It seems that both Youtube and Vimeo have both chosen to use their own custom controls, and disable the default controls native to the user's browser.

That wouldn't be such a big deal, except for the fact that full screen mode can currently only be entered using those default controls (making full screen mode available via a scripting api is considered a security risk, and thus discouraged by the HTML5 spec). So they're sacrificing that functionality at the alter of branding.

Ok, given the prices listed here, it looks like the un-discounted components of a common 1.6Ghz/945GSE Atom chipset are $44/$26/$13 for the processor/northbridge/southbridge, for a total of $83.

Intel doesn't seem to show bundle discounts anywhere I can find on their public site, so I can only guess at what exactly they are. If only the CPU received any discount at all, the discounted bundle bundle would cost $64, but if we assume the other components are discounted at the same rate needed to bring the Atom itself down to $25, that means the whole bundle would cost about $47. That's more than the $44 the Atom alone would cost but not by much, especially on the low end.

If my exact statement was untrue I apologize, but the core fact remains that Intel was using their processor pricing to undermine their chipset competitors.
That may be business as usual in some circumstances, but it's a problem if the business doing it is considered a monopoly, and even if they're not a monopoly it can be a problem if they're found to be dumping (ie, if the price of an Atom with a chipset bundle minus the price of an Atom alone is greater than the chipset's production costs, iirc).

Would you care to provide evidence that Intel never sold an Atom alone for more than the price of the same Atom bundled with a chipset?

There are certainly articles like this one at Reuters saying it did.

The FTC press release says:

"To remedy the anticompetitive damage alleged in the complaint, the FTC is seeking an order which includes provisions that would prevent Intel from using threats, bundled prices, or other offers to encourage exclusive deals, hamper competition, or unfairly manipulate the prices of its CPU or GPU chips

That sounds like a pretty direct strike against Intel's moves in the graphics market lately. Selling an Atom alone for more than the price of the same Atom bundled with a chipset, trying to prevent Nvidia from making chipsets for their Nehalem CPUs, bundling their own GPU on the package of all of their low to mid range next generation CPUs, etc...

It should be interesting to see how Intel responds to this. It's probably too late to make any major changes to Clarkdale/Arrandale before they ship, so on-package GPUs are definitely coming. But imagine if Intel were required to sell bare dice at fair prices (surprisingly enough, packaging a die is one of the most expensive steps of chipmaking), so that others could do the same thing. Imagine an intel chip with an on-package Nvidia or AMD GPU...

Sometimes I wonder if computers will always be built around motherboards as we know them. As motherboards shrink, and we start seeing multiple dice on a single package even in low end consumer gear, could the motherboard eventually be replaced with one big multi-die package? It would certainly reduce size and bring part counts down, and I expect it would allow for lower power consumption and higher speeds as well (although, of course, it would make building your own as an enthusiast impractical).

One problem killing the iPhone, is that most of the iPhone's weaknesses are one policy change away from disappearing.

Enough people want background apps? Well there they are.
Enough people want customizable lock screens? Alright, that's easy enough.
Enough people want shared file storage? There, done.
Enough people want post-hoc approval of apps, like Android? No problem, it'll save Apple time and money to boot.
Enough people want unsigned apps distributed outside the app store? Ok, here you go.
Enough people want Flash, or other browser plugins? Fine, Adobe has been clamoring to put Flash on iPhone since it's inception.
Enough people want root access? Fine, administration is their problem.

Apple keeps those measures of control because they help to protect their platform's image from incompetent or unscrupulous coders, and their negative impact on most users is relatively minor. If that balance ever shifts, either due to more competent coders (supposedly Flash 10.1 is heavily optimized) or more demanding users (with friends whose phones do some or all of the above), the rules can change in an instant.

The report on this this that I saw at ars technica said this is implemented using BD-Live. If that's right, then it means that any fully featured BluRay player could do it.

So Netflix will have effectively co-opted the next generation physical media installed base for their online distribution system. I think that's a pretty big deal compared semi-supporting one more console, don't you?

Quoth CNN's article:

The magsafe cords detached instantly, offering no resistance and leaving power sockets undamaged.

Finally, the stiff unibody shells meant that the villains could grab the notebooks one-handed from a corner with no flexing, and no risk to the internal circuitry, the tough aluminum bodies resisting the jostling clanks inside the sacks.

And so we see that it is true that Apple really does design for the end-user, with small efficiencies that all add up. Thanks to Apple, the scoundrels managed to load up their booty 23 Macbook Pros, 14 iPhones and nine iPod Touches in just 31 seconds.

MacBooks: Laptops for a better class of criminal!

The product page says it has 256MB of physical RAM, and 1GB virtual...
Using virtual memory on a phone's flash storage strikes me as questionable. There have to be reasons that the iPhone/Pre/Android don't do that.

Isn't all the swapping going to wear out your flash pretty fast? And, assuming this thing only has one or two flash chips like most phones, and therefore can't bond a bunch of channels together with a fancy controller for speed like a SSD, isn't it going to be really slow?

Do the previous Mameo devices do this? If so, how does it work.

Even more than on "the big three" and desktops/laptops, hardware decoders are essential on mobile hardware.

Apparently an iPhone 3GS can unofficially decode 1080p30 h264, and the ZuneHD can do 720p (and even officially supports it). That's just insane; some modern non-hardware accelerated, or even partially accelerated, desktops and laptops still have trouble playing back 1080p smoothly. Being able to do so on a cell phone, and to do so without killing the battery within seconds, is a big deal.

Lack of hardware decoders on the desktop is a minor annoyance, but for mobile hardware it's a deal breaker. And mobile is a big and rapidly expanding market.
If open source codecs are going to get widespread adoption going forward, they're going to need to get built into hardware codecs.

I actually have some hopes that Google is moving in the direction of radically improving OSS codec quality and providing hardware support via their recent purchase of ON2. If they can release VP8 as open source, along with finishing and releasing a good hardware decoder for it, they'll have put OSS codecs within spitting distance of h264 on most issues.

Don't forget the mobile market.
According to NPD, in April mobile sales were:
1,040,000 DSes and DSis
116,000 PSPs

iPhones/iTouches weren't in that report, but going by the quarterly numbers apple releases, they sold 3,793,000 iPhones in the Quarter ending March 28. And they mentioned earlier that there were 18Million iPhones out of 30Million iPhones/iTouches, so holding that ratio constant, they sold about 6,321,667 iPhones/iTouches over a 3 month period, or 2,107,222 devices per month.

Of course, the iPhone is a lot newer, and all the DSes and PSPs that have been sold still outnumber iPhones/iTouches by about 5 to 1, so it'll probably take a few years for Apple to catch up to their install base even with almost double their combined sales rate.

Still, I think it's kind of strange that Nintendo and Sony left accelerometers out of the DSi and PSP Go respectively... don't you?

Earlier prototypes used an Atom CPU, I doubt that's changed. And the connectivity is some sort of wifi, presumably g, maybe n.

It looks like a neat device, and I'm definitely interested in the cheap lightweight tablet form factor and market niche. But when I think about purchasing it I can't help comparing it in my head to the super-sized iPod tablet Apple is rumored to be working on.
The crunchpad's 12" screen is nice compared to the 8-10" expected from apple, but the atom and big screen are going to make for really crappy battery life compared to an ARM based 8-10" solution, and the Apple version will be able to do more than just web surf (a version of the iPhone SDK and app store seems inevitable). However, while the crunchpad may have missed it's $200 price target in favor of $300, the rumors of Apple's $600+ price point were never in that league to begin with.

Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet.
Thus Safari users are shown better compressed, but definitely patented, h264 streams on those sites.

IIRC some other WebKit browsers use GStreamer as the back end for their video tag support, and thus probably support Theora.

The Google case *does* relate to full texts, *and* to whether an author should be paid the price of their choosing for their work.

Basically, Google was able to settle a class action lawsuit in such a way that it was given rights to works from all members of a class (including the right to sell access to full texts for out of print books). So basically, unless you've taken action to exclude yourself from the class's deal, Google can sell almost anything you've ever written that is not currently in print, without any permission from you or your agents.

Google has used brilliant legal tricks and some paltry millions to more or less turn the copyright system from opt-in to opt-out when it comes to selling on Google Books.

I personally suspect that this will be a net win for everyone involved, Google, readers, and writers. But it would be wrong to downplay the importance of this case, and the potential impact of it's settlement.

No, it really isn't.

Free filtered internet means that all the people paying for a broadband line to read email, and occasionally browse the web, can now do so for free. Without the ~95% of customers who underuse their connections subsiding the cost of the ~5% who actually need broadband, ISPs will have to increase prices dramatically.

The end result is that only the financially well off will have access to anything the government feels like censoring on their network. And that's making the optimistic assumption that the censorship stops with government networks, and isn't extended, voluntarily or not, to the big ISPs.

What will happen to political speech when that happens? Given what we've seen of these kinds of filters thus far, they tend to pick up on key words, block entire sites for single pages, and generate a lot of what a reasonable person viewing a site would consider false positives. Will any site the agitates for the rights of sex workers, or transsexuals, or gays risk being marked as sexual content, and blocked from the vast majority of american voters? Will any site that discusses a hate crime risk being labeled as hate-speech, and excluded as well? How much harder will it be to get a major party to take up such causes in that kind of environment?

I think that free ubiquitous basic internet access is a great idea, that could do a lot of good for a lot of people and the economy overall.
But I'd gladly forgo it, if the cost is freedom of speech on the internet.
Any government supported network needs to be an unfiltered. Even forcing people to register with the government as adults to receive an unfiltered connection is far too burdensome, in that it destroys users' privacy and any potential anonymity for whistleblowers and the like. Any parents who want to restrict their kids' browsing have plenty of options to do so on their own devices, without unconstitutionally and unduly compromising adults' freedom of speech.

It's consider that a much more interesting topic.

The idea of giving free cellular data service away with a device is basically the exact opposite of what the rest of the industry does.

You can get an iPhone for $200, but then you're obligated to pay ~10x that amount for wireless service over the next couple of years. A Kindle costs $350 and has free wireless for how long? forever?

Can that business model really be profitable in the long term? If so, I'd say it's a great deal for the consumer. But I have to wonder how many people have to do a bit of web browsing on their Kindle before Amazon starts losing money on wireless bills, and decides to remove features or connectivity?