News for Friday, 2 February 2007

Apple and Cisco commonly agreed to cool down around the much coveted iPhone name. They have decided to take more time to find an agreement that would satisfy all parties.
We can nonetheless expect to hear about this again sooner rather than later, as this battle allows both parties to stay in the eye of the media at no extra cost.

Although Dell is far from being in trouble, the company nonetheless has lost its position as top manufacturer in the United States to HP. This news is enough to have pushed the CEO, Kevin Rollins, to resign.
Pushed by the board of directors and probably the shareholders, Michael Dell has decided to return after two years of absence to retake command of his company.
Of course this reminds us of the return of Steve Jobs :)
For a few years Dell has been in search of fresh inspiration. They tried to compete with Apple in the iPod market, but quickly ended up giving up.
Now, and against all expectations, the company is thinking of re-examining it's internet oriented distribution and moving towards opening real "brick and mortar" shops.
Although Dell has long been a economic model for Apple, it now seems that the situation has reversed.

In Microsoft Vista license you'll read that using the system via virtualization or emulation is restricted to Business and Ultimate versions only. Doing it with more limited, cheaper versions will contradict their license policy. So if you do it nevertheless, it will be illegal, despite your buying this license.
Of course, this information has upset people at Parallels for who it is some kind of discrimination for those who'd want to use their software and Vista on Mac OS X or Linux.
Another issue if you decide to use Vista with Parallels: you won't be able to use any contents requiring the use of DRM managing layers, as they will be deactivated. This is easier to understand, as Microsoft might fear virtualization would allow "listening" to those systems while they work, and therefore lead to bypassing them.
For those who'll absolutely need this system, it's still possible to install it on another hard drive, or another partition via Boot Camp. In that case, as boot will be native, the software should work normally. But at the expense of the flexibility that Parallels had brought to our user experience.