Opponents of Windows 7 IE plan label browser ballot screen a 'threat'
In a complete reversal of roles for at least one of the principal advocates for equal access to Windows Web browsers, an attorney for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems told the European Commission in a statement published by The Wall Street Journal today that he now sees the possible inclusion by Microsoft of a Web browser selection ballot for European users of its upcoming Windows 7 operating system as a threat to those users.
Last July, Microsoft submitted a proposal to the European Commission that it hoped would comply with its demands to unbundle Internet Explorer 8 from Windows 7, and give users a choice of competing browsers. "Nothing in the design and implementation of the Ballot Screen and the presentation of competing Web browsers will express a bias for a Microsoft Web browser or any other Web browser," the proposal reads, "or discourage the user from downloading and installing additional Web browsers via the Ballot Screen and making a Web browser competing with a Microsoft Web browser the default."
The utility pole dilemma: 21st century broadband faces a 19th century hurdle
If the Federal Communications Commission is serious about wanting to be the regulator of record for net neutrality -- which the FCC defines as guaranteeing the right of equal access -- then it will have to deal with an issue that Congress once tabled in order that the country could fight World War I: In the ultimate example of turnabout-as-fair-play, four of the nation's largest private utility companies are borrowing the newly re-forged principle of net neutrality to argue that they should not be forced by law to charge cable TV broadband and VoIP service providers a lower rate for stringing their equipment on their utility poles, than they charge other utility and telephone companies.
All things being equal, in other words, if a CATV provider should not be allowed to offer content providers discounts for heavy traffic on its pipelines, then a utility provider should not be forced to offer access to its poles -- the pipelines for the pipelines -- to CATV providers for discounts. Currently, a provision in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ensures that CATV providers get about a one-third discount over market rates for other utilities and telephone companies.
McAfee makes strides in the DRM business with Adobe partnership
On the surface, it might seem that a company whose principal business is malware detection and eradication would eschew the thought of associating itself directly with digital rights management technology. But the job of protecting one's assets in an enterprise setting, more than ever before, directly involves being able to identify to whom an asset belongs.
For that reason -- among some others, as you'll see in a moment -- commercial anti-malware software provider McAfee this morning announced its partnership with Adobe for the distribution of data loss prevention (DLP) technology. DLP is a more politically correct, socially conscious phrase for the category of software that protects data against theft and misuse. In a way, DLP leverages much of the existing technology base that McAfee had already built up for itself for malware detection, including critical patents for data file fingerprinting including this one. Ostensibly, such a patent refers to the ability for an anti-malware program to detect infected files within encrypted and packed structures, especially when the encryption can almost completely obfuscate a Trojan file's signature.
Inside Office Web Apps: Is it good enough to be called 'Excel?'
Most businesses I know stopped calling the class of documents that Excel produces a "spreadsheet" long ago, and have deferred to the phrase "Excel sheet," rather than to Microsoft's preferred "workbook." The reason is because the types of data the application now works with have ceased to be exclusively flat and bordered. Excel data is complex, often relational, certainly networked.
So already there's going to be a big distinction that limits anything that portends to be the Excel Web App from being the complete Microsoft Excel. You don't want to bring networked, dynamic, data that's interlinked to data elsewhere in the world, onto the public platform; there are too many risks involved. If you have a complex Excel workbook on your home or business system now where the source of your data lies outside the workbook, don't expect to be able to use it on the Excel Web App.
What Windows 8 perhaps should be: Microsoft's multi-kernel OS project
Perhaps you've read an article this week purporting to offer new details on "Windows 8," or whatever Microsoft's next client operating system will be called, only to be perturbed at discovering at the end that you were the one being asked to supply the details. The expectation among many observers is that Windows 8 will be a lot like Windows 7, maybe something less than the great leap forward that a "point-oh" release typically implies.
But that doesn't mean there aren't folks at Microsoft (or at least, folks being funded by Microsoft) who are unaware that such a significant advance may be necessary within the next few years. Granted, simply because a project is being undertaken at Microsoft Research is no guarantee that anything that culminates from it will ever be put to use (case in point: HTTP-NG). On the other hand, to paraphrase a slogan formerly used by PBS, if Microsoft doesn't do it, who will?
Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #9: Processor core parking
When you think of kids on the playground playing Star Trek make-believe, you see the guy who plays Scotty inevitably being shouted at to increase or decrease the power, and then the guy putting on his best (or worst) Scottish accent and complaining back to the captain about how it canna be done, she can't take this abuse much longer or we're all genna bloe! Powering up and powering down is the most common task that amateurs think of when they consider the role of an engineer running a big machine.
And yet up until very recently, servers have existed in a perpetual "on/off" state -- they're either turned on and consuming the energy they've been designed to consume, or they're off and your data center is offline. Only in the last few years, with the introduction of the multicore era coupled with the sudden ubiquity of virtualization, has there been the notion that you can move the entire serving job at any one time to the most efficient processor available. New CPU technologies like Intel SpeedStep have created the opportunity for administrators to eliminate the problem of processor latency by turning off entire cores when they're not in use.
EC's evidence shows Intel paid HP for 95% exclusivity
When the European Commission delivered its first evidence against Intel last May, in papers that were only released this week (PDF available here), it argued that Dell Computer's belief that Intel could penalize it for purchasing AMD's CPUs was as good as Intel actually making the threat. But other evidence later in the 517-page document collected from both Intel and Hewlett-Packard suggests that HP was under the clear impression from the very beginning of its agreement with Intel that if it were to purchase more than 5% of its CPUs from AMD, HP would not only disentitle itself to Intel rebates but also possibly forfeit rebates it would have already received.
But the evidence also shows that HP may not have been under any coercion to agree to these terms. In fact, HP may have been instrumental in stipulating the nature of the rebates, in an effort to streamline its purchasing costs following its just-completed merger with Compaq.
Patent logic in Lucent case may benefit Microsoft in its Word appeal
Two weeks ago, the Federal Circuit Appeals court struck down a huge jury verdict against Microsoft, on the basis that the jury didn't appear to use a real-world formula for determining infringement damages. If it had, it might not have come up with $357,693,056.18, the judges there stated. In the same appeals court this morning but in a different case, as reported separately by Reuters and by Bloomberg, Microsoft's lawyers were all prepared to argue that they could not have infringed upon a patent for XML tag storage, as former partner i4i alleged, because no one in the company had actually seen the patent.
But they may as well have come to court stone-cold silent, as the issue Judge Kimberly Moore raised, according to both reports, was whether i4i's experts came up with a real-world formula for calculating damages. Citing the very same case that these same judges would cite in overturning the Alcatel-Lucent ruling, i4i argued that its expert figured that a company that borrows a patented invention generally owes the inventor about one fourth of its profits.
As i4i's citation explicitly read, "When an inventor allows someone else to use [his] invention, [he'll] keep 25 percent of the profits from the sale of that infringing product."
Microsoft takes a second swing at the Web apps 'ecosystem'
Download Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 from Fileforum now.
Back in 1990, Microsoft made a genuine attempt to build what is now referred to as an "ecosystem" around applications for Windows, including advising its competitors as to how to write for the system, and even funding smaller groups that needed a leg up to become viable players in the market. As things turned out, however, there ended up being one word processor, one spreadsheet, one presentation manager, and one organizer that each commanded more than 90% of the market, compelling many to wonder aloud why the metaphors comparing Microsoft to something out of a certain old Dutch fairy tale weren't taken more literally.
Senate Republicans suspend opposition to FCC net neutrality regulation
As first reported in the Washington Post this afternoon, and as has been independently verified by two other Washington news sources, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R - Texas) has agreed to withdraw her amendment to an Interior Dept. spending bill that would have cut off funding to any Federal Communications Commission effort to regulate "net neutrality." This as aides to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, as reported by Congressional Quarterly, approached Sen. Hutchison seeking her withdrawal, at least until the Chairman can put forth a complete proposal.
On Monday, Chairman Genachowski made a public policy speech outlining a framework for new FCC regulations that would prohibit service providers from disabling certain Internet services on behalf of customers, as well as more transparently specify for customers what allowed measures they are taking to regulate traffic on their networks. The implication of these "Fifth" and "Sixth Principles," as they're being called, is that the FCC would in turn prohibit ISPs from being able to provide better bandwidth to certain classes of content providers willing to pay a premium.
Chrome Frame erodes IE from the inside: Can Google get away with this?
Yesterday's revelation by Google that its open source Chromium lab developers have been testing deploying the Chrome browser engine as an Internet Explorer add-on called Chrome Frame, and its subsequent opening up of that project to the public, is a surprisingly ballsy move from a company typically known for being cool, plain, and innocent-looking. Quite seriously, the complete engine is being offered as a downloadable add-on, with the promise that developers will be able to retool their sites to let IE users render them using standards accepted by developers rather than those deployed by Microsoft.
But that's not exactly what happens -- and in fact, that last phrase could apply in any number of cases to how the browser-within-a-browser actually works. First, for developers to be able to utilize these standards, they're being invited to include tags in their code that target a specific browser, such as <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
But as you can plainly see, that browser isn't IE. It's Chrome, which means that Google Frame is actually an incentive to get more developers to target Google's browser specifically.
Composers await Thursday release of radically updated Notion software
In the not-too-distant past, professional musicians used dedicated sound modules and sound synthesis hardware to produce realistic representations of full orchestras. We're not so certain what composers used to do before such hardware existed, though they probably all sympathized with Ludwig van Beethoven struggling with his immortal Ninth Symphony while deaf.
As PCs rapidly evolved, their CPUs and everyday sound chips became theoretically more capable of producing and reproducing realistic sound samples than dedicated MIDI sound modules. So software very quickly assumed the role not only of sequencer but of virtual orchestra; and just like in every other field of software, one or two standards-bearers swiftly emerged: Sibelius (named for the composer) and Finale. And a very familiar logic was applied to them: If you were a composer and you didn't produce scores using either or both standards, you were officially declared non-professional.
World put on hold as Google News hiccups again
You can't fault any service for not being capable of providing 100% uptime; but you also can't help but notice the shockwaves when that one-tenth-of-one-percent comes around. This morning, Google is acknowledging that users throughout yesterday had difficulty accessing its Google News server, although it is not calling the event an outright outage.
News publishers whose promotional models rely upon Google News received notices from Google yesterday afternoon saying that users began having access difficulties at about 12:30 pm PDT (3:30 EDT) yesterday. Betanews is capable of tracking its own readership, along with referral sources, on a minute-to-minute basis; and we could actually see the event as though we were watching a seismometer. Assuming our instrumentation is accurate, our traffic from Google News began plummeting almost three hours earlier than this report, at about 1:00 pm EDT. Referral traffic from Google News began resuming its normal pattern at about 5:30.
Seagate doubles the capacity, doubles the bandwidth for Barracuda XT
The typical PC hardware introduction is targeted first at the high end of the product's respective market, often referred to as the "enthusiast" or "early adopter." This is the person expected to have more disposable income, willing to pay a premium to be first on the block, and the person I'm most often told by company representatives fits the description "Betanews reader."
But the recent trend that has breathed new energy into the hard disk drive industry -- energy it desperately needed during the worst days of the bad economy -- has to do with consumption, and it affects more than just the high end of the market. Everyday PC users are finding themselves more comfortable with larger hard drives, so much so that average street prices for 1.5 TB HDDs are now approaching $125. It's the mainstream that's driving prices lower, but that's also purchasing more drives especially now that external HDDs -- once considered dead just a few years ago -- have exploded into a commodity market. Now that consumers can simply plug them in and go, they're as ubiquitous as printers.
Inside Office Web Apps: Will Word Web App hold a candle to Word 2010?
One of the more startling announcements we've received from Microsoft since the first word that Office will support OpenDocument Format as an alternative default, was last week's news that access to its forthcoming Office Live Apps would be open to all users for free. We're being told again and again that there's no catch, no asterisk with small print behind it, that Microsoft is perfectly happy to let everyone edit Office documents online for free.
But does the Technical Preview give any indication that these Web apps are ready for prime time? For Microsoft to make its case against Google, Zoho, and others that produce free-for-general-use Web apps (although Google Apps' continued free state has become debatable of late), it has to demonstrate that it can carry not just the look-and-feel, but also the functionality and reliability, of traditional Office applications into the Web apps space. This is especially true if Microsoft truly does have a plan to earn revenue indirectly from the product, whether through advertising or commercial derivative services.
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