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Microsoft to Delay Next Version of Windows — Microsoft's long effort to deliver the next version of its Windows operating system suffered another setback yesterday when the company said that the system would not be ready for consumer personal computers for the holiday sales season.
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Microsoft Delays Windows Vista Debut Again — Consumer Version to Miss — Critical Holiday Season; — Unit Shake-Up Is Expected — Microsoft Corp. announced a delay in its long-awaited Windows Vista operating system, and people familiar with the matter said the company is planning …

Vista Delayed Again
Discussion:
InsideMicrosoft, Ars Technica, Good Morning Silicon Valley, AMCP Tech Blog, Bink.nu and activewin.com

How France Is Saving Civilization — New legislation in France would force Apple Computer to open the iPod and iTunes to competitors — and that's a good thing for consumers, in the long run. — On Tuesday, the French parliament passed a law that would require digital content bought …
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Apple attacks plan to open iTunes — Apple has criticised a French law that could break the locks tying songs from the iTunes store to iPod players. — In a statement Apple said that if the law were passed it would result in "state-sponsored piracy". — The law to open up all online music stores …

Yahoo! Messenger is In (and Out) — We reported back in December that Yahoo! would be rolling out Phone In and Phone Out services with its Yahoo! Messenger service; the wait is finally over for those in the U.S. (it has been tested in limited international markets for some time now).
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Windows XP on Macs: Tested, Benchmarked — Since narf2006 and blanka announced their solution for booting Windows XP on Intel Macs last week, many aspiring dual-booters have been posting on the OnMac forums trying to get Bill's baby running on Steve's systems. We thought, what can we add to all of this?
Discussion:
The Cult of Mac Blog
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Now That Plaxo Spam Has Annoyed Enough People, It's Time To Fade It Out? — from the dubious-reasons dept — For years, plenty of people have complained repeatedly about the scourge of "Plaxo spam." These are the constant bombardment of emails from new Plaxo users who have you in their address book …
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Plaxo Drops the "Hi, I'm updating my address book" Email — Plaxo is dropping the "Hi, I'm updating my address book. Please take a moment to update your latest contact information..." email which has, over the past three years, raised more than a few hackles. (What is a hackle?


Return of Rakesh Mathur — Rakesh Mathur is someone I have known from a bubble ago. He dropped me a note today saying that he has moved back to Silicon Valley from Seattle. (That perhaps explains the torrential rains, which have followed Rakesh to the Bay Area.)

It's Official: Dell Beams Up Alienware — Dell Inc. confirmed Thursday that it had acquired boutique PC vendor Alienware, a move that will add some zing to the company's image. — Although Dell's acquisition was widely anticipated, Alienware chief executive Nelson Gonzalez said that his company …


Sharing feed items with Google Reader — Development on the somewhat unpopular Google Reader doesn't seem to go at a furious pace, but every couple months theydrop a new feature into it and usually it's at least marginally cool. Yesterday was such an event, and the featurethey've added lets …


No Bundle of Joy — Some Buyers Find Packaged Telecom Services a Tangle of Trouble — Lori Mabry thought she was getting a good deal by putting all of her home communications needs in the hands of one company. — Two years ago, the Lanham resident turned to AT&T for a package …
Discussion:
Techdirt


It's Official Now! Get The Portable Firefox 2 Alpha 1 Here — Unfortunately I had just went to sleep last night when this was released...so I know it has been out for 9 hours but here is the Portable version of Firefox 2 Alpha 1 that I promised. I have received a lot of emails requesting …

Backing Up Flickr Photos with Amazon S3 — I love that I now have an Amazon S3 billing page that reads like a really cheap phone or water bill. I think that they're silently changing the game (again) without telling anyone else. I really like the implications of this magepiebrain post …


Survey of Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Reveals Increased Confidence in Startup Venture Landscape — Leapfrog Ventures' Survey of Current Entrepreneurs Shows Startup Conditions, Valuations and Liquidity Opportunities Have Improved in Last Six Months — According to a survey …
Discussion:
Valleywag


Google Finance doesn't care about black people — John W. Thompson, CEO of Symantec, according to Symantec.com — John M. Thompson, CEO of Symantec, according to Google Finance — Hooray! Silicon Valley has black people! They're just disguised as white people! — Symantec Corporation [Google Finance]
Discussion:
PaidContent.org


Network.com - Sun Provides Grid Computing for $1/CPU-hour — This is really interesting. Following Amazon's release of S3 (an on-demand storage solution), Mechanical Turk (human tasks on demand) and the Alexa Web Search Platform (rent your own search engine), I've been told that Sun …

What you get with sudo — What are you really gaining by using sudo in the default Mac OS X configuration? First, you gain some comfort that nobody can login as root, either locally or remotely via SSH or FTP and tamper with your machine. Second, you get a log entry in /var/log/system.log every …
Discussion:
The Unofficial Apple Weblog