A Michigan-based networking company on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Google, Microsoft, and Apple, alleging that all three tech giants violated a patent it owns on the use of document-preview icons–or thumbnails–in operating systems.

In the suit (PDF), Cygnus Systems targets Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Vista and Internet Explorer 8, and Apple’s iPhone, Safari, and Mac OS X as patent infringers. Apple uses the patent-protected technology in its Finder and Cover Flow Mac OS X features, the lawsuit claims.

Cygnus describes the technology covered by the patent as “methods and systems for accessing one or more computer files via a graphical icon, wherein the graphical icon includes an image of a selected portion or portions of one or more computer files.”

E-mails seeking comment from Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Cygnus’ attorney were not immediately returned.

The case was filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona, where company owner Gregory Swartz lives, according to PCWorld.

Cygnus was granted the patent in March 2008, according to the lawsuit, although it first applied for it back in 2001 as a continuation to a 1998 application, according to Ars Technica, which appeared to report the case first.

Cygnus is seeking damages and a permanent injunction to prevent further alleged infringement. It has also indicated that it might go after other companies as defendants.

More Stories at-

http://gizmodo.com/5119074/tiny-company-sues-apple-microsoft-and-google-has-balls-the-size-of-texas

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4242

Dentsu, Japan’s largest ad agency, said it will team up with Nintendo to launch a video distribution service on the Wii.

The two companies plan to offer programs created specifically for the service, a Dentsu representative said Thursday. By contrast, most online channels tend to carry existing TV shows and movies. According to the Nikkei business daily, the programs will focus on cartoons and other entertainment.

Viewers will need to pay to see some of the programs, while others will be offered free of charge and accompanied by ads, the representative said.

Nintendo had sold 34.6 million Wii consoles as of the end of September, far outselling Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3.

Dentsu and Nintendo will launch the new service in Japan next year, while the timing for overseas sales has yet to be set, the Dentsu representative said. ( 2008 Reuters Limited)

Read More at-

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21627

 http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE4BN4JR20081224

Intel and Nvidia are entering into a new, nasty phase of competition. What’s at stake? Only the future of the personal computer.

Though the Santa Clara, Calif., neighbors (only a couple of miles from each other) have never really been on speaking terms, the rivalry is intensifying with the emergence of the Netbook–small, lightweight laptops priced below $500.

The competitive backdrop is still the same–Intel’s longstanding (and very successful) vision of a CPU-centric universe versus Nvidia’s creed that graphics processing matters more and more in a multimedia-intensive world.

The challenge for Nvidia is that as laptops downsize into Netbooks, a graphics vacuum has been created. And Nvidia abhors a graphics vacuum.

Nvidia’s vision of the Netbook core

(Credit: Nvidia)

Inside almost every Acer, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell Netbook beats an Intel silicon core. Both CPU and GPU–the latter in the form of the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950. Read the rest at-http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10127699-92.html

http://www.vindy.com/news/2008/dec/21/pc-makers-aim-for-more-sales-with-netbooks/

http://www.newmobilecomputing.com/story/20671/NetBooks_To_Get_Serious_Performance_Boost_Next_Year

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Warner Music Group ordered YouTube on Saturday to remove all music videos by its artists from the popular online video-sharing site after contract negotiations broke down.

The order could affect hundreds of thousands of videos clips, as it covers Warner Music’s recorded artists as well as the rights for songs published by its Warner/Chappell unit, which includes many artists not signed to Warner Music record labels.

The talks fell apart early on Saturday because Warner wants a bigger share of the huge revenue potential of YouTube’s massive visitor traffic. There were no reports on what Warner was seeking.

“We simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide,” Warner said in a statement.

YouTube is hugely popular, with more than 100 million viewers in the United States alone in October, according to comScore, a Web audience measurement firm. Read the rest at- http://uk.reuters.com/article/industryNews/idUKTRE4BJ1EY20081220

Talks break down; Warner Music pulls videos from YouTube

Warner Music Content Disappears From YouTube

MySpace is getting back into the business of blocking third party widgets, it seems - today they’ve banned embedded music widgets from the fast growing Project Playlist. But unlike previous 2006 and 2007 blocks of iMeem, Photobucket and many others, this time MySpace is doing it under threat of litigation from the major labels.

We first got word from MySpace users that their Playlist widgets are simply vanishing from their MySpace profiles earlier today. When we contacted MySpace they confirmed the ban, noting that they have received infringement notices from “major music companies”:

MySpace is an open platform that welcomes all developers to build rich and legitimate applications for its global community. We take copyright issues very seriously and our goal is to help developers build a substantial business by creating an environment that respects rights holders and protects their content.MySpace has received notices of infringement about Project Playlist at different times from several of the major music companies currently suing Project Playlist. Per our policy of taking very seriously the requests of rights holders to block access to third party sites that are believed to be infringing, we have evaluated the requests of the major music companies and determined that it is in our best interest not to allow Project Playlist widgets on MySpace, and effective immediately, we will no longer be allowing these widgets within the MySpace platform. Any third party widgets (including any music widgets) are welcome on MySpace so long as they do not include infringing content?we encourage our users to utilize the many legitimate applications found on MySpace and across the Web. Read the rest at- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/19/AR2008121903102.html

More articles at-

Warner, EMI, Universal force MySpace (and Facebook?) to remove Project Playlist

The mixtape wars keep on: MySpace bans Project Playlist

MySpace Forced to Give Up Project Playlist Due to Copyright Infringement Issues

NASA researchers this week said Mars appears to have been more hospitable to life in the past than previously believed. Using the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM, on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have found carbonate minerals on the planet. Because carbonates dissolve rapidly in acid, their presence has forced researchers to revise conclusions based on previous evidence that the Martian environment was primarily acidic. NASA says that its findings, published in the Dec. 19 issue of Science magazine, indicate that different types of watery environments existed, raising the chance that at least one may have supported life.

“Although we have not found the types of carbonate deposits which might have trapped an ancient atmosphere,” said Bethany Ehlmann, lead author of the article and a spectrometer team member from Brown University, in a statement, “we have found evidence that not all of Mars experienced an intense, acidic weathering environment 3.5 billion years ago, as has been proposed. We’ve found at least one region that was potentially more hospitable to life.”   Read the rest at- http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212501435&subSection=All+Stories

more articles at-

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/20/nasa_mars_findings/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/12/081219-mars-carbonate.html

In the early 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram shocked America when he demonstrated that ordinary people will commit acts of violence that conflict with their personal conscience and moral convictions if instructed to do so by an authority figure.

A researcher prepares for a Milgram-type experiment in which some subjects believe they are shocking other study participants with electricity — and they see how far these people will go to hurt their fellow man if prompted by an authority figure.

(Courtesy Dr. Jerry Burger)

Now, a replication of that famous experiment is uncovering some of the same findings and controversy.

In the original experiment, Milgram asked ordinary people to administer painful — and in some cases, even fatal — shocks to other people posing as research subjects. The maximum voltage they could administer was 450 volts — enough to cause permanent damage or even death to the study subject.

In reality, the “research subjects” were not receiving any shock. But the act of inflicting harm on another individual was still very much real to the people administering the voltage. Read the rest at-http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=6496911&page=1

More at-

http://uk.reuters.com/article/burningIssues/idUKTRE4BI0VQ20081219

http://chattahbox.com/science/2008/12/19/experiment-shows-humans-still-unable-to-say-no-to-authority/

Will “Halo 3” players want to make cute little avatars on their Xbox 360s?

Well, guess what? They’ll have to. It’s the first thing you’re prompted to do in the New Xbox Experience, the shiny makeover to the Xbox interface that rolled out on Wednesday.

The NXE, as it’s called, is an update to the front-end of the Xbox Live online system, which is, without question, the industry standard.

Since its inception three years ago, the Xbox Live Marketplace — the storefront for the system — has grown far beyond Microsoft’s expectations. And the Xbox Live interface, called the “blade” system, became ill-equipped to handle the deluge of downloadable games, demos, trailers and movies that came to populate it.

Marc Whitten, general manager for Xbox Live, says they anticipated maybe 200 items in their online store when it launched. “But where we ended up, we have over 20,000, and we’ve had over 500 million downloads inside of our marketplace since we launched the 360,” he says. And from watching that growth, he says it became clear how to change it……………-you can find the rest at-

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27811886/

Toshiba unveils a 43nm MLC SSD with 512GB of storage

Las Vegas (CA) – Toshiba said it will showcase a 512 GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive at next month’s Consumer Electronics show (CES). The 2.5” drive is likely to be the highest-capacity SSD when shown at the tradeshow, but the device will not go into production until the second half of next year.

Among the issues that some users have with SSDs are price and storage capacity. It’s easy to recognize that SSD perform better than a traditional HDD, but it’s very difficult to argue that the increased performance justifies the often many fold increase in price an SSD commands over similar traditional HDDs.

Toshiba has addressed the easiest to defeat of the two concerns — storage capacity. Toshiba is the first company to introduce a 512GB SSD built on 43nm MLC NAND technology. The 512GB SSD uses a traditional notebook 2.5-inch form factor and is aimed at the consumer notebook space.

Alongside the 512GB SSD Toshiba has also announced other SSDs using the same 43nm MLC technology including SSDs with 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB of storage. All of the drives use advanced MLC controller technology, which allows them to achieve higher read/write speeds, parallel data transfers and wear leveling.(more at- http://www.dailytech.com/Toshiba+Takes+Its+SSDs+to+512GB/article13719c.htm 

Also on-

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-40638-135.html

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2337194,00.asp

A video card, also known as a graphics accelerator card, display adapter, or graphics card,
is a hardware component whose function is to generate and output images
to a display.

Some video cards offer added functions, such as video capture, TV
tuner adapter, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding, FireWire, mouse, light pen,
and joystick connectors, or even the ability to connect multiple
monitors.

A common misconception regarding video cards is that they are
strictly used for video games. Video cards instead have a much broader
range of capability. Being specialized for video, output video cards
improve what a computer monitor displays. As well, they play a very
important role for graphic designers and 3D animators, who tend to
require optimum displays for their work as well as faster rendering in
order to efficiently tone up their work.

Two ATI Graphics Cards 

Video cards are not used exclusively in IBM type PCs; they have been
used in devices such as Commodore Amiga (connected by the slots Zorro
II and Zorro III), Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Atari Mega ST/TT
(attached to the MegaBus or VME interface), Spectravideo SVI-328, MSX,
and in video game consoles. (Wikipedia.com)

Components

THE GPU

A GPU is a dedicated graphics microprocessor optimized for floating point calculations which are fundamental to 3D graphics rendering. The main attributes of the GPU are the core clock rate, which typically ranges from 250 MHz to 850 MHz, and the number of pipelines (vertex and fragment shaders), which translate a 3D image characterized by vertices and lines into a 2D image formed by pixels.

Video Bios

 The video BIOS or firmware
contains the basic program that governs the video card’s operations and
provides the instructions that allow the computer and software to
interface with the card. It may contain information on the memory
timing, operating speeds and voltages of the graphics processor and RAM
and other information. It is sometimes possible to change the BIOS
(e.g., to enable factory-locked settings for higher performance)
although this is typically only done by video card overclockers, and
has the potential to irreversibly damage the card.

NVidia Graphics Card

Video Memory

If the video card is integrated in the motherboard, it may use the computer RAM
(lower throughput). If it is not integrated, the video card will have
its own video memory, called Video RAM. The memory capacity of most
modern video cards range from 128 MB to 4.0 GB.
Since video memory needs to be accessed by the GPU and the display
circuitry, it often uses special high speed or multi-port memory, such
as

VRAM, WRAM, SGRAM, etc. Around 2003, the video memory was typically based on DDR technology. During and after that year, manufacturers moved towards DDR2, GDDR3 and GDDR4
even GDDR5 utilized most notably by the ATI Radeon HD 4870. The memory
clock rate in modern cards are generally between 400 MHz and 3.8 GHz.

Outputs

The most common connection systems between the video card and the computer display are:

Video Graphics Array (VGA) (DB-15)	Analog-based standard adopted in the late 1980s designed for CRT displays, also called VGA connector. Some problems of this standard are electrical noise, image distortion and sampling error evaluating pixels.
Digital Visual Interface (DVI)	Digital-based standard designed for displays such as flat-panel displays (LCDs, plasma screens, wide High-definition televisionnative resolution. displays) and video projectors. It avoids image distortion and electrical noise, corresponding each pixel from the computer to a display pixel, using its
Video In Video Out (VIVO) for S-Video, Composite video and Component video	Included to allow the connection with televisions, DVD players, video recorders and video game consoles. They often come in two 9-pin Mini-DIN connector variations, and the VIVO splitter cable generally comes with either 4 connectors (S-Video in and out + composite video in and out) or 6 connectors (S-Video in and out + component PB out + component PR out + component Y out (also composite out) + composite in).

9-pin VIVO for S-Video (TV-out), DVI for HDTV and DB-15 for VGA outputs.

 Video Cards also have the ability to connect to each other to load frames faster.(more info in separate blogs)

With ATI it is called Crossfire

 And with NVidia It is called SLI Mode