IBM deal with Sun could leave Fujitsu servers up in the air
With the industry at large collectively having verified that IBM and Sun Microsystems are in talks toward a possible merger deal, the question of the fate of Sun's long-standing SPARC system architecture becomes a topic of intense conversation. Today, a Fujitsu America executive probably did the opposite of what he'd intended, first by telling Reuters he wouldn't comment, and then commenting in a way he might not have planned on.
"We continue to sell server-based products, we want to assure all our customers ... that product we sell in the SPARC line of products we will continue selling and maintaining them," Farhat Ali told Reuters, effectively saying that anyone who's already purchased SPARC-architecture servers from Fujitsu need not worry about long-term customer support. That isn't exactly saying the company will go forth with plans that seemed very ambitious just months ago, including beefing up its midrange SPARC server line.
Behold the Open Cloud Manifesto: Insert your ideas here
A spectre is haunting New York City, though at the moment, it's not a very well defined one as spectres go these days. The leading participants in a major conference on cloud computing standards are being asked to sign a document, whose basic contents actually advertise themselves as not being defined. What's most important about the document for now, at least from the perspective of its backers, is that it gets signed.
"This document does not intend to define a final taxonomy of cloud computing or to charter a new standards effort," reads the preamble to the Open Cloud Manifesto, published this morning (PDF available here). "Nor does it try to be an exhaustive thesis on cloud architecture and design. Rather, this document is intended for CIOs, governments, IT users and business leaders who intend to use cloud computing and to establish a set of core principles for cloud providers. Cloud computing is still in its early stages, with much to learn and more experimentation to come. However, the time is right for the members of the emerging cloud computing community to come together around the notion of an open cloud."
'Earth Hour' looks for public show of support for Kyoto Protocol U-turn
In December 1997, 37 industrialized nations entered into an agreement signed in Kyoto, Japan, to begin reducing carbon emissions into the Earth's atmosphere by five-percent increments beginning in 2005. Since that time, 181 nations and the European Union have ratified the Kyoto Accord. But the United States -- at the beginning, one of its driving forces, and still believed to be the world's principal emitter of carbon pollution -- never ratified or endorsed the treaty.
It was a fact cited frequently during the campaign of then-US Presidential candidate Joe Biden, now Vice President: After the US turned its back on Kyoto, in a manner that could not be construed as anything other than intentional and a vote against climate change measures, much of the rest of the world perceived the US' move as an implied endorsement of coal-burning plants. As described by Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria in his 2008 book The Post-American World:
Mozilla to release urgent 'chemspill' Firefox update next week
Download the "code-frozen" early version of Firefox 3.0.8 for Windows from Fileforum now.
The Mozilla organization has issued a "code freeze" for its next update to the Firefox 3.0 production Web browser series. As a result, a version of Firefox 3.0.8 went live this morning on Mozilla's servers, although the organization's planners are saying that an announcement of the version's official release may come as late as next Wednesday.
Here comes the Cloud Manifesto, to be signed by the usual suspects
The leader of a company called Enomaly, which manufactures an elastic computing platform toolkit for companies to build their own cloud computing platforms, is the "instigator" -- to use his own word for it -- behind a document referenced by Microsoft yesterday calling upon manufacturers in the cloud space to come together. The "Open Cloud Manifesto" is being drafted now, and will be revealed Monday at a cloud interoperability conference in New York City. Betanews will be on hand to cover it.
The manifesto will be the founding document of a group called the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum, which describes itself as having been "formed in order to enable a global cloud computing ecosystem whereby organizations are able to seamlessly work together for the purposes for wider industry adoption of cloud computing technology and related services. A key focus will be placed on the creation of a common agreed upon framework / ontology that enables the ability of two or more cloud platforms to exchange information in an unified manor."
Crossed swords: Nvidia countersues Intel over chipsets for Nehalem
In a court filing in Delaware district court today, revealed by the filer itself, Nvidia is counterclaiming that Intel had no right to tell the general public -- by way of the court -- that Nvidia was not licensed to produce chipsets for motherboards based on Intel's Nehalem processor architecture.
"Nvidia admits that it believes that Intel has violated its contractual obligations and has improperly made statements to the effect that Intel does not believe, or 'disputes,' that Nvidia is licensed to market [Media and Communications Processor] chipsets," reads the text of Nvidia's countersuit filed this morning (redacted PDF available here).
Finally, Google delivers the search we BlackBerry users expected
I still like to take my wife on dates. Call me old-fashioned, or just call me old. We sometimes only manage to get away on the spur-of-the-moment, and if we can get a table at one of our favorite places, we're lucky.
Anyway, in low-light situations, I can't exactly maintain whatever fleeting resemblance I may have had to a debonair man-on-the-town if I'm fidgeting with the BlackBerry's default browser trying to locate movie times. I could keep my cool if I could just say, "Movies," into the little speaker that comes as standard equipment with these new phones nowadays, and get a list.
Microsoft touches on some new Windows 7 touch methods
In an update published yesterday on the Windows 7 design team's efforts at standardizing its touch and gesture recognition methods, Microsoft revealed that it has made some of those ergonomic design choices that were up in the air when Win7 was first unveiled last October.
For example, what's the difference between a "drag" and a "scroll?" Think about it; with a mouse, the distinction is clear. There's an on-screen device for scrolling windows, but with a drag, the pointer target is the item being dragged. With touch, the expectation is that the target is the same: To drag a document or to scroll a document, you start by touching the document. So how does the system distinguish the differences?
Microsoft launches a pre-emptive strike against cloud competition
Almost every sector of the computing field either has, or is forming, dividing lines between Microsoft and its partners, and a coalition of familiar players outspoken in their criticism of Microsoft. Both factions are vying for the right to the "open" computing mantle, but historically, both sides have actively worked to keep each other away from their respective clubhouses.
Certainly IBM has made no secret of its intention of becoming an axis for cloud computing development; in late 2007, its Blue Cloud Initiative was the topic of our New York Bureau Chief Jacqueline Emigh's very first article for Betanews. Since that time, IBM has been pairing with Google, most ostensibly for a program called the IBM Academic Initiative which aims to inspire, fund, and facilitate the education of new programmers in the distributed computing model. And just last month, IBM took the next step in building out Blue Cloud by announcing something it's calling the Infrastructure Strategy and Planning for Cloud Computing.
IE8 loads pages faster, but not fast enough, in Microsoft test recreation
Performance needs to be something the user feels. That's the explanation we hear from companies that have had difficulty of late demonstrating raw performance by the numbers (AMD comes readily to mind). Numbers may tell you a certain story, Microsoft's marketing team proclaims, but if the user doesn't perceive the speed increase, it may as well not be there.
So in a white paper released last week along with IE8, entitled "Measuring Browser Performance" (PDF available here), made the case that today's Web pages are comprised of so many components, any one of which may load faster or slower in one browser than another. And because of that, the only way to get a real sense of which browser is generally faster is to feel the overall speed.
Doing just fine on its own, Xobni's Outlook plug-in emerges from beta
From time to time, Microsoft has announced its intent to build its Outlook component of Office into a more fully-featured system for organizing personal contacts, as well as doing some automatic background research into those contacts on the side. Last year, the company very nearly concluded a deal with a San Francisco-based company called Xobni that would have given Microsoft that functionality in one fell swoop, but that deal collapsed.
As it turns out, that's where the good news actually began for Xobni. It managed to obtain startup funding from such top-tier venture capital sources as Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Cisco, and now BlackBerry Partners Fund. Now, the company is prepared to remove the little piece of sticky-tape that says "Beta" from its principal product, which now becomes "Xobni 1.7" for the first time, though it remains a free download.
At last, a bridge between Windows Home Server and Media Center
Ever since Microsoft's innovative Windows Home Server operating system first appeared on the scene a few years ago, prospective users have asked why a Windows Media Center computer can't stream content from a Home Server-based unit. As early as January 2007, popular MSVP Chris Lanier (not a Microsoft employee) posed the question himself publicly, adding, "Microsoft would be crazy to not include access functionality to Media Center Extenders, but I think we all know that Microsoft is good at leaving out features that we all think should be there."
And a forum thread on the Media Center blog The Green Button on the topic of Media Center/Home Server integration, launched in December 2007, is still an active and vibrant discussion.
Final SuSE Linux 11 includes Moonlight 1.0 for Silverlight
As reported here earlier today, the release edition of SuSE Enterprise Linux 11 announced today is the first commercial product to feature Moonlight 1.0, the Linux-based runtime for Web sites released last month, geared to show video and graphics for Microsoft Silverlight 1.0.
But another of the immediate benefits that Linux users will be seeing is that sites with built-in WMV format videos, may play using Moonlight 1.0. For many users, it will be the first step toward something resembling ubiquity, as Linux users -- who note there aren't many, if any, sites developed "for Linux" -- will at last be able to run Web sites that clearly give off the appearance of having been developed "for Windows."
Controversial copyright violator provision struck down in New Zealand
The world continues to wrestle with the problem of who is truly responsible for copyright infringement over the Internet, if it is allowed to persist. Over the years, Internet service providers have fought for, and won, protections from liability for the conduct of customers they can't always monitor. In the US, ISPs have an interest in limiting online file-sharing, mainly because the heaviest perpetrators are also the ones using the most bandwidth. Here, legislation under consideration by Congress would prohibit ISPs from taking bandwidth-throttling actions against customers based solely on their perceived online behavior.
But in New Zealand, the opposite approach was about to be tried and then, yesterday, failed in Parliament: A provision of an amendment to the country's Copyright Act, based on language that it appeared to have intentionally omitted, would have enabled authorities to instruct ISPs to disconnect customers on the mere suspicion of illicit file trafficking. That provision -- now known notoriously throughout the country as Section 92A -- was struck down yesterday, in a move that ended up being heralded by someone once thought to have supported the idea, Prime Minister John Key.
Mozilla experiments more with 'New Tab' in Firefox 3.1
The engineer behind the ambitious Ubiquity project, Mozilla Labs' Aza Raskin, is already on record as not being too keen on the completely blank "New Tab" feature in current production editions of Firefox 3.0.
"Right now, when you open a new tab, you get a blank screen," Raskin wrote on his laboratory's blog last August. "While clean, it has a 100% probability of not getting you where what you want to be. While it's good to not intimidate with an explosion of information, we can get a much more streamlined workflow -- thereby saving huge amounts of aggregate time-- by showing something. The question is, 'What?'"
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