The era of the personal computer is coming to an end and the tablet will take its place, Steve Jobs predicted yesterday.  As Apple’s iPad racked up sales for more than two million since launch two months ago, the company’s chief executive said the transition was inevitable.

The Times 

Google (GOOG.O) expects to release its Chrome computer operating system in the "late fall", a top executive said on Wednesday, as it aims a competitive strike at rival Microsoft's (MSFT.O) Windows. The Chrome system will designed initially to work on laptop PCs, Sundar Pichai, Google's head of the Chrome project told reporters at the Computex PC show.

Ofcom has published a draft code for the first stages of the Digital Economy Act's implementation, describing how copyright holders and ISPs will identify suspected unlawful file-sharers. The draft initial obligations code was revealed on Friday and is open to consultation until 30 July. It confirms early reports that suggested ISPs with fewer than 400,000 customers, as well as mobile operators, would not have to participate in the copyright crackdown for now. The draft also confirms that three notifications will be sent to suspected file-sharers before their details are passed back to rights holders for further action, and it also provides some clarity around the issue of operating open Wi-Fi networks.

The company has faced criticism because the new Office 2010 productivity suite didn't implement the strict ISO-approved version of OpenXML but a version that had been rejected. The main focus for Microsoft was to move its clients to cloud computing, said Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business Division. He considers cloud offerings a good extension of the desktop software that Microsoft currently sells. 

Palm Pixi Plus unboxed: see the photos!

The Palm Pixi Plus just sidled up on our doorstep, at long last. We’ve been waiting for Palm’s little webOS phone to rock up on UK shores in original or Plus flavour since last year, and now the itty bitty blower is in our hands. We’ll be giving it the full review treatment, naturally, but before we do, have a look at the photos of it coming out of its quirky carton right here, and tell us what you most want to know.

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, finds "troubling" a string of worker deaths at Foxconn, the contract manufacturer that assembles the company's iPhones and iPads, but said its factory in China "is not a sweatshop". Jobs was making his first public comments about employees' apparent suicides at a complex operated by the unit of Hon Hai Precision Industry, which also counts Hewlett-Packard and Dell among its clients. At this year's All Things Digital conference, an annual gathering of A-list technology and media executives in California, Jobs sniped at Adobe Systems's "waning" Flash technology, vowed not to get into a search battle with Google, and waxed lyrical about the future of tablet PCs.

Google is reportedly about to offer European data protection officials a compromise in terms of the amount of personal Wi-Fi data it will hand over.

The search firm is being investigated after mistakenly collecting private Wi-Fi information from homes and businesses when creating its Street View service. Google's actions breached the Data Protection Act, and European countries including Germany, Spain, France, the Czech Republic and Italy opened full investigations into the incident.

TV manufacturers the world over are currently touting their 3D wares to consumers, but it seems that the 3D-with-glasses approach could be defunct in as little as five years. This is according to Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a Taiwanese company who is trialling the next generation of glasses-free technology. Using parallax barrier technology, ITRI showed off a 42-inch television sporting the tech, which it hopes will be ready for home use by 2015.

Finnish police have raided five homes in a search for virtual furniture stolen from Habbo Hotel.

The virtual world, which is big in Finland, claims 15 million users and turns over about $60m a year by charging users for various virtual goods.

Finnish police told the Beeb that they were investigating 400 separate cases of missing pixels with some people reporting the loss of up to €1,000 of stuff.

Such virtual thefts have been relatively common in Asia where gaming and virtual worlds are massively popular. Nor has Europe been immune - a Dutch teenager was arrested for stealing from Habbo Hotel in 2007.

A pedestrian is suing Google for supplying unsafe directions in its Maps tool after she was hit by a car on a Park City road. Even with the acknowledgement that most American cities are built for cars, rather than people, isn't that a lawsuit too far? Lauren Rosenberg is seeking $100,000 in damages after the accident in January when she tried to cross a busy state highway with no pavements at night and was hit by a car. A lawsuit filed in a Utah District Court last week accused Google of being "careless, reckless, and negligent" in supplying unsafe walking directions.

The Guardian