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On this issue, here is some threads from Ars Technica's forums:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20687&hilit=actiblizzard
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=50015&hilit=actiblizzard

Sounds like Google has already begun its defense: Google buys Chip startup

Ars has a couple of articles that may be of interest. Firstly concerning Google chrome
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/chromeos-kernel-source-code-hints-at-arm-tegra-2-hardware.ars
and later there was this
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/04/google-buys-secret-chip-startup.ars

Ars has a couple of articles that may be of interest. Firstly concerning Google chrome
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/chromeos-kernel-source-code-hints-at-arm-tegra-2-hardware.ars
and later there was this
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/04/google-buys-secret-chip-startup.ars

More to the point, Apple possible discontinuation of the software download page:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/developers-concerned-that-mac-os-x-downloads-page-may-vanish.ars

(It might paranoid, nevertheless...)

However, as I understand it, you can supply a license to the effect of, "If you don't like this license, you can't use this site." At least, that's the current theory.

At least they're trying?

Trying it is not enough. It's 2010, and AMD bought ATI almost 4 years ago (1), so there are no excuses. I would be glad of buying AMD+ATI integrated graphics instead of Intel, but it is a no-no until drivers for Linux reach its Windows counterparts performance-wise, and of course, I will not buy anything from AMD+ATI until then, not before. I buy products based on facts, not promises (I already made a mistake 3 years ago buying a AMD/ATI integrated graphics, still today without proper driver for Linux WTF!!!).

But Jobs was definitely trying to inspire some FUD (in this case, fear) against the Android when he said "You can download porn, your kids can download porn..."

Good job he didn't mention the Kin, then you can download porn *of* your kids.

In 2006, Apple was heavily criticized for the conditions of the Chinese factories owned by Foxconn, Apple's iPod manufacturer. Foxconn first denied the sweatshop claims, but Apple launched an investigation anyway, forcing Foxconn to admit that it had broken some of China's labor laws. Apple did eventually release its official report on the iPod factory conditions, noting that Foxconn had indeed violated some of the company's Code of Conduct. Foxconn agreed to make changes immediately in order to better comply.

Looks like they forgot about that again?

[...]They've been redirected into oblivion in my /etc/hosts since then.

Yes, because simply not visiting the site would be silly.

From http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars

[...]We made the mistake of assuming that everyone who is blocking ads at Ars is doing so with malice. As it turns out, only a few people are, and many (most?) indicated you are happy to help out. That's what led to this hopefully informative post.

Our experiment is over, and we're glad we did it because it led to us learning that we needed to communicate our point of view every once in a while. Sure, some people told us we deserved to die in a fire. But that's the Internet![...]

What dicks!

What about Title II?

It's clear that piracy does result in lost sales,

My understanding is that that's not the case. That the people who pirate the most also tend to be the largest purchasers of legitimate music.

Reference: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars

I spend most of my time reading http://www.engadget.com/ and http://arstechnica.com/ depending on whether I want 'gossip' news or 'newspaper' news. Engadget was created by the original founder of Gizmodo, so to me it's a fairly close match minus the over the top Apple slant.

That isn't to say that they don't go pro-Apple sometimes, but it's far less "I love Apple and here are some of the reasons why you are an idiot if you don't" than Gizmodo's articles are.

SSDs will probably see a slight boost in the next year or two due to rotating hard disks finally getting around to migrating to 4kb sector sizes (which still poses compatibility and performance challenges for Windows XP, and even many Linux utilities aren't quite prepared yet)

2TB drives have just started to come out, which is actually the limit to the 512b sector sizes hard coded into many OSs for the past couple of decades. Here's a good explanation:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/why-new-hard-disks-might-not-be-much-fun-for-xp-users.ars/

So the SSD manufacturers could do well to advertise that people still running older systems may run into a fair amount of trouble upgrading to newer hard disks with 4kb sectors. Even in compatibility mode, they've found 3x-4x slowdowns in write performance if the file systems aren't aligned with the sectors just right. Makes the decision to upgrade with SSDs sound that much better if they can really increase their performance and not have to plop down a few hundred $$ and time on OS upgrades.

(yes, of course there are similar write performance gotchas with aligning file systems to the 128k SSD erase blocks, but those shouldn't bite quite as much)

The thousands making Android, J2ME etc. apps would look strangely at your strange ideas.

Well if you can actually show some numbers that would help your argument.

In case you missed it:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars

Because the number of people who can stand up and say 'I only used bittorrent for legal purposes' is almost 0

Possibly so, but I bet the people who had their Lotus Notes messages blocked certainly have legs to stand on.

I'm saying the appstore is about 25% of the market based on usage. According to this anyway or I could say the Iphone is 25% of the smartphone market based on this

Either way I'm saying Microsoft passed the 25% mark for its share of the PC OS market a long long time ago. I couldn't find a site that gave me the raw numbers for downloads but every site a saw gave Apple around 25% for it's market share whether based on smartphone sales, OS used on smartphones, or app store marketplaces. So I'm open to a citation showing apple having more than a 25% market share based on something else if you have one to provide.

Actually, in terms of dollars Apple does have a pretty strong monopoly on mobile application sales. Yeah, Android is closing the gap in terms of amount of apps Apple still completely dominates in terms of revenue. So much so that in 2009 99.4% of all the dollars spent mobile application purchases went through apples store. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars

The second generation (iPhone 3G) is too old. It won't be able to utilize many of the new capabilities of the iPhone OS 4.0, including multitasking.

Well, not exactly

Ars Technica article on Oracle licensing for Solaris
http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2010/04/standalone-solaris-subscriptions-will-soon-be-history.ars

I've done some school IT work.

Here's my experience: The pay is pretty unexciting; but the pressure is correspondingly low. Corp pays better; but teachers are so much nicer to deal with(obviously teachers aren't 100% angels, and corporate isn't 100% nutjobs; but the difference between working in a place where the average response is "Hey, thanks a lot for fixing that!" and one where the average hovers around "OK" or "Well, why wasn't it done yesterday? I have things that need to get done!" makes a fair difference in one's state of mind at the end of the day). Because the pay isn't so exciting, you don't get many of your truly driven types; but because the conditions are OK, you do get better help than you would expect.

The real kicker, security wise, in my experience is the demand for ease-of-use and heavy use of various ghastly legacy software(stuff that shipped with textbooks and whatnot). I spent a lot of time grovelling through psmon traces, trying to get crap to run under limited accounts with as few security-compromising modifications as possible. Still, sometimes, you just had to do gross stuff to make it work.

The ease of use thing caused some limitations as well. Yeah, we knew that kids were bringing in crap on flash drives. Could we have stopped that trivially? Sure. No big deal. Except the shitstorm that would break out when all the faculty and students who shuttle work to and from school on flash drives learn what they can no longer do. Internet filtering was in the same bucket. Yeah, we have a firewall and a proxy, we can be as draconian as you like. Wait, so you don't actually want draconian? Ok. Yup, we knew that we could use Software Restriction policies, make sure that the set of locations that users can write to/mount from external media and set of places from which the system will execute binaries are disjoint, all that stuff. No problem. We could even set it so that ain't nothing gonna run unless the IT department has signed the binaries with their own private key. Guess what? The users, and Admin, would have had our heads. Teachers shoving in CDs from various textbooks and expecting the (usually Macromedia director based) content to Autoplay was a daily use case, among numerous others.

Then you get into the issue of legacy server software. Just as "enterprise" can be used as a epithet when describing software quality, and most enterprises of decent size have some real horrors lurking at the dark heart of their IT-assisted business processes, so does education. Bespoke crap, student information databases that were designed by people who thought that Windows 3.1 was too visually elegant and user-friendly, and that SQL was something that happened to other people, that sort of thing.

I don't intend this as a general apology for the state of educational IT, some of it is incompetence driven; but, a lot of it is pretty much like corporate IT, just with less money(and corporate IT has a few security issues of its own.) The same basic dynamics are in place. Some incompetence, some crap legacy software that you can't get rid of for organizational reasons, some security measures that are possible; but would cost too much or upset too many legitimate users, and so forth...

I understand that "the man" is not allowed to go through my stuff without a warrant and stuff like that, and that I cannot invoke any "don't touch that!" type of rights when "the man" wants to go through my friends' and associates' stuff, in their attempts at finding out stuff about me. Are they now, however, required to jump through similar hoops to compel others to show them or give them stuff? If the police turn up at my mom's house and ask to see all the letters I wrote to her (email or snail-mail) does she not have the right to refuse them unless they have a search warrant? Are they not required to get a subpoena in order to compel her to turn stuff over?

I suppose even in that case, the level of review that a subpoena requires is less than that for a search warrant, and that one has less control over the actions of your mom that is desired (she might just give them the info without protest). In this case, the EFF, Yahoo and Google seem to be arguing that the third party should not even have the option of providing the material.

I guess at a minimum this points out that people might want to consider the policies in regards to searches that your online storage providers have.

Is there any implementation of IMAP that encrypts the email on the server with your public key, as it is read or received? Maybe some system such as that would provide the storage service provider some ability to say to any request for data - "sorry, I do not have the key to unlock that information - you'll have to get a warrant for the suspect for that". Of course in the UK, that would not give much protection since it is a crime not to give up your keys when requested (which could make for some interesting "pranks" where you plant encrypted files on a person and then get them investigated for some nefarious thing)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/10/uk-can-now-demand-data-decryption-on-penalty-of-jail-time.ars

Apple isn't a monopoly, in mobile products or any other market.

Apple currently holds a monopoly position in the mobile application market. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars

The question will be what happens this year with Android ramping up. The last thing Apple wants are development tools which allow both iPhone and Android executables to be generated from the same source code, and Apple's recent development policy changes play right into that, despite Apple's claims to the contrary.

If Apple succeeds in preventing dilution of their "monopoly" application market they are leaving themselves wide open to an antitrust action. The problem is that they may kill off any viable competition long before the DOJ does anything... we know well from Microsoft just how fast the DOJ works.

Um... you know the iPhone web browser still has unpatched exploits that were demonstrated during the last Pwn2Own contest, right?

Wait, your post must be sarcastic, because people on the internet are never so blatantly wrong.

Well sopssa, what you said technically true, except there was two leaks that the ipad would be released in March or April. Maybe you just weren't paying attention?

But I'm sure you'll be happy with google's or MS' tablet.

As for the sales drop off. While there is huge drop-off in sales, they're still selling 24,000 per day, 168,000 per week. That is quite respectable in that at that rate they will still have sold nearly 9 million units in a year. In any case, this "sales drop off" is a tune we've heard before from Apple haters about the iphone and we see how right they were.

I'm no fashionista, and I certainly won't be buying an ipad because 'm perfectly happy with my laptop, but the irrational Apple hatred from people like you on this board is a drag.

Apple - Well-designed and clever products.

Apple was estimated to have owned 99.4% of the mobile application market last year. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars. That sounds like a defacto monopoly in the making to me.

And they are currently "abusing" their monopoly to prevent dilution of their market to Android and other handhelds (e.g. restrictions on coding languages and frameworks).

Yes, they may not be "technically" considered a monopoly, at least not yet, but if it quacks like a duck.

I don't know what kind they are, but there are a lot of them: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/windows-7-surpasses-10-market-share.ars

And are you one of those mediocre programmers who are just lucky enough to be developing cleartype but fail to realize the best way to promote a technology is to improve it instead of relentlessly push it?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars/1
very interesting!

http://blog.motorists.org/6-cities-that-were-caught-shortening-yellow-light-times-for-profit/
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2008/04/red-light-camera-monkey-business-may-be-a-national-trend.ars
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123975737976619187.html

in 2009, 99.4% of all smartphone app sales were apple app store based. that's a monopoly. your problem is that you are looking at the wrong market.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars

except you are looking at the wrong market. it's not the smartphones, it's smartphone apps. according to this,
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/apple-responsible-for-994-of-mobile-app-sales-in-2009.ars

apple had 99.4% of all app sales in 2009. that my friend is a monopoly.

Based on a number of different sources, the thing is hard to hold on to for any decent length of time. Nearly every review I have read makes mention of this, regardless of whether it heralds the iPad as the second coming of christ or as a piece of junk.

Just like supermodels with eating disorders, being too skinny can be a bad thing.

Yo dawg, let me have a look at your keyboard for a few minutes, I swear nothing bad will happen to it. So I guess in your RDF none of thisexists?

I'm particularly fond of the bugs that allow arbitrary code execution through a spell checker or from viewing a QuickTime movie.

Ars seemed to like them well enough.

Ars has a piece on it too that sheds a little light on it:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/us-government-finally-admits-most-piracy-estimates-are-bogus.ars

Why is the government even looking into this issue? It's all due to the PRO-IP Act, which passed under President Bush and has led President Obama to appoint an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator within the White House. Part of the IPEC's duties include gathering data on piracy and counterfeiting, and current IPEC Victoria Espinel is now rounding up that data. The GAO report is part of this process, and it certainly doesn't make industry estimates look compelling.

This is ironic for a bill that was backed by the big rightsholders; even its acronym, the PRO-IP Act, shows what it was supposed to do. But, by hauling the black art of "piracy surveys" into the light, the PRO-IP Act is forcing rightsholders to tone down some of their more specific and alarmist rhetoric.

Ars has a story about Google funding the TheorARM project. One huge weakness with Theora (technicals aside) is the dearth of support on mobile devices.

This, and the open release of VP8, are very much welcome news to the FOSS community.

If we're talking about the iPhone/iPad market, then Apple does indeed have a "monopoly".

By these definitions of "market" and "monopoly", every manufacturer has a monopoly on every product they sell: Nintendo has a monopoly in the Wii market, Ford has a monopoly in the Taurus market, and so on.

A more useful distinction (and one that fits closer to the legal definition of monopoly) is that Apple has 99.4% of the market for smartphone application sales... and they're taking steps to ensure those apps will only run on Apple devices.

Of course, it's unlikely that Apple will have such a dominating market share by the end of 2010: Apple's "app store" business model caught the entire smartphone industry flat-footed, but they're all racing to catch up now. The Android Store and the Windows Mobile Media Smartphone Zune Seven Series Platinum Edition KIN Store are gearing up and trying to attract developers -- and, clearly, it's in Apple's corporate best interests right now to make it as difficult as possible to write cross-platform apps.

I don't know, however, that Apple is crossing the line into abuse of monopoly power. Apple can make a plausible argument that what they're doing is no different than a Nintendo approving Wii console games, and that their actions are in the best interest of consumers whose batteries would be drained by bloated cross-platform runtimes. It's certainly in Apple's best interest that developers write for the iPhone / iPad first, and then port to Android or Windows Mobile Zune KIN Bob Smartphone Seven Mobile as necessary; whether it's an abuse of monopoly power to insist on that approach is probably something that Adobe and Apple will litigate.

Apple doesn't even have the #1 spot in smartphone manufacturers, I don't know where you get "monopoly" from. Maybe you're just an idiot.

Feb 2010 Smartphone Market share

Sorry, next time I'll include sarcasm tags so idiots responding won't think I'm an idiot.

Feb 2010 Smartphone Market share

along with Cider-ported versions of Valve's Steam games

Incorrect. They have promised native ports, not Cider.

however, it does seem unfair to punish those who can drive while talking without a loss in attention or skill.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/rare-supertaskers-balance-driving-and-cellphone-use.ars

The authors also took the time to remind their readers that the supertasking population really is small, so you shouldn't assume you're one of them. Unfortunately, it looks like most people tend to believe they're the exception to this rule, as the authors note, "our studies over the last decade have found that a great many people have the belief that the laws of attention do not apply to them (e.g., they have seen other drivers who are impaired while multi-tasking, but they are the exception to the rule). In fact, some readers may also be wondering if they too are supertaskers; however, we suggest that the odds of this are against them."

I went to a hockey game last night and at the beginning we sang something that ended with "Land of the free, home of the brave". It didn't end with "home of the pansies afraid of dying because 1 in 1000 people can't drive an automatic and have a conversation with their passenger"

This is one of those situations where people will vote with their wallet, if allowed. But even when municipalities try to set up their own broadband, they get sued by the incumbents or would-be incumbents for their trouble. Google is mooting the roll-out of very high speed connectivity in limited cities, and recently asked for volunteers via an essay contest. Their bandwidth could be the perfect vehicle to return to the older broadcast satellite model of multiple broadcasters bundling and selling channels ala carte. I don't think Comcast is as likely to sue Google as Monticello, Minnesota.

however, it does seem unfair to punish those who can drive while talking without a loss in attention or skill.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/03/rare-supertaskers-balance-driving-and-cellphone-use.ars

The authors also took the time to remind their readers that the supertasking population really is small, so you shouldn't assume you're one of them. Unfortunately, it looks like most people tend to believe they're the exception to this rule, as the authors note, "our studies over the last decade have found that a great many people have the belief that the laws of attention do not apply to them (e.g., they have seen other drivers who are impaired while multi-tasking, but they are the exception to the rule). In fact, some readers may also be wondering if they too are supertaskers; however, we suggest that the odds of this are against them."

Kotick responded not by addressing any of the games by name, but by talking about Activision's publishing philosophy. The games Activision Blizzard didn't pick up, he said, "don't have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million franchises.

source

Is the Unity3D [unity3d.com] Game Engine threatened? I doubt it. Adobe, yes. Unity, no. I think this Adobe guy is reading between the lines of Apple's announcement. He knows Flash (its code generator workaround, not Flash itself) will be targeted, but not Unity3D. He's only trying to get Apple to admit its hidden agenda, or goad them into banning Unity3D to maintain consistency (which would only go against Apple's interests, Unity3D already has many top selling titles, the code generator from Adobe is not even close).

It's not just him, Ars Technica has a writeup about the new terms and they felt it was probably targeting Adobe and Google both, by making it harder to do cross-platform development. (Since it basically outlaws many development tools.) Ars lists "Novell's MonoTouch, Unity3D, or Ansca's Corona" as definitely going against the new terms, and "Appcelerator's Titanium and PhoneGap" as questionable (in they might or might not run afoul of Apple's gatekeepers).

In all honesty the new clause is ridiculous, have you read it? It says:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Another thing pointed out (by this developer/blogger):

Developers are not free to use any tools to help them. If there is some tool that converts some Pascal or, Ruby, or Java into Objective-C it is out of bounds, because then the code is not “originally” written in C. This is akin to telling people what kind of desk people sit at when they write software for the iPhone. Or perhaps what kind of music they listen to. Or what kind of clothes they should be wearing. This is *INSANE*.

Ars also pointed out that at its most extreme the wording would ban writing English pseudocode first, because then the application would not "be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript".

And yes, Unity3d is threatened as it allows you to use C#, which is then compiled down into native ARM assembler. You know, just like Adobe's Flash CS5 was going to let you use Flash to develop iPhone apps and compile it down into ARM assembler. Want to make any bets on whether Apple's consistent on enforcement and bans all Unity3D developed games as well as all future Flash CS5 developed apps?

Video encoder comparison

Ogg Theora vs. H.264: head to head comparisons

There is an ABP extension for Chrome too. :)

    Actually, the question was silly. Why do you "need" Mozilla to survive? As long as they have something that someone wants, then someone will use it. When they have something that no one wants, then they're just entertaining themselves.

    But, the question of if Mozilla is going to die is just academic at this point. They only brought in $78.6 million dollars in 2008. Ya, only ... well ...

    $78,600,000 (Mozilla)
  -$ 30,000 (Me)
  ------------
    $78,570,000 .. a whole lot more than I did, and I think I overestimated my income for last year. Damn, it's been a shitty year.

    But, if Mozilla went away, I'd use a different browser browser. If whoever stops making the OS I like, I'll find another one. If the Internet goes away, I'll find a different job. If the whole world goes away, well, I guess it won't matter much. ;)

Tthe ISO standard was revised long after Office 2010 had been in development; supporting the changes would have supposedly delayed the release too much.

Office 2010 does support the "transitional" OOXML format, and has read support for the proper ISO OOXML format. source

Also, MS extended their community promise (apparently legally binding) to not go after mono with patents:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/07/microsoft-issues-patent-promise-dispels-mono-concerns.ars

and directly from MS:
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx