January 4, 2012 – Ken May

First Ford Focus Electric rolls off the production line into Google’s open arms

The future of transportation is here, folks. We’ve spent some time with the Ford Focus Electric and have seen all the bits that make it go, but we didn’t know who’d be the first to receive one. Turns out Google got an early Christmas present, and received its Focus Electric, the first production unit, just before the holidays. That means that the gang at Big G is already enjoying the 84mph top speed and fast charging secret sauce that lets the Ford fully charge on a 240-volt outlet in just over three hours — or roughly half the time it takes a Leaf to top off its batteries. Wonder whether the EV from Dearborn is destined to join Google’s Street View fleet, its cadre of self-driving cars, or replace some of those multi-colored company bikes strewn about Mountain View?

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First Ford Focus Electric rolls off the production line into Google’s open arms originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft: UK Retailer ‘sold 94,000 counterfeit copies of Windows’ (Update: Comet responds)

Microsoft has launched an attack on beleaguered electronics retailer Comet — stating that the British chain pirated 94,000 copies of Vista and XP recovery discs. Comet, which was recently sold off for £2 ($3), allegedly produced the copies at a factory in Hampshire and bundled them with PCs sold at its stores. There’s been no official response from Comet yet, but we can’t imagine Microsoft would throw this sort of statement around lightly. If you’re concerned you are running a counterfeit copy of Windows, check out the How To Tell site below and we’ll keep our eyes on this one as the saga unfolds.

Update: Comet has issued the following response to Microsoft’s statement which we’ve got for you in full, after the break.

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Microsoft: UK Retailer ‘sold 94,000 counterfeit copies of Windows’ (Update: Comet responds) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft: UK Retailer ‘sold 94,000 counterfeit copies of Windows’ (Update: Comet responds)

Chile Forbids Carriers From Selling Network-Locked Phones

An anonymous reader writes “As from today, network operators in Chile are no longer allowed to sell carrier-locked phones, and must unlock free of charge all devices already sold to costumers through a simple form on their respective websites. The new regulation came into effect in preparations for the rollout of Mobile Number Portability, set to begin on January 16th. This is one among other restrictions that forbid carriers to lock in the customers through ‘abusive clauses’ in their contracts, one of which was through selling locked devices. Now if a customer wishes to change carriers he/she needs only to have the bills up to date and the process of porting the number should only take 24 hours.”

Microsoft will add Linux virtual machines to Windows Azure

Microsoft is preparing an expansion of the Windows Azure virtual machine hosting technology that will let customers run either Windows or Linux virtual machines, as well as applications like SQL Server and SharePoint, according to Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Azure already has a “VM role” service in beta, letting customers deploy a Windows Server 2008 R2 image. This is similar to the type of VM hosting offered by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, but much more limited—Azure hides much of the complexity of the operating system layer so developers can just focus on building applications.

Foley and her sources say Azure’s current VM role is not persistent, meaning data is frequently lost. But a Community Technology Preview set to launch in spring of 2012 will fix this problem and add several other capabilities, including Linux hosting, according to Microsoft partners who spoke with Foley.

“What does this mean? Customers who want to run Windows or Linux ‘durably’ (i.e., without losing state) in VMs on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service platform will be able to do so,” Foley wrote yesterday. “The new persistent VM support also will allow customers to run SQL Server or SharePoint Server in VMs, as well. And it will enable customers to more easily move existing apps to the Azure platform.”

The Register noted last June that Microsoft was already testing Linux on Azure in its internal labs. Although Microsoft has often been at odds with the Linux community, it’s a logical next step for the company, given that it has already worked on supporting Linux distributions on its Hyper-V virtualization software.

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Microsoft will add Linux virtual machines to Windows Azure

Discardia: not anti-stuff, just pro-awesome

In 2002 Dinah Sanders started a personal holiday called Discardia. As she writes in her book, Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff, her quarterly festival celebrates “unconsumption, the slow movement, downshifting, and voluntary simplicity.” In other words, it’s about getting rid of stuff so you can enjoy a richer life.

Sanders (who maintains a blog called Discardia) believes that many people mistakenly seek the good life by acquiring lots of things and experiences and then try to shoehorn these into an already overcrowded life. But Sanders maintains that the good life is better achieved by taking the opposite approach: stripping away the layers of material, habitual and emotional cruft that we accumulate over time to reveal a more meaningful, engaging, and manageable way to live.

Read my review of Sanders’ book at credit.com