By Sylvie Barak
18 November 2008, 1:04 PM

SUPERCOMPUTERS are especially trendy this week after SC08, but it seems even regular desktops could soon be getting the super treatment with computer makers like Dell seriously mulling the possibility of a PC built around Nvidia’s Tesla floating point accelerators.

The idea isn’t one that’s just been pulled out of a hat, but previous attempts at desktop supercomputery have all been a bit of a flop (as opposed to FLOPS). But Nvidia seems to think a Tesla desktop might just cut it, and has set about convincing the likes of Dell, Asus, Lenovo, Scan and Boxx to start configuring one up. The idea seems to be that the systems would be fully functional PCs based on four Tesla C1060 cards with a quad-core CPU and 16 GB of memory bunged in for good measure.

The desktop hulk would boast some 960 graphics cores and should be able to pack a theoretical four TFlops of single-precision processing punch. Of course, that’s not even mentioning the 400 GFlops in double-precision applications and the C1060 GPUs (T10P processor) clocked at 1.33 GHz putting out a performance of around 900 GFlops in a single-unit configuration. All for just $10,000.

Nvidia reckons a super Tesla puter would weigh in at 250 times faster than a normal desktop PC, but that’s not taking into account a super ATI competitor. A computer boasting an Nvidia SLI system or two of ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 cards could theoretically give the Tesla desktop a run for its money. Also, ATI reckons its tow 4870 X2 cards pack some 2.4 TFlops in single-precision, blowing the four Tesla cards out of the water in double-precision apps with 480 GFlops of performance.

by Mary Jo Foley
November 18th, 2008 @ 11:18 am

Two years ago this month, in November 2006, Microsoft inked its controversial cross-licensing pact with Novell. In exchange for Microsoft distributing to its customers certificates for Novell’s SuSE Linux, Novell basically conceded that its implementation of Linux violated Microsoft patents and agreed its customers needed patent-enforcement protection.

(That’s not how Novell or Microsoft likes to portray the arrangement, but that’s what it boiled down to, in essence.) Since the agreement was forged, a lot has happened. In the first few months after Novell and Microsoft announced their deal, Microsoft convinced a number of smaller Linux players they needed similar “patent protection” coverage. Among those who signed on Microsoft’s dotted patent-infringement line: Linspire and Xandros.

Red Hat held firm and wouldn’t succumb to CEO Steve Ballmer’s infringement sabre-rattling. In March 2007, Yankee Group issued a study noting that Novell’s share was growing vis-a-vis Red Hat’s, and said Microsoft’s certificate distribution was the main reason. And Microsoft and Novell proudly touted customers who they claimed were eager to seek shelter from potential Microsoft patent lawsuits by signing up for SuSE Linux.

In February 2007, Ballmer stated in no uncertain terms that the deal between Microsoft and Novell was proof that open-source vendors need to respect Microsoft’s intellectual property. One month later,Microsoft licensing officials made the bold (and as still publicly unsupported) claim that Linux and other free software violated 235 Microsoft patents.

by Robert Vamosi
November 18, 2008 1:50 PM PST

Without fanfare, Apple has apparently added antiphishing to its Safari 3.2 release. The new version of Safari, which was largely a security update and released last week, includes a new configuration option saying: "Warn when visiting a fraudulent website". It is configured to be on by default. So far, Apple is not talking about the enhancement, nor is there any documentation on the Safari site.

CNET tested the updated Safari 3.2 for Windows on various newly reported phish sites listed on DSLreports and PhishTank, and found none produced a warning. It could be that the phish sites being tested were not yet reported to the Google database or that the antiphishing update hadn't made it locally to our Safari browser for blocking. According to Ryan Naraine at ZDNet, the alert displays standard language. It also includes two links, one to Google's explanation of a phishing site, the other to a Google Report an Error page.

Apple is the last of the major browser vendors to offer antiphishing protection. Microsoft uses its own antiphishing and anti-malware tool for Internet Explorer; Mozilla uses a combination of tools, including Google, for Firefox; Opera uses Haute Secure to provide bogus site warnings to end users; and Google uses its own antiphishing technology within its Chrome browser.

By David Chartier
November 18, 2008 - 12:30PM CT

iPhone owners can now perform a Google query with the sound of their voice. Google Mobile App has long been one of the most useful iPhone apps for finding local search results, querying Wikipedia, or even quickly sifting through one's own address book, and thanks to a major update, users can speak virtually any search phrase into their iPhones and receive quick results for things like photos, the nearest coffee shop, and local movie showtimes.

Let's take a look at how it works. Available for free from the iTunes App Store, Google Mobile App (iTunes link) presents the company's trademark simple search interface, into which users can type general queries, or specific searches for a wide range of data types, incluing the web, contacts in the iPhone's address book, maps, images, news, shopping, and Wikipedia results.

As we previewed last Friday, this new version of the app (a verbose 0.3.142) brings voice searching, where users simply hold the iPhone up to their face and speak their query. Note that while most of Google Mobile App and its text-based features will run on an iPod touch, the vocal search feature is only compatible with the iPhone for now, and only in English. A number of other features and changes arrived in this new version, but we'll look at this vocal search feature first.

Google Mobile App takes advantage of the iPhone's proximity sensor to start and stop voice recording, and the audio file containing the voice query is sent to Google's servers for processing. The iPhone's location-based features are also automatically harnessed when necessary, and results are provided pretty quickly over WiFi and 3G.

By Egan Orion
17 November 2008, 6:15 PM

MORE EMAILS tipped up Friday in the ongoing 'Vista Capable' class action lawsuit against Microsoft, revealing the anger of HP executives who felt that Microsoft had betrayed them by relaxing its minimum PC chipset specifications for the 'Vista Capable' label to help Intel.

Disgruntled punters who bought low-end PCs preloaded with Vista Home Basic and sporting 'Vista Capable' stickers are suing the Vole because those systems can't handle the eye-candy Aero graphical interface that's featured in the Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate and Enterprise editions.

Unsealed by the US District Court in Seattle, Washington on Friday, this latest court filing contains several emails sent by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft executives regarding the Vole's late stage decision to downgrade its 'Vista Capable' programme requirements to include Intel's obsolescent 910 and 915 graphics chipsets, as requested by Intel executives.

HP had made significant investments to upgrade to newer PC graphics technology, based upon Microsoft's initially more demanding PC specifications for OEM participation in its "Windows Vista Capable" marketing initiative. In late 2005 or early 2006, Richard Walker, senior vice president of HP's consumer PC business unit, emailed Jim Allchin of Microsoft seeking assurance about the stability of the 'Vista Capable' PC specifications, writing:

By Tom Slee
18th November 2008 11:13 GMT

Guest opinion The Long Tail has just had another run-in with large amounts of real-world data, and again come out the worse for wear. Tens of millions of music transactions were analyzed by economists and the shape of the sales distribution shows no resemblance to the Pareto (or Power) Curve, 1/x^n of the Long Tail, but a near perfect fit with a log normal, exp(-x^2). So can the Long Tail survive?

I think it can, because there are actually two long tails. One is the Inspirational Tail, rolled out with winning enthusiasm and brio. The other is the the disingenuously Modest Tail that shows itself mainly in response to the critics. So far, the Modest Tail has come to the rescue of the Inspirational Tale, but now the pattern is reversing. In Chris Anderson's original essay these two tails seemed to be one and the same.

That essay was full of eye-opening facts, which seemed to support the inspirational language: "The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles." But even before the book of the essay hit the shelves the two started to diverge. Amazon's tail turned out to hold not over 50 per cent of the market, but less than 30 per cent. No matter.

Chris Anderson rephrased his inspirational claim that the market for niches is bigger than that for hits as a rhetorical question ("What if the non-hits, from healthy niche product to outright misses, all together added up to a market as big as, if not bigger than, the hits themselves?") and when challenged, coyly pointed out that it is "in the future conditional tense". Another inspirational eye-catcher was "the 98 per cent rule" - that 98 per cent of everything sells if you can just find a way to stock it.

By Nick Farrell
18 November 2008, 8:01 AM

USERS ARE FUMING after Dell twice advertised a computer for sale at less than half the usual price last week, but then abruptly pulled the offers. Bargain hunter websites in Australia were all a buzz with word that Dell was offering a Aus $799 Vostro 220ST computer on its website for $240.

Dell said it was all a terrible mistake and pulled the deal. Not only that, it refused to honour those people who had placed orders. But the same model was also involved in a similar problem earlier in the week. This time Dell accidentally offered the machine for $350 and also pulled out of the deal in exactly the same way. Punters are saying Dell deliberately advertised at an impossibly low price as a marketing ploy, knowing it could pull out at any time and claim the offer was a mistake.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald Dell believes it is justified in refusing to honour the sales, saying it did not send customers a notice accepting the orders and therefore no contract was created. Dell Australia spokesman Marty Filipowski claims the offer was simply a mistake and stemmed from Dell accidentally allowing customers to delete certain accessories from their orders.

The NSW Office of Fair Trading says traders such as Dell are generally obliged to deliver goods only if customers have paid for them, which creates a binding contract. Filipowski insisted that no cash had been accepted. ACCC spokeswoman Lin Enright, when asked if Dell had breached laws related to false advertising, said: "I'm advised that if it was a genuine mistake, and it seems to be, no action would be taken." However the question is, how seriously are you going to take Dell advert if it can make the same mistake twice in the same week.

by Larry Dignan
November 18th, 2008 @ 5:13 am

Facebook rolls out what appears to be a fine move: Verify applications are trustworthy and validate them. I could use the help given I don’t download a lot of Facebook apps since a lot of them would be described as crap. But this seemingly straightforward effort has raised a ruckus because Facebook is (gasp!) charging an annual fee to validate apps.

The contrast over this Facebook announcement is a bit comical. Facebook’s Sandra Liu Huang writes: As members of the Facebook Platform developer community, many of you spend a lot of time thinking about how to create new social experiences that are valuable to users. We know that you want to make sure that your applications have visibility so users can discover, try out and regularly engage with them.

That’s why we’re opening registration today for our Application Verification program — an optional new program designed to provide your applications with a way to stand out and reassure users that they will provide a good experience. Badges for verified applications will appear to users early next year, beginning in an application’s About Page and the Application Directory.

We’ll do our part to help educate users to recognize the verification badge as a symbol for applications that are respectful, transparent and meet the guiding principles for trustworthiness. In addition, users will see more information from verified applications as we increase their allocations for communication channels such as requests and notifications, and increase visibility of their stories in News Feed.

by Stephen Shankland
November 17, 2008 5:02 PM PST

Updated 5:11 p.m. PST with Yahoo announcement. Updated 5:21, 6:19 p.m., and 6:57 p.m. PST with further detail. Yahoo, under fierce financial pressure, has begun a search to replace company co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive, the company said Monday.

"Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level," Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement. "We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo as a key executive and member of the Board."

Yang will resume his position as chief Yahoo, the company said, the role he had before taking over in 2007 after former CEO Terry Semel departed. After reporting a 64 percent drop in net income and warning that the advertising market is softening, Yahoo announced a layoff of at least 1,430 by the end of 2008 in October. The cut follows another in which about 1,000 Yahoo employees lost their jobs in February. In after-hours trading Monday, Yahoo rose 47 cents, or 4 percent, to $11.10.

All Things D's Kara Swisher reported the move earlier Monday. Hitting the reset button - "I think it's the right move for the company," said Eric Jackson, an activist Yahoo shareholder who has pressured the company for big changes. However, he added, "It's really too little too late. This is a board failure more than it is Jerry's failure. These problems have been around at Yahoo for well over two years now."

By Joel Hruska
November 17, 2008 - 10:00PM CT

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group announced today that the USB 3.0 specification has been finalized, some 14 months (almost to the day) after Intel first demonstrated a prototype USB 3.0 device. The new standard isn't expected to start headlining on motherboards until the latter half of 2009 (at the earliest), with compliant devices hopefully appearing sometime in 2010.

Expect USB 3.0-compliant motherboards to command a fair premium for the privilege; motherboard manufacturers will jump at the chance to differentiate themselves via support for the new, high-speed Super Speed interface. Those of you hoping that the USB group would seize this chance to adopt a naming scheme that wasn't invented by six year-olds can commence weeping.

Super-Speed USB 3.0, with its transfer rate of 4.8Gbps will join High-Speed (USB 2.0, 480Mbps), Full Speed, (USB 1.0, 12Mbitps) and Low Speed (USB 1.0, 1.5Mbps) on the list of easily understood USB standards. Anyone care to take an early stab at USB 4.0's eventual moniker? "Ultra Speed," "Xtreme Speed," or "OMGWTF Speed," all seem to be strong possibilities.

The road from prototype to finalized specification was marred by a few bumps, including a challenge from AMD and NVIDIA that Intel was unfairly sitting on the new standard's draft certification. USB 3.0 isn't just a faster implementation of USB 2.0—the new standard will support a more flexible power scheme, including support for reduced power operation and an idle power mode, but several core concerns appear to have gone unaddressed.

By David Chartier
November 17, 2008 - 01:40PM CT

3D modeling for the rest of us became a little more intelligent today with Google's announcement of SketchUp 7 and SketchUp Pro 7, new versions of its popular modeling software. Amid a healthy collection of new features in SketchUp 7 and SketchUp Pro 7 is a new type of "Dynamic Components," or 3D models that "are aware of what they are and behave like the real-world objects they represent."

Google uses the example of a dynamic staircase which can automatically gain or lose steps when using SketchUp's Scale too to increase or decrease its size. Dynamic Components also maintain resolution when scaling them, can be designed for easy configuration out of the box, thanks to a new Component Options dialog that allows for adjusting aspects without having to get one's hands dirty with modeling tools.

Also new in SketchUp 7 and SketchUp Pro 7 is the integration of the Google 3D Warehouse, a public area where users can upload and share models they have created. Google announced the 3D Warehouse when it originally released a free version of SketchUp in 2006, after the acquisition of the application from @Last Software. Until now, however, Google 3D Warehouse and its millions of user-generated components could only be searched and accessed externally via a browser, outside of SketchUp.

Along with this integration for Google 3D Warehouse, the company has also introduced an attribution layer to the warehouse that allows users to tag their creations with their name, ensuring that credit is given where due. A number of other features have arrived for both SketchUp and its big Pro brother, including an Interact tool that can trigger built-in Dynamic Component behaviors like animations or color changes, custom templates, antialiasing for textures, various UI tweaks, and the ability to edit textures in external photo editors.

by Dan Farber
November 17, 2008 12:21 PM PST

OpenSocial is growing up fast. What started out as Google's effort to create a common application programming interface for developing small applications that can tap into multiple social-networking services is becoming a full-fledged development platform.

According to the OpenSocial Foundation, it has garnered a potential audience of 600 million users, with 7,500 compliant applications developed so far and 20 containers (hosts for social applications) supporting the APIs within the last 12 months. The Google spin-off incorporated itself as a nonprofit foundation to ensure support from a broad range of social-networking competitors, including Yahoo, MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, and Xiaonei, China's largest social network.

Giants Facebook and Microsoft, however, have so far not jumped on the OpenSocial bandwagon. Facebook has 125 million active users around the world, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seeking to establish Facebook as an "open" application platform and so far is holding off on endorsing OpenSocial. Facebook investor Microsoft, which last week introduced a social dimension to its Windows Live platform, is in the midst of rolling out a cloud services development platform.

The large OpenSocial contingent, plus Facebook and Microsoft, are all advocates of open Web standards, but they are in a competition for developers. "Everyone doing social stuff is interoperable at some level of the stack," said David Glazer, vice president of engineering at Google. "Facebook and Microsoft are using a big chunk of the open stack. Open architectures are all converging. It's moving fast--last year, there was no such thing as a social platform."

by Doug Washburn
November 17th, 2008 @ 1:28 pm

In a number of recent client interactions with both enterprise IT end users and vendors, the question of “Is the ‘green’ in Green IT dead?” has come up. Primarily driven by the current economic climate, IT end users want to understand how relevant the environmental benefits of Green IT should be to their strategic planning; likewise, vendors want to know how palatable green messaging of their products and services is to their customers.

First and foremost, technology is not green and never will be. The design, manufacture, operation and disposal of IT equipment generates tremendous upfront and ongoing environmental impact (read more about this in my “Is Green IT Your Emperor With No Clothes?” research). A recent – and very primetime – example of this is the 60 Minutes “The Electronic Wasteland” segment.

David Berlind from InformationWeek offers a great follow on to this in his “An E-Waste Story That’ll Make You Want To Quit Tech” story. Secondly, the ecological benefits of Green IT take a backseat to the business benefits – namely cost reduction. In other words, IT leadership’s driving motivation for Green IT is financial, not environmental.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. At the end of the day, corporations – even those with the greenest of intentions – make decisions to effectively manage risk, costs and revenues to deliver profits which ultimately drive shareholder value. While corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability is on the rise, these practices are being employed to ultimately achieve an economic goal. And a green strategy can be an effective means to this financial end.

November 15, 2008
By Sumner Lemon and Martyn Williams

Intel Corp. began sales of its high-end Core i7 desktop chips in Tokyo late Saturday night, bringing to market a series of processors that are significantly more powerful than any of the company's current desktop products.

In a move intended to stoke demand among Japanese PC enthusiasts, shops in Akihabara, Tokyo's main electronics district, stayed open past midnight to put the first Core i7 chips on sale. The launch preempted a San Francisco news conference planned for Monday, as signs increasingly point to softening global demand for computers.

"This is a major new architecture for Intel, and to be able to launch it here first to the user community that Akihabara supports is a really exciting thing for us to do," said Steve Dallman, vice president of sales and marketing and general manager of Intel's worldwide reseller channel organization, shortly after the midnight launch. He was referring to the PC hobbyists and gamers who crowd the area's electronics stores in search of components to build their own computers.

"One of the features in the new processor I think they are going to be very excited about is Turbo mode," he said. "There's also Turbo-tuning, which allows them to go in for the first time and tune 20 different parameters to optimize the performance of the processor." The 3.2-GHz Core i7 965 Extreme Edition is priced at $999, while the 2.93-GHz Core i7 940 and 2.66-GHz Core i7 920 are priced at $562 and $284, respectively.

By Cade Metz
17th November 2008 19:11 GMT

A New Yorker has sued Apple over hairline cracks known to appear in the Jesus Phone. In a 23-page complaint that seeks class-action status, Long Island resident Avi Koschitzki howls about poor reception on the 3G iPhone, joining a chorus of existing legal complaints over Apple's use of AT&T's third gen wireless network.

But he also accuses Steve Jobs and cult of allowing unsightly physical flaws in their handheld status symbol. "The 3G iPhones do not and cannot adequately perform due to the insufficient 3G bandwidths and AT&T infrastructure," the suit, which was filed last in federal court in the Eastern District of New York, reads.

"Additionally, the iPhones have had well-known and documented issues regarding the premature 'wear-and-tear' of the iPhones’ housing, including the formation of hairline cracks in the iPhones’ casing." As early as July 31, iPhone buyers turned up at Apple's discussion forums to voice their displeasure over the cracks, and Koschitzki says the company has ignored their hardship.

"Although Apple was and is aware that the iPhones were and are defective, and that consumers have experienced repeated instances of cracked housing, Apple has nevertheless allowed the defectively designed iPhones to be sold to the public," his suit continues.