inVoid

Sony to close factory in France

Sony Corp. said Friday it would shut down its factory making videotapes in France due to slumping global demand.

The fate of the factory's 320 workers remained unclear, but Sony spokesman Shusuke Kanai said the company was doing its utmost to help them after the closure.

Expert questions Windows 7 user interface

In Microsoft's quest to simplify the Windows 7 user interface, they're actually making it harder to use. So argues Windows expert Paul Thurrott on his SuperSite for Windows blog. Thurrott, the author of Windows Vista Secrets, based his observations on pre-beta releases.

Bluetooth 2.2 spec could be released as early as mid-2009

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) recently announced that it will release a new version of Bluetooth in mid-2009. Bluetooth 2.2 promises to be much faster than previous versions, allowing transfer rates at higher speeds.

Microsoft Releases a Firefox Addon

Microsoft has today released a plug-in for Firefox that allows Open XML documents to be viewed within the popular open source browser.

The software giant said that its new Open XML Document Viewer works within Firefox and can be used on Windows and Linux platforms without needing a local installation of MS Office.

Microsoft said its new Firefox-friendly OXML* viewer would improve translations between formats including "direct interoperability" from OXML to HTML formats.

Barack Obama uses a Zune…Its time for a change!

Well well well, what do we have here? Turns out Obama is a Zune user. The change is already starting it seems.

Microsoft exec: Windows 7 is no service pack

Microsoft is attempting a challenging task with its positioning of Windows 7. The company is trying to make the case that the product won't break things that work with Vista, but at the same time trying to convince users its a worthy upgrade.

Bill Veghte, the senior vice president of the Windows business put it this way in a speech to investors on Wednesday: "It's a minor release when it comes to incompatibilities," he said, adding that most applications and hardware that worked with Vista should work just fine in Windows 7. At the same time, Veghte tried to make the case that Windows 7 will nonetheless be a significant step forward.

"There are plenty of great things in there that make it much more significant than a service pack," Veghte said. In addition to improving some of the annoyances of past releases, such as slow boot time, Veghte pointed to new features that make it easier to connect to both home and business networks.

"In Windows 7 there's a capability called Direct Access," Veghte said, that allows users to more easily connect to their corporate network. "You no longer have to VPN in," he said.

Edge: Bigger Than Blu-ray - New 400GB Disc Could Be PS3-Compatible

Edge writes: "In the picture above you will see the materialized form of one of Pioneer's boldest claims in recent memory: a 400GB optical disc, of 16 layers with a capacity of 25GB each.

What's missing from this equation is the word Blu-ray. In fact, yesterday at the IT Month Fair in Taipei, Taiwan, Pioneer was coy about not using the term Blu-ray at all when unveiling its newest disc, save for suffixing it to "16 times the storage of..."

The consoles you have right now will not be able to play these discs. Numerous sources have reported that the disc is compatible with Blu-ray players (and therefore PS3s) already on the market. Speaking to Edge, Pioneer said the opposite was true. "Current BD players and drives would not be able to read these discs," the company said, adding that the technology is "at this time not being proposed as a candidate for addition to the existing Blu-ray Disc format."

However, the company went on to say that a firmware upgrade may allow Blu-ray players to read the disc, putting Sony's PS3 straight into the spotlight as the likeliest device available today that could read them."

Bad News for Microsoft: Windows Drops Below 90% Market Share–Firefox Above 20%

NetApplications is out with a couple of new metrics of market share for operating systems and browsers, and the news is good for open source. Topping their findings, Microsoft Windows' market share has dropped below 90 percent for the first time in its measurements. The share erosion is largely attributed to increased interest in the Mac platform, but Linux is cited as on the rise as well. In addition, for the first time since it launched its metrics, NetApplications' data shows Firefox's market share topping 20 percent.

On the browser front, NetApplications finds Firefox to have achieved 20.78% market share for the month of November, and the complete breakdown for browser market share is seen in their graphic below.

Use Your iPhone to Fight Global Warming

That's right, you can now use your iPhone to fight global warming. How, you say? Simple - buy the new app called 'A Real Tree' and you will actually be buying a real tree (go figure) that will be planted on your behalf somewhere in this crazy world of ours.

Hans Chung, founder of Mokugift and developer of the Real Tree app, had the following to say:

Microsoft: OpenOffice better than Google Apps

Steve Ballmer has insisted that OpenOffice is a far better rival to Microsoft's Office than Google's applications suite, and insisted that he isn't worried about people skipping Vista and moving straight onto Windows 7

The Microsoft CEO, talking at the Gartners Inc conference, told the assembled audience that he did not consider Google the company's biggest rival in terms of applications, in a market that Office currently dominates.

When asked about Google's online applications, Ballmer said: "People don't use it. People try Google Apps, they don't use it. You can't even put a footnote in a document!"