A guy going by the developer name GeoHot has released the first application to jailbreak the iPhone 3GS so you can unlock it and install all sorts of homebrew apps on it. Right now it's Windows-only, but a Mac version is expected soon.

Folks have been waiting for the Dev Team (the group that jailbroke the last iPhone) to do it but they decided to wait until iPhone OS 3.1 comes out and this guy... well, he didn't. Use at your own risk of course; it'd be tragic to brick your iPhone on 4th of July weekend.

An Apple-written heat advisory document has been uncovered. It warns users not to use the iPhone 3G or 3GS where temperatures exceed 113 degrees, or to run graphics or CPU-intensive programs in direct sunlight or where temperatures are greater than 95 degrees.

While some blogs are interpreting this as an admission of an overheating problem 3GS users have been complaining about, the document was written back in May. Still, the limitations described therein could explain some of the overheating problems. It depends; were you inside a car in Phoenix, Arizona with the windows closed when your 3GS overheated? Eh, probably not.

A reference to a "Family Pack" of Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium was discovered in the license agreements included with a recent release candidate of the operating system. If Microsoft does release a Family Pack, you'll be able to buy several licenses of Windows 7 at a significant discount and install them on multiple computers in your home. Otherwise you would have to buy a whole new, full-priced copy of Windows for each computer.

It's hard to get too excited about the implementation of this, because it's actually very small and specific — Bing is indexing the Twitter streams of a few thousand "prime movers" and digerati and showing those results for specific queries like "Kara Swisher tweets." Still, it is exciting to see some loud and vocal challenges finally coming to Google, who to date has essentially only faced small and scrappy Davids to its Goliath (if you forget about Yahoo which, sadly, is quite easy to do).

It's also another stake in what is going to be a heated battle over real-time web search, with a veritable fleet of small startups emerging to tackle the problem and now the major players acknowledging they simply must confront real time and beginning to make actual implementations. If you're interested in this space, check out a recent op-ed on TechCrunch by Mary Hodder that discusses some of the many issues to be teased out to solve the real time web search and discovery problem well.

By the way, although Google itself hasn't made any specific announcement surrounding the real time web, there are third parties providing a way to incorporate Twitter search results within Google:

• Twoquick
• Twitter search Firefox add-on

For some companies, being smashed into dust and having to file for bankruptcy would be a sign that it might be time to throw in the towel. Not so for dubious-and-certainly-not-legal Apple clone maker Psystar, who recently emerged from Chapter 11 and have come out gunning with a new product and old hubris. They're calling the new Open(7) their "fastest and most quiet computing configuration" ever — maybe they're hoping it will be so quiet that Apple somehow won't notice.

Anywho, it's hard to imagine how this will end well, but as Gizmodo notes, at least it's not a celebrity death story — yet somehow it's almost as lurid.

The full email newsletter announcement is past the post break.

Continue reading Psystar still trying to sell things... seriously? ›

Just in case you forgot, today is the day that the beta version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system expires. That means it will shut down automatically every two hours, just to make sure you're annoyed enough to consider installing the more recent release candidate version, which will last about a year before it starts doing the same thing. Naturally, the official release of Windows 7 won't ever do that (one hopes), but it's not out yet and when it does hit, it'll set you back at least $120.