On Friday, Motorola launched a phone based on the Intel chip set and Linux operating system; the phone is currently available only in China. Motorola declined to provide details such as price or if/when the phone might be available in the U.S. or Europe. The company sells a phone with a Microsoft operating system in the U.S.
The New York Times reports this morning that Microsoft is wooing Google and has offered to buy (ie, assimilate) the upstart firm.
Neither Google nor Microsoft would confirm the paper’s report. News.google.com, science-tech section, does not list the story, but a search on Google, IPO and Microsoft yields a plethora of citations, many talking about the NYT story.
The Financial Times reported last week that Google was exploring an IPO. Microsoft announced this week that it was splitting MSN into two parts; news reports noted that the firm is still trying to write its own search software.
We can only hope that Google founders remain committed to their own vision, and that they don’t succumb to the prospect of Microsoft $$$$.
Links: NYTimes (requires registration); Washington Post; The Guardian; ZD.net
It’s the week for divorces, it seems.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it was splitting MSN into two parts: communication and information. The information division has the web site, e-commerce, the nascent search technology; this group will also work on an online music store. The communication division has Messenger, Hotmail, Passport.
Interesting timing. It’s the first quarter of profitability for the long-suffering division.
On Monday, stockholders approved a split of Palm Inc., where the software division was spun off, and also approved the purchase of Handspring, Inc. The hardware company will be known as PalmOne.
Links: cNet; InternetNews.com; Financial Times; Seattle Post-Intelligencier; Information Week.
It started as an effort to circumvent the lag time associated with using U.S. Department of Energy computers, according to Dr. Srindhi Varadarajan of Virginia Tech’s Terascale Computing Facility, speaking at the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference.
The project was to build an academic supercomputer. Budget contraints caused him to envision a linked system of off-the-shelf 64-bit processors, bound together with an off-the-shelf backbone.
His first call was to Dell. Negotiations for 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 processors fell through. And IBM said that its PowerPC 970 wouldn’t be available until 2004. Quotes of $9 million to $11 million, well over budget, eliminated AMD and HP.
The unlikely project savior appeared in June, when Apple announced the G5. Three days later, Varadarajan was on the phone with Apple and the next day, on a plane to Cupertino.
When Apple representatives asked Varadarajan how long he’d been using Macs, the answer was “never.” He said, “I’m probably one of the few people who came to the platform by reading the kernel manual.”
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The U.S. Copyright Office has ruled that Lexmark, the second largest printer company in the U.S., cannot invoke the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in its lawsuit against Static Control Components (SCC). The opinion is not binding on the Federal Court that is reviewing the case.
SCC, a small North Carolina firm, sells a chip that allows Lexmark printer owners to use third-party, recycled toner cartridges. The firm contends that Lexmark is trying to use copyright and the DCMA to eliminate competition from the toner cartridge market. The company insists it engaged in “legitimate” reverse engineering, a claim substantiated by the U.S. Copyright decision.
Lexmark says the Copyright office decision is irrelevant. It’s not the reverse engineering that they are complaining about, it’s the “theft” of intellectual property, the software that tells the cartridge that it is empty and must be replaced. This saga began in December 2002, when Lexmark filed suit in federal court.
Links: ZD.net; InternetNews.com; Raleigh News Observer; Triangle Business Journal; CIO; Slashdot; Static Control; Copyright Office Opinion.
The worldwide production of information has increased by 30 per cent each year between 1999 and 2002, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.
The team started measurements with terabytes, but quickly found that insufficient; they also measured information by exabytes, each equal to a million terabytes.
In 2002, we produced about five exabytes of information on paper, film, optical and magnetic media, equal to about half a million new libraries, each containing a digitized version of the print collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. This was twice the volume produced in 1999.
The telephone accounts for the largest percentage of information flow, with e-mail (including spam) placing second.
Links: Globe & Mail; San Jose Mercury News; cNet; 2003 Study, 2000 Study
A federal appeals court has sided with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), upholding a ruling that all television tuners larger than 13″ must have digital tuners by July 2007. The court noted the catch-22 — consumers aren’t buying digital TVs because of the paucity of digital programming; programmers cite lack of receivers as a reason for not creating content.
Links: Washington Post; CNN; FCC press release (PDF).
The Globe & Mail reports that Sony Entertainment will pull a scene featuring terrorists attacking a Toronto shopping mall from the final version of its latest installment in the best-selling Playstation 2 series Syphon Filter 4. Game players were instructed to “mow down” the terrorists, who were identified as being from Quebec.
Opponents of the game said that the theme was close to hate propoganda. The overall mission for the series is to stop a global terrorist consortium from unleashing a fictional a biological weapon that could kill millions.
Imaging being able to find obscure citations by searching the entire contents of a library (all those books!) … from a computer terminal.
Now imagine doing it from your home, when the library is “online” at Amazon.com. That’s the idea behind Amazon’s latest project, launched last week.
This tool allows you to search 33 million pages of 120,000 books — and this is just the beginning. These are not eBooks — what is returned from the search are “pictures” of the pages, not unlike Amazon’s “look inside” feature. There are limits to how many pages a customer can search, both on a per book and calendar year basis.
Links: Authors Guild; Search Engine Watch; Seattle P-I; San Jose Mercury News; Reuters; Amazon press release, letter from Bezos, and FAQ.
Dell’s new 15GB jukebox and music service debuted Tuesday, while Lexar joined the MP3 player market.
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