Microsoft, Philips Retest 'White Spaces' Device
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The prototype wireless device intended to in unused portions of the television spectrum has been resubmitted for testing after it malfunctioned in eariler FCC tests.
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(InfoWorld) - The association of television broadcasters launched a campaign on Monday designed to persuade the Federal Communications Commission not to allow portable wireless Internet services in the so-called "white spaces" of TV spectrum. The move pits powerful broadcasters against some of the biggest names in technology, including Microsoft, Google, Intel, and Dell. The broadcasters said they began airing a television advertisement as well as print ads in several Capital Hill publications on Monday. They also planned to send a letter to the FCC arguing that enabling portable wireless Internet services in the white spaces will degrade TV service for consumers just as they spend billions of dollars buying new digital TV sets. "This investment should not be jeopardized by the introduction of unlicensed personal and portable devices that are sure to interfere with television reception," the letter reads. The campaign from the National Association of Broadcasters and the Association for Maximum Service Television comes in response to anÂ FCC report detailing its testing of prototype devices from the technology giants, which are working together as theÂ White Space Coalition. The companies, also including Hewlett-Packard, EarthLink, and Philips Electronics North America, had submitted prototypes of products that could operate in the portion of a spectrum band that a TV broadcaster doesn't use, known as white space. The devices were designed to look for broadcasts in the spectrum and then transmit only if the spectrum was free. But the FCC found that the devices didn't consistently detect the signals and could sometimes cause interference. The FCC has already approved transmission in the spectrum for fixed devices. The prototypes submitted by the technology companies were of portable products. However, two weeks after the FCC released its report,Â Microsoft filed a letter with the FCCÂ explaining that the device it submitted was badly damaged and that's why it failed to adequately detect broadcast signals. The broadcasters say that even if the devices work as designed, they won't protect digital TV sets from "devastating interference." That interference would cause an unacceptable hit on quality, they say. "While our friends at Intel, Google and Microsoft may find system errors, computer glitches and dropped calls tolerable, broadcasters do not," Alan Frank, NAB's chairman, said in a press release. Even though the FCC found that the prototype devices don't consistently work properly, the agency said it is open to the possibility that future devices could perform better.
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There must be a typo in the name of Microsoft's new software for handheld organizers and smartphones. It's called "Windows Mobile 6," but this release seems hardly different from the 2005 Windows Mobile 5.
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It is launching a test service to allow people to publish blogs, or online journals, called MSN Spaces. Microsoft is trailing behind competitors like Google and AOL, which already offer services which make it easy for people to set up web journals.
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Device can improve the image quality of standard and high-definition images.
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A week after releasing Windows XP Service Pack 2 to enterprises, Microsoft is trying to quell confusion over an apparent security flaw and applications that won&#39;t work without adjustments.
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Microsoft has previewed &quot;Whitehorse,&quot; a set of visual design tools intended to support the design and validation of Web services-based applications.
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But what happened to the Codemasters? Vanishing Point, the Microsoft puzzle challenge which offers the winner a trip into space, is over; all that remains is to draw the winners name from a hat. The last Microsoft competition to promote Vista was won by one Nicholas P.; weâd like to tell you more about how Nick came to win the Codemasters Challenge, but Microsoft won't tell us.â¦
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A coalition of technology vendors, consumer groups, and think tanks has launched a campaign to persuade the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve wireless devices that would operate in unused television spectrum.The Wireless Innovation Alliance, which launched a Web site Wednesday, is an expansion of the tech-centric White Spaces Coalition that has been pushing so-called white-space spectrum as a possible new broadband network. At Wednesday&#39;s alliance launch, several other groups, including Free Press, the Media Access Project, TechNet, the Computing Technology Industry Association, and Educause, joined the tech companies pushing for the FCC to approve broadcast white spaces for broadband use.U.S. Representatives Jay Inslee, a Washington state Democrat, and Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, also lent their support.Inslee called white space one of the &quot;greatest untapped&quot; sources for innovation in the U.S. &quot;We&#39;re just waiting for government to do its job, to set the rules of the road, so the geniuses in America can really use this tremendous resource,&quot; he said.The white spaces can help bring broadband to areas of the U.S. that have limited or no choices right now, Inslee added. The lack of broadband in many areas is &quot;really a sad comment on our failure to move ahead as a nation,&quot; he said. &quot;This is one of my continuing frustrations -- that we have not made adequate progress -- and the availability of white spaces is one tool to attack that.&quot;Inslee and Blackburn were among six lawmakers who signed a letter, dated Tuesday, to the FCC, calling on the agency to wrap up its ongoing inquiry into white spaces.Advocates of white-space technology have run into significant opposition and some technical problems this year.The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), representing U.S. television stations, has raised concerns that white-space devices will interfere with TV signals. And more than 55 U.S. lawmakers have raised their own concerns about interference. &quot;Placing these devices in the television band is believed to cause unacceptable interference to television reception for all Americans and impair coverage of news and sporting events by interfering with wireless microphones,&quot; wrote Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, in an Oct. 9 letter to the FCC.In addition,&#160;the FCC rejected a device built by Microsoft and other members of the White Spaces Coalition in July, saying it interfered with TV signals. Microsoft later said the device was damaged and &quot;operated at a severely degraded level.&quot;In September,&#160;Microsoft and Philips Electronics North America submitted new tests from a functioning device to the FCC. The group is awaiting FCC action on the new device.NAB still has concerns, said Dennis Wharton, the group&#39;s executive vice president for media relations. White spaces supporters are &quot;playing Russian Roulette&quot; with TV signals, he said. &quot;It is unfortunate that Microsoft and Google continue to try to muscle their way through Washington in support of a technology that simply does not work.&quot;Blackburn urged the FCC not to &quot;pick winners and losers,&quot; but to base its decision on objective tests of the white spaces devices. A lot of areas in rural west Tennessee have no broadband, she said. &quot;It is essential for economic development,&quot; she said.Asked if any other countries are using white-space spectrum for broadband devices, alliance members said they aren&#39;t aware of any formal projects.Other countries are looking to the U.S., said Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. &quot;The United States has led the world on unlicensed technologies from the get-go, and if we don&#39;t want to lose that leadership, we need to keep moving forward,&quot; he said.
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Because of a bug in Windows Vista's antipiracy technology, some users are being told that they need to reactivate the operating system after installing new device drivers or software.
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Microsoft makes available a test version of the software, which can be installed on a spare computer to share music, movies and digital media throughout a house.
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Microsoft on Thursday released a second beta of Windows Media Player 11, providing some performance enhancements, bug fixes and the integration of Windows Media Connect functionality into the player itself.
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Customers using Windows XP Embedded will be able to use a downloadable preview to test the new software for conflicts with existing drivers.
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Sticky notes. White boards. Videogame consoles. For a Microsoft Corp. event designed to show off cutting-edge software inventions, there are a lot of familiar tools on display. That's intentional, said Rico Malvar, the managing director of Microsoft Research's Redmond lab, at TechFest, the annual gathering of the software maker's international research department Tuesday.
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More than a decade after Microsoft used an idea for making binary programs work with one click from inside Web pages, the company is testing a patch that restores that functionality in the wake of a settlement with the idea's creator.
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Microsoft Corp. has fixed a problem that made it difficult for users of the most recent Windows Mobile devices to synch with PCs running Vista.
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Microsoft Windows users need to watch out for several flaws in non-Microsoft media players.