Posts by EddieC

With the first availability of an Android-based phone is only weeks away, it's my guess that T-Mobile's G1 phone will be the next big "must-have" gizmo for today's techno geeks. The carrier, which promised delivery on the Oct. 22 launch date to customers placing advance orders, has sold through its initial allotment and has stopped taking advance orders.

The company said it expects to sell half-a-million G1s through Christmas, and according to reports yesterday, T-Mobile will order as many as 2 million G1 units from HTC, maker of the device.

While T-Mobile has never billed G1 as an "iPhone killer" as many media reports have, the parallels are hard to ignore. The frenzy surrounding the device, for one thing, hearkens back to the iPhone buzz prior to its launch and strong sales and inventory shortages afterwards. Let's hope T-Mobile took note of the networking woes suffered by AT&T (to say nothing of the PR fallout suffered by Apple). Such woes might have been behind T-Mobile's initial decision to throttle bandwidth usage on its 3G network to 50Kbps for anyone topping 1GB of data transmission. The company on Sept. 24 reversed that decision, a wise move if you ask me.

In terms of price, the US$179 G1 has the edge over iPhone, which costs $244 with an unlimited data plan from AT&T. Both offer GPS and a large touch screen. The G1 also has a hardware keyboard. And while Apple might have the edge …

Adobe Systems has confirmed what many in the media have been speculating for months--that it will produce a version of its Flash runtime environment for Apple's iPhone. The move will open the device to an enormous wealth of applications and Flash-enabled Web content. What remains to be seen is whether Flash will run fast enough in iPhone's ARM11 processor to be useful.

Apple CEO Steven Jobs in March was reported to have said that Flash in its state at the time "performs too slow to be useful" for a good iPhone experience and that there's a "missing product in the middle" that would be suitable. Adobe went right to work, and three months later Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen reported that the company was making good progress; a version of Flash was running on an iPhone emulator.

The word came today at Flash on the Beach '08, a sold-out conference for Flash designers and developers in Brighton, U.K., but not as a formal announcement from Adobe. Instead, confirmation came at a town hall meeting in answer to a direct question from an attendee to Adobe senior director of engineering Paul Betlam. Since first seeing the report at FlashMagazine.com I've seen other coverage today varying widely, from "it's coming, maybe," to "it's coming but is that a good thing?" to "due soon," "ready to rock" and "ready and waiting for Apple." Neither Adobe nor Apple has released a statement on …

With ElectricCommander 3.0 set to begin shipping this week, I caught up with Electric Cloud CEO Mike Maciag to better understand the build automation tool's new "preflight" capability. That's a feature that determines whether changes to code will integrate correctly with the main build before those changes are actually checked in.

When I reported on ElectricCommander 3.0 earlier this month, I told you that the tool works by applying an overlay of developer changes through production build and test procedures across all targets, giving developers the chance to commit only if their changes worked. Not content with that, I queried Maciag via e-mail, and he provided some more detail.

EddieC: Can you explain exactly how the tool accomplishes its preflight magic?

Maciag: Here’s how the preflight workflow works: A developer invokes a preflight build and test procedure through the ElectricCommander Visual Studio or Eclipse IDE plug-in. The procedure automatically uploads both the developer’s changes from the IDE and the existing application source code from the SCM tool to ElectricCommander. ElectricCommander overlays the developer’s changes on top of the source code snapshot and executes a build just as if the developer had checked in the code.

The results of this procedure are displayed in the IDE. ElectricCommander can then ‘autocommit’ successful changes to the SCM, or the developer can do this manually. This enables the developer to identify issues instead of introducing them to the code base. It also enables subsequent builds to proceed unimpeded …

They've been available on the black market almost since the beginning. They'll be selling in Russia next week. And now you can get them at the Apple Store. What are they? They're unlocked iPhone 3Gs, usable on the carrier of choice, not just AT&T. Simply insert your existing SIM card and activate by visiting iTunes 8. There's just one catch: Your address has to be in Hong Kong.

Oh, and they cost about US$700 (HK$5400) for the 8GB unit or $800 (HK$6200) for one with 16MB. That's according to the unit's Apple Store page, which I visited this morning and attempted to buy one. But no dice; my New York address didn't qualify. I wasn't really going to buy one, I just wanted to see if Apple would let me.

But if you're in the area and in the market, the iPhone 3G works on UMTS/HSDPA and GSM/EDGE carrier networks, and also includes WiFi (b/g) and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (enhanced data rate) wireless communications. It's the WiFi that would interest me because my pay-as-you-go cell phone plan does not include Internet access via the carrier network. But I could make calls using a number of Skype-like client apps such as SoonR Talk and Fring, which also gives you instant messaging. But in that case, I suppose an iPod Touch would do just as well.

Apple this week released an update to its Java Virtual Machine, taking users of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard to 1.6.0_07. Depending on your operating system, the patch fixes as many as 27 bugs, and chances are pretty good that you'll benefit.

There are separate updaters for Tiger and Leopard, or you can simply run Apple's Software Update and let the OS figure it out. If you're not sure whether you need to upgrade, an applet at the JavaTester.org Web site will help you find out which JVM version you're using in the browser that you use to visit the page.

While Sun updates JVMs for Linux, Solaris and Windows, and fixed many of the defects in the Apple update months ago, Apple maintains its own JVM, and was left to fix the Mac-only vulnerabilities. The most critical of the bugs reportedly permit crafted Java code to be executed remotely by visitors of Web sites containing the malicious code, according to an Apple security report.

The update brings Java SE 6 to v1.6.0_07, Java SE 5.0 to v1.5.0_16, and Java SE 1.4.2 to 1.4.2_18. According to Apple, the update for Leopard "delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Java SE 6, J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X 10.5.4 and later," and for Tiger does the same "for Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0 and Java 1.4 on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and …

A company called Moderro Technologies this week unveiled the Xpack Web 2.0 Cloud Computer, a palm-sized appliance dedicated to cloud computing. The US$395 computer was being demonstrated at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo in New York City this week, and is set to begin shipping in late October.

Although the company is playing close to the chest with its technical specifications, I was able to find out that the Xpack operating system is Linux-based and built around a fast processor with plenty of RAM and even some local flash storage. "You buy a game console based on what it does, not on what's inside," company vice president Dan Itkis told me in a phone interview yesterday. The company is guarding its precise specifications, he said, because they're likely to change slightly from time to time. "I don't want to say it comes with a 1.5 GHz processor when it might actually ship with a 1.6 GHz processor," he said, which I inferred as its approximate power.

What he would tell me was that Xpack includes a specialized keyboard and mouse, digital and analog video ports (with just single-monitor support for now), wired and wireless Ethernet, and a USB port. "So if someone wants to download a PDF file [for example], it can be put onto a USB stick," he said. For certain applications, the port also can be disabled via secure management software "to prevent clutter and security vulnerabilities."

What really makes this …

Here's a Q and A with Electric Cloud CEO Mike Maciag with more info on the "preflight" feature.

http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3259.html

If you're part of a software development team that performs multiple daily builds, then you might replace the term "continuous integration" with "continuous build failure." A company called Electric Cloud may offer a solution. The software production tools maker later this month will begin shipping ElectricCommander 3.0, the latest version of its build automation system that can now check or "preflight" newly modified source code to determine if it will correctly build into an application. Version 3.0 also now integrates with Eclipse and Visual Studio.

ElectricCommander automates the process of assembling components that make up a software program and "building" them into a running application. It's independent of development language (C/C++, Java, .NET, etc.) and build utility (Ant, Maven, Make, etc.), and supports numerous scripting languages, including perl, Python, bash and Tcl. It also works with software configuration management systems AccuRev, ClearCase, Perforce, Subversion and Synergy, if you have one.

"The preflight build and test functionality enables developers to run builds and tests on production hardware before checking in code to the SCM system, thereby catching errors before they impact the productivity of the rest of the team," said Electric Cloud CEO Mike Maciag. The tool helps eliminate the problem of a successful build on one machine and a failure on another due to differences in machine type and configuration, tool versions or platform.

The tool works by applying an overlay of developer changes through production build and test procedures across all targets, giving developers …

VMware yesterday unveiled a series of solutions yesterday--its Virtual Datacenter OS and related products--that I personally believe are a gigantic advance not just for IT administrators, but for software developers and testers too. And that's just the beginning. The company also introduced a new way of packaging applications with the potential to allow them to execute on any platform or as a stand-alone appliance.

Please note that VMware itself isn't saying this. But the company's new vApp and vStudio sound similar (functionally, not technologically) to Sun's promise of a "run anywhere" Java more than ten years ago. vApp employs technology developed under the OpenVZ container solution based on Linux. As explained by VMware, the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) provides "a standard way to package and distribute virtual machines" that is "independent, efficient, extensible, and open."

OVF simplifies setup of pre-configured, multi-tiered services, VMware says, and allows delivery of enterprise apps with single or multiple encapsulated, portable virtual machine(s). Developers gain portability, platform independence, verification, signing, versioning, and improved licensing terms, the company says. The way I see it, a standardized tool that streamlines installation is something Linux could certainly use. OVF also is extensible, and provides platform-specific enhancements and localization. Applications packaged in this way can be deployed to any hypervisor that supports OVF.

Along with vApp is VMware Studio, which the company describes as "an authoring and configuration tool that enables ISVs and enterprises to construct Virtual Appliances and vApps." …

Zend Technologies today is set to announce a series of alliances intended to allow its PHP framework and development environment to work with other widely deployed RIA technologies from Adobe, Dojo and IBM. In a keynote speech at ZendCon, the company's annual PHP developer conference in Cupertino, Calif., Zend CEO Harold Goldberg reportedly was to deliver the news.

The most far-reaching collaboration will be with Adobe, and is aimed at simplifying development of PHP application that combine PHP with Flex, the company's popular framework for developing rich Internet applications. I received advance copy of an embargoed document, in which it was revealed that Adobe will help Zend integrate its Zend Framework with Action Message Format (AMF), Adobe's typed language for exchanging data between a Flash application and a database. The idea will be to enable "data integration between server-side PHP and client-side Flex data and logic components," according to the document. The alliance also is intended to simplify the use of PHP with Ajax and the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), Adobe's cross-platform environment for developing browserless desktop applications using Flash, Flex, HTML or Ajax techniques.

Zend also announced ties with The Dojo Foundation aimed at delivering a boxed solution for building Ajax-based Web apps using the Zend Framework and Dojo Toolkit for JavaScript. Zend Framework 1.6, released earlier this month, includes integration with the toolkit.

The company also updated Zend Core i5/OS 2.6, its certified PHP stack …

Making what now seems like the next logical step for operating system evolution, VMware today told the world about Virtual Datacenter OS, which it positions as a way to "pool all types of hardware resources--servers, storage and network--into an aggregated on-premise cloud." The solution gives enterprise administrators flexibility and options in terms of application environments and computing power than had been previously possible.

Introduced at VMworld 2008, its annual conference for IT professionals, VDC/OS comprises three primary services: Infrastructure vServices, which aggregate servers, storage and networking and dole them out to applications as needed; Application vServices, which oversee application availability, security and scalability; and Cloud vServices, which manage and federate overall execution workloads, and can seek assistance from clouds outside an organization if computing demand requires it.

The benefits of such an environment are many, including the obvious access it afforts IT folks to nearly instantaneous setup of high-power servers running Linux, Unix, Windows, .NET, Java EE or all of the above. The system can virtualize as many as 8 CPUs with 256 GB RAM; that's gigabytes, with a "g." Applications can execute on virtually any version of any operating system, or can "run in mixed operating system environments," the company claimed in a news release issued this morning from the Venetian in Las Vegas.

Virtual CPUs memory and networking devices can be added on-the-fly without downtime, the company claims. For transaction-based applications, a feature called VMDirectPath boosts network and storage …

A new application programming interface released this week gives development and test teams the ability to link their ground-based test systems with virtual operating systems accessed through a browser. It all comes from Skytap, which earlier this year released Virtual Lab, a Web-based infrastructure that provisions virtual hardware, software, networking and storage in which to run and test applications.

According to the company, the new API permits development teams to create a so-called "hybrid" software development and testing infrastructure in which the physical test systems running in their labs can make use of cloud-based resources, and do it transparently to the applications and systems involved.

The solution's secret sauce is a REST-based Web service interface that enables control of cloud-based resources programmatically. Access to the Skytap environments is provided through static, public IP addresses. IT environments are linked via automatically generated VPN connections; all configurations are GUI-driven. An organization’s existing virtual machines, Skytap claims, can be uploaded without modification to the Virtual Lab and controlled from the ground as usual. The infrastructure supports hypervisors from Citrix and VMware; support for Microsoft Hyper-V is planned. A variety of Linux and Unix versions are supported, as are Windows and mainframe systems.

“The advantages of cloud computing introduce an entirely new model for IT,” said Skytap CEO Scott Roza, “where organizations can leverage their existing virtualization investments, increase business agility and reduce costs by transitioning…environments into the cloud.”

Yahoo yesterday released an update to Blueprint, its mobile development platform that it says now allows developers to build stand-alone Java apps, and apps for devices running Symbian and Windows Mobile. Previously the platform was limited to building mobile widgets for its Yahoo Go mobile back-end system.

Of perhaps greater appeal, the company on Wednesday unveiled a version of its oneConnect IM and SMS application for iPhone that lets users access Bebo, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, MySpace and other social networks from that single iPhone interface. The so-called Pulse feature is part of oneConnect, a free app available at Apple's App Store.

Also new in Blueprint, according to Yahoo, is the ability to create mobile Web sites that can be viewed using HTML- or xHTML-capable mobile browsers. I'd guess such Web sites would be akin to Yahoo's own m.yahoo.com, which serves mobile devices with a Web-based interface to messaging, e-mail, news, driving directions, calendar and most of Yahoo's other applications.

"Developing applications for the fragmented mobile ecosystem...often results in developers creating an application that serves the least common denominator of mobile devices with a poor user experience, and an inability to effectively scale," said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo Connected Life, in a statement. "Now with one click, you can write once and have mobile services run across a critical mass of devices and operating systems, potentially reaching millions of users."

In addition …

Microsoft yesterday released a security update intended to fix eight critical vulnerabilities in as many as 42 Windows apps and components, including IE6, Media Player, Office, SQL Server and Visual Studio. The patch was made available before they could be discovered and exploited by malicious hackers, or at least before any were reported. The flaws were all found within GDI+, Microsoft's Graphics Device Interface subsystem.

The vulnerability could allow remote code execution "if a user [views] a specially crafted image file using affected software or [browses] a Web site that contains specially crafted content," according to Security Bulletin MS08-052, issued Sept.9. Many image file formats are affected, including bitmaps (.bmp), Windows Metafiles (.wmf), Enhanced Metafiles (.emf), Vector Markup Language (.vml) and .gif. A user need only view a Web page containing a malicious image to be infected. The exploit is particularly dangerous to users with administrative privileges, the bulletin said. GDI+, introduced with Windows XP, is also used in Vista and Windows server editions, and just about every Microsoft application and Windows component is affected. Therefore the company recommends that the patch be applied immediately.

The patches cover only Microsoft software, and not that of companies that have licensed GDI+ for their applications, which would need to issue patches of their own.

Microsoft also issued critical bulletins MS08-53, a patch for Microsoft Media Encoder 9, MS08-54, for Media Player, and MS-08-55, that repairs a flaw in Office …

There's been no shortage of speculation about apple CEO Steven Jobs has up his sleeve for the media event he's about to give today in San Francisco at 10 am local time. There's even been a leaked photo of a new "taller"iPod that's also thinner and less costly.

Apple today also is expected to make available iPod Touch firmware 2.1, which is rumored to add support for a camera, turn-by-turn GPS navigation and a speakerphone. It has also been reported that firmware 2.1 for iPhone will add background push, enabling the unit to accept messages and perform other tasks without taking focus of the operating system. It's also been speculated that iTunes 8 might be released with tons of new features.

PC Pro was reporting news of a revamped MacBook Pro, complete with a link to this crummy photo of what is supposed to be the new case. Who knows what that thing is, but it has an Apple on it.

Digg founder Kevin Rose posted on his blog the clearest picture so far of a Hershey-bar sized iPod nano, and confirms (or simply mirrors) all the guesses I've just reported, adding that the revamped iPod line is expected to begin shipping in two to three weeks with new reduced prices. You can also hear him describe the news in a video on the same page.

With all the rumors and speculation circulating the Web, only one thing …

If your plan is to strong-arm customers into offering your products exclusively, you had better give them something people want to buy. With Microsoft and Windows Vista, such is not the case, and Hewlett-Packard isn't taking it lying down.

HP, the world's number one PC supplier in terms of volume sales, appears to be leading a new anti-Vista revolution, of a sort. In an interesting article yesterday in BusinessWeek, Aaron Ricadela reports about "HP's 'End Run' Around Windows," and what a team inside the company is doing to improve the appeal of Vista by making it easier to use.

Known inside HP as the "Customer Experience Group," the team is developing technology that will allow users to access their digital photos and movies, as well as other common features using a touch-sensitive screen. In the article, Ricadela quotes Phil McKinney, chief technology officer in HP's personal systems group: "Our customers are looking for insanely simple technology where they don't have to fight with the technology to get the task done." Could he mean that Vista isn't insanely simple to use? "For us, it's about innovating on top of Vista." So it would appear.

This would not be the first time HP sought to improve Microsoft's user interface. The company through the 1990s included software that ran on top of the Windows versions of the day and presented a super-simplified interface to which the user could launch their applications with buttons. The term "topware" comes to …

The ultimate purpose was to get people talking, so I guess you would say the commercial has been a success.

If you have to release a statement explaining your commercial, I think it's safe to say it was a failure. The much anticipated Microsoft commercial featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld debuted yesterday, and quickly rose in the viewer ranks on YouTube. Not only was the 90-second spot not funny, it left so many people asking what it was about that it prompted Microsoft to post a release that read, in part:

After seeing the new ad from Microsoft, which debuted today, some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software. The answer, in the classic Seinfeld sense of the word, is nothing. Nevertheless, the spot is the first and most visible sign of an ambitious effort by Microsoft's Windows business to reconnect with consumers around the globe.

Maybe Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency that created the ads, thought that the irony of Bill Gates being spotted by Seinfeld shopping for discount shoes was enough to carry it. And maybe they also liked the last few Star Wars movies because of their special effects.

The general consensus of people I've spoken with and whose comments I've read was that the commercial was a disappointment. From the very start-- with Seinfeld reading the shoe store outside--it was trite. And if it was supposed to be an ad for Vista, it totally missed the mark. The best moment came at the end, with Jerry's enthusiastic …

I agree it was a disappointment. And if it was supposed to be an ad for Vista, it totally missed the mark. The best moment came at the end, with Jerry's enthusiastic "YES...!" However, the message I got was that there's something else coming; something other than what's already out.

Sorry folks. Here's the link to the ars technica comparing JavaScript engine performance of Chrome's V8 versus Firefox 3. It got messed up in my original post somehow. -EC

Bravo to Google for daring to compete in the two-party system of the world's desktop browser market. And kudos for bucking the status quo to design a "modern platform for Web pages and applications," as its release statement read. But there's also skepticism out there about Google's bravado, and about its motives for the whole browser project.

"Google wants to control the way people do business on the Internet, and the way to do that is to control how they get there," said Gwyn Fisher, CTO of Klocwork which makes code analysis tools. While many of today's news reports say Google has it sights on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Chrome's so-called Omnibar--an address bar that also performs Google searches--allows Google to gain search business perhaps without the user even realizing it. "We look at it with a jaundiced eye because and they’re having people search more, just by putting text in the address bar."

Still, the Chrome platform does offer some pretty cool capabilities for application developers and users. It's built on Mozilla and WebKit, the same open source rendering engine used by Apple's Safari. As such, content tested for Safari "should already work well on Google Chrome," says Google. Perhaps more significant is that Chrome's user agent string includes AppleWebKit , which simplifies the browser targeting for your applications. There's also a freshly rewritten JavaScript engine, which Google says vastly outperforms those available today. But that claim was challenged today in
…

It was widely reported today that Apple will begin selling iPhones in Russia through agreements with at least two of the country's top three carriers. Apple might be better off settling for its current black market sales figures, which one report has at about 20,000 units a month.

Because Apple could easily end like BP, which is seeing its multi-billion dollar oil venture with Russia's TNK go straight into the tank thanks to a Putin-led government masquerading as friendly to Western corporations and amenable to free-market capitalism. It is not.

So shipping phones COD and demanding cash should not be a problem if Apple does go ahead with its plans with MegaFon and Vimplecom; Russians appear to have plenty of disposable income. The iPhone 3G currently sells for about US$1,000 a pop plus another $100 to unlock it for use in the country. It's estimated that about half a million earlier iPhones have already been sold there.

Not content with that, Apple is also reportedly in talks with Mobile TeleSystems, Russia's largest mobile telecom, which according to reports expects to sell about a million units in two years. That same report said that if all three companies reach agreements with Apple, about 3.5 million units could move in that time. Authorized iPhone sales in Russia will begin in October. Not much information is available about any of the deals. For example, it is not known if any of the Russian carriers will defer the iPhone's …

With dozens of freshly minted applications on hand to stock its shelves, Google's Android Market is all but ready to open-- right across the street from Apple's App Store. All Google needs now is for someone to start selling phones that use Android, its Linux-based mobile operating system. According to reports, that will happen just in time for this year's Christmas buying season.

It looks like the first Android-based devices to hit the shelves will be from T-Mobile, that's according to a story in the New York Times last month. Dubbed the Dream, the phone is built around a large LCD and is clearly is designed to compete with iPhone. As seen in this blurry video of the Dream, the screen slides to unveil a QWERTY keyboard, overcoming what I saw as iPhone's deal breaker--lack of tactile response. The video is too blurry to see much of what the unit offers in terms of graphics, but if Google built it, you know it's got plenty of whiz-bang.

Speaking of which, take a look at the winners of Google's Android Developer Challenge, announced Friday. The way I see it, Google got more than its money's worth from the US$10 million in prize money awarded to developers. Of the [/URL=http://code.google.com/android/adc_gallery/index.html#1]top 10 applications[/URL], all of which are really clever, most involve location-based services in some way or other. It must have been really hard to classify the 10 next-best applications, which …

Google yesterday announced winners of the Android Developer Challenge, which put up US$10 million in prize money to developers of the best applications for its nascent mobile platform. In doing so, Google also helped to stock the shelves of Android Market, a forthcoming online retail site for Android applications akin to iPhone's App Store.

Development teams of the top 10 applications each received $275,000, the 10 next-best applications got $100,000. Another 30 applications were recognized as finalists.

Many of the top finishers employ location-based services of some kind. There's GoCart, which uses the phone's camera to scan a bar code while you're shopping and then price-compares like items from nearby stores and online retailers and provides inventory data and user reviews. Compare Everywhere, a similar product, also helps manage shopping lists. An extremely clever app is cab4me, which combines GoogleMaps, GPS and cell data to hail a cab to your location with just one button-press. No phone call, no directory assistance. You don't even need to know where you are.

It's remarkable that an operating system released only last November has spawned so many great and useful applications, especially when they involve technologies as complex as mobile cell networks, global positioning and the restrictions of embedded programming. The first phones to use Android, which is Linux-based, could be available to consumers as early as October, according to an August 14 report …

Most of the reports out yesterday about the release of Internet Explorer 8Beta 2 focused on its so-calledInPrivate Browsing, which leaves no trace of the Web sites you visit and protects anonymity. And while that's certainly useful, developers are likely to be more interested in its improvements in DOM and HTML 4.01 cross-browser inconsistencies, new Ajax features and news that IE8 passes the Acid2 test for accurate browser rendering.

Microsoft on Wednesday made available for download the latest IE 8 beta, which it says includes fixes to "the get/set/remove Attribute,default attributes, Attribute object and the <Q> tag." The company also claims IE8 will fully support CSS 2.1 upon general release, allowing Web developers and designers to "write their pages once and have them more easily render properly across different browsers." Applications written with Ajax techniques can now "update the browser back and forward navigation stack and address bar" from within their application, and the features work correctly, Microsoft claims.

For the IT department, Microsoft says that IE 8 will be easier to deploy and manage. So-called slipstream installation allows the browser to be installed as part of Vista. That kind of language makes me think "Here we go again." Because if it's installed this way, it cannot beuninstalled by users, "thereby improving desktop consistency and manageability," and perhaps helping build Microsoft's browser dominance? Oh wait, this only applies to Vista.Never mind . Microsoft has also added more than 100 new group policy …

Are you participating in Hack Week? That's Novell's open invitation to the world for suggestions on how to improve its openSuse Linux distro running through this Friday, Aug. 29. And you might just even win a prize.

Calls for porting Tomboy to Windows (and maybe even Mac OS X), adding geocode filtering to RSS and fully supporting Amazon's Elastic Cloud 2 are just a few of the ideas put forth in this year's annual Hack Week. Among last year's 10 winning ideas were a build service project that recompiles Debian packages, a service that can run automated tests as part of a build, and Giver, which discovers peers on a local network and allows desktop file transfers via simple drag-and-drop.

Ideas will be judged in the following categories, as described on the Hack Week Web site. Best Overall Project will be awarded to "the most outstanding project, either for being an exceptional piece of engineering work, for being stunningly beautiful, or for being a simple, elegant and useful solution to a common problem, or simply for awing the jury." The First Penguin Award "goes to the project that went out on a limb to try something difficult and risky… and probably failed. Named in honor of the first penguin to jump into the water when there may be predators swimming below." And the Best Cross-Pollination Team award goes to "the team that really wouldn't have been working together …

In the late 1990s an innovative company called Enroute Imaging came out with QuickStitch, a program that could analyze a series of digital photos and "stitch" them together into a single image. It cleverly figured out where the image data repeated and combined the photos seamlessly. It was really cool software, but I couldn't quite see a wide need. The company fizzled. A number of companies have popped up since then offering similar solutions. Can you name one? I didn't think so.

But now Microsoft has released Photosynth, a Web service that does largely the same thing, but using its own back-end systems for storage and processing horsepower. The idea is that people would feed in between 20 and 300 photos of a particular subject and thePhotosynth.net Web site would spit out a "synth ," a navigable virtual representation of the images that you can pan and zoom. With the technology, Microsoft claims to turn 2D photos into 3D images, but that's a stretch. I'd describe it more like QuicktimeVR or like taping a bunch of photos to a clear beach ball and looking at them from the inside.

On the client side, a small viewer apps is required, as is an account on Live Labs, Microsoft's collaborative web site for "scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs," and now photographers, I guess.

It's interesting to note that the Photosynth client does not require Silverlight. The tool relies instead on Flash. That …

I can just hear Jerry Seinfeld’s monologue taking jabs at Redmond: “…and what’s with Microsoft Vista—Bob and Windows ME weren’t embarrassing enough?” Who knows, maybe he already has. But now all that must be put aside as he takes on the role of pitch man for Vista. Do the folks in Redmond realize that Seinfeld’s TV shows are all reruns now?

Ron Miller’s post today got me thinking about how pathetic Microsoft's reaction was to Apple’s funny and in my opinion memorable and effective--not to mention widely spoofed--ads depicting Microsoft operating systems as the nerdy loser against the hip, savvy Mac OS X guy.

Microsoft’s reaction—to set aside US$300 million for a counter insurgency led by American comedian and TV star Jerry Seinfeld—is telling. The company has lost its way when it comes to marketing. Gone are the “Start Me Up” theme songs, the dedicated techies camping out to be first in line to buy Windows 95, the lights shining Microsoft’s colors from the Empire State Building.

Now it will be Jerry Seinfeld, perhaps asking rhetorically “What’s with widgets? Aren’t they fictional items they teach you about in statistics class?” Or maybe they’ll turn Seinfeld into some kind of WindowsMan, or pair him up as in the “Adventures of Seinfeld and Superman”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Seinfeld_%26_Superman[/URL].

In most good comedy there’s a nugget of truth. And Microsoft’s reaction to the ads indicates that they must have really hit home. More …

Intel Thursday unveiled something Nikola Tesla could only dream of. The company this week was demonstrating the ability to transmit 60 watts of electrical power across three feet of thin air with 75 percent efficiency.

I had a toothbrush once that recharged without wires. Every time the handheld part was placed on the base, it used electromagnetic induction to charge the batteries from the base with no electrical connection between the two. The technology Intel was demonstrating at its annual Intel Developers Forum this week was based on the very same principles. One practical application would be to install base units in office desks and enable laptops, cell phones and other portable devices to receive power whenever they are near or on the desk. Other applications might include small kitchen appliances that receive power just by sitting on a counter top; no need for a plug. Could unlimited laptop power aboard commercial airliners be far off? I'd pay a little extra for that one.

According to a New York Times article published Wednesday, the technology is based on a research project led by Intel's Joshua Smith in Seattle. "[It] builds on the work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Marin Soljacic, who pioneered the idea of wirelessly transmitting power using resonant magnetic fields." Hmmm. No mention of Tesla. The MIT group refers to the idea as WiTricity, a combination of wireless and electricity.

Being from Long …

Device maker Palm this week placed its bet on a pair of pros. First is the Palm Treo Pro, its next-generation smartphone to rival Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry. The other is Jon Rubinstein, the company’s executive chair hired earlier this year and now charged with the company's salvation. Rubinstein is largely credited with Apple’s turn-of-the-century turnaround thanks to the hugely successful iMac and iPod.

He'll have his work cut out for him. According to most reports, the Treo Pro does little more than maintain the status-quo. It’s got WiFi, 3G, a 2 mega pixel camera, USB and a QWERTY keyboard; all the things people now expect from any smartphone. It’s slimmer than previous Treos, and its 320x320 pixel display is black-framed and flush-mounted, like its expected competitors. But at US$549 unlocked, it’s expensive. And it runs only Windows Mobile; there’s no more Palm OS. For me that’s the deal breaker. The only difference between Windows Mobile and a bag of dog-doo is the bag; it's slow, unreliable unintuitive and idiotic to use.

Through the 1990s, my trusty Palm 500 tirelessly reminded me of appointments, and would eventually store thousands of contacts. And during those years, I resisted getting a cell phone, not wanting to carry two devices around. Then the Treo 600 came along. The simplicity of the Palm OS running on a powerful ARM processor, combined with a phone to which I would not have to manually transfer all my contacts was too tempting …

Hi Ron: Good post. I couldn't agree more. Microsoft's reaction to the (really funny, and I believe effective) Apple ads indicates that the ads must contain more than a 'kernel' of truth. And since Apple still has such a small percentage of the market, the move makes Microsoft look even more pathetic.

To begin to compete with Apple, Microsoft should emulate its bottom-up approach to OS improvement rather than piling the same tired old kernel with loads of useless eye candy and "features" (bloat).

A better marketing strategy for Microsoft might be to release a series of ads similar to Apple's pitting Vista against Linux, which it could more easily compete with. Because the Apple-Microsoft debate is over- the Mac OS X is in an entirely different galaxy.

Toshiba is taking another crack at high-definition DVD, sort of. Half a year after it ceased combat major operations in the format wars with Philips, Sony and the Blu-ray format, Toshiba has taken the wraps off XDE, a new up-conversion format that it claims can wring more resolution from pictures on your standard-resolution DVDs.

The premier model is available now for a list price of US$149.99. Dubbed the XD-E500, the unit converts the 480p DVD signal to 720p, 1080i or 1080p. The mode you select depends on the resolution of your display. There are also sharp, color and contrast modes, two of which can be enabled in certain combinations. According to Toshiba's XD-E500 Web page, enhancement effects will vary depending on the quality of disc content quality and your display's capabilities and settings. Hmmm, I guess that would be OK. The company also warns that "depending on the quality of the DVD disc, some video noise may be visible." Who cares about a little video noise, right?

Oh, and there's one more thing. "Due to laser pick-up and disc design," it might not play some DVD-R and DVD-RW discs, and some recordable media or recording formats may not be supported. Well in that case, I'll take two.

This move by Toshiba is either extremely smart or extremely dumb. If it's a way to repackage and clear out Toshiba's obsolete DVD-HD inventory, it's not a bad idea. But that doesn't seem likely …

All in good time. There are more variables in the scenario that you described than data transfer speed, one of which is the operating system (assuming you're on Windows). Linux and Mac OS X seem more adept at such things at present.

Get ready to rewrite your USB drivers. Again. Intel this morning released portions of an updated draft of the Extended Host Controller Interface 3, the latest version (0.9) of the part of the USB specification that handles register-level communications between the operating system and the USB host controller. The new spec could support transfer speeds of 4.8 Gbps, 10 times faster than the theoretical maximum of 480 Mbps of the current USB 2.0 specification. Finalization is expected in 2009.

Do we really need USB to go that fast? Few, if any, hard drives are capable of sustaining such transfer rates. So why does the world need such transfer rates from a serial bus? "We’re looking forward and preparing a USB 3.0 technology roadmap that will intercept emerging flash-based solid state drives (SSD) that will be able to transfer files this quickly, if not faster," according to Jeff Ravencraft, a technology strategist in the Communication Technology Lab at Intel in an Oct. 2007 blog post. Jeff leads Intel’s USB and Wireless USB projects.

To accommodate gigabit transfer rates at the physical layer, USB 3 uses packet routing technology and separate channels for data and acknowledgments. This replaces the polling and broadcast technique now in use. Also supported will be multiple data flows per channel, each with its own priority. At the application level, the spec will permit transfer speeds of around 300Mbps.

Also involved are in work on the spec are Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NEC, …

It’s a new day for open source developers. A U.S. Federal appeals court yesterday ruled that someone releasing code under an open source license can control future use of that code using copyright law. That’s important because copyright laws carry stronger remedies—including court injunction—along with the monetary remedies available for breach of contract.

The 15-page ruling in Jacobsen v. Katzer favored Robert Jacobsen, a model train hobbyist who gave away his Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) software under the Artistic License for free software. “Through the collective work of many participants,” according to the ruling, “JMRI created a computer programming application called DecoderPro, which allows model railroad enthusiasts to use their computers to program the decoder chips that control model trains.”

At issue before the lower court was whether Matthew Katzer and Kamind
Associates had included algorithms from the DecoderPro project in its Decoder Commander in a manner not in compliance with the Artistic License. Decoder Commander is a commercial product that competes with DecoderPro, which is free. Compliance would have required that Kamind include the authors’ names, JMRI copyright notices and several other references, and a description of how the source code was changed from the original.

Jacobsen was initially rebuffed when seeing a preliminary injunction against Katzer by district court, which ruled:

The plaintiff claimed that by modifying the software the defendant had exceeded the scope of the license and therefore infringed the copyright. Here, however, …

use 11743, huntington, NY, verizon FiOS. (you can always tell when they picked the catchy acronym first, then shoe-horned the silly words to match :^)

What's "post code?" Will help any way I can. I am in U.S.

I'm in hog heaven right now. I've got nothing to do today but munch on linzer tarts and watch the first day of 2008 Olympic games live from Bejing, China. And if the mood strikes me (as it obviously has), maybe even do a bit of blogging.

Unlike with previous Olympics, during which I was limited only to broadcast television coverage, this time I have 24/7 access to all events live, as they happen. And it's not because I've broken down and started paying for cable or satellite TV, but because of the technology in use at NBColympics.com.

Never mind the stuff you'd expect to see--event news and schedules, athlete pics, profiles and taped interviews, and video highlights and the like--on a Web site dedicated to the event; that's all there. Also standard is the medal count table, listing the top countries and their takes of gold, silver and bronze. Clicking on a country brings you details of who and what. A nifty and useful feature I don't recall seeing on prior Olympic Web sites is a time converter showing your local time and that of Beijing. There's mobile access to content and an alerts feature that will message your phone with breaking news and medal alerts, event reminders and even video and photos. And depending on your carrier and level of service, you can even watch events live on your phone.

All that's great, but the best part …

Google is doubling down on cookies. I like cookies as much as the next guy; I've got a box of linzer tarts next to me as I write this. But when a company as powerful as Google starts force feeding you with tracking agents, some might see that as unpalatable.

Much of Google's revenue is based on targeted advertising based on the browsing habits of searches of its Web database. This was accomplished through its AdSense network, which places a cookie on the systems of anyone visiting a site in its AdSense network. Now, Google will place aDoubleClick cookie too, as it integrates that Web pattern tracker's network with its own. The strategy was announced in a Thursday post on The Official Google Blog:

Today we're announcing some key enhancements on the Google content network (partner sites for which we provide advertising) that will offer a better experience for users and better value for advertisers and publishers.

Some of the capabilities to be enabled "in the coming months" according to the blog include frequency capping and reporting, which allow advertisers to control the number of times a user sees a particular ad and access pertinent reports. Advertisers also will have access to "view-through" data, which helps show ad effectiveness by reporting how often people visited their sites after seeing an ad. Google also claims improved ad performance of its content network.

We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google …

AUGUST 7, 2008--There was much to celebrate at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo this week in San Francisco's Moscone Center, particularly if you're a developer building applications on or for the platform.

Remember when gOS debuted as the operating system inside Wal-Mart's US$199 PC? The company yesterday introduced gOS 3 Gadgets, a version of its Ubuntu-based distribution that launches Google Gadgets at start-up. Gadgets are miniature, targeted applications that can be placed on the desktop of a Web page; tens of thousands are already available for free. gOS 3 Gadgets also preloads the WINE Windows API implementation for X, and LXDE, the Lightweight X Desktop Environment. The company was demonstrating gOS 3 Gadgets--now in beta--on a number of laptops at the show.

Open-source mobile device maker Openmoko said yesterday it will publish schematics for its Neo 1973 and Neo FreeRunner Linux-based mobile phones. You might recall that on July 4, the company liberated its FreeRunner Linux phone design. It sold out in a week, according to claims. At that time, Openmoko also published CAD files for the design, saying it would enable device designers to "alter the look and feel" to suit medical, industrial, science and other vertical markets, or make it more rugged or aesthetically pleasing. By publishing schematics, customizations are now possible to all aspects of the design, including hardware interfaces and functionality. Both specifications will be available under the Creative Commons license; schematics …

How's this for a news story? Genuitec, which develops the MyEclipse commercial Eclipse IDE, announced today that it is working toward a near-zero carbon footprint and wants other Java tool companies to do the same. Stay with me here.

Touting its environmentally friendly ways, the company starts with a boast that it's a so-called virtual organization. "Genuitec does not contribute to gas pollution by requiring employee commute times," it said in a news release. Nothing wrong with that. Working from home just one day a week would save me about $75 a month at today's gas prices. By eliminating office space, Genuitec says it also avoids high energy costs of its maintenance (to say nothing of rent).

What's more, all of the company's "communications, conferences, meetings and Webinars are virtual, which makes the organization practically paperless and minimizes further environmental impact," it said. And since it sells its software electronically, Genuitec also does away with the plastics, mailing fees, materials and energy costs associated with delivering packaged goods. With the combined results of these efforts, Genuitec claims to prevent more than 70 metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere per year.

Here's where it gets interesting. While the company simply cannot avoid some air travel, it compensates for the resulting carbon emissions by--you guessed it--purchasing carbon offsets. The company has partnered with the CarbonFund.org Foundation, a non-profit organization that's focused on education, conservation and reforestation. Nothing wrong with that, right? Sounds like a …

It’s not a new snack food and it’s not a plan to help save the Earth. The low power chips are a series of application processors and digitial signal processors announced in July by Texas Instruments that consume significantly less power than predecessors and prolong battery life of the devices built around them. The best part? Nowhere in TI’s release documents was the word “green.”

Not surprisingly, device designers using TI processors have been asking the chip-maker for products that consumer less power, more or less supplanting prior requests for more and more power. “[The] developers first question is now, ‘This is my power budget; how can TI help me do more with it?’ ” That’s according to Gene Fritz, a principal fellow at TI. The answer, he said, is simple: “Decades of experience allow TI to cut power consumption, improve ease-of-use and drive performance within its architectures through better process technology, peripheral integration, parallel processing, analog, connectivity and power management software and tools.”

The results is a series of about 15 new devices in four product lines to be released over the coming year that it claims will increase battery life to days and weeks without sacrificing application performance.

Aimed at audio, medical and industrial applications needing a high-accuracy floating point unit is the 674x DSP, with TI says consumes one-third the power of its rivals. In sleep mode, it sips as little as 6 mW of power, according to claims, and 420 mW in …

Postbuild is a deployment tool, NOT a development tool. It allows you to take YOUR EXISTING .NET APPS and deploy them where no .NET framework exists.

Does that help?

Virtualization tools company Xenocode today is set to begin shipping an update to Postbuild 2008 for .NET, which enables developers to deploy .NET applications to systems that do not have the .NET framework installed or have a mismatched version. The update adds support for .NET 3.0 and 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, the Windows Presentation Foundation and the LINQ .NET extensions for native-language queries.

Among the benefits of the tool are the ability to package and distribute applications, dependencies, components, DLLs runtimes and services as a single executable. Apps can be sent via e-mail, direct file transfer, removable media such as USB drives or other any available method. Intellectual property is protected from reverse engineering or decompilation by means of code obfuscation included with the product.

Packaged applications perform as well as those running in the .NET Framework as normal, according to the company. “Postbuild is primarily designed for use in deploying applications into production environments.,” said Xenocode CEO Kenji Obata via e-mail. It integrates directly with Visual Studio and includes a scriptable command-line interface. The addition to application footprint is minimal, he said, and I would add minuscule compared with the hard disk space required for Microsoft’s framework (not to mention the labor involved in maintaining subsequent versions).

When Microsoft does update its framework with features developers would like to take advantage of, “the software publisher validates the application on the new runtime and then rebuilds and updates the packaged application,” Obata said. This minor inconvenience is …

Apple has grabbed lots of headlines this week, some for things it has done, others for things done to it. Of all the major Apple products, only the iPod has escaped mention.

With perhaps the potential to affect the most people is the deal announced this week with AT&T to extend exclusivity with the iPhone's only service provider until 2010. According to a story Thursday in USA Today, the two have conspired to ditch Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon customers, which expected to have access to the apple of every geek's eye after the end of 2008.

AT&T made the deal too sweet for Apple to pass up, reports USA Today, offering US$300 per unit for continuing as the sole provider of the iPhone 3G. That also explains how Apple managed to drop the price to $199. months. In exchange, Apple forgoes its slice of service revenues, reported the story, which goes into some detail about the deal's genesis.

In every life some rain must fall. Apple was publicly criticized last week for reacting slowly to the DNS vulnerability that surfaced in July. But now that the company has finally gotten around to releasing a patch, it's only for the server versions of OS X and leaves Tiger and Leopard users wide open.

Apple without explanation pulled the plug on NetShare, an tethering application from Nullriver that turns the iPhone into a wireless modem for your MacBook. …

Erik Anderson and Rob Landley are at it again. The guys who brought us the BusyBox toolset for resource-constrained Linux and Unix systems, together with the Software Freedom Law Center, have filed yet another GPL enforcement lawsuit for copyright infringement.

This time it’s against Extreme Networks Inc., a maker of high-performance network switches and other connectivity and communications gear. Without even reading the complaint, I would put my money on the FSLC; the previous four such cases resulted in out-of-court settlements in favor of the plaintiffs. In those cases, defendents were ordered to distribute source code in compliance with the GPL 2. They’re also looking for damages and litigation costs.

According to the five-part complaint, which was filed July 17 in the United States District Court in New York, a judgement is sought against Extreme Networks be immediately “enjoined and restrained from copying, modifying, distributing or making any other infringing use of Plaintiff’s software.” Also sought is that the Extreme “account for and disgorge to Plaintiffs all profits derived by Defendant from its unlawful acts.” Good luck with that one.

"We attempted to negotiate with Extreme Networks, but they ultimately ignored us," said Aaron Williamson, SFLC Counsel. "Like too many other companies we have contacted, they treated GPL compliance as an afterthought. That is not acceptable to us or our clients."

In a related story, BusyBox has agreed to end its lawsuit against Super Micro Computer, which manufactures and distributes …

Forgive this experiment. I need to know how much the headline matters.

If you've already read my Midori article from yesterday (July 30), don't bother to CLICK HERE.

If you haven't read it (and want to), please do CLICK HERE.

Thanks.

Details of a future Microsoft operating system were revealed yesterday by David Worthington, a guy who works down the hall from me. He has apparently gotten his eyes on Microsoft documents that contained extensive details of a ground-up OS rewrite code-named Midori. Based on those documents, he reports for SD Times that Midori "will have a programming model, a platform stack and execution techniques that are intended to help developers write applications that can safely and efficiently use a greater number of hardware threads than is currently feasible," Worthington wrote.

Midori's lowest level consists of a hardware-native kernel. A second, managed-code kernel, provides operating system functions. A single scheduler, or Resource Management Infrastructure, controls resources such as I/O, memory and power management. Response time will be monitored. The scheduler will be accessible by user-level applications as well as distributed applications and cloud computing services.

Midori will be built with connectivity and concurrency as core principles, in line with modern users who want to move seamlessly to multiple devices and platforms and consume local and distributed applications. The nascent operating system will run natively on x86, x64 and ARM hardware, Worthington reports, and is intended to allow Windows applications to coexist with those for Midori. Its asynchronous-only architecture that will permit "task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources" running across multiple topologiesinclusing client-server, peer-to-peer and cloud computing.

The system also will reportedly introduce a so-called Asynchronous Promise Architecture, an abstraction layer for processors …

GUIdancer 2.2 Automates Failure Retires

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Such is the way of GUIdancer 2.2, the latest version of the function-test automation tool from Bredex, which began shipping yesterday. The keyword-driven tool for Java (Swing, SWT and RCP) and HTML can now retry failed test steps using pre-defined test execution variables, according to the company.

Version 2.2 is compatible with the Eclipse 3.4--the Ganymede release. GUIdancer can run as an Eclipse plug-in or stand alone. Test cases are now automatically included in projects, enabling testers to reuse keywords across projects and create them quickly using drag and drop. Applications under test can be started more easily now from executable files. Other usability improvements include the "addition of welcome pages, cheat sheets and new example projects," the company said. Object mapping and maintenance or modification of large and complex tests is now simpler and smoother, according to claims.

“We’ve done a lot of work on the usability of GUIdancer, especially in the initial stages,” said GUIdance development-team member Zeb Ford-Reitz in a statement. “There is plenty of information available to GUIdancer testers – example projects to run, tutorials to work through, and examples of best practices in the welcome pages," the statement continued.

Of course, GUIdancer 2.2 retains all the benefits of previous versions, including easy test creation and maintenance without programming skills, the ability to extend the tool with Java and to keep test creation separate from the application under …

Opening Windows would enable you, me, anyone an everyone to enhance, extend and improve the operating system used by 90 percent of the world, or maybe to replace the kernel with something better, more stable (a la Darwin).

Linux etc. has surely made strides, but it's not quite there yet, IMHO. Mac OS X on the other hand...