| ARM-based netbooks set to arrive on US shores by year end August 3, 2009 at 10:44 pm |
| DigiTimes has been making the rounds of the Taiwanese OEMs, and the company claims to have the scoop on a coming wave of ARM-based netbooks, often called "smartbooks," that will wash ashore in the US in the last quarter of this year. Smartbooks based on Qualcomm's SnapDragon processor and NVIDIA's Tegra line are allegedly on deck from netbook names like ASUS, Acer, and Foxconn. Lesser-known Chinese netbook maker Compal, which was showing off products at this past CES but which doesn't yet ship to the US, is also named as an ARM netbook maker, as are Inventec and Mobinnova. Then there's the Touch Book, from Always Innovating, which sent out a note today to everyone who contacted them via web form (including Ars) to say that the device is is now shipping. We haven't really covered the Touch Book, but boy have we been getting reader mail about it. A lot of folks want us to review it, and I've contacted the company in an effort to get a review unit. (No response so far, but I'll keep trying.) The Touch Books' main gimmick is that its screen can be detached and used as a standalone tablet, and the second gimmick is that it runs the TI OMAP 3 chip, which is looking like a killer PMP/tablet processor. 
 
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| Accused domain thief faces jail time for "stealing" P2P.com August 3, 2009 at 8:12 pm |
| Domain name investing has been around almost as long as domain names were open for purchase by the general public, and the practice has picked up since the mid-90s, as companies stake out their spot on the digital frontier. Domain names can be so valuable, in fact, that people actually steal them to sell to unsuspecting companies or other domain name investors. The legal process to combat a domain name thief is complicated at best, but there is hope, as police have arrested a man accused of stealing the domain P2P.com. An initial investigation by Florida police, where the victims reside, was dropped for lack of evidence. The rightful owners of P2P.com then filed a civil suit as they believed it was their only recourse. However, Detective Sergeant John Gorman of the New Jersey State Police Cyber-Crimes Unit later reviewed the case, and asked the victims if they wanted to pursue the case in New Jersey, where the alleged thief lived. Based on evidence gathered for the civil suit, the NJ District Attorney approved an indictment. On July 30, Daniel Goncalves, a 25-year-old computer technician for a NJ law firm, was arrested at his home and his computers were seized. The first-ever criminal arrest for domain name theft has been made in the great state of New Jersey. 
 
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| DPI vendor says 90% of ISP customers engage in traffic discrimination August 3, 2009 at 5:42 pm |
| In our globalized, post-industrial world, a single Canadian company can shape the Internet experience for 20 percent of the world's wireline broadband users. Sandvine makes deep packet inspection hardware that can identify and then block, shape, degrade, fold, spindle, or mutilate user traffic coming from particular applications such as Skype or BitTorrent clients. The 160 worldwide ISPs who use the company's products love this particular capability so much that a full 90 percent of them employ it to "manage" their networks in a discriminatory way. According to the company, these 160 ISPs serve 20 percent of the world's wireline broadband connections. If 90 percent of the ISPs shape traffic by application, Sandvine equipment alone may be responsible for the application-specific discrimination that 18 percent of world wireline broadband users face—and that figure says nothing about all the other ISPs who use similar products from other vendors. If you thought that network neutrality was some kind of default position for the worldwide Internet, think again. 
 
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| Titan Studios announces fixes for Fat Princess August 3, 2009 at 12:50 pm |
| Despite the fact that we love Fat Princess here at Ars, some readers have reported experiencing problems like lag during online play and general connection problems. Apparently they aren't the only ones, because Titan Studios has announced that it is aware of the problems and has some fixes on the way. According to the developer's blog, they already have solutions to both problems in development. As of right now, the problem with lag in games is due to the following reason: "The matchmaking system will randomly pick potential servers bases on a number of criteria. As implemented, the results that are returned are fit in some regards, but sometimes have a high ping for your location." Titan is working on a system that will now favor servers with low ping numbers. As for connectivity issues, the studio has already got a patch in place that they're working to get through the Sony testing process as soon as they can. Some comments across the 'Net have been accusing Titan of inadequately testing their game—hence the problems—though the studio has made a point of denying this. "Fat Princess went through comprehensive testing with Sony in the US and Europe and a beta, but these issues did not manifest until the game went live at scale," the developer's blog states. "Rest assured, we’re working on it, and think we have it largely addressed."  
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| Google using billboards to lure IT into Google Apps embrace August 3, 2009 at 11:08 am |
| Google has begun a new ad campaign for its enterprise services, but it isn't your typical Google venture—it's going oldschool. Starting today and running for the next four weeks in August, Google will be running a series of billboards—yes, real ones—in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco in order to showcase the benefits of "going Google" for business. The hope is that more business owners will ditch managing their own e-mail, calendaring, and doc sharing solutions in favor of Google Apps—especially now that they're out of beta. For those who want to see the billboards for themselves, they will be placed along Highway 101 in San Francisco, the West Side Highway in New York, the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago (and that's why we haven't rushed out to go see it yet), and the Mass Pike in Boston. Google says that the billboards will be changed every single weekday for the next month, but you environmentalists in the crowd should worry not—all vinyl used on the billboards will be recycled and turned into either computer bags or shopping bags. 
 
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| DSi sells 1.7 million in US, Facebook application tonight August 3, 2009 at 10:50 am |
| If you've been taking snapshots with the Nintendo DSi's built-in camera and you've been wondering what to do with them, wonder no more! After 5 pm Eastern time a system update will be made available for the DSi, allowing you to upload the pictures directly to Facebook! If your profile has been lacking in grainy pictures of you wearing a Mario hat, this is the perfect solution to your problem. Nintendo explains the process. "While reviewing pictures they've stored in the Nintendo DSi Camera album, which includes photos taken by users and manipulated using the built-in interactive lenses, users can simply tap the Facebook icon on the system's touch screen to instantly transmit photos to the user's Facebook profile," the company states. "The user's system must be configured to a wireless broadband Internet connection for the transmission of photos." The announcement does give us some other interesting information, such as the fact the DSi has sold 1.7 million units in the US alone. That's not bad for a system that launched at a higher price point than the original, featuring updates the gaming public wasn't sure they wanted... such as the ability to update Facebook remotely.  
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| The Matrix Online? "No... not like this." August 3, 2009 at 10:30 am |
| It's odd when online games come back into the news because they shut down. There is something strangely touching about a world—even an unpopular one—where all the stories, all the gaming, and all the hours people put into it disappear when the publisher finally pulls the plug on the servers. The Matrix Online has been shut down, but at least players had one last party before things all went away. The Matrix Online offered a weirdly meta experience, as real people created virtual players to go online in a virtual world pretending to be a virtual world. The story continued where the movies left off, but the game never caught on with players; the most impressive thing about its death over the weekend was that it was still going up until then to begin with. Players enjoyed parties, talked about their time in the game, and the developers had fun adding neat effects to the sky and the environment for players to enjoy. The game was remembered fondly before the plug was pulled, but now... it's all over. When death comes, we only remember the good times. The game's characters were smashed into tiny balls before the servers were shut down.  
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| This week in game releases: August 3-9, 2009 August 3, 2009 at 10:05 am |
| Pick of the week: SingStar Queen (PS2, PS3) While Rock Band and Guitar Hero may get all the glory when it comes to the rhythm game genre, we here at Opposable Thumbs have a soft spot for Sony's SingStar karaoke series. There's just something great about getting a bunch of friends together, and then looking (and sounding) like idiots while playing the game. The series has taken a turn towards artist-themed games, starting with ABBA, and continuing with the release of SingStar Queen. The tracklist is impressive, and boasts such great tunes as "Don't Stop Me Now," "Fat Bottomed Girls," and, of course, the perfect sing-a-long tune, "Bohemian Rhapsody." It may not break any new ground, but for fans of both Queen and karaoke, it's about as perfect as you can get. 
 
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| Breakin' up is hard to do: Schmidt leaves Apple board August 3, 2009 at 9:18 am |
| After months of controversy over possible conflicts of interest between Google and Apple, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's Board of Directors. The decision comes after the FTC launched a probe into the two companies to see whether competition between them had been reduced thanks to Schmidt's (and Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson's) presence on Apple's board. Continuing concerns from shareholders have forced Schmidt to discuss the issue with the board, apparently resulting in his decision to leave. "Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. "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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| Network neutrality in Congress, round 3: Fight! August 3, 2009 at 9:00 am |
| The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009" (PDF) means that legislators will duke it out a third time. Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to "block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade" access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device. ISPs would also be forbidden to "impose a charge" on content providers that goes "beyond the end-user charges associated with providing the service to such a provider." In other words, AT&T doesn't have to let Google "use its pipes for free," but it can only collect the money is owed through customary peering and transit arrangements. 
 
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| The prospects of Microsoft Word in the wiki-based world August 3, 2009 at 12:04 am |
| I was having dinner with friends the other day and we started talking about word processing programs we'd all used in office jobs. "You know, I've been using Word for over 20 years," I said, and immediately felt older than dirt. But it was true. The first word processor I ever used was a combination of the PIE text editor and the TEXT formatter, both for CP/M, almost thirty years ago, back when computers were powered by tiny pterodactyls in cages. From there I jumped to DOS machines and the famous WordStar, once the most popular word processor of all time. Around 1987 I switched to Microsoft Word for DOS, version 3.0. I used to laugh at the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS people, with their silly keyboard templates and inscrutable function-key combinations—I had proper menus and italic text that really looked italic! Of course I also had slow scrolling speeds in graphics mode to view those italics, and bizarre text transitions that would happen when I deleted invisible formatting commands. Word for Windows 1.1 was a delight, with the transition to a GUI interface, then Word for Windows 2.0 both pleased me with a bevy of new features and frustrated me because it took twice the RAM just to get up in the morning. (Macintosh Word 6 users, I'm sure, have no sympathies). Word 95 was really just Word 6 with red squiggle spell checking and long filenames, and after that things pretty much stayed the same until Word 2007, when Microsoft changed the entire user interface because it was getting too hard to find all the new features they kept cramming in. Jensen Harris has a great series of posts examining the history of Word's user interface and the reasoning for the UI rewrite. It's actually somewhat astonishing to learn how many features Microsoft added in each version. 
 
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| NetNewsWire beta beginning of transition to Google Reader (Updated) August 2, 2009 at 10:46 pm |
| NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons has released the sixth beta of version 3.2, finally adding the Google Reader integration that users have been requesting for some time. However, the release was also accompanied by an announcement from NewsGator that the company would discontinue its online feed reading and syncing service, instead opting to transition all of its clients—including the popular Feed Demon for Windows—to Google Reader for syncing. NetNewsWire is arguably the most popular RSS reader on Mac OS X, and is a favorite here in Orbiting HQ. The software was developed by Simmons for his independent Ranchero Software in 2002, but was later acquired by NewsGator, then a popular online feed reader. The company eventually made its online reader, which originally had paid subscriptions, as well as its NetNewsWire and FeedDemon desktop clients, available for no charge. Instead, NewsGator intended to make money on its enterprise and server software, and its clients would fuel ubiquity of RSS use. 
 
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