links for 2009-07-16

"Apple has sunk a full position in the US computer market during the spring, according to early estimates by IDC. The Mac producer is expected to have dropped from fourth place in the winter to fifth in the spring as it should have shipped 12.4 percent fewer computers than it did a year earlier, falling to 1.21 million Macs. Its market share is poised to remain the same at 7.6 percent but will have been eclipsed by Toshiba, which could jump over a full percentage point to ship 7.7 percent of PCs in the US."

"Apple is poised to open the iPhone 3G to Orange and T-Mobile in a bid to boost sales. The move is set for as early as September and will end Apple’s two year exclusive deal with O2. Crucially, the manufacturer will continue to give O2 exclusivity for the new, faster 3GS version, but will grant distribution of the older 3G handset to another network." What will happen here in the US.

"Reports are coming in that Apple’s latest update to its iTunes software has locked out Palm’s Pre." An unsupported competing device is now locked out, makes sense.

"American troops are not to be banned from smoking in war zones, the US Defence Department says. The decision comes despite a recent study which recommended the US military should be tobacco-free. Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said US troops were already making enough sacrifices in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, did not want to add to the stress of the troops by taking away their right to smoke. But Mr Morrell said the Pentagon would examine the recent study to see what else could be done to move towards banning tobacco in the military."

" One interesting possibility: Facebook is working on a new, more native Twitter integration that would let users publish updates to Twitter automatically from Facebook. If that is indeed the case, it would be an interesting move by Facebook. Allowing users to more easily link their Facebook updates with other services like Twitter could potentially make Facebook one of the largest Twitter applications. If only a few million Facebook users were to publish their status updates to Twitter, Facebook could become the largest source of tweets – an interesting inversion of the way Twitter is used as a Facebook application by many users today." This would be really cool.

Dealing with appropriateness of children's dress.

"In an emergency meeting held two days before the parties were due to appear in court — and after the Justice Department filed a brief supporting the plaintiffs Tuesday — the board of the Florida High School Athletic Association voted unanimously to revert to its original policy that permitted more robust scheduling. Individual school districts will still be able to decide whether to limit their games."

"The microblogging service Twitter is taking legal advice after hundreds of documents were hacked into and published by a number of blogs. TechCrunch has made public some of the 310 bits of material it was sent. It posted information about Twitter's financial projections and products." Fun stuff.

"We have just started using a new compression algorithm called Courgette to make Google Chrome updates small." Essentially 10 times smaller than one of the old difference generators out there.

Sing it.

A pretty interesting way to search, keyboard driven.