The Technology newsbucket: less spam, total SimCity, N8 v iPhone 4 and more

SimCity hell, or possibly Seoul. Photo by Photography by M.E. on Flickr. Some rights reserved A quick burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Spam Volumes Drop After Spamit Shakeup >> M86 Security Labs Blog It may be that the spammers behind Spamit (never heard of it? But you've probably received spam from it) are shutting down. Or perhaps they're just regrouping. How SimCity Teaches Us The Pinnacle Of Urban Planning Is A Totalitarian Death State >> The Consumerist If it never occurred to you that SimCity is the most dramatically right-wing imagining of a city... why didn't it? Tegra-powered Advent Vega tablet sports HDMI, "up to" 16 hours of battery life >> ZDNet And now the small print: "The real treat with this one is the longevity as a user can squeeze a maximum of approximately 16 hours of battery life out of a single charge when playing audio only. That means the screen has to be dimmed." Fantastic - the 10" iPod has landed. (With screen: 6.5hrs claimed.) Yours for £249 from Monday 18 October. Android 2.2, Wi-Fi, 3G, 1.3MP webcam, 4GB microSD. Dead platforms running >> Gartner blog Analyst Nick Jones: "There are too many mobile operating systems and too many handset manufacturers, in the long term this is unsustainable so some must vanish. History and economics both point to consolidation" Nokia N8's bill of materials costs similar to iPhone 4 >> EETimes "Despite dramatic differences in the designs, the NB carrier a bill of materials (BOM) cost nearly identical to iPhone 4, according to the teardown analysis. The N8's BOM cost is $187.47, according to the teardown analysis, just 4 cents less than an iSuppli teardown found to be the BOM of the 16-Gbyte version of the iPhone 4 in June. "Andrew Rassweiler, principal analyst and teardown services manager at iSuppli, the N8's BOM is proof that Nokia is going after the touch-screen smartphone segment dominated by Apple. "Although the two phones differ markedly in key areas, including the camera and the core silicon, both are designed to hit similar production cost budgets," Rassweiler said." The N8 uses slightly more expensive memory than the NAND Flash used in the iPhone. This will be interesting to watch. GMPolice (gmp24_7) on Twitter >> Twitter If you don't laugh at this then you may be eligible to join the police. London Homicide Reported Direct from The Old Bailey - Map >> Murdermap Includes poisonings. Dr Cripper rubs shoulders with a triple shooting and double murder from July 2010. Phew. Nokia N8 bill of materials same as iPhone >> Mobile Ent How many users have JavaScript disabled? >> YDN Blog Yahoo Developers found: "After crunching the numbers, we found a consistent rate of JavaScript-disabled requests hovering around 1% of the actual visitor traffic, with the highest rate being roughly 2 percent in the United States and the lowest being roughly 0.25 percent in Brazil. All of the other countries tested showed numbers very close to 1.3 percent." Google Chrome (v8) Download >>> Betanews fileforum Now with support for GPU acceleration. (Thanks @briantist for the pointer.) You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious To suggest links, tag articles on delicious.com with "guardiantech"