A federal judge refused to enforce a $450 million settlement between Research In Motion and NTP on Wednesday. Also, a request by the BlackBerry maker to stay proceedings until the U.S. Patent Office rules on the validity of NTP's patent was denied, which could mean trouble for the popular wireless service.

U.S. District Judge James Spencer had indicated earlier this month that his patience was running thin in the dispute between the two companies, and planned to rule swiftly on whether the settlement could be enforced.

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Microsoft on Wednesday began rolling out Milestone 4 of its new Windows Live Mail beta, formerly known by the code-name Kahuna. The update adds support for Web browsers beyond IE6 and implements a number of new features such as spell checking and resizable window panes.

When complete, Windows Live Mail will serve as the next-generation Hotmail, offering an application-like interface for viewing and sending e-mails online. The service has been rebuilt from the ground up to be fast and safe using Microsoft's AJAX-based Atlas framework and a new architecture known as FireAnt.

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VMware released the latest version of its VMware Workstation product on Wednesday, adding better support for 64-bit operating systems and hardware, experimental support for two-way SMP, and enhancements to the virtual machine importer and command line interface.

Virtualization is useful to software developers and testers because it allows them to mimic the setups of several different computers on a single machine. This gives users the capability to test a program across a variety of production environments.

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MP3.com founder Michael Robertson is reviving an old service with a new twist as part of his new venture called MP3tunes. The company on Wednesday launched Oboe, an online music storage locker that offers syncing and streaming capabilities. But is Robertson setting himself up for another attack by the RIAA?

The new service is designed to rid users of having to carry around their music around wherever they go. "It makes more sense to safely store your music online and sync it or stream it to all the places you listen to music, which is exactly what Oboe makes possible," Robertson says.

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Since it's last revision of the GPL over a decade and a half ago, the software landscape has changed dramatically. Thus, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) on Wednesday released guidelines for revising the GNU General Public License. Version 3 of the GPL is currently in the works.

The organization hopes to have the first draft of the license available for review at a conference scheduled for January at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The GNU GPL is one of the most widely-used free software licenses; it is estimated that three-quarters of free and open source programs use the license.

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Taking a different approach than Google, which launched a separate Web RSS reader last month, Yahoo on Wednesday rolled out an update to its Yahoo! Mail Beta that integrates RSS feeds directly below e-mail folders. Feeds can be synched from My Yahoo! or added manually.

Full posts from RSS feeds show up like an e-mail message, and can be forwarded, printed or saved for later viewing. An "All Feeds" feature creates an aggregate list of updates from the feeds, order chronologically.

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Acting on a promise first made in July of this year to take action against violent and lewd video game sales, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday announced that she would introduce a bill to protect children from such games when congress reconvenes in two weeks. The bill is being co-sponsored by Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman.

Clinton led the call in July to ask for a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the discovery of lewd content in the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas video game. The FTC began an investigation later that month. The game was then recalled and a version without the questionable scenes was released in September.

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Microsoft is waving goodbye to Symantec and McAfee it seems. On Tuesday, the company opened the doors to its Windows OneCare Live beta, a PC protection and maintenance service that offers an antivirus and firewall, along with tune-up and backup functionality.

Any Windows XP SP2 user can now register to download the latest beta release.

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Testing has begun on a new service being offered by Cingular that would allow its customers to make unlimited phone calls to at&t local telephone customers, the company disclosed on Wednesday. The service, called Mobile2Home, will be available until February 25 to customers in Connecticut who combine their at&t and Cingular bills.

Cingular is a joint venture of BellSouth and at&t, formerly SBC Communications. The service would cost $5.99 USD per month, and is an effort by Cingular to retain wireless customers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. If successful and expanded nationwide, other carriers with local telephone service divisions such as Verizon and Sprint Nextel could follow suit, analysts say.

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Blu-ray assured reporters and analysts at a demonstration Tuesday that the new DVD format is still on schedule for a spring 2006 release. The Sony-led group said it also planned to have specific launch plans available in the form of product announcements at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

While the format seems to have the upper hand in the next-generation DVD war, recent questions have arisen over its manufacturing cost and once strong supporter HP has begun to waver in recent months. Sony has shot back, saying production costs will become competitive soon after manufacturing begins.

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The city of New Orleans plans to offer free Wi-Fi Internet access to its citizens within a year, Mayor Ray Nagin announced on Tuesday. While most of the network's bandwidth will be marked for use by emergency responders, the remaining capacity would be opened up to the public.

The idea for a wireless network is not new to the Big Easy. The city was already using a small system to monitor security cameras in areas of high crime.

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Apple late Tuesday issued Security Update 2005-009 containing 13 fixes for security vulnerabilities, two of which only affect server versions of Mac OS X. The update plugs holes in Apache, CoreFoundation, curl, OpenSSL and fixes four flaws in Apple's Safari Web browser.

Two of the updates for Safari cover problems in JavaScript, while another corrects a problem with overlong file names in which downloads could be saved to a different location than requested. Safari's WebKit rendering engine also contained a heap overflow that could potentially lead to the execution of arbitrary code. Mac OS X users can download the patch through Software Update.

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Microsoft on Tuesday acknowledged the existence of exploit code that could crash vulnerable Windows computers through a flaw in image file handling. The company had provided a patch for the problem as part of its November Patch Tuesday security update.

The flaw affects the way the OS renders Windows Metafile and Enhance Metafile image formats. While the vulnerability could lead to remote code execution, Microsoft says that, based on its research, this particular exploit would only cause a denial of service attack. So far, the company has not been made aware of any reported attacks using the code.

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Microsoft has plans to launch an online marketplace similar to Google Base, according to statements made by the company on Tuesday. Codenamed "Fremont", the service will allow users to post listings akin to the way the popular classifieds Craigslist site operates.

Fremont will also be tied into the company's new Live.com, where users will be able to view local listings from their personalized pages. Microsoft has begun testing the service from fremont.live.com, however access has been restricted to Redmond employees.

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Microsoft announced in a conference call on Tuesday that no Windows Vista CTP would be released for November, with the development focus shifting to a "quality based schedule, rather than a calendar date one." Instead, a December CTP will be issued before the Christmas holidays.

Amitabh Srivastava, who heads up Microsoft's Windows engineering efforts, explained that the company was endeavoring to finish the code for all Windows Vista features by the end of December, with a feature-complete build of Vista shipping "early next year."

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