Tag: Microsoft
Sony staffer fingered for negative Halo 3 Wikipedia edits
Life’s got very entertaining since the development of technology allowing you to track who’s been making what edits to Wikipedia entries. Sony is the latest company to end up with egg on its face, after some negative edits to the Halo 3 page were traced back to its Sony Liverpool studio.
Microsoft gives Zune a 'B-' for its first year on sale, hints at ZunePhone
Here’s to consumer tech execs eschewing hype in favour of realistic assessments of their products. Mindy Mount is corporate VP and chief financial officer at Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, so you’d expect her to bang on at length about Zune’s zeitgeist-seizing iPod-slaying revolution. And stuff.
Nokia teams with Microsoft for Windows Live apps on smartphones
Until recently, Nokia and Microsoft have been fierce competitors in the smartphone market, certainly in terms of their rival operating systems (Series 60 vs Windows Mobile). However, that rivalry is shifting to something friendlier, and fast.
See, just a couple of weeks after Nokia announced plans to put Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM inside its Series 60 handsets, it’s now revealed that it’s also going to preload Windows Live applications like Hotmail, Messenger, Contacts and Spaces on its smartphones, with Series 40 devices to follow next year.
Adobe updates Flash Player 9 "Moviestar" to include H.264 video support
Adobe has announced that its popular Flash Player 9, codenamed “Moviestar”, is being updated to include the H.264 / MPEG4 standard video format. This, together with technologies including High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support and hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced full screen video playback, could lead the way to Flash Player being used for high definition content.
It could also have implications for how popular video sharing services such as YouTube and MySpace operate, although YouTube is already moving to the H.264 format used by Quicktime so that videos can be played back on the iPhone, which currently doesn’t have Flash support.
Skype crash latest: it's all Microsoft's fault! Oh, hang on, it's not.
Okay, it’s not like Bill Gates hired a crack team of ninjas to assault Skype’s secret server bunker for some nefarious purpose. Although I haven’t ruled it out.
No, it seems last week’s Skype outage was caused by a huge synchronised reboot after the latest Windows Update patch.
Xbox 360 Core drops to same price as Wii in Australia
Those Aussies sure are a strange bunch, I should know, I was born there! The latest What The Hell Were They Thinking?! story comes from WiiWii, who are reporting that the recent price drop in Australia of the Xbox 360 Core model is now the exact same price as the Nintendo Wii. Whoops…
Nintendo Wii sells 10.10 million units, soon to surpass Xbox 360
Somewhere in Mushroom Kingdom, Shigeru and Reggie are having a party that Freddie Mercury could only dream about. Dwarves dressed up as Mario, suspicious substances being consumed off the shells of dogs dressed up as Bowser, and a bevvy of beauties resembling Princess Peach prancing around in pink satin frocks…
Daily Tech Hotlinks for 09-Aug-07: Xbox 360, Carlos Slim, Freakonomics, Flickr, Nokia DRM
– Xbox 360 gets first official price cut (Daily Tech)
– The world’s new richest man, Carlos Slim, to donate 250,000 laptops to children by 2008 (Engadget)…
Apple launches iWork 08: updated productivity tools
They’ve been a long time coming, and talked/rumoured about, and at last Apple has updated its iWork and iLife applications, bringing up to ’08.
iWork 08 not only enhances the Pages and Keynote applications, but includes the new “Numbers” spreadsheet application that many believed Apple would, and needed to, introduce if they stood any chance of competing against Microsoft.
Interestingly, Apple has gone for a new approach to spreadsheets with the Numbers application. Instead of copying Excel, as so many others have, their approach allows people to organise and interlink information on different sheets on a flexible graphical canvas. This should make it easier to build relationships between the intelligent tables, each of which is a spreadsheet in its own right, as well as printing them.
Judge overturns $1.53bn MP3 patent ruling against Microsoft
A US federal judge has overturned a jury decision that Microsoft had to pay $1.53 billion to Alcatel-Lucent for infringing two of the latter firm’s MP3 patents. The original ruling, which was made in March, sent shockwaves through the digital music world.
