MPEG LA starts the search for VP8 patents
MPEG LA, the one-stop shop for motion video patent licenses, yesterday announced a call for patents essential to the VP8 video compression algorithm—the algorithm that is fundamental to Google's WebM video format. MPEG LA is asking organizations that hold patents believed to cover integral, unavoidable parts of the VP8 algorithm to come forward and submit those patents to the licensing company. The patents will in turn by analyzed by MPEG LA, and those deemed to be relevant will be pooled together. The pooled patents will then be available to license as a single convenient bundle.In its promotion of WebM and VP8, Google has insisted that all the relevant patents were developed by codec company On2, which Google purchased last year. The patents can be licensed from Google without payment of any royalties or any restrictions on usage. Google has been heavily promoting WebM for use with the HTML5
Competitive codecs such as the open and industry standard H.264 require royalties to be paid by software and hardware developers. Companies like Opera and Mozilla, as well as the W3C group that is developing the HTML5 specification, deem these royalties be an unacceptable impediment to their usage. They have no such qualms about the royalty-free WebM.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Rumor pegs Sandy Bridge MacBook Airs launching in June
Apple's MacBook Air line is now rumored for a summer refresh, leveraging Intel's next-generation Sandy Bridge architecture. An anonymous source "familiar with Apple's plans" told CNET that the update would come in June of this year.Intel officially launched Sandy Bridge, which combines a CPU with an integrated memory controller and integrated GPU on the same silicon die, earlier this year. Some Sandy Bridge processors have already been shipping to vendors who plan to release desktops and laptops that use the new chips soon, though some products will be delayed a few weeks due to a flaw discovered in some 6-series controller chips required by Sandy Bridge processors.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
PlayStation 3 Sharpshooter hands-on: a peripheral's peripheral
We've covered the Move controls in Killzone 3 extensively, and yes, a full review of the game is coming. But today is the day I was finally able to get my hands on the game's Sharpshooter peripheral. The Move and Navigation controllers snap in, you point at the screen, and there you go.So how does it feel? Much more solid than expected, with a very good heft and easy access to all the buttons, including side buttons near the trigger for things like reloading. There is also a pump-action that can be mapped to various controls. It's a rather nice piece of equipment, but you're locked into holding a large object instead of the Move controllers—having to move both hands to turn or aim is somewhat hard to get used to. It's not a bad thing, but I found that even with my knowledge of the Move controls, I was set back a bit using the peripheral.
Still, it's neat. It's a gun controller that's way more fully featured than the hardware we're used to getting, and the rumble effect gives everything a little extra "oomph." I'm not saying this is a must-have accessory by any stretch. I seriously doubt there are going to be many people playing Killzone 3 with a set of Move controllers, with those peripherals plugged into a second peripheral, all while watching the action on a 3D TV... but it is certainly an effective way to show off just how specialized the experience can become.
With Killzone 3 close to release and SOCOM 4 coming down the line, both with full support for the Sharpshoooter, fans of the "pew pew" are in for a very good time. We'll have a full review of the peripheral soon, and I'd like the thank the gracious gentlemen who let me photograph him holding a plastic gun while wearing 3D glasses. We've all certainly looked more dignified in our lives.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Verizon v. AT&T: dueling iPhone launches, and what Verizon did right
The Verizon iPhone launch was, by all accounts, a very calm one—at least by the standards we're used to. Past iPhone launches on AT&T have been, shall we say, much more chaotic. So what's the deal? Verizon lovers touted this lack of chaos as evidence of Verizon's superior customer service vs. AT&T, while Verizon (and Apple) haters used the seemingly low turnout to argue that the launch was a failure. Verizon declined to comment to Ars on its launch-day figures, so we'll likely have to wait for Apple to announce that it sold 8 kazillion phones before we know for sure. The carrier did note last week, however, that it had completely sold out of preorder iPhone 4s on the first day of sales, and that orders within the first two hours exceeded the one-day total of any other device debut in Verizon's history. It certainly seems like a successful launch, which makes us look back on AT&T's iPhone launches to wonder why they were so different. Here are a few things that we think Verizon did right.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
Security expert: iPhone password hack shows flawed security model
News of a successful attack that almost instantly gives full access to an iPhone's password keychain made its way around the Web on Thursday after Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology revealed the exploit to IDG News Service. While the fact that hackers could access a device's keychain in such a short time certainly sounds alarming, the attack isn't entirely new, and is actually a product of Apple's "DRM approach" to security, one iOS security expert told Ars.Fraunhofer SIT's exploit first relies on physical access to an iPhone, so an attacker has to get your iPhone away from you before digging in. In most cases like this, you would likely want to use Apple's (now free) remote wipe feature in order to protect your data, but remote wipe is easily thwarted by removing the device's SIM card. Any attacker sophisticated enough to decrypt the keychain will know this trick.
Read the comments on this post
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment