It's Monday, March 19th, 2012.
I'm Bridget Carey on CNET.com and it's time to get loaded.
For the first time in nearly 17 years, Apple will pay a dividend to shareholders.
Apple announced it will pay a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share starting in July, and Apple's board authorized a 10 billion-dollar share repurchase program which begins at September.
Apple had built up a cash hoard of 100 billion dollars, and shareholders were demanding that some of that excess should be paid out in a bonus, and since 1995 before Steve Jobs returned to lead the company, Apple was not paying dividends and instead preferred to stockpile the cash or reinvest the money.
There will be no new Xbox console release this year Microsoft told All Things D, Microsoft won't unveil a new version of the Xbox at this year's E3 Video Game Conference in June, and there's no need; the Xbox 360 is selling so well, Microsoft can hold-off on new hardware; the past year has been the best ever for the 360.
It's possible that you might not have to turn off your iPad or Kindle during takeoff and landing of a flight, the Federal Aviation Administration told the New York Times that the agency will take a fresh look at the use of personal electronics on planes; they're not budging in the cellphones but they are saying maybe aviators and tablets can be allowed but it's gonna take a whole lot of testing for that to happen and it's not cheap.
The FAA would have to test each version of a product by itself on a flight without passengers; so, one flight test for the original iPad, another for the iPad2, and yet another separate flight test for that new iPad, the same goes with every version of the Kindle.
Remember NetZero, they provided dial-up internet access; well, now NetZero sells mobile broadband, and it's offering up to 1 year free service but there's a catch.
NetZero is using the Clear Spot Apollo device and well, really just sticking their NetZero logo on it, buying it direct from Clear costs $35.00 a month for unlimited data but NetZero's version has data caps at lower price points and you can get 4G for free with a 200 megabyte cap, of course you'll burn through that in like 20 seconds but the point is that if you want to throw out all the price and speed down to free for a few months, you can do that for the first year.
And over the weekend in San Francisco, interactive artists got a chance to showcase their digital works of art, it's called the Creator's Project, and it's in its third year.
Thousands gather to see strange installations like interactive screens that use Microsoft Connect sensors to convert your silhouette into flights of fancy or a 40-foot tall cube of lite metal and sound called the Origin.
Those are your headlines for today, I'm Bridget Carey for CNET.com, and you've just been loaded.
