Microsoft watchers have two interesting stories to follow this week. First is the new Intellectual Property (IP) licensing scheme. The second is a feverish round speculation (just a rumor) that Microsoft will buy AMD. Both tie into an older story about plans for the next generation Xbox.Editorial Notice: All opinions are those of the author and not necessarily those of osnews.com
The IP story alone is quite interesting. The AMD story, while a long shot, is potentially huge. The older Xbox story has gained significance in light of the other two. Together, these stories suggest Microsoft may be about to launch a new hardware related business strategy.
Microsoft announced their new IP scheme with great fanfare last week. Read a more objective report here. They positioned this new scheme as a fit of generosity. On a side note, this is why MS is so disliked in the industry. They come up with a self-serving gambit, and solemnly tell you its entirely for your benefit. The infuriating thing is that they really believe it. That explains their petulance when these things are criticised.
Anyway, the two specific initiatives they announced were licensing regimes for Clear Type and the FAT file system. The FAT regime requires 25˘ payment to MS per formatted device. To a maximum of $250,000 per company. The main effect of this will be on digital storage devices for things like cameras. $250,000 will not break any manufacturer, and the 25˘ per device can be hidden easily in the price. Microsoft is well within their rights here. They hold patents on FAT and the fees are not excessive. However, hardware manufacturers won't like to pay for what used to be free. And they're not going to like paying Microsoft for using something that became the standard because it was free.
In a Register story , Andrew Orlowski reports Microsoft hired Marshall Phelps away from IBM in June. Phelps was the man that monetized IBM's patent portfolio. The story quotes Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation as saying, “from 1935 to 1984, IBM did not ever enforce a patent for license revenue." IBM's 2002 annual report states their patent revenue for that year was $1.1 billion. This was down from a peak of $1.6 billion in 2000. Phelps is widely credited with inventing this business.
We all know that Microsoft is desperate for new sources in income. Office and Windows are the only divisions making money. Microsoft has acknowledged that growth is flattening in these sectors as well. They have made big investments in cable TV, game consoles, an ISP, embedded operating systems, and phones. None of these have paid off so far. A new income stream based on Microsoft's patent portfolio is a no-brainer.
Orlowski observes that Microsoft is well positioned to push Linux and Linux distributors on patent issues. He writes "Microsoft's actions so far don't constitute a full frontal attack on free software. It's often been rumored that Microsoft has a number of patents - the number varies - on the Linux kernel itself. But it has chosen not to pursue such an inflammatory tactic, just yet, and may not even need to at all in order to succeed."
He reckons by crippling the likes of RedHat and Novell with legal threat, MS may be able to manage the Linux contagion. Things may not be so simple anymore, however. SCO has radicalized the community and make it clear that while fractious, the open source community is no pushover.
Too much pressure could also bring unwelcome anti-trust attention. John Ashcroft will not run the Department of Justice forever. And the individual states have shown they are not shy about acting on their own. A convicted monopolist using patents to cripple technological development would be a tempting political target. Even a pro-business regime like the Bush administration needs to throw an occasional scrap to the hounds.
- "Toll Road, Page 1"
- "Toll Road, Page 2"
"After a long wait, Apple has released the next major update to its pro-class photo workflow application, Aperture 3. The new version boasts over 200 new features, including the addition of the successful facial recognition and geotagging features, Faces and Places, that were introduced with iPhoto '09. Version 3 also adds edge-detecting adjustment brushes for non-destructive localized editing and touch-ups. Along with numerous UI and performance improvements, Aperture 3 adds full 64-bit support on supported systems running Snow Leopard."
"Every few months I make a pilgrimage to the Sysinternals website to look at its superb collection of tools. It's now hosted inside the Microsoft Technet monster since its authors joined Microsoft as employees some while ago, but the value of their site is still as strong as ever and the tools are now guaranteed not to be ignored or left to rust."
Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick. The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied. A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the "Quantum Tunnelling Composite". The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets."Whereas the iPhone is aimed at short, focused tasks, the iPad is more likely to lend itself to longer, more general tasks that involve using multiple apps, just as we're used to on the Mac. It's easy to imagine wanting to use an iPad to read text in Mobile Safari, copy some text to a Pages document, and send that document to a colleague via Mail. That specific example may turn out to be possible with the current iPhone OS, but it points toward needing more ways for iPad apps to work together in the future."
"The 'Llano' processor that AMD described today in an ISSCC session is not a CPU, and it's not a GPU - instead, it's a hybrid design that the chipmaker is calling an 'application processor unit', or APU. Whatever you call it, it could well give Intel a run for its money in the laptop market, by combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four out-of-order CPU cores on a single, 32nm processor die."
"The scuttlebutt is that IBM seemed perfectly content to wait until May to launch the Power7-based Power Systems servers, but something changed and compelled the company to move up the announcement of its first machines using the eight-core processor to today. Big Blue is not in a habit of explaining its motives or its timing for product launches, but it seems clear that IBM wanted to get out in front of a whole lot of processor and systems launches that are expected between now and the summer."
Mozilla has announced that they are going to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger definitively. "Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then," Josh Aas writes, "We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X and 10.4 support has been a hindrance. Where we can work around supporting 10.4, doing so consumes valuable time and effort. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this.""The ancient bug was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy in January 2010 and involves a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run very old programs. Mr Ormandy has found a way to exploit this utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7. The patch for this vulnerability will appear in the February security update. Five of the vulnerabilities being patched at the same time allow attackers to effectively hijack a Windows PC and run their own programs on it."
"Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM's regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap."
With all the virtualization schemes running on top of Linux, how do they exploit the underlying kernel for I/O virtualization? The answer is virtio, which provides an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Discover virtio, and learn why Linux will soon be the hypervisor of choice.