A federal court ruling against RIAA’s accusations stated that “Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder’s exclusive right of distribution.”  The RIAA, or as I like to call them, the Really Inconsiderate Assholes of America, have been using this same litigation strategy for sometime.  Going after normal everyday people and slamming them with copyright infringement damages of $750 per song has been their normal policy.  A copyright lawyer said that this recent federal court decision the end of this RIAA litigation strategy.  The Inquirer reports:

“A lawyer investigating appeals for people already ordered to pay damages of up to $150,000 a song says that, following the new ruling, he believes the convictions were reached following improper instructions to juries. He added that damages of $750 per song would be ruled unconstitutional, as the actual lost profit when a song is copied is more like 40 cents.”

Gamers in the UK have stated thatGTA IV runs at a resolution of 630p (1120 x 630) on the PS3 as opposed to the standard 720p High-Def resolution HDTV’s are accustomed to.  It has also been reportedthat the Xbox 360 version of GTA IV runs at the full 720p resolution.  What does all this mean?  Nothing.  Most, and by most I mean 99% of all people playing the game will not notice.  Unless of course you have both games for each console and play them side by side.  In either case, the great gameplay and storyline are still there.  Now if this happened in the UK does that mean it may have trickled over to the US too?

EMC’s Mozy’s online backup will be expanding its operations internationally.  Mozy was acquired by EMC not too long ago with the CEO’s initial intent to gain market share by providing very affordable online backup solutions for home and business users.  Mozy claims that they have a data center currently being built in Ireland and will be fully operational by the end of the year.  Taken from The Reg:

“The data centre infrastructure underpinning Mozy is going to grow further: “Our growth plans are pretty impressive. We’ll have more data centres internationally and in the USA as well. There are logistical reasons for local centres. Very large restores can be carried out closer to the customers. Another driver is data privacy.”

We should think in terms of a global rollout of inter-connected data centres with several in Europe, the MIddle East and the Far East. The customers for these will be enterprises of all sizes; from Fortune 10 to Fortune 1,000 and beyond.”

–Update–

Softpedia.com has a download link that claims it is the final version of XP SP3, but Microsoft’s download site still does not have it readily available.  Windows XP SP3 download here.

Today is April 29th, the day Microsoft said XP SP3 is available.  I have yet to see it on the Microsoft Download site but I will keep checking.  If anyone has a link to it please reply with it in the comments section.  The new service pack offers 1,100 hotfixes and patches.  Quite possibly the definitive reason for a lot of users to stay with XP until Windows 7’s release.

The P2P throttling plot thickens!  Gizmodo reports that Azureus/Vuze said earlier today that AT&T is pulling a Comcast by resetting Torrents.  This seems to be a pretty shady business practice that more and more ISP’s are found to be doing.  Can the consumers fight back?

“A month after releasing its plugin that detects if your ISP is performing reset voodooon your torrents, Azureus/Vuze is claiming AT&T hexes them with the same reset TCP packet curse as Comcast, despite AT&T’s explicit statementsotherwise. AT&T denies the accusation and points out a flaw in the plugin’s method, that it can’t tell the difference between naturally occurring TCP resets and artificial ones generated by an ISP. Azureus, while admitting the issue, still says AT&T is full it.”

As if the Web 2.0 arena needs to get anymore bloated.  Especially with MySpace launching their MySpace Karaokeservice today.  BeamMe.info offers links on websites to text message information straight to your cell phone.  BeamMe.info works by web site authors placing a link to the BeamMe.info website next to information they would otherwise write down or email to themselves.  TechCrunch Reports:

“The service comes in two flavors: ad supported or paid. The free ad supported version means end users also get an advertisement with the SMS they receive. The paid version sees website owners paying for every SMS sent by their users; the price ranges from a couple of cents through 20 cents per SMS depending on the country a user is sending the SMS to.

The service has built in spam protection, with limits per IP address and account holders are able to limit the number of SMS messages sent to the same phone per day.”

Intel has been eating away at AMD’s market share ever since the introduction of the Core 2 Duo processors in 2006.  More so since the introduction of the Quad Core Xeon processors but AMD has to try something.  AMD has announced as part of the business class platform, they will be offering the Athlon X2, Phenom X3 Tri-Core, and Phenom X4 quad core processors.  AMD also extends the processor warranty from 1 year to 3 years and guarantee the new part will be available for 2 years.  You can read the rest of the news release at The Inquirer.

The RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis doesn’t like touchscreens, he personally has never been able to type on it and reports that none of his friends were able to type on them either.  But that  doesn’t seem to be stopping RIM from designing a new BlackBerry with just that, a Touchscreen model.  The Blackberry 9000 is dubbed to come out later on this summer and has been called the “Apple Killer” or A.K. for short.  Hopefully the CEO’s hatred for Touchscreen’s will push their engineers to revolutionize this industry, although I won’t be holding my breath, at least not for the short term.  As with most new model’s they seem to carry extra overhead baggage such as glitches and incompatibility issues.  But as we have seen with the iPhone & iPod it usually takes a couple of generations before they get all of the kinks out.  Gizmodo reports.

I seem to be talking more about Nvidia lately than any other company.  They just can’t seem to stay out of the headlines.  Anyways, Nvidia seems to have an answer for ATI’s upcoming Radeon HD 4800, the GeForce 9900.  ATI’s new 4800 toy may threaten Nvidia’s performance dominance in the PC market and they just can’t have that.  The rumor has itthat Nvidia will be pushing the release date up to July of this year for the GeForce 9900 series.  So even if the ATI 4800 card overruns the fastest unit from Nvidia’s arsenal they won’t let it stand for long.

iZ3D has been shipping 19″ and 22″ 3D monitors for a while now mainly aimed at gamers.  How the 3D monitor technology works is better explained here.  The manufacturer has announcedprice cuts for their bottom line models but there’s quite a few glitches that will score negative points and chase away potential customers.  First and foremost, in order to get the iZ3D to work properly you must install the S-3D drivers which are compatible with all major ATI & Nvidia graphics cards.  But there are currently no 64-bit drivers so anyone using a 64-bit operating system is SOL.  Additionally, for you more hardcore gamers, these LCD’s will not work in SLI or Crossfire configurations.  If you use an Nvidia card, forget about using more than one monitor.  The 22″ iZ3D model had a $1,000 price tag but it has dropped down to $599.  Will this help this technology take off?  Personally, I think they should start making these for console(360, PS3, Wii) units.  Gamers are moving away from PC’s over to the console arena anyways so they’ll have better market share.

The battle between CPU and GPU rages on.  According to this article over at The Inquirer, the VP of Sales over at Nvidia has stated the CPU is dead.  He states numerous references from this TG Daily articlein his argument that Intel and AMD are crapping in their pants because CPU technologies are a dying breed.
Here’s what he had to say:

“I don’t know how much this will mean to you all but for those that don’t know a war has just started that will likely be written about for years and which will affect everyone who owns a PC. Everyone.

Basically the CPU is dead. Yes, that processor you see advertised everywhere from Intel. Its run out of steam.The fact is that it no longer makes anything run faster. You don’t need a fast one anymore. This is why AMD is in trouble and its why Intel are panicking. They are panicking so much that they have started attacking us. This is because you do still [need] one chip to get faster and faster – the GPU. That GeForce chip. Yes honestly. No I am not making this up. You are my friends and so I am not selling you. This shit is just interesting as hell.

Today your PC plays video (its our chip that makes that work), you play games (its our chip that makes that work), you rip movies (yup our chip again) – you get the picture?”

Although Roy does have a point, the video card takes on a lot of multimedia tasks, but the CPU is needed to execute and run these processes.  Unless Nvidia has something up their sleeve where a next generation GPU can also take on these tasks, these accusations and rants are null.

Nasa’s Ames Research Center has got into bed with m2mi to experiment with a new satellite network system.   According to a NASA press release, NASA and m2mi will work together to build a network of “nanosats” on a commercial basis.  These nanosat’s will be low orbit satellitesweighing between 11-110lbs and will be arranged in a cluster or constellation pattern.  They will provide a global, space-based, high-speed network for voice, data, storage applications, and Earth observations.  Being that they so small, they can be mass produced at reasonable prices and since they will be so close together(space wise), if one fails then the network will not suffer.  Could this be the future of the Internet?  The Reg reports.

Apparently Research In Motion (RIM) has delayed the launch of the 3G capable BlackBerry 8900 so it doesn’t run along side the launch of the next-generation iPhone.  The Reg reports this isn’t the only reason why it has been delayed.  Reports say that the company’s internal staff has complained about the products technical glitches and will delay its release from this June to August.  The BlackBerry 8900 is supposed to be the first 3G BlackBerry to appear on the AT&T network here in the United States.  Is delaying it past the iPhone’s release date a good idea?  Time will tell.

Microsoft’s Q1 2008 earnings report came out and saw a 24% drop in sales versus this time last year.  The culprit: Windows sales have shriveled up.  It’s no surprise with this lackluster economy and poor consumer acceptance of the new(er) operating system Windows Vista.  There’s still a big consumer fan-base for Windows XP that refuse to switch over.  Now, with XP Service Pack 3 just days away from official release(April 29th), all the reason for XP users to not even bother with Vista at all.  Quite possibly wait it out until the Windows 7 release in 2010.

On a lighter note, Microsoft Office is still doing fairly well, but has suffered a bit with the continued roll out of online applications such as Google Apps.  Additionally, the entertainment division(Zune & Xbox), is up 68%.  The bottom line for Microsoft’s total income is down 11% from the previous year.  Microsoft has its work cut out for them.  The market is shifting and they must change with it to survive.

If enough customers complain about the end-of-life cycle on June 30th.  Steve Ballmer announced at a news conference in Belguim today, “XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies we can always wake up smarter but right now we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments”.  Of course he also announced that Windows Vista sales are pumping right along and that customers are transitioning over slowly.  Consumers are still buying PC’s preloaded with Windows XP but that trend will soon stop as of June 30th as OEM’s will no longer be able to get new XP licenses.  If enough customers complain, this date could be extended further.  Windows XP Service Pack 3 has been released which may convince current XP users to stay longer and even hold out until Windows 7 is released in 2009 or 2010.  If that’s the case then the backlash from the consumer community may burst soon.  The Reg reports.