Promises, promises, promises … When Apple debuted iTunes Movie Rentals this past January, the company pledged to offer “over 1,000 titles by the end of February, including over 100 titles in stunning high-definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound.” Well, today’s March 4 and, as best I can tell, Apple hasn’t kept its promise.
Microsoft (MSFT) made a “significant” company announcement this morning, one thankfully unrelated to its bid for the much diminished Yahoo (YHOO) Inc.
But what is there for the software giant to talk about these days other than Yahoo, really? Why that old saw, software interoperability, of course. In a statement issued this morning, the software giant [...]
Here’s a savvy way to debut your new advertising-supported music service: announce that it will offer some 25 million songs from “all the major labels,” and then hope that those labels follow your lead. And if they don’t, just hang in there until they do.
Which is essentially what Qtrax, which claims to be the world’s [...]
Microsoft’s gone and killed Vista’s infamous “Kill Switch,” a service that hamstrings unlicensed versions of the operating system.
Responding to complaints, the company said today that the upcoming Service Pack 1 update for Windows Vista will remove “Reduced Functionality Mode” from the OS’s copy-protection scheme.
That’s great news for innocent Vista users who’ve had their systems “reduced” [...]
Burst has added another notch to its patent-infringement settlement belt. The scrappy three-man company, which once beat a $60 million settlement out of Microsoft over charges that the software giant had stolen its streaming media technology, has managed to squeeze a few million out of Apple as well.
Bringing an end to an often contentious [...]
Oracle isn’t going to pay $21-per-share for BEA Systems. In fact, it won’t even pay $17.01-per-share for it–a penny more than its original $17-per-share offer. Because even that would be too much.
In a letter to BEA late Tuesday night, Oracle President Charles Phillips rejected, with barely restrained incredulity, BEA’s proposed acquisition price of $21 [...]
Hard as it might be to believe, people are actually buying Windows Vista. After market close yesterday, Microsoft reported a 27% surge in revenue, to $13.76 billion for the first quarter of 2007, its best quarterly revenue growth in eight years, on robust demand for its new operating system.
Vista appears to be selling far [...]
Flash memory maker SanDisk has apparently devised a means of offsetting the legal bills that might arise from the price-fixing suit filed against it (and 23 other companies) earlier this year: suing the better part of the removable flash storage industry for patent infringement.
SanDisk filed three patent-infringement lawsuits against 25 companies that make, sell or [...]
It’s been a year since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer first claimed the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft’s intellectual property and six months since the company’s general counsel, Brad Smith, and vice president of intellectual property and licensing, Horacio Gutierrez, told Fortune magazine that Linux and other open-source software projects between them violate 235 Microsoft [...]
Vonage lawyer Louis Jameson was right. Vonage doesn’t owe Sprint Nextel a dime. It owes the company 800 million of them. Vonage settled its patent dispute with Sprint Nextel this morning for $80 million–$35 million for past use of Sprint’s patented technology and $40 million for future licensing, along with a $5 million prepayment.
Apple’s fight to keep the iPhone off unauthorized networks will apparently begin in earnest later this week. In a statement released Monday, Cupertino warned users that they can “cause irreparable damage” to their iPhones by modifying them to work on unauthorized wireless networks.
By “irreparable,” Apple seems to mean damage that may turn unlocked iPhones into [...]
If billionaire investor-provocateur Carl Icahn wants to put enterprise software company BEA Systems on the block, he’d best prepare himself for another Time Warner-style siege.
According to Kevin Faulkner, the company’s senior vice president of investor relations, BEA isn’t for sale. And what’s more, even if Icahn is able to use his 8.5% of the company’s [...]
The laundry rooms at Sun Microsystems and Network Appliance must be on the fritz, because the two companies have begun washing their dirty laundry in public. Yesterday, NetApp sued Sun, alleging that its ZFS storage software, a key element of its Solaris operating system, violates seven NetApp patents. Dave Hitz, co-founder of NetApp, explained the [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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