Tivo, Amazon unveil download deal ... Samsung to pay states $90 million in DRAM case

HIGHLIGHTS
News: Tivo, Amazon unveil download deal
News: Samsung to pay states $90 million in DRAM case
News: Lenovo resumes trading after IBM share sale
News: Texas, Minnesota eye move to ODF
Unix Tip: Last workday of the month
Podcast: Today's IT news audio update
ITwhirled: Finn to publish all text-message novel


NEWS UPDATES

Tivo, Amazon unveil download deal
Owners of Tivo Inc.'s popular digital video recorders (DVR) will soon be able to download films and television shows for rental and purchase from Amazon.com Inc., the two companies announced Wednesday.

Samsung to pay states $90 million in DRAM case
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the world's largest DRAM (dynamic RAM) maker, agreed to pay $90 million in a DRAM price fixing suit raised by a group of state governments, the first company named in the suit to reach such an accord.

Lenovo resumes trading after IBM share sale
Shares in Lenovo Group Ltd. resumed trading on Wednesday, after being temporarily suspended due to the sale of 300 million shares by IBM Corp., the PC company's second-largest shareholder.

Texas, Minnesota eye move to ODF
Texas and Minnesota may become the second and third U.S. states to adopt Open Document Format for XML (ODF) as the standard file format for government documents instead of the file format that Microsoft Corp. uses in its Office 2007 software suite.

Apple's response not good enough for Norwegian group
Just because three major online music retailers bind their music stores to specific portable players doesn't make it acceptable, a Norwegian consumer group leading the charge against Apple Inc.'s DRM (digital rights management) policy said.

Video games can improve your vision, study finds
Researchers from the University of Rochester in New York found that people who play video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month can improve certain aspects of their vision by about 20 percent.

Hackers slow Internet root servers with attack
Online attackers have briefly disrupted service on at least two of the 13 "root" servers that are used to direct traffic on the Internet. The attack, which began Tuesday at about 5:30 a.m. Eastern time, was the most significant attack against the root servers since an October 2002 DDOS attack.

EMC to acquire Indian security software company
EMC Corp. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Valyd Software Pvt. Ltd., a Hyderabad, India, vendor of software for securing enterprise data. EMC did not disclose the sum it will pay for Valyd, a privately held company.

RIM stays atop PDA market despite slow sales
Research in Motion Ltd. held onto its spot as the world's largest PDA (personal digital assistant) vendor, thanks to swelling demand for wireless e-mail, according to a market report released Tuesday.

AMD introduces Opteron chips that use less power
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) Wednesday announced three dual-core additions to its Opteron processor lineup that use less power than standard versions of the chip. At the same time, the company added more dual-core Opteron chips to the high end of the line.

Sun sets 10 percent operating margin goal for FY 09
Sun Microsystems Inc., buoyed by its first profitable quarter in more than a year and a half, said Tuesday it has a goal of generating an operating margin of 10 percent by its 2009 fiscal year.


UNIX TIP

Last workday of the month
By Sandra Henry-Stocker

In a column published last year, we looked at various ways to
write scripts that would only run on the last day of the month.
Determining whether an arbitrary day is the last day of the month can
be done in a number of ways, using the cal and/or the date command.
For example, if tomorrow is the first, then today must be the last day
of the month. This gets us around the complexity of months with 28,
30 or 31 days.

When a reader recently asked how to write a script that would only run
on the last workday of the month, a new twist was added to the old
problem. A day is the last workday of a month only if it's a weekday
and the following weekday falls in the next calender month. So, I
came up with two approaches to solving the new challenge.


PODCAST

Daily IT News Audio Update
Samsung settles DRAM suit for $90 million ... YouTube founders meet with Japanese copyright holders ... Attackers hit DNS root servers, but don't disrupt Internet


ITWHIRLED

Finn to publish all text-message novel
"The Last Messages," a modern day epistolary novel consisting entirely of text messages sent by an IT exec as he travels through Europe and India, is about to hit shelves from Helsinki to Espoo. But then, what do you expect from a country whose prime minister recently dumped his girlfriend via text?