Intel exec shake-up promotes Maloney as Gelsinger moves to EMC
A recent Intel television ad uses the slogan, "Our rock stars aren't like your rock stars," and features Ajay Bhatt, a long-time company engineer who led the project to create USB. But during the company's conferences such as IDF where the execs are expected to really rock the house, it's been Pat Gelsinger -- who has held the title CTO at the senior vice president level -- who typically draws the crowd. Besides CEO Paul Otellini, Gelsinger has been the company's most visible and charismatic leader.
As of today, Gelsinger is no longer with Intel, having officially jumped ship to become President and COO of a company whose ability to "rock" ranks right up there with Lawrence Welk: EMC, the storage systems company whose acquisition of storage rock-star Iomega last year put a damper on that party as well.
Here it comes: .NET for the iPhone
The big payoff for Novell's investment in an open-source version of a platform created by its rival in the operating system category, Microsoft, may come in the unlikeliest of places: Today, Novell begins shipping the 1.0 edition of MonoTouch, its commercial software development platform that extends the .NET Framework and the C# language...to Apple's iPhone.
Although this effort is itself an extension of Mono, the open source .NET extension for Linux and Mac that's funded by Novell, MonoTouch is somewhat different: First, it includes an exclusive, Mac-based development environment for iPhone. Second, it requires the iPhone SDK, which means MonoTouch is being marketed for registered Apple iPhone developers. Third, it ain't free -- a five-developer license costs $3,999.
Jury verdict against Microsoft overturned in precedent-setting ruling
At one time, French networking systems producer Alcatel-Lucent -- the caretaker of patents once belonging to AT&T's Bell Laboratories -- stood likely to receive infringement payouts from Microsoft that may have collectively exceeded $2 billion, including for licensing MP3 technology from what some believed was the wrong authority. But the MP3 ruling was reversed in August 2007; and today, the second largest jury verdict against Microsoft -- and still one of the largest in history -- has also been struck down by a federal appeals court.
Today, the Federal Circuit panel of judges ruled in Microsoft's favor, overturning a jury award of over a third of a billion dollars, in a case involving infringing an old Bell Labs patent for a technique for users selecting a date from an onscreen calendar. Last spring, the US Patent Office overturned the validity of that patent anyway.
You saw this coming: Revised Twitter terms of service enables ads
A typical publishing business requires a business model before it can establish the type of service that can generate an audience. By anyone's standards, Twitter has never been a typical publisher. Venture capitalist Jason Calcanis -- who offered to pay a quarter million dollars for prominent placement on Twitter -- has been on record throughout last year and up until last May as saying a real online business must first build an "audience of scale" -- something on the order of 10 million unique users -- before it can actually start building a business model for monetizing the strength of that audience.
Well, Twitter is probably there now, but the first signs of what kind of monetization we're likely to see for it appears to be more categorical than architectural. As its first true sign to the world that it's "going that way," the publisher unveiled its new Terms of Service late this week, with a new and vague paragraph asserting its rights to place ads somewhere within the service, at some time.
Stadium event source of first signals of Silverlight-bearing 'Bing 2.0'
The initial rollout of Bing search has been moderately successful -- it's recaptured a few points of market share for Microsoft at a time when Windows Live Search had not seen a share gain in several years. Yesterday at a company shindig thrown at Safeco Field in Seattle -- which featured entertainment from comedian Seth Meyers, bands, and an expected audience of 40,000 -- the biggest news to be tweeted from excited guests at the event (plus a few analysts who picked up the private stream remotely) concerned a possible near-term rollout of Bing 2.0.
One tweet from Microsoft software engineer Sushil Choudhari yesterday read, "Saw the demo of Bing 2.0, super imressive! Watch out its release next week!!" [sic]
Microsoft, Mono developer form open source/commercial cooperative
Perhaps Microsoft's most effective competitive effort to date against Linux has been its recent moves directly into the open source arena, fuzzifying the boundaries between open source and commercial software efforts and playing more like a participant than a conqueror. If it does anything at all, it makes efforts to continue characterizing Microsoft as an evildoer look like recent right-wing efforts to paint the Obama administration as the re-emergence of Joseph Stalin.
Those broad-brushstroke efforts will become even more difficult after today, now that the company has announced it has funded an independent organization -- an offshoot of its Codeplex counterpart to Linux' SourceForge -- to nurture and facilitate efforts for private software companies, including itself, to contribute intellectual property to open source development efforts.
Google: Open news publishing 'need not mean free'
In a response this week to a questionnaire from the Newspaper Association of America earlier this week, obtained by Harvard University journalist Zachary M. Seward (PDF available here), Google told newspaper publishers it is implementing an infrastructure extension to its Google Checkout service, for implementation sometime within the next 12 months, that may enable news sites and other publishers whose content is located via Google to receive payment for that content from users.
It's being called a "micropayment model," and it's similar in concept to the one being proposed by the Journalism Online coalition, which is led by former executives from Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, and endorsed by their parent company News Corp. And like the Journalism Online model, publishers may make their products more attractive by coalescing and offering them in bundles, according to the most rational interpretation of Google's questionnaire response.
Adobe Flash in a race against Silverlight for the most DRM
Largely by virtue of its support from YouTube, which some say supplies four-fifths of the Web's streaming video, Adobe Flash is the de facto delivery standard for video through Web pages. While content creators have been urging Google and other video hosts to implement better controls over how unauthorized content can become so freely distributed, Adobe is now working on a way to enable those creators to post or host their own Flash video, in a way that they and only they are in control of the distribution process -- including, who gets to see those videos and for how much.
The next edition of Adobe's rights management server, now called Flash Access 2.0, was unveiled today at a broadcasting conference in Amsterdam. This while Silverlight -- perhaps Flash's most direct competitor in the functionality department, but still representing a very small slice of the global viewer base -- demonstrates its next version as well, with very similar goals. Today, Adobe said its next version of the Flash Player will be required for Web users to view videos that content owners produce specifically for customers.
Add-on maker i4i: Microsoft destroyed its market to compete with it
The central question with regard to the i4i patent infringement case, which Microsoft is now appealing, is whether the Canadian software firm and one-time Microsoft partner had a legitimate and exclusive right in 2001 to produce XML authoring tools that enabled markup code to be distinguished from content. In its response to Microsoft's appeal filed Tuesday (PDF available here), as first reported by TechFlash blogger Todd Bishop, i4i says it knew Microsoft had been trying to build an XML authoring tool for Microsoft Word, but in the absence of one had deferred to i4i as a preferred provider.
Only during an April 2001 joint presentation of Word's and i4i's functionality to a US government customer, i4i says, did Microsoft learn that i4i had a patent on its metadata/content separation technology. And only after that time did Microsoft apparently pursue a course to compete with i4i using the basic concepts of that technology.
Obama challenges Internet disinformation during Cronkite tribute
During a public memorial event in tribute to the life and career of the late CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, who passed away in July, President Obama spoke in an almost candid fashion about the evolution of news media in the age of the Internet. Specifically, he wondered aloud -- and with surprisingly stark honesty that might have even raised Cronkite's celebrated bushy eyebrows -- about whether the legendary news anchor would be able to perform the same job, in the same manner -- managing editor of a globally respected news service -- with the challenges posed by the nature of today's media.
"He was excited about all the stories that a high-tech world of journalism would be able to tell," the President said, "and all the newly emerging means with which to tell it. Naturally, we find ourselves wondering how he would have covered the monumental stories of our time. In an era where the news that City Hall is on fire can sweep around the world at the speed of the Internet, would he still have called to double-check? Would he have been able to cut through the murky noise of the blogs and the tweets and the sound bites, to shine the bright light on substance? Could he still offer the perspective that we value? Would he have been able to remain a singular figure in an age of dwindling attention spans and omnipresent media?
Silverlight 4 to do for PCs what HD DVD couldn't
A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that the company is planning to demonstrate technology currently being planned for version 4 of Silverlight, its media distribution platform based on .NET, designed to provide both an interactivity layer and digital rights management services for movie studios and other content providers. These services, the company now says, are intended to "enable movie studios and retailers to provide the same rich interactive experiences via digital copy and Internet distribution as consumers get with DVD or Blu-ray."
As many DVD and Blu-ray Disc collectors already know, "digital copy" in this instance refers to a separate file distributed with a disc that usually plays in ordinary DVD or BD players, but which plays interactively on PCs. If Microsoft's plan as it currently describes it becomes successful, movie discs produced in the near future could bear the Silverlight logo.
Microsoft: SMB 2.0 hole does affect Vista, not Windows 7
A security advisory issued by Microsoft late yesterday takes to task a security consultant for a British ISP who apparently, and possibly even accidentally, discovered a way that the Server Message Block 2.0 driver can trigger an instant Windows crash. Rather than report the incident directly to Microsoft, Laurent Gaffié went public with his findings first, in such a way that appears to have triggered the enthusiasm of the black-hat side of the security community.
"Microsoft is concerned that this new report of a vulnerability was not responsibly disclosed, potentially putting computer users at risk," reads yesterday's Security Advisory 975497. "We continue to encourage responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities. We believe the commonly accepted practice of reporting vulnerabilities directly to a vendor serves everyone's best interests."
Vista SMB 2.0 exploitable hole points to need for new filters
Nearly two years ago, I proclaimed Microsoft's adoption of Server Message Block version 2 the #6 of ten best new features of Windows Server 2008. Essentially, it provides a way for servers utilizing the Common Internet File System to utilize modern filing tools such as symbolic links and transaction batches, to expedite the process of sending large files over the Internet.
It has taken this long for anyone to find what was described earlier today as a glaring hole in Windows SMB 2.0 security, but it's an embarrassing little hole nonetheless: A security researcher discovered that if you get the order of the words in the SMB 2.0 message headers wrong, in such a way that you end up sending an ampersand (&), where a zero should be in the high word of the Process ID field, then you can end up sending a message block that could literally crash the remote recipient. Conceivably, an exploit could be crafted that could remotely crash a Vista-based client.
Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #10: Boot from virtual devices
Last month, Microsoft made available to its TechNet partners the first release-to-manufacturing code for Windows Server 2008 R2, the next edition of the server operating system that premiered in January 2008. While I've said here before that I feel Windows 7 is "Vista service pack 3" (and I meant that in a good way), Microsoft is right up front about the fact that R2 is the Windows 7 kernel applied to WS2K8, the result of that alone being an immediate improvement in the system.
But there are other bonuses as well -- so many, in fact, that it took me much more time than I anticipated to pore through the multiple lists of new features, research the potential impact of each one, confer with others as to their significance, and peek into how they are already impacting businesses' deployment plans. In a number of key aspects, WS2K8 R2 is actually the complete package that WS2K8 should have been, minus the Vista core that led some shops to stick with Windows Server 2003.
Has 'beta' lost its meaning?
About 11 years ago (please ignore the rapidly aging "10 Years" banner overhead), a very bright young man put together a hosting service for new software, and a news feed to help publicize it. I'll spare you the part where I praise my boss for his wisdom and insight and great sense of timing, although all of that's certainly true.
In 1998, the term "beta" was generally used to mean "new software;" and so "Beta News" was interpreted quite correctly to mean "new software news." Some enterprising person may be able to dig up something I published elsewhere during that time where I complained about what I perceived as the misappropriation of "beta" to simply mean "new."
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