France moves forward with law challenging Apple

France's lower house of parliament passed a law on Tuesday that could challenge Apple's dominance of the online digital music market by making it open its iTunes store to portable music players other than its iPods.

French officials said the law aimed at preventing any single media playing operating system, Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's Windows Media Player, from building a grip on the digital online music retail market.

"These clauses, which we hope will be taken up by other countries, notably at the European level, should prevent the emergence of a monopoly in the supply of online culture," Richard Cazenave and Bernard Carayon, National Assembly deputies from the ruling UMP party, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The new legislation will require that online music retailers such as iTunes provide the software codes that protect copyrighted material -- known as digital rights management (DRM) -- to allow the conversion from one format to another.

Sun releases processor designs as open source

Sun Microsystems Inc. has taken another step to leverage open-source design so that developers can create more servers based on its Sparc chip architecture. The company on Tuesday released the source code for its UltraSparc T1 processor.

The strategy is part of Sun's OpenSparc Initiative, a move to create the world's first multicore, multithreaded ecosystem, the company says.

Sun advanced that effort in February when it released its Hypervisor API (application programming interface) specifications. That move allowed companies to port Linux , BSD and other operating systems to UltraSparc T1 and gave developers the information they needed to create related hardware and software tools.

Mozilla Happenings

Lightning strikes Mozilla

Mozilla ventures into the world of integrated calendaring with the release of Lightning 0.1. Will the addition of calendaring capability give Thunderbird a popularity boost?

Lightning 0.1 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as an extension for Thunderbird. Currently limited in its functionality and not yet ready for a production environment, it does offer a handful of calendaring functions, all of which are integrated into Thunderbird.

Installing it is simple. Download the .xpi file and then install it into Thunderbird as you would any other extension. After restarting the e-mail application, you are rewarded with a changed interface. Under the list of e-mail inboxes and folders on the left-hand side of the application is a new mini-calendar along with a three-tab interface for accessing an agenda, a to-do list, and calendars. Clicking on the Calendars tab causes the message list and message preview window to be replaced with a one-week calendar view. The view appears to be limited to one week at a time; clicking on a particular day brings up a appointment entry dialog box.


Firefox 2.0 alpha available

Curious to see what's in store for Firefox 2.0? An alpha of 2.0 with some new features has appeared on Mozilla's FTP servers.

Due out later this year, Firefox 2.0 promises a handful of improvements and new features over what is already a very solid browser. (By way of disclosure, I use Firefox 1.5 exclusively on my PCs and laptops)

McAfee Update Breaks Hundreds Of Apps

For over five hours Friday, McAfee's anti-virus software erroneously flagged hundreds of legitimate executables as a malicious virus, leading some customers to quarantine or delete the offending files and render applications such as Microsoft Excel inoperative.

An error in McAfee's daily virus definition file (dubbed "DAT") identified the files as W95/CTX, a virus first discovered in 2004. All editions of McAfee's on-demand-scanning products, including both the enterprise and consumer versions of VirusScan, were affected.

Among the legitimate files painted as malware were Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet, Adobe's Flash, the Google Toolbar installer, several Adaptec drivers, and parts of Sun Microsystems' Java Runtime Environment. The list that McAfee posted of the affected files numbers more than 330, but even so, the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center called it incomplete.

T-Mobile to offer converged service

T-Mobile International will start offering a converged Wi-Fi and cellular service this summer, using network equipment from Nortel Networks, Nortel announced Friday at Cebit.

T-Mobile customers will be able to use laptops and PDAs to use services such as video calling, video conferencing and IM even as they move between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Their connections won’t be dropped as they move between the networks and the customer can use one phone number to be reached regardless of which network they are near, Nortel said.

The companies are demonstrating the capability, which will work over 3G, EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and Wi-Fi, at Cebit.

IBM breaks speed records with new version of file system

On thursday,IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the results of "Project Fastball," a performance test of the latest release (2.3) of their General Parallel File System. GPFS was invented by IBM in 2001 as an experiment in clustered file systems, where data is accessed over multiple computers at once. Most existing file systems are designed for a single server environment, and adding more file servers does not improve performance. GPFS provides higher input/output performance by "striping" blocks of data from individual files over multiple disks, and reading and writing these blocks in parallel.

"Computing capability has been growing very fast, but the file system capacity has not kept up," IBM engineer Dr. Rama Govindaraju said.

Project Fastball achieved a new speed record of over 102 gigabytes per second of sustained read/write performance to a single file. The record was achieved using 416 individual storage controllers combined with 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes (each p575 node has eight dual-core 2.2 GHz POWER5+ processors).

Google snaps up Writely

Since its introduction last August, Writely has acquired a devoted following. For those not familiar with it, Writely bills itself as 'The Web Word Processor'. Users create, edit, and store documents via a web browser interface with a word processor feel. Documents can be stored on Writely or on a local machine, and the application can handle Word and OpenOffice.org documents.

In a posting on Google Blog, Google let it be known that it had acquired Writely earlier this week for an undisclosed amount. Current users are still able to use the service, but those wanting to sign up for Writely will be disappointed, as new registrations are not being accepted until Writely is moved to Google's software architecture.

Writely has been in beta since its appearance last summer. It has been a free service, although Upstartle, the small development firm that created it has made it clear that some sort of fee structure would be implemented once the beta was over. Some users have hailed it as a Microsoft Word killer, which is a bit of an exaggeration. However, Writely does demonstrate the degree to which web applications have evolved, to the point where it's no longer outside to realm of possibility to conceive of some very popular desktop applications being challenged and even supplanted by web-based application.

China creates own domain names

China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has established a set of new top-level and second-level domain names, according to People's Daily Online, the Web site of the official People's Daily newspaper.

The new domain name system took effect as of Wednesday, according to the report. "It means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States," the report said.

The MII has temporarily set up Chinese versions of three existing top-level domain names: ".cn", ".com" and ".net", according to the report. China's top-level domain established through ICANN is ".cn" in Roman characters.