Germany gains a foothold on Top 500 supercomputer list
In the inaugural edition of What's Now | What's Next, we mentioned that the Jülich Supercomputer Center was boasting it had used the IBM supercomputer design responsible for the world's fastest machine several times over, to build what would likely be recorded as the third fastest supercomputer in the world. This morning, Mannheim made that official with the release of the June 2009 edition of the Top 500 Supercomputer list.
There, Jülich's BlueGene/P -- a 294,912-core, 850 MHz PowerPC 450-based cluster -- claimed the #3 position, with an Rmax score of 825,500. The design that inspired it, former champion BlueGene/L at Los Alamos National Labs, lagged 72.6% behind with its historical score of 478,200.
New Microsoft 'Morro' anti-malware will share competitors' security events
Download Microsoft Security Essentials Beta Build 1.0.1487.0 from Fileforum now.
It's an argument we've seen before from Microsoft's competitors and opponents, as well as from many sensible observers: It may be unfair for the manufacturer of the operating system to leverage its customer visibility to advance a free software platform that cuts out commercial competitors. But there's another argument from opponents as well, many of them the same people: Microsoft should be responsible for the health and well-being of its customers' systems when the operating system is threatened, either through malicious use or from system defects.
Sign up to beta test CA's 2010 edition Security Suite
With the debate only beginning now over whether Microsoft's Security Essentials will provide adequate protection for Windows 7 users or merely placate users who settle for mediocre security, the question becomes whether competitors in the security field have an appropriate alternative. CA has informed Betanews it's looking for willing participants in a registration-only beta test of its Internet Security Suite Plus 2010 edition.
Rather than consider anti-malware and anti-virus as separate functions, the new edition will utilize a unified engine managed through a completely new front end. So veterans of the 2009 edition should take note that this is a completely new product. Personal firewalls and spam and phishing filters are included in the new edition just as before; but for 2010, the Web site blocking filter has been expanded for more personal -- and more parental -- control. A P2P filter has also been added to the suite.
Intel and Nokia will partner on mobile Linux, but maybe not on Atom
As it turns out, Bloomberg News' source this morning on Intel's and Nokia's major news was kinda right, kinda not. In a morning press teleconference, Intel's Ultra Mobility Group SVP Anand Chandrasekher and Nokia Executive Vice President for Devices Dr. Kai Öistämö announced their two companies are jointly licensing critical technologies to one another, for the purposes of building platforms.
Now, those platforms could lead to Atom-based Nokia mobile devices, but the keyword here is "could." Through a barrage of questioning from press and analysts on this topic, Öistämö and Chandrasekher would only repeat that their companies will collaborate on their respective mobile Linux platforms -- Intel with Nokia's Maemo, Nokia with Intel's Moblin. But neither party would not say the collaboration would necessarily lead to any kind of Linux platform whatsoever that bears the opposite partner's brand, or is carried on the opposite partner's equipment.
Apple either upgrades or downgrades its MacBook Pro SATA
Viewpoint certainly depends on where you stand; and in some quarters this morning, Apple MacBook Pro users are reading that a firmware upgrade to MacBook Pro may double their throughput from the SATA interface to their internal hard drives.
Well, sure, after the manufacturer slowed down the transfer rate by half for unexplained reasons. That fact was uncovered by readers of MacRumors.com two weeks ago, and formally reported a week ago Sunday: Customers who purchased MacBook Pros just this month are reporting slower throughput.
Congress: Should cell phone exclusivity contracts be illegal?
Exclusive cell phone sales and distribution contracts, such as the one between AT&T and Apple Inc. for all models of iPhone, are solely responsible for the quickening pace of innovation in the American handset market, or solely responsible for its imminent demise -- solely. That's the black-and-white nature of the arguments raised before the Senate Commerce Committee last Wednesday, as executives from the nation's second largest carrier and two smaller ones joined industry advocates in debating whether locking out carriers' access to popular phones is good for competition and good for the consumer.
"Today, when you sit down at a computer and you access a broadband connection, you're not told by your broadband provider that you have to have a Dell or an HP or an Apple in order to access the network," stated Sen. John Kerry (D - Mass.), the former presidential candidate who chaired a portion of Wednesday's hearing. "And when you purchase a wireless phone in Asia or Europe, you typically don't buy it through a wireless carrier. You purchase it separately from the manufacturer or from an outlet."
Now official, it's up to the public to test Firefox 3.5 RC2
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Although two (2) "candidates for release candidates" for the next Mozilla Web browser have been released in the past week (with the first being given the weird title "Beta 99"), the official notice of what it's calling "the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate" was posted this morning.
Collecta vs. Google in real-time search matchup
If you have a completely new search engine -- in other words, one that's not a renamed version of Windows Live Search -- you need to give it a niche that somehow emphasizes the quality of its results compared to those from Google. Wolfram Alpha's niche of choice is the intelligence of its results, in an effort to wring the educational power out of the verbal sponge that is the Internet. So that slot's taken for now.
Enter Collecta, the product of former AOL search chief Gerry Campbell, and an indicator of what AOL could have accomplished had its previous leadership chosen to invest in ingenuity. Launched last Thursday in public beta, the ideal of Collecta is that it searches content that tends to be updated quickly and frequently, and that it conducts those searches on the fly -- it's truly searching for what you've asked it to search for, rather than look up results from a massive index.
Harris Poll: More Americans own HD DVD consoles than Blu-ray
No, this isn't an accidentally posted Betanews article from back when we had a capital "N." The findings of a recent Harris Interactive poll released yesterday, whose major headline was to demonstrate the lack of recent consumer uptake for Blu-ray players more than one year after the high-definition format war ended, says that among 2,401 Americans polled last April, 11% own an HD DVD player console. But just 7% own a Blu-ray player console.
Could the pollsters be counting Xbox 360 as "an HD DVD player," or "HD DVD-capable," as some did during the format war's heyday? Apparently not. Some 9% of respondents own a Sony PlayStation 3, all of which are Blu-ray capable. Thus, 9% of citizens polled own Blu-ray players of some sort, whether or not they use them as Blu-ray players -- a gain of 4% over last year. Meanwhile, 3% of those polled own an Xbox 360, which Harris says "plays HD DVDs" even though the drive for doing so was well-known to have been an optional attachment.
Mozilla posts yet another Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.
It was apparent yesterday, after a test of the organization's latest private daily build of the Firefox 3.5 browser, that Mozilla's developers had discovered a jackpot of performance improvements in some specific areas: JavaScript math, RegEx (regular string expression) searches, and general control flow. Betanews tests yesterday gave the Thursday morning build 8% better overall speed in Windows 7 RC, and a better overall performance index score on that platform of 9.35 versus 8.81, relative to the performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista on the same physical machine.
Lawsuit against US on IP trade agreement dropped for national security
Opposition to a sweeping trade agreement being negotiated in secret between the United States and at least eleven other countries, plus the European Union, is being voluntarily curtailed after an apparently successful effort by Obama administration officials to prevent parties in a lawsuit against US trade representatives from obtaining any information about that agreement.
It's the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the existence of which is about the only thing the government will barely acknowledge. A document leaked last year to the community journalism site Wikileaks.org indicated that intellectual property protections were on the agenda, and may have been part of the reason why the treaty was not ratified by July 2008 as previously planned.
Safari 4 for Windows slows down after Apple security update
Download Google Chrome 3.0.189.0 Beta for Windows from Fileforum now.
After Apple yesterday released a bug fix update to its Safari 4 Web browser for Mac OS, reportedly to address incompatibility issues between it and certain features in iPhoto '09, the company also issued a new file for the Windows version as well. Though some in the press have been told there wasn't really a difference, and although the new file still installs with the build number 530.17, it wasn't the same file that Apple issued last week.
Farewell, Centrino...We think we knew ye
Two brands saved Intel from possibly being permanently relegated to also-ran status as an innovator. "Core" is one of them; arguably, the "Core" ideal that thinking smaller can lead to better performance plus power savings, may have saved the company by itself. But there was also Centrino.
And despite that fact, consumers remain confused over the whole question of just what a "Centrino" is. No, mom and dad, it's not the processor...Well, then, what is it, son? The Centrino ideal in 2003 was that a laptop computer manufacturer could base its entire design around a set of chips, most with the Intel brand. The CPU would be at the center of that heap, and six years ago, Pentium M was the CPU Intel had intended, back before Core Microarchitecture revolutionized mobile CPUs -- back then, processor overheating was still a huge issue.
Now you can expect that 250% speed blast from Firefox 3.5 RC1
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5 RC1 for Windows from Fileforum now.
Last week, we reported that the first public users of the first Mozilla Firefox 3.5 release candidate could expect two-and-one-half times the speed of Firefox 3.0.10 right after installation. But we also thought that the RC was coming within mere hours. As it turned out, the organization released a stand-in called "Beta 99" instead, with a warning that it may not have received the full array of testing a release candidate should require.
Tracking Vista's elusive 'Black Screen of Death'
What we've been calling a "perception problem" with Windows Vista -- the notion that users may tend to think it's less secure or reliable than it has proven to be on a large scale -- isn't just about perception for users faced with severe unreliability issues. As a Windows user for over two decades, I have been to the far depths of unreliability, and have lived to tell the tale. Probing the problems with Windows is actually part of my job, and one reason I actually am a Windows user -- unlike the rest of the world.
Yesterday, a problem that's far beyond perception afflicted a 64-bit Vista SP2-based Betanews production system for the fourth time in a year, this time with the remedy being so far out and unusual that everyday users could not possibly have discovered it by normal means. As we've found out, it's a problem that has affected a small number of Vista users since the system's debut three years ago, though that number appears to be growing steadily just as Vista is preparing to vacate the spotlight for Windows 7.
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