Gadget & Tech

Seagate today updated the Barracuda line to include the industry’s first drive to use an 6Gbps SATA interface. The 2TB Barracuda XT has twice as much theoretical bandwidth as existing SATA II drives and gives the disk up to 600MBps in burst transfers. Read More

Anyone who deals with Apple on a regular basis knows it is a company that gives information on its own terms. But now even the federal government is having problems getting a clear answer regarding Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application for the iPhone.
On July 28, Google announced that the calling and message service application had been rejected from Apple’s App Store. Three days later, Google, Apple, and AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the U.S., received inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission regarding the app’s rejection. In its answer to the FCC, Apple said that the application was not rejected, but was still “under review.” In Google’s response–the most interesting parts redacted until Friday–it told the FCC that a series of conversations took place between Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller and Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Alan Eustace during the month of July, including one on July 7, where Schiller told Eustace that Google Voice was being rejected for duplicating the phone dialing function of the iPhone.
The discrepancy between what Google said and what Apple said in their answers to the FCC, of course, leads to many more questions. In response, Apple released the following statement Friday:
“We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google. Read More

The Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, the world’s largest volunteer effort to help protect oceans and waterways, gets underway Saturday with hundreds of thousands of volunteers expected to pick up trash on beaches around the globe. The International Coastal Cleanup has been held on the third Saturday of September since 1986.
The volunteers keep track of every piece of trash they find and report it to the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, which uses that information to produce an annual country-by-country, state-by-state index of marine debris.

Greenpeace Water Patrol volunteers and students from Laguna Province lead a trash cleanup at Laguna Lake, south of Manila, Philippines. September 20, 2008. (Photo courtesy Greenpeace Southeast Asia)

Of the 43 items tracked during the Coastal Cleanup, the top three items of trash found in 2008 were cigarette butts, plastic bags, and food wrappers/containers, according to the Ocean Conservancy’s latest report.

During the 2008 Cleanup, some 390,880 volunteers removed 6.8 million pounds of debris from 6,485 sites in 100 countries as well as 42 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

They removed more than 400 pounds of debris for every mile of beach cleaned. Read More

AT&T’s decision to delay iPhone MMS to early fall doesn’t stop ambitious folks such as ourselves from finding a way around it. And we have. You wanna do it to? click here for complete instructions for enabling MMS on iPhone 3.1.

Soon to be proposed FCC rules may stop the likes of Comcast from discriminating against P2P applications on their networks, and AT&T sure will have a tougher time justifying why it won’t let the iPhone’s version of SlingPlayer run on 3G while giving WinMo and BlackBerry users all the bandwidth they can handle. Julius Genachowski, the new chairman of the entity, is slated to discuss the new rules on Monday, though he isn’t expected to dig too deep into the minutiae. Read More

AT&T’s Microcell acts like a mini tower that will boost 3G reception in homes with poor network coverage. There is no official confirmation on this thus far, and the initial markets could include more cities if and when AT&T finally rolls out the hardware, in the next few days it will come to select markets that include: Atlanta, San Antonio, Seattle and North Carolina. Read More

Does Apple have the right to tell people who buy iPhones to use them only in the way it wants them to. Why shouldn’t we be able to run buggy software if we choose to?

But it’s not quite so simple. Jennifer S. Granick, a lawyer for the E.F.F., said that Apple can force buyers of the phone to agree to any conditions it wants to write into a user agreement. But those agreements would be governed by contract law, which would force Apple to sue users and prove actual damages.

Under copyright law, Apple would have the right to claim statutory damages of up to $2,500 “per act of circumvention.” People who jailbreak phones, might even be subject to criminal penalties of as long as five years, if they circumvented copyright for a financial gain.

“Apple is bringing the hammer down in a way that Congress never intended and is really severe for something that is just not wrong,” Ms. Granick said. An Apple spokesman declined to comment beyond its legal filing.

Are you fired up yet? Read More

Linux is free operating system, but there are still many users afraid to use it, if you give linux a chance, you will become a fun. They are many apps available in linux for free, from animation to audio and video, from image authoring/editing program to office to internet browser and more, click here to see the top 50 linux alternatives to popular apps provided by Blair Mathis from laptoplogic.com.

The new iPhone firmware 3.0 is rumored at Macword Expo 2009 to have four-core iPhone CPU support, this would make it even more a gaming device beating the PSP in terms of performance.
Imagination Technologies will announce the PowerVR SGX543 at CES , it’s the firm’s first multi-core capable GPU technology and Apple could have access to it.

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Three major electronics manufacturers have agreed to plead guilty to a price-fixing conspiracy and pay $585 million in criminal fines for their roles in the pricing of LCD display panels, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

The Justice Department said LG Display Company, previously LG Philips, will pay by far the largest fine – $400 million, the second highest criminal fine ever imposed for price-fixing. The firm agreed to plead guilty to participating in a conspiracy from 2001 to 2006 to set the price of LCD panels worldwide.

Chunghwa will pay a $65 million fine for participating with LG and other unnamed co-conspirators during the five-year period.

Sharp agreed to pay a $120 million fine for three separate conspiracies with unnamed partners who sold LCD panels with artificially inflated prices to Dell for computer monitors and laptops, Motorola for panels in Razr mobile phones and Apple for panels used in iPod portable music players.

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