By Bill Brenner June 29, 2010

Windows XP SP2 enthusiasts, this is a sad time for you. Microsoft, eager to get us all to use Windows 7, has announced that XP SP2′s days are numbered — at least in terms of support and security updates. Change is hard, and this will be no exception. Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP SP2 after July 13. That means no more security fixes on Patch Tuesday. You can soften the blow by updating to Windows XP SP3, which will be supported until April 2014. But that doesn’t make this much easier. It’s still a major update, and major updates are fraught with problems. It’s a fact of life. Your anxiety is made worse by what this ultimately means — an across-the-enterprise switch to Windows 7. You can already picture the flood of help desk tickets bloating your inbox as users try to figure out how to handle this new OS. Heck, you’re not sure you even know how to handle it yet. Some of you have even developed a genuine affection for SP2, which makes this all the more painful.

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“Don’t bring this to customer’s attention proactively” “Emphasize uncertainty” — Dell memo to sales staff
By Jason Mick – June 29, 2010

It’s no secret that Dell, the world’s second largest computer maker is struggling.  Evidence of that was on display when following a series of layoffs last December, the company’s site became riddled with pricing errors — including the world’s most expensive mouse, priced at $3,999.99 USD. The company’s profits plunged 54 percent between 2008 and 2009.  Now, documents unsealed in court this week paint a troubling picture, showing that the manufacturer knowingly sold defective machines between 2003 and 2005 according to the New York Times. Among the customers burned by Dell was the University of Texas, which purchased a large number of computers for its math department only to see them fail and die.  Dell blamed the college for overtaxing the machines, but newly released evidence indicates that the failures were actually caused by faulty electrical components that leaked chemicals.

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By MyHostNews.com June 29th, 2010

SGI, a global leader in HPC and data center solutions, today announced broad support for AMD® Opteron™ 4000 Series platforms across SGI® scale-out server platforms. New SGI servers featuring the AMD Opteron 4100 Series processor technology are compelling for customers that require high performance in the smallest possible power footprint. Day-one support for the AMD Opteron 4100 Series processor is offered in four new SGI® CloudRack™ and Rackable™ scale-out server models, which can be installed in either traditional data center racks or in ICE Cube™ modular data centers. AMD Opteron 4100 Series processors offer significant power savings over the previous generation. These processor enhancements perfectly complement SGI’s overall Eco-Logical™ server strategy. “SGI is pleased to expand our AMD Opteron support across our scale-out server and data center product lines,” said Rick Chapek, senior vice president of hardware engineering at SGI. “Our AMD Opteron 4100 Series based servers will provide SGI customers with the ability to gain new levels of scale, efficiency and price performance per watt.” The new CloudRack server models maximize compute core density without sacrificing local storage capability. Each CloudRack tray supports either one or two dual-socket nodes and up to eight 3.5 inch drives. The new Rackable™ rackmount server models are available in both 1U and 2U half-depth form factors, for either up to 1,104 cores per 46U cabinet or enhanced I/O capabilities with as many as five expansion slots and 10 2.5 inch hot-swap drives per server. “AMD values its strong relationship with SGI and the opportunity it brings to supply the channel with the world’s lowest power-per-core server processor,” said Patrick Patla, vice president and general manager, Server and Embedded Divisions, AMD. “The AMD 4000 Series platform can greatly benefit SGI customers thanks to exceptional value with unprecedented platform flexibility for easy customization.”

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Left handers are the spawn of Satan
by Nick Farrell June 28, 2010

Apple fanboys throughout the world will be jolly relieved to discover that the fact their iPhone 4 is broken is a complete “non-issue” in the eyes of its creator. Jobs’ Mob has admitted that if you use the iPhone 4 with your left hand it has some reception problems.  However it seems that a few users have managed to get hold Steve Jobs himself and asked him what he was going to do about it. It turns out that the mighty Steve regards the whole problem as a “non-issue” according to some reported comments and he is going to do sod all to fix it. All users have to do to avoid the problem is “use another hand”. The alternative is to buy Apple’s “bumper” case which can be had for $40. So rather than admit that he has cocked up, Jobs clearly expects users to spend more money to fix a design fault, or use the iPhone 4 with the hand in a position that he approves of. We are looking forward to the law suit.  After all it is not as if Apple puts labels on the boxes saying “Left handers are the spawn of Satan and this phone will not work for them.”  Left handers could feel justifiably miffed and certainly had their consumer rights violated.

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by Stephen Shankland June 28, 2010

Listening to marketing messages from companies such as Apple and Google, one might think HTML5, the next-generation Web page standard, is ready to take the Net by storm. But the words of those producing the specification show an HTML governance process that can be stormy, fractious, and far from settled down. The World Wide Web Consortium’s return to HTML standardization after years of absence has produced tensions with the more informal Web Hypertext Application Working Group (WHATWG) that shouldered the HTML burden during that absence. Some examples of language that’s cropped up this month on the W3C’s HTML Working Group mailing list: “childish,” “intolerable,” “ridiculous”, “shenanigans.” And there’s a concrete manifestation of the divisiveness: The WHATWG and W3C versions of the HTML5 specification, though both stemming from the same source material, have diverged in some areas. Some of the differences are relatively minor, and there are strong incentives to converge the two drafts of the HTML5 specification so that browser makers and Web developers aren’t faced with the prospect of incompatibilities. In the meantime, though, the overseers of the Web are clashing during a time when their important new standard is just arriving in the spotlight.

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by David Jackson Jun 28, 2010

President Obama is signing an executive order today committing the government to provide 500 MHz worth of new broadband to ease the use of electronic equipment ranging from cell phones to laptop computers. Under the order, the government will begin identifying specific sources of the new spectrum; they will come from both the public and private sectors, including television broadcast and mobile satellite facilities. “The President’s plan will nearly double the amount of commercial spectrum available to unleash the innovative potential of wireless broadband,” says Larry Summers, director of Obama’s National Economic Council. “This initiative will catalyze private sector investment, contribute to economic growth, and help to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.”

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By Rik Myslewski  24th June 2010 

Skype is releasing an SDK to enable makers of mobile and desktop devices to embed its internet-telephony tech into globally distributed systems at low cost. According to CEO Josh Silverman, the goal is to have Skype preloaded onto 100 million PCs in 2011. Silverman also said that competition from Google Voice, which went into mass US release this Tuesday, doesn’t phase him. “We [have] faced competition since the day Skype was launched,” the Taipei Times quoted him as telling a gaggle of reporters in the Taiwanese capital, “but we have grown bigger than we were in the past.” The SDK — dubbed SkypeKit — is now available only for Linux, and only as an invitation-only beta. Versions for Mac OS X and that obscure operating system from Redmond, Washington, will be released in a few weeks, and will be available for under $20.

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By Grant Gross, Jun 24, 2010

Social-networking giant Twitter has agreed to settle a complaint from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleging that the company deceived users and put their privacy at risk by failing to take appropriate security safeguards. Twitter used lax security measures to protect user personal information, resulting in hackers gaining administrative control of the service, the FTC said in a complaint made public Thursday. Hackers were able, on two occasions in early 2009, to gain access to Twitter messages, called tweets, that users had designated as private, and they were able to send out phony tweets pretending to be from U.S. President Barack Obama, Fox News and other organizations, the FTC said. Despite a privacy policy saying that Twitter took several measures to protect user privacy, the social-networking site failed to create or enforce several common security policies, the FTC said in its complaint. Twitter did not create or enforce a policy against easy-to-guess administrative passwords, and did not create or enforce policies prohibiting the storage of administrative passwords in plain text in personal e-mail accounts.

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By Sumner Lemon, Jun 24, 2010

Some users who purchased the latest version of Apple’s iPhone report finding yellowish spots and bands marring the device’s high-resolution display. Several blogs, including TUAW and Gizmodo, reported user complaints of yellow discoloration on the phone’s screen, which offers significantly higher resolution than screens on previous versions of the handset. Pictures of the problem posted online by Gizmodo showed faintly yellow patches and bands crossing the screen. An Apple spokeswoman could not immediately be reached for comment about the reported screen problems. The iPhone 4 went on sale Thursday, starting in Japan. However, some users in the U.S. who preordered the new handset received their phones before retail sales started.

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Memory longevity is a touchy subject that most businesses, researchers, and consumers purposefully ignore. Magnetic drives, in theory, are thought to be corrupted in about 40 years due to the Earth's magnetic field, though this has not been fully observed yet (hard drives have only seen widespread since the 80s). Optical discs, such as CDs and DVDs are expected to become corrupt in about 30-100 years, if not kept out of contact with moisture and oxygen. So if we wanted to store something for more than a century, there are few good current solutions. Until now, that is; Japanese researchers have come up with a new form of ultra-long term memory that they say can last over 1,000 years. They dub their memory the Digital Rosetta Stone, or DRS memory for short.

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