I feel a little sorry for Psystar. But only a little, because the Mac clone maker should have realized it couldn't rewrite history.

Its latest courtroom loss -- where a US District Court judge last week sided with Apple and said Psystar can no longer sell hardware based on hacked versions of Mac OS X -- will in all likelihood bring the whole concept of clones to an inglorious close. And none too soon.

The reason Windows Vista seemed slow, and somehow, strangely seemed even slower over time, is now abundantly clear to Microsoft's architects: The evolution of computer hardware, particularly the CPU, exceeded anyone's expectations at the time of Vista's premiere in early 2007. But the surge in virtualization, coupled with the rise of the multicore era, produced a new reality where suddenly Vista found itself managing systems with more than 64 total cores.

Architects had simply not anticipated that the operating system would be managing this many cores, this soon -- at least, that appears to be the underlying message we're receiving here at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles. As independent scientists were speculating about possible performance drop-offs after 8 cores, server administrators were already seeing it. There were design tradeoffs for Windows Vista -- tradeoffs in efficiencies that could have been obtained through complex methods, for simplicity.

Participants in the first Technical Preview for Microsoft Office 2010 received invitations this morning to join the Office 2010 technical beta build 4536.1000. Not long afterward, the link to the technical beta went live on MSDN and TechNet.

Ironically, once again, attendees at Microsoft's own PDC 2009 conference were the last to know about it, unless they were checking their own e-mail. The first hint that something was up came up during an unrelated demo during Day 0 of the conference. At the bottom of a screen where taskbar demos were being shown, the new icons for the Office 2010 apps showed up. Now, it appears all Office apps will be represented by their initials, not just Word.

Twitter reportedly will be abandoning its suggested user list following some unfavorable attention it received last month.

When a new user signs up on Twitter, the site offers him a long list of suggested users he may be interested in following. The list consists of about 500 prominent users in various fields, including politics.

The architects who redeveloped the thread scheduling system for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 realized that during the Vista era, they made some design decisions in favor of simplicity, especially for developers. But that simplicity came with a performance hit, especially from processes running in multicore processors -- the more the cores, the bigger the hit.

We all saw that with Vista. In overcoming these deficiencies, it's apparent from listening to the architects themselves, speaking on "Day 0" of PDC 2009 in Los Angeles (the day before the big keynotes), that they had come to loathe Vista's problems just as much as everyday users.

Windows Marketplace for Mobile launched exclusively with Windows Mobile 6.5 in October, and unified the vast Windows Mobile application ecosystem under a single umbrella.

Prior to launch, Microsoft announced that users running Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 would eventually have access to the new app marketplace, but did not provide a specific date.

Former Senior Vice President of AOL and political activist Mark Walsh makes a convincing argument that the Internet is broken. He believes that as soon as people started making money on the Internet, things changed for the worse.

"We really thought that the Internet, or the 'interactive services business' as we called it back then, was going to change the world," Walsh said in a recent TED talk. "And we thought it was important that that sense of community, that sense of transparency, that sense of empowerment was really a set of core principles that all of us believed in...it really was a perfect time. But then the money showed up, and things changed...The internet is broken because of that money."

Samsung today officially announced the long-rumored Galaxy Spica (i5700,) the company's fourth Android smartphone and sequel to its Galaxy handset from early 2009.

Like the original Samsung Galaxy, this 3.2" touchscreen smartphone is not likely to hit the American market, and will be released in select markets in Europe and Asia.
This 3.6Mbps HSDPA 3G device is equipped with the basic Google-friendly Android 1.5 distro, a 3 Megapixel camera, and an 800MHz application processor. It's actually considerably less feature-rich than the Behold 2 which came to T-Mobile in October.

For days, I've read blogs and news stories misstating Apple's cell phone profitability compared to Nokia. Headlines range from the AppleBlog's "Apple Surpasses Nokia as Most Profitable Cell Phone Maker" to Reuters' "Apple tops phone chart as Nokia, Samsung step up" to Silicon Alley Insider's "Apple's iPhone Operating Profit Beats Nokia For The First Time," among, many, many others. As good as this feat sounds for Apple -- profit share beating market share -- every one of these stories is wrong. Right, everyone is wrong.

Three days ago, Strategy Analytics released report "Apple Becomes World's Most Profitable Handset Vendor in Q3 2009," written by Alexander Spektor. I contacted Spektor this morning for clarification on the report or for an actual copy. He hasn't yet responded. So I have to go by all the misreporting.

Yesterday, U.S. movie rental chain Blockbuster Inc. reported a third quarter net loss of $116.8 million, some $96 million worse than last year. Overall sales were $910.5 million, down from the $1.15 billion it made in the same quarter last year.

Numbers notwithstanding, Blockbuster may be in a better position now than it was earlier this year.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched Windows Marketplace for Mobile's Web component, a version of the store fully accessible through any browser.

I lamented that Apple had not yet created a similar face for the iTunes App store, even though it is the most popular download shop among the smartphone competitors. Users who want to browse the contents of the iTunes store, be it music, videos, or applications, must have the iTunes desktop software installed or otherwise browse it on their iPod Touch or iPhone (in which case they're almost guaranteed to have iTunes installed on their PC anyway.)

All next week, Betanews will be reporting from Los Angeles, at the scene of this year's Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference. Based on our experience with prior years' shows, here's the pattern we expect: Day 1 (officially next Tuesday) will center on self-congratulation for Windows 7, much of it deserved. Day 2 will likely bring out the bugle corps for the public introduction of Office 2010 Beta 1 -- not the Technical Preview that's currently being circulated, but a more feature-complete rendition that should have more Web- and cloud-related connectivity.

But our coverage will begin on Monday with an unusual twist to "Day 0," which is usually reserved for in-depth workshops that command extra attendance fees. This year, Microsoft is trying an unusual step by opening up its day-long "Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp," headlined by Technical Fellow and SysInternals engineer Mark Russinovich, not only to all PDC attendees but to the general public. Here, we'll see how much attention Windows 7 can get not just from developers, but from passers-by on the street corner.

Now that it's finally been launched in at least some parts of the world today, Dell is working to keep its new Mini 3 smartphone device closely associated with Dell's computers, calling it "The world's most compact Dell" directly on its packaging.

"Our entry into the smartphone category is a logical extension of Dell's consumer product evolution over the past two years," Ron Garriques, President of Dell Global Consumer Group said in a prepared statement today. "We are developing smaller and smarter mobile products that enable our customers to take their Internet experience out of the home and do the things they want to do whenever and wherever they want."

If there were a psychiatrist seated across the room from us, and we were to present to her our feelings about information technology as a force in our lives, her diagnosis would be simple and immediate: We have an obsession. Maybe having nothing to do with technology itself at all, we're obsessed with the notion of a nemesis with an unfair advantage influencing the decisions we make.

In every major arena of information technology over the past five years, the principal topic of discussion has been the need to level the playing field, to restore something called "fair competition," to ensure that the smaller player still has a chance. For the topic of PC operating systems, to this day, there's a frenzied Pavlovian response to the notion that Microsoft Windows stole its ideas from Apple Mac OS -- I moderated public, online discussions about that same topic 25 years ago. For Web applications, we're beta testing the idea of shifting the Darth Vader mask from Microsoft over to Google, the dominant player in nine out of ten of the world's queries; and we're reveling in the irony of AT&T proclaiming Google an evil empire. For smartphones, we're evaluating whether Apple fits the role of dominant player, whether that Halloween costume we used to fit on Bill Gates and that we're testing on Eric Schmidt can be swapped out with Steve Jobs.

Chipmaker Qualcomm's mobile broadcast television subsidiary FLO TV has officially launched its PTV 350 personal television at retail today.

This is the smartphone-sized device that Qualcomm and hardware maker HTC unveiled in October. Like many of HTC's smartphones, the FLO TV PTV 350 includes a 3.5" capacitive touchscreen, built-in stereo speakers, and a battery which can support 5 hours of continuous mobile broadcast viewing.