Apple: One Large Depressing Metallic Greyathon

Apple 55 Comments
Using his blue box, Steve Wozniak once called the Vatican (for free), and, imitating Henry Kissinger's voice, asked if he could speak with the pope. The pope turned out to be asleep. Wozniak pulled these pranks together with Steve Jobs, with whom he'd found Apple computer not long after. Oh, how the times have changed. How can a company with its roots in phreaking, pranks, and home-made computing end up the way it is today?
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Microsoft Acknowledges Linux Threat

  Submitted by caffeine deprived Microsoft 14 Comments
Microsoft for the first time has named Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical as competitors to its Windows client business in its annual filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The move is an acknowledgment of the first viable competition from Linux to Microsoft's Windows client business, due mainly to the use of Linux on netbooks, which are rising in prominence as alternatives to full-sized notebooks.
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Critical Bug Could Derail Windows 7 Launch

Windows 25 Comments
Windows 7 RTM Build 7600.16385 includes a potentially fatal bug that, once triggered, could bring down the entire OS in a matter of seconds: "The bug in question - a massive memory leak involving the chkdsk.exe utility - appears when you attempt to run the program against a secondary (i.e. not the boot partition) hard disk using the "/r" (read and verify all file data) parameter. The problem affects both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and is classified as a 'showstopper' in that it can cause the OS to crash (Blue Screen of Death) as it runs out of physical memory," reports InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy. Microsoft is claiming the bug is a chipset driver issue, but Kennedy's testing of the latest Intel INF Update Utility driver set and VMware virtualized chipset drivers suggests otherwise. "This is clearly a Microsoft bug - and the fact that it manifests itself via the chkdsk.exe utility makes me wonder if it isn't something intrinsic to the Windows 7 version of the New Technology File System (NTFS) driver stack." Worse still, user comments suggest that Windows Server 2008 R2 suffers from the same flaw.
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Google To Buy Video Compression Technology Outfit On2

  Submitted by John Mills Google 22 Comments
"Google confirmed today that it plans to buy digital video compression outfit On2 Technologies in an all-stock agreement, valued at $106.5m. Mountain View said On2 shareholders will be handed 60 cents worth of Google class A common shares for each outstanding share they hold in the company. Clifton Park, New Jersey-based On2 employs around 60 staff. It started life as the Duck Corporation in 1992. On2's VP6 codec is licensed by Adobe, for its Flash Player and Flash Lite 3 for mobile phones. Other major customers include AOL, Freescale, Nokia and Sun Microsystems."
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Apple Censors Dictionary iPhone App

Apple 45 Comments
" is a terrific app - pretty much exactly what I've always wanted in an iPhone dictionary, and, yes, with both a better user experience and better dictionary content than the other low-cost dictionaries in the App Store. But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed "objectionable" by Apple's App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating. Apple censored an English dictionary. A dictionary. A reference book. For words contained in all reasonable dictionaries. For words contained in dictionaries that are used every day in elementary school libraries and classrooms."
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KDE 4.3 Released

  Submitted by rexstuff KDE 163 Comments
The KDE team has released KDE 4.3. This release comes packed with improvements and bug fixes - in fact, over the last six months, 10000 bugs were squashed, 2000 feature requests handled, and 63000 changes were checked in by 700 people. We've already talked about this new release in quite some detail last week, but let's take a look at the most important new features anyway.
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Sony Open Sources Digital Effects Software

  Submitted by tupp Multimedia, AV 4 Comments
Sony Pictures Imageworks has released five digital image-manipulation software tools under open source licenses. Imageworks (the unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions that handles visual effects and digital character animation) has contributed other open source software in the past. However, the release of five tools at once brings its involvement in open source to a new level. The new effort includes a Web site aimed at keeping open source developers up to date on the projects. All five of the tools are licensed under the new BSD license, and are hosted on Google Code.
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Update: CentOS/Lance Davis Situation Resolved

  Submitted by hornett Red Hat 6 Comments
It looks like the CentOS leadership situation is moving towards a resolution: "The CentOS Development team had a routine meeting today with Lance Davis in attendance. During the meeting a majority of issues were resolved immediately and a working agreement was reached with deadlines for remaining unresolved issues. There should be no impact to any CentOS users going forward. The CentOS project is now in control of the CentOS.org and CentOS.info domains and owns all trademarks, materials, and artwork in the CentOS distributions. We look forward to working with Lance to quickly complete all the agreed upon issues. More information will follow soon."
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Dr. Eric Schmidt Resigns from Apple’s Board of Directors

  Submitted by Adurbe Apple 6 Comments
Apple today announced that Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, is resigning from Apple's Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006. "Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, "Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple's core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric's effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple's Board."
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Apple Tried to Silence Exploding iPod Victim with Gagging Order

  Submitted by anonymous Apple 66 Comments
I think we just found out why we aren't hearing more stories of exploding and burning iPods. Ken Stanborough had to throw his daughter Ellie's iPod Touch outside, because it got too hot to hold, and he could see vapour. Within 30 seconds, he could see smoke, he heard a pop, and the Touch went 10ft into the air. After contacting Apple, the company denied liability, but offered a refund. However, Apple said that in accepting the money, Stanborough was not allowed to talk about the existence of the agreement - or else Apple would sue him. Update: Apple told Sky News Online that the letter with the gagging order is standard practice.

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Net Applications Adds Country Level Weighting

  Submitted by Luis In the News 20 Comments
It's market share/installed base/whatever time! Net Applications' figures had been under review for a while, and now we know why: they've finally done what should have been done ages ago. Namely, they've added country-level weighting to their figures. They also added this retrospectively, meaning all previous figures have been updated to reflect the change. This has devastating effects for some.
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