Ford squeezes an office into a truck

Ever wanted your vehicle to run Windows XP Professional? Well, if so, here's your chance! On Tuesday, Ford Motor Company has unveiled a newly designed F-Series truck that includes a touch-screen computer, printer, wireless Internet access and Global Positioning System. The lightweight, touch-screen slate computer is mounted on the transmission tunnel inside the truck. The computer rests inside a cradle and is powered by the vehicle's battery. The system runs Microsoft Windows XP Professional and uses a broadband wireless cellular card to keep the computer online continuously. The mobile office system is expected to become a dealer-installed accessory in 2006. Source: Neowin.net

FeedMonster Beta 3

Today I've released Beta 3 of my RSS feed reader Feedmonster. This version is a major overhaul of FeedMonster (well it is when compared to beta 2). Some of the new features include: A new rss engine that is 10x more reilable and faster that its predecessor, an implementation of Tabbed Browsing. Anyway here is the changelog:

- New: Feed Engine; This one replaces the unreliable one used by FeedMonster before.
- Changed: Feed Database format; It is now an XML file that combines the feeds list (.fmf) and the feed link files (.flf).
- Changed: Web Browser controls; Same IE just a different control
- Added: Feed Auto Discovery; automatcally scans for links to RSS feeds in the pages you vist in the FeedMonster web browser.
- Fixed: Annoying Feed Selection issue; Occured when a feed was already being downloaded and the user clicked on
it again or on another feed that needed to be downloaded.
- Changed: Item Newspaper theme; Now uses a built in CSS stylesheet.
- Added: Status Bar; FMWB actually finished now
- Changed: Add feed and Edit feed moved; Now on a sidebar
- Added: Toolbar and Sidebar layout saving; Now when you reposition the toolbars and sidebars
they're automatically repositioned for you each time you start FeedMonster.
- Added: Tabbed Browser; now FeedMonster has a tabbed browser just like all the others.
- Added: Colored Tabs; Tabs in FeedMonster now have alternating background colors
- Fixed: ClickTwice feed viewing; now when a feed has never been DL'ed all you have to do is ClickOnce.

Screenshots: 1

And for the curious this build 2055

Download: Here

If that one doesnt work then Here

Off topic rant!!!

Ok i just going to warn you all i'm about to go off ranting about something that most of you probably won't care about so if you dont just ignore this post.

Something that really bothers me is the fact that people think that everything should be the same and should never change. Take RSS readers for example, I have been working on one for roughly 4 months now, here in the last 2 or 3 weeks I released beta 2 on the forums at Neowin.net, and someone comes along talking about having been looking for RSS reader for quite some time. So he downloads it and then comes back and says "...the layout is horrable. Its a listbox in its most simple form.". Then he posts this picture of another feed reader, saying that my program should looks somewhat like the pic he posted which in turn looks just like Mozilla Thunderbird.

In my opinion, things that all look exactly the same are just plain boring which is the whole reasoning behind my program being different.

I call upon the loyal reader to answer the following question:
Why do you think people are afraid of something different?

AMD sues Intel

Advanced Micro Devices, the world’s No.2 maker of x86 microprocessors, said Tuesday it had filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel Corp., the world’s largest maker of chips, in U.S. federal district court for the district of Delaware accusing Intel of unfair competition, which limited market share growth of AMD.


“Everywhere in the world, customers deserve freedom of choice and the benefits of innovation -- and these are being stolen away in the microprocessor market,” said Hector Ruiz, AMD chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer. “Whether through higher prices from monopoly profits, fewer choices in the marketplace or barriers to innovation – people from Osaka to Frankfurt to Chicago pay the price in cash every day for Intel’s monopoly abuses.”
The antitrust complaint against Intel Corporation was filed under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Sections 4 and 16 of the Clayton Act, and the California Business and Professions Code. The 48-page complaint explains in detail how Intel has unlawfully maintained its monopoly in the x86 microprocessor market by engaging in worldwide coercion of customers from dealing with AMD. It identifies 38 companies that have been victims of coercion by Intel – including large scale computer-makers, small system-builders, wholesale distributors, and retailers, through seven types of illegality across three continents, AMD claims.
AMD said that Intel’s share of the x86 chip market currently counts for about 80% of worldwide sales by unit volume and 90% by revenue, “giving it entrenched monopoly ownership and super-dominant market power”.
AMD said Intel’s illegal and unfair actions include the following:
Intel has forced major customers into exclusive or near-exclusive deals;
Intel has conditioned rebates, allowances and market development funding on customers’ agreement to severely limit or forego entirely purchases from AMD;
Intel has established a system of discriminatory, retroactive, first-dollar rebates triggered by purchases at such high levels as to have the practical and intended effect of denying customers the freedom to purchase any significant volume of processors from AMD;
Intel has threatened retaliation against customers introducing AMD computer platforms, particularly in strategic market segments;
Intel has established and enforced quotas among key retailers effectively requiring them to stock overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, Intel-powered computers, thereby artificially limiting consumer choice;
It has forced PC makers and technology partners to boycott AMD product launches and promotions;
Intel has abused its market power by forcing on the industry technical standards and products which have as their central purpose the handicapping of AMD in the marketplace.
This litigation follows a recent ruling from the Fair Trade Commission of Japan (JFTC), which found that Intel abused its monopoly power to exclude fair and open competition, violating Section 3 of Japan’s Antimonopoly Act. These findings reveal that Intel deliberately engaged in prohibited business practices to stop AMD’s increasing market share by imposing limitations on Japanese PC manufacturers. Intel did not dispute these charges. The European Commission has stated that it is pursuing an investigation against Intel for similar possible antitrust violations and is cooperating with the Japanese authorities.
In the lawsuit AMD brings several examples how Intel forced customers not to buy AMD processors, how the chipmaker provided or withdrew marketing or engineering funds from certain PC makers or provided other privileges or disadvantages in order to stop those companies from using AMD chips or participating in AMD events. The Sunnyvale, California-based company says that Intel has attempted to change specification of DDR3 memory pin-out in order to slowdown adoption of the memory type by the main rival. Among other things AMD blames Intel in creating compilers for software that caused AMD chips either to work slower than Intel’s, or to crash.
AMD demands the court to find Intel guilty of all charges and compensate AMD its losses as well as profits caused by Intel’s actions.

Source: X-Bit labs

Windows Longhorn Build 5087

Apart from showing off IE7 at Gnomedex this year, screenshots of Longhorn also show it's current build: 5087. It is not known whether this build will be the Beta build that will be released to testers this summer. Read more for screenshot provided by Flickr.com.

News Source: Flexbeta

Skype in merger talks with Yahoo?

Engadget writes, "It’s sort of early in the game on this, but word on the street is that Skype and Yahoo are in “close contact,” as in, snuggly enough to talk about a possible buyout. It makes sense from the standpoint that Yahoo already wants to add voice to their Yahoo! Messenger platform, and Skype would be an attractive acquisition in terms of merging IM with VoIP. The concern, though, is that it would complicate Yahoo’s relationship with the Baby Bells as it tries to build its media empire status. In any case, though, it does look like both parties are interested in cooking up some sort of commercial partnership. Ain’t courtship grand?"

Your chance to meet Bill Gates

You could meet the chairman of Microsoft, but you'll have to profess a passion for Windows first. Microsoft is looking for true stories about people using Windows computers to pursue a passion or hobby. The company plans to use them in a marketing blitz tied to the 20th anniversary of Windows' debut. To entice essay submissions, Microsoft is offering a number of prizes, including the chance to meet Gates in Seattle and appear in the ad campaign. Other prizes include an overseas trip with National Geographic Expedition, VIP access to a major movie premiere and a home makeover with an HGTV designer.

News source: Neowin.net

Microsoft Building a 'Team 99'

We're obviously getting close to Longhorn's releass acording to this article:

Microsoft geek blogger, Robert Scoble has begun taking nominations for a "Longhorn superuser and superdeveloper blogger group". The group will be 20 strong and members at Channel 9 appear to have the final say on who will get picked. Team 99 members must be bloggers, Trusted by the community, visible and can give good feedback to Microsoft about upcoming technologies developed for the next gen Windows operating system, codenamed Lognhorn.

If you feel Neowin has, over a period of nearly 5 years, given you the most up to date information on Microsoft products and Windows Longhorn then feel free to nominate in the thread at channel 9 - linked below.

From: Neowin.net

AOL Rebuilds AIM

Internet portal AOL has initiated a major makeover of its instant-messaging client with an early-stage beta test of a new architecture and code base dubbed Triton. The new AOL instant messaging (AIM) architecture takes a modular approach to building messaging applications and supports features such as live PC-to-PC voice communications, streaming video messaging and media file transfers.

Source: Life really needs to get Laid

Flash hard drives

A hybrid memory system, combining a hard drive and flash memory, has been demonstrated by Samsung and Microsoft. The aim is to combine the fast read/write access times of NAND flash with the storage capacity of a rotating hard drive. By using the 1Gbit flash as a cache for the hard drive, the drive does not need to spin continuously. When the write buffer is full, the drive is spun up and data written to magnetic storage.

Boot up times can also be reduced, claimed the firms, by using the flash as a boot buffer during shut-down. Microsoft calls the device a hybrid hard drive (HHD). It is designed to work with Longhorn, the next generation of Windows. "Hybrid drive architecture... is an advancement that will improve the performance and reliability of any computer using the Windows Longhorn operating system," said Tom Phillips, general manager of Microsoft's Windows group.
News source: electronicsweekly

WinHEC's Longhorn Build 5048 leaks

Also from Flexbeta

Well Microsoft's WinHEC conference doesn't officially start until tomorrow (Monday, April 25th) , but Longhorn has managed to make its way to the web. Screenshots are going to follow.

French court rules in favor of DVD copying

I found this interesting post at Flexbeta:

Engadget writes, apparently a French court has ruled that adding anti-copying mechanisms to a DVD violates the rights consumers have to make private copies of media that they’ve bought and paid for. Reportedly the court has given the company that released the film in question one month to provide the guy who sued them with an unprotected DVD; it’s not entirely clear whether this ruling applies to every DVD sold in France or just that one copy of Mulholland Drive this guy was trying to dub. Either way, expect the film industry to throw its entire weight behind getting this ruling overturned.

A few details about IE7

The Internet Explorer Team has released a few more details about their upcoming Internet Explorer 7.

Here's an exceprt from their blog

"We’ve heard some great feedback on what web developers would like to see in IE7, both from the responses to my last post and from the resources I referred to. The rest of the team was cranking away while I was away on parental leave, and I wanted to share a few details about what they were doing: The first couple of things they’ve done are:

• Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.
  
• Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely. For example, we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine...."
  

Read more Here

Opera

An overly excited Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software, today proclaimed at an internal company meeting that if the download numbers of the new Opera 8 Web browser reach 1 million within the first four days of the launch, he will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother's house in his home country, Iceland.

Opera's communications department could obviously not resist to make such a bold and inarguably over-confident statement public. Opera's new Web browser, Opera 8, was released Tuesday, and the massive response had Opera's download servers kneeling an hour after the launch. Still, the download numbers of Opera 8 reached 600 000 in the first 48 hours.

Download: Opera 8
News source: Opera Press Release

US Judge Dismisses California Claims Versus Microsoft

A federal judge on Monday dismissed a claim by five California cities and counties that Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, had overcharged them for software. U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz in Baltimore, Maryland, granted Microsoft's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying that some of the plaintiffs were not allowed to sue because of their status as municipal corporations and that the statute of limitations had expired on several of the claims.

The plaintiffs, which included the City and County of San Francisco, city of Los Angeles and the counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo and Los Angeles, sued the Redmond, Washington-based software maker last August for violating antitrust and unfair competition laws in California. "Today's decision granting Microsoft's motion to dismiss is welcome news," Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said in a statement. "We look forward to continuing to work with California government agencies to help deliver technology solutions to their communities."

News source: e-Week, Neowin.net