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After telling US to mind its own business, Kroes slaps caps on Rambus royalties
The holder of many patents worldwide pertaining to DDR memory offered to reduce its royalty stake in that technology, and today the EU said yes.
Why Apple succeeds, and always will
The company consistently plays by different rules, literally like David did in his battle against Goliath.
EC's Kroes to US senators: Mind your own business on Oracle + Sun
UPDATED The EU's antitrust chief told the United States Senate Tuesday that any merger that takes place in the world is more her affair than theirs.
Betanews Podcast: Rupert Murdoch and the buying stuff online problem
We'll have a more difficult time paying for online news if the underlying protocol for online payment has a big gaping hole in it.
In a peace offering to newspapers, Google offers a new news format
It's probably not a solution to the woes of major news publishers, but Living Stories may gather a few of those publishers together in search of one.
Google Maps doesn't prevent car accidents, only search accidents
This week, Google updated Maps for Android 3.3.1, adding topography, nearby points of interest, and error reporting.
DOJ: Microsoft interop docs are now 'substantially complete'
A major milestone in the US Government's oversight of Microsoft is passed, as the Justice Dept. is now saying the company's protocol documents make sense.
The $1 DVD rental debate: LA group says Redbox will lose movie makers $1B
A report from the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation says cheap Redbox DVD rentals could seriously damage the movie business.
First impressions of Droid: Easy, breezy, friendly, if a little fat
Though it's not quite as well-polished as Apple's iPhone OS, the version of Android that Motorola's Droid phone sports is still a breeze to use.
Windows fix for TLS security bug still forthcoming, won't be Tuesday
Anyone looking for a fix for last month's discovery of a potentially serious security hole in TLS and SSL may have to wait until everyone is ready to act together.
Not the first, not the last, technology predictions for 2010
Carmi Levy | Wide Angle Zoom: The real truth is probably that what went around in 2009, will come around to haunt us next year.
Confirmed: Office 2010 to ship in June
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 30, 2009, 4:30 PM
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After several Web sites today claimed to having seen a possibly inadvertent notice from Microsoft claiming June as the release month for its forthcoming Office 2010 (we looked hard and couldn't find it ourselves), a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that June is indeed the ship month.
The news comes two weeks after the company's PDC 2009 conference in Los Angeles, where we had expected not only to see the final shipping date but to hear a lot more about Office and Office Web Apps. What was on many attendees minds even after leaving the last day of the show was, what will make Office 2010 worth the upgrade, and what will not be in Office Web Apps that will be in Office 2010? In an interview during the conference, company communications senior director Janice Kapner told Betanews that to some extent, the answers to those questions are still being determined by users.
New EU antitrust commissioner will oversee Microsoft, Oracle+Sun, Intel issues
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 30, 2009, 3:55 PM
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The final word over whether the European Commission has accepted, and is willing to oversee the deployment of, a new "ballot screen" that gives Microsoft Windows users the choice of Internet Explorer or a competitive browser, may not be given by Neelie Kroes after all. Despite her prominent role as the European Commissioner for Competition, often siding against the United States with respect to Microsoft and other issues, Comm. Kroes will be swapping roles with her fellow Commissioners next month, as her term in the antitrust oversight role expires in January.
To replace Kroes, EC President José Manuel Barroso has chosen Joachín Almunia, currently the continent's Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs -- essentially its finance minister. Almunia is well-known throughout Europe, and especially in his native Spain, where he distinguished himself as the Socialist party candidate for Prime Minister in 2000. He's perceived as a trusted associate of Barroso, although his executive authority will be ceded somewhat to a new executive branch of government, by virtue of the recent ratification of the new Lisbon Treaty.
Continue reading New EU antitrust commissioner will oversee Microsoft, Oracle+Sun, Intel issues...
Apple invokes DMCA, claims Psystar is 'trafficking in circumvention devices'
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 30, 2009, 12:22 PM
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One of the reasons Apple Inc. has been the most venerable opponent a courtroom defendant may face, is because of a significant trump card the US Supreme Court handed it in 1983. In a landmark case that rendered "Apple II clones" effectively illegal, the high court established a unique precedent for determining liability and damages in software copyright cases. It assumed that since any legitimate US company is capable of performing legitimate business, the possible damage a defendant might suffer from an injunction against possibly infringing software is outweighed by the simple declaration that such business is illegitimate.
So it was that, with amplification supplied by a citation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Apple invoked its own case law -- citing Apple v. Franklin -- in arguments in recently revealed court papers that Psystar should be permanently enjoined from selling "Mac OS X clones." The specific passage is this: "Where the only hardship that the defendant will suffer is lost profits from an activity which has been shown likely to be infringing, such an argument in defense merits little equitable consideration."
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Microsoft 'worked with Apple' for Silverlight on iPhone, says Goldfarb
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 25, 2009, 4:37 PM
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It was an impressive demonstration, once they got it working: H.264 video streaming wirelessly (and slowly, at least during the caching sequence) using Microsoft's Silverlight video streaming, to an Apple iPhone. It's all the more impressive when you realize that Flash video still has not made its way (permanently) to the iPhone, not for any technical reasons we know of...simply because Apple wants to control the video channel for streaming media to its devices.
And yet here it is, a Microsoft stream. You'd think Apple would have stood firm against Microsoft at least as aggressively as it has against Adobe, if not more so. How did this happen? We asked Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb last week at PDC 2009, and the answer was a huge surprise...followed by some caveats. But it contained these four amazing words: "We worked with Apple."
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Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: 'Nobody's going to be 100% open'
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 25, 2009, 2:52 PM
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Over the last five years, Microsoft has undergone a gradual, but significant, shift in its public image, a shift toward interoperability and a willingness to play more fairly in competitive markets. At the same time, it remains a commercial software producer committed to the protection of its proprietary intellectual property.
Openness, as CEO Steve Ballmer explained to his company's Worldwide Partner Conference in July 2008, should not imply free. "Open source also implies free -- free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference," he told attendees at the time.
Continue reading Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: 'Nobody's going to be 100% open'...
A case study in improving software: What Office 2010 can learn from Notion 3
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 25, 2009, 12:08 PM
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Download a 14-day trial of Notion 3 music composer, plus 10-day trials of IK Multimedia plug-ins, from Fileforum now.
On the surface, this is a review of a music composition product entitled Notion 3, from Notion Software, priced at $249 suggested retail, born out of the original VirtuosoWorks product produced in 2005 by music professor Dr. Jack Jarrett, and which produces realistic orchestral sound from precisely notated sheet music on a standard Windows-based PC or Mac. But if you've never composed music before, and even if you don't plan on doing so in the future, I urge you to read on anyway, because this is about the business that we are all engaged in.
Continue reading A case study in improving software: What Office 2010 can learn from Notion 3...
Will Firefox beat IE9 to Direct2D rendering?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 24, 2009, 12:47 PM
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It was a principal element of the Day 2 keynote at Microsoft's PDC 2009 conference last week in Los Angeles: an early demonstration of code being worked into Internet Explorer 9 that replaces the browser's outdated reliance upon the (very) old GDI rendering library, with new code utilizing Direct2D -- a library that borrows processing power from the GPU. But with the project only having begun last October, it could still be several months before Microsoft creates still more features to make IE9 worthy of a point-release.
By that time, Mozilla could very well have absorbed Direct2D capability into Firefox, if it accepts the contribution of engineer Bas Schouten. By modifying a recent daily build of the organization's "Minefield" track for Firefox 3.7 Alpha 1 for Windows, Shouten was able to graft Direct2D support onto the browser, which also usually relies on the old GDI library. The results were Web pages that were as instantaneous to the eyes as the demos we saw of Direct2D rendering on IE9 test code last week.
Continue reading Will Firefox beat IE9 to Direct2D rendering?...
Microsoft's Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie on Silverlight vs. standards
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 23, 2009, 4:43 PM
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Last week at Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference, Betanews had the honor of being invited to join a small cadre of reporters -- including noted blogger Long Zheng; TechCrunch's Steve Gillmor; and our good friend from SD Times and Technologizer, David Worthington -- for a luncheon with Microsoft's President of Server and Tools, Bob Muglia; and Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. There, we discussed a handful of topics -- some of their comments were candid and off the record, and some were for the record.
The first issue on our plate Tuesday afternoon concerned Silverlight, and Microsoft's continuing efforts to entice developers to build Web sites around a platform that is not considered a "standard," and perhaps never will be. Some developers discount Adobe Flash as a "standard" for the same reason; while others suggest that Flash's ubiquity renders it a de facto standard. The questions for Web developers have centered around whether they can afford to evolve any portion of their forward-facing online assets around a proprietary standard (around Silverlight) and still have it be on "the Web," whose values are based around platform neutrality. Those questions do seem a bit more pronounced for Microsoft than for other platform developers. But how should Microsoft handle the delicate issue of developing for a platform that's "ours" versus one that is "yours?" (And what's the difference really?)
Continue reading Microsoft's Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie on Silverlight vs. standards...
Google's value proposition for Chrome OS: Should we feel insulted?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 23, 2009, 1:19 PM
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Let's be absolutely honest and straightforward about this right up front: Google Chrome OS is not an operating system. It's a device, like the iPhone, only that Google wants to license its specifications to OEMs. Any OEM that builds it is making a Chrome device, whose profile will be so low that it could probably never be switched out to run Windows, even XP. Probably great connectivity, but not enough solid-state storage to manage local documents or store many media files.
More than an Android device, less than a Windows device.
Continue reading Google's value proposition for Chrome OS: Should we feel insulted?...
PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 19, 2009, 8:17 PM
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It ended up being a somewhat different PDC conference than we had anticipated, and even to a certain extent, than we were led to believe. Maybe this was due in part to a little intentional misdirection to help generate surprise, but in the end, the big stories here in Los Angeles this week were more evolutionary than revolutionary. That was actually quite all right with attendees I spoke with this week, most of whom are just fine with one less thing to turn their worlds upside down. It's tough enough for many of these good people to hold onto their jobs every week.
We'll start our conference wrap-up with a look at the flashpoints (remind me to call Score Productions for a jingle to go with that) we talked about at the beginning of the week, and we'll follow up with the topic that crept in under the radar when we weren't expecting.
Continue reading PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?...
PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 19, 2009, 1:21 AM
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I know when I've hurt a man's feelings. In a segment of the technology business that has recently become fiercely competitive, it's difficult to report bad news about a team that tries very hard to build a good Web browser. It was very apparent from our interview today at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles that Microsoft Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch has an emotional and personal investment in the product he's building.
"If I had a script engine that was twice as fast as the one before, the Web should be twice as fast," said Hatchamovitch today. "But if JavaScript is 10 percent of my site, at most, I'll shave 5 percent off; and if the site was 1.8 seconds, yea, I'm not going to be able to tell...Yes, we understand that there's a microscope on JavaScript performance. We've made progress on JavaScript performance -- we're all in the same neighborhood now."
Continue reading PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance...
PDC 2009 Post-keynote Day 2: What are we learning today?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 18, 2009, 2:20 PM
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The Day 2 keynote is actually still ongoing at the time I'm writing this -- it's run 20 minutes over schedule, and the SharePoint demos are still going on. But here's an assessment of the information we've received thus far today: First of all, the first news on Internet Explorer 9. If you weren't listening closely to Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky, you might have missed this little fact: The team is only three weeks into the project, having just started after the Windows 7 launch. Now, think about that for a bit: The implication here is that the development team cannot work on the operating system and the Web browser at the same time. This from the company that used to argue that the two components were inseparable.
Then there is the whole "three weeks in" news...It's difficult to believe that Microsoft hasn't really been working on a Web browser since last March, and I actually expect Dean Hachamovitch, who leads IE8 design, to contradict that bit of information. He and his team haven't been lying dormant.
Continue reading PDC 2009 Post-keynote Day 2: What are we learning today?...
PDC 2009: Live from the Day 2 keynote
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 18, 2009, 11:33 AM
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Microsoft's Windows division president Steven Sinofsky is the headliner for today's Day 2 keynote at PDC 2009, and Betanews has its usual front-row seat.
11:04am PT: Promise of discussion on Windows Mobile at MIX '10 next March 15-17 in Las Vegas -- notice once again that the number "7" is omitted from the reference to this product. Keynote ends 35 minutes over schedule.
PDC 2009: Windows Server's plan to move customers back off the cloud
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 18, 2009, 2:21 AM
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Much of the value proposition for Windows Azure -- the star of the show Tuesday at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles -- has been its ability to open up new business avenues for customers who had not been able to envision hosting high-intensity data center operations before. Azure could give these customers a leg up, a new and more affordable way to get off the ground.
But once they're off the ground, the question becomes, why stay up in the air? What's to keep those customers grounded -- to mix metaphors like an old editor of mine -- in the cloud? The surprise answer to that question is coming from a senior product manager for Windows Server, not Azure. Scott Ottaway told Betanews today that provisions are being planned for customers to move their deployed applications back off the Azure cloud, onto on-premises data center servers.
Continue reading PDC 2009: Windows Server's plan to move customers back off the cloud...
PDC 2009 Day 1, post-keynote: What are we learning so far?
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 17, 2009, 1:43 PM
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What we're seeing evidence of today is a kind of Microsoft restructuring in progress -- a slow shift toward a future revenue model that actually began about two years ago. Rather than alert Dow Jones as to the need for major structural change, the company did what its MVPs have always suggested enterprises do for themselves: Don't panic, plan, and take things slowly.
But this means juggling a lot of balls in the air in mid-transition, the move to a more global network-centric and license-based revenue model. So individuals who were looking for the launch of a boxed product today, something with a jazz theme and a celebrity to accompany it, were probably disappointed -- but that's no evidence of the lack of a strategy. We're seeing a framework shift, and if you look at Microsoft using the old frame, you don't see the whole picture.
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Live from the PDC 2009 Day 1 keynote
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 17, 2009, 11:30 AM
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Chief Architect Ray Ozzie is scheduled to be the main presenter this morning at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. We're in our usual location at the press box.
10:05am PT: New applications server called App Fabric goes into beta today, Muglia announced -- a "platform for building scale-out, high-tier services." Enabling developers to concentrate on core functionality, fielding out the failover part of the operation to Microsoft. Database cache is kept entirely in the cloud. Sounds at first glance like a more pre-packaged, buffet-table-based model for delivering cloud-based applications through Azure.
PDC 2009: Scuttling huge chunks of Vista architecture for a faster Windows 7
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 17, 2009, 2:45 AM
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The reason Windows Vista seemed slow, and somehow, strangely seemed even slower over time, is now abundantly clear to Microsoft's architects: The evolution of computer hardware, particularly the CPU, exceeded anyone's expectations at the time of Vista's premiere in early 2007. But the surge in virtualization, coupled with the rise of the multicore era, produced a new reality where suddenly Vista found itself managing systems with more than 64 total cores.
Architects had simply not anticipated that the operating system would be managing this many cores, this soon -- at least, that appears to be the underlying message we're receiving here at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. As independent scientists were speculating about possible performance drop-offs after 8 cores, server administrators were already seeing it. There were design tradeoffs for Windows Vista -- tradeoffs in efficiencies that could have been obtained through complex methods, for simplicity.
Continue reading PDC 2009: Scuttling huge chunks of Vista architecture for a faster Windows 7...
Microsoft launches Office 2010 technical beta a few days early
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 16, 2009, 5:39 PM
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Participants in the first Technical Preview for Microsoft Office 2010 received invitations this morning to join the Office 2010 technical beta build 4536.1000. Not long afterward, the link to the technical beta went live on MSDN and TechNet.
Ironically, once again, attendees at Microsoft's own PDC 2009 conference were the last to know about it, unless they were checking their own e-mail. The first hint that something was up came up during an unrelated demo during Day 0 of the conference. At the bottom of a screen where taskbar demos were being shown, the new icons for the Office 2010 apps showed up. Now, it appears all Office apps will be represented by their initials, not just Word.
Continue reading Microsoft launches Office 2010 technical beta a few days early...
PDC 2009 Day 0: Vista is through
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 16, 2009, 2:17 PM
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The architects who redeveloped the thread scheduling system for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 realized that during the Vista era, they made some design decisions in favor of simplicity, especially for developers. But that simplicity came with a performance hit, especially from processes running in multicore processors -- the more the cores, the bigger the hit.
We all saw that with Vista. In overcoming these deficiencies, it's apparent from listening to the architects themselves, speaking on "Day 0" of PDC 2009 in Los Angeles (the day before the big keynotes), that they had come to loathe Vista's problems just as much as everyday users.
PDC 2009 Preview: The move to Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 13, 2009, 1:25 PM
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All next week, Betanews will be reporting from Los Angeles, at the scene of this year's Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference. Based on our experience with prior years' shows, here's the pattern we expect: Day 1 (officially next Tuesday) will center on self-congratulation for Windows 7, much of it deserved. Day 2 will likely bring out the bugle corps for the public introduction of Office 2010 Beta 1 -- not the Technical Preview that's currently being circulated, but a more feature-complete rendition that should have more Web- and cloud-related connectivity.
But our coverage will begin on Monday with an unusual twist to "Day 0," which is usually reserved for in-depth workshops that command extra attendance fees. This year, Microsoft is trying an unusual step by opening up its day-long "Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp," headlined by Technical Fellow and SysInternals engineer Mark Russinovich, not only to all PDC attendees but to the general public. Here, we'll see how much attention Windows 7 can get not just from developers, but from passers-by on the street corner.
Continue reading PDC 2009 Preview: The move to Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010...