/web/log/flazx

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

Barcode printing, barcode creation apps, and barcode spoofing are really nothing new — but you have to be of a certain persuasion to walk right into a Target with a fake barcode for $4.99 headphones and try and walk back out with an iPod shuffle for your trouble. Perhaps some might call that the poor college student persuasion, but apparently 19 year old Colorado college student Jonathan Baldino actually made it past the register with his $4.99 purchase, only to be halted by one of those receipt checking door guards. Now dude’s facing a criminal felony count of forgery and two misdemeanor counts of theft (he’d admitted to trying the fake-barcode trick on a CD player, before). Sucks to be 18 and out in the world, kid, but you’ve got to grow up and buy your gadgets like the rest of us, dig?

Source : CNET

As a Web communications tool, blog software utilizes a fairly standardized format for sticking content on the Internet. It’s far easier that building a personal or business Web page, and is appropriately scaled for dashing off notes and responses or posting passionate, or more detached, manifestos, proclamations, encomiums and rants. RSS, trackback, OPML and hopefully something like SSE make the mammoth blog flow more manageable, and comments, photos, video, podcasts and links provide for meaningful clues, validation and avenues to pursue in search of enlightenment or disillusionment.

Fundamentally, blogs are fodder for conversation, with no credentials, job titles or degrees required other than whatever authority is embedded in the voices and accorded by readers, listeners and watchers. We vote with our clicks. The conversations, which occur within (comments) and across blogs, can sputter into inanities or resolve into truths and action, and every place in between.

Admittedly, the tools are relatively primitive and threading conversations across blogs via trackback or other mechanisms is hapharzard. In many instances, dozens, hundreds or thousands of bloggers converge on a topic, often blind to one another’s discourse, glancing off an adjacent post, or piling on an overworked meme. For the most part, self assembling communities of bloggers hold a kind of virtual Socratic court, sorting out the issues of the day in a public forum, open to anyone, including spammers. It’s not a serial conversation by design; it’s more in the tradition of the deconstructionists, multiple parties challenging assumptions and riffing off (sometimes ripping off) of one another.

Memeorandum is a first generation attempt to corral a limited range of newsy blog content (tech and politics, so far) on a timely basis. The comment universe is an invisible substrate, which is unfortunate. Unlike Technorati or other blog search engines, Memeorandum doesn’t list every blog posting it can find; instead, it cluster posts by a few selective topics based on a source-picking algorithm. It eliminates a lot of the noise, as well as some of the valuable content. A next step would be in presenting the clusters (feeds) in a easy-to-read format and allowing users to rate or rank the posts to add personalized filtering to the service. TailRank, which just launched, provides collaborative filtering of blog content.

For a journalist, technologist, politician or anyone with a pulse and who doesn’t know everything, blogs matter. Every morning I can wake up to lots of IQ ruminating, fulminating, arguing, evangelizing and even disapassionately reporting on the latest happenings in the areas that interest me, people from every corner of the globe. That’s certainly preferable to the old world and worth putting up with what comes along with putting the means of production in the hands of anyone with a connection to the Net…

Source

In an interview with ZDNet News today, Microsoft’s French security head Bernard Ourghanlian revealed that the software giant will indeed release a third service pack for Windows XP. According to Ourghanlian, Microsoft is planning to ship SP3 after the launch of Windows Vista next year, claiming that their new OS is the foremost “priority for the development teams.”

This doesn’t exactly come as a surprise seeing as how many corporate customers will still be using XP on their desktops for years after the launch of Vista. As for new features that we can expect in SP3, a Microsoft representative commented that “Historically, certain functions of new versions of Windows are integrated in the service packs of previous versions.” One can assume this will mean updated “Vista-Age” versions of software like Windows Media Player being integrated into this new service pack. Internet Explorer 7 integration is still up in the air after a Microsoft developer commented a few weeks back that their “current plan is to continue to ship IE6 on XP SP3, but IE7 will be supported on XP SP3.”

Source

The world’s first interactive 3D display has been developed by IO2 Technology. HelioDisplay creates 3D displays in the air using lasers, drawing input from computers, TVs and DVDs. It also allows interactive applications to be controlled by a finger, instead of a mouse. “Our first generation version, the Heliodisplay, projects TV, streaming video and computer images into free space, (mid-air)”, the company’s website claims.

IO2 Technology Website

News source

The first commercial Apple Macintosh computers running on Intel processors may be released a bit earlier than expected, believes UBS Investment Research analyst Ben Reitzes. He claims that Apple will have new products and content to announced at the Macworld Expo scheduled for early January and notes that Intel is expected to unveil its dual-core Yonah processor for mobiles also early next year. The analyst, excepts from whose research notes were published by AppleInsider web-site, believes that early January, 2006, is a possible timeframe for the first Intel-based Apple computers to debut. UBS researchers suppose that the first of Apple’s computers to use Intel processor, in particular, Intel’s next-generation Pentium M flavour code-named Yonah, will be Mac Mini. The firm claims that Apple’s strategy will be to equip its computers with Intel processors starting from the most affordable models.

“We continue to believe that both the PowerMac and PowerBook will be introduced at a later date (late 2006 or early 2007) – with the possible use of the Intel’s Merom processor for the PowerBook and Conroe processor for the PowerMac,” Mr. Reitzes is reported to have said.

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Google Inc. was sued by a major publishing association for digitizing library books without the permissions of copyright holders, the second such suit filed against the search engine giant.

The Association of American Publishers, based in Washington, D.C., sued the Mountain View, Calif., company on behalf of members The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. The suit seeks a court declaration that Google infringes the rights of copyright holders when it scans entire books and stores the digitized versions in its massive database. The trade group also wants a court order requiring Google to first obtain permission from copyright holders.

Patricia Schroeder, AAP president and a former Colorado congresswoman, said the suit was filed after talks broke down. The AAP had proposed that Google use each book’s unique ID number to determine if the work is under copyright, and then seek permission from the book’s owner. For more than 30 years, most books have carried an ISBN identification number, which is machine readable.

Google, according to Schroeder, refused.

“If Google can scan every book in the English language, surely they can utilize ISBNs,” Schroeder said in a statement. “By rejecting the reasonable ISBN solution, Google left our members no choice but to file this suit.”

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Last week’s column about Apple and Intel generated more e-mail than I could possibly answer, so I am sorry if I didn’t get to yours. Please don’t take it personally. More on Apple/Intel below, but first I must make a correction concerning the so-called Osborne Effect, which this column and a hundred others cited during the past week as proof that Apple was taking a huge market risk by switching to Intel processors. It turns out that the history we all think we remembered wasn’t exactly correct, according to Mike McCarthy, who was working at Osborne Computer when the company folded. Mike has always been my hero.

Adam Osborne was accused of pre-announcing the DOS version of his CP/M line — in fact, he told reporters there wouldn’t be a DOS version for at least a year because it was too expensive for his price-sensitive line. He announced the Executive — the follow-on model to his successful first Osborne — one month before delivery, and sales dropped in half for a couple of weeks while inventory cleared out. Then the Executive actually went on sale — and sales dropped, from about 10,000 a month for the original model, to essentially zero for the new model.

The reason for the drop was that the Osborne Executive was not competitive with the Kaypro, a slapped-together rival priced at a couple hundred less ($1,795 instead of $1,995 for the Osborne 1), but it had a much larger screen — 9 inches compared to O1’s five inches.

The Executive came out, much better built, more manufacturable, but with a mere 7-inch screen. There was deep disappointment among Osborne fans. Worse, it was priced at $2,195 — a two hundred dollar increase in a very price-sensitive end of the market! Four hundred dollars more than Kaypro for a brand name but a smaller screen? No thank you! Buyers walked away. Osborne sales dropped to fewer than a thousand a month for the next three months–which was enough to choke the high-flying company, which was forced to declare bankruptcy after a mere five months of this.

But the buyers just walked across the street to the Kaypro. Kaypro sales jumped to nearly 10,000 a month — in other words, they captured all the disgusted Osborne buyers. Which proves the Osborne’s disaster had nothing to do with, as legend has it, the “pre-announced DOS machine.” The Kaypro was and remained for the next 18 months a CP/M machine.

So poor Adam Osborne is off the hook. Spread the word.

Now back to Apple and Intel. While last week’s use of the term “merger” may have been a bit too strong, it is clear that both companies have a lot to gain if this alliance is done properly.

Some of last week’s questions now have answers. First, Phil Schiller’s old PhotoShop demos probably were a bit over-hyped and the Altivec Factor, while real, probably wouldn’t have been much of a factor two years down the road when these new Apple machines were shipping in volume. The low-end machines get Pentium Ms while the higher end machines will get dual-core Pentium Ds.

Yes, the G5 is nominally a 64-bit processor, but beyond addressing a heck of a lot more memory, Apple doesn’t at present use those 64-bits for much. And Intel is bringing AMD64 — sorry, EM64T — to their Pentium product line. By next year, there will be 64-bit support in all, or nearly all, of their desktop chips. So Apple doesn’t have to make any sacrifice for 64-bit. In fact, this may be part of the timing of the move — they had to wait for 64-bit support in affordable Intel chips.

Apple didn’t go with AMD, I’ve been told over and over again, because AMD has production problems. I don’t buy this. Apple’s production needs are modest and down-the-road to boot. Chip companies will promise ANYTHING if the delivery horizon is far enough away. I’m sure AMD could deliver the chips. And they may still do so if Intel and Apple don’t merge in some way. But for now Intel is Apple’s new processor partner.

And what Intel brings to this party apparently includes some chipset design, which IBM never did for Apple. Especially important, I’m told, is the Trusted Computing support that found its way into a few Intel motherboards just last month. Trusted Computing was supposed to have been one of the signal virtues of Longhorn until that capability was thrown in the toilet to make possible a delivery schedule that remains several years late. We think about Microsoft as having something to gain from Trusted Computing, but so does Intel, and without Apple, Intel apparently has no partner capable of leveraging that capability — the Hollywood connection. So the idea that Digital Rights Management and the demands of movie studio honchos were behind this move may be correct, but in reverse because it suits INTEL’s needs more than Apple’s.

Apple didn’t go with the Cell Processor despite a hard sell by Sony. They simply didn’t like the chip and thought that it was much better suited to a game system than a general purpose PC. So no PS3 game development will be taking place on Macs. In fact it will be happening almost entirely on Sony Cell workstations, the first of which was shown this week at a Power.org meeting in Barcelona.

Where this all leaves IBM, I find especially fascinating. Yes, the volume of chips Apple was asking for was miniscule compared to what IBM will be selling to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for games. And yes, it is within IBM’s character to walk away from Apple by refusing to put enough resources into meeting contractual obligations (that three gig G5, remember). But the part I want to understand is what Apple takes with it on the way out the door?

Remember that the PowerPC program was established by Apple, IBM, and Motorola. All three companies contributed intellectual property to the project, and all three earned royalties from their contributions. IBM failed to meet its roadmap obligations, and on top of that, apparently said that it wasn’t willing to do what it would take to retain Apple’s business. These two positions apparently worked together to weaken the IBM-Apple bond in critical ways, with the result being — as was told — that Apple is coming away from the relationship with a somewhat greater share of PowerPC IP than it would otherwise have had. How odd.

What isn’t clear is whether this simply means that Apple gets a royalty (or a bigger royalty) on all those xBox 360 chips, or whether Apple is somehow walking with actual technology that can be given to a new partner, like an Intel for example.

While this all sounds like crossing dinosaurs with rutabagas, stranger things have happened. I wonder if we’ll see some hybrid chip appearing under the Intel name?

Of course, none of this will mean much for a year or more, and a lot can happen in that time. Next month, for example, Apple promises to deliver a new version of iTunes. Why? It’s the next step in Apple’s HD movie delivery scheme and promises to keep us so engaged between now and Christmas that we won’t even think about Intel.

Source: pbs.org

Google is in the news everywhere lately. They are filching executives from Microsoft, and Microsoft is conveniently forgetting how Redmond did the same and worse to Borland. Google is scanning the world’s books, and the world’s authors aren’t all pleased about that. But this column is about something both far more prosaic and important — the very nature of Google AdWords, the search giant’s paid placement advertising program that is, by far, its greatest source of revenue. But as you are about to read, AdWords is probably much more complex than we are led to believe by Google.

AdWords was Google’s response to the paid search placement program from Overture Systems, now part of Yahoo. Overture allowed web sites to pay for higher placement in searches that used certain words. Someone could pay a lot of money for the word “Cringely,” for example, and have their totally non-Cringely web site appear above this one in Overture’s search results. This really wasn’t as bad as is seems as long as advertisers paid for words that really described their sites and most words weren’t purchased.

Google’s AdWords took the process a couple steps further. First, it segregated paid and unpaid search results by placing the paid results in a separate location where those results were identified as advertisements. But Google also embraced fully the concept of an ad and allowed the payers to make their own two-line pitch. Overall, the AdWord system was more honest and up-front with users about what was happening. And honesty has worked well for Google, with AdWords becoming a goldmine for the company.

But AdWords isn’t as simple as it seems at first. With Google, things rarely are. As usual for Google, there be algorithms at work here, and the nature of those algorithms is alluded to, but never fully explained. What Google does admit is there are forces that can drive an advertiser’s listing up or down, making them appear on the first page of results or push them down to second and subsequent pages. Both effects, it is strongly implied, are in the control of the advertiser. Advertisers can move higher in AdWord ranking by paying more money for the key words they have chosen. But they can also move higher — or lower — based on the quality and desirability of the ad, itself.

This second effect deserves its own paragraph. As a Google advertiser you can decide to pay some amount — say $0.20 — to have your ad appear whenever someone’s Google search includes the word “Cringely.” To be honest, I just checked, and while there are 1,030,000 Google results for “Cringely,” there are no ads at all on the results page, indicating — as many have long suspected — that I have no commercial value whatsoever. But for searches that involve very common words like “mountain bike,” or “libido enhancement,” for example, there are multiple pages of ads, and what puts your ad on the front page is not just how much money you are paying, but also how frequently Google searchers actually click on your ad.

This makes a lot of sense because Google wants to feature ads that its users find interesting enough to click on, both because it indicates they are more intrigued than annoyed by the ad and because Google makes money from the clicks-through. So without having to actually read the ads individually, Google has found a revenue-generating way of measuring their usefulness to readers by monitoring click-throughs.

The upshot of all this is that clever ads and offering legitimate good deals can improve your ad positioning ,which will inevitably improve your sales in a virtuous cycle that fits well with Google’s corporate model of not doing evil. The users’, advertisers’, and Google’s results are all optimized in this way, which discourages bad or poorly-targeted ads. If your ad is so clueless or useless that hardly anyone clicks, Google will eventually reject the ad altogether.

That’s what we know about the AdWords algorithm without being actually able to SEE the algorithm, which is of course a trade secret. But does the algorithm do anything else?

One of my readers makes his living selling goods over the Internet, and his sole means of obtaining customers is through Google AdWords. His business is robust for a one-man operation and he makes a good living. Knowing the actual numbers, I would say he makes a VERY good living, which shows the effectiveness of Google and AdWords as an advertising medium.

But one can never make enough money, it seems, so this reader decided to do some research to see if he could improve his results by modifying this and that. He decided that the best way to conduct this research was not by altering variables on his existing, very profitable web site, but by creating a separate site purely to be used for these tests.

Clearly, this is a behavior that the big brains of Google did not expect.

It was no big deal to create a separate experimental site. Web hosting companies offer e-commerce sites for only a few dollars per month. A Google AdWords account costs only $5.00 to set up. The actual content of the new web site could simply be copied over from the pre-existing site and changed at will as dictated by the experiment.

Most people would alter variables on the main site and see what happens, but this guy didn’t want to mess with the success he was already achieving, so he came up with this parallel experimental design.

The first thing he wanted to study was the impact of paying more or less for AdWords. He knew that paying more would result in higher placement — especially given that both the ads and the AdWords would be identical between the two sites. What he didn’t know, however, was whether a slight increase in cost-per-word would more than pay for itself in increased sales, or whether a slight decrease would go effectively unnoticed, thereby increasing his profit margins.

His old site with the same ads had been running successfully for a year paying at the relatively low rate of $0.10 per word (the AdWords minimum is $0.05 per word) and generating about 15,000 clicks-through per day. But for the new site, he started out paying $1.00 per word for exactly the same words. Based on everything he had read about AdWords (remember nobody actually SPEAKS to Google about these things — the service is totally automated from Google’s end), he expected his ad to move higher in the rankings and, hopefully, to make more sales as a result. And that’s exactly what happened, though not to the extent that he would have liked.

Buying AdWords at $1.00 versus $0.10, his ads DID move higher on the page and his revenue was increased, though not by enough to justify going all the way to $1.00 with its associated higher cost basis.

All the while, of course, the essentially identical original web site was churning along, still entirely dependent on AdWords, still carrying identical ads for identical products as the test site, and still generating an average of 15,000 click-throughs per day.

Now it was time to drop the per-word price a bit on the test site to see whether he could increase his profit margins after paying too much at $1.00. So he set the new per-word price at $0.40 — still four times as much as he was paying per word through his main site.

And his clicks-through dropped from 15,000+ to 1,200 per day.

Huh?

Same products, same ads, same service, but by paying four times MORE than his main site his results dropped by an order of magnitude.

A bit more experimenting showed a similar effect and he was never again able to match the success of his original site as it continually operated in precisely the same market with precisely the same services over the exact same period of time.

I have no idea what the heck is happening here, but my friendly reader, who makes his living from this stuff, has a theory. He believes the Google AdWords algorithm tries to do many things and one of those is to encourage advertisers to pay more for words. By modifying something that in turn modifies the results, Google is effectively encouraging advertisers to change their behavior.

So increasing the amount per word DID increase sales, though not enough to justify the additional cost. Google’s revenue per word, of course, went up by 10X. But dropping the price by more than half was greeted by a huge decrease in clicks-through that could only have resulted from some unknown resultant change in GOOGLE’s behavior, given that all other variables were constant.

If that’s indeed what’s happening, it isn’t illegal and to some might not even be unethical (I guess) but it feels just a little bit EVIL.

Ironically the only way this could be observed was though the use of parallel, otherwise identical web sites and AdWords accounts.

“It’s like Vegas,” said my friend. “They want you to lose. Try to game the system and they cut off one of your legs.”

Source: pbs.org

Play to your strengths. That’s the key to success in any industry. This is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and playing to the company’s strengths is key if they are going to do what I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won’t steal it or strong-arm us. They’ll seduce us into giving it to them. And I am not at all sure that’s a bad thing.

Google’s strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with Microsoft. I’m not saying they aren’t doing that (I simply don’t know), but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn’t play to any of the company’s traditional strengths.

The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won’t happen. And WHY it won’t happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco with wireless) would only hurt Google’s earnings.

So why buy-up all that fiber, then?

The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn’t just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria’s Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn’t matter. To Google’s local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they’ll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they’ll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.

And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It’s back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using.

This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.

There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We’ll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways — most of them not even envisioned by Google) there’s suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That’s the goal.

All this is based, of course, on Google’s proven network and hardware expertise. Have you seen Google’s Search Appliance? They ship you a 1U prebuilt server. You connect it to your network, fill out a simple configuration screen, and it scans and indexes your web site (or sites) for you. Google monitors and manages it remotely, and sucks up the data and adds it to theirs. You just plug the thing in and turn it on. It just works. You need do nothing else to keep it running. Google understands how to do this stuff. Microsoft definitely does not.

And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft’s best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they’ll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can’t match.

But that doesn’t mean Microsoft customers will be denied access to the Google Internet. Quite the contrary. Google would be insane to exclude Microsoft customers, which will be as welcome as any other. Only Google will be benefiting far more than Microsoft from that usage.

Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they’ll be BUYING service from those outfits — many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That’s $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart’s. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we’ve thought of as a threatened species, won’t be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren’t worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn’t try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.

Microsoft can’t compete. Yahoo probably can’t compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That’s less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.

Game over.

And yet next week I’ll take it one more step.

Source: pbs.org