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mobile phone £15 (that's ~30US$). I's prefer it without the colour screen though, for £10/20$

I have a specific goal in mind. OpenMoko just seems to say "tons of possibilities and it's open", but for people who have no clue about development, "tons of possibilities" just means "this is not for me".

A truly open platform's killer apps don't need to be entirely new ones. They just need to be unmolested by the legacy carriers' greed/stupidity/business models. For example, a true push email service - one which does alert you about new messages but doesn't kill your battery through polling - does not need to be a $$/month line item. With OpenMoko it can - and will - be "free" on top of one of the affordable data plans. Same deal with location-aware services, since there's no restricted API between the developer and the GPS functionality.

OpenMoko costs $450/$600. You can get a Symbian/WinMobile smart phone with open API for less than that.

Ah yes, open APIs and timely firmware updates. The joys of being a user of smartphone platforms dictated by operators.

It's an overpriced yuppie toy status symbol for the same tools who pay $50 for a "status brand" T-shirt and buy a new cell phone every six months. That's why it's only designed to last that long. Apple figures they'll sell 3-4 of them over the course of the contract they're locked into. And you know what? The desire to have the latest "cool" thing plus the notoriously short attention spans of these people means they probably will.

Basically, Apple put a cell phone into an iPod and tripled the price. And to get it, you must sign a two year contract with the execrable AT&T Wireless (f/k/a Cingular) and pay full retail for the phone. Used to be that you got a break on the phone for signing a contract, no more. Apple knows that the idiot lemmings will flock to their stores and gladly plunk down $600 for a non-subsidized phone that you (1) cannot unlock, (2) cannot change the SIM card in, and (3) cannot even replace the battery.

As usual, /. is well behind the power curve: iPhone costs about $220 to make. I guess I should be happy to get three dupes of some MIT wunderkind's latest too-cool-for-school case mod involving a pizza box or something.

I'll stick to the BlackBerry, thank you very much. I can unlock that and use somebody else's SIM card when I travel overseas rather than pay exorbitant roaming charges.

For those of you Apple fanboys who think I'm just a hater, I'm typing this on my Mac Mini. I'm going to do work later on an iBook G4. Apple does make some great products, including the iPod, but they've screwed the pooch on this one bigtime.

We're getting a 3G-enabled version of the phone.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/17/amd_launch es_dual-core_turions/

TL-50 1.6GHz 2*256KB caches $184
TL-52 1.6GHz 2*512KB caches $220
TL-56 1.8GHz 2*512KB caches $263
TL-60 2.0GHz 2*512KB caches $354

There are borked chips with half the cache disabled (or maybe faulty) and then a load of different speed grades.

There are many misunderstandings about parallelism, as it is evident from this discussion. Some posters said that "my O/S already runs in multicore/multicpu systems, thank you very much"...some others said that some tasks are like word processing is non-parallelizable etc.

The misunderstandings lie not in what parallelism is, but what Intel and other companies are trying to achieve. The quest for parallelism is not about running lots of programs in parallel, but extracting the parallelism out of sequentially written programs, including kernels. In order to improve performance, any parallelism that lies in our applications but is not exploited right now must be utilized, if we want to see real improvements in the future.

Modern CPUs do many tricks in order to increase parallelism, like pipelining and out-of-order execution. Current research at Intel has produced an 80-core CPU. It is highly unlikely that any of us will run 80 programs simultaneously tomorrow, so either this research is for servers only (highly unlikely because Intel will need to sell a lot of these chips to cover research expenses), or Intel knows that programs can be parallelized even more.

Compilers can not identify all possible parallel paths of execution, because it is an intractable problem. Writing complicated multithreaded programs using threads, semaphores and mutexes is quite difficult. So what is needed is another software architecture that allows programs to be easily parallelized.

Ericsson has dealt with these problems a lot time ago, and the result was Erlang. Based on the Actor model, Erlang programs can contain thousands of objects working in parallel, and the programmer need not worry about how to lock/unlock resources.

Microsoft's only option is to ditch C and use another language for their O/S. C can not work with the Actor model, unless modified. The best option for them is to make a C-like low-level language that includes the Actor model as part of the language specification. They can combine Cyclone, a version of C which is safe, with the best parts of ADA and Erlang, and come up with a language which allows the easiest possible path to writing parallelizable programs. And there is a big opportunity for them to put bounds checking and garbage collection to all their code, so as that two basic problems (buffer overflows and wild pointers) are solved at last.

photos of the new laptop

Sony's put Cells into over 3 million PS3s. The Cell is a 3.5GHz PPC on a cache-coherent onchip bus with 6 usable DSPs for over 200GFLOPS. IBM is putting together workstations to supercomputers of these same (and denser) Cells in parallel. Other chipmakers are following suit. These are not GPUs, but CPUs with embedded DSP that can process graphics: "NGPU", if you will. But actual GPUs use even more embedded DSPs to get something like 10x the specialized performance.

NSP is the way to go only when there's CPU power to burn and DSP is a small share of the CPU duty. Now that CPUs without DSPs are hitting sequential walls, and going parallel, they're parallelizing the NSP HW, with all its overhead, just to handle more DSP tasks. To compete with Sony and others (probably including nVidia), Intel will have to do what they do. Thereby flipping the entire CPU industry to mainly embedded parallel DSPs.

The question is when, and in what form. There's already some demos by Intel of MPP DSP CPUs. But they're not x86 compatible, while the Cell is PPC compatible (reuse PPC code on the PPC core, then port some features to use the DSPs). Let's see what Intel does, and what they show in the next few years that look like Sony/IBM/Toshiba will pioneer.

Apple 'underpromises and overdelivers'

I think ATI made the better move here. They have been recouping the research money on unified shader GPUs from a much bigger market segment, though it does make it appear they are lagging behind in the PC gaming sector.

You're missing one fact: the PC GPU market is MUCH LARGER market than the console GPU market.

Here are some recent sales numbers: 76 million units in Q3 2006. With ATI holding roughly 1/4 of the market (~18 million), that's more units than ATI sold in the last 6 months on the 360 and Wii combined, let-alone in the last quarter. The sad thing is, the Wii and 360 sales will likely go down from here, but the PC graphics market (overall) keeps improving with every quarter.

Furthermore, the share of discrete GPUs (where the real money is) was a massive 26 million, and those were split solely between Nvidia and ATI. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that ATI makes more money on an x1950 Pro or x2900 XT chipset sale than on their license fee for an Xbox 360 GPU.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/05/04/intel_anno unces_moorestown/

OSNews just linked an article about the first computer that could fit in this category, from 1981, the Epson HX-20.

Kind of looks like a neat idea for its time, albeit a little limited by the available information processing technology of that era.

The tide is turning in the UK, with both Vodafone and Orange disabling VoIP on the Nokia N95.

You see, Sony is basically telling their partners to not sell BD players below the price of the PS3, because they still have this twisted hope/dream that it will help them sell PS3s

More like actual fact.

"The BDA cites a survey in conducted by talking to 10,000 US PS3 owners. It claims more than 80 per cent plan to buy movies on BD. A slightly smaller percentage, just over 75 per cent, said they plan to use their console as their prime device for watching movies."

Though that proves the converse of what you said (that the PS3 is helping them sell BluRay movies), it's hard to believe that none of those PS3 owners bought one at least in part because it could play BluRay movies.

Rob

I never claimed that it required a widescreen TV. Scart cables carry information about the aspect ratio of the signal, and most fullscreen TVs in Europe will automatically compensate.

Connecting to a standard-def TV using component cables obviously requires a standard-def TV with component inputs. Don't know about America, but in Europe these are very thin on the ground. You might be able to connect it via a component-to-Scart cable, but this is a non-standard use of Scart and not guaranteed to be supported by your television (although you could buy a converter).

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/28/o2_ships_o rbit/
... which ships with:
http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/copilot-live-ppc-5.p hp
As to the one touch blog bit, I'm sure someone's written something for WM5?

Back in the 1980s, Apple would ruthlessly try and sue anyone who attempted to sell a GUI that looked even remotely similar to their own

I never said apple were soft fluffy nice guys - I just said they never had a monopoly. GEM 1 wasn't just "remotely similar to Mac OS" - it had pretty clearly been designed to look as much like Mac OS as possible (I had an Atari ST for a while, which managed to hold on to the old version of GEM) As for MS Windows, MS already had a near monopoly so my heart fails to bleed. I don't think Apple can be blamed for tha fact that windows versions 1.x and 2.x failed to take off - lack of software and running under DOS on clunky 186/286s did that.

Of cause, I would like to point out that Commodore filed for Chapter 11 some time ago, so you are really unlikely to see a 64, 128 or 1000 sold in stores, much less one running Windows.

I was thinking of these - of course, it just means that someone has bought the brand name and logo in a fire sale. The point was, there used to be lots of diverse "platforms", but they were bulldozed by the IBM/MS PC.

Fast And The Furious, The: Tokyo Drift (HD-DVD) is region code 1. You're wrong. While most HD-DVDs are currently "all region" discs that won't last for long. The current Toshiba hardware isn't checking region codes but there certainly are region codes in the media and it will become standard.
The DVD Steering Committee is making every effort to include region coding in the next HD-DVD standard too.

Unfortunately for the early adopters, HD-DVD is a format that is going to die quickly. Sony has seen to that already. This also shows when you look at Amazon sales figures. The top eight selling HD-DVDs are not selling as well as the top eight Blu-Ray discs. Sorry to say, but your format was dead before it took off. HD-DVD is the Beta of this decade.

If you want to hurt Sony buy a PS3, just don't buy and games and run Linux on it. Hugely expensive as it is, it still costs more to make than they are selling it for. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/16/isuppli_pr ices_up_ps3/

There ya go found the link on The Register.. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/13/sony_to_sh rink_psp/

Heck, even Intel, whom Microsoft laudes as a partner in embracing Vista has publicly stated that they, as a corporation, will not even install Vista on their computers until after SP1 is released... So now you have a technology partner publicly stating they wont be so quick to upgrade either... http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/07/intel_wati ng_to_go_vista/

I worked at a Gamestop as an Assistant Manager for the holiday season .. (and both the Wii and PS3 launches), this is what people bought:

1. Wiis, if we had them (tended to run out about an hour after the UPS guy arrived, sometimes less)
2. PS3s, until the Wii released.
3. Xbox 360s by the TON (average 3-4 a day), and out of those, 75% went out the door with a copy of Gears.

"around 2m Xbox 360s were sold between the start of November 2006 and Christmas Day." and Gears of War, ... with shipments of more than 2 million copies in six weeks leading Microsoft to proclaim it the "fast-selling next-generation console game" to date"

Yea .. I can see your point. Really.

I dont need a phone to bend around my face. However, thats not to say that the principle isnt good. I mean, surely it holds something over Samsungs "Worlds Slimmest" handset, that will, predictably, be subject to many breakages after being inserted into a pocket. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/02/12/samsung_de buts_ultra_edition_deux/

That is supposedly no longer true: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/12/19/sony_posts _bluray_burner_patch/

OK, this may even sound a bit un-American, but dont worry about the iPhone. The Chinese will copy it. It's a cool form factor, and just like other Apple products, they will clone it. They have already done this with similar phones. It will probably have a better screen,, run Linux, and be easily available unlocked at half the cost in guangzhou, shenzhen or the other Far East tech markets. From there, they'll make it to eBay. Those guys are fast too. There's a fair chance it will be available before the iPhone is even available.

Just need glue: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/10/warner_lau nches_total_hd_disc/

The Linksys iPhone. Linksys is a Cisco brand.

When you say a 'fashion phone', what do you mean? Isn't that like calling a Macbook Pro a 'fashion laptop'?

From the little I've seen of this, it looks like possibly the first smartphone ever made where the designers actually gave a shit about design. It makes the SPV m3100 I bought last month look about as smart as a pocket calculator.

Even if it doesn't have 3G.

If the manufacturing costs of these disks is comparable to HD-DVD/Blu-ray disks, it might just click.

Yes, this is a mod without an actual mod. All they do is show pictures of the hard drive, and pine for an extra 1.8" hard drive. On one hand, if you spend ~1000 on a camcorder, what's an extra $240 to more than double the recording time? On the other, do you really want to take a chance that you might destroy your ~1000 investment?

Hard drive camcorders might be the wave of the future. However, removable flash based memory is also interesting, and avoids mechanical parts all together. 8 gig SD cards are here, though still expensive. The question is, will the convenience of having no moving parts and removable media outweigh the inconvenience of smaller media? Ultimately, flash (or some successor) will probably win. But in the short term, hard drives look good.

The Sony HDR SR1 has a serious problem, in that it records using AVCHD, which is uneditable by third party products at this time. Things should be better come spring (when Sony Vegas will support AVCHD).

I'm going out on a limb here, but maybe because it's not true?

Some of the early players didn't recognize or support region coding. That doesn't mean that the format is incapable of it. And trust me on this, it is unfortunately going to be with us for a long time to come.

The pitch now is that EVD will not be an alternative to DVD but its successor - essentially it's been repositioned as an alternative to HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Technology provided by London-based New Media Enterprises, which has been touting a format it calls VMD (Versatile Multi-layer Disc), to provided a storage capacity sufficient for HD content but read using standard red lasers rather than blue.

To get it there, some 20 CE vendors yesterday unveiled 54 EVD players, China's Xinhau state news agency reports. Among the suppliers were the Haier Group, one of the world's biggest white-goods makers, and TCL Group, which manufactures kit for France's Thomson, owner of the RCA brand.

"While The NPD Group's retail tracking service shows what appears to be a decline in PC game sales, critical developments in the PC games industry, specifically the Internet, is fundamentally changing the PC software industry," Anita Frazier analyst at NPD said in statement. "With the increase in high speed Internet access, not only are users purchasing their games online, they are also willingly paying additional recurring fees over and above the price of the game to subscribe to services that let them play with others online."

Intel's share of the 74.9m GPUs that shipped in Q1 rose from 37.5 per cent in Q4 2005 to 39.1 per cent. ATI took 28.7 per cent of the market, up 2.2 percentage points, while Nvidia's share was up a third of percentage point to 18.7 per cent.

Intel claims the X3000 is Shader Model 3 compliant, and meets Microsoft's GUI requirements for Vista Aero Premium. Intel has released production version drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista that enable the Aero style.

PC Gaming is dying. If you want to make a truckload of money, just get out of the PC entertainment market and sell to consoles exclusively. If idiotic tripe like Star Wars: Republic Commando and The Guy Game never touched the PC I'd have no beef with you, but by developing for consoles and then porting those horrid, god awful titles to the PC you consistently stifle the development of original IP, and original IP is what has made the PC game market so consistently great over the years.

Amazing that this is news, yet the current serious DMG security problem presently affecting OSX does not appear on /. at all, not even buried in the Apple section. Strange huh? Even the BBC is reporting on it.

The Register is reporting that Apple have released some security updates, yet the DMG issue is unpatched.

/. positive OSX bias? Shurely not.

People love HD TV. I am not a marketing exec, but I can see that paying to advertise on these services could end in profit.
No, UK broadcasters love HD TV, I'm a Brit, and I know very few people with HD TV sets.

People love HD TV. I am not a marketing exec, but I can see that paying to advertise on these services could end in profit.

1)Get YDL from http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/tss_home.shtml

2) Have fun on your X11 running optimised PPC Linux

Sorry but why don't we discuss the Disk image mounting exploit ( http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/22/mac_zero_d ay_bug/ ) , some real stupid "Spyware experiment" ( http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/24/mac_os_x_a dware/ ) on Slashdot Apple?

I understand the slow news due to Thanksgiving but I can't figure the meaning of discussing of X11 on Apple hardware. Yes, if you have nothing to do with Aqua, better install/run Darwin or Yellow Dog Linux.

If you want Apple frameworks, desktop technology, run X11 Aqua on OS X.

Have a nice day

1)Get YDL from http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/tss_home.shtml

2) Have fun on your X11 running optimised PPC Linux

Sorry but why don't we discuss the Disk image mounting exploit ( http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/22/mac_zero_d ay_bug/ ) , some real stupid "Spyware experiment" ( http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/24/mac_os_x_a dware/ ) on Slashdot Apple?

I understand the slow news due to Thanksgiving but I can't figure the meaning of discussing of X11 on Apple hardware. Yes, if you have nothing to do with Aqua, better install/run Darwin or Yellow Dog Linux.

If you want Apple frameworks, desktop technology, run X11 Aqua on OS X.

Have a nice day

Seems a bit much, if you ask me. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/17/ebayer_bid s_89m_for_ps3/

Thanks - I'm aware of web'n'walk but firstly T-Mobile's service is crap where I live, secondly their handsets come in a crap brown or very gay pink compared with Orange's black.

Finally 'web'n'walk' is web only - it's not all ports and protocols (although they tried to tell me in the shop that it was 'full internet access'), however they have been threatening to cancel the contracts of users running Skype.

Orange do an 'off peak' for £5 a month where 'off-peak' is after 7pm until 7am weekdays and all day weekends. This is all well and good except any other times it's £4 a megabyte.

AMD is converting Fab 30 in Dresden from 90um and 200mm wafers to Fab 38, with 65nm and 300mm wafers. This should come on line in 2007. Longer term, AMD is building a new fab in upstate New York for 32nm features on 300mm wafers. That should come on line in 2010.

Meanwhile, AMD's main fab, Fab 36 in Dresden, is starting to produce 65nm features on 200mm wafers. AMD is also outsourcing some production to a 65nm fab in Singapore.

Down at the user level, this means that first shipments of AMD CPUs made with 65nm technology should appear in December of 2006. Coming soon to Dell Dimension desktops.

AMD is converting Fab 30 in Dresden from 90um and 200mm wafers to Fab 38, with 65nm and 300mm wafers. This should come on line in 2007. Longer term, AMD is building a new fab in upstate New York for 32nm features on 300mm wafers. That should come on line in 2010.

Meanwhile, AMD's main fab, Fab 36 in Dresden, is starting to produce 65nm features on 200mm wafers. AMD is also outsourcing some production to a 65nm fab in Singapore.

Down at the user level, this means that first shipments of AMD CPUs made with 65nm technology should appear in December of 2006. Coming soon to Dell Dimension desktops.

Except MSFT will have to refuse to sell to people building AMD based systems because they will be based on processors that have virtualisation technology, Intel will go the same way with hardware virtualisation, it will the only way to deal with hardware like this Intel fabs 80-core teraflop processor if MSFT sells to people who are using it on hardware that has virtualisation in it, then the EULA will be useless at best and at worst they could be accused of breaking it to begin with.

From AMD quad-core Opteron will support FB-DIMM

However, Barcelona will also incorporate hardware-controlled memory page nesting to accelerate the manipulation of memory addresses when the CPU's virtualisation technology is in operation.

Hardware virtualisation will kill Vista is it's not allowed by the EULA, I can't wait for some stock analyst to realise MSFT has just slashed it's own throat by making it verboten.

Apple does not use AMD chips.

Maybe not now, but never say never...

The usb big red button.

sure you can!

Well, you'll still need a HD-DVD player to access the HD-DVD layers... so I don't see how it'll help the XBOX, unless you want to use the new external HD-DVD drive.

This guy compared a dual core apple to a single core vaio. Thats hardly a fair representation of a high end PC vs apple benchmark.

Also, acording to a few reports, the MacBook has an underclocked gpu (possibly to reduce heat), so it may not be able to even match a similarly loaded machine, at least when it comes to directX/OpenGL, Vista's territory.