Wayne Williams

You’ve got to hand it to Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. Despite living under house arrest, his assets frozen, and facing the prospect of extradition to the United States and up to 20 years in prison if found guilty of copyright theft, money laundering and racketeering fraud, he’s pressing ahead with plans for a new file-sharing site.

Mega, his Megaupload replacement, was revealed yesterday, and despite just consisting of a holding page at the moment, was quickly overwhelmed. "Millions of users hitting at once. I'm delighted by the interest. But servers can't handle it. The new Mega will. WOW!!!" Dotcom tweeted an hour after the news broke.

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When it comes to Windows 8 sales, CEO Steve Ballmer obviously knows much better than I do how many copies of the new OS Microsoft is shifting. But, his claim that the company has sold four million upgrades since Friday, sounds suspect to me. Where is he getting this figure from? Is it from the Windows Upgrade Offer site? If so, then that’s great -- a phenomenal achievement.

If it’s from there and other sources, as the slide shown at BUILD 2012 suggests, well, I’m not sure. Getting those kind of sales figures from a wide range of retailers takes time and can only have been arrived at by making some phone calls to gauge response (or chasing up EPoS from selected sources), followed by a spot of calculator prodding and some guessing.

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I love Gmail, but one thing frustrates me. I’m composing a message or a reply, and suddenly I need to check some details or copy some text from another email. That means saving the draft I’m currently working on, going into the other email I want, then returning to my new message and continuing from there.

It’s not a major problem, but it is a frustrating niggle, and I’m clearly not alone in thinking so, as Google is in the process of rolling out a change to Gmail that addresses this very issue.

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Towards the end of Walter Isaacson's authorized biography, Apple founder Steve Jobs talks about a self-designed boat he’s having built for himself and his wife Laurene. He shows Isaacson his models, and architectural drawings, and of course it’s a typical Jobs affair, with obsessive attention to detail: In order to realize the idea of having walls of glass "forty feet long and ten feet high" Jobs gets the chief engineer of the Apple stores to create a special type of glass capable of providing the necessary structural support.

Prophetically he tells Isaacson, after admitting he’s still tinkering with the design even though construction has begun, "I know that it's possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat. But I have to keep going on it. If I don't, it's an admission that I'm about to die". He did sadly pass away before the yacht was completed, but a year later his creation, named Venus, has been unveiled at a shipyard in the Netherlands.

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Just in case you were thinking it was all about the iPad mini and Surface tablets at the moment, along comes Google with a new Nexus range. The company had planned to make a big announcement in New York today, stealing some of the thunder from Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 launch, but Hurricane Sandy decided to put the kibosh on that (how ironic), so instead the search giant has had to make do with a blog post instead.

There are actually three Nexus devices being announced today, the Nexus 4 smartphone, the new Nexus 7 tablet (which my colleague Joe Wilcox talked about here) and the bigger Nexus 10 -- Google’s 10.1-inch answer to the Apple iPad.

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It’s fair to say Valve’s boss Gabe Newell isn’t a fan of Windows 8. In fact, the ex-Microsoft man called the new OS a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space" and, just in case that doesn't make his views clear enough, Valve announced shortly afterwards that it would be working on bringing Steam, its hugely popular games distribution platform, to Linux. A move that prompted me to ask the seemingly unthinkable: Will Windows 8 make Linux the new gaming OS?

I guess we’ll find out the answer to that question soon enough because Windows 8 is now here and, it seems, the Linux version of Steam won’t be too far behind it.

Last Friday, Valve put out an open request for experienced Linux users to apply for the chance to install and test its new Steam for Linux client, stating that it would be notifying successful participants this week, and kicking off the limited beta shortly afterwards.

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If you’re the proud possessor of a copy of Windows 8, or you rushed out today to buy a brand new touchscreen device with it pre-installed, the first thing you’re going to need to do is configure it to suit your needs, and install all of your favorite software.

You’ll probably want to make installing a better browser a priority (no offense Microsoft) and Google has designed a version of Chrome especially for the new OS, with some customizations for touch screens, including larger buttons and the ability to keep the browser open next to other apps.

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With all the Maps and Street View improvements that Google’s been rolling out lately you’d think the company had something to prove. Apple might be able to fix some of the many issues that plague its fledgling service, but it’s going to struggle to ever catch up if Google continues to advance its mapping tool at the rate it has been recently.

Google’s latest change is to the basemap you see when you open the service in your browser. Whereas before a zoomed out view of the world showed a fairly basic map, with borders, country names and some sparse vegetation, now it shows a more colorful view, with detailed terrain, making it much easier to identify forests, deserts, and mountain ranges.

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Steve Jobs was a huge fan of the Beatles and would no doubt have been pleased by the news that his company finally now owns the Granny Smith logo of the band’s holding company, Apple Corps.

The two Apple firms faced off in court regarding trademark infringements three times in a long running dispute, and although the Beatles’ company won the initial two cases, in 1981 and 1991, the third case was settled in Apple Inc.’s favor in 2007 when, for an undisclosed fee, Jobs’ company secured the rights to all Apple trademarks and logos, provided they agreed to license them back to the music company. Three years later Jobs successfully brought the Beatles back catalog to iTunes.

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It’s something that programmers of the popular credit card-sized ARM GNU/Linux box have been asking after for a while now, and finally that wish has come true. Broadcom has agreed to make its mobile GPU drivers open source, releasing them under a 3-Clause BSD license.

What that means for developers, is it will now be much easier to implement Wayland EGL client and server support, and allow anyone attempting to port a different OS to Raspberry Pi to take full advantage of the graphics core.

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Another day, another patent story. After a spot of bad news for Apple, comes something good for the Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation. A United States International Trade Commission judge has decided in a preliminary ruling that Samsung infringed four of Apple's intellectual property patents.

The ruling will be considered by the full commission, with a result expected in February, but it’s an important, albeit early, victory for Apple as the ITC has the ability to block the import of infringing products into the US.

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The first Microsoft Surface reviews are beginning to surface and they’re a mixed bag to say the least. Since all my money is going towards a new 4th gen iPad, and Microsoft is happy to send me a copy of Windows 8, but not a Surface tablet (sorry, Surface PC), I can’t give you my own insightful opinion on the device, but I can tell you what the early reviewers are saying.

And that early feedback is good (mostly) but far from being universally glowing. Pretty much all of the reviews point out the one thing we knew was going to be a problem: that there just aren’t anywhere near enough apps at the moment. But there are other issues that we didn't know about, such as that it soon gets very heavy, the cameras are poor, and it can be sluggish at times. Here’s just a selection of what those early reviewers are saying:

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To answer my colleague Joe Wilcox’s question, I won’t be buying an iPad mini. I will however, be shelling out on a 4th gen iPad. I already own an iPad 2, and was thinking of upgrading to the 3rd gen version, but I knew an update was likely. Even though Apple only rolled out the most recent iPad in March, there were a few clues that suggested a sooner-than-usual upgrade was on the cards.

Firstly, the Lighting port. On the accessories front alone it’s important for Apple to transition its devices to the new connector as quickly as possible, which means putting it in all of its relevant hardware. Secondly, the 3rd gen iPad gets incredibly hot when doing graphically intensive tasks. The new A6X chip will, I suspect, greatly reduce that problem. Making the iPad faster (while keeping the price the same) will also help position it a little further away from the new mini. However, the main reason for the upgrade is much more straightforward: it kicks the hell out of the competition.

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Uh-oh. While Apple was launching all its new and improved products yesterday, bad news brewed in the background. I just hope the company hasn’t pre-emptively spent any of the $1.05 billion it was awarded from Samsung recently, because the US Patent and Trademark Office has just ruled that 20 patents relating to overscroll technology (the bounce effect that happens when you scroll beyond the edge of an image or document) are invalid, and that could spell problems for the Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation.

According to Groklaw, "the notorious rubber-band patent [Apple's] been going after Android with, has just been tentatively rejected by the USPTO on re-examination. Apple has two months, until December 15, 2012, to respond and try to save it".

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Google is intent on making as much of the world available in Street View as possible. It recently added 250,000 miles of roads and additional special collections, and even provided a startling glimpse inside one of its own data centers.

The company has several methods of gathering this visual imagery, including a fleet of Street View cars, trikes and snowmobiles. Its latest innovation is Trekker, a backpack with a camera on top, which is currently used to capture 360-degree photos of the Grand Canyon.

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