Die Preise auf dem heiss umkämpften Markt für Ultrabooks werden in den nächsten Wochen und Monaten weiter fallen. Wie das taiwanesische Branchenportal Digitimes berichtet, sind von der Entwicklung vorrangig die nordamerikanischen Märkte betroffen. Dort hatten Lenovo, Acer und Hewlett-Packard (HP) zuletzt ihre Preise gesenkt, um so den Weg frei für neue Ultrabooks zu machen, die den noch leistungsfähigeren Intel-Prozessor Ivy Brigde verbaut haben.

Inmitten der vielen Patentschlachten in der Mobilfunk-Branche strebt Apple klarere Regeln für Patente an, die Kernbestandteil von Industriestandards wie UMTS sind. Am Mittwoch wurde ein entsprechender Brief von Apple an das europäische Standardisierungsgremium Etsi vom vergangenen November bekannt.

Der US-amerikanische IT-Gigant IBM verlegt seinen Hauptsitz Nordosteuropa von Zürich in die spanische Hauptstadt Madrid. Big Blue will die beiden Hauptsitze Nordost- und Südwesteuropa in Spanien vereinen. IBM Schweiz ist von den Veränderungen nicht betroffen.

Hacker haben am Mittwoch erneut die Website des polnischen Kulturministeriums ausser Gefecht gesetzt. Kulturminister Bogdan Zdrojewski gilt als der entschiedendste Verfechter des Acta-Abkommens für Urheberschutz in der polnischen Regierung und hat sich damit seit Wochen die Internetgemeinde des Landes zum Feind gemacht.

Radikaler Schritt beim kriselnden finnischen Handyhersteller Nokia: Der mit roten Zahlen und sinkenden Verkäufen kämpfende Konzern wolle die Smartphone-Fertigung nach Asien verlagern. Betroffen seien rund 4.000 Mitarbeiter in drei Werken in Ungarn, Mexiko und in Finnland, teilte das Unternehmen heute mit. Der Stellenabbau solle bis Ende des Jahres geschafft sein.

Die auf E-Government, Geschäftsprozesse und eCH-Standards fokussierte Soreco Publica ist nach diversen Erfolgen auf Bundes- und Kantonsebene in zwei weitere Grossprojekte involviert: Das Unternehmen unterstützt zum einen den Kanton und die Stadt Schaffhausen künftig dabei, die E-Government-Dienstleistungen des Online-Schalters weiter auszubauen. Zum anderen erhielt die Firma vom Kanton Aargau den Projektauftrag zur Einführung eines internen Kontrollsystems (IKS).

"Wie bei der Desktopversion stehen auch bei der Betaversion von Chrome für Android Schnelligkeit, Sicherheit und Einfachheit im Vordergrund", mit diesen Worten stellte Google Chrome für Android vor. Seit Dienstag steht die Betaversion des Browsers im Android Market zum Download bereit.

Die jahrelange Fehde der Software-Konkurrenten Oracle und SAP geht in eine neue Runde. Oracle will die von einem US-Gericht in Kalifornien zugebilligte Schadenersatzzahlung von 272 Mio. Dollar (209 Mio. Euro) nicht akzeptieren und ein neues Gerichtsverfahren anstrengen, das nochmals Jahre in Anspruch nehmen könnte.

Um die einstigen Stars unter den deutschen Internet-Treffpunkten wird es einsam. Immer mehr Nutzer kehren StudiVZ, Lokalisten oder Wer-kennt-wen den Rücken und laufen zu Facebook über, das den Schwung nun für einen Aufsehen erregenden Börsengang nutzt.

Der schwächelnde US-Internetkonzern Yahoo steht vor einem grossen Umbau seines Verwaltungsrates. Wie das Unternehmen mit Hauptsitz in Sunnyvale (Kalifornien) mitteilt, stehen der Vorsitzende des Verwaltungsrats, Roy Bostock, und drei andere Verwaltungsrats-Mitglieder nicht mehr für einer Wiederwahl zur Verfügung.

bs0d3 writes "After some litigation; ReDigi, a site where people can sell used MP3's has been found legal in America. One of the key decisions the judge had to make was whether MP3's were material objects or not. 'Material objects' are not subject to the distribution right stipulated in "17 USC 106(3)" which protects the sale of intellectual property copies. If MP3's are material objects than the resale of them is guaranteed legal under the first sale' exception in 17 USC 109. Capitol Records tried to argue that they were material objects under one law and not under the other. Today the judge has sided with the first-sale doctrine, which means he is seeing these as material objects."

First time accepted submitter derekmead writes "A Yale researcher says that culture differences how much money we save, how well we take care of ourselves, and other behavior indicative of taking the long view, are all based on language. His study argues that the way a language's syntax refers to the future (PDF) affects how its speakers perceive the future. For example, English and Greek make strong distinctions between the present and the future, while German doesn't, while English and Greek speakers are statistically poorer and in worse health than Germans. (The study includes a broader swath of languages/nationalities, but that's a start.)"

CheerfulMacFanboy writes "Labor Activist Li Qiang wants you to know that the iPhone 4 in his pocket is not an endorsement of Apple's policies, just an acknowledgment that the company is doing a better job of monitoring factory conditions than its peers. The founder of leading advocacy group China Labor Watch (CLW) told us that, though the Cupertino company does more-thorough inspections than competitors, it is responsible for poor working conditions at its suppliers' factories and needs to invest some of its record-breaking profits in improving them. 'Although I know that the iPhone 4 is made at sweat shop factories in China, I still think that this is the only choice, because Apple is actually one of the best. Actually before I made a decision, I compared Apple with other cell phone companies, such as Nokia,' he said through a translator. 'And the conditions in those factories are worse than the ones of Apple.'"

wiedzmin writes "A low-profile Chicago biologist, Michael Doyle, and his company Eola Technologies, who has once won a $521m patent lawsuit against Microsoft, claim that it was actually he and two co-inventors who invented, and patented, the "interactive web" before anyone else, back in 1993. Doyle argues that a program he created to allow doctors to view embryos over the early Internet, was the first program that allowed users to interact with images inside of a web browser window. He is therefore seeking royalties for the use of just about every modern interactive Internet technology, like watching videos or suggesting instant search results. Dozens of lawyers, representing the world's biggest internet companies, including Yahoo, Amazon, Google and YouTube are acting as defendants in the case, which has even seen Tim Berners-Lee testify on Tuesday."

An anonymous reader writes "This report looks at file sharing in the post MegaUpload era. The main finding — file sharing did not go away. It did not even decrease much in North America. Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links."

savuporo writes "Well known Boston Dynamics BigDog prototype now has a bigger brother named 'LS3' or Legged Squad Support System. It's intended to carry heavy loads for long treks and have enough autonomy to follow soldiers around, listen to voice commands and navigate autonomously."

pigrabbitbear writes in with a link about a virtual reality helmet designed to help people deal with medical emergencies in space. "Humans are pretty fragile. A bad break in your hip can mean surgery and months of rehab. That's pretty bad, but what if you fall and break your hip on the Moon, or even Mars? You'd be hundreds of thousands or millions of miles from a fully stocked hospital and a surgeon with steady hands. There's the option of doctor-assisted surgery from Earth — a fellow astronaut performing the surgery with remote assistance from a doctor via video link. But the lengthy communications delay make this a poor option anywhere further than the Moon. Luckily for our Mars-bound descendants, the European Space Agency has a solution: an information-loaded assisted reality helmet that will let anyone identify and perform minor surgery to repair injuries."

New submitter shuttah writes "Robert X. Cringely, author of the 1992 influential book Accidental Empires , will be republishing and updating (including pictures and new chapters) the now twenty year-old book via the launch of a new blog also by the author. Cringeley tells us, 'So next month I'll be starting a second blog with its own URL just for Accidental Empires. I, Cringely will continue right here as ever (no changes at all), but on the book blog I will over several months publish — a chapter or so at a time — the entire 100,000-word book for the world to read, free of charge.' The book was also the basis for Cringley's 1996 TV miniseries Triumph of the Nerds released by PBS."

New submitter HungryMonkey writes "According to the latest EBITDA numbers from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, the subsidies they have to pay Apple in order to carry the iPhone are drastically reducing their profits. From the Article: '"A logical conclusion is that the iPhone is not good for wireless carriers," says Mike McCormack, an analyst at Nomura Securities. "When we look at the direct and indirect economics that Apple has managed to extract from the carriers, the carrier-level value destruction is quite evident."' So one money sucking leech has attached itself to another money sucking leech?"

itwbennett writes "Yahoo's restructuring continued Tuesday with the ouster of 4 board members, including chairman Roy Bostock, according to an IDG News Service report. The move follows the resignation of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang in January and gives investors something they'd been calling for, says analyst Greg Sterling: 'Investors have felt for a long time that the board was just rubber stamping what the leadership was doing. They want a reinvigorated board with some independence. People will wait to see what's different but I think this will be seen as a positive.'"

mikejuk writes "SuperPoke Pets is another casualty of Google's aggressive spring cleanup... But unlike other users of Google's trashed software, Superpoke users have decided to fight back with a class action. The aim is to recover the money they spend on virtual gold used as a currency to buy clothes for their virtual pets. The total 'amount in controversy' exceeds $5,000,000 — a sum that is credible given that there were at least 7,000,000 users. So if you are considering adding a virtual currency to your app you might want to think of the future."

Zothecula writes "Two years after BAE Systems was awarded a US$21 million contract from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to develop an advanced Electromagnetic Railgun for the U.S. Navy, the company has delivered the first industry-built prototype demonstrator to the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren. The prototype launcher is now being prepared for testing which is scheduled to take place in the coming weeks."

An anonymous reader wrote in with news of the latest release of ReactOS, a project to create a complete reimplementation of Windows. The highlights of this release are the integration of a new network stack based upon lwIP, the ability to build using Microsoft's C compiler, and Wifi support. There are a few options for trying it out (emulator image and a livecd amongst others) and source code over at Sourceforge.