So the fist story of the day is…. Microsoft says one thing and does another. Microsoft has long stated that it did not foresee a ‘post PC era‘ but it is now making it’s new operating system work on both tablets and PCs. They’ve announced that they intend Windows 8 to be used on PCs as well as tablets and other mobile devices. This is a good move for them since they don’t know which is going to be more important between tablet and PCs. This way they have a shot at success no matter which way the market swings. Good job Microsoft. Don’t push for change, just wait for it to happen and make sure you’re there to pick it up when it falls on the floor.

Now here’s the kind of news that I really like to hear. AMD chips have broken the land speed record at 8.4GHz. I have long been a fan of Intel chips and generally refused to use AMD chips in any of the computers I design because of their history of less than excellent performance and mediocre longevity. I am beginning to reconsider that stance a little bit as AMD is putting out chips with more cores and now much faster maximum clock speeds. In addition to being oveclocked to incredible speeds using liquid nitrogen cooling they found that it was actually able to sustain a clock speed over 5GHz using only conventional air or water cooling systems that cost under $100. Right now I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on one of the newest AMD unlocked CPUs so I can try to beat their clock. I’m also going to see about overclocking one of the Intel core i7 chips too. Not sure when this will all happen but I’ll post the results on here when it does.

More tablet stuff in the news today. Google is continuing it’s push into the smartphone market and announced that it is teaming up with Intel to make the next generation of smartphones and tablets. Google’s android software will now be optimized for the latest of Intel’s Atom mobile processors. As a side note Google’s Android system has remained the world’s best selling smartphone software at 43% market share worldwide last quarter. I personally can’t wait for Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings to go through so they can start making their own phone hardware.

Thoughts on Google making it’s own phone hardware… Making hardware for it’s Android OS would greatly increase the profitability of the Android project, but I don’t think it fits with the rest of Google’s Android business plan. So far they have been giving their Android OS away to any phone manufacturer who wants it and making money off of the app downloads and the increase in search and advertising revenue. It seems to me that when Google releases it’s own smartphones with it’s own OS on them it would be an act of trying to kill a market that they created. It would probably work, but seems like it’s not the most logical way of doing things. Also, when they’re making more money off of their own phones than off of the Android phones that other companies sell what is their motivation to continue giving it’s operating system to those manufacturers. Just seems like an odd plan to me. Sort of like when Apple authorized the Mac Clones back when stupid people were running the company.

In other bad news for Google, it’s search engine market share has dropped to 65% just thought you’d like to know.

No more Nintendo? Nintendo continues to struggle with it’s terribly introduced 3DS handheld. It has, however, released a host of new games that you should Google because I don’t care enough about the games to post them on here. My theory though is that in the future we will either have no Nintendo at all or we will have an Nintendo that only makes games for other consoles and not their own devices.

Please post any comments you have in the comments section because that’s what it’s for. You are also welcome to post links to other stories that you’ve seen that you think I should have posted in this post post post post…. I need to give you an update on this site’s impressions sometime in the future but I don’t feel like typing out the data right now so I’ll wait till a later date… haha that rhymed.

That is all.

First I’d like to share some of my experiences on the day of September 11th 2001. I was nine years old at the time so I had just arrived at the socialist compound that the adults in my life called school. It was a Catholic school so it was more repressive feeling than any other school I’ve been in. They treated us like we had no capacity to understand what was going on around us and today was no different. Early in the morning, nearest I can figure it must have been around 8:30 the principal of the school announced over the intercom that we were all to head to the church that was attached to our building to pray for some people who had died in an accident this morning. This was only a little bit unusual because the school had us pray for everything that happened. If someone got in a car accident nearby or someone was ill we’d take time out to pray for them. I hindsight it was sort of a nice gesture to do this for people but it was also odd that they would think that forcing children to pray for something they knew nothing about would somehow make their prayers have a greater effect.

So we went to the church and prayed for about a half an hour which was a really long time compared to the other times we had done this, though I didn’t notice that until later. What I did notice though was that the administrative staff all seemed to be very forlorn, or worried about something. It felt as if this incident had some personal consequence, or had just scared the living hell out of them. No joke intended there… I also noticed that all of our teachers seemed to be as much in the dark as we were, and they seemed confused for the rest of the day. You have to keep in mind that Internet was much less of a powerful force in these days and most of the rooms in our building had no outside connection at all. The day continued as normal with only a few students being picked up by their parents shortly after we got out of church. I assumed they had some sort of social function or an appointment.

I had always been an admirer of the architecture and odd symmetric beauty of the twin towers. I’m not sure why, but when I look at them I was sort of awestruck. It was a symbol of human power to me, and the power of thinking, and the greatness of this country. I knew that it was the first thing many people from Europe would see of our country before landing on our soil and I was proud of that. I loved the buildings so much that when we were having a history lesson at school I would always turn to the page in our book that had the picture of the towers on it and just look at the picture and sometime read the text. I had long called them my favorite buildings in the world, though I didn’t know what their function was.

My mom picked me up after school this day and the first thing she said as we were driving away was, “Did they tell you about what happened today?” I said something along the lines of “No. What happened?!” to which she responded,  “Two planes flew into your favorite buildings…” I said, “It was that big?!” Mom, “Yeah. the buildings collapsed and lots of people died.”From what I remember I kind of got sad at this point partly for the loss of the towers and partly because of so many people dying, but I was still really confused. I continued asking stupid questions all they way home and by the time we got there I think I had pretty much put together that the US had been attacked, and that scared me… as I’m sure it did everyone.

What I’m sure I was still confused about was what this meant. I had heard of how wars began and how they played out but my country had never been at war in my lifetime. I was sure this was something like war but I didn’t know what war was. I came home to the TV running replays of the footage and CNN anchors talking about the Terrorists and how the president was safe and hadn’t yet made a comment… I don’t really remember a whole lot after that clearly. Just that I was shaken and scared about the future.

Moving on…

Being a huge fan of architecture I wanted to post a few pics of the new memorial and the freedom tower which I think may just be my new favorite structures in the world. They are both incredibly beautiful and I hope you all agree.

here they are.

Most moving picture I've seen in a long time...

Moving on…

First story of the day is a hacker who claims to be a 21 year old Iranian engineering student in Tehran who hates dissidents of his country. This guy snuk into the computers of an amsterdam security firm called DigiNotar and created 531 fake certificates for major high traffic websites such as Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook. He also made certificates for public websites of the CIA and other foreign spy groups. These certificates are blieved to be in the possesion of the Iranian government and were used to redirect traffic to fake versions of the sites. I might write a more full post on this subject later today or tomorrow.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-cyber-attack-20110910,0,5366016.story

Moving on to the the iphone 5. I found when I posted my last story on the iphone 5 that if I would only tag “iphone 5” in each of my posts my site would quickly rise to the top of the wordpress most viewed thing. So I’ve been trying to find more information to give you on the iPhone 5, but classic apple tactics have resulted in very few tid bits being released. But there is one little thing that I noticed today, and that is that sprint is possibly one of the new carriers. Sprint told all of their employees in a recent memo that they would not be allowed to take vacations in early october. So we can guess that sprint is going to be carrying the iphone from it’s release date, and that release date will be in early October.

HTC appears to be considering purchace of HP’s webOS. WebOS is their tablet operating system that they created to compete with Apple’s iOS, but HP abandoned the project shorty after launch and then went on to be diagnosed with bipolar disorder while vehemently denying the diagnosis. This purchase if HTC decides to go through with it could potentially put HTC in a better position against the iphone.

One more Iphone thought. Android has, for some time, had a really good voice recognition software built into the OS. Why doesn’t apple have that. They have the connections that they could strike a deal with Nuance to get Dragon dictation software built into the phone. Perhaps that will be one of the new features in Iphone 5.

Moving on from the iphone to the ipad… I’m noticing a theme for today… Sorry to those of you who hate hearing about Apple news but it seems that the only thing that’s happing today is Apple related. Personally I’m not a big fan of writing it either. I thought it was worth noting that the iPad currently has 73% of the tablet market share or more depending on who you’re asking. Some market analysts however seem to think that number is set to drop in the near future. This is because most people still don’t have a tablet and now that there are more ipad competitors out there on the market some people will opt for other brands. But don’t worry apple’s market share will remain high and the number of users will continue to grow rapidly.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ipad-share-2011-3

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/12/apple-tablet-market-share-set-to-fal

More porn! But not with celebrities names in it. The .xxx domain name that was recently introduced for the porn industry blocks the use of celebrity names in the damain itself. You can still say www.pr0n.xxx/kimkardashian.html but not www.kimksextape.xxx. This limitation was likely put into place because of celebrities like Kim who don’t want their names associated with porn. I’m just surprised that they don’t realize it’s too late for that.

I just had to put the porn bit in there to say that this post wasn’t entirely about apple. I any of you guys have a non apple story that you think I missed please put it in the comments section and I might repost it or make a video about it in the future. All other comments are welcome too though please be respectful. Have a nice day!

Today around 8:00PM DolFin MicroDevices Co. quietly updated it’s website www.dolfinmd.com with a new product that is much different from previous products on the site. The new DolFin RX1 appeared for $3999 and is touted as a desktop replacement gaming notebook. Here are the specs posted on the website:

…and there you have it. That’s all I can say on this site. Let me know if you like it. Your opinions will be taken into consideration when I go to build the RX2 or whatever succeeds this one.

So. On with the article….

Here are fiveish things that I would like to see or think we might see in Apple’s next iPhone.

Apple has been true to it’s roots in saying absolutly nothing to the public about what might be in iPhone 5. They have, however said some things about it’s new version of iOS. So today I’m going to run down some of the hardware features that I think will be in the next iPhone.

1. Pretty, lots of pretty.

All Apple products are pretty. There’s no contest on this one, but we can assume that it will be prettier than the last one. More aluminum and glass stuff going on, but it will probably be sturdier than the iPhone 4 because of the complaints and refused warranty claims that were put forward upon the initial release of the last model.

2. Louder speakers and a radio.

These ones aren’t things that I personally care too much about but they’re things that I have heard a lot about. People weren’t satisfied with the max volume on the iPhone 4 speakers and I must say, the complaints weren’t unfounded. The reason for the cheap speakers, however was the fact that speakers take up a lot of space in the small case of the phone. To install loud, or high quality speakers the would’ve had to decrease the size of the battery or increased the size of the phone.

Also many smart phones as well as some MP3 players have FM tuners in them. Again, this feature matters not to me because I don’t listen to over the air radio. The programming sucks, the quality sucks, and there are much better and more personalized options like www.pandora.com available. However, the fact that I don’t listen to it doesn’t mean that no one out there does. Neither of these things will probably make it into any iPhone because of Apple’s obsession with sleek design, and their investment in the online music industry.

3. Flash!!!!! (haha like that’s going to happen…)

Yeah right. Flash support. I suppose that we can hope that Steve Jobs will be too feeble to keep his employees from putting flash in there… But I’m guessing that Apple still hates flash even with it’s new CEO in place.

4. 3D Camera.

I know that most people really don’t care about how many Ds their camera has. But I just think it’s cool. It was a very short time ago that we couldn’t even see true 3D if we payed to go to a 3D theater. Now 3D glasses have only one color of lens and provide the illusion of a 3D holographic image. A camera that could record in 3D wouldn’t be terribly useful but it’s really fun to play with!

5. 3D holographic display.

This one is actually likely to appear in an Apple product at some point in the future. A ways back I wrote a story on Apple filing patent on a holographic display that didn’t require glasses to view 3D. According to Apple it was “true 3D” not just a 3D illusion, but I question weather or not that claim could possibly be accurate. But I would love to see the iPhone being the first true 3D mobile device, or even the first true 3D consumer device of any kind.

Well that’s about all I can think of that may or may not be seen in the new iphone other than the obvious Apple-ish or of things. Right now the announcement date is slated to be September 30^th so I guess we’ll wait and see.

Twitter is Growing?

Despite everyone hating twitter for the fact that their service is just so much less good than Facebook, Twitter’s user base is still growing. Twitter said Thursday that it now boasts 100 million active users, half of which tweet to the site on a daily basis. This is a mere shadow in the face of Facebook’s 500 million users, or what ever is now… It seems though that twitters me use your base is from mobile device users as over 55% of the active users contribute tweets from phone.

Google Sells Patents to HTC, HTC Sues Apple.

The web search giant Google, yeah we are back to Google News now, has sold nine key patents to iPhone competitor HTC allowing the Taiwanese mobile phone manufacturer to sue Apple for infringement of intellectual property. Apple has already been in dispute with HTC regarding the number of alleged breaches of Apple patents and android handsets on Thursday HTC countersued against Apple in two courts in the US. This is just more fuel to the fire as Apple and Google along with other mobile device manufacturers are in constant legal battle with each other around their respective smart phones. As a sidenote Apple has succeeded in getting an injunction on Samsung galaxy at 10.1 in Germany which was removed from the IFA trade show in Berlin.

More Good News!

To add to the fire of the lawsuits against AT&T and T-Mobile’s merger, Sprint has now filed its lawsuit to block them now not only must AT&T dispute claims from the US Department of Justice but also dispute claims from Sprint and possibly other companies as well. More good news for the everyday consumer. Things continue to look up.

More 3Tb Compatability and New Benchmarks.

Now to move onto an issue that has been kind close to my business, which is the issue of 3 TB hard drives and their compatibility, or lack thereof, with current motherboards. Right now there are four major players in 3 TB hard drive market. Those being, Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi. As more UEFI equipped motherboards come trickling on the market to handle the increased storage capacity, the battle continues to heat up. The benchmark enthusiasts over at hothardware.com decided now would be fine time to pit a few of them against each other. So they naturally picked the three main manufacturers. They ran a battery of 28 test on each of the hard drives and found that the Seagate Barracuda XT outperforms the other two by a notable margin. The Seagate Barracuda XT is also tied for most expensive drive in the line up with the Hitachi, at $179.

Motorola Droid Bionic!

The Droid Bionic is finally out after eight months of delays. The starting price is $300 with two-year contract and I haven’t got my hands on it yet, but I’m told by the massive media on the Internet that it is a very good phone. I’m going to refrain from passing judgment on it until I can actually see the phone, but if you would like to read some reviews I have found a good news article whose link is right here.

AT&T Sucks!
AT&T still plans to merge with T-Mobile however the Department of Justice is suing to block the merger and the hearing is set for September 21. AT&T keeps saying that there are quote enormous benefits on quote of this merger, I would like to see what those benefits are.  In my view there seem to be no benefits whatsoever for AT&T to merge with anyone. Click here to read the article.

nVidia Sells Lots of Graphics Cards.
Nvidia’s sales are higher than expected and has raised its fiscal outlook for the quarter, which is good news for anyone who’s interested in any video or anyone who just loves Nvidia as I do I think they make some of the best graphics processors.

MORE PORN!
Here’s something that our most of our readers should be very interested in. The domain name service registry has begun has begun limited registration 4.XXX domain names for pornographers. I’m not sure why this was necessary to do. Don’t the.com domain names work perfectly fine for pornography?

Amazon looks weird.
Amazon.com the worlds most popular shopping website has launched a look. The redesigned version of this website is a bit more minimalist than the old one. I can’t find the date on which they plan to begin using this new layout but there is a picture of the new layout in the PCWorld.com article that is linked to below this blurb. It does seem that Amazon.com still has the old layout right now.

AMD get 12-core chips out soon.
AMD or Advanced Micro Devices is poised to released its new generation of quote bulldozer unquote processors and only shipping in major OEM vendor configurations. The list price on the 12 core 1.8 GHz off to wrong is only $873. For me I think 873 is rather high price for an AMD CPU, however, it’s not high price for 12 core processor. I personally use on the Intel processors in my own computers, because I find that they last longer and have more potential for overclocking if you buy the unlocked version of the Intel core I seven processor’s. I do take note that the 12 core 1.8 GHz operon should perform better than the current maximum on Intel being eight cores, but AMD does not support hyperthreading.
That is pretty much all that was in the news today that I really cared about. So I hope you enjoyed it and please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments and if you would like to e-mail me at DEO LF I NMD@Gmail.com, you can tell me what you think should be in tomorrow’s post. You can also tell me what you think should have been in today’s post and I left out.

This program will still be sponsored by DolFin MicroDevices and we will begin to post some small advertisements at the bottom of each post. They will be Google advertisements so they will be minimally invasive . I have also decided to do daily news updates that will include all of the technology news items of the day that I thought were cool or interesting in some way. I will also try to do product reviews of every major new item that comes out such as Apple iPods and new laptops of any kind and even gaming desktops and such like that.

You’ve also probably noticed the new layout that is the new minimalist design on the WordPress blogging system. We think this design is more conducive to an effective news blog. It seems to me that it looks like the New York Times website or some other large and well respected news site. It also will make sure that the page loads very quickly because there won’t be a whole lot of extra things to load other than the graphics in the articles themselves. I think this new reboot of the site will be very good for me and good for all of the sites viewers. It should be no to that the sites daily viewership has gone from an average of 300 views per day to about four. Our goal is to get up to 1000 by the end of the year. I look forward to writing the articles and viewing the feedback for this new reboot and I hope you guys all enjoy it .

To buy online click on the picture!

Also check out the new revised version of the DolFin EXTB external hard drive! Still just $85.99 with a four year warranty!

Please do not use these images for anything other than personal use as desktop pictures. Unauthorized distribution of these images will be considered theft of intellectual property unless permission is obtained from the copyright owner and citation is posted. Don’t be afraid to email me requesting rights. I will be glad to grant them nine times out of ten.

Please do not use these images for anything other than personal use as desktop pictures. Unauthorized distribution of these images will be considered theft of intellectual property unless permission is obtained from the copyright owner and citation is posted. Don’t be afraid to email me requesting rights. I will be glad to grant them nine times out of ten.

This sent sort of chills down my geeky spine as the event took me back to 2006 when the grand central station of underground torrents was raided, and taken down for three days! I thought “It’s happening again! Are they coming back up this time?”

I checked the news to find only one article about the site’s downtime on March 25th. The good people at torrentfreak.com are so far the only news people to post an article on this downtime. Their article is posted at this link. They said in the article that it’s probably nothing, and they kind  of put down the theory that they’re down for a big important reason. This is true. Odds are that there’s nothing to worry about, but what if there is?

There are a very large number of things that could take this website down. As mentioned in the article someone could’ve tripped over a cable, or they could be doing maintenance. I don’t think either of those are the case. First of all if you’re running a website of this size usually you’ve learned how to avoid the simple mistakes like tripping over cables and the like. There are also lots of life lines in place to keep the site running even if someone accidentally unplugs a cable. As far as maintenance goes, most sites post something on the site a couple days or more before they go down saying “We will be down for some work between xx/xx and xx/xx.” Now, I was on the site yesterday, and though I wasn’t really looking, I did not notice any notes that said the site would be down, and apparently the people at torrentfreak.com didn’t either.

So, we know what didn’t happen, but the question still remains, “What did happen?” One of the thing that could take the site down is hackers. Three days ago news was released of some hackers getting into The Pirate Bay’s security system and causing lots of trouble. The article is online at this link. Again the torrent freaks do a good job.

So my theory is that either the Swedish government has shut them down again or some hackers are holding the site down for some reason. Could be DDOS or some form of actual hacking. But I’m leaning toward hacking. Whatever it is, lets hope that they’re back up soon so we can start our downloads again! I’m missing out on some new TV shows!

*****UPDATE*****

The Pirate Bay is now back online with no explanation for the downtime. If anyone knows why this downtime happened please comment to let me know. This has been one of my most popular posts and has caused my site to break it’s previous daily traffic record.

*****UPDATE*****

_______________________Advertisement__________________________

Need more space for your torrents? When TPB is back up, buy a really reliable DolFin external hard drive!

Though the drives are only available in one size right now DolFin says it will soon be releasing a wide range of sizes from 320Gb- 750Gb. Wait, that seems a lot like another manufacturer of external drives… Seagate? Yep. That’s because DolFin uses Seagate internals for their drives but unlike Seagate themselves DolFin is selective about the drives they ship. There is a 24 hour burn test in which all aspects of the hard drive are monitored while it is at max load. If, while the little drive strains to keep up with demand, it shows any sign of slowing down or giving up the bare drive is boxed up and sent back to Seagate to be used in one of their external disks or a Dell laptop.

This is a first for the industry of mobile drive which is quite impressive no matter how you look at it. There are some complaints about the high price of the DolFin drives ($85.99 for the 500Gb) but most should find it to be a small price to pay for that kind of reliability. If you’d like to buy a DolFin USB hard drive you can do so at the following web page:

http://dolfin.webs.com/apps/webstore/products/show/2196591

I also am very excited to announce that a company called DolFiN MicroDevices is now going to be producing publicly available devices and products based on the developments we make here at the lab. DolFiN is a separate company from this blog, and this blog is still run as a nonprofit organization. The two entities do, however, share personnel and visions of the future. You may click on the image below to see the company’s newly formed website.

DolFiN currently has two main products available: A $1000 touch screen desktop, and a $299 small workstation. DolFiN will soon be making available products like laptops and handheld devices as well. We think this is going to be a great partnership and enable both this blog and DolFiN to be great innovators.

DolFiN is available on facebook and we would like all of you to “Become a Fan” of what we do. This way we can send you updates and information about new products and or services that you may be interested in. you can also buy our products in the Facebook marketplace! Click on the image below to be taken to our facebook page!

We look forward to showing you the great new products that we create! Until then have a great week!

We are pleased to respond to the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau’s inquiry dated July 31, 2009, requesting information regarding Apple’s App Store and its application approval process. In order to give the Bureau some context for our responses, we begin with some background information about the iPhone and the App Store.

Apple’s goal is to provide our customers with the best possible user experience. We have been able to do this by designing the hardware and software in our products to work together seamlessly. The iPhone is a great example of this. It has established a new standard for what a mobile device can be—an integrated device with a phone, a full web browser, HTML email, an iPod, and more, all delivered with Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch user interface.

Apple then introduced something altogether new—the App Store—to give consumers additional functionality and benefits from the iPhone’s revolutionary technology. The App Store has been more successful than anyone could have ever imagined. Today, just over a year since opening, the App Store offers over 65,000 iPhone applications, and customers have downloaded over 1.5 billion applications.

The App Store provides a frictionless distribution network that levels the playing field for individual and large developers of mobile applications. We provide every developer with the same software that we use to create our own iPhone applications. The App Store offers an innovative business model that allows developers to set their own price and keep more (far more in most cases) of the revenue than traditional business models. In little more than a year, we have raised the bar for consumers’ rich mobile experience beyond what we or anyone else ever imagined in both scale and quality. Apple’s innovation has also fostered competition as other companies (e.g., Nokia, Microsoft, RIM, Palm and Verizon) seek to develop their own mobile platforms and launch their own application stores.

Apple works with network providers around the world so that iPhone users have access to a cellular network. In the United States, we struck a groundbreaking deal with AT&T in 2006 that gives Apple the freedom to decide which software to make available for the iPhone. This was an industry first.

We created an approval process that reviews every application submitted to Apple for the App Store in order to protect consumer privacy, safeguard children from inappropriate content, and avoid applications that degrade the core experience of the iPhone. Some types of content such as pornography are rejected outright from the App Store, while others such as graphic combat scenes in action games may be approved but with an appropriate age rating. Most rejections are based on bugs found in the applications. When there is an issue, we try to provide the developer with helpful feedback so they can modify the application in order for us to approve it. 95% of applications are approved within 14 days of their submission.

We’re covering new ground and doing things that had never been done before. Many of the issues we face are difficult and new, and while we may make occasional mistakes, we try to learn from them and continually improve.

In response to your specific questions, we would like to offer the following:

Question 1. Why did Apple reject the Google Voice application for iPhone and remove related third-party applications from its App Store? In addition to Google Voice, which related third-party applications were removed or have been rejected? Please provide the specific name of each application and the contact information for the developer.

Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it. The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail. Apple spent a lot of time and effort developing this distinct and innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality of the iPhone. For example, on an iPhone, the “Phone” icon that is always shown at the bottom of the Home Screen launches Apple’s mobile telephone application, providing access to Favorites, Recents, Contacts, a Keypad, and Visual Voicemail. The Google Voice application replaces Apple’s Visual Voicemail by routing calls through a separate Google Voice telephone number that stores any voicemail, preventing voicemail from being stored on the iPhone, i.e., disabling Apple’s Visual Voicemail. Similarly, SMS text messages are managed through the Google hub—replacing the iPhone’s text messaging feature. In addition, the iPhone user’s entire Contacts database is transferred to Google’s servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways. These factors present several new issues and questions to us that we are still pondering at this time.

The following applications also fall into this category.

• Name: GVDialer / GVDialer Lite
  Developer: MobileMax
  info@mobile-mx.com
• Name: VoiceCentral
  Developer: Riverturn, Inc.
  4819 Emperor Blvd., Suite 400
  Durham, NC 27703
• Name: GV Mobile / GV Mobile Free
  Developer: Sean Kovacs
  sean@seankovacs.com

We are continuing to study the Google Voice application and its potential impact on the iPhone user experience. Google is of course free to provide Google Voice on the iPhone as a web application through Apple’s Safari browser, just as they do for desktop PCs, or to provide its “Google-branded” user experience on other phones, including Android-based phones, and let consumers make their choices.

Question 2. Did Apple act alone, or in consultation with AT&T, in deciding to reject the Google Voice application and related applications? If the latter, please describe the communications between Apple and AT&T in connection with the decision to reject Google Voice. Are there any contractual conditions or non-contractual understandings with AT&T that affected Apple’s decision in this matter?

Apple is acting alone and has not consulted with AT&T about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application. No contractual conditions or non-contractual understandings with AT&T have been a factor in Apple’s decision-making process in this matter.

Question 3. Does AT&T have any role in the approval of iPhone applications generally (or in certain cases)? If so, under what circumstances, and what role does it play? What roles are specified in the contractual provisions between Apple and AT&T (or any non-contractual understandings) regarding the consideration of particular iPhone applications?

Apple alone makes the final decisions to approve or not approve iPhone applications.

There is a provision in Apple’s agreement with AT&T that obligates Apple not to include functionality in any Apple phone that enables a customer to use AT&T’s cellular network service to originate or terminate a VoIP session without obtaining AT&T’s permission. Apple honors this obligation, in addition to respecting AT&T’s customer Terms of Service, which, for example, prohibit an AT&T customer from using AT&T’s cellular service to redirect a TV signal to an iPhone. From time to time, AT&T has expressed concerns regarding network efficiency and potential network congestion associated with certain applications, and Apple takes such concerns into consideration.

Question 4. Please explain any differences between the Google Voice iPhone application and any Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications that Apple has approved for the iPhone. Are any of the approved VoIP applications allowed to operate on AT&T’s 3G network?

Apple does not know if there is a VoIP element in the way the Google Voice application routes calls and messages, and whether VoIP technology is used over the 3G network by the application. Apple has approved numerous standard VoIP applications (such as Skype, Nimbuzz and iCall) for use over WiFi, but not over AT&T’s 3G network.

Question 5. What other applications have been rejected for use on the iPhone and for what reasons? Is there a list of prohibited applications or of categories of applications that is provided to potential vendors/developers? If so, is this posted on the iTunes website or otherwise disclosed to consumers?

In a little more than a year, the App Store has grown to become the world’s largest wireless applications store, with over 65,000 applications. We’ve rejected applications for a variety of reasons. Most rejections are based on the application containing quality issues or software bugs, while other rejections involve protecting consumer privacy, safeguarding children from inappropriate content, and avoiding applications that degrade the core experience of the iPhone. Given the volume and variety of technical issues, most of the review process is consumed with quality issues and software bugs, and providing feedback to developers so they can fix applications. Applications that are fixed and resubmitted are approved.

The following is a list of representative applications that have been rejected as originally submitted and their current status:

• Twittelator, by Stone Design Corp., was initially rejected because it crashed during loading, but the developer subsequently fixed the application and it has been approved;
• iLoveWiFi!, by iCloseBy LLC, was rejected because it used undocumented application protocols (it has not been resubmitted as of the date of this letter);
• SlingPlayer Mobile, by Sling Media, was initially rejected because redirecting a TV signal to an iPhone using AT&T’s cellular network is prohibited by AT&T’s customer Terms of Service, but the developer subsequently fixed the application to use WiFi only and it has been approved; and
• Lingerie Fantasy Video (Lite), by On The Go Girls, LLC, was initially rejected because it displayed nudity and explicit sexual content, but the developer subsequently fixed the application and it has been approved with the use of a 17+ age rating.

Apple provides explicit language in its agreement with iPhone developers regarding prohibited categories of applications, for example:

• “Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory; and
• Applications must not contain any malware, malicious or harmful code, program, or other internal component (e.g. computer viruses, trojan horses, ‘backdoors’) which could damage, destroy, or adversely affect other software, firmware, hardware, data, systems, services, or networks.”

And we also provide a reference library that can be accessed by members of the iPhone Developer Program that lists helpful information such as Best Practices and How To Get Started.

Question 6. What are the standards for considering and approving iPhone applications? What is the approval process for such applications (timing, reasons for rejection, appeal process, etc.)? What is the percentage of applications that are rejected? What are the major reasons for rejecting an application?

As discussed in the response to Question 5, Apple provides guidelines to developers in our developer agreement as well as on its web site regarding prohibited categories of applications. These materials also contain numerous other provisions regarding technical and legal requirements that applications must comply with, and Apple uses these standards in considering whether or not to approve applications.

Apple developed a comprehensive review process that looks at every iPhone application that is submitted to Apple. Applications and marketing text are submitted through a web interface. Submitted applications undergo a rigorous review process that tests for vulnerabilities such as software bugs, instability on the iPhone platform, and the use of unauthorized protocols. Applications are also reviewed to try to prevent privacy issues, safeguard children from exposure to inappropriate content, and avoid applications that degrade the core experience of the iPhone. There are more than 40 full-time trained reviewers, and at least two different reviewers study each application so that the review process is applied uniformly. Apple also established an App Store executive review board that determines procedures and sets policy for the review process, as well as reviews applications that are escalated to the board because they raise new or complex issues. The review board meets weekly and is comprised of senior management with responsibilities for the App Store. 95% of applications are approved within 14 days of being submitted.

If we find that an application has a problem, for example, a software bug that crashes the application, we send the developer a note describing the reason why the application will not be approved as submitted. In many cases we are able to provide specific guidance about how the developer can fix the application. We also let them know they can contact the app review team or technical support, or they can write to us for further guidance.

Apple generally spends most of the review period making sure that the applications function properly, and working with developers to fix quality issues and software bugs in applications. We receive about 8,500 new applications and updates every week, and roughly 20% of them are not approved as originally submitted. In little more than a year, we have reviewed more than 200,000 applications and updates.

App

I was at a car show earlier today taking pictures. I decided to post the pictures on this site because after all cars are technology too!

Corvette Engines:

Corvettes that the engines go in!

A nice black Camaro!

and finally a Nissan 350Z that has been tune quite nicely it has an exposed carbon fiber hood and dual HUGE exhaust pipes! not sure what all is under the hood but you can guess it matches the rest.

See what I mean by huge exhaust? these look like they belong on a bus!

After Apple’s transition of Intel processors in 2006, the founder of Psystar was probably thing thinking something like this, “if the Mac OS runs on Intel chips now, what would be stopping me from building my own Mac clone?” So the company of Psystar began building computers saying that Apple’s Macintosh computers were over priced and that theirs were cheaper. Apple then sued Psystar saying that it was unlawful to install Mac OS X on any computer or other device not designed by Apple itself. Psystar counter sued and the outcome of said counter suit is yet to be decided.

So… back to the main topic. Psystar has done a very good job of making their new Open(7) computer appear cheaper than it counterpart at Apple, the MacPr, however when I looked at their site and priced out an Open(7) customized to my specifications, I thought it seemed a little high. Behold the price of a MacPro of similar specs is about $100 cheaper. Why is this? or was it just that configuration?

For all intents and purposes the two computers are about the same. they both run the Mac OS and both run it fast and have loads of storage. When I went looking for a high end mac desktop I wanted at least 600GB of storage and i wanted the fast 3GB per second hard drive. I wanted lots of firewire ports that come on every Apple Mac. I wanted 6GB of RAM and an aluminum enclosure. Everything else standard.

The final thing on my list left me with no option but to buy a Mac Pro from Apple, but I decided to check Psystar to see how much money I was wasting. Here’s what I got:

On the Mac Pro:

• One 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• 3GB (3x1GB)
• None
• 640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• None
• None
• None
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB
• One 18x SuperDrive
• None
• None
• Apple Mighty Mouse
• Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) and User’s Guid

$2,499

On the Psystar Open(7) I learned that I could not just buy one hard drive to get to my 600GB minimum. So I bought two of the High speed drives. This was what jacked up my price. but here it is:

2.66GHz Quad-Core Xeon Nehalem

two Fast! 300GB 10,000RPM SATA2 Hard Drives.

20x DVD±RW DL

// <![CDATA[// 802.11n (PCI-E 1x)

USB Bluetooth adapter

Firewire ports.

$2,907.98

The reason the Open(7) looks cheaper than the Mac Pro is the fact that with the Mac Pro many of the items that I would’ve had to pay extra for from Psystar, come standard on the Mac. Things like the Keyboard and mouse, bluetooth, extra firewire ports, and then there’s the fact that the hard drives were more expensive because I couldn’t buy just one! Bottom line, Psystar is cheaper in it’s base configuration and probably in some other configurations too, however not in all or even most configurations. Also when you buy an Open(7) you can expect a cheap plastic case held together by screws and filled with lose wires and scattered parts held down by screws and clamps. When you buy a Mac you can expect a sleek Aluminum case held together firmly by Torx bits, with an equally sleek and accessible design on the inside. With the Mac it is simple and quick to replace or upgrade parts. With an Open(7) it would be a long frustrating experience involving many tangled wires and stripped screws.
MacPro insides!

My mother’s MacBook has similar issues to the ones mine is developing only it get’s to the extreme of actually causing the machine to slow down to less than the performance of mine! That’s pretty bad… I have been working on cooling these computers with out any major ‘under the hood’ investigation and I thought that I would share with you some of my findings. These will go into the options if you want to take the whole damn thing apart and if you don’t. I do however recommend that if you know how to take your machine apart that you should. There are some minor changes you can make to the insides of the machine that will collectively make a large difference in heat output.

SMC Fan Control (for Intel Macs)

SMC fan control (download) is a great solution for people with Intel macs that don’t like getting their lap burned every time they use their computer. It enables you to set the minimum speed at which your fans run. It also shows you the temperature of all of your components. Unfortunately there is no solution like this for PPC machines at this point. The downside of using an application like this is that your battery life will decrease the faster you run your fans. This works great if you don’t have any problem plugging your computer in a little more often.

Cooling pad

There are cooling pads available for all types of laptops. They can be found in almost all computer stores and in most department stores. You can also search on Amazon.com or other online retailer for ‘laptop cooling pads’ The one on Amazon that I like the best can be found here. Laptop cooling pads usually plug into your USB port and run 1-4 fans off of USB power. This will drain your battery less than using SMC fan control but usually provides for less cooling. This option will work on any computer Mac or PC.

Underclock the processor

Underclocking the processor decreases the CPU performance thereby decreasing the heat it generates. This also increases your battery life. This is great for anyone with a computer of which they do not require all of the power most of the time. To do this on a G3 you can download the application called iCook. It enables you to change your clock speed on the fly. On any other Mac I can tell you how to do it but I’m sure there is a way. On a PC there is usually a setting in the startup bios that you can tweak to get a new clock speed but you can’t do it on the fly

Heatsink/Thermal Compound

The braver of us may wish to make a more perminant change to our computer by taking it apart and tweaking it. These people may try replacing the heatsink or thermal compound or both. I have no personal experience doing this with anything other than my G3 iBook so I won’t give detailed instructions. you can get instructions on how to fully dismantle your computer at a number of places on the web. I recommend that you have a friend help you if you haven’t done this before so that you may blame all of your mistakes on him/her. The theory behind this procedure is that Apple usually puts way to much thermal compound on their processors so that it ends up smothering the processor. Thermal compound and heat sinks also do ware out. You can buy new heatsinks on ifixit.com.

If anyone has any other experiences in cooling down their hot Apple laptops please share in a comment to this post.

On Monday, Steve Jobs will take the stage at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference and announce … something. As usual, it’s a mystery, and as usual, there’s plenty of speculation and expectation in the blogosphere. Hopes for a new iPhone are running high, though ideas on how it might be priced fall all over the map. Indeed, some say the 3G iPhone is a big red herring.

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This week, the Apple-focused blogosphere’s eyes are cast forward to Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) Worldwide Developer Conference, where nearly everyone expects Apple CEO Steve Jobs to announce the iPhone App Store and iPhone 2.0 software, not to mention a new version of the iPhone itself.

In still more iPhone speculation, debate over possible AT&T (NYSE: T) subsidies has been raging — mostly on the hope that it could drive down the cost of acquiring a new iPhone. Still others are speculating that Jobs has something even more interesting up his sleeve for the conference — like a multi-touch Mac tablet device.

App Store on the Way

“A source at a software company that has been working on a native iPhone application tells us the company is getting ready to launch that application on Monday, which could also imply that Apple’s App Store will be up and running that day,” noted Cnet.com’s Tom Krazit, writing on his One More Thing blog.

While the news isn’t exactly surprising, it does lend a bit more weight to the idea. Jobs could possibly announce the App Store, meaning delivery could happen in late June, around the one-year anniversary of iPhone. All the developers who’ve been working away with Apple’s iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) might have to wait a while longer before their third-party applications hit iPhone and iPod touch consumers.

“There are already a great number of applications already available for the iPhone (and iPod touch). However, you do have to jailbreak your iPhone. Developers have been using the installer programs to distribute beta versions of their software among the more technical iPhone users. There are some wonderful programs out there and next week there will be even more!” commented jypeterson on the One More Thing post on the subject.

There’s also hope that if the App Store is ready, a 3G iPhone might be ready as well. This, however, seems to be a slightly bigger leap of faith. Apple might think the iPhone’s one-year anniversary is a better time to launch a new iPhone, and that won’t happen for three more weeks.

Either way, the App Store is a huge leap forward for iPhone lovers and the ecosystem Apple is trying to build.

“The launch of the App Store represents the coming of age of the iPhone platform. You will see thousands upon thousands of developers begin to release new and innovative applications for iPhone and iPod touch,” Raven Zachary, a research director for The 451 Group, told MacNewsWorld.

“Consumers will no longer perceive these devices as just phones and music players. I think the market is underestimating the impact of the App Store launch. We’re talking about a single platform dominating portable music, telephony, gaming, personal productivity and, over time, enterprise applications,” he explained, adding that the App Store will be a highly disruptive move.

A Cheaper iPhone?

Bloggers have also been poking at the possibility that AT&T may subsidize the cost of the iPhone, which would let it retail for as low as US$200. AT&T subsidizes most every other phone it carries, so this isn’t such a wild idea. However, it still may be just a pipe dream. Apple most likely isn’t keen on the subsidies because it undermines the consumer perception of value for a product, making it much harder to roll out new devices — independent of subsidies — at the premium prices Apple is used to.

Still, given iPhone’s strong sales despite the relatively high starting cost, would it really behoove AT&T to subsidize it?

Some think so.

“I’ll speculate that the subsidy happens because the ‘fan-boy’ crowd and early adopters are already on their network and the iPhone. This round is to tempt all the rest of us over, which will require lowering the cost of the phone since it won’t have any features that aren’t already available at lower costs,” Gando commented on InformationWeek.com’s Over the Air blog.

Not everyone agrees. “iPhone has shown that they do not have to subsidize the device in the U.S.,” William Ho, a research director of wireless services for Current Analysis , told MacNewsWorld.

“The numbers that it puts up [are] certainly enviable. This is a trend that carriers want to acclimate the general public towards — at least the higher-end ones — as open access comes into play a few years down the road. No subsidy equals a lower acquisition cost, which means ultimately margins are better for AT&T,” he added.

Drooling Over ‘One More Thing …’

Cult of Mac blogger Leigh McMullen took a striking different turn this week by speculating that Jobs may have something even cooler than a 3G iPhone to deliver at WWDC.

“Personally, I think this whole 3G iPhone business is a red herring. Sure, it’ll be announced, and people will love it. But the leaks abound so much. I find myself hoping that it’s part of a disinformation campaign; to keep us distracted so we don’t guess too closely at what new cool products Apple might unveil, and that there will be a terrific surprise for all of us at WWDC,” McMullen wrote, linking to a previous post and artist mockup of a possible multi-touch Mac tablet device.

Some readers hoped for new cinema display, Blu-ray Apple TVs and free .Mac service. Several seemed to concur with McMullen’s tablet desire.

“It’s going to be a tablet. Or something touchscreenie. Why else would microsoft otherwise rush to show windows 7 with touch screen capabilities. They wanted to be the first to claim it. Although it didn’t make a lot of impact …,” airwin commented.

“WWDC is about development, not really hardware. Sure, hardware has been announced in previous WWDC’s, but it’s not a common thing,” Sven Rafferty, director of Internet technology for Hypersven and editor of Svenontech.com, told MacNewsWorld.

“After two years of Leopard, Leopard and just Leopard, it’s easy to ignore the fact that there might be more than just the iPhone next-gen and firmware 2.x. Rumors are seeping of 10.6, which I wouldn’t be surprised by, as well as the tablet,” he said, noting that the tablet is less likely.

“It’s a niche market … I’d say a mini-PC, like that of the ASUS, would make more sense. Now is that a tablet? I don’t know …” he added. “I say the next-gen iPhone will be center stage along with the SDK and all the apps.”

========================================================

less professional speculations from a non-professional writer

I am very sure we will see a 3g capable iPhone. The iPhone has been struggling in Europe because of the EDGE network’s inability to match the speeds of their existing 3g network and that would solve the problem. Also there is the fact that apple seems to have shipped over 1 billion brown boxes out to their retail stores in anticipation of a product release. I realise that this could be anything but the boxes appeared to be the correct size and I just have a hunch I know what’s in them.

Business Stuff

Apple had a special event a while back about business apps for the iphone. This was at the same time they announce that the AppStore would be released ‘sometime in June’. Therefore it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that there will be something about said AppStore.

‘Rumors are Seeping of 10.6′

That would surprise me greatly considering only a few well known facts. First: Apple just released 10.5 this January! There is no way in hell that they would announce a new OS so soon. It took them 3 years or so of tiger to get around to releasing leopard. Second: If history is a guide (it usually is for Apple) they will release many more patches to leopard before releasing another. Third: It’s obvious that they might crank it to 11 sometime. You can’t expect the X to stick around forever do you?

I will probably use these points in a more detailed article written entirely by myself later on. Till then this is what I have for you. Goodnight and good luck…and stuff the end.

Someone hacked into a California library’s dial-a-story phone service and replaced a fairy tale with a pornographic, profanity-laced message, according to The Associated Press.

The director of the public library in Benicia, which is about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, says a four-digit passcode is required to change the recording. The offensive message was immediately removed after it was reported last week.

I know you’re probably wondering what the message was. It reportedly involved a dog and a pig. Enough said.

Info found on CNET

A one billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube threatens internet freedom, according to its owner Google.

Google’s claim follows Viacom’s move to sue the video sharing service for its inability to keep copyrighted material off its site.

Viacom says it has identified 150,000 unauthorised clips on YouTube.

In court documents Google’s lawyers say the action “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information” over the web.

The search giant’s legal team also maintained that YouTube had been faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that they responded properly to claims of infringement.

In papers submitted to a Manhattan court, Google said it and YouTube “goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works”.

Viacom disagreed that either firm had lived up to that standard and said that they had done “little or nothing” to stop infringement.

Abuse

In a rewritten lawsuit filed last month, Viacom claimed YouTube consistently allowed unauthorised copies of popular television programming and movies to be posted on its website and viewed tens of thousands of times.

It said it had identified more than 150,000 such abuses which included clips from shows such as South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants and MTV Unplugged.

The company says the infringement also included the documentary An Inconvenient Truth which had been viewed “an astounding 1.5 billion times”.

Viacom, which is asking for damages for the unauthorised viewing of its programming, said its tally represented only a fraction of the content on YouTube that violates its copyrights.

“The availability on the YouTube site of a vast library of the copyrighted works of plaintiffs and others is the cornerstone of defendants’ business plan,” Viacom said.

Viacom originally started legal action last year and filed an amended version last month. Earlier this month Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone told Dow Jones: “When we filed this lawsuit, we not only served our own interests, we served the interests of everyone who owns copyrights they want protected.”

He added: “We cannot tolerate any form of piracy by anyone, including YouTube…they cannot get away with stealing our products.”

For its part, Google said the only way the legal action would be resolved was in court.

Google’s vice president of content partnerships David Eun has said: “We’re going all the way to the Supreme Court. We’ve been very clear about it.”

After the legal action was first started, YouTube launched an anti-piracy tool that checks uploaded videos against the original content in an effort to flag piracy.

The more powerful iMac. Now running at speeds up to 3.06GHz.

Just when you thought iMac had everything, now there’s even more. More powerful Intel Core 2 Duo processors. And more memory standard. Combine this with Mac OS X Leopard and iLife ’08, and it’s more all-in-one than ever. iMac packs amazing performance into a stunningly slim space.

Wide-eyed wonder.

Photos, movies, games, videos, and applications with palettes. Anything you see on the 20- or 24-inch glossy widescreen display will be a perfect pixel experience. iMac features a flat-panel LCD screen with 1680-by-1050 resolution (20-inch) or 1920-by-1200 resolution (24-inch), giving you vivid colors and breathtaking clarity.

Power duo.

The latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors run at speeds up to 3.06GHz with advanced 45-nm process technology and 6MB of shared L2 cache. Translation: iMac runs your applications faster and more efficiently than ever before.

View the iMac Application Performance Chart

iMac Application Performance. Up to 28% faster than previous iMac.

When looking at how the new iMac performs with real-world applications, you can clearly see its advantage over the previous generation. Now with iMac, you’ll enjoy new levels of performance with tasks across the board, whether it’s creating web pages, movies, or music, or organizing and enjoying your favorite pictures and music.

Testing conducted by Apple in April 2008 using preproduction 24-inch iMac units with 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors; all other systems were shipping units. All systems were configured with 2GB of RAM. Photoshop test file size = 120MB. HTML and JavaScript benchmarks based on VeriTest’s iBench Version 5.0 using default settings. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of iMac.

Final Cut Pro. HDV render and encode

28% faster

iPhoto. Common application tasks

27% faster

Adobe Photoshop. 45-filter function test

22% faster

iMovie. Common application tasks

21% faster

iTunes. Convert for iPhone

21% faster

Safari. HTML, JavaScript, Java VM

17% faster

iMac with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo. (previous generation)

Baseline

The best iMac graphics yet.

With ATI Radeon HD graphics standard, iMac delivers smooth video playback and realistic visual environments. And now you have the option to upgrade to the most powerful graphics ever available in an iMac. With the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS and 512MB of dedicated video memory, this 24-inch iMac configuration reaches a whole new, blow-you-away level of detail and realism in games, three-dimensional graphics, high-resolution photos, and high-definition video.

View the iMac Graphics Performance Chart

Graphics Performance. Up to 2.2x faster with NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS.

Quake 4 performance: 1920-by-1200 High Quality

Configure-to-order 24-inch iMac with 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS 2.2x faster

Standard-configuration iMac with 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo

ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO Baseline

Testing conducted by Apple in April 2008 using preproduction 24-inch iMac units with 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of iMac.

Massive storage. More memory standard.

iMac has up to 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 memory standard so you can run more applications simultaneously. And with a Serial ATA hard drive up to 320GB, you can load up on photos, videos, and music. The 24-inch model has a remarkable hard drive option — up to 1TB — for just about anything and everything you want to pack in.

	Standard Drive	Optional Drive	Standard Memory	Optional Memory
20-inch 2.4GHz	250GB	320GB or 500GB	1GB	2GB or 4GB
20-inch 2.66GHz	320GB	500GB or 750GB	2GB	4GB
24-inch 2.8GHz	320GB	500GB, 750GB, or 1TB	2GB	4GB

iMac ins and outs.

Bring on your iPod, digital camera, mobile phone, and external hard drive. If it has a cable, iMac has a place for it. You’ll find three USB 2.0 ports on iMac itself and two on the Apple Keyboard. Connect faster peripherals to the FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 ports for even more possibilities.

Built-in freedom.

Turn your house into a wireless wonderland. High-speed 802.11n wireless technology is built into iMac. And with Time Capsule or the AirPort Express Base Station, every computer in every room can connect to iMac, the Internet, and each other. Over this network, everyone can print, surf the web, and even play music from the iTunes library through your home stereo — wirelessly.

iSight camera.

Built into the top of iMac is an iSight camera. You’ll hardly notice it’s there until you want to launch iChat, Photo Booth, or iMovie. iSight is easy to use and highly advanced. The remarkable picture quality and color accuracy make this tiny feature huge.

SuperDrive.

iMac doesn’t have a disc tray. CDs and DVDs slide right into the slot-loading SuperDrive. What makes it super? You can burn your own CDs and DVDs — including double-layer DVDs — to back up data or create your own music mixes. With the SuperDrive and iDVD, you can even burn the movies you make onto a DVD and watch them on your TV.

Dazzling display

The glossy widescreen display on every iMac delivers incredibly rich, vivid color. And you can configure a 24-inch iMac with a new option — the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS — to enjoy up to 2.2X faster graphics performance.

The question remains however “Is this legal?” Psystar says ‘yes’ because Apple is running a monopoly by not allowing people to install Mac OS X on non-apple hardware. They believe Apple does not have the right to tell it’s customers what hardware they can put Mac OS X on. Apple believes that it does have the right to say that and that it is not running a monopoly.

Apple’s philosophy has always been ‘people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware’ for that software. The outcome of this case may compromise the ideal which Apple was founded on.

A Mac user, Chuck Maunder, says this about the situation “When apple sells a computer they aren’t just selling a computer they are selling the Mac OS.” He later went on to say “Apple should probably win this case if it ever goes to court.” and “I don’t think it will make it to court.”

Another concerned consumer says “Apple can only say that they will not honor the warranty.”

No matter what the outcome Apple will continue to make great products and high profit margins.

Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.

About Earth Hour

On March 31 2007, for one hour, Sydney made a powerful statement about the greatest contributor to global warming – coal-fired electricity – by turning off its lights. Over 2.2 million Sydney residents and over 2,100 businesses switched off, leading to a 10.2% energy reduction across the city. What began as one city taking a stand against global warming caught the attention of the world.

In 2008, 24 global cities will participate in Earth Hour at 8pm on March 29. Earth Hour is the highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals to take the simple steps needed to cut their emissions on an ongoing basis. It is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference – from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty, to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.

Intel Prepares a Quad-Core Notebook Chip

By Bryan Gardiner 03.17.08 | 7:30 PM

Intel’s widely expected to release new quad-core laptop processors this fall, but even the chipmaker admits it could be years before the chips really go mainstream.
Courtesy Alienware

Stanford president John Hennessy calls parallel programming for multicore processors the biggest challenge computer science has faced in more than 50 years. But that’s not stopping Intel from moving ahead with plans to bring even greater core counts to your laptop.

According to trade-media reports, Intel is readying a new breed of quad-core mobile processors for release this fall, marking what could be the first concerted effort by the chip giant to aim its high-end multicore processors at the general mobile market.

Just don’t expect quad-core laptops to become an industry standard anytime soon. As DigiTimes notes, these chips won’t come cheap, and will also suck down significantly more power than today’s mainstream mobile Core 2 Duo processors — a big no-no in the mobile space.

Intel has previously stated its intention to release quad-core notebook processors, but the company would not confirm the details reported by DigiTimes.

“I’ve always used the adage, the hardware is ahead of the software is ahead of the user,” says Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, who says that quad-core processors in notebooks will not be suitable for mainstream consumers for quite some time.

“I can imagine a small niche [of adopters] on the notebook side, but I still think it’s going to be three to four years before [quad-core laptops] become mainstream,” he says.

In addition to high prices and power constraints, there’s still a dearth of software (and programmers) that can properly take advantage of four processing cores, a fact that will make selling multicore laptops an even harder prospect for Intel in the near term.

Nevertheless, IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell says the decision to relocate quad-core from the desktop to the laptop may actually make sense when you look at future industry trends.

“If you look at where the market is going, we have notebooks sales surpassing desktops on a worldwide scale in 2009,” says O’Donnell. “Notebooks are clearly the platform of the future; hence all the movement by Intel and others into the mobile space recently.”

In the not-too-distant future, O’Donnell also says that notebooks may even become the platform of choice for which chipmakers will develop new technologies, platforms and, yes, even new multicore processors.

For its own part, Intel seems to be well aware of the challenges it and the rest of the industry face in creating software that can take full advantage of multicore chip technology.

Intel and Microsoft are expected to announce a partnership on Tuesday with the University of California-Berkeley and other universities. The venture will see both companies funding new research into parallel programming techniques.

“Given the many attempts at salting parallel computing in the industry over 40 years, there have only been relatively modest successes to date,” says David Patterson, a professor of computer science at Berkeley.

Because the entire industry is now betting on multicore processors, it’s also realizing that unless the software community catches up, there remains no compelling reason for consumers to buy 4-, 8- or any other multicore processor.

As Jerry Bautista, director of technology management for Intel’s Microprocessor Technology Lab, puts it: “It’s not the hardware that’s really compelling. It’s what you can do with the hardware that really is the interesting stuff.”

click to enlarge.

click to enlarge

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Thanks

Click images to enlarge.

Claims include:
A three-dimensional display system, comprising:providing a projection screen having a predetermined angularly-responsive reflective surface function;determining the left and right eye locations of at least one observer;projecting left and right three-dimensional sub-images toward the projection screen; andmodulating the sub-images respectively in coordination with the predetermined angularly-responsive reflective surface function to respectively direct the left and right sub-images substantially exclusively to the respective left and right eye locations.

A three-dimensional display system, comprising:providing a projection screen having a spatial filter defining a predetermined angularly-responsive reflective surface function;determining the left and right eye locations of at least one observer substantially facing and in proximity with the projection screen;projecting left and right sub-images of a three-dimensional image toward the projection screen; andangularly and intensity modulating the left and right sub-images respectively in coordination with the predetermined angularly-responsive reflective surface function to define respective discrete light paths that respectively direct the left and right sub-images to reflect from the projection screen substantially exclusively to the respective left and right eye locations to provide a three-dimensional viewing experience.

Descriptions include:
Although much more realistic, a dynamically presented holographic image also requires far greater computational ability and bandwidth than is generally required for a two-view stereo display. Effective means are also noticeably wanting for dynamically recreating the original wavefront, or an acceptable facsimile thereof, in real time and at commercially acceptable costs. Thus, a need still remains for highly effective, practical, efficient, uncomplicated, and inexpensive autostereoscopic 3D displays that allow the observer complete and unencumbered freedom of movement. Additionally, a need continues to exist for practical autostereoscopic 3D displays that provide a true parallax experience in both the vertical as well as the horizontal movement directions.

You may download it by clicking the following link.

Click Here.

Intel announces, demonstrates USB 3.0

By Joel Hruska | Published: September 18, 2007 – 10:12PM CT

One of the announcements to come out of the IDF keynote this afternoon was Pat Gelsinger’s discussion and demonstration of USB 3.0 technology. Although still in the prototype stage, USB 3.0 is aiming for 10 times the bandwidth of current USB2.0 solutions, or approximately 5Gbps. Since this requires fiber optic cabling, USB 3.0 will add a length of optical data cable to the mix, though USB 3.0 will retain full compatibility with USB 2.0 (and, one assumes, USB 1.0 as well).

Gelsinger expects the final version specifications to be finished by the first half of 2008, with USB 3.0 peripherals realistically appearing in 2009 or 2010. There are an increasing number of devices that could potentially take advantage of the additional bandwidth, including external hard drives, flash readers, video cameras, and the all-new USB-compliant llama expected to be genetically delivered from the Andes sometime in late 2011. Obviously a USB llama wouldn’t be much use without a USB 3.0 device—ever tried downloading from a llama over an old 10BaseT network? Yeah. It’d be worse.

As for the other, official features of USB 3.0, there remains quite a bit of information we don’t know, and it would have been nice for Intel to have included additional information. USB has long been criticized for relatively high CPU usage. This has inevitably become less of an issue as CPU performance has improved, but devices capable of using USB 3.0′s higher bandwidth capabilities could make CPU usage a problem again unless the issue is addressed during spec development. Issues like cable length, available power provided, and the number of devices per channel are all unrevealed as yet, and possibly unresolved. The Inquirer has a few more details on the spec (and the rest of the keynote) if you’re interested.

As far as future market competition, its target of 5Gbps puts USB 3.0 ahead of current eSATA (3Gbps), which is really the only other device protocol under active development that might challenge it as a peripheral interconnect. Although an IEEE 1394c protocol has been developed and published as of June 8 2007, no company has announced an intent to produce a product or chipset that utilizes the standard. FireWire remains supported in certain sectors, but I’d personally be surprised if the combination of USB 3.0 and eSATA doesn’t push FireWire out of the market completely. As for the nascent specification, the proposed 5Gbps speed is great and all, but hopefully the development committees will acknowledge some of the other concerns regarding the USB 2.0 protocol and incorporate solutions for them, rather than carrying them over into another product generation.

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Gelsinger demos USB 3.0, PICe 3.0 and other new toys
Intel Fall 007 Kicking ass

By Charlie Demerjian in San Francisco: Tuesday, 18 September 2007, 10:46 PM

PAT GELSINGER GAVE the afternoon keynote at IDF today, and it started off with some rather tame enterprise parts, then moved on to the fun stuff. First up was virtualisation, and a show and tell of the virtualisation vendors.

The one interesting one was presented by John Fowler of Sun with its upcoming, unannounced VM on its unannounced Tigerton/Caneland box. The most interesting bit is that, because it is running on Solaris,and you run Windows under that, the IO and storage are Solaris based and simply exposed. If you run Windows under Solaris, you get a real fault-tolerant file system on a toy OS.

The one time Itanium was mentioned was in a new Hitachi Virtage blade. This blade is running Montvale, aka Montecito v.07. Other than that, the red-headed step-chip was absent from just about everything.

Next was security, and they gave the quick rundown of VPro 2007 aka Weybridge. We told you all about it here, check it out if you are into virtualisation security. The next-gen VPro is called McCreary, coming in 2008. It will have a TPM v1.2 on the chipset, AMT 5.0 and a technology called Danbury. We will have a full write up on Danbury later today.

Going to I/O, we have the announcement of PCIe 3.0, Quickassist and USB3.0. PCIe 3.0 has twice the bandwidth – that would be 10Gbps – dynamic power management and supports accelerators. This used to be called Genesseo, but now has some marketing name related to Quickassist.

USB3.0 is probably going to be the biggest one of the bunch. They are aiming for 10-times the bandwidth, which would put it at about 5Gbps. For this you need optical, and USB 3.0 cables have an optical link in the current form. Backwards compatible, loads of bandwidth, optical and hopefully available in 1H/08.

Another optical link was the FCoE announcement, aka T11. It does just what it sounds like; puts fiber channel over vanilla ethernet. Intel has 10GigE adapters in copper and fiber for that, buy 12.

Then comes storage. Intel is getting into SSDs and they were showing of prototypes and vague specs. The specs were SATA 3.0, 10-50x the IOPs and a 4.5x power savings, all with twice the write speed. What this is over was not stated, but I don’t think it will be all that slow in any case.

Gelsinger then mentioned Skulltrail and pointed to a box without any more comment. There are several of these boxes at the show, so more info will be forthcoming.

The system diagrams for Nehalem were also shown off, but that is old news, see here and here. They then demo-ed probably the most important bit of the show, a 2S Nehalem system running. Getting one CPU up is easy, the second is much much harder with a new interconnect. Intel did it.

In general, there was a lot new here, more than can be covered in a single story. Much of it will be on your desktop in a year or two, most of it not esoteric server side technology. All I have to say looking back to the spring IDF is …. Yo! µ
=================================================

My thoughts.

My initial reaction to the new USB is wow 5 gb!!!!! Holy shit that’s a lot of data to go in one second. Then I thought about it and realized: Ya that’s fast but that number is not the actual speed you’ll get it is the original data throughput. Also I don’t think they will be able to deliver something quite that fast right away. From just over 400 megs to 5 gigs is a long way to jump overnight. I must admit that no matter what it’ll be fast and well worth installing in a machine. It’s just questionable weather they will actually deliver something as good as they say it is.

Here’s a list of the features:

80 gig hard drive

1 gig or high speed ram

2.66 ghtz processor

6 USB 2 ports and built-in networking

Auto overclocking that will automatically speed up your processor to get optimal performance and reliability

Logic board is specially designed so that the parts in the computer will not make very much noise and will last a very long time.

Here’s the link to the page on ebay!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK…

Christopher Maunder

Owner/CEO

Forrester Technologies

There are a few screen shots below this short list…

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AppleScript

Scriptable System Preferences & ApplicationsDo more with AppleScript. A number of system preferences in Leopard are now scriptable, including the Dock, Security, Exposé, Accounts, and Networking — as well as a number of features in iChat.

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Automator

Starting PointsStart creating workflows more easily than ever. Starting Points automatically displays a sheet in new workflow windows, from which you choose categories representing the things you want to do. Then select options from contextual pop-up menus.

Command-Line Utility for AutomatorGain access to other languages for running Automator workflows, as well as the ability to set the initial value of variables contained in the targeted workflow.

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Boot Camp

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Dashboard

Web ClipClip out any portion of a web page and turn it into a Dashboard widget. Just click the new Web Clip icon in Safari and select the portion of the page you want, then click Add to see your Dashboard spring to life with a brand-new widget. The widget is “live” and will update as its page of origin does. You can even customize your widget’s frame.

Movies Widget in DashboardWatch movie trailers right in Dashboard, then click to buy tickets. A cool new movie widget puts movies and showtimes just a click away.

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Dashcode

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Desktop

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Dictionary

Wikipedia in DictionaryHarness the power of Wikipedia when you’re connected to the Internet — it’s built right into Dictionary. You get a great Mac OS X user interface with super-fast searching and beautifully laid out-results.

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DVD Player

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Finder

Instant Screen Sharing from the FinderStart an interactive screen sharing session with other Macs on your network. Just select the Mac from your sidebar and (if authorized) you can see and control the Mac as if you were right in front of it. Change a system preference, publish an iPhoto library, or add a new playlist to iTunes.

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Fonts

Printable Font BookPrint out comprehensive previews of your fonts, including sample text in varying sizes or all available glyphs. Just select fonts in Font Book, choose Print from the File menu, and select any of the three built-in report types.

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Front Row

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Graphics

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iCal

Reserve Rooms and EquipmentReserve meeting rooms and equipment as you create your meeting invitations. If your calendar is administered through a CalDAV server, iCal automatically displays availabilities when you add a room or resource to your meeting.

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iChat

Backdrop EffectsDrag an Apple-designed backdrop or your own photo or video into the video preview window to create an effect that will fool your buddies into thinking you’re chatting from your living room, the beach, or the moon.

iChat Theater Show nearly any file on your system through an iChat video conference. Put on an entire photo slideshow, click through a Keynote presentation, play a movie, and more — in full screen, accompanied by a video feed of you hosting.

Tabbed Chat Consolidate your chat windows into a single tabbed window. Each chat is represented by a tab on the left side of the iChat window. Turning on tabbed chats is as easy as selecting “Collect chats into a single window” in iChat preferences.

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Imaging

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Instruments

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International

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Mail

Forward as AttachmentForward an email as an attachment instead of an inline message. Select the message or group of messages you’d like to forward and choose “Forward as Attachment” from the Message menu. You can also drag and drop Mail messages into applications like iChat and they’ll be sent as attachments.

To-Dos Create to-do items directly from email messages or notes in Mail. Simply highlight text in an email, then click the To Do button to create a to-do from a message.

Data DetectorsAct on information in Mail immediately. Mail automatically detects text fragments like appointments and addresses, and lets you choose smart actions with a click: create a new contact, map an address, or create an iCal event.

Simple Mail SetupAutomatically configure new email accounts. Just enter your email address and password. Mail knows the email settings for 30 leading email providers, including Yahoo!, AOL, Gmail, Verizon, AT&T, British Telecom, and Comcast.

NotesWrite handy notes you can access from anywhere — including graphics, colored text, and attachments. Group notes into folders or create Smart Mailboxes that automatically group them. Your notes folder acts like an email mailbox, so you can retrieve notes from any Mac or PC.

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Networking

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Parental Controls

Time Limits and BedtimesControl exactly how much time your children spend with the computer each day. Limit total daily usage and define hours the computer can or can’t be used (set differently for weekdays and weekends). Built-in flexibility allows you to make adjustments on the fly as schedules and schoolwork change.

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Photo Booth

Photo Booth with Burst ModeCapture multiple shots during a brief moment in time with Photo Booth Burst. Four successive shots are taken and presented in a unique four-up layout that’s completely interactive.

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Preview

Improved PDF AnnotationsTake advantage of new PDF annotations in Preview. Add Stickies-style notes and links to websites or other pages within the PDF. Mark important areas in ovals or rectangles and highlight text. All annotations are saved with the PDF so you can share them with others.

PDF Manipulation in PreviewRe-create your PDF as you like. Move individual pages around, or remove pages altogether. You can even combine PDFs with a simple drag and drop.

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Printing

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Quick Look

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Safari

Enhanced Find Instantly and graphically locate any text on the current web page. Safari highlights every instance of the word you’re searching for and even dims the rest of the page so you can focus on the results of your find.

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Screen Savers

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Security

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Spaces

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Spotlight

Spotlight Application LaunchingLaunch applications quicker. The Spotlight default item is now the Top Hit, so if you search for an application, all you have to do is press Return to launch it.

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System

Help Menu SearchEnjoy more helpful Help. A new search field in the Help menu displays all relevant menu items in the active application. Highlight one and Leopard opens the menu and highlights the command.

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System Preferences

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Terminal

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Text Edit

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Time Machine

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Universal Access

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UNIX

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Xcode 3

Screenshots:

Here is the link.

http://www.orbitfiles.com/download/id2123998295.html

Although Apple built considerable security measures into the device, according to Charles Miller, the main analyst for the firm, “Once you did manage to find the hole, you were in complete control.”

So far, there’s no evidence that the flaw has been exploited, and the firm generously offered to sell Apple a plug-in to fix the leak. Which would ease our worries completely, except Miller is described as “a former employee of the National Security Agency,” and we all know how hesitant that agency has been to spy on American citizens.

Turkey’s Ruling Party Gets Roasted

Turkey’s Islamic-inspired governing party’s harder-than-expected pummeling of the secular opposition in Sunday’s parliamentary elections topped the Wall Street Journal’s newsbox and, at least visually, the front pages of the The New York Times, and Los Angeles Times today.

While the LA Times seemed most concerned about of the “specter of bitter quarrels over the feared erosion of Turkey’s secular traditions” that would arise from the ruling party’s new mandate, the WSJ focused on the silver lining, emphasizing that “the wide margin of victory paves the way for more pro-Western and business friendly policies.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times asks, but doesn’t answer, the question at the heart of it all: “Can an Islamic-oriented government that is popularly election be democratic and aligned with the West?”

Perhaps it was the absence of an answer to this question that relegated the story, teased with a colorful lead photograph women in headscarves waving celebratory flags, to A3.

Iraq Update: Not So Fast

Meanwhile, there remains a little less than nothing to celebrate in Iraq. In the latest wholly depressing dispatch, a top U.S. training official told USA Today that “military offensives and a changed focus on increasing security” (Um, does this mean we weren’t focusing on security before?) have slowed the training of Iraqi forces. Admitting the news was “a hard pill to swallow,” the general said American troops would need to remain in Iraq for at least two more years to prevent “a bloodbath.”

Democrats: The New Money Party?

Downers like this do have an upside – if you are Democrat, reports the Wall Street Journal. With more than a year to go before the elections, Democratic candidates have raised $100 million more in campaign contributions than Republicans, putting them on track to win the money race for the White House and Congress for the first time in recorded campaign finance history.

The reason? “Democrats have taken the lead by exploiting widespread disapproval of President Bush and the Iraq war to develop a more robust online network of new, small donors, as well as to gain traction with deep-pocketed business contributors.” That, and Democrats are way better at surfing (and milking) those wild and crazy “internets.”

A NOTE TO READERS: The Skinny is now available via e-mail. Click here and follow the directions to register to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

© MMVII, CBS Interactive, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

When Apple release this amazing smartphone in june Steve Jobs also announced that until the two-year contract with AT&T ran out the iPhone would only work on AT&T’s cellular network. Hotz changed all of this by making a way to put it on any other network. Hotz says that he will leave instructions on how to do it yourself on the internet, however I haven’t been able to find it yet.

After he made the public release of this hack there were many companies wanting to buy his hacked gadget. He finally did sell the phone to a company called CertiCell for a Nissan 35z and three more 8gb iPhones. [Terry] Daidone, who’s the co-founder of Louisville, Kentucky-based CertiCell, has apparently also offered the young man a paid consulting job, but stresses the company doesn’t have ‘any plans on the table right now to commercialize Mr. Hotz’ discovery’.

” I am a long time mac user stuck in a windows world and I have noticed the quality of products produced by microsoft to be decreasing in quality in the past few years. In the days of 98, I just didn’t like windows because it was not what I knew how to use and it wasn’t quite as stable. I still thought that it was a respectable OS. With windows XP you made almost no improvement. When you guys released Windows Vista half a decade late I actually expected it to be a good bit better than XP. But the only thing Vista had on XP was that it was very pretty, but it contain no useful functions. Even the good features in XP were taken out in vista. I was glad to see that you continued to sell windows XP but I think that you should go back to windows XP and try to improve on it insted of going back to the beginning and trying to start from scratch. You should have learned from apple’s mistake with mac OS X. OS 10.0 was a really bad OS and it didn’t sell very many copies. It took them tree major revisions to create something that was better than mac OS 9. You might say that that wasn’t a mistake because after all they are still selling more copies than Vista is, and you would be right. The difference is, however, the Microsoft has done that every time they release a new OS. and every timw the release a major update something big is left out of the picture.

My recomendation would be to abandon DOS and use unix for the next version and then continue to perfect the unix versions of windows for a very long time. “

Yet another great disappointment from Microsoft.

–
**************************************
Christopher Maunder
Forrester Technologies Co.
Owner /CEO

If the internet has no doors or fences, who needs windows or gates?
**************************************

Baby Goa’ulds are being sold in Wal-mart stores across the US.

    Disguising themselves as harmless aquarium fish the goa’ulds have found a new way to invade earth through Wal-mart’s pet department. If you have unknowingly purchased one of these you are instructed to contact General O’Neil, USAF. Caution these are a very dangerous creature. Keep an eye on other residents of the house—watch for any strange behavior (eg. glowing eyes, speaking in a low resonate voice, or demanding worship) These are signs that the person may be possessed by a goa’uld and is very dangerous at this time. This is yet another example the nefarious deeds of Wal-mart.

As you can see, even pets aren’t safe from these dastardly invaders. There have been countless reports of cats and other earth dwelling creatures becoming infected. In these reports cat have been said to exhibit egocentric behavior such as demanding that they be served, laying around the house acting god-like, and having a generally superior attitude. They have also been known to appear to be plotting to take over the world at any moment.

Bloggers’ search for anonymity

By David Reid Reporter, BBC Click

The internet has given the individual unprecedented power to reach out to millions but some governments are cautious, even hostile, to giving their citizens free access to ideas they deem too democratic and dangerous.

Bloggers can face harsh penalties from some regimes

Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia: they are all popular with holiday makers but they also censor and even lock up journalists and bloggers.

This is why the media rights group, Reporters Without Borders, has published The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents.

“There is another side to the picture post-card,” said Robert Menard, secretary general, Reporters Without Borders. “There are around 100 people in jail in Tunisia and the entire media is controlled by the powers that be and there are bloggers who have been locked up just for criticizing the Tunisian president.”

In many countries a journalism student covering a demonstration of school children would be commended for his initiative.

In Syria, student Mesud Hamid posted photos on the net of Kurdish pupils demanding equal rights. He was arrested while taking an exam at university.

“I was tortured,” he said. “For one year and three months I was held in a cell measuring one metre by two. I didn’t see the sun or sky for all that time.”

Mr Hamid has since fled to France.

Remaining anonymous

So what do you do if you want to escape detection from authorities who might not like your work as much as you do?

The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents is pretty technical but it also contains some simple tips, so you can say what you think without having to worry the censors or cyber-police too much.

If you want to protect your anonymity you can use a proxy, using a proxy is very simple. Anybody can do it even if you’re not a geek Julien Pain, Reporters Without Borders

“The first thing is don’t write anything under your real name,” said Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders.

“Even if you are using a pen name, then you have to be careful because the authorities can track you down on the internet.”

You might be tight-lipped about who you are, but your computer is screaming your presence all over the net.

All net-connected computers get assigned an IP address – which ensures that they data you request is sent to the right place.

It can let people know which websites you have visited, which e-mails you have sent and which articles you have posted. But if you are clever you can cover your tracks.

“If you want to protect your anonymity you can use a proxy, using a proxy is very simple. Anybody can do it even if you’re not a geek,” said Mr Pain.

Now there are two ways you can do this. An open proxy is essentially a computer, based elsewhere on the web, through which you can surf, send e-mails or post articles anonymously.

You have to change your IP address to one listed on various sites and, in principle you should be able to work anonymously.

“In principle”, because open proxies can also be used by hackers, so administrators often block them after a few days.

Another option might be a web-based proxy site abroad like Anonymouse or ProxyLord. They are going down well among surfers and bloggers in China.

China’s censorship machine blocks information in various ways

“The authorities would not be able to trace the IP because you’re doing this through a proxy site, and that’s probably the most efficient way now for the readers in China now to visit officially blocked websites,” explained Xiaorong Li, a research professor at the University of Maryland.

Proxies have their drawbacks as they can be blocked.

But for a very effective, albeit technical way of staying anonymous you could use The Onion Router (TOR). This is so called because the data it sends between computers is encrypted in successive layers like an onion. The data also takes an unpredictable path through all the proxies making up the TOR network.

Each proxy peels off a layer of encryption, revealing the next proxy it has to go to. Intercept the message at any point and the identities of both sender and recipient are protected. Not until it arrives, can the message be read.

Firewall of China

There are less technical ways of avoiding censorship. In China filters seek out specific words that the authorities consider contentious.

The mere mention of Tiananmen Square would be enough to get you noticed. But you may, however, be able to fox the filters.

“If you want to put the words June 4th, you put a comma or a period in between June and 4th, so they are not one phrase and that enables this word to evade detection through the filter, because the filter works by phrases: June 4th or 1989,” explained Xiaorong Li.

“If you put some kind of punctuation between the words they become not a phrase but readers can perfectly understand what you are saying.”

There is no sure-fire way of staying anonymous on the web and avoiding detection. But if you are careful about what you do, you can cut down your chances of being caught up by the cyber-police.

http://www.orbitfiles.com/download/chrism 

Sign up for our free in-home wireless broadband service

Sick of paying for broadband that you have to, well, pay for?

Introducing Google TiSP (BETA), our new FREE in-home wireless broadband service. Sign up today and we’ll send you your TiSP self-installation kit, which includes setup guide, fiber-optic cable, spindle, wireless router and installation CD.

TiSP in-home wireless broadband is:

• Free, fast and highly reliable
• Easy to install — takes just minutes
• Vacuum-sealed to prevent water damage

Interested? You can learn more about TiSP via the links below, or get started now.

Google has finally created an internet service that is free for everyone unless the person doesn’t have a toilet! There are higher, faster versions of this that you have to pay for but the entry level is faster than most home DSL so I think that it would work fine.

Read more….

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

Installing a typical home TiSP system is a quick, easy and largely sanitary process — provided you follow these step-by-step instructions very, very carefully.

#1   Remove the spindle of fiber-optic cable from your TiSP installation kit. #2   Attach the sinker to the loose end of the cable, take one safe step backward and drop this weighted end into your toilet.

#3   Grasp both ends of the spindle firmly while a friend or loved one flushes, thus activating the patented GFlush™ system, which sends the weighted cable surfing through the plumbing system to one of the thousands of TiSP Access Nodes. #4   When the GFlush is complete, the spindle will (or at least should) have largely unraveled, exposing a connector at the remaining end. Detach the cable from the spindle, taking care not to allow the cable to slip into the toilet.

#5   Plug the fiber-optic cable into your TiSP wireless router, which has a specially designed counterweight to withstand the centripetal force of flushing. #6   Insert the TiSP installation CD and run the setup utility to install the Google Toolbar (required) and the rest of the TiSP software, which will automatically configure your computer’s network settings.

#7   Within sixty minutes — assuming proper data flow — the other end of your fiber-optic cable should have reached the nearest TiSP Access Node, where our Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) will remove the sinker and plug the line into our global data networking system. #8   Congratulations, you’re online! (Please wash your hands before surfing.)

–>

Note: If you have any difficulty installing, operating or simply living with TiSP, we suggest joining the TiSP Help Group.

Professional Installation Service
You can also choose to request our professional installation service, which dispatches an army of factory-trained, sub-contracted nanobots from the TiSP Access Node. The nanobots travel with exhilarating nano-speed through the sewer system and into your home to perform the installation service, which should be complete within 15 minutes. Note: For your own physical safety and emotional well-being and in consideration of the nanobots’ working conditions, please make absolutely certain that your toilet is unoccupied at the scheduled appointment time.

In-Commode Package Delivery
With professional installation service, you can also have your Google Checkout purchases delivered directly through the sewage network into your bathroom. Each package comes pre-sealed in a watertight and nanobot-resistant bag made of biodegradable corn-based plastic. For a limited time, TiSP subscribers who sign up for a Checkout account will receive free bathroom delivery on their first ten Checkout purchases.

TiSP for Enterprise
We’re actively developing a higher-performance version of TiSP specifically tailored to small and medium-sized businesses, including 24-hour, on-site technical support in the event of backup problems, brownouts and data wipes.

Learn more about TiSP: Frequently Asked Questions

Have a great april fools day!

PS. if you thought that any of this crap was actually true this is your day!

PS.PS. Ok this proves that at least most of it is fake. But google could still be offering free internet sevices. Hell of an april fools joke though! I do think it would be awsome for google to make an internet service weather it was free or not. Think about it google has the best services around in what it does do.

By Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret

The race to connect your TV to your computer and the Internet is about to kick into high gear this week when Apple Inc., the company many believe is best positioned to pull off this feat, introduces a slender, wireless set-top box called Apple TV.

This silvery little $299 gadget is designed to play and display on a widescreen family-room TV set all the music, video and photos stored on up to six computers around the house — even if they are far from the TV, and even if they are all Windows PCs rather than Apple’s own Macintosh models. It can also pull a very limited amount of music and video directly off the Internet onto the TV.

The $299 Apple TV device connects wirelessly to home computers and then with a cable to your widescreen TV.

Apple TV is tiny, just about eight inches square and an inch high, far smaller than a typical DVD player or cable or satellite box, even though it packs in a 40-gigabyte hard disk, an Intel processor and a modified version of the Mac operating system. And it has a carefully limited set of functions.

Yet, in our tests, it worked great, and we can easily recommend it for people who are yearning for a simple way to show on their big TVs all that stuff trapped on their computers. We tried it with various combinations of Windows and Mac computers, with movies, photos, TV shows, video clips and music. And we didn’t even use the fastest wireless network it can handle. It performed flawlessly. However, it won’t work with older TVs unless they can display widescreen-formatted content and accept some newer types of cables.

Like the iPod before it, Apple TV isn’t the first gadget in its category. Several other companies have made set-top boxes or even TV sets and game consoles that could link the TV to the digital content that people have on their computers. But none has found a mass audience for this functionality, mainly because they tend to be hard to set up and confusing to use. Apple is hoping that, just as the iPod trumped earlier, but geekier, rivals, Apple TV can do the same by making a complex task really simple.

Part of the secret of Apple TV is that, like most of Apple’s products, it doesn’t try to do everything and thus become a mess of complexity. It can’t receive or record cable or satellite TV, so it isn’t meant as a replacement for your cable or satellite box, or for a digital video recorder like a TiVo. It can’t play DVDs, so it doesn’t replace your DVD player. Its sole function is to bring to the TV digital content stored on your computer or drawn from the Internet. Like a DVD player, it uses its own separate input on your TV set, and you have to change inputs using your TV remote to use it.

Apple TV isn’t for that small slice of techies who buy a full-blown computer and plug it directly into a TV, or for gamers who prefer to do it all through a game console. And it’s not for people who are content to watch downloaded TV shows and movies directly on a computer screen. Instead, it’s for the much larger group of people who want to keep their home computers where they are and yet enjoy their downloaded media on their widescreen TVs.

Apple TV’s most formidable competitor is the Xbox 360 game console from Microsoft, which, in addition to playing games, can also play back content from Windows computers on a TV. And Xbox 360 can do something Apple TV can’t do, at least not yet, which is to directly purchase and download movies and TV shows from the Internet. But the comparable Xbox costs 50% more than Apple TV, is much larger and stores only half as much material.

We’ve been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it’s a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.

In our tests, Apple TV performed perfectly in Walt’s house over a standard Wi-Fi wireless network with a Pioneer plasma TV and six different computers — three Windows machines from Hewlett-Packard and Dell, and three Apple Macs. Setup was a breeze, the user interface was clean and handsome, and video and audio quality were quite good for anyone but picky audiophiles and videophiles. We never suffered any stuttering, buffering or hesitation while playing audio and video from distant computers.

The Apple TV menu points to content stored on your home computers.

Unlike any of its rivals, Apple TV can play the copy-protected music, TV shows and movies purchased from Apple’s iTunes online store, the most popular legal downloading service by far. (However, it cannot play copy-protected music in Microsoft’s formats, even from Windows computers.) It worked great with laptops and desktops alike, with Windows XP and the new Windows Vista operating system, and with newer Macs powered by Intel processors and an older Mac powered by an IBM-built G5 processor.

Apple TV’s most important limitation is that it can’t stream much video or audio directly from the Internet — yet. The capability to go directly to the Internet, bypassing the computers in your home, is built in, but is initially being used only to fetch feature film trailers and short preview clips of popular songs, TV shows and movies sold on the iTunes store. Apple TV also won’t allow you to buy media directly from the iTunes store. You must first download content from the Internet or iTunes on a computer, and then Apple TV will grab it from the computer and play it on the TV.

In its usual secretive fashion, Apple refuses to say if or when this direct-to-the-Internet capability will be expanded. But we fully expect Apple to add the capability to stream or download a variety of content directly from the Internet, and that this new capability will be available on current Apple TV boxes through software updates.

In our tests, Apple TV is a pleasure to use. Setup was stunningly simple. We just plugged the unit in and hooked it up to the TV with a single cable (not included). The unit found and connected with Walt’s Wi-Fi network almost instantly. To link to each computer, we just typed into iTunes on that computer a five-digit code number the Apple TV put up on the TV screen. This needs to be done only once.

You can select one computer to automatically synchronize with the Apple TV. Any song, TV episode, movie or photo you download or otherwise add to that one computer is automatically replicated on the Apple TV’s internal hard disk for playback on your TV. We tested this synchronization function with both a Mac laptop and a Windows Vista desktop, and it worked perfectly on both.

For instance, we imported 376 photos Katie had taken on a recent trip to France to a Mac laptop that was synchronized with the Apple TV. In short order, all of the photos were on the Apple TV and we watched them on the big plasma screen.

We also bought some TV shows, movies and songs from iTunes on our synchronized laptop, and they were automatically transferred to Apple TV, where we could watch them. It can, however, take hours to synchronize large files like movies over a slow wireless network.

In addition to your single synchronized computer, you can designate up to five other computers as sources for your Apple TV. From these machines, you “stream” the content over your wireless or wired network, instead of actually transferring them, but the music and video shows up on the TV just as if it had been synchronized to the Apple TV’s own hard disk.

All of these functions are controlled through iTunes on your Windows and Mac computers, just as you would control an iPod through iTunes. (The latest version of iTunes is required.)

In our tests, streaming worked just as well as playing content from the Apple TV’s own hard disk. Even though Walt’s Wi-Fi network is of the older “G” variety, and the Apple TV can handle newer, faster “N” variety networks, every single movie, TV show and song streamed without interruption from both Windows and Mac computers. That even included older or slower computers. This was an impressive feat.

The only downside of streaming as compared to syncing is that you can’t stream photos. These can appear only through synchronization. Apple plans to enable photo streaming later.

On the TV screen, Apple TV presents a simple, handsome list of content for each computer you choose to view. Media is divided into Movies, TV Shows, Music, Podcasts and Photos. You can change among your various computers using a menu called Sources.

There are some drawbacks to Apple TV. It won’t work with most older TV sets, the square kind that aren’t capable of handling widescreen programming. And it works only with TVs that have the newer types of connectors, such as “component” jacks, and the new HDMI cables being used on most high-definition TVs. It works best with high-definition TVs, and it puts out video in high-definition resolutions. But it will also work with “enhanced definition” widescreen sets.

Also, the tiny, simple Apple remote control can’t control the volume on either Apple TV or your TV set or audio receiver, so you have to keep reaching for the TV or audio receiver remote. And you can’t plug in an extra hard disk to add storage capacity, even though there’s a USB port on the back and the built-in 40-gigabyte drive is too small to hold many TV shows or movies.

But, all in all, Apple TV is a very well-designed product that easily brings the computer and the TV together.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

This article was copyed from http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/solution-20070321.html.

If anyone associated with this site would like me to take this off of this blog please email me at forrestersoftware@hotmail.com.

Thank You.

Steve Jobs
February 6, 2007

With the stunning global success of Apple’s iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to “open” the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Let’s examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.

To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats.

The rub comes from the music Apple sells on its online iTunes Store. Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices.

Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.

To prevent illegal copies, DRM systems must allow only authorized devices to play the protected music. If a copy of a DRM protected song is posted on the Internet, it should not be able to play on a downloader’s computer or portable music device. To achieve this, a DRM system employs secrets. There is no theory of protecting content other than keeping secrets. In other words, even if one uses the most sophisticated cryptographic locks to protect the actual music, one must still “hide” the keys which unlock the music on the user’s computer or portable music player. No one has ever implemented a DRM system that does not depend on such secrets for its operation.

The problem, of course, is that there are many smart people in the world, some with a lot of time on their hands, who love to discover such secrets and publish a way for everyone to get free (and stolen) music. They are often successful in doing just that, so any company trying to protect content using a DRM must frequently update it with new and harder to discover secrets. It is a cat-and-mouse game. Apple’s DRM system is called FairPlay. While we have had a few breaches in FairPlay, we have been able to successfully repair them through updating the iTunes store software, the iTunes jukebox software and software in the iPods themselves. So far we have met our commitments to the music companies to protect their music, and we have given users the most liberal usage rights available in the industry for legally downloaded music.

With this background, let’s now explore three different alternatives for the future.

The first alternative is to continue on the current course, with each manufacturer competing freely with their own “top to bottom” proprietary systems for selling, playing and protecting music. It is a very competitive market, with major global companies making large investments to develop new music players and online music stores. Apple, Microsoft and Sony all compete with proprietary systems. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods. This is the current state of affairs in the industry, and customers are being well served with a continuing stream of innovative products and a wide variety of choices.

Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the iTunes store – they are the industry’s most popular products and we have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full.  This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.  It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.  And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

The second alternative is for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores. On the surface, this seems like a good idea since it might offer customers increased choice now and in the future. And Apple might benefit by charging a small licensing fee for its FairPlay DRM. However, when we look a bit deeper, problems begin to emerge. The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players.

An equally serious problem is how to quickly repair the damage caused by such a leak. A successful repair will likely involve enhancing the music store software, the music jukebox software, and the software in the players with new secrets, then transferring this updated software into the tens (or hundreds) of millions of Macs, Windows PCs and players already in use. This must all be done quickly and in a very coordinated way. Such an undertaking is very difficult when just one company controls all of the pieces. It is near impossible if multiple companies control separate pieces of the puzzle, and all of them must quickly act in concert to repair the damage from a leak.

Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free  and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries.  Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free.  For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard.  The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company.  EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company.  Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace.  Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

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Those are all very good phones and maybe apple will release something like that in the future. I liked the idea of the iPhone nano.

I am personally hoping that they will release some type of iphone that is cheaper than the regulare full-sized $500 monster of a phone that has already been announced.

Behold the real iPhone!

I am going to wait before posting the final specs so that I’m not wrong because I hate being wrong. Therfore I will post another entry on the iPhone as soon as the first one ships.

I love the size of the thing! It’s not too big and not too small.

Horay iPhone!

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