The PC Report

When using a rented-out PC at an internet café/business kiosk you might have thought it was legal. Well actually, up until now, it wasn’t legal under the old Microsoft licensing. Now, under the new Rental Rights Licensing all businesses have to do is pay a small fee and they can legally license out PCs to customers that have either Microsoft Windows or Office loaded on them.

The fee is a one-time only payment, and up until June 30, 2010 you can pay a cheaper promotional price (which is 30% off) to ensure your businesses legality. The prices to obtain the Rental Rights License are $58 (promotional)/$83 (standard) for Office Professional Plus, $45/$64 for Office Standard and Windows is licensed at $23/$32. Whether or not business will actually pay the fee after they’ve been running (illegally) for all these years has yet to be seen.

Greenpeace has gone and awarded Apple a prized four giant gold stars for their efforts in keeping their company, and products, green. According to the latest report from Greenpeace, Apple is the only company to have been awarded the four giant gold stars for keeping polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFR) out of their desktop and laptop computers, as well as their mobile phones and computer monitors.

With this award, Apple blew away all the competition, coming in better than all the other five companies who have products in each category, and most of the other companies who produce computers (the best being HP with two small gold stars). Nokia and Sony Ericsson also did well, achieving a large gold star each for the only category they were in (mobile phones). Keep up the good work Apple; maybe we’ll see other manufacturers doing better in the future.

Microsoft is continuing to bask in the glory of their latest (and greatest) operating system, Windows 7, with new claims that suggest that it is the fastest selling operating system in history. While no actual sales numbers have been given, Craig Bellinson, the Director of Marketing for Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, shares with us that PC sales went up 50% the week after 7 was released, Black Friday sales were up 63% and year-over-year PC sales were up by more than 50%.

After the flop that Vista was, it isn’t surprising to see that Windows 7 sales are so good as people flooded to use the new operating system to rid themselves of Vista. Good reviews and positive comments also would have helped Windows 7 successfulness. It also wouldn’t be surprising to see Microsoft’s next big OS leap over Windows 7 and see better, and faster, sales.

An injunction against Microsoft to stop them selling Word has occurred before: it was Microsoft vs i4i, where i4i held a patent for custom XML tagging, something used by Word in the way it saves files, which Microsoft wilfully infringed. Microsoft lost the case and was barred from selling any versions of Word that contained the custom XML; however the injunction was delayed upon request until Microsoft could appeal the case.

Microsoft appealed the case, and today, once again, lost. The US Court of Appeals has ordered Microsoft to drop the Custom XML editing in Word, which has effectively banned current versions from sale and also prevents all versions of the entire Office suites from sale because they contain Word. The injunction will come into effect on January 11, 2010.

However, Microsoft has said that they have been preparing for this outcome since August, and will be ready to distribute copies of Office 2007 and Word 2007 without the feature by the injunction date. Microsoft Office 2010 will not be barred from distribution because it doesn’t contain the infringing technology, so you can keep downloading the beta all you like.

The browser ballot screen seems to finally be getting ready for approval, months after they originally set the plan in motion thanks to the EU blaming them for anti-competitive behaviour. Originally the browsers would have appeared on the ballot in alphabetical order by developer, putting Apple’s Safari browser in the first position. Google, Opera and Mozilla quickly hit back, saying that this was unfair and proposing that a random order is much better.

The case is apparently going to be settled on or before December 15th by the European Commission, and Microsoft is said to be randomising the browser ballot to appeal to the EU. If the case is settled this month, the release of the browser ballot to the general public would come sometime mid-February next year, with an update released to Windows Update if you have IE set as the default browser. You would then be presented a choice to download a browser out of IE, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera and when you do download it, no security warning is present – a win to other browser developers.

Feel like moving yet another one of your internet services to a Google-run service? Google is dominating again by setting up their own Public DNS for people to use. According to Google, by using their Public DNS service you can “speed up your browsing experience, improve your security and get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.” To use it, just change your DNS servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 -  watch out, OpenDNS.

Enjoying the great new Windows 7? Well, so is Microsoft – according to the NPD Group, Windows 7 opening few days’ sales are up by 234% over Vista’s opening few days’ sales. This is pretty impressive; more impressive than the mere 82% revenue growth over Vista. Interestingly, PC sales weren’t as strong during the Windows 7 launch as they were during the Windows Vista launch.

Unfortunately, the amount of sales of computers that had older operating systems than Windows 7 was high during the launch: 20% of PCs sold during the Windows 7 launch had an older operating system on them, compared to 6% during the Vista launch.” Aside from Vista being stronger in PC sales (probably due to people realising you need a new computer to run Vista), it looks like the Windows 7 launch was a great success. Congratulations to Microsoft.

We all remember the fuss that the European Union made about web browsers in Windows, first making Windows 7 go without a browser altogether (Windows 7 E), and then making Microsoft propose the “browser ballot screen.” Microsoft originally proposed the order of the browsers on the screen to go by market share, placing IE first. The EU rejected this idea, so Microsoft and the EU agreed on alphabetical order (see above image).

As you may have realised, Firefox isn’t in the second spot it used to be. Mozilla user experience designer Jenny Boriss, doesn’t like this layout at all, claiming there’s an unfair advantage towards Safari:

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One of Australia’s largest science institutions, CSIRO, recently announced that it had earned around AU$200m (US$183m) from its WiFi patent battles with some of the worlds largest computer companies. CSIRO owns the patents to the 802.11 wireless standard they made in 1996, a standard they claim is used in over 800 million devices worldwide at any moment.

Over the past years they have been battling some of the largest companies over these patents, including Microsoft, Intel, Netgear, Dell, HP and more. It looks like all this money from the court cases and settlements has finally pooled to quite a sum. CSIRO will soon announce how the money will be spent, although we’re sure the money will go towards more research within the company.

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Australian power supplier Integral Energy, a company “trusted” by 800,000 families and businesses according to their web site, has recently had to repair all of the company’s 1000 desktop computers and replace machines in the control room to contain a Win32 virus. If the Sydney Morning Herald is correct and Integral have been using anti-virus software that hasn’t been updated since before February, this is a huge cause for concern.

According to The Inquirer:
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