Apple

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

On a conference call to discuss first-quarter earnings, Verizon operating chief Dennis Strigl said the company is always talking to device makers, but had "no announcements to make relative to Apple today."

USA Today reported that Apple is in high-level talks about bringing the iPhone to Verizon Wireless. The news comes just a few days after AT&T CEO Randall … Read more

Apple said Monday that its shareholders have approved a so-called "say on pay" proposal, contrary to the results it had reported earlier.

The company informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that a filing last week "incorrectly reported the voting percentages for shareholder-submitted proposals because abstentions were counted as 'No' votes." At Apple's February 25 shareholders meeting, shareholders had seemingly rejected a "say on pay" resolution that would have let them weigh in on policies regarding executive pay and compensation.

After a recount, Apple told the SEC on Monday, it turned out that a … Read more

Updated on April 27 at 8:20 a.m. PDT with additional information about DirectX 11 and correcting for Intel comments at bottom.

Graphics chips will be tapped to accelerate more tasks in upcoming versions of Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems, according to Nvidia.

In an interview Friday with Sumit Gupta, product manager for Nvidia's Tesla products, Gupta described how new programming environments will tap into the latent compute horsepower of graphics processors to accelerate software in Apple's upcoming OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft's Windows 7 operating systems.

Graphics chips aren't just for games anymore. The trend toward general-purpose graphics processing is defined by an acronym that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue: GPGPU. But the essence of General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units is pretty simple: use the scores--or even hundreds in higher-end chips--of processing cores inside GPUs to speed tasks that, in some cases, would be done much less efficiently by the central processing unit (CPU).

This is where OpenCL (Open Computing Language) comes in. OpenCL is a programming environment for "heterogeneous" computing. That is, computers using a mix of multicore CPUs and GPUs. Microsoft's analogous programming environment is DirectX.

Apple says this about OpenCL on its Web site. "Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL...makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit."

Today, on a PC or a Mac, the CPUs made by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are adept at handling general operating system tasks. For instance, handling the sequence of things that must happen after the user clicks on an icon to start an application on their desktop. … Read more

As Apple celebrated, Microsoft canceled the company picnic.

As Apple announced results that beat expectations, Microsoft had its first ever year-over-year dip in sales .

As Apple announced a billion app downloads, Microsoft gritted its molars with a view to finally shaking a little of the smugness from Apple's chops.

So you might be wondering, as you sip your weekend cocktail and ponder why the NBA playoffs are even longer than the regular season, just how much each company's advertising might have contributed to these slightly diverse results.

In recent weeks, Microsoft has turned to a strategy of death … Read more

A notebook from MSI portends the crush of lower-cost, Intel-based MacBook-Air-like laptop designs to come.

As I've written before, consumer ultra-low-voltage (CULV) chips will arrive in earnest this summer. The X-Slim X340 from MSI (Micro-Star International) is using the ULV SU3500, a precursor to lower-cost CULV Intel chips to come.

(Note: On April 19, Intel cut prices (PDF) on a wide range of processors. Though the SU3500 didn't see any cuts, the prices on its low-power cousins, the SL9400 and SU9400, were reduced 10 percent and 9 percent, respectively.)

What is CULV exactly? Well, one thing it's … Read more

This week, Apple surpassed an amazing milestone at the iTunes app store: one billion downloads. Apple had been running a contest called the Billion App Countdown promotion with prizes including a chance to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, a MacBook Pro, an iPod Touch, and more. Though the contest ended once they reached their mark (winners will be announced soon), it's still an amazing feat and clearly implies the apps are going to keep on coming. That's great news for iPhone app lovers like us!

It's no secret that the most popular apps at the … Read more

We get taken to task today for our segues, which, we admit, can be quite forced sometimes. So, we show some examples of the good and the bad. We also have a Cooley rant about the new Segway minicar from a few weeks ago. And I suggest we go clubbing with baby seals, and Cooley and Natali threaten to kill me.

Now closing: GeoCities, a relic of Web’s early days http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10226255-2.html http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2345857,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03069TX1K0001121

Obama getting a … Read more

Things were really shaking in Silicon Valley, and people weren't necessarily happy about it.

Oracle and Sun announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun in an all-cash transaction valued at about $7.4 billion.

Sun made its name as a supplier of server hardware during the dot-com heyday, but its best-known technology is software: the Java programming language. The two companies said Java is the "most important software Oracle has ever acquired."

Ellison didn't always see Sun as a desirable takeover target. In 2003, when Oracle was in the … Read more

Apple's retail group shed about 1,600 full-time equivalent workers during its second fiscal quarter.

Apple's second fiscal quarter was a blowout considering the state of the economy, but executives noted that the retail division took a hit during the quarter, with average revenue per store declining to $5.9 million from $7.1 million a year ago. With overall revenue from that segment increasing just 1 percent to $1.74 billion and with 45 new stores having been opened since last year, something had to give.

The retail arm of the company now employs 14,000 full-time … Read more