News for Monday, 7 April 2008

Orange announced with great pomp they will soon propose a VOD service comprising 6 movie channels via unlimited ADSL, which will offer films from Gaumont, Warner, HBO, and an independent studio, Loyalty. According ElectronLibre , Apple would be interested in this channel and could ensure the compatibility of its products. That would be great news, the current offers of Orange are only compatible with Windows DRM.
In this case, one could take advantage of this offer, which would cost less than € 20 per month both on television, and Apple iPhone or Apple TV.

If the fight against piracy intensifies and is codified via legislation, certain related conduct is not to be accepted.
It began with the case now called Call of Juarez. Techland, the Polish publisher of this software mandated a Swiss company, Logistep AG, to track illegal downloading of its software over P2P networks.
The publisher appointed lawyers to find the identities of the persons in question, and ask them to pay compensation.
In France, advocate Elizabeth Martin was entrusted with the job. Thousands of people have received a missive requesting them to pay € 400 to avoid the horrors of a trial (see here) for a detailed history.
But the method used by the lawyer and her firm has been criticized, and other lawyers ready to fight back.
The case has drawn the attention of the bar of Paris, who have just taken important disciplinary action against this important lawyer.
She could have been banned from exercising her profession as a lawyer for 6-month sentence and was banned from professional associations and the opportunity to sit on the governing bodies for 10 years.
This heavy sentence was motivated by her overly aggressive attacks, but also by her refusal to disclose the number of people who agreed to pay that sum. It should also be noted that the money in question was deposited in a private account and not in a specific account at the Carpa as the procedure requires.

Source: Dailytech

While they spent a fortune to buy the colossal bandwidth of 700 MHz, Verizon and AT & T have announced that they do not want to use it immediately.
It will be in operation only at the beginning of the next decade, even though it would b e extremely useful, at least to customers, thanks to its great potential in terms of speed and excellent penetration in buildings.
But obviously, operators have no commercial interest in investing in it, preferring to extract as much profit from technologies already deployed. It must be said that they have acquired these frequencies in order to block other competitors such as Google, deemed too dangerous.
Meanwhile, in France, a rumour suggests that the proposed sale of a fourth 3G licence has been abandoned. If this is confirmed, it will put an end to the hopes of seeing a real competition between operators, the 3 already in place having proven their wonderful agreement not to engage in a price war (and who have been heavily sentenced for such acts).

This is not a new strategy, and other companies have already tried to increase lifetime of a product by renaming or re-branding it. In 2005, ATI renamed the Radon 8500 as Radeon 9100 to keep selling this previous generation card. Today, NVidia deiced to follow the same strategy, by re-baptizing the GeForce 8800 GS into GeForce 9600 GSO, giving potentially a new business life to an old product.
The new generation of NVidia graphic cards from the 9xxx serie are rather disappointing as they are based on the previous G9x GPU already present in the previous generation, and beside higher cores and memory frequencies, nothing really changed with the new generation. The company is most likely delaying the launch of new or innovative products till its main competitors ATI/AMD is able to come with some new products on the market.
For us, Mac users, applications are usually benefiting more from old graphic cards than last generation ones, as Apple is slow in releasing "efficient drivers" for our Macs ; so if you have Pro application, having the latest GPU does not necessarily translate in higher graphical performance levels...

Over the week-end, the story "Microsoft tries to acquire Yahoo" was enriched with a new episode. Weeks after its initial offer, and several maneuvers to seduce Yahoo' Board and bring them to accept the deal, Microsoft decided to change its strategy and to threaten Yahoo' Board and set a deadline for an acquisition agreement. It this public letter, Microsoft claims that if an agreement is not reached within three weeks, Redmond's giant will take the case directly to Yahoo’s shareholders, aiming to replace the Yahoo's board with a more favorable slate of directors.
With such strategy, Microsoft demonstrates its real interest in Yahoo, and its wish to integrate it as soon as possible; while not being really ready to put more money on the table.

The well known RAM manufacturers, Hynix, has signed a license agreement with Grandis to jointly integrate Grandis' STT-RAM technology into Hynix' future memory products.
The STT-RAM (Spin-Transfer Torque Random Access Memory) is a next-generation non-volatile memory (NVM) solution which might overcome the limitations of current conventional magnetic RAM (MRAM) technologies:
- lower power consumption
- faster read/write capability
- higher endurance
- lower manufacturing costs
Hynix will most likely try to manufacture such RAM modules with 40-nm or lower process node to become the leader in this field with such technology. If the STT-RAM proves to be reliable, deliver results according to expectations, than it should rapidly be used in SSD as it will be the main and largest future market for all non-volatile memory technologies.