Siemens Computer Technologies

Apple embraces DRMs, and any other restrictions the copyright industries want. This is at the heart of its power. Its alliance with the copyright industries has brought Apple from the brink of irrelevance to dominance of the handheld Internet and gadget markets in this decade.

We really tried to get away from talking just about the iPhone in MobileTechRoundup show #140, but when it is the hottest news in the mobile space it is tough. We did talk about some applications, iPhone 3G battery life, and a utility we would like to see on the iPhone. We also talked about the free Opera Mobile 9.5 beta now available for Windows Mobile touch screen devices. Netbooks were also part of the topics with Acer’s Aspire One and the MSI Wind mainly discussed.

Hey, we all complain about work from time to time; we’ve all had lousy jobs. But before you call it a day and head off to the support group that meets at the bar, here are a few words from IT pros that love their work. “I do whatever needs to be done, including windows–and I don’t just mean the operating system!”Name: J. Oquendo, CEH, CNDA, CHFI, SGFA, SGFE Location: New Haven area, Connecticut Profession, specialization: Nerd at a VoIP carrier specializing in doing whatever needs to be done including Windows (and I don’t solely mean the operating system). There are so many tasks involved with my job its difficult to pinpoint a specific title. My business card says Senior…

SaaS CRM vendor Entellium is phasing out its browser-based offerings in favor of a smart client version that it says sells faster, better and at one-fifth of the marketing costs of the old version.

The latest version from the Mountain View, Calif., and Sri Lanka company adds WSO2 Data Services and security features for enterprise-class service composition. Mashup Server 1.5 is built on the WSO2 Web Services Application Server based on Apache/Axis 2. It can be used as an individual service development and deployment tool or can scale up to support team, enterprise, or Internet communities.

More than two years ago, Microsoft purchased Apptimum, Inc., which had developed two system utilities for transferring programs and settings from one computer to another. Roughly six months later, around the time Windows Vista was released to corporate customers, Microsoft announced that it would release the software under a new name, Windows Easy Transfer Companion. Last month, the “extended public beta” ended suddenly, with no announcement and no plans for a replacement. What’s going on?

After analyzing three weeks of spam data between June 13 to July 3, 2008, Roaring Penguin Software Inc. found evidence that spam originating from the top three fre email providers (Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail) is increasing, with spammers in favor of abusing Gmail’s privacy preserving feature of not including the sender’s original IP in outgoing emails : “Spammers are increasingly using free e-mail providers to avoid IP address-based reputation systems. These systems track mail sent by various IP addresses and assign each IP address a rating. Some anti-spam software operates largely or exclusively on the basis of the IP address rating. Roaring Penguin’s data shows that over the three weeks from June 13 to July 3, 2008, the percentage…

After well over a year of scrutiny, the proposed merger between the country’s two satellite radio providers - XM and Sirius - is finally on the home stretch, set for an approval vote as early as Aug. 1. But wait. This week, one of the FCC commissioners proposed even more conditions - beyond what chairman Kevin Martin has already suggested and what XM/Sirius execs have offered. With Washington politics at play, could the last mile to a vote be delayed even further? From the beginning, XM and Sirius faced an uphill battle to get this merger approved, notably the matter of a no-merging-in-the-future clause that was established when the two companies received their licenses. But through it all, Sirius CEO…

Hamilton “Hammett” Verissimo, the founder of the open-source Castle Project, is joining Microsoft on August 11 as a program manager on the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF) team.

My post the other day about Windows “Workstation” 2008 (the nickname given to an installation of Windows Server 2008 that’s been tweaked to be more of a desktop OS) seemed to have caused a bit of a stir amongst those who believe that the server OS makes a better desktop OS than Vista. OK then, if that’s the case, show me the money!