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P.S. The best way to boycott Sony is not buying their stuff. Buy a Wii instead. That's what I do. I won't be turning up in a Sony store tomorrow because I haven't cared about Sony for years.

Because Nintendo and Microsoft are so inclusive and accepting of crackers and users breaking their copy protection aren't they? Oh wait, no they're not different at all. Just 3 examples of many. I am not sure at all why Sony gets singled out for the hate.

This is a ridiculous speculation by IDC. From this article:

IDC also hugely underestimated Android growth (again), predicting 24.6 percent market share by 2014. But Android already exceeded the projection in 2010 -- just months after IDC's forecast.

Seems like they're pulling numbers out their ass to me.

There - FTFY. ;)

This is a ridiculous speculation by IDC. From this article:

IDC also hugely underestimated Android growth (again), predicting 24.6 percent market share by 2014. But Android already exceeded the projection in 2010 -- just months after IDC's forecast.

Seems like they're pulling numbers out of a hat to me.

... YET.

After just one weekend, iPad 2 is already jailbroken

http://www.betanews.com/article/After-just-one-weekend-iPad-2-is-already-jailbroken/1300129072

The forums are full of frustrated users who will not be receiving a vendor supplied update to the latest versions. Not a big deal for a typical /. user, but a bit daunting to a non-techie. The vendors have no incentive to upgrade a phone once they lock someone into a contract. It is actually desirable that they don't upgrade a device to enable new features since it creates a horse and carrot effect.

The numbers are closer to 42% below version 2.2 according to Google, rather than 60% but still nothing to be happy about.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Fragmentation-is-root-cause-of-Androids-recent-malware-problems/1299518685

Elop, Nokia's new CEO is an x-Microsoft executive. So this is no surprise. He left Microsoft to headup Nokia. And while at Microsoft Elop was President of the Business Division. So this is no surprise here at all. Not to mention he just sold all his MS stocks i guess to appease critics. http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsofts-Stephen-Elop-moves-to-Nokia-what-a-waste/1284136468

I want a tablet with a data plan. It could be my phone and my portable computer.

But, it is specifically AT&T's fault I choose not to. Here's why.

1.) limitation on bandwidth: I expect to use 5 gigs of data a month. This puts me right on the borderline of what will cost me hidden fees.
2.) Hidden fees: They abound. If I could get a straight answer on what it would cost, I would gladly pay for a data package. They lie about what the cost will be. I don't pay hidden fees. So I can't get a data package.
3.) Crippled hardware: Of the android OS devices I wanted, almost all are crippled in one way or another. The worst is when AT&T sells devices without a wireless chip and doesn't tell you. They did that to me with my blackberry, and it pissed me off.
4.) Crippled software: How many data carriers block access to parts or all of the Android Market in favor of a contractually obligated private market?
5.) Trust: Because AT&T isn't up front with costs and feature limitations, I don't believe them when they tell me what they could get. They are liars, and normally I wouldn't do business with liars. Luckily for me, I sublease my phone contract with someone else, so I'm only in a 6 month pre-paid contract with a friend. If it weren't for this, I'd be 100% prepaid phone service.

also: http://www.betanews.com/article/ATT-sued-over-iPhone-data-overbilling/1296585365

Furthermore, look at the best-of-class spyware tools:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php -- no OSX or Linux versions
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Spybot-Search-Destroy/1043809773/1 -- no OSX or Linux versions
http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php?t=techspecs -- no OSX or Linux versions

Why could that be? Maybe because OSX and Linux don't allow malware to be installed, and the MicroIdiots have their heads up your ass.

http://www.betanews.com/article/MPEG-LA-wins-major-MPEG2-settlement-from-AlcatelLucent/1269898704

MPEG LA theoretically already dealt with it and Alcatel/Lucent has formally agreed to surrender all patents to them.

I am surprised that the lawsuit regarding these patents has been filed. In fact, I suspect that a "contempt of court" ICBM is already somewhere around the highest point of its trajectory and is dispensing suitable size warheads.

Even if it did not, such hiding of patents while participating in standard bodies is as per US law an antitrust matter. There is a significant body of precedent and most of it is not in favour of the companies which hid patents while participating in a standard body.

Exactly. I built my current machine for around $600 after rebate and it has a 925 2.8GHz quad, 8GB of DDR2 800MHz, an HD460, a pair of 500GB HDDs, and Windows 7 HP X64. To build an Intel machine at the roughly same specs I was looking at a minimum of around $200 more thanks to the higher prices on Intel motherboards, and if I wanted anything even slightly future proof I would have had to go DDR3 which 8GB would have put a serious bite in my wallet.

Plus if you support having a free market and competition your really should be looking at AMD first. Intel was caught bribing OEMs and rigging their compilers to sabotage AMD chips, which is why they paid AMD 1.25 Billion to try to make the heat go away. Personally I think Intel will still be looking at EU fines as well as a host of lawsuits by AGs. I'm all for someone winning a good chunk of the market by having better products, performance, marketing, etc, but sabotaging the market through payoff and rigging just makes the market a sham.

So unless you are in one of the niches where the insane price difference is worth it to squeeze every amount of speed you can get I would look at AMD first. Since Intel got caught rigging and bribing and Nvidia pulled bumpgate I have switched my shop to AMD only and my customers couldn't be happier. I just sent out a triple core with 4GB of RAM and a TB of HDD along with an HD4350 for the local print shop and it cost them just $485 after paying me. According to the owner which had already added a quad I built to the office the performance is great and the lower price is allowing him to accelerate the replacement of the older machines in his business. Hell you can get quad kit with Win 7 for $400 or supply your own OS and get a get a triple for $220. Intel just doesn't have anything similar at those price points unless you get the bottom o' the line Celery or Pentium duals. At those prices the bang for the buck is firmly in the AMD camp. And if you are looking at mobile the Turion and Neo chips make for nice laptops you can actually play games and watch HD video on without breaking the bank. Not a hard choice IMHO.

But that story is five years old, and it doesn't seem to have popped up in news or articles very much since then. THe Linux Foundation made an anouncement in 2007 that they were also putting one together to defend against MS: http://www.betanews.com/article/Linux-Foundation-We-Have-Our-Own-Patent-Arsenal/1180127700 as well, and that has shown up a bit more recently

Phones, anyone? Display is one of the most power-hungry components in a mobile phone, where battery life is absolutely critical. Oddly enough, I have seen only one phone with e-paper display, and that one was really lame.

Here's an article that discusses the issue. Take a look at the comments after the article, too. The first one sheds some light on the matter. Personally, I think that Adobe was simply scared of the possibility of native support within Office for exporting PDFs. I've worked with folks who use Acrobat for nothing but writing PDFs, and you can be sure that Adobe knows that there are lots of folks spending money on their software for one single feature.

Adobe released their new flash version to fit in ie9 nicely. There is also native 64-bit version for all three platforms. Betanews article on this: http://www.betanews.com/article/Adobe-launches-Square-Flash-Player-preview-adds-IE9-64bit-OS-support and download site: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Correction; the iPhone struggles to play a handful of Strong Bad flash files (using a much slower & more limited javascript client), hardly the whole site.

And you're mistaken if you think Adobe hasn't been trying to get Flash on iPhone. It's Apple that has been blocking them.

I'm gonna go with "the huge margins on $1k+ machines". For the same reason that every other computer mfg. still sells high-end desktops. And Apple is by far the best at it: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-market-for-1000-PCs-says-NPD/1248313624

I'm also not sure where you got your 10% number from. Last I heard it's more like 50%, maybe a little less. There are lots of laptops, but walk into almost any office in the country and you'll find a desktop in almost every cube. That's not going to change for the millions of users that have no use for a mobile machine until and unless laptops gain price quality with desktops (which is infeasible given current manufacturing technology).

not the same order of magnitude. MS mainly lives, and males money, off selling Windows and Office. These two are a huge portion of their revenues and profits, and are pure software. Peripherals, xbox, zune are more sideshows, probably even smaller than MS's server line.
http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Microsoft_(MSFT)/Data/Revenue_Breakdown

OTOH, Apple do not sell any significant amount of software apart from their devices' OS. That OS is a major "leg" of Apple's competitive advantage, but it's available only linked to a hardware sale. They don' even allow you to run it on anything but a Mac.
http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-the-numbers/1248218543.

As for the in-house part, Apple also design their hardware, including the CPU, in-house. Would you call Dell not a hardware company because they outsource most of their manufacturing ?

Or should I say the Scam Artist Formerly Known As Prince or the Plaintiff (RIAA Sockpuppoet) Formerly Known as Prince?

He tried to sue the Internet and his fans that didn't seem to go too well for him, so now he says the Internet is dead.

Maybe Prince is just mad that Internet killed the Video Star or something? :)

Maybe Prince is mad That Dave Chappelle made fun of him and it is all over the Internet? :)

What's Mac's share? 10%?

It depends on which market you're looking at. For PC sales overall they're still fairly small, but for high-end consumer grade ($1000+), they're sitting pretty with 91%.

Fifty-six percent of women in technology companies leave their organizations at the mid-level point, 10-20 years in their careers

At Google, you're old and gray at 40. [June 22]

It is something the geek has been known to give a positive spin:

3. Microsoft's senior leadership is middle-aging. Older folks with families and kids don't have the same priorities as younger employees -- and they're not as hungry workaholics.
The average Microsoft employee is 38 years old, according to the company's self-published corporate data. Only 15.9 percent of employees are under 30. By comparison, Google employees' average age is somewhere under 30. The company doesn't publicly release average age, presumably because of an age-discrimination lawsuit. According to the last publicly available data, less than 2 percent of Googlers were over 40. For Microsoft: 40.7 percent.
Most employees are young, fresh from college and have fewer family obligations and other distractions from work. The corporate culture encourages employees to work long hours and provides services that support the work ethic. Googlers can quickly advance up the management chain, and they can look forward to healthy compensation-for-results rewards.
The most innovative thinkers are at the top of the decision-making tree rather than being at the bottom (under much older managers). Five reasons why Microsoft can't compete (and Steve Ballmer isn't one of them) [June 22]

If you look at Apple sales you'll see that iPhones only sell double Mac sales, and cost less than half on average. iPods have maxed out at 50Million a year, and cost far less than 1/5 of the average Mac. So from a revenue standpoint, Macs are still very relevant. Also from a pure numbers and sales standpoint, macs are relevant and bugging MS

If it comes down to Adobe Flash or HTML V5 H.264 I'll take Flash any day and twice on Sundays! At least Adobe doesn't act like douchebags and make you pony up $$$ just to have flash support in Linux distros. And SD Flash plays beautifully on this 1.8Ghz Sempron I use for a low power netbox, and with the latest Flash I can add a $50 AGP card and go full HD. From what I have seen HTML V5 is frankly a dog, and even in a window it runs like a slideshow.

And let us not forget the real enemy here is MPEG-LA, who unlike Adobe really REALLY likes to sue...a lot. Old Steve may like having only H.264 on his iStuff ( and why not? Apple and MSFT are a part of MPEG-LA) but I prefer having a format I can run just about anywhere WITHOUT having to write a check. MPEG-LA has made it clear that even just using a browser plugin to view H.264 means you WILL pay up.

So everyone can go "poo poo Adobe, poo poo" and I'll be the first to say their past versions of flash left a lot to be desired. But at least it seems they are trying, and aren't going around trying to lock up the web with an AV paywall like MPEG-LA. Why anyone not drinking the iKoolaid would actually want MPEG-LA with their major douchebag behavior to win over Flash is frankly beyond me. And please don't claim the H.264 paywall is a "standard" because it doesn't matter if it is all locked down behind a paywall of patents. I mean, do you REALLY want to help lock web video into a legal minefield that benefits Apple and MSFT while screwing Linux?

The company had been around since the early 1990's. They were well aware of video patents, and monitored patent filings quite closely. Many of their features were adopted on the day that the statutory 1 year gap between publication of a method and possible patent filing expired. Much of the VP8 codec is actually prior art for the patents in the H.264 pool. On2 codecs have been used in Theora, Flash and Microsoft video products. If MPEG LA goes after them, it seems likely MPEG LA will lose more than they win - especially since all of us will be against them. Additionally, they'll be in court facing off with their patents against Google, and I hear Google has a few folks who know how to look stuff up like prior art. Heck, Google probably did this looking up before they decided to spend a hundred million dollars on buying the company just to give away its technology. It seems likely Google did look some stuff up before they decided to transcode their entire YouTube library to VP8. They're diligent like that.

And so having done the math, MPEG LA is investigating creating a patent pool to support VP8. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. It seems unlikely they'll find success in this, but they will try.

You can't say you're entitled to have that copy and have any legitimate basis for that claim, regardless as to the cost to the business.

And you are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to tell me what I can or can not do with my computer, and what subset of the base 256 representation of pi I can or cannot download with the internet connection I paid for. It cost money to create it? Tough shit. Sue the guy who uploaded it. If you can't find him, that has nothing to do with me.

Also, if the number of pirates is as high as these companies suggest (which would also mean that there are also many people who agree in principle, but don't do it for whatever reasons), shouldn't that invalidate any laws against it in a democracy by default? Think about it: how many people breaking the law does it take to change it, if the majority of the population is at least neutral to their cause?

If you think the examples are absurd in this context, you're right. But in 15 years, we'll remember this as the dark ages where corporations roamed the tubes hunting for dead people, and have not yet adapted their business models to reflect the inherent freedom of the internet. Or we'll remember this as the good old times, when you could modify the OS on your computer without going to jail for non-compliance with the Computing Device Copyright Infringement Monitoring Act. Which one of these lies ahead of us? You choose. We all do, day by day.

My proposed solution: a) extend Fair Use to the whole of the internet for personal use (even Hungary has that fercrissake), b) slap on an optional and reasonable Entertainment Fee/Tax to designated connection plans, to be distributed among the content creators based on measurements, and possibly c) zero tolerance among those who opt out, with fines based on the tax, not $2M for an album.

Your second point stands. But your first does not -- XNA isn't the equivalent of Objective-C, it's the equivalent of Xcode. I have never heard of anyone succeeding in using any language with XNA other than C#.

I didn't say or imply that XNA was the equivalent of Obj-C. XNA is an application framework (read your own link), it is NOT the equivalent of XCode, you are probably thinking of XNA Game Studio (the plugin for VS), which is not the same thing.

I have never heard of anyone succeeding in using any language with XNA other than C#. As far as I'm aware, every single "indie game" (they used to be called "community games") is written in C#.

I don't know specifically which games are written in other languages but microsoft themselves are certainly supporting other languages. There is absolutely no reason, technical or otherwise, that you can't use any .Net language to write games using XNA, hell you can even use F#, Don Syme (of Microsoft Research) wrote a whole tutorial on using F# to develop games for the XBox360 in GSE, im sure you'll find it if you google it. What makes you so convinced that every single indie games is developed in C#? Is there any evidence to back that?

I agree with you. I am referring to lawsuit against small startups such as the ones I have had expereince with. There are numerous examples of actions between the large players such as this. Such cases tend to reinforce the idea the MPEG-LA will win.

I agree with all you've said. My point is that in a billion dollar industry (which the iPhone is [or is close to being] on hardware alone, excluding accessories and apps), every percentage point you lose to a competitor is a $10M+/year loss. While nobody is going to be making an identical copy of the device, it's amazing that before the iPhone nobody was making anything remotely like the iPhone. After the iPhone came out? Every major phone manufacturer had copied in some way a lot of the features, from the touch-screen to the "tiled apps" interface.

I don't know how much can be gleaned from this leak, but if a competitor can react fast enough and well enough perhaps they can shave off a few percentage points from the iPhone's marketshare. Whether or not their gain is well-deserved and due to a quality product is irrelevant at that point. The HTC Touch (a garbage product as you state) still sold half as many units as the iPhone. If HTC had this advanced knowledge with the original iPhone, things might be skewed more in their favor. Instead of selling 50% as many units, maybe they would have sold 55% or 60% as many units.

Read this over @ beta news http://www.betanews.com/article/No-Microsoft-did-not-say-Android-steps-on-its-IP/1272479167

I have found that cell phone users have actually tried to run me down on the motorcycle. Hold the phone, don't hold the phone, there is little difference once any thought provoking question is asked. The person on the phone is no longer giving operation of their vehicle proper attention. I would like to see the Driving Under the Influence laws modified to include cell phone usage. Anyone using one for non-emergency use while operating a vehicle should be subject to DUI laws and the appropriate insurance penalties. Want to make a call? Pull over so others won't be killed.

The conclusion of that Mythbusters episode was that using a cell phone was as impairing as drunk driving. If you do not believe Mythbusters, check out the NTSB (staff usage ban), NTSB (2006 CDL recommended ban), NTSB (2005 teen ban) or the Center for Transportation Research News. They know what the rest of us survivors do, that these people are dangerous.

http://www.betanews.com/article/One-more-iPhone-app-rejected-for-duplicate-functionality/1222125984

Yes it is an "OS" feature, just like being able to view tifs, jpgs, bmps without downloading additional software. PDFs are ubiquitous and cross-platform, and if two of three major "OSes" (numerous Linux distros, MacOSX) can do it, Win7 should do it as well. Win7 does have XPS support by default, but this is not a suitable alternative to typesetting, archiving, and sharing documents as no one uses it!

Yup, because clearly Adobe wouldn't sue over that.

After all, Adobe didn't threaten to sue Microsoft for wanting to implement the (at the time, pending ISO standardization) PDF file format in Office 2007. Oh wait, yes they did!

Cite your sources for those numbers. I can honestly say none of my dozens of hardcore gamer friends and acquaintances use a Mac. Not sure where this statistic of yours is coming from.

If I read this correctly, the claim isn't for "hardcore gamers," but people who buy premium ($1000+) machines... and while I'll gladly admit hardcore gamers fit that description, they don't comprise its entirety. Numbers here.

Is it me, or has the press turned really critical of Microsoft in past couple of months? It sort of feels like the barbarians are at the gate, waiting to taste Balmer's bitter flesh. Yesterday it came to a crescendo with Joe Wilcox publishing a devastating piece on how middle manager culture is destroying innovation at the company.

I can't really peg this on one single thing, but if I were to guess, it's probably because Apple and Google are mapping out the future while Microsoft is still hung up chasing ghosts of yesteryear with me-too products with little or no tangible value.

Or perhaps it's just confirmation bias on my part because I don't particularly care for the company or majority of their products.

Though this is 3rd Quarter 2009 I am sure this is an accurate picture of how much Apple makes from each product. Notice the difference between software and even Desktops. Desktops represent roughly double software sales.

Apple is a software company.

Really?

See http://images.betanews.com/media/3620.png or some article at http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-the-numbers/1248218543 (which got data from Apple's SEC filings).

From 2009, software was ~500 megabucks, iPods ~1500, iPhones ~1700, music ~1000. Also Desktops ~1130 and Portables (Laptopts?) ~2200.

Apple sells computers and consumer electronics (~tied first place). Then music. Then software at a quite distant third.

If you measure by sales, Apple is not a software company.

Then again, Apple probably ships software on each of their hardware devices, so by unit count... well... just like how Vader betrayed and murdered Luke's father, you can get the conclusion you want if you look at reality from a certain point of view that's particularly supportive of your interpretation.

Apple is a software company.

Really?

See http://images.betanews.com/media/3620.png or some article at http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-the-numbers/1248218543 (which got data from Apple's SEC filings).

From 2009, software was ~500 megabucks, iPods ~1500, iPhones ~1700, music ~1000. Also Desktops ~1130 and Portables (Laptopts?) ~2200.

Apple sells computers and consumer electronics (~tied first place). Then music. Then software at a quite distant third.

If you measure by sales, Apple is not a software company.

Then again, Apple probably ships software on each of their hardware devices, so by unit count... well... just like how Vader betrayed and murdered Luke's father, you can get the conclusion you want if you look at reality from a certain point of view that's particularly supportive of your interpretation.

http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-market-for-1000-PCs-says-NPD/1248313624

Not just laptops but all high end computers. Sure, some of the blame lies with the hardware manufacturers too but a lot of it is Microsoft.

First off, last time I checked, mac had a market share around 5%. Now if you want to quote a source saying over 10%, be my guest. Secondly, even if it was above 10%, I think that could be considered a fraction of the installed windows user base.

This took all of about 15 seconds:

http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-market-for-1000-PCs-says-NPD/1248313624

Was the last time you checked? 1997?

The market share argument is getting about as dated as the "one button mouse LOL" argument. Try again.

I'm going to have to call "NPOV violation" on that one... it's a list of their losses, while their wins have gone unmentioned.

Actually, the PS3 currently uses BD-Live to stream Netflix, but other than that I fully agree with what you say.

Looking forward to this, it will mean we will have Netflix streaming on all floors in our townhouse (PCs upstairs, 360/PS3 in the living room, Wii in the basement).

Wrong.

From a previous post of mine: "Microsoft has an exclusivity deal with Netflix for the time being. Either due to technical or legal reasons, requiring the disc is a way to get around this. Considering Sony has already said the required disc is temporary, this implies the exclusivity deal is nearing its end. This also implies any disc required for the Wii would be temporary as well."

To add to this, it's also possible that since Silverlight is currently used for streaming except to the PS3, there is a technology issue. Streaming to PS3's currently uses the BD-Live protocol, hence the need for a disc. Once either the exclusivity deal runs out or they implement a different streaming solution for the PS3, the disc will be no longer needed.

I hate the four-letter words you mentioned as much as the next guy, but they aren't the cause of everything.

Just to attempt to quantify what a "metric-butt-ton" is: According to wikipedia, MS had lost about $4 billion on the xboxes by the end of 2005 and about $1 billion to replace bricked xbox 360s. Their most recent quarterly report from Q1 2010 (Oct. 23rd) showed that their entire entertainment division posted a $312 million profit. I have no idea what the total take is, but just to recoup the $5 billion we know they lost would take over four years of quarters like Q1 2010. If every quarter has been like Q1 2010, that would mean they would be breaking even just about now, except the entertainment division at MS never posted a profit until 2008! So it's a good bet that MS has even now not yet recouped the losses from developing the xbox. They're rich though, they can afford to wait for years and years to recoup an investment.

No they are not very narrow.

In the meantime, a company which was issued a patent in 1998 for the idea of maintaining a document's format in a separate file, has been awarded $200 million to a Toronto-based collaborative software firm, whose engineers claim they had the idea first. The case made by i4i Limited Partnership in its March 2007 suit essentially boiled down to the allegation that the entire move toward XML by Microsoft was a willfully executed strategy against i4i.

In 1994, just as HTML was first being investigated elsewhere as a vehicle for networked hypertext, i4i Ltd. applied for its US patent. For the time, its concept was novel as any notion of XML would be years away, and the applications for which XML would be used had yet to be envisioned.

"Electronic documents retain the key idea of binding the structure of the material with its content through the use of formatting information," reads the 1994 patent's background. "The formatting information in this case is in the form of codes inserted into the text stream. This invention addresses the ideas of structure and content in a new light to provide more flexible and efficient document storage and manipulation."

Did i4i create XML? Not specifically, though it did receive a patent for one of its principal ideas, years before the W3C began to come to the same conclusions. However, despite being what many observers at the time considered late to the game in adopting XML, it is Microsoft that ended up the loser in what some analysts are saying could be among the top five willful patent infringement awards in US history. The company has made clear it will appeal the jury's verdict.

Yet what is entirely missing (and this is the #1 problem with IP patent law right now), is that they never specified their format. This is the equivelant to someone saying "Hey, back before Henry Ford invented the Model T., we came up with the idea that you could transport people and things in vehicles that didn't rely on horses or people for power!! So you owe us big time."

It's total BS the way the system is setup. If they developed a format, then sure give them a patent for the FORMAT they developed. But you don't get to just say "Hey, I'm patenting this idea which I never actually implemented". The entire point of patents is so that someone can't rip off your EXACT invention... but they CAN alter it in a "significant" fashion even if the resulting device does the same damn thing. Well, that's in the real world anyhow. Congress needs to get their collective heads out of their asses and fix this shit, right now, before this gets worse. It isn't that difficult: Require source code and/or executable, the equivelant of blueprints/working models, and if someone makes significant alteration to the code then it isn't covered. For example, imagine if some asshat had "patented" the idea of using pixels to display a 3-D virtual world, and got it, without having to be more specific or submit and code, etc. This is effectively what this company is trying to do.

No they are not very narrow.

In the meantime, a company which was issued a patent in 1998 for the idea of maintaining a document's format in a separate file, has been awarded $200 million to a Toronto-based collaborative software firm, whose engineers claim they had the idea first. The case made by i4i Limited Partnership in its March 2007 suit essentially boiled down to the allegation that the entire move toward XML by Microsoft was a willfully executed strategy against i4i.

In 1994, just as HTML was first being investigated elsewhere as a vehicle for networked hypertext, i4i Ltd. applied for its US patent. For the time, its concept was novel as any notion of XML would be years away, and the applications for which XML would be used had yet to be envisioned.

"Electronic documents retain the key idea of binding the structure of the material with its content through the use of formatting information," reads the 1994 patent's background. "The formatting information in this case is in the form of codes inserted into the text stream. This invention addresses the ideas of structure and content in a new light to provide more flexible and efficient document storage and manipulation."

Did i4i create XML? Not specifically, though it did receive a patent for one of its principal ideas, years before the W3C began to come to the same conclusions. However, despite being what many observers at the time considered late to the game in adopting XML, it is Microsoft that ended up the loser in what some analysts are saying could be among the top five willful patent infringement awards in US history. The company has made clear it will appeal the jury's verdict.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Mark-Russinovich-on-MinWin-the-new-core-of-Windows/1259792850

That is my point. Read it. He's smarter than me. Is in charge of Windows architecture. If he says it sucked, then it sucked.

I was wondering about that; I saw "FreeBSD 8.0 Final" a few days ago on FileForum, but the FreeBSD homepage said RC3 was the latest.

Multi-touch is not supported by windows yet.

Kindle goes multitouch on Windows 7

Dell SX2210T - multi-touch, Windows 7 ready, full HD monitor

Windows 7 could hasten touch-screen computers

If they wouldn't license it to Dell, then they won't license it to you. Not as long as Steve is the boss.

That's why I don't think this is the case. Netflix has said that they had help from Sony, so I think it is more likely a PS3 application and not a BD-Live Java application.

According to this article, it was an analyst who believed that the implementation was BD-Live, rather than citing some inside source. I'm still hoping for some more interesting BD-Live Java homebrew....

But Apple by no means has a monopoly on PCs.

No, but they're very close to a monopoly on good ones.