MPAA cheers online distribution, glosses over YouTube
In February, the US Senate cut nearly $250 million in aid to the motion picture industry from the economic stimulus bill. Legislators determined that Hollywood studios didn't need the "bailout" after enjoying several months of record-breaking sales.
Yesterday, however, the Motion Picture Association of America attempted to show lawmakers how important the entertainment industry is to the global economy, releasing a study (PDF available here) which suggests, "The production and distribution of motion pictures and television programs is one of the nation's most valuable cultural and economic resources," and therefore worthy of hefty tax breaks.
Expensive roaming is history in EU this July
The European Commission's quest to end "roaming ripoffs" on text message and data charges incurred while roaming in the EU has come to a triumphant end.
The European Commission's proposal (PDF available here) to cap wholesale data roaming rates and roaming text costs was approved by the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council in December and was approved yesterday by the European Parliament.
New Opteron EE processors attempt to carve out an 'ultra-low-power' niche
Already, AMD has a low-power segment to its Opteron server processor line, the HE series. With Intel Xeon processors still holding a measurable performance lead -- especially with models that command a comfortable premium -- AMD needs to be able to compete efficiently and maintain that goal of 40% gross margin (it made 43% last quarter). And to do that, the company feels it needs a new product category for a certain segment of customers who may be willing to pay a bit extra for something particularly useful.
If that's not performance, then for now, maybe it can be very low power consumption. This afternoon, the company announced a new and exclusive segment of Opteron EE quad-core processors that are intentionally turned down, drawing 40 watts of average CPU power (ACP, which is AMD's own metric) versus 75 watts for the standard Opteron and 55 watts for the company's Opteron HEs -- which will continue to exist as an in-between choice.
Dell launches notebooks with lower prices but higher resolution
Retrevo provides a survival guide to greener living with electronics
For your Earth Day reading enjoyment, the folks at Retrevo (that indispensable source for the product manual you were just sure you'd never need to open again -- you know, the one you tossed two days before you desperately needed page 47) have a nice PDF guide to greening your electronics usage without tearing your hair out.
And if 30 pages is too much greenery for you -- a real possibility according to a recent Retrevo survey -- we talked them out of one tip that everyone should be able to handle.
AMD: 12-core server CPUs in 2010, 16-core in 2011
During a press webcast Wednesday afternoon, AMD server business unit VP Pat Patla verified yesterday's news revealed during the company's quarterly earnings call yesterday, but then added one big component: In addition to six-core "Istanbul" Opteron server CPUs for 2P, 4P, and 8P servers available as soon as this June -- moved up from the second half of the year -- the first of AMD's 45 nm 12-core Opteron server CPUs will become available next year.
The "dodeca-core" processor will be made possible through an upgraded version of AMD's Direct Connect Architecture, now numbered 2.0. Patla showed off an accelerated roadmap for future server CPUs, which from here on out divides Opteron series into two families -- the general-performance 4000 series and the higher-performance 6000 series -- featuring 16-core "Valencia" and "Interlagos" architecture 32 nm CPUS, respectively, as soon as 2011.
New LG TVs support HD DivX
Today, DivX and LG Electronics announced that the upcoming line of HDTVs from LG will carry the DivX Certification for full 1080p DivX playback. LG says its new line of TVs will be available in late May in the United States, and within the next eight days in Europe.
With the DivX 7 software package, users can compress a full HD movie onto a USB stick or SD card, or several on a standard DVD. The company says a 2-hour 1080p feature film (H.264 .mkv) can fit on an 8GB SD card. The companies mentioned that these TVs will be able to play back DivX content "from the PC or the Internet through the USB slot."
AT&T profits fall sharply, but wireless subscribers flock to iPhone
The big news from AT&T's first quarter earnings report is that both revenue and profits dropped; revenue fell $1.7 million, and profit dropped by $4 million, or 9.7%.
While the company continues to suffer drain from its wireline services, AT&T's wireless business is booming, adding a net 1.2 million subscribers in the quarter. Of that 1.2 million, some 875,000 signed new contracts. Industry researchers at Changewave recently found that of all the mobile operators, AT&T consistently manages to attract and keep the most new subscribers, and many suspect the iPhone is responsible.
Seagate adopts the 'hybrid' theme for Earth Day with 5900 RPM HDD
On this Earth Day, a number of manufacturers are releasing their "green" product announcements, some believing they're either capitalizing upon, or trying to jump-start, a social trend in smarter engineering. But PC builders and OEMs don't need peace rallies and protest signs to tell them how important it is to make systems and data centers run cooler and with more energy efficiency.
For them, the news from Seagate today about a new class of lower-power Barracuda hard drives that makes an effort to squeeze out a little more performance than low-power drives have before, will make them skip over the whole Earth Day part and go straight to the details. The company's new Barracuda LP series will be unique in that it won't reduce drive rotation as much as other brands and as Seagate's own brands have in the past.
Beta of Live USB Sugar OS opens
Sugar Labs, makers of the icon-based GUI for the One Laptop Per Child XO-1 announced today the first beta of Sugar on a Stick, a live version of the operating system that can be booted from a USB stick as small as 1GB in size.
While One Laptop Per Child continues forth despite the crushing blows dealt by the economy, Sugar Labs has found that a Live distro of its linguistically-unencumbered interface will help it grow outside of the confines of the "$100 laptop". Based on Fedora LiveUSB, Sugar on a Stick boots to the Linux distribution, and stores all usage data on the USB device without any alteration to the host system.
At last, Windows Live Messenger has a Web interface
Better late than, um... what took so long, again? Never mind: Microsoft's release this week of a Web interface to its Windows Live Messenger instant-messaging service is good news for users in Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the UK and the US. (The rest of you are going to have to wait.)
The interface can be reached from one's Windows Live Hotmail or People pages -- in other words, from any computer that can get online. (It worked fine from my Mac and Linux boxes, and from within Firefox.) Sign in as usual and there's a Messenger option in the upper-right corner; you can sign in or, if you need your privacy at the moment, you can ignore it.
Yahoo earnings down, but this time there's a $@)#! plan
No surprises in the Yahoo earnings call on Tuesday, but not much joy either: EPS for the search giant for Q1 weighed in at a feather-light 8 cents, down 29 cents (or 78%, if you prefer) year-over-year. Net income was $118 million on revenue of $1.58 billion.
Also: CEO Carol Bartz dropped the f-bomb near the end of the call. It may not be the most upbeat hour of the earnings-report season these days, but under Bartz's charge Yahoo's calls are, heaven knows, never dull.
VMware launches 'cloud OS' for SMBs, hosters and enterprises
At a large-scale rollout today, VMware and blue-chip partners filled in the details on a cloud-oriented "virtualization operating system" that's been hinted more and more about since its initial preview at an EMC customer conference last fall.
Essentially, vSphere 4 "slides in a new layer of software" for bringing together "islands" of server software running in different operating environments, said VMWare CEO Paul Maritz, speaking at an event that also featured live appearances by top brass from allies Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.
AMD: Six-core Istanbul server CPUs moved up to May
During the early part of this afternoon's conference call with analysts this afternoon, AMD CEO Dirk Meyer told analysts -- one day ahead of a momentous product call scheduled for tomorrow afternoon -- that strong reception and testing for its Istanbul-architecture server CPUs will enable the company to start orders for its first six-core products next month. This will enable shipments of six-core systems from suppliers as soon as June, said Meyer.
This despite a continuing, if somewhat diminished, loss for the first quarter of the year of $416 million, on revenue that was 21% lower annually. The server side of the business, Meyer admitted twice, was something of a downer for the quarter, while sales of CPUs and graphics chips in the desktop and mobile segments rose to compensate. The company continues to be cautious about its outlook, and disputes Intel's claim earlier in the week that the fallout in the technology industry had hit bottom.
1080i Amazon on Demand comes to TiVo
TiVo was definitely an early adopter with Amazon's movie download service, equipping its Series2 and Series3 set-top boxes with Amazon Unbox more than two years ago. As streaming video-on-demand has gained popularity, TiVo's roster of services has grown substantially.
Today, TiVo's version of the Amazon Video on Demand service gains more than 500 high-definition titles from major studios, including new-release films "Frost/Nixon," and "Twilight," and popular TV shows like "Gossip Girl," and "Californication."
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