« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »
Hands-on: the iPhone (video)
Sneaking into the Apple store for the iPhone launch is one of the benefits of working as a tech journalist. Inside we got plenty of time to play around with the hottest device in today's technology scene.
Below you can watch a video demo of a few of the device's features.
June 30, 2007 at 05:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
San Francisco hails the iPhone (video)
Months of waiting came to a climax tonight as Apple started selling its iPhone in stores across the US.
As it goes with highly anticipated events, the actual launch was somewhat of an anti-climax. Hundreds of people waited for hours, some of them days, and every one of them received an iPhone. But all they really did was walk in the store and hand over Apple a bundle of cash (activation will be handled over the internet, so buyers couldn't use the phone just yet.
You don't have to feel bad for the people at the front of the line, such as our Jerry Taylor who waited for 33 hours and was the first person to get into the store. Most of them really enjoyed the experience and made new friends.
June 30, 2007 at 04:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
iDay -4hrs: SF line going around the block
The line outside the San Francisco Apple store currently holds about 150 people and is stretching two blocks. They are all eagerly waiting for the iPhone to go on sale.
Jerry Taylor, who we interviewed yesterday, is still at the front, but he is now accompanied by a rich group of people including some clowns playing mini golf, an Adobe engineering manager called Arno Gourdol who's donning a "Steve Jobs for President" T-Shirt, and your share or profiteers who refused to talk to us.
Arno Gourdol is pitching in on the presidential debate
At the front of the lines, the Peep Show Mini Golf folks set up a miniature golf course. "We're putting the circus back in media circus," they proclaimed.
Chilling out on a San Francisco side walk (but why isn't that a Mac?)
Rich, but we'll call him grumpy guy, has an iPhone for sale. Wouldn't say much, which tends to be problematic if you're trying to sell something.
The line at AT&T Wireless store that we visited this morning also continues to grow. But it's still far shorter than the one at the Apple store. Perhaps because AT&T stores limit iPhone sales to one per customer, while the Apple store will let you buy two.
Photos by vnunet.com's Shaun Nichols
June 29, 2007 at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
iDay -4.75hrs: New York's iPhone line (video)
The East Cost still close to 5 hours to go before the iPhone starts selling, New York is only 2 more hours away, and Greg Packer is set to become the first person to get one.
Raven Zachary did a video interview. Interestingly enough, Zachary happens to be an analyst with the 451 Group, where he covers open source technology. He is actually one of my favourite analysts covering that beat.
June 29, 2007 at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
iDay minus 8 hours: lines everywhere
iPhone lines were mostly limited to the Apple stores yesterday in San Francisco, but on Friday morning (8 hours before the launch of the iPhone) you were hard pressed to find a single AT&T Wireless store that didn't have a line of people camping outside.
The lines furthermore are highly visible, as AT&T Wireless stores are plastered throughout the city. And each and every one had a group of about five iPhone hopefuls outside.
You can dismiss the people camping outside the Mac stores for several days as Mac zealots or attention seekers, but the lines outside each of these AT&T stores is underscoring the instant cult status of this gadget.
Line outside the AT&T store on Market @ 3rd street in San Francisco
June 29, 2007 at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Somebody wants an iPhone
Comedy Central's Steven Colbert didn't get a iPhone for review. But nobody gets away with upsetting Colbert that easily.
The imaginary iPhone that he reviewed received zero stars. That will teach Apple for messing with the wrong people.
June 29, 2007 at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Red Hat talking to Microsoft, oh my
Blogs and new sites are abuzz about some comments that Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik made yesterday during its earnings conference call: the company has been talking to Microsoft.
The only news in there was that the firm had been approached by Microsoft before the software giant partners with Novell. But neither company has been very secretive about thee fact that they are in talks.
As far as these talks go, there doesn't seem to be much space for maneuvering. Red Hat has always said that it refuses to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property (read: patents), and is insisting that any interoperability is done through open standards.
Neither party seems to be getting any closer to a compromise, but you never know what might be worked out at the bargaining table.
Szulik still singing the same old gospel
June 29, 2007 at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Big Wait: the San Francisco Mac store @ iDay - 30hr
It took some time, but San Francisco as of this morning finally has its own iPhone line outside the Apple store.
Jerry Taylor got to the store around 9am, armed with a lazy chair and his own carpet. Where other iPhone lines are filled with line holders out to make a quick buck, Taylor claims he wants the iPhone itself.
Except... everybody has his price. Taylor's is around $500.
Below you can watch a video interview with Taylor.
June 28, 2007 at 08:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
iPhone on the EDGE of living up to the hype
The iPhone is turning out the first highly hyped consumer launch of the millennium that actually lives up to the hype.
With the iPhone launch only 2 days and 3 hours away, Apple provided review models to a few A-list tech columnists such as The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret and David Pogue from the New York Times.
The device seems all that Apple said it would be. That alone is quite a feat. In the past years, no a single consumer electronics provider was able to create a large buzz without disappointing when their product launched. Sony's PS3 tanked, Wii never really built up much up much fervour prior to the launch, and Microsoft failed with pretty much all of their products, most notably the Zune, Windows Vista and the UMPC that it developed together with Intel.
The reviewers however all seemed to agree that the iPhone's wireless radio is drastically underpowered. Being equipped with an Edge radio rather than 3G technology, browsing the web will proof a challenge to your patience.
Secondly, the on-screen keyboard will take some getting used to.
But for every minus, there are numerous plusses, most notably the phone's intuitive user interface and operation.
June 27, 2007 at 09:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Why would the music industry kill internet radio?
Tuesday marked a day of silence for web radio broadcasters as they oppose a 300 to 1,200 per cent license fee hike from the US Copyright Royalty Board.
Although the fees are set by a government body, they would only get the idea from a strong lobby group such as the RIAA. As the dinosaurs from the record labels attempt to make the online world adjust to its 20th century thinking, it is charging online broadcasters a fee per station. But that doesn't work very well for broadcasters who allow users to create their own stations, such as Pandora.
To further demonstrate the industry's blind appetite for revenues, online broadcasters will be charged more than traditional radio broadcasters. It should a blind disregard of the economics: the fact that more people are still listening to traditional radio, and that those stations also are making more money than their online counterparts.
The recoding industry's lobby must be either clueless about the online music market or is knowingly sabotaging internet stations. Either way, this has monopoly power written all over it. Where is justice when you need it?
June 26, 2007 at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dell's Linux desktops have teething difficulties
No that Dell has started selling Linux desktop and laptop computers, the company is trying its hardest to prevent businesses from buying any of them.
At least that was what a user by the name of Cosborn72 reported on an Ubuntu user forum. As a small business, he tried calling his regular Dell contact. But the small business section doesn't offer any Linux desktops and forced him to visit the "home and home office" department instead.
Last time we checked, Dell's market share was still slipping against HP's. Seems like the company still needs all the sales it can get, and shouldn't get too religious about businesses slipping in the consumer aisles of its warehouses.
June 26, 2007 at 01:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
iPhone vs. PS3 launch – which one is the most overhyped?
Individuals on Craigslist have started offering "line-standing" services to individuals who want a guaranteed shot at the iPhone but don't have the time to wait in line for one.
Most line-holders are offering their services in San Francisco and New York – both are apparently cities where wannabe hipsters are expected to be able to burn a few hundred bucks on the device.
A line-holder goes about $175 to $250. At least that's the asking price. But the smart folks asking such prices clearly have failed to factor in the large homeless populations in both cities. Although they may not be as reliable as your average high school student on summer break, they are likely to be much cheaper and experts at holding their ground on public sidewalks.
In New York meanwhile, there are already two consumers lining up for an iPhone.
At last year's PS3 launch (and to a lesser extend the Nintendo Wii launch), there were people camping out as well. But iPhone seems to be catering to a different audience that can't afford to waste their time to stand in line.
But for both cases, patience is a virtue. By now there are plenty of PS3 to come by. And your hipness-factor is bound to wear off pretty fast once Apple makes available a second batch of iPhones.
Photo: Vicarious Music
June 26, 2007 at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The dark motive behind Microsoft's virtualization delays
Microsoft last week pulled a planned update to the Windows Vista licenses that would have made it easier to use the software in a virtual desktop environment. The event was strange from the very beginning, with the firm first briefing several reporters and then pulling the announcement without any explanation.
Gartner claims that Microsoft has returned to its old anti-competitive roots. The Vista licenses are currently preventing virtualization because Microsoft doesn’t yet have a competitive offering in that market, the analyst fumed.
Microsoft is getting a severe beating in the virtualization market place. Windows Server's Viridian has been reduced from a "kicking everybody else's behind" to a "me too" offering in a desperate effort to salvage its release schedule. Virtual PC 2007 meanwhile has been turned into a free offering because it literally is a product that you couldn't give away for free.
Preventing users from running Vista virtually is essentially a tactic of the scorched earth. Virtualization could have offered a high level of security by running Internet Explorer inside a 'disposable' operating system, or by offering enterprises to store their user's entire desktop on a central server, or run a media server in a separate virtual system.
Never mind that Microsoft will hold back the truly interesting desktop virtualization applications for years, the company has a monopoly to defend.
Dell CTO Kevin Kettler envisions a world in which Linux and Windows XP coexist at Linuxworld in April 2006. But because Microsoft is looking out for its customers profits so well, this won't be an option with Vista any time soon.
June 26, 2007 at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The first iPhone SDK that isn't
Ajax vendor Backbase claims to have created the world's first software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone.
Never mind the details. The firm for instance doesn’t offer an SDK but Ajax development framework that is compatible with the Safari 3 browser. But calling a web toolkit an SDK makes for better hot PR air.
Still, adding support to Safari 3 only two weeks after the software was launched would be quite an accomplishment, right? We figured would check that with some of the leading Ajax vendors.
The Google Web Toolkit ranks as the second most popular Ajax development tool (trailing only behind Microsoft).
"We haven't discovered any compatibility issues between Google Web Toolkit and Safari 3.0, but we'll continue our testing as Safari 3.0 moves toward general release," a Google spokesperson informed us in an email.
So Backbase didn’t create an SDK and it succeeded in upgrading its existing product to a new version for which there are no apparent compatibility issues.
Is anybody interested in paying this company $10,000 per seat for these wonderful innovations?
June 25, 2007 at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Get 2 years of "me time"
If you've always wanted to write that book, needed some time to think, want to really focus on your blog, or just don't like getting exposed to different people all the time, you should consider applying to this job.
The European Space Agency is looking for volunteer who will spend 520 days in isolation. This will allow them to test for the social implications of a space journey to Mars. Food will come from a bag – for nearly two years.
The ESA has left out the real kicker. When you think you're done, they might just lock you up all over again. This time to simulate the trip back to earth.
But the overtime pay should be pretty sweet.
June 23, 2007 at 01:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft to the world: we have fewer bugs. Na! Na!
Microsoft has published a study that compares the number of security vulnerabilities in Vista to those in OS X, Windows XP and various Linux distributions. To allow for an fair comparison, he only measured flaws that were reported and patched in the first 90 days after the official launch.
Windows Vista comes out winning by a margin. The software received only 12 patches during the first 90 days. OS X 10.4 in its first 90 days plugged 60 holes, Windows XP 36 and Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu between 74 and 281.
Counting vulnerabilities is one way tot measure security, but certainly not the only way. Despite the 281 flaws that were patched in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 workstation or the 60 that his OS X, machines running those operating systems don't face the same threats from spyware, rootkits and viruses that are plaguing Windows XP in droves.
If you want a safe home, you don't just buy an expensive alarm system – you also move to a good neighborhood. Attackers are likely to shift their focus on OS X and Linux if they become more prevalent, or if they become easier to target than Windows. But until then, Windows is still leading the least secure environment around.
June 22, 2007 at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Intel envisions mashups for the masses
Have you ever felt like a website would be just perfect if it added one more feature or information element? Then your essentially interested in building your own mashup.
Mashups are all the thing in Web2.0. Most of them combine Google maps with some other information source and post the new service on a new website.
If the site offers APIs and uses XML based standards such as RSS, you can build your own mashup. Except that you have to be a programmer to get there.
Wouldn't it be much easier if you can add information without worrying about the underlying technology? Meet Intel's MashMaker, a research project from Intel Labs that will do just that.
In the video below you can view a demo where we combine rental listing with restaurant listings – just in case you want to make sure that there is plenty of takeout near your new home.
June 21, 2007 at 03:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Kicking Intel's 80-core tires (video)
We've seen Intel's 80-core processor before from far, far away at the Intel Developer Forum, but today we finally had the opportunity to get up and close with the silicon. Intel showed off the research project at an open house of its research arm.
In the video below you can see the silicon as well as a test setting that Intel uses to bully the beast around.
June 21, 2007 at 02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Intel, you can drive my car (video)
Intel is betting that two of its quad core processor will give a vehicle the brains to navigate a real urban area, complete with oncoming traffic and other obstacles.
The chipmaker is supporting Stanford's entry into the upcoming Darpa Urban Challenge. The same team won the Darpa Challenge in 2005, but this time the race is much more complicated.
The biggest concern last time was avoiding rocks and elevation drops – and even then only four of the 15 entries succeeded in doing so. This time they have to obey traffic laws and respond to other traffic participants. All that causes a dramatic increase in the amount data that needs to be crunches and responded to.
We'll see on 3 November if this challenge will turn into a demolition derby, or if computers are actually smart enough to navigate our urban jungles. Below you can watch a video of "Junior", as the Stanford car is called.
June 20, 2007 at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Manhunt2 just got interesting
The British Board of Film Censors has outlawed the computer game Manhunt2, we learnt from vnunet.com's sex and gore correspondent (he also writes swell stories on enterprise IT).
A good-old moral values discussion is the best advertisement that any product can get these days. So you can rest assured that this will spawn a rich Ebay market.
Next we'll line up the free speech advocates. Because if we don't allow gamers to engage in role playing games where they are killing random strangers and blowing up buildings and objects, Osama Bin Laden win.
For that matter, if you watch this trailer you're probably committing a dozen crimes against whatever.
June 19, 2007 at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Microsoft and Apple engage in "copied here first" bickering
Is OS X Leopard a copy of Windows Vista? Mari-Jo Foley, of former Microsoft-watch fame, seems to think so.
She sat through Steve Jobs' WWDC presentation last week and noticed that:
"if you’ve seen Vista, there’s no way you could help but compare the feature-complete Leopard beta Jobs showcased with Windows Vista. And — surprise — Vista looked pretty darn up-to-date in comparison."
To a Mac fan crowd that applauds an update to the calculator application (yes, they have done that), claiming that OS X is copying features from Microsoft is poring gas on the their Mac loyalist fires.
Microsoft hasn't invented many of the features in Windows Vista, and neither has Apple with OS X.
Apple's Time Machine backup and recovery technology appears to be
powered by Sun Microsystems' ZFS (although Apple has yet to confirm
that this is the case). If true, Apple can merely take credit for
bringing it to the consumer space. But nobody will give Apple (or Microsoft) credit for inventing backup and recovery technology.
The idea of creating a platform for tiny applications too was
by no means an Apple (Dashboard) or a Microsoft (Sidebar) innovation.
In fact, do you really want to take credit for inventing the ability to run applications that provide the users with information?
Does folding two functionalities into a single application and passing it off as an innovation warrant bragging? It can be useful to have your RSS reader and browser in the same place. But neither Microsoft nor Apple demonstrated any leadership in inventing the browser or RSS in the first place.
Apple and Microsoft are both in the business of slapping a user interface onto technology – most of which was invented elsewhere. They then squash the competition by bundling those user interfaces with their operating system (just ask Netscape if it is possible to compete with an application that is bundled free of charge).
If you want to take credit for anything, take credit for making somebody else's invention easier to use. That too is an argument that you will never win, but at least it gets us away from the "invented here first" nonsense and elevates us to "copied here first" level.
June 18, 2007 at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
SOA: Web2.0 without the hype (so far)
If you like the mashups that show Flickr photos or Craigslist rental properties or Twitter posts on a Google map, you might be interested in using similar tools at your job.
But Web2.0 for business will go above and beyond what the consumer version offers today. Because it may be fairly easy to slap together a Housemaps.com today, it's still far from trivial.
What are lacking are easy to use development tools that make building a mash-up as easy as setting up your own blog. That’s where IBM and others see a juicy market.
But before enterprises get there, they also need to unlock data from a slew of legacy applications and systems, allowing them to be combined, mixed and mashed up. Enter: service oriented architectures (SOAs).
SOAs aren't just about code reuse (that's merely the development angle), they are also about creating applications that are built by stacking up functionalities. Another way to look at functionalities is to consider them data that is either changed or presented.
So image that you're working for a shipping company that has
boats all over the world. And with a few clicks you'd combine
information from you enterprise application on the ship with weather
data and news reports. It wouldn't be an earth shattering application
to most of the world, but it's priceless if you receive calls from
clients wondering if their goods will get to their destination on time. The picture below shows for a working example of this application.
You can probably think of a few applications where the ability to craft your personal Web2.0 mash-up would take repetitious tasks out of your day.
Web2.0 for business will turn you into a programmer without realizing it. At last, applications will meet your requirements instead of you learning your way around an application.
Business web2.0 mashup, developed using IBM's "Quick and Easily Done" (QED) mashup tool.
(Click to enlarge)
June 18, 2007 at 06:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
No more Paris Hilton please!
Hopefully you haven't noticed, but Paris Hilton has been making a few headlines.
The prison blues for the seemingly brainless millionaire is occupying the minds of millions of people, and is spilling over to the internet.
Even a tech news website such as vnunet.com is affected. Spammers and malware purveyors in the past have used the name of the promiscuous blonde to peddle their wares.
And users looking for information or adult photos of the hotel heiress are therefore finding our website in droves. "Paris Hilton Porn" ranks at the number 6 search query, (The top 3 this month so far are Porn, Limewire and iPhone). "Paris Hilton Nude" comes in 9th and a plain "Paris Hilton" ranks at number 18.
While we don't mind the extra traffic, I doubt that these people got what they were looking for in the security stories. Search engines still have a long way to go.
June 15, 2007 at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Does the ISS come with a Ctlr-Alt-Delete button?
The International Space Station has been suffering from a computer failure. The affected systems operate oxygen and water supplies and allow it to navigate, making the outage a little more inconvenient than your average Windows XP crash.
We won't see imploding astronauts grasping for air just yet however. Just like Steve Jobs in his keynotes, the designers have deployed backup systems in the space station.
But the crash has prolonged the mission of the Atlantis space shuttle, allowing the vessel's crew to help out restore the issue.
It makes you wonder if you should feel good or bad about this
happening. On the one hand, a space station crash doesn't make you feel
as bad about your computer illiteracy at home. But you also have to
wonder what the collaboration space agencies are doing with those
billions in tax payer moneys. It obviously isn't being spent on stable
software.
June 15, 2007 at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Microsoft Vista DVD puzzle
Some blogger in Spain was taking a close look at his Windows Vista DVD and noticed something odd. The hologram on the front of the DVD appeared to contain minuscule images. A mystery was born wWen he posted the images on his blog.
Microsoft was kind enough to shed light on the matter: they are one of the many anti piracy features on the disks, and actually just one of many images embedded in the design. Even if copiers replicate the overall design of the hologram, they might miss these images.
The tree gentlemen (pictured right) are part of the design team that created the hologram. Other images are photos of paints that are part of the public domain (as in: non-copyrighted materials)
It's hard to image exactly how small these images are. We took a close look at a Windows Vista DVD. The picture measures less than a millimetre. Although you can see that there is something going on, it's impossible to make out its contents.
Creating a high resolution scan wouldn't help either – the image showed up at about 4 by 4 pixels. And we were equally unsuccessful when using a compact camera.
Which makes you wonder how exactly the blogger posting the original image was triggered to start looking for the image in the first place. But it's an admirable catch nonetheless.
See the Windows logo with the circle around it?
We're going to zoom in on one of the little squares above and below next to the big gray box
Once you get to a microscopic level, you see this image
June 14, 2007 at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sun's Schwartz "gets" open source
Jonathan Schwartz today succeeded to divert a raging debate within the Linux community that had turned into a Sun bashing with a simple diner invitation.
Although I wouldn't call an offer by Schwartz to cook diner "simple", his move shows an ability that too often is lacking in both high tech companies and technology enthusiasts (Mac fanboys, please pay attention too): the ability to take a deep breath and think before you talk.
Sun was getting slaughtered by Linus Torvalds. In a posting on the Linux Kernel Developer mailing list Torvalds questioned Sun's honesty and its intensions in open source. The company only wanted to take from open source, but wouldn't give anything back.
The evidence lays in Sun's decision to license Solarlis under the CDDL open source license, which prevents Linux developers from using components in Linux. While Sun is taking Linux drivers and certifying them for Solaris, Linux developers can only drool over Sun's ZFS file system. Enough so that Torvalds would consider switching to GPLv3 if that allowed him to get his hands on the technology.
But Sun would never do that, anyway, grumbled Torvalds.
Schwartz took him up on that challenge with his diner invitation. In an open letter, he pointed out that even though Linux and Solaris often compete in the market place, that both can thrive if their developers cooperate. And instead of fighting petty arguments over the existing market, they would do better to include the billions of people who don't use computers today. It's the classic "tide raising all ships" story.
It's also proof that Schwartz is the right man for the job as Sun CEO. His greatest contribution to Sun during his first year as CEO was to end some of the company's long standing feuds such as the one with Intel. You can call him names behind his back and he will still call you for a partnership agreement – if he sees value in doing so.
Because he'll think first and talk later. That's the key to being a successful open source provider.
June 14, 2007 at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Intel plugs into the Mac Factor
How many computer makers that log $2.3bn per quarter in PC and notebook sales can get Intel chief executive Paul Otellini to show up for a developer event?
We have yet to see Otellini make an appearance at an HP, Dell, Acer, Lenovo or Toshiba event – even though each of those sell more computer and more Intel chips than Apple does.
But Otellini did make it out to Apple's World Wide Developer Conference on Monday. There Steve Jobs presented him with a make-believe award to thank Intel for its help in the transition from Power to x86 processors.
According to an Engadget transcript it went like this:
Jobs: "Paul, I've got something for you... we're not big on awards, so I asked Jony Ive if we could make something for you..."
Otellini: "Thank you so much Steve. I didn't know what you were doing. I just wanted to say thanks with you and your team. Working with Apple has been one of the best things that's happened in my career and with Intel... but the best is still to come."
Otellini drove out for one minute of stage time next to Steve Jobs and a commemorative ring. The Mac Factor had better pay a big premium on its processors, or double Intel's shininess.
June 12, 2007 at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Apple enters the security mine field
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said remarkably little about security when he unveiled his Windows version of the Safari browser on Monday. Instead he boasted about Safari's great performance – a non-issue as few users have any complaints about the load speeds of websites that can be blamed on the browser.
But Apple couldn't resist in its marketing materials. Tucked away at the bottom of a list that explains ignorant Windows users why they will "love Safari" is security.
"Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one," the site boasts. But don't take that statement to apply to the quality of the code. The site is quick to clarify that Safari uses encryption to ensure that private information stays that way. Yes. Apple thinks that you will love Safari because it has encryption. And a variety of proxy controls that help your firewall block suspicious traffic.
If Jobs believes that users will get intimate with Safari just because of encryption, he must take Windows users for your average street prostitute. Because Firefox, Opera and even Internet Explorer too offer encryption. So the clueless Windows flock must just LOVE those users too. Love in the world of Steve Jobs must be subject to some significant inflation.
One security researcher meanwhile spared no time to shatter Apple's security image to pieces. Within hours after Apple published the beta of Safari for Windows, Aviv Raff claimed to have found a first security flaw in the browser.
June 12, 2007 at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Shake Sun's Black Box the California way
When Sun Microsystems shipped its project BlackBox server in a shipping container, the company claimed it had covered most potential problems.
But it left out an obvious California challenge: earthquakes. So Sun shipped off one of the devices to a testing facility where it was subjected to some of the worst trembles that have been known to hit the golden state.
As the video below shows, you don't want to seek refuge inside a black box unless you want to be crushed by a server cabinet. But Sun is working to solve those issues.
June 12, 2007 at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Mac deemed cheaper than Windows, when purchased by flying pigs
Computerworld has taken on the position of chief Mac cheerleader for this month. In a story last week, the publication sets out to prove that Macs aren't more expensive than PCs.
It's one of those stories that look great when you come up with the headline in an editorial meeting, or worse, when conceived by the publisher as he or she tries to suck up to the vendor as a potential advertiser.
But the real story never succeeds to establish the required credibility. The tagline states: "Everybody knows PCs are cheaper than Macs, right? Wrong! (At least sometimes.)"
In a single swipe, the author dismisses all PCs that cost less than $600. Never mind that more than half of all the PCs sold cost less than $500. But PCs in this segment are disqualified without explanation.
Would the author then also agree that more than half of the world's consumers shouldn't bother looking into buying Macs because they are too expensive? And wasn't that the entire point that he was attempting to dispel?
The story instead focuses on the higher priced niche markets. Although one-on-one comparisons there are nearly impossible (finding two systems using identical hardware components is like finding two identical snowflakes), there are niche markets where Macs are less expensive than similar Dell or HP computers.
Next month, Computerworld will make an attempt to proof that some planets are flat, if only we disqualify the round ones and consider odd shaped asteroids as flat planets. At least some times.
If you want a skewed comparison, we recommend adding the OLPC in the mix too
June 11, 2007 at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack
Intel's bad hair day
When Intel signed a multi million dollar sponsorship with the BMW Sauber Formula 1 racing team in December 2005, the company must have realized that cars racing at 200 miles per hour sometimes have accidents.
Still, having your boy-toy fall crash like a Windows XP computer can't be good PR
June 11, 2007 at 05:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Death by EULA
Dennis Sheehan is fighting back against the EULA-mafia, and has won the first round.
January 2006 the 43-year-old from Grizzly Flats in eastern California ordered a computer from Gateway. The appliance turned out to be rubbish. Months of fruitless conversations with tech support followed, which ended with Gateway's flat-out refusal to solve his problem.
Being a proper American, Sheehan took his case to court. That's when things got really interesting.
Gateway in its end user license agreement (EULA) states that users have to agree to settle all conflicts through arbitration rather than in court.
But the document is only presented to users on their screen when they first boot up their computer. The image on Sheehan's computer screen was so scattered that he couldn't read the EULA, let alone that he could agree with it.
So when Gateway asked the judge to dismiss the charges and force Sheehan to agree to arbitration, the judge turned down the computer maker's request.
Arbitration clauses aren't unique to Gateway. Although supporters claim that arbitration provides a cheaper and faster resolution, they also tend to favour the vendor over the consumer and reduce consumer rights.
Many people just agree to license agreements without reading them, and when you do actually read one, they joke that you're just signing your firstborn away. But the sad truth is that sometimes this really seems to be happening. And big vendors are just getting away with it.
click image to enlarge
June 8, 2007 at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Dell continues redecoration
Dell is rumored to be exiting the LCD television market, claim anonymous sources in Asia (where poorly paid laborers piece together Dell products).
The move would hardly come as a surprise. Dell has traditionally done well in commodity markets such for PCs and laptops. There goods require the fashion appeal of male underwear.
Consumers buying status symbols such as LCD television sets want to touch and feel the item before they purchase. And they require a brand that instils awe with their hard-to-impress friends. Dell doesn't qualify in either of those areas.
Even when Dell does innovation, the company prefers to focus on technology that is hidden under the hood rather than fancy features that appeal to the eye. Dell may have been the fist to ship notebooks with Sandisk's solid state hard drive, but that hardly buys the company any design points. Meanwhile, at a company event last month CTO Kevin Kettler talked up a cutiting edge cooling fan and monitor connector cable.
Had the company known what image it had cultivated and created for itself, it could have prevented costly failures in the LCD TV or PDA segments. For that matter, Dell should thank the gods that it never attempted to enter the cell phone market. The slaughter would have been bloody and pitiful.
Kettler shows off his cable. But would it make you buy a Dell over an HP computer?
June 8, 2007 at 01:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Netscape still around, still irrelevant
Netscape on Tuesday released a beta of its Netscape 9 browser.
It promises some nice features: built in spell-check for misspelled URLs, automatically changing googlecom into google.com, as well as the ability to preview links in the sidebar mini-browser. But it also is catching up with Internet Explorer 7 by incorporating a news reader into the browser.
But why even make this effort? Hitlink pegs Netscape's market share at 0.33 per cent and the visitor stats on vnunet.com show a similar picture.
The browser wars are long over, and Netscape lost. Why waste developer
time on reinventing the wheel if Firefox allows everybody to help build
a better one?
June 7, 2007 at 01:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Hacking Macs for fame, hacking Windows for money
Rich Mogull, a Gartner analyst hits the nail in the head when he describes the fundamental difference between Windows and Mac OS X exploits:
"Often the motivation is some kind of publicity," he said in a eWeek story on an exploit for an OS X flaw. "Recognizing vulnerabilities in OS X does have some cachet these days."
The story doesn't provide any evidence to get overly excited about. Apple late May patched a flaw in its UPnP Internet Gateway Device Standardized Device Control. Within 24 hours researchers at Immunity had created a working exploit. An attacker could use the exploit to gain root access to a remote system.
But it's bound to get the Mac fanboys up in arms for claiming that OS X near-spotless malware image is about to get tarnished. We've heard the reasons before: Apple's growing market share is rendering it’s a more attractive target, and online criminals will also have to shift focus because of Windows Vista's decreasing bugginess.
Immunity proved what sane computer user already knows: each application has vulnerabilities, and some of those allow an attacker to take full control of a system.
From a security perspective, the main difference between Linux, OS X and Windows is the lack of spyware and botnets for the first two. Such tools allow attackers to financially gain from exploiting security flaws, leaving fame as the sole incentive.
The wait isn't for Vista to dominate the PC market, or even for OS X to gain more users. All that OS X needs to become a real target is for attackers to craft revenue generating spyware and adware.
Perhaps another market where Zango can show its innovation in "meeting consumer needs"?
June 7, 2007 at 01:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Death by Powerpoint
If you attend enough technology conferences, you're bound to eventually run into Don McMillan (we saw him most recently at IBM's Connect conference last month, and before that at some Sun Microsystems show several years ago).
As a geek comedian, he is often hired to lighten the mood at shows and conventions, where he'll lighten the mood with his 'binary high five' (forming 101 by raising one finger, followed by one lowered and another raised one), followed by the token comment: "Where else can I make that joke?"
The electrical engineering major however might have some true relief to the PowerPoint challenged.
Life After Death by PowerPoint
Add to My Profile | More Videos
June 7, 2007 at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
SCO admits to multi billion dollar dreams
SCO was building a money vault that would hold 1 to 6 billion dollars for its Linux property claims, the company's chief executive Darl McBride testified.
McBride (left) revealed his firm's big money dreams in a deposition earlier this. Groklaw published a transcript of the deposition over the weekend.
But his testimony also explained why SCO abandoned its SCOsource licensing programme around 2003. As it turned out, that had everything to do with Novell's claims that it was the real owner of the code for which SCO claimed the property rights.
Potential customers got confused about the legal squabbling between the two and flat out told SCO that they weren't buying any Linux licenses until it had sorted out the Novell issues. Selling at $699 a pop (but you could easily talk off $200, like Computer Associates did), SCOsource brought in millions in revenue before Novell ruined everything.
McBride fondly remembers Google, which at the time of the negotiations was believed to be running between 250,000 and 500,000 servers running Linux. That would have made for sales of $125m to $250m. But Google didn’t bailed out before SCO was able to make it sign a contract.
Poor, poor Mr. McBride.
Darl McBride's billions are just as fake as the Tina Turner impersonator that he is posing with (photo from 2005 SCO Forum in Las Vegas)
June 6, 2007 at 02:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Internet claims victim in French IT publishing market
One of France's main IT publishing houses is drastically cutting in its paper portfolio. As the Collision Media blog reports, Groupe Tests is discontinuing all its publications expect for 3.
Advertising Francs just aren't flowing to paper the way they used, which apparently is blamed on sky-high advertising rates. Groupe Tests' premier publication 01 Informatique saw its revenues plummet by over a third last year.
There is now news that the lost revenue is flowing to the web instead. But that's is a pretty safe bet.
To further illustrate that the French IT print business is hurting, IDG France was put up for sale last month.
Disclaimer: Collision Media and this blog used to be part of the same company prior to the sale of VNU BPL to Incisive Media.
June 5, 2007 at 02:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Xandros bows to Microsoft's Linux patents
Microsoft has persuaded Xandros to join Novell in the corner of Linux pariahs and agree to pay the company for its intellectual property.
The two make a real effort to paint the agreement as a technology partnership – all for the customer's sake. There is one minor detail: Xandros has a minimum number of enterprise users (if any).
Both Xandros and Microsoft however have lots to gain from a public relations point of view. Xandros simply gets its name in a few headlines. Microsoft meanwhile has found another partner willing to pay for its intellectual property.
You also have to factor in that this partnership will likely be banned after the publication of the GPLv3. At least, if the developers behind one or more of the Xandros components chose to switch to the forthcoming open source license. In that case Microsoft's victory will proof to be short-lived.
June 5, 2007 at 01:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Searching for trouble
One in every 25 search results yields a website containing malware, according to a study by SiteAdvisor and spyware pundit Ben Edelman.
But in a classic case of fear mongering, the McAfee subsidiary then immediately jumps to the conclusion that people performing more than 10 searches are getting exposed to malware:
"In fact, an active search engine user, one that performs more than 10 searches per day, is likely to visit a dangerous site at least once a day," Tim Dowling, vice president for Consumer Growth Initiatives with McAfee SiteAdvisor said in a press release.
Following his reasoning, we must get mugged, rapped and murdered on a constant basis. Be