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Tid-bits
12/18 - Hewlett Packard (HP) has done an about-face, or half an about-face. Before HP exclusively supported the Blu-ray Disc format and not HD DVD (High Definition DVD). Now it will support both. HP wanted the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) to adopt two additional technologies, one called Mandatory Managed Copy and another technology called iHD. Support for iHD shall be built into Microsoft's next generation operating system, Windows Vista. The Blu-ray Disc Association decided to incorporate Mandatory Managed Copy but not iHD. "HP believes both Mandatory Managed Copy and iHD are important to fostering the digitally connected home".
A Japanese court shall permit the use of documents seized from Intel and Japanese OEMs (original equimpment manufacturers) as evidence in AMD's case against Intel. AMD alleges that from 2000-2002 its growing success had increased its market share to 22%; that this success led Intel to coerce, offer rebates with conditions, and use the Intel Inside program to limit or exclude AMD CPUs; and that Intel's actions tumbled market share of non-Intel CPUs from 24% to 11% from 2002 to 2003. That's quite a drop. According to AMD, this type of thing is "what people inside our industry already know well – that Intel abuses its monopoly position to threaten and intimidate OEMs not to do business with AMD".
Yahoo! now offers companies that advertise online a service that evaluates the sales impact of their advertising, both online and offline. Yahoo! is working with another company, Marketing Management Analytics, which said that advertisers "need to move beyond measurement of clicks and page views to understand what is really working to drive sales".
Companies that use NETGEAR ProSafe 7000 Series Layer 2 managed switches now have a limited lifetime warranty on their hardware. Before they had a five-year warranty. NETGEAR's ProSafe 7000 Layer 3 managed switches already had a limited lifetime warranty. The company is "extending lifetime warranties across the entire line of ProSafe 7000 series managed switches".
A study is available from IBM that suggests that finance staff need to spend a greater percentage of their time on decision support, performance and growth activities, as opposed to transactional activities. Part of the problem is fragmented business processes and systems. Organizations need to base insights on facts, as opposed to decision making by intuition. Fragmented systems can make this difficult. Companies should strive to turn financial information from a passive state into a active service. The right tools can help, such as dashboards, fed by real time data. The objective is to "to unlock, from the exploding volumes of data, the hidden gems of information that could uncover future business opportunities and foresee trends or costly problems ahead of time".
A new version of Tivoli Access Manager can automate auditing and reporting. Tivoli Access Manager can also combine with Tivoli Federated Identity Manger to audit and report on business partners' access to services. Used with repositories that store user names and passwords such as Tivoli Directory Server, Tivoli Access Manager can manage access for web businesses. The software can also audit and report on SOA (service oriented architecture) applications. Assisting in the compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements is one such application of the new version of the software, which automates the audit "by capturing the data in one centralized location and then generating automated compliance reports".
AIX and POWER are alive and well. IBM has opened an AIX Collaboration Center for test and development of applications and middleware for the AIX operating system. The center shall assist ISVs (independent software vendors) with applications on AIX. Symantec does not develop for Windows alone. Virtualization technology extends to the AIX platform as well. The center shall provide resources to enable "applications for AIX and the latest 64-bit POWER systems".
Customers of Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM), based on Microsoft Office Professional 2003 and Project Server 2003, please be aware that Microsoft is bringing to project management portfolio management. Microsoft shall acquire a portfolio management firm, which shall enable Microsoft's Enterprise Project Management "to offer an end-to-end enterprise project and portfolio management solution".