Technology News
Macworld.com - Steve Jobs is accustomed to bringing the house down—unveiling remarkable devices like the iPad, the iPhone, and the original iPod make that a pretty common occurrence. Now, though, after an extended battle, the Apple CEO can finally bring down the other house he’s been trying to raze for so long. Maybe.
AP - Factory worker Chen Qinghai frowned as he looked at a tall bulletin board full of help-wanted notices from companies making everything from photocopiers and DVD drives to mobile phones and car parts.
Macworld.com - Online technology journalism. Can’t live with it and you can’t shoot it in the back of the head and dump it in the creek off the old interstate bypass where all the serial killers dump bodies. Wait, can we? Because this week brought out the seamy underbelly of people who inexplicably get paid to pontificate about Apple and if there’s a way—any way—to make it all stop, the horny one is all ears and antlers.
Reuters - Talks with China over censorship have reached an apparent impasse and Google, the world's largest search engine, is now "99.9 percent" certain to shut its Chinese search engine, the Financial Times said on Saturday.
AP - Motion controls and social gaming were the hot topics at this week's Game Developers Conference, the annual convention of game designers, programmers and executives.
Macworld.com - Toon Boom Animate 2 announced
PC World - Microsoft's Xbox 360 outsold Nintendo's Wii in February to claim the top spot in the U.S. monthly sales ranking for the first time in more than two years, analyst group NPD said Thursday. Overall the industry had a poor month with total sales down 15 percent from February last year.
AP - DVD-by-mail service Netflix Inc. has canceled a sequel to a $1 million movie-recommendation contest, avoiding a potential courtroom drama over the privacy rights of its subscribers.
AP - Apple Inc. is giving its chief operating officer a $5 million bonus for "outstanding performance" running the company while CEO Steve Jobs was on medical leave.
AP - Shares of QAD Inc. sank Friday after the business software provider reported a drop in fourth-quarter revenue and predicted another drop for the first quarter.
PC World - The Troyak ISP, which has been linked to the Zeus botnet, was briefly taken down this week. The takedown occurred on the heels of the RSA Conference last week, where there was much talk about the "cat-and-mouse" game of trying to squelch cybercrime. Otherwise, things got a little testy at the ICANN meeting in Nairobi, and iPad pre-orders got rolling. Oh, and the Internet was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Seriously.
AP - THE DISPUTE: Cable TV providers challenged a five-year extension of federal regulations requiring them to make channels they own available to rivals such as satellite TV.
AP - A federal court Friday upheld regulations that require cable TV companies to make sports programming and other channels they own available on equal terms to rival TV providers such as satellite companies.
AP - China's top Internet regulator insisted Friday that Google must obey its laws or "pay the consequences," giving no sign of a possible compromise in their dispute over censorship and hacking.
AP - Porn Web sites can't park themselves at a ".xxx" address quite yet.
AP - RadiSys Corp., a maker of servers that support wireless phone networks, said Thursday it acquired privately held Pactolus Communications Software Co. Terms were not disclosed.
PC World - $200 tablet PCs have been something of a pipe dream. There was the Crunchpad, which was supposed to be $200, but that didn’t last very long, coming out as the $400 Joo Joo. If what Freescale showed off at Mobile World Congress becomes reality, though, the dream may finally come true.
