The Mozilla Foundation Tuesday opened Mozilla Messaging, a new subsidiary focused on developing its free, open-source Thunderbird e-mail software.
Mozilla Messaging will initially focus on developing Thunderbird 3, which aims at improving several aspects of the software, including integrated calendaring, better search, as well as enhancements to the overall user experience, the company said in a statement.
The Mozilla Foundation is best known for creating the Firefox Web browser, a potent rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The organization enjoys wide support in the open source community because both Firefox and Thunderbird are based on the open source development model.
Mozilla Messaging will continue using the open source model in work, maintaining a small product development team to work with contributors from around the world on Thunderbird software.
David Ascher is the CEO of Mozilla Messaging and sits on its board of directors, which also includes Christopher Beard, vice president and general manager of Mozilla Labs, and Marten Mickos, CEO of open source database vendor MySQL AB.
Mozilla Messaging is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Sun ships management piece of xVM strategy
Sun is expected Tuesday to ship xVM Ops Center, a data center automation console compatible with Linux- and Solaris-based x86 and SPARC environments.
Ops Center's features include automatic installation of firmware and bare-metal operating systems; scanning and tracking of servers in a network; and patch-management tools for SUSE, Red Hat and Solaris, according to a company statement.
James Staten, an analyst with Forrester Research, said the last feature is particularly compelling, but not enough to attract a great deal of new business to Sun's platform.
"The patching mechanism they have is very impressive and works with both Linux and Solaris, but given that this is a 1.0 product the appeal will remain mainly with existing Sun customers," he said via e-mail Friday.
"It's a substantially better entry in systems management than their previous attempts, and much more open," he added.
The Ops Center codebase has already been released under the open-source GPLv3 license and is available at www.openxVM.org.
Sun previously said the first commercial version of Ops Center would be available on Jan. 8.
Oren Teich, director of product management and marketing for xVM, said the company needed additional time to make some final tweaks and improvements in areas including firmware provisioning and reporting, following requests from early beta users.
He disagreed with the notion that mainly existing Sun customers will buy the software, saying the company expects that sales will be split between current and new users. While it is a 1.0 release, code from two existing Sun products, N1 System Manager and Sun Connection, are running under the hood of Ops Center's GUI, he said. "In some ways, this is a very mature project."
Yet the first version has a key omission: support for Windows. "Although Windows support is not currently available, we're committed to offering it in the future," Teich said.
Sun is also developing xVM Server, a bare-metal, Xen-based hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris and Windows guest operating systems.
While Sun's xVM brand stands for "the intersection of virtualization and management," according to Teich, the Ops Center 1.0 release does not feature a broad range of functionality around virtualization. This summer, Sun will release its hypervisor product and "an update to Ops Center that will have a lot of virtualization capabilities on top of it," Teich said.
The company will battle along with leader VMware, Oracle, Microsoft and an array of other vendors for a stake in the virtualization space, which analysts have pegged as remaining wide-open despite the voluminous hype around the topic in recent years.
With Ops Center, Sun will go up against IT management powerhouses such as HP and IBM.
Subscription pricing for Ops Center, with support and network-delivered services, ranges between US$100 and $350 per managed server per year.
Ops Center's features include automatic installation of firmware and bare-metal operating systems; scanning and tracking of servers in a network; and patch-management tools for SUSE, Red Hat and Solaris, according to a company statement.
James Staten, an analyst with Forrester Research, said the last feature is particularly compelling, but not enough to attract a great deal of new business to Sun's platform.
"The patching mechanism they have is very impressive and works with both Linux and Solaris, but given that this is a 1.0 product the appeal will remain mainly with existing Sun customers," he said via e-mail Friday.
"It's a substantially better entry in systems management than their previous attempts, and much more open," he added.
The Ops Center codebase has already been released under the open-source GPLv3 license and is available at www.openxVM.org.
Sun previously said the first commercial version of Ops Center would be available on Jan. 8.
Oren Teich, director of product management and marketing for xVM, said the company needed additional time to make some final tweaks and improvements in areas including firmware provisioning and reporting, following requests from early beta users.
He disagreed with the notion that mainly existing Sun customers will buy the software, saying the company expects that sales will be split between current and new users. While it is a 1.0 release, code from two existing Sun products, N1 System Manager and Sun Connection, are running under the hood of Ops Center's GUI, he said. "In some ways, this is a very mature project."
Yet the first version has a key omission: support for Windows. "Although Windows support is not currently available, we're committed to offering it in the future," Teich said.
Sun is also developing xVM Server, a bare-metal, Xen-based hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris and Windows guest operating systems.
While Sun's xVM brand stands for "the intersection of virtualization and management," according to Teich, the Ops Center 1.0 release does not feature a broad range of functionality around virtualization. This summer, Sun will release its hypervisor product and "an update to Ops Center that will have a lot of virtualization capabilities on top of it," Teich said.
The company will battle along with leader VMware, Oracle, Microsoft and an array of other vendors for a stake in the virtualization space, which analysts have pegged as remaining wide-open despite the voluminous hype around the topic in recent years.
With Ops Center, Sun will go up against IT management powerhouses such as HP and IBM.
Subscription pricing for Ops Center, with support and network-delivered services, ranges between US$100 and $350 per managed server per year.
Timeline: HD DVD vs. Blu-ray Disc
The high-definition movie disc battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc can be traced all the way back to 2000, when companies began experimenting with using new blue lasers in optical disc systems.
Because the wavelength of blue light is shorter than that of the red lasers used in DVD, less physical space is needed to record each bit of data and so more information can be crammed onto a DVD-sized disc. This extra space was needed to store the new high-definition video and TV services that were starting to be commercialized around that time.
But what started in 2000 as technical research became a battle between the world's largest electronics companies and movie studios, with the consumer caught in the middle.
Here's a look at the major milestones from the first research:
2000
Oct. 5 -- Sony and Pioneer unveil DVR Blue at Japan's Ceatec show. The format would go on to form the basis for first-generation Blu-ray Disc BD-RE.
Nov. 1 -- Sony announces the development of Ultra Density Optical (UDO), a blue-laser optical disc format proposed to replace magneto-optical discs.
2002
Feb. 19 -- Led by Sony, nine of the world's largest electronics companies unveil plans for Blu-ray Disc.
Aug. 29 -- Toshiba and NEC propose to the DVD Forum the next-generation optical disc format that will become HD DVD.
Oct. 1 -- Prototypes of both formats are unveiled at Japan's Ceatec exhibition. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Pioneer and JVC showed prototype Blu-ray Disc recorders while Toshiba showed a prototype under the name Advanced Optical Disc (AOD).
2003
Feb. 13 -- Licensing of Blu-ray Disc begins. Player makers pay US$20,000 to license Blu-ray while the content-protection system license carries a $120,000 annual fee and additional charge of $0.10 per player. Media makers pay $8,000 annually and $0.02 per disc for the copy protection system.
April 7 -- Sony announces its Blu-ray Disc-based Professional Disc format for data archiving applications.
April 10 -- Sony puts on sale in Japan the world's first Blu-ray Disc recorder, the BDZ-S77. It's based on a 23G-byte cartridge version of the BD-RE disc and costs ¥450,000 (US$3,815 at the time). The machine and a later model from Panasonic lack support for prerecorded movies that will launch later and prove an expensive early step into next-generation video.
May 28 -- Mitsubishi Electric joins the Blu-ray Disc group.
2004
Jan. 7 -- Toshiba unveils its first prototype HD DVD player at CES. The player includes backwards compatibility with DVD.
Jan. 12 - Hewlett-Packard and Dell put their support behind Blu-ray Disc.
June 10 -- The first commercial version of HD DVD-ROM is approved by the DVD Forum.
Sept. 21 -- Sony announces the PlayStation 3 will use Blu-ray Disc.
Nov. 29 -- Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO and New Line Cinema announce support for HD DVD.
Dec. 9 -- Disney announces support for Blu-ray Disc.
2005
Jan. 7 -- Backers of both formats promise players and movies in North America by the end of the year -- something that never materialized.
March 24 -- Talk and hope of a common format as Ryoji Chubachi, then Sony's president-elect, says: "Listening to the voice of the consumers, having two rival formats is disappointing and we haven't totally given up on the possibility of integration or compromise."
April 21 -- Sony and Toshiba begin discussions on the possibility of a single format. The talks ultimately go nowhere.
Aug. 18 -- Lions Gate Home Entertainment and Universal Music Group decide to back Blu-ray Disc.
Sept. 27 -- Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. put their weight behind HD DVD.
Oct. 3 -- Paramount Home Entertainment says it will offer movies on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
Dec. 16 -- Hewlett-Packard decides to drop exclusive support for Blu-ray Disc and back both formats.
2006
Jan. 4 -- Bill Gates announces at CES that Microsoft will offer an add-on HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 console.
March 10 -- Blu-ray Disc-supporter LG Electronics surprises the industry with news that it's developing an HD DVD drive.
March 31 -- Toshiba launches the world's first HD DVD player, the HD-XA1. It cost ¥110,000 (US$936 at the time) in Japan.
Nov. 11 -- Sony's PlayStation 3, which packs a Blu-ray Disc drive, goes on sale in Japan.
Dec. 29 -- Hackers report success in breaking through part of the AACS copy protection that's on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
2007
Jan. 7 -- Seeking to end the battle, LG Electronics unveils a dual-format player, while Warner Bros. shows a prototype disc that holds both an HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc layer so is compatible with players for both formats.
April 17 -- Sales of HD DVD players in North America hit 100,000 since launch.
Aug. 1 -- Microsoft cuts the price of its HD DVD player for the Xbox 360 from US$199 to US$179 and starts offering five free movies.
Aug. 20 -- Paramount and Dreamworks Animation both drop Blu-ray Disc in favor of HD DVD.
Sept. 13 -- Sony says it will use Blu-ray Disc in all high-def video recorders in Japan.
Nov. -- The price of Toshiba HD DVD players drops to US$100 with rebates as the holiday shopping season begins.
Nov. 11 -- Sony begins selling a lower cost version of the PlayStation 3.
2008
Jan. 4 -- Warner Bros. drops its bombshell: it will stop issuing HD DVD movies in the coming months and rely exclusively on Blu-ray Disc. In response the HD DVD Promotion Group cancels its CES news conference.
Jan. 6 -- Akio Ozaka, head of Toshiba America Consumer Products, says at CES: "We remain firm in the belief that HD DVD is the format best suited to the wants and needs of consumers." In response Sony CEO Howard Stringer, with a grin on his face, says "All of us at Sony are feeling blue today."
Jan. 14 -- Toshiba cuts the price of HD DVD players with the HD-A3 seeing a retail price of US$150.
Feb. 11 -- NetFlix and BestBuy say they will phase out HD DVD.
Feb. 15 -- Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, says it will phase out HD DVD by June.
Feb. 16 -- Japanese public broadcaster NHK reports Toshiba has halted production of HD DVD players. Several additional local media reports confirm and The Nikkei business daily says Toshiba has decided to stop developing the format any further.
Feb. 19 -- Toshiba formally announces it will phase out the production of HD DVD players and recorders by the end of March. The format war is over.
(Dan Nystedt in Taipei contributed to this report.)
Because the wavelength of blue light is shorter than that of the red lasers used in DVD, less physical space is needed to record each bit of data and so more information can be crammed onto a DVD-sized disc. This extra space was needed to store the new high-definition video and TV services that were starting to be commercialized around that time.
But what started in 2000 as technical research became a battle between the world's largest electronics companies and movie studios, with the consumer caught in the middle.
Here's a look at the major milestones from the first research:
2000
Oct. 5 -- Sony and Pioneer unveil DVR Blue at Japan's Ceatec show. The format would go on to form the basis for first-generation Blu-ray Disc BD-RE.
Nov. 1 -- Sony announces the development of Ultra Density Optical (UDO), a blue-laser optical disc format proposed to replace magneto-optical discs.
2002
Feb. 19 -- Led by Sony, nine of the world's largest electronics companies unveil plans for Blu-ray Disc.
Aug. 29 -- Toshiba and NEC propose to the DVD Forum the next-generation optical disc format that will become HD DVD.
Oct. 1 -- Prototypes of both formats are unveiled at Japan's Ceatec exhibition. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Pioneer and JVC showed prototype Blu-ray Disc recorders while Toshiba showed a prototype under the name Advanced Optical Disc (AOD).
2003
Feb. 13 -- Licensing of Blu-ray Disc begins. Player makers pay US$20,000 to license Blu-ray while the content-protection system license carries a $120,000 annual fee and additional charge of $0.10 per player. Media makers pay $8,000 annually and $0.02 per disc for the copy protection system.
April 7 -- Sony announces its Blu-ray Disc-based Professional Disc format for data archiving applications.
April 10 -- Sony puts on sale in Japan the world's first Blu-ray Disc recorder, the BDZ-S77. It's based on a 23G-byte cartridge version of the BD-RE disc and costs ¥450,000 (US$3,815 at the time). The machine and a later model from Panasonic lack support for prerecorded movies that will launch later and prove an expensive early step into next-generation video.
May 28 -- Mitsubishi Electric joins the Blu-ray Disc group.
2004
Jan. 7 -- Toshiba unveils its first prototype HD DVD player at CES. The player includes backwards compatibility with DVD.
Jan. 12 - Hewlett-Packard and Dell put their support behind Blu-ray Disc.
June 10 -- The first commercial version of HD DVD-ROM is approved by the DVD Forum.
Sept. 21 -- Sony announces the PlayStation 3 will use Blu-ray Disc.
Nov. 29 -- Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO and New Line Cinema announce support for HD DVD.
Dec. 9 -- Disney announces support for Blu-ray Disc.
2005
Jan. 7 -- Backers of both formats promise players and movies in North America by the end of the year -- something that never materialized.
March 24 -- Talk and hope of a common format as Ryoji Chubachi, then Sony's president-elect, says: "Listening to the voice of the consumers, having two rival formats is disappointing and we haven't totally given up on the possibility of integration or compromise."
April 21 -- Sony and Toshiba begin discussions on the possibility of a single format. The talks ultimately go nowhere.
Aug. 18 -- Lions Gate Home Entertainment and Universal Music Group decide to back Blu-ray Disc.
Sept. 27 -- Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. put their weight behind HD DVD.
Oct. 3 -- Paramount Home Entertainment says it will offer movies on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
Dec. 16 -- Hewlett-Packard decides to drop exclusive support for Blu-ray Disc and back both formats.
2006
Jan. 4 -- Bill Gates announces at CES that Microsoft will offer an add-on HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 console.
March 10 -- Blu-ray Disc-supporter LG Electronics surprises the industry with news that it's developing an HD DVD drive.
March 31 -- Toshiba launches the world's first HD DVD player, the HD-XA1. It cost ¥110,000 (US$936 at the time) in Japan.
Nov. 11 -- Sony's PlayStation 3, which packs a Blu-ray Disc drive, goes on sale in Japan.
Dec. 29 -- Hackers report success in breaking through part of the AACS copy protection that's on both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
2007
Jan. 7 -- Seeking to end the battle, LG Electronics unveils a dual-format player, while Warner Bros. shows a prototype disc that holds both an HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc layer so is compatible with players for both formats.
April 17 -- Sales of HD DVD players in North America hit 100,000 since launch.
Aug. 1 -- Microsoft cuts the price of its HD DVD player for the Xbox 360 from US$199 to US$179 and starts offering five free movies.
Aug. 20 -- Paramount and Dreamworks Animation both drop Blu-ray Disc in favor of HD DVD.
Sept. 13 -- Sony says it will use Blu-ray Disc in all high-def video recorders in Japan.
Nov. -- The price of Toshiba HD DVD players drops to US$100 with rebates as the holiday shopping season begins.
Nov. 11 -- Sony begins selling a lower cost version of the PlayStation 3.
2008
Jan. 4 -- Warner Bros. drops its bombshell: it will stop issuing HD DVD movies in the coming months and rely exclusively on Blu-ray Disc. In response the HD DVD Promotion Group cancels its CES news conference.
Jan. 6 -- Akio Ozaka, head of Toshiba America Consumer Products, says at CES: "We remain firm in the belief that HD DVD is the format best suited to the wants and needs of consumers." In response Sony CEO Howard Stringer, with a grin on his face, says "All of us at Sony are feeling blue today."
Jan. 14 -- Toshiba cuts the price of HD DVD players with the HD-A3 seeing a retail price of US$150.
Feb. 11 -- NetFlix and BestBuy say they will phase out HD DVD.
Feb. 15 -- Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, says it will phase out HD DVD by June.
Feb. 16 -- Japanese public broadcaster NHK reports Toshiba has halted production of HD DVD players. Several additional local media reports confirm and The Nikkei business daily says Toshiba has decided to stop developing the format any further.
Feb. 19 -- Toshiba formally announces it will phase out the production of HD DVD players and recorders by the end of March. The format war is over.
(Dan Nystedt in Taipei contributed to this report.)
Toshiba abandons HD DVD
Toshiba will discontinue its HD DVD products, it said Tuesday, handing victory to rival high definition disc format Blu-ray Disc.
The company will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.
It will reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail markets and aims to cease the businesses altogether by the end of March.
But the Japanese electronics giant pledged to provide full product support and after-sales service for owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.
Recent changes in the market prompted the decision, Toshiba said. Early this year, Warner Bros. said it would stop issuing movies on HD DVD in the coming months and rely exclusively on Blu-ray Disc. The Hollywood studio was one of three major studios remaining in the HD DVD camp, and its defection created widespread belief that the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc was now over.
More recently, major U.S. retail chain Wal-Mart announced it would phase out the sale of HD DVD products, moving to exclusivity with Blu-ray Disc. Electronics retailer Best Buy also said it would back Blu-ray Disc, but it did not say it would stop offering HD DVD.
Warner made its decision based on consumer confusion and indifference to high definition movies, an indifference that cost Hollywood in lost revenue, it said. Wal-Mart said U.S. customers preferred Blu-ray Disc movies and hardware. Blu-ray Disc is the high definition disc format championed by Sony.
"This once again shows why incompatible and mutually exclusive formats should be avoided at all cost by the industry," said Carl Gressum, a senior analyst at Ovum. "It reduces profitability and delays customer adoption."
"The big question is, however, the impacts on Toshiba as an electronics company," he added. "It has after all bet its disc media business on HD DVD, as well as gone for HD DVD integration into some of its laptop PCs. The channel has inventory to clear, and demands from owners of HD DVD players."
Toshiba said its decision came after careful analysis of the long-term impact of continuing the format war, and said a swift decision was called for to help the high definition market develop.
The company also pledged to remain a player in the high definition market. Developing HD DVD created many assets for Toshiba and its partners, which include Microsoft, Intel, HP, and Universal Studios, the company said. Toshiba plans to work with these companies to seek future business opportunities.
The company will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.
It will reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail markets and aims to cease the businesses altogether by the end of March.
But the Japanese electronics giant pledged to provide full product support and after-sales service for owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.
Recent changes in the market prompted the decision, Toshiba said. Early this year, Warner Bros. said it would stop issuing movies on HD DVD in the coming months and rely exclusively on Blu-ray Disc. The Hollywood studio was one of three major studios remaining in the HD DVD camp, and its defection created widespread belief that the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc was now over.
More recently, major U.S. retail chain Wal-Mart announced it would phase out the sale of HD DVD products, moving to exclusivity with Blu-ray Disc. Electronics retailer Best Buy also said it would back Blu-ray Disc, but it did not say it would stop offering HD DVD.
Warner made its decision based on consumer confusion and indifference to high definition movies, an indifference that cost Hollywood in lost revenue, it said. Wal-Mart said U.S. customers preferred Blu-ray Disc movies and hardware. Blu-ray Disc is the high definition disc format championed by Sony.
"This once again shows why incompatible and mutually exclusive formats should be avoided at all cost by the industry," said Carl Gressum, a senior analyst at Ovum. "It reduces profitability and delays customer adoption."
"The big question is, however, the impacts on Toshiba as an electronics company," he added. "It has after all bet its disc media business on HD DVD, as well as gone for HD DVD integration into some of its laptop PCs. The channel has inventory to clear, and demands from owners of HD DVD players."
Toshiba said its decision came after careful analysis of the long-term impact of continuing the format war, and said a swift decision was called for to help the high definition market develop.
The company also pledged to remain a player in the high definition market. Developing HD DVD created many assets for Toshiba and its partners, which include Microsoft, Intel, HP, and Universal Studios, the company said. Toshiba plans to work with these companies to seek future business opportunities.
Tech starts week in the doldrums
The global technology industry ended last week on a down note after electronics giant Best Buy issued a profit warning and DRAM prices fell again, but the troubles may be good news for bargain hunters if they lead to lower prices.
Best Buy Friday lowered its profit expectation for its current fiscal year, which ends March 1, 2008, to earnings per share of US$3.05 to $3.10 from previous guidance of $3.10 to $3.20 due to slower after-holiday sales, the company said in a statement.
The largest electronics retailer in the U.S. expects slower sales of home theater items, MP3 music devices, and digital imaging gear than previously anticipated in the current quarter, it said. It also pointed out that video gaming sales have slowed, but blamed the trouble on inventory shortages.
The company also expects its fiscal fourth quarter same store sales to decline compared to a year ago, causing it to cut its full year same stores sales target to nearly $40 billion this year, a gain of 2.5 percent to 3 percent, compared to a prior forecast calling for 4 percent year-over-year growth.
"This is the first same store sales decline since the first quarter of 2002, (Best Buy's fiscal second quarter of 2001) and in line with the economic slowdown in 2001," said Warren Lau, research analyst at Macquarie Securities in Hong Kong.
Best Buy's troubles could be an indication of slower consumer spending in the U.S., and could raise recession fears, analysts said.
DRAM (dynamic RAM) prices are also on the decline again after hopes a nascent rebound had started early this month. Prices of the chips ticked up ahead of and during the Lunar New Year holiday, which is celebrated in China, Taiwan and elsewhere, as people in those countries bought more PCs as gifts and some companies built inventory.
But DRAM prices resumed their slide at the end of the holiday. Last week, spot prices of mainstream 1G bit and 512M bit, DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) DRAM chips that run at 667MHz fell 10 to 12 percent last week to $1.88 and $0.90, respectively, according to industry researcher inSpectrum Technology.
The price is below the cash cost for all DRAM makers and the price drop will likely continue in the first half of this year, said Lau. DRAM makers continue to churn out more and more chips in new factories, with some factories just now being finished. Bit supply growth is expected to be 80 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2008.
The DRAM glut should keep the chips cheap for a while. Market prices normally take about a month to filter down to users, according to one DRAMeXchange analyst, and users can benefit from lower prices in a few ways. PC vendors often increase the amount of DRAM per computer when prices are low, or offer additional DRAM as an incentive to buy a new PC. Also, the price of DRAM modules found in stores will fall as retailers clear out their older, more expensive inventory.
Best Buy Friday lowered its profit expectation for its current fiscal year, which ends March 1, 2008, to earnings per share of US$3.05 to $3.10 from previous guidance of $3.10 to $3.20 due to slower after-holiday sales, the company said in a statement.
The largest electronics retailer in the U.S. expects slower sales of home theater items, MP3 music devices, and digital imaging gear than previously anticipated in the current quarter, it said. It also pointed out that video gaming sales have slowed, but blamed the trouble on inventory shortages.
The company also expects its fiscal fourth quarter same store sales to decline compared to a year ago, causing it to cut its full year same stores sales target to nearly $40 billion this year, a gain of 2.5 percent to 3 percent, compared to a prior forecast calling for 4 percent year-over-year growth.
"This is the first same store sales decline since the first quarter of 2002, (Best Buy's fiscal second quarter of 2001) and in line with the economic slowdown in 2001," said Warren Lau, research analyst at Macquarie Securities in Hong Kong.
Best Buy's troubles could be an indication of slower consumer spending in the U.S., and could raise recession fears, analysts said.
DRAM (dynamic RAM) prices are also on the decline again after hopes a nascent rebound had started early this month. Prices of the chips ticked up ahead of and during the Lunar New Year holiday, which is celebrated in China, Taiwan and elsewhere, as people in those countries bought more PCs as gifts and some companies built inventory.
But DRAM prices resumed their slide at the end of the holiday. Last week, spot prices of mainstream 1G bit and 512M bit, DDR2 (double data rate, second generation) DRAM chips that run at 667MHz fell 10 to 12 percent last week to $1.88 and $0.90, respectively, according to industry researcher inSpectrum Technology.
The price is below the cash cost for all DRAM makers and the price drop will likely continue in the first half of this year, said Lau. DRAM makers continue to churn out more and more chips in new factories, with some factories just now being finished. Bit supply growth is expected to be 80 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2008.
The DRAM glut should keep the chips cheap for a while. Market prices normally take about a month to filter down to users, according to one DRAMeXchange analyst, and users can benefit from lower prices in a few ways. PC vendors often increase the amount of DRAM per computer when prices are low, or offer additional DRAM as an incentive to buy a new PC. Also, the price of DRAM modules found in stores will fall as retailers clear out their older, more expensive inventory.
Harvard Web site hacked, database on file-sharing site
One of Harvard University's Web sites appeared on Monday to have been hacked, with its contents appearing on the BitTorrent file-sharing network.
A compressed 125 M-byte file claiming to be the database for the Web site of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is available via the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer to peer) network. The file is listed on The Pirate Bay, a Web site that indexes torrents, or small information files that coordinate the download of content from other users on BitTorrent.
The Web site for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was offline on Monday.
A note attached to the torrent claimed the file contained a backup of the site -- including some contacts files and other files associated with Joomla, an open-source content management system -- along with other various bits. It appeared to be legitimate.
The note's writer claims the stunt is intended to demonstrate the insecurity of Harvard's server. The writer also exposed what purport to be usernames and passwords belonging to two of the site's system administrators.
"Stupid people, you don't use a secure password," read a note preceding the sensitive information.
As of Monday afternoon, the compromised file was being distributed by 11 users -- known in file-sharing terminology as "seeders" -- and was being downloaded by nine "leechers," or those downloading the files.
Harvard's media office was closed on Monday due to a national U.S. holiday.
A compressed 125 M-byte file claiming to be the database for the Web site of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is available via the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer to peer) network. The file is listed on The Pirate Bay, a Web site that indexes torrents, or small information files that coordinate the download of content from other users on BitTorrent.
The Web site for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was offline on Monday.
A note attached to the torrent claimed the file contained a backup of the site -- including some contacts files and other files associated with Joomla, an open-source content management system -- along with other various bits. It appeared to be legitimate.
The note's writer claims the stunt is intended to demonstrate the insecurity of Harvard's server. The writer also exposed what purport to be usernames and passwords belonging to two of the site's system administrators.
"Stupid people, you don't use a secure password," read a note preceding the sensitive information.
As of Monday afternoon, the compromised file was being distributed by 11 users -- known in file-sharing terminology as "seeders" -- and was being downloaded by nine "leechers," or those downloading the files.
Harvard's media office was closed on Monday due to a national U.S. holiday.
Opera, Firefox bug could export users' Web history
A flaw in the way the Firefox and Opera browsers handle an image file could allow an attacker to see what Web sites a person has visited.
The problem concerns how the two browsers handle a ".BMP," or bitmap, image file, according to an advisory written by Gynvael Coldwind of Vexillium.org, who posted a video illustrating the problem.
A malicious bitmap file can be created that pulls other information from the browsers' memory. Some of the information that can be captured is random, but at other times could be valuable, the advisory said.
"The harvested data contains various information including parts of other Web sites, users' favorites and history and other information," Vexillium.org said.
Using the "canvas" HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) tag supported by the browsers, an attacker can capture the data. Then, using JavaScript, the information can be sent to a remote server.
The flaw could also crash Firefox. The vulnerability affects Firefox 2.0.0.11 and previous versions of that browser as well as the beta version of Opera 9.50.
The problem concerns how the two browsers handle a ".BMP," or bitmap, image file, according to an advisory written by Gynvael Coldwind of Vexillium.org, who posted a video illustrating the problem.
A malicious bitmap file can be created that pulls other information from the browsers' memory. Some of the information that can be captured is random, but at other times could be valuable, the advisory said.
"The harvested data contains various information including parts of other Web sites, users' favorites and history and other information," Vexillium.org said.
Using the "canvas" HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) tag supported by the browsers, an attacker can capture the data. Then, using JavaScript, the information can be sent to a remote server.
The flaw could also crash Firefox. The vulnerability affects Firefox 2.0.0.11 and previous versions of that browser as well as the beta version of Opera 9.50.
Court orders whistle-blower site offline in U.S.
A California district court has shut down a controversial Web site in the U.S. that allows whistle blowers to post corporate and government documents online anonymously.
The site, known as Wikileaks.org, has been taken offline in the U.S. due to a court order from the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. However, the site remains online in other countries, including Belgium and Germany.
The order in the U.S. came after a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, earlier this month filed a complaint against the site and San Mateo, California-based Dynadot, Wikileaks' domain-name registry, for posting several hundred of the bank's documents.
Some of those documents allegedly reveal that Julius Baer was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands for customers in several countries, including the U.S.
The court ordered that "Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name," according to court documents. It also said that Dynadot should prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org Web site or any other Web site or server other than a blank park page until further notice.
A spokesman for Julius Baer could not be reached for comment Monday.
According to its Web site, the purpose of Wikileaks, founded in 2006, is to develop "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis."
Wikileaks has been plagued by controversy since its inception, coming under fire from institutions whose confidential documents have been posted and from critics who questioned the motives of the site's founders. Still, others have praised the site for supporting the free dissemination of information.
Wikileaks posted a press statement on its site about the U.S. order, calling it "clearly unconstitutional" and said it "exceeds its jurisdiction."
The site, known as Wikileaks.org, has been taken offline in the U.S. due to a court order from the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. However, the site remains online in other countries, including Belgium and Germany.
The order in the U.S. came after a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, earlier this month filed a complaint against the site and San Mateo, California-based Dynadot, Wikileaks' domain-name registry, for posting several hundred of the bank's documents.
Some of those documents allegedly reveal that Julius Baer was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands for customers in several countries, including the U.S.
The court ordered that "Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name," according to court documents. It also said that Dynadot should prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org Web site or any other Web site or server other than a blank park page until further notice.
A spokesman for Julius Baer could not be reached for comment Monday.
According to its Web site, the purpose of Wikileaks, founded in 2006, is to develop "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis."
Wikileaks has been plagued by controversy since its inception, coming under fire from institutions whose confidential documents have been posted and from critics who questioned the motives of the site's founders. Still, others have praised the site for supporting the free dissemination of information.
Wikileaks posted a press statement on its site about the U.S. order, calling it "clearly unconstitutional" and said it "exceeds its jurisdiction."
Toshiba shares surge on HD DVD talk
Investors in Tokyo welcomed news reports that Toshiba is considering pulling the plug on its HD DVD format by pushing the company's shares up 5 percent in Monday trading.
At the market close Toshiba shares were trading at ¥829 (US$7.69), up ¥45 on Friday's close. The overall market, as measured by the Nikkei 225 index, was only slightly higher on the day.
Toshiba has been ploughing money into promoting the format for the last two years to battle stiff competition from Blu-ray Disc, a rival format backed by Sony. To promote sales Toshiba has also been deeply discounting players but the last few weeks have seen HD DVD's chances of victory substantially reduced.
In January Warner Bros. said it would drop HD DVD later in the year leaving the format with only Paramount and Universal among major studios. Then last week Netflix, Best Buy and Wal-Mart all said they would soon stop selling HD DVD discs.
Japanese television reported that Toshiba has stopped production at its factory in Japan and is currently considering HD DVD's future.
Sony shares closed up 1 percent at ¥4,900.
At the market close Toshiba shares were trading at ¥829 (US$7.69), up ¥45 on Friday's close. The overall market, as measured by the Nikkei 225 index, was only slightly higher on the day.
Toshiba has been ploughing money into promoting the format for the last two years to battle stiff competition from Blu-ray Disc, a rival format backed by Sony. To promote sales Toshiba has also been deeply discounting players but the last few weeks have seen HD DVD's chances of victory substantially reduced.
In January Warner Bros. said it would drop HD DVD later in the year leaving the format with only Paramount and Universal among major studios. Then last week Netflix, Best Buy and Wal-Mart all said they would soon stop selling HD DVD discs.
Japanese television reported that Toshiba has stopped production at its factory in Japan and is currently considering HD DVD's future.
Sony shares closed up 1 percent at ¥4,900.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Samsung starts shipping SATA II flash drives to Dell
Samsung Electronics has begun shipping a flash memory-based solid state disk drive (SSD) that offers better performance than many of the flash drives currently available, the company said.
The 64G byte drive has a SATA II interface that can support data reading at speeds of 100M Bps (bytes per second) and writing at 80M Bps. That makes it 60 percent faster than SATA I drives of the same type and two to five times faster than conventional hard-disk drives, according to Samsung.
SSDs use flash memory rather than magnetic storage, which means faster reading and writing of data, lower power consumption and zero noise. They've been around for several years although it is only recently, after flash memory chip prices fell, that they have become practical for use in laptop computers.
The drives were announced back in November when Samsung started supply samples of the drives to PC makers. Commercial versions of the drive are now available and will be offered as options on some Dell and Alienware laptops in the coming weeks, said Samsung. Prices were not announced.
Samsung is also planning to target the enterprise server market and other applications that demand high-speed data transfer.
Despite their advantages over hard-disk drives, SSDs are only taking off slowly because they are much more expensive. To get around this problem Samsung showed a 128G-byte SSD based on MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash, at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's a cheaper but not as powerful or efficient version of flash chip than the SLC (single level cell) used in most SSDs drives until now. The SLC-type memory chips last about 10 times as long as MLC chips.
The 64G byte drive has a SATA II interface that can support data reading at speeds of 100M Bps (bytes per second) and writing at 80M Bps. That makes it 60 percent faster than SATA I drives of the same type and two to five times faster than conventional hard-disk drives, according to Samsung.
SSDs use flash memory rather than magnetic storage, which means faster reading and writing of data, lower power consumption and zero noise. They've been around for several years although it is only recently, after flash memory chip prices fell, that they have become practical for use in laptop computers.
The drives were announced back in November when Samsung started supply samples of the drives to PC makers. Commercial versions of the drive are now available and will be offered as options on some Dell and Alienware laptops in the coming weeks, said Samsung. Prices were not announced.
Samsung is also planning to target the enterprise server market and other applications that demand high-speed data transfer.
Despite their advantages over hard-disk drives, SSDs are only taking off slowly because they are much more expensive. To get around this problem Samsung showed a 128G-byte SSD based on MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash, at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's a cheaper but not as powerful or efficient version of flash chip than the SLC (single level cell) used in most SSDs drives until now. The SLC-type memory chips last about 10 times as long as MLC chips.
Sony hits greenhouse gas emission cuts target early
Sony is beating its own target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and will begin promoting a sustainable lifestyle to consumers through its products, its chief executive said Friday.
On this topic
Green Grid lays out ambitious action program
Tech CEOs push for green computing
Greenpeace applauds MacBook Air
Deploying Residential Wi-Fi Wireless LANs: RF Repeaters for Coverage and Reliability
Get practical tips, IT news, how-tos, and the best in tech humor.
"Sony alone has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 9 percent to date, exceeding our original target of a 7 percent reduction by 2010," said Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony, at the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) Climate Savers conference in Tokyo. The conference was held at Sony's new headquarters in Tokyo, which itself has helped the company to achieve its goal. Greenhouse gas emissions from the building are 40 percent lower than at equivalent conventional buildings.
Sony is one of 12 companies that has joined the WWF's Climate Savers initiative, under which they pledge to an aggressive cut in greenhouse gas emissions. Tech companies Hewlett-Packard and Nokia are also members as are Allianz, Catalyst, Collins Companies, Nike, Novo Nordisk, Sagawa Express, Spitsbergen Travel, Tetra Pak and Xanterra Parks and Resorts.
At the conference the companies signed a declaration that recommitted themselves to action and expanded their work to include partnering with business partners to further cut emissions, the promotion of a low-carbon lifestyle to their customers and greater transparency of their carbon footprint and environmental activities.
"For Sony this means we will proactively look to expand our emissions reductions beyond our sites to include logistics and other parts of our business," said Stringer. "We must also continue to improve the energy efficiency of our products, particularly televisions which consume the most energy of all our home electronics products. Yet while the trend is towards larger screens and more sophisticated functions that inevitably consume more power Sony's televisions are already among the industry leaders in terms of energy efficiency."
Stringer said Sony expects the operating power of electronics products to be reduced to half their existing levels in a few years.
"I am confident that our engineers can meet these expectations," he said.
And just as the company has created products like the Walkman Stringer said Sony will now look to promote and help people adopt sustainable lifestyles through its products.
For companies like Sony one of the greatest inefficiencies in their products comes from the standby power that is consumed continuously when the device is not in use. It's not a great deal of power per product but the number of such devices has multiplied in recent years so the total amount of energy used in this way is now becoming quite large.
"Standby power is a huge and growing share of electricity use because those things are plugged in 24/7 but nobody when they buy a computer buys it based on its efficiency in using standby power," said James Leape , director general of WWF International, at a Tokyo news conference. "You're thinking about a hundred other things when you buy your computer and so the market doesn't work. And so standards are crucial and the industry can lead on that by defining norms but its a place where government action can be quite important."
Many of the largest PC makers have joined together under the banner of the Climate Savers computing initiative and have pledged to reduce power consumption of computers by 50 percent by 2010. The companies plan to highlight some of their advances and technologies at the Cebit exhibition that will take place in Germany in March.
Energy use by IT equipment is growing fast. The recently published report, "An Inefficient Truth," found about 10 percent of energy consumption in the U.K. is by IT equipment -- equivalent to the output of four nuclear power stations.
On this topic
Green Grid lays out ambitious action program
Tech CEOs push for green computing
Greenpeace applauds MacBook Air
Deploying Residential Wi-Fi Wireless LANs: RF Repeaters for Coverage and Reliability
Get practical tips, IT news, how-tos, and the best in tech humor.
"Sony alone has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 9 percent to date, exceeding our original target of a 7 percent reduction by 2010," said Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony, at the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) Climate Savers conference in Tokyo. The conference was held at Sony's new headquarters in Tokyo, which itself has helped the company to achieve its goal. Greenhouse gas emissions from the building are 40 percent lower than at equivalent conventional buildings.
Sony is one of 12 companies that has joined the WWF's Climate Savers initiative, under which they pledge to an aggressive cut in greenhouse gas emissions. Tech companies Hewlett-Packard and Nokia are also members as are Allianz, Catalyst, Collins Companies, Nike, Novo Nordisk, Sagawa Express, Spitsbergen Travel, Tetra Pak and Xanterra Parks and Resorts.
At the conference the companies signed a declaration that recommitted themselves to action and expanded their work to include partnering with business partners to further cut emissions, the promotion of a low-carbon lifestyle to their customers and greater transparency of their carbon footprint and environmental activities.
"For Sony this means we will proactively look to expand our emissions reductions beyond our sites to include logistics and other parts of our business," said Stringer. "We must also continue to improve the energy efficiency of our products, particularly televisions which consume the most energy of all our home electronics products. Yet while the trend is towards larger screens and more sophisticated functions that inevitably consume more power Sony's televisions are already among the industry leaders in terms of energy efficiency."
Stringer said Sony expects the operating power of electronics products to be reduced to half their existing levels in a few years.
"I am confident that our engineers can meet these expectations," he said.
And just as the company has created products like the Walkman Stringer said Sony will now look to promote and help people adopt sustainable lifestyles through its products.
For companies like Sony one of the greatest inefficiencies in their products comes from the standby power that is consumed continuously when the device is not in use. It's not a great deal of power per product but the number of such devices has multiplied in recent years so the total amount of energy used in this way is now becoming quite large.
"Standby power is a huge and growing share of electricity use because those things are plugged in 24/7 but nobody when they buy a computer buys it based on its efficiency in using standby power," said James Leape , director general of WWF International, at a Tokyo news conference. "You're thinking about a hundred other things when you buy your computer and so the market doesn't work. And so standards are crucial and the industry can lead on that by defining norms but its a place where government action can be quite important."
Many of the largest PC makers have joined together under the banner of the Climate Savers computing initiative and have pledged to reduce power consumption of computers by 50 percent by 2010. The companies plan to highlight some of their advances and technologies at the Cebit exhibition that will take place in Germany in March.
Energy use by IT equipment is growing fast. The recently published report, "An Inefficient Truth," found about 10 percent of energy consumption in the U.K. is by IT equipment -- equivalent to the output of four nuclear power stations.
Report: Toshiba halts HD DVD production, mulling future
Toshiba has halted production of HD DVD players and recorders and is close to making a decision on whether to throw in the towel on the high-definition movie disc format, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported Saturday evening.
he decision, which NHK said will likely cost the company several tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars), is being made in the face of flagging support by movie studios and major U.S. retailers.
"We are making considerations following the impact on sales of Warner's announcement but we haven't made any decision," said Keisuke Ohmori, a spokesman for Toshiba, when reached on Saturday evening. He was referring to the January decision by Warner Bros to stop issuing movies on HD DVD and go solely with Blu-ray Disc.
Other local media reports on Saturday said an official announcement from Toshiba is likely in the coming week.
HD DVD has been battling Blu-ray Disc for just under two years to become the defacto replacement for DVD for high-definition video. HD DVD is backed by Toshiba and a handful of other companies including Microsoft and Intel but Blu-ray Disc counted a larger number of consumer electronics heavy hitters. The main backer of the format is Sony and other supporters include Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung, LG and Philips.
Both formats delivered a similar audio and video quality and the main difference comes down to the movies available on each format. Most movie studios have taken one side or the other so consumers are left with a difficult decision. As a result many have walked away from stores with neither an HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc player and the market has performed poorly.
The Warner Bros decision in January has been seen by many as the beginning of the end for HD DVD. With Warner pulling out HD DVD only two of the major Hollywood studios, Paramount and Universal, are left backing the format.
In the weeks since the Warner announcement things have gotten worse for HD DVD. In the last week Netflix, an Internet-based movie rental company in the U.S., said it would cease supporting HD DVD and then on Friday Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the U.S., said it would stop selling HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray Disc.
he decision, which NHK said will likely cost the company several tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars), is being made in the face of flagging support by movie studios and major U.S. retailers.
"We are making considerations following the impact on sales of Warner's announcement but we haven't made any decision," said Keisuke Ohmori, a spokesman for Toshiba, when reached on Saturday evening. He was referring to the January decision by Warner Bros to stop issuing movies on HD DVD and go solely with Blu-ray Disc.
Other local media reports on Saturday said an official announcement from Toshiba is likely in the coming week.
HD DVD has been battling Blu-ray Disc for just under two years to become the defacto replacement for DVD for high-definition video. HD DVD is backed by Toshiba and a handful of other companies including Microsoft and Intel but Blu-ray Disc counted a larger number of consumer electronics heavy hitters. The main backer of the format is Sony and other supporters include Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung, LG and Philips.
Both formats delivered a similar audio and video quality and the main difference comes down to the movies available on each format. Most movie studios have taken one side or the other so consumers are left with a difficult decision. As a result many have walked away from stores with neither an HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc player and the market has performed poorly.
The Warner Bros decision in January has been seen by many as the beginning of the end for HD DVD. With Warner pulling out HD DVD only two of the major Hollywood studios, Paramount and Universal, are left backing the format.
In the weeks since the Warner announcement things have gotten worse for HD DVD. In the last week Netflix, an Internet-based movie rental company in the U.S., said it would cease supporting HD DVD and then on Friday Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the U.S., said it would stop selling HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray Disc.
Microsoft offers patent protection for Office binaries
Microsoft on Friday said it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the Office Open XML (OOXML) file-format standards process.
The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft's format and the possible standard.
Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.
Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company's Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to "promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML, and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers."
The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML, as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.
According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them, as outlined in an article in Microsoft's Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.
Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.
To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.
Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML's rival file format, Open Document Format (ODF), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft's format and the possible standard.
Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.
Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company's Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to "promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML, and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers."
The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML, as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.
According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them, as outlined in an article in Microsoft's Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.
Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.
To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.
Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML's rival file format, Open Document Format (ODF), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
Amazon's S3 storage service down for several hours
Amazon's data storage service was down for several hours on Friday morning, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.
As of around 9 a.m. on the West Coast of the U.S., the issue had been resolved, according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. "This morning's issue has been resolved and the system is continuing to recover," wrote Kathrin, the Amazon employee, on the forum.
She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly happened, but that the priority is to make sure the system is stable.
Companies use Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.
A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service was unreachable for about two hours, but that it was operating at 99 percent of normal performance before 7 a.m. on the West Coast. "We've been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it," said Drew Herdener in a statement.
Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when it would be fixed. One suggested that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web services site, so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn't on their end.
Others wrote about the problems that the outage was causing their businesses. "It's becoming very embarrassing for us here," one wrote. "We desperately need an update... it's a huge hit on our reputation."
Many of the users said that the service was down for around three hours.
Gustavo, a user in Brazil, said that his company hosts more than 30,000 images from a large television station in Brazil. "Now we are having several problems because of this S3 issue," he wrote. "My company chose to work with Amazon because of its reliability."
Late last year, Amazon introduced a new service level agreement for S3 that guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime each month. If the service slips below that level, the company promised to provide service credits to certain users.
As of around 9 a.m. on the West Coast of the U.S., the issue had been resolved, according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. "This morning's issue has been resolved and the system is continuing to recover," wrote Kathrin, the Amazon employee, on the forum.
She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly happened, but that the priority is to make sure the system is stable.
Companies use Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.
A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service was unreachable for about two hours, but that it was operating at 99 percent of normal performance before 7 a.m. on the West Coast. "We've been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it," said Drew Herdener in a statement.
Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when it would be fixed. One suggested that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web services site, so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn't on their end.
Others wrote about the problems that the outage was causing their businesses. "It's becoming very embarrassing for us here," one wrote. "We desperately need an update... it's a huge hit on our reputation."
Many of the users said that the service was down for around three hours.
Gustavo, a user in Brazil, said that his company hosts more than 30,000 images from a large television station in Brazil. "Now we are having several problems because of this S3 issue," he wrote. "My company chose to work with Amazon because of its reliability."
Late last year, Amazon introduced a new service level agreement for S3 that guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime each month. If the service slips below that level, the company promised to provide service credits to certain users.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Google finds evil all over the Web
The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.
The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.
These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.
In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.
Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim's browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim's PC. "The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks," said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.
In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.
Some of the data surprised Provos.
"When we started going into this I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger," he said.
It turns out the Web's nice neighborhoods aren't necessarily safer than its red-light districts.
"We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher," he said. But "there really wasn't a huge difference."
"Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn't good enough," he noted.
Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google's research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia, (4 percent) Malaysia (2.2 percent) and Korea (2 percent).
It costs next-to-nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. "They're the Kleenex Web sites," he said. Criminals "know they're going to be shut down, and they don't care."
Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.
So how to stop this growing pestilence?
Google's Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. "You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology," he said.
But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. "I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts," for the problem to go away, he said.
The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.
These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.
In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.
Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim's browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim's PC. "The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks," said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.
In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.
Some of the data surprised Provos.
"When we started going into this I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger," he said.
It turns out the Web's nice neighborhoods aren't necessarily safer than its red-light districts.
"We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher," he said. But "there really wasn't a huge difference."
"Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn't good enough," he noted.
Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google's research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia, (4 percent) Malaysia (2.2 percent) and Korea (2 percent).
It costs next-to-nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. "They're the Kleenex Web sites," he said. Criminals "know they're going to be shut down, and they don't care."
Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.
So how to stop this growing pestilence?
Google's Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. "You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology," he said.
But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. "I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts," for the problem to go away, he said.
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