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Google Chrome 4: Yes, it's fast, but is it usable?
As Betanews readers have responded to our stories about Chrome's JavaScript superiority...Does that mean we'd actually use this browser? Well...
Verizon Wireless launches new Android, Chocolate, and ruggedized phones
The lower-priced Eris joins the Droid, while the Chocolate gets a touchscreen and more music playback.
Early sales figures for Windows 7 nicely high, but do we know why?
Fans of triple-digit surges in figures quoted by Betanews will love this one, as it appears Microsoft rediscovered how to pull off a software launch.
Myka announces its latest Linux-based 'net top box'
Myka's ION brings Boxee, XMBC, and much more to HDTVs.
What hath Mac wrought? A remembrance after a quarter-century
The reason there's a Macintosh today is not because of some brilliant flash of engineering genius, but because Apple had the audacity to learn from its mistakes.
Early build of Moblin 2.1 improves connectivity, but not device support
The Linux Foundation's Atom-centric OS yesterday received a major overhaul with the project release of Moblin 2.1 for netbooks and nettops.
The iPhone's China syndrome: Sales of 5,000 and climbing
There's actually a country where Apple's device is not a godsend, where sales can be measured in the dozens.
New European counterpart to FCC will ensure 'a more neutral net'
Late Thursday night, the ruling telecom administrators of the EU's member nations signed away their final authority to a new entity overseen by the EC.
Sophos study suggests Windows 7 UAC's default setting is self-defeating
Without any anti-virus installed, a Sophos test showed, User Account Control was only capable of thwarting just one malware package out of ten samples chosen.
Indiscreet tweet trips awareness of Web SSL vulnerability
A group of high-level security engineers had been making progress on thwarting a low-level threat to the Web, until somebody blurted it all out on Twitter.
Amazon lowers EC2 cloud service fees, adds MySQL relational instancing
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 27, 2009, 6:07 PM
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Come November 1, Amazon's Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a "quadruple extra-large" AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).
The new high-end instances won't come cheap -- they'll carry a premium of $2.40 per instance-hour for Linux editions, and $2.88 per instance-hour for Windows Server 2003. The previous high-end AMI, still called "extra large," had been priced at nearly one-third that amount.
Continue reading Amazon lowers EC2 cloud service fees, adds MySQL relational instancing...
Flashback 1990: The debut of Windows 3.0
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 21, 2009, 4:24 PM
25 Comments
This is most likely neither the first nor the last article you will read on the subject of Microsoft Windows 3.0. The attention being given the new product is not only deserved, but in many cases carefully orchestrated. The weeklies and fortnightlies have already extolled the merits of Win3's "three-dimensional" buttons, proportional text, and now-boundlessly managed memory. Their gold-star awards have no doubt been bestowed upon the product for being the best in its class, albeit the only product in its class. The "pundits" have already laid blame upon someone for Win3's alleged tardiness to market. The entire story is so well-patterned, it may be read without ever having laid eyes to the printed page.
Yet if we follow the pattern, we miss the real story...
Continue reading Flashback 1990: The debut of Windows 3.0...
A Sidekick crisis post mortem on cloud confidence
By Tim Conneally on October 21, 2009, 4:15 PM
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I was sitting in the dentist's chair getting my teeth drilled, while the technician complained about her now-worthless Sidekick. With no way to access her contact lists, she couldn't get in touch with her family due to arrive in DC for a reunion, and had to rely on the frequently failing device as a simple inbound line for family members to contact her. When that failed, she had to use a payphone.
It was a pretty sad story, and thousands of users were faced with a similar communication breakdown...for more than a week.
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Office 2010, SharePoint public betas for November, VS 2010 Beta 2 Wednesday
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 19, 2009, 2:56 PM
16 Comments
During an industry event whose original purpose was to concentrate on SharePoint 2010, Microsoft's collaborative server product, CEO Steve Ballmer revealed that his company is making ready an official "public beta" of Office 2010, the applications suite for Windows.
The most likely timeframe for such a release would be during PDC 2009, Microsoft's annual developers' conference now scheduled for the third week of November in Los Angeles.
Continue reading Office 2010, SharePoint public betas for November, VS 2010 Beta 2 Wednesday...
How do you define performance?
By Carmi Levy on October 15, 2009, 4:26 PM
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System performance is an interesting concept; everyone seems to define it differently. To some, it involves chewing through a complex spreadsheet. To others, it's how fast a 3D video sequence can be rendered, or how easily Web pages are served up.
Call me a rebel, but after years of living off of a BlackBerry, my thinking has evolved. As much as I focused on megahertz and gigahertz for much of my computing life, the most important criteria for me these days are how fast the thing turns on, and how long it stays on before I have to recharge it.
Danger signs: Now how secure does the cloud look?
By Carmi Levy on October 12, 2009, 5:57 PM
26 Comments
There are service outages, and then there are service outages. T-Mobile customers who carry the Sidekick smartphone are learning the hard way that there's a major difference between having no access to a service for a little while and losing every contact, calendar entry, and related shred of personal data they've got.
In the not too distant past, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have all experienced basic, quaintly simple service outages. Despite the headlines and general chaos associated with each incident, the bottom line impact was never all that onerous: When service returned, so did their users' data. For the most part, users were given an easy excuse to take a few hours off. And with the exception of Google's subscription services, most were free, so folks couldn't argue that they weren't getting their money's worth.
Continue reading Danger signs: Now how secure does the cloud look?...
'Amateur' Linux IBM mainframe failure blamed for stranding New Zealand flyers
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 12, 2009, 11:20 AM
6 Comments
12:05 pm EDT October 11, 2009 · The president of a design firm that specializes in data center power efficiency, and that was working on a new design last year for the Auckland-based data center that failed Friday morning, told Betanews today that even if changes were being made to that data center, if both the original design and the changeover plan were implemented properly, the data center failure would not have happened.
"What seems strange about this incident is that they are blaming it on a generator failure during testing," stated California Data Center Design Group President Ron Hughes, whose organization was not responsible either for the data center's current design or the changeover. "If this failure did occur during testing, the question I would ask is why didn't the redundant generators assume the load or why didn't they just switch back to utility power."
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Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #9: Processor core parking
By Scott M. Fulton, III on September 25, 2009, 1:06 PM
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When you think of kids on the playground playing Star Trek make-believe, you see the guy who plays Scotty inevitably being shouted at to increase or decrease the power, and then the guy putting on his best (or worst) Scottish accent and complaining back to the captain about how it canna be done, she can't take this abuse much longer or we're all genna bloe! Powering up and powering down is the most common task that amateurs think of when they consider the role of an engineer running a big machine.
And yet up until very recently, servers have existed in a perpetual "on/off" state -- they're either turned on and consuming the energy they've been designed to consume, or they're off and your data center is offline. Only in the last few years, with the introduction of the multicore era coupled with the sudden ubiquity of virtualization, has there been the notion that you can move the entire serving job at any one time to the most efficient processor available. New CPU technologies like Intel SpeedStep have created the opportunity for administrators to eliminate the problem of processor latency by turning off entire cores when they're not in use.
Continue reading Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #9: Processor core parking...
For AMD, keeping it too simple may be too stupid
By Carmi Levy on September 21, 2009, 4:59 PM
8 Comments
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
Continue reading For AMD, keeping it too simple may be too stupid...
Like HP, Dell also acquires a Perot empire for enterprise services
By Tim Conneally on September 21, 2009, 2:09 PM
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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.
Continue reading Like HP, Dell also acquires a Perot empire for enterprise services...
Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #10: Boot from virtual devices
By Scott M. Fulton, III on September 8, 2009, 4:50 PM
4 Comments
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.
Continue reading Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #10: Boot from virtual devices...
FCC ponders a future with multiple 'internets'
By Tim Conneally on September 4, 2009, 6:24 PM
23 Comments
While many of the FCC's broadband workshops have dealt with current, concrete issues such as the deployment, adoption, and utilization of broadband in the United States, Thursday's FCC workshop took a refreshing departure from the here and now -- which in government practices is the equivalent to three years ago -- and spent time discussing the ideas that could potentially change what we know as the Internet.
One of the questions in the discussion was, "What might the Internet architecture look like in ten to twenty years, beyond incremental changes like speed increases?"
Continue reading FCC ponders a future with multiple 'internets'...
Here come AMD's six-core, ultra-low-power Opteron EEs
By Scott M. Fulton, III on August 31, 2009, 12:43 AM
1 Comment
There are three "rails" of wattage in AMD's architectural plan for its CPUs: its higher-performance SE line, its lowest-power EE line, and its hybrid HE line that trades some performance for power savings. Two months ago, AMD introduced its first six-core Opterons in the SE flavor first, setting the general trend for future rollouts; last month, it trotted out the HE hybrid line in that same series.
Today, as expected, the company is announcing stage 3 of its plan: the rollout of its first ultra-low-power six-core Opteron series, including the model 2419 EE, with 40 watts of average power consumption (ACP) clocked at 1.8 GHz. This time, AMD's value proposition is this: Server centers that already have quad-core 75W Opteron-based units can replace them for dropped in 40W six-core units, and see better performance per watt while gaining two cores per socket in the process.
Continue reading Here come AMD's six-core, ultra-low-power Opteron EEs...
The 'partly cloudy' network: Amazon's new partial clouds via IPsec VPN
By Scott M. Fulton, III on August 26, 2009, 5:07 PM
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This past year, what has very clearly distinguished one company's cloud services from another has been their intended uses. Whereas Microsoft Windows Azure has been a custom applications platform, and Salesforce.com has built a business logic platform around Force.com, Amazon Web services has been about deploying entire servers in the cloud, letting customers lease the processing time and bandwidth to deploy their own Web fronts on Amazon's hardware.
Up to now, the question for AWS customers has been to deploy or not to deploy; but this morning, data center architects will be asking how much to deploy. With the rollout of what it's calling Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, the service will enable a new class of customers to deploy limited resources into the cloud, and then secure and administer those resources through the customers' own firewalls and admin software. Amazon announced the initial beta of VPC to select customers this morning.
Continue reading The 'partly cloudy' network: Amazon's new partial clouds via IPsec VPN...
Glass: Android for office phones
By Tim Conneally on August 19, 2009, 9:12 PM
2 Comments
Earlier this year, we took a look at a desktop phone running Android built by California startup Touch Revolution. While that device provided a look into the potential application of the OS in fixed telephony, the devices we saw were running a version of Android almost indistinguishable from the publicly available build.
Today, Cloud Telecomputers has debuted a completely unique build of Android as a part of its Glass "telecomputer" platform. The company's reference design has the Android environment running on a TI OMAP processor, and all telephony (VoIP and DSP, SIP Stack and Voice Codecs) being handled by a separate Audiocodes processor.
Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate available today
By Scott M. Fulton, III on August 18, 2009, 11:43 AM
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Download Exchange Server 2010 x64 Release Candidate from Fileforum now.
This morning, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company will be making available the first public release candidate for its Exchange Server 2010 e-mail server today. As of late Tuesday morning, the links still pointed to the last ES 2010 public beta.
Continue reading Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate available today...
Microsoft and Nokia join forces to take on BlackBerry
By Tim Conneally on August 12, 2009, 11:53 AM
7 Comments
Nokia's Symbian S60 today became the first non-Windows Mobile platform to receive support for the Microsoft Office Mobile suite of applications and services. Microsoft and Nokia today announced their long-term partnership to collaborate on the design, development, and marketing of mobile productivity solutions.
Beginning next year, Nokia's E-series handsets will ship with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile built in, and later, other Office applications and software will be added to the Symbian platform, such as mobile versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote, as well as SharePoint Server and Microsoft System Center.
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Microsoft works to claim its own slice of the cloud
By Scott M. Fulton, III on August 3, 2009, 5:16 PM
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It would appear to be the most lucrative new platform in all of computing: the "cloud" -- the space on the Internet from which applications and services can be presented to customers without the need for physical location. It was once called the "grid," but the fact that companies other than IBM managed to effectively rechristen the idea speaks to its inability -- along with everyone else's -- to build a clear and concise message around just what the cloud is.
No one really knows, at least not completely. That's the message we've seen thus far from nearly every major vendor in the cloud space, and it's the message we're seeing from Microsoft as well. Even with a full business plan for Windows Azure, the company's platform for .NET Services in the cloud, its own platform evangelist admitted to Betanews that much of the projected purpose for the service still remains a mystery. Microsoft usually undertakes a platform buildout by leveraging its resources from other platforms (Internet Explorer from Windows, SharePoint from Office, Exchange from Outlook, etc.). And it would seem, at least on paper, that Azure would be leveraged from .NET.
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The state of Microsoft's Business and Server & Tools divisions
By Joe Wilcox on July 30, 2009, 6:20 PM
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Stephen Elop and Bob Muglia delivered two of the more difficult presentations during Microsoft's annual Financial Analyst Meeting. Elop runs the Business division, which had been a consistent performer until fiscal fourth quarter, when revenue fell 13 percent year over year. Server and Tools did better, but still took a revenue hit in fourth quarter.
The two divisions share several important attributes, and the businesses are highly entwined. With the 2003 release cycle, Microsoft started aggressively increasing integration along the vertical applications stack between Office and server software. The integration creates sales pull for Office and newer server software, like SharePoint Server. I leave out Exchange Server, since Microsoft long ago established applications stack integration with Outlook.
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IBM attributes impressive Q2 to margins, margins, margins
By Angela Gunn on July 17, 2009, 9:32 AM
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Mark Loughridge on Thursday dispensed with the introductory pleasantries; the IBM CFO dived right into the Q2 earnings per share with his second sentence. Considering how that sentence panned out, analysts probably would have forgiven him for prefacing his prepared statement with booya!
IBM blasted past expectations, delivering earnings of $2.32 per share -- a company-best EPS for a first, second, or third quarter (adjusting for stock splits), and up 35 cents year-over-year. Q2 net income was $3.1 billion, up 12% year-over-year -- impressive considering total revenues were off 13%, or 7% adjusting for currency fluctuations. Public-sector spending was once again the fastest-growing business sector at 7%.
Continue reading IBM attributes impressive Q2 to margins, margins, margins...
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