by Christopher Dawson
July 3rd, 2009 @ 8:11 am

Obviously, this isn’t true. Their underlying architectures are quite a bit different, Gnome looks different than the 7 UI, etc., but to an average 17-year-old, there just wasn’t any meaningful difference between the two operating systems. The other day, I posted a blog titled “Windows 7: Good enough to pay for?”

I described how I’d installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on my son’s computer for his take on the OS after living with Ubuntu 9.04 (and 8.10 before that) for a few months. It’s summer break, so he basically spends every waking moment when he’s not actually interacting face-to-face with friends on the computer. No better time to have a kid do some serious testing, right? I asked him last night about his initial impressions of Windows 7 and, in typical teenage fashion, as he was bouncing between Meebo windows and browser tabs, he said it was “nice.”

I managed to extract from him that his favorite feature was that he was able to use his Zune with it, something that had never worked terribly well with Ubuntu. Otherwise, he said, “Windows 7 is the same as Ubuntu; there just really isn’t anything different about them.” Of course there isn’t. He lives in a web browser. The underlying OS is irrelevant. He has no need for Office 2007 and I expect his next portable music player will be platform independent.

For some, Windows 7 may, indeed, be good enough to pay for, especially if they are power-users of Windows-only software. For my oldest son, if he gravitates to any machine, it’s to my Mac because it’s so easy for him to create and share video content. For the average student, though, the old Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux debate may finally be dead. For someone who “hated Linux” a year ago to now happily switch between Windows 7 and Ubuntu in a completely transparent way certainly signals an end to that age-old flame war.

by Stephen Shankland
July 6, 2009 4:00 AM PDT

Twitter's dramatic rise has helped ignite an industry to shorten Web addresses to fit within 140-character messages. With the technology, though, comes a new handful of challenges. Among the challenges are reliably connecting people to the Web sites they want to reach, keeping spam and phishing attacks at bay, and maintaining the service into the future.

Joshua Schacter, founder of Yahoo's Delicious site for storing and sharing Web bookmarks and now a Google programmer, summarized the issues in an April rant about short-URL problems. "I feel that shorteners are bad for the ecosystem as a whole," he concluded. Until a remote future arrives when Twitter and the telecommunications industry decide 140-character messages are too short, though, URL-shortening services aren't going to go away.

Fortunately, their potential problems can mitigated through careful use, and newer services such as Bit.ly are being designed expressly to avoid the pitfalls. And even if some service falls by the wayside and stops functioning--well, welcome to the real world, where not all information is preserved. "In the digital age, everything has a certain amount of bitrot," said Paul V. Mockapetris, who invented the Domain Name System (DNS) that serves as the Internet's address book.

URL-shortening services are abundant and becoming more so. They're usually designed with a priority on minimum character length, not easy reading: Is.gd, Bit.ly, Twurl.nl, Tr.im, Sn.im", Cligs, and TinyURL. If you want to see dozens more, Mashable has a long list. And the traffic they handle is large. On a typical day right now, Bit.ly is used to create 5 million to 7 million shortened URLs each day, and it handles 25 million requests to expand them--and the growth rate is at a breakneck 5 percent to 15 percent week over week, the company said.

By Ryan Paul
July 5, 2009 3:30 PM CT

The HTML 5 video element has the potential to liberate streaming Internet video from plugin prison, but a debate over which codec to define in the standard is threatening to derail the effort. Ars takes a close look at the HTML 5 codec controversy and examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of H.264 and Ogg Theora.

The increasingly competitive browser market has at last created an environment in which emerging Web standards can flourish. One of the harbingers of the open Web renaissance is HTML 5, the next major version of the W3C's ubiquitous HTML standard. Although HTML 5 is still in the draft stage, several of its features have already been widely adopted by browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Firefox.

Among the most compelling is the "video" element, which has the potential to free Web video from its plugin prison and make video content a native first-class citizen on the Web—if codec disagreements don't stand in the way. In an article last month, we explored the challenges and opportunities associated with the HTML 5 video element. One of the most significant of these challenges is the lack of consensus around a standard media codec, a contentious issue that has rapidly escalated into a major controversy.

The debate has now stalled without a clear resolution in sight. The HTML 5 working group is split between supporters of Ogg Theora and H.264. Their inability to find a compromise that is acceptable to all stakeholders has compelled HTML 5 spec editor Ian Hickson to "admit defeat" and give up on the effort to define specific codecs and media formats in the standard itself.

July 2, 2009 11:55 PM ET

IDG News Service - In the story "Ask.com bets on semantic search, targeting special audiences," posted on Thursday, the last name of Ask Networks President Scott Garell was misspelled.

The story has been corrected on the wire and the paragraphs 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 and 16 now read: Scott Garell, president of Ask Networks, views things from a different perspective, pointing out that Ask.com's queries are growing. The search engine handled 486 million U.S. queries in May 2008 and 555 million in May of this year, according to comScore. "In a very tough and competitive market, we're holding our own," he said in an interview.

Garell also points out that Ask.com and the other sites that make up the Ask Network, like Dictionary.com, are collectively the sixth-largest Web property in the U.S., ahead of powerhouses like eBay, Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon, according to comScore. Garell is particularly encouraged by Ask.com's advances in semantic search and in its attempts to attract specific audiences like NASCAR fans to the search engine. "People don't talk in keywords," Garell said.

According to Garell, that perception persists, although after the dot-com bubble burst, Ask Jeeves abandoned the consumer search market for several years to focus on enterprise search, before reversing course in 2003. Garell thinks Ask.com can pursue this "audience-centric" strategy with eight to 10 vertical markets per year, having seen that it's an effective and interesting approach to promoting and growing usage of the search engine.

By Sylvie Barak
Thursday, 2 July 2009, 16:42

RUMOUR HAS IT the next version of Nvidia's Ion platform will pack a much stronger performance punch and come with twice the number of shaders. The first we heard of the plan was at Nvidia's analyst day a few weeks back, when the Green Goblin mentioned it would be releasing two more versions of the modified GeForce 9400M processor it calls Ion, although it stingily neglected to give out either dates or specifications.

Our sources expect products based around Ion 2 to be available before the end of the year, however. New details have tipped up on the tech news site Fudzilla, claiming that the green machine's second generation integrated graphics platform will come complete with a die shrink and twice the shaders of its contemporary. Since the Ion 1 currently boasts 16 shaders, that means the Ion 2 will have 32 shaders, for all of you who forgot your calculators today.

The increase in shaders is apparently aimed at upping the system's 3D rendering capabilities, although why this would be so essential on a netbook or dirt-cheap notebook is a bit beyond us. But the die shrink should mean that the platform's current low power draw remains unchanged, and it probably also means it will be cheaper to produce, although it seems highly unlikely that price cut will filter down to consumers.

When the INQ asked graphics analyst Jon Peddie about the speculative specs, he heaved a heavy sigh and told us ""We are for better or worse trapped in the mantra of Moore's law," adding "We have to do more, make better, faster, and less expensive machines and components under the guise that if you build it they will come." How very fatalistic. Elaborating, Peddie explained "someone will see the new capabilities and say, 'Hey, I can use that to...' and then we get new exciting software developments. It's an act of faith, not a consumer demand."

by Marguerite Reardon
July 2, 2009 2:25 PM PDT

Net neutrality advocates got a boost of support Wednesday from the Obama administration when it released grant guidelines for spending the government's $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package.

Companies winning grants to help build new broadband infrastructure will have to follow the Federal Communications Commission's Internet Policy statement, which prohibits companies from deliberately blocking or slowing Internet traffic on their networks.

Proponents of that concept, Net neutrality, have been pushing the government to pass laws or set stricter requirements to ensure that consumers get access to content they want and that competitors are not run out of business by network operators. The phone companies and cable operators have opposed such legislation, a sentiment that seemed to be shared by the Republican-controlled FCC under the previous presidential administration.

But now that Democrats are in charge, Net neutrality advocates have been looking for indications of how the new FCC led by recently sworn-in Chairman Julius Genachowski will handle the issue. It is still too early to know whether Democrats will push for new laws. But it's becoming more clear that protecting access on the Internet is an important issue to many. Consumer and advocacy groups, such as Public Knowledge and Free Press, applauded the decision to make Net neutrality a condition of the grants.

By Chris Foresman
July 2, 2009 3:47 PM CT

Rumors concerning the latest negotiations suggests Apple is none too thrilled with NVIDIA, despite its 9400M chipset being the basis of nearly all of Apple's machines save Xeon-based Mac Pros and Xserves. Apple has nearly turned its entire line of computers over to NVIDIA-based GPUs, thanks mainly to the vastly improved graphics performance of its GeForce 9400M chipset over comparable chipsets from Intel.

However, rumors suggest that recent negotiations between the two companies over next-gen hardware have soured to the point that Apple may give NVIDIA a complete cold shoulder. According to SemiAccurate (the irony of the site's name isn't lost on us), Apple is supposedly done with the "arrogance and bluster" that NVIDIA showed in its proposals concerning chipsets for Apple's next-gen hardware, which should include Nehalem-based Intel CPUs.

According to the site's sources, the language used in Apple's rebuke was forceful and unfriendly, and amounted to Apple telling NVIDIA to "get lost" for three or four years. At issue is a major problem with previous-generation GeForce GPUs used in Apple's MacBook Pros. Due to a flaw in some of the materials used to make those chips, the GPUs have a significant chance of failing after extended periods of use.

Despite NVIDIA's claims to the contrary, Apple identified the GPUs as being defective after an internal investigation into the problem. The problem has become so widespread that Apple has already extended the period under which affected machines can be repaired or replaced, whether or not the owner has AppleCare for the machine or not. NVIDIA is still dealing with issues surrounding the GPU failures from a number of different fronts, including at least two lawsuits.

By Gavin Clarke
3rd July 2009 00:13 GMT

Debian, the foundation of Ubuntu, has rejected claims that it's potentially holding Linux's future hostage to Microsoft by including an open-source implementation of .NET in its code. A project spokesman has said GPL daddy Richard Stallman was wrong to say Mono will be featured in Debian's default installation, adding Mono would be used by just a mall number of users.

Installations affected will be those that implement the Gnome desktop using a meta package with a dependency on Tomboy. These installations will need to pull in Mono, the long-running open-source implementation of .NET now sponsored by Novell. Tomboy is a note-taking application for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X available under the LGPL. Debian developer and spokesman Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has written: "The default installation - or to be more precise: The default GNOME installation (there are installation media which install an KDE, Xfce or LXDE desktop by default, too) - hasn't changed. It still installs a more or less minimal Gnome Desktop without tomboy and without mono."

The reply came after Stallman, founder of the GNU project and a General Public License author, said the inclusion of Mono in Debian's default installation posed a "dangerous" risk to the open-source community. Stallman predicted Microsoft would challenge free and open-source implementations of C#, part of .NET and therefore Mono, using the threat of patents. In answer to Stallman, Reichle-Schmehl said Debian: "Has not [sic] 'to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy.'"

By Nick Farrell
Thursday, 2 July 2009, 11:50

A YEAR AGO Microsoft announced that Windows XP was deader than Elvis Presley and yet for some reason the operating system appears to still be going strong. But the June 30 kill date came and went. Based upon user complaints, the Vole kept XP going and even found it a new market in the netbook world.

Microsoft even allows PC makers to 'downgrade' new systems to XP, so Dell and Hewlett-Packard continue to offer XP on a selection of models. Reportedly they will not be able to do this from the end of the month, but it is still on offer at the moment. Then there are also online software sellers who are still flogging old licences that were bought years ago. Either way, it is impossible for the world to know how many copies of Windows XP are out there.

Analysts like Gartner's Michael Silver say the fact that the Vole allows downgrades for those who buy Vista means that we can't really be sure how much hardware still depends on XP. With companies not buying software or hardware because of the current recession, it is likely that Windows XP, rather than fading away, will remain in stable use on many PCs, particularly in corporate environments. Microsoft will have to convince those XP users that Windows 7 is worth the money.

Otherwise some of them might decide to jump to some of the more friendly XP-ish flavours of Linux instead. We should expect to see one of the Vole's most expensive marketing campaigns ever, all the way until Christmas. If that works, then it is likely that the outfit will make more money than it ever has before out of a single product. But in order to pull that off, Microsoft's marketeers will need to make both Windows XP and Vista users make the move to its shiny new operating system while also seeing off any rivals.

by Tom Krazit
July 2, 2009 3:40 PM PDT

Technical difficulties forced Google's Web application hosting infrastructure off the air for about four hours Thursday morning. Customers who run their Web applications on Google App Engine were forced idle Thursday by a series of issues involving "elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates," according to a Google employee posting in the Google App Engine Downtime Notify group spotted by TechCrunch.

A Google representative acknowledged the downtime and apologized for the outage. "Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem that caused the outage and service has now been restored to all applications. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site." Google's cloud-computing service allows Web developers who can't afford to host their own applications a place to get their work online. Amazon Web Services does something similar.

By Ars Staff
July 2, 2009 4:30 PM CT

Lori Drew was accused of breaking federal law last year after helping to orchestrate a MySpace hoax that left a neighbor's child dead. Now, a judge has overturned her convictions, saying that the law in question doesn't apply to mere terms of service violations. "MySpace mom" Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports.

Violating a website's terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all. The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an "overwhelming message" to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor.

Drew was due to be sentenced today. But the "message," legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a website without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns. Drew's story is, by now, familiar: Concerned that her daughter Sara was being badmouthed by a former friend, 13-year-old Megan Meier, Drew took protective parenting way too far.

Together with Sara and an employee, Drew created a MySpace account for a fictional teen boy, "Josh Evans," who would extract evidence of Megan's trash talk. But after luring the girl in with flirtatious banter, the prank took a crueler turn, and "Josh" unleashed a barrage of vicious insults—publishing a number of Megan's intimate messages to salt the wound. The sudden betrayal proved too much for Megan, who had a history of depression: The girl hanged herself in her closet on an October afternoon in 2006.

By Sylvie Barak
Thursday, 2 July 2009, 11:13

WITH THE ADVENT of Windows 7 and just before delivering its first DX11 GPU to the world, AMD is also preparing a brand new integrated GPU, according to certain mainboard partner roadmaps. Designated the RS880, the device will sport AMD's new Radeon HD 4200 graphics core, which is almost 15 per cent faster than anything comparable that's currently available.

Support for AMD's ever evolving Stream technology will purportedly also be included, for all that's worth, considering the paltry number of Stream partners at present. With all of the chest thumping between DAAMIT and the Green Goblin over discrete graphics, it's sometimes easy to forget that the global market for integrated graphics parts is actually much larger. So large, in fact, that the sheer volume of those hardworking integrated graphics chips is enough to put Intel, rather than either Nvidia or AMD/ATI, at the top of the global graphics pyramid.

AMD's new integrated DX10.1 chipset is set to launch sometime in the last week of August. It's noteworthy that, as AMD shoves DX10.1 out to all of its platforms and readies itself for the big push on DX11, Nvidia is still somewhat struggling to hit the DX10.1 spec. And Intel, we're told, is still in the design phase and unlikely to have anything to show in DX11 for at least six months.

by Ed Bott
July 1st, 2009 @ 9:40 pm

In two recent posts (Windows 7 versus Snow Leopard: How much do upgrades really cost? and Do you need more than Windows 7 Home Premium?), I took a closer look at the differences between Windows 7 editions and their counterparts from Apple. In the Talkback section of both posts, several commenters noted that Microsoft is still far behind its archrival in Cupertino.

Until Microsoft comes out with a Family Pack license, they say, Apple will continue to have the upper hand. Well, maybe the wait is over. Thanks to a tip from Kristan Kenney, I took a close look at the agreements embedded in the License folder of the latest leaked builds of Windows 7. This is no longer a beta license agreement and is presumably very close to the final agreement that customers will accept. The agreements for retail copies of Windows 7 Home Premium contain this eye-opening clause: Family Pack Clause

If you can’t read the screen shot, here’s the relevant section: “If you are a ‘Qualified Family Pack User’, you may install one copy of the software marked as ‘Family Pack’ on three computers in your household for use by people who reside there.” (And a proofreading note to Microsoft Legal: Fix the typo in the last sentence of that clause before RTM.) When I first wrote about Windows 7 pricing last month, I speculated that Microsoft was likely to have a program like this up its sleeve:

What else can we expect to see? Back in early 2007, Microsoft offered a so-called Family Discount for Windows Vista, which allowed anyone with a Vista Ultimate license to purchase two Home Premium upgrades for $49.99 each. I expect to see an improved version of the Family Discount this time around. If Microsoft wanted to aim directly at its archrival Apple, it could sell three Home Premium upgrade licenses (to be used only in a single home) for $199 or less.

by Stephen Shankland
July 1, 2009 2:17 PM PDT

Yahoo has released a test version of a Delicious social bookmarking extension for Chrome, one of the strongest indications so far that the technology foundation is coming to fruition in Google's browser. Extensions still must be specifically enabled through a command-line switch on the developer version of Chrome, and Google recently broke extensions compatibility through an update, so the technology clearly is immature.

But Google is steadily addressing the concern that its browser lacks one of Firefox's notable features--called add-ons in the Mozilla browser. "Delicious extension (alpha version) for Google Chrome is now available," said Amit Papnai of the Delicious team in a mailing list posting Tuesday. "This is a light version of the extension and allows you to sign in and post bookmarks to your Delicious account."

Extensions can be powerful tools to customize a browser's interface or add significant features. In an effort to ease programming difficulties, Chrome's extensions technology uses the same interface techniques as Web pages, a method Mozilla as adopted for its Jetpack Firefox extensions project at Mozilla Labs. Delicious lets people store, tag, describe, and share bookmarks, and the add-on simplifies use of the service directly through the browser.

In addition, Nick Baum released a Chrome-based Twitter extension called Chritter on Tuesday. I found both the Delicious and Chritter extensions easy to download and install, though Chritter isn't terribly useful at this stage because it only flashes recent tweets in a status bar. Update 2:57 p.m. PDT: Google has added a rough but workable interface for managing Chrome extensions, including uninstalling them, by typing "chrome://extensions/" into the address bar.

By Ryan Paul
July 1, 2009 7:15 PM CT

A Linux developer has published a new kernel patch that provides a workaround to avoid Microsoft's patents on the FAT filesystem. The patch, which has undergone extensive legal review by patent lawyers, could make it possible to use FAT on Linux without having to pay licensing fees to Microsoft.

Microsoft's recent lawsuit against TomTom, alleging infringement of filesystem patents, has left many questions unanswered about the legal implications of distributing open source implementations of Microsoft's FAT filesystem. A new Linux kernel patch that was published last week offers a workaround that might make it possible to continue including FAT in Linux without using methods that are covered by Microsoft's patents.

The patent dispute erupted in February when Microsoft sued portable navigation device maker TomTom. Microsoft claimed that TomTom's Linux-based GPS products infringe on several of its patents, including two that cover specific characteristics of FAT, a filesystem devised by Microsoft that is widely used on removable storage devices such as USB thumb drives and memory cards.

The dispute escalated when TomTom retaliated with a counter-suit, but it was eventually settled in March when TomTom agreed to remove the relevant functionality. The outcome of the lawsuit created ambiguity around the legal status of the Linux FAT implementation. Microsoft contends that the suit was a largely isolated incident and that there are no plans to pursue litigation against individual Linux users. For commercial Linux adopters, however, the situation is murkier.