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Charlie is known for being divulging information about the NVIDIA graphics chip manufacturing defect that affected Dell, HP, Apple and others. NVIDIA kept claiming there was no defect until the hardware manufacturers put them in their place. Like someone else said here, The Inquirer did not sign NDAs, so NVIDIA did not cut him from anything.

I have nothing against him, but he's sharing his impressions with us one the same day that he got access. His insights are not profound.

He's either attacking straw men or telling us that twitter is an aid to productivity. Twitter.

Try this for a decent and recent writeup.

The straw men: all those dozens of people typing at me all at once! Who are these dozens of people and why would I be watching their typing? Although it's been disabled in the developer sandbox, there is a check box that turns this feature off.

I don't guess that Mr. Scoble has written any wave extensions. One very nice thing about wave is that it's pretty easy to do so; some simple python programming and you can make a robot to do something useful. Here is my robot that draws sparklines. Praise Google for publishing a powerful API (now they need better documentation).

Here is where wave can be immediately useful: the mess that an email thread becomes when more than two people are participating, some of them top-posting, quoting the entire thread in every reply, and so on, becomes a coherent document that can be simplified and neatened as it grows. And the entire history is conveniently available.

but, isn't it going a bit far on things that just are naturally aimed for normal people?

I happen to believe that this country's government should do everything possible to help those who want to contribute and be a part of society do so -- normality not withstanding. Most people don't make a choice to go deaf, blind, or become handicapped. It just happens (most of the time). I would feel a lot better going to bed each night if I knew that should such a calamity happen to me, my life wouldn't come to an end literally or figuratively. There's some things that are just humane to do. That's why the rules are there. No, they're not important for you but to someone else it might mean the world.

No, it's not going too far -- it's not going far enough. WHO estimated that in 2002 there were 161 million (about 2.6% of the world population) visually impaired people in the world, of whom 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind. For comparative purposes, it's guessed that Linux commands a 1.7% marketshare on the desktop. Which means, there's more people out there who are blind than use linux -- yet, were I to suggest that support for Linux not be included because it isn't something normal people use or care about, I'd be lynched.

Ars Technica did a pretty good writeup on it.

Holographic storage, phase-change memory

• Phase change memory relies on a class of alloys called Chalcogenides, which can adopt crystalline or amorphous forms; the crystalline form provides low resistance to currents. Switching between the two states can be done simply by heating the alloy and carefully controlling the cooling process. Fortunately, "carefully controlled" doesn't mean "slow"â"Doller said that his company has phase change devices with 17 times the access speeds of SSDs.

PCRam is far more interesting than holographic BluRay storage. It is going to market _now_ and Samsung is set to begin mass production.

Currently the storage capacity isn't yet on par with SSD - but that should just be a matter of time as the technology matures. As it stands right now it is already faster and significantly more durable than SSD/Flash Ram.

The smartest thing to do is not to buy color printers from HP. I don't just mean laser printers either; HP practically pioneered the practice of crippling toner carts with a magical chip, although they never got as serious about it as some (like, say, Lexmark.) But HP is legendary for the price of their refills. Even on the 5550n, a $3000 workgroup color laser with four bigass toner carts, the carts are a full third of the price.

I think the best thing to do is to buy a printer that takes wax sticks or something. It will probably suck, and crap itself just like HP color laser printers and it might not even save you any money, but at least you don't have to fuck around with any gigantic toner carts. I don't know how cheap you can get something like the Phaser 8860 these days (I know nothing about it, just found it on a search) but I hope they're coming down. We had a Tektronix Phaser 740 or 750 or something (a predecessor to this printer) and it produced truly beautiful output in quite good time. You occasonally fed it a wax stick. I wasn't there to see it fail :)

Why do you assume it'll be the security council that'll get involved rather than say the International Telecommunication Union?

What's that? You didn't realise the UN already does pretty much what ICANN does in another area very successfully?

"Frankly, I don't give a damn what China, Lybia or Iran think when it comes to running the Internet. And, if it comes to that, I don't want things like the German, French, or Canadian "hate speech" laws going international either. That sort of feel-good censorship can be even worse than the jackbooted variety, as the authorities choke off dissent while insisting it's all for our own good."

But you think it's okay for a single US state to be able to impose censorship for our own good I suppose?

http://www.freepress.net/node/45158

Eventually the appeals court realised this was stupid and overturned it, but the fact is a single judge in a single state of the US whilst US has full control of ICANN could censor whatever they wanted and did so for a damaging period of time for a web based business, and they did. More than once:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/02/us-judge-censors-wikileaksorg.html

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2008/03/us-interferes-with-travel-to-cuba.ars

"Honestly, I can't understand how any serious observer of world affairs, whatever you may personally think of the United States, can maintain that UN control is preferable to the current system. Not by any standard."

Your answer lies above, it is because any "serious observer of world affairs" who is not ignorant to the reality of US control of ICANN realises it's been doing a really, really bad job in recent years with everything from gTLDs to censorship of foreign domain names being.

I guess you weren't aware of what ICANN has done wrong in recent years which is fair enough, but if you're going to defend an organisation and speculate on what an alternative organisation would do wrong, you should at least make sure the organisation you're defending wasn't guilty of doing exactly what you're so concerned about- censorship.

'I can't see any justification for making Microsoft give away Security Essentials [to counterfeit Windows users],' said John Pescatore

How about this: MS owes it to the world for putting out such a shitty, vulnerable operating system for so many years. Since 80% of spam comes from botnets, maybe, just maybe there would be less spam in the world if there weren't so many shitty, easily-exploited Windows boxes out there. Not only should MS give this away, they should make it available for all XP users as well, legit or not. Bill Gates said in 2004 that spam wouldn't be a problem in two years. He had the power to do so all along, he just never did. I'm sure he thought it would be an interesting solution, involving artificial intelligence and cool 3D worlds like in Hackers and Swordfish and Johnny Mnemonic, and lasers and magnets and sharks and God knows what else... not something boring like cleaning up the mess made by his own shitty products.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/08/escalating-penalties-bring-domain-tasting-to-a-crashing-halt.ars

The judge agreed with you. Looks like CW ran an old story, or they are talking about an appeal and forgot to mention it. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars

The software itself may not have been sold, however a CD containing the software and license to use said software were sold. Therefore these should come under a first sale doctrine. The idea of a non-transferable license has been shot down before and should been again.

From a comment on the article, this looks like it must be about an appeal. It's certainly not the first encounter in court as it would seem on reading it. Seems arstechnica had an article about this last year.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars

From the only comment in the article: "Ron said on Wednesday, 30 September 2009 Of course no one responded to your request for comments, this was decided over a year ago http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars So much for breaking news."

According to this article Vernor won the case: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars

Not the same case. "Last updated May 23, 2008". Mods might want to pay attention...

According to this article Vernor won the case: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars

Isn't that article from last year?

I should hope so, they already won the court case more than a year ago when AutoDesk got bitchslapped hard.

eBay is the one that needs to be slapped now. As far the AutoDesk continuing to send DMCA notices, well they need to be put in jail for harassment.

According to this article Vernor won the case: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars

Stupid thing is.. they *did* think of it first, but didn't get their plugin released in time.

http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/08/mozilla-drags-ie-into-the-future-with-canvas-element-plugin.ars

Oh boy. Here we go.

Mozilla drags IE into the future with Canvas element plugin

Granted, Mozilla's technology doesn't do as much as Chrome Frame. It does less. But it introduced tag soup into IE. One can now, according to Mozilla's own damn hypocritic opinion because of a technological big brother envy, be sure of how IE render content.

"Once your browser has fragmented into multiple rendering engines, it's very hard to manage information across Web sites" - Mozilla

Oh, and how does adding canvas support reduce confusion when even more complete HTML 5 support won't?

But read on guys... It get funnier.

Ars Technica:

This Canvas plugin is only the first step toward bringing standards-based web technologies to Internet Explorer. Mozilla is working on a much more ambitious initiative called Screaming Monkey that will make it possible to plug Mozilla's entire next-generation JavaScript engine directly into Microsoft's web browser. If these plugins gain widespread acceptance, it will empower web developers and give them the ability to target web standards and not have to compensate as much for Internet Explorer's broken behavior.

Hahaha! I love this! Thanks for the laugh, Mozilla!

I've yet to work out where the sweet spot is for copyright.

About 14 years, apparently.

For the record, the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 already boots in 5 seconds using a SSD.

Just imagine, combined with the technology from the article, Ubuntu 9.10 could conceivably boot before your finger even makes it to the power button!

For the record, the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 already boots in 5 seconds using a SSD.

Counter: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/03/chrome-is-the-only-browser-left-standing-in-pwn2own-contest.ars

Most Linuxes are GNU/Linux, including such things as a standard libc. Android uses its own

Android also uses its own video driver architecture, its own window manager, its own desktop, and its own virtual machine. The statement that 'Android is "orthodox" Linux' isn't even true if you only consider "Linux" to be the kernel - Android uses its own kernel with a unique IPC mechanism. As Ars said: Android uses the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux platform. It offers its own totally unique environment that is built on Google's custom Java runtime. There is no glide path for porting conventional desktop Linux applications to Android. Similarly, Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments. This makes Android a somewhat insular platform. (source).

  In fact, according to that article, Android doesn't even use a standard kernel: Android's sophisticated interprocess communication system, which is called Binder, requires a special kernel driver in order to run properly. The driver is in the kernel staging tree and is not enabled - a problematic impediment for the Android execution environment developers. Their current prototype is using a temporary workaround to bypass Binder, but they hope that the necessary patches can be enabled in the kernel for the next Ubuntu release so that the execution environment can work properly.

"None of my computers involve any glass any more"

So you're not running an iMac then?

Heck yes I call that acceptable. Like I said, consumer electronics failure rates are more than 10% for almost all devices: see the Consumer Reports report.

PS3 and Wii failure rates are supposed to be around 3%

It is not just games that have ads. According to Ars Technica, launching core apps like Calculator takes 9 seconds with ads, and launching Weather takes 8 seconds with ads. Videos in the Ars article ...

"The first batch of apps for the Zune HD can now be freely downloaded from Microsoft, and they come with an unexpected "present": static and video ads that play during launch."

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/zune-hd-apps-are-here-complete-with-pre-roll-ads.ars

No, you can confirm that your own personal PS3 broke. That's it. You cannot confirm that there's some systemic problem with launch US PS3's.

Maybe not a confirmation, but after Ars Technica's Ben Kuchera mentioned that his 60GB PS3 died playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, he got responses from at least five others who also saw their PS3s die in similar fashion (Ben and Ars are based in the USA). He wrote a small article about it.

As Ben says, it's unscientific. They also had not heard of the term "Yellow Light of Death."

You don't believe in evidence. There either is evidence supporting your claim, or there isn't.

I said "I believe there is evidence". I'm'a assume English isn't your first language (for now; more on that below) and explain that the phrase means "I'm not certain, but I think evidence has been found".

But since you're calling me out on it, I'll look at your links. Link the first:

This powerful combination of two studies presents persuasive evidence that violent video games do indeed increase aggression in some players.

Link the second:

Playing violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Mortal Kombat can increase a person's aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior both in laboratory settings and in actual life, according to two studies appearing in the April issue of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Furthermore, violent video games may be more harmful than violent television and movies because they are interactive, very engrossing and require the player to identify with the aggressor, say the researchers.

Link the third:

After 40+ years of research, one might think that debate about media violence effects would be over. An historical examination of the research reveals that debate concerning whether such exposure is a significant risk factor for aggressive and violent behavior should have been over years ago (Bushman & Anderson, 2001). Four types of media violence studies provide converging evidence of such effects: laboratory experiments, field experiments, cross-sectional correlation studies, and longitudinal studies (Anderson & Bushman, 2002a; Bushman & Huesmann, 2000).

Link the fourth:

The link between anger and aggression is far from clear, and they would like to see similar results reproduced with other test groups and using different games and experimental setups. It's also worth noting that they attempted to measure a wide range of additional factors during their study, but many of these measurements produced statistically insignificant or contradictory results.

This is the first one that doesn't claim the connection is well-established, but it does find a causative link between aggressive behavior and violent media. It attempts to establish that there is an additional factor. Link the fifth:

After an average playtime of 56 hours over the course of a month with âoeAsheronâ(TM)s Call 2,â a popular MMRPG, or âoemassively multi-layer online role-playing game,â researchers found âoeno strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game,â said Dmitri Williams, the lead author of the study.

Teenagers experiencing 56 hours of fantasy violence over one month and then self-assessing their feelings. 'Nuff said, I hope. Link the sixth:

A brain mechanism that may link violent computer games with aggression has been discovered by researchers in the US. The work goes some way towards demonstrating a causal link between the two - rather than a simple association.

Link the seventh:

After an average playtime of 56 hours over the course of a month...

Same as five.

Almost anything that is uploaded to the Kindle store that was based on a public domain work is no longer entirely public domain.

No. It remains in the public domain. Parent poster would be right, and trying to apply a copyright to expired material is a form of copyfraud. Others have tried to re-copyright stuff. A mere digital translation does not a copyright make either (i.e. it's not a creative work, it's algorythmic).

I suppose there is that whole dubious "End User License Agreement" that Amazon has gooed up the Kindle with. But I guess that's why it's called the "Kindle Swindle." The only reason to own a Kindle is if you want to join the class action suit that will eventually follow with this continued nonsense that Amazon seems apt at creating.

bah, copied the link from the wrong tab. This is the right one:

age of the average gamer is 33

The 14% is worldwide growth in the home market

I assume you didn't actually mean "growth" but "sales". Anyway, picking a specific market segment (home in this case) is just as important as the geographical area... I'm sure Apple does a lot better at home than in the workplace.

The only figures I've seen for PC sales are the yearly IGD and Gartner studies (or rather, reports based on those). In those, I've never seen Apple over the 10% mark even in the US (example). In fact, Apple is only ever mentioned in the US numbers because it's not in the top 5 anywhere else...

Your appleinsider link didn't contain any relevant numbers as far as I can see (images don't load so maybe there was something there?).

I think it's interesting that ARM has decided to try and break into Intel's current marketshare around the same time Intel is revealing plan to push it's 32nm chips into ARM's.

Right-to-Repair Law To Get DRM Out of Your Car

Right to repair proposal

Congressmen want automakers to cough up diagnostic codes

The EFF's Fred von Lohman, however, pointed out that there's a certain irony in this widespread public support and Congressional interest. What the bill suggests is that the sort of market created by the DMCA, in which companies are given the right to encrypt and protect information of their choosing, shouldn't apply when it comes to autos. To be clear, there are implementation differences. The DMCA could still apply in that third-party tools that provide access to encrypted data in a car would still run afoul of the law. But the need for these tools would be severely reduced by the fact that the manufacturers would be required to provide an equivalent. That would also, presumably, eliminate most of the incentive for manufacturers to take action against the providers of third-party tools.

From Car Makers Put FPGAs In The Driving Seat

ProASIC3 devices are also designed with an on-chip 1024-bit non-volatile flash ROM (FROM) and a built-in 128-bit AES decryption core, which facilitates independent, secure, in-system programming (ISP) of both the FPGA core array fabric and the FROM itself. This allows designers to implement a number of secure features. For instance, an AES master key can be preloaded into the device in a secure programming environment. Users can then ship 'blank' parts to an insecure programming or manufacturing centre for final personalisation with an AES encrypted bit stream.

Actel Drives FPGAs 'Under the Hood' Into Critical Automotive Powertrain and Safety Systems

    Actel also announced today that Delphi Corp., a leading global supplier
of mobile electronics and transportation systems, will be using the Actel
ProASIC3 FPGA in a production engine control module being designed into a
heavy-duty diesel engine. Additionally, Magna Electronics has selected the
Actel ProASIC3 FPGA for its automotive vision systems (see release "Magna
Electronics Chooses Actel's ProASIC3 FPGAs to Enable Automotive Vision
Systems" also announced today).

Magna Electronics expansion in Rochester Hills to focus on developing electric car program for Ford

Magna Electronics discussed plans for what it calls its intelligent power systems group during a news conference at the Rochester Hills City Hall. The expanded unit, which is expected to add 90 employees over five years, will develop hybrid and electric drivetrain systems and electronics that control motors.
The parent company, which is working with Ford Motor Co. to develop a battery-electric small car by 2011, ...

Magna Powertrain and Hyundai announce joint venture

Yeah right you "love Linux", then you installed Windows 7 that you find amazing, fast, slick and easier ?
Are you from the MS marketing division ?

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/microsoft-teaches-best-buy-employees-how-to-troll-linux-users.ars

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/microsoft-upgrade-to-windows-7-can-take-up-to-a-day.ars?comments=1&comment_id=136007241041

The upgrade process (be it Vista or 7) copies the data out of the current \Users, \Program Files, and \Windows directory to a temporary directory. It then kills those directories and lays down the new OS. After that, it copies all of the data back (well, probably a move operation -- but it still takes a long time).

You can watch it if you do a Ctrl-F10 to bring up a command prompt during the upgrade process.

...if Apple hadn't bought NeXT.

But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.

And now, they have stuff that provides a sensible approach to concurrency, BeOS or a clone of BeOS is a lot less meaningful.

(Actually, pages 9-15 of that review are all about Be's boat having sailed.)

I wrote a long article for Ars Technica nearly a year ago that looked at the past, present, and future. The reality hasn't changed much since then.

Most so-called municipal Wi-Fi projects involved a handful of companies absorbing all the initial network cost in exchange for some to no city business and access to citizens for coverage. EarthLink, MetroFi, Kite, and AT&T were the most prominent. EarthLink got out of the business; AT&T still does some metro-scale networking (Riverside), and MetroFi and Kite shut down.

There are a ton of networks run entirely or nearly so for public safety and/or municipal purposes that have been very successfully in Oklahoma City and elsewhere.

And for those who are suffering from TL;DR, page 12 has the relevant section on GCD.

Heh... Yeah, it's negative. But it's merely an annoyance to the pirates; and a disaster (Warning: Volumes of Coarse Language...) for the end-users and a financial drag on the company that deploys it.

As negative impacts go, EA's starting to figure out that draconian measures don't quite sit well with people and had to relent on the DRM at least a bit.

Really? World of Goo has extreme pirating problems.

What sort of explanation would you like?

A general overview for the layman?

A more thorough overview for the OS enthusiast?

A detailed overview from a developer's perspective?

Ars had a pretty good article on the subject. Fast-forward to page 8 of the review and go from there - they touch on LLVM, C blocks, and how Grand Central Dispatch works.

Ars had a pretty good article on the subject. Fast-forward to page 8 of the review and go from there - they touch on LLVM, C blocks, and how Grand Central Dispatch works.

read ars technica's review of snow leopard.
They have a few pages on Grand Central Dispatch, LLVM etc
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

This and the next 3 pages in that review explain it all very well.

ArsTechnica always does a pretty thorough and reasonably technical review of each OSX release, and the latest one gives a pretty good explanation of GCD as well as Blocks.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

The GCD stuff in particular starts on page 12, but the previous couple pages give a little bit of useful background on why it's important.

I'd recommend reading the relevant section of the ars technica review of mac os x 10.6

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/09/linux-foundation-to-microsoft-stop-secretly-attacking-linux.ars

While I dont think theres some grand plan to kill open source, I see absolutely no reason to trust MS at all.
Even if Ballmer swears on a stack of dried lawyers, that means nothing tomorrow if someone else gets the job.

The MS engineers probably mean well, but have no say in the end.

And ofcourse theres all the crap theyve pulled in the past, should this just be forgiven?

Piracy is a problem, though it's nigh impossible to provide accurate figures. As an example, 2D Boy, the makers of World of Goo, state that 90% of their game was pirated. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90.ars (To be clear, I believe it's an overexaggeration, but not impossible)

Piracy is bad. Bad for the developers earning less and eventually bad for the gamers getting worse products. Moreover small companies are hurt alot more by this, resulting in less competition and less innovation. Therefore I don't quite understand, why you list privacy as a con.

I think it fights piracy in a passive way, yes. Take a look at Steam where most games are cheap and easy to obtain. I guess many people rather spend 10 bucks for something having ongoing support, rather than obtaining a torrent, where you never really know what you will get and the game may break after patching. I do not suggest releasing games only through this channel, but I believe it certainly is a good option.

Regarding the 'dependence over an online service for your enjoyment'. Yes, that's bad if it runs like twitter once did. Every software has bugs, but sooner or later every properly maintained service will stabilize. Although I highly doubt, that the servers will be able to handle the demand, but that's speculation.

It is.

Microsoft isn't a homogeneous organisation. Parts of it are still in the "Embrace" part of the plan while others are working on "Extinguish"