From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices and its ATI graphics business unit will not support Nvidia Corp.'s CUDA general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) environment. AMD/ATI believes that since CUDA (which was originally an abbreviate for compute unified device architecture) was developed by Nvidia, the latter will get unreasonable performance benefits in CUDA-powered applications, whereas performance of ATI graphics chips may be handicapped.

"[Nvidia] would intentionally damage performance to make Nvidia GPUs run the same app better. Even if it was not intentional, it would not be optimized for our instruction set architecture like our own SDK," said Gary Silcott, a spokesperson for AMD, reports The Inquirer web-site.

Earlier this week William Dally, chief scientist of Nvidia, said that in the future software developed using Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA software development kit will be able to work on a broader range of platforms.

“In the future you will be able to run C with CUDA extensions on a broader range of platforms, so I don't think that will be a fundamental limitation. I am familiar with some projects that are underway to enable CUDA on other platforms,” said Bill Dally at a “roundtable event”.

Despite of the fact that Mr. Dally did not name ATI Radeon graphics processing unit family as an alternative platform for Nvidia's CUDA, since presently there are no widespread stream computing platforms apart from Nvidia GeForce and ATI Radeon, it is logical to assume that Nvidia's chief scientist meant AMD's graphics processors.

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From InfoWorld: Looking to focus on the budding -- and game-changing -- HTML 5 specification, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) said Thursday it plans to increase available resources for the effort by discontinuing further development of XHTML 2.

XHTML been an XML-based version of HTML and has been the subject of several W3C efforts ranging from XHTML 1.0 to XHTML Modularization and XHTML 2. The 2 version of the XHTML language was to offer capabilities for mobile systems and internationalization.

The XHTML 2 Working Group charter, scheduled to expire at the end of 2009, will not be renewed. By discontinuing the XHTML 2 working group and increasing resources in the HTML 5 Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate progress of HTML 5 and clarify the organization's position regarding the future HTML.

HTML 5, out in a draft form, focuses on Web application development and offers such capabilities as multimedia for browser-based applications, which could present strong competition to existing browser plug-in technologies such as Adobe Flash. "HTML 5 is the language of Web pages," said Ian Jacobs, W3C representative.

XHTML was spawned in the late 1990s, when some thought XML represented the future of formats on the Web, said Jacobs. Meanwhile, others stuck by HTML and formed WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) outside of W3C to continue work on HTML. But work on the HTML 5 specification development now is taking place at W3C, with W3C and WHATWG working in parallel.

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From PC World: Taiwan will have to revise chip-industry regulations before United Microelectronics (UMC) can invest in China, an official said Friday.

UMC, the world's second-largest contract chip maker, announced a plan in April to pay US$285 million for an 85 percent stake in He Jian Technology, which was established by former UMC employees in China in late 2001. At the time of the announcement, UMC said it believed having a production base in China was key to increasing profitability and promoting growth at the company.

But old chip investment regulations in Taiwan will keep UMC out of China entirely for now.

Taiwan long ago enacted rules allowing only three Taiwanese chip plants in China that make chips from 8-inch wafers. More modern fabs make chips from 12-inch wafers and are moving toward 18-inch wafers.

All of those factories have been spoken for, therefore UMC will have to wait until regulations are changed before it can complete its purchase of He Jian, according to John Deng, vice minister of economic affairs in Taiwan, speaking at a news conference in Taipei.

"We're working with UMC now, but we have not given them permission yet," he said.

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From CNET News.com: Technical difficulties forced Google's Web application hosting infrastructure off the air for about four hours Thursday morning.

Customers who run their Web applications on Google App Engine were forced idle Thursday by a series of issues involving "elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates," according to a Google employee posting in the Google App Engine Downtime Notify group spotted by TechCrunch. A Google representative acknowledged the downtime and apologized for the outage.

"Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem that caused the outage and service has now been restored to all applications. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site."

Google's cloud-computing service allows Web developers who can't afford to host their own applications a place to get their work online. Amazon Web Services does something similar.

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From CNET News.com: Microsoft appears likely to offer a "Family Pack" version of Windows 7, according to language in a leaked test version of the operating system.

This week enthusiasts started buzzing over wording in the license agreement in the test build that suggests Microsoft will have an option to buy a license for Windows 7 that covers up to three PCs in the same household.

According to blogger Kristan Kenney, the license agreement included with the recently leaked version states that "if you are a 'Qualified Family Pack User', you may install one copy of the software marked as 'Family Pack' on three computers in your household for use by people who reside there."

Microsoft would neither confirm nor deny that it plans to offer the family pack.
"We will continue to work with our partners and expect to have other great offers in the future as we lead up to and beyond general availability," a representative said. "We have nothing to announce at this time."

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From DailyTech: Recently, Apple has struggled with the security ramifications of a higher commercial profile, and seeing an increasing number of OS X malware. Now another security flaw has been found, this time in the iPhone OS. The flaw allows attackers to gain root access to the iPhone's underlying OS, allowing them to install and execute malicious programs at will.

The iPhone apparently automatically executes binary code sent in SMS messages. Messages are limited to 140 bytes, but this is little deterrence as longer programs can be broken up into several messages, which the phone automatically reassembles. While other applications such as the Safari browser on the phone only enjoy access to their sandbox, the SMS system is automatically granted root access, and SMS commands execute as root.

Charlie Miller, during a presentation at the SyScan conference in Singapore on Thursday introduced the vulnerability to the public. He declined to go into specific details or offer his proof-of-concept code to the public, as he has entered under an agreement with Apple. Mr. Miller did state, "SMS is a great vector to attack the iPhone."

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From CNET News.com: Google has been sued again by a company mad over the use of its trademarks as keywords, but this one comes with a twist.

Ascentive, the company behind those incessant "Finally Fast!" PC support ads, became the latest Google advertiser to sue the company for allowing advertisers to purchase ads using trademarks they do not own as search keywords. It will have to get in line behind Firepond, Rescuecom and several other companies challenging Google's policy, recently expanded to allow some companies to use trademarks they don't own in the text of their ads.

Ascentive takes its suit a step farther, however, also claiming that Google has unfairly removed some of Ascentive's Web sites from its search index. Ascentive's Finallyfast.com Web site and related software are designed to examine your computer for registry errors and spyware that are ostensibly slowing its performance, and the company has battled with StopBadware.org this year over whether its products should be considered a scam for its dire warnings about benign security threats on your computer that lead to an upsell pitch for Ascentive's services.

According to Ascentive, Google dropped it from search results following two warnings from StopBadware.org about its products. Still, even after StopBadware.org removed their warnings about Ascentive's products following some changes, a search for "finally fast" on Google does not return any Ascentive Web site. That search does, however, return a result for a company called "Finallyfast.us" which appears to offer a very similar product but does not appear to have any relationship with Ascentive.

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