by Martin LaMonica
December 12, 2008 7:38 AM PST

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove has joined other Silicon Valley elites who are advocating for an industry shift into energy technology. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Friday, Grove said he is urging Intel to invest in battery manufacturing as a way to diversify from its core chip business.

Grove told the Journal that Intel's "strategic objective is tackling big problems and turning them into big businesses." He said Intel, with its cash resources, can invest in battery technology and manufacturing to bring down the cost of car batteries, which would drive adoption of plug-in electric cars. Batteries are the most expensive component in plug-in electric vehicles, a market being pursued by a few U.S. companies.

General Motor's 2011 Volt is testing batteries from lithium-ion maker A123 Systems. Other U.S. companies include Ener1 and Valence Technology. Notebook battery maker Boston Power also intends to enter the auto market. But battery makers and analysts say that U.S. manufacturers lack the financial means to meet the anticipated demand of electric cars.

"The technology exists today to put (electric drives) into an automobile," said Ener1 CEO Charles Gassenheimer at last week's Electric Drive Transportation Association's Conference & Exposition. "But it is not doable without the ability to drive down the cost of manufacturing." Intel has invested in battery technology through its venture capital arm and other energy-related firms.

By Jacqui Cheng
December 12, 2008 - 11:04AM CT

There's a xkcd comic that shows a person resisting going to bed because "something is wrong on the Internet!", which has become an Internet meme because it strikes a chord with so many of us. Admit it: we've all done it before, probably multiple times. But when we think of the type of person who does this, most of us think of men.

That stereotype, it turns out, is not quite as true as we think. According to new survey results from Intel, women are more likely than men to willingly sacrifice sex for two weeks than risk losing Internet access for that long. And you thought headaches were a problem. According to the survey of 2,119 adult Internet users, commissioned for Intel by Harris Interactive (full results will be published next week), 95 percent of all respondents said it was at least "somewhat" important to have devices that allow them to get online.

65 percent said that they simply could not live without Internet access, period. Clearly, this is a crowd that loves their Internet. But it wouldn't take much for this luxury-turned-utility to interrupt people's lives in the bedroom, it seems, and in trends that seem to be moving in opposite directions. Almost half (46 percent) of all women said that they would choose the Internet over sex for two weeks.

Broken down, the numbers are even more scary for the male side of the population: 49 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 34 would rather have the Internet than some tender lovin', and 52 percent between age 35 and 44 felt the same way. It looks like the numbers only go down in the upper age groups, who don't tend to spend as much time on the Internet in the first place.

By Lester Haines
12th December 2008 12:23 GMT

Aboxalypse now HP's ongoing bid to trash Mother Earth by putting small things in really big boxes and, if possible, strapping those to a pallet continues apace, as witnessed by NZ-based Eugene Chan, who recently made the mistake of ordering a licence key from the world's biggest consumer of cardboard.

Scratch one hectare of rainforest, and no messing. However, in the interests of balanced journalism, we'd like to note that if Eugene lived in Oz, his licence key would probably have arrived on a small piece of recycled paper delivered by a courier astride a carbon-neutral mountain bike constructed from bamboo. Why?

Because HP (and make sure you haven't got a mouthful of coffee before continuing) recently secured an Australia Packaging Evolution Award for "exceptional results in packaging environmental design and waste management". We kid you not. Specifically, HP stepped up to the podium to receive the “Household Goods Packaging Action Award”, prompting Annukka Dickens (Environmental Manager, South Pacific) to effuse: “This award is a valuable recognition of our environmental efforts this far and provides great encouragement to continue developing the programs further in the future."

She insisted: “Packaging and product environmental design continues to be part of HP's environmental focus, along with product reuse and recycling programs and the drive to increase social and environmental standards within our extended supply chain.” Oh really? Well, let's examine Chris Fryer's experience of how the company drives environmental standards within its extended supply chain.

11 December 2008, 14:56

THOSE OF YOU who dream of lightning fast data storage and disk access can prepare to have your dreams come to life: the Fusion IODrive has hit the testbench of the Internet, and it's a firecracker. Appearing on techno-temple TweakTown, the drive is actually not a drive.

It's a PCI Express card with 80GB to 320GB worth of Samsung NAND Flash. Now this isn't your standard SSD, the kind becoming popular in notebooks these days. Oh no - those are designed to be connected to the SATA controller, which runs at around 3GB/s tops. By connecting directly to the PCI-Express bus, the IODrive can achieve a full 10GB/s.

That's more than three times the SATA transfer speed, for the mathematically challenged. The boys at TweakTown reckon that it's the fastest storage option they've ever seen, thanks to its "near nonexistent latency", and suggest that the drive "Raises the bar so high that once adopted, traditional solutions will be considered legacy products". Nice.

Of course, legacy data storage products are a great deal cheaper than this bad boy. The 80GB version clocks in at a whopping $3,000, and the tradtional disk sized 320GB model will set you back a credit-crunching $14,000. But given how cheap PCs are these days, why not splash out on some fast storage to make up the numbers?

by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
December 12th, 2008 @ 2:32 am

Effective from January 3, 2009, Seagate will be cutting the warranty period from 5 years to 3 years on selected bare drives. Drives affected by thins change include:

* Barracuda 7200
* Diamondmax
* Momentus 7200
* Momentus 5400
* Pipeline HD
* Pipeline HD Pro
* DB35
* LD25 5400

Drives purchased prior to January 3, 2009 will still carry the 5 year warranty. Seagate is keen to point out that this change shouldn’t reflect badly on drive quality or the confidence that Seagate has in the product:

Our product quality remains excellent, and, as the worldwide leader in drive storage, Seagate is committed to providing our customers with the most reliable storage solutions available anywhere. Based on our data, we know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by going to a 3-year warranty period (which is more in line with the rest of the industry and the needs of our partners and customers) we can make other aspects of our customer and warranty support programs more attractive, with negligible impact on customer product return needs.

by Josh Lowensohn
December 11, 2008 @ 3:20 PM PST

The Guardian is reporting that George Oates, along with two others on the Flickr team have been let go as a part of this week's Yahoo layoffs. Oates was one of the first employees at Flickr before its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005, and more notably its former chief designer.

Flickr, along with its Yahoo sister site Delicious, are well known for having a minimal, and angular user interface. Oates was a big part of that. After her stint as Flickr's chief designer, Oates moved on to become a senior program manager where she headed up Flickr's Commons project. Oates has made no confirmation of the move on her personal blog or Flickr profile page, however former Yahoo Personals product manager Susan Mernit is confirming the news.

By Ryan Paul
December 11, 2008 - 09:56PM CT

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has filed a lawsuit against Cisco for copyright infringement. The suit contends that Cisco widely distributed the FSF's software and failed to fulfill the requirements of the General Public License (GPL) under which the software is published. The lawsuit, which is the culmination of a lengthy conflict between the two organizations, is the first one that the FSF has ever filed for GPL infringement.

The GPL was originally devised by FSF founder Richard Stallman with the aim of providing a legal framework for software freedom. The license broadly grants users the right to study, modify, and redistribute software but it also has a reciprocal provision that requires developers to make their derivatives available under the same terms so that the rights are perpetually preserved downstream.

Many popular open source software applications are distributed under this license or the related Lesser General Public License (LPGL), including several that are copyrighted by the FSF, such as the core GNU userspace stack and the GCC compiler—components that are essential on Linux-based platforms.

Linksys—which is owned by Cisco—has distributed a wide range of Linux-based products that use GPL-licensed components, but Linksys has repeatedly failed to fulfill the obligations of the GPL. The terms of the license require distributors to disclose that their products contain code licensed under the GPL they must also offer to make that code available to end users at request.

by Sam Diaz
December 11th, 2008 @ 10:00 am

Google has made it official: Chrome is out of beta. As for the answer to my earlier question - Where is my Mac version? - the short answer is next year, probably the first half but no solid date, the company said. And, yes, Sergey is still popping in on the Chrome team regularly, asking about the Mac version.

The team says it’s hard to be more exact about a release date but that the source code is public and available and anyone can follow along with the progress to get a better idea of a release. As for the Windows version, the reviews have mostly been favorable. The common theme is that browser, in terms of speed, beats the competition - and Google says it’s gotten 1.4 times faster since the beta launch 100 days ago.

Most of the issues that people were once squawking about - notably performance and stability issues around plug-ins - have largely been fixed. A nice bonus feature is one that bundles all of the options that might impact a user’s privacy in one common place. Basically, if there’s a feature in Chrome that involves acessing or storing information that might identify you or something about you, it will be grouped with all of the other features that might have privacy implications so that users can find them easily and adjust the settings to their comfort levels.

In a blog post, the company said: We’ve taken security very seriously from the beginning and we will continue to look for ways to make Google Chrome and all browsers even more secure. Google Chrome’s unique sandbox technology creates an additional layer of defense against harmful software, while the Safe Browsing feature provides protection against phishing and malware attacks for many browser users.

By David Chartier
December 11, 2008 - 01:04PM CT

Microsoft is continuing its adventure into web apps with a new Live Labs experiment called Thumbtack. As a simple web-based filing cabinet for storing clipped information from around the web, Thumbtack is yet another entry into an already broad market, but it brings one particularly interesting trick to the table.

At face value, Thumbtack is a pretty simple tool that allows users to organize snippets of content they paste into notes, or easily clip text and images from other sites via bookmarklet. Compatible right now with IE7 and Firefox 3 (cross-platform), Thumbtack provides a familiar UI of a sidebar on the left that lists custom "collections" (like folders) and a content panel front and center where notes can be viewed as icons or in list view with more metadata.

Collections can be published with a clean URL for sending via e-mail and the like, or shared with other users for collaborative editing. Thumbtack's bookmarklet makes it much easier to snip stuff from around the web into a collection. Select some text and/or images on a page, click that bookmarklet in your browser's toolbar, and a javascript Thumbtack pop-up will allow you to pick a collection, add tags, and preview what you're actually adding.

These tools make Thumbtack handy for everything from planning a trip with another decision-maker in the family, publishing a wishlist, or quickly collecting bits of research while browsing. Users of any of the wide variety of competitors like Google Notebook or Evernote may be yawning, and so far, we don't blame them.

By Kelly Fiveash
11th December 2008 11:41 GMT

Yahoo! began laying off more than 1,500 employees yesterday as part of the struggling company’s latest painful round of job cuts. The internet giant has swung the job axe across all departments at Yahoo!, with human resources and finance workers reportedly expected to take the biggest hit.

Lame duck CEO Jerry Yang told Yahoo! workers that the firm “must take actions to better perform in today's turbulent global economy. While we've found efficiencies in many parts of our business, laying off employees is unfortunately unavoidable.” He added that the decision to axe jobs had been a “difficult” one, but said it meant Yahoo! could “better align costs with revenues”.

Yang, who resigned from the CEO post last month, said during the company's Q3 earnings call in October that Yahoo! would jettison at least ten per cent of its workforce by the end of the year, affecting about 1,500 positions. In related news, hedge fund Ivory Investment Management (IIM) has urged the Yahoo! board to salvage a search business deal with Microsoft, reports the Wall Street Journal.

IIM owns a 1.5 per cent stake in the internet firm. The shareholder said in a letter to Yahoo! management that selling the company’s search biz to MS could lead to a deal worth twice as much as Yahoo!’s current stock price. Yahoo! shares closed at $13.4 on Nasdaq yesterday.

By Paul Taylor
11 December 2008, 15:32

NOTABLE MERCHANT of Mac clones, Psystar, added another argument to its countersuit against Apple, yesterday. Reports have surfaced that the company is accusing Apple of burying code in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that blocks anything that doesn't faintly resemble a Core 2 Duo, further extending Apple's grip on who and what runs their operating system.

According to Psystar, the fruity OS will run code at boot that checks which processor your system is running and shuts down in the event it isn't a Core 2 Duo processor. This unknown bit of code, present in Mac OS X Leopard, claims Psystar, is further proof of Apple's sneakiness. True, Apple only has Core 2 Duos in its current Mac range, with the exception of the Mac Pro that uses Xeons on Mac OS X Leopard Server - hardly the budget philosophy you'd see at Psystar.

Psystar has argued that you don't need high-end hardware for Mac OS X, you can imagine the company carefully eyeing Intel's cheaper dual-core Celerons or AMD's Phenom(II?) and Athlons for its catalogue... but Apple wouldn't want its OS running on cheap hardware, now would it? We spoke to some developers and industry sources and we were told that OS X Leopard will run (and is running) on any SSE3-gifted processor (theoretically that would even include AMD platforms), rather than just the "Core 2 Duo"-specific claim.

Drivers, however, are the main issue with this approach, as Apple only supplies drivers for a very limited range of hardware - its hardware - so any other kit running OS X is likely to be missing a feature, or ten. One particular developer is, at the time, running a (non-Psystar) Core 2 Quad at 3.83GHz on an X48-DQ6 motherboard and had no problems with the system boot.

by Andrew Nusca
December 11th, 2008 @ 9:14 am

Comcast says it will debut its new ultra-high-speed Internet service in the Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Fort Wayne, Ind. markets, according to the Associated Press. The Philadelphia-based company says the next-generation Docsis 3.0, or Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification 3.0, technology will include some of the fastest speeds available today, including a tier with download speeds of up to 50 megabits per second.

This “wideband” service will also enable the company to double speeds for most of its existing high-speed Internet customers at no additional cost. The service is expected to debut this month in areas of Annapolis and Anne Arundel and Howard counties, with the remainder of the Baltimore region online in 2009. The service is already available in Minneapolis and St. Paul; the Boston metro area; parts of southern New Hampshire; the Philadelphia metro area; New Jersey; Seattle; Portland; Spokane, Wash.; and Eugene, Ore.

Which leaves the question: Can Wi-Fi go head-to-head with WiMax or other approaches to broadband access to the Internet, over the air?
More on Baltimore’s Internet drama from ZDNet:
* Sprint XOHM WiMAX service launches in Baltimore
* Xohm WiMAX service to launch in Baltimore in September 08

News about Docsis 3.0 on ZDNet:
* FIOS, DOCSIS 3.0: The future’s so fast you gotta wear goggles
* 100Mbps. 2010. Over the air. Don’t be surprised.
* 120 Mbps upstream? Even 30 Mbps? Come on- who really needs it?

by Caroline McCarthy
December 11, 2008 8:01 AM PST

Accel Partners, a longtime investor in social network Facebook, has created two new funds that add up to just over $1 billion, according to The New York Times. One of the funds, totaling $525 million, will be used to invest in European start-ups.

But the interesting part, at least where juicy tech gossip is concerned, is the other $480 million, which is going toward a new late-stage venture fund. A few speculative bloggers have connected the dots and taken this to mean that Accel may be looking to pump more cash into Facebook. The firm first invested in Facebook in 2005, and partner Jim Breyer sits on the social network's board of directors.

With the recession starting to hit social-network ad spending, and some critics expressing concern about whether Facebook's revenue can keep pace with its wild growth, there's a legitimate question as to how effectively Facebook has battened down the hatches for the economic storm. Raising more money would be an obvious solution, given the social network's repeated insistence that it's more important for the company to focus on expansion rather than profits for the next few years.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed speculation that his chief financial officer, former YouTube exec Gideon Yu, has been attempting to drum up interest in more venture cash. Accel has also invested in Glam Media, Metacafe, Etsy, BitTorrent, Trulia, Wetpaint, and a whole host of others. But Facebook, unsurprisingly, is front and center right now.

By Ryan Paul
December 11, 2008 - 12:25PM CT

Update: Google has announced that Chrome is no longer a beta. Chrome 1.0 is now available for download for Windows; Google says it is working on support for Mac OS X and Linux. When Google first began to expand beyond search, the company pioneered a new release management strategy that—to put it diplomatically—challenges the conventional definition of "beta."

Although some of Google's most prominent and widely-used web services still bear the beta designation long after their public debut, its new Chrome web browser is heading for a full release and won't remain in beta for much longer. Chrome is an open source web browser that leverages Apple's WebKit HTML renderer and a unique JavaScript virtual machine called v8. It offers a number of advanced features, such as the Incognito privacy mode and integrated search capabilities in its URL bar.

The browser also has a few very impressive innovations under the hood and is designed to isolate individual tabs in separate processes. When we reviewed it following the first public beta release in September, we liked what we saw, but we also identified some key limitations, such as the lack of support for a full bookmark manager and RSS feeds, and proper tab overflow behavior. Google has worked to address some of those weaknesses in subsequent releases.

Several new features have also been introduced in unstable developer builds that are made available through a special update channel. Google's plan to push Chrome out of beta was first revealed last month when Google VP Sundar Pichai announced that the browser would enter full release status in January and that Google could pursue partnerships with major OEMs in a bid to get Chrome shipped on new PCs.

By Preston Gralla
December 10, 2008

Firefox 3.1 may only be a point release -- from 3.0 to 3.1 -- but its just-released Beta 2 version is a good indication that the final release will be a must-have upgrade for anyone using Firefox. Beta 2 (now available from Mozilla) unveils the browser's most important new feature -- Private Browsing, which automatically deletes all traces of a browsing session.

In addition, the new beta turns on a feature designed to make the browser up to 40 times faster (at least, according to Mozilla). Browsing in private - The most important new feature in Beta 2 is the addition of Private Browsing -- the same feature that is called Incognito Mode in Chrome and InPrivate Browsing in Internet Explorer 8.

All traces of your browsing session are deleted when you use Private Browsing -- your browsing history, temporary Internet files, search history, download history, Web form history and cookies. (For obvious reasons, it's popularly known as "porn mode.") To launch a Private Browsing session, choose Tools --> Private Browsing. When you do that, you'll get a warning that Firefox is going to close all of your current tabs to launch a Private Browsing session.

Select Start Private Browsing, and from then on, the history of your session won't be kept. The only indication that you're using Private Browsing are the words Private Browsing in the title bar of your browser. To exit Private Browsing and return to your normal session, select Tools and uncheck the mark next to Private Browsing.