony said.

Among the features included are 1080p upscaling, 24p True Cinema, support for the x.v.Color standard, and HDMI. The S500 adds HDMI 1.3 and Dolby and DTS-HD1 sound. " "Blu-ray is taking off, and the BDP-S300 player is designed to give many more people a way of joining the party in style," Sony Europe Home Entertainment chief Hiro Shinohara said in a statement.

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Newly elevated Yahoo President Susan Decker issued a memo to employees detailing another massive organization for her company, which for the third time in a mere nine months realigns its business operations under reappointed leadership. Gone is the executive said to have spearheaded the takeover of ad market broker Right Media last April, and the fate of one of the company's most outspoken senior VPs appears uncertain.

"Building on the success that we have had in aligning our sales and distribution organizations around customers, rather than around advertising products like search and display, the two major changes we are announcing today are designed to take this to a higher level," reads Decker's memo to employees yesterday, first published by PaidContent.org. Sounding much more like a content producer than a search or advertising platform, she added, "They will also better align our resources and priorities focused on building key audiences."

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Microsoft on Thursday announced plans to acquire Chicago-based Parlano, which makes the popular enterprise chat application MindAlign. The move further bolsters the Redmond company's arsenal of unified communications products.

The technology in MindAlign will be integrated into Office Communications Server and the client Office Communicator application. Although Microsoft has long offered group chat abilities, Parlano's program focuses on topic-oriented chats that can persist over multiple sessions. Further details of the agreement were not disclosed, although Microsoft is unlikely to continue developing MindAlign as a standalone product.

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A service designed to help Windows users download Microsoft's updates and install them in a faster manner was ordered shut down by Microsoft, in a cease and desist letter to the service's proprietors.

For the past few years the AutoPatcher service had been giving users what was believed to be a simpler and more intuitive front end and a monthly digest for downloading and installing updates. But it was redistributing Windows code - or, at the very least, distributing a new way to get to Windows code - and was an alternative to Microsoft Update, and as such, the company had no remaining patience for letting it stand.

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In the wake of curious surges in the memberships of national standards bodies, as well as the ISO, prior to upcoming votes to recommend or approve the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML as an international standard, the Linux Foundation today pleaded with voters worldwide (both old and new) to listen to reason before making their decisions. But the reasons they're giving have been heard before, and may not be enough to suppress the sudden surges of support for OOXML among national bodies' swelling ranks.

"The Linux Foundation is not only familiar with, but has a vested interest in the preservation of the validity and integrity of the global standards adoption process," writes the Foundation's marketing director, Amanda McPherson, in a statement released today

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A curious problem cropped up last month: Windows Vista users reported that the program that manages their Windows services (SVCHOST) would crash after having downloaded and installed a batch of updates.

Microsoft recently issued a manual fix for this problem, though users who don't want to have to learn the equivalent of heart surgery should soon be able to download a patch for the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)...assuming it works.

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The unnamed-until-now joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal now has a name: Hulu. But can the two media giants really challenge Google and the online video dominance of YouTube?

Like so many before it, Hulu's name means absolutely nothing. However, the two companies wanted something short and simple to identify the product, so it settled with the unusual name.

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Although Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is the big news of the day, Microsoft is concurrently preparing the third service pack for Windows XP. But SP3 won't introduce much of anything new for XP users, and will simply serve as a roll-up of already released fixes, Microsoft says.

Essentially, SP3 will provide a new baseline for the aging operating system, which was released to the public six years ago. As XP nears its end-of-life, Microsoft can ensure customers are up-to-date by telling them to upgrade to SP3, as opposed to SP2 with 85 or more additional patches. The first beta release of XP SP3 will reach testers mid-September, with final availability scheduled for the first half of 2008.

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After almost two years, Apple is finally expanding its video presence outside of the US by launching a store in Britain.

28 different programs will be available from several providers including ABC Studios, Disney Channel, MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Comedy. However, much of the programming is US-centric shows, with smattering of UK programming.

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Following their public availability on Microsoft's Download Center, two hotfix packs for Windows Vista that improve performance and reliability are now available as optional downloads via Windows Update. They will not, however, be delivered automatically to Vista users.

Some of the changes offered by the updates include better file copy performance, faster boot times, improved compatibility with newer graphics cards, and better performance in games with advanced visuals. Those who do not want to install the fix packs manually can wait for Vista SP1, which is slated for public release early next year.

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Microsoft said Tuesday that the glitch that caused Windows Genuine Advantage servers to fail this past weekend was due to human error. According to a post on the WGA blog, pre-production code was released on a production server, causing a domino effect of failures. About 12,000 Windows users were affected. The company said that it did not consider it an outage, since when the servers are down, the system is designed to default to "genuine."

"The production servers had not yet been upgraded with a recent change to enable stronger encryption/decryption of product keys during the activation and validation processes," Microsoft said. "The result of this is that the production servers declined activation and validation requests that should have passed."

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In a sure sign that the fervor behind municipal Wi-Fi is cooling rapidly, the city of Chicago announced Tuesday that it was canceling its plans to blanket the city with wireless Internet.

The city says it failed to reach an agreement with either AT&T or EarthLink, the two companies vying for the contract. Chicago first announced that it was considering citywide Wi-Fi early last year.

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Now that Microsoft has set a release date for both the beta and final versions of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the company is also offering a detailed look at what's being fixed and changed. One thing customers will not see is major changes to User Account Control, although Microsoft says it will reduce some pop-ups.

Perhaps the most notable change will not be for customers, but rather Microsoft partners. The company is including an API that third-party developers can tap into in order to work with kernel patch protection on x64 editions of Vista. This patch protection has proven to be a problem to antivirus and other security vendors.

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