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Comment Telecoms should go to regulators, really (Score 1) 449

by ableal (#31834422) Attached to: In EU, Google Accused of YouTube "Free Ride"
Telcos bill their customers for data, and want to go to the regulators to also charge Google/etc. Fine. But, while the regulators are looking into it, perhaps they could also look into things like the "4 euro/week" subscriptions to wallpapers and ringtones, plus the premium SMS charges for 1-in-30 drawings of movie tickets, etc. The telcos' cut of those interesting money-transfer operations may not be big enough.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Symbian soon to be Free Open Source Software (infoworld.com)

Submitted by xlotlu
xlotlu writes: InfoWorld reports that Symbian is to become Free Open Source Software in a matter of hours.

108 packages will be available at Symbian's website, mostly under the Eclipse Public License, in what is probably the largest open source migration project in history: more than 40 millions line of code representing 10 years of development, currently in use on 330 million devices.

In the Wired coverage of the story, Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, picks on the Android platform, saying that "About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more. And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary."

Submission + - Why you need TRIM for your SSD (bit-tech.net)

Submitted by mr_sifter
mr_sifter writes: SSDs promise blazing fast access times and data transfer speeds — but many SSDs suffer from horrendous performance degradation over time. The answer, according to drive manufacturers and Microsoft, is TRIM: but does it really make a difference? And how bad is the performance drop without TRIM? Our extensive testing shows that efficient implementation of TRIM is actually crucial for maintaining SSD performance.
Piracy

App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million 202

Posted by Soulskill from the arrr-me-hearties dept.
An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.: "There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers." A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.
Announcements

Submission + - DataSlide's Hard Rectangular Drive - 64 heads (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by ableal
ableal writes: Magnetic recording, but instead of spinning disks, uses a massive 2-dimensional array of read-write heads over a piezo-electric-driven oscillating rectangular plate — the result is said to be 160,000 random IOPS with a 500MB/sec transfer rate. The 2006 slides linked in the article (.ppt, not PDF), in page 14, say that the plate would be oscillating at 800 Hz (moving +/- 80 micron). The current website page, http://www.dataslide.com/technology.html , appears to say 250 micron, no frequency given. Anyway, it's a lot more than 64 read-write heads, but only 64 are used at a time. Still looking at millisecond latency, if the 800 Hz holds. Cum grano salis.

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