Recent speculation about a chip change in Apple's product line has been rife since July 21, when CFO Peter Oppenheimer said to expect a dip in profits from a "product transition". However, Apple has flatly denied a move away from Intel CPUs or chipsets, which was most peoples' first guess.

Cringley thinks the news is related to a year-old story about Apple adding a H.264 chip that both decodes and encodes. Cringley explains:

The last I heard NHK was claiming the chip could compress a 1080p video and audio stream into four megabits per second, down from the 20 megabits normally required. If we assume Apple will apply the same kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge transcoding to 1080p that they've already applied to 720p in the Apple TV, then it is within reason to expect they'll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second.

The theory goes that Apple is moving to corner the HD market in its iTunes store a full year before other companies can develop a competing technology. This comes on the heels of not-so-recent news that Apple has taken the #1 spot in music distribution in the US, finally surpassing Wal-Mart. It's possible they're on track to do the same with HD video content.

Blu-ray? Isn't that how they used to do HD back when we used optical media?

As if the zealous fanboys did not have enough fuel in their fire, the NPD group has figures indicating that your average Apple Mac costs twice that of your average PC. However, the study found that superior hardware is not to blame as the average PC typically offers better hardware.

Eweek's resident Macintosh fan Joe Wilcox came to the disheartening conclusion after analyzing the NPD's numbers. In fact, Wilcox discovered that the gap has widened from 180% to 210% more expensive over the last few years. Thanks to introductions like the Macbook Air, the average Apple PC has increased in price.

It better be a good OS for $800.

There have been many operating systems running on the PS3, but all are Linux-derived and compiled specifically for the unique Cell CPU. One daring user has gone ahead and successfully run Vista on the machine.

By success, we mean something nearer to that of Enron or MCI Worldcom's definition, but success all the same. The feat employed the processor emulator QEMU and managed to launch notepad in a spry twelve minutes.

It appears Microsoft has been hard at work enhancing the responsiveness of the Vista platform.

(Ed note: Zing.)

Grandfather of the internet-gone-Googler Vint Cerf came out swinging yesterday at the obtuse approach ISPs are taking with bandwidth management. While most are looking to throttle and meter customers in any way they can, Cerf suggests that a bandwidth guarantee would mean everyone wins.

Cerf suggests that users should be guaranteed a minimum bandwidth without traffic limitations. I would like you to raise your hand if you believe that's what you're already paying for. If you raised your hand, it is unfortunate that this is probably not the case. Today's ISPs do not guarantee a maximum or minimum bandwidth for your line, and instead choose to qualify bandwidth statements with "Up to." This charming phrase guarantees that your line will be able to access content on the internet, and implies nothing further. You are not entitled to, nor may you ever come close to, what was advertised on the box.

Cerf's musings seem absurd on the surface, but a closer look at the state of bandwidth in the U.S. reveals a bleak picture. Provider nodes are typically over-saturated; they service entire neighborhoods with an insufficient capacity to deliver as advertised. This irritating little problem leads to the rapid jump in speed that many users experience between the hours of five and seven in the morning when most sane users are rather asleep.

Vint Cerf smartly points out that we have a chance to fix the real problem, rather than masking it with caps and penalties. Guaranteeing each user a set amount of bandwidth means the ISP knows precisely what equipment and provisioning is required for each user and neighborhood. One hundred users paying for 8Mbps/2Mbps service would require a node capable of handling 800Mbps/200Mbps. Miraculously, the congestion issues would disappear as no user is battling another for the slice of the pie.

Ars rightly points out that both DSL and cable are capped by the DSLAM or the cable modem. This leads to well-known bandwidth requirements, but ISPs have oversold the promise of speed, under-delivered on the back-end, and rode that overburdened hog to the bank.

This tectonic paradigm shift in broadband provisioning in the United States would require significant investment in the improvement of existing infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, telcos and cablecos are not in any hurry to fix the root of the problem. It's easier to blame your customers for your inadequacy. There's profit in that.

While boffins have been slavishly beavering away to get speed out multi-level cell technology, MLC SSDs typically offer capacity at the expense of speed. However, Micron's new RealSSD C200 seems to have its cake and eat it too. The new series of drives, which bring up to 256GB to the desktop, also delivers an absurd 250MBps read/100MBps write.

Micron's new drives are targeted at the price/performance bracket, while still managing to topple the 200MBps write crown held by Samsung's beloved FlashSSD series. The read is considerably more average, falling some 60MBps shy of that offered by Samsung's performance products.

Expect to see these Micron-based beauties hit the shelves in Q4 under the Lexar brand for an undisclosed price.

Users of NVIDIA's famed SLI technology have long bemoaned the lack of multi-monitor support with SLI enabled, but it seems all of that is about to be remedied. NVIDIA is preparing driver release 180 -- known internally as Big Bang II -- this September. The driver is to finally deliver multi-monitor support in an SLI environment.

Other improvements to the ForceWare series of drivers includes the long-awaited implementation of the OpenGL 3.0 specification. The new revision represents the first major overhaul in the history of the OpenGL and brings the aging standard into competition with DirectX 10. The inclusion of OGL3 is sure to please cross-platformers and open-sourcers everywhere.

Lastly, NVIDIA is harnessing the horsepower of their GPUs to enable video transcoding. The firm is promising to deliver a ten-fold speed increase over today's quad core processors.

These drivers are certainly both welcome and ambitious, and we're sure NVIDIA owners are pleased to hear some of these fantastic changes.

We picked up a little conjecture on Saturday that suggested NVIDIA was set to quit the chipset market due to poor uptake of upcoming chips. Digitimes now reports that NVIDIA has fired back to say that it's just not true.

Senior director of corporate marketing Michael Jong said that the claims were entirely without merit. The release points to various indicators as to why the situation is rosier than painted: NVIDIA held a 60% share of chipsets on AMD last quarter, their MCP sales are as strong as ever, and the 790i is an editor favorite the world over.

NVIDIA has been whipped into a fervor over the recent allegations. Public commentary from big green has called for a retraction on more than one occasion.

In 2007, Virgin American unofficially became a geek's favorite airline. Their planes featured in-seat LCDs, passenger-to-passenger chat, movies, games, podcasts, and more.

Today Delta upped the ante and announced something even Virgin America doesn't offer yet - in flight broadband Wi-Fi.

That's right, in the near future you will be able to make crude jokes on IRC, troll 4chan, and read xkcd from 30,000+ feet in the air.

Delta is joining with Aircell®, a 17-year leader in airborne communications for business and commercial aviation, to install the company’s Mobile Broadband Network on the carrier’s domestic fleet. The system, Gogo™, will enable Delta customers traveling with Wi-Fi enabled devices, such as laptops, smartphones and PDAs, to access the Internet, corporate VPNs, corporate and personal e-mail accounts, as well as SMS texting and instant messaging services. Gogo will be available to customers for a flat fee of $9.95 on flights of three hours or less, and $12.95 on flights of more than three hours.

Plane upgrades are set to start ASAP and Delta expects to have their entire mainstream fleet upgraded by mid-2009.

News broke a little over one year ago regarding Intel's secretive "Larrabee" project, a massively-parallel GPU positioned to compete with NVIDIA's premiere GPUs in 2009 or 2010. Fast forward to 2008 where the New York Times has gleaned some more info regarding Intel's long-incubated technology.

Rather than developing larger, faster and hotter cores, Larrabee will boast 16 to 48 x86-compatible execution engines on a single board. Intel hopes that this will be competitive when pitted against next-generation AMD and NVIDIA GPUs theorized to be massively-parallel operations with 500 or 600 micro-cores.

Intel knows that this is an important development for them. Doug Carmean, chief architect for the Larrabee project said that “this is on the level of the 432 or the Itanium.” He went on to imply that the unfortunate struggles they've had with those projects was a learning experience for Intel in the making of Larrabee.

It is expected that Larrabee will begin to see the light of day by 2010, with alpha silicon theorized to already be in the hands of developers to ready a healthy support ecosystem for the product.

Access Linux file systems from Windows

If you've ever had the gumption to access Linux file systems from Windows, you might be interested in trying coLinux. This version of Linux runs a modified kernel that can be run like a Windows executable, which permits it to function like a WIN32 application. Once inside, Polishlinux takes you through the steps to mount Linux drives inside Windows from your coLinux session.

IBM talks Fedora on the PS3

Sometimes it's easy to forget that Big Blue has a hugenificent research and development department. Today they're leveraging the power of R&D in an article that clearly spells out how to get Fedora working smoothly on the Playstation 3.

Capcom talks Devil May Cry IV and piracy

It is rare that consumers get a direct line to game developers and their executives. It is even more rare that these executives take the opportunity to talk realistically and humanly about their product, rather than dishing out canned responses. But Capcom just extended this opportunity to fans of the popular Capcom Unity site, where a user sought to satisfy an eternal curiosity: Is Capcom pleased with the sales of Devil May Cry 4?

What ensued was an open discourse with Christian Svensson, the Corporate Officer/VP of Strategic Planning & Business Development of Capcom. He noted that while DMC4 was strongly pirated, they were still optimistic about the future of the PC by saying "We are members of the PCGA. As a company, we strongly believe that the future of the PC is bright."

This is truly a fascinating read and a rare opportunity to see a major firm talk in an approachable manner.