Monthly Archive:: March 2010

Seventy percent of the 40000 people who work on software at Microsoft are in some way working in the cloud internet, CEO Steve Ballmer said in a talk to comp sci students at the University of Washington. "A year from now, that will be 90 percent," he said. Ballmer also said that Microsoft wants to help foster the development of different cloud internet-computing services, both private and public. All Microsoft products including Windows, Office, Xbox, Azure, Bing and Windows Phone are driven by the idea of being connected to the cloud internet.

"RealNetworks has agreed to pay USD 4.5 million and permanently stop selling its RealDVD software as part of a legal settlement with six Hollywood movie studios, the company said Wednesday. The lawsuits date back to 2008, when the movie studios accused RealNetworks of selling software that allowed people to essentially steal DVDs by making copies of them. RealNetworks argued that RealDVD was designed only to let customers make a backup copy of movies on their PC hard drive. But in granting a preliminary injunction against sales of the product last year, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said RealDVD violates federal law as well as a license agreement that Real had signed with the DVD Copy Control Association."

Choson Minjujuui Inmin Konghwaguk, here in the west more commonly known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or North Korea, is a country you usually read about in the foreign affairs section of the newspaper. As a logical consequence of its Juche ideology, North Korea has developed its own Linux distribution.

"Ultimately, we want to be able to securely make transactions without giving third parties the ability to masquerade as us; we want to be able to visit websites and make purchases without those sites being able to track us or combine different pieces of information to draw a more complete picture of us; we want to be able to be able to disclose some information about ourselves, but not everything. The U-Prove framework, released as a CTP today by Microsoft, aims to solve these problems."

"With the latest releases of Opera, Google Chrome and Firefox continuing to push the boundaries of the web, the once-dominant Internet Explorer is looking less and less relevant every day. But we should expect Microsoft to go on the offensive at its upcoming MIX 2010 developer conference in Las Vegas, where, it has been speculated, the company will demonstrate the first beta builds of Internet Explorer 9 and possibly offer a preview release of the browser to developers. Several clues point to the possibility that the next version of IE will include broad support for HTML5 elements, vector graphics and emerging CSS standards. If Microsoft plays its cards right in Vegas, IE 9 could be the release that helps IE get its groove back in the web browser game."

Today's "the day after". The day after Apple started a patent war with HTC and Google. Today, we have statements from both HTC and Google, and a number of other people have weighed in as well as to the possible ramifications of Apple's lawsuit.