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Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft patent infringement suit tossed (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
castrox
castrox writes: "Ars Technica reports on the just tossed verdict on the claimed Microsofts patent infrigement concerning MP3 compression, filed by Alcatel-Lucent. Quoting Ars:

A judge has overturned a jury's $1.52 billion award in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Alcatel-Lucent against Microsoft. Ruling that Microsoft had not violated one of the two patents in question after all, Judge Rudi Brewster threw out the verdict and indicated that the second patent was on shaky ground as well.
The future of software patents, it seems, will be dominated by people in courtrooms."

Submission + - Keeping track of all your systems

Submitted by FrodoTeeBagins
FrodoTeeBagins writes: Managing multiple servers, programs, and updates is something that IT professionals do everyday. Keeping track of all the servers, passwords, software versions, update history, and logs is becoming a chore that builds up and becomes more complex day by day. What program or method do you use to keep track of all your systems information?
User Journal

Journal Journal: Windows users suffer from "sunk costs" fallacy. 14

Journal by tomhudson

That's the only explanation that fits all the facts, and it explains their behaviour, from the average users' reluctance to try something new to people like Dan "Lying" Lyons spending thousands of hours astroturfing for Microsoft on various message boards (the Yahoo! SCOX discussion board is a good example).

Portables

Lenovo to Sell, Support Linux on ThinkPads 243

Posted by CmdrTaco from the march-of-the-distributions dept.
Pengo writes "Lenovo has announced that they will begin selling T-series ThinkPads with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 pre-installed beginning sometime during the fourth quarter. In addition to supplying the hardware support, Lenovo will also handle OS support for ThinkPad customers, with Novell providing software updates. 'Unlike Dell, which has targeted its Linux offering primarily at the enthusiast community, Lenovo's SLED laptops are targeted at the enterprise. Whether they are running Ubuntu, SLED, or some other distribution, the availability of Linux pre-installation from mainstream vendors increases the visibility of the operating system and gives component makers an incentive to provide better Linux drivers and hardware support. If Lenovo is willing to collaborate with the Linux development community to improve the Linux laptop user experience, it will be a big win for all Linux users, not just the ones who buy laptops from Lenovo.'"
Biotech

MIT Engineers World's First Schizophrenic Mice 159

Posted by kdawson from the beautiful-little-minds dept.
Frosty Piss writes "MIT researchers have created a schizophrenic mouse that pinpoints a gene variation predisposing people to schizophrenia. Research with the mouse may lead to the first genetically targeted drugs for the disease, which affects 1 percent of the population worldwide. This is the first study that uses animals who demonstrate an array of symptoms observed in schizophrenic patients to identify specific genes that predispose people to the disease."
Intel

Submission + - EU slaps Intel with formal antitrust charges (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
castrox
castrox writes: "Quoting Ars Technica

Intel faces a long and costly legal battle in Europe after the European Commission formally lodged antitrust charges against the world's leading CPU manufacturer.

Seems Intel has been playing dirty. A suit filed by AMD last year includes Intel making at least one sell-only-Intel deal in Germany. Sort of interesting since this is what e.g. Microsoft does on a daily basis?"
Biotech

Harvesting Energy from the Human Body 160

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-nothing-compared-to-what-i-harvest-from-mine dept.
Late-Eight writes "Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working on a new type of nanogenerator that could draw necessary energy from flowing blood in the human body. The hope is to incorporate the new nanogenerator into biosensors, environmental monitoring devices and even personal electronics that will require no fuel source, internal or external. Once completed, this new cellular engine could find various applications, even beyond medicine."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft to simplify downgrades from Vista to XP

Submitted by castrox
castrox writes: It seems Microsoft have taken a notice that users may want to run XP instead of Vista. The new deal is to simplify downgrading for the OEMs. Currently, all OEMs must call Microsoft whenever a downgrade is done. After this "simplification" OEMs may submit batches of keys to Microsoft which will save time.

According to the Microsoft blog on ZDNet, the "downgrade software" will still need to be supplied by the end user. The deal is rather perplexing — it does not seem like you can convert the license since the only eligible versions for downgrading is Ultimate and Business.

Effectively, it seems nothing has changed. More on the downgrade "rights" (warning: PDF) here.
Censorship

Submission + - RIAA going bust in Sweden

Submitted by mengu
mengu writes: It seems that a recent decision by Swedish court will make it more difficult for the **AA to find the persons behind the ip-addresses. From TFA "The court is confirming that file sharing is punishable by fines. This means that the police are not permitted to demand details of the addresses behind IP addresses and cannot carry out house searches," said Piratbyrån's Tobias Andersson. What it translates to is that since the crime will only render in fines and not prison time, Search-warrants cannot be issued. http://www.thelocal.se/7581/20070612/
Microsoft

Microsoft Votes to Add ODF to ANSI Standards List 231

Posted by Zonk from the curiouser-and-curiouser dept.
RzUpAnmsCwrds writes "In a puzzling move, Microsoft today voted to support the addition of the OpenDocument file formats to the American National Standards List. OpenDocument is used by many free-software office suites, including OpenOffice.org. Microsoft is still pushing its own Office Open XML format, which it hopes will also become an ANSI standard. Is Microsoft serious about supporting ODF, or is this a merely a PR stunt to make Office Open XML look more like a legitimate standard?"
Graphics

AMD Promises Open Source Graphics Drivers 264

Posted by Zonk from the feel-the-love-linux-gamers dept.
MoxFulder writes "Henri Richard, AMD's VP of sales, has promised to deliver open-source drivers for ATI graphics cards (recently acquired by AMD) at the recent Red Hat Summit. A series of good news for proponents of open-source device drivers. In the last year, Intel, the leading provider of integrated graphics cards, has opened their drivers as well. But ATI and NVidia, the only two players in the market for high-performance discrete graphics cards, have so far released only closed-source drivers for their cards. This has created numerous compatibility, stability, and ethical problems for users of Linux and other open source OSes, and prompted projects like Nouveau to try and reverse-engineer NVidia drivers. Hopefully AMD's decision will put pressure on NVidia to release open-source drivers as well!"
Operating Systems

VMWare Rolls Out Vista Virtualization 152

Posted by Zonk from the i-virtually-am-excited-by-this dept.
MsManhattan writes "VMWare Inc. today is slated to introduce a new version of its workstation virtualization software that supports Windows Vista. The upgrade, VMWare Workstation 6, enables users to run Vista as a host or a guest operating system. Additionally, it allows users to store a virtual machine setup on a portable device — like as a USB drive — and transfer the set-up to another computer. Virtualization, an old concept that has gained new momentum, can help organizations optimize their infrastructures but it can also create expensive management headaches. Just the same, the analyst group Gartner predicts that three million virtual machines will be in use by 2009, up from today's 500,000."
Linux Business

Why Dell Won't Offer Linux On Its PCs 628

Posted by kdawson from the D-I-Y dept.
derrida sends us to an article in the Guardian by Jack Schofield explaining why he believes Dell won't offer Linux on its PCs. In the end he suggests that those lobbying Dell for such a solution go out and put together a company and offer one themselves. Quoting: "The most obvious [problem] is deciding which version of Linux to offer. There are more than 100 distros, and everybody seems to want a different one — or the same one with a different desktop, or whatever. It costs Dell a small fortune to offer an operating system... so the lack of a standard is a real killer. The less obvious problem is the very high cost of Linux support, especially when selling cheap PCs to naive users who don't RTFM... and wouldn't understand a Linux manual if they tried. And there's so much of it! Saying 'Linux is just a kernel, so that's all we support' isn't going to work, but where in the great sprawling heap of GNU/Linux code do you draw the line?"
Software

Debian Package of the Day 58

Posted by kdawson from the even-got-an-RSS-feed dept.
A user writes "The Debian project has started a new webpage: the 'Debian package of the day.' It does what it says — every day another package from the Debian repository is posted with an elaborate description and some nice screenshots. As Debian (and all the other distributions as well) contains way too many packages for it to be feasible to inspect all of them yourself, this is then a nice way of learning about all kinds interesting software packages."
United States

Submission + - DST has come in like a lion in the USA

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The SANS Internet Storm Center at http://www.isc.sans.org/ is keeping a running commentary of US Daylight Saving Time problems that people are reporting. DST in the USA starts three weeks earlier than it has for the past two decades. Reported problems include GPS units, cell phones, home "atomic" clocks, backup software, and electronic time clocks. It's going to be an interesting day at work on Monday...

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