How to Use Windows

Bringing to a close an investigation that began in January 2007 , the South Korea Fair Trade Commission (FTC), has concluded there is no evidence of collusion to fix prices in the NAND flash memory industry. The FTC was investigating the world’s four largest manufacturers of NAND flash memory: two in South Korea, one in Japan, and one in the United States. The four companies investigated are unnamed in the report, leaving us to wonder who they are. The report, however, does tell us the world’s four largest NAND flash memory manufacturers are Samsung and Hynix (in South Korea), Toshiba (in Japan), and SanDisk (in the United States). Perhaps it’s not such a mystery after all

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

In a relative sense YouTube is big–it’s ten times more popular than its nearest competitor. But, YouTube isn’t satisfied –the average user spends a mere 15-minutes a day on the service. It looks at TV and laments: “[People] spend about five hours in front of the television.” And that’s action YouTube wants a piece of. What’s YouTube’s plan?

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

Acer has announced its move into the Pine Trail market : the Aspire One AO532h. And while it wasn’t first, it so far is the cheapest with a $299 price tag. As netbooks go, this new Aspire One isn’t all that different from its predecessors, save for it sporting an Intel Atom N450 CPU, GMA 1350 graphics, and a promised 10-hours of battery life. The N450 has a speed of 1.66 GHz, with a 512 KB L2 cache, and a 667 MHz front-side bus.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

The sun has nearly set on the first decade of the third millennium, and we have been truly blessed… with phones. Sodding millions of the things. We’ve seen phones made from wood, plastic, glass (and one from cheese… but that’s a story we swore we’d never tell again), we’ve seen mobiles that delighted, dismayed, made us go ‘meh’ and those that have made us curse our ridiculous laziness that we didn’t at least look at them before agreeing to a 24-month contract.

The full story can be found on Tech Radar

Language is evolutionary. It meets the needs of the people who use it through adaptation to the necessary and the novel. Technology, for example, adds new words, some of which stick, others which don’t, every year. But there are those out there who’d just as soon you stay within the bounds of ‘proper’ language usage–if it’s good enough for the Queen, then by golly it’s good enough for you

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

Is emailing the new blogging? It was with a bit of apprehension that I clicked on the link in my email box to check out the personal site that Posterous, an online archive of notes both yellow and multimedia, had automatically created for me. First off, they got the name all wrong. I won’t tell you what it is, for fear that an unsavory party might sign me up for all sorts of interesting email lists, but just know that I hadn’t exactly intended for random letters to be a part of my brand-new domain. But that’s Posterous .

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

Taiwanese chip designer Richtek Technology said Wednesday it has filed a patent infringement complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) against several companies, including uPI Semiconductor, AMD, Sapphire Technology, Diamond Multimedia, and XFX. Richtek claims the aforementioned graphic chip makers have infringed on three of the company’s technology patents, as well as misusing business secrets. According to Fudzilla, the three patents deal with technologies for a Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) circuit, a method for current balance in a mulit-phase DC-to-DC converter to produce a respective PWM signal to regulate the corresponding channel current, and for a power metal oxide semiconductor transistor layout comprised of a gate electrode with a lattice pattern on a substrate having a first area and a second area. Richtek is seeking an injunction and compensation, but the company didn’t say for how much.

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

Go ahead an crank up the volume on your iPod touch, just don’t go crying to the courts if you rupture an eardrum in the process. That’s because a San Francisco federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld a 2008 district court ruling saying Apple iPod earphones can’t be held responsible for hearing loss. “The plaintiffs do not allege the iPods failed to do anything they were designed to do nor do they allege that they, or any others, have suffered or are substantially certain to suffer inevitable hearing loss or other injury from iPod use. At most, the plaintiffs plead a potential risk of hearing loss not to themselves, but to other unidentified iPod users,” Senior Judge David Thompson wrote. The plaintiffs, Joseph Birdsong and Bruce Waggoner, had sought monetary damages, and also asked the court to require that Apple provide better earphones, test iPod users for hearing loss, and offer disclosures

For the full story, go to Maximum PC

Scientists in Seattle have made a major breakthrough in designing computer-aided design systems to allow them to build artificial life forms. In a research project which sounds like it was inspired by Will Wright’s magnum opus Spore , the group of synthetic biologists are now designing artificial life forms with the new CAD system. Meddling with Artificial Life Deepak Chandran and his colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle have made the breakthrough, naming their new CAD system ‘Tinkercell’ – a new technology which the New Scientist claims will, “allow biologists to meddle with the components of, say, a bacterium, and simulate the effect the change has.” “The package has a library of the components of life, from which users can pick different cells, membrane proteins, fluorescent proteins, enzymes and genes to create their organism. Tinkercell can then simulate the life form to see if it functions as expected.” For those who want to know a little bit more about the science behind the tech head over to the Journal of Biomedical Engineering .

The full story can be found on Tech Radar

Apple’s Steve Jobs is officially the ‘person of the decade’ – at least, he is according to the readers of esteemed US newspaper the Wall Street Journal . Journal readers voted for Jobs one as their man of the Noughties following the Apple CEO’s return to work after some time away for medical treatment. WSJ notes that Jobs increased the company’s stock by an amazing 700 per cent in value after returning to the the helm earlier this year. Changed music Jobs picked up 30 per cent of the vote for changing “the way people buy and listen to music,” with the iPod and iTunes.

The full story can be found on Tech Radar