Slashdot Mirror

The lawsuit is not "similar to Microsoft's" patents over Linux functionality.

Well, the Apple patents are basically software patents in relation to phones.

So, as the submitter, I saw a lot of similarities here. Basically when Microsoft entered the operating system market, they borrowed a lot of ideas and they innovated some as well. Then they patented as much software "methods" as they could. Now you see them demanding everyone to pay protection money who is using Linux.

Now, you have Apple entering the mobile phone market and borrowing ideas from around the industry and innovating some. Then they patent their software "methods" on these phones and wait for everyone to adopt them. How many tens of millions of units have they let HTC ship? And now they're basically suing Nokia (of all companies) and HTC.

The post immediately denigrates the validity of the litigation by linking it to something that it is not.

Considering the above, I'm not sure which case is more degenerative ... but they're both pretty despicable in my opinion.

I am interested in your view of how these two cases are different. I don't think pointing out that someone may just be flexing their software patent portfolio against the industry is "editorializing" or "BS" when it appears this is exactly what both companies are doing with different results.

We only learned of Apple's actions based on your stories and Apple's press release. We have not been served yet so we are in no position to comment on the claims. We respect and value patent rights but we are committed to defending our own innovations. We have been innovating and patenting our own technology for 13 years.

Apparently some 700 pages were just filed and they aren't all in the court's record system yet. In addition some of the patents are pretty questionable. Crazy.

Its more likely than you think!

http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/01/if-you-throw-away-your-console-the-terrorists-have-won/

I saw this posted by grobbo at engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/28/caltech-gurus-whip-up-highly-efficient-low-cost-flexible-solar/#comments

Turns out the only benefits to this are the flexibility and low cost (which are good, sure, but not that exciting).
According to their letter to nature.com this "also may offer increased photovoltaic efficiency", _may_ suggests to me there probably isn't any significant improvement.

For anyone wondering why high absorption and a high QE don't necessarily result in high energy conversion (like I was a few hours ago) it's because 30% of the photons have insufficient energy to free an electron in silicon, and most of the rest of the photons have more energy than needed to free an electron, so any excess energy beyond that required to free a single electron is wasted as heat.

Goddamn lazy photons

I saw this posted by grobbo at engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/28/caltech-gurus-whip-up-highly-efficient-low-cost-flexible-solar/#comments

Turns out the only benefits to this are the flexibility and low cost (which are good, sure, but not that exciting).
According to their letter to nature.com this "also may offer increased photovoltaic efficiency", _may_ suggests to me there probably isn't any significant improvement.

For anyone wondering why high absorption and a high QE don't necessarily result in high energy conversion (like I was a few hours ago) it's because 30% of the photons have insufficient energy to free an electron in silicon, and most of the rest of the photons have more energy than needed to free an electron, so any excess energy beyond that required to free a single electron is wasted as heat.

You'll be glad to hear that in the SFF (2.5") form factor consumer SSDs have now reached density parity (512GB) with enterprise SAS spinning discs, and passed FC SFF SSDs in price parity ($4k/TB). That's still spendy for consumer gear, but for enterprise drives it's cheaper and the 50x IOPs make it better. Intel and Micron's 25nm technology has not yet hit the market but when it does density will double and performance will quadruple. These individual chips deliver 200MB/s, and individual devices will be able to deliver 2GB/s and/or insane IOPs. Large (128MB or more) RAM cache on individual drives is now in the consumer market, and enterprise drives include supercapacitors to ensure writes for data integrity. The advent of these technologies will push down prices of currently available gear at the (as you noted) accellerated rate. The conversion will now begin. These flash drives have a better MTBF, and a better failure mode (fail on write rather than fail on read). TRIM support is looking good in W7 and Linux, but array controller firmwares need to be updated to support it, and they're working on that at a furious pace.

TRIM drivers for XP and Server 2003 would be the courteous thing for Microsoft to do for its committed Software Assurance customers who just can't migrate yet because they bought into that whole IE6/iis/.NET V1 thing - but I don't see Microsoft doing that because they want to shuffle those customers on to W7 and Server 2008 whether they're ready or not. What are they going to do if Microsoft doesn't enable TRIM support on legacy platforms - migrate to Linux? Not likely: they're Microsoft shops and they'll take what Redmond gives them.

We need a new interconnect to pull this all together because bandwidth and IOPs are getting out of hand. lightpeak looks like it if it has the right features. We've passed the performance abilities of copper, so something optical will be the order of the day. If LightPeak doesn't cut it, we can consider PCIe-F (PCI Express over Fibre) or some new thing.

The times, they are a-changing. Spinning disk is the new tape. Tape? Hopefully the kids coming up today will be challenged by the question "what was data tape?" With luck they will be confused by the ambiguity between punched paper and magnetic tape and not pursue that shameful episode further.

Site is down Engadget review at http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/16/lg-gd910-watch-phone-review/

As the link posted here is dead, I googled for it and found this: http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/16/lg-gd910-watch-phone-review/

With the iPad, not only will we need to buy all these stupid little 5 dollar apps, but it will still be tethered to a regular computer running iTunes.

For what? Not for initial device activation, app loading, app purchasing, media purchasing/browsing/playback, content creation, USB connectivity, SD Card reading, LAN nor WAN connectivity, et FUCKING cetera. For fuck's sake, you don't even need a "regular computer" for 3G activation. It even has an accessory full-sized physical QWERTY keyboard/dock combo accessory (or you can use a BT keyboard)

Did you even watch the iPad Keynote?

While I am personally quite excited about using the iPad with VNC to work in conjunction with my "regular computer", for a large percentage of applications, a computer simply isn't necessary.

And further, there is much evidence to support the conclusion that Apple is working hard to make iPad a more general-purpose platform.

I thought it was flamebait for why the iPhone drops 30% of calls.

Oh, they have curved lcd's now too, geeze, I am behind the times.

DLP I believe

Oh, they have curved lcd's now too, geeze, I am behind the times.

HTC recently took out a patent for a stylus design that works on a capacitive screen, but with "resistive accuracy", so I'm sure that the future of (non iphone?) touchscreen phones is capacitive screens with stylus support. The proximity sensor idea is great. My touch Pro 2 already has one that can detect something as little as a finger.

This is being blown out of proportion.

The XEL-1 was discontinued in Japan because new TV sets sold this year will require a "V-chip" parental control, and a $2,000 11" TV doesn't justify a redesign to add that feature. The XEL-1 is still going to be sold in the US and Europe.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&tl=en&u=av.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/20100216_349284.html

Also, Sony is still going ahead with their 22B yen ($210M) investment in OLED
http://www.trustedreviews.com/tvs/news/2008/05/22/Sony-Boasts-of-22-Billion-OLED-Investment/p1

Moreover, at the 2010 CES Sony just finished showing off a 24.5" OLED set that does 3D.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/07/sony-oled-3d-tv-eyes-on/

As Mark Twain said, can be applied to OLED, "rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated"

If I recall correctly, it looks like any new TVs in Japan need to have parental controls since not many weeks ago. Sony does not want to recall the XELs for any firmware upgrade (if it is feasible), so it is just saying that is good enough. Time to rest. You know, two years is already a long time for TV manufacturers. This is the story by engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/16/sony-kills-xel-1-oled-tv-production-in-japan-cites-sluggish-de/

As I see it the problem isn't so much that it's just another "picture", it's the fact that your fingerprint is high-value.

The huge level of implicit trust given to fingerprints by the government means that a fingerprint is considered absolute proof of identity. Show me a company that produces a foolproof fingerprint scanner and I'll show you a company who has only ever had themselves test their product. Anyone can invent security that they cannot crack, it takes a whole hell of a lot more work to create security that nobody else (or a reasonably high proportion of everybody else) can crack.

These things are not infallible, and when they fail, or are cracked/bypassed, well if it was your fingerprint - too bad, you've just been pwned for the rest of your life. You can't get another fingerprint.

I'm sorry to break this to you, but no biometric is reliable, either in the capture, or the matching to a database. The systems are vulnerable to attack and abuse. The privacy angle isn't always about what you are giving up today - it's about what you will be giving up tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. It's about the appalling level of trust given to so called high-tech products that claim to give everything but in reality give nothing of practical value.

anime-expo.org engadget.com anishshaikh.com schneier1 schneier2 schneier3 schneier4

Actually, It is not so hard to copy fingerprints.

I've heard they're working with a Trim function thingy to remedy this, but I haven't really paid attention since.

If you're going to take the time out to post and bitch, at least read up and know what you're bitching about. They've had TRIM for a while now, and Indilinx firmware can collect fragmented nodes during pause time.

These are solved problems you're bitching about.

What do you do for an encore? Complain about how annoying it is to get across town in a horse and buggy?

There's a couple of reasons. First, homebrew. You can use your DS as a decent MP3 player, or even video player (with transcoding). There are also apps to take notes, read ebooks, etc. etc. There's even a handy scrabble dictionary, and some homebrew games available. (Amazingly, Quake runs pretty well on the DS.) A French court recently ruled that flash carts were legal for homebrew purposes.

There's also convenience. It's just easier to carry one card with your entire collection of DS games instead of juggling a dozen carts when you travel.

That said, there's plenty of illicit uses for such a device as well.

Latency...

Most things casual users do with their broadband connection work just fine with satellite broadband, which makes it competition for cable and DSL. They aren't perfect substitutes, but they don't have to be.

...satellite internet is basically a stopgap measure between dial-up and a real broadband connection.

Define "real broadband connection." The FCC says it's broadband if it's 768kbps in one direction. How does 1+ Mbps satellite broadband not meet that definition?

Apple, Google, and now Microsoft (among others) have announced they won't be supporting Flash.

Think it's not doomed now?

The industry verdict on Flash: You have wasted too many CPU cycles and therefore must DIE!

Good riddance. There is absolutely no reason why Flash should be such a resource hog. Adobe has become even fatter and more lazy than even Microsoft, and is about to receive a rude awakening (just like MS has been getting from Apple for the past 10 years or so).

Speaking of touch screen, watching the two vids on Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-hands-on-and-impressions/ and boy either the user isn't touching the screen when moving his fingers around or it's missing a crap lot of touch gestures. That can't be right!?!?!

This link goes to Ben Heck's version (credit to this post from further down the page). It's considerably smaller and better-built.

Summary should include link to this article made back in 2007.

you do realize that the levono idea pad is going for $999 with 16 gig of flash instead of $499 for the 16gb version of the ipad?

Or are you just another moronic apple hater who refuses to do proper price comparisons of actually equal hardware specs?

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/04/lenovo-ideapad-u1-hybrid-laptop-by-day-unhinged-tablet-by-nigh/

Just to prove my point. Apple fscked over every other tablet maker when they announced $499. they can't do it for that price point let alone with a custom tablet OS with a decent UI and various 3rd party software packages readily available.

I have seen a few Android based tablets on the web the MSI tablet being one of the better ones. The first thing you notice is they generally all have a webcam and USB and SD card slots both missing on the iPAD (cough iTunes lockin anyone). The reason I think Android is the real competitor in the tablet market is the OS was designed as a touch screen OS and has an app-store presence without the intentional lockin. Also the price mentioned for Android tablets are lower (same cpu/hardware basically as the iPAD but more connectivity, WTF apple) so I can only see the most style centric and shallow consumers wanting one.

You cannot run any "office" software

Did you miss the part where they showed off iWork for the iPad? That's technically "office" software, regardless of how well it works...

no IDE

There's no user-accessible filesystem, no user-accessible command-line, no multitasking, and it's a 10" touchscreen. "No IDE" is last on the list of "reasons this is not a developer-oriented device".

not even Web with flash or even Java

The lack of Flash (and Silverlight, for Netflix) is my wife's biggest complaint about the iPad.

Battery life - no.

10 hours isn't good enough for you? For a device aimed at the market it's aimed at, 10 hours is pretty good.

Connectivity - haha!

That would depend on what you mean by "connectivity". Internet connectivity? Sure - the 3G models will get you online just about everywhere. Device connectivity? That's a whole other ball game - but even so, there are already some devices you can hook it to, and if serial devices are possible, then anything is possible. Technically.

Usablity - not even a test editor!

Apple's touch interfaces are quite usable. I'm not sure what you mean by "test editor". Remember: not aimed at developers.

can Apple pull out with one? I don't think so.

Sure - as long as you remember that this isn't aimed at developers. I load a page in Safari, switch to the home screen, and open Pages to start a document. To the end-user, it's as if Safari is still running - after all, when they switch back to Safari, the same page is open, scrolled to the same place.

Sure, things like messenger and Skype won't be able to run in the background without jailbreaking, but then again, the device isn't really suited for that sort of thing.

You're right in that it doesn't do what you want, but to say it doesn't do what anybody wants is silly. So, to answer your first question:

What the heck it is for?

It's for the sorts of things you'd like to be able to do on the iPod Touch or iPhone if only it had a larger screen.

It's for reading ebooks on a device better than competing ebook readers.

It's for inventing new ways to interact with existing software. (And I don't mean it's for Apple to do that inventing.)

I'm not an Apple fanboy - I actually dislike them fairly strongly - and I'm a developer. But that doesn't mean I see the iPad as useless, it just means I realize that the iPad isn't for developing.

The only reason I'll be buying one is so that i can toy with new ways to use a 10" interactive display.

Wow you are so wrong and yet you where modded up to a five.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/12/boeing-747-destroys-ballistic-missile-with-laser/?s=t5
Including pictures of the shootdown.

Just amazing....

The PS3 will be able to accommodate the spec as per Sony's announcement at CES last month. It's all a mater of when Sony pushes out the update for it. Apparently, the bigger problem is that you'll likely need a new TV from what I've been able to find. There are some models that are apparently capable of supporting it, but it seems fairly sparse.

As far as I know there isn't a lot of content out there to take advantage of either. Avatar is a nice example, but I can't think of anything else off of the top of my head that's mainstream or will be ready any time soon.

I have a e-reader (Hanlin v3) which I use and like a lot.

I won't go into the merits of e-books and e-readers, they are not for everyone. But as a recent research shows there is a target market that loves it. Many e-readers I've read reviews about are great but all are still seriously lacking (as reading devices). So most users I know of would like to have something even better to use for **reading**.

But the ipad thing has this LCD screen of sorts, I don't doubt many Steve Jobs fans will buy into the hype, and try to replace e-readers with the ipad, but I do doubt that this ipad can be used as comfortably for actual reading. What I do hope for, is that this will get other companies to produce better dedicated e-ink readers. I know I can use one.

No no no! These are not real objections when the company sells you the car, but maintains ownership of the battery! "Physical labor" of swapping batteries? Are you serious? Don't tell me you haven't seen the Better Place battery swap automated station? http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/13/video-better-places-automated-electric-vehicle-battery-switch/

It sounds like you need to spend some time here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place Just like in the "olden days" the King's messenger didn't wait overnight for the horses to rest & recharge their 'batteries', but swapped them out, Better Place has come up with the battery standards that are so good Tokyo is trialling TAXIS out on this Battery-swap system, and they'll NEVER get a chance to just sit still and charge for 8 hours! I can't believe there are slashdotters that don't know about Better Place, especially when HSBC just invested $350 million in Better Place and the CEO is all over "The Economist" podcast. They're coming to San Francisco, Hawaii, Tokyo, Canberra... and at a price / km at about half the price of oil, it's simply going to CHANGE THE WORLD people!

And in EU you pay full price of the device. If you buy it without contract that is. What is this novice concept in USA that everyone's so freaked out about? You buy a phone, you pay its retail price. It's normal.

I do realise it'll take years for people (of USA) to realise that their phones cost much more than they paid [when they renewed the contract].

There are two plans at T-Mobile. One is when you get cheap phone, you pay $99 all unlimited. Or (!) you get identical T-Mobile plan for only $79 ($20 less per month). But you do pay for the phone yourself; you do not get subsidized. If you do the math, on most of the phones you _will_ save money if you pay full price for the phone.

Refer here for more info: http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/25/t-mobile-officially-unveils-99-even-more-79-even-more-plus-pl/

Barnes & Noble totally botched http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/26/nook-fails-to-communicate-download-purchased-ebooks/ their attempt to setup an online e-book shop to support their new hardware product (Nook).

WTF makes you think you could do in one single day what B&N couldn't do even when they had months of planning and it was needed as part of a major campaign to keep their company alive?

Mainly because Apple is violating tons of Palms patents and they don't want to wake that (IP) giant. http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-depth-analysis/

This will require fast, cheap and energy efficient cpus, and if well could not be netbooks, ARM and other non-intel (i.e. TI's OMAP4) cpus should have a good portion of the market in that scenario,and probably a lot will be somewhat linux based (android, moblin, maemo,etc)

Notion Ink Adam

I would like to see android as a downloadable set of *stuff* for generic linux, allowing you to run android apps alongside X apps. it looks like Michael Frey has been working on it, though with mixed results.

As for dual boot I saw this page here and it looked interesting. I very much doubt it's a polished or finished thing that can access all the hardware properly, but it is at least booting.

Integration and hardware costs keep the cheapest hard drives somewhere around $40 (for new stuff). Someone will be tempted to play in that space with a $20 SSD, at which point people will get out their fingers and determine the per GB cost of the $20 drive and be very unhappy with larger drives that cost much more than that.

Also, in 2007, they were ~$7.50 per GB:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/25/ssd-prices-in-freefall-wont-overtake-hard-disks-anytime-soon/

Vs less than $3 today (just google it). So the prices haven't come down quite as much as the article predicts, but there are 11 months left in the year, and I made that calculation using an intel drive (which probably carries a slight premium to the market).

But 3d TV requires glasses

False. Some displays do not require glasses.

Just google for: 3d tv no glasses
1 2 3 4 5

But 3d TV requires glasses

False. Some displays do not require glasses.

Just google for: 3d tv no glasses
1 2 3 4 5

It's a laser so the beam can be tight. That lends itself to geeking it to reflective targets mutually visible in outdoor applications. If people can get wifi at 237 miles, this tech may be capable of extending both the range and bandwidth of point to point communications. That would extend the reach of the Internet to a lot of people isolated by distance and infrastructure. That would be cool.

And then there's the neighborhood network thing. I can gather maybe 250 single family homes into a network with a fenceline network without crossing a right-of-way with a cable. Leveraging this tech I could probably extend that reach to 30,000 families. If you can build a 1 Gbps network that large in the US, the Internet will beat a path to you because you've got something they want: earners with eyeballs. Real bandwidth becomes free, which changes a whole bunch of things in a totally positive way

Have you had a chance to look at the Pixel QI tablets coming out?

A reason that BluRay has not taken off in the way they hoped is the attempt to stop the discs playing on non-authorised drives (didn't pay the bribes), region locking / cartel protection etc. etc

Blu-Ray did rather well in 2009. Blu-ray sales were up 67 percent in 2009

There are only three Blu-Ray regions.

A1 is North and South America, East Asia, excluding China and Mongolia, Southeast Asia and Japan. This does not strike me as any great hardship.

The Blu-Ray player with Netflix streaming starts at $140.

I already showed you how it can multitask. And developers can use multiple threads. The phrase "no multitasking" is simply wrong, since it supports it at all. What you are looking for is "limited multitasking".

I don't really call letting other apps sending notifications in the background to be multitasking. I'd call it hardly any multitasking. If it supported even limited multitasking I should be able to listen to Last.FM/Pandora/Shoutcast while doing something else.

As for censorship, basically - no porn (in an app).

Or "foul" language, or any number of ill-defined things. Apple even blocked a Twitter app because tweets could have foul language ( http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/apple-stupidly-rejects-tweetie-1-3-for-foul-language-in-twitter/ )

I have not found developer communications to be that bad. If I had a question they answered.

Then how do you explain the thousands of rejected apps where people can resubmit the app and get it approved with -no change- and then the others that never have a clear reason for it being blocked. If communication was there, it would be really easy to find out what was the "problem" and change it. Not true.

As for "who knows when it will be on the market" - try seven to fourteen days. You don't get 140k apps IN the market without a ton being accepted, most rather quickly.

And seven to fourteen days to patch a severe exploitable flaw or to fix some bugs is a really long time.

Since I do this all the time it's not hard to imagine, and it's not as bad as you make it out to be.

So you mean to tell me at this point in time you have a single browser window open, no tabs nothing else, no music, no IM, no compiler running in the background and to say check your facebook you have your browser save your session, close it, open up a different browser check your Facebook, close it, then resume your other work? Because basically that is what the iPhone OS forces you do to.

But not on a netbook compared to the iPad. It's really not that much slower.

On my first generation netbook (EEE PC 4G Surf, Intel Celeron M underclocked to 633 mhz, 512 MB of RAM running Xubuntu) its still a lot faster than my second generation iPod touch.

The problems you list are all true of flash games too. The next time you play one you might want to look around, as there are plenty of ads to be had

There are a few ads, but usually after the first 10 seconds they go away never to be seen again. With iPod games they are perpetually below the screen in many games.

"Vital Part" is bullshit. I've been browsing for a year with click to flash enabled, and as I said I've only needed to enable flash for videos. I've almost never seen it used for nav, since dhtml is so much more flexible...

Perhaps for the sites you visit that is true, for a lot of other people, Flash is really needed to actually do much on the web.

What "Advanced Functions" are you talking about here? You can buy anything right on the device. You can use applications to send files to and from other systems. You could easily never attach it to a computer.

You mean I can add my Amazon/Wal-Mart-purchased MP3 files onto the device and have them show up in music without having to sync them via iTunes?

You mean I can save YouTube videos in memory and have them show up in videos without having to sync it to iTunes?

You mean I can take the device out of the box and start using it when I walk out of the store without having to sync it to iTunes?

You mean I can download OS patches and download them over wi-fi or 3G and install them without havi

The same is true for iPhone games. Further, the overwhelming majority of Flash games will be unplayable on a multitouch device. They just aren't designed to be played by nothing more than clicking the mouse.

Huh? You obviously haven't been playing much Flash games, have you? Mouse-only Flash games have been around since forever. They constitute quite a significant portion of Flash games and would have no problems running on a stylus/tablet device. Try visiting Ferry Halim's awards-winning Orisinal games. Tapping on touch devices/tablets is no problem too since those are just normal mouse calls on Flash. No problem with em running on multi-touch too since since the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 (coming out on both desktop and mobile devices) has multi-touch support.

Regarding Mac performance, from what I know, there's an certain class & method needed by Adobe engineers to do certain acceleration on OSX, but access isn't being given by Apple's APIs. With Linux acceleration (Flash has now been using the GPU for acceleration for a while), there's quite a number of complications like incompatibility with Compiz Fusion enabled (See this entry by Penguin.swf, one of the lead Flash engineers working on Linux -> http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/05/flash_uses_the_gpu.html.

Check out John Gruber's excellent post at http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash:
I've been hard on Flash Player for Mac OS X, but this performance situation is not entirely in Adobe's hands. On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. This is one reason why Flash video playback performs better on Windows than Mac OS X, and also why H.264 playback on Mac OS X is better through QuickTime (which does use hardware decoding).

According to Adobe, though, this is because they can't. Heres an entry from their Flash Player FAQ:

Q. Why is hardware decoding of H.264 only supported on the Windows platform?

A. In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate when to support this feature on Mac and Linux platforms in future releases.

Adobe platform evangelist Lee Brimelow posted a weblog entry addressing this:

But let's talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. Im happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple.

The concept of Flash is awesome, but it is a CPU hog and often abused in places it ought not be implemented. Good news however. Starting with Flash 10.1, it will be GPU accelerated for Windows, Mac, and Linux. So far the benchmarks have been very promising. Check out the following links for more info.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/adobes-flash-player-10-1-beta-gpu-acceleration-tested-document/

Ipad will not be successful. geeks will tell you Ipad lacks a camera, tethering etc. But the mainstream will not buy it at large: you cannot read books in sunlight, it has a very low browsing experience (no tabbed browsing, no flash plugin support). And in the sunlight you can't use the device. How phenomenal is unusable?

The really cool apps will be on android. Innovation needs open systems, it simple doesn't work in closed software, hardware and distribution systems. For instance notions ink device looks like the Ipad and runs android and has a color screen which is readable in direct sunlight. It has even all the things that geeks miss in the Ipad, camera microphone etc. tabbed browsing, flash support. Check the video at the bottom of the linked page. That's phenomenal!

So I guess this is the same megajoule laser, that I read about over at engadger?

According to tfa:

"We hit it with 669 kilojoules - 20 times more than any previous laser facility," Nif's Siegfried Glenzer told BBC News.

So, basically, if I am getting this straight

Really powerful laser => shoots really cold stuff => reaction causes x-rays to be created => x-rays cause stuff to get super hot => if you can get two things hot enough (i.e. hydrogen atoms), they fuse.

How interesting.

I've heard no plans of a Google tablet

Here:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/08/msi-shows-off-10-inch-android-tablet-running-new-tegra-chipset/

Now you've heard of one, it will reportedly be available later this year for $500.

Awesome, thanx. Saw that earlier today after the post but didn't get a chance to read the specifics on it.

I used this along time ago on FreeBSD and Windows...

http://www.engadget.com/2005/08/09/how-to-share-your-keyboard-and-mouse-in-realtime-with-synergy/

I'm pretty sure it won't work on the iPad though.