SCO Warns SEC It Might Not Survive Novell Payoff
In its quarterly 10-Q filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, UNIX provider SCO Group expressed its fears that, if it were faced with a judgment ordering it to pay Novell for several years of using UNIX trademarks recently found to have been owned by Novell all this time, it may not be able to continue business.
"As a result of both the Court's August 10, 2007 ruling and the Company's entry into Chapter 11, there is substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern," the company stated in its SEC filing Tuesday. "Absent a significant cash payment to Novell for this matter, management believes it is remote that the undiscounted future cash flows generated by the Company would not be sufficient to recover the carrying values of the long-lived assets over their expected remaining useful lives. However, if a significant cash payment is required, or significant assets are put under a constructive trust, the carrying amount of the Company's long-lived assets may not be recovered."
US Antitrust Chief, EU Competition Chief Spar Over Microsoft
In an unusual move, US Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Thomas Barnett issued a statement earlier this week, following the European Court of First Instance (CFI) decision in the Microsoft matter, politely but clearly dissenting from the Court's decision and implying the American antitrust system is more evolved.
"It will...be some time before the full impact of today's decision on antitrust policy in Europe will be apparent," wrote Barnett last Monday. "We are, however, concerned that the standard applied to unilateral conduct by the CFI, rather than helping consumers, may have the unfortunate consequence of harming consumers by chilling innovation and discouraging competition."
Warner Bros. Holds Fast on Blu-ray / HD DVD Dual Commitment
As polarizing as the high-definition format war continues to be, Warner Home Video remains silently, but firmly, committed to its position of providing its movie titles to users of all formats on the market.
"If the consumer continues to support both formats, the industry will as well," Warner Home Video president Ron Sanders told TWICE magazine in an interview last week from the floor of the CEDIA convention in Denver.
FCC Adopts Compromise on 'Must-Carry' Provisions for Cable TV
On September 11, the US Federal Communications Commission approved a plan that would continue to mandate cable TV carriers within an area make available all the broadcast signals receivable in that area. Both cable operators and broadcasters applaud the plan, but perhaps it's because it has not only been scaled back but also has an expiration date.
That date is three years following the February 17, 2009 transition date for terrestrial broadcasting from analog to digital format. After that time, the FCC will review the plan...though it would appear commissioners are betting that it will be a different FCC by that time.
EU Proposes Bailout of Galileo Sat Nav Project
Galileo, once billed as a potential rival to the US Department of Defense's GPS system, is now facing serious issues following disagreements over the development of the system by eight companies tasked with its build-out. However, the European Commission is proposing to shift money in the bloc's 2007-2013 budget to come up with extra funds to ensure its completion. Public funds were initially supposed to cover about one-third of the cost, said to be around 3.5 billion euros.
EU officials say the additional money -- some 2.4 billion euros -- will come from unspent money elsewhere. They are making the case by saying that the Galileo project is a strategic necessity, and would lessen the dependence on the US GPS system. The EU's positioning system would improve coverage in higher latitudes, and be interoperable with the GPS system through a recently announced deal. Member countries will still need to approve the bailout before it can proceed, however.
Apple Defends iTunes Pricing in Europe
At the same time Apple was celebrating the iPhone's launch in Germany, elsewhere the company was defending its price structure for iTunes.
The European Commission claims that the record labels are forcing iTunes to not allow European residents to purchase music from stores in other countries in the EU. This apparently runs afoul of the bloc's laws, and the Commission isn't happy about it.
.NET Micro Framework 2.0 SP1 Now Available
Service Pack 1 for the developers' toolkit for the second edition of Microsoft's just-in-time high-level language interpreter for embedded equipment was released yesterday.
.NET Micro Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 tackles an interesting issue for embedded systems: code signing. A device vendor may have any number of reasons why it would prefer for its binary code to be signed and authenticated: perhaps to serve the authenticated user, perhaps to help authenticate the firmware code, but most often to ensure that users can't change the code. Up until Windows XP Embedded, embedded systems developers looking to produce signed code had to encode their security catalogs in their program's binaries.
Teardown Reveals 41.6% Markup for New iPod Nano
While the top-of-the-line 8 GB Apple iPod nano still retails for $199, the completely revised new model costs Apple about $7 less to build than the previous edition, based on a preliminary teardown analysis by iSuppli. With a bill-of-materials at $82.85 per unit, according to iSuppli's estimate, Apple enjoys a nearly 42% markup in retail price.
Of course, that's not the company's wholesale margins for its resellers, though a great many units are sold through Apple Store outlets and through Apple.com - where it can feel the full benefit.
T-Mobile Gets iPhone in Germany
Apple and T-Mobile said Wednesday that the carrier will begin selling the iPhone in Germany on November 9, the same day UK consumers first see the device.
T-Mobile is Germany's largest provider with 30.7 million customers. It is also the only carrier in the country that will have deployed EDGE data across its entire network by the end of 2007, which is central to the data capabilities of the iPhone.
V Cast Mobile TV Fall Lineup Announced
Verizon today announced the fall lineup for its V Cast Mobile TV service, and this year, several network TV shows will debut on Verizon phones at or around the same time.
Verizon's V Cast mobile TV, launched in the first quarter of this year, announced its fall programming lineup today. At least ten new shows are expected to debut at the same time on Vcast as on broadcast television. Never before has watching soon-to-be-canceled shows been so convenient.
Intel: Harpertown Xeon Performance Will Beat QC Opteron
In the only raw performance test figures revealed yesterday by Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger at Fall IDF in San Francisco, preliminary tests of the company's forthcoming quad-core "Harpertown" architecture Xeon 5400 show it beating a quad-core Opteron 2300 system in the critical SPEC floating point throughput rate test by just over 4%.
"We have leadership on a broad range of benchmarks," Gelsinger proclaimed yesterday, "literally every benchmark. But the area where competition is closest is in bandwidth-intensive and floating-point areas. And what we see here is [that], with the improvement of the 1600 [MHz] front-side bus, [and] the larger cache of 3.2 GHz, going from [Intel] Clovertown to Harpertown, a 34% improvement."
CBS Looks to Avoid iTunes Price Fight
On Tuesday, CBS became the second network behind Fox to indicate that it will likely be staying on iTunes. In comments to the Merrill Lynch Media and Entertainment conference, CEO Les Moonves said the company will be staying out of the battle and that the network "likes our relationship with iTunes." Moonves' comments follow that of News Corp, which owns the Fox network.
Shortly after NBC Universal pulled its own programming, News Corp's president Peter Cherin told Reuters that they planned to stay on the network and had "a perfectly good relationship with Apple." Later, the company said they expected the negotiations to be contentious, however it is still expected that the two sides will eventually come to a deal.
Google Introduces Widget Ads
Google is beta testing a new type of ad with a select number of its clients that allows them to take advantage of the rise in popularity of the widget.
Called Google Gadgets, the ads can be placed freely on web pages and the iGoogle pages of interested consumers. From there, the advertiser can regularly update the ad's content to keep the user's interest while at the same time advertising their products.
IBM Revives 'Lotus Symphony,' Supports ODF Format
In a clever marketing move that had some of us fooled, IBM revealed today it was doing much more than beginning the process of rebuilding its own applications suite. In fact, Beta 1 of the new Lotus Symphony is already under way.
It's not so much a symphony, I wrote in a 1984 review of Lotus Symphony, but a cacophony. Lotus, I said, fails to make the value proposition about why users should invest nearly a thousand dollars in software whose components collectively sell for less than that, and whose best in class includes the best spreadsheet at that time, Lotus 1-2-3.
Time Warner CEO: Sale of AOL's ISP Division Likely
Time Warner is "looking hard" at selling off the internet access portion of its AOL division over the next 12-18 months, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons said on Tuesday.
NEW DETAILS Rumors have been floated in the past about a sale of AOL's US ISP business, but up until now Time Warner -- including Parsons himself -- had denied that it was even a possibility. Parsons did admit earlier in the year that he had been approached by several groups looking to buy the ISP.
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