By Ryan Paul
August 08, 2008 - 06:15AM CT

At the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, analyst Jay Lyman of the 451 Group spoke about the potential for enterprise adoption of Ubuntu and the impact that community-driven Linux distributions will have on the market.

Companies are increasingly choosing free community-driven Linux distributions instead of commercial offerings with conventional support options. Several factors are driving this trend, particularly dissatisfaction with the cost of support services from the major distributors.

Companies that use and deploy Linux internally increasingly have enough in-house expertise to handle all of their technical needs and no longer have to rely on Red Hat or Novell, according to Lyman.

Procurement practices are evolving overseas, especially in Europe, where distributions like CentOS and Ubuntu are gaining more traction in corporate environments and data centers. "In Europe there is a greater propensity to consider something that is not from a traditional vendor," Lyman commented.

August 7, 2008
By Heather Havenstein

Almost half of all Internet users now use search engines on a typical day, according to a new study released Wednesday, that showed search engines are drawing ever closer to the all-time dominant Internet application -- e-mail.

The percentage of Internet users who turn to search engines has been steadily increasing from one-third in 2002 to 49% now, according to the report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Sixty percent of Internet users use e-mail on a typical day, according to Pew's statistics.

While the percentage of Internet users who search on a typical day grew 69% from January 2002 to May 2008, the use of e-mail on a typical day for the same six-year period increased from 52% to 60%, a growth rate of 15%, Pew noted. These new figures show search is far ahead of other popular daily Internet activities like checking the news (which 39% of users do on a typical day) or checking the weather (which 30% of users do on a typical day).

People who are using search engines are more likely to have at least some college education and incomes greater than $50,000 per year, according to the study. They are most likely to have at least six years of experience going online and to have their homes wired for fast Internet connections, Pew said. Younger users and men are more likely to search than older users or women on a typical day.

By Axonn Echysttas
07 August 2008, 10:35 AM

TO QUOTE A famous expression: "there can be only one". Looking at how things shape up for AMD and Nvidia, it's rather obvious to see that in the future there can be only one. To battle Intel and its upcoming technologies, it's going to take a lot more than what AMD or Nvidia can offer on their own.

They need to form a very close cooperation or even fuse into one single, across-the-board company. Daamit is in big trouble with its CPU line and Nvidia is in big trouble with... pretty much everything. But AMD has a big debt coming along with it and Graphzilla is far from being the richest boy in the classroom. However, they're both green, so check one on the compatibility list.

Not only in colour are the two companies a good match. Now that Ruiz is gone, maybe a bit of common ground can be found. If only Huang can forget about his ego for a few moments, only enough to realize that a common future is a much better path than a separate future. Daamit has a very nice engineering potential as well as several fabs in its pocket. It has the most efficient GPU to date and a CPU line to go with it, embattled as it may be.

Nvidia on the other hand, can fill in the high performance GPU gaps and can offer additional chipset know-how. Together, they have what it takes to deliver strong single and multi GPU technologies, a very complete physics support for gaming purposes and a great GPGPU range. AMD already delivered Puma, a unified mobile platform. Together with Nvidia, they can put the pressure on Intel, big time.

by Phil Wainewright
August 7th, 2008 @ 1:36 pm

We live in an era when any of us with an Internet connection can converse and do business instantly with strangers on the opposite side of the planet. Yet when any of us experiences a problem with one of the largest providers of that very technology, we might as well live on the Moon.

Yes, hey, Google, I’m talking about you. We’re here, on the outside, knocking on your door. Is there anyone at home? IDG reports today (via PC World) that an unspecified number of Google Apps users were locked out of their accounts by a Gmail problem for around 15 hours yesterday and today. Google left them tearing their hair out for lack of information, as IDG reports:

In the main Google Apps Discussion Group thread devoted to this incident, administrators complained loudly about the length of the outage and the lack of status update details offered by Google officials . “Seriously… It has been two hours. Can you provide us with another update? For a company with your reputation, I’m absolutely shocked at the apparent absence of customer service,” wrote a Google Apps administrator on the discussion forum on Wednesday. “This amount of down time is unacceptable.”

Sooner or later, Google will realize that if it aspires to be a business-class SaaS provider, then it’s going to have to take customer service seriously — and disprove the suspicion that its company culture can’t do enterprise-strength. A few months ago Amazon — finally — got serious about the enterprise and launched two enterprise-class paid support options along with a Service Health Dashboard.

by Ina Fried
August 7, 2008 8:37 AM PDT

Although it talks about the battle with Google as a marathon rather than a sprint, Microsoft is hoping that the Olympics will help give its Internet properties a tail wind. As Google and Yahoo are also doing, Microsoft is tailoring its search results to feature Olympics content.

Its news, video, and celebrity search results will all highlight Olympics content. Still, when it comes to search, Microsoft is probably going to have to be happy with the Bronze medal, in terms of overall traffic. In other events, though, Microsoft is going for the gold (OK, I'm done with Olympic metaphors). Most notable is its deal with NBC, which is using Microsoft's Silverlight to power the video on NBCOlympics.com, which is being produced in conjunction with MSN.

While much of the attention is focused on the thousands of hours of live and on-demand video streams for the PC, more limited options also exist for content to be downloaded to an Xbox, Zune, or Windows-running laptop.

By Jacqui Cheng
August 07, 2008 - 01:30PM CT

Believe it or not, some Internet users still don't use a search engine during the course of a typical day. That number is shrinking, however, according to new data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Almost half of all Internet users today use a search engine on an average day—a number that has increased from only a third of Internet users in 2002.

The trend may seem predictable, but it also means that there's still plenty of room for Google and its competitors to grow. The demographics of your typical search engine user are like those of many Internet-based services. Those who search on a daily basis tend to either have a college degree or have completed some college, come from households with an income higher than $50,000 per year, and have broadband at home.

The numbers are weighted slightly more toward men (53 percent versus 45 percent women) and toward the younger crowd, although the numbers for those over 50 are not tiny. After all, where would our parents and grandparents be without "The Google?" Pew points out that the variable most strongly correlated with search engine use is having a broadband connection—as more US homes get access to broadband, more users are willing to turn to the Internet (and thus to search engines) in order to find information.

One of the other reasons for rising numbers is that more sites are including a site-specific search engine as part of their site designs. "With a growing mass of web content from blogs, news sites, image and video archives, personal websites, and more, Internet users have an option to turn not only to the major search engines, but also to search engines on individual sites, as vehicles to reach the information they are looking for," writes Pew.

By Nate Anderson
August 06, 2008 - 10:25PM CT

Despite the fact that bandwidth costs for ISPs are dropping as fast as user traffic rates rise, many ISPs still face congestion problems at the last mile, and Bell Canada is no exception, as internal data recently showed.

Not content with simply throttling P2P traffic for ten hours a day, the company has just announced plans to impose usage-based billing on the small ISPs that buy wholesale access from Bell. In some cases, the "free" monthly limit will be as low as 2GB. No, that's not a typo. News of the move began to percolate through online forums this week as small ISPs expressed outrage over a practice that could make them even less competitive with Bell, and it then expanded (a bit) into blogs and outlets like the CBC.

The Canadian government requires Bell to lease access to other firms because of its infrastructure dominance, but Bell recently extended its P2P throttling techniques from its own ISP service (Sympatico) to wholesalers as well. This spawned its own outrage, as the small ISPs argued that Bell was forcibly removing one of the main ways that they could distinguish themselves from Sympatico (no throttling!).

The news that Bell would institute caps on new wholesale user accounts was seen as another attempt to undermine the small ISPs, which will soon have one less selling point (unlimited downloads!). Some wholesalers complain that this simply makes them, in effect, into mere resellers of Bell's own service. In Bell's view, however, the move is about fairness.

By Aharon Etengoff
07 August 2008, 8:44 AM

GOOGLE HAS announced the launch of yet another search tool geared towards advertisers, small business owners and academics. The latest add-on from the Mountain View giant reportedly offers users a detailed breakdown of search patterns across specific regions, categories and time frames.

According to Google, Insights works by analyzing web search samples across domains and calculates the number of searches executed for the relevant term over time. The results are then displayed on a graph, which is plotted on a scale from 0 to 100. The data is apparently normalised by the division of a common variable – thereby allowing the underlying characteristics of various sets to be compared.

by Paul Murphy
August 7th, 2008 @ 12:15 am

A few weeks ago we had a fascinating discussion here comparing the functionality available with the Staroffice/OpenOffice open source cluster to that available with Microsoft’s Office set.

The general conclusion, I thought, was that the two sets of technologies are roughly equivalent on office functionality but Microsoft wins easily in terms of development integration and related tools. Today I’d like to start expanding that discussion into two related areas: one focused on risk, the other on developed application functionality.

Since I believe in the adversarial advocacy route to truth used in the judicial system, I’m going to take the position first that the applications delivery ideas underlying the architecture in use determine both the limits of its toolsets and the extent of the risk you accept by using them; and second, that risks are higher, and the limitations more constraining, for Microsoft’s client-server than for the Unix/Smart display approach - where the latter is assumed to rely as much as possible on open source applications and development tools.

In today’s opening round on this I want to challenge readers who use Microsoft’s development tools in an Office or general business applications context to contest the following statement: Anything you can do with Microsoft servers, clients, Office, and dot.net technologies I can do better [i.e. at some combination of greater functionality, lower risk, and lower cost] using the standard LAMP/SAMP toolset with emphasis on OpenOffice and the Apache cluster.

by Rafe Needleman
August 6, 2008 5:10 PM PDT

Mozilla has released a 0.1 version of Snowl (official blog post), an experimental add-in for Firefox that reads news and nanoblog feeds. It's an attempt to marry together the incoming separate content streams that many of us have feeding on to our desktops full time: News and blog stories via RSS, and social and personal communications from services like Twitter.

Of course, under the skin they're all just RSS feeds. The key to mashing these feeds together is treating them somewhat differently depending on where they came from, and adding in capabilities to let you take action on an item. Currently, Snowl just showcases two ways to blend news and nanoblog feeds into a browser.

There's a three-pane view, like an e-mail client or a traditional offline RSS reader, and there's the newspaper or "river of news" view (which did not work correctly for me). The add-on searches for items you've received as you type in queries, which makes it a useful tool for quickly recalling items. My favorite feature is the left-hand navigation window, which by default displays a list of people--not folders or feeds, as most three-pane views do.

Click on a person and you see what they've sent into your feeds. Missing, so far, are capabilities to reply to or share items that you've read. Also, the nanoblog and social feed options are limited. Mozilla plans to layer in support for Facebook and other social sources as the experiment progresses. This is a good stab at addressing a common complaint, and I hope it continues to develop.

By Joel Hruska
August 06, 2008 - 08:15PM CT

Green may be the new black of the advertising industry, but an increasingly large number of corporations are interested in cutting energy use to save both the planet and their pocketbooks.

Rising fuel costs inevitably translate into rising energy costs, and while much of the US enjoys cheap power (7˘ per KwH in Louisville, KY, according to last month's bill), rates aren't exactly headed down. With no price relief expected in the near future, companies are searching for ways to cut their electricity use.

We've already seen an increasing number of organizations express concern over data center power consumption and cooling costs, but up to now, comparatively little has been said about desktop energy utilization.

The power draw of a data center outweighs that of a desktop by orders of magnitude, but the scales begin to balance when you consider just how many desktops a given company might own. Ironically, tackling the problem of corporate desktop energy efficiency (or lack thereof) is both amazingly easy and mind-bogglingly complex.

by Dana Blankenhorn
August 6th, 2008 @ 1:59 pm

I admire the audacity of what IBM is trying to do with its “Linux on a stick” program. It is amazing how cheap stick memories have gotten. Down at the local Fry’s you can get an 8 Gbyte stick for $35.

I’m old enough to remember 5 1/4 floppies with 128Kbytes. (Hey, Sparky, today’s 6th graders have no memory of 9/11.) But the hardware side of this remains a big problem, as I’m learning in my Linux laptop experiment. It’s the channel, stupid. IBM abandoned PC retailing when it sold its PC business to Lenovo of China, four years ago now, but here in the world the channel is where we get our stuff.

So I used my fingers to do a little shopping and educate Big Blue. When it comes to new hardware, most makers charge you for Windows even if you don’t get it. They do this to maintain their relationship with Microsoft. Sometimes they’ll load something like FreeDOS on for you, but the cost of Windows is usually baked-into the price you pay.

Small dealers, like LinuxCertified, sell Linux-only laptops, but given their small quantities their rock-bottom price can be higher than what you’d pay for a similar Windows machine. Given the fact that it takes less power and storage to run Linux than it does Vista, a used market might sound nice. But the savings aren’t huge and who are you dealing with?

by Stefanie Olsen
August 6, 2008 4:19 PM PDT

SAN FRANCISCO--E-commerce payment company PayPal has grown organically on the back of eBay, but apparently no longer. PayPal President Scott Thompson said here at the RBC Capital Markets conference Wednesday that by year's end, his company will derive more total payment volumes from its Merchant Services than from eBay buyers and sellers.

Merchant Services is the name for the payment software PayPal provides to third-party sites like Starbucks, Delta Airlines, and American Outfitters.(In the last quarter, eBay buyers and sellers---long the bread and butter of PayPal's business--racked up about 51 percent of the payment volumes.) That's a big shift for a company that was bought by eBay only six years ago.

"We've had organic growth with eBay, but as merchants migrated off the eBay platform (by building their own sites), they've brought us with them," Thompson said while speaking to a group of fund managers and venture capitalists at RBC's technology, media, and communications conference. That trend also couldn't come sooner.

PayPal is facing increased competition from the likes of Google's Checkout and newcomer Amazon.com. eBay's retail rival, Amazon, recently introduced an e-commerce payment service called Checkout by Amazon. To be sure, Thompson was giving a virtual sales pitch to investors. But the story is impressive.

By Nate Anderson
August 06, 2008 - 12:27PM CT

Mozilla Labs this week took steps to open up its idea factory to wider outside input, asking for community help to develop the next big ideas that might power future browsers. Like any good research lab, the goal is not an immediate product but a set of innovative ideas that can be played with and debated without the pressure of an immediate implementation.

Mozilla Labs' "concepts" can consist of three parts: ideas, mockups, or prototypes. The idea of throwing open the lab to more voices was all about hearing from... new voices (surprise!), so Mozilla wants to make sure that plenty of people can contribute, even if they can't hack code. "You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program," says the announcement.

"Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open-source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations." Ideas are simple text descriptions of a new concept. They're meant to be thrown out by anyone, then talked about and possibly taken to the next level, which is the mockup.

Mockups turn ideas into pictures or video clips that illustrate how the idea might look and operate in practice. Finally, prototypes are fully interactive implementations of ideas, though they may not be "fully functional or pretty." To illustrate the process, Mozilla commissioned three videos from UI designers, each showing possible ideas for browser development.

by Larry Dignan
August 5th, 2008 @ 1:31 pm

The Linux computing crowd smells blood and wants to make a run at Microsoft’s Vista operating system. Coinciding with LinuxWorld, IBM, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, Novell and Red Hat issued a joint statement promising “Microsoft free” desktops across the globe.

I doubt it will put a significant in Microsoft’s market share tally, but the dogpile will be interesting to watch. IBM’s Linux gang says it will deliver Lotus Notes and Symphony worldwide by 2009. The goal: Sprinkle the globe with Linux-based desktops in a year. In a statement touting the partnership, the companies said the time is right to upend Windows and Office-based PCs. Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president for IBM’s Lotus Software unit was a bit more blunt in a statement.

“The slow adoption of Vista among businesses and budget-conscious CIOs, coupled with the proven success of a new type of Microsoft-free PC in every region, provides an extraordinary window of opportunity for Linux. We’ll work to unlock the desktop to save our customers money and give freedom of choice by offering this industry-leading solution.”

The companies said they will work with hardware manufacturers to distributed a preloaded PC that includes “Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony and Lotus Sametime; the Linux operating system of each distributor; and software applications and installation services from the local partners in each market.”