Apple gets greener

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has defended the computer maker's record, and outlined a number of steps it will take to become more environmentally conscious, reports Forbes.

He said the company is moving to rid its products of mercury, arsenic, polyvinyl chloride and brominated flame retardants, and that Apple's US retail stores offer to take old iPods for environmentally friendly disposal. Jobs said Apple intends to make this a global initiative.

By 2010, Jobs said Apple could recycle a larger portion of the products it sells than either Dell or HP.

Tuesday, 15 May is a date marked for the demise of Internet radio, says Msnbc.com. The three Library of Congress judges that oversee copyright laws' statutory licences have decided this will be the date royalty fees owed by Web radio operators will be recalibrated.

The Copyright Royalty Board changed rates from a percentage of revenue to a per-song, per-listener fee, effectively hiking the rates between 300% and 1 200%, says a lawyer who represents a body of Webcasters.

Should this rate remain unchanged, the vast majority of Web radio will be wiped out, said Tim Westergren, founder of the music discovery service Pandora. "If this stays, we're done. Back to the stone age again."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the future of the mobile handset business will primarily depend on software influence rather than hardware, reports Information Week.

This implies the hardware approach to sales, favoured by Apple, will not work, and that Microsoft's software approach is better.

Ballmer says he would rather have Microsoft software on 60% or 70% of the phones in the world than meet the hardware sales goals of Apple's iPhone. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at the iPhone's launch that he would like to see the iPhone represent 1% of all mobile phone sales by the end of 2008.

The bug that upset many Google users last Thursday has returned, following the renaming and upgrading of Google's Personalised Home Page this week, says Computerworld.

The bug caused the free service, which lets users turn Google.com into a customised portal, to revert an undetermined number of pages to their default settings or to months-old versions.

According to Google, the problem is now solved. The company said a number of Google users had difficulty accessing their settings and preferences on their iGoogle pages over the past day, but that users should now have their iGoogle pages restored.