If PCs are now trucks, as Steve Jobs suggests, then there have been some wrecks on the computing highway this week.
First, there's Sony, which is recalling half a million Vaio notebooks because they can, apparently, get hot enough to "cause skin burns". Ouch. Oddly, though, Sony has only received a handful of complaints about laptops overheating, and apparently a software download can actually solve the problem. So, this recall sounds like more trouble than it's worth.
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Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20102 comments
We at RCPU hate passwords, mainly because we can never remember them and end up getting locked out of our bank accounts (which is probably just as well in your editor's case...), so news this week that the government wants to replace passwords with something called an identity ecosystem sounded pretty good to us.
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Posted by Lee Pender on July 01, 20101 comments
Back in January, Google took a stand. Fed up with the Chinese government's insistence on filtering search results, the company started automatically redirecting users in mainland China to its Hong Kong site, which remains as unfiltered as pond water.
This week, though, China fought back, threatening (according to Google) to pull Google's license to operate in the country if the Hong Kong hijack continued. Now Google has taken a very impressive stand on this whole thing up to this point...however, pragmatism is now creeping in.
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20103 comments
There's a public beta coming of a lightweight, easy-to-install and (quite possibly) free version of Microsoft's IIS Web server coming soon. And, yes, it'll work with XP. Redmond columnist Mary Jo Foley offers more details.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20100 comments
We at RCPU have always kind of wondered when this sort of thing would happen: A Texas-based company called Versata has filed an antitrust suit against SAP. What's interesting here is that Versata didn't file up the road in the patent-suit haven of Tyler, Texas, but instead is pursuing this claim with the European Union. Now, the EU has hit Microsoft pretty hard in recent years, and we've always suspected something of an anti-American bias in some of those rulings and penalties. How hard will the EU hit a German firm this time, if at all (assuming Versata even has a real case here)? Stay tuned...
Posted by Lee Pender on June 30, 20100 comments
Microsoft says that it has sold 150 million copies of Windows 7 in less than a year, making the operating system...yes, you guessed it, the fastest-selling operating system in Microsoft history! It seems as though we remember hearing similar claims about Vista and not believing them, but somehow just about everything attached to Windows 7 seems pretty credible. So, we'll believe these numbers...as your editor types away on his XP laptop.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 28, 20100 comments
Last month, Microsoft finally stopped just ratting its patent saber and actually wielded it, filing a patent-infringement lawsuit against mouthy upstart competitor Salesforce.com.
So, what has Salesforce.com done in return? Settled? Cowered? Prepared a defense? Well, maybe it's done the latter of those three, but it definitely hasn't done the first two. The "no software" cloud company fired a patent suit right back at Microsoft late last week, setting up untold riches for software patent lawyers everywhere.
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 28, 20101 comments
A Microsoft enthusiast has posted on his blog what he says is official information about "Windows 8" -- the as-yet-unnamed (by Microsoft) successor to Windows 7. Facial recognition, much faster start times and super-whammy graphics are apparently in the offing. Actually, there's not a whole lot more to say than that, but the whole blog entry is here.
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 28, 20105 comments
The deal Microsoft struck with Novell that guaranteed interoperability between Windows and SuSE Linux (and supposedly offered Novell and its customers amnesty from Microsoft's patent wrath) lit the industry on fire when the two companies first announced it in 2006.
Then, it sort of went away. Oh, sure, every now and then some open source zealot would attack the pact or some Microsoft defender would...well, defend it, but most partners and folks in the industry seemed to more or less forget about it. Until this week. Now, Microsoft is talking about it again, and we're not really sure why.
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Posted by Lee Pender on June 23, 20102 comments
It looks ridiculous, doesn't seem to have an obvious purpose outside of maybe storing lots of textbooks for college kids and still seems like an awfully expensive toy...but, gosh darn it, people like that iPad. Three million sold in not quite three months? The pace of sales seems to be quickening, not slowing. Microsoft, maybe you really did miss something with this whole tablet thing.
Posted by Lee Pender on June 23, 20101 comments