Apple's ALAC lossless codec is only a dozen C/C++ files (C for the actual codec, C++ for the file format). It's easy to understand, port, and include in other software. To build it you type 'make'. So from a source code perspective ALAC is much better... FLAC has many dozens of source files, assembly, uses automake etc so it's annoying to work with the actual source.

Not that any of that matter to users, but to programmers ALAC is *much* better.

It comes with the wireless modem, not a data plan. You still have to buy a 'day pass' for however much that is or add it to some wireless plan (article says $10/mo to add it to existing plan).

You'd probably be better off just tethering a MacBook Pro to your phone anyway.

Sun's CNP is modeled after Tera's MTA architecture (now named Cray again), which trades memory latency for throughput. Basically, in MTA (massively threaded architecture) each of 128 processor threads issues a few memory fetch instructions and waits for the memory to arrive (dozens to hundreds of cycles). This happens for every thread so the effect is that memory fetches and execution time are separated... iow time=max(execution,fetch) vs time=exeuction+fetch of normal processors. This also makes having a pipeling irrelevant so no effore is wasted in branch prediction.

That's great for scientific apps since they are massively parallel... Sun has taken the same idea and scaled it down to 4 overlapping threads so normal applications can benefit. While it can be used to run 4 separate process threads at a time, at least the MTA's is fine-grained so that what really happens is that the compile changes a for (;;i++) loop into four (;;i+=4) loops and runs them in parallel.

This technology done right means a massive performance boost (as in like 25-50%) while also simplifying the processor. Contrast that this Hyperthreading, which complicates the processor and only gets ~5-8% benefit on average... it's mostly designed to minimize context switch times.