Apple To Sell Mac OS X Lion Next Month For $30

Computerworld - Apple today said it would ship Mac OS X 10.7, aka "Lion," next month, and sell it exclusively through its own Mac App Store for $29.99.

Steve Jobs takes the stage to discuss the iCloud service at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. (Beck Diefenbach / Reuters)

The news came as CEO Steve Jobs introduced several other Apple executives during a keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which opened today in San Francisco. "If the hardware is the brain and the sinew of the product, the software in the middle is the soul," Jobs said at the beginning of the two-hour presentation.
Philip Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, and Craig Federighi, the company's vice president of Mac software engineering, spelled out 10 of the new features in Lion (see our continuing coverage page), which Apple will release in July.
Apple will offer Lion only through the Mac App Store, the e-mart that launched last January for Snow Leopard users. The upgrade will be a 4GB download.
The new operating system can be installed on all a user's personal Macs, said Apple, which puts an end to the multi-license Family Pack it's sold previously. And it will sell for $29.99, the same price as the Snow Leopard upgrade in 2009.
Last week, analysts speculated that Apple would retain the low price for Lion.
"Reducing the price [of Snow Leopard] did not negatively affect revenue," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, in an interview last Tuesday. "I expect them to offer a low-priced upgrade to Lion as well."
Doing so would let Apple again contrast its upgrade pricing with Microsoft's, as it did in 2009 prior to the debut of Windows 7, Gottheil added.
Lion will ship in July, but Schiller did not put a specific date to the release. Developers can download a new preview -- there have been several issued since earlier this year -- starting today.
Most of the features Schiller and Federighi demonstrated were ones Apple disclosed last year when it first announced Lion, including full screen applications, a tool dubbed "Mission Control" that combines several previously-separate interface elements into a single screen, and Mac App Store, the online e-mart Apple launched last January for Snow Leopard users.
"This stuff is useful, but it looks even more useful than it is, and that's going to sell Macs," said Gottheil in a Twitter message posted during the Lion demo.
In Lion, the Mac App Store will get additional features, said Schiller, including in-app purchases -- similar to what's available in iOS' own App Store -- push notifications, and anti-exploit "sandbox" technology that isolates those apps from the rest of the Mac.
Lion will feature additional tools, such as system-wide automatic document save, the ability to revert to an earlier version of a document, and a resume mode that restores a previously-closed application to the state before it was shut down.
During the WWDC keynote, Apple also revealed its iCloud service and ran through several of the new features slated for iOS 5, the mobile operating system upgrade scheduled to ship this fall.
But Gottheil was more impressed with Lion than with iOS 5.
"So far, Lion innovations are far ahead of iOS innovations," Gottheil said, again on Twitter. "As Spock would say ... 'interesting.'"

Apple Launches iCloud

So Apple’s iCloud was launched yesterday (June 6) and you can be sure that there will be dozens of thinkpieces all over the Internet on what this means for the music industry. The iCloud is free—you’ll get 5GB of space in which you can upload anything you want, but there’s also a deal specifically targeted at iTunes users.

For $25 per year iTunes will scan your music library and allow you to access copies of all those songs from their cloud. In other words, you’ll be able to stream them on a mobile device without needing to cart round thousands of MP3 files. The only snag? Well, iTunes may not have every song you own, but that may be a small price to pay for such an affordable service.

The best part of this deal is that the songs that iTunes matches in its cloud doesn’t count against your 5 GB iCloud limit, meaning that music obsessives won’t quickly fill it up if they go with Apple’s new service. The iTunes cloud songs will all be encoded at 256 kbps, which may be an upgrade in quality for some users. Gizmodo claims this will all work just fine even if you’ve been heavily downloading pirated music online. With that in mind, the RIAA statement on all this should be well worth waiting for.

Apple's New iOS5 Already Jailbroken

 

Less than 24 hours after Apple executives took to the stage at this year's WWDC and announced iOS 5, hackers already took to Apple's upcoming mobile OS and jailbroke it. (Shocking, I know!)

Word of the jailbreak first surfaced on Twitter, when user MuscleNerd linked to some proving pictures. The linked photos showed a jailbroken version of iOS 5 running on a fourth-generation iPod Touch (screenshots above).The images show that MuscleNerd gained root access to the device, and was able to install a couple jailbreak-only apps.

MuscleNerd is a well-known member of the iOS jailbreaking scene, forming part of the Dev-Team blog--a group known for rooting various versions of Apple's mobile operating system.

This new jailbreak, which makes use of the GeoHot Limera1n method, requires some patience to use as the jailbroken device will need to be tethered to a PC each and every time the device is rebooted.

It's not perfect by any means, but either way this means that iOS 5 has been jailbroken. And if past experiences hold true, an untethered jailbreak will probably come out sooner or later

Nintendo Unveils Wii U, Coming In 2012

Nintendo on Tuesday unveiled the Wii U, a new gaming platform that adds a small screen to a controller that can interact with the larger TV screen or be used as a standalone handheld device.

The white Wii U controller features a built-in, 6.2-inch screen, as well as the usual control and circle pads and buttons. It also includes a microphone, speakers, an accelerometer, gyroscope, and front-facing camera.

Much of the focus at the E3 press event today was on that controller rather than the console. In demo videos, the console appeared in the background and wasn't much larger than the Wii U controller.

The Wii U will make its debut in 2012; Nintendo did not discuss pricing.

In addition to usual Wii gaming, however, the Wii U adds casual games, video chat, a Web browser, drawing app, motion controls, and other tablet-esque features. If you're playing a game and someone wants to watch something on TV, for example, you can switch your game to the Wii U controller. Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's global president, however, stressed that the Wii U "was not designed to be a portable video game machine."Even though you can operate the Wii U like handheld device, it won't function without the console. "The images displayed are generated only by Wii U [and are] wirelessly transmitted without latency issues," Iwata said. "We decided on this new structure because we want to create a strong bond between games, your TV and the Internet."
Still, the Wii U will be compatible with all existing Wii games, controllers, and other offerings, like Wii Fit. To weigh yourself, for example, you don't need to turn on the TV; just use the Wii U controller's screen.
"It's a new structure for home entertainment. But to be sure, the most important part for gamers is how this new structure can be incorporated into game play," Iwata said.
Nintendo America president Reggie Fils-Aime described the Wii U as "a system we will all enjoy together, but also one that's tailor-made for you."
Nintendo did not discuss specific specs for the device, but stay tuned for more details.
For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.

What are the standard top-level domain names and who controls them?

The article How Web Servers Work discusses the concept of domain names. "Howestuffworks.com" is a domain name. The com portion of the name is called the top-level domain name. There is a very small set of generic top-level domain names, which you will probably recognize:

• com - for commercial endeavors
• org - for non-profit organizations
• net - for network providers
• mil - for military organizations
• gov - for government organizations
• edu - for educational organizations
• info - for entities providing information services

 There are also a number of top-level domain names for individual countries, including countries like Canada (ca), Australia (au) and the United Kingdom (uk). IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Association, provides world-wide management of the top-level domain names.