In the News Archive

It's market share/installed base/whatever time! Net Applications' figures had been under review for a while, and now we know why: they've finally done what should have been done ages ago. Namely, they've added country-level weighting to their figures. They also added this retrospectively, meaning all previous figures have been updated to reflect the change. This has devastating effects for some.

In a recent speech Bill Gates gave to a group of government officials and tech specialists in New Delhi, he criticized US privacy and immigration laws, spoke of his outlook on future technologies, and explained why he got rid of his Facebook page. His criticisms of the US laws took the pretense that health care providers and doctors not being able to share medical information of an individual to other institutions was a stumbling block and that exceptions in strict immigration ought to be made for "smart people" to live and work in high-paying jobs in the US. Gates also mentioned his views of a future with cell phones recognizing people around them or testing for diseases and an Internet being utilized for a broader use than simply web pages and the like. He mentioned that he once had a Facebook page and that it became too much of a time-waster having to sort through ten thousand friend requests periodically.

Every now and then, these news items cross your path that simply don't need any words or imagery in order to make an impact. This is definitely one of those. You all know Amazon's Kindle, right? It's Amazon's successful e-book reader which allows you to buy a subset of Amazon's book catalogue in electronic form. Well, the term "buy" doesn't really apply here. Update: In a rare case of company mea culpa, Amazon has explained that deleting the books was a bad idea, and they assured us it won't happen again. The issue here was that the publisher behind the two Orwell books in the Kindle Store did not have the rights to sell these books, and after Amazon was informed by the rightsholder, they removed the books. Still, according to the NYT, more books were deleted from Kindles, even though Amazon doesn't have the right to do so according to its own TOS.

The pro-internet file sharing Pirate Party yesterday scored a big win by securing a seat in the European parliament. It pulled in 7.1 per cent of votes in Sweden, which handed the party one of the country's 18 seats in the European parliament. "Privacy issues and civil liberties are important to people and they demonstrated that clearly when they voted today," Pirate Party candidate Anna Troberg told Swedish TV on Sunday.

Let's get thoroughly British! What what. Digital Planet, BBC's technology podcast walks through the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (Home to code-cracking Station-X during WWII), taking a simultaneous trip down memory lane discussing the general history of home computing. The podcast also talks to "Pixelh8" a chip-tune composer who has put together "Obsolete?" 'composed using some of the oldest and rarest computers in the world such as the WWII code-breaking machine Colossus Mark 2 Rebuild'.

The news has been out for a few hours already, but we were waiting for some official documentation and sources until we would publish it: Psystar, the Macintosh "clone" maker, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Apparently, the small company has a debt of USD 259000. The filing was made on a voluntary basis, and according to Psystar the financial troubles arise from the economic downturn.

US media giant Time Warner has said it anticipates spinning off one or more parts of AOL as advertising sales decline at the internet business. The announcement came after Time Warner posted stronger-than-expected profits and reaffirmed its full-year forecast. Net profits for the first quarter came in at USD 661m (GBP 448.8m), a fall of 14% from the USD 771m reported a year earlier. Revenue at the company, which owns Time magazine and the CNN and HBO television networks, fell by 7% to USD 6.9bn.

After being admitted to the hospital earlier today, the health situation of Professor Stephen Hawking has improved, and he is now "comfortable" according to a spokesperson of the University of Cambridge in the UK. He was admitted into the hospital today after "chest problems", and university spokespeople stated he was "very ill".

If all this works out, then IBM will be one of the luckiest companies in the world. eWeek has learned a lot of details regarding the IBM-sun acquisition talks, as well as that today, the Sun board is holding another meeting to discuss the talks. The outcome could be that IBM would buy Sun after all - but at a much lower price since Sun's shares fell 25% after it had broken off the negotiations with IBM.

The live migration work in the L4-based "NomadBIOS" hypervisor, which inspired Xen's live migration and the influential "Live Migration of Virtual Machines" USENIX NSDI 2005 paper, also resulted in a Ph.D. thesis called "Virtual Machine Mobility with Self-Migration". The author of the thesis, Jacob Gorm Hansen from the University of Copenhagen, was recently awarded the EuroSys Roger Needham Ph.D. Award for best European operating systems thesis in 2008. Last year's award winner was Adam Dunkels, author of the uIP/LWIP embedded TCP/IP stacks. See this link for more information.

After weeks of negotiations, IBM reportedly is eyeing a $9.55-per-share buyout for Sun Microsystems, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. Such a price would value the deal at roughly $7 billion and offer Sun investors nearly double the price of the stock before reports surfaced earlier this month that the parties are in buyout talks. A report in The New York Times, meanwhile, notes the parties are discussing a purchase price of $9.50 a share. In either case, Sun's investors haven't seen the hardware maker's stock trade at those levels since August. Last spring, Sun was trading at a 52-week high of $16.37 a share.

A week ago, we reported that IBM was in acquisition talks with Sun. Sun has been in trouble for a while now, and has been shopping around the Valley for a potential buyers for the company. This report came from "people familiar with the matter", but it seems that we now have a confirmation from none other than Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini.

During these financially dire times, it's always interesting to keep en eye on the sales figures of computes, to see if the downward trend is still running. Sales figures from February analysed by NPD indicate that while Mac sales went down, sales of Windows PCs went up. Mind, though, that these figures are US-only.

Now's the time for a congregational sigh of relief. After the DTV transition was postponed from February 17th to June 12th, several millions of Americans waited impatiently for government funding to get their $40 converter-box coupons. Now our reliable Congress has approved another $650 million for the program, and the 4.1 million-deep waiting list can begin to flow again. NITA, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, plans to eliminate that pending list in a mere three weeks. If you're not already on the waiting list, you had better skedaddle and get on it because who knows if the money poured into this project will dry up again?