Microsoft on Wednesday made available a beta of the second "Ultimate Extra" for Windows Vista, which is available for download free of charge for those who purchased the Ultimate Edition of the new operating system. Called DreamScene, the Extra lets users put videos as their desktop background.

Developed by Stardock and first demoed at CES in January, DreamScene also adds the capability to fill a background with an image without distorting its size. Microsoft reminds users that DreamScene is still a Technical Preview and unsupported until the final release. Vista Ultimate users can download DreamScene from Windows Update.

Continue reading →

A report issued last week by JupiterResearch lead analyst Mark Mulligan, just two days after Apple CEO Steve Jobs published an open letter advocating the end of digital rights management for downloadable music, revealed that in a continental survey of European music industry executives, more than half agree with the statement that DRM measures are "overly restrictive," and an astonishing 62% agree that dropping DRM measures altogether would drive consumer adoption of downloadable digital music.

Among the subset of those executives who produce records as well as downloadable music, that figure is 48%, though it rises to 58% when only counting executives of "major record labels." For the remainder, the figure is 73%.

Continue reading →

The beta program for the update for IBM's Informix database server (IDS), code-named "Cheetah," was opened to the public on Wednesday. Coming with the release are new features, enhanced support for hierarchical data, and improved query capabilities.

To make Informix more attractive to small and medium sized businesses, IBM also plans to offer a package deal with a IBM xSeries 3105 server and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Service. Pricing on the package would be announced at a later date.

Continue reading →

Software company VirnetX filed suit against Microsoft Thursday, accusing the Redmond company of infringing on two of its patents regarding virtual private networking. According to a statement from VirnetX, one patent deals with the methods to create a secure communication link, and the other on ways to transparently create a VPN.

VirnetX seeks damages and injunctive relief. The suit was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, seen by most as the most patent-holder friendly of the federal courts. Further details of the suit were not disclosed, and a request for comment from Microsoft was outstanding as of press time.

Continue reading →

A highly publicized piracy case against a schoolteacher in Russia was dismissed on Thursday, with a Russian District Court saying the case against the man was "trivial."

Alexandar Ponosov's plight was high profile enough to move former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to step in and plead with Microsoft founder Bill Gates to intercede on behalf of the man, saying he did not know he was committing a crime.

Continue reading →

Even though its fundamentals are improving, including a narrowing loss, VoIP provider Vonage is beginning to feel the sting of competition.

For the quarter, the Holmdel, N.J. company reported a loss of $64.6 million on revenue of $181.5 billion. This was markedly better than the year ago quarter, when the company lost $72.3 million on revenues of $95.2 million.

Continue reading →

Sharp officially released to the Japanese market yesterday the first Blu-ray Disc recorder console to record high-definition TV content directly. But Sharp's solution to the problem of securing the digital connection between the recorder and TV tuner could become controversial: It requires a dedicated link to the company's own Aquos brand HDTV units.

Sharp's dedicated connection, called Aquos Fami-Link, uses a four-pin derivative of FireWire for connecting components, called i.LINK. The connection has been deployed for quite some time in Sharp's HDTVs and DVD-R consoles capable of high-definition recording.

Continue reading →

A negligence lawsuit filed by a Texas family after a 13-year-old girl was assaulted by a 19-year-old man after meeting on MySpace was dismissed Wednesday, with a U.S. District Judge saying the site was protected by the Communications Decency Act.

Under the CDA, MySpace is considered an "interactive service." With that designation, it is given immunity to lawsuits that are filed against it over third-party communications. Also, it was found that the girl lied about her age.

Continue reading →

The 'alliance' between Novell and Microsoft got a bit weirder after Novell's CEO indicated that he was pleased by Vista's slow rate of adoption, and will continue to battle the company directly in the marketplace.

Ron Hovespian made the comments to reporters in Australia on Thursday. He mentioned that Vista took over five years to produce, while open source is much easier to develop for. Also, the agreement brings Novell closer to Microsoft's customers.

Continue reading →

10:00 am ET February 15, 2007 - An Intel spokesperson told BetaNews late Wednesday that Intel and Nokia both plan to continue pursuing new communications technologies (plural) to include with Intel's forthcoming Centrino Duo platform, but that they came to the joint conclusion that HSDPA wasn't one of them.

HSDPA, the spokesperson said, was "one particular program that was canceled," though Nokia and Intel remain committed to driving all other technologies forward, including their joint effort with WiMAX.

Continue reading →

One of the under-appreciated events at this year's 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona was the demonstration by graphics component manufacturer nVidia of a theoretical user interface programmed using a 3D library evolved from OpenGL. The Khronos Group industry consortium - of which nVidia is a member - used the company's demonstration to highlight the public release of version 1.0 of the OpenKODE specification, which incorporates the OpenGL ES library for embedded systems, along with other open standards specifications for streaming media.

The hope is to get handset manufacturers interested in the notion of a kind of unified interface, incorporating functions that could be enabled on several brands of phones and portable devices regardless of whether they're running on different infrastructures, such as Symbian, Java, or Windows Mobile. AMD, now the parent of ATI, is also a Khronos Group member, as is Intel, along with phone producers Nokia, Motorola, and Apple, and portable game console maker Sony. Microsoft is not a member.

Continue reading →

While admittedly, two of the big attractions at this year's 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona were DVB-H and MediaFLO technologies - both of which generated huge news in the portable digital video fields this week - a smaller and perhaps nimbler set of technologies may quickly evolve into a real challenger: A company with offices in Palo Alto and Seoul called Thin Multimedia Inc. demonstrated a possibly disruptive concept: a kind of embedded IPTV that could endow handsets with the capacity and functionality of living-room set-top boxes.

Last week, a Seoul-based startup called Ubicode, according to press sources there, won a huge contract with handset providers in that country to develop their mobile IPTV service platform. Their bet is that handsets that already have HSDPA broadband capabilities (and HSDPA is already big in Korea) may only need software to render them capable of receiving digital, streaming signals. IPTV platforms do have one conceptual advantage over DVB-H and MediaFLO: Based on Internet technology, they enable unicasting on-demand rather than adopting the broadcast metaphor made prominent by analog TV.

Continue reading →

A new method to detect and help stop worm attacks being developed by researchers at Penn State University is using the speed of connections to detect the attacks. The system also uses other algorithms to limit the number of false positives.

Current systems for detection of worms focus on signature or pattern identification in order to determine whether or not to block the traffic. However, this method is often too slow, allowing the worm to do damage long before it is stopped.

Continue reading →

Likely Republican presidential candidate Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas plans to reignite the Congressional movement to ban violent video games by reintroducing the Truth in Video Game Rating Act.

The bill was first introduced in September of last year along with similar legislation in the House, but nether bill made it to the floor for an actual up or down vote.

Continue reading →

Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format.

In an open letter posted to its Web site, Microsoft claims IBM is trying to limit choice by pushing the OpenDocument format, which it is a strong supporter of, while attempting to block Microsoft's attempts at standardizing its own format.

Continue reading →