Intel's latest energy-saving CPUs: 'As revolutionary as Pentium Pro'
In practical simultaneity this afternoon, AMAX, Cray, NEC, HP, and Dell all announced brand new products. The common link? They're all based upon the newly available Intel Xeon 5500 processors.
In fact, Intel says more than 70 companies will be announcing new products based on the Xeon 5500 processor, based on the company's energy-saving branch of its Nehalem architecture. Intel introduced the 5500 series today, touting it as its most revolutionary server processor since the Pentium Pro nearly 15 years ago. (Those who remember the Pentium Pro may be scratching their heads at that.)
Nokia updates the questionable 5800 XpressMusic's software
Sales of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic were halted in the US after less than a week of availability due to unspecified issues. While those issues could have included poorly assembled handsets, users' complaints indicated that performance was foremost on their minds.
Today, Nokia announced a software update for the 5800 that adds a handful of new features, but lists "faster user interface and faster download times" as the first, and arguably most important, aspect.
MySpace to be bathed in a Silverlight
MySpace may not need any more chaos on its festively designed pages, but with traffic numbers down it could probably use some good news on the apps-development front, not to mention some good apps. To the rescue: Microsoft. On Monday MySpace announced that its Open Platform will support Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework. (This runs the table for MySpace, by the way, putting it on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Sidekick, Palm, Nokia, and now Windows Mobile phones.) The SDK will be available from Microsoft's CodePlex site on Thursday.
Virginia anti-spam law now dead after Supreme Court rejects appeal
After losing a unanimous decision by the state's Supreme Court last September, the State of Virginia appealed to the US Supreme Court to breathe new life into an anti-spam law that was intended to put serial spammers behind bars. A constitutional rights appeal by convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes, convicted in 2005 and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment, met with overwhelming victory, but state lawmakers saw the nation's highest court as their last chance.
It was not to be. Though the high court's Web site has yet to carry the news (sometimes it takes a few hours or even a day to update), the Associated Press is reporting that the court has refused to hear the State of Virginia's appeal. The State Supreme Court had earlier ruled that the Virginia law failed to explicitly distinguish between "commercial spam" and "personal spam," and in so omitting, traversed the boundaries of professional conduct by limiting free speech.
Found: An Achilles heel for Conficker
A few of the folks scrutinizing Conficker realized something mighty interesting on Friday: The malware not only changes what Windows looks like on the network, if you ask a server whether it's got a case of the Conficker, it will tell you -- remotely and without authentication, even. One insanely hectic weekend later, there are multiple brand-new enterprise-class scanners available for netadmins' network-protection needs.
So far on Monday, versions are being integrated into scanners from Tenable (Nessus), McAfee/Foundstone, nmap, ncircle and Qualys. There's also a proof-of-concept tool available as well. The charge was led by the Honeynet Project's Tillman Werner and Felix Leder and moved along by Dan Kaminsky at Doxpara, along with Securosis' Rich Mogull, and the Conficker Cabal Working Group.
Now Western Digital enters the SSD market with SiliconSystems buyout
Last spring, Western Digital -- which duels with Seagate for top market share -- began pushing hard disk drives with very fast RPM speeds (20,000, versus the conventional 5,600 and 7,200 RPM) as a way of answering the challenge of solid-state drive technology. See, even though sustained transfer times for HDDs have surprisingly stayed competitive with SSDs (which are made of flash memory, after all), what's always impressive about SSDs are their seek times -- how fast they can access the first bit of data.
Meanwhile, catering specifically to the enterprise market, Aliso Viejo, California-based SiliconSystems had been countering WD and Seagate with an argument that truly does have some weight to it: the idea that mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) estimates for HDDs showing them more reliable than SSDs, didn't take real-world operating conditions into account.
T-minus two days...Ready or not, here comes Conficker
The computers -- over a million of them at last count, it is believed -- are in place. The Microsoft vulnerability making it all possible has been patched by, presumably, everyone who's going to do so. The poisonous code itself has been upgraded. We've seen the effect of the early tests, we've pondered the bounty on the developers' heads, and yet we've got to start asking ourselves: What's going to happen when Conficker lights up on Wednesday?
Wouldn't you like to know. Wouldn't a lot of people like to know.
Subsidized netbooks on the way, say Verizon representatives
Verizon will reportedly begin selling subsidized netbooks next month, like AT&T began doing late last year with the Acer Aspire One. Representatives of the company note that netbooks could begin selling as early as the next quarter in Verizon stores.
Like the AT&T deal, Verizon's main interest is getting customers to subscribe to the company's mobile broadband network. AT&T subsidizes the netbooks until they can be sold for $99, and then the mobile broadband service costs roughly $60 a month for two years.
New Nvidia GPUs geared to work with multiple physical, virtual systems
The one thing you typically cannot do well with a virtual system is graphics, mainly because the GPU's typical channel to the outside bus is through the physical CPU. Getting 3D accelerated performance to pass through to the virtual level is practically impossible, because there hasn't been a way for the physical graphics driver to cede some performance time to a virtual graphics driver.
Beginning today for business users, that changes with Nvidia's refresh of its Quadro FX professional graphics card line. As a feature that distinguishes Quadro FX from Nvidia's GeForce consumer graphics line, SLI Multi-OS will be a firmware/driver combination that enables systems using Intel's VT virtualization technology to push graphics processing to virtual systems. The GPU maker listed Parallels as the first hypervisor producer to take advantage of this functionality.
CERT suggests one-click Conficker check
Does the machine you're using have a case of the Mondays Conficker worm? CERT on Sunday issued a bulletin updating the infection situation and suggesting that if users are unable to load two particular URLS -- one at Symantec, one at McAfee -- it might indicate that the machine is infected, since Conficker interferes with access to those sites. Windows users may want to take a second to click for themselves.
Microsoft v. TomTom: Both parties emerge mostly unscathed
Microsoft will be settling with Dutch navigation device maker TomTom in the intellectual property battle in which both parties sued one another for patent infringement.
In Microsoft's suit, TomTom was accused of violating eight patents involved with memory management and file system architecture used in its Linux-based devices. TomTom shot back with a countersuit that accused Microsoft of infringing upon three of its patents, and then promptly became a licensee in the Open Invention Network, a group specializing in the protection and defense of Linux patent holders.
Netflix raises Blu-ray surcharge by 300% to $4 per month
Although it's been over a year since Blu-ray won the format war against HD DVD and almost all new movies are simultaneously released in the high-definition format, prices have not fallen, with Blu-ray discs still costing up to 3 times more than DVDs. In turn, Netflix has begun informing subscribers that it is raising the cost of those who receive movies on Blu-ray from $1 to $4 per month.
Netflix is attributing the 400% fee increase to the cost of the company having to stock more films in Blu-ray. "As we buy more, you are able to choose from a rapidly expanding selection of Blu-ray titles. And as you've probably heard, Blu-ray discs are substantially more expensive than standard definition DVDs," the company said in an e-mail to subscribers.
Motorola's first US touchphone announced
Motorola hasn't exactly had the strongest presence in mobile phone hardware lately, and was slow to officially hop on the 3G touchphone bandwagon, but now it has debuted its second device in the familiar form factor.
Today, just two days ahead of the CTIA Wireless convention, Motorola announced the Evoke QA4, an CDMA/EV-DO (Rev. A) device with a 2.8" touchscreen. The Evoke is equipped with 256MB of on-board memory and is expandable up to 8 GB via MicroSD, a 2 megapixel 5x digital zoom camera, stereo Bluetooth and full HTML browsing.
Skype for iPhone launches tomorrow with Wi-Fi calling functionality
Skype, the popular voice, video, and instant messaging chat software parented by eBay is reportedly coming to the iPhone App Store tomorrow as a free download.
When a user's iPhone is connected to a Wi-Fi network, they will be able to use their Skype account to make free Skype-to-Skype voice calls, send instant messages, and make outbound calls to other mobile devices or landlines for a fee.
Chasing the dragon of online popularity with social-networking sites
We see from new comScore numbers that MySpace is making like Friendster and earlier stars in the social-networking space -- losing numbers to the newer, more hyped Facebook. (In February, MySpace traffic was down 2% to 124 million unique users, while Facebook's traffic was up 16.6% to 276 million unique visitors.) Meanwhile, Facebook has been Facelifted to look more like Twitter, which many believe to be the next next big thing. May we offer a suggestion?
Skip Twitter, fretful Facebook keepers, and move right along to Hulu. A second comScore survey indicates that Hulu's 33% traffic jump after the Super Bowl was no fluke, as the video service gained 42% over the entire month of February. That was enough to catapult Hulu to fourth place on comScore's online-video charts, behind Google/YouTube, Fox Interactive Media, and Yahoo. And just think, Mark Zuckerberg: Ape Hulu and the next time anyone pitches a fit about a clunky redesign or a nasty privacy breach, you can air a deliciously weird commercial with Alec Baldwin and everybody will like you again.
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