Liberty Media has reached an agreement to provide Sirius XM with $530 million to pay off its debts that are coming due very shortly and keep the satelite radio company from going under. The first payment of $280 million will be $171 million go straight to debtors and the addition $25o will be available to pay off other debts and prevent a takeover by Dish Network. Liberty Media is the parent company of DirecTV so this was a strategic move by the company to prevent competitor Dish Network from claiming sole possession of satelite radio. In return Liberty Media will receive 12.5 million shares and two board of directors positions expected to be filled by Liberty Media founder John Malone and CEO Greg Maffei. It is good to see that a company was able to come to the rescue to prevent another large bankruptcy.
OCZ has made a lot of progress since introducing it’s first SSD in August of 2008 and their latest model continues to improve. While most MLC SSDs using the JMicron controller have been plagued with issues such as stuttering, the OCZ Apex drive takes a unique approach to remedy this. OCZ is not a manufacturer of the SSD chips so they don’t have a lot of control over the logic controller like Intel which SSDs don’t have this problem. But OCZ does have enough leeway to do some engineering and they have come up with a way to avoid the issues by using two controllers in a RAID setup. The result is a larger capacity drive with better performance without many of the issues that plague previous drives. PC Perspective was able to get ahold of this drive and test it out. If you are interested in the benchmarks please check out the links below.
Well, even after receiving a life line from Bank of America during the holiday season, Circuit City was unable to survive the poor economy. Along with the company go another 34,000 jobs. There were two potential buyers, Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego who runs an electronics chain in Latin America and also Golden Gate Capital private equity firm. Both considered purchasing a portion of the stores, but negotiations fell through. After a buyer could not be obtained, bankruptcy judge Kevin Huennekens gave the go-ahead to liquidate the rest of the Circuit City assets. The liquidation sales will continue through March and then finally close their doors.
Circuit City has a rough time competiting with Best Buy recently and it seems combined with the poor economy finally took its toll on the company. It is a shame that so many people are going to lose their jobs and that at least a part of the chain could not be purchased as undoubtiedly there are some profitable stores. Plus, with another competitor gone, prices will probably go up at Best Buy. Definitely not a good move for consumer’s sake.
As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted much in the last week and that is because I have been working on another project – my free web hosting site. I was able to launch it on Wednesday and I’ve already got quite a few clients. If you would like to check it out it is ATBHost.net. There are four packages right now ranging from totally free, to post-4-host, and ad supported. There are a few more details to work out on the backend, but everything for the clients is ready to go and working very well. Now that most of the hardwork is over I will be able to get posting some more articles.
Microsoft ran through a demo of their latest OS, Windows 7, today at the PDC Keynote. The OS apparently is aimed to run anything from netbooks to very powerful computers being able to utilize up to 256 CPUs. Here are some of the key features included as of the pre-beta:
New taskbar with icons instead of text with application options available through right clicking. When you hover over an icon in the taskbar, the other applications on the screen go transparent allowing you to see that application.
The sidebar is gone and now gadget can appear any place on the screen. This will help out mobile users who do not have that much screen real estate in the first place. This can be combined with the above ‘peek’ feature to render all windows transparent and just view the desktop with gadgets.
Automatic window resizing: drop a window to the top to maximize to 100% or to the edges for 50% and restore when pulling it down from the top.
UAC has been tamed down and allowing settings for each program.
Demoed the improved multitouch features including a start menu which is 25% larger when touch screen is enabled to improve controlability.
Windows SVP Steve Sinofsky showcased his netbook with 1GHz processor (presumably a VIA Nano) and 1GB of RAM running Windows 7 and saying about half the RAM was still available after boot. It is probably a special netbook version, but still impressive.
As I said before, scaling up to 256 CPUs. I doubt any consumer computer would need this ability in Windows 7’s lifetime, but it is probably a function embedded in the kernel code for compute clusters.
Improved multi monitor management and setting up projectors. Remote Desktop Connection will be able to be used with multiple monitors.
Improved UI for Media Center resembling the Zune Interface.
All in all a pretty decent amount of improvements in the last year or so that work has been done with Windows 7. Microsoft has said before they want to keep changes to a minimum and focus on making the OS provide a better experience for the customer. The dramatic change from XP to Vista is probably what gave a lot of users a hard time so keeping the UI similar but better looking and more intuitive helps. No release date has been set yet, just hopefully Microsoft gets it done correctly before pushing it out of the door. Below are some more relevant links if you are craving more screenshots and information. I will try to keep as up to date with the Windows 7 developments as I can. I also hope to write more about Microsoft’s other big project, Windows Azure, the cloud OS.
The bigger question, is where was the original driver? While it probably is illegal to do so, I really don’t think they need to charge him with such high degree crimes though. Perhaps they could have just offered him an unpaid internship! Problem solved.
Apparently the Google taking over Digg rumor mill is back in full action. This time around the figures are much higher than before, now at $200 million. According to Tech Crunch sources, the deal should be made within weeks. Microsoft could step in and block the deal with their own offer, but that remains to be seen. The Microsoft ad deal, which provides Digg with most of its revenue, would be terminated if Google should buy out Digg. For those of you who may not know, Digg is a social content driven website where you ‘Digg’ articles you like and the popular ones get to the main page for others to view.
The average American only gets 50% on this quiz and Americans 18-29 only score a 30% on average. No wonder the United States is in such a sad state of affairs, no one is really paying attention. Can you do better? I only missed one, I’m glad I am in the know.
Happy Fourth of July to all Americans! Hope your day went well and you enjoyed the picnics and fireworks. Crack open another brew in celebration! I know I’ve been enjoying my day off, I hope to get some news posted over this extended weekend.
