McClatchy's D.C. bureau chief, John Walcott, recalls a Justice Department official telling Taylor that she simply "had" to use certain information he had given her for a story.
A week ago, EMI and Apple set the digital-music world buzzing with news from London. No, the Beatles weren't coming to iTunes just yet. Rather, EMI had broken ranks with the rest of the major labels and decided to offer its catalog to music retailers without digital-rights-management software that restricts consumers' ability to copy files and transfer them between devices.
That was the biggest headline of the day, but not the only news. The DRM-free songs would be ripped at a higher bit rate, giving them improved sound quality. They would cost more -- $1.29 per song, though albums would cost the same in both formats. And lower-quality, 99-cent DRM-protected songs weren't being phased out, just making room for the new offerings. ...
... First and most obviously, a major label is finally treating its customers like customers, instead of regarding them as likely shoplifters who should be given as few rights as possible.
Shorter Microsoft - we support open standards; it just has to be our standard. I don't see how they are going to make this stick.The petition, which was uploaded to Microsoft's U.K. site on March 29, asks businesses to show their support for the Open XML format being fast-tracked through the standardization process at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The format is integral to Office 2007, but Microsoft is pushing it as an international open standard for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
"We already have an international standard, the OpenDocument format, and governments are increasingly adopting it," said Taylor on Thursday. "Having a second standard is utterly unnecessary."
And the January lunch, although almost undeniably inappropriate, was not planned or approved by Doan and came months after one election and years before another.
Vendors and evangelists at the U.S. IPv6 Summit in Reston, Va., are beating the drums for the seamless, always-on ubiquitous network serving up device-agnostic services and applications promised by the new generation of Internet protocols. They gave talks citing the usual uses for these networks, from programmable refrigerators to digitally connected network-centric warfighters.
What were largely missing in the presentations were the tools and applications to use the brand-new IPv6 networks being set up by military and civilian agencies.
With $12 million in sales last year and some 1600 corporate clients -- including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Oracle, PepsiCo and about 100 of the Fortune 500 -- business information company ZoomInfo has decided to provide free access to most of what it had been charging for.
On Monday, ZoomInfo.com plans to offer a newly improved business-oriented semantic search service, tailored for finding information about companies and their employees, to any Internet user under an advertisement-supported model.
"We believe that this is disruptive to the business information world," said Russell Glass, VP of products and marketing for ZoomInfo.
The group, a nonprofit professional association for members of the intelligence community -- including private contractors, academics and members of U.S. spy agencies -- is largely unknown. That's quite a feat, because its chairman, retired Navy Vice Adm. John M. McConnell, the former head of the National Security Agency, left recently to be sworn in as director of national intelligence, the president's top intelligence adviser. (A new chairman for the professional association is expected to be selected soon.)
