Scott M. Fulton, III

The death of Usenet has been proclaimed for well over a decade now, but the use of some derivative of the Internet's NNTP protocol for the trafficking of messages -- some of which are actually parts of legitimate conversations -- continues today. In fact, it probably can't really be stopped since, as is the case with a P2P network, no one really owns Usenet.

Since 2001, the Web's portal to Usenet has been Google Groups, the successor to the Deja.com archiving system. Google's plans to make something of Google Groups stretch as far back as 2004, with promises to make the experience more personalized and exciting. For the most part, Google Groups provides organizations with an expense-free system for broadcasting memberships to select groups on an opt-in basis.

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In what may become the most wide-ranging insider stock trading scheme to be uncovered this decade, evidence uncovered last month by the US Securities and Exchange Commission led to the indictment last week of IBM Senior Vice President Robert Moffat, believed to have been the next-in-line for the CEO post. Moffat was indicted on October 16, arrested on criminal insider trading charges, and has posted $2 million bail, according to reports.

Now, the latest name to become linked to the alleged scheme has submitted his resignation, effective next January, and will take a leave of absence in the interim. Dr. Hector Ruiz was chairman of GlobalFoundries, the manufacturing entity spun off from AMD, which Ruiz led as its chairman and CEO during the dawn of the multicore era.

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If Apple's Safari is going to make any kind of a challenge for best performing Windows-based Web browser moving into next year, it needs to be now. In Betanews' most extensive testing to date, involving tests that by anyone's guess should not have given it any special advantages, the latest stable edition of Google Chrome runs away with a three point lead over the latest stable Safari -- a lead that now grows by one-half point with each point release.

Chrome now posts test scores in certain heats of our revised CRPI 2.2 test battery that are virtually obscene -- so far ahead of competition that we have to validate our results on various machines to make sure we're not generating false results. For example: On the control flow element of the SunSpider test, both Chrome 3 and the dev build of Chrome 4 post record low time scores of 2.6 ms. This is an element that tests the JavaScript interpreter's capability to keep track of nested loops and its location in a twisted program. By comparison, the latest public Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 -- released late yesterday afternoon after a flurry of delays totaling over one month -- posts a score of 38.2 ms in that category.

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We did not have the Comprehensive Relative Performance Index (CRPI -- the "Creepy Index") out for very long before we found it needed to be changed again. The main reason came from one of the architects of the benchmark suites we use, Web developer Sean Patrick Kane. This week, Kane declared his own benchmark obsolete, and unveiled a completely new system to take its place.

When the author of a benchmark suite says his own methodology was outdated, we really have no choice but to agree and work around it. As you'll see, Kane replaced his original, simple suite that covers all the bases with a very comprehensive, in-depth battery of classic tests called JSBenchmark that covers just one of those bases. For our CRPI index to continue to be fair, we needed not only to compensate for those areas of the old CK index that were no longer covered, but also to balance those missing points with tests that just as comprehensively covered those missing bases.

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Let's face facts: The real reason you'd ever want a search engine to locate "similar images" to one or more you're observing at the moment, is because you're not certain of what you're looking for or what you want to find. A search for photographs that look like da Vinci's Mona Lisa is going to turn up more pictures of the same Mona Lisa. And while a search for photos that look like Paris Hilton will turn up more photos of Paris Hilton, a search for photos that look like other one-hit wonders like William Shatner will turn up pictures of folks we may have never heard of, like someone named Mike Vogel.

So while Google Labs' pre-built experimental searches for its first public incarnation of Similar Images, unveiled Wednesday, does demonstrate an uncanny ability to isolate Paris Hilton pictures from its index, the fact that most of those pictures are labeled "Paris Hilton" anyway suggests that these are not real-world experiments. In the real world, people are looking for a picture of that person in that show with the other guy with the weird hair, or a painting from an artist with the funky name. They're looking for the imaging algorithm to fill in the gaps for the information they don't have on hand, not to demonstrate the ability to mimic a successful search when the information is in front of our face.

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Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 from Fileforum now.

One of the nicest new features in Microsoft Windows 7 concerns the revised taskbar, specifically how many more choices are available to you when you right-click an icon, or when you just hover over it to see where all your open windows are. In Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, which went live just minutes ago, the browser's integration with the Win7 taskbar is now on a par with that of Internet Explorer 8.

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The final test editions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, released while Windows 7 was still in the technical preview phase, suggested that its performance could very well triple that of its predecessor, the venerable IE7. When the RTM edition first became available, its performance was pared down a bit, but still better than double that of IE7, based on Betanews' assessments at the time.

But we've noticed a trend of IE8 performance dragging down over time, while every other major Windows browser in the field was headed the other direction -- and fast. Early this month, when Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 appeared imminent (and still is at this moment), we calculated the performance difference between IE8 and IE7 at about 75%.

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Typically when you upgrade a computer from one operating system to the very next level up, you don't want the new system replacing or deleting anything without your knowledge and approval. Windows 7 thus far seems to be quite good on this score. But perhaps it's too good in the case of its new and somewhat enhanced Windows Media Center, whose new reliance on an upstream recording prevention mechanism that's part of its PlayReady scheme, among other things, renders obsolete Vista's media settings.

As a result, if you have a TV tuner in your Vista-based PC, and you follow all the instructions for migrating to Win7, the new Media Center could insist you don't have a TV there at all. Betanews was able to reconstruct the conditions of a situation some upgraders are reporting where their built-in tuners disappear. Luckily, we also have a solution to the problem that worked for us, and that may hopefully work for you if you're in similar circumstances.
But let's concede right off the bat, it's not an easy or intuitive solution, so don't blame yourself thinking there's something you missed.

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Although we had good reason to expect that most folks' experiences with Windows 7 upgrades this past week would be, as we put it, "without the crap," the exceptions are starting to show up. One of the more serious cases involves Intel, which has withdrawn its latest solid-state drive firmware update after multiple reports from disgruntled users of complete storage system failure following their Windows 7 upgrades.

The new firmware, along with Windows 7, was supposed to support a new internal file management methodology called TRIM. Its purpose was to compensate for a problem typical of memory-based storage, as opposed to traditional magnetic disks: Since memory systems must keep track of their contents even some of those contents aren't really in use, over time, SSDs' performance can lag. While traditional disks don't have to retain a memory of the contents of sectors pointing to "deleted" files, SSDs do...and they can't wipe the contents of those sectors individually. Instead, they have to wait until entire blocks become disused -- which happens less and less often as drives become more and more fragmented. TRIM was supposed to overcome that deficiency with a kind of self-optimizing mechanism, letting SSDs wipe blocks more often, thus overcoming lags and keeping performance levels high over time.

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Come November 1, Amazon's Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a "quadruple extra-large" AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).

The new high-end instances won't come cheap -- they'll carry a premium of $2.40 per instance-hour for Linux editions, and $2.88 per instance-hour for Windows Server 2003. The previous high-end AMI, still called "extra large," had been priced at nearly one-third that amount.

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In a lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court for DC, the US Chamber of Commerce charged the company that manages the team of self-styled comedians and social activists known as the Yes Men with criminal fraud, including the creation of a fake Web site designed to resemble the real Chamber site, specifically to promote sales of their new film and paraphernalia surrounding that film. Along the way, the Chamber bypassed any allegation that might lead directly to the "parody defense" -- that appropriating the appearance of the target of parody is necessary in order to "bring to mind" the subject of that parody, as the law puts it.

Instead, the Chamber went straight for the heart, alleging that the creation of a Web site at www.chamber-of-commerce.us was done to dilute the value of the real Chamber trademark. "Defendants' use of Plaintiff's marks without the authorization or consent of the Chamber causes tarnishment by associating those marks with Defendants, whose positions and tactics are inconsistent with positions and conduct of the Chamber, its members, and prospective members."

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The usual reason commonly given for the creation of technology standards is to enable a more open, seamless process for licensing and adoption. But in its lawsuit filed last week against iPhone maker Apple, Nokia is attempting a rather interesting spin on this definition, a spin which may very well reflect reality: It argues that standards are broadly licensed in order to increase the size of the market which those standards can address.

As a result, when a transgression against the standard comes about -- for instance, by way of failure to pay royalties -- the rights holders throughout the market enabled by that standard, have a duty to come to its defense. An attack against one, in other words, is an attack against the whole portfolio.

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During a Mozilla developers' planning meeting today, it was officially announced that Firefox users will begin seeing notices for version 3.5.4's availability beginning tomorrow (October 27). Full information about security issues addressed by this regular update will probably be released at that time, although Betanews tests indicate that Windows 7 users in particular will probably notice a bit of a speed boost, on account of improved document load times.

The first public beta of Firefox 3.6, which adds even more Windows 7 integration, will be released the following day. It will probably not be the final public beta for the product, as a development cycle for Beta 2 has been ongoing since the Beta 1 code was frozen last October 14.

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Three weeks ago, the European Commission signaled its approval of Microsoft's revised plan for a more vendor-neutral Web browser selection screen for European Windows users. But that revised plan was buffered with a big bonus: a promise to supply the general public with a wealth of interoperability information, including about proprietary formats.

Among the most sought after formats on that list has been for Outlook Personal Folders -- the much-maligned .PST file format, whose lack of comprehension has been the pet peeve of certainly every developer who's ever worked on a calendar or smartphone synchronization utility. Now the manager for Microsoft's new Office Interoperability Group announced this morning that work is under way on public documentation for the file format.

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It looks like the US Chamber of Commerce Web site, and has a convincing URL: www.chamber-of-commerce.us. It bears the seal of the Chamber, a private organization that advocates for business issues before federal legislators. And where you'd expect to find links to the real Chamber Web site, there they are -- real links to www.uschamber.com.

But it's another daring act of imitation crafted by the self-proclaimed impostors known as the Yes Men -- the same group that, in 2004, successfully pretended to be Dow Chemical representatives, appearing on the BBC to take responsibility for the Bhopal chemical plant tragedy. This was after Yes Men posted a similar impostor Web site purporting to come from Dow Chemical. That site had a press response address, to which the BBC addressed its request for an interview, and from which Yes Men -- still pretending -- complied.

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