[Palm] Hewlett Packard To Acquire Palm For US$1.2 Bill

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According to Hewlett Packard’s press release Palm is gonna be acquired fo US$ 1.2 Billion. This means besides HP smart phones, which are running Windows Mobile, they are now entering the smart phone market with Palm’s best asset: WebOS. Anyway PreCentral.net picked that HP don’t intend to give up on selling Windows Mobile phones as they

intend to continue to be a strategic partner for Microsoft.

According to PreCentral.net Palm will operate as a business unit besides groups like the “Imaging and Printing Group” or “Personal Systems Group” within the HP organization.

Golem.de reports that HP sees WebOS as an ideal platform to strengthen their mobile strategy. The merger is intended to be finished in July 2010.

Our Comment

It’s complicated to estimate the situation of HP and Palm, but HP now bought a company that has lots of patents for the mobile age. We suppose $1.2 billion is not too expensive for a company that also with WebOS offers a superior operating system for mobile devices. HP clearly sees the mobile market is the market of the future. Apple showed how a business model for mobile devices looks like and now all the companies are moving into that direction. With buying Palm, HP tries to take the short cut. Until now they haven’t played a serious role in the mobile App market.

Anyway Microsoft is a strategic partner for HP – has been explicitly said by HP officials – and HP is using Windows Mobile currently on their mobile devices. Moreover Microsoft is to release Windows 7 Mobile to the market at the end of 2010. Windows 7 development will be quite easy as it will be based on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology.

We don’t want to sound too pessimistically but that might bring a new situation to the future of WebOS. As HP is company who then has to estimate if it is cheaper to license another Microsoft operating system – namely Windows 7 Mobile or the put money into developing an own operating system – namely WebOS.

Let’s hope for the best. We really like WebOS a lot and we feel the brand Palm still sounds very good worldwide.

[Media] Newspaper Articles About Copying And File Sharing

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Abstract

According to the RIAA the media industry is suffering heavy losses due to increased copying and file sharing in the last 10 years. Sanity and reason shows there must be something true with that argument. But are the numbers the media companies are providing correct? What can we learn from history?

The following links provide an uncategorized and unsorted mixture of links (in multiple languages) dealing with the topic of copying and file sharing. It is in no way complete and perfect, but is probably usable as a lateral cut thru that topic.

We will update this section frequently. Comments are highly appreciated.

Links

Date Headling Editor/Media Link
1977 Sind Leer-Cassetten der Tod der Schallplatte? (~ “Will blank tapes mark the end of vinyl?”) Bravo Link
1977 “Klang-Supermarkt zum Nulltarif” (~”Sound supermarket for free”) Spiegel Link
Late 1980s “Anti-DAT lobbying” Wikipedia Link
1992 “Audio Home Recording Act” Wikipedia Link
2003 “Studie: Illegale Kopien sind ein internes Problem der Filmindustrie” (~”Study: Illegal Copies Are Internal Problem Of The Filmindustry”) Heise.de Link
2006 “Studios See Big Rise In Estimates of Losses To Movie Piracy” Wall Street Journal Link
2006 “Raubkopie-Studie: Hollywood verliert 6 Milliarden Dollar” (~”Illegal Copy Study: Hollywood Loses 6 Billion US$”) Golem.de Link
2009 “COMMENTS OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORPORATION IN RESPONSE TO THE NATIONAL BROADBAND PLAN WORKSHOP ON THE ROLE OF CONTENT IN THE BROADBAND ECOSYSTEM” Paramount Pictures Link
2009 “Hollywood-Studio will Suchmaschinen kontrollieren” (~”Hollywood Studio Aiming At Control Of Internet Search Engines”) Golem.de Link
2009 “How UK Government spun 136 people into 7m illegal file sharers” PCPro.co.uk Link
2009 “Blu-ray kann weltweiten DVD-Verkaufsrückgang nicht auffangen” (~”Worldwide Blu-Ray Sales Don’t Compensate Reduced DVD Sales”) Golem.de Link
2009 “Blu-ray Disc zieht an – DVD-Verkäufe rückläufig” (~”Blu-Ray Sales Increasing – DVD Sales Decreasing”) Big Screen Link
2009 “Artists’ lawsuit: major record labels are the real pirates”) Ars Technica Link
2009 “Sind Labels die wahren Piraten? Musiker verklagen kanadische Musikindustrie” (~”Are Labels The Real Pirates? Musicians Sue Canadian Musicindustry”) Tom’s Hardware Link
2010 “Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods” U.S. Government
Accountability Office		 Link
2010 “Verluste durch Filesharing sind stark übertrieben” (~”Losses From File Sharing Massively Exaggerated”) Big Screen Link
2010 “Seagate to preload hard drives with movies” Financial Times Link

[Win] Oracle VirtualBox: Workaround For Initialization Issue

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“and first for something complete different”: Muzaq… coding or administrating system can’t do without gooood muzaq. Check our latest tunes here :-)

History

VirtualBox is an open source virtualization software. Originally it has been developed by a german company named Innotek, which has been acquired by SUN Microsystems in 2008. SUN Microsystems in turn has been acquired by ORACLE in 2010.

Innotek originally collaborated with Connectix on Virtual PC – a virtualization software targeting the Mac OS platform. Connectix has been bought by Microsoft in 2003. Innotek then decided to develop VirtualBox.

Status Quo

VirtualBox is used by many companies for virtualization and thus developing. Palm for example uses VirtualBox for WebOS development in an emulated environment. Thus allowing either Linux, Mac OS or Windows host systems for development.

CPU VT-X/AMD-V Issue

After configuring a dual core virtual machine and trying to start you may encounter a message box indicating:

VERR_VMX_MSR_LOCKED_OR_DISABLED

This issue may occur no matter which host operating system you’re using. The reason for this might be:

  • you’re not using a CPU that supports hardware virtualization
  • your BIOS does not support hardware virtualization properly
  • hardware virtualization is disabled in your BIOS settings (check it!)
  • there is a bug in your current BIOS version regarding

Known Workarounds

  • Disable USB for the virtual machine
  • Reduce the amount of CPU cores to 1
  • upgrade your BIOS to the latest version (this might be dangerous)
  • Disable VT-X/AMD-V
  • Disable 3D acceleration
  • Shutdown your host machine, unplug (!) from electricity for say 30 secs, reboot then

As we’re currently using VirtualBox only on the Windows XP platform we categorized this article under Win, anyway it is very likely that the same issue also occurs under Linux or Mac OS, as VirtualBox on all platforms derives from the same source code.

Any suggestions, hints or things need to be added? Don’t hesitate to tell us below…

[Pre] Comprehension Of Palm’s Developer Day

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The diligent ppl from PreCentral.net report, what this automn will come from Palm:

  • Microphone Access via API
  • Camera Access via API
  • Bluetooth Serial Port Profile
  • Bonjour/Zeroconf support
  • Background services are gonna be switched from Java to Javascript to speed up processing
  • HTML5
  • Mojo Core: web Apps can include a little portion of added lines to offer Mojo services (like Geolocatation etc.)
  • Improved App Catalogue

Read all of the news in detail at PreCentral.net…

[iPad] Israel Allows Import Of iPads (Update)

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On saturday, 24ht Israel’s Minister of Communications released a press statement. Israel now approved the import of Apple’s iPads to Israel.

The scrutiny conducted by the Ministry technical team vis-à-vis Apple’s
team, International laboratory and European counterparts confirmed that
the device which could be operated in various standards will be operated
in Israel in accordance to the local standards.

Update: According to german Heise.de iPads need to be used with Hebrew language as regional settings, otherwise iPads might be doing probe requests on 5 GHz channels, which are illegal to be used in Israel.

[iPhone] ThunderSt0rm is Fake – Don’t Install

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According to TheBigBoss.org two tools have appeared on the net:

  • ThunderSt0rm and
  • TurboSn0w

Both of them are fakes and don’t jailbreak the iPhone, the iPod Touch, nor the iPad, but harm your system and delete iTunes files. Thus leaving you with broken installations.

[Apple] Certified Apps Only As Of Mac OS X 10.7?

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According to Rixstep.com Apple plans to set up an App Store starting with the introduction of Mac OS X 10.7.

Developers planning on marketing software for 10.7 will submit their products to the App Store as iPhone and now iPad developers have already done. 10.7 will have kernel support for (‘insistence on’) binaries signed with Apple’s root certificate.

No software will be able to run on Mac OS X 10.7 without being approved and signed by Apple, Inc.

According to MacStories.net allegedly Steve Jobs has answered a direct request send to him by Fernando Valente of Chiaro Software. Valente asked him:

There’s a rumor saying there will be a Mac App Store and no software without authorization from Apple will run on Mac OS X. Is that true)

According to the mail Steve Jobs (or someone managing his email account) simply answered:

Nope.

Anyway: you cannot be sure what his answer specifically means. Probably we’re gonna need jailbreaks for Mac OS X in the near future anyhow…

[Pre] Baseband Downgrade Tool For Rebel SIM Unlock

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The proxy unlock seller of the Rebel SIM has just released a tool to downgrade the Palm Pre’s baseband to re-allow proxy SIM unlocking with their Rebel SIM. Find the manual here.

As we don’t have exact information about how the Rebel SIM works we suspect it’s based on the same background as the iPhone proxy SIM’s.

As there are serious security and legality implications concerning using proxy SIM unlocked devices on networks, you’d better stop by here to read what the iPhone Dev Team found out about proxy SIMs.

[Pre] WebOS Vulnerable To Several Attacks

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Researchers from Intrepidus Group said in an advisory published on Friday last week that Palm’s WebOS operating system is subject to web application vulnerabilities.

These bugs can all be traced back to that fact that WebOS is essentially a web browser and the applications are written in JavaScript and HTML.

The bugs and vulnerabilites released are for WebOS 1.3.5. Palm has fixed all of them in WebOS 1.4. Anyway the Intrepidus Group said there are still undisclosed bugs in WebOS 1.4.

Via Intrepidus Group…

[iPhone] Adobe Ceases iPhone To Flash Compiler

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After Apple’s announcement of their iPhone OS 4 SDK  license:

Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine

This came a couple of days before Adobe shipped their latest Creative Suite 5, which contains a native Flash to iPhone compiler. Sadly this compiler can only (legally) be used for iPhones running the iPhone OS3 as the license of iPhone OS 3 still allows it. Anyway at the end of june the iPhone 4G is expected and thus the new iPhone OS 4 will be released under those heavily limiting terms.

Mike Chambers of Adobe now responded publicly to Apple’s moves:

We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5. However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.(..)

The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development. The cool web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms. There is plenty of commentary online about this, so I won’t belabor the point, but I have included some links below that cover it more depth:

So, was all of the work on the iPhone packager a waste of time and resources? No, I don’t believe so. We proved that:

  1. There is no technical reason that Flash can’t run on the iPhone
  2. Developers can create well performing and compelling content for the device with Flash

via Mike Chambers’ Blog…