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The courts ruled that the FCC was out of bounds, but there is nothing to stop Microsoft or other electronics makers from choosing to adhere to flags.

“The success of the entire distribution chain is dependent on all involved maintaining the necessary checks and quality control so that coding is correctly applied,” a Microsoft spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail to News.com.

A week after some users of Vista Media Centers were prevented from recording two NBC Universal shows, the network acknowledged Monday that it inadvertently blocked some people from recording the shows.

“Customers need to know who Microsoft is listening to and how that affects their equipment,” said Danny O’Brien, a staffer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for Internet users.

For a week, fans of digital video recorders wondered if Hollywood was trying to force DVR (digital video recorder) owners to watch commercials. Historically, TV and cable networks have resented DVRs for enabling viewers to jump past ads. The Federal Communications Commission proposed rules that would require electronics manufacturers to set up their technologies to block recording at the request of TV networks.

“We made an inadvertent mistake,” an NBC spokeswoman said in an interview with CNET News.com. “We’re not aware of any other complaints, and we believe we have addressed the problem.”

The owners of
Windows Vista Media Centers were prevented from recording American Gladiators and Medium last Monday. At the message board The Green Button, Vista users gathered to complain about receiving a prompt that informed them that the broadcaster had “prohibited recording of this program.”

The NBC spokeswoman said the network had no intention of blocking the show but declined to specify how the error was made. Flags that have been issued accidentally aren’t uncommon, some industry insiders say. While acknowledging that it “fully adheres to flags used by broadcasters,” Microsoft said that it was working with content owners to reduce the number of false flags.

The EFF says it’s important for consumers to know whether their DVRs can be controlled by entertainment companies.

Meanwhile, the larger issue for some is that Microsoft and possibly other hardware and software makers will honor broadcast flags.

Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss remain contenders for the U.S. rowing team that will compete in the Olympics in Beijing this summer.

Both parties must still show up in court on July 2–a “speak now, or forever hold your peace” sort of occasion. But it appears that the public will remain shut out. Earlier this week, the same judge, James Ware of U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., opted to make the proceedings of the case private and keep court documents under seal. CNET News.com is evaluating a possible legal challenge to Ware’s decision, which keeps matters out of public view.

ConnectU’s legal team had alleged fraud on Facebook’s part for a number of reasons: one, because a forensic expert it hired had unearthed instant messaging logs that were relevant to the case and which had not been used as evidence prior to the settlement, and two, because they alleged that Facebook altered the value of its common stock between an October press release that pegged it at $15 billion, and February’s signing of the settlement term sheet.

“We are happy that Judge Ware enforced the agreement settling our dispute with the ConnectU founders,” according to a statement from Facebook late Wednesday night. “ConnectU’s founders were represented by six lawyers and a professor at Wharton Business School when they signed the Settlement Agreement. The ConnectU founders understood the deal they made, and we are gratified that the Court rejected their false allegations of fraud. Their challenge was simply a case of ‘buyers remorse,’ as described by the Boston Court earlier this month.”

The Facebook statement continued: “We were disappointed that we had to litigate the settlement, as we believed we were caught in the middle of a fee dispute between ConnectU’s founders and its former counsel. Nevertheless, we can now consider this chapter closed and wish the Winklevoss brothers the best of luck in their future endeavors.”

A U.S. District Court judge has decided to enforce the settlement that Facebook and would-be rival ConnectU signed in February, rejecting the ConnectU founders’ claims of fraud.

Facebook, which is not publicly traded, did not deny that it had altered its valuation, but Ware deemed that the failure to disclose the change in valuation could not be considered fraudulent.

The legal battle between the two social-networking sites has gone on since 2004, when ConnectU founders Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra initially sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and several other early employees for allegedly stealing ConnectU’s code and business plan while they were all students at Harvard. Facebook countersued in 2005, claiming that ConnectU had hacked into its user database to mine e-mail addresses.

My own company uses SugarCRM (as well as Zimbra and other open-source software), and we’ve been very happy with it, but we also use proprietary software where it’s more mature and hence makes more sense. Open source will eventually be on par or better than its proprietary counterparts in most or all product segments, but until then, we need to use what works.

We didn’t do (open source and SaaS) because they were cool, or for any desire to be some sort of fashionable IT software company. We did it because it makes sense for our users, and both are an approach to building more affordable, useful, and scalable IT.

In other words, if it works, do it, whether you’re a vendor or a buyer. It’s really not any more complicated than that.

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Apparently, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, missed Stallman’s memo, because it’s advertising for a Salesforce.com developer to help it manage its proprietary (gasp!), SaaS (gasp!) CRM system.

Not that Canonical is alone. Red Hat, Hyperic, MySQL, and other open-source companies also use Salesforce. Are they bad? Are they putty in the hands of Salesforce? Maybe. But they’re also companies that need to make the trains run on time, and apparently, they felt that Salesforce was the best tool for the job.

This is the point that Hyperic’s Stacey Schneider makes while analyzing the comments of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Stallman, relating how Ellison’s critiques of SaaS sound eerily similar to early complaints about open source, all of which have been disproved over time:

Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman recently went on a tirade against software as a service (SaaS), suggesting that consumers of SaaS are “putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”

The company is offering free licenses of the software to the first 1,000 people who sign up to use it. After that it will get capped off at 10,000 sign-ups.

Tuesday morning software company Memeo launched a new product called Share. Aimed at people who don’t use photo- or video-sharing sites, Share lets you take what you’ve captured on your digital camera and beam it to friends and family members without clogging up their e-mail in-boxes with full-resolution shots.

The product is not aimed at the Flickr crowd, but instead at people who want to create small circles of people to share their shots with. That’s not to say there’s not a social element, since it can be configured to automatically upload your shots to Facebook. It can also slurp up your existing contacts from Web mail providers, like what you’d get using Plaxo.

2. SolFocus: Another technology for utility-scale solar power is concentrating photovoltaics (CPV), where light is magnified onto high-efficiency solar cells. SolFocus, incubated at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, is well funded and already has a few customers.

A trial balloon or the face of solar power in the future?

And will this influx of capital result in cheaper solar panels for average consumers? Yes, but government policies make a huge difference on the economic equation. What’s also needed to make solar really widespread is more flexible financing to lower the hefty upfront cost.

Mirrors reflect light onto a liquid that makes steam, which drives a traditional electricity turbine. Other companies have different designs including BrightSource Energy which recently signed a huge deal with Pacific Gas & Electric and eSolar, which is reported to have just raised $130 million. Honorable mention goes to Infinia, which uses a Stirling engine to make distributed solar electricity.

Expect it to stay that way in the coming years but not without some bumps. Lux Research predicts a shake-out among the larger companies because supply of polysilicon will overshoot demand in a few years, bringing prices–and a few solar vendors–down.

5. Cool Earth Solar. Apart from the great name, this company is taking a potentially disruptive approach to solar electricity. Never mind expensive plants out in the desert. Why not just float reflective balloons in open fields?

Overall, you’ll see that a lot of the action in renewable energy is not in the residential solar panel world, perhaps what most people would think.

Click here to see all of News.com's Earth Day 2008 stories, photo galleries, and more.

4. First Solar. In the traditional solar photovoltaic market, First Solar the one to catch. The reason is simple: cost per watt. Its cadmium telluride-based panels take up more space than silicon cell panels, but its overall cost has set the mark in a highly competitive field. Hot in pursuit are other thin-film solar companies–Heliovolt, Global Solar Energy, and Nanosolar, which are making cells from yet another material, CIGS (copper indium gallium and diselenide).

(Credit:
Cool Earth Solar) 1. Ausra: Originally from Australia, Ausra is one of the movers and shakers in solar thermal, a technology that is already competitive with utility-scale fossil fuel power generation.

Which are the companies to watch in clean tech? Most are definitely not household names but they are having an impact.

3. Southwest Wind Power. There are several companies taking different approaches to small wind turbines, designed for homes and buildings. Southwest Wind Power has turbines for remote off-grid locations but it now also has a ground-mounted one for homes. Another company to watch is Aerovironment which just had its small turbines installed at Logan Airport in Boston.

Below the photo is a list of some of the newsmakers in the renewable energy business, with a focus on start-ups. Along the way, you’ll get a feel for the technology categories that define this corner of
green tech.

Instead, most of the money is going to utility-scale power plants to make power at peak times of the day. And businesses, helped by favorable financing models, are the big buyers.

At first, the company plans to put the cells onto a glass substrate for solar panels. Later, it intends to put the flexible cells onto a plastic substrate so it can be integrated into building materials, like roofs or awnings.

More significant than the actual number is the fact that HelioVolt hit 12 percent efficiency with its manufacturing process, which it says can turn out a cell in six minutes.

In fact, when HelioVolt first delivers product at the end of this year or early next year, Langdon said that the efficiency will be between 10 and 12 percent because it’s a more efficient process.

The little solar cell that could. HelioVolt says CIGS cells are approaching silicon in effciency.

Solar upstart HelioVolt on Monday will announce that it has reached 12.2 percent efficiency with its CIGS solar cells, setting another mark in the race against competitors and silicon.

(Credit:
HelioVolt)

“Everybody has known for years that the cost of CIGS film is much less than silicon–something like 3 cents on the dollar. The issue has always been making it fast enough,” he said.

But working with CIGS is notoriously difficult, particularly manufacturing at large scale.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) earlier this year said that it attained 19.9 percent efficiency for a solar cell made out of CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide), an alternative to traditional silicon.

Langdon said the company’s FASST process is like making a grilled cheese sandwich where two pieces of bread contain different chemicals. Under heat, the two layers of “cheese” bind together to form a cell.

Company CEO BJ Stanbery will present a paper at the IEEE Photovoltaics Specialists Conference where he will disclose the efficiency threshold which HelioVolt has reached in its labs. The well-financed company expects it can go much further in converting light to electricity.

NREL used a technique called co-evaporation where active chemicals are immersed in a solution, which then gets removed. That process can take 40 to 50 minutes, according to HelioVolt.

What matters more than the efficiency record is the speed with which solar companies can manufacture. Ultimately, high scale is what brings costs down, said John Langdon, HelioVolt’s vice president of marketing.

Another CIGS company, Global Solar Energy, also uses co-evaporation. Earlier this year, it said it broke the 10 percent mark with its commercial products and expects to hit 13 percent or 14 percent this year.

Another venture-backed CIGS company, Miasole, had to set back its initial plans after technical difficulties and efficiency levels that were only 4 percent to 6 percent.

Companies are pursuing alternative materials to silicon to get around the high prices and demand associated with it. Thin-film cells use less material than traditional cells.

For comparison, commercial silicon cells convert light to electricity at about 14 percent to 20 percent. But efficiency doesn’t translate into commercial viability.

Solar high-flyer First Solar uses thin film solar cells made out of cadmium telluride that are less efficient than silicon.

Competitor Nanosolar claims an efficiency in the nine to ten percent range for its commercial products which started shipping at the end of last year and higher results in its labs.

Among the critical patches one each affects Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Host Integration Server, and Microsoft Excel. All four could enable remote code execution if exploited.

On Thursday, Microsoft announced four security bulletins for next week. The announcement is intended as a heads-up for IT departments before Patch Tuesday. Four fixes are considered critical, six important, and one is moderate as ranked by the software giant.

Of the important patches, all six affect Windows, and could enable remote code execution or elevation of privilege if exploited.

The lone moderate patch affects Windows Office and could enable information disclosure if exploited.

Starting this month, Microsoft is sharing the technical details of new vulnerabilities to give software developers a catch to update affected products before the public announcement. And on Tuesday, Microsoft is expected to provide with each bulletin an “exploitability index” to help system administrators prioritize the patches.

“This is not a lab in some tall building,” Wolff said during his speech. “This is a 20-square-mile sandbox that will give people the ability to really innovate.”

The network will cover more than 20 square miles in the heart of Silicon Valley and will bring 4G wireless service to campuses of big technology companies, such as Google and Intel. Service is expected to be available to developers by late summer of this year. The company is offering the service free to developers for a year, but developers will have to pay $49.99 to buy a WiMax USB modem. To qualify, developers must register for Clearwire’s developer program and describe the products or business ideas they wish to pursue.

Clearwire is building a nationwide wireless broadband network using a technology called WiMax. Late last year, it merged its wireless assets with spectrum from Sprint Nextel. And it has received billions of dollars in investment from Google, Intel, Comcast, and Time Warner.

Ben Wolff, co-chairman of the company, announced the new WiMax Innovation Network during a speech at the CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show here on Thursday.

The company currently offers service in two cities: Baltimore and Portland, Ore. And it’s announced 10 more markets for later this year. By the end of 2010, the company plans to have service in over 80 markets with access to more than 120 million.

Wolff added that the company decided to open the network up to developers because executives recognize the need for new applications to drive demand for its service.

“We know we need killer applications for our network,” he said. “And we know we aren’t the folks to build the best applications. That’s not our core competency. So we are encouraging third parties to take advantage of our network.”

LAS VEGAS–Wireless operator Clearwire is offering application developers in Silicon Valley free access to its 4G wireless network in the hopes that they will come up with cool applications for the new service.