MS to appeal antitrust violation ruling

Microsoft will next week appeal a ruling by the European Union ruling that the software giant had violated antitrust law.

According to ZDNet, the EU also ruled that Microsoft should be should be fined a record EUR497 million (R3.87 billion) and forced to curtail its business practices. The appeal will be placed with the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, says Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler.

"We look forward to filing our appeal and believe we have a very strong case to present to the court," he said.

Meanwhile, European regulators say they believe the ruling will hold.

Protection-technology company Sunncomm has developed a technique that would allow a certain number of copies of a CD to be made, but not copies of the copy, reports geek.com.

The procedure, known as "secure burning", was co-developed by competitor MacroVision and is already being used by the BMG music group, in markets outside of the US.

The developers hope to integrate the technology with popular music download sites like iTunes and Napster, preventing anyone from downloading the songs, burning them to disc, and distributing them via P2P networks.

Toshiba yesterday announced its plans to release a 60GB version of its 1.8-inch hard drive, which could allow for higher capacity Apple iPods.

While Apple has not commented on any future devices, ZDNet reports that the company readily adopted new capacity as it became available in the past. The fact that Apple has historically used 1.8-inch drives from Toshiba in its iPods could be an indicator that the company will snap up the new 60GB drive when it becomes available.

The iPod currently has a storage capacity of 40GB - enough to store 10 000 songs, says Apple.

Pixar Animation Studios - responsible for smash hits like Shrek and Finding Nemo - unveiled the feature list for its forthcoming RenderMan Pro Server 12 rendering software.

According to yahoo, new features include improvements to 3D "baking," improved volume rendering, performance optimisations and memory reductions of to 30 percent for large scenes, improvements to geometry including a new loop subdivision scheme.

The new version will be released in the third quarter of 2004.