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/ 27 February 2006
Octavia Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died, a close friend said on Sunday. She was 58. Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.
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/ 19 January 2006
Amazon.com plans to broadcast on its website an original show hosted by Bill Maher and featuring performers and authors touting new releases — which will be for sale at the online retailer. The webcast series is the first offering in what the company says is a plan to add more original programming to its website.
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/ 22 December 2005
Boeing says it plans to deliver 112 of its new 787 airplanes in 2008 and 2009, and is still on track to get the plane into service in the early summer of 2008. Still, the company could soon reach a point where it is unable to provide potential customers with airplanes as quickly as they might want them.
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/ 21 December 2005
America Online (AOL) has sealed a late deal with Google to deepen their relationship, while leaving Microsoft as the spurned suitor. The software titan’s failure to woo AOL away from Google in favour of its own search technology highlights the uphill battle Microsoft faces in the lucrative business of selling online ads.
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/ 22 November 2005
Anyone who snagged one of Microsoft’s new Xbox 360s at its Tuesday debut will likely see the new video-game console as just that — a medium for spending hours playing the likes of Halo II and Project Gotham Racing III. But executives at Microsoft see video games as just the beginning.
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/ 1 November 2005
Microsoft is widely expected to announce on Tuesday further forays into software and services that can be accessed over the internet — a growing competitive arena that some say could eventually threaten Microsoft’s biggest cash cows. The software behemoth is facing increasing competition from companies such as Google and Yahoo!.
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/ 2 September 2005
Machinists at Boeing voted overwhelmingly to strike, rejecting a three-year contract proposal their leaders had deemed ”insulting”. The strike by more than 18 000 assembly workers at 12.01am local time on Friday means Boeing will stop building commercial airplanes, and comes at a time when new orders had picked up in recent months.
Jimi Hendrix might have stayed in the army. He might have been sent to Vietnam. Instead, he pretended he was gay. And with that, he was discharged from the 101st Airborne in 1962, launching a musical career that would redefine the guitar, leave other rock heroes of the day speechless and culminate with his headlining performance of The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock in 1969.
Microsoft sued one of its former executives and Google on Tuesday, the same day the internet search engine company announced it had hired Kai-Fu Lee to head up a research and development centre in China. The Redmond-based software maker argued that by taking a job with a direct competitor, Lee is breaking contractual promises.
Mount St Helens is living up to the name it was given by Indians who inhabited the north-west United States — ”Smoking Mountain”. Since late last year, it’s been showing signs of life again, and a new 100m-high lava dome has formed over the seething magma within it. The 25th anniversary of the volcano’s big eruption was this week on Wednesday.
Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox gaming console will be more of a digital entertainment hub than its predecessor, making it even more of a PC hybrid than ever, Bill Gates has told a meeting of business journalists. The console, code-named Xenon, is due to be previewed on the music cable channel MTV later this month.
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/ 3 February 2005
Amazon.com said on Wednesday that earnings for its all-important fourth quarter rose more than fourfold, but the internet retailing giant was helped by a big one-time tax benefit and missed Wall Street expectations. The results sent Amazon shares plunging 13%, or ,44.
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/ 25 January 2005
Current and former African American employees of Boeing have been granted class-action status in their lawsuit accusing the defence giant of discrimination and harassing black workers. The law firm Hagens Berman said the plaintiffs are seeking injunctive relief, back pay and punitive damages.
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/ 10 December 2004
In a victory for rebellious teenagers, the Seattle Supreme Court has ruled that a mother violated Washington’s privacy law by eavesdropping on her daughter’s phone conversation. Privacy advocates applauded the Thursday ruling, but the mother was unrepentant.
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/ 12 November 2004
Four former Microsoft employees were charged with stealing ,4-million worth of software and selling it on the side. According to the complaint filed on Monday, the employees ordered software available to Microsoft employees for free to use for business purposes, then sold it to online software retailers.
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/ 9 November 2004
Amazon.com said that its website experienced slowdowns for much of the day on Monday but was running normally by the evening. Spokesperson Patty Smith said the world’s largest internet retailer began experiencing ”a slowness” around 8.30am (4.30pm GMT), causing problems for some customers trying to access the website or buy items.
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/ 15 September 2004
Microsoft announced on Tuesday it has found a new security flaw with its Windows XP operating system and warned that an attacker could infiltrate other computers by persuading their owners to open a specialised graphics file. The company released a patch to fix the flaw as well as a tool that allows users to scan their systems to see if they need it.
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/ 3 September 2004
Though Microsoft’s new security update package is all about protecting systems from worms, viruses and spyware, it can’t do much about what’s already on computers — and that could pose a problem. The company is warning users of the Windows XP operating system to check for spyware before downloading the free massive security update, called Service Pack 2.
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/ 2 September 2004
On the face of things, Microsoft’s online music service looks a lot like the market leader, Apple Computer’s iTunes. When the service launches on Thursday, songs will cost 99 cents — the same as Apple. The catalogue will initially include about 500 000 songs, but the company plans to scale up to more than one million songs over the next few weeks
Microsoft, hoping to take a bite out of Apple Computer’s highly popular online music service, is gearing up to launch its own website for selling songs over the internet. With Thursday’s planned debut, the software maker will become the latest competitor in a market experts say is still in its infancy — but one that is expected to grow considerably more popular in the coming years.
It’s a frustrated commuter’s escapist fantasy: literally lifting your car from a clogged highway and soaring through the skies, landing just in time to motor into your driveway. Engineers at Nasa, the Boeing Company and elsewhere say the basis for a flying car is there. At Nasa, the first goal is to transform small airplane travel.
Microsoft is close to releasing the biggest update ever for the Windows operating system, aiming to plug holes that have led to massive security problems for computer users the world over. Microsoft senior product manager Matt Pilla said late on Wednesday that it is expected to release the update for Windows XP, called Service Pack 2, ”in the coming days”.
As a vice-president at security software leader Symantec, Matthew Moynahan applauds Microsoft’s effort to make its Windows operating system safer from attack. But Moynahan is not so excited about the flood of help-desk calls almost certain to come when Microsoft releases a security overhaul of Windows XP next month.
Microsoft will release a major update to the Windows XP computer operating system in August that focuses on boosting protection against malicious intrusions. The company had previously said the free update, called Service Pack 2, would be available sometime this summer but did not offer a specific date.
Microsoft is to pay -million to Silicon Valley company Intertrust to settle a lawsuit that the software giant illegally used technology for protecting music, movies and other digital content against piracy, the firms announced on Monday.
Microsoft is already known for its aggressive efforts to extend its global reach. Now, it’s taking those efforts one step further. The latest versions of the company’s dominant Windows operating system and Office software will soon be available in languages ranging from Ethiopia’s Amharic to Inuktitut of the Arctic’s Inuit.
In the fall of 2002, Microsoft chairperson Bill Gates stood on stage at Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, home to the Academy Awards, and pronounced this ”the digital decade”. Eighteen months later, Gates’s endeavour could be facing a big roadblock.
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/ 26 February 2004
United States voters will go to the polls in November using electronic voting machines that cannot be verified, a computer scientist warned last week. David Dill of Stanford University said that 1 600 technologists and 53 elected officials had now joined his crusade for a ”paper trail”, so that electronic voting machines could be checked.
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/ 16 February 2004
About 1 100 marine scientists worldwide called on the United Nations to ban the use of deep-sea trawling nets, according to reports on Monday. They are destroying irreplaceably coral fields and sponges — ”like bulldozers”, according to the appeal.
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/ 4 February 2004
Fresh from five more wins in the Democratic presidential race, United States Senator John Kerry fired off a fierce attack on President George Bush on Tuesday, accusing him of misleading Americans over the Iraq war. Kerry is the frontrunner in the race to take on Bush for the White House in November.
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/ 17 December 2003
The Boeing Company will launch its first new jet design in 13 years, the 7E7 Dreamliner, as it works to regain aircraft leadership from European rival Airbus by pinning its future on a lighter, roomier, more fuel-efficient jet.
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/ 2 December 2003
Microsoft Corporation has been tarred as an illegal monopoly and a copycat. Its flagship Windows operating system gets knocked for its security holes and user-unfriendly quirks. So what is the world’s dominant software company doing? Betting billions that its next generation of Windows, code-named Longhorn, will be the breakthrough technology that quiets its critics.