Microsoft isn't the only company in the technology industry with a monopoly. Its partner in crime, Intel, has often been accused of monopoly abuse as well, and is currently under scrutiny by the same European Commission who fined Microsoft. Sources have told eWeek (which generally has a good track record) that Intel will indeed be found guilty this week of abusing its monopoly position to stifle the competition.According to eWeek's source, Intel will be found guilty of two violations in which it abused its dominant position in the CPU market to stifle the competition, which mainly comes down to AMD. The violations sound eerily similar to what that other company used to do.
Intel is said to have given rebates to computer makers to restrict the use of chips from its main rival AMD, or not to use them at all. In a similar manner, the chip giant also coerced retailers to only sell machines with Intel chips in them. Both of these actions are illegal in the EU. On top of that, Intel paid PC makers to delay or eliminate products with AMD chips in them. The source says the EC will characterise these as "naked restrictions" to the competition.
There are even some tantalising figures, as Intel told the PC makers what percentage of their machines could carry AMD chips. NEC was allowed to ship 20% of their machines with AMD chips, while Lenovo notebooks and Dell products had to be 100% Intel. HP had to produce 95% of its business desktops with Intel processors.
eWeek is generally pretty accurate with its sources, so it's quite safe to assume this story is correct. This is exactly what I want the EU to do: make sure there is a level playing field in the EU market. If you want to sell your products within the EU, you had better follow the rules to be sure it's a fair game.
"After a long wait, Apple has released the next major update to its pro-class photo workflow application, Aperture 3. The new version boasts over 200 new features, including the addition of the successful facial recognition and geotagging features, Faces and Places, that were introduced with iPhoto '09. Version 3 also adds edge-detecting adjustment brushes for non-destructive localized editing and touch-ups. Along with numerous UI and performance improvements, Aperture 3 adds full 64-bit support on supported systems running Snow Leopard."
"Every few months I make a pilgrimage to the Sysinternals website to look at its superb collection of tools. It's now hosted inside the Microsoft Technet monster since its authors joined Microsoft as employees some while ago, but the value of their site is still as strong as ever and the tools are now guaranteed not to be ignored or left to rust."
Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick. The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied. A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the "Quantum Tunnelling Composite". The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets."Whereas the iPhone is aimed at short, focused tasks, the iPad is more likely to lend itself to longer, more general tasks that involve using multiple apps, just as we're used to on the Mac. It's easy to imagine wanting to use an iPad to read text in Mobile Safari, copy some text to a Pages document, and send that document to a colleague via Mail. That specific example may turn out to be possible with the current iPhone OS, but it points toward needing more ways for iPad apps to work together in the future."
"The 'Llano' processor that AMD described today in an ISSCC session is not a CPU, and it's not a GPU - instead, it's a hybrid design that the chipmaker is calling an 'application processor unit', or APU. Whatever you call it, it could well give Intel a run for its money in the laptop market, by combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four out-of-order CPU cores on a single, 32nm processor die."
"The scuttlebutt is that IBM seemed perfectly content to wait until May to launch the Power7-based Power Systems servers, but something changed and compelled the company to move up the announcement of its first machines using the eight-core processor to today. Big Blue is not in a habit of explaining its motives or its timing for product launches, but it seems clear that IBM wanted to get out in front of a whole lot of processor and systems launches that are expected between now and the summer."
Mozilla has announced that they are going to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger definitively. "Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then," Josh Aas writes, "We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X and 10.4 support has been a hindrance. Where we can work around supporting 10.4, doing so consumes valuable time and effort. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this."
"The ancient bug was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy in January 2010 and involves a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run very old programs. Mr Ormandy has found a way to exploit this utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7. The patch for this vulnerability will appear in the February security update. Five of the vulnerabilities being patched at the same time allow attackers to effectively hijack a Windows PC and run their own programs on it."
"Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM's regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap."
With all the virtualization schemes running on top of Linux, how do they exploit the underlying kernel for I/O virtualization? The answer is virtio, which provides an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Discover virtio, and learn why Linux will soon be the hypervisor of choice.