Thursday's Everlasting Showstopper

And now the news... The typesetting machine was patented on this day in 1857. General Motors was founded in 1908. Richard Nixon said "sock it to me" on Laugh-In in 1968. Ahnold became a US citizen in 1983. Happy birthday JC Penney, the man not the store, 1875 and BB King, 1925.

1. More news about Internet Explorer losing market share. According to WebSideStory, Microsoft's browser has dropped by 1.8% over the past three months to 93.7% of the market. As I mentioned yesterday, that drop is much greater on geek sites like mine.
2. The high tech sector lost 403,300 jobs in the past three years, and according to researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago the market remains bleak.
3. Citing a bandwidth crunch, Microsoft shortened blog entries from its developers on the MSDN site and its RSS feed. Then it did an about face. For one day last week, you'd get only a 500 character summary of the story, then have to click to read more. Microsoft said that doing so reduced the bandwidth sucked by the blogs by 70%. Complaints from readers forced the company to reverse the decision. You'll always get the full story on my RSS feeds... sometimes two hours early.
4. Student protests turned the tide at UT Dallas where administrators tried unsuccessfully to ban 802.11a. b and g are allowed, but student-installed routers were conflicting with the university's own wireless services. Students cited an FCC notice which affirmed consumer's rights to install 802.11a equipment in the unregulated 5GHz band and got the university to back off. Ironically, UT Dallas was founded by Texas Instruments, a major player in wi-fi chips.
5. Our schools win, too. A judge cut the fees in half for the attorneys who represented California consumers in a lawsuit against Microsoft. The suit won $1.1 billion for consumers overcharged by the software company and the winning lawyers were asking for $268 million. The judge ordered Microsoft to pay them $112.5 million.
6. Yahoo has purchased MusicMatch for $160 million, giving the Internet giant a foothold into the 99¢ online music sales business.
7. A Canadian inventor has created a pointing device you control with your nose and eye blinks. Dubbed the nouse, it's for people who have trouble using a normal mouse.
8. Get 'em, Ivan. Business Week says the Florida hurricane has not slowed down spam, despite anecdotal evidence to the contrary. Most US spammers live in Florida for some reason.

Listen in tomorrow at 8:35a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KFI 640 AM in Los Angeles.