28743257
submission
N!NJA writes:
Barnes & Noble's primary line of defense against Microsoft's allegations of patent infringement by the bookseller's Android-based devices has collapsed in its entirety. An Administrative Law Judge at the ITC today granted a Microsoft motion to dismiss, even ahead of the evidentiary trial that will start next Monday (February 6), Barnes & Noble's "patent misuse" defense against Microsoft. [...]
Prior to the ALJ, the ITC staff — or more precisely, the Office of Unfair Import Investigations (OUII), which participates in many investigations as a third party representing the public interest — already supported Microsoft's motion all the way. The OUII basically concluded that even if all of what Barnes & Noble said about Microsoft's use of patents against Android was accurate, it would fall far short of the legal requirements for a patent misuse defense.
27456400
submission
N!NJA writes:
My favourite fact of this past year was the proof that China makes almost nothing out of assembling Apple‘s iPads and iPhones. It’s a favourite because it speaks so directly to one of the great political arguments going on in both the US and the UK. I refer, of course, to this very strange idea that both countries would get (even) richer if only they would do more manufacturing. [...] If you want lots of jobs and lots of high paying jobs then you’re not going to find them in manufacturing. They’re where the money is, in the design, the software and the retailing of the products, not the physical making of them. Manufacturing is just so, you know, 20th century.
5702799
submission
N!NJA writes:
In an amicus curiae brief filed on Aug. 24, Dell asked the judge overseeing the Eastern District Court of Texas to reconsider its order blocking sales of Word, part of the original ruling in favor of Canadian software developer i4i. In the worst case, the brief argued, the injunction should be delayed by 120 days.
"The District Court's injunction of Microsoft Word will have an impact far beyond Microsoft," Dell and HP wrote. "Microsoft Word is ubiquitous among word processing software and is included on [redacted] computers sold by Dell."
"If Microsoft is required to ship a revised version of Word in Dell's computers, a change would need to be made to Dell's images," Dell wrote. "Making such a change would require extensive time- and resource- consuming testing."
An addendum to the brief notes that it was authored in Microsoft Word, part of Office 2003.
4985239
submission
N!NJA writes:
A tectonic shift has taken place for the digital age: ad rates for popular shows like The Simpsons and CSI are higher online than they are on prime-time TV. If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers. Online viewers have to actively seek out the program they want to watch, so advertisers end up with a guaranteed audience for their commercial every time someone clicks play on Hulu or TV.com. Online programs also have an average of 37 seconds of commercials during an episode, while prime-time TV averages nine minutes of ads.
4667747
submission
N!NJA writes:
Hulu on Thursday announced Hulu Labs, a new section of the site that allows users to (beta test) play with new products and services as they are almost ready for prime time. Among the new toys of everyone's favorite piracy-busting online video service is Hulu Desktop, a bona fide client for the service running on both Mac OS X and Windows computers. It also single-handedly answers all the questions about the recent Boxee fiasco.
4144839
submission
N!NJA writes:
California's biggest energy utility announced a deal Monday to purchase 200 megawatts of electricity from a startup company that plans to beam the power down to Earth from outer space, beginning in 2016. Solaren would generate the power using solar panels in Earth orbit and convert it to radio-frequency transmissions that would be beamed down to a receiving station in Fresno, PG&E said. From there, the energy would be converted into electricity and fed into PG&E's power grid.
4134969
submission
N!NJA writes:
Two major themes of our time — the desire to achieve energy independence and the furor over public bailouts — have collided in the drama surrounding swanky electric carmaker Tesla. Late last year, a New York Times column whipped Silicon Valley innovators and bailout-weary taxpayers into a frenzy. Valley professor and writer Randall Stross wrote that Tesla was hoping for government money to produce its cars, which only the very wealthy could afford. It wasn't exactly true, since the loan was intended to produce the $50,000 Model S sedan, not the $109,000 Roadster. Still, Stross called it a risky, waste of taxpayer money that would only benefit the wealthy and bailout VCs who'd sunk money into the money-losing company. Never mind, Tesla has developed two cars on less than $200 million--compared to the $1 billion General Motors spent developing the now-deceased EV1.
4103043
submission
N!NJA writes:
As an answer to those who say e-cars will never take off because their range is limited, this isn't at all bad. A Tesla Roadster managed to cover 241 miles on a single charge while taking part in the Rallye Monte Carlo d'Energies Alternatives. Organised by the Automobile Club of Monaco, the annual rally is open to cars powered by just about any 'alternative' fuel source, such as LPG, ethanol or even petrol-powered hybrid drives. The rally course runs 390km (241 miles) from the town of Valance in France to the Principality of Monaco and covers a mixture of trunk roads, motorways and single-carriageway roads that wind through the mountains. This year's all-electric entrants included a Ruf-modified Porsche 911 and a handful of Mitsubishi iMiEVs but it was the Tesla that stole the e-car laurels by managing to get cross the finishing line with an indicated 61km (38 miles) of juice left in the battery pack.
3994145
submission
N!NJA writes:
I have come across an interesting development with Hulu this morning. They have started encoding the html that they send to people's browsers, and then decoding it using javascript before rendering it. [...] They then run the character stream through a series of javascript functions to convert it back in to plain text before pushing it in to your browser using DHTML. That's quite a lot of effort just for fun, so I assume that is to stop screen scrapers from parsing content.
3964141
submission
N!NJA writes:
NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry U.S. astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer.
3931173
submission
N!NJA writes:
With a lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Francisco, California, two residents of Fostoria, Ohio seek damages and relief from the world's third-largest computer maker after purchasing a sub-$600 Aspire notebook that included Windows Vista Premium and a gigabyte of shared system and graphics memory.
