/web/log/flazx

Given the aggressive way Apple pursues its legal agenda, it should come as no surprise to the company that some customers play the game the same way. And that’s what some iPod nano owners have done, in a class-action suit filed in San Jose. The suit, brought over the easily bruised nano, seeks reimbursement for the cost of the iPod and legal fees, along with a share of “unlawful or illegal profits” made by Apple through nano sales. Just a garden-variety nuisance suit? Maybe. But now that even Walt Mossberg has come down hard on the nano for scratching so easily, it might be a good idea for Apple to find a way to make this go away, rather than having it hang over the company’s head during the holiday selling season.

Source

Google has just activated Gmail Mobile that (surprise, surprise) allows you to check you Gmail from your mobile. There have been all sorts of ways for the resourceful Engadgeteer to do this for themselves, — we’ve been checking Gmail over POP for a while now — but a web interface is pretty ideal for many phones since they won’t choke on downloading a few days of mail if they haven’t been used to read messages in a while, and who better to do it than Google? They’re also bringing those sweet attachment converting services of theirs, so, using no more than your phone’s browser, you can browse Word documents and PDF files. Of course you’re not getting any of those fun abilities like e-mail auto completion and auto saving from the mother Gmail, but there are a few features like a frequently mailed contacts list and replying to messages by calling the sender that should help ease the pain.

Source

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) board of directors today announced that Quanta Computer of Taiwan was chosen as the original design manufacturer (ODM) for the US$100 laptop project. The decision was made after the board reviewed bids from several possible manufacturing companies.

Continue Reading »

A new study from the OSDL Desktop Linux Working Group attempts to shed some light on why Linux isn’t making major inroads into the desktop market. Not surprisingly, the biggest stumbling block cited by potential Linux users is the lack of applications, as well as complex setup processes for peripherals, and limited training available for end-users. Yes, it’s stuff we’ve all heard before. However, there are some interesting findings just under the surface. For example, the apps that most users said they wished they could use under Linux are e-mail programs, office productivity apps and web browsers. Given the widespread availability of programs like Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice, this means there’s a huge opportunity to educate potential customers. Of course, configuring peripherals is still a little harder than it should be. But the survey may actually be good news for companies attempting to bring Linux to the masses, since most of the pieces are already in place; they just need to put them together and make sure consumers know how to use them (yes, that’s not an easy task — but it’s certainly not insurmountable).

Survey says: Not enough desktop Linux apps - Download Squad

There’s not much to say about Winpooch apart from the facts: “Winpooch is a Windows watchdog, free and open source. Anti spyware and anti trojan, it gives a full protection against local or external attacks by scanning the activity of programs in real time.” It hooks into Windows to let you prevent certain processes from making changes to system files rather than the signature method used by most commercial spyware products. It also integrates with ClamWin to provide virus protection. I’d be interested to see how well it works, but regardless it’s nice to see some more open source action in the Windows security sector.

Winpooch: Open source anti-malware for Windows - Download Squad

Well that didn’t take long. BetaNews is reporting that Windows Vista Beta 1 and IE 7 Beta 1 have now both leaked to the web, less than a day after they were officially released to beta testers. A crack for the Windows Product Activation security component is included in the leak, which is almost 2 1/2 Gigs in size. The size hasn’t appeared to deter the file sharers though. I can see why Microsoft is keeping such tight wraps on their top-secret new user interface for Vista. It appears that there’s just no way they can control the leaks.

Windows Vista Leaked to Web - Download Squad

Google’s search for revenue beyond its wildly popular pay-per-click advertising system has everyone from publishers to phone companies unnerved by the seemingly endless scope of the Web leader’s ambitions.

Nowhere is this more closely felt than Madison Avenue, where the advertising industry sees Google encroaching on turf ad agencies and media buyers have considered their own for much of the past century.

Seeking to diversify its revenue base, Google has begun offering advertisers a set of free marketing analysis tools to help customers boost how much they spend on text ads carried by Google.com or affiliated sites. It is selling ads in print publications and expected to move into branded, graphical ads.

These moves, which some see as competing with systems offered by independent companies and ad agencies themselves, has provoked grumbling among many in the advertising industry.

“There is an inherent conflict of interest there,” said Brian McAndrews, chief executive of aQuantive, a company that is both a big buyer and reseller of Google advertising but also a rival supplier of ad measurement tools.

“Am I going to use Google to measure my search results on Microsoft and Yahoo? Am I going to use Google to measure my advertising results on ESPN?” McAndrews asked rhetorically during the Reuters Media and Advertising Summit on Thursday.

The company is the top independent supplier of ad-buying tools advertisers use to buy online ads on Google’s ad network as well as Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and other networks.

Wall Street analysts estimate that about 5 percent of the $10 billion spent on online ads runs through aQuantive’s system.

“From a consumer perspective, Google is all good,” Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine said in a recent note to clients. “However, Google is starting to attract negative publicity (tied to) its foray into other mediums.”

His argument that Google’s encroachment into other businesses, including the large advertising agencies, drove Google shares down 4.7 percent on Monday, its biggest percentage loss in a year.

The stock has since recovered most of its losses, closing at $417.70 on Friday, but the debate over Google’s power to transform whole industries only continues to grow.

The success of Google’s keyword search system among advertisers has in just a few years spawned a niche industry known as search engine optimization (SEO) made up of tech-savvy marketers who help companies find ways to insure their Web sites feature at the top of Google searches and ads.

“Google needs this ecosystem,” New York-based Susquehanna Financial analyst Marianne Wolk said of the Web if ad agencies, marketing support firms and other industry organizations that help advertisers make use of Google ads.

David Verklin, chief executive of Carat Americas, the largest independent media services company in North America, with $6 billion in customer billings, said Google has the power to create new businesses, but also tear them down.

IProspect, a unit of Carat, is one of the search marketers who have prospered on the back of Google’s success. Companies like Motorola pay iProspect to target ads tied to 300 words associated with Motorola wireless products, he said.

Verklin complains Google has begun charging marketing firms like his own $50,000 a month to use Google’s ad buying system.

“We’re going to try and convince (Google) we think that’s a bad idea,” Verklin said. “I don’t want to have to use one tool to manage Google and my own tool to manage Yahoo and Ask Jeeves and everyone else,” he said of conflicts between ad systems.

Advertisers are spooked by the idea of relying entirely on Google to deliver their ads and want independent ways to shop around for the best price and the greatest exposure, he said.

Google hears the growing drumbeat of criticism. Executives say they must do a better job of clarifying their aims.

“When the business was just about ads it was pretty straightforward,” Marc Leibowitz, Google’s director of strategic partnerships, said in a recent interview.

“There’s this notion that Google has a grand master devious plan” to put ad agencies and publishers out of business, Leibowitz said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We see ourselves in a symbiotic relationship with them.”

The cost of building a Microsoft Xbox 360 video game console is nearly 40 percent higher than the retail price, technology and microchip research company iSuppli said on Wednesday.

The firm estimated the total cost to manufacture and test a premium Xbox 360, the software giant’s sleek and powerful new gaming machine, which debuted on Tuesday, was $552.27, compared with its retail price of $399.

Microsoft aims to sell about 5.5 million premium and lower-priced basic Xbox 360 units by the end of June. The machine will compete with the PlayStation 3 from Sony and Nintendo’s Revolution, each due out in 2006.

Console makers have historically subsidized manufacturing costs by creating and selling their own video games and by collecting fees from publishers who make titles for their systems. Several new Xbox 360 games are priced as high as $60.

Crotty said the IBM chip that runs the Xbox 360 cost $106.

ATI Technologies’ graphics processing unit, which provides the system’s high-definition graphics, cost about $141, including DRAM memory from NEC.

The Xbox 360’s main memory from Samsung Electronics added another $65, while an SIS Southbridge chip cost about $12, iSuppli said.

Other costs included a DVD drive, accessories, literature, packaging, assembly and testing.

The price of the system’s two main chips should drop during the next year as manufacturing efficiency improves. That should save at least $50 per unit, in addition to other cost reductions, Crotty said.

Analysts had predicted that the Xbox 360 would initially sell at a loss.

“We expected the cost of the console to at least exceed the retail price,” Crotty said.

Microsoft, currently in second place to Sony in the $10 billion U.S. video game market, is gunning for the top spot with the release of its new console.

But Crotty said the big winner in the video game wars is IBM, since its microprocessors power all three of the new consoles from the industry’s heavy hitters.

The release of those machines is expected to reignite hardware sales growth. Crotty said iSuppli is forecasting 38.5 million video game consoles sold next year, up from 28.5 million in 2005.

Source: CNET

The mysteries of dark matter, multiple dimensions and even the conditions following the Big Bang could be solved with the help of the world’s biggest computer grid.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being constructed at CERN near Geneva will be the largest scientific instrument on the planet and will need the hugely powerful computing to process the 15 petabytes of data that it will produce each year.

The LHC will smash protons and ions into head-on collisions to help scientists understand the structure of matter.

Discovering new types of particles can only be done by statistical analysis of the massive amounts of data the experiments will generate, which is where the LHC Computing Grid project comes in.

And although the LHC won’t be up and running until 2007, work has already begun on the grid, with the UK being one of the largest contributors.

Of the 150 grid sites around the world, 18 are in the U.K. And much of the U.K. work is being done at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire, England.

Because of the scale of processing needed, grid is the best way to go, explained John Gordon deputy director of the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils e-Science Centre at RAL. “The computing has been planned for years; we’ve been looking at distributed computing for a long time,” said Gordon.

He added: “They couldn’t afford to do all the computing at CERN so we knew we would have a big distributed computing problem of sifting the data around the world and finding it again. It’s the biggest production grid in the world.”

The grid will use a four-tier model; data will be stored on tape at CERN, the ‘Tier-0′ centre. From there, data will be distributed to Tier-1 sites which have the storage and processing capacity to cope with a chunk of the data. These sites make the data available to the Tier-2s, which are able to run particular tasks. Individual scientists can then access data from Tier-3 sites which could be local clusters or individual PCs.

RAL hosts the UK’s Tier-1 site, with the universities of Lancaster and Edinburgh and Imperial College operating Tier-2 sites.

And while real data won’t start flowing until 2007, scientists are already using lots of processing power on simulations. Gordon said: “They need to know what they are looking for so they do lots of simulations.”

Commodity hardware and open source software are being used to keep costs down; “because it’s worldwide we are all looking at open source,” said Gordon. “All the grid stuff is done in open source, that’s taken for granted. Grid should use standard protocols, it’s across administrative domains.”

Network bandwidth will also be key–at the moment it has a 2Gbps dedicated link to CERN–the same amount of bandwidth RAL uses for all the rest of its internet traffic, and the plan is to build a dedicated fibre-optic network between the sites.

Gordon said: “What we are looking at is setting up a network of private light-paths to Tier-1 sites.”

Managing the huge number of files the experiments will generate is another problem the team is working on, according to Gordon: “You end up with millions of files and the problem comes in handling them and that’s where the data management comes in. Data management is key.”

But beyond all the exciting technology, much of the work will be in persuading different organizations to share. Gordon said: “A lot of it is sociological–you are persuading people that they gain by connecting all their computers together. It’s about collaboration; it’s not about people sitting in London using computers all over the world, it’s about groups of people working on the same problem.”

Source: CNET

Computer Hangs After 49.7 Days ONLY applies to Windows 95 & 98. There are 100,000s of servers running on Windows NT, 2000, 2003, that do NOT suffer from this (although, I’ve heard that a near aeroplane collisions almost occured, because Windows 2000 Professional reboots after 35 days (exact time not sure of). This event took place a few years back at an air-traffic control center (either in the U.S. or the U.K.).

Source: Microsoft