Microsoft Hardware today announced TrueColor Technology, which enhances color and brightness of webcam video in poor lighting conditions, and three new LifeCam models that support it.

Read More: Microsoft News Center

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As the Federal Communications Commission hands its National Broadband Plan over to Congress, the cable industry's top trade association has issued a manifesto that looks pretty good, at least on paper. It boils down to seven "consumer principles," says the National Telecommunications and Cable Association, to which cable operators will adhere, "and which we believe could serve as the foundation for Commission and inter-industry efforts."

The principles have a sort of FCC Internet Policy Statement or even FDR Four Freedoms speech feeling to them, but focus on mobility of content, portability of devices, and ease of Internet access. They include the Holy Grail: "1. Consumers should have the option to purchase video devices at retail that can access their multichannel provider's video services without a set-top box supplied by that provider." A right-to-broadband clause: "3. Consumers should have the option to access video content from the Internet through their multichannel provider’s video devices and retail video devices." And a freedom-of-platform commitment: "5. Consumers should have the option to easily and securely move video content between and among devices in their homes."

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ASP.NET MVC 2 has been released for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5.

Read More: Scott Gu's Blog, Microsoft Download Center

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Games are now supported long after they're released in retail stores, but some consumers cry foul when they buy a game, go online, and see there is already downloadable content to add to the experience. Why force gamers to go online to get the content? Why not just include the content on the disc?

We spoke with Casey Hudson, the project director for Mass Effect 2, at GDC. He's a man who knows a little bit about post-release content, and he explained it in a way that makes sense. The simple answer? It takes time to get discs into the hands of gamers.

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Microsoft plans to appeal a British Columbia court decision that certified a class-action lawsuit alleging the software giant illegally got rid of its competition, then raised its prices.

Read More: The Vancouver Sun

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Macs are often the black sheep in the many enterprise environments which have been dominated by Windows for nearly two decades, but the growing consumerization of IT is slowly changing that perception. Though Macs often have a higher up-front price than many business-class PCs, Macs are usually believed to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) due to lower support costs. A recent survey of IT professionals in large enterprise environments that have a mix of Macs and PCs overwhelmingly agree that Macs cost less than PCs to support.

The Enterprise Desktop Alliance, which seeks to make it easier to integrate Macs in Windows-centric IT deployments, surveyed IT admins from companies that made large deployments, including universities and government agencies. Responses included in EDA's analysis include those from environments with a mix of Macs and PCs that had a total of 50 servers or over 100 Macs.

A majority of respondents said that Macs cost less in terms of time spent troubleshooting, user training, help desk calls, and system configuration. Admins generally agreed that costs related to software licensing and supporting infrastructure were the same between the two platforms.

Two-thirds of those managing mixed environments plan to increase the number of Macs deployed in 2010. Twenty-nine percent cited lower TCO as a "key reason" for deploying Macs. Almost half cited lower TCO, ease of support, or a combination of the two as leading factors in Mac adoption. User preference and increased productivity were considered important factors as well.

"As a greater percentage of enterprise applications become OS-neutral, the cost to support a more diverse hardware and OS mix will decrease, making Macs a more viable choice for a greater number of users who continue to demand them," noted Michael Silver, vice president and research director at Gartner, in a recent report on PC trends. Macs tend to be popular among C-level execs, as well as with those in creative departments and developers (especially cross-platform developers).

Apple has historically done little to actively develop a traditional strategy to target enterprise deployment. Instead, the company tends to focus on consumers first, and lets individuals drive enterprise demand for its computers and mobile devices. It does, though, make continual small improvements that make it easier to integrate Macs, iPhones, and soon iPads into many corporate environments.

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General relativity, our current best understanding of gravity, has passed yet another test—this time on a much larger length scale. Ever since relativity's first confirmation in 1919, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington observed that the light from distant stars was shifted by the mass of the sun, direct tests have been confined to length scales smaller than our solar system. No test to date has stringently probed general relativity's applicability to the length scales of the universe itself.

A paper that is published in the current edition of Nature reports on research that incorporates gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering measurements, and growth rates of large scale structures to measure a single parameter that can be compared to the predictions of general relativity. To probe the effect of gravity at large length scales—on the order of two to 50 megaparsecs (MPc) at a redshift of 0.32—the authors describe a variable EG that incorporates three physical parameters and can be used to differentiate between competing theories of gravity.

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Blockbuster's latest SEC filing indicates that bankruptcy is a very real option for the company.

Read More: SEC, Silicon Alley Insider

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Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch all but confirmed today that the next version of Microsoft's Web browser, Internet Explorer 9, will not be supported on Windows XP.

Hachamovitch stopped short of explicitly saying that XP would not be supported, but said that building a "modern browser" required a "modern operating system." IE9 will be heavily dependent on hardware acceleration, courtesy of its use of Direct2D and DirectWrite; neither API is available on Windows XP.

That IE9 would use these features has been known since last year's PDC, and so the lack of XP support should come as a surprise to few. Nonetheless, there are sure to be some who will gripe that the newest browser (not likely to hit until next year at the earliest) won't be available for a decade-old operating system.

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The UK's House of Lords has passed a version of the Digital Economy Bill that eliminated one controversial anti-piracy measure but added a new one in its place. The bill, which includes a three-strikes provision that will suspend the service of repeat copyright infringers, will now be considered by the Commons. There are promises that a provision that would require ISPs to block access to sites used for infringement will be revised during the process, but the rush to complete work on the law ahead of the UK's coming elections has left a number of advocacy groups feeling that major changes to copyright enforcement are being rushed through Parliament without proper consideration.

The Digital Economy Bill was first introduced last November, at which point attention focused on a provision that some claimed would turn the UK's Secretary of state into a "Pirate Finder General." Although the government wouldn't specify anti-piracy measures in the bill proper, it reserved the power for the Secretary of State to take unnamed actions in the future, if those actions were likely to reduce infringement.

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Two years after the official announcement, a beta of Silverlight has been released for Symbian on devices such as Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97, and Nokia N97 Mini.

Read More: Microsoft Silverlight for Symbian, Ars Technica

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Hate groups have always been a presence on the Internet, but their presence is growing quicker lately thanks to social networking sites. According to a report from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), groups that promote violence, terrorism, homophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of intolerance grew by 20 percent in the last year alone.

The report is part of the Center's annual look at the spread of hate groups online, which noted that there are now more than 11,500 social networks, websites, forums, and blogs that focus on spreading intolerance, recruiting new members, and instructing people on how to hurt others. "The numbers are probably, at the end of the day, multiples of that," the SWC's associate dean Abraham Cooper said in a news conference Monday. "That should be taken as a low ball figure."

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Droid sales were a hair faster than the original iPhone in its first 74 days, but the Nexus One was far slower. Analytics firm Flurry credits this largely to consumer perception and demand.

Read More: Flurry

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When the federal government spends more than a year developing a 300+ page report on national broadband policy, perhaps the last thing one expects to find in it is a quote from Shakespeare's Henry IV.

As two rebels plot their assault on the English king, the Welsh leader Owen Glendower brags that he can "call spirits from the vasty deep." The English Hotspur retorts, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?"

Anyone can talk a good game about conjuring broadband policy from the vasty deep of the FCC—but can those people actually implement their visions? The National Broadband Plan, released today, drops this bit of Shakespeare on readers at the bottom of page 11 to make a simple point: this Plan is about the art of the possible.

Perhaps a better quote from Henry IV might be from the lips of the famous comic figure Falstaff: "The better part of valor is discretion."

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A pair of white dwarf stars called HM Cancri have now been imaged with Hawaii's enormous Keck telescope, which revealed that they're orbiting their mutual center of mass with a period of only 5.4 minutes.

Read More: The Smithsonian's take

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Engadget has some leaked promo materials for Dell's upcoming Mini 5 tablet.

Read More: Engadget

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National iPad Day is just over two weeks away, but when April 3 rolls around,  iPad owners won't be able to get most of the accessories that were touted to go along with the device. As noted by Electronista, the iPad keyboard dock and USB power adapter have both been pushed back until May, after even the 3G model of the iPad is set to be released.

During the introduction of the iPad on January 27, the keyboard dock was the accessory that got some major attention from Apple-watchers. After all, it's the "cheapest" and simplest way to do text entry on the iPad without typing on the touchscreen itself. However, the delay doesn't mean WiFi iPad owners will be prevented from entering mass amounts of text until May—the regular (non-keyboard) dock is still set to ship on April 3, and iPad users can pair their devices with a bluetooth keyboard for text input if they so desire. (The dock connector to VGA adapter is also still on schedule for early April.)

The only other accessory that is currently MIA is the Camera Connection Kit. Announced at the iPad event, the kit is meant to allow users to read SD cards or connect to their cameras via USB through the 30-pin connector. The kit remains on Apple's spec page for the iPad but is nowhere to be found in the online store.

The inability to buy certain accessories to go along with their shiny new toy will undoubtedly disappoint some iPad buyers. Some have tried to analyze what these accessory delays could mean, but we're going to chalk it up to poor coordination among manufacturers.

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Eduard Khil of Trololololololololololo fame is interviewed about the popularity of his 1966 Soviet TV recording.

Read More: Neatorama, TROLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLO

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Microsoft today released the Windows Internet Explorer Platform Preview to the public. The release is meant to demonstrate the capabilities of Internet Explorer 9 to Web developers while at the same time providing feedback to the IE9 team. Microsoft says it is committed to updating the Platform Preview to keep a more effective rhythm for discussion, and it will be updated every eight weeks or so. Microsoft will share feedback with standards-setting bodies in addition to using it for internal development.

The Platform Preview is a minimal wrapper: it's not a full-fledged browser. It has no tabs. It has no address bar. It has no back button. So what is included? Everything that Web developers need to see: the rendering engine, of course, as well as the new JavaScript engine, hardware acceleration features, and the developer tools. The IE9 team told Ars that each update will use one of the latest internal engineering builds, at which point the feedback loop will start again.

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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is undergoing significant changes in management. Founder Mark Shuttleworth has stepped down from his role as the CEO so that he can increase his involvement in the software design and development process. Jane Silber, who has long served as the company's chief operating officer, will be taking over as CEO. To fill the COO vacancy left by Silber's ascension, Canonical has recruited Matt Asay, the former vice president of business development at open source content management software company Alfresco.

Asay seems like a good choice for Canonical in some key ways. He accumulated knowledge of the enterprise Linux ecosystem during his time at Novell and he brings a wealth of real-world expertise in monetizing open source software from his experiences at Alfresco. Despite these strong points in his favor, there are also some reasons why he is a surprising choice for Canonical. In particular, Asay has always been an extremely vocal skeptic of Linux's viability on the desktop. During the month that he has been working for Canonical, his views on the matter seem to have evolved considerably.

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