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Microsoft remains a 2.5 trick pony
Microsoft's Thursday earnings report was both good and bad news for the software company.
The good news is that sales of Windows are up significantly, indicating that consumers are buying new Windows Vista systems. Similarly, there is a significant uptake in Office sales.
The bad news is that Windows, Windows Server and Office are the only profitable business groups. The gaming group (Xbox) and Online services group (Live search, Hotmail, etc) continue to bleed red ink.
Microsoft is splitting out its earnings in a very strange way, throwing sales of the Zune (pictured above) Windows CE and Windows Mobile in with Xbox sales. Similarly, sales of Microsoft's CRM and ERP suites are thrown in with Office sales.
It is however, safe to assume that Office accounts for the majority of the $4.8bn that the business division sold (and the $3.4bn in profits that it got from those). Similarly, Windows Server sales are the driving force behind the "server" division. SQL Server after all doesn't run on Linux, HP UX or Solaris.
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has repeatedly called Google a one trick pony that has failed to succeed anywhere outside its search advertising business. Microsoft however is only doing slightly better. It has built a successful business for its Office and Windows (and Windows Server) software, but the online and gaming groups are still hurting, despite large investments.
| Sales | Profit | |
| Windows client | $5,272m (+67%) | $4,244m (+70%) |
| Office & enterprise applications (CRM, ERP) | $4,829m (+34%) | $3,421m (+42%) |
| Windows Server, Sharepoint, SQL, etc. | $2,749m (+15%) | $979m (+32%) |
| Online services | $623m (+11%) | $-200m (-833%) |
| Gaming and devices, incl. Windows Mobile, Win CE | $929m (-21%) | $-315m (+22%) |
Another one of Microsoft's great successes
April 28, 2007 at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Cisco admits to blogging fear
Cisco blogger John Earnhardt is wondering if the of network gear should do more blogging. Earnhardt is a senior manager of policy communications for Cisco's Worldwide Government Affair Group (simply put, he's in public relations).
He proudly proclaims that the company has "a handful of blogs", and points to event driven blogs and concludes that Cisco is doing "a decent job of giving some flavor of what we are interested in."
Earnhardt however must be doubting that statement (thank goodness!), because he continues his blog posting questioning if the company should open up more. If it should, for instance, provide a blogging platform for all its employees.
The answer to that question can only be a resounding: Duh! I can't believe that companies are even asking that question in 2007.
If you're restricting what your employees blog about, you're essentially saying that you don't trust them. But don't you also trust that they won't harm the company when they talk about it during the weekend and at night when they aren't at work?
Of course things will go wrong. Employees will make stupid mistakes and they will write things that might make you decide to fire those employees. But again, wouldn't that employee be making the same comments in public before? Blogs just do a better job at exposing those people, but it doesn't turn your number one workers into a secret exposing devil.
What exactly is Cisco afraid of? That its carefully crafted PR strategy is undercut by Cisco employees giving honest facts? Doesn't that say more about the (perceived) honesty in your PR strategy than it does about your employees?
Cisco coined the phrase "the participation age", but for some reason Earnhardt claims that for Cisco is enough to just talk and not participate.
April 27, 2007 at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Sun puts some real business in 3D environments (video)
If you're one of the many folks who have (legitimately) been scratching their heads
over the use of Second Life, you might want to look at Sun's MPK20 project. The company showed off a very early prototype on Thursday at an open house of Sun Labs.
Instead of building fancy pavilions on overprices virtual land, MPK20 uses a 3D environment as a collaboration tool. The people you run into aren't strangers but work for the same company, or at least work on the same project. The platform allows for VoIP conversations but you can also look at a presentation or share a document.
You can watch a video demo below.
April 27, 2007 at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
The Simpsons take on Google
The world just becomes so much clearer when you look at it through the eyes of The Simpsons.
April 25, 2007 at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Windows Vista proclaimed "Me II"
Could Windows Vista proof a repeat of Microsoft's Windows Millenium Edition (Me) marketing disaster?
Several people are starting to ask just that question after Microsoft released a $3 software bundle for developing nations and Dell brought back Windows XP systems.
Windows Me was released in 2000. Microsoft at the time was the laughing stock of the high tech world. It had just been convicted of abusing its monopoly and had completely missed out on the internet boom (well, it acquired Hotmail, but that was it). The Windows Me launch prompted headlines like "Windows washes even whiter", to indicate that the launch was 99 per cent marketing fluff. The market agreed. Consumers held on to their Windows 98 systems and Me sales tanked.
So is Vista a useless update? At work we're still running Windows XP, mainly because several of our applications won't support Vista or Internet Explorer 7. Having run the operating system on a home computer for several months now, I can hardly say that it wows me. The user interface is pretty. It is slightly easier to find documents and applications than it was in Windows XP. But the nicest feature by far is the deep sleep mode that drastically shortens the boot-time.
If shaving off the odd minute from the boot-time is your best feature, something is severely wrong.
Microsoft will tell you that Vista is all about security. But security is a checkbox item: essential to have but mostly a pain in the behind when it's flawed. Secondly, most users are confident that they are safe online until they catch a virus. Security doesn't drive sales.
A second sales pitch would talk up Vista's multi media capabilities. We have yet to see applications that use the stunning graphics that Windows Vista supposedly should offer. And a Netgear media adapter that is supposed to play content from the PC on the stereo won't function, even though both Vista and the device are supposed to support the same industry standard.
Lastly, I'm pissed off that my cell phone won't synchronize with Vista's bundled calendar and address book applications. Syncing requiresOutlook 2007 - for some reason Vista doesn't support Outlook 2003. But I certainly won't shell out $500 for Office 2007. Instead I downloaded OpenOffice and increasingly find myself using Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Now that I think of it, Linux should be well equipped to perform all the tasks that are currently performed on my computer. Perhaps it's time to create a Linux partition.
April 25, 2007 at 08:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack
Of open source billionaires
What would have happened if Bill Gates was born 15 years later, somewhere in Finland. One boring summer he would set out to build an operating system, name it Linux and set if free for the world to use and play with.
His impact on the world would have been about as great as it is today, but he never would have topped the Forbes list of the richest people in the world.
But if Linux is so great, where are the Linux billionaires?
At first glance they may not be any. Torvalds certainly doesn't rank very high on the Forbes list, and neither does GPL and GNU inventor Richard Stallman, or Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik
But 40 years from now, Bill Gates and all the other Microsoft billionaires may very well proof to be an abnormality, a footnote in history: in the early days of the IT industry, companies were able to artificially lock in users, forcing them to buy all software from a single vendor. This allowed them to create an illegal monopoly that had to be broken open by force. Consequently open standards emerged that prevented a repeat of the monopoly nightmares.
And as the link above points out, open source is today is powering the ideas of the latest generation of billionaires. Just look at Youtube and Google. But then open source is like air for the world's economy. You shouldn't notice it when it's there, but will dearly miss it if it isn't.
Matt Szulik - not a billionaire, but influential nonetheless.
April 25, 2007 at 01:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Open source to Adobe: Apollo, move over!
The Dojo open source Ajax development framework has released a beta of its Dojo Offline tool. The tool provides developers with an easy to use way to add offline functionality to their services.
Think about being able to access you Gmail or Yahoo mail at all times, regardless of your network status. Or being able to use Google's Documents and Spreadsheets applications in a way that is similar to Word, with the added advantage of data sharing and online storage.
Adobe has been beating its marketing drum for its Apollo technology since early this year. But following the Dojo release, Apollo looks mostly like a bloated attempt to squeeze more software revenues out of develops by creating a new platform.
Essentially, Dojo requires a 300KB download that will be delivered in an intuitive way. Developers add a few lines of code (more if they require granular customization) and their application receives offline capabilities. Furthermore, the user experience is essentially the same for both the online and offline application.
With Apollo, developers have to create an entirely new application that users access as a regular application. The Ebay auction tool that the company has been showing off for instance doesn't look anything like the user interface on the Ebay.com website.
Users furthermore don't have a clear incentive to download a special runtime engine (6MB for the Windows version) that allows Apollo applications to function.
Looks like open source wins again.
April 25, 2007 at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Google scores top brand position
Google's brand is worth an estimated $66.4bn, according to Millward Brown's second annual 'Brandz' ranking. That makes it the world's most valuable brand.
The search engine's brand value surged 77 per cent in the past year, allowing the company to surpass Microsoft and GE for the top spot.
The ranking is based on rather fuzzy mathematics. In additional to quantifiable metrics such as current earnings, it also takes into consideration expected future earnings, and (it gets worse) factors like customer loyalty. Add all those variables, shake well, and Google (with a stock market based $149.2bn market capitalization) is valued higher than Microsoft, despite its $281.8bn market cap, as well as GE's $357.9bn.
Google is a valuable brand and the company will probably be able to expand to numerous online markets. But don't overestimate the stretch and flexibility of its brand.
Google's brand has proven a failure in conquering the online email or messaging markets in a way that resembles its search success. And let's not forget that until the Youtube acquisition, Google Video was left in the shadow of a start-up company.
Next year the study should factor in a firm's track record in expanding to new markets. That will cause Microsoft to plunge into a deep hole (it's still a two-trick pony that relies on Windows and Office), while a firm like Cisco should rank much higher.
April 24, 2007 at 01:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
In memoriam: Boris Yeltsin
Russia's first post-communist president Boris Yeltsin has died.
Although he oversaw a regime that brought out the worst in many of Russia's capitalists and waged bloody wars in Chechnya, he should be primarily be remembered dismantling the countries communist regime.
The Yeltsin era was one of peace dividends that only ended with the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and Bush's subsequent invasion of Iraq.
It was a time when the Russian president refused to get off an airplane during an official visit to Ireland. After waiting for several hours, the hosts were told that the president was "unwell". It was generally accepted that he was drunk at the time, as well as during many other public appearances.
Good times.
April 23, 2007 at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dell's virtual tree hands on
Last Friday's posting about Dell's virtual tree give-away has struck a cord. Numerous blog postings are pointing out Dell's questionable promotion in which the company advertised a virtual tree give-away as being environmentally friendly.
We were kind of tied up with our real life on Sunday and coudln't attend the Dell's virtual party, but made sure to drop by on Monday and pick up a free Dell tree.
Our company bean counters wouldn't clear the expense for some Second Life private land where we could plant the saplings, but we found a public park that would tolerate them for a few minutes (our successful planting of 1 and 2 "meter" tall trees is pictured on the right).
Some commenters argued that Dell has every right to give away virtual trees, and we couldn't agree more. But Dell crosses a line when it starts portraying a virtual promotion as somehow being environmentally friendly.
As the 'Watts up with that' blog pointed out: " Maybe [Al] Gore will fly in on his private jet to make a 'virtual appearance' to preach to the faithful."
UPDATE:
Commenter "Honey" from our Friday post has a picture from the actual party here. At the Dell party he/she pointed out the hypocrisy of marketing virtual tree planting as environmentally friendly, and now seems to have been permanently banned from Dell's Second Life island.
view from the top... not so pretty
Dell's second life pavilion, the day after the party
April 23, 2007 at 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Open source protester disrupts Bill Gates presentation
Reminds me of an October 2004 presentation by Gates in Berkeley, when during a question and answer session, a student asked his fellows for a show of hands of people who dislikes Microsoft. Nobody raised his hand and Gates responded calmly, asking if he had a question for him, and then moved on.
originally uploaded by wutheringea.
April 20, 2007 at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dell contribues some virtual trees to Earth Day
Earth Day (this Sunday) may be another fabrication by some marketing department, but Dell is taking it to a new low.
The company is handing out free trees in Second Life. These aren't just your every day virtual trees, players can configure the speed at which they grow and the trees offer several textures.
All this, the company claims is an "expansion of Dell's Plant a Tree for Me program", in which computer buyers can choose to pay an additional $2 to plant a tree and offset some carbon emissions. It also shows Dell's intension to use Second Life "to explore new ways we can extend our direct relationship with customers, and to learn new ways to interact with virtual communities".
You can argue that handing out free virtual trees helps with Dell's image, just like handing out free T-shirts at a trade show makes for very happy goody hunters.
But labeling this marketing stunt as environmentally friendly is utter nonsense, if not just plain deceptive. It has nothing to do with planning a real tree. The Second Life trees don't offer any benefit to the environment. In fact, they increase the demand on Second Life's servers, thereby increasing their power consumption and growing the carbon footprint of this virtual world.
Making things worse, Dell is throwing an Earth Day party this Sunday. Soliciting users to further increase the load on Second Life servers... isn't that as helpful for the environment as staging a drive in protest?
Don't get me wrong. Dell has every right to throw Second Life parties and the company deserves praise for setting up genuine customer conversations through its Direct2Dell blog and IdeaStorm. But the Second Life tree planning initiative has nothing to do with the environment.
April 20, 2007 at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack
Ubuntu has some executive mindshare at Dell
With Dell looking to introduce Linux systems, one distribution can be almost certain to make the company's short list.
That's because Dell chief executive and founder Michael Dell himself is running Ubuntu on his 4GB, Core 2 Duo laptop at home, the company disclosed on its website.
If we are to believe the site, Michael Dell owns a total of five computers. In addition to a laptop and desktop systems at home, he also uses laptop for mobile gaming, travelling and a business desktop system.
Except for the Ubuntu system, all other computers are running Windows Vista Ultimate. Still, 20 per cent desktop share would be a decent target.
April 19, 2007 at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft's $3 desktop monopoly move
Microsoft will be offering developing nations a $3 software suite containing Windows and Office applications. All this, the company's PR spin doctors claim, is aimed at closing the digital divide.
Closing the digital divide is a noble cause by all means. But some of the plan's implications are less noble.
North America, Europe and parts of Asia are considered firm territory for Windows, simply because users are familiar with their operations and their data has been locked in. Microsoft's greatest challenge is to repeat this feat in emerging economies.
The challenge however is competing with Linux and open source software. Microsoft largely sees those applications as cheap competitors, but believes that few consumers care about (or think that they should care about) open standards. So faces with a $0 competitor, Microsoft can only follow with a price drop.
The move raises some ethical monopoly questions. The company after all is using the monopoly margins that it makes on Windows in the developed world, to give away software for (nearly) free elsewhere. This would be clearly illegal within a single market, but anti trust law doesn't cross borders.
All is not lost for the open source movement however. A growing number of governments is warming up to the idea that open source helps to build a local information technology economy, where Microsoft software will only create an IT services economy.
If a nation is dying of thirst, you can ship them bottled water or teach them how to dig a well. Microsoft is clearly in the bottled water business, and just launched a new low end brand.
(picture above: solar project to power up to 30 workstations at a school in South Africa's KwaZulu-Nathal region)
April 19, 2007 at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Digg rides the Web2.0 hype roller coaster (video)
If you didn't believe Web2.0 was overhyped, you should definitely listing to Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg.com who spoke at the Web2.0 Expo earlier this week.
Last year the public attention for the social media service peaked when the company was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek in good-old-web1.0-hype-style. As suitors started calling on a daily basis, it got more and more distracted from executing on Digg's business plan. Non of the acquisition plans materialized, and as Adelson admitted, the company learned the hard way that it should pay so much attention to what bloggers and media were saying.
Below you can watch a video of Adelson talking about his Web2.0 wild ride.
April 19, 2007 at 07:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Amazon talks up the web services paradise
Amazon might be a strange player in the Web2.0 world, but the bookseller feels that it can teach you a few things.
Over the past years, Amazon has build up online compute and storage services that essentially deliver all the resources to start your next online service. No purchase and provisioning of new hardware required - no peak loads that knock down your priced startup.
In he video below, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos explains the vision behind his firm's web services at the Web2.0 expo.
April 19, 2007 at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Judgement day for social networks approaches
The experimental phase for social networks is over. It's time to show a viable business model, analyst firm In-Stat claimed.
Services like Myspace, Linkedin and Facebook have had a fun time signing up users, but now the time has come to start making charging those users for premium services or useful advertising.
It can hardly be considered a coincidence that the wake-up call coincides with the high-on-hype Web2.0 expo that is taking place in San Francisco this week. At the event, one of the show's organizers asked a packed keynote room if they considered web2.0 a bubble. To his own surprise, nobody seemed to deny the hype element.
But except for the purpose of hype debunking, why would now be the time for the Web2.0 bubble to burst? The Web1.0 bubble burst because entrepreneurs had lied to investors about their growth and customer base and because investors failed to see that a two year growth trend couldn’t be extrapolated into a larger trend for the overall economy. This fueled a mad rush on talent, equipment and office space that snowballed out of control.
Current web2.0 startups rarely have VC funding, and we haven't seen a single Web2.0 firm go public. Investors aren't fighting for investment opportunities, because except for Myspace and Youtube, the returns have been abysmal. Development meanwhile is done with worldwide teams of a few dozen people, as evidenced by a continuing number of vacancies in the Silicon Valley real estate market.
It doesn't seem that Linkedin or Facebook need to be afraid of In-Stat's doomsday scenario. But then, it wouldn't hurt any Web2.0 service to be profitable either.
April 18, 2007 at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Intel takes another shot at UMPC
The first versions of the Ultra Mobile PC were high and hype and short on reality, but Intel at its Intel Developer Forum is standing firm behind the new device category.
The chip maker not only unveiled a 2007 update, it is also pulling forward its 2008 update by about 6 months.
The new models will be running Windows Vista and offer slightly better energy efficiency, but consumers would be wise to wait for at least the 2008 upgrade. That gets them a 45nm processor that will probably allow for smaller devices and a more decent battery life.
Currently UMPCs are useless toys that fruitlessly attempts to cram Windows XP onto a 480 by 800 pixel screen and suck their battery dry in a mere 2.5 hours.
Intel would have done a great job if it had attempted to create a device that is worse than a laptop and cellphone at all levels. The chipmaker keeps insisting that isn't the case: it didn't create a Frankstein device, it just attempted to design something cool and fell short on all levels.
UMPC: now running Vista. (photoshop image - actual units won't ship until later this year)
This image replaces another pic that featured an Uren CARPC. Thank you JKK for pointing out the error.
April 18, 2007 at 02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Vnunet TV goes live!
It has taken a bit longer than we were hoping for, but vnunet.com has finally received its own video player.
My favourite feature is the mini player on the front page that will show the latest content in addition to the full sized player on the new video page. RSS junkies also will be taken well care of.
I'm sure that we'll run into some minor bugs in the near future, but it looks like we're at least 95 per cent there.
That also means that we no longer will be posting all our videos on this blog, but the content remains largely the same: short news items that capture major developments and players in the field of high tech.
April 18, 2007 at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Intel declares open season on "Larrabee" speculation
Intel today made sure that it said as little as possible on its forthcoming Larrabee architecture.
A roundup of information that was provided to the media simply stated:
"Intel has begun planning products based on a highly parallel, IA-based programmable architecture codenamed "Larrabee." It will be easily programmable using many existing software tools, and designed to scale to trillions of floating point operations per second (Teraflops) of performance. The Larrabee architecture will include enhancements to accelerate applications such as scientific computing, recognition, mining, synthesis, visualization, financial analytics and health applications. "
Hardware enthusiast websites such as our big sister The Inq have digging for details on Larrabee for some time now, speculating that Larrabee amounts to an entry by Intel into the graphics market.
Problem is that Intel is withholding so many details, that the above paragraph could be used to proof or disproof anything and everything.
The mention of application specific accelerators for high performance applications however could lead some to speculate that the architecture targets the scientific computing area that Intel is currently addressing with its Itanium.
But then again, graphics chips do a pretty good job at heavy number crunching. The one thing therefore doesn't exclude the other. For it just means that Intel has declared open season on Larrabee specs.
April 17, 2007 at 02:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Is OS X Leopard a train wreak?
Apple's legal department allegedly is strong-arming the AppleInsider blog. The site in March published details about the latest OS X build, commenting that it "carries with it a significant laundry list of impending issues that will need to be ironed out before any such public release is considered." Apple wants that report taken down.
Few people paid attention to the incident. Apple Insider after all has a pretty poor track record in accurately reporting about upcoming Apple products. But on Thursday Apple decided to delay the release of its OS X 10.5 Tiger, claiming that it needed additional time to test the upcoming product.
The delay only served to support Apple Insider's theories, and instantly gives birth to a few new ones. Should we believe Apple's explanation for the delay that is pointing to iPhone issues? Did OS X 10.5 run into some serious trouble? Is the iPhone delay just a way to cover up the fact that Apple is working on some last minute additions to OS X 10.5?
Surely the Mac rumour blogs will help us add numerous additional theories and baseless gossip. We won't know for sure what really happened until the WWDC this summer.
April 14, 2007 at 01:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bush presidency "lost" 5 million emails
The White House has come under fire for being unable to retrieve 5m email messages.
Conspiracy theorists were quick to accuse the presidency of systematically deleting sensitive materials, even though all presidential communications are supposed to be saved. Given the fact that the Bush presidency knowingly ignored evidence indicating that Saddam Hussein didn't own any weapons of mass destruction, it won't surprise anybody that evil forces are at work here too.
In this case, the administration is under fire for an alleged plan to fire all attorney generals and/or retaliating against attorney generals who didn't dance to Bush' tune.
When Bush was hit by the terrorist attacks of September 11, he allegedly wanted to make sure that his following years as president would help him build a legacy as one of the US' greatest presidents. If public opinion provide any measure, he will go down into history as one of the worst. The "accidental loss" of some email will only further tarnish his image.
April 14, 2007 at 01:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Google scoops up Doubleclick
Google has agreed to buy Doubleclick for $3.1bn in cash.
Doubleclick is a provider of internet and ad service software that websites and advertisers to manage the banner ads that a site visitor views. The deal provides a significant boost to Google's network of third party web publishers.
Doubleclick was one of the big names during the first internet hype. So why is Google interested in acquiring a service that will only further increase its dependency on the advertising market?
You pick:
- Because Google's efforts to grow its revenue outside the advertising space are so far have been an epic failure. The company still makes about 99 per cent of all its revenues from advertising. Acquiring Doubleclick is grab for market share.
- Because all of Google's competitors were in the market for the Doubleclick. Reportedly Google won a week long bidding war against Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. Especially Microsoft could have profited from a good advertising platform, given its fruitless efforts to grow in the advertising space so far. Sometimes competing means that you have to deprive your rivals of a tasty snack.
- Because Google's success has been linked to it being a text advertising firm, while Doubleclick is kind in managing banner ad campaigns. Google single-handedly created the text advertising category. It's pretty hard to convince advertisers that you do banner ads too once you've got the image of being the king of text ads.
- Because Google has too much cash (about $10bn of it).
Shareholders don't want Google to have its money sit in a savings
account accruing interest.
- Doubleclick has some very large clients like Johnson & Johnson, Proctor and Gamble and Unilever that currently don't advertising heavily through Google's network. This deal allows Google to grow its customer base.
April 14, 2007 at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
iPhone eats up Leopard
Apple has been forced to delay the release of its OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system. The engineers who were busy updating the calculator and adding the new Time Machine backup feature have been reassigned to the iPhone instead.
The iPhone will run a modified version of OS X, which itself based on Unix. Apple is finding out the hard way that an operating system that has a 40-year history running servers and desktop systems isn’t an ideal fit for a mobile phone.
A half second wait time is fine on a computer, but if you press the "hang up" button on a phone, you want it to respond instantaneously. Just ask Windows Mobile users if that is available from Redmond, and they'll instantly tell you that it isn't. Several Linux vendors also have been working for years to fine-tune the open source operating system to run on mobile devices. While they claim to be making progress, we're still waiting for the first real device.
And than Apple isn't just building a Unix based mobile phone. It is aiming to redefine the smart phone category. Today it admitted that it bit off a bit more than it could chew, luckily is seems to be just a small bit.
There is no running away from the iPhone monster
April 12, 2007 at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft lives in a multi processor fantasy land
Microsoft today spilled the beans on its failure to build a competitive virtualization product on schedule, forcing the vendor to delay the beta release of its Viridian virtualization technology.
Viridian will be one of the major features of its upcoming Windows "Longhorn" Server product (although it will only be released up to 180 days after the official Lonhorn launch).
Users however are likely to use virtualization to move multiple smaller servers onto a single, larger box (aka: server consolidation). To really profit there, you need to be able to run Windows Server on really big servers with numerous processors. Traditionally that hasn't been Microsoft's strongest feature.
Early tests indicated that Viridian did poorly on multi processor, Mike Neil, general manager for Microsoft's virtualization strategy wrote on a company blog. Thus a delay was required.
But that isn't bad, he stresses. "We’re designing Windows Server
virtualization to scale up to 64 processors, which I'm proud to say is
something no other vendor’s product supports" (emphasis by me). Bear in mind that the
current Windows Server 2003 already supports up to 64 processors. Neil
is strictly referring to Viridian's performance issues - not those of Longhorn server.
True, VMWare only supports up to 16 CPUs. But Novell's SLES 10 with Xen support for instance has been tested to run on as many as 1024 CPUs and is actively deployed on systems with 512 processors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (also with Xen) advertises an "unlimited" number of processors.
Solaris 10 has been supporting virtualization for several years now. The largest box that it runs on is Sun's E25K featuring 72 dual core processors. It will run on bigger boxes, it's just that Sun isn't making any bigger ones at this point.
Microsoft is finding out that building scalable systems is hard to do. But just because Microsoft is running into those walls today, doesn't mean that the rest of the industry hasn't already solved those problems years ago.
April 12, 2007 at 10:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Living a Web2.0 first life
What if your non-digital life would be more Web2.0?
The video below does a pretty good job at taking that thought exercise to the extreme in a supermarket scenario. Food is tagged, buyers are flogging to the products that rank highest on the best seller list and buyers receive "Pandora style" product suggestions.
Caution though: you have to be into the whole Web2.0 thing to get most of the jokes.
Via: Emerging Earth
April 12, 2007 at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft still out on plugging Vista BIOS crack
Microsoft says it's monitoring a method that allows users to install pirated copies of Windows without tipping of built in anti-piracy protections, but isn't yet committing to closing the loophole.
It all has to do with a feature dubbed OEM Activation: a method that allows system builders to verify the authenticity of a Windows copy, no questions asked. It relies on a special marker in the BIOS. Add the marker to your BIOS, or emulate that it's there, and Microsoft will stop bugging you.
Tinkering with your BIOS isn't something that you want to do. If you do it wrong, there's a good change that your computer will simply refuse to boot up. You can't rely on simple third party tool either, because the BIOS differs between system vendors and even computer models.
The emulation route would be a much safer road. Except that it's much easier to block a software application than it is to detect a BIOS that has been tinkered with.
That creates an opportunity for hackers and malware writers looking to expand their businesses beyond botnets, identity theft and holding data hostage. Surely these nice gentlemen will be able to create a single application that supports most Dell, HP and Acer systems? Plenty of consumers will be happy to shell out say $40 for a tool that lets them get their hands on a $400 application.
Pirates allowed Chinese consumers to purchase Vista before the official launch
April 12, 2007 at 01:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
AMD and Intel continue price wars
Intel may have an edge on rival chip maker AMD, but the latter showed that it has no plans to bail out of the chip wars just yet.
On Monday AMD unveiled a restructuring that will cut $500m in annual expenses. At the same time it cut prices for its Athlon processors by up to 60 per cent.
The two are directly related. AMD's earnings this quarter will miss analyst expectations by more than $200m because its profit margins have been sliced by its price war with Intel. By cutting expenses and lowering prices on the same day, the firm is signalling that it is digging in for a long winter.
It was clearly AMD's turn to respond. Intel over the past months has been gaining market share, partly because it is already shipping 65 nm quad core server chips where AMD won't release theirs until later this year.
But if AMD's boasting about its upcoming 65nm chips carries any weight, it soon will become Intel's turn to respond.
April 11, 2007 at 01:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A life-line of blogging coments
Good blog comments follow a strict pattern, the New York Times argued on their op-ed page last weekend. It goes something like this:
Click to enlarge
April 11, 2007 at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Palm travels down the Linux road
Palm by the end of this year will start shipping Treo phones with a Linux-based operating system as a replacement for the current Palm OS 5 software.
While most people could have seen a Linux move coming, few would have expected that the company will be using an internally developed version of the open source operating system. A more likely supplier would have been Access, which acquired Palmsource and is working on the Access Linux Platform software for mobile phones.
Palm's Linux phone will target so-called prosumers (professional consumers), while Windows powered models will target enterprises.
But while this marks a big score for Linux on the mobile phone, open source enthusiasts have reason for concern. Palm sees its Linux platform as a competitive advantage over the competition and therefore is likely to hide key innovations in the source code. For starters, Palm has already said that it won't license the software to fellow phone makers.
If even has a little Tux button! (thanks to the wonders of photoshop)
April 10, 2007 at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
IDC: the spammers have won
Spammers have succeeded to become the dominant email category. According to analyst firm IDC, spammers will send a total of 40bn messages out of the total 97bn messages that will be sent. Spam for the first time will surpass person-to-person email volumes.
Users however won't be sitting around, waiting for the spam flood to hit. Instead they will increasingly turn to instant messaging, VoIP services and even text messaging to get their daily shot of communications.
There are plenty of arguments against those walled gardens and the seemingly needless barriers that they put up against interoperability. But at the defense mechanisms that keep users from exchanging messages between AOL IM and Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk also seem to have succeeded at keeping out most spammers.
Similarly, text message spam is nowhere near the levels that email spam has achieved. But before you seek refuge with alternate media, ask yourself the question if you are willing to concede victory to the spammers.
April 10, 2007 at 01:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Zango lowers itself to Wikipedia whitewashing
Zango, the company that continues to live in a state of denial about the horrible things that its adware application does to the computers of unknowing consumers, has adopted a new strategy to polish up its tarnished image.
As the VitalSecurity blog points out, the company over the past few days has repeatedly edited its wikipedia entry – taking out critical comments and replacing them with baseless praise.
Zango earlier this year announced a legal settlement with the FTC over its past wrongs. As part of the deal, Zango promised to ensure that its software wouldn’t get installed without the user's permission and that it would provide clearer disclosures to users.
As multiple security researchers have noticed since, very little has changed. Most notably, botnet operators continue to install Zango on the computers of unsuspecting end users without their permission.
Zango's violations of the FTC settlement have been well documented, but the company still found it necessary to remove references to these missteps from its Wikipedia page.
Zango is trying its hardest to rid itself of the image that it’s a malware pusher. Apparently changing factual statements in its Wikipedia entry is part of that strategy, together with hiring a PR firm that attempted to position the company's founder as a pundit in the field of "not pissing off" your users.
Some free advice to Zango: if you don't want to be called a criminal, get your hand out of the cookie jar before you start complaining.
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An example of Zango's whitewashing: left before, right after. Changes are marked in red in both cases (on the left these amount to deletions by Zango, on the right red marks Zango's additions)
| It usually lures web surfers into downloading their products by acting as a protective gateway to free content. For example, it would say "Click continue to download Zango and gain access to this sexy video". | It advertises to web surfers by offering free content in exchange for [[Time shifted advertising]] |
April 9, 2007 at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
HP gets its game on (video)
HP recently showed off some of its most cutting-edge gaming breakthroughs. The experimental products offer everything from massive HD screens produced by clusters of low-cost projectors to coffee tables with built-in touchscreen PCs.
In the first video after the jump, researchers show off Pluribus, a system that allows multiple cheap projectors to be hooked into one, high-quality projection system. The second video is a demonstration of Misto, a touch screen PC system built directly into a coffee table. Misto is being touted as a form of "social computing" allowing families or groups of friends to show off media or play games.
April 6, 2007 at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Vonage gets closer to getting knocked-out
A judge today prohibited Vonage from signing up any new customers until it has ceased violating 5 patents owned by Verizon. Given that 2.5 per cent of Vonage customers run away from the service each month, the latest order is essentially a death sentence.
Vonage got a stay of execution within hours of the first ruling, as the company convinced an appeals court to temporarily lift the earlier ban. But put the emphasis on temporarily.
The VoIP provider already has to pay $58m in damages because of the case, has to spend increasingly more on marketing to lure in new customers and has yet another patent suit that will hit the courts this September, it would be safe to say that the desperation level must be rising.
Vonage last May underwent a disastrous IPO. It stock price currently trades at about $3.37 (down from $17 at the time of the IPO) and the company has a market capitalization of $522m. Based on its earnings of $372.71 for all of 2006, Vonage currently would have a price/earnings ratio of 1.40. (a p/e ratio however requires 4 quarters of data. Vonage has only been listed for the past 3 quarters).
P/E ratios are a strong indicator of investor confidence and normally run in the double digits: Microsoft's is 23.79; Google's 47.44 and Cisco's 29.28. Even a troubled company like Telecom Italia is still trading at a P/E ratio of 16.09.
Signs from the investment community don't come any clearer. This company need a miracle to survive.
April 6, 2007 at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The "iPod virus" redux
Marketing seems to have taken over control of the blogs from some security vendors.
Kasperky Labs yesterday was first out the gate with a press release trumpeting the "detection" of the world's first iPod virus. Later that day Symantec and F-Secure joined the shouting match. Because malware and Apple helps to boost your Technorati ranking.
They all received the virus through their malware submission channels. As F-Secure shows on its blog, the author describes the malware as an "ipodlinux" virus and indicates that it affects Linux. The malware author is merely an attention seeker, but the security vendors blow this thing way out of proportion.
Symantec, Kasperksy and F-Secure all advertise the pest as an iPod virus. But as if they know that they are engaging in baseless fear mongering, they quickly disclose the fact that this virus is utterly useless and harmless, and has as much to do with the iPod as weapons of mass destruction did with invasion of Iraq.
But why then make all this noise about an iPod virus, if isn't?
Blogs from security vendors used to be a trustworthy source of news where fine security researchers would apply their expert filters to weed out the hoaxes from the genuine threats. As the iPod dud indicates, getting attention has taken over from doing a good job.
April 6, 2007 at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Life saving iPod
The US army is issuing such poor body armour these days that one Kevin Garrard with the 3rd infantry division had to rely on his iPod to save his life.
Garrard came face to face with an AK-47 toting insurgent in Bagdad. His opponent didn't survive the ordeal, but Garrard's iPod took the bullet – literally. Apple apparently has offered a free replacement unit. (more pics after the jump)
(the story's source is someone's "wife's uncle" which always triggers a dozen hoax alarms, but in this case we'll give the story the benefit of the doubt)
April 6, 2007 at 12:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The iPod virus that isn't
Kasperky Labs claims to have seen the first iPod virus.
Minor detail, the firm quickly adds, is that it only works on iPods that users have equipped with Linux. That would be uClinux to be exact - it is one of the few (only?) Linux distros that supports CPUs without a memory management unit such as the Motorola DragonBall that powers the iPod.
The virus doesn't affect the iPod operating system. Which probably excludes about 99.9 per cent of all the iPods currently in use.
Calling this an iPod virus therefore is like installing Windows on a Mac (through Bootcamp or Parallels) and arguing that Macs are now vulnerable to the animated cursor flaw. Kaspersky Labs is a fine security research outlet, but in this case they seem to be crying wolf.
Why would users want to install Linux on an iPod in the first place? Excellent question. Running Linux on in iPod allows you to develop custom applications. After you're done installing the operating system, you'll be able access both Linux and the existing configuration.
April 5, 2007 at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Vigilante hackers threaten cyber war on Iran
An anonymous group of hackers -- or some sad attention seekers -- are threatening to launch a cyber attack on Iran. Hostilities are scheduled to commence at "dawn of April 06, 2007" and aim to cripple the nation's internet infrastructure.
The pending action was announced on the Full Disclosure security email (full email after the jump) list on Wednesday. There is a fairly large chance that this is a hoax or empty threats. If the group seeks to do damage, they should prefer to have the element of surprise.
Instead the posting sparked a lively debate on the list about the alleged benefits of this attack. Many doubt that it will yield any benefits, but there are always the few trigger happy Texans (Paul Schmehl from the University of Texas is happy to take on that role) arguing that the only way to deal with extremists is to "kill or imprison them".
After all, that strategy has worked wonders in Palestine and Iraq, and solved the conflicts with the Irish and Basque separatists in Northern Ireland and Spain, right Paul?
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 15:14:29 -0500
From: "United Hackers" <united_against_islam@mail.com>
Subject: [Full-disclosure] The Cyber war on Iran
_ _____ ___ ____ _ __
| | /| / / _ | / _ \ / __ \/ |/ /
| |/ |/ / __ |/ , _/ / /_/ / /
|__/|__/_/ |_/_/|_| \____/_/|_/
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/ _/ _ \/ _ | / |/ /
_/ // , _/ __ |/ /
/___/_/|_/_/ |_/_/|_/
Hackers United against the Threat of Islam
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ANTI-MUSLIM LEAGUE
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April 04, 2007, 2100Z
We, the Hackers United against the Threat of Islam to the Freedom of Thought and Peace are hereby declaring open war against the evils of Islam. The axis of evil must be stopped and destroyed. The United States of America is planning a demonstration of military force against the evil nation of Iran. As of the moment of this announcement, a Cyber War has been declared against Iran. We do this to assit the United States of America in their war against the evils of Islam.
The first operation in this war was the secretive Operation Screaming Eagle. This has been an ongoing preparation for battle, mapping out critical Internet infrastructure to the Nation of Iran, as well as determining passwords, access codes and vulnerable attack vectors for gaining access to Iranian systems, including routers and servers. Many Iranian machines have backdoors installed, and many routers have been broken into had have had their login security mechanisms comprimised.