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That's not exactly accurate - MPEG LA has been granted patients in numerous countries: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020400.html

Yes, it is "exactly accurate". It's just misleading...

In countries without software patents, you can implement an H.264 decoder that runs on your PC, free of charge, no problem. HOWEVER, as soon as that code gets flashed into the firmware of a device, it's now a hardware patent, and you're either paying the patent license fees, or having your devices seized by authorities, in just about any country in the world...

See:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5312696.stm
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/12/15/german_court_rules_on_sansa_snatch/

Hasselblad recently brought out a digital camera back for their old film cameras, which is compatible with all their V-system cameras, which they made from 1957. They include software which corrects for lens errors for every lens they've ever made.

I remembered seeing a few stories about the BT HomeHub being weak.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3258-bt-to-close-remote-assistance-hole-on-home-hub.html
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/09/bt_home_hub_vuln/
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/201312/bt-home-hub-spits-out-password-to-hackers

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/04/16/review_camera_hasselblad_cfv_39_digital_back/print.html

It's only interesting that just today, along with this news announcement, was the first time when we (as in Europeans) even heard about it or when EU operators even announced iPad coming and its release dates.

Yes, there really was no announcement on release date before Apple said they will be delaying it. Marketing at its finest.

Another interesting aspect; Those UK operators were also all send the same basic marketing template they used in their press releases today.

Bar the name of the operator and the countries mentioned, the Orange and O2 statements are exactly the same as Vodafone's. So written by Apple, then, and cut and pasted by the carriers.

Can't leave any marketing aspects to be ruined by other companies eh?

And the last interesting point - iPad sales dropped down to ~10% after first day sales.

Apple - PR and Advertising.

Another way to look at it is that iPhone provides a solid single platform that developers can concentrate on features rather than UI and input differences.

Yes, because if Apple allowed pictures of women in bikinis, uncensored dictionaries or mentioning the name of a competitor on the iPhone, the "solid single platform" would fragment into a dozen incompatible versions, right?

The Register got it right. It's a portable TV for the 21st century. If you think of it that way, you will be less disappointed.

The least companies could do is send him a free one with service contract.

Well, it's not technically Linux these phones use, as it's now an incompatible Linux fork. So, I guess like the authors of this article, the company told Linus to go fork himself.

Without reading TFA or TFS this is obviously because Apple fabois are easier to con into buying
overpriced fisher price junk than Nintendo fanbois.

Apple knows how to sell products better than anyone.

They're selling an ebook reader that wont read books.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/01/28/ipad_no_uk_ibooks/

Even with a hefty chunk off that and costs of running the service removed from it, it's still an amount that's noticably larger than for example, the entirety of Sony's quarter 3 net profit. If just one tiny segment of Microsoft's empire can rake in that much money in a year in relation to Sony's entire empire (remember that includes it's music, movie, TV, Bluray, semiconductor etc. sections) can in a quarter then you can see why Sony would be interested in copying that. There's a lot of money there for them- enough to give at bare minimum a 10% company wide increase in profits if they can mimic Live's success which for a company of their size is quite an impressive increase.

Nokia have had free navigation for years.

This deserves a mention, the legendary Nokia 6310i still has a thriving refurb market to this day. That thing is probably the highest quality mainstream phone ever made. http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/12/20/nokia_breakthrough_phone/

3G (UMTS) turned out to be a bit of a disappointment with the required cell density there are only a few 3G-only networks in densely populated places like South Korea, 2G GSM is likely to stay around well into the LTE era.

Satellite phone networks have also come a long way since the initial bankruptcies and unreliable services. There are now at least 4 Geosynchronous orbit satellite phone networks with handheld phones and the two LEO networks that went bankrupt both recovered and are planning to launch new satellites. The phones themselves also not half the size they used to be.

"We are watching the landscape," Cook told financial analysts. "We like competition, as long as they don't rip off our IP, and if they do, we're going to go after anybody that does."

(see here)

Apple has been building up for a patent war and so Nokia has no choice other than to strike before their N900 phones make them vulnerable. Remember Apple's lawsuit happy history was what caused the League for Programming Freedom. I guess the fact that so many seem to believe that Nokia is the agressor here (remember, they've been trying to Negotiate for years before this suit came out) really does show that Apple can distort reality.

There's a lot of handwaving about how Chrome is not Windows, how it won't let you use photoshop on the netbook, as if you would. Here's a hint: if you're trying to run Photoshop on a 10" screen, you're doing it wrong.

Look for disastrous reports from Gartner, Forrester and of course the Rob Enderle / Maureen O'Gara flackalyst duet on how Chrome is the worst thing since smallpox. These are your clues that this is the real thing. They said the same things about the When Google says they released the source, people build it and publish virtual machines the same day.

Netbooks are stepping up in performance, as this four-threaded model shows, and will soon be able to do many more things. Yes, VDI is starting to ramp. There is still a place for Chrome. It's the dead-simple desktop interface that many of the technology impaired need. It's a point on the graph twice the distance on the line from Debian to Ubuntu.

A bunch of people are going to whine it doesn't support disk. It's a next-generation operating system and solid state is the storage of the next generation. It has local storage - just not the slow kind you're used to. There is no more reason to support the legacy spinning disk on this platform than there is to support tape storage or floppy disk. Moving parts are so 2008.

Dual screen design is patentable?

You mean like my Razr?

You can not take an idea available in the market on one device, bolt it to another, and claim patent-ability. Not when such an application would be obvious to anyone skilled in the craft.
I can't believe they are going to try to hang their hat on that. Will they have the moxie to take on Microsoft to court over Microsoft's Courier? http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/09/23/microsoft_courier/

I don't think this is a patent fight as much as a NDA violation fight.

it's just not worth carrying around a separate eBook reader all the time.

I read a lot, and I used to carry around a paper book all the time, two when I was getting close to the end of the previous one. I recently bought a Sony PRS-600. It fits in the inner pocket of my jacket, and it's far more handy than a paper book. I literally never leave home without it.

I've also tried reading books on my phone (Nokia N95 8GB), but the screen is too small for reading comfort in the long run, and the display quality is vastly inferior. I ended up choosing green on black to avoid eye strain, same as my terminal colours of choice. Even an iPhone can't touch E-Ink for reading novels.

Hmm, perhaps what the world really needs is a cell phone with an eInk screen.

I've thought about that as well, and apparently one exists, even if it obviously isn't intended for reading. It looks more like it's geared toward people with vision problems or technophobia. I don't think a "reader phone" would have a big market, people just aren't that interested in reading books. It also needs to be bigger than most phones to work well for novels. That said, I'd probably buy one if they built it :)

Aaaand now it's been pulled.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/28/intel_yanks_ssd_update/ :p

There is a cell phone with an e-ink screen: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/29/review_motorola_motofone_f3/

You can get one on Ebay for about $25, and probably another $25 in battery/charger/etc costs. It has very few features.

A more powerful/featureful e-ink phone could be pretty cool, I agree. I don't think the form factor is enough for me to want to use it for reading, though.

As always, it comes down to consumer choice. Do you want an MC-900-Foot-Jesus-Phone with a library of twelve thousand different fart noises at your fingertips which goes from fully charged to flat in six hours, or would you rather tote around a nigh-indestructible Motofone F3 with a battery which lasts over a week on a single charge, but has no features beyond voice and SMS?

I would advise you to vote with your wallet and let the market decide, but you'd have to buy a new F3 every day for over three weeks just to add up to the cost of The Other Phone so it seems that some votes count more than others.

Here's just a brief search for personal supercomputers of days gone (not too far) by. Most if not all are cheaper than the SGI. Being older they may not stack up spec-wise, and the definition will always be changing anyway. More than one claim to be 'first', and to SGI's credit they only claim it's 'their' first.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/23/068234

http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?fID=569&rID=4263

http://aslab.com/products/workstations/marquisk942.html

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/06/07/tyan_unveils_typhoon/

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Cray_Unveils_Personal_Supercomputer.html

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/08/19/asus_tops_reliability_test/

• You can combine USB2.0 with eSATA http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/10/03/review_laptop_dell_latitude_e6400/print.html
• We don't need SATA USB bridge chips for drives!
• SATA 6.0Gb has 576Mbytes/sec of bandwidth to USB3's 410Mbytes/sec of bandwidth.

I hope Apple starts putting eSATA/USB combined ports on their laptops soon.

Now if Apple could just invent a docking station... so corporate users wouldn't have to plug in half a dozen cables every day. Of course you could go out an buy the Apple Monitor, which would eliminate 1 cable...

Is this what you are looking for? :>

...I'm not so sure this design will ever hit market. Nintendo's got a bit of a history for filing patents on applications of the Wii Remote and never following through with them.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/08/18/canalys_q2_smartphone_sales/

Interestingly, this article suggests Asia-Pacific is by far Apple's weakest market still, with Nokia holding nearly 60% of phone sales and Sharp and Fujitsu taking second place.

So yeah, I can't help but feel TFA is as much pro-Apple propaganda as the anti-Apple propaganda the parent poster was talking about.

Apple's certainly doing well in NA and Europe, but in the context of overall marketshare it's not doing so well in Asia-Pacific. Of course, that includes more than just Japan but that only furthers the point that the iPhone hitting number 1 selling handset of an individual month in an individual company is a hell of a cherry picked statistic.

There was the argument that Japan matter in these contexts because it was a major tech. market, but that's a position that's been eroded over the last decade since the SNES/Megadrive era when Japan was at it's peak in this respect. The US and Europe are now the bigger markets, so grasping at Japan as evidence of something in terms of tech. trends and importance doesn't really hold water anymore.

I wondered that too, considering Dell were rumored to be working on an Android-based netbook.

I guess maybe they've renegotiated their Windows 7 pricing with MS and no longer need that rumor! Or maybe I'm being cynical?

The iPod - the original iPod, when the alternatives were CD walkmen and minidisc players - created the market and the demand for Chinese iPod clones.

No it didn't.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/10/ft_first_mp3_player/

I assume you know that Top Gear *admitted* to faking the ep -- not that this is something new for them. They're an entertainment show. They never ran out of electricity and were never without a working car. The only thing that actually did go wrong was with the brakes -- but it was merely a blown fuse from the abusive track duty they put it through, and the replacement was a nothing task. Their charge time statements were horribly misleading, too.

Clarkson stated that even if the Roadster had performed flawlessly, he still would have been hard on it because he believes that hydrogen is the future.
 

If you calculate how much I get paid an hour and convert the lost hours to dollars, it's more cost efficient for me to take a gas powered car over 4 hours than an electric car for 10 hours.

"It will apparently also come with an on-board charge unit that when hooked up to a 480V supply should enable the battery back to be recharged in around 45 minutes." http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/27/tesla_unveils_model_s/

That seems reasonable. :)

You may not be able to run Linux. But SUPER MARIO KARTS is running on this SNES toaster

From the headline, I was expecting the story to be about this man making solar cells from tea and doughnuts. Just gluing existing cells together doesn't sound nearly as interesting.

Your post seems to be just pulling data out of thin air and pushing it as fact. Could you link your sources? I'm unable to find anything close to the figure you give

See When Will Microsoft Own Up to the XBox Bomb As of the 1st quarter of 2007 they'd invested over $21 billion and had chalked up over $5 billion in operating losses on their "Home Entertainment" (read XBox) division since 2001.

the suggestion that Microsoft is still losing money on consoles, again this is outright false and hasn't been true since about Q3 2006

Microsoft's HE division turned a small profit starting a year or two ago - I don't know if they've recorded a consistent profit each quarter since - but according to this analysis they still aren't making any money on the consoles themselves (articles back in 2005 indicated MS might have been losing a staggering $500 a console). I guess the hope is they'll make the money back on games, but they'd have to move billions of titles to make up for the $30 billion or so they've dumped into the gaming business. (Don't forget, the "red ring of death" is going to cost them between another $1 to $5 billion, according to published reports. Ouch!)

Regarding the suggestion that Microsoft is possibly a bigger loser than the PS3, I'm trying to figure out how you can calculate that one.

Because Sony successfully used the PS3 to push Blu-Ray as a new standard. Even if they're never able to make much money off the consoles themselves, between the games and Blu-Ray licensing fees, Sony will probably eke out a tiny profit off of the PS3. With its more sophisticated hardware and its ability to be used as a Blu-Ray player (among other things), the PS3 will probably have a longer shelflife than either the 360 or the Wii, giving them more time to recoup their investment.

In contrast, the piddling earnings Microsoft's getting from its Home Entertainment division - a paltry $151 million for the most recent quarter - can't even hope to fill the $30 billion chasm that division has dug for itself over the past decade fighting the console wars. Worse, those reduced HE earnings came on increased HE revenues. What happens if the economy continues to slump and sales actually decline? Looks to me like their Home Entertainment division will promptly plunge back into the red again. Whoops.

Comparing to the likes of the iPhone and the Wii is rather ignorant of the long term goal here. Microsoft wanted to break into the home entertainment area because it believes having a box under the TV is important because that box will be called upon to play games, movies and offer countless other entertainment services within a few years.

If Microsoft does manage to get a box under every TV how do you think that's going to boost their profits?

You might as well ask what's gonna happen if Microsoft discovers a way to turn lead into gold, because they have as much of a chance at that as they do at getting a "box under every TV". Which, when you think about it, is a pretty useless strategy to begin with since that box is a worthless hunk of plastic and silicon without content. And Microsoft doesn't make content.

Does anyone in their right mind think Hollywood is gonna sit back and let the likes of Microsoft control a single point of access to the home (the only way Microsoft's massive investment in consoles could ever hope to pay off)? Good luck with that strategy, Redmond. Heck, even the game developers are smart enough to realize they're better off with two (or more) players competing against one another for dominance in the home.

Beyond that, as time passes it's only going to get easier - and cheaper - to create and market devices that

Someone at Intel told me that 22nm chips will come after the 32nm design rules, code named Haswell.

See this Register article: Intel adds 22nm octo-core 'Haswell' to CPU design roadmap.

Intel's chipset design and fabrication progress is AMAZING. Everything else about Intel is backward, in my experience: Web site, marketing, behavior toward employees, and so on.

Reg reported yesterday that HP UK was dropping linux from its netbooks.

Just not as a pre-installed option.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/02/06/hp_drops_mini_1000_uk/

The article linked to in the slashdot summary barely rises above the level of cut and paste. The photos came from here, and the content is just a paraphrase of what the register and some blogs also have.

None of the nearly identical articles tell me anything useful about what the heck the eee keyboard is supposed to be good for. It doesn't look like something you want to lug around in a briefcase or backpack, unless it comes with some kind of protective cover. The screen is too small for real websurfing. Is it basically supposed to be like a PDA for people who hate typing on anything less than a full-size keyboard? But why would you want a PDA that leaves out the "P?"

Asus has to do whatever they've got to do to make a profit, but personally I'm less excited about new products like this than I would be about better pricing and availability of previously announced products. They originally claimed they were going to price the eee Box at $269, but the suggested retail price seems to be $320-ish, with Amazon selling it for $300. For what you're getting, I think the right price is actually more like $150, and at that price I would have bought several. At $300, it's just not compelling, unless you really have a strong need for the tiny form factor. The quantities available also seem to be small, and I don't know if that's because they're having trouble meeting demand, or if they just decided not to produce very many.

both cars died on the track, first one ran out of joice after 50 miles, second one lost power due to engine overheating.

Not according to the register.

Troll. Fastest XP Laptop is Macbook. Don't be hatin.

or they should have fit in with a family. but then again, they have to create a family first, and creating a family has SO much overhead and effort in these days

I believe that doesn't happen until they get to level 20 Humanoid or something.

Seriously though, you raise an excellent point and I think you're absolutely right.

It's odd that people analyzing gaming seem to focus so closely on it that they can't see the forest for the trees; they don't see it in the context of the 'grand scheme of things'. It actually doesn't matter all that much.

People do waste time in other, similarly 'wasteful' ways that could in some cases be seen as addiction in just the same way ("I can't miss American Idle* tonight" etc.) and nobody says anything about those. * [sic] :)

And since when was being a gamer a bad thing. One survey found that gamers generally aren't the social misfits they are perceived to be. I'd personally put 'addicted' gamers above 'addicted' television watchers, arguing that they are ultimately seeing more benefit (hand-eye coordination etc.) than those folk who just slob out in from of the TV. Even gamers who spend every waking hour playing.

I suppose one could argue that gaming addiction exists when it negatively affects aspects of their real world. Family, friends, bills not getting paid, etc. I'd say that's different. What's important to realize is that it is highly unfair to categorize those 90% of gamers in the title as addicted when they just enjoy spending the majority of their free time playing them.

People shouldn't be required to fit in with a perceived norm.

(I'm also sad to report that I read the title as "90% of Gaming Addiction Patents" and thought this was going to be about another stupid patent.)

It was actually 29%, so I won't require your $20.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/03/28/29-of-windows-vista-crashes-caused-by-nvidia-drivers/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-vista-capable-lawsuit-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.html
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/03/28/nvidia_vista_drivers/

3M makes and sells a very pocketable battery powered projector already. It has been for sale for a couple of months. Has better specs too, and it's cheaper. I'm not sure why we have articles that ignore stuff like this. I know we can't be experts on everything, but man, the author couldn't do a quick google search for pico projectors?
-Taylor

And according to The Register, it's borderline unusable.

(Got to admire how a product which by their own admission "The first unit sent was nigh on impossible to use, because the cable had to be held in some impossible position to get a picture. The second unit involved a similar palaver but, with the aid of a tripod and a few books to support the cable, once a picture had been established it would remain, so long as you didnâ(TM)t touch it." still gets 50%)

Do note, this is the US market only, and only in July/August of this year. It was 17.6% in June. It worse world-wide, 4.6% in March. Of course, these are sales, not installed base, which make Apple look better (you can find installed base numbers, also called market share, out there; basically halve the numbers).

I suspect that support for XP will actually be fairly similar. Its just that that will only be of use to you if you are a legacy customer with a load of XP embedded machines. Embedded is a totally different world. Heck, according to The Register Intel only stopped shipping embedded 386s, perfect for running embedded Win3.1, in September of 2007.

Unfortunately, the economics of user and embedded environments make for very different horizons.

MS lost both marketshare and mindshare with Vista. Everyone, from the kid down the street to the sysadmin to the 50 year old knows that Vista sucks. There is no denying it.

Really? In my experience the number of laptops I've seen where the user is running Vista seems to be growing.

If Vista is so popular then why do OEMs still install or offer XP? And why has MS extended service and support for XP? For instance Dell is still selling PCs preloaded with XP. Of those laptops you see with Vista I wonder how many came with it preinstalled vs how many installed Vista on the laptop. I haven't looked to see what OS the laptops I see are running but I've been seeing more and more MacBook/ MacBook Pros (which is growing in market share), the glowing apple is easy to spot but I know of no way to tell what version of Windows is running without looking at the OS.

Falcon

FWIW, this article recommends the Velociraptor over SSDs for gamers. The Velociraptor either beats or is close to SSD's in many benchmarks and the price per GB is at least an order of magnitude less.

First off, nice how el Reg mistakes German Customs officers for private security guards, although they are wearing federal seals on their shoulders, have the word "Zoll" ("Customs") written in nice big friendly letters all over their backs, and are wearing anti-person handguns (which are illegal for almnost anyone except the police in Germany)

Second, as TFA happily drops somewhere between the lines, we don't actually know yet whether the hardware was seized due to alleged patent infringement or allegations of plain old plagiarism, as happens regularly at such trade fairs. In the latter case, I would be hard pressed to find anything bad about this. While copyright law is debatable, trademarks generally are a good thing.

I used to be a fan of Nintendo, but they seemed to totally screw everything up this generation.

What, other than the whole pwning the competition while making a profit on each console sold thing?

Yeah, but not smartphones that would be capable of doing the equivalent of what the Kindle does. The general phone market isn't relevant for comparison. In the smartphone market, the iPhone is a pretty big player. Nokia's worldwide smartphone sales only outnumber the iPhone by a factor of 8 or so. (Source: Register Hardware)

'Essentially this means that anyone with a pay-in-front service agreement won't be able to access their email or use anything apart from basic HTTP, even though O2 are now selling and advertising the new Apple iPhone on PAYG and stating it will support "all the same features as contract customers"'

They aren't selling a PAYG iPhone yet, and are now only saying it will be available 'in time for Christmas':

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/07/cw_payg_iphone_launch

This appears to be some earlier info on the kit they are using in this laptop, here, with pictures!