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Just how thick is Microsoft? Everywhere you go, there are advertisements for how unstable Windows is.

You can see the ad on train arrival displays, airport screens, on the LCD display in elevators, on video games in entertainment parlours, on massive projections on the sides of buildings or even while Bill Gates is on stage demoing Windows.

B

SOD in Times Square: high profile advertising for Windows

Your bus is arriving: but you’ll need to run CHKDSK /F first to find out when

Stable. Reliable. Dependable: as demonstrated by this Vista PC right here…

Thank god: Boeing doesn’t use Windows to fly the autopilot.

Yes — you know what I’m talking about: the dreaded bluescreen of death. Or if you’re really behind the times and still running a beta version of Vista, you might even get the infamous red screen of death.

It’s when Windows just throws up its hands and ditches its slick-as-spit Aero GUI altogether, in favour of a stark DOS-style text-mode screen that reels off some technical data that is largely unintelligible to the average user, like “0×0000001E, KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED”.

There’s a whole group on Flickr dedicated to public bluescreens of death. There are some fricking huge examples. Like whole sides of buildings showing the bluescreen for days.

World’s biggest BSOD?: Toronto’s The Bay department store

It has been giving Apple’s Fake CEO endless material to work with.

Case in point from the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: “See here. This woman says Dell shipped her a defective machine and when she complained they sent her four more, all of them also defective. The “defect,” which still plagues her fifth machine is that her computer “goes to a blue screen, which indicates a serious error that requires the PC to be restarted.” Poor lady didn’t realize, apparently, that in the world of Windows this is not a defect. It’s normal operating procedure.”

Or this, also from Fake Steve, about the massive Toronto department store bluescreens above: “A few people have sent me this and asked if this was our work. They think maybe we rented these screens and did this on purpose. You know what? We didn’t. You know why? We don’t have to. That’s the beauty of Windows. The wow is now. As in, Wow, that OS is wicked unstable, isn’t it?”

It’s confounding that Microsoft hasn’t twigged to what an image problem the BSOD creates.

For all its multigazillion dollar marketing campaigns dreamed up by the “wow is now” geniuses, nobody at Microsoft seems to have twigged that the best thing they could do is do away with the ubiquitous bluescreen.

Nothing says “sloppy programming” better than a tech-dump bluescreen which says “yeah, ok, somebody’s crummy software caused our kernel to fail, but we couldn’t handle the fault elegantly enough to actually stay in graphics mode.”

Apple twigged to this years ago in OS X, introducing an unassuming semi-translucent charcoal screen overlay that says “you must reboot your Macintosh” in multiple languages. Simple. Unintimidating. Actually quite visually attractive.

Kernel panic: much less panic-inducing than Microsoft’s bluescreen

Admittedly, Apple’s relatively elegant handling of a total system failure is a first in computing terms. It used to have a “sad Mac” face if there was a boot problem, and in really bad cases, the Mac would actually have a black screen and make a very alarming car crash noise.

The Amiga had “guru meditation ” — a cryptic error message upon total system failure

It seems to be a running joke among software engineers to make system failures either humorous or full of technical info to help the infinitesimally small proportion of users who happen to be software developers debug their software.

But I ask again: how thick is Microsoft? Seriously, nobody likes to get a BSOD. Isn’t it time it was replaced with something slightly less offensive?

Last June, Microsoft geared up to announce a major change in Windows Vista’s licensing terms. It planned to allow Vista’s Home Basic and Home Premium editions to be run in a virtual machine via hardware emulation, something not allowed under Vista’s license.But for some reason, the company backed off suddenly, even after having pre-briefed some reporters.

Today, though, Microsoft went ahead with the change, making it a lot less expensive to run Vista virtually.

Previously, Microsoft’s license for Vista limited virtualization — using programs such as Parallels Desktop for Mac or VMware’s offerings — to Ultimate and Business. The new license adds Home Basic and Home Premium.

How much cheaper is it to use these editions? If you buy OEM versions of Windows — which come with no support from Microsoft — it costs significantly less. At Newegg.com, for example, an OEM copy of Home Basic is $95. Home Premium is $110. Ultimate is $170 and Business is $145.

Retail copies of Vista are much more expensive. The full, retail version of Ultimate costs $320 at Newegg.

This is something Microsoft should have done long ago. The company had argued that, because virtualization was something done by power users and IT shops, Ultimate and Business were more suitable editions. But the popularity of consumer products, particularly for Macs, undercuts that argument.

Microsoft also announced that it had acquired Calista Technologies, which has technology that can improve the graphical and 3D capabilities of virtualization products.

Additional coverage from Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet.

Source : TechBlog 

A new UK report on the habits of the “Google Generation” finds that kids born since 1993 aren’t quite the Internet super-sleuths they’re sometimes made out to be. For instance, are teens better with technology than older adults? Perhaps, but they also “tend to use much simpler applications and fewer facilities than many imagine.”

The report (PDF), sponsored by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, tries to get beyond the stereotypes to find out just how good young people are with information technology, and what the implications are for schools and libraries. Based on log analysis from British Library web sites and search tools, along with a “virtual” longitudinal study based on literature reviews from the past 30 years, the report explodes a number of myths about students today.

It’s true that young people prefer interactive systems to passive ones and that they are generally competent with technology, but it’s not true that students today are “expert searchers.” In fact, the report calls this “a dangerous myth.” Knowing how to use Facebook doesn’t make one an Internet search god, and the report concludes that a literature review shows no movement (either good or bad) in young people’s information skills over the last several decades. Choosing good search terms is a special problem for younger users.

The report’s cover image. Seriously.

Another common trope is that respect for authority on the Web is dead (with Wikipedia usually cited as an example) and that there are no more “experts” on the Internet; it’s all about peer knowledge. The report calls this a “myth” as well, saying that “research in the specific context of the information resources that children prefer and value in a secondary school setting shows that teachers, relatives, and textbooks are consistently valued above the Internet.”

Or what about this hoary chestnut: students today are impatient, incapable of waiting, and demand instant gratification, and any delay or requirement that effort be expended simply leads them to click off to some other site. This idea also gets axed by the report, which calls the idea “a truism of our time” with “no hard evidence to suggest that young people are more impatient in this regard.”

So what’s true about the Google generation?

• They like to cut-and-paste. “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
• They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
• They multitask all the time. “It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”

But libraries, generally headed by members of “the greatest generation” rather than the Google generation, need to be careful about how they try to meet the needs of the next generation. Jumping headfirst into hot new technologies like social networking can easily backfire. The report notes that some librarians are opening MySpace and Facebook pages, trying to make their services hipper to students, but that “there is a considerable danger that younger users will resent the library invading what they regard as their space.”

Source : Ars Technica 

Battered by slow revenue growth and the popularity of social networking Web sites, Yahoo! Inc. is poised to lay off hundreds of workers, according to published reports.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have both reported on the slumping Internet icon’s cost-cutting plans, citing people familiar with the matter.

Precisely how many of Yahoo’s roughly 14,000 employees will lose their jobs hasn’t been determined, the newspapers said. A final decision could be announced January 29 when Yahoo executives are scheduled to review the Sunnyvale-based company’s fourth-quarter results.

If several hundred employees are dumped, it will mark Yahoo’s most extensive layoffs since 2001 when the company was trying to battle back from the dot-com bust.

The payroll purge was first reported over the weekend by Silicon Alley Insider, a blog focused on investments in technology and media. The blog said Yahoo had drawn up a list of 1,500 to 2,500 jobs that could be eliminated, but Monday’s reports indicated management doesn’t expect the cuts to be that deep.

A Yahoo spokeswoman didn’t immediately return calls seeking comment.

It won’t come as a surprise if Yahoo jettisons workers, said Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry. He believes Yahoo has room to trim its work force by about 5 percent, or 700 employees, after phasing out some of its services, such as auctions and photos, during the past year.

Besides falling further behind Silicon Valley rival Google Inc. in the lucrative Internet search and advertising market, Yahoo also has been struggling to hold on to younger Web surfers as they spend more time on hip online hangouts like Facebook.com and MySpace.com.

The problems have slowed Yahoo’s revenue growth even as spending on online ads accelerates. That trend has devastated Yahoo’s stock, which has plunged by nearly 50 percent since the end of 2005. Yahoo shares finished last week at $20.78.

With shareholders clamoring for a shake-up, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang took over as the company’s chief executive last June, replacing former movie studio mogul Terry Semel.

Yang has promised to re-establish Yahoo’s position as the Web’s most popular “starting point” while building a compelling ad network, but his progress hasn’t impressed investors so far. Since Yang became CEO, Yahoo’s stock price has declined by 25 percent while Google shares have surged by more than 15 percent.

Earlier this month, Yahoo opened its mobile platform so outside programmers can develop new applications for Yahoo pages accessed on mobile handsets. Yahoo hopes the mini-applications will bring the company more money from advertising.

The company also unveiled a redesigned home page for mobile phones that includes more content and enables visitors to designate material they want highlighted.

Source : CNN.com

A recently-release roadmap for the next major Window release – Windows 7 – indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010.

There are apparently three “milestone” builds planned for 2008, and the first one – M1 – has already shipped to key partners for code validation. M1 is for the English language build only, but is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will most likely be the last Windows operating system available in 32-bit, and given the rapid advances Windows Vista is making in the 64-bit computing market, this seems a sensible decision.

Is this Windows 7: This screenshot, floating around on online forums, purports to be from an alpha of Windows 7. Probably fake, but interesting nonetheless

M2 should ship around April/May, and M3 some time in the third quarter of 2008. There’s no available roadmap information about further milestone, beta or release candidate builds, except the updated RTM release date of H2 2009.

If Windows 7 is released in the second half of 2009, this will be three years after Windows Vista which went RTM in November 2006. A three-year major product cycle would take the Windows operating system out of cycle with Windows Server, which is on an approximate four-year cycle.

The big question is who in the market will respond to an early release. The transition to Windows Vista seems to have caused a lot of angst amongst users, but I think has far more to do with moving out of the Windows XP comfort zone, rather than any indication of Vista’s quality or stability. In which case, perhaps a shorter product cycle from here on in will get users and businesses thinking ahead much quicker, not to mention the hardware vendors who were the major contributors to Vista’s shaky start.

Source : APCMag.com

Work has started on a new technical specification that will allow external SATA storage devices (eSATA) to receive power via their single external cable, removing the need for a separate power cord.

Although the standard is designed for connection of external hard drives, it could potentially be used inside PCs too, allowing bare metal hard drives to be installed with a single cable rather than the two that are currently required.

The nobly named Serial ATA International Organisation (SATA-IO), a consortium of companies with vested interests in the SATA standard, says the new Oower-over eSATA specification should be completed by the second half of this year. Equipment based on it should quickly follow. SATA-IO members include Dell, HP, Intel, Hitachi and Seagate.One of the key challenges to be addressed by the new standard is to ensure that the new power-enabled connectors are backwardly compatible with existing eSATA gear. The standard will also need to maintain a data transfer rate of 3 gigabits per second.

Takeup of the eSATA standard has been slow to date, despite the fact that it allows drives to be run externally at the same speed as they would if installed internally in a PC.

The SATA-IO believes moving to a powered version of eSATA will make storage equipment based on the standard more appealing to end users. It comes at a time when external storage growing in popularity in both small office and home applications.

Doing away with power cables will also make the prospect of using an eSATA-based device on the road much easier. Rather than hunting for a power point, users will simply be able to connect a hard drive or optical storage device directly to their computer.

Source  : APCMag.com 

Massive price drops have marked the beginning of the end for HD-DVD, with Toshiba slashing prices by 50% today.

But Sony, maker of the competing Blu-ray format, is making a concerted effort to ensure the swift death of HD-DVD by offering free Blu-ray-playing PlayStation 3s with certain models of Bravia TV.

Toshiba’s HD-DVD pricing is now as follows:

• HD-E1: was $599, now $299 with four free movies
• HD-EP10: was $799, now $399 with six free movies
• HD-XE1: was $1299, now $599 with 11 free movies.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the XE1’s 11 free movies are worth about $400 alone, so you could theoretically snag a top-of-the-line HD-DVD player for about $200 under Toshiba’s new pricing.

Toshiba’s HD-DVD players will also upscale your standard DVDs to “near high-definition”quality when you play them back via an HDMI connection, which is a bonus for people who already have HDTVs.

Unfortunately, with most movie studios having announced they will produce movies exclusively for Blu-ray in the future, it seems unlikely that Toshiba’s price cuts will win many customers.

One exception, perhaps is people who happen to need a new DVD player anyway and figure they may as well replace it with a cheap HD-DVD player and enjoy a few free movies, even if they can’t buy many high-def movies in the future.

Currently, the only studios that are still committed to producing HD-DVD movies are Universal and Paramount, but the largest producer of home videos, Warner, switched its allegiance to Blu-ray on the eve of the international tech tradeshow, CES Las Vegas. The other studios lined up behind Blu-ray are a formidable barrier for the HD-DVD camp to overcome, including Sony, Fox, MGM, Disney and Lions Gate.

Sony is obviously keen to keep the momentum going to the finish line, offering free PlayStation 3s with Bravia XBR, X and W TVs.

However, even Blu-ray is not yet a clear choice for consumers, as initially produced players may not be able to access special features of Blu-ray movies yet to be released.

Early Blu-ray players were only capable of playing the Blu-ray 1.0 specification, however, the newer 1.1 profile requires secondary audio and video hardware decoders as well as 256MB of storage in the player for content. The future 2.0 profile needs an additional set of hardware decoders (bringing the total up to two video and two audio decoders) for picture-in-picture functionality, along with 1GB of storage for content.

The PS3 is widely regarded as the best Blu-ray player available because of the ease of upgrading its firmware to cope with new Blu-ray movie features, but consumers may still hold off on buying other home theatre Blu-ray players until they are fully Blu-ray 2.0 compliant.

Source : APCMag.com 

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Los Angeles, the new-look USB 3.0 connectors and sockets got a public airing.

First announced and demonstrated by Pat Gelsinger (Intel’s Senior Vice-President and General Manager of the Digital Enterprise Group) at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in September 2007, “SuperSpeed USB” utilises a parallel optical cable to deliver bandwidth at approximately 4.8 Gbit/sec which is around 10 times the speed of the current USB 2.0 standard.

Pat Gelsinger

Unfortunately the optical connectors weren’t on display at CES, just the electrical ones.

USB 3.0 optical connector

As USB 3.0 is designed to be backwards-compatible with both USB 1.1 and USB 2.0, the pin design is almost identical with existing USB plugs and receptacles. The five USB 3.0 contacts have been positioned behind the existing four USB 1.1/2.0 contacts, and the receptacle is deeper as a result of this – USB 3.0 plugs will be longer than existing USB plugs to reach the rear contacts.

USB 3.0 electrical plug

USB 3.0 connector diagram

The USB 3.0 specification is expected to be released in the first half of 2008, with peripherals hitting the market in 2009 or 2010.

Source : APCMag.com

If you’ve always longed to be a disc jockey–or at least to play one on Saturday nights–some new, highly portable DJ gear could bring that dream much closer.

Two new devices dispense entirely with the bulky turntables and CD players of traditional DJ equipment. Instead, the new products are so compact that aspiring jam masters can put a DJ rig in their pocket–or at least in a backpack–and head for the party, connect to the stereo system, and rock the crowd.

One of the new players, the Pacemaker (520 euros, or about $760), created by a small Swedish company, Tonium, reduces the basic DJ equipment of dual players and mixer to a device the size of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The Pacemaker has a 120-gigabyte hard drive, fits in the palm of the hand, runs on batteries, and has a built-in mixer to layer tunes seamlessly so the music never stops.

Tonium will begin shipping Pacemakers in February, said Ola Sars, sales and marketing director for the company, which is based in Stockholm. It will focus first on customers in the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, and then on the United States. American consumers will be able to order through the Web site in February, he said.

The Pacemaker lets the DJ preview one track in the headphones while another song is playing for the audience through speakers. “You can select the second song, and then mix the songs together so one song goes into the next smoothly,” said Jonas Norberg, the chief executive of Tonium.

Norberg, an engineer and professional DJ, started working on the Pacemaker in 2005, hoping to shrink the common DJ interface of CD players and mixer into something a bit larger than an iPod. He and his team have been working on it ever since.

“I wanted a PlayStation Portable for music,” he said.

Interested consumers won’t have to spend $760 to experiment with the Pacemaker. Tonium invited a test group to try out Pacemaker software on their Macs and PCs. Using this software, the group has been creating desktop DJ mixes from music stored in digital files on computers, matching beats between one track and the next for smooth transitions and adding special effects like reverberation.

YouTube for DJ fans
The software will be offered free to the public when the Pacemaker is released, Norberg said. He hopes that people will use the software to share mixes online, turning the Pacemaker site into a type of YouTube for DJ fans. Mixes made on the Pacemaker can be uploaded to the site, just as those made on a computer can be downloaded to Pacemaker.

Tonium plans to make the Linux-based software on the Pacemaker public, so users can innovate and share their improvements with others, Sars said. One improvement the company is already planning is software to create the effects of scratching or touching and rocking a turntable.

Another mobile DJ device comes from Numark, a longtime maker of professional DJ equipment. Called the iDJ2 (about $600), this lightweight mixing console has been on sale since September, and is available at Guitar Center stores and other locations. The iDJ2 has a docking station for an iPod; the DJ can start one song from it, then line up another while using the headphones and then create the mix.

DJs can carry along extra songs on another iPod or on a thumb drive or another USB storage device, then plug the devices into the iDJ2.

iPods are already beginning to replace CD players. Michael Holtz, a DJ in Minneapolis who specializes in weddings, switched from dual CD players and a mixer to the iDJ2 in September. He is not the only one to make the change.

In 2006, consumers in the United States spent about $125 million on DJ-specific hardware, said Brian Majeski, editor of Music Trades magazine in Englewood, N.J. Some $35 million of it was on CD players. But CD player sales are probably going to shrink.

“Instead of buying expensive CD players, people are starting to migrate to hard-drive devices, in many instances substituting an iPod for a CD machine,” he said. “The Numark iDJ2s have appeal both to consumers and mobile DJs. You don’t need to haul as much stuff.”

The use of the iPod, often wielded by amateurs, has raised eyebrows among some professional DJs. “It’s as though their guild is being infringed upon,” Majeski said.

If the Pacemaker catches on, this invasion may accelerate. But Dan Brotman, a Manhattan-based DJ whose Web site FutureMusic.com, reports on new music technology, isn’t worried. “People looked down their noses when DJs brought in CD players and computers instead of turntables and vinyl records,” he said, and now it is iPods that are scorned.

Slowly, though, this new stigma will fade. “If you are rocking the house,” he said, “who cares what equipment you are using?”

Source : News.com

An Islamist Web site often used by al-Qaida supporters carried updated encryption software on Friday that it said would help Islamic militants communicate with greater security on the Internet.

The Mujahideen Secrets 2 was promoted as “the first Islamic program for secure communications through networks with the highest technical level of encoding.”

The software, available for free on the password-protected Ekhlaas.org site, which often carries al-Qaida messages, is a newer version of Mujahideen Secrets issued in early 2007 by the Global Islamic Media Front, an al-Qaida-linked Web-based group.

“This special edition of the software was developed and issued by…Ekhlaas in order to support the mujahideen (holy war fighters) in general and the (al-Qaida-linked group) Islamic State in Iraq in particular,” the site said.

The efficacy of the new Arabic-language software to ensure secure e-mail and other communications could not be immediately gauged. But some security experts had warned that the wide distribution of its earlier version among Islamists and Arabic-speaking hackers could prove significant.

Al-Qaida supporters widely use the Internet to spread the group’s statements through hundreds of Islamist sites where anyone can post messages. Al-Qaida-linked groups also set up their own sites, which frequently have to move after being shut by Internet service providers.

Al-Qaida’s own media arm, As-Sahab, has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years. It issued 97 audio and video Web messages in 2007 compared with just 6 in 2002, according to IntelCenter, a U.S.-based group that monitors Islamist sites.

Al-Qaida and other groups have increasingly turned to the Internet to win young Muslims over to their fight against Western countries and Western-backed governments.

Source : News.com