Although Apple’s iPad has yet to hit the market, the Federal Communications Commission has expressed concern over its potential impact on AT&T’s 3G network.
Without naming AT&T, which has secured a carrier deal for the tablet device, Phil Bellaria, director of scenario planning, and John Leibovitz, deputy chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, outlined their concerns in an FCC blog post Monday:
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Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release.
According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, the team will be “investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future.”
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Although PlayStation 3 sales have been on the rise and Sony has a rosy outlook for the console’s future, it turns out that the company is still losing money on every PlayStation 3 unit it sells.
According to The Wall Street Journal, which examined Sony’s fiscal third-quarter financial performance, the company loses 6 cents on “every dollar of PS3 hardware sales.” Considering the PlayStation 3 current retails for $300, we can safely assume then, that the company loses about $18 per unit.
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A few weeks after releasing Thunderbird 3.0, an overhaul of its open-source e-mail software, Mozilla has issued an early test version of a successor that smooths rough edges and fixes some bugs.
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Facebook has gotten another face-lift.
The popular social-networking site has tweaked its home page yet again. This time around, the redesign puts more of Facebook’s core features and settings right on the home page. The goal is to spare users from having to jump from one page to another to access their favorite features.
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Google isn’t marching into consumer electronics; it’s tentatively dipping its toes.
When word of the Nexus One smartphone broke, the consensus was that Google was about to challenge Apple for the high end of the mobile phone market. One month after its launch, it’s clear that an awful lot will have to change before Google can truly be considered a viable competitor.
It’s not that there’s anything lacking from the Nexus One. It’s easily the best Android phone produced to date, and CNET editors recently decided it outranked the iPhone 3GS, Apple’s best iPhone to date.
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It has taken almost a year, but on Thursday AT&T said it will start allowing Sling Media’s SlingPlayer to work over its 3G network on the iPhone.
SlingPlayer, which redirects TV signals from a home TV over the Internet so it can be viewed on a portable device, like cell phones or laptops, is the latest application that AT&T is making available to iPhone users on its 3G network. In October, it said that it would allow voice over IP services, such as Skype, to operate on the iPhone using the 3G network. Previously, these applications could only be used over Wi-Fi connections.
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Cable companies may be raking in profits as they add more broadband subscribers, but price-sensitive consumers may only be a discount away from ditching them.
On Wednesday Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, announced it had more than doubled its fourth-quarter earnings, due in large part to a promotional push that resulted in 247,000 new high-speed Internet subscribers. Time Warner Cable, which announced fourth-quarter earnings last week, also swung to a profit, buoyed by gains in broadband Internet and phone subscribers.
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IBM has a tall order from the U.S. Air Force–create a cloud network that can protect national defense and military data.
Big Blue announced Thursday a contract from the Air Force to design and demonstrate a cloud computing environment for the USAF’s network of nine command centers, 100 military bases, and 700,000 personnel around the world.
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Microsoft said on Wednesday that it is investigating another flaw in Internet Explorer, this time a vulnerability that could result in an unauthorized disclosure of information for users running its browser on older operating systems.
The software maker said in a security advisory that, although it knows of no attacks based on the flaw, the vulnerability could lead to a Web-based attack from either a Web site designed to take advantage of the flaw or from a site that becomes compromised via user-generated text or a malicious ad. Either way, a user would have to actively go to the compromised Web site.
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