Google Does Not Have a Monopoly on Search

Google 48 Comments
My colleague Thom wrote an excellent evaluation of the European antitrust investigation of Google yesterday. I agree with much of what Thom says in his article, including the statements that the investigation isn't surprising and that it's fishy that the complaining companies have ties to Microsoft. What I don't agree with is the offhanded comment that Google has "pretty much a monopoly in search." There was a lively discussion on this point in the comments, but I thought that rather than join the fray there, I'd exercise my monopoly power and put my thoughts into an editorial.
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Linux 2.6.33 released

  Submitted by diegocg Linux 15 Comments
Linux 2.6.33 has been released. This version features Nouveau, Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support, DRDB (Distributed Replicated Block Device), TCP "cookie transactions", a syscall for batching recvmsg() calls, several new perf subcommands (perf probe, perf bench, perf kmem, perf diff), support for cache compression and other improvements. See the full changelog here.
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Xerox Sues Google, Yahoo Over Search Patents

Legal 8 Comments
Xerox Corp has sued Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, accusing them of infringing the document management company's patents related to Internet search. In a lawsuit filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, Xerox said Google's Web-based services such as Google Maps, YouTube and AdSense advertising software, as well as Web tools including Yahoo Shopping, infringe patents granted as far back as 2001. Xerox seeks compensation for past infringement and asked the court to halt the companies from further using the technology.
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On MicroSD Problems

Hardware 10 Comments
"Normally, the story would end there; you'd RMA the material, get an exchange for the lot, and move on. Except there were a couple of problems. So I kicked into forensic mode. Very low serial numbers are a hallmark of the "ghost shift", i.e. the shift that happens very late at night when a rouge worker enters the factory and runs the production machine off the books." A fascinating in-depth peek into the grey-market of China.
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Haiku: Diving Into WebKit

  Submitted by Michael Oliveira Haiku 35 Comments
This is news that makes me very, very happy. Stephan "stippi" Assmus has written a lengthy blog post detailing the progress made on Haiku's WebKit port, and they're quite far along. Thanks to the help of several community members, the test browser, enticingly named (euh...) HaikuLauncher, is already relatively stable, supports tabbed browsing, and a whole lot more.
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EU Launches Antitrust Inquiry Into Google

Google 66 Comments
Well, this was pretty much inevitable. With Google having pretty much a monopoly in search, it's not surprising to see authorities putting the company under a microscope, and this is exactly what the European Commission is doing. The EC has launched a fact-finding antitrust probe into Google. However, looking at where the probe originates from, some might have a sense of "ah!". Update: more bad news for Google.
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Genode 10.02 Gets Real-Time Support, Adds Codezero, NOVA

OS News 3 Comments
With the new version 10.02, the Genode OS Framework significantly extends its supported base platforms by the addition of two modern microkernels, namely Codezero and NOVA. In contrast to most operating systems that are tied to one respective kernel, Genode enables the development of specialized component-based operating systems that are portable across 6 different kernels including the whole family of open-source L4 kernels. Each kernel has different strengths, which increasingly become available at the framework's API level. For example, the new version 10.02 enables applications to benefit from the real-time scheduling as provided by the OKL4 and L4ka::Pistachio kernels.
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Would You Buy an iPhone OS-Powered Laptop?

Apple 88 Comments
Now that Apple has unveiled the iPad, people are wondering what the future holds for the iPhone OS platform and the concepts behind it. The iPad comes scarily close to being an actual computer in the more classical sense of the word, and a recent Apple job posting seems to indicated the Cupertino giant is interested in further moving the iPhone OS up the ladder. We ask you: would you be put off or excited about the iPhone OS' restrictive model moving up the stack?
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Apple VP Attempts to Explain Double Standard for Risque Apps

Apple 12 Comments
"Apple recently began purging over 5000 'overtly sexual' apps from the App Store after customer complaints caused Apple to reverse a policy that had allowed such apps to be approved. The New York Times recently asked Apple's SVP of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, to explain the reasoning behind the decision, and he says that it's all about the children. However, there might be a double standard if you are an 'established brand' such as Playboy or Sports Illustrated. The uneven application of constantly changing standards is a problem for developers and users alike, and continues to be a thorn in Apple's side."
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Apple, RIM Spark Quarterly Mobile-Phone Sales

Wireless No Comments
"Global sales of mobile phones dipped slightly in 2009 overall but did stage a fourth-quarter recovery, according to new figures from Gartner. Last year, consumers worldwide bought 1.21 billion cell phones, a 0.9 percent decline from the prior year. However, a surge in smartphones from the likes of Apple and Research In Motion and in low-end devices boosted fourth-quarter sales to 340 million units, an 8.3 percent gain over the fourth quarter of 2008, the market researcher said Tuesday."
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Microsoft, Amazon Sign Patent Cross-Licensing Agreement

  Submitted by lemur2 Legal 20 Comments
Reminiscent of the much-discussed deal with Novell, Microsoft has entered into a patent agreement with Amazon, in which both companies promise not to sue one another over patent-related issues. So far, that doesn't sound all too uncommon, but what makes this one stand out is that Microsoft explicitly mentions Amazon's use of open source technology such as Linux, rekindling an old claim from Microsoft.
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Flash, Google, VP8, and the Future of Internet Video

  Submitted by edogawaconan Multimedia, AV 20 Comments
Fantastic expose about Flash and HTML5 video by lead x264 developer Jason Garrett-Glaser. "The internet has been filled for quite some time with an enormous number of blog posts complaining about how Flash sucks - so much that it's sounding as if the entire internet is crying wolf. But, of course, despite the incessant complaining, they're right: Flash has terrible performance on anything other than Windows x86 and Adobe doesn't seem to care at all. But rather than repeat this ad nauseum, let’s be a bit more intellectual and try to figure out what happened."
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LLVM: Dragonegg Successfully Self-Hosts

  Submitted by tyrione General Development 2 Comments
"The dragonegg GCC plugin can host itself! Dragonegg lets you use the LLVM optimizers with GCC-4.5, much like llvm-gcc, but unlike llvm-gcc does not involve modifying GCC, thanks to the new GCC plugin infrastructure (currently one small patch is required). We built all of GCC-4.5, LLVM and dragonegg with dragonegg, then used the resulting binaries to build them all again. Why? Because we love to build! And because this was a great way of checking that nothing was miscompiled. The final dragonegg plugin was fully functional, successfully passing the entire dragonegg test suite."
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