multi

Apple's effort to trademark the term "Multi-Touch" in the United States has been denied.

MacRumors posts the decision of the United States Patent and Trademark Office dated from last week, wherein the governing body denied Apple's application, saying that the term is merely descriptive of how people interact with its products.

"Thus, from the foregoing, we find that 'multi-touch' not only identifies the technology, but also describes how a user of the goods operates the device," the filing from the USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board reads. "Based on the evidence discussed … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--As the Intel Developer Forum gets under way this week, one hardly unexpected theme of CEO Paul Otellini's keynote address was that Moore's Law continues. Ivy Bridge, Intel's upcoming 22-nanometer processor platform, is slated for 2012. This continuation of Moore's Law means that a given area of silicon will contain more transistors.

Until relatively recently, more transistors more or less mapped directly to faster processor performance. That's because the additional transistors were primarily used to boost processor frequency and increase fast local memory--changes that were largely invisible to software. However, beginning around the middle … Read more

One of the most popular and customizable third-party clients in the multiservice chat category for Mac continues to impress. It supports multiple services, including AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Facebook, Windows Live, and Google Chat. Part of what made the original Adium so attractive was the multitude of IM service options, and that still forms the core appeal of this client. The interface is smooth and lean, fitting in well with the Mac OS. The client supports tabbed browsing, encrypted messaging, and you can transfer files to your buddies, though it can be hit or miss depending on what service you're … Read more

The mobile world moves at a breakneck pace, and it's difficult to keep up--even without the technical jargon most industry insiders throw around. And they do love to toss those terms about.

Last week, I dabbled in Wall Street-speak after AT&T and Verizon Communications reported their quarterly financial results. But today, I wanted to get back into some of the more technical (read: geekier) aspects of the industry.

So for some light reading, here are a few terms telecom experts throw around with the assumption that everyone understands them.

Spectrum: The term used to describe the radio … Read more

When Apple showed off Mac OS X Lion at the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote speech earlier this year, it was clear the company had paid attention to its successes with the popular iOS devices, and was now beginning to include successful iOS features in its flagship OS.

Also, with Apple laptops and tablets now far outpacing desktop sales, Apple has moved from a primarily desktop computer company to embrace mobile computing. This release of Mac OS X seems to be a reflection of Apple's successes in those categories.

With this eighth major release of the big-cat OS, Apple is … Read more

What happens when you combine social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook with cloud-based services from Google and make them all accessible from one desktop service? The new program called MultiMi (download) gives you access to all those accounts and lets you share items to contacts across the board using drag and drop.

"The objective of the product itself is to give them one centralized location to receive and manage their information," said Eidan Apelbaum, CEO of MultiMi's publisher, ZBang It.

Pronounced "multi me," the Windows-only program supports a wide range of services out of the … Read more

Video games tend to be more enjoyable on a large screen, but what happens when you harness the power of a 20-foot-wide multitouch display that runs at 8,160x2,304 resolution? Some incredible pew pew.

Fleet Commander, designed by computer science grad student Arthur Nishimoto and developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Chicago, is perhaps the most tantalizing "Star Wars" concept game ever made.

Under development for several years, it currently harnesses the power of a giant multitouch LCD wall to "explore how a real-time interactive strategy game that would typically rely on complex keyboard commands and mouse interactions [could] be transferred into a multi-user, multitouch environment," according to EVL. Fingers are tracked via TacTile software. … Read more

When you delete a file from your hard drive, the system will by default just remove that item's directory entry but will leave its data structure on the drive intact. This allows the file's data to be overwritten, but it also means that until this happens, the file's data can be read and reassembled if needed, as is done by various file recovery utilities. To prevent files from being recovered, OS X comes with a secure erase option that overwrites the location of files on the disk with random data, which interferes with the file's data … Read more

NASA today announced its plans for its next-generation deep space crew exploration vehicle.

President Barack Obama last year pulled the plug on the space agency's long-planned and multibillion dollar Constellation program. That system, which was expected to replace the Space Shuttle after its retirement this year, was thought to be central to bringing humans back to the moon, and possibly even to Mars.

But today, the space agency unveiled its plans for what it called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), a new spacecraft based on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle that was related to the Constellation program.

While Obama'… Read more