These latest reports add to previous claims that similarly predicted Apple would eventually wrap Snow Leopard in a new interface rumored to go by the code-name “marble.” Details were sparse, but speculation pointed to a move towards a darker chrome motif for application windows alongside an inverted menubar with light text on a dark background.
Apple has been targeted twice in lawsuits this week by companies that claim patent infringement in the iPhone, the App Store, and even the chips that power its camera. The most notable, from Affinity Labs, accuses Apple of violating three patents for sending information wirelessly to a portable device, including for browsing downloading online co
The Federal Trade Commission held its long-awaited Seattle conference on DRM. As expected, agreement was hard to come by, but the agency made clear that it has had enough of hidden DRM schemes and companies that pull the plug on authentication servers and leave the users who didn’t pirate content with nothing.
alphadogg writes “Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company’s applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol. ‘We can provide all Google services over IPv6,’ said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a ‘small, core team’ spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
ericatcw writes “Do you love the smooth, silky performance of a multi-core PC loaded to the gills with the fastest RAM? Take a look at Dell’s new Precision T7500 desktop. According to Computerworld, the T7500 will come with 12 memory slots that can accommodate 16 GB of PC-106000 (1333 MHz) DDR3 RAM for a total of 192 GB. Dell’s not the only one — Lenovo, Cisco (with blade servers reportedly up to 384 GB in memory) and Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel’s new Nehalem architecture to enable unprecedented amounts of RAM. But beware! Despite the depressed DRAM market, loading up on memory could see the cost of RAM eclipse the cost of the rest of your PC by 20-fold or more.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CWmike writes “As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix’s 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles. So now that we’re more than 30 years into the era of the personal computer, Computerworld writers and editors, like all technology aficionados, find ourselves with lots of memories and reactions to the OSes of yesteryear (pics galore). We have said goodbye to some of them with regret. (So long, AmigaOS!) Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!) Some, we threw out with great force. (Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, MS-DOS 4.0!) Today we honor a handful of the most memorable operating systems and interfaces that have graced our desktops over the years. Plus: We take a look back at 40 years since Unix was introduced.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: “If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Island Dog sends news that shortly after Valve showed off their new anti-piracy methods in Steamworks, Microsoft and Stardock were quick to demonstrate their new, similar technologies as well. All three companies are bending over backwards to say that this is not traditional DRM. Stardock (the company behind the Gamer’s Bill of Rights) calls their system Game Object Obfuscation (Goo), “a tool that allows developers to encapsulate their game executable into a container that includes the original executable plus Impulse Reactor, Stardock’s virtual platform, into a single encrypted file. When a player runs the game for the first time, the Goo’d program lets the user enter in their email address and serial number which associates their game to that person as opposed to a piece of hardware like most activation systems do. Once validated, the game never needs to connect to the Internet again.” Microsoft’s update to Games for Windows Live has similar protections. “You can sign in and play your game on as many systems as possible, but you have to have a license attached to your account. Of course, this only works for online games.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader sent in a video clip showing Sun experimenting with shoving a data center through a simulated 6.7 Earthquake. Everything stays running, but some power cords came out and some screws worked loose. It’s still kind of neat to see a bunch of racks shake like a polaroid.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thelasko writes “In an effort to knock Buster’s socks off, the Mythbusters accidentally created an explosion so large it shattered windows in a small town over a mile from the blast site. The Mythbusters had the broken windows replaced the very same day. The Esparto, California fire chief says that several firefighters were on hand for the blast, but he didn’t notify residents because, ‘Mythbusters is supposed to be a really popular show. Everybody would have been out there. We would have had to cancel it because it would have been too dangerous.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
