Cody Taylor

An anonymous reader writes “The Digital TV transition delay bill has failed to pass the United States House of Representatives. By a vote 258 to 168 in favor of changing the date, the bill has failed as two-thirds of the votes are required for it to pass. The delay bill was once perceived as inevitable, [but the House] has now apparently made February 17th the date of transition once again. Now the question remains, will they attempt to pass it again by the deadline?”

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Hugh Pickens writes “For years, the computer industry has made steady progress by following Moore’s law, derived from an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months. The Economist reports however that in the midst of a recession, many companies would now prefer that computers get cheaper rather than more powerful or by applying the flip side of Moore’s law do the same for less. A good example of this is virtualisation: using software to divide up a single server computer so that it can do the work of several, and is cheaper to run. Another example of ‘good enough’ computing is supplying ‘software as a service,’ via the web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software that hardly anyone uses anyway. Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon: the next version of Windows is intended to do the same as the last version, Vista, but to run faster and use fewer resources. If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version. That could be bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade only proving that Moore’s law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles.”

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suraj.sun writes “AT&T and Comcast, two of the nation’s largest Internet service providers, are expected to be among a group of ISPs that will cooperate with the music industry in battling illegal file sharing, three sources close to the companies told CNET News. The RIAA said last month that it had enlisted the help of ISPs as part of a new antipiracy campaign. The RIAA has declined to identify which ISPs or how many. It’s important to note that none of the half dozen or so ISPs involved has signed agreements. But as it stands, AT&T and Comcast are among the companies that have indicated they wish to participate in what the RIAA calls a ‘graduated response program.'”

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