News Humor Common PC Linux Mac CUCUG
The next CUCUG meeting will be held on our regular third Thursday of the month: Thursday, September 18th, at 7:00 pm, at the First Baptist Church of Champaign in Savoy. The Linux SIG convenes, of course, 45 minutes earlier, at 6:15 pm. Directions to the FBC-CS are at the end of this newsletter.
The September 18 gathering will be one of our split SIG meetings. The PC SIG will have a review of some of the commercial web sites our more tech savvy members use to acquire hardware for both fun and profit. The Macintosh is open for anything anyone wants to bring in.
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We'd like to welcome the newest members of our group, joining us in the last month: Robert Price (Linux & Mac).
We welcome any kind of input or feedback from members. Run across an interesting item or tidbit on the net? Just send the link to the editor. Have an article or review you'd like to submit? Send it in. Have a comment? Email any officer you like. Involvement is the driving force of any user group. Welcome to the group.
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by Paul Lilly
Posted 09/15/08 at 03:42:05 PM
URL: <http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/208_million_petascale_computer_system_gets_green_light>
Forget about dual, quad, or even eight-core processors, all of which would prove woefully inadequate next to the system being called Blue Waters. The 200,000 processor core supercomputer got the green light at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finalizing a contract with IBM to build the what will be the world's first sustained petascale computational system.
For anyone not up on their flops, a petaflop is the equivalent to roughly 1 quadrillion calculations per second, presumably just enough to get a decent framerate out of Crysis. Coupled with the 200,000 processor cores will be more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. And yes, that would hold a lot of porn, though Blue Waters will spend its time on scintillating real-world scientific and engineering applications.
Specifically, the National Science Foundations says that Blue Waters will wade into the study of complex processes like the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere. Other examples include the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe, understanding the chains of reactions that occur with livings cells, the design of novel materials, and other decidedly nerd topics that have nothing to do with propelling Folding at Home team 11108 ahead of the competition.
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Posted by Declan McCullagh
September 12, 2008 4:00 AM PDT
URL: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10040152-38.html?tag=nl.e703>
A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.
The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the "IP Traceback" drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.
The potential for eroding Internet users' right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates. Also affected may be services such as the Tor anonymizing network.
"What's distressing is that it doesn't appear that there's been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. "That's really a human rights concern."
Nearly everyone agrees that there are, at least in some circumstances, legitimate security reasons to uncover the source of Internet communications. The most common justification for tracebacks is to counter distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks.
But implementation details are important, and governments participating in the process -- organized by the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency -- may have their own agendas. A document submitted by China this spring and obtained by CNET News said the "IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing (IPv4 and IPv6), different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet) and etc." It adds: "To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged."
The Chinese author of the document, Huirong Tian, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Neither did Jiayong Chen of China's state-owned ZTE Corporation, the vice chairman of the Q6/17's parent group who suggested in an April 2007 meeting that it address IP traceback.
A second, apparently leaked ITU document offers surveillance and monitoring justifications that seem well-suited to repressive regimes:
A political opponent to a government publishes articles putting the government in an unfavorable light. The government, having a law against any opposition, tries to identify the source of the negative articles but the articles having been published via a proxy server, is unable to do so protecting the anonymity of the author.
That document was provided to Steve Bellovin, a well-known Columbia University computer scientist, Internet Engineering Steering Group member, and Internet Engineering Task Force participant who wrote a traceback proposal eight years ago. Bellovin says he received the ITU document as part of a ZIP file from someone he knows and trusts, and subsequently confirmed its authenticity through a second source. (An ITU representative disputed its authenticity but refused to make public the Q6/17 documents, including a ZIP file describing traceback requirements posted on the agency's password-protected Web site.)
Bellovin said in a blog post this week that "institutionalizing a means for governments to quash their opposition is in direct contravention" of the U.N.'s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He said that traceback is no longer that useful a concept, on the grounds that few attacks use spoofed addresses, there are too many sources in a DDoS attack to be useful, and the source computer inevitably would prove to be hacked into anyway.
Another technologist, Jacob Appelbaum, one of the developers of the Tor anonymity system, also was alarmed. "The technical nature of this 'feature' is such a beast that it cannot and will not see the light of day on the Internet," Appelbaum said. "If such a system was deployed, it would be heavily abused by precisely those people that it would supposedly trace. No blackhat would ever be caught by this."
Adding to speculation about where the U.N. agency is heading are indications that some members would like to curb Internet anonymity more broadly:
By itself, of course, the U.N. has no power to impose Internet standards on anyone. But U.N. and ITU officials have been lobbying for more influence over the way the Internet is managed, most prominently through the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia and a followup series of meetings.
The official charter of the ITU's Q6/17 group says that it will work "in collaboration" with the IETF and the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, which could provide a path toward widespread adoption -- especially if national governments end up embracing the idea.
Patrick Bomgardner, the NSA's chief of public and media affairs, told CNET News on Thursday that "we have no information to provide on this issue." He would not say why the NSA was participating in the process (and whether it was trying to fulfill its intelligence-gathering mission or its other role of advancing information security).
Toby Johnson, a communications officer with the ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau in Geneva, also refused to discuss Q6/17. "It may be difficult for experts to comment on what state deliberations are in for fear of prejudicing the outcome," he said in an e-mail message on Thursday.
When asked about the impact on Internet anonymity, Johnson replied: "I am not fully acquainted with this topic and therefore not qualified to provide an answer." He said that he expects that any final ITU standard would comport with the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
It's unclear what happens next. For one thing, the traceback proposal isn't scheduled to be finished until 2009, and one industry source stressed that not all members of Q6/17 are in favor of it. The five "editors" are: NSA's Richard Brackney; Tian Huirong from China's telecommunications ministry; Korea's Youm Heung-Youl; Cisco's Gregg Schudel; and Craig Schultz, who works for a Japan-based network security provider. (In keeping with the NSA's penchant for secrecy, Brackney was the lone ITU participant in a 2006 working group who failed to provide biographical information.)
In response to a question about the eventual result, Schultz, one of the editors, replied: "The long answer is, as you can probably imagine, this subject can get a little 'tense.' The main issue is the protection of privacy as well as not having to rely on 'policy' as part of a process. A secondary issue is feasibility and cost versus benefit." He said a final recommendation is at least a year off.
Another participant is Tony Rutkowski, Verisign's vice president for regulatory affairs and longtime ITU attendee, who wrote a three-page summary for IP traceback and a related concept called "International Caller-ID Capability."
In a series of e-mail messages, Rutkowski defended the creation of the IP traceback "work item" at a meeting in April, and disputed the legitimacy of the document posted by Bellovin. "The political motivation text was not part of any known ITU-T proposal and certainly not the one which I helped facilitate," he wrote.
Rutkowski added in a separate message: "In public networks, the capability of knowing the source of traffic has been built into protocols and administration since 1850! It's widely viewed as essential for settlements, network management, and infrastructure protection purposes. The motivations are the same here. The OSI Internet protocols (IPv5) had the capabilities built-in. The ARPA Internet left them out because the infrastructure was a private DOD infrastructure."
Because the Internet Protocol was not designed to be traceable, it's possible to spoof addresses -- both for legitimate reasons, such as sharing a single address on a home network, and for malicious ones as well. In the early part of the decade, a flurry of academic research focused on ways to perform IP tracebacks, perhaps by embedding origin information in Internet communications, or Bellovin's suggestion of occasionally automatically forwarding those data in a separate message.
If network providers and the IETF adopted IP traceback on their own, perhaps on the grounds that security justifications outweighed the harm to privacy and anonymity, that would be one thing.
But in the United States, a formal legal requirement to adopt IP traceback would run up against the First Amendment. A series of court cases, including the 1995 decision in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, provides a powerful shield protecting the right to remain anonymous. In that case, the majority ruled: "Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority."
More broadly, the ITU's own constitution talks about "ensuring the secrecy of international correspondence." And the Council of Europe's Declaration on Freedom of Communication on the Internet adopted in 2003 says nations "should respect the will of users of the Internet not to disclose their identity," while acknowledging law enforcement-related tracing is sometimes necessary.
"When NSA takes the lead on standard-setting, you have to ask yourself how much is about security and how much is about surveillance," said the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Rotenberg. "You would think (the ITU) would be a little more sensitive to spying on Internet users with the cooperation of the NSA and the Chinese government."
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Kevin Hisel for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
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By BEN CHARNY
September 15, 2008 5:03 p.m.
URL: <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122151212200638441.html>
Hewlett-Packard Inc. said it will reduce its work force by 7.5% as part of its plans to restructure after buying outsourcing giant Electronic Data Systems Inc. for $13.9 billion.
H-P also said the work-force reductions will "streamline the combined company's services" businesses, which is an area that financial analysts say the two companies overlapped the most.
H-P estimates about 24,600 employees will be affected, and nearly half of the reductions will occur in the U.S. Combined, H-P and EDS have a total work force of 325,000. There are 178,000 H-P employees and 142,000 EDS employees.
The staff reductions will be spread between both companies, according to H-P.
The company will record a $1.7 billion charge in its fourth quarter relating to the restructuring program. H-P Chief Executive Mark Hurd and executives are expected to provide additional details of plans for EDS during a meeting with analysts Monday afternoon.
Once completed, the restructuring program should result in annual costs saving of $1.8 billion, H-P, which the Palo Alto, Calif., company will reinvest in areas including sales and emerging markets.
Four months ago, H-P unsettled investors when it announced it was considering the complex deal, which will expand its small presence in outsourcing and consulting. They dumped shares, unpersuaded that the combination would benefit H-P and worried that H-P was overpaying.
H-P shares skidded 7% to a three-month low of $45.85 on May 12, the day it unveiled its discussions with the Plano, Texas, company. The shares kept falling even after Mr. Hurd later told investors that EDS would nearly double H-P's computer-services business and push H-P's earnings per share higher within a year.
H-P shares have rallied over the last two months as investors shed their initial skepticism and warm to the deal.
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Kevin Hisel for submitting this article for the newsletter.]
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Today, Comcast officially announced a 250 GB cap, while threatening to disconnect users who exceed this limit more than once. Comcast is taking the heat once again, but they are not the only ISP that limits its users. Other ISPs, Qwest being one of them, have exactly the same policy - and the same threats.
<http://torrentfreak.com/qwests-unofficial-250-gb-data-cap-080829/>
Bell Canada Inc. is moving to impose download limits on customers of independent internet providers, an act the smaller firms say is designed to eliminate broadband competition and prevent the introduction of new television services.
<http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2008/07/31/tech-bell.html>
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By Todd Shields
Last Updated: August 28, 2008 17:42 EDT
URL: <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aVzedYON0tJ4&refer=home>
Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable operator, said subscribers whose use of the Internet exceeds 250 gigabytes of data a month may get a warning call and could lose their service.
Customers who breach the threshold -- enough to send 50 million e-mails or 125 standard-definition movies -- may be asked to reduce their use, the Philadelphia-based company said today in a Web posting. Those whose "excessive use" continues may be cut off for a year, Comcast said.
Comcast's procedures are unchanged except for establishing the threshold so consumers know where they stand, Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said in an interview. The limit officially becomes part of Comcast's acceptable use policy Oct. 1, Khoury said. The company reported 14.3 million high-speed Internet customers at the end of the second quarter.
Cable operators are wrestling with how to keep high-speed Internet services operating smoothly as demand soars for features such as streaming video that place heavy demands on networks.
Federal regulators on Aug. 1 found Comcast had improperly blocked peer-to-peer programs such as BitTorrent that are used to share videos and other files. The company said on Aug. 19 it plans to slow the top Internet speed for its heaviest users, rather than target specific programs.
"It remains unclear how the cap announced today helps solve Comcast's supposed congestion problems -- or how the cap will work with other usage limits Comcast has been considering," S. Derek Turner, research director for Free Press, said in an e-mailed statement.
Customer Usage
The Washington-based non-profit group filed the complaint about Comcast that led to the FCC's action.
"The monthly data usage threshold will have absolutely no impact on 99 percent of our customers because their usage is well below" 250 gigabytes, Khoury said. Residential customers' median consumption is two to three gigabytes monthly, she said.
Khoury declined to say how many customers Comcast contacts for heavy Internet use, or how many it cuts off.
Comcast rose 38 cents to $21.66 at 4:30 p.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. It has gained 19 percent this year.
To contact the reporter on this story: Todd Shields in Washington at <tshields3@bloomberg.net>
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Date: August 28, 2008
Contact: Jen Howard, Free Press, (202) 265-1490, x22 or (703) 517-6273
URL: <http://www.freepress.net/node/43818>
WASHINGTON -- Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, has announced that it will impose a monthly cap of 250 GB on its customers' Internet usage.
The cable giant was recently sanctioned by the Federal Communications Commission for secretly blocking consumer access to Internet content. The FCC ordered Comcast to disclose its current and future network management practices and to stop blocking Internet traffic by the end of the year.
S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, issued the following statement:
"While today's announcement provides some details about Comcast's future network management practices, we still await their detailed response to the FCC. It remains unclear how the cap announced today helps solve Comcast's supposed congestion problems -- or how the cap will work with other usage limits Comcast has been considering.
"Though the proposed cap is relatively high, it will increasingly ensnare more users as technology continues its natural progression. If Comcast has oversold its network to the point of creating congestion problems, then well-disclosed caps for Internet use are a better short-term solution than Comcast's current practice of illegally blocking Internet traffic. But in the long term, congestion should be treated as a temporary problem -- one that is managed without discrimination.
"If the United States had genuine broadband competition, Internet providers would not be able to profit from artificial scarcity -- they would invest in their networks to keep pace with consumer demand. Unfortunately, Americans will continue to face the consequences of this lack of competition until policymakers get serious about policies that deliver the world-class networks consumers deserve."
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Posted by Brooke Crothers
September 12, 2008 11:15 PM PDT
URL: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10041107-64.html?tag=mncol>
Texas Instruments commemorated the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit with the opening Friday of Kilby Labs, honoring Jack Kilby, the Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the seminal electronic device.
As a new TI employee in 1958, Kilby was forced to work during the traditional company summer vacation. During that time, he built the first integrated circuit, now the basic building block of everything from 3G cell phones to supercomputers.
The first IC was crude: a sliver of germanium with protruding wires glued to a glass slide (see image below). When Kilby applied electricity to the circuit, "an unending sine wave undulated across his oscilloscope screen. In that instant...he had successfully integrated all of the parts of an electronic circuit onto a single device made from the same semiconductor material," according to TI's Web site.
Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel, also created an integrated circuit, about six months after Kilby. At that time, Noyce was at Fairchild Semiconductor (which he also co-founded). Noyce's chip, made of silicon, overcame some practical problems that Kilby's germanium-based device did not.
Kilby won the inventor's "Triple Crown": the Nobel Prize in physics; the National Medal of Science; and the National Medal of Technology. He held more than 60 patents including one for the portable electronic calculator, which TI invented in 1967. He died in 2005 at the age of 81 after a battle with cancer.
Kilby Labs will be located on TI's Dallas North Campus, where Kilby first designed the chip. The new facility will bring together university researchers and leading TI engineers to discover new ways to use the IC--"from creating new ways to make health care more mobile to harnessing new power sources to enabling more fuel-efficient vehicles," TI said.
TI has named Ajith Amerasekera as director of the labs. Amerasekera, who is a TI fellow, joined the company in 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics.
At TI's headquarters, the original lab where Kilby worked and made his discovery of the first integrated circuit has been re-created on-site. TI has also made a donation toward Jack Kilby's memorial statue in his hometown of Great Bend, Kan.
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Om Malik, Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 8:30 PM PT
URL: <http://gigaom.com/2008/09/06/google-at-10-larry-sergey-me/>
It is not clear how old Google is - some argue that world's largest search engine operator is 13 - after all it operated in stealth for about 3 years before launching in September 1998. Many major news organizations are going with September 2008 as the tenth anniversary so I am going to play along. Forbes.com even asked the question, Has Google Changed The World? from many well known people. For some odd reason they decided to seek my thoughts.
Gandhi changed the world. The steam engine changed the world. Heart transplants changed the world. The Internet changed the world. Google simply made a small (albeit important) contribution toward making Internet a better experience for all of us.
Google's contributions are still worthy of praise. It is no longer impossible to find relevant information on the fast-growing Internet. I remember tearing my hair out looking for relevant information. Today it is as simple as acting on our impulse to seek that knowledge-and that has infinitely changed the way we interact with the machines.
The article triggered a chain reaction and a trip down the memory lane. I had been a Google-addict for a while and loved its simple elegance over rivals such as AltaVista and Inktomi-powered searches. I had talked to the company earlier, but I didn't meet the Stanford duo in person up until September 1999. The company had just raised about $25 million in venture money.
"I have never paid more money for so little a stake in a startup," John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was heard saying. Good thing he did - for he paid next to nothing for what could arguably be the Internet-equivalent of Alaskan oil and gas fields.
Larry Page & Sergey Brin had stopped by at the Forbes.com offices and we talked at length about the company. It ultimately resulted in this feature, How Google Is That? Larry still had the same disastrous haircut he supports today. Brin was measured and logical as always in his responses. They thankfully made no meaningless and "do-no-evil" hypocritical statements. They were just two guys out to change the world. I remember getting along with them famously, but never saw or talked to them since, though I have been to many Google press events.
The company was 12-months old. They had just come up with their version of contextual-text advertisng system. They had 40 employees, were looking for an inhouse chef, and were doing about 4 million page views a day and about 4 million searches a day. That's 45 searches per second. No one in the company owned a glider, though their venture backers had their own private planes. The company was housed in 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto and the co-founders were single.
In July 2008, Google registered 7.23 billion searches - about 242 million a day. That works out to about 4 10 million searches in an hour or over 1100 2772 searches per second. (Funny, it turned out to be much bigger than the market estimates used by Google.) It had sales of $5.4 billion in the second quarter of 2008 alone. It now employs over 19,000 people. Larry and Sergey are billionaires and own a Boeing 767 & a Boeing 757. They are both married. The company has offices in multiple locations and data centers that are sprinkled around the globe.
After meeting with them and discussing the merits of search-only approach versus portals, I came to this conclusion: "Perhaps the other Stanford duo, Yahoo! cofounders David Filo and Jerry Yang, should be a little concerned-their media ambitions have superseded their customers' desire for a really smart search engine." In hindsight, I am surprised I was able to get away with making that statement and my editor didn't catch what clearly was an opinion - a no-no in the non-blog mediascape. After all, it seemed so stupid to suggest that because Yahoo had 240 million page views a day and was literally printing money.
Brin tried to convince me that the text-based contextual advertising (first popularized by LinkExchange, a company that was bought by Microsoft) was their way of making money. "Banners are not working and clickthrough rates are falling, I think highly focused ads are the answer," Brin said, and pointed out that Google would be in black in 24 months. By 2001, I could have kicked myself for doubting the kid!
Fast forward 9 years, and most of Google's competitors have gone to the great technology graveyard, nary a tombstone. Simpli.com, Dogpile, Direct Hit and Northern Light were all part of the new search engines that were taking on the incumbents like Yahoo, Lycos and HotBot and wanted to make web searches simpler and more accurate.
"Google is essentially trying to categorize and catalog the web. We have a very different product and a different approach," Jeffrey Stibel, cofounder and CEO of then Providence, R.I.-based Simpli.com told me for the Forbes.com story. He was taking a more exotic linguistic approach to search. It is now owned by Valueclick, an ad-network.
In comparison, Google's analysis of the link structure of the World Wide Web and large-scale data mining and ability to ranks a page against similar pages turned out to be the right approach. Was it just the algorithm and a better monetization scheme? Was it a right solution at the right time? I think it was a bit of all that - but most importantly, it was a farsighted approach to infrastructure and the network.
This was the critical difference - I wrote about it recently - between winning and losing. I was reminded of this by an old PowerPoint presentation. They talked about using commodity compute infrastructure to out muscle everyone and doing analysis of the web like it has never been done before. It seems so obvious today - but back then it was an idea ahead of its time. The impact of pizza box servers was yet to be seen, and companies like Cobalt Networks (sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 2.4 billion) were selling early versions of Linux-powered thin servers, but they were not cheap by any means.
Many on Wall Street question why Google spends so much money on infrastructure. The question is why not - after all every millisecond of performance means more searches and more searches mean more advertising. More infrastructure means more crawling, more indexing and better results. I think that slide reminds us of the fact that infrastructure-as-an-advantage is in the DNA of Google. And that is unlikely to change - and that is why world's smartest engineers and computer scientists still want to work there.
History has made a genius out of all who bet on Larry and Sergey - the investors, the employees, journalists who were enthralled by their story. In reality to those who built Google, it was the only option.
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From The Times
September 15, 2008
URL: <http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article4753389.ece>
Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own "computer navy".
The company is considering deploying the supercomputers necessary to operate its internet search engines on barges anchored up to seven miles (11km) offshore.
The "water-based data centres" would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google's costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres, which are sited across the world, including in Britain.
In the patent application seen by The Times, Google writes: "Computing centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away."
The increasing number of data centres necessary to cope with the massive information flows generated on popular websites has prompted companies to look at radical ideas to reduce their running costs.
The supercomputers housed in the data centres, which can be the size of football pitches, use massive amounts of electricity to ensure they do not overheat. As a result the internet is not very green.
Data centres consumed 1 per cent of the world's electricity in 2005. By 2020 the carbon footprint of the computers that run the internet will be larger than that of air travel, a recent study by McKinsey, a consultancy firm, and the Uptime Institute, a think tank, predicted.
In an attempt to address the problem, Microsoft has investigated building a data centre in the cold climes of Siberia, while in Japan the technology firm Sun Microsystems plans to send its computers down an abandoned coal mine, using water from the ground as a coolant. Sun said it could save $9 million (£5 million) of electricity costs a year and use half the power the data centre would have required if it was at ground level.
Technology experts said Google's "computer navy" was an unexpected but clever solution. Rich Miller, the author of the datacentreknowledge.com blog, said: "It's really innovative, outside-the-box thinking."
Google refused to say how soon its barges could set sail. The company said: "We file patent applications on a variety of ideas. Some of those ideas later mature into real products, services or infrastructure, some don't."
Concerns have been raised about whether the barges could withstand an event such as a hurricane. Mr Miller said: "The huge question raised by this proposal is how to keep the barges safe."
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Google plans to launch its own browser, in the latest twist in a battle with Microsoft. The open-source software is designed to make it easier and faster to browse the Web, the company said.
<http://online.wsj.com/public/us>
"Both U.S.-based tracking company Net Applications Inc. and Irish vendor StatCounter put Chrome's total market share at around 1%, less than 24 hours after the browser's launch, passing rivals such as Opera and Netscape in the process."
<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9114047>
Here is just a little of the email traffic I have encountered concerning Chrome.
This comic is a good intro to it:
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
Looks very impressive from a techincal standpoint. I'll have to check it out.
Here's another version of it - "Understanding Google Chrome"
<http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/>
Page 21 and 22 alone make me want this thing yesterday.
Chrome is lightning fast.
and now, 2 days later, you can get infected at lightning speed too :/
<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9114078>
By Gregg Keizer
September 3, 2008 (Computerworld)
Attackers can combine a months-old "carpet bomb" bug with another flaw disclosed last month to trick people running Google Inc.'s brand-new Chrome browser into downloading and launching malicious code, a security researcher said today.
The attacks are possible because Google used an older version of WebKit, an open-source rendering engine that also powers Apple Inc.'s Safari, as the foundation of Chrome, said Israeli researcher Aviv Raff on Wednesday.
Raff posted a proof-of-concept exploit to demonstrate how hackers could create a new "blended threat" -- so-named because it relies on multiple vulnerabilities -- to attack Chrome, the browser Google released this week.
Users can set an option in Chrome that will thwart Raff's exploit by
popping up a warning asking for a file name and location for any
downloaded file. To change Chrome, select Options under the "Customize
and control Google Chrome" menu; the menu is at the far right, near the
top. Although not named, it looks like a small wrench. Next, click the
"Minor Tweaks" tab in the Options window, then check the box that reads
"Ask where to save each file before downloading."
Part of the Chrome core is now on ARM, and on its way to mobil devices:
<http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210300117&cid=NL_eet>
They seem to confuse Java and Javascript in that article:
'One of the core planks of the Chrome browser is a new Javascript virtual machine called V8 that delivers "many times" the performance of other Java VMs'
A bit disappointing to see such a thing from EE Times.
Seems it will work if you install Java version 6, update 10. It's a beta, but that's what's required.
---Unfortunately, this is Windows Only for now. They're working on a Mac version. It's based upon WebKit, so the page rendering should be similar to Safari. This is good for Apple because it means that if people write webpages for Google Chrome or Android, they'll render fine in Safari too.
Google Chrome will put pressure on Mozilla and Opera to adopt WebKit as their internal rendering engine.
The JavaScript engine, however, is their own devising which makes me a bit nervous. That means there's another JavaScript engine everyone is going have to test their code against. Maybe if there JavaScript engine is as good as they claim, WebKit will adapt some aspects of it, and thus get transferred to Safari too.
David Weintraub
---It's wicked fast; much faster than FF3 and noticably faster than Safari3. As far as I can tell, it is stable (hasn't crashed yet). The javascript is at least as fast as they claim. I haven't seen web pages loading this fast since the mid 1990's when the web was small and a 20K image was considered large and I was lucky enough to be on a T1. It's autocomplete is very nice as well. Heck, it almost makes me want to cruise the web on the crappy wintendo machine. Well, almost.
Interesting side effect for me though, ads on pages are not nearly as annoying when I'm not waiting for them to load. Maybe this is a secret 'feature' of Chrome?
Lewis@Gmail
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URL: <http://www.codeweavers.com/about/general/press/20080915/>
Exciting New Browser Now Runs on Mac and Linux via the Power of Wine with release of CrossOver Chromium
SAINT PAUL, Minn. (September 15, 2008) - CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that transform Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, has extended the Google Chromium launch beyond Windows. They are announcing the release of CrossOver Chromium for Mac and Linux, available immediately as a free download.
CrossOver Chromium is offered as a proof-of-concept so that Mac and Linux users can try first hand the power and flexibility of the new Chromium open source browser. CrossOver Chromium also showcases the power of Wine that allows CodeWeavers to rapidly migrate technology from Windows to alternate platforms.
"We did this to prove a point," said Jeremy White, CodeWeavers President and chief executive officer. "The message is very simply this: if you are a Windows software vendor, and you want to get your product into new markets, you should pay attention to Wine. Wine is a very powerful tool for bringing your product to new audiences in the Mac and Linux spaces. And in many cases Wine is faster and more economical than doing a native port."
"This is really cool," agreed Larry Kettler, Vice President of Business Development at Xandros, a leading Linux distribution and digital download and software management service. "CodeWeavers has demonstrated that Linux users don't have to be second-class citizens in terms of getting their hands on the latest software releases. I'm very impressed that they were able to release this just a few days after the Chromium open source project was lauched."
White was quick to caution that CrossOver Chromium is still in its early stages. "CrossOver Chromium is a proof of concept built around a piece of beta code. So users shouldn't view this as a production release. It may be buggy, and they should use it with caution. Nevertheless, it is as fully functional as the Windows beta, and we think that sends an important message."
John Rizzo, noted blogger for MacWindows.com, also expressed his interest. "Chromium understandably generated a lot of buzz when it was released last week. Anything Google does is big news. It's intriguing that CodeWeavers could pick up that ball as rapidly as they did and run with it. I'm sure there will be a lot of Mac users out there who will want to try this out, if nothing else just to see what all the excitement is about."
About CodeWeavers
Founded in 1996 as a general software consultancy, CodeWeavers today focuses on the development of Wine -the core technology found in all of its CrossOver products. The company's goal is to bring expanded market opportunities for Windows software developers by making it easier, faster, and more painless to port Windows software to Linux. CodeWeavers is recognized as a leader in open-source Windows porting technology, and maintains development offices in Minnesota, the UK, and elsewhere around the world. The company is privately held. For more information about CodeWeavers, log on to <www.codeweavers.com>.
# # #
Contact
Alex Seitz, Haberman & Associates, 612.372.6471, <alex@modernstorytellers.com>.
Eric Davis, Haberman & Associates, 612-372-6465, <eric@modernstorytellers.com>.
It is running in WINE.
Written by Mike Gunderloy - Sep. 11, 2008
URL: <http://ostatic.com/173233-blog/sun-open-sources-their-hypervisor>
Hypervisors - bare-metal virtualization solutions that don't depend on an underlying operating system - used to be the high-priced spread of the virtualization world. You can still pay a pretty penny for hypervisor solutions from some vendors. But an announcement from Sun yesterday increases the pressure on purely-commercial solutions: Sun's own xVM Server is now open source.
Sun xVM Server is an outgrowth of the Xen project - which raises the question of why a company would go with Sun's version rather than the Xen one. Apart from its support for SPARC and Solaris (as well as other chips and operating systems), Sun is also building a services and sales organization around a commercial version of xVM server.
If you want to kick the tires or cut your costs, you can hop over to xVMServer.org, download the source (GPL 3) and join the community. But Sun is betting that, as deployments move from an initial testing phase to active usage, large organizations will be willing to pay for guaranteed support (starting at $500 per year per physical server).
This is essentially the same strategy that Sun is using for MySQL: give the open source version away for free, but provide a trusted safety net for companies that want support and training from an experienced organization. It remains to be seen whether this can work in the hotly-competitive virtualization field, but Sun has been reporting successes with similar plans for MySQL and GlassFish.
ToC
Posted by Daniel Terdiman
September 12, 2008 2:15 PM PDT
URL: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10040670-52.html?tag=mncol>
More than 2,200 one-star reviews of the new Electronic Arts game Spore, left on Amazon.com as part of a well-publicized and coordinated user revolt against the game's digital rights management restrictions, disappeared Friday.
And while Amazon customers reacted angrily to what they said was obviously Amazon's caving in on a bad situation, the retailer itself said that the take-down was the result of nothing more onerous than a glitch.
Users have been angry at EA because the game's DRM system appears to limit the number of activations per copy of the game to three.
And as a way of striking back, some users had coordinated their efforts by leaving the more than 2,200 one-star reviews on Amazon.
On Friday, every single review for Spore for the game was gone.
But Amazon says there was no foul play at work.
"There's just a glitch on the site that ended up wiping those reviews clean," said Amazon.com spokesperson Tammy Hovey. "So we're working on putting them back up. I don't have any details (on what happened). But we're working on it so all the customer reviews will be back up on the site."
Asked if perhaps Amazon had decided to put the reviews back up in anticipation of bad PR for taking them down, Hovey said, "Customers always have their opinions about all the products on our site, and we don't censor them, whether they're favorable or unfavorable."
By 2:10 p.m. PDT, the reviews were back up on the site.
For its part, EA said it was looking into the situation.
Although the actual reviews were removed, Amazon did leave up a discussion thread on the Spore page. And during the period while the reviews were down, some users angrily employed the thread to paste in reviews that had originally been left for the game.
For example, "1.0 out of 5 stars Dumbed down experience and draconian DRM, September 7, 2008," Amazon user Keri Gibson-tutt posted.
"Utterly disgraceful," wrote Amazon user Paul Tinsley. "This means that the Amazon review system has not value at all to its customers. Sad days indeed."
It's not clear how users will respond now that the reviews are back.
ToC
from Mark Zinzow
This may be worth watching for occasional things of real value.
<http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/>
Giveaway of the Day - A different software package every day for free.
Today - Magic Lens Max 5.0.2 screen magnifier Recently more powerful tools like commercial DVD rippers, recovery utilities, video, image and audio editors, register cleaners, etc. Archives show what's been posted in the past.
Please note that the software you download and install during the Giveaway period comes with the following important limitations:
There is also a related site:
<http://game.giveawayoftheday.com/>
ToC
September 16, 2008
URL: <http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/16/mccain-blackberry/>
Speaking to reporters today, McCain campaign adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin claimed that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is responsible for the "miracle" of PDAs. Politico reports:
"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce committee so you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."
Although he doesn't e-mail, McCain told the New York Times in July that he does "use the Blackberry." Campaign aide Mark Salter added, "He uses a BlackBerry, just ours."
According to the AP, Holtz-Eakin also pointed today to McCain's service leadership of the Senate Commerce Committee, which "put him at the intersection of a number of economic interests, including the telecommunications industry." Similarly, McCain yesterday told scienceblogs.com:
Under my guiding hand, Congress developed a wireless spectrum policy that spurred the rapid rise of mobile phones and Wi-Fi technology that enables Americans to surf the web while sitting at a coffee shop, airport lounge, or public park.
However, what McCain failed to accomplish has left a bigger impression on tech experts than anything that McCain actually did. "The thing that stands out for his entire tenure is that he has never had a priority, and has never had, to my knowledge, any accomplishment of any kind at all," former FCC chairman Reed Hundt told Salon last month. When McCain took over his second tenure of Senate Commerce Committee, the United States ranked fourth in broadband penetration. In 2007, two years after he had given up that position, the United States had dropped to 15th in the world.
Note to the McCain campaign: The Blackberry was invented in Canada [by Research in Motion].
Update: Washington Wire reports that according to senior McCain aide Matt McDonald, the senator "laughed" when told about Holtz-Eakin's comment. "He would not claim to be the inventor of anything, much less the BlackBerry. This was obviously a boneheaded joke by a staffer," McDonald said.
Update: In 1999, McCain made fun of Al Gore for allegedly saying that he invented the Internet.
Editor's Note:
"Did Gore invent the Internet?"
<http://archive.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/10/05/gore_internet/>
<http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp>
"The internet is a series of tubes." - Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtOoQFa5ug8>
Beth Shirk
Assistant Director, Computer Information and Access Office
Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
Hi all--
I wanted to pass along some information concerning the use of free, web-based wiki and photo-sharing sites and other similar services. While they can make collaboration much easier, please do be aware that their terms of use may prevent them from being a good solution, depending on the nature of the material you wish to share.
For example, one site (smugmug) states the following:
"...by posting any Content or otherwise participating in any Interactive Area, you grant SmugMug a perpetual, nonexclusive, royalty-free right to use, publish, distribute, reproduce, perform, adapt and display the Content on the Site, including the right to use the name that is submitted in connection with such Content. You further understand and agree that, in order to help ensure smooth operation of our system, we may keep backup copies of Content indefinitely."
Another site (flickr) states:
"...with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable:
- With respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the specific Yahoo! Group to which such Content was submitted or made available....
- With respect to photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available....
- With respect to Content other than photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service other than Yahoo! Groups, the perpetual, irrevocable and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed."
And one more (facebook):
"...By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing."
Other sites may have similar terms of use, and shouldn't be used where there are any questions about the ownership of the materials to be shared.
Please remember that there are University rules and regulations (as well as state laws) that protect people's privacy and govern how we may use their photographs with or without their permission, regardless of whether they're faculty, staff, students, artists, patrons, etc....
It's a matter of context and personal judgment, and no one answer will fit all situations. Our recommendation is to a) read the fine print and b) make sure you're clear on any matters of copyright or file ownership before using one of these services.
ToC
Quinn Norton, Maximum PC
October 2008, p.14
URL: <http://www.maximumpc.com/article/columns/copywriting_wrongs>
With a presidential election around the corner, let's look at how people pervert copyright law to squelch speech. Copyright takedown notices were never meant to stifle whistle-blowers or detractors, yet that's become a popular use for them. Individual critics are likely to go broke even if they win a case, so people and ISPs tend to back down at lawyer point.
One of the most repugnat misuses of the takedown notice was by Diebold, a maker of electronic voting machines. Diebold responded to allegations of security flaws with an "Oh no, our machines are fine! Move along!" type of response. But leaked internal Diebold documentation posted on the net confirmed the company knew it was pOwned. Diebold couldn't deny anything -- instead it demanded the documentation be taken offline, on the basis of copyright infringement. According to the EFF, Diebold failed to pass "the giggle test" on that case.
Nobody loves its copuyrights and hates its former members like the Church of Scientology. It makes the RIAA look like an amateur when it comes to suing the hell out of its critics, anywhere, anytime. The Church of Scientology has been at it the longest, too. When there's no legitimate way to gag your critics, you're down to sending a cease-and-desist letter or hiring a team of ninjas to take them out. The former is a lot cheaper. Even if the latter is more fun.
It goes on ... the Jehovah's Witnesses shutting down a critical website, the rapper Akon trying to shut up conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, etc.
My personal favorite is radio personality Michael Savage. Savage made some comments about Islam on his radio show that were, shall we say, colorful. The nonprofit Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) posted these comments on its site to highlight his bigotry. So Savage sued for copyright infringement. At no point did he actually try to defend his comments, he just tried to hit CAIR over the head with a big lawyer and intimidate the group into silence. In this case, the EFF stepped in and hit him back.
But it's such a weak way to shut people up. If you really want to oppress someone, I say get the ninjas.
--
Quinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired News and other publications. Her work has ranged from legal journalism to the inner life of pirate organizations.
[Editor's Note: A few other items you might want to check out.
Step by Step Guide to Hacking Electronic Voting Machines
<http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/98290/step_by_step_guide_to_hacking_electronic_voting_machines/>
Evaluating the Security of Electronic Voting Machines
<http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/%7Eseclab/projects/voting/>
Stephen Spoonamore, CEO of Cybrinth, October 15, 2006
<http://www.velvetrevolution.us/prosecute_rove/images/Spoon_Full.wmv>
Fasten your safety belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride.]
ToC
On The Media, September 05, 2008
Audio: http://audio.wnyc.org/otm/otm090508c.mp3
Text: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/09/05/03
Nate Silver created a remarkably accurate computer system that projects stats for baseball players and teams. Now he's turned his attention to polling data for the presidential election with his website Five Thirty Eight. Silver explains how his site can out-perform the polling firms, whose data he relies on.
<http://www.baseballprospectus.com/pecota/>
<http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/>
<http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469>
BOB GARFIELD: So, if the polls gave an inaccurate picture of both public opinion and elections, what are we to do? Nate Silver runs the blog FiveThirtyEight.com, and his solution is to compile the data from all polls, give weight to those with a proven track record, project data for areas where none is available and combine everything into a computer algorithm that runs thousands of simulated elections. This way, Silver generates a projected popular vote and, more importantly, a projected tally of the electoral votes, of which there are 538.
It might seem like voodoo to take a bunch of wrong answers to create a right one, but in the primaries, Silver's system outperformed other polling organizations.
NATE SILVER: In North Carolina, which is a state where Obama had been only ahead by six or seven in the polls, if you looked at other Southern states that have the same demographics, in all those states he had beaten his polls. It's not that much of a trick to figure out what's going to happen in North Carolina if it's so demographically similar to South Carolina, to Virginia.
So we didn't look at the polls at all in that case, and we turned out to be, you know, close to the mark. I think we had him at 16 points; he won by - by 14 or so.
BOB GARFIELD: Your reputation is built substantially on your experience with PECOTA, which data-mined baseball statistics in order to make predictions about a current year's performance by a player or a team. Tell me about PECOTA and how that informed what you're doing with FiveThirtyEight.com.
NATE SILVER: Yeah, what PECOTA is, it's a projection system, so we tell you, you know, how many home runs Derek Jeter's going to hit every year. And the way it works is to look throughout history for what we call comparable players, and they'd give you distribution of outcomes. So maybe one player continued to be very good until he was into his forties, maybe one player, you know, started to stink and had to retire. Take an average of that, that gives you the projection.
We do, do some similar things at FiveThirtyEight. For example, which states are similar to one another? Ohio and Michigan, both very important states, they'll probably move in the same direction from here on out.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, now what about the idea of weighting some poll organizations more heavily than others? How does that work?
NATE SILVER: Well, we've gone back to 2000 and looked at essentially every election, every poll since then, but that includes general elections for senate and governor, as well as for president, as well as, you know, primaries in 2004 and this year in 2008.
Some polls do a better job than others. They're more thorough. They're more scientific. They might have larger sample sizes. So they might be weighted twice as much as a poll with a marginal track record.
BOB GARFIELD: As I look at how the polls that you weight are weighted, there are a couple that are just consistently kind of off the charts in inaccuracy. Who's in your hall of shame?
NATE SILVER: Yeah, there are two. One is Zogby Interactive. Zogby's a pollster who's been around a long time. He's kind of an average pollster. But they have a poll they do purely online where they distribute surveys to people. They can fill them out if they want. You're only going to respond to it if you're motivated by politics, so it's kind of a self-selected sample.
The other poll that's really bad is one from The Columbus Dispatch. It's kind of the same thing, really, which is that they mail, get a ballot out to every voter in Ohio. People only send them back if they're interested in it.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, your methodology has taken some criticism in The American Spectator, which is a right-leaning publication. The criticism is that you're just extrapolating current numbers. That assumes nothing happens between now and November 4th, two months from today.
NATE SILVER: We don't assume that we know everything. We think there's a pretty big margin of error, literally. We're just trying to say, here's what the relative likelihood of different kinds of things happening. If you average it all together, yeah, that middle point, the median's at about 300 electoral votes for Obama right, now but could go way in another direction.
In 1980, for instance, Jimmy Carter had been ahead of Ronald Reagan. It moved into a tie. Then they had a last debate really late and people kind of flocked to Reagan. The polls didn't even pick it up. He wound up winning by 10 points.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, you are a declared supporter of Barack Obama. Why shouldn't we just take everything that you have just said and dismiss it as some sort of spin, you know, under the guise of statistical analysis?
NATE SILVER: You can, you're welcome to, but we do have a 6,000-word-long explanation of how we do everything. So, in theory, it should all be reverse-engineerable, I think. We've made adjustments at times that have benefited McCain, for instance. You know, there are rules we establish. If I make changes, we'll kind of discuss them.
It's a good community. You get a lot of smart people contributing. So we try and be as open and transparent as possible, and that includes actually saying who I'm most likely to cast my vote for in November.
BOB GARFIELD: Nate Silver runs the blog FiveThirtyEight.com. Thank you so much.
NATE SILVER: Thank you.
ToC
by David Murphy
Posted 09/05/08 at 11:00:00 AM
URL: <http://www.maximumpc.com/article/%5Bprimary-term%5D/the_new_wave_lcds>
Buying a new monitor can be tricky. First, you must decipher the manufacturer doublespeak. Not all specifications are created equal, nor are they measured fairly: You truly can't tell a book by its cover, nor a monitor by its box copy. And then there are the displays themselves. A monitor by itself might look good to you, but you won't know what you're missing unless you compare it against the competition.
That's why we're here to help. The market is flooded with configurations, technologies, and sizes that might look good on paper or even attractive in the store, but that doesn't mean these monitors represent the best of their class. You owe it to yourself to understand all the options. What does color gamut really mean? How do you know if a panel has 6-bit or 8-bit color depth? And how do those matters and others impact the overall image quality of a screen?
We're going to walk you through the basics of today's LCD monitor technology and what it means to you, a consumer who wants the best picture for your pennies. But we're not going to leave you hanging: We're also going to review 10 monitors across a wide swath of sizes and prices to give you a head start on your purchasing decision.
In the end, you'll get the picture-the picture you deserve!
What's important? What's hype? What do those numbers on the box mean? We're glad you asked.
COLOR GAMUT
The human eye can perceive a far more expansive range of colors than a computer or television display can produce. The subset of colors a display is capable of producing is defined as its color gamut. Typically, a display's gamut is measured as a percentage of the National Television System Committee (NTSC) color standard, with 72 percent of that range being standard for LCDs. Recent technology advances, however, have enabled displays to reach 92 percent and even beyond 100 percent of the NTSC. But the expanded range of colors can come at the cost of color precision if a display's color depth hasn't increased as well.
[The triangle in the center of this chromacity diagram represents the NTSC color gamut, used to measure the color output of LCDs.]
COLOR OEPTH
An LCD'S color depth defines the number of levels that each primary color can render. In ay 8-bit panel, the red, green, and blue channels of a pixel are capable of 256 levels each. Multiplied, that makes for a total of 16.7 million possible colors. (This number doesn't change if the display's color gamut broadens; the space between colors only widens, thereby diminishing color precision.) With 6-bit LCD panels, which are increasingly common, the red, green, and blue subpixels of a single pixel are capable of just 64 levels each for a total of 262,144 colors. That's a big drop from their 8-bit counterparts. To compensate for the difference, manufacturers use techniques such as dithering and frame-rate control on 6-bit panels to expand their palettes. Traditionally these techniques have been able to elicit up to 16.2 million colors, but it's now common for 6-bit panels to claim 16.7 million colors, making it difficult for consumers to discern whether a display is actually an 8- or 6-bit panel. (See the sidebar on this page for more on this issue.)
BACKLIGHT
The vast majority of desktop LCD monitors have backlights made of cold-cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL), but the use of LEDs for backlights is rising. LED backlights use a grid of either white or mixed red, blue, and green LEDs to create the display's backlight. In the latter case, the panel's color is theoretically improved because the backlight matches the color filters of the pixels themselves. Besides producing a wider color gamut, LED displays are also able to achieve a deeper black than standard CCFL monitors. On the other hand, LEDs are more expensive than CCFLs, and individual LEDs can, potentially, age at different rates.
INPUTS
Ideally, you're not planning to connect your new LCD monitor with a VGA cable. That analog standard is old and moldy, and it's preferable to maintain a digital signal from your computer to the display. While LCD displays should come with at least one DVI port, that standard is being augmented by newer, more capable digital interfaces such as HDM and DisplayPort. Both offer greater bandwidth than DVI (which is crucial for displays with resolutions greater than 1920x1200), HDCP-support for playing copy-protected content, and the ability to carry both video and audio signals over the same thin cable. While HDMI has more market penetration on videocards than DisplayPort. adapters will allow you to connect your videocard's DVI port to your display's HDMI or DP input.
HDCP
Put simply, if your display doesn't support HDCP (High-Definition Copy Protection), you won't he able to watch commercial HD DVD or Blu-ray movies in full resolution on your display.
CONTRAST RATIO
Don't pay attention to contrast ratios: They're all hype, as each display manufacturer will engineer its own testing situation, so there's no basis for meaningful comparison.
Manufacturers have recently taken to touting a screen's dynamic contrast ratio, which is typically a higher (thus more impressive) number than standard contrast ratio, although the techniques for measuring this are just as suspect.
Some monitors offer a dynamic contrast feature that performs on-the-fly adjustments to contrast in order to enhance the grayscales of the given content. The downside is that these adjustments aren't always analyzed correctly -- your picture can be thrown too far into either the dark or light extreme. Worse, if consecutive scenes in a movie or game differ dramatically, you'll likely notice the image fading in and out as the display adjusts to the content.
PIXEL RESPONSE TIME
Ouite simply, pixel response time refers to how Iong it takes a single pixel to transition from one stale to another. Just like contrast ratios, pixel response measurements are entirely at the mercy of the manufacturer. A slow pixel response time can result in ghosting in fast-moving content such as games.
---Increasingly, LCD monitors sport newer video interfaces, such as HDMI, alongside the trusty DVI port.
---TFT Comparison
Know Your Panel's Lineage
While all modern LCD monitors fall under the thin-film- transistor (TFT) classification, subsets within that class bear notable differences. These are the most common types of TFTs:
-> TN (Twisted Nematic): The most inexpensive and commonly used TPT, TN panels are known for having extremely fast pixel response times and a 6-bit color depth. These panels feature inferior viewing angles and lower color fidelity than S-IPS or S-PVA panels. -> S-IPS (Super In-Plan Switching): Considered to be the best overall TFT in terms of color reproduction and viewing angle, S-IPS panels are often sold at premium prices, so they're sold by a limited number of manufacturers. The panels have 8-bit color depth, although black and dark grays can take on a purplish hue at wide viewing angles. And the overdrive technology manufacturers use to elicit faster pixel response times from these panels can introduce noise into videos, unless your monitor or videocard comes with a built-in noise-reduction function. -> S-PVA (Super Patterned- ITO Vertical Alignment): S-PVA panels also have 8-bit color depth and better color reproduction and viewing angles than TN panels. S-PVA panels feature better contrast and black levels than both TN and S-IPS panels, and S-PVA is usually the panel type found in higher quality (but not professional) monitors.---
LEARN MORE AT MaximumPC.com <http://tinyurl.com/5chq4a>
[Editor's Note: This article continued with a comparison of ten different monitors. For that we refer you to the magazine (Pages 44-52) or the link above.]
ToC
Posted by Robert Vamosi
September 12, 2008 2:17 PM PDT
URL: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-10789_3-10040669-57.html?tag=mncol>
What if you wanted to build your own botnet to act as a spam relay or to launch a denial-of-service attack against an organization or a country? "It's actually a lot of work," says Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks.
I had a chance to talk with Stewart at this year's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas where, in a talk, he provided insight into the inner workings of one botnet, the Storm worm botnet. Using unpackers, debuggers, and decompilers, Stewart was able to dissect the rogue network and learn how it works and why Storm remains so resilient when other botnets simply fail over time.
Botnets, whose combined computing power can equal that of a large supercomputer, are organic, yet they only evolve when they need to, such as after they've been discovered and shut down, Stewart said. But he said anyone wanting to copy a successful botnet like Storm would simply be wasting their time. While all the coding tricks used to make Storm successful are available on the Internet, it's combining them that's the trick.
"How you are going to make all that work for your specific needs? It's pretty complex," he said. "The person who developed Storm did it over a long period of time. They didn't start out with the peer-to-peer program (as used today); they started out with something much simpler. They then made small modifications. A lot of hours have been put into it."
A basic botnet would includes a Command and Control (C&C) server contacted to thousands of compromised desktop computers worldwide. Were that always the case, botnets could be taken down quickly by simply finding and shutting down the C&C server. Storm's approach is more nuanced and layered. Top level is a Command & Control server running Apache (presumably somewhere in Russia). Next level is a server running a Nginx 0.5.17 proxy; this server is designed to hide the Apache machine from view. At the third level are a couple more Nginx 0.5.17 proxies used to hide the master Nginx 0.5.17 proxy from view. Sitting at the fourth level are public nodes that act as reverse proxies leading back to the controller and perform as fast-flux name servers. Fast flux means that a hard-coded URL can be sent out with the bot code, but where that URL resolves changes.
The final level is composed of thousands of compromised computers worldwide. Stewart says that Storm starts out infecting a computer with a dropper. Right now the preferred infection process is via an e-mail link, but this might change to a peer-to-peer process. However infected, the initial click by the end user installs a rootkit which, in turn, reaches out to the EXE file from a fourth-level supernode. Once infected, the compromised computer and supernode trade the infected desktop's IP information. This information is sent to a third-level supernode proxy as part of its mapping operation. At the third level it is also compressed and encoded for obfuscation, then sent on to the second level proxy, and finally to the top level server.
At the second and third levels, the Nginx proxies listen for Overnet/eDonkey peer-to-peer Internet traffic. Overnet/eDonkey was a popular peer-to-peer network application until it was shut down by the Recording Industry Association of America. While the service is gone, the code still exists. What botnet operators like most is Overnet/eDonkey's distributed nature; it lacks a central peer list. Thus, each of the nodes keeps only a small list of neighboring peers.
This decentralized network is what Stewart and many other experts say is the key to Storm's resilience.
And it almost proved to be Storm's undoing. Overnet/eDonkey is still used for file-sharing, so in Storm's view there is a lot of bogus traffic out there. To better distinguish its traffic from other traffic, Stewart says Storm uses the Kadamlia distributed hash table (DHT) and its C&C servers listen only for predictable MD4 hashes. Those hashes are derived from a simple checksum algorithm that includes IP address and the port used. Authentication is accomplished through a 4-byte challenge and response.
The predictable hashes also have a positive effect for researchers, says Stewart: If a given peer doesn't know the location of the specific node you're searching for, the known peer will provide you with a list of peers closest to what you asked for. And, because the Overnet/eDonkey supernode peers all broadcast their presence, Stewart and other researchers can walk all the nodes in a network to get a fairly accurate count of the botnet's size.
Lately, though, Storm has been evolving yet again. This time it's isolating its network further from the general Internet traffic by encrypting packets using an embedded key and simple XOR. It also has been changing its initial infection packing or compression process. The outer layers change every 10 minutes, while the interior bot code changes packing more on the order of once a month. Neither the packing nor the encryption have so far proven defeating to security researchers.
However, one downside to encryption is that Storm's handlers could now segment parts of their network--that is, they could rent or sell off pieces of the botnet to others. Although speculation around segmentation has been widespread, Stewart says he has not observed it.
In addition to Stewart's research, see Brandon Enright's report for another detailed look at the structure of this venerable botnet.
<http://noh.ucsd.edu/~bmenrigh/exposing_storm.ppt>
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new research provides insights into how the brain works
Press Releases from University of Reading
Release Date : 14 August 2008
URL: <http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/newsandevents/releases/PR16530.asp>
Watch our interview with Professor Kevin Warwick, School of Systems Engineering, and Dr Ben Whalley, School of Pharmacy (WAV - 57MB)
<http://www.reading.ac.uk/researchdownloads/UoRrobotwithabiologicalbrain.wmv>
A multidisciplinary team at the University of Reading has developed a robot which is controlled by a biological brain formed from cultured neurons. This cutting edge research is the first step to examine how memories manifest themselves in the brain, and how a brain stores specific pieces of data. The key aim is that eventually this will lead to a better understanding of development and of diseases and disorders which affect the brain such as Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, stroke and brain injury.
The robot's biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells. This is then used to drive the movement of the robot. Every time the robot nears an object, signals are directed to stimulate the brain by means of the electrodes. In response, the brain's output is used to drive the wheels of the robot, left and right, so that it moves around in an attempt to avoid hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer, its sole means of control is from its own brain.
The researchers are now working towards getting the robot to learn by applying different signals as it moves into predefined positions. It is hoped that as the learning progresses, it will be possible to witness how memories manifest themselves in the brain when the robot revisits familiar territory.
Professor Kevin Warwick from the School of Systems Engineering, said: "This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorises its experiences. This research will move our understanding forward of how brains work, and could have a profound effect on many areas of science and medicine."
Dr. Ben Whalley from the School of Pharmacy, said: "One of the fundamental questions that scientists are facing today is how we link the activity of individual neurons with the complex behaviours that we see in whole organisms. This project gives us a really unique opportunity to look at something which may exhibit complex behaviours, but still remain closely tied to the activity of individual neurons. Hopefully we can use that to go some of the way to answer some of these very fundamental questions. "
---
For more information please contact Dr Lucy Chappell on 0118 378 7391 or 0751 518 8751 or email <l.chappell@reading.ac.uk>.
A two page feature about this research appears in New Scientist issue 16/08/08
This project has been funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Dr Ben Whalley is a registered Pharmacist from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Reading. Professor Kevin Warwick is Head of Cybernetics in the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading.
The University of Reading is ranked as one of the UK's top research-intensive universities. The quality and diversity of the University's research and teaching is recognised internationally as one of the top 200 universities in the world. The University is home to more than 50 research centres, many of which are recognised as international centres of excellence such as agriculture, biological and physical sciences, European histories and cultures, and meteorology.
The most recent Research Assessment Exercise confirms our strengths, with 20 departments being awarded top ratings of 5 or above. Of these, Archaeology, English, Italian, Meteorology and Psychology each received a 5** rating in recognition of their high quality sustained over more than a decade. The University takes a real-world perspective to its research and is consistently one of the most popular higher education choices in the UK
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Aug 13 03:25 PM US/Eastern
URL: <http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080813192458.ud84hj9h&show_article=1>
Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.
Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.
Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.
"The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain," said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot's principle architects.
Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
"If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs," he said.
Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster animation "Wall-E", Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000 active neurons.
Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch) array of 60 electrodes.
This "multi-electrode array" (MEA) serves as the interface between living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by sensors reacting to the environment.
Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special temperature-controlled unit -- it communicates with its "body" via a Bluetooth radio link.
The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.
From the very start, the neurons get busy. "Within about 24 hours, they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections," said Warwick.
"Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like activity" similar to what happens in a normal rat -- or human -- brain, he added.
But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within a couple of months.
"Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain ways," explained Warwick.
To some extent, Gordon learns by itself. When it hits a wall, for example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot's sensors. As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit.
To help this process along, the researchers also use different chemicals to reinforce or inhibit the neural pathways that light up during particular actions.
Gordon, in fact, has multiple personalities -- several MEA "brains" that the scientists can dock into the robot.
"It's quite funny -- you get differences between the brains," said Warwick. "This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to."
Mainly for ethical reasons, it is unlikely that researchers at Reading or the handful of laboratories around the world exploring the same terrain will be using human neurons any time soon in the same kind of experiments.
But rats brain cells are not a bad stand-in: much of the difference between rodent and human intelligence, speculates Warwick, could be attributed to quantity not quality.
Rats brains are composed of about one million neurons, the specialised cells that relay information across the brain via chemicals called neurotransmitters.
Humans have 100 billion.
"This is a simplified version of what goes on in the human brain where we can look -- and control -- the basic features in the way that we want. In a human brain, you can't really do that," he said.
For colleague Ben Whalley, one of the fundamental questions facing scientists today is how to link the activity of individual neurons with the overwhelmingly complex behaviour of whole organisms.
"The project gives us a unique opportunity to look at something which may exhibit complex behaviours, but still remain closely tied to the activity of individual neurons," he said.
Video: <http://www.breitbart.tv/html/151703.html>
Related link:
Gordon the robot controlled by living brain
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Edwin Hadley for submitting the above articles on "Gordon" for the newsletter.]
ToC
Posted by Charles Cooper
September 12, 2008 3:30 PM PDT
URL: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-10039963-60.html?tag=mncol>
So how does it feel to be associated with one of Big Blue's biggest failures?
"All depends on your perspective," recalled an amused Fran Allen, not at all regretting her participation in a now-storied mid-1950s supercomputer project popularly known as "Stretch."
Even though IBM only built nine of the machines, Stretch left behind a legacy that remains a source of pride to the participants who were present at its creation.
"A lot of what went into that effort was later helpful to the rest of the industry," Allen said with the sort of understatement you'd expect from a former winner of the prestigious Turing Award. Fact is that Allen and the 300-some people who collaborated on Stretch invented many of the concepts that later became standard computer technologies. The short list includes multiprogramming, pipelining, memory protection, memory interleaving, and the eight-bit byte.
Many members of that original team, now grayer and more slow-of-gait than they were during the Eisenhower administration, filled an auditorium Thursday night at the Computer History Museum to reminisce and consider the legacy they bequeathed. Fred Brooks, who was a system planner for Stretch, and Harwood Kolsky, who worked on product planning, later joined Allen on stage for a panel discussion moderated by The New York Times reporter Steve Lohr.
In January 1956, work on the Stretch project formally got underway with the goal of building a supercomputer to replace IBM's 704 supercomputer. The resulting product, called the 7030, as the Stretch was officially known, could perform 100 billion computations a day and handle half a million instructions per second.
"We were about 300 people working in Poughkeepsie (New York)," said Kolsky. "Individual teams met frequently. That's why it's hard to tell who invented what. Generally, morale was high. You wouldn't know it by looking up here, but it was a young person's group...there were only two people over 40. Most members of the team were in their 20s and 30s."
But they were in for a shock. IBM's then-CEO, Thomas Watson, Jr. judged the 7030 to be a failure. Even though the machine was about 30 to 40 times faster than other systems, IBM won a bid submitted to Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory on its pledge to build a supercomputer that was at least 100 times faster than the 704.
When Stretch came along, IBM, which controlled about 70 percent of the computer market and about 90 percent of the punch-card business, was already fending off charges it exerted monopoly control. Brooks said that when Watson ordered the original price cut to $10 million, "that put it at under cost and violated antitrust...antitrust was a fact of everyday life in all our thinking."
In fact, IBM had signed off on a consent decree with the Justice Department in 1956. The company eventually shipped nine systems to customers around the world but then closed the production line forever.
Kolsky recalled the initial reaction to Watson's decision, saying that the project's engineers thought it served as a potential death knell to future supercomputer development.
Of course, it was anything but. In fact, the lessons learned from Stretch paved the way for the subsequent development of IBM's System/360, which turned out to be a smash success. Meanwhile, the innovations invented for Stretch subsequently entered the wider world of mainstream computing.
With the exception of industry cognoscenti--and the relative handful of folks responsible for engineering and managing the project--Stretch remains a footnote for most people. But maybe that's starting to change. To underscore the moment, IBM flew in one of its up-and-comers, senior VP of Development and Manufacturing Rod Adkins, to introduce the panel. Earlier in the evening, I sat down for a conversation with Adkins, who placed Stretch in its historical context.
"It's a pretty good model of a highly ambitious program that, at the time, was considered having not met its objectives," he said. "But when you look at some of the things that came out of that effort and how it's influenced the computer industry today, (Stretch) has had a profound, indirect, benefit to this industry."
Computer historians should also note the following: Stretch remained the most powerful computer in the world until 1964. Some failure.
ToC
Paul Thurrott
URL: http://www.wininformant.com/
OK, it's a bit early to throw a parade, but in the week following its decision to dramatically drop the prices of each Xbox 360 unit in the United States, Microsoft saw some impressive (if possibly temporary) week-over-week sales increases. It's amazing what a $50 to $80 price cut can do: Sales surged 100 percent in the wake of the reduction, which Microsoft credits to getting its console under the magic $200 price barrier, which is widely seen as the upper limit of the "spousal acceptance factor." Not that gamer chicks can't play Xbox, of course. Anyway, it's interesting to note--and not ironic, as it turns out--that the Xbox 360 actually edged out the Sony PS3, sales-wise, in August, before the price cuts, for only the second time all year. The Xbox 360 price cuts were widely seen as a response to the PS3 outselling Microsoft's console for 6 of the 7 previous months.
Back when Dell was running roughshod over the PC industry, it built factories all around the world, seeking to minimize the time between a customer's order and its arrival at their front door, regardless of where they lived. Today, the market dynamics have changed, and while Dell's factories are mostly geared towards making desktops, most customers are now buying portable computers. So Dell has a plan, and yes, if you know the company at all, you know it's all based around the notion of saving money. It hopes to sell most of the factories to contract PC makers who will then make PCs for Dell. And, knowing Dell, I'm sure they'll play these contract PC makers against each other, always looking for the best possible deal. They're fun like that.
Microsoft this month was awarded a patent for--get this--the Page Up and Page Down keys that have graced PC keyboards since, well, there were PC keyboards. Well, to be fair, they didn't really patent the keys; they patented the process of paging up and paging down. According to the software giant's application, which was filed way back in 2005, the patent is for "a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed." They should patent the space bar next. I hear that's a big deal in word processing too.
Microsoft this week shipped the first deliverable from its Live Labs group, an amazing digital photo exploration tool called Photosynth, which allows you to combine photos from an area into a "synth" that you can virtually walk through in a 3D space. Some of the results people have gotten with this tool are simply magical. So magical, in fact, that it's touched off an insane amount of online excitement, of the type that Microsoft does not usually receive these days. The site was actually offline for much of Thursday, but it's back up as of this writing. Check it out. <http://photosynth.net>
We are the connected generation, with our iPods, smart phones, laptops, GPS devices, XM satellite radios, portable DVD players, and so on. But this reliance on portable technology brings with it an ugly and necessary side effect: A jungle of charging cables that we often have to duplicate between work and home. Well, Intel is seeking to end our reliance. No, not on portable technology but rather on the cables. The company reports gains in its efforts to wirelessly charge portable electronics devices, gains that could lead to a world without wires. (Don't worry, I'm sure dentists will continue making metal braces.) But don't think this means our devices will be like perpetual charging machines, capable of keeping going due to sheer force of will alone. Well, at least not right away. First, Intel sees tables and other surfaces as potential charge stations, where devices would charge up simply by making contact. But researchers are also working on a technology called "resonant induction," which would let portable devices charge wirelessly when held a few feet away from a charging station. Warp speed, Mr. Sulu.
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Paul Thurrott
URL: <http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/100125/microsoft-makes-anti-piracy-changes-to-windows-xp.html>
Microsoft late Tuesday made changes to its Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) Notifications anti-piracy service in Windows XP, a change that should begin appearing on users' desktops over the next few months. The company says it made the changes in order to align the WGA Notifications experience in XP with that of Windows Vista, but the new XP version actually adds an additional twist that's not present in Vista.
"Helping customers identify and buy genuine copies of Windows and avoid pirated software are top priorities for Microsoft," a representative of the software giant told me. "Microsoft is making these changes to simplify the installation process--making it easy for customers to stay up-to-date--to increase the effectiveness of these notifications, and to align experiences across Windows XP and Windows Vista."
WGA Notifications is responsible for alerting users when the copy of Windows they're using does not pass an internal test to determine whether it is genuine or potentially pirated. These alerts have taken different forms over the years. In Windows Vista, WGA Notifications originally moved the system into a reduced functionality mode that allowed only access to Internet Explorer, and then for only one hour at a time. But beginning with Service Pack 1 (SP1), Microsoft changed WGA Notifications in that OS so that the system would be fully functional but include regular, nagging notification messages but the status of the install. This technology also delays logon and changes the desktop background to solid black once an hour.
With this week's changes on XP, Microsoft says it is making the WGA Notifications experience more similar to that in Vista with SP1. That is, the system will still be fully functional when found to be non-genuine, but will feature the delayed logon, hourly notifications, and change the desktop to black on a regular basis.
But there are some differences. First, the new WGA Notifications experience will occur only on versions of XP that are based on XP Professional, including XP Professional, XP Media Center Edition, and XP Tablet PC Edition. These are the XP versions that are "most often stolen," Microsoft says, and over time the company will target just XP Pro, because the other two versions are now much less common. XP Home, which is still being sold with new Netbooks, is not affected by this change apparently.
Second, Microsoft is also painting a non-removable and non-interactive watermark to the bottom right corner of the XP desktop when the system is found to be non-genuine. This watermark displays the WGA logo and the text, "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting. This copy of Windows did not pass genuine Windows validation." In Windows Vista, WGA Notifications does occasionally pop-up dialog boxes with this information, but no desktop watermark appears.
The biggest change with this revision, perhaps, concerns the way WGA Notifications is installed. Microsoft is changing the XP end user license agreement (EULA) to state that WGA Notifications will be automatically-updated via Windows Update going forward. So many users will not necessarily be aware when future updates to the technology are applied. On the other hand, this change also means that legitimate customers will have fewer interactions with the anti-piracy technology, which is probably a good thing.
Also of note is the fact that Microsoft is making such unprecedented changes to XP at all. The company originally released the OS seven long years ago and released is successor, Windows Vista, a full two years ago. This year, Microsoft has made two major changes to the core XP OS, first with Service Pack 3 (which changed the Setup process, among other things) and now with WGA Notifications. Microsoft has never made such sweeping changes to an OS so late in its lifecycle.
ToC
Paul Thurrott
URL: <http://windowsitpro.com/windowspaulthurrott/article/articleid/100243/microsoft-launches-2008-hardware-lineup.html>
Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled its 2008 hardware lineup, with innovative new mouse technology leading the way. The company also unveiled new keyboards, Web cameras, and an online video service aimed at users of those cameras.
It is the mouse, however, that steals the show. Powered by new Microsoft BlueTrack Technology, the 2008 Microsoft Explorer Mouse and Microsoft Explorer Mini Mouse go where no mice have gone before, working on far more surfaces than traditional optical and laser mice. Microsoft also unveiled its fashionable new Arc Mouse, which features a unique folding design and resembles an elegant crescent when it use.
On the keyboard front, Microsoft introduced the Wireless Desktop Laser 6000 and Wireless Media Desktop 1000 mouse-and-keyboard bundles. The Wireless Desktop Laser 6000 features a comfort-curve ergonomic keyboard, Vista design cues and features integration, and a full-sized Wireless Laser Mouse 6000. The Wireless Media Desktop 1000 includes one-touch access to Vista multimedia functionality, an ultra-thin design, and an ambidextrous optical mouse.
Microsoft also unveiled two new Web cameras, the LifeCam Show and LifeCam VX-5500, both of which feature radical new designs. The LifeCam Show is tiny, and can be attached to any PC with a bundled clip, or placed on top of an elegant 11-inch tall stand. The LifeCam VX-5500 comes with interchangeable color faceplates, can be used on any laptop or desktop PC, and folds flat for easy mobility.
Finally, Microsoft unveiled the Video Messages services, which allows users of LifeCam and other Web cams to send video messages to each other. The service is available on the Web and via a free gadget for Windows Sidebar in Windows Vista.
ToC
Paul Thurrott
URL: <http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/100208/microsoft-begins-new-windows-vista-push.html>
Almost two years after the OS was finalized, Microsoft is beginning a new push to sell consumers on Windows Vista. The timing might seem odd, given that Microsoft has sold an approximate 200 million Vista licenses so far and dominates its nearest competitor by a factor of over 30 to 1. But a concerted effort from the software giant's competitors and other enemies have had an effect, however misguided, on consumer opinions of the quality of Vista. And Microsoft, finally, is fighting back.
Microsoft's approach is multi-pronged. Last month, the company's viral "Mojave Experiment" ads began appearing on the Web before moving this month to TV. In the ads, people who have never used Vista but are convinced that the product is horrible are fooled into believing in a blind-taste-test-type experiment that they're using a future version of Windows. Universally, these Vista haters rate the future OS very highly ... only to be later told that they're actually using Windows Vista.
Late last week, the second prong of this campaign began with the first in a long series of ads starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. While reviews of the first ad have been decidedly mixed, Microsoft says it was just an "icebreaker," and the company may indeed be onto something, as the ad does indeed portray Microsoft in a more humble and human way than the company's ads of the past.
Microsoft will run more Seinfeld/Gates ads, of course. But the company has other plans to turn consumer opinions of Vista. For months, the company has been training 155 "Microsoft gurus" who will appear in Best Buy and other retail locations throughout the US, providing consumers with more accurate information about its latest OS, and provide a counter-attack to Apple's Best Buy-based "stores within a store." With 40 percent of all PCs being sold in retail locations, Microsoft decided it needed to become more directly involved.
Behind the scenes, Microsoft is working with PC makers--long believed to be responsible for many of Vista's perceived problems, thanks to their "crapware" bundling practices--to make their products perform better with the OS. Under a program called "Vista Velocity," new PCs are being tweaked with the proper drivers, improving performance by up to 60 percent.
And internally, Microsoft has created a small group, operating under the name FTP168 for "Free The People 24x7," tasked with turning public perception of Vista and promoting the use of Windows on the PC, on the Web, and the phone. With this initiative, Microsoft is looking ahead to a cloud computing-based future where more and more people access computing resource on non-traditional devices like smart phones.
So will it work? Vista is destined to sell several hundred million copies regardless. But Microsoft has bigger concerns that continuing its domination over Apple's Mac OS: It needs consumers to want to upgrade to new versions of Windows going forward and believe that it's already on the right path. Changing minds is a difficult thing to do, and with the ceaseless noise of Apple's deceptive "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads echoing throughout the public consciousness, it was arguably time for Microsoft to do something. The prognosis thus far is decidedly positive.
ToC
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Kevin Hisel for submitting all the articles above in this section of the newsletter.]
[Editor's Note: My thanks to Jon Bjerke for submitting all the articles below in this section of the newsletter.]
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from Jon Bjerke
Posted by Erica Ogg
September 12, 2008 3:02 PM PDT
URL: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10040719-92.html?tag=mncol>
Is the biggest PC vendor in the world looking to give customers an option besides Windows?
An article appearing in BusinessWeek this week cites anonymous sources who say Hewlett-Packard is at least looking into it. "Sources say employees in HP's PC division are exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system," the article states.
The operating system would reportedly be Linux-based, but would be tweaked to be more accessible to mainstream users. Those same sources say it's part of an HP plan to become less dependent on Windows, and to compete better with Apple for the same type of person who would consider a Mac, which has its own operating system on its computers touted as more user-friendly than Vista.
HP isn't confirming the report, but had previously been open about the formation of a new group within its Labs that developed the touch-screen technology and special software used in its TouchSmart PC. The software lets users get around certain features of Vista to do certain multimedia tasks more easily.
Phil McKinney, CTO of HP's Personal Systems Group, didn't deny the company is looking into it, but said it didn't make much sense to build its own operating system. "Is HP funding a huge R&D team to go off and create an operating system? (That) makes no sense," he told BusinessWeek.
Maybe not for HP, who's the world's leading purveyor of Microsoft software, through the approximately 50 million PCs the company ships around the globe each year. The article also points out Intel's recent support for Netbooks, mini-notebooks that use its Atom processor and run Linux, and Dell's decision to offer Linux as a Windows alternative on some of its PCs.
They're not the only ones. Asus makes a motherboard called P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP. It allows a PC to boot directly to Windows or any other operating system installed on the hard disk. Basically this alternative operating system, provided by DeviceVM to Asus, is another way to do an end-run around Windows.
Whether Windows' dominance is in any actual danger of disappearing, Microsoft has already begun to fight back. Last week it rolled out the beginnings of a high-profile and expensive ad campaign starring its co-founder Bill Gates and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. The response has been, well, mixed.
ToC
by TidBITS Staff <editors@tidbits.com>
TidBITS#945/15-Sep-08
article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9764>
As leaves prepare to take color and drop from trees in the Northern hemisphere, so, too, does Apple release its flight of new iPods. This year's revisions settle on one capacity for iPod classic storage, reformulate the iPod nano, and bring new hardware features to the iPod touch. Pricing remains high, in our opinion, showing Apple's confidence in maintaining its large product pricing margins.
Formerly available in 80 GB and 160 GB varieties (the latter of which was packaged in a thicker case), the iPod classic now sports a 120 GB drive and gleams either in silver or black; it's $249. The new iPod classic supports Genius playlists, but is otherwise unchanged from the earlier version.
This may indicate that the iPod classic, and perhaps the hard drive-based iPod in general, is on the way out. 1.8-inch hard drives may be small, but they're less durable and bulkier than flash RAM, and as RAM capacities increase and prices drop, Apple may be looking to move the entire iPod line to RAM-based storage. The problem there lies in the capacity differences; no RAM-based iPod offers more than 32 GB of storage, whereas the iPod classic goes up to 120 GB. No reason was given for dropping the 160 GB iPod classic; perhaps it simply wasn't selling well enough.
(The iPod shuffle, unmentioned at the product launch, remains available in two capacities: 1 GB for $49, and 2 GB for $69. You can choose among silver, blue, green, pink, and awareness-raising (PRODUCT) RED.)
The iPod nano, as widely rumored, has returned to a long, skinny form factor to make room for a 2-inch, 320-by-240-pixel screen with LED backlighting. The new glass-and-aluminum case is curvier and thinner than the older designs.
Surprisingly, the iPod nano now includes an accelerometer (much like the iPhone and iPod touch), enabling it to switch from portrait to landscape and back as you change the iPod nano's orientation. You can also shake the iPod nano to shuffle the song selection, a clever feature that drew cheers during Steve Jobs's presentation. Like the other new iPods, the nano can create Genius playlists. Battery life is improved, with Apple claiming 24 hours of music playback and 4 hours of video playback.
The new iPod nano supports voice recording via a new set of headphones with a built-in microphone (as well as buttons for play/pause, track skip, and volume control), which is scheduled to ship in October 2008 for $29. Also coming in October are an armband for the nano ($29) and redesigned in-ear headphones with dual drivers (a woofer and a tweeter) for $79.
Apple offers the revised iPod nano in two capacities (8 GB for $149, or 16 GB for $199), and in your choice of nine colors - an entire spectrum including silver, black, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, (PRODUCT) RED, and pink. The 8 GB models are available immediately, with the 16 GB models expected to ship within days.
Overall, the new iPod nano seems like a winner. Most people seem happy about the return to the longer, thinner form factor, and the addition of the accelerometer is truly neat. We expect it to sell like the proverbial hot cakes this holiday season.
The iPod touch received a significant overhaul as well. Now featuring a stainless steel back, the updated iPod touch is thinner than before, with curves that resemble those of the iPhone 3G. The iPod touch now has a built-in speaker (which, Jobs emphasized, is not intended to replace the headphones for music listening), external volume controls, and connects wirelessly to a $19 Nike+iPod sensor without needing the separate adapter that was formerly required. That's a big win for people who use the iPod while running or walking for fitness; the Nike+iPod adapter messed with the clean lines of the iPod, especially when it came to shoehorning it into armbands or other cases.
The iPod touch is available in 8 GB, 16 GB and 32 GB capacities, priced at $229, $299 and $399, respectively. Those are significant price drops - $70 for the 8 GB model and $100 for the 16 GB and 32 GB models. All three models are now shipping.
In comparing the new iPod touch with the iPhone 3G, the big differences (apart from cellular capabilities, of course) are the iPod touch's lack of a GPS chip and a camera, both of which would be awfully nice to have in an iPod touch. Apple is clearly trying to differentiate the iPhone and iPod touch on more than just the capability to make calls, but the now-subsidized iPhone prices confuse that comparison. An 8 GB