The good news for consumers is that AMD also is preparing to have two 45nm fabs ready by 2008, and will rely on Charter Semiconductor to provide additional production capacity.

Users, in other words, can expect a flood of 45nm processors to hit the market in the coming years, causing prices to come down at an unprecedented level.

Quad core processors for everyone! And go short on your Intel and AMD stock.

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini with an image of Intel's first 45nm "Penryn" chip in the back

Support for iTunes content, including DRM-ed video and music would be the main benefit. But its missing a digital video recorder that would allow users to record and play back television shows.

TiVo will sell you a box that will record your TV shows and that offers all of the Apple TV features except for iTunes DRM support. It will even offer a video download service together with Amazon that will launch in the future.

And if you prefer to avoid TiVo's monthly subscription fee, you can opt for one of the many media adapters. Starting at $60 for a model that supports music and photo streaming, you can go all the up to the $349 Netgear Digital Entertainer HD that will hook you up with Youtube shows on your TV, as well as digital movies, music and images.

Apple probably does have one thing going for its however. Setting up a third party media adapter can be a royal pain in the you-know-where. The Apple TV is sure to work brilliantly provided you don't venture outside of Apple's nicely decorated walled garden.

The 2006 data has "market shift" written all over it. Companies aren’t buying more servers so much as that they are buying more expensive ones. That bodes well for companies with a legacy of system building, while box pushers suffer the consequences of focusing on volume and failing to innovate. Sun again is the obvious winner, while HP and IBM failed to even keep pace with the average market growth.

The reason for all this server joy apparently is virtualization. Consolidating several boxes on a single, bigger server makes for lower energy bills and easier maintenance. We've been talking about it for years, but server buyers only now are starting to implement it.

Blade servers did well too, despite HP's Anne Livermore embracing the firm's c-Class systems as if it had some infectious disease at a launch event

But why do Digg users claim that they have a moral ownership of Ajax powered voting boxes, rounded corners or social bookmarking? Digg didn't invent any of those features, it just happened to create the most user friendly implementation. Calling something a Digg ripoff is a stretch of the imagination.

The Digg vigilantes are starting to resemble the Mac fan boys. Apple users proudly proclaim that Windows Vista is copying design features from OS X, but they conveniently fail to notice that Apple didn't invent items like Dashboard (sidebar in Vista) or desktop search technology either.

In both cases, the loyalty seems to stem from the underdog effect. Apple nearly got crushed by the PC, Microsoft and its own management. Digg currently is the only major social bookmarking websites that remained independent – Wired.com owner CondeNet acquired Reddit and Yahoo has snapped up Del.icio.us. Digg is the only one that has a moral claim on being community driven, not money driven.

But an army of overly vocal backers doesn't mean that you are right.

Oh no, a site that allows users to indicate that they like a story or idea. How dare they!

The software automatically starts up and connects to the server whenever it has an internet connection. So Melin monitored the Seti@Home log files to pin down the IP address for his machine. He forwarded the data to the police which subpoenaed the internet provider to give them the subscriber's address.

A few days later, Melin had his laptop back. The contents of the hard drive was intact, except for the addition of a dozen rap songs. But it did contain his wife's novels and screenplays.

Which just goes to show that having a geek husband goes a long way. "I always knew that a geek would make a great husband," she told the Associated Press. "He always backed up all my data, but this topped it all. It became like `Mission: Impossible' for him, looking for hard evidence for the cops to use. ... He's a genius -- my hero."

The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Life (SETI) however still has to yield any direct results.

Millions of public funds finally get put to good use

There is no excuse for Kline's actions. But William is just as guilty of crafting malware and breaking into innocent people's computers.

If President Bush doesn't have the right to spy on US citizens, some random kid from a Canadian basement should be banned from those practices as well. Yet no legal charges have been filed against William, where at least Kline would have a very strong case against him.

He's doing his superman thing again...

Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on television commercials and seedy adware banners, Vonage might just as well pay new subscribers $200 for a two year commitment.

The provider doesn't seem to have much choice. Deep pocketed providers such as cable provider Comcast have kicked off an aggressive VoIP offensive that makes Vonage look pale by comparison.

(disclaimer: I cancelled my personal Vonage account earlier this year after the company claimed it would take 1.5 months to port over my number to a competing service)

In other news, Spears on Wednesday checked out of a rehabilitation clinic only hours after she had entered it. So our "hit me baby one more time" girl is doing just fine.

Wait... how is this related to high tech? Oh, wait, Ebay.

Think of the wonderful things that you could do with Britney's hair

under:<script>alert(This is all it takes)</script>

Once you enter that instruction, an alert box will pop up with the text "This is all it takes" inside. Displaying an alert box might not be anything serious, but that attacker can also insert more harmful commands that can expose confidential information, or worse.

Now go to Google and download the latest Google Desktop update.

Selling credit card numbers still is far more profitable: on average they rake in $7 to $15 each.

But a hacked Myspace account still has some use. MySpace apparently is facing a moral dilemma and won't shut down hacked accounts of genuine users. A spam account is shut down in no time.

And most users furthermore are clueless about what is going on anyway. After all, computers do weird things all the time.

image borrowed from McAfee Avert Labs blog

Microsoft is scared and promised a review of its advertising process. But if rogue advertisers can slip through this time, they no doubt will be able to do again in the future. They may not be able to fool Windows Live Messenger a second time, but there are plenty of other victims waiting to be had.

The online security scare isn't going away. We're just beginning.

But we have yet to meet the first company that simply decides to turn off its lights and disappear. Instead you need a fancy marketing campaign with lots of drum rolls and waving feathers.

Not that Cisco isn't vulnerable. The networking giant is raking in record profit margins on its core routing and switching business, while investing billions in emerging markets such as home entertainment and $280,000 telepresence systems (two or more required).

But the way to beat Cisco is by out-innovating them rather than claiming that your boxes works slightly better than your competitors. It's the difference between showing vision and faking it.

All bark and no bite?

Selling more consumer systems will cause a drop in the average revenue per system because those software packages are priced cheaper than enterprise ones. Ballmer also cautioned that there will be just a limited spike from "high piracy markets as a result of Vista's new piracy protection technologies. But many piracy users in emerging economies couldn't afford to pay for Vista anyway.

Ballmer didn't dim Vista's overall market expectations, but he issued analysts a dose of realism.

I've looked at some of the models and reports, et cetera, about our business and what people think it looks like, and I'm really excited on how enthusiastic everybody is about Vista.  I, too, am very enthusiastic about Vista.  But I think sometimes the enthusiasm about this great product and the excitement and the launch, people have to understand our revenue models because I think some of the revenue forecasts I've seen out there for Windows Vista in fiscal year '08 are overly aggressive, if I could say it that way, and let me kind of walk through what drives Windows revenue so people understand why I say what I'm saying.

PC growth is a driver of Windows revenue.  You all have your own forecasts for PC growth.  I will tell you that whatever you think it is, more growth comes from high piracy markets than from low piracy markets.  That's an important thing to remember.  And more of the growth tends to come from the consumer market these days than the business market, which means we also receive as a mix lower average price.  We have a lower average price typically on Windows in the consumer world than we do for the business world.

Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth, and I think we'll make some piracy improvements this year.  We have new technologies built into Windows Vista, something we call Windows Genuine Advantage we've really dialed up in capabilities with the Vista release, and I do think that that will bring some revenue growth.  I still don't count on it to be a huge thing on the scale of this business as we really ferret through how far we can dial it up, and what that means for customer experience and customer satisfaction.

We will have strong growth in the Windows business in emerging markets:  China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others.  But that's strong growth on quite a low base of revenue.  Those markets are very high piracy.  In some cases we also have much lower pricing in some of those markets with our Starter Edition, et cetera.

Corporate upgrades, people say, ah, corporate upgrades, that's the place to go.  We already sold a lot of Vista corporate upgrades.  That's built into a lot of our Enterprise Agreements that have previously been signed.  And I think some people may be a little bit more bullish.  I think we can drive these harder.  I think there is some upside.  But I think people might underestimate the degree to which we already have a very strong base of Enterprise Agreement bookings for essentially -- that essentially include Windows Vista.

And last but not least is non-corporate upgrades where, if anything, I think you have to think FY '08 might be slightly down versus FY '07, because we have such a large surge that we're getting post the Vista launch in these non-corporate upgrades.  This is people walking into retail stores typically buying a retail copy of Vista to upgrade to.  We get huge spikes in the first month, two months, three months, which all occur in fiscal year '07, and will not recur in fiscal year '08.

So, I think as I've looked at what many of you have to say about it, I think this is an area where perhaps people are somewhat too bullish. 

There are two other areas that I think are worth mentioning.  Online customer acquisition:  I said this last year at the meeting; I'll say it again this year.  We continue to explore interesting ways to actually increase our operating expense against online customer acquisition.  We've pursued a number of those.  Some have been successful and are in the statement I'm making about 2.7 billion or less of operating expense growth, but we continue to look for effective, cost-effective ways to increase customer acquisition.  And while there's a lot of this funded, we may come back to you some time in the year and tell you that we will increase it.

But the company at a launch event earlier this week in San Francisco pushed its luck when it tried to pitch the software against Sun's Solaris operating system. The "we're not Linux, but open source just the same" Solaris software has found a strong following with companies that install it on industry standard x86 servers (many of which come from HP).

HP-UX doesn't even support x86 servers – it's limited to PA-RISC (which has been all but discontinued) and Itanium processors.

HP-UX is to software what mainframes are to the server market: really important its installed base, and utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world.

HP's superdome, as exciting as an IBM mainframe and not nearly selling as well.

The Canadian archbishop Raymond Roussin earlier this week lashed out against Telus for launching a mobile porn service:

"Given the increasing awareness of addiction to pornography through internet access, and the abuse that this perpetuates of vulnerable persons, the decision by Telus is disappointing and disturbing," Roussin told the British Columbia Catholic newspaper.

Viacom's example hopefully will be followed by many others, enabling a legal and viral market for online videos.

If that happens, the question that begs for an answer becomes: what is Youtube's role and benefit? Currently the video service is the biggest because its the biggest: publishers like Youtube's massive audience and the audience likes the massive amount of videos.

As publishers choose to host video on their own servers, Youtube will lose its role as the world's video aggregators. Soon it will go the same way as Geocities and Xoom, services that offered easy to use tools that allowed consumers to build and host their own websites in 1999, and now are nowhere to be seen.

The world doesn't need a $1.65bn video hosting service. It needs a video search engine that connects consumers and content.

"Frequently, when I have to make a statement to the media about developments with regard to the progress of our litigation or a certain direction the company was going, I couldn't for legal reasons."

The Linux lawsuit has caused many SCO customers to abandon the company's Unix operating system in protest, causing a drop in the firm's revenues. SCO employees furthermore have become the pariahs among their peers.

No matter how much SCO tries to keep the legal case separated from its everyday operations, Stowell's comments underscore that this is just wishful thinking.

In 2005 we attended SCO Forum in Las Vegas, where we had back to back interviews with SCO chief executive Darl McBride and the general manager of SCO's Unix division Jeff Hunsaker. While we mostly discussed the Linux suit in the first interview, the second one focused on SCO's Unix product.

At the end of the Hunsaker interview, McBride walked into our room. Unware of the topics that we discussed, he asked Hunsaker:

"Did he ask you what it is like to work for the devil?"

Are they doing the same for other 3G services? My provider charges a $20 monthly fee for unlimited access to mobile email news headlines in the mobile browser. But the real bargain lays in the fact that high speed data subscription with network card would go for much more.

The provider doesn't know that I'm using a smart phone – for all they know I'm still on a stone-age handset. If they did, they would instantly raise the subscription fees. The rate for an unlimited data plan on a smart phone jumps to $40 – there $20 suddenly buys me no more than a measly 5Mb per month.

If operators are scratching they heads about the limited adoption of high speed data services, they should take a closer look at their pricing structures. The average consumer isn't going to enjoy mobile data services at $40 per month, just because Vodafona or AT&T feels that it needs to further increase its profit margins.

Operator greed killed the promise of MMS. Will they repeat their mistakes for 3G?

Apple's iPhone too risks becoming a victim of operator greed

This blog is part of the vnunet websites. We work with Google, allowing web searchers to easily find the information that they are looking for. They submit information to Google Base and use tags and robots.txt files to help the search engine navigate our websites.

This site's parent company is fully aware that Google copies information from the website to its cache. And we don't mind if Google news copies our copyrighted headlines in the Google News service.

Because as Google helps users find their way around the way, they find our pages more often, giving our advertisers the opportunity to target entice them with their offerings, helping us, Google, and the advertisers make more money.

Allowing Google to link to our headlines is a small price to pay. Especially if you consider the fact that the benefits translate into real money, where the disadvantage is merely a theoretical loss of control over our headlines. A no-brainer, except in Belgium.

We could dive into an hour long debate about the question if this qualifies as an actual Vista bug (and believe me, we did). The component after all might be an exclusive Vista tool, but isn't a core part of the operating system. But Microsoft gave the final word: because the vulnerability causes Vista to be flawed, the update is considered a Vista update, a company spokesperson told vnunet.com.

So there we have it. The most secure version of Windows suffered from a critical security hole. It was bound to happen. But it would have been nice for Microsoft if it wouldn't have happened on the first patch release cycle after the official launch.

Onecare for Vista (click to enlarge - picture of beta software)

A next Windows will come no doubt, and people will buy it. But the most interesting question is if Microsoft by 2009 will be ready to truly and genuinely embrace the internet, or if Windows by then will have been reduced to a basic operating layer that provides access to Google's and Yahoo's online applications.

Lets see some vision before we start looking at features.

Yearning for a new vista already?

Money: Mac may be cool but PC has the money.

Girl: PC gets the girl.

Work: Mac works for PC.

Music: Mac doesn't like to share.

Unless you're planning to run the web server for Google or Digg.com from under your living room sofa, you'd have to start looking at image analysis to get any use for your terraflop system. Because we're just dying to search for that one photo of auntie Margie in front of the pyramids (search for triangels), or the single pic of uncle Bob smiling (search for smiles).

At least, that was one of the benefits that Intel researchers are touting about the chip.

A minor issue is that Intel last year already showed off an application that does image retrieval... running on a current generation notebook computer. You can check it out on the video below.

Time to head back to the drawing board?

A few days ago I got a call from a friend. His young cousin had received an iPod nano for his birthday and the parents were having trouble getting the thing to work in iTunes on their new Vista PC.

I headed right over. I had to see what all the fuss was about. There's no way that the compatibility issues could be so bad as to warrant not upgrading at all.

I was wrong. It went down just as Apple had said it would.

The problem was that the parents had about 50 of their son's favorite songs picked out from their library of more than 500 songs. When they plugged in the iPod, it automatically began to sync the entire library, leaving the kid with a nano full of songs he didn't want. When they went to erase those unwanted songs, well, that's where our little Vista "quirk" came in.

Making changes to your iPod settings requires that the "enable disk use" option is selected. But iTunes won't allow you to make any changes to the iPod settings when its running in Vista. Instead the system would become unresponsive for 45 seconds, followed by a cryptic error message.

After about an hour of trying, explaining to the thoroughly confused parents what I was trying, failing, and explaining to the even more thoroughly confused parents why it was failing, I had an idea. Plug it in to XP, turn disk mode on, and presto: Vista iPod.

The short of it is that over the next hour we were able to use the iPod to wipe the player and change the setting. Next it was easy to get the iPod to hook up, set it to sync with a custom playlist, and show the parents how to manipulate the playlist and fill it with all the Justin Timberlake and Weird Al Yankovic any nine year-old could ever want. After three hours and numerous suppressed urges to send the iPod into the San Francisco Bay, it worked like to our complete satisfaction.

Is this sort of issue anything different from what other companies do? Of course not. Every new operating system will have compatibility issues.

The problem here is that Apple has pumped out so many wild exaggerations and anti-Windows FUD, that we can't tell the genuine Microsoft bashing from the Steve-Jobs-gone-made Microsoft bashing.

What happened here was, to the letter, exactly what Apple warned of. The same Apple that classifies Vista as "major surgery" and claims that it has "reinvented the phone" issued a 100 per cent serious warning that users not upgrade Windows for fear of major iTunes compatibility woes, which for obvious reality distortion reasons should be blamed on Microsoft.

Regardless, in this case, Apple's not kidding. No FUD this time, just a good headache. If you have an iPod, don't take it anywhere near Vista any time soon. If you absolutely need to use iTunes, stick with XP for the time being.

They really mean it this time.

Don't do it - yet

The '''Football Association of Ireland''' ('''FAI''')Are a bunch of useless cunts that should be taken out and shot. Everything that they touch turns to ash. wheither it's the Eircom League, all the money that they blew after the 1990 & 1994 world Cups, the Building of Eircom Park, The Roy keane incident, The Sacking Of Brian Kerr after he did the best that he could right down to the Appiontment of a man without no managerial experience and who talks through his arse...Mr Steve Staunton! the organising body for the sport of [[Football (soccer)|association football]] (soccer) in the [[Republic of Ireland]]They should appoint Dave Barry 'cause he is from Cork and knows all about winning. Doucha Davey Barry boy!. It should not be confused with the [[Irish Football Association]] (IFA), which is the organising body for the sport in [[Northern Ireland]] which is full of dirty fuckin huns and snakes just like Rangers.

Editing the entry is currently block due to an overly colored level or accuracy.

San Marino: picture perfect, but not for the Irish

When Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie first unveiled Windows Live in November 2005, the service was presented as a full fledged assault on the online advertising market.

Microsoft has since received a severe humbling as its "revolutionary" Live search engine failed to steal any market share from Google. The latter also unveiled betas of services that will be able to rival many of Microsoft's upcoming services.

Convincing existing Hotmail users to start using additional Microsoft services sounds like a more sensible strategy that competing with Google head on.

Security so far has been mostly treated as a puzzle, with anti virus, anti spyware and access management as the solutions.

The mystery of security however is how to build a service that is intuitive and easy to use. If we follow Swainson's reasoning, that is a journey without a destination.

"Our greatest challenge comes at the intersection of technology and human psychology—the grand mystery of security: how to make it all work together seamlessly. How to ensure that once the human elements are introduced everything still works as it should."

Insert comment about open door here.

Swainson deserves credit for delivering a keynote that isn't an obvious company product pitch, or worse, pull an Oracle. But the company failed to deliver a visionary speech. Instead Swainson left behind a puzzled audience.

We can't help but speculate that there is a deeper meaning behind Elison's absence. The company in past months has come under fire for the horrible security record of its database. Security experts grade it as one of the worst in the industry.

Ellison is known to allow some time for questions at the end of his presentations, and several delegates that we spoke with were looking forward to challenging the vendor's state of security denial.

But what did Oracle talk about? Rizvi in about 20 minutes rushed through a presentation where he showed off the company's enterprise search and briefly mentioned that is has identity services too.

There can't be any better way to bore an audience of cryptographers and bug hunters to dead.

Ellison actually pulled the same prank one year ago, when the company staged a cheer fest about its 2008 Project Fusion. Ellison was scheduled to close the event, but he never showed up (again claiming to have caught a flu virus). He sent his president Charles Philips instead. Then too the company failed to mention Ellison's absence until the very last minute.

Oracle's last keynote presentation at Linuxworld comes to mind as well. Charles Philips there too rushed through his 45 minute time slot, didn't address anything relevant to the audience and left behind a puzzled crowd.

Rizvi: "As you all see, I am not Larry Ellison."

If you're a clever online thief however, you don't pillage the online bank accounts and credit cards yourself. That merely increases the risks of getting caught. The real pros sell the login information online. The average credit card will net you a between $7 and $15. A gold card with a high credit limit of $22,000 gets you about $40. (pictured right: asking prices for a series of credit cards with varying limits)

But let's say you're desperate for some cash. The clever crooks recruit some gullible consumers to work from home transferring money through their personal bank accounts. The "employees" never realize that they are laundering funds until it's too late.

A more risky way is to set up a fake online store and use the stolen credit cards to purchase goods.

If you happen to have the credit card owner's social security number, you can also change the billing address on the credit card, go on an online shopping spree and have the goods delivered at the address of a middleman (or again, someone who fell for a "work from home doing nothing" ad.

And the less sophisticated create a fake plastic card, including magnetic strip, to go on a real world shopping spree.

Laundering money isn't as easy as it seems, and will likely cost some money. But if you just netted $1.1m, you can justify some costs.

Management console for the Visual Brix hacking tool (click picture to enlarge)

Microsoft joined three other vendors in the failure category, including McAfee.

The results bode badly for consumers. Despite Vista's advertised bullet proof security, users of the software can't trust that they are safe and secure.

Are video content owners merely afraid to repeat the mistakes of the recording industry, which alienated music buyers and set off a sales decline? Or do they actually believe in the web as a way to deliver their videos, and think that Google would make for a good friend and a dangerous enemy?

As Google's treasure chest is swelling, somebody is bound to make a run for some of its riches. The search engine's constant enablement of copyright violations would be a great starting point.

The culprit, it seemed, is a company called Moduslink, which handles the upgrade orders. During regular business hours, the site was so slow that we were unable to complete our order. The first time we stumbled just before the finish line when the system tried to charge a credit card for the shipping and handling fee. Other attempts failed even earlier in the whole process.

We tried calling Moduslink to find out what was happening. A defiant spokeswoman first tried to confuse us with lies, incorrectly claiming that each vendor had its own service. Most of them use this webiste, where Toshiba and HP have a slightly customized version. All sites are clearly run on the Moduslink.com domain.

She then promised to look into the matter and give us a call back. She never did.

Microsoft too was contacted, but the company couldn't respond because all the relevant employees were only now making their way back from the Vista launch event in New York.

After numerous attempts during the day, we decided to give it one more shot at 5:30pm Pacific Time. By then, we hoped, most of the world would have stopped flooding the website with upgrade requests. The site was still slow, but this time we successfully placed our order.

--
Update 4/5/07: Moduslink has finanlly found its box with envelopes and pens and has started shipping!

Seagate therefore expects you buy the hard drive as a stand alone device that's as big as a stack of say 10 credit cards. It connects to your phone through a Bluetooth connection and requires that users recharge the battery after 10 hours of use.

The hard drive maker is hoping that digital video will fuel demand. But in that case users might just as well sign up for a mobile video service or buy a large capacity MiniSD memory card. That may not allow you to store an entire season of The Office, but it saves you from having to worry about yet another device.