Apple has managed to get a patent on its multi-touch technology used in the iPhone. The extremely long patent number 7,479,949 was awarded on the 20th and seems to be a way to stifle competition in the smart phone market.

This new patent comes as companies like Acer and Palm are getting into the market. Apple's acting man in charge Tom Cook said they were not trying to stamp out the competition but just wanted to protect their IP.

I am not sure I buy that, lately Apple has faced some stiff competition from the G1 and other smart phones that cost less and allow for greater freedom. Google was even selling Unlocked and Unrestricted G1 phones for less than you could get an iPhone. Something tells me this is method to slow down the other guys as they are getting too close to dethroning the iPhone.

Looks like Crysis Warhead will be getting a patch, the first one for the popular game from Crytek. This is according to an article over at Fudzilla.

This new patch should include better dynamic texture support while running in enthusiast mode. The TimeDemo can now be started from the command line. But the biggest one for many is they have finally fixed the issue in Vista where the game will launch in windowed mode if you are not running at your monitor's native resolution (which is most people) as well as the Mouse offset problem that pops up so often.

The new patch will also bring the long awaited 64-bit mode to the game. Unfortunately 32 and 64-bit saved games are not compatible with each other.

While the faithful await the AM3, Fudzilla seems to think they will be let down in terms of Price/Performance.

According to Fudo, the AM3 on an AM3 board with the current BIOSes out will not give enough of a performance boost to warrant the extra cost of DDR3. He says that even with tweaks to the BIOSes there will only be a roughly 5% performance gain using an AM3 board over an AM2+.

Does this bode well for AMD? In the end I do not think it will matter. The AM3 CPUs will run happily in an AM2+ board with DDR2. This means that some will buy them and run them in current boards waiting for DDR3 prices to drop.

The controversy surrounding Gary McKinnon is something to watch. The U.S. wants him due to the embarrassment caused by having supposedly secure military installations breached more than any real damage done.

While his lawyers want to keep him at home and have pretty much thrown every argument in the book out to keep him in the UK.

The question is; did McKinnon hack into the US DOD to look for little green men? Or did he know what he was doing. He knew enough to leave little notes saying that the security sucked. He also was aware enough to plan out the hack attempt by using a blank password scan.

Diskeeper Corporation has recently released an add-on to its popular on-the-fly defragmentation software "Diskeeper 2009".

HyperFast is a specifically designed application designed to optimize the performance of SSDs on Windows operating systems. They key benefits are said to be faster performance, longer lifespan and avoidance of operating system / SSD design incompatibilities.

But how does it do all of this? Using InvisiTasking processing technology, which works transparently in the background (no scheduling!), HyperFast creates and maintains optimized free space, increasing the controller's ability to write sequentially and thereby enormously increasing the peak speed and life of the SSD, according to the company.

Some more details have emerged regarding AMD's move to a 40nm process with its RV740 and RV790 GPUs. Although not confirmed just yet, it's likely these refreshes of the existing Radeon 4600 and 4800 series could be released as the Radeon 4700 and 4900 series cards.

RV740 and RV790 should be considered as a trial run for TSMC's 40nm process, currently "the most advanced manufacturing process" on Earth. Yes, it is plain bulk silicon, thus it is not High-K/SOI and this claim can be disputed. Then again, Intel always bangs the drum of numbers, and only numbers will count when the company regains the lead. When it's following TSMC, then it is usually talk about materials such as brilliant implementation of Hafnium for High-K process.

Some beautifully presented images of Zalman's upcoming VF2000 LED have been published on the web which was first spotted at CES earlier this month.

The folks at Zalman have really put their heads together when designing this product; the VF2000 LED is natively a GPU cooler, but some additional retention modules also allow it to be used to cool CPUs (including LGA775 and AM2/AM2+/AM3 sockets).

Apple has just dumped another firmware on the iPhone. This one is a small update to 2.2 and only includes a few stability fixes to Mobile Safari and one for mail images not saved to your camera roll.

As always if you have an Unlocked or Jailbroken phone approach this update with caution, you will need to reapply any hacks you have setup.

Read more here.

Not too long ago the web was filled with the shocking news of once nVidia only partners switching to ATi. XFX a long time nVidia camp was one of these and many reasons were put forth to explain the move.

Fudo over at Fudzilla was able to talk to Cy Brown and get some more details. It seems XFX did not leave due to anything more than the desire to provide ATi fans with XFX quality products.

I am not sure if I believe that though, at the time when the decision was made ATi was on top and nVidia sales were plummeting. There did not seem to be an end in sight, nVidia was hurting from a few class action lawsuits, failed MCPs and the possibility that their GPUs were affected as well.

Intel's i7 is a performance powerhouse, there is no denying that. However the price premium has hurt its sales and the need to switch out the whole platform is not helping either.

To help combat this Intel is going to continue the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad line until 2011. There will be no new Chipsets but the P45 and G45 will be improved to allow for this extended life cycle.

According to Fudzilla this means improved support for DDR3 on the P45 and the inclusion of DDR3 1066 support and Windows 7 enhancements on the G45.