Seagate: Solid-State Disks Will Never Replace Magnetic Storage
A statement to BetaNews today by one of Seagate Technology's top managers indicates that some of the content of yesterday's Wall Street Journal story -- whose original online headline was "Seagate to Enter Flash Memory Market," prior to having been edited -- may have been inaccurate.
Josh Tinker, market development manager for Seagate's Personal Compute division (not a typo), told BetaNews this afternoon that his company does indeed plan to enter the solid-state disk drive market, but has no plans to shift production -- as reports yesterday indicated -- away from traditional hard disk drives any time soon.
Microsoft Endorses Product That Turns Off Vista UAC Nags
The latest version of a well-reviewed third-party security policy enhancement system for Windows Vista claims to solve what its manufacturer characterizes as "not a secure solution" to a critical problem Windows historically had with administrator privileges on programs. But in the announcement of the upgrade earlier this week, a key Microsoft product manager is quoted as having acknowledged Vista's own take on the solution was not quite enough, effectively reversing his company's stand on User Account Control.
The product is BeyondTrust Privilege Manager 3.5, and its key new feature is the ability to run Vista's UAC transparently without prompting the user for privilege elevation. In Monday's press release, Microsoft director of client security product management Austin Wilson is quoted as not only endorsing the product, but appearing to agree with BeyondTrust's key contention: that the UAC prompts were not only a nag but an insecure solution in itself.
Skype: Client Updates May Have Played a Role in Service Outage
The Skype representative who first invoked the phrase "perfect storm" to describe the confluence of events that led to 48-hour service outage on August 16, told BetaNews today that circumstances such as those we experienced in our own tests yesterday could indeed have contributed to triggering that storm, if only in a minor way.
Villu Arak, who works in Skype's global public relations department, told BetaNews this morning that the incident we experienced, and which we described to Skype at length, was the first he'd heard about unusual client-side update behavior. "Still, while what you described could have played a small role in the disruption," he wrote us, "the series of events that led to the outage was triggered by unattended automatic reboots."
Europe Lays Framework for Mobile Satellite TV by 2009
At the same time that the US makes its first transition to an all-digital terrestrial broadcasting system for television, member states of the European Union may all be rolling out mobile satellite services (MSS) for no less than satellite television. Imagine a Sirius/XM-style portable network, whose receivers will likely be integrated into cellular phones, on a continental scale as soon as 20 months from now.
It's an ambitious idea, and it's not nearly a done deal. But yesterday, a proposal was introduced before the European Parliament for a timetable by which the EU would select a few choice service providers, for the precious and narrow spectrum it will be making available for the entire continent. It will require the consent and cooperation of all 27 member states - something the EU rarely gets even with less ambitious proposals.
AMD's SVP for Marketing to Exit, Leaving Behind Stellar Legacy
The man credited with making the global CPU industry a two-horse race once again in the public mind is leaving next month the company he helped put back on the map. Henri Richard, who put a personable, approachable, practical face on AMD as its senior vice president for marketing over the past five years, will pursue other interests outside the PC industry, AMD confirmed last night.
It was Richard's strategy to re-develop AMD's product offerings into discrete product lines that targeted customer segments instead of manufacturing generations. The Athlon/Sempron/Turion/Opteron subdivisions, and the subsequent introduction of Athlon FX, Phenom, and the possible future Fusion series, were all part of Richard's and AMD's strategy to combat Intel on multiple levels individually and simultaneously.
Microsoft Demonstrates Return of S/MIME E-mail for Outlook Web Access
In a blog post on Monday, the development team for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 showed screen shots of an enhancement to Outlook Web Access that enables encrypted e-mails to be sent and received through a Web browser. The demo marks the return of S/MIME support, which had been introduced to OWA before, but which had temporarily disappeared with the first release of ES 2007.
As with Exchange Server 2003 and prior editions, the demo clearly shows that users will need to download and run an additional S/MIME control along with their browsers. For now at least, that makes S/MIME support a Windows-only function, even though OWA itself can be used through browsers in Linux and other environments.
Webcasters Offered Lower Royalties If They Promise to Remain Small
The performance rights organization that collects royalties from streaming music providers on behalf of recording artists and copyright holders, has offered small streamers a reduced rate that caps royalties collected at 10% to 12% of their annual revenue. But for selected streamers to qualify, they would need to sign an agreement with the SoundExchange organization that would include a cap on growth, and a possible penalty for growing too fast.
In a statement late yesterday, SoundExchange described the restriction as "a usage cap to ensure that this subsidy is used only by webcasters of a certain size who are forming or strengthening their businesses." Webcasters would have until September 14 to sign on the dotted line, which is not long after Congress reconvenes after summer recess.
San Francisco Elections May Have Used Uncertified Machines
According to revelations made public today by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, as many as 972 electronic voting machines sold to San Francisco and four other counties by Election Systems & Software, Inc., may never have actually been certified by the state prior to their sale.
The systems in question were all AutoMARK A200 version 1.1, some of which were apparently delivered throughout 2006, prior to their having been certified by the federal government. The A200 has never been certified by California state government, because ES&S never submitted it to the state for its certification.
Could Skype's Own Update Have Contributed to Last Week's Outage?
BetaNews reported yesterday that Skype issued an update notice to its users for downloading the new release of its VoIP client software, on the Monday prior to what Skype engineers are now calling a "perfect storm" of events which took down its network for about 48 hours. In our report, we posed the question of how a mass Microsoft software update on Patch Tuesday have triggered such a storm on a Thursday. This morning, BetaNews' tests revealed a possible clue to an answer.
On one system last Monday, August 20, at approximately 11:00 am ET, we installed an upgrade to Skype bringing it up to version 3.5.0.214. The upgrade immediately brought up the new program, which appeared to be - and still appears to be - fully functional and in good working order. Wednesday morning, after two full system standbys (S3 sleep mode hibernation) had passed though without a full system reboot, and without the Skype client actually running, a "Restart required" message appeared on that system's screen.
Adobe: New Flash Beta Will Deliver 1080p in H.264
A high-level representative of Adobe told BetaNews late yesterday that "Moviestar," the code-name for the latest upgrade to its Flash Player 9 software, will indeed be capable of playing back H.264-encoded video at modern high-definition: 1920 x 1080.
Mark Randall, Adobe's Chief Strategist for Dynamic Media Organization, also told BetaNews that the newly supported H.264 format will be capable of playing back videos encoded for Apple's QuickTime. H.264 is the video encoding codec currently used in MPEG-4.
Microsoft's Answer to Google AdWords Enters Beta August 29
Customers of Microsoft's AdCenter are being invited to participate in the company's first foray in the field of context-sensitive, text-only advertising - the product that many say established Google's permanent presence in online services.
Displaying its typical flair for draining all the poetry out of the naming process, Microsoft Content Ads enters the beta process one week from tomorrow, with the promise of opening up formerly premium MSN ad inventory to low-cost clients.
Microsoft Sets a Date for Unveiling UC Software
The first commercial release of Office Communications Server 2007 will be unveiled to the public on October 16, Microsoft announced this morning. Along with it will be the Office Communicator (OC) client - the company's professional grade on-screen messaging service - as well as the next edition of Live Meeting, whose conferencing features will be upgraded to support OC.
The move comes a day after Microsoft publicly made nice with Cisco, which is otherwise one of its principal competitors in the communications space.
Flash Player Beta Adds H.264, But Is It High-Definition?
A forthcoming update for Adobe's Flash Player 9, the beta testing for which is set to begin today, will incorporate the ability to decode H.264 videos - the Advanced Video Codec portion of MPEG-4, and the same standard currently used by Apple's QuickTime. Adobe's move comes as users of Macs, iPhone, and AppleTV have been noticing YouTube's gradual shift away from Flash video and toward H.264, which some speculate may become a complete shift within months.
While the new Flash version is not getting a new number, it is getting a new code-name: "Moviestar." A check of Adobe's release notes reveals why: The playback module now enables the hardware acceleration mode of many graphics cards, when going to full-screen mode. Earlier versions relied on software acceleration.
Microsoft: Patch Tuesday Didn't Cause Thursday Skype Outage
Yesterday afternoon, Microsoft's security engineers formally ruled out the possibility of its regular monthly "Patch Tuesday" update sequence as having triggered a worldwide outage of Skype VoIP communication service on Thursday, which lasted for about two days.
In a company blog post yesterday morning, Skype engineers disclosed that they suspected a wave of client-side reboots were triggered by Patch Tuesday at roughly the same time. The temporary reduction in P2P traffic capacity that followed, Villu Arak said, triggered a failure of the Skype VoIP network. This was after Arak had blamed an internal server software glitch, during the time of the outage.
IBM to Beta Test First Desktop Blade Server
In June, IBM announced a fourth-quarter release timeframe for a new class of BladeCenter systems for small and medium business. To make certain its initial rollouts are going the right way, this morning, IBM added that it's launching a beta test program for select BladeCenter S customers, encompassing perhaps dozens of clients in ten countries.
Whereas most SMB servers are based on processor platforms, with a blade cluster, the "platform" stops at the blade's edge. So BladeCenter S will offer clients the extraordinary option of Intel, AMD, or Power processors.
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