Warner Music CEO: 'We were wrong'
The chief of one of the labels leading the fight against P2P has a surprising change of heart: The industry, he says, was wrong about digital music.
Edgar Bronfman's comments came as part of a broader talk about mobile music at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress. He seemed to admit that the industry itself was at fault for the piracy problem that now plagues digital music.
New Russian movie download site follows AllofMP3's lead
Although it is apparently not related to the music download site that was the bane of the music industry's existence, a new site is promising cheap downloads of movies.
Called ZML, the new site offers about 1,500 different titles for download that are free of any digital rights management restrictions. Among the titles available include recent hits 300 and Transformers, as well as classics Apocalypse Now and Aliens.
Leopard update fixes Finder data loss bug
Less than three weeks after its launch, the first update to Mac OS X Leopard, version 10.5.1, has arrived, bringing with it a number of bug fixes and security updates.
While Leopard's arrival was greeted with overwhelmingly positive reviews, a number of problems did hit early adopters. Most notably, some users found that when they were moving files across a network and the destination drive disappeared, Finder still deleted them from the source. Apple says it has fixed the problem, although it may be a little late for an unlucky few.
IBM floats 'Blue Cloud' data servers
[EP's note: With this story, we welcome one of the most respected bylines in all of technology journalism - correspondent Jacqueline Emigh - to the BetaNews team.]
Giving a nod to the privacy concerns of enterprise customers, IBM today is launching Blue Cloud, a "cloud computing" manifestation enabling companies run data-intensive Web 2.0-class applications directly with their own data centers.
Comcast sued over file sharing practices
The nation's largest cable provider has been taken to court by a San Francisco man who says its efforts to throttle the bandwidth of file sharers is illegal.
Jon Hart sued the company in Alameda County Superior Court, alleging the company misleads the customer by claiming "unfettered" access to the Internet. He is seeking monetary damages for its loss, as well as class-action status.
Sun enters a suddenly crowded virtualization market
Virtualization was the huge topic during Oracle OpenWorld 2007, and Sun Microsystems kept it going on Wednesday, using Oracle's own show to announce its own virtualization tool to compete with it.
Sun said yesterday it will spend at least $2 billion towards supporting xVM, the company's own virtualization software offering that its executive vice president of software, Rich Green, described as a "complete suite of data center automation technology,"
Apple's eye isn't off Tiger just yet
In a somewhat surprising move, Apple pushed its eleventh and likely final update to Mac OS X 10.4, before devoting itself to Leopard.
As is typical with Apple's regular updates to its operating system, the patch includes a bevy of fixes for various issues. However, in somewhat of a break from the norm, the update also includes a new feature: Safari 3 for Tiger.
Texting your next pizza order
One of the lasting contributions of the "dot-com" era, the way consumers interact with retailers, is changing, as evidenced by online pizza ordering.
Papa John's International Inc. first rolled out its online ordering option in 2001, and it now accounts for almost 20% of the company's domestic sales. Competitors Pizza Hut Express and Domino's Pizza Inc., which began to offer comparable services shortly after, are also seeing the option more frequently used.
Microsoft refreshes Vista's value proposition
Vista's Software Assurance customers need more value from Vista more often, and now the company has a plan for addressing their needs come next spring.
A growing number of Microsoft's business customers for Windows Vista are subscribers - customers who've signed onto the company's Software Assurance program. As such, they want their money's worth, which means Microsoft finds itself in the position of having to deploy noticeable improvements to the operating system at least every eight to ten months...as opposed to every five years.
Sony capitalizes on Wii's supply shortage
Lowering price and making the best of its competitors' slip-ups are how the PS3 will come back from the brink, its CEO says.
The discounting of its PlayStation 3 by $100 and the introduction of a cheaper model has caused sales in the US to double, CEO Sir Howard Stringer told the Associated Press on Wednesday.
SanDisk wants to hybridize your hard drive
SanDisk has announced the upcoming availability of Vaulter, a solid state memory chip that will be able to turn standard HDDs into hybrid hard drives.
The flash-based PCI express module operates in parallel with the system's hard drive, with the duty of storing and launching the operating system and user-defined applications. By doing this, Vaulter relegates the hard drive to "cold storage," where the system can draw from only when needed.
Microsoft expands its Vista SP1 beta
Microsoft has released yet another build of its first planned service pack for Windows Vista on Wednesday, opening up the patch to a broader base of testers. While the first public beta of SP1 was shipped to 12,000 testers, this latest build opened up the test to 3,000 additional people. Smaller groups have been receiving private builds since the spring of this year.
The targeted release date still seems to remain as the first quarter of 2008, although the Redmond company is so far staying silent on any word when wider public betas will be available. Details on exactly what will be included are somewhat scarce, although Microsoft is promising to include all fixes issued since the release of Vista last fall plus several new features.
OpenDocument Foundation Dissolves, Leaving Projects in Disarray
After warning just two weeks ago that the conversion of workplaces' information infrastructure to XML "must not be disruptive," the open source group that helped catalyze that conversion has apparently ceased to exist.
The OpenDocument Foundation has disappeared, taking with it its Web site and having deleted pages Google had been hosting for it, including news on its Compound Document Format translator project.
Creative Ships 25 Millionth MP3 Player
Beleaguered electronics company Creative took a moment to toot its own horn on Wednesday, saying it had recently shipped its 25 millionth player.
Even though Creative was in the digital music market two years before the first iPod even shipped, it took the company eight years to get to this level, whereas Apple passed the same milestone in 2006, in only five years.
VeriSign to Focus on its Traditional Businesses
VeriSign is exiting the business sector, instead opting to focus on its core businesses of running the .com and .net registries and securing online transactions.
The announcement was made during a conference for analysts in New York Wednesday. CEO Bill Roper said that the company had reviewed its business and made changes to improve returns for its shareholders.
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