The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

Trade groups blocked from MS appeal
A federal judge on Monday rejected a bid by two computer industry trade groups to appeal Microsoft's settlement deal with the government. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the Software and Information Industry Association and the Computer & Communications Industry Association do not have the legal standing to step in and appeal the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. With the judge's permission, the two groups had filed friend-of-the-court briefs with Kollar-Kotelly arguing in favor of stricter sanctions against Microsoft. But Kollar-Kotelly said legal precedents did not support the groups' argument that they had a right to intervene in the government case. If they want to pursue the matter further, she said, they can file a private case against the company.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-980358.html

Case resigns as AOL chairman
Steve Case will step down as chairman of AOL Time Warner in May, saying he wants to avoid "distractions" at a critical time for the company. Case will remain a member of the company's board, he said in a press release issued Sunday night. "Given that some shareholders continue to focus their disappointment with the company's post-merger performance on me personally, I have concluded that we should take steps now to avoid the possibility of that effort hindering our ability to pull together as a team and focus fully on our businesses," Case said. Case, the architect of America Online's blockbuster merger with Time Warner, has not had a major day-to-day role in overseeing operations, but he has nonetheless come in for sharp criticism for the company’s woes.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-980284.html

HP probed over potential drive defects
California's attorney general has accused Hewlett-Packard and its lawyers of misleading investigators and frustrating state and federal probes into potential defects in millions of computers, according to a Monday report. The Wall Street Journal said the state disclosed the "improper tactics" in court documents unsealed within the last two weeks in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco. The Journal said the allegation surrounds $27.5 million in consulting fees HP paid to Phillip Adams, a computer expert who had alerted law-enforcement officials about suspected flaws in floppy-disk drives in HP's and other companies' PCs that can randomly delete or alter data without a person's knowledge.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-980329.html

Intel raises Pentium 4 speed limits
Intel will increase the speed of the chipset on the Pentium 4 in the coming months, a change that will likely boost the performance of top-end PCs. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker is coming out with a new chipset, code-named Springdale, for Pentium 4 PCs. The chipset runs at 800MHz, substantially faster than the 400MHz and 533MHz chipsets currently available for Pentium 4 computers, according to sources close to the company. The new chipset will be released with a 3.2GHz version of the Pentium 4, the sources said. Intel could not be reached for comment. Among other tasks, the chipset creates a data path, or system bus, between the processor and a computer's memory. Speeding it up increases both the rate the processor can obtain data and the amount that can be transferred.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-980206.html

IBM unleashes an all-out patent blitz
IBM will announce on Monday that it was the top recipient of U.S. patents in 2002. Big Blue was awarded 3,288 patents during the past year, making it the top recipient among private sector companies for the 10th year in a row, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Canon ranked second during in 2002 with 1,893 patents. IBM has generated just over 22,000 patents during the last 10 years, but those patents have changed with the times, IBM researchers said. Many of the company's newest patents are related to servers; grid computing; and self-healing, or autonomic, computers and how to better put them to use for customers. Most of the new patents also fit into the framework of IBM's computing on demand initiative, announced late last year, said Ravi Arimilli, an IBM research fellow.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-980262.html

Linux hears a calling for cell phones
A half dozen companies are developing cell phones based on the Linux operating system, an executive familiar with the plans said Friday. Among the big names backing Linux for mobile phones are chipmaker Texas Instruments and device maker NEC, representatives from the two companies confirmed Friday. Also, two phone manufacturers will ship Linux phones that work on the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) standard sometime this year, according to Scott Hedrick, a marketing manager at MontaVista Software, which makes the Linux chips destined for these phones. Hedrick would not identify the phone makers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-980214.html

Studio copyright battles worthy of Hollywood script
The Internet's long-held promise of offering every movie ever made is facing a threat far more powerful than any studio chief, box-office star or pitbull uber-agent: the Hollywood contract. Although the movie industry is taking steps that signal new seriousness about selling works online, complex matters of intellectual property rights could keep some titles offline for years, according to those negotiating such deals. "Clearing rights to movies is the biggest single hurdle to Internet video on demand today," said CinemaNow Chief Executive Curt Marvis, whose company struck a deal late last year to sell first-run movies from Warner Bros., including the smash hit "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." "The studios would like to give us more, but can't clear the titles," he said.
http://news.com.com/2009-1023-979754...g=fd_lede1_hed

PalmSource picks up handwriting tool
PalmSource is turning over a new leaf for handwriting recognition, replacing its idiosyncratic software amid a growth in popularity for keyboards in the handheld industry and amid a continuing patent battle with Xerox. The operating system subsidiary of handheld maker Palm announced Monday that it has signed a licensing agreement with Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Communication Intelligence to use its Jot handwriting recognition software -- dubbed Graffiti 2, powered by Jot -- in current and future versions of the Palm OS. The PalmSource move comes as the industry works to extend the scope of the handheld market to include more mainstream buyers, by introducing lower-cost models and by making the devices easier to use.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-980403.html?tag=fd_top

The Army of the future will be lighter, fleeter and better connected
The U.S. Army wants to get to and maneuver within trouble spots faster, and over the next six years it will spend $91 billion figuring out how to do that. The goal sounds simple: be able to send a brigade anywhere in the world within 96 hours, a division within 120 hours and five divisions within 30 days. Achieving that goal, however, means transforming the army from a ponderous force built around the use of tanks and other heavy vehicles to one that is comprised of lighter, less heavily armored vehicles that can sprint across the battlefield at speeds of 60 mph and that can deliver the same dose of lethality as their bigger predecessors.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...3B809EC588EEDF

Copy cats and robotic dogs
Everyone knows that the Japanese are a bit obsessed with graphic novels, better known as comics. Forty percent of publications produced in Japan are comics, which provide 30 percent of Japanese publishing revenue. But the comics, or manga, market in Japan is divided into two types: one is purely (or as pure as one can get) original work; the other is "amateur" or copycat comics, which develop the work of original artists in different and unauthorized ways. This second kind of comic, called dojinshi [doh-GIN-she], is a huge and growing market in Japan. Dojinshi conventions are among Japan's largest mass gatherings, drawing more than 450,000 fans and 33,000 artists each year. And as comics move online, through the increasing penetration of online games, the dojinshi market is only expected to increase. In an article published in the Rutgers Law Review this fall, Temple Law professor Salil Mehra puzzles over an aspect of the dojinshi market that would stump most copyright lawyers.
http://www.herring.com/insider/2003/...ats011003.html

Sharman Networks to fight Californian judgement
Sydney-based Sharman Networks, which owns the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer software, has announced it intends to launch a counterclaim following the US District Judge Stephen Wilson's decision to allow a US lawsuit against the company to proceed. The company decided to go ahead with the counterclaim after reviewing Judge Wilson's "thoughtful" 46-page decision handed down on Friday last week. "While Sharman is disappointed with the court's conclusion that the Constitution permits this case to be heard in the United States, we fully expect to prevail on the merits," the statement said. "Sharman's upcoming counterclaim will set forth the full story for the first time." The company is declining to reveal any further details at this stage.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebu...0271194,00.htm

Tomorrow's Smarter, Connected Navy
Give the Navy credit for pioneering the concept of network-centric warfare. Its roots hark back to the late 1970s, when some prescient Navy researchers realized that then-emerging computer and communications technologies might provide a better means of coordinating all the ships in a battle group. That has always been a daunting task, considering that a naval battle group can consist of dozens of ships spread over hundreds of square miles of ocean. With high tech's progress in the 1980s, the network-centric idea advanced from possible to plausible. The initial research goals were to provide U.S. naval commanders with a decisive edge in deep-sea battles with the Soviet navy. But then the Soviet Union collapsed, and by the mid-1990s the U.S. found itself with no real blue-water rival. Instead, it was clear that the Navy would increasingly be called into "brown water" -- close to shore -- to support local military operations and peacekeeping missions, such as Operation Joint Guard in Bosnia in the late 1990s.
http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...30110_3330.htm

Tiny Storage Gets Big
Last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas had a little something for everyone with a gadget jones. There were new digital cameras, new PDAs, new mobile phones, laptops, tablets and music players along with dozens of electronic products that weren't as easy to categorize. But slipped quietly into the hyped-up announcements for many a latest and greatest this or that was a mention of removable storage that will make each product able to do their job better. For Japan's entertainment electronics megalith Sony, there was news about a new kind of Memory Stick product, this one called Memory Stick Pro. If you own almost any recently manufactured Sony product -- be it a camera, a Clie PDA or a Vaio PC, to name a few -- then you're probably familiar with the Memory Stick, a piece of flash memory about two-thirds the size of a stick of Juicy Fruit gum, first introduced in 1998. Until recently the sticks topped out at a capacity of 256 megabytes.
http://www.forbes.com/home/2003/01/1...artner=newscom

[TankGirl]

Thank you very much, WT!

- tg

...and now don't try to flirt with me while i read the newspaper...