A new set of x264 and vpxenc encoder benchmarks have been published. The new benchmarks address many of the concerns raised in the comments about the methodology used in the previous article, such as using SSIM for quality measurement. Theora is also included in these tests.

"Sony has filed a new document arguing that the legal action against the noted hacker George Hotz should proceed in California. One of the arguments Hotz's legal team made against California's jurisdiction was the lack of a PlayStation Network account, which means he didn't agree to the Terms of Service, but now the company claims to have 'proof' that Hotz did in fact have a PSN account. An interview with a company based in California, and the number of downloads from California, are being used as evidence."

"Does $75 trillion even exist? The thirteen record companies that are suing file-sharing company Lime Wire for copyright infringement certainly thought so. When they won a summary judgment ruling last May they demanded damages that could reach this mind-boggling amount, which is more than five times the national debt. Manhattan federal district court judge Kimba Wood, however, saw things differently. She labeled the record companies' damages request 'absurd' and contrary to copyright laws in a 14-page opinion." Wait, this is only five time the US national debt? Fascinating.

"A federal judge rejected Google's $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, delivering a blow to the company's ambitious plan to build the world's largest digital library and bookstore. Judge Denny Chin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York said that the settlement went too far in granting Google rights to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners, and that it was 'not fair, adequate and reasonable'." Here is a desk. Please to bang head against it repeatedly until world starts making sense.

After a very long development phase, Mozilla has finally officially relased Firefox 4.0. The binaries were already up on the FTP sites yesterday, but today the release became official. Firefox 4.0 packs a heck of a lot of new features, including an entirely new user interface.

And so the story regarding Android supposedly violating the GPL continues. Linus Torvalds has responded to the story in his usual straightforward manner - he thinks it's "totally bogus". In the meantime, Groklaw - not exactly my favourite place but alas, good points are good points - found out that the IP lawyer who started this story, Edward Naughton, used to be a lawyer for Microsoft in dozens of cases, a fact he tried to erase from his online resume.

There's a scene in American Beauty where Kevin Spacey masturbates in the shower, while his voice-over states: "This will be the highlight of my day. It's all downhill from here." That's how I feel right now. We just had Microsoft suing Barnes & Noble, which was already pretty low to begin with, but Apple just upped the ante by suing Amazon... Over the 'app store' trademark. For the love of god.

Since competing on merit is looked down upon in the computer and software world, companies in this business usually go for the blindfolded chick with the scale and sword. Up until recently, Microsoft didn't go for the whole patent litigation thing, but now that they've tasted some, they want more. They just sued Barnes & Noble, Foxconn, and Inventec for patent infringement because they use Android.

If you use a photo editor to crop or convert your images, or to improve brightness, color balance and contrast, then you probably don't need a professional image processing suite. There are tons of web-based graphic editors that are available for free. However, if you are looking for self-hosted, open source solutions, you should definitely go in a different direction. Here's a list of four open source, self hosted online graphic editors.

The community-created Nouveau driver that's open-source and is written by clean-room reverse-engineering the NVIDIA binary display driver, has reached a serious milestone. For low-end NVIDIA GPUs, the Nouveau driver based upon the Mesa Gallium3D architecture is now as fast, or even faster, than NVIDIA's official proprietary driver.

Microsoft is claiming that Android infringes its patents, and has chosen Barnes and Noble, which is using Android for its e-reader, as a target for its ire: "The Android platform infringes a number of Microsoft’s patents, and companies manufacturing and shipping Android devices must respect our intellectual property rights."

A major deal just went down in the United States, which seriously shakes up the mobile industry on the other side of the pond: AT&T has announced it plans to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom.

"AMD worldwide developer relations manager of graphics Richard Huddy has blamed Microsoft's DirectX and its APIs for limiting the potential of GPUs in PCs. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because... DirectX is getting in the way.'"

"Addressing a major weakness its plan to build its WebM video technology into the Web, Google yesterday released a version of its VP8 video encoder and decoder designed to be baked into hardware. The hardware implementation of VP8 is called H1 and now Anthill, said Aki Kuusela, engineering manager of the WebM Project, in a blog post. It comes in the form of RTL, or Register Transfer Language, a very low-level description close to how processors actually perform their instructions, and it's available royalty free."