A U.S. federal jury found that Microsoft Corp. infringed audio patents held by Alcatel-Lucent and should pay $1.52 billion in damages, the No. 1 software maker said on Thursday.

Alcatel-Lucent had accused the world's biggest software maker of infringing patents related to standards used for playing MP3 digital music files.

One analyst said the decision means Alcatel-Lucent may seek payments from providers of software and hardware that support MP3 files, including Apple Inc.'s iPod and iTunes. "Potentially it's a significant windfall for Alcatel-Lucent," Bernstein analyst Paul Sagawa said.

He said Alcatel-Lucent could go after include MP3 player makers Sony Corp., Creative Technology Ltd. and music service provuder Napster.

For Microsoft, $1.52 billion represents about six weeks of cash flow or about 15 cents per share -- a charge that most analysts would likely take in stride, according to Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund.

"While $1.52 billion is a large sum, it is less than the $4.5 billion Alcatel-Lucent originally sought according to other press reports and is not particularly material in our opinion when considered with the amount of cash on Microsoft's balance sheet and substantial free cash flow generation of about $1 billion per month," he wrote in a research note.

The $1.52 billion awarded was based on 0.5 percent of the price of personal computers sold since around mid-2003, Tom Burt, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, said.

"We are concerned that this decision opens the door for Alcatel-Lucent to pursue action against hundreds of other companies who purchased the rights to use MP3 technology from Fraunhofer," Burt said. Computer, cell phone and MP3 player makers may be affected as well as software suppliers, he said. ...Read more here...

The TV show "American Idol" has finally weeded out the "weird" and the "unusual" and the "not talented", and is now into the serious part of the show. Next week the Top 24(12 girls and 12 boys)start competing and sometime this May we will have a new "American Idol".

A professional collaboration between a popular lyricist and a well-known musician takes a decidedly personal turn as the pair gradually sees their relationship developing into something much deeper.

A romantic comedy directed by Marc Lawrence and starring Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

From The Washington Post

This week PC World, one of the largest computer retailers in Europe, announced it will stop selling floppy disks once its existing stock is sold. Dell Computer Corp. stopped including floppy drives in its desktop computers four years ago.

Floppy's gone, an artifact of that time back in the day when we called the new, exciting, mysterious creation of the Internet the World Wide Web.

As Bryan Magrath, commercial director of PC World, told Britain's Daily Telegraph: "The sound of a computer's floppy disk drive will be as closely associated with 20th-century computing as the sound of a computer dialing into the Internet."

And these days you can store your MP3s, video files, Web pages, anything on the Web, in a CD or a USB thumb drive. Goodbye, Floppy.