Stories about: Sonic Solutions

A British consumer advocacy group is charging that Microsoft and other major software companies engage in misleading and unfair practices related to end-user license agreements (EULAs), and has asked for an investigation by the U.K.'s Office of Fair Trading (OFT).

It's ironic: The copy protection created to stop the illegal copying of DVDs is the same technology that has prevented users from legally downloading paid-for content and then burning it to a DVD for playback in their living rooms. At the time the copy-protection rules were created, they had no provision for user recording of protected content to a recordable DVD, as opposed to a factory-replicated DVD-ROM.

Propelled by new tools to extend AJAX and make the Web even more interactive, the worldwide market for digital content creation products is expected to grow from $US3.04 billion last year to $US4.95 billion by 2012, according to a market research firm.

Intel on Monday is shipping three threading tools to enable developers to better take advantage of newfangled multicore processors. The tools include Threading Building Blocks 1.0, a C++ runtime library to introduce threads to an application; Thread Checker 3.0, a threading analysis tool to minimize the potential for errors, and Thread Profiler 3.0, which provides insight into how application threads interact. Threading Building Blocks is a new product; the other two offerings are upgrades to existing products.

Take a stab at this riddle: When is a new product upgrade not really all that new? Answer: When it was first announced several months before its release. Apple Computer Inc. (800/795-1000, http://www.apple.com) has boosted the processor speeds on its Power Mac G4 product line, with the fastest G4 now clocking in at 500MHz. The G4 systems also come in 400MHz and 450MHz versions.