Apple’s discussion board has been jumping a bit about Windows 7, and it isn’t because they’ve all converted from Apple’s OS to Windows suddenly; it’s because many of them have been experiencing weird errors and issues with their PCs freezing out the iPhone when using Windows 7 in conjunction with the Intel P55 USB chipset. Both are brand new, so odds are you’re not affected. But if you’re a “keep up with joneses” type with all new stuff, you might be affected.

The thread is pages long now, and a fair number of users are claiming the same “0xE8000065″ error when trying to sync their data on their iPhone with the hardware setup above. The issue seems more prominent with 64-bit versions of the OS for some reason or another.

Microsoft is reportedly aware of the issue, and is working on a fix that should be released soon. Consider this a public service message for those few who might have had trouble, and wondering if they’d gone mad.

Offender Locator, a controversial, high-profile application that allowed users to find registered sex offenders, was removed from the App Store this week.

The software from ThinAir Wireless was priced at $0.99, and had resided among the top 10 selling applications in Apple’s App Store for weeks. But according to CNet, the application was banished from the App Store for legal reasons.

While those reasons have not yet been made clear, some have speculated that it may be illegal in the state of California for anyone to profit from the

sale of publicly-available criminal information. But according to a ThinAir Wireless employee, Sex Offenders Search, a competing application for $1.99, remained on sale even after Offender Locator had been pulled from the App Store.

The software allowed users to see nearby registered offenders based on the phone’s current location or by manually entering an address. The program then pulled up a map with pinpoints for each nearby offender. The locations were each selectable, giving users access to the person’s picture, a physical description, and information on what crime they were convicted of.

Streaming Networks, a leader in on-the-go audio and video solutions, has announced the availability of a software upgrade for their iRecord Pro PMR-200, to record movies and music directly to the iPhone 3GS without the need of a computer.

With iRecord Pro, users can enjoy video and audio on their iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G, iPhone, iPod touch, iPod nano, iPod classic, Nokia N95 and N78, PSP-Slim, PSP, Walkman, USB flash drive and a host of other USB media. Designed for use in professional and consumer applications and high-end environments such as video broadcasting/podcasting and video streaming over the internet, iRecord Pro is a fraction of the cost and exponentially faster and easier to use than many other encoding solutions.

iRecord Pro connects via standard audio/video (AV) connectors to any

TV, set-top-box (STB), digital video recorder (DVR), camcorder, VCR, DVD player, cassette and LP players, or just about any audio and video source. With the press of a button, iRecord Pro records directly to your choice of portable media player, thereby offering an alternative to drag-and drop and iTunes procedures.

iRecord Pro is the only product in the market which can directly record to all members of the iPod family, including those running OS 3.0, in their native resolution and offers DVD quality video for USB storage media including PC/MAC.

An added feature of iRecord Pro is to transcode MPEG-2 video to H.264/AVC format for the portable media players without using PC/MAC resources.

The iRecord Pro firmware upgrade is available now and can be downloaded FREE from www.irecord.com by registered users.

One of the more overlooked features of the new iPhone 3.0 is support for a new open standard for live video streaming over HTTP, which promises to open up standards-based video broadcasting to a wide audience while giving mobile users an optimized picture as they roam between WiFi and mobile networks.

At the March unveiling of iPhone 3.0, Apple only dropped a subtle hint about new streaming video features in the new operating system (literally limited to writing “streaming video” on the slide of other features, below), leaving out any details about how it would work and not even mentioning the feature in any detail in the presentation.

The technology behind HTTP Live Streaming leaked into public knowledge in May when Apple submitted it to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a draft standard on track to become an RFC (or Request For Comments, the memorandum used by the Internet Society

to define how technologies work in order to foster cooperation and compatibility between the vendors implementing them).

Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming proposed draft looks a lot like a method Microsoft began selling last year, called Smooth Streaming. The difference is that Apple’s proposed IETF standard can use anybody’s encoder and broadcast server, and will work with any client software designed to receive the stream. In contrast, Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming is of course designed to exclusively use Microsoft Expression Encoder, Microsoft Internet Information Server with a Smooth Streaming extension, and requires Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 on the client.

Essentially, Apple wants a standard for streaming video that anyone can use so that it can continue selling hardware without being either shut out of the market by proprietary software, or held captive by it; Microsoft, as a software vendor, wants to create another captive market where it has the power to shut out competitors at its whim.