Sony Computer Entertainment and its US division, Sony Computer Entertainment America, are suing Connectix over its Mac-based PlayStation emulator, Virtual GameStation (VGS), according to Japanese news agency Kyodo. When the software was released at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco earlier this month, many observers anticipated Sony would take legal action (see PlayStation emulator launched for Mac). Given that possibility, Connectix has moved very cautiously throughout the VGS' development and launch. The product was only on sale at Connectix's stand during the show -- a spokesman said it would not be available once the show had ended -- unboxed. And after the launch, it emerged numerous Mac-oriented Web sites had colluded with Connectix to prevent news of the product leaking out and becoming the target of a pre-emptive legal strike from Sony. Connectix's argument is that the VGS' was engineered without recourse to Sony intellectual property, Sony has no case against it. That said, the company originally suggested that since Sony only makes money from games, not consoles, Connectix could hardly be sued for damages relating to lost earnings. However, according to the Kyodo report, Sony has finally concluded that it does have a case against the developer. The suit, filed at the San Francisco Federal District Court, alleges Connectix has violated not Sony's intellectual property rights but its copyrights, too. However, Sony was unable to confirm that legal action had indeed been taken -- certainly the news conflicts with earlier reports that Sony had decided that it would not pursue Connectix through the courts. Does Sony have a case? Certainly, Connectix's arguments carry some weight, but having an unsure case has rarely stopped corporates using the courts to delay a product's release or even to bully the developer into abandoning that product. Yet it's hard to see how you can genuinely build as complex an application as an emulator without recourse to the emulated system's specifications and intellectual property -- it's simply not that easy a task. If Connectix chooses to fight, it will certainly make for an interesting battle. ® See also Apple to bid for PlayStation emulator outfit?
Sony to sue Connectix over PlayStation emulator
Emulator violates copyrights, intellectual property, claims Japanese giant
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NASA's first asteroid sample on its way to Earth after OSIRIS-REx boosts for home
Boffins will have to wait until September 2023 to get their hands on the goodiesContinue readingOSIRIS-REx, the spacecraft carrying NASA’s first-ever asteroid sample, has started its two-year journey back to Earth, the space agency confirmed on Monday.
On Friday, ground control sent the commands directing the 2,110 kg (4,650 lb) vehicle to fire its main thrusters to get out of asteroid Bennu’s orbit and return to our planet. The team erupted in cheers on Monday after it received confirmation that OSIRIS-REx had successfully fired its engines at 2016 UTC, and was on its way.
"Mission navigation has received confirmation of burn cutoff. OSIRIS-REx is headed home with a souvenir of rocks and dusts from a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid," the NASA team said.
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LibreBMC project to open source baseboard management controllers with security as a priority
Freely available to use, from the hardware schematics to RISC-V cores on an FPGA, to the firmware on topContinue readingThe OpenPOWER Foundation, formed to promote IBM's open-source POWER instruction set architecture (ISA), on Monday said it is putting together a new working group to develop LibreBMC, claimed to be the first baseboard management controller (BMC) designed with open source software and hardware.
"The LibreBMC project came out of a desire to both utilize and showcase the fully open POWER cores, and apply software driven development to hardware design," said James Kulina, executive director of the OpenPOWER Foundation, in an email to The Register. "We determined the lowly BMC controller – something that the broader industry doesn’t think too much about – is a great use case that if successful will have a real positive impact."
BMCs monitor and manage devices in data centers. They collect sensor data like temperature, humidity, fan speed, power supply voltage, and provide administrative functions like remote access.
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Kubecon 2021: A largely dry and corporate affair where the best bits involved a spot of Kubernetes-hacking roleplay
But we heard the message loud and clear – it's pretty much the standard runtime platform nowContinue readingKubecon A session on how to hack into a Kubernetes cluster was among the highlights of a Kubecon where the main events were generally bland and corporate affairs, perhaps indicative of the technology now being a de facto infrastructure standard among enterprises.
Kubecon Europe took place online last week with more than 27,000 attendees, according to Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which hosts the Kubernetes project among many others.
That is a substantial increase on the reported 13,000 or so at last year's event, which was also virtual. Kubernetes is huge, and if there was an underlying theme at the event it was that Kubernetes is becoming the standard runtime platform.
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US postal service goes all in on AI
Plus: Google boffin who resigned over AI ethics controversy, joins AppleContinue readingIn Brief What do you know? The US Postal Service uses AI technology and have GPU servers running computer vision algorithms to track items being delivered across the country.
The system is called Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP, pronounced EE-sip) and is designed to run inference operations on machine learning models using Nvidia’s GPUs. The USPS relies on deep-learning systems to perform image recognition tasks, and hopefully speed up the mail.
“It used to take eight or 10 people several days to track down items, now it takes one or two people a couple hours,” said Todd Schimmel, the manager who manages ECIP and other USPS systems. Schimmel hopes USPS will deploy more algorithms that can detect if the correct postage stamp has been used for a package, and to automatically read barcodes even if they’re damaged.
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As another vendor promises 3 years of Android updates, we ask: How long should mobile devices receive support?
Really, three years should be the bare minimum at this pointContinue readingAnalysis Almost seven months after the brand splashed down in the UK market, mobile maker Vivo is making some bold promises about the longevity of its upcoming phones.
The Chinese company is promising at least three years of software and security updates for selected premium devices introduced after July.
And? It's underwhelming. When it comes to software updates, most smartphone vendors fare dismally. Three years is a decent figure, on par with the Android One programme, although slightly below what Samsung has provided newer Galaxy devices.
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'A fair amount of stuff, all over the place': Torvalds closes merge window for Linux 5.13 with support for Apple M1
5.10 lifespan also extended to six years, up from twoContinue readingLinus Torvalds has closed the merge window for Linux 5.13 with the first release candidate, which includes initial support for Apple's M1 processor along with "a fair amount of stuff, all over the place."
The closing of the merge window means that the new code which has been accepted by the Linux development community as both desirable and sufficiently stable is included in the first release candidate for the new kernel, which is generally feature-complete. The work is now focused on stability and fixing problems, ahead of the stable release which usually follows within a couple of months.
On this occasion Torvalds said that "there's a lot in there," of which a third is auto-generated from hardware descriptions and 60 per cent driver changes. That still leaves room for a number of significant new features. Overall, there are 12,015 files changes, 631,309 insertions, and 246,239 deletions.
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NASA ups price of a private stay aboard the ISS to reflect true expense of keeping tourists alive in space
Should cover the cost of the air leaking out of the Russian segmentContinue readingFancy a stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS)? It is about to get a lot pricier for future private astronaut missions.
NASA last published its commercial pricing policy in 2019, and price tags included $22,500 per person per day for supplies such as food, air and exercise equipment. Life support (and using the toilet) came in at $11,500.
The agency has now said that the policy "did not reflect full reimbursement for the value of NASA resources", it was only there to stimulate the market and was planned to be "adjusted".
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Microsoft unveils Rust for Windows v0.9, with 'full consumption support' for the Windows API
Rust/WinRT moniker consigned to the garbage collectionContinue readingMicrosoft has released an update for Rust for Windows (formerly Rust/WinRT) with completed support for Win32 and COM APIs.
Version 0.9 of the Rust language projection turned up last week and, according to Microsoft, gives "access to the entire Windows API surface in a language-idiomatic way."
It's a tacit admission that no matter how much Microsoft might hope it will, the Win32 API does not seem to be going anywhere any time soon. Even the most beloved of languages will struggle to avoid a dip into the API of yesteryear if it is to run efficiently on the Windows platform.
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Hear that, Qualcomm? Analyst claims Apple's homegrown 5G modems to land in 2023 'at the earliest'
Securities advisor passes note setting potential date for snipping of Snapdragons to investorsContinue readingNearly two years after Apple swallowed Chipzilla’s smartphone modem business for a cool $1bn, the company is reportedly set to start using its own home-grown baseband chips, starting with 2023’s iPhone.
The report comes from Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at TF International Securities with a solid track record of gaining accurate inside information about Apple’s product movements. According to AppleTrack, Ming-Chi's tips have a 76.6 per cent accuracy rate.
In an investor's note, Ming-Chi wrote he expected the iPhone will start using modems designed in-house by “2023 at the earliest.” This echoed similar predictions expressed by analysts at Barclays.
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Meme crypto-coin literally going to the Moon, if Elon Musk is to believed, on DOGE-1 mission courtesy of SpaceX Falcon 9
Rocket marks 10th successful launch and landing, though Dogecoin's descent was a little rougherContinue readingElon Musk has announced a SpaceX mission to the Moon paid for in Dogecoin, just a day after the cryptocurrency tumbled in response to the multibillionare calling it a "hustle" while he hosted Saturday Night Live.
The DOGE-1 mission is due to launch early next year as part of a rideshare aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. It will consist of a 40kg cubesat replete with camera, sensors and onboard computational systems aimed at gathering what sponsor Geometric Energy Corporation described as "lunar-spatial intelligence."
There is no indication how much the mission will actually cost (particularly considering the volatility of the currency involved). SpaceX charges $1m for a 200kg payload to a Sun Synchonous Orbit on a rideshare and describes its rates for flinging an object at the Moon as "affordable."
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UK's competition watchdog sniffs around AMD's proposed $35bn all-stock buy of Xilinx
Will deal make goods, services less competitive? Regulator wants to hear from interested partiesContinue readingBritain’s competition regulator has belatedly stuck a probe in AMD’s $35bn all-stock proposal to purchase Xilinx, more than a month after investors in both businesses gave the transaction their seal of approval.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today launched an enquiry inviting interested parties to provide written comments on the planned buy. The deadline for this phase 1 is scheduled for 6 July.
It said:
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