What sort of GPU is included in these chips? Is it a PowerVR core as found in the GMA500 chipset, or one based on Intel's own GPUs?

Didn't Palm do exactly that? They wrote a library that allows their device to speak the protocol that MacOS X's default music management application uses to synchronise with devices.

I'd have more sympathy for Apple if iTunes could synchronise with generic MP3 players out of the box (via USB Mass Storage Class or MTP). But instead, they consider it a feature that it will only synchronise with own-brand devices. And if pretending to be an iPod at the protocol level is the only way to achieve interoperability then so be it.

Apple's actions are anti-competitive, and it is hard to see any benefit to the user.

The patent appears to be about a delta compression algorithm targeted at machine code.

If you insert a byte into an existing program, it will offset the addresses of all the following instructions. Any jumps to that code will now need to use a different address so the initially simple change has a large knock on effect.

A compression algorithm that doesn't know about these properties would likely end up patching every affected jump instruction. A machine code aware algorithm might simply record that "all jumps to this address range must be offset".

While it is an interesting technique, I find it hard to believe that no one thought of it before 1998 (one year before the application date).

First off, surely the classification board already has the power to classify iPhone games: if Apple is selling unclassified games in its app store, then it would be breaking the law.

Of course, only video games are required to be classified, so there shouldn't be any problem with apps outside of that category being sold.

I agree that the price for classifying video games is a bit steep. While they've got a sliding scale in place for film so that shorter films have lower fees, there seems to be a fixed fee for games. Given that a trivial iPhone game is going to be easier to review than a PC game with 10 hours of game play, it is unreasonable to charge the same fee for both.

This isn't the same as stolen goods though: it is closer to a person buying a CD at a record store, only to get home and find that it is a CD-R rather than an authorised copy.

It is the person making the copies who is liable here, and they're guilty of copyright infringement even if they come into your home and destroy the CD-R after the fact.

So if the rights holder was intent on suing, then Amazon's actions wouldn't stop them.

Those image file formats basically form the de-facto baseline spec for image handling in web browsers. There is nothing stopping a browser from implementing more formats, but a browser that omitted support for those formats would not be very useful (even if the standards don't require that support).

As there is no existing body of content being served with the <video> tag, people wanted to have a baseline specified that didn't impose patent royalties on browser makers or content producers (read up on the GIF patent issues from a few years ago if you don't know why this matters).

With that language gone from the spec, it will depend on what browser makers and content producers do. One thing for certain is that Mozilla won't be able to have default support for H.264 while remaining free software though.

So why exactly would anyone risk leaking public interest information to The Times if they act like this? If they didn't find the information interesting enough, they might publish a story about who leaked it ...

Presumably he is referring to the subscription with the carrier (it is a phone, after all). At least for the case of phones subsidised by contracts, a portion of the monthly fee is going to Apple.

If Maone thought that countermeasures were necessary to stop NoScript users from blocking ads, he could easily have updated his own extension to automatically disable itself when run together with AdBlock. After all, if those users are cutting off his revenue stream, why should he provide them with service?

But that isn't what he did. Instead his extension monkeypatched AdBlock to disable parts of its functionality. It also did this using obfuscated code, so Maone obviously knew he was doing something a bit fishy. This left his extension very close to malware in my mind.

It would have been far better to let the user continue to use AdBlock but show that it has negative effects as well as positive ones.

From someone who doesn't know how to change their spell checker language?

So why exactly do businesses give BT the ability to update their hubs remotely?

Each TLD is signed separately with DNSSEC. The way you can tell that the TLD signature is valid is by looking up the key associated with it one level higher up. The same method is used to let domain owners create domains without needing to get the TLD to resign its zone file.

The question here is who signs the root zone? By necessity, the key used to sign the root is implicitly trusted by DNSSEC resolvers. That effectively gives then the ability to choose which key is authoritative for each TLD, which some people consider a problem (above their existing ability to redelegate a TLD).

What sort of memory configurations were in the test machines? The scores for the Core i7 are a lot better than everything else, which would indicate a significantly different configuration or technology.

I'd definitely like to see some numbers for the Phenom II with DDR3 memory to give a better comparison, although I'd expect it to still lose out to the i7 if we're comparing triple channel to dual channel.

Prior to MySQL taking off one database people were using on Linux was mSQL, which was developed by an Australian company. MySQL won out though, as it had a less restrictive license (and this was before it switched to GPL)

The MySQL C API was based on mSQL's API, and MySQL still ships with an "msql2mysql" tool to convert programs from one API to the other.

So that could be considered pretty direct competition.

I don't know about anyone else, but the current generation of iPhones seem pretty large to me. I am also not about to shell out for an overpriced mobile data plan. So many smartphone features don't affect my purchasing decisions.

So I could definitely see a market for a device that just did phone, music and maybe video without the requirement for a mobile data plan: the other phone companies seem to be doing pretty well from that segment.

Is there any overlap with their existing market? sure, but it'd certainly be a large increase in their total market.

If you have an old CRT monitor, you might be right about black using less power.

If you have an LCD, the backlight will be using power for both the black and white pixels (I am ignoring the backlight dimming features Intel has been developing on the assumption that you'll have both high and low intensity pixels close together with text). While there is an absence of light for black pixels, you'll see an increase in heat output.

Furthermore, energy must be expended to change an LCD from its steady state. So you might find that black pixels actually use more power ...

Even if it hadn't been released at time, it would still be covered by copyright. However he got hold of the tracks, he'd need an appropriate license to stream them from his site.

If there are any trade secret problems here, that would be in addition to the copyright problems.

To be fair, they have managed to fit two Opterons into the box. That could have been two separate shipments.

Michael Jackson has ownership interest in the songs but not the physical recordings. He'll benefit from sales on iTunes, but isn't in a position to license the recordings himself.

He could rerecord the Beatles' catalogue and sell that on iTunes, but that is probably not what people are after ...

So after going to all the effort to prepare the turkey, she decides not to eat it? I would have thought PETA would consider that worse than eating turkeys.

It sounds like this is just doing voice/video over Jabber/XMPP (the IM protocol Google Talk uses), so it sounds like it'd be possible for the feature to work beyond GMail. It might even allow voice chat with existing jingle enabled Jabber clients already.

So support for other platforms should be possible, although maybe not easily from within GMail.

Not doing WPA is basically the same as saying the DS doesn't support secure wireless networks these days. It is a bit surprising that Nintendo hasn't added the feature through a firmware update or with one of the hardware refreshes.

presumably the reason for standardised measures for beer is so that people can compare prices easier. Can you easily tell whether 0.5L at $7 is better or worse than 1 pint at $8? How about after a few pints?

The other way to fix this problem rather than requiring that beer be served in particular measures is to require that prices get published in a standardised manner (e.g. $ per 100mL) so that you can tell whether it is good value no matter what the size.

The 3DSecure system doesn't reduce the amount of information being sent to the merchant -- it just adds an extra step to the payment process.

After all, the merchant won't know which bank website to send you to until you've given the merchant your credit card number.

I suppose Intel is correct. How well is an ARM chip going to run an ActiveX component?

While the comment seems to indicate that WIndows 7 would be lighter weight, making it more suitable than Vista, the other interpretation is that the Eee PCs sold in the middle of next year will be more powerful than those available today.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

I wonder if the domain owners have any recourse with the registrars? Could they argue in a non-Kentucky court that the registrar illegally interfered with their business by transferring the domain?

If the courts in Kentucky really want to stop its citizens from visiting objectionable websites, there are much more effective ways to do so that don't require every company on earth to know Kentucky law. They could ask the Chinese government for advice.

There are lots of ways that a locally run data network could be implemented without locking private entities out of the market.

One example would be to offer wholesale access to the network to other parties. While the private telco might not originally have been willing to invest in creating a high speed network, they might have been willing to offer service over an existing network. Due to the lower start up costs, this would also make it easier for other companies to enter the market and service the entire community (I'm not sure why you see more than 2 suppliers as being a problem).

As for selling off the infrastructure, that seems to be a case of "privatising proffits while socialising losses". If the private entity didn't feel it was worth the risk to build the network, why should they benefit from its success? I assume you don't feel that private entity should pay if the project fails, right?

Given that the interactivity spec for Blu-ray uses a java virtual machine. Perhaps Microsoft feels that Java is too bitter a pill to swallow a second time ...

Given that the flash player is essentially a virtual machine for running ActionScript programs, I wonder if it'd get rejected for the same reasons as the Java port was?

Not that I'm complaining about the lack of flash on that device. Given that many designers seem to like the iPhone, perhaps the lack of flash would encourage them to provide alternatives to it on more web sites.

eBay only backed down in Australia because it was illegal (forcing a customer to buy services from a particular third party as a condition of trade is anti-competitive). If they could have gotten away with it, they would have.

If eBay is trying this in the US now, it either means that the same consumer protections don't exist there or they don't think the government will enforce those protections.

Anything eBay learnt from trying to roll this out in Australia will likely only affect their behaviour in Australia. They obviously believe the lost auction fees from restricting payment methods will easily be covered by additional PayPal fees.

By the look of it, the idea is to break off the end of the card containing the SIM, leaving you with a square chunk of plastic that should be fairly well balanced. For a tray-style DVD drive, this should fit snugly in the inner "mini CD" sized indent. You are right about the problems with slot loading drives though.

I wouldn't say that console driving games are targeted.

While the classification board considers games about spraying graffiti to be so bad that no one should be allowed to play them, they seem to be okay with games that promote illegal street racing ...

If only there was some kind of online certificate status protocol that could be used to determine if a certificate was valid. Then Sun could make sure no one misused the old cert.

Note that the XDR memory (which is an evolution of RAMBUS memory) uses quite a different transfer method to DDR memory, so you can't compare clock rates directly. The XDR memory uses fewer pins, but transfers data over those pins at a higher rate.

The 3.2GHz XDR memory is roughly equivalent to 400MHz DDR memory. So it won't necessarily give better performance compared to the PS3's DDR memory or the 360's DDR memory.

Note that for wi-fi some directions are more important than others. As an example, an antenna pointed straight up is less likely to be optimal than one pointing out horizontally.

If you're going to use 12 antennas it would make sense to have more of them pointing out horizontally than those pointing up or down.

I remember one of the Sun engineers reporting some results from DTrace that showed that one of the GNOME applets was regularly polling a file at regular intervals. When people tried to reproduce the results on Linux with less sophisticated tools like strace, they couldn't see the polling.

The reason for this was that Linux provided a file change notification API to user space, which allowed the app to do its job without polling, while Solaris did not.

Of course, today Solaris has exposed a user space file change notification API, and people are working on DTrace-like tools for Linux. To say that innovation only occurs on the Solaris side or only happens on the Linux side is deluded.

If it is anything like my thinkpad, it'd be the operating system and service partition (which essentially contains a second copy of everything).

Why bother with the expense of including an extra DVD in the packaging when you could bung it all on hard disk? Assuming it is similar to previous models again, there is probably an option to burn the data to DVDs after which you can repartition.