TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

People in the consumer electronics industry have been expecting the end of the VHS era ever since the introduction of the DVD back in the late '90s. But while most of us probably thought the format was already long gone, it wasn’t until recently that the last major supplier of VHS tapes, Distribution Video Audio, shipped its final truckload of the format.

The company prided itself in keeping little tidbits of pop culture alive and supported part of their $20 million a year business by selling mass amounts of VHS tapes on the cheap. And even though watching a movie on modern disc formats (or via digital distribution) is certainly a much richer experience than watching on VHS, one can’t deny the effect this technology had in the video field – I particularly loved the ability to catch up on any missed TV show by recording into a blank tape.

I wonder how long it will be until DVD suffers the same fate and if it will be Blu-ray or digital downloads taking over – they both still have a long road ahead.

If recent rumors are anything to go by, Dell is preparing the release of a brand new “Adamo” notebook computer that will aim squarely at taking some of that MacBook Air market share. Although Dell has not made an official statement about the product, Engadget claims a “totally amazing” source has confirmed the black and silver laptop will be both lighter and thinner than Apple’s offering.

No further details were given other than it will be marketed as the world's thinnest laptop sometime around February. The New York Times also speculates that the Adamo notebook will arrive as an ultra-thin portable system, and infuses their claims with a little credibility by referencing the nervous body language of Dell executive Michael Tatelman when asked about them making a laptop to compete with the MacBook Air.

Whatever the case may be, all we know is that Adamo is definitely coming, as evidenced by Dell giving it its own website featuring only the name and the words “coming soon.” But what exactly Adamo will be is still subject to a fair amount of speculation. Perhaps we’ll learn more about it at CES next month.

Western Digital has announced plans to slash 2,500 jobs, or about 5 percent of its workforce, and considerably cut executive pay in an effort to counteract what the company calls a “softer demand environment.” The world’s second-largest maker of hard disk drives is just the latest in a long list of tech companies reducing costs to cope with the economic downturn.

The company also lowered its revenue outlook for the current quarter from $2.15 to $1.8 billion due to a significantly lower demand and, as a result, said it plans to reduce production by halting most of its manufacturing operations from December 20 to January 1. It will also close one of its three manufacturing facilities in Thailand and another one in Malaysia. The measures are expected to be completed by the end of March and should save the company about $150 million a year.

Sony BMG is going to cough up $1 million to the FTC, in a deal to settle charges that the company was collecting information on children in an illegal manner. Sony was cited for violating COPPA, primarily through information harvested from social networking sites and children under the age of 13. The information was all fairly general, such as names, birthdates, email addresses, phone numbers and a bit more. It's pretty standard fare for a company to harvest that sort of information from their customer base, but Sony in this case earned the ire of the FTC due to the age of a large chunk of them.

This hasn't been the only bad news from Sony this week. On Tuesday, we learned that the company was going to cut a swath of employees, upwards of 8,000, on top of closing several factories to cut costs. The amount of money they expect to save through these cuts, however, vastly outweighs this FTC settlement which is truly minor in comparison. In reality, this is only a slap on the wrist for Sony.

Amid a global economic downturn, Sony has announced it is to cut 8,000 jobs and close several of its manufacturing facilities in a bid to save $1.1 billion in its next fiscal year, which runs from April 2009 to March 2010. Apparently, their exports are swimming against the tide as the yen gains strength against the dollar and the euro, which causes prices of its products to rise.

The job losses will come out of core Sony electronics divisions, though no official breakdown has been revealed. The Japanese company also said that it would begin outsourcing parts of its semiconductor business, in which unnamed third parties will take care of Sony's planned increase in manufacturing of CMOS image sensors for use in mobile phones.

Two months after first announcing its chip-making spin-off, AMD has said it will get a smaller stake than initially planned in the new company after renegotiating the transaction agreements. Apparently, the value of AMD assets being contributed to the joint venture with Abu Dhabi investment entities has been cut, reducing AMD’s stake in the venture to 34 percent from its original take of 44 percent.

ATIC, one of the two Abu Dhabi firms behind the deal, will now own approximately 65.8 percent of The Foundry Company stock. However, both companies will retain equal voting rights. The other firm involved, Mubadala, still intends to purchase 58 million AMD shares as part of the deal, but it will do so at a revised stock price: either the average for the 20 days leading up to and including December 12 or the average in the 20 days before the deal closes, whichever is lower.

AMD will also issue to Mubadala an additional 5 million warrants to purchase AMD stock, for a total of 35 million warrants. They expect the deal to close at the beginning of 2009.

AMD is making quite a few concessions here, but it may have no other option as it tries to cut costs following a string of quarterly losses that have amounted to several billion dollars. Here’s hoping they can step up competition against Intel with their upcoming Deneb chips, they certainly need to.

As promised several months ago, in partnership with Canonical, IBM has begun offering its Microsoft-free systems bundled with a Lotus suite of office applications and collaboration tools running on top of Ubuntu Linux. The machines are designed to run in a virtual configuration, as thin clients, with the software stored on remote servers.

IBM claims the system can save businesses $500 to $800 per user on Microsoft software licenses along with up to $258 per user on hardware and bring additional savings in power and air conditioning costs. According to the company, the virtual Linux desktop suite could cost companies as little as $59 per person, which includes a minimal configuration of $49 for the VERDE desktop virtualization software, $10 for Ubuntu Linux support and no cost for Lotus Symphony productivity software.

IBM is counting on the prevalent economic pressures to help make its “Microsoft-free” offering more appealing and touts the benefits of open standards over a proprietary platform. We should note that IBM’s calculations don’t factor in the cost of extra server and networking hardware that might be required for a company to adopt this environment – they also don’t mention any plans to host and deliver the software itself as a service.

Details aside, though, one has to wonder if corporate customers are willing to revive an environment where all their data is stored centrally instead of locally.

AT&T; is joining a long list of companies slashing costs to cope with the economic downturn, with an announcement today that it would axe 12,000 positions, or roughly 4 percent of its workforce. Not only is the recession to blame for the move, though, but also a “changing business mix” that has left its traditional landline service in decline.

But while 12,000 employees of the company are on the chopping block, the company said it plans to add jobs in areas that are growing, such as its cellular division as well as its Internet access and video services. Cuts are expected to begin this month and move into next year, according to the company.

AT&T; is certainly not the company in the technology sector (or elsewhere for that matter) that has had to lay off workers recently. Viacom also announced today that it will cut its workforce by seven percent, or 850 jobs, while Adobe Systems announced on Wednesday it will let go eight percent of its employees, or around 600 people.

Two top research firms are cutting forecasts for 2009 personal computer sales, with them expecting 2009 to be the industry’s toughest in at least seven years amid falling sales of high-end computers. IDC, for instance, has reduced its outlook for 2009 worldwide PC unit growth to just 3.8 percent compared to this year.

That's quite a drastic cut from the 13.7 percent growth initially projected, with the latest report particularly mentioning how the hardest hit areas will be the emerging PC markets of Latin America, Central Europe, the Middle East, and Africa due to falling commodity prices and the worldwide credit crunch. Likewise, just a few weeks ago iSuppli slashed its 2009 growth forecast for worldwide PC shipments by nearly two-thirds because of the deteriorating economy. The analyst firm is now projecting that shipments will rise by 4.3 percent in 2009, down from its previous forecast of 11.9 percent.

Despite the dreary picture the market researchers are painting, sales in general are still being driven by demand for laptops and the need to replace older systems, but there is a discrepancy between the growth in units sold and value of those PCs because prices are falling as consumers and businesses are willing to spend less for new PCs.

The never-ending talks centering around Microsoft and Yahoo have continued, with both web giants recently dismissing new rumors that the companies are discussing some sort of partnership or have Yahoo's Search business sold to Redmond. Recent news articles from the Wall Street Journal and NY Times indicated that Microsoft was already “agreeing” to a deal, but neither company has made any announcements pertaining to this. Considering how open both companies have been the past year with their intentions, a behind-closed-doors deal would seem unlikely at this point, especially with Yahoo under fire for their sudden drop in value after initial talks with both Microsoft and Google went south.

Much of the current rumors are spun from recent statements by Steve Ballmer, who mentioned not long ago that he would still be “interested” in a deal with Yahoo – not that such a deal was actually formulating. The suffering stock of Yahoo has led to a lot of internal turmoil, but apparently it's still not yet enough for the company to bail. Let's not forget Yahoo is still a profitable business.

Even if Yahoo did choose to find some form of exit out of the search business, they still have numerous other services at their disposal. Yahoo may be suffering, but they certainly aren't out of options.

The WiMAX joint venture between Sprint and Clearwire is finally a done deal, despite a few setbacks along the way, as is the $3.2 billion cash infusion from Comcast, Intel, Google and others. The transaction, announced back in July, brings together both companies’ WiMAX assets under a new company valued at $14.5 billion that will retain the Clearwire name.

The WiMAX network will be branded Clear and should initially deliver average download speeds of 2 to 4 megabits per second. Sprint's WiMAX service in Baltimore, which currently runs under the XOHM brand name, will transition to the Clear name in the coming months as Clearwire converts most of its existing pre-WiMAX networks in 46 markets to standard mobile WiMAX. The new service will be an open standards-based network that will enable customers to use any WiMAX device.

Microsoft’s Windows operating system last month took its biggest market share dive in years, according to some new Net Applications statistics, with the number of Windows users surfing the web falling below 90 percent. Specifically, Windows secured 89.6% of the global PC market in November, down from 92.4% a year before, 94.2% in November 2006, and 96.4% in October 2004.

This is still quite an enviable position for any company, but it’s believed to be the first time Windows market share has dipped below 90 percent since the mid-1990s, when Windows 3.1 ruled the Microsoft roost. Apple’s Mac OS X, meanwhile, posted its biggest gain in a two-year period, growing by 0.66 percentage point to end the month at 8.9%. Linux also gained ground but Net Applications’ numbers still pin it under the 1% threshold at 0.83%.

Buying a new BMW looks set to become a much more hands-on process, with the German car maker hoping to entice potential customers by using Microsoft’s Surface computer to configure the cars. Dubbed the BMW Product Navigator, the new system lets users customize their future car by placing small tiles onto the screen and then watch a computer-generated video of the vehicle in action.

Potential buyers can customize their new car’s interiors and exteriors in an interactive way and then take the results home via email, printed or saved to a USB drive. There’s nothing ground-breaking and it’s not surprising either to see BMW adopting new technologies, but it’s still incredibly cool. The company has not yet specified when the BMW Product Navigator kiosks will be widely available, though.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has previously stated he had no knowledge of the whole “Vista Capable” fiasco, in which the company apparently lowered the minimum requirements to run Vista in order to help Intel sell their motherboards with embedded 915-based graphics chipsets, but a federal judge wants him to testify in an ongoing class action case anyway.

Apparently, the judge is curious as to what was discussed in a phone call between Ballmer and Intel CEO Paul Otellini on January 30, arguing the Microsoft exec may have “unique personal knowledge of relevant facts.” Ballmer has 30 days to meet with plaintiffs’ lawyers for his deposition and will be forced to testify when the case goes to court next April.

TIME's Best Inventions of 2008 @ TIME
Canadian regulators allow P2P throttling @ ArsTechnica
Will technology drive global recovery? @ InfoWorld
Web debut for Guns N' Roses album @ BBC News
See more articles and reviews.

Five years ago in TechSpot:
'Spyware' would be tricky to outlaw

The amount of content available online has risen exponentially the past few years. Any respectable news agency will have at a bare minimum all their articles online, and the overwhelming majority usually offers something more in the venue of live updates, comment sections and more. Thus it's no surprise that more and more, people are relying on the Internet for news and information as opposed to magazines and newspapers.

Some companies are working hard to embrace that, and PC Magazine is one of them. The magazine, which has been in print for nearly 27 years, before the Internet as we know it even existed, has decided to go fully digital at the beginning of next year. Their January 2009 issue will be the very last printed edition. For the people who still subscribed to the paper magazine, the company is offering digital subscriptions as a replacement.

A statement by PCMag outlines numerous reasons why they're switching to an all-digital format, ranging from the greater interactivity it allows, the reduced impact on the environment, ease of distribution and a lot more.

An East Texas federal jury has ruled that Sony must cough up $18.5 million in damages to a company called Agere Systems for a patent violation on a “wireless local area network apparatus” included in the PSP and other handheld devices such as the mylo Personal Communicator and Network Walkman audio players.

When the suit was originally filed in March of 2006, alleging Sony knowingly and willfully infringed on this and seven other patents, with the slate of complaints being cut down over the intervening years. Also since the filing of the suit, Agere Systems has ceased to exist, having merged with silicon and software tech firm LSI Corporation in 2007.

Sony was also recently hit with a patent claim for the PS3 Blu-ray capability, but won a dismissal in a related suit and settled with Immersion over controller vibration in 2007 for the DualShock 3.

A recent Gartner research shows 85 percent of firms use at least one piece of open source software in their business IT infrastructure, with the remaining 15 percent expected to do so over the next twelve months. But while most of us would assume this is a good thing, the market researcher apparently thinks otherwise.

According to the report, 69 percent of these companies don't have a formal open-source management team and this apparently opens up huge potential liabilities for intellectual-property violations, inadvertent or not.

The Gartner survey results also indicated that open source software in new projects is being deployed nearly equally in mission-critical and non-mission-critical situations; and that the top three reasons for using OSS were total cost of ownership, cheaper development and the fact that it is easier to embark on new IT projects or software initiatives using an open-source base.

Following a tumultuous year and a half at the forefront of one of web’s biggest properties, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang is stepping down from his chief executive role as soon as the board of directors appoints a replacement for him. Yang failed to bring either a viable merger partner or a strong revenue-generating deal in his short tenure as Yahoo CEO, so his resignation doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

Earlier this year, Yahoo rejected a $33 per share buyout offer from Microsoft and decided to focus on a search advertising partnership with Google instead. The move was met with disapproval by many share-holders and since then the company’s stock share price has plunged incessantly – reaching $13 earlier this month when Yahoo’s planned deal with Google also fell apart.

Once its successor as CEO is appointed, Yang will remain as a Yahoo board member and resume his previous role as “Chief Yahoo” – whatever that means. His impending step down leaves much unresolved for the Internet company, which has been struggling to remain independent for months, but could perhaps pave the way for a deal of sorts with Microsoft.

We’ve all faced the frustration of buying a shiny new toy only to find ourselves struggling with a lack of herculean strength – or a toolbox – to get through the packaging. Even worse, over 6,000 U.S. citizens per year make hospital visits because of injuries provoked by opening the potentially dangerous hard plastic shell designed to curb theft.

With that in mind, online retailer Amazon started a campaign earlier this month to abolish the consumer unfriendly plastic packaging in favor of the old-fashioned cardboard box. And while it is relatively easy for them to adopt the new scheme considering they don’t have to deal with shoplifting, even those who sell from shops are coming up with solutions to this seemingly trivial but often infuriating problem.

Microsoft, for instance, has unveiled an unusual container for the Explorer computer mouse it sells at Best Buy stores that is easily opened using a zipper on the side. Meanwhile, Sony has adopted a new method that allows packages to be easily opened but emitting a loud Velcro-like noise intended to deter thieves. Could this be the beginning of the end for clamshell packages? I certainly hope so.