The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) today announced the impending publication of the results of its microblogging study. In a peek forward, the Institute revealed that most respondents using Google-owned "lifecasting" service Jaiku are either very bland, or are not using the service properly.

According to the Institute, the five most common status updates on the service are:

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The "Keep It Simple, Stupid" rule works in business as well as in everyday life, primarily because it forces us to focus on the one or two basic issues we need to make the right decision. My kindergarten teacher shortened it to "KISS," perhaps in the interest of simplicity. When you're driving a car: Know where you are, know where you're going. Leader of the free world: Keep your hands clean, know what you're aiming at. Reprogramming your iPod/in-vehicle audio system interface: Pull over, let the semi pass you.

More data, please

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Similar conclusions about Intel's possible retaliation were drawn by Dell for over three years, according to a plurality of e-mails cited by the EC. But a statement from Dell to the European Commission on precisely this subject actually begins with the following two words: "Dell assumed."

"Dell assumed that shifting some purchases to AMD would result in a reduction of MCP. But Dell did not know precisely how much MCP would decline, in what manner and over what time period. Dell understood that Intel would not welcome such a decision, as it would be viewed as a significant shift in the historical relationship between the companies," Dell told the EC. "As indicated in the documents, the Dell team sought to forecast this negative impact across a range of potential scenarios, including some which predicted a substantial reduction in MCP, and did not rule out the possibility that such reduction might be disproportionate to the reduction in the volume of Dell's purchases from Intel."

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Though Dell has extended its brand to consumer electronics of all sorts, the company's latest drive is straight into enterprise services, a segment of the IT market which has helped HP retain a competitive edge on Dell in hardware sales.

Today, Dell announced it will be acquiring Perot Systems in a $3.9 billion all-cash transaction expected to be completed in January.

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In a court filing that seriously jeopardizes a proposed settlement of the e-book publishing dispute between Google and members of the Authors Guild and other publishing groups, the US Dept. of Justice has raised serious allegations that the settlement as it stands now may violate the country's antitrust law. The keyword here is "may," as that final determination "may" be up to a judge.

The main problem is this: Google would like to be able to electronically publish a wide variety of titles, including out-of-print works whose publishers or former rights holders may not even exist anymore. The keyword here is still "may." The settlement as proposed is clearly between those publishers that do exist and Google; but can Google necessarily claim the right to unilaterally assume that all those who didn't respond, aren't necessarily present?

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In a flashback to the more prosperous years before the current "deep recession," hordes of truly enthused journalists crowded dozens of vendors' booths at a revitalized Pepcom pre-holiday event in New York City last week, waiting for their turns to get up close and personal with forthcoming consumer electronics wares.

ViewSonic, a company known until now mostly for its monitors, introduced a total of four new PCs at Pepcom's press event Thursday night.

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The Betanews Comprehensive Relative Performance Index (CRPI)

Click here for a complete introduction to the Betanews Comprehensive Performance Index.

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The additions and changes we've made to our performance index

The Mozilla 3D cube by Simon Speich (Testcube 3D) is an unusual discovery from an unusual source: an independent Swiss developer who devised a simple and quick test of DHTML 3D rendering while researching the origins of a bug in Firefox. That bug has been addressed already, but the test fulfills a useful function for us: It fills precisely the gap in our test suite that we've been needing to fill, testing only graphical dynamic HTML rendering -- which is finally becoming more important thanks to more capable JavaScript engines. And it's not weighted toward Mozilla -- it's a fair test of anyone's DHTML capabilities. There are two simple heats whose purpose is to draw an ordinary wireframe cube and rotate it in space, accounting for forward-facing surfaces.

Each heat produces a set of five results: total elapsed time, the amount of that time spent actually rendering the cube, the average time each loop takes during rendering, and the elapsed time in milliseconds of the fastest and slowest loop. We add those last two together to obtain a single average, which is compared with the other three times against scores in IE7 to yield a comparative index score. The SlickSpeed CSS selectors test suite is a new and probably controversial addition to our suite, but as you'll see, we addressed the reason for the controversy and compensated for it. As JavaScript developers know, there are a multitude of third-party libraries in addition to the browser's native JS library, that enable browsers to access elements of a very detailed and intricate page (among other things). For our purposes, we've chosen a modified version of SlickSpeed by Llama Lab, which covers many more third-party libraries including Llama's own. This version tests no fewer than 56 shorthand methods that are supposed to be commonly supported by all JavaScript libraries, for accessing certain page elements. These methods are called CSS selectors (one of the tested libraries, called Spry, is supported by Adobe and documented here).

So Llama's version of the SlickSpeed battery tests 56 selectors from 10 libraries, including each browser's native JavaScript (which should follow prescribed Web standards). Multiple iterations of each selector are tested, and the final elapsed times are rendered. Here's the controversial part: Some have said the final times are meaningless because not every selector is supported by each browser; although SlickSpeed marks each selector that generates an error in bold black, the elapsed time for an error is usually only 1 ms, while a non-error is as high as 1000. We compensate for this by creating a scoring system that penalizes each error for 1/56 of the total, so only the good selectors are scored and the rest "get zeroes."

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At the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC today, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski discussed the Commission's plans for preserving net neutrality with the addition of two new tenets to the FCC's existing open Internet principles.

"Why has the Internet proved to be such a powerful engine for creativity, innovation, and economic growth?" Genachowski asked, "A big part of the answer traces back to one key decision by the Internet's original architects: to make the Internet an open system."

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Microsoft is promoting its Tag barcode system over at its PressPass this week. The PR is a big marketing pitch showcasing brands like Ford and Proctor & Gamble; it's a sensible approach for the technology. But I see another: Making augmented reality more real, and in so doing recover Microsoft's botched handset strategy. AR isn't new, but it's all the geek rage now that iPhone has a compass: BBC, CNET News, Robert Scoble and Telegraph UK, among many others.

A quick AR primer: Augmented reality is essentially the overlay of additional visual information onto something real. American football is great example, where during TV broadcasts yellow lines and other information overlay the field of play. What? You thought those lines were really there? You experienced augmented reality.

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During yesterday's quarterly earnings call, Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein confirmed that webOS is going to be the sole operating system coming from Palm as the company goes ahead.

"Due to importance of webOS to our overall strategy, we've made the decision to dedicate all future development resources to the evolution of webOS. Which means that going forward, our roadmap will include only Palm webOS-based devices," Rubenstein said.

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The text of a letter from Google to the US Federal Communications Commission dated last August 21 -- the un-redacted contents of which were only made available today -- directly contradicts information given by Apple and iPhone partner AT&T, regarding the apparent rejection of a key Google mobile app from Apple's iTunes App Store.

Google Voice is a beta project which allows several phone lines to be united under a single new number, accessible from any phone. Earlier this year, Google submitted to Apple an app that would make the service usable on the iPhone. The fiasco over Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application from the App Store came to a head when the FCC began a formal inquiry into whether the relationship between AT&T and Apple is fair and encouraging to innovations in communication.

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In the midst of my own Comcast outage today, I began to contemplate the alternatives to my current cable Internet connection and the satisfaction of customers elsewhere. Being a Baltimore native, I'm fortunate enough to have a number of options at my disposal, including WiMAX. It's a technology that I've frequently covered here at Betanews, and one which we've been following for a long time.

For a little while, we had a WiMAX connection in our headquarters and I was using it without even being aware of a difference. I probably wouldn't have even found out if Nate hadn't asked me what wireless network I was connected to one day and informed me that it was actually our Sprint/Xohm WiMAX test line.

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The problem with sleeping giants in recent years is that "terrible resolve" hasn't necessarily gotten them very far. Of course, this applies outside the information technology industry as well. But not even the Internet -- the biggest revolutionary IT technology since the personal computer -- is creditable to any one major player or allied force. Historians will note that almost every company or group to attain success through the Internet did so either 1) completely by accident, and/or 2) without any substantive plan as to what to do with that success once it attained it.

But the last great "sleeping giant" episode in the history of the IT industry was one of absolute, intentional, and steadfast resolve. The landscape of our lives and work has been shaped by this chain of events. It was triggered by WordPerfect, and the terrible resolve was manifest in Microsoft Office. I watched from very close range as, within a span of mere months, the axis powers that commanded respect and even awe -- WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE, and Harvard Graphics -- deflated to mere also-ran status. Their manufacturers, in an often comical display of poor timing and miscommunication, self-destructed.
As a result today, when you ask businesses worldwide why they use Microsoft Office, the majority of responses you'll get say it's because it's the productivity suite for Windows. And when you ask those same businesses why they use Windows, the answer is because it's the operating system that runs Office.

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Palm limped toward the launch of the Pre, relying on cash and short-term investments to pull it through eight consecutive money-losing quarters in an attempt to turn things around. And now that the Pre has been turned loose, and Pixi, Palm's second WebOS, device is on the way, the struggling company's long-term outlook remains modest, and it continues to post losses. Yet it doesn't want to get too specific about numbers.

For the quarter ending on August 31, Palm reported a loss of $161.1 million with revenues that dropped 82% to $68 million.

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