Microsoft yesterday surprised us all when it pledged to make its Office suite interoperable with competitors’ products by adding support for ODF, Adobe PDF and even the XML Paper Specification in a Service Pack due next year. The software giant claims the move will give consumers more choice, but European regulators aren’t convinced such is necessarily the case and thus are launching a probe on them.
The European Commission has long accused Microsoft of abusing its dominant market power by making software that is incompatible with products made by its rivals. Back in February, regulators slapped Microsoft with a record $1.3 billion fine after it defied a 2004 antitrust ruling that came with a $788 million fine. Microsoft is currently appealing against the decision.
While many welcomed the company’s new file format stance, its rivals termed the move insufficient and a delaying tactic amid an ongoing anti-trust battle opened against Microsoft in January, which targets its widely-used Office program.
Recently, Cisco's Chief Security Office, John Stewart, made an interesting statement regarding the nature of today's virus and malware threats. He has stated that spending money on Antivirus (along with other types of malware protection) is a complete waste, with vendors fighting an uphill battle that they are losing. It's a statement that many could probably relate to, as often even a machine that is fully patched and fully updated can still fall prey to viruses or spyware.
Mr. Stewart asserts that the frequency of new malicious software being released into the wild has made it so commonplace as to be almost ignorable, with companies preferring to just “live with them” rather than struggle to fight them. That sounds like a complete loss of hope, but it wasn't all doom and gloom – he vouched for the idea of white-listing software, crafting systems that only let certain software execute at all. Provided that control is in the hands of the user (or at least whoever administers the machine), it's a nice ideal if not completely realistic.
A lot of people disagree with that point of view – the regional director of McAfee, for instance, who retorted to the Cisco Chief's comments, claiming that while AV suites are not perfect, it is certainly leagues better than having an unprotected machine.
Earlier this year a company called Core Security reported it had found critical vulnerabilities in Apple’s iCal calendar program that can be remotely exploited to crash the application or execute arbitrary code. Now, after several months of Apple wavering over whether the flaws were serious enough to warrant patches, the security vendor has decided to detail the three bugs hoping that it would prompt Apple to take action more rapidly.
According to an advisory from Core Security, the most serious of the bugs is the result of a memory corruption vulnerability that can be triggered if a user runs a malicious .ics file, while the other two are null-pointer errors caused when parsing malformed .ics files. The vulnerabilities affect iCal version 3.0.1 running on Mac OS X 10.5.1. As of this writing, no official patch has been released from Apple so until then users are strongly advised to only open .ics files from a known, verified source.
by Jose Vilches on May 22, 2008, 9:12 AM | (2 comments)
It’s that time of the month again when AMD releases a new set of Catalyst drivers for Radeon graphics card owners, bringing the usual host of bug fixes along with performance improvements for the Radeon HD 3xx0 series in several games such as Call of Juarez, Lost Planet, Halo, Stalker, and World in Conflict.
Besides that, however, Catalyst 8.5 also introduces some significant new features including some that will certainly please HTPC users. Among those is support for TV output adhering to the SECAM (a European color television standard), 1080p24 mode support, and HDMI audio support for all TV timing modes and non-standard (CEA 861b) TV modes. AMD claims Adaptive Anti-Aliasing support for OpenGL applications has been added, as well.
You can learn more about the changes and fixes within the official release notes. The drivers are for all ATI Radeon graphics cards from the 9500 on up, and as usual they are available for Windows XP 32 and 64-bit, Vista 32- and 64-bit, and Linux.
Apple has been criticized by some environmental groups for not being a leader in removing toxic chemicals from its new products, but the company has pledged to mend its ways. It appears now that Apple will indeed live up to its promise as it is set to replace all the CCFL backlights in its MacBook range with energy-efficient LED systems by 2009.
This is according to Economic Daily News, a Taiwanese publication that spoke with Apple's main supplier of LED backlight units, Kenmos, which could ship as many 1.5 million LED backlight units this year alone. Since Apple has already made LED backlit displays standard on its 13-inch MacBook Air and offers them as a build-to-order option on the 17-inch MacBook Pro, such an update to the MacBook line seems like a no-brainer. LED backlighting not only provides a brighter display, it is also better for the environment, better for color reproduction, and better for battery life.
OpenOffice makes great strides to be compatible with Microsoft formats, which is often an uphill battle with how often MS changes their formats around. With how intent MS has seemed to be in the past on keeping outsiders from prying into an Office document, it is surprising now that they claim to be opening up their office suite to the ODF format. Microsoft claims that their current and future versions of Office will support the Open Document Format version 1.1, starting with Office 2007 Service Pack 2. They also claim they are joining OASIS to work on the next release of ODF.
The first part might be hard to swallow but at least plausible to supporters of ODF, but Microsoft being part of the decision making process in future versions of ODF sounds bad. Their tactics in the past of embrace, extend and obliterate has let them remove many competitors in the past, and given how big of a cash cow is Office is to them, it is easy to see why many are skeptical.
by Justin Mann on May 21, 2008, 4:40 PM | (3 comments)
Have you ever signed up for a new service then found out a few months later it completely sucks? In the modern world where most of us have a plethora of choices to choose from, such as with cell service carriers and ISPs, it's usually just a matter of terminating your old contract and picking up a new one with a new company. If you have done that, however, you've also likely run into early termination fees. These companies want so badly to prevent you from leaving that just about all of them have steep penalties for anyone leaving a contract early, with most early termination fees ranging from $100 to $200.
The FCC sees that as excessive, and is now considering a bid to limit these fees. The FCC seems to be considering an overhaul with the system, giving consumers the right to cancel with no penalty in the first month of service, reducing the maximum size of the termination fees and allowing the fees to “taper off” the longer service has been established. The proposal itself was actually sponsored by Verizon – one of the largest cell companies in the U.S. Why? While hiding behind a proposal that seems to be consumer-friendly, in actuality they are seeking immunity from lawsuits related to just such fees. Class-action lawsuits in multiple states have been filed at multiple times against these companies for these fees.
The cell companies claim such fees are necessary to recoup losses from cell phone sales and the cost of setting up and supporting new customers. The customers, on the other hand, believe it's just a way of strong arming you into sticking with their service, whether or not you are unhappy with it.
Unless you're a member of the retro-gaming community, you probably never think about the SNES anymore. And yet, Nintendo is battling the EU over that very console all the way into 2008, following a hefty fine the EU laid down 6 years ago. In 2002, the EU accused Nintendo of price-fixing the SNES for several years in the 1990s, and sought to penalize them for their actions. They handed them a fine of 149.1 million Euros, a fine rivaled by very few others.
The EU asserts the fine was fair, whereas Nintendo claims it was not only unfair, but outright illegal. As a result, Nintendo is refusing to pay the draconian fine. That's quite a while to wait to fight back, but is still interesting.
by Jose Vilches on May 21, 2008, 3:19 PM | (3 comments)
In an effort to lure people to its search engine and convince advertisers that it has a viable strategy to combat Google’s share of the online ad market, Microsoft today unveiled a new program whereby it plans to pay consumers who search and buy products through Microsoft’s Live Search engine.
Microsoft will reportedly pay users who buy products found through its Live Search Cashback engine between two and 30 percent of their purchase depending on the store they choose – in other words Microsoft is giving up their commission for referring a sale and passing it to users. The initiative may seem a bit desperate, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless. As part of the program, the software giant is also unveiling a new business model that allows search marketers to pay for ads only when users buy a product, rather than when they simply click on their ads.
While admittedly I spend much of my time testing high-end motherboards that come at astronomical prices, and graphics cards that cost more than some people's first cars, I never forget about the importance of value. In fact, the one thing that I constantly keep in the back of my mind when evaluating any product is how well it stacks up in terms of value and its competitors.
The Radeon HD 3650 looks to be an attractive product on paper, it is the latest member of the Radeon HD 3000 series, and can carry up to 1GB of memory on-board. The 3650 is also a Direct X 10.1 compliant card that supports the PCI Express 2.0 bus. Furthermore, like all Radeon HD 3000 series products, this new low-end graphics card is built using a 55nm design process. Topped off with a 725MHz core speed, the Radeon HD 3650 sounds like quite a gutsy little graphics card.
But of course the card had to fell short in other places, otherwise we wouldn't be calling it a budget product. For example, it is limited to a 128-bit wide memory bus, and when combined with rather sluggish GDDR2 memory, the Radeon HD 3650 produces a memory bandwidth of just 16GB/s. To put this figure into perspective, it is comparable to the Radeon X700 XT which was released back in 2004. This goes to remind us what is the Radeon HD 3650 is targeted to a certain less demanding crowd and that we shouldn't expect spectacular results on the gaming front.
Modern-day phishers often chase the avenues they see as most likely to pay off, and the increasing popularity of iTunes has now made it (and iTunes users) a target. A new scam has been reported that is specific to the aforementioned app, though it follows the same basic methods that most other phishing scams use. The new scam urges people to fix issues with their iTunes account, luring them to a fake billing login page. They try to pilfer credit card numbers social security numbers and other sensitive information from unsuspecting people.
A savvy user is not going to be fooled by these obvious scams, but given the mass appeal of iTunes it seems likely that many people will.
Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3650 1GB review @ TechSpot Keep track of removed video from YouTube @ YouTomb 10 Cool Websites We Recommend @ Ploomy 10 things you can do when Windows XP won’t boot @ TechRepublic See more articles and reviews.
Though previously leaked details already revealed AMD would be using GDDR5 memory in at least one of its forthcoming next-gen ATI Radeon graphics card products, it wasn’t until today that the company confirmed it is working with a number of leading memory providers, including Samsung, Hynix and Qimonda, to bring GDDR5 to market.
It is the German-based Qimonda, however, who will be supplying the GDDR5 modules to be used with the first R700 chips that hit the market. According to AMD’s internal testing, GDDR5 has been found to support data rates at up to five times that of GDDR3 and four times that of GDDR4, enabling more bandwidth over a narrower memory interface.
Qimonda said its GDDR5 chips are already being produced in volume and started shipping to AMD, hinting that the launch of the Radeon HD 4800 series is indeed not far off. There will be GDDR3 variants of the 4800 line too, so it should be interesting put these cards on the bench to see the difference performance-wise.
Acer's entrance into the “enthusiast” PC market is now underway, with the company planning the release of their “Predator” series PCs. They're going head to head with other brand-name high performance machines such as Dell's XPS and Alienware lines, targeting both notebook and PC users. The machines are fairly conspicuous, according to reports, with Acer going for shock value in designing the color scheme for the units. It looks unique, to say the least.
The Predator PCs will be an extension of their Aspire G hardware, and will come out of the factory with a Core 2 Extreme or Core 2 Quad CPU with 1333MHz FSB available. The units will also feature a motherboard with an nForce 780 SLI chipset, can be configured for up to 8GB of DDR2-1066, include a Blu-ray burner by default and will sport at least two GPUs. While the chassis for the unit looks gawky in my eyes, the HDD bays are the same type of externally-accessible hot-swap bays you'd find in modern servers. All and all, on paper the system has impressive specifications, likely for an impressive price. Given that many enthusiasts seek to build systems themselves, I don't know how much more room there is for “super elite” hardware resellers. Acer will try, though.
In a move that challenges Apple and others looking for a space in people’s home entertainment centers, Netflix yesterday introduced a dedicated set-top box that will stream the company’s movies and TV shows to a subscriber’s television set.
But while Apple and Netflix are going after the same potential customers, their offerings are fairly different. Apple is focusing on new releases that are rented individually by customers, whereas Netflix offers a subscription-based service with unlimited access to older titles, starting at $8.99 per month for the one movie plans.
The small square box, which is made by a company called Roku, sells online for $99.99 and the on-demand movies are available to Netflix subscribers at no extra cost. The device currently streams DVD quality content only, but the company is also working with LG to introduce a set-top box which is rumored to be capable of streaming high-def videos.
