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Indeed it is. It is now merely bad.

As I said. And it is still a rather uneccessary fork; there is nothing in webkit which could not have been integrated in KHTML by the normal channels.

In short, they try to make some of the more popular opensource projects work in OSX. Which is smart, of course.

Forgive me if I am not impressed :)

This article suggests that the relationship between the KHTML team and Apple is much improved over what it once was. They maintain a blog/svn at webkit.org and have a relatively open development process for a traditional closed-source shop.

If you want to see what else Apple gives back to the community, you can find it yourself at their main Open Source page, which includes links to their OS kernel (mainly Apple + NeXT), userland (mostly FreeBSD), Launchd (Apple), etc.

Apple also runs macports.org, which is a community-driven ports system for OS X, following along the example of the BSD ports systems. Apple contributes hardware & some development resources (not sure if they're paid for this or if it's voluntary, but they are there).

This seems semi-ridiculous.

But I'll say the same thing here that I did last time. Basically, the reason that SP1 isn't as big as deal as a "Service Pack" normally is, is that the two "main" updates that will provide a different end-user experience have already been released.

The main "other" thing that SP1 will offer, which apparently wasn't confirmed by Nick White's post, is Paul Thurrott's statement (echoed by others, but which he has now stepped back from until he can get confirmation) that Vista SP1 will include a kernel update to 6.1. This would be the same kernel that will be in Windows Server 2008.

Many of you may not be aware of this since it is a fairly recent ruling. If LJ/6A does make changes to their ToS, it's users have recourse. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070729-cour t-says-no-to-changing-terms-of-service-without-not ification.html

Oops, according to this we have rights regarding any change to the ToS. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070729-cour t-says-no-to-changing-terms-of-service-without-not ification.html

If you look around the web, you'll find that the main two fixes to be included in SP1 are already out, and have been since the beginning of August.

Ars Technica article about the packs

[regurgitation]
As mentioned on Infinite Loop, however, it is possible to activate an iPhone without committing to AT&T's "required" 2-year service plan. By entering "999-99-9999" into the Social Security field, you will get booted into GoPhone (AT&T's prepaid phone plan that does not require a contract) mode. An equivalent voice plus data plan under GoPhone comes out to about $10 more per month than a similar plan under contract, and so this may be a very attractive option to those who aren't interested in committing to AT&T for long periods of time. Seeing as AT&T isn't subsidizing the iPhone's cost when you sign a contract (as most carriers do in order to entice customers with steep phone discounts), it doesn't seem as if there is much reason not to go this route unless you are interested in saving $10 per month and don't mind being in a contract for two years. This is the simplest way to activate the iPhone without a contract without getting into some hackery, which we will discuss in a later section. It will cost $175 to break an iPhone contract with AT&T if you choose to leave before the two years is up (although if you cancel the contract within 30-days of activation, you will not get charged an early termination fee. If you return an open-box iPhone within 14 days of purchase, Apple will charge you a 10 percent restocking fee).
[/regurgitation]

[ found here -> http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/iphone-rev iew.ars/2 ]

Deliberately dumb? Not really, just baiting. Don't think the Xerox copier hasn't been considered in copyright infringement litigation. The main point is the MPAA and RIAA are so bent on driving a crowbar between the consumer and the media they control, they'll do anything necessary to limit our historical rights. Part of this is threatening manufacturers with litigation if they don't apply copy protection systems to ordinary items under threat of violating some imaginary clause of the DMCA. Unfortunately, the DMCA is being used to drive out all notions of "fair use" and the eventual "public domain" status of any copyrighted work. Fortunately, the public can supply feedback to the Government on how the DMCA is going.

The granddaddy of this litigation in the modern age was the Betamax Case where Universal and others accused VCR makers of being part of a copyright infringement mechanism. That was struck down and the ruling was later challenged by MGM v. Grokster. That allowed the Betamax ruling to stand but failed to define the limits of what is legal or illegal in the Internet age.

Meanwhile, the MPAA and RIAA were very busy trying to lock down all technical avenues of distribution. They even tried to get copy protection applied to analog audio systems (apply a phase rotation at several frequencies which triggers copy inhibit). I can't find a current link to that but the RIAA gave demonstrations to Congress on how this would reduce the problem of tape copying and off-air recording. Artists countered with their own demonstrations to Congress on how it trashed the audio. The goal was to enact a law to make copying music illegal under any circumstances, including "fair use". The INDUCE Act proposed by Orrin Hatch gives a glimpse into how far this could go.

I have no idea how they let the CD slip out the door without protections but the content controllers (I hesitate to call them providers) have been trying to retrofit restrictions to the CD ever since the CD-R came about for consumers. The MPAA made sure the DVD wouldn't be in the same boat as the CD or the Betamax. The DVD, obviously designed for recording movies, was not to be released in any form without controls approved by the MPAA members. I work with some of the people who were in the room when the first DVD was made in the U.S. What a mess - the MPAA had teams of lawyers ready to sue you for trying to create a mechanism to pirate movies. That's how the DVD was viewed.

Now, there's no shortage of ways to recognize content and disable equipment from use which displeases the MPAA or RIAA. Fortunately, several watchdog groups are pushing back on the laws just as hard to keep some of these historical freedoms and "fair use" alive. Otherwise, we'd get sued for copyright infringement by walking down the street and whistling a song.

Here are a few other things worth reading:

• The MPAA's attempts to lock down media and eliminate our legal rights.
• Janis Ian's excellent view from the other side of the RIAA.
• How the RIAA is using technology to limit rights.

they did not know what he was being investigated for?

I think not.

Beijing State Security Bureau
Notice of Evidence Collection
[2004] BJ State Sec. Ev. Coll. No. 02
Beijing Representative Office, Yahoo! (HK) Holdings Ltd.:
According to investigation, your office is in possession of the following items relating to a case of suspecting illegal provision of state secrets to foreign entities that is currently under investigation by our bureau. In accordance with Article 45 of the Criminal Procedure Law of the PRC, [these items] may be collected.

The items for collection are:
Email account registration information for huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn, all login times, corresponding IP addresses, and relevant email content from February 22, 2004 to present.
Beijing State Security Bureau (seal)
April 22, 2004

see:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070730-chin ese-dissident-e-mails-what-did-yahoo-know-and-when -did-it-know-it.html
http://www.duihua.org/press/news/070725_ShiTao.pdf

And even if it is local law, that does not make it the right thing to do. Even then they should of been more upfront to congress when asked about it. Shi Tao will be in jail until 2014 and thats no laughing matter.

Well at some point, this very point of the ESRB not playing every game was brought up by our law makers:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2006/9/ 27/5427

I agree that there is an element of trust but the ESRB was created and is supported by the game industry. Developers and publishers are only hurting themselves by submitting bogus material. Witholding content from the ESRB raters is just what Washington needs to turn the ESRB from a self-regulating body to a government-regulated body.

Just to clarify: Read this Ars Technica article about how the new trusted computing technology introduces the kind of DRM geeks have been rebelling against for years.

Lawyers my eye, this is probably covered by the DMCA reverse engineering, same as for unlocking XBoxes and so forth.

I had to look this up but Cell Phones have been ruled to be one of the exceptions to the the DMCA:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061124-8280 .html
http://www.darknet.org.uk/2007/04/legal-to-unlock- cell-phones-since-november-2006/

Cell Phone providers do not have to provide you with the ability to unlock your phones nor provide you with the information, but they cannot legally sue their customers for unlocking them according to Federal rules.

No mention of Nokia N800 ? It has Skype, Google Talk with webcam, and pretty much do what a linux pc can do.

The articles by Lobos Motl and Chris Lee are pretty interesting. Direct URLs: http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/08/magic-dispersion -of-gamma-rays.html http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/0 8/23/probing-quantum-gravity-with-gamma-ray-burste rs None of them seems to believe that this observation is connected with quantum gravity.

This "rootkit" stuff--and I know it's not a true rootkit, just some overzealous DRM, it's still bad--isn't the only thing that might put some people off from buying Bioshock. The game requires a video card that supports PS3.0, so that means there's a lot of gamers out there that simply wont be able to run the game, DRM or not. Over 40% of Steam users from Valve's hardware survey are not capable of running Bioshock. This article from arstechnica explains, it's mostly the ATI x800/850 users who are being kept from playing. There is a project in development to port Bioshock to work on the older cards, so we'll see how that pans out. This whole thing reminds me of a similar situation with BF2 requiring PS2.0 support, plenty of older cards that could run the game fine otherwise were incompatible because EA didn't include an alternate rendering path for cards that didn't include the new PS standard.

I don't know about Epson, but Lexmark didn't get away with it.

The DMCA currently has an explicit exemption surrounding cellular phones locked to a specific provider (at least until November 2009). For more, see Ars Technica or Freedom To Tinker.

There may be other legal avenues they can pursue, but DMCA appears to be out of the running.

Basically, take the income of those who download and multiply it with the average fraction of income spent on music by those who don't. That would be a good indicator of how much potential market is lost.

Wrong.

Unless the industry can demonstrate that sales/income/market are actually being lost due to p2p. There's no point in trying to calculate the amount of money you're losing due to a particular phenomenon when you don't know that that phenomenon is costing you money in the first place. Indeed, there is some reason to think that those who download music often buy the same music .

As far as I've ever been able to tell, the music industry just relies on the fallacy alluded to in the summary to, um, 'calculate' their 'losses'. The claim that every unpaid download represents a financial loss to the music industry equivalent to the retail cost of the downloaded music is so obviously false that I can't believe we're still discussing it...

If the music industry can demonstrate--or already has demonstrated without my having noticed--that p2p downloading definitely costs them sales/income/market, then your proposal is at least better than the method of so-called 'calculation' in TFA...

That was hard: typing in Blu Ray HD DVD hybrid into Google brought a plethora of links, including this one.

"Microsoft has no financial relationship with BayStar and never agreed to guarantee any of BayStar's $50 million investment in SCO," it stated.

http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=EA4 A3F1E-C7CC-42F1-9927-24227A1EEFD0

Buried in IBM's recent motion for summary judgment against SCO is a Declaration from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb. Near the beginning of the long-running legal soap opera, BayStar invested $50 million in SCO. In exchange for their investment, BayStar received 20,000 shares of preferred stock in SCO.

In his declaration, Goldfarb testifies that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed "a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop,' or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment." Goldfarb then said that after BayStar committed the $50 million to SCO's cause, Microsoft "stopped returning my phone calls and e-mails, and to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Emerson was fired from Microsoft."

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061008-7932 .html

Sound Familiar?

Reportedly, HD-DVD requires relatively minor upgrading of existing DVD production plants. BR requires a complete re-tooling, thus increasing the cost and effort. Consumers won't care much, this is more studios/production houses, but in theory would allow for more plants producing them, so the time loss you mentioned could be spread out (perhaps better to have 10 plants taking a few extra seconds than just 2 plants that are backed up with production orders even though they're faster?)

Primarily, though, HD DVD's lack of region coding is enough for me to support them over BR, potential technical superiority or not. Well, at least until they implement it anyway. (Note that it was reported as just a motion; I can't find anything newer than 2006)

PC World in the UK are also still selling them in the Business section. As you may be aware OEMs have until Jan 2008 after which they must ship with Vista.

Yes. The Athlon64 is not a new core design, it's heavily based on the original Athlon core. Of course improvement were made to the core, but it's not a total redesign like when they switched from the K5 to the K6, or the K6 to the K7 (Athlon). http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/amd-ham mer-1.ars "Given the Athlon's continuous performance scaling, it came as no surprise that when AMD hatched the idea of bringing x86 into the 64-bit realm, they decided to build on the K7 architecture instead of creating an entirely new design from scratch. With a few signficigant changes and an untold number of tweaks, Hammer brings both the K7 architecture and the x86 instruction set into the future."

"The auction will be expensive, last year's auction for a much-less-attractive slice of spectrum netted the US Treasury $13.9 billion" - http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070720-goog le-announces-intent-to-bid-on-700mhz-spectrum-auct ion-if.html

This spectrum will probably go for 20 - 30 billion. How much cash does Google have?

Ars has much better info and commentary on the auction. Basically tho, Att can try to outbid google, however, there are requirements that the auction winner has to abide or they lose the spectrum.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070815-700m hz-auction-whats-really-up-for-grabs-and-why-it-wo nt-be-monopolized.html/

An article from July.

"BluRay, please meet betamax."

I wouldn't call blu-ray the new betamax just yet, with Blockbuster already announcing they're carrying only blu-ray titles primarily due to PS3 sales.

But you have a point. Sony doesn't have a great history of making formats that eventually become the standard. Minidisc? DAT? UMD movies? If I was Sony I'd practically give away Blu-ray players just to get them out there, then in a year or two once it becomes a standard re-coop their costs in license fees. Microsoft has been doing this for years with the Xbox and Xbox360 but it was necessary to make them a major player in the console wars and at times Xbox has had the most sales.

If you follow the links on TFA you'll find it refers back to a lengthier piece written at arstechnica.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070818-gami ng-on-the-mac-getting-better-but-not-there-yet.htm l

The Ars Technica article has a lot of good detail:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070814-micr osoft-fcc-used-broken-white-spaces-device-for-test -neglected-backup-unit.html

The scanner on one of the prototypes was broken, nobody seriously disputes this. But another identical prototype (identical except for being broken) was available and even tested, but the FCC CHOSE not to use the test performed on the non-broken prototype. And remember, the Philips prototype worked perfectly. Even if the MS device was a total failure, they only needed one working prototype from the White Spaces Coalition. Again, this isn't a "evil Microsoft" story.

I think this story is badly titled. My understanding is that the outage happened because of patch Tuesday but Skype isn't blaming Microsoft for it. In fact it helped reveal a flaw in their p2p healing networking stack. I'm as much a /. fanboy as the next guy but this title is inflammatory and misleading.

More info: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070820-gian t-synchronized-reboot-windows-update-smokes-skype. html

me 3.. Got Vista on new laptop, and would never go back to XP. Is it perfect? No. Is it better? Yes. (Especially after the performance and compatibility updates, solved my laptop sleep network problem, why they are not more widely published is beyond me). When I read about Vista on Slashdot I wonder how people can experience it so differently. But if you look closer, it seems many of the most vocal Vista critics here actually don't have any real experience with it at all. Just jumping on the bandwagon and repeating fud.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070816-fast er-than-the-speed-of-light-no-i-dont-think-so.html /

Update:

Judgment was entered against the RIAA on August 16th. It has been reported that the RIAA intends to just pay it.

doh, I gave the wrong link... try here instead to understand why these scientists are wrong:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070816-fast er-than-the-speed-of-light-no-i-dont-think-so.html

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070816-fast er-than-the-speed-of-light-no-i-dont-think-so.html

iTunes already does this. http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/05/ 31/eff-drm-free-itunes-files-carry-more-than-just- names-and-e-mail-addresses/

Granted it's not contained within the actual music data to my knowledge, so your idea for removal does work http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/ipodblog/2007/06/un wateritunesplus/index.php/

As for actually corrupting the quality of the song, I highly doubt it will do that more than the encoding process already does - not to mention it could be put at higher/lower than human hearing range (though this would make it easier to find), or it could possibly be removed by comparison of multiple tracks (as mentioned by another poster).

Finally... If they're going to transfer the file anyway, someone could just buy the CD and rip that... but I understand this will likely deter the common user from transfering files, which is ultimately the point. No DRM stands up to dedicated hackers, but the average user will get too annoyed to bother to learn how to crack it...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070816-fast er-than-the-speed-of-light-no-i-dont-think-so.html

They've already got the net radio groups between a rock and a hard place. They haven't started collecting yet but they're pushing for DRM and baiting with reduced rates for small broadcasters.

There already are systems which do exactly that (optimise dynamically C programs), see http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/dynamo/dynamo- 1.html.

Of course HotSpot-like JIT'd languages are "easiest" target and most likely gives the biggest performance improvement. After all, HotSpot does partially (in SW) what the proposal does (in HW).

Office and Windows are what is keeping Microsoft alive, and they know it.

Read, and read.

I'm not going to rag on the writer of TFA since he makes it clear he's presenting things from the perspective of a developer, but from the business side, no way. Ever.

"By putting two sheets of paper together with the cellulose side facing inwards (and a drop of electrolyte on the paper), a supercapacitor is formed. These supercapacitors retain the flexibility of normal paper, but they have a rating that is comparable to that of standard commercial hardware--a 100g sheet could replace a 1300mAh battery. Because the medium is flexible, the researchers say you could shape batteries of all sizes for very specific use.

It doesn't stop there, however. By putting a drop of electrolyte on a single sheet and then putting a metal foil consisting of lithium and aluminum on each side, a lithium ion battery is formed. This paper device had a respectable 110mAh/g capacity, and the researchers indicate that small prototypes could already power small mechanical devices like fans. These batteries and supercapacitors are quite stable and have been shown to operate over a wide range of temperatures, with the research showing that they can operate between -78-150C. "

From: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070813-scie ntists-create-paper-thin-flexible-biodegradable-ba ttery.html

it may help shoot the dying beast in the head and put it out of its misery.

sco's stock price is shit now that the four people still stupid enough to own SCO stock are bailing.

(and provide amusement for the rest of us)

hilarity ensues when they are delisted.

Ben Kuchera over at ARS Technica gave a very positive review here

Somebody saw it fit to tag this article with 'getamac', but this Ars Technica article explains that it won't be long before Apple goes the same way.

The only way this can be stopped is for consumers to NEVER buy HD content. That said, I find DVD to be high quality enough. I can still enjoy a movie even if it's being played from a crappy VHS recorder.