"iPad hoopla" has passed, according to a survey by electronics shopping site Retrevo, and consumers have lost interest after the product's unveiling . More than twice as many respondents said they were uninterested after the iPad was announced compared to a week prior. Of course, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics—three times as many said they were confident they would buy one after finding out the product's details.

Retrevo did similar surveys to in Apple's new portable touchscreen device both before it was announced and after. The week prior to Apple's big media event, 26 percent of those surveyed said they knew about the device but weren't interested. After the announcement, that number jumped to 52 percent. However, 3 percent said they would buy an iPad sight unseen. The number that would buy an iPad after Steve Jobs showed it off went up to 9 percent.

The next major release of Firefox will not be compatible with Macs running Mac OS X 10.4, also known as Tiger. This comes from a mozilla.dev.planing started by Josh Aas, a Mozilla-employed developer working on the project. The change will go into effect later this year when the browser's Gecko rendering engine makes the jump from 1.9.2 to 1.9.3.

The Mozilla Foundation estimates that there are currently about 1.4 million Tiger users using Firefox 3.5 every day and approximately 36,000 using version 3.6. Those numbers total a little under 24 percent of daily Mac Firefox use.

According to the discussion, Mozilla stopped supporting Tiger on mozilla-central, the most "cutting edge" repository, in September of 2009. Much of the old code was left, however, in case Mozilla had a change in heart. The decision means that the code specific to the old operating system will be removed soon, along with any hope of future 10.4 support.

Users of the open source Web browser who are still using Tiger will be able to continue to use Firefox 3.6 for as long as they want, but the browser will stop receiving updates "several months" after the release of the next major update. This means that any security issues found in the browser after that date would be unlikely to be addressed by the team, and, in turn, left unpatched.

Unsurprisingly, there is a vocal minority speaking out against the move. Individuals with older hardware are no doubt concerned that their old hardware will become even more obsolete and less usable as the rest of the world soldiers on. Mozilla isn't concerned however, citing past data that shows no significant market share loss occurs after support for an older version of the Mac OS has been dropped. The company also claims that it usually supports older versions of Mac OS X longer than most companies. 

Last week, Microsoft said it was investigating issues in Windows 7 that affect batteries on certain notebooks after hundreds of users reported they thought the OS was to blame. Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division, has posted a lengthy response on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. "At this time we have no reason to believe there is any issue related to Windows 7 in this context," Sinofsky writes. Here's his explanation:

Several press articles this past week have drawn attention to blog and forum postings by users claiming Windows 7 is warning them to "consider replacing your battery" in systems which appeared to be operating satisfactorily before upgrading to Windows 7. These articles described posts in the support forums indicating that Windows 7 is not just warning users of failing batteries - as we designed Windows 7 to do this - but also implying Windows 7 is falsely reporting this situation or even worse, causing these batteries to fail. To the very best of the collective ecosystem knowledge, Windows 7 is correctly warning batteries that are in fact failing and Windows 7 is neither incorrectly reporting on battery status nor in any way whatsoever causing batteries to reach this state. In every case we have been able to identify the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement.

Sinofsky goes on to explain that PC batteries inherently degrade in their ability to hold a charge and provide power, and ultimately batteries must be replaced to restore an acceptable battery life (batteries usually have a warranty of 12 months). Windows 7 taps into a feature of modern laptop batteries which have circuitry and firmware that can report the overall health of the battery in Watt-hours power capacity. Windows 7 then calculates the percentage of degradation from the original design capacity; the threshold is set at 60 percent degradation, so if the battery is performing at 40 percent of its designed capacity then users will see Windows 7 report that it might be time to change the battery.

Further, he notes that Windows 7's new "Consider replacing your battery" message does not exist in Windows XP and Windows Vista, so many users would probably not have been aware of their batteries degrading. This would also explain why some users were seeing the battery indicator in Windows 7 builds prior to the RTM release while others only saw it in the RTM.

Finally, Sinofsky asks users who believe they are receiving this error because their battery is new or in great shape to contact Microsoft via the TechNet forum, the Microsoft Answers forum, or to visit support.microsoft.com to find how to contact Microsoft assisted support in their region.

SAN FRANCISCO—The "Llano" processor that AMD described today in an ISSCC session is not a CPU, and it's not a GPU—instead, it's a hybrid design that the chipmaker is calling an "application processor unit," or APU. Whatever you call it, it could well give Intel a run for its money in the laptop market, by combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four out-of-order CPU cores on a single, 32nm processor die.

Details on the highly parallel vector hardware—the "GPU" part of the device—have yet to be disclosed, but AMD is focusing today's revelations on the CPU part of the design. In a nutshell, AMD has taken the "STARS" core that's used in their current 45nm offerings, shrunk it to a new 32nm SOI high-K process, and added new power gating and dynamic power optimization capabilities to it. Each out-of-order core has a bit under 35 million transistors, and a 1MB L2 cache that's not included in that number. AMD is targeting sub-3GHz operation, and a power consumption range of 2.5 to 25 watts.

The latest research from Websense Security Labs paints a dreary but familiar picture of the state of online security threats. Echoing the bad news of other such recent reports, it seems the vast majority of the Web consists of malware and spam. Worse yet, even legitimate, well-known sites are being used to pump malware, SEO poisoning, or phishing attacks.

Websense uses a global network of systems to scan and analyze over 40 billion websites every hour, tracking malware and other unwanted content. The results for the latter half of 2009 show a 225 percent increase in malicious websites. Worse, 71 percent of websites found to contain some malicious code were in fact legitimate websites that had been compromised in some way.

Just as it looked like Amazon was about to achieve an iTunes-style lock on the e-book marketplace, the impending arrival of Apple's iPad seems to have emboldened book publishers. After a pricing dispute caused all Macmillan titles to disappear off Amazon's virtual shelves, other publishers joined the pricing revolt, demanding greater flexibility in setting prices on their wares. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has apparently settled the first of these disputes by capitulating.

According to the Journal's report, Amazon will give up on its $9.99 pricing target for e-books, and allow Macmillan greater flexibility to set the rates for its content. The new prices may be as much as $5.00 higher. Although Amazon had announced that it had no choice but to concede given what it termed Macmillan's "monopoly" over its content, the publisher's books were slow to reappear in the retailer's site. That apparently changed over the weekend following a full settlement of the dispute on Friday.

Unfortunately for Amazon, it appears that Macmillan will be the first of many publishers that seek to renegotiate terms, as at least two others (Harper Collins and Hachette) have voiced their intention of doing so. The trigger for the sudden uprising, according to nearly every report on the  matter, is the impending arrival of Apple's iPad, as Apple has negotiated deals that allow publishers to retain significant control over e-book prices. As we noted in our earlier coverage, this is a complete role reversal compared to the dispute over downloadable music pricing.

For Amazon, it all has to be a major disappointment. After remaining relatively circumspect about Kindle sales, the company allowed itself a bit of back-patting after both hardware and e-book sales boomed over the holidays. Its primary competitor, Sony, appeared to be struggling in comparison, and newcomers to the e-book reader market appeared to have a bad case of first-generation hardware blues, something that Amazon had already put in its past. But the mere threat of Apple releasing a competing product seems to have encouraged Amazon's key suppliers (the publishers) to think different.