Scott M. Fulton, III

Adobe releases alpha of AIR for Linux, joins Linux Foundation

Is Adobe playing catch-up in the open source development field? Or is the open source community not giving it enough of that valuable feedback it's so well-known for. This morning, Adobe's giving the community an extra chance.

The stated goal of Adobe since 2006 has been to build an operating environment using its Flash technologies, that is truly cross-platform and that can run offline. To accomplish that for real, Adobe needed to embrace more platforms outside the traditional box than just Macintosh; so today, even if the current build isn't ready for prime time, the company released what it's describing as a feature-incomplete version of the AIR platform for Linux.

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Preview of new Windows Search adds cross-PC indexing

A typical lexical search engine creates a single, indexed repository of addressable content, which can get pretty cumbersome to search through unless your name is "Google." Now, Microsoft is shedding a little more light on an alternative.

One very seldom noted project at Microsoft is an offshoot of the old WinFS file system project, and which is slowly seeing the light of day, just through another route: It's the ability for one PC's local search engine database to access another PC's index. Imagine a kind of peer-to-peer distributed search environment rather than a centralized repository, a more "open" approach compared to the more organic, nuclear model that Microsoft attributes to Google.

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Newest Safari browsers find themselves shooting gallery targets

Apple could soon find itself the #5 PC producer in the US. Part of the cost of success is prolonged exposure to a more intense spotlight, and when more people are looking at your close-ups, they tend to notice your wrinkles.

It's unusual for Apple to be the one fighting a two-front battle for browser security. But today it's the one that feels like it's being pummeled with tomatoes normally reserved for Microsoft. Yesterday, the latest Safari running on a MacBook Air actually went down first in a public contest for security engineers, just days after an Argentine researcher discovered that a very old JavaScript page spoofing routine could direct Safari for Windows to just about any address.

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AMD's price/performance conundrum: Can it keep its high-end customers?

Its highest-end CPUs will be stuck behind two big barricades -- a 2.6 GHz speed cap and a 65 nm barricade -- until at least the latter half of the year. So AMD now looks to ATI to help make up the difference, with an argument that just might work.

AMD's value proposition for its updated desktop processors is based on a return to the company's remaining strengths, and a hope that it can triangulate its positions in three corners of the PC component market -- CPUs, GPUs, and chipsets -- to eke out a price/performance claim that's stronger than any of its components viewed separately.

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Safari for Mac, Opera for Windows both claim 100% on Acid3

As the race for perfect compliance with the Web Standards Project's latest test battery heats up, the two dark horses in the race claim a neck-and-neck finish ahead of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Screenshots of perfect 100/100 scores on the Acid3 standards compliance test for apparently the most recent daily development builds, were posted on the team blogs for both the Safari browser for Mac and Windows and the Opera browser for Windows, at the very same hour early yesterday evening. It may have been perhaps the closest photo-finish since Intel and IBM claimed they discovered the hafnium formula for high-k dielectrics on the same morning.

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AMD transforms into a platform company, to release triple-core CPUs

It builds CPUs, chipsets, and now with ATI, it builds graphics processors. So beginning today, AMD is radically reforming its marketing strategy, arguing now that it takes all three components together in harmony for customers to realize value.

Between now and April 7, AMD will be releasing its first triple-core processors, announced last September, along with performance upgrades to all three of its quad-core Phenom desktop processors. The success of their release may be completely dependent upon how well the company's new value proposition is received by consumers: What their CPUs may lack in performance against Intel's top-of-the-line, may be compensated when you add an AMD chipset-based motherboard and an ATI graphics card.

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Which company will be 'Motorola' in 2009?

During a half-hour conference call with investment analysts this morning, Motorola CEO Greg Brown provided very few more details regarding his company's plans to become two companies.

"Today's announcement that we are creating two new businesses will create many benefits...As separate, publicly traded entities, the Mobile Devices business and the Broadband and Mobility Solutions business would each have global scale and leadership in key markets," Brown told analysts. "Each company would benefit from improved flexibility, a capital structure more tailored to its individual business needs, and increased management focus. Investors will have a more targeted investment opportunity, and employees and management will be more closely aligned with each company's goals and objectives."

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Google advises shareholders again to vote down anti-censorship proposal

For the second straight year, the search giant is silently opposing a proposal to shareholders that would prohibit it from housing personally identifiable data in countries whose human rights policies could be detrimental to its customers.

It's a publicly known, if not well known, fact that part of New York City's many pension funds are invested in the stock market. Among the city's teachers, firefighters, police, and administrative employees, their pool of ownership of Google stock alone now totals nearly $383.3 million, according to the city's comptroller-general, William C. Thompson, Jr. So it seems only fair that those employees should have a respectable voice with regard to the policies of the companies in which they invest.

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Motorola begins its plan to split Mobility from Devices

There will be two Motorolas, once all this is done, and both could very well retain the same brand, logo, and parent or co-parent company. But they will be two companies, and the Mobile Devices business will have new leadership.

Former CEO Ed Zander stepped down last November, leaving his replacement Greg Brown to execute a systematic executive housecleaning, with "execute" being the operative word. But when that's done, Brown himself won't be the leader of the future company currently being referred to as Motorola Mobile Devices.

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XAML specification published, added to Microsoft's open promise

It's the language that Microsoft's opponents in Europe claim the company is using as a possible proprietary bypass of HTML. But now, that opposition will have to face the fact that nearly every scintilla of detail about XAML is in the public record.

The second bit of news emerging from Microsoft today on the interoperability front comes from its release of complete documentation for its existing 2006 implementation of Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML): both the object mapping specification and the vocabulary specification for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). (Complete ZIP file with both specs available here)

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Yahoo enrolls in Google's OpenSocial network, joining MySpace

On the same day Microsoft casts its net to draw Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, and two others into a contacts-sharing system, Yahoo joins Google's similar collective which already snared MySpace and just poached imeem. The battle lines are starting to be drawn.

You can't find any corner of the computing industry these days where there are fewer than two competing standards or ways of doing business. Among the general "social networking community," there are fast becoming two centers of gravity. Google already placed itself at the center of one with its creation of the OpenSocial Foundation last October; and if Microsoft isn't exactly at the other center, it's trying to adjust its orbit to come close enough, with the establishment of a network of services with Windows Live as the facilitator.

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Microsoft offers a contacts 'bridge' to Facebook, Bebo, others

One way to make yourself accessible to others is by offering a valuable service that they can't easily turn down. Microsoft hopes it's doing that today by offering users of LinkedIn, Facebook, and three other platforms a way to consolidate their contacts...through Windows Live.

Rarely does a week go by without Microsoft announcing another interoperability initiative; the company has put forth two new ones just this morning. One deals not so much with making some Microsoft product accessible to the outside world as it does with offering a kind of bridge between social media platforms, although it's hard to escape noticing that this bridge runs right through Windows Live Messenger.

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INCITS chair: Failure of OOXML could endanger ODF

While the official ISO vote on Microsoft's response to thousands of technical comments on OOXML is being tallied, the man who made a personal U-turn that helped rally the US delegation now says the question of interoperability hinges on adoption.

The chairperson of the INCITS V1 technical committee -- the US' standards body representative to the International Organization for Standardization -- expanded on his stated position yesterday in support of Office Open XML's adoption as ISO standard DIS 29500, by suggesting that if ISO decides against adoption, the result could negatively impact the already adopted OpenDocument Format.

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Lack of interoperable radio key to XM + Sirius merger approval

As it turns out, if XM and Sirius actually were to deliver on an earlier promise to make an interoperable radio, that fact might precipitate a reduction in consumer choice. That's the conclusion Monday from the Dept. of Justice.

In an unusually sideways argument from the US Justice Dept. this afternoon, the fact that both XM and Sirius satellite radio services have been unable to create an interoperable radio device for the foreseeable future, has been put forth as evidence that a merger between the two entities -- which the DoJ approved this afternoon -- would not reduce competition between them.

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Accidental Wi-Fi access still a criminal offense in Maryland

If you're sitting on a coffee shop patio with your laptop, and you find out later that you happen to be accessing the Wi-Fi from the attorney's office upstairs by accident, should you go to prison? A Maryland legislator says no, but his bill is facing opposition.

A bill introduced by a Maryland state delegate that would hold users innocent when they accidentally access the Wi-Fi services of portals other than the one they think they're logged onto, faces trouble today after an unfavorable report to the state's House Judiciary Committee.

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