ada kabar tekno

Fujitsu Kembangkan Charger Wireless Super Cepat

2010-09-16T12:03:00.001+07:00

Jakarta - Fujitsu tengah mengembangkan sebuah teknologi charging tanpa kabel. Dengan teknologi ini, proses charging atau pengisian baterai diklaim bisa 150 kali lebih cepat dari biasanya.

Teknologi charger wireless besutan Fujitsu ini memanfaatkan sebuah metode yang disebut resonansi magnetik. Tak seperti metode induksi elektromagnetik kebanyakan, metode ini nantinya tak akan lagi mengharuskan adanya keselarasan antara power transmitter dan receiver.

Keunggulan yang ditawarkan oleh Fujitsu lewat teknologi ini adalah kemampuan
melakukan proses charging ke beberapa perangkat sekaligus lewat sebuah transmitter tunggal. Selain itu, teknologi wireless charging ini diklaim mampu mengisi ulang baterai sebuah perangkat dalam jarak beberapa meter.

"Teknologi lain hanya bekerja pada jarak yang dekat serta power transmitter dan receiver harus selaras. Jadi, efektivitasya tak jauh beda dengan teknologi charging lewat kabel. Yang dilakukan oleh Laboratorium Fujitsu adalah mengembangkan teknologi yang bisa mempersingkat waktu charging, mengembangkan sistem charging lewat metode resonansi magnetik," demikian penjelasan Fujitsu seperti detikINET kutip dari Cnet, Rabu (15/9/2010).

Metode resonansi magnetik yang dipakai Fujitsu pada teknologi wireless charging ini memanfaatkan koil dan kapasitor sebagai resonator. Resonator inilah yang nantinya mampu mentransmisikan energi listrik dalam jarak beberapa meter.

Teknologi yang diklaim 85 persen lebih efisien ini rencananya akan dipasarkan mulai tahun 2012. Perangkat pertama yang menikmati teknologi ini kemungkinan besar adalah ponsel. Selain itu, nantinya Fujitsu juga berencana memanfaatkan teknologi ini untuk mengisi ulang baterai perangkat berukuran besar seperti mobil elektrik.
( feb / rns )

Flashdisk 3.0 Kingston Janjikan Transfer Data 10 Lebih Cepat

2010-09-16T11:59:00.001+07:00

Jakarta - Kingston resmi mengapalkan generasi perdana flashdisk USB 3.0. Kemampuan USB
3.0 besutannya itu menjanjikan kecepatan yang lebih prima dibandingkan USB 2.0.

Produk anyar yang diberi nama DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 ini diklaim mampu mendongkrak kecepatan transfer data hingga 10 kali lipat. Sedangkan untuk kemampuan baca dan tulis, Kingston menjanjikan DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 bisa mencapai kecepatan 80MB/detik dan 60MB/detik.

Untuk mengetahui gambaran produk ini, Kingston melakukan sebuah tes internal yang memperlihatkan bahwa sebuah film berdurasi 1 jam 44 menit berkapasitas 3,9GB bisa tuntas dicopy ke DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 hanya dalam waktu 1 menit 13 detik. Sedangkan proses transfer DVD berdurasi 2 jam 23 menit dengan kapasitas 4,4GB bisa selesai dalam waktu 1 menit 23 detik.

Untuk mendukung kompatibilitas dengan produk sebelumnya, Kingston juga menyertakan kabel Y dalam paket pembelian flashdisk ini. Pasalnya, beberapa port USB 2.0 memerlukannya untuk menginisialisasi drive USB 3.0.

"USB 3.0 adalah tonggak utama berikutnya untuk produk flashdisk, dan Kingston ingin punya sebuah produk di pasar untuk para pembeli awal. DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 merupakan flashdisk USB 3.0 pertama kami yang dirancang untuk orang-orang yang ingin menjajal teknologi baru sebelum itu menjadi hal yang mainstream," kata USB Business Manager Kingston, Andrew Ewing.

Dikutip detikINET dari PR Newswire, Kamis (16/9/2010), ada tiga pilihan kapasitas yang ditawarkan, yakni 16GB, 32GB dan 64GB dengan harga bervariasi. DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 dibanderol seharga USD 89 (sekitar Rp 798 ribu) untuk kapasitas 16GB, USD 138 (sekitar Rp 1,23 juta) untuk 32GB, dan USD270 (sekitar Rp 2,42 juta) untuk 64GB.

Berikut adalah spesifikasi lengkap DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0:

- Kapasitas - 16GB, 32GB, 64GB
- Requirement - System with USB 3.0 port
- Backwards compatible - with USB 2.0
- USB 2.0 speeds - approximately 30MB/sec. read and 30MB/sec. write
- Dimensi - 2.90" x 0.87" x 0.63" (73.70 mm x 22.20 mm x 16.10 mm)
- Temperatur operasi - 32° to 140°F (0° to 60°C)
- Temperatur penyimpanan - -4° to 185°F (-20° to 85°C)
- Kapabilitas OS - Windows XP, Vista and 7
- Garansi - 5 tahun

( feb / rns )

Nyasar di Jalan, Robot Tanya Pejalan Kaki

2009-05-15T15:14:00.001+07:00

Jerman - Kian lama, tingkah robot kian mirip manusia saja. Kala nyasar di jalanan, si robot pun tidak segan-segan menanyai orang-orang untuk mencari arah yang benar.

Kemampuan itu disematkan pada robot canggih bernama Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) ini. ACE dibuat para ilmuwan di Jerman, tepatnya para akademisi di Technical University of Munich.

Para ilmuwan membiarkan si robot berjalan dari universitas menuju sebuah tempat di tengah kota Munich dengan jarak sekitar 1,5 km. Untuk diketahui, ACE tidak dibekali perangkat penunjuk arah seperti sistem GPS.

Dengan demikian, sang robot harus bertanya pada orang-orang di dekatnya untuk mencari jalan menuju tujuan. Untuk itu, ACE dibekali dengan kamera dan software agar dapat mendeteksi keberadaan manusia di sekitarnya.

Dikutip detikINET dari Times of India, Jumat (15/5/2009), ACE mengandalkan speaker untuk menanyai para pejalan kaki. Kemudian, jika orang tersebut mau menolong, ia bakal diminta menyentuh layar sentuhnya untuk menujukkan arah.

Sesudahnya, si robot tak lupa mengucap terima kasih pada manusia yang mau membantunya sebelum nyelonong pergi ke tempat tujuannya. Setelah berinteraksi dengan 38 orang dalam periode waktu 5 jam, ia baru bisa mencapai tujuan.

ACE juga sempat nyasar karena ada orang yang salah menunjukkan arah. Namun meski cukup kepayahan, keberhasilan ACE sampai ke tujuan disambut gembira para penciptanya. Ia pun sukses menuruti petuah yang lama diajarkan pada kaum manusia, malu bertanya sesat di jalan.
( fyk / ash )

DARPA working on "Silent Talk" telepathic communication for soldiers

2009-05-15T15:00:00.001+07:00

We're no strangers to crazy DARPA projects around here, but this one especially strikes our fantastic fancy. The agency's researchers are currently undertaking a project -- called Silent Talk -- to "allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals."

That's right: they're talking about telepathy. Using an EEG to read brain waves, DARPA is going to attempt to analyze "pre-speech" thoughts, then transmit them to another person. They first plan to map people's EEG patterns to his / her individual words, then see if those patterns are common to all people.

If they are, then the team will move on to developing a way to transmitting those patterns to another person. Dream big, that's what we always say!

Boston Dynamics-designed RiSE V3 robot climbs poles, haunts dreams

2009-05-15T14:55:00.001+07:00

The folks at Boston Dynamics have already made quite a name for themselves in the world of creepy robotics, but it looks like they're not ones to keep all their know-how to themselves, and they've now lent the University of Pennsylvania's Kod*lab a hand with this new RiSE V3 pole-climbing robot.

That, as you've no doubt surmised, is a followup to RiSE V1 and V2, which were developed without the help of Boston Dynamics and were more suited to climbing flat surfaces than poles. In addition to a vastly different leg mechanism, this latest model also makes use of some brushless DC motors that increase the power density to let it climb poles at rates up to 22cm per second, which the researchers say make it well-suited for a wide range of tasks.

As you can see for yourself, the bot mostly seems to work remarkably well, although it's obviously not quite ready to tackle critical jobs all by itself just yet.

USB Powered Monitor

2009-01-14T16:21:00.001+07:00

We swung by D-Link's booth at CES to check out its upcoming SideStage USB-powered monitor, hoping to see the thing in action and get some more details ahead of its release.

What we found was quite familiar looking, to say the least. D-Link was disappointingly just demoing a Nanovision, but was quick to point out this would not be the product destined for a full US release sometime this summer.

That new display will still be produced by Nanovision, but will be modified to better suit our market, graced with a different logo, and cheaper, too. No firm price yet, but the company is targeting sub-$100, which sounds good to us.

Libelula rocket-powered helicopter backpack redefines danger

2008-05-07T15:27:00.003+07:00

Sure, you can get yourself a personal helicopter or, if you're particularly daring, a jet pack, but what about those that crave yet more danger in short 30-second bursts? As in, rocket-propelled helicopter blades a few inches from your head-type danger. Thankfully, the folks at Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana (makes of some of the aforementioned jet packs) have come to the rescue (so to speak), with their latest high-flying concept, the Libelula rocket-powered helicopter backpack. Apparently, the rockets on the tips of the blades are necessary to keep the whole rig counter-balanced, a job that would normally be done with a tail rotor on an ordinary helicopter. Of course, as you can no doubt surmise by the detailed illustration above, this one's still a ways away from getting its first test flight, but the folks at TAM do have a proven track record, so we wouldn't put it completely past 'em to get it off the drawing board sooner or later. [Via Tech Digest]

Conceptual artificial plant enables you to practice before slaying flora

2008-05-07T15:09:00.002+07:00

C'mon, we know there are a few of you out there who couldn't keep a potted plant alive if a botanist was holding your hand, but there's hope for you all yet. At least, there is if QianJun Gao's masterpiece ever makes it past the drawing board. This eloquently dubbed Practice Plant features a trio of "flowers" that display barometric readings and turn colors depending on status, and the surrounding leaves will droop to signify their need for attention. Thankfully, even the brownest of thumbs could always restart this puppy and try again, and with enough trial runs, maybe one day those hanging baskets wouldn't sway out of your way as you waltz by.

[Via YankoDesign]

BAE Systems working on spider-bots, other ways to scare you to death

2008-05-07T14:59:00.002+07:00

Do you enjoy gangs of tiny, spider-like robot insectoids swarming all over your house, car, or personage? If you answered "yes," you're going to love what BAE Systems is cooking up. The company recently received an infusion of $38 million from the US Army Research Lab to fund the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) consortium; a team of scientists and researchers hell-bent on developing an "autonomous, multifunctional collection of miniature intelligence-gathering robots that can operate in places too inaccessible or dangerous for humans." Sure, that description (and accompanying photos, straight from BAE) does give you the impression that whoever came up with this really liked Minority Report, but won't it make you feel safer at night knowing a swarm of metallic spiders are looking out for you? No? Huh, weird.

[Via The Register]

Everex Cloudbook MAX with WiMAX network

2008-04-04T15:50:00.003+07:00

Debuting today at CTIA 2008, the Cloudbook MAX not only boasts an 8.9-inch WVGA (1,024 x 600) display, Windows Vista, 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth, integrated GPS receiver, 2-megapixel webcam and a battery good for four hours, but it also features an 80GB HDD, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, audio in / out and an S-Video output. Beyond all that, this thing gets energized by a 1.6GHz VIA C7-M ULV processor coupled with the VX800 digital media IGP chipset, which touts full DirectX 9 support and video acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, VC1 and DivX video formats (plus a VMR-capable HD video processor, among other things).

Lastly, the unit includes built-in support for Sprint's XOHM WiMAX network. Brimming with excitement yet? Start stocking that piggy bank -- this currently unpriced rig will be available in the latter half of this year across North America.

Snake-like robots

2008-03-08T12:55:00.001+07:00

We'll be honest -- we've seen more snake-like robots than we care to count, but a new creature slithering out of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is noticeably different than most. As you can see above, there's a distinct lack of treads, tracks or wheels on Aiko, as it actually pushes off foreign objects it encounters in order to creep forward. Additionally, researchers have created a "virtual double" of the critter in order to help guide the development of the actual robot, though we've yet to hear if it plans on joining Anna Konda in war on fire.

Robotic lawn mowers

2008-03-08T12:48:00.004+07:00

Robotic lawn mowers have been keeping yards tidy for their masters for a good while now, but Husqvarna is looking to teach an old robot new tricks with its Automower. As expected, the grass muncher is ultra-quiet and outputs zero emissions, and you can even program it to take off and get to work whenever you please.

Reportedly, a fully charged battery can get about 40 minutes of cutting done, and best of all, the unit will automatically return to its charging base to juice back up if the sun isn't out. Still, with a price tag of around £2,000 ($3,971), you may just be better off paying that punk kid down the street to handle your mowing needs.

The growth of the Internet

2008-01-30T15:03:00.000+07:00

Every conduit can take a 144-fiber cable

Thanks to the virtually infinite bandwidth of fiber—or rather, the empty tubes that can hold multi-fiber cables—the Internet has continued to get faster for almost four decades, with congestion only proving a temporary condition. But now, it's again uncertain if the routers that sit at the ends of these fibers will be able to keep up with the growth of the Internet.

Most of us take it on faith that if a computer creates an IP packet and sends it out with the right IP address in the "destination" field, the packet will get delivered to the computer holding that address. Anyone who's ever used the traceroute program ("tracert" on Windows) can attest to the fact that there are usually a good number of routers between any source and destination connected by the Internet.

So how do these routers know which path any given packet should take? Unsurprisingly, routers keep a list of which address block needs to be sent where; it's called the routing table. As with all things Internet-related, these routing tables have been growing steadily, and even multiply in accordance with Moore's Law in the coming years. Unfortunately, in engineering, it's often the case that something that works well on a small scale doesn't work on a (much) larger scale. So "scalability" is always a concern—doubly so for anything related to the Internet with its unprecedented growth rates.

Building routing tables with BGP

Conduits waiting to be put in the ground

First, a little background. When a router starts up at first, it only has local destinations in its routing table. With the help of routing protocols, though, routers are able to build a complete table so that they know where to send packets to all possible destinations.

There are several routing protocols that organizations can use locally in their own networks, but only one that spans networks that belong to different organizations. This is BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol. Back in the day, "gateway" was a term used for what we now call a router, which makes BGP "the protocol that runs between routers on both sides of the border between neighboring networks."

Currently, nearly a quarter million address blocks are injected into BGP. This means that the large routers at the core of the Internet must search through at least a quarter million address blocks for every single packet that they forward. This can easily reach one or two million packets per second for each 10 Gigabit Ethernet interface in such a router, given the Internet's average packet size of around 500 bytes.

Overcoming DRAM slowness

Internet routers maintain two (sometimes more) distinct tables: the RIB and the FIB. The Routing Information Base contains the information exchanged through BGP. In most cases, there are several ways to get to a certain destination, and the RIB tends to hold several of these pathways for each address block, along with the information that is necessary to suppress routing loops. This table is kept in DRAM and maintained by a regular CPU running software.

The Forwarding Information Base is a table that's highly optimized for looking up the next hop for a destination during the forwarding process. A routing table lookup needs at least a couple of memory cycles, which are highly unpredictable from one packet to the next—bad for caching—so in order to work at 10Gbps speeds, the FIB needs to be held in faster and more expensive SRAM. Alternatively, routers may use Content Addressable Memory (CAM) to quickly find information in the FIB. However, CAMs, traditionally used in Ethernet switches, are notoriously power-hungry at high speeds.

Scaling to larger and larger routing tables

For some time now, the community of "inter-domain routing" operators has been concerned about the growth in both the size of the global routing table and the growth in the number of routing updates that routers must process.

This has happened before: in the early 1990s, the number of class B address blocks (with 65,536 addresses each) started running out, so organizations started using a number of class C blocks (256 addresses each). However, this meant that every new organization that connected to the Internet needed four to sixteen routing table slots—one for each class C block—rather than a single one for a class B block.

The routers of the time could only handle a few thousand routes, which quickly became a problem. In 1993, the main router vendors were just implementing a new version of BGP, which doesn't look at the traditional class A/B/C addressing model but can carry address blocks that are any even power of two in size.

Around 1997, there were again problems as buggy BGP implementations caused "flapping" where BGP sessions kept going down and coming back up, using up CPU time in routers around the world. Back then, "flap damping" saved the day.

Today's and tomorrow's problems

A little over a year ago, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which guards the architectural underpinnings of the IETF's work, organized a workshop about this topic: the routing and addressing workshop (RAWS). Earlier this year, the report from the workshop was published as RFC 4984. Let me quote a bit:

One surprising outcome of the workshop was the observation made by Tony Li about the relationship between "Moore's Law" [ML] and our ability to build cost-effective, high-performance routers. "Moore's Law" is the empirical observation that the transistor density of integrated circuits, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles roughly every 24 months. A commonly held wisdom is that Moore's law would save the day by ensuring that technology will continue to scale at historical rates that surpass the growth rate of routing information handled by core router hardware. However, Li pointed out that Moore's Law does not apply to building high-end routers as far as the cost is concerned.

However, Moore's law has increased the amount of transistors companies like AMD and Intel can put on a CPU die so much that it's now more efficient to put the cache there as well, so fast SRAMs are no longer a commodity that goes into every PC. Those SRAMs are now a specialty product that isn't particularly cheap or developed particularly fast. So rather than buy commodity chips on the open market, router vendors are now forced to bankroll the development of hardware that supports faster FIB lookups. With the jump to 40Gbps and 100Gbps coming in the next years, this will be a challenge—a challenge that the biggest router vendors can probably meet, though the resulting products won't be cheap.

In the meantime, the RIB is having some trouble of its own. Not only are there many network operators that inject more prefixes (BGP lingo for address blocks) into the global routing system than are strictly necessary, but there are also a few that insist on sending huge numbers of updates every day. Apparently, their links keep going up and down and up again and down again all day.

The design of BGP is such that when this happens on one remote corner of the planet, every other BGP router in the world has to process these updates. Both the size of the table and the number of updates grow at healthy rates, while at the same time DRAM speeds only increase marginally every year. This means that at some point, the route processors can no longer get at the RIB fast enough to perform all the updates in real time.

But didn't we have flap damping for that? Yes and no. It turns out that flap damping can actually be harmful if it's deployed in an uncoordinated fashion. And if there's one thing that's hard to do, it's coordinating (herding cats, in IETF parlance) the network operations people that are in charge of global inter-domain routing.

The source of the problem

It's not entirely clear where the growth of the global routing table comes from. If you dust off your telnet client and connect to route-views.oregon-ix.net, you can log in to a publicly-available Cisco router that gets copies of the BGP data from a large number of ISPs, which you can inspect using the command "show ip bgp." (Also try "show ip bgp

".)

If you do that, you'll often see consecutive address blocks with identical properties, which could just as easily be expressed as a smaller number of larger blocks. So apparently, a large part of the size of the Internet's routing table is essentially pollution from people who can't be bothered to clean up after themselves. In other cases, the blocks ultimately lead to the same destination, but through different intermediate networks. In those cases, the destination in question is doing "traffic engineering," balancing the flow of traffic over the available links towards the Internet that are most favorable.

ISPs tend to inject a number of different blocks into the global routing system because, as they grow, they obtain new address space. However, the number of ISPs is stable or even declining.

There are also organizations that aren't ISPs who have their own presence in BGP. Normally, end-users ride along on the BGP advertisements from their ISPs, but "multihomers," organizations that connect to the 'Net through two or more ISPs, have to do this themselves.

Finally, some organizations are present in BGP just because they can. This way, they get to take their IP addresses with them when they switch ISPs, and avoid the hassles and costs involved with renumbering their network. Both traffic engineering and multihoming are often cited as primary reasons the global routing table keeps growing, but it's anybody's guess to what degree both of these will contribute to future growth.

Solving the problem

So what's an Internet engineer to do when her tables grow by 16 percent a year while RAM speed only grows by 10 percent annually? Two things, mostly: either complain that the previous generation of engineers didn't do a good job, or (if she's part of that generation herself) point out that she proposed the perfect solution a decade ago but nobody listened. That's probably a bit unfair, but it's not without a kernel of truth.

However, both the IETF and its research-focused sibling the Internet Research Task Force have studied the problem as a whole or certain aspects of it over the past decade. When IPv6 was developed, this was seen by many as an opportunity to fix the routing scalability problem as well. However, the argument that you can only make so many changes at once won out—along with the fact that back then there was no easy way to solve the routing issue, either. A few years later, Mike O'Dell wrote up the famous "8+8" or GSE proposal. The idea behind it is to allow routers to rewrite the upper 8 bytes of the 16-byte IPv6 address and hosts only look at the lower 8 bytes. This addresses multihoming, traffic engineering, and provider independent addressing. However, the proposal was never developed any further and suffers from a number of issues.

Early this century, the IETF started the "multi6" working group that was chartered to look at scalable multihoming for IPv6. The fear was that with the increased IPv6 address space, multihoming could become a big problem. The job of multi6 was to explore ways to do multihoming that don't tax the routing system. After many years and numerous proposals, this led to the shim6 working group, which is now about to publish specifications that allow a "shim" layer in the TCP/IP stack to dynamically move ongoing communication from one address to another. Under this plan, a computer might have an address from ISP A and an address from ISP B. When it's communicating over ISP A, but that ISP goes down, shim6 simply moves the communication session to the address from ISP B. Shim6 could be useful for home networks and small offices, but operators of larger networks don't see much to like in this approach.

Currently, the IRTF's Routing Research Group (RRG) is evaluating a number of proposals, with most of them falling under the "jack up" moniker. The jack up class of approaches basically takes all the addresses used by end-users and removes them from the current inter-domain routing system. These addresses are then tunneled through the core of the Internet; devices that sit close to the user/ISP boundary encapsulate packets to provider independent addresses into another IP packet. This IP packet is then sent to an equivalent device close to the user/ISP boundary at the destination's end, where the original packet is decapsulated and sent on to its intended destination.

By hiding the addresses that the users see from the big core routers in this way, it's possible to make those core routers faster and cheaper. However, it does mean it's necessary to deploy encapsulation/decapsulation devices at the edges of ISP networks (or even in end-user networks) everywhere. This would be the first big change in Internet routing in a decade and a half. But if it doesn't work, perhaps some more cat herding will do the trick.

Intel's x86 ISA grows down: today laptops, tomorrow the iPhone

2008-01-30T14:42:00.000+07:00

In spite of its astounding commercial success, x86 is almost certainly the world's most-maligned instruction set architecture (ISA). Predicting the death of x86 used to be a favorite pastime of everyone from bearded mainframe geeks to Mac-using AOLpersons (especially the latter). But like various bad 80s fashions, x86 may be ugly, but it just keeps coming back.

These days, I don't field nearly the volume of "When do you think x86 will finally roll over and die?" questions that I used to. Indeed, it has been over nine months since I last faced this particular question, in a radio interview for a program called GeekSpeak—this has to be some kind of record for me. Perhaps the public is finally catching on to the fact that x86 isn't going anywhere. If so, then that's progress, but here's the next reality that x86's (technically justified) detractors will have to deal with: not only is x86 not going anywhere, but in 2008, it's going everywhere.

Mark my words: in 2008, you'll see x86 processors win the first few major battles in a multiyear war to displace the likes of ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS in the pockets, purses, and briefcases of everyone from corporate executives to mall-hopping Paris Hilton wannabes. 2008 will be the year of the must-have x86-based ultramobile PC (UMPC) and mobile Internet device (MID), and from there it's a straight march into a future iteration of the iPhone.

No, I'm not just mindlessly regurgitating Intel marketing materials; this prediction is a matter of physics and economics. The 45nm process node that Intel has brought online and will soon begin ramping up marks an important milestone in the evolution of the world's most commercially successful (and most perpetually "old and busted") instruction set architecture. This is the point at which the bulky and bloated x86 ISA elbows its way into the embedded space like a 250-pound man squeezing into coach class, carrying with it the billions of lines of legacy code that give it such powerful economic and technological inertia. With a 45nm x86 processor, you can boot decades' worth of Windows software without a recompile on a device that fits comfortably in the palm of your hand and boasts a four- to six-hour battery life. This makes 45nm the point at which things will get really, really interesting on the mobile front.

Of course, it has been possible for some time now to squeeze an x86-based PC into an ultramobile form factor, but it hasn't been cheap or attractive. Intel may yet find some success with its 90nm, Pentium M-derived "McCaslin" UMPC platform, which just recently launched, but the party won't really get started until McCaslin's 45nm successor, Menlow, arrives in 2008. Menlow and its successor, Moorestown, will fundamentally change the complex cost/power/thermals/compatibility equation that dictates what kind of hardware goes into a commercially viable pocket-sized widget.

Menlow: UMPC and MID

The first major step on the road to a truly portable x86-based device is the "Menlow" platform that Intel touted at the most recent IDF. Menlow, which pairs Intel's 45nm mobile "Silverthorne" CPU with a special ultramobile chipset called "Poulsbo," will feature support for 802.11n and WiMAX, so that the whole Menlow package can deliver a full wireless Internet experience by running standard (x86) Linux and Windows browsers.

Speaking of operating systems, Intel is pretty aggressively showcasing Linux as the OS of choice for the UMPC. Nonetheless, Microsoft is working on something for the devices, which will support Direct3D 9ex and WMV9. The iPhone has shown that interface is key—no one should ever have to manipulate a tiny scrollbar with a stylus—and the Linux software that Intel showed me on a Menlow demo unit back at Research@Intel Day looked remarkably iPhone-like. So we'll see what Redmond comes up with on that front.

The UI for the Mobile Linux Internet Project. Source: Moblin.org

The Menlow slides that Intel was showing at IDF are variations on a slide deck that has been around at least since May of this year and IDF Beijing. One of the slides compares the king of hearts to a similarly sized Menlow motherboard, to show that Intel can now fit an x86 PC in an area not much bigger than a playing card. One of the major factors behind this high level of integration is Silverthorne.

The Silverthorne CPU. Source: Intel

Menlow's Silverthorne CPU as miniscule as you might expect of a 45nm single-core design. The whole package for this CPU, which will also power some of Intel's notebook offerings, is smaller than a penny. In spite of its small size, however, the processor will pack more horsepower than a similarly-clocked Core Solo (that is, if it's a Penryn variant, and I believe it is), which is more than enough performance to give a full Web experience using the same binaries of Firefox, Internet Explorer (and Safari?) that run on x86 desktops.

Menlow

CPU	45nm Silverthorne
CPU features	1-2GHz, 64-bit, HyperThreading
Chipset	Poulsbo
GPU	Probably PowerVR sgx
3D support	D3D9ex, OLG 2.0
Memory	DDR2 400MHz/533MHz
Networking/IO	802.11n, WiMAX, GPS, BlueTooth
Form factor	UMPC and MIDs with 4"-6" screens
Storage	NAND flash
Battery life	6 hours of usage, 10 hours standby
Arrives	First half of 2008

Intel will follow Menlow in the second half of 2008 with a new mobile platform called "Moorestown." We don't know as much about Moorestown as we do about Menlow, but what we do know is pretty tantalizing.

A slide from Anand Chandrasekher's IDF keynote, slightly modified for clarity. Source: Intel

For starters, the heart of Moorestown is an as-yet unnamed system-on-a-chip (SoC) processor that includes one or two processor cores, a GPU, video encoding and decoding hardware, and a DDR3 memory controller. Note that this processor does not appear to share any DNA with Tolapai, the Pentium M-derived 65nm SoC that Intel will aim at the embedded networking space.

Given Moorestown will launch in the same timeframe as Nehalem (Intel's first microarchitecture designed specifically for the 45nm node), it's very likely that its processor is simply a Nehalem variant. Indeed, Nehalem is made to be modular, so that Intel can easily produce different processors containing different numbers and mixes of general-purpose processor cores and special-purpose functional blocks (e.g., graphics, video, cryptography) for different market segments. This being the case, it's easy to envision the Moorestown CPU as a Nehalem variant with one CPU core, one GPU core, the standard on-die memory controller that Nehalem products will feature, and a block containing video encode and decode hardware.

If Moorestown's CPU turns out to be a Nehalem flavor, then by the end of 2008 we'll have reached the truly remarkable state where a smartphone and a supercomputer cluster can be built on the same processor base and can run the same OS kernel (Linux) binaries for everything from instant messaging to nuclear blast simulation.

The big question about Moorestown is its integrated GPU. Even at 45nm, there won't be nearly enough transistors available on an SoC die to add a GPU that performs anything like a discrete GPU. Rather, we can expect performance that's something like Intel's integrated graphics processors. Real 3D rendering horsepower will be confined to dedicated, discrete GPUs for the foreseeable future.

Even if it's short on 3D rendering power, Moorestown marks the point at which an x86 processor can feasibly fit into a smartphone-class product. Chandrasekher showed off a device, pictured in the slide below, that looks remarkably like an iPhone.

A slide from Anad Chandrasekher's IDF keynote. Source: Intel

If Intel does meet its design goals with Moorestown, then we won't have to wait for the 32nm node to see a generation of phones that run the same OS binaries as a desktop PC. At that point, it would take a lot less of an investment of programmer time for Apple to fully incorporate the iPhone as a target in its Xcode toolset, enabling developers of third-party OS X apps to easily make mobile versions of their products.

Moorestown

CPU	Unnamed (probably Nehalem-based) 45nm SoC
CPU features	Single- and dual-core. 50 percent less power than Menlow. Includes an on-die GPU, video encode and decode blocks, and a DDR3 memory controller
Chipset	Integrated northbridge, discrete I/O controller with storage and communication hardware
GPU	Integrated onto CPU die
Memory	DDR3
Networking	802.11n and WiMAX
Storage	NAND flash
Battery life	"All day"
Arrives	Second half of 2008

Postscript: the threshold of inferiority

Over the years, I've attempted with varying degrees of seriousness to coin a number of laws, rules, lemmas, and corollaries, but at this point I've given up and am content to repeat laws with other peoples' names on them. But if I were to give a name to the following law, I'd call it "Hannibal's Law of x86 Inevitability." The "law" goes something like this:

The moment an x86 processor becomes available that you can squeeze into your implementation's design parameters (cost, performance, features, power, thermals, etc.), then the x86 legacy code base makes that processor the optimal choice for your implementation.

Note that an x86 solution does not have to outperform (by whatever metric is important to you) the non-x86 competition in your application niche for it to be the overwhelming choice. Rather, x86's legacy code base makes it compelling when the degree to which is inferior to the competition narrows beyond some threshold, due to the cost and feature advantages of running the x86 software stack.

I firmly believe that this law applies to almost every niche in computing, from embedded to GPUs to high-performance computing. You may think x86 is old and busted, but what you or I think about ISA design doesn't really matter. Or, you may be a code geek with lots of experience in your particular niche who believes that some combination of cross-platform development tools and binary translation is good enough to make ISA irrelevant to any hardware design decision, but you are wrong, wrong, wrong. (At this point, you can imagine me banging my shoe on the table like Khrushchev at the UN, promising that x86 will bury you... except that Khrushchev was ultimately mistaken, and I am not.) The moment that someone makes an x86 solution that can compete in your niche, then the Invisible Hand of the Market will seize the x86 legacy code base and bludgeon the competition with it.

I've seen this law in operation for almost a decade now, and I expect to see it in operation for another decade. In fact, I'll end this article by going out on a limb to assert something that many people whose opinions I respect will consider ludicrous: the coming decade will end with the dominance of x86 in the embedded, GPU, and high-performance computing niches. Count on it.

Samsung Kembangkan Memory Card 128 GB

2007-10-24T10:00:00.000+07:00

Fino Yurio Kristo - detikinet

Seoul - Raksasa elektronik Korea Selatan, Samsung Electronics memaparkan rencana besarnya mengembangkan memory card atau kartu memori dengan kapasitas penyimpanan terbesar yang pernah ada.

Berkenaan dengan hal ini, Samsung dalam pernyataannya yang dilansir AFP dan dikutip detikINET, Selasa (23/10/2007) menyatakan bahwa mereka telah mengembangkan NAND flash memory berkapasitas 64 GB pertama di dunia. Perusahaan inipun mengklaimnya sebagai sebuah kemajuan besar dalam bidang teknologi penyimpanan flash.

Keberadaan flash memory memang memudahkan karena tetap bisa digunakan untuk menyimpan data digital meskipun tidak mendapatkan pasokan daya apapun. Aplikasinya antara lain terdapat di memory card dan USB Flash Drives.

Dengan perkembangan ini, Samsung nantinya akan menciptakan memory card atau kartu memori berkapasitas 128 GB. Jika diilustrasikan, kapasitas sebesar ini bisa digunakan untuk menyimpan sekitar 80 film DVD atau 32.000 musik MP3.

"Produk ini punya kapasitas penyimpanan terbesar di dunia," demikian klaim dari Kwon Hyosun, manajer senior di Samsung Electronics. Produksi massalnya direncanakan akan dimulai tahun 2009.

Diproyeksikan, produk ini akan menghasilkan pangsa pasar baru bernilai miliaran dollar Amerika, dengan diaplikasikan pada berbagai produk multimedia seperti ponsel, kamera digital ataupun pemutar musik MP3. ( fyk / fyk )

Recycle bin hard drive stores your deletions, mimics a trash can

2007-08-27T14:31:00.000+07:00

Posted Aug 26th 2007 8:20AM by Darren Murph

We'll admit, it does seem a bit unnecessary to purchase an external hard drive that reserves its space for your deleted files, but if it looks this good, we can't help but be awed. Designed by Franco Cagnina, the Tempo concept is a 250GB hard drive that somehow resides in a trash can-shaped enclosure, and as expected, stores every single byte that you (haphazardly or otherwise) direct to File 13. The standout feature, however, are the blue LEDs that creep up the can as you add more and more junk to the heap. Well played, Franco, well played.

[Via TechnaBob]

Flexible displays created by stretching crystals

2007-08-27T14:29:00.001+07:00

Posted Aug 24th 2007 6:18PM by Darren Murph

As researchers continue to forge ahead in their quest to create commercially viable flexible displays, a new team from Canada has apparently unearthed a breakthrough of sorts. Reportedly, the crew has been able to conjure up a full-color display which boasts pixels made from photonic crystals, and by "bonding them to an electroactive polymer that expands when a voltage is applied to it," the colors of the pixels change. According to André Arsenault of the University of Toronto, the newfangled devices "can be viewed just as well in bright sunlight as in indoor light," and if all goes as planned, we could be seeing a whole lot more of these promising units "in as little as two years" when the startup Opalux looks to fit these bendable creations into billboards, handheld gadgetry, and anything else it deems fit.

[Image courtesy of MSNBC, thanks Alan]

Festo's fluidic muscles make us all look weak

2007-08-27T14:28:00.001+07:00

Posted Aug 24th 2007 10:29AM by Darren Murph

Yeah, we've seen some pretty fancy robotic arm work already this year, but Festo is out to show 'em all up with its fluidic muscle-packin' Airic's_arm. This robotic prosthesis sports a "bone structure" which mimics that found on a real live human, and can be moved via the 30 "muscles" built within. Essentially, Festo's approach to movement relies on "an elastomer tube reinforced by aramid fibers, which contract quickly and exert a pulling force when they're filled with a blast of compressed air or liquid." Of course, you'll notice it doesn't offer quite the same range as less bionic alternatives, but this thing's pretty accurate, indeed. Check it out for yourself, the video's right down there.

First all-electric police car takes to the streets

2007-08-27T14:22:00.000+07:00

Posted Aug 24th 2007 8:31AM by Darren Murph

C'mon, fess up -- you'd be a lot less intimidated by a whisper quiet, all-electric squad car than one with a roaring V8, but it's hard to argue the fuel savings that would accrue if an entire precinct resorted to using the former. Such a car has now been loosed by the Connellsville Police Department, which had its combustion engine removed and replaced by a "pure-electric" alternative. The modified Chevy Impala will reportedly cruise for eight hours on a two-hour charge from a 240-volt outlet, but can't chase down baddies in heavy rain for fear of water "destroying its electrical circuits." Furthermore, Coherent Systems International (the car's converter) will be monitoring its effectiveness over the next two years as it aims to "work with other state agencies" and create more alternatively-fueled automobiles for public service.

HP's MediaSmart Home Servers get a release date

2007-08-23T09:16:00.000+07:00

Posted Aug 22nd 2007 6:03PM by Joshua Topolsky

If you're keeping abreast of the Windows Home Server proceedings (and we suspect you are) then you're probably somewhat familiar with the HP EX470 / EX475. Furthermore, If you've been eyeing the two, drive-filled towers and been hoping to know when you might get your hands on them, you may be in luck. According to reports from retailers like Amazon and PCMall, the $599 EX470 (clocking in at 500GB) and and $749 EX475 (1TB) will begin shipping on September 15th. As you'll recall, the servers rock 1.8GHz AMD Semprons and contain four drive bays, plus tout four USB ports and one eSATA port -- for additional external expansion. As the supposed launch date for WHS draws ever nearer (or further... it's hard to tell) it's at least nice to know that we'll have some options when it does eventually land.

[Via DailyTech, thanks Mark]

Ageia announces PhysX 100M processor for gaming laptops

2007-08-23T09:14:00.000+07:00

Posted Aug 22nd 2007 4:32PM by Darren Murph

Although it's been well over a year since the Ageia PhysX processor made any noise at all over on the desktop front, the firm is taking full advantage of the exposure provided at the Games Convention in Germany to unveil the PhysX 100M processor for "high-performance" gaming lappies. According to the company, this new device aims to provide "the most intensely realistic gaming and entertainment experience to PC gamers" on-the-go, but the nitty-gritty we were hoping for simply hasn't been divulged just yet. Of course, it's fairly safe to assume that we'll only be seeing this unit packed within beastly gaming laptops that can't stray far from an AC outlet, but only time will tell which manufacturer takes the bait first.

[Via ExtremeTech]

Baterai 'Kertas' Siap Hidupi Gadget Masa Depan

2007-08-16T10:13:00.000+07:00

Fino Yurio Kristo - detikinet

Baterai 'Kertas' (BBC)

Jakarta - Baterai 'kertas' fleksibel bisa memenuhi kebutuhan sumber daya energi gadget masa depan. Demikian klaim para peneliti dari Rensselaer Polytehnic Institute. Mereka membuat contoh baterai yang hanya sedikit lebih besar daripada kertas perangko. Baterai ini bisa mengeluarkan daya sebesar 2,3 volt, cukup untuk menghidupkan cahaya kecil.

Ambisi mereka lainnya adalah untuk memproduksi baterai kertas yang suatu hari nanti bisa menjadi sumber daya mobil.

Profesor Robert Linhardt, salah satu peneliti menuturkan bahwa baterai kertas ini bisa jadi merupakan masa depan penyimpanan daya. Berbeda dengan baterai konvensional yang mengandung berbagai komponen, baterai kertas ini mengintegrasikan seluruh komponen baterai dalam struktur tunggal.

Baterai tersebut mengandung carbon nanotube sebagai elektroda dan dalam keadaan terpotong atau terlipat, baterai ini masih bisa berfungsi. Karena hanya mengandung kertas dan karbon sebagai unsur utama, pengaruhnya terhadap tubuh juga diklaim tidak berbahaya seperti baterai biasa yang bisa mengeluarkan racun.

Meskipun daya output yang dikeluarkan untuk sementara ini masih berukuran kecil, Professor Linhardt optimis energi yang dihasilkan oleh produk ini mudah untuk ditingkatkan.

"Jika kita menumpuk 500 baterai kertas bersama-sama, voltasenya juga meningkat 500 kali. Sesederhana itu," klaim Profesor Lindhart seperti dikutip detikINET dari BBC, Kamis (16/8/2007).

Namun, Profesor Daniel Sperling, seorang pakar sumber energi alternatif dari University of California mengatakan bahwa penemuan ini masih belum meyakinkan. "Saya kira, belum akan ada perubahan drastis akibat penemuan ini. Mereka juga harus memikirkan soal biaya," tegasnya.

Carbon nanotubes memang sangatlah mahal. Baterai kertas untuk mendayai mobil misalnya, mungkin juga tidak akan terjangkau. Profesor Lindhart sendiri pun mengakui baterai kertas ini juga masih membutuhkan waktu untuk bisa dipasarkan secara massal.
(ash/ash)

Pocket-sized PC runs Linux

2007-05-22T14:28:00.000+07:00

May 14, 2007

Parisian startup Linutop has started shipping a compact, Linux-based computing appliance said to draw less than six Watts. Linutop's "Linutop" can serve as a standalone PC or Linux terminal, and targets web surfing kiosks in libraries, schools, offices, hotels, hospitals, Internet cafes, and family rooms.

Now that's a Pocket PC
(Click to enlarge)

Linutop claims that its Linutop PC draws "less than 6 Watts" -- less energy than many computing appliances such as printers and scanners dissipate in standby mode. The device measures 3.7 x 1.1 x 5.9 inches (9.3 x 2.7 x 15 cm), and weighs 9.9 ounces (280 grams). Its compact wall-wart-style power supply incorporates a European-style plug.

Linutop is based on a 433MHz AMD Geode LX 700@0.8W processor. It has 256MB of RAM, and comes standard with a 1GB USB flash key as its main storage device. The lack of moving parts contributes to a long life cycle that generates less waste than less robust designs, the company said.

At 6 Watts, the Linutop is no hotplate
(Click to enlarge)
The Linutop's I/O includes four USB 2.0 ports and audio, along with a VGA port and 10/100 Ethernet, with USB WiFi optional.

Linutop desktop
(Click to enlarge)
On the software side, the Linutop PC is based on Xubuntu, a version of Ubuntu that eschews complicated, slow-moving window environments like KDE and Gnome in favor of Xfce. Interestingly, Xfce was also selected by Zonbu for its low-power, Via C7-based Zonbox, announced earlier this month along with a "carbon offset" program.

Other pre-installed Linutop applications include Firefox, AbiWord, Evince, Gaim, Totem, XDMCP (for interoperability with the Linux Terminal Server Project), and Etherboot. The environment is simple and easy, and users can surf the web within minutes of receiving their device, the company said.

Availability

The Linutop is available now, for European power outlets, in two configurations. A single Linutop with a 1GB USB stick is priced at 280 Euros (approx. $380). A pack of eight Linutops, each with a 1GB USB stick, is priced at 2,100 Euros (approx. $2,850).

Adapter does 200Mbps networking via AC wiring

2007-05-22T14:20:00.000+07:00

May 17, 2007

Actiontec Electronics has released its next-generation powerline networking kit based on the HomePlug AV standard for distributing large multimedia and data files around the home without Ethernet cabling. "MegaPlug AV" adapters can network computers, set-top boxes, and other devices at 200Mbps over existing home electrical wiring, according to the company.

MegaPlug AV connection diagram

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According to Actiontec, use of the latest HomePlug AV technology enables throughput speeds that are more than twice as fast as the previous generation of HomePlug technology -- "at least double that of 802.11g wireless connectivity," and approaching wired-Ethernet levels. As a result, the network is suitable for high-speed transfer of data files as well as HDTV programs, movies, or other rich media. In addition, the new HomePlug standard provides enhanced 128-bit AES security, the company says.

Each MegaPlug AV kit comes with two Ethernet adapters that can be used either to build a new home network or to extend an existing network to areas of the house that are difficult to reach with Ethernet cabling or wireless signals. One adapter is needed for each device to be networked.

Setting up the network, according to Actiontec, is simple -- users simply plug one MegaPlug AV adapter into a power outlet near the broadband home router, plug the other into a power outlet near the PC or other Ethernet-equipped device, and connect both the router and the device to the respective adapters with the Ethernet cables included in the package. Each adapter measures 2.25 x 3.25 x 2 inches, making it small enough to be used without interfering with adjacent sockets, according to the company.

In addition to the two adapters and Ethernet cables, each kit includes a quick start guide, an installation CD, a user manual CD, and instructions for changing the encryption key.

The adapters are compatible with any wired- or wireless-broadband router or gateway and any PC, regardless of OS, the company says.

The Kit can be purchased from the company's website for about $170.

Big Blue boasts of "fastest chip ever"

2007-05-22T13:36:00.000+07:00

May 21, 2007

IBM claims to have doubled the performance (or halved the power requirements, depending on your point of view) of its top-end processor for servers and mid-range systems. The dual-core "Power6" processor clocks to 4.7GHz, has 8MB of L2 cache, and breaks four widely used Unix performance benchmarks, according to the company.

The Power6 chip will appear initially in "System p 570" systems with two to 16 cores. The p570 reportedly broke SPEC 2006 benchmark records for integer, floating-point, Java, and transaction-processing, marking "the first time a single system has owned all four categories," IBM said.

IBM plans to roll out the Power6 processor in its "System p" and "System i" mid-range systems. These have traditionally run IBM's proprietary AIX version of UNIX, while also supporting multiple virtualized Linux servers running simultaneously alongside AIX.

The "thumbnail-sized" Power6 chip is built on 65-nm process technology, and integrates a generous 8MB of L2 cache, along with a pair of cores based on the Power6 architecture and connected by an SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) fabric.

Power6 die layout
Claimed Power6 features include:

300GBps processor bandwidth -- claimed to be 30 times greater than Intel's Itanium

First UNIX microprocessor able to calculate decimal floating point arithmetic in hardware

Low-voltage operation, for processor blade applications, and high-voltage operation for SMP server operation

Separate power supply "rails" for circuits that can't support low-voltage operation

Voltage/frequency "slewing"

Dynamic clocking

Additionally, the Power6 chip offers virtualization capabilities said to support live migration of virtual servers between physical hardware platforms without downtime.

Pricing and availability were not disclosed.

Mini Linux distro features X-free OpenGL graphics

2007-05-22T13:32:00.000+07:00

May 01, 2007

A minimalistic Linux distribution that can run OpenGL-based applications without X is now available from New Zealand based hacker Zeljko "Zelko" Aksentijevic. Zelko said his "MyOS Miniature OpenGL development system" shows that Linux development systems can be simple.

Zelko said MyOS has been "stripped down of everything, but core necessary files to compile and run OpenGL/C code." It is distributed as a 12.8MB ISO image, and fits on a 1.44MB floppy disk when OpenGL development tools are removed, according to Zelko.

Zelko said MyOS offers "really all one needs to learn OpenGL." Additionally, applications written on MyOS can run on "any Linux," he said.

In order to run OpenGL applications without X, MyOS makes use of SciTech's interesting GPL-licensed SNAP/MGL drivers. The drivers use a portable, cross-platform, HAL (hardware abstraction layer) with an OpenGL API.

In addition to serving as a teaching tool, potential applications for MyOS listed by its creator include: USB key-chain Linux implementations, rescue Linux, secure information storage and processing systems, and embedded applications, such as mobile phones, PDAs, media players, public computers, ATMs, and "other systems or terminals that need to run safely without 'Hard Drive' or entirely from ROM chip."

MyOS could also serve as the basis for building a graphical windowing system on top of OpenGL, Aksentijevic suggests.

In addition to the SciTech drivers, other components of MyOS are said to include a stripped down and modified GNU GCC compiler, diet libc, Necromancer's windows manager, and of course, busybox.

Linux-powered gateway crams into USB key

2007-05-22T09:48:00.000+07:00

A tiny, Linux-based gateway has won an award for hardware innovation at the 2007 Embedded World conference in Nuremberg this week. SSV Embedded Systems's "Tux/Stick" interfaces between USB-enabled PCs and various industrial and embedded networks, including LANs, WiFi networks, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and in-car networks.

The Tux/Stick looks like a typical USB memory stick. And, one end does plug into a USB port, just like a memory stick, drawing power from the host PC and booting a tiny ARM9-powered processor running Linux.

SSV Tux/Stick
(Click to enlarge)
Beneath a removable cap on the Tux/Stick's other end, though, is a "miniature plug" of an unspecified nature. This plug accepts "media couplers" that provide various interfaces. Available interfaces include 10/100 Ethernet, SPI, USB host, and serial UART interfaces.

SSV says the Tux/Stick comes with "special USB drivers" that make the device look like an Ethernet connection or a serial UART to the host computer, while supporting the device's various communication profiles. The device can establish connections in an "ad hoc" fashion, according to the company.

Marketing Manager Jorg Neumann stated, "This award confirms the importance and market need for small and innovative embedded hardware products that enables a huge range of communication."

What's under the hood?

The Tux/Stick is based on SSV's tiny DNP/9200, a miniature ARM9-powered SBC (single-board computer) that comes preinstalled with Linux. The DNP/9200 processor module measures 3.2 x 1.1 inches (82 x 28mm), and fits into a standard JEDEC DIL (dual-inline) socket with 64 pins spaced at 0.1 inches.

DNP/9200 module
(Click to enlarge)
The DNP/9200 SBC, in turn, is based on an Atmel AT91RM9200 clocked at 180MHz, and has 32MB of SDRAM and 16MB of flash memory. On-board interfaces include two UARTs, SPI, SSI/I2C, USB host and device, an 8-bit bus interface, and 20 GPIO lines.

DNP/9200 diagram
Additionally, the DNP/9200 SBC offers a "dock" that supports a Sony/Ericsson GSM/GPRS modem. Additional details can be found in our previous coverage, here.

Availability and pricing details for the Tux/Stick were not available by publication time.

Microsoft-Yahoo Siap Bersatu Jegal Google?

2007-05-07T08:59:00.000+07:00

Microsoft-Yahoo Siap Bersatu Jegal Google?
Dewi Widya Ningrum - detikInet

Jakarta, Kabar Microsoft akan mencaplok Yahoo kembali merebak setelah keduanya disinyalir tengah memasuki taraf negosiasi jual beli. Untuk menjegal Google-kah tujuannya?

Seperti dilansir New York Post, Microsoft disinyalir tengah bernegosiasi dengan Yahoo. Bahkan Microsoft dikabarkan telah mengajukan tawaran senilai US$ 50 miliar guna bisa membeli perusahaan web portal tersebut beberapa bulan yang lalu. Saham Yahoo pun langsung bereaksi positif dan naik lebih dari 17 persen menyusul merebaknya kabar ini.

Sementara itu menurut Wall Street Journal, diskusi antara Microsoft dan Yahoo sudah berlangsung sejak beberapa bulan terakhir ini. Negosiasi itu disinyalir masih dalam tahap awal dan belum membuahkan kesepakatan yang jelas, apakah Yahoo akan diambil alih secara penuh oleh Microsoft atau membentuk joint venture.

Demikian rangkuman laporan Vnunet yang dikutip detikINET, Minggu (6/5/2007). Mengenai kabar merger ini, baik pihak Yahoo maupun Microsoft enggan mengomentari hal ini.

Posisi Yahoo dan Microsoft di bisnis mesin pencari internet saat ini, masing-masing bertengger di peringkat kedua dan ketiga setelah Google.

Akuisisi ini, jika terjadi, memungkinkan Microsoft untuk menghadapi rivalnya Google di bisnis pencarian online. Akuisisi ini juga akan menjadi yang terbesar yang pernah dilakukan Microsoft.

Beberapa analis bersikap skeptis menanggapi kabar ini. "Menurut saya, ini (akuisisi) tidak akan terjadi," kata analis Matt Rosoff dari Directions yang mempelajari bisnis Microsoft.

"Saya tidak tahu apa yang akan diperoleh Yahoo dari transaksi ini, termasuk orang-orang yang tidak mau bekerja untuk Microsoft," lanjutnya seperti dilansir AFP.

Sebenarnya kabar Microsoft akan mengakuisisi Yahoo ini sudah mulai terkuak sejak setahun lalu. Saat itu salah satu sumber terdekat Microsoft yang enggan disebutkan namanya mengatakan bahwa Microsoft tengah melobi Yahoo agar pihaknya bisa membeli saham penyedia mesin pencari itu.

Akankah keduanya melebur dan bersatu menjegal Google?
(dwn/rou)

India Kejar Laptop Rp 100.000

2007-05-07T08:57:00.000+07:00

India Kejar Laptop Rp 100.000
Wicaksono Hidayat - detikInet

Jakarta, Laptop dengan harga US$ 100 (sekitar Rp 909.000) saja sudah dianggap mimpi yang nyaris mustahil, kini India justru berani mengejar laptop US$ 10 (Rp 90.900). Mungkinkah?

Impian yang mungkin dianggap tidak mungkin itu dicanangkan oleh Kementerian Tenaga Kerja India. Dua buah desain telah ditelaah oleh kementerian itu.

Satu desain dari Vellore Institute of Technology dan satu lagi dari Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Demikian dikutip detikINET dari Times of India, Sabtu (5/5/2007).

Apakah rancangan itu sudah cukup murah? Sejauh ini, tanpa biaya buruh, biaya pembuatan laptop termurah yang bisa dirancang adalah US$ 47.

Namun seorang pejabat India mengaku optimistis. "Biaya yang terlihat cukup membesarkan hati. Kami berharap bisa turun hingga US$ 10. Kami juga akan mencari kemungkinan perusahaan India yang memproduksi komponennya," tutur sang pejabat.

Sebagai bandingan, proyek laptop termurah saat ini adalah US$ 100 yang dikedepankan oleh Nicholas Negroponte. Itu pun harganya sudah naik menjadi US$ 175.

Di sisi lain akademisi di Amerika Serikat sudah mulai mengembangkan ponsel US$ 10. Ponsel itu akan dikembangkan untuk penyebaran teknologi di negara berkembang.

Laptop US$ 10 yang 'dikejar' India kemungkinan akan menggunakan komponen lawas atau yang sudah tidak digunakan pada laptop model terbaru namun masih menumpuk di gudang. (wsh/wsh)

MacBook hacked in contest at security event

2007-05-04T13:48:00.000+07:00

VANCOUVER, B.C.--Shane Macaulay just got himself a free MacBook.

By Joris Evers, CNET News.com

Macaulay, a software engineer, was able to hack into a MacBook through a zero-day security hole in Apple's Safari browser. The computer was one of two offered as a prize in the "PWN to Own" hack-a-Mac contest at the CanSecWest conference here.

The successful attack on the second and final day of the contest required a conference organizer to surf to a malicious Web site using Safari on the MacBook--a type of attack familiar to Windows users. CanSecWest organizers relaxed the rules Friday after nobody at the event had breached either of the Macs on the previous day.

Macaulay teamed with Dino Dai Zovi, a security researcher until recently with Matasano Security. Dai Zovi, who has previously been credited by Apple for finding flaws in Mac software, found the Safari vulnerability and wrote the exploit overnight in about 9 hours, he said.

"The vulnerability and the exploit are mine," Dai Zovi said in a telephone interview from New York. "Shane is my man on the ground."

Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox declined to comment on the MacBook hack specifically, but provided Apple's standard security comment: "Apple takes security very seriously and has a great track record of addressing potential vulnerabilities before they can affect users."

Dai Zovi plans to apply for a $10,000 bug bounty TippingPoint announced on Thursday if a previously unknown Apple bug was used. "Shane can have the laptop, I want the money," Dai Zovi said. TippingPoint runs the Zero Day Initiative bug bounty program.

A TippingPoint representative said the company would pay, after looking at the vulnerability. "If it is an actual zero-day in Safari that's fine with us," said Terri Forslof, manager of security response at TippingPoint.

The successful hack comes a day after Apple release its fourth security update for Mac OS X this year. The update repairs 25 vulnerabilities.

CanSecWest organizers set up the MacBooks connected to a wireless router and with all security updates installed, but without additional security software or settings.

Keep DNS servers from contributing to a DDoS attack

2007-03-31T14:18:00.000+07:00

Takeaway: How can a recursive query become a DDoS attack? It doesn't take much. Mike Mullins explains how an attacker can take advantage of a DNS server using recursion to perpetrate a DDoS attack, and he tells you how to prevent your organization's DNS servers from taking part.

Is your public DNS server just waiting to participate in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack? If it's using recursion, then the answer is yes. DDoS and DNS attacks aren't new, but they're on the rise.

Using authoritative name service, DNS servers primarily advertise to the world the various records associated with the domain they serve. Because users prefer common names and networks prefer numbers, DNS servers handle the translation between what a user types in a browser—such as techrepublic.com—and the actual IP address the network understands.

The task of answering a query recursively is completely different. According to a US-CERT report, between 75 and 80 percent of all DNS servers can handle recursive requests.

Recursive DNS provide answers to queries for records by asking other DNS servers and providing that response to the client that made the request. Here's an example:

A user enters www.techrepublic.com into a Web browser.
The computer contacts its local DNS server to determine the IP address of www.techrepublic.com.
The DNS server looks up www.techrepublic.com in its local tables (i.e., its cache) but does not find it listed.
The DNS server sends a query to a root server for the IP address of www.techrepublic.com.
The root server replies with a referral to the top-level domain (TLD) servers for www.techrepublic.com.
The DNS server then contacts the TLD server to determine the IP address of www.techrepublic.com.
The TLD server replies with a referral to the name server for www.techrepublic.com.
The DNS server contacts the name server for www.techrepublic.com to determine the IP address.
The name server checks a zone file that defines a CNAME record, which shows www.techrepublic.com is an alias of techrepublic.com.com. DNS returns both the CNAME and the A record for techrepublic.com.com
The DNS server sends this response to the original client: techrepublic.com.com = 216.239.113.146 (with CNAME record www.techrepublic.com=techrepublic.com.com).

How can a recursive query become a DDoS attack? For the attack to work, the attacker needs to be in control of one DNS record.

He or she then populates the TXT field of that record with information. (The maximum size of the TXT field is approximately 4,200 bytes.) And then the fun begins. Here's how:

The attacker programs bots to continuously execute requests for this record against recursive DNS.
The bots spoof the source IP address of these requests, replacing it with the DDoS target.
The recursive servers take the record from the attacker-controlled zone, and send it along to the IP address they think the request came from.

Multiply this by the number of bots participating in the attack, and you've got a DDoS attack. If your DNS server is a target of this attack, your network will grind to a halt because none of its clients can resolve an IP address.

What's the solution? It's quite simple: Run two different DNS servers. Let the internal server handle all requests from your network (even recursive for your clients only).

On the external DNS server, disable recursion. With recursion disabled, the external DNS server won't send queries on behalf of other name servers or clients, which stops attackers from bouncing DoS attacks off your DNS server by querying for external zones.

Final thoughts

Open DNS recursion isn't the problem—it's a symptom of the problem. IP address spoofing is the real problem, and this spoofing provides a ready venue for DDoS, spam, and other headaches.

In my opinion, IP address verification is the answer, and the tools already exist to solve that problem. I know the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is looking at the issue, but it needs to stop investigating and take action.

Michael Mullins CCNA, MCP

OQO Model 02 arrives

2007-03-05T14:18:00.000+07:00

Posted Jan 7th 2007 9:30PM by Peter Rojas

It's been pretty much exactly two years since we first hassled Jory about this, but OQO officially announced its latest handheld PC, the Model 02. This time they've improved pretty much everything, from the sleek, new black casing and backlit keyboard (with actual keys!), to the brighter LCD screen and integrated EV-DO. Specs have gotten a much needed bump across the board, with the most expensive model they're offering sporting a 1.5GHz VIA processor, 60GB hard drive, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 5-inch, 800x480 pixel display (with active digitizer for pen-based input), Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11a/b/g WiFi, integrated EV-DO (courtesy of Sprint), and even an HDMI-out port.

The Model 02 also has a few other slick features, like the ability to zoom to 1000x600 and 1200x720 interpolated modes, a sensor that automatically protects the hard drive in case of a drop, and an optional docking station with a DVD+-RW drive, HDMI and VGA video out, three USB 2.0 ports, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

There are a couple of disappointment -- namely that battery life is a paltry three hours unless you pick up an extended life battery, it's only Vista-capable, not shipping with Vista (at least not initially), and there's no longer a slot for the stylus -- but overall this is the upgrade we've been waiting for. Click on for some more pics, as well as a shot of the OQO in the docking station.

Virtual Windows jalan tanpa modifikasi di Linux

2007-03-05T14:16:00.000+07:00

Device drivers yang dikembangkan Novell dan Intel memungkinkan untuk menjalankan Windows Server 2000/2003/XP di lingkungan Xen virtual environments diatas SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 dan Intel® Virtualization Technology tanpa perlu modifikasi.

Best Linux Desktop

2007-03-05T14:12:00.000+07:00

Dalam sebuah siaran pers, Novell mengumumkan SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 telah meraih '2007 InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award' dinobatkan sebagai "Best Linux Desktop." Menurut InfoWorld, Novell telah mengangkat distribusi Linux desktop dan memoles dengan professionalitas berikut fitur-fitur useabiliti unik yang tidak ditemukan dari vendor lain. Alhasil SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 menyediakan sejumlah alasan yang kuat kepada 'business users' untuk menjadikan Linux sebagai 'enterprise desktops' mereka.

Samsung Luncurkan Pesaing iPhone

2007-02-09T11:11:00.000+07:00

Dewi Widya Ningrum - detikInet

Jakarta, Samsung memperkenalkan jajaran ponsel Ultra terbarunya, Ultra Smart F700. Dengan disain minimalis layaknya iPhone, Ultra Smart F700 disebut-sebut sebagai ponsel revolusioner dan sebagai pesaing iPhone.

Dari segi fitur, Ultra Smart F700 dilengkapi dengan user interface (antar muka) layar sentuh dengan display berwarna 2.78 inci dan resolusi 440 x 240 piksel. Ponsel ini juga dipersenjatai dengan keypad full QWERTY slide-out dan teknologi VibeTonz, yakni sistem vibrasi (getaran) yang bisa menstimulasi umpan balik sentuhan terhadap tekanan touchscreen.

Tak hanya itu, Ultra Smart F700 juga dibekali dengan tombol navigasi untuk mempermudah pengguna mengontrol menu, music play list control, dan beberapa fungsi lain.

Perangkat genggam berukuran 104 x 50 x 16.4 mm ini juga dilengkapi dengan fitur HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) dengan kecepatan transfer data 7,2 Mbps. Dengan kecepatan seperti itu, perbandingannya pengguna bisa men-download lagu berukuran 4MB hanya dalam waktu sekitar 4 detik. Tak ketinggalan pula web browser full HTML, kamera 5 megapixel dengan auto focus, Bluetooth, WAP, Java, dan port USB.

Ultra Smart F700, seperti dilansir Tech Digest dan dikutip detikINET, Jumat (9/2/2007), rencananya akan dipamerkan di ajang 3GSM World Congress minggu depan. (dwn/dwn)

Software Bisa Menghemat Konsumsi Bahan Bakar

2007-02-09T11:10:00.000+07:00

Ardhi Suryadhi - detikInet

Jakarta, Di tengah harga minyak dunia yang terus merangkak naik sehingga berakibat pada harga bahan bakar kendaraan, ilmuwan Belanda berhasil menciptakan software yang dapat mengurangi konsumsi bahan bakar di kendaraan.

Adalah John Kessels, ilmuwan dari Universitas Eindhoven yang mengatakan mampu untuk mendapatkan performa mesin yang optimal dan menghemat konsumsi bahan bakar hanya dengan menambahkan sekeping software ke komputer mesin sebuah mobil.

"Hanya dengan menambahkan sekeping software dan kabel sederhana, mobil dapat menghemat konsumsi bahan bakar sampai 2,6 persen," ujar Kessels, seperti dilansir Reuters dan dikutip detikINET, Jumat (9/2/2007).

Kessels menjelaskan, software buatannya ini bekerja secara dinamis dengan mengubah dinamo yang mengisi baterai mobil ketika dalam keadaan mati maupun hidup.

Penelitian ini merupakan proyek bersama antara Universitas Eindhoven Belanda dengan salah satu produsen kendaraan asal Amerika Serikat, Ford. Namun software ini tidak menjadi hak milik Ford, sehingga bisa digunakan di berbagai mobil yang memiliki komputer mesin dan secara umum merupakan tipe mobil modern, imbuh Kessels.

Penghematan yang bisa didapat secara maksimal bisa mencapai 5 hingga 6 persen jika mesin kendaraan dapat dimatihidupkan, tetapi dibutuhkan setelan tertentu untuk mesin mobilnya.

Sekedar informasi, efisiensi bahan bakar merupakan topik utama bagi produsen kendaraan seiring dengan perjuangan pemerintah di kawasan Eropa guna mengendalikan pemanasan global.(ash/dwn)

Dua Bugs Terpampang di Browser Firefox

2007-02-09T11:08:00.000+07:00

Dewi Widya Ningrum - detikInet

Jakarta, Sebanyak dua buah celah terpampang di browser andalan Mozilla, Firefox. Celah ini disinyalir memungkinkan file yang disimpan secara lokal ringkih terhadap serangan dedemit dunia maya.

Keberadaan dua celah tersebut dilaporkan oleh SecuriTeam, salah satu divisi perusahaan keamanan Beyond Security.

Menurut SecuriTeam, celah pertama terbentang di fitur pop-up blocker Firefox. Fitur pop-up blocker memungkinkan pengguna untuk menentukan secara spesifik situs mana saja yang diperbolehkan untuk membuka pop-up windows, dengan cara mengetikkan alamat situs yang dimaksud dan meng-klik tombol "Allow". Melalui fitur ini pula, browser biasanya tidak mengijinkan situs untuk mengakses file yang disimpan secara lokal di komputer.

Ketika pengguna Firefox mematikan window pop-up secara manual, URL permission check bisa diubah, misal yang seharusnya diblokir namun malah di-allow. Akibatnya, penyerang bisa mengeksploitasi celah ini untuk mencuri file dan informasi pribadi yang disimpan secara lokal di komputer korban.

Skenario lain yang mungkin terjadi adalah, pengguna akan dijebak untuk meng-klik sebuah link jahat. Secara diam-diam penyerang telah menanamkan file jahat yang dilengkapi dengan kode eksploitasi pada hard drive komputer. Lalu akan muncul sebuah prompt yang meminta pengguna untuk mengijinkan sebuah pop-up tampil untuk memutar download atau file video.

Nah, melalui file itulah hacker kemudian bisa mengeksploitasi browser dan memungkinkannya mendapatkan privileges untuk membaca file lokal di komputer.

Seperti dilansir Cnet dan dikutip detikINET, Jumat (9/2/2007), celah tersebut kemungkinan hanya mendera Firefox yang versinya lebih lawas dari Firefox 2.0. Beyond Security sendiri belum mau angkat bicara soal versi Firefox berapa yang didera celah ini.

Kemudian celah kedua, yang ditemukan SecuriTeam selang beberapa hari setelah celah pertama, berkaitan dengan fitur perlindungan phishing pada Firefox. Melalui celah ini, seorang ahli phisher konon bisa mengutak-atik browser menjadi sebuah situs 'penipu' dengan menambahkan karakter khusus ke dalam URL situs. Celah phishing ini dikabarkan mendera Firefox versi 2.0.0.1.

Sampai berita ini diturunkan, pihak Mozilla masih belum mau berkomentar perihal celah tersebut.(dwn/dwn)

My Canon Pixma IP1000 has "Waste Ink Full"

2007-01-30T14:53:00.000+07:00

My Canon Pixma IP1000 has "Waste Ink Full" by the blinking orange-led.

These steps works for me :

# 1: Disconnect the printer from AC power
# 2: Press and HOLD the POWER button, and connect the printer to AC power
# 3: Release the POWER button
# 4: Press the POWER button again

Another suspected NASA hacker indicted

2006-12-26T14:02:00.000+07:00

By Joris Evers, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: December 1, 2006, 9:10 AM PT

A Romanian man was indicted Thursday for allegedly breaking into more than 150 U.S. government computers.

The indictment charges Victor Faur, 26, of Arad, Romania, with leading a hacking group called the "WhiteHat Team," according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. The group allegedly hacked into the government systems because of their reputation as some of the most secure in the world.

"After hacking into and taking control of the government computers, Faur allegedly caused the compromised machines to display screens that flaunted the computer intrusion," the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Faur is charged with conspiracy and nine counts of computer intrusion. If convicted of all counts, he faces up to 54 years in federal prison, the prosecutors said.

However, a trial isn't likely to happen soon. Faur is currently in Romania, where he was arrested and then released on bond on separate, Romanian charges, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Hoffstadt said in an interview.

"The next step for us is to seek extradition from the Romanian government," he said. There is an extradition treaty between the U.S. and Romania, but an extradition procedure can take up to two years. "It takes a long time," Hoffstadt said.

Computers that were compromised included machines at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center, the Sandia National Laboratory, and the U.S. Naval Observatory, according to prosecutors.

The breached computers were used to collect and process data from spacecraft. Because of the break-ins, systems had to be rebuilt and scientists and engineers had to manually communicate with spacecraft, resulting in $1.36 million in losses for NASA and nearly $100,000 in losses for the Energy Department and the Navy, prosecutors said.

Several suspected NASA hackers have been dealing with law enforcement recently. In Sweden, a teen suspected of hacking into systems belonging to the U.S. military, NASA and networking giant Cisco Systems was charged recently. Earlier this year, London resident Gary McKinnon lost a crucial battle in his fight to avoid prosecution in the U.S.

No charges have been filed against any other suspected members of the WhiteHat Team, Hoffstadt said. "But the charges against Faur may not be the last charges," he said.

U.S. warns of possible al-Qaida financial cyberattack

2006-12-26T14:00:00.000+07:00

Reuters
Published on ZDNet News: November 30, 2006, 6:55 PM PT

The U.S. government warned American private financial services on Thursday of an al-Qaida call for a cyberattack against online stock trading and banking Web sites beginning on Friday, a source said.

The source, a person familiar with the warning, said the Islamic militant group aimed to penetrate and destroy the databases of the U.S. financial sites. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed an alert had been distributed but said there was no reason to believe the threat was credible.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a "situational awareness report to industry stakeholders," said Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke. The warning said the threat called for attacks to begin Friday and run through the month of December in retaliation for the United States keeping terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

"Denial of service is what it called for," said a Homeland Security official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A person familiar with the warning said the threat came from a group calling itself "ANHIAR al-Dollar." The effort was related to al-Qaida and intended to avenge "Muslim brothers in the crusaders' Guantanamo prison camp," the source said.

Reaction in the financial community was muted, with markets showing little or no reaction.

New York Republican Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, said the report was "nothing to panic over, but it will be looked at very carefully."

Robert Albertson, chief investment strategist at Sandler O'Neill & Partners in New York, said it was unlikely al Qaeda members could do serious harm to financial Web sites.

"I'm not saying there aren't precautions to be taken, but I just can't fathom how there would be serious havoc," he added.

Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the RAND Corp., said that such threats were not unusual.

"There is a regular stream of Jihadist exhortations to attack various targets," he said. "Financial organizations stay at a fairly high level of readiness anyway because of regular assaults."

A government source said regulators were being briefed on the warning.

Alleged NASA hacker loses extradition ruling

2006-12-26T13:57:00.000+07:00

By Colin Barker, ZDNet (UK)
Published on ZDNet News: May 10, 2006, 5:27 AM PT

Accused hacker Gary McKinnon has lost a crucial battle in his fight to avoid prosecution in the United States after a British judge ordered his extradition to America.

Judge Nicholas Evans, sitting at Bow Street Magistrates' Court, ruled on Wednesday morning that McKinnon must face U.S. courts.

McKinnon, who lives in London, is accused of hacking into 53 U.S. government computers, including some used by NASA, and causing $700,000 worth of damage.

Evans rejected the defense arguments that McKinnon would not face a fair trial in the U.S. or that he risked being treated as a terrorist suspect.

The two countries "have had extradition arrangements in place for over 150 years. I have no reason to believe that McKinnon will not receive fair treatment," Evans said.

McKinnon was instructed that he must prepare himself to be flown to America on May 17. However, he is likely to appeal the decision.

The final decision on whether McKinnon should be sent to the U.S. for trial rests with Home Secretary John Reid.

McKinnon has admitted accessing U.S. government networks but denies causing any damage. He has claimed that he was looking for, and found, evidence of UFOs and secret military technology.

Speaking outside the court, McKinnon indicated he was not hopeful about his future.

"Virginia (where his case will be heard) is famously conservative. I am practically hung and quartered there already," he said.

Most security tools not quite ready for Vista

2006-12-26T13:54:00.000+07:00

By Joris Evers, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: November 30, 2006, 2:54 PM PT

Microsoft released Windows Vista for businesses on Thursday, but most security companies look like they need more time to deliver tools to protect the new operating system.

Symantec, Trend Micro and CA are still working on products for Vista, representatives for the each of the companies said Thursday. McAfee is the only major security software maker that has products available now for the long-awaited Microsoft operating system.

"The absence of security software from the major vendors will be another reason why business will not migrate to Vista right away," said Natalie Lambert, an analyst at Forrester Research. That's in addition to the lack of support for Vista in general applications, which are the tools businesses need to run their operations, she noted.

Microsoft celebrated the launch of Vista in New York on Thursday. It is the company's first major Windows client release since Windows XP shipped in 2001. On the back of Microsoft's announcement, Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro and CA all put out news releases promoting software for Vista PCs. Yet none announced actual product availability, except McAfee.

"McAfee is the only major security vendor with products available today that support Vista right out of the gate," said Rees Johnson, McAfee's vice president of product management. McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5 and McAfee AntiSpyware Enterprise 8.5 support Vista and are available now, the company said.

The other large security vendors plan to release their corporate products for Vista over the next months. Symantec plans to release an update to AntiVirus Corporate Edition by December 31; Trend Micro expects to have a new version of OfficeScan ready in the first half of 2007; and CA's new antivirus and antispyware is due out by early February.

"I really expect all vendors to have shipping solutions before the end of the first quarter," Lambert said. "But even then, Vista rollouts will be time-consuming." Forrester doesn't expect mass deployment of the new operating system until 2008, she said.

So, while lack of security tools for Vista could mean some people will hold off from upgrading right away, it is not a major issue for the majority of business users, Lambert said. "This is not a big deal, as we will not see enterprises switching to Vista immediately," she said.

Microsoft is more optimistic. The Redmond, Wash., company predicts that Vista will be adopted by companies at twice the speed as its predecessor, Windows XP. Twelve months after the release of Vista, Microsoft expects that usage share of the oft-delayed operating system in businesses will be double that of XP a year after it shipped, the company has said.

Microsoft has promoted Vista as the most secure version of Windows yet, but has also emphasized that users will still need to run security software to protect their PCs. For example, 3 of the top 10 types of malicious software that hit PC users today can bypass Vista's security defences, security company Sophos said on its Web site Thursday.

"Microsoft continues to encourage customers to follow all of the steps of the 'Protect Your PC' guidance of enabling a firewall, applying all software updates and installing antivirus software," a Microsoft representative said.

Die, C, die! 5 reasons to UN-learn C

2006-12-22T16:09:00.000+07:00

November 28th, 2006
Posted by Ed Burnette @ 12:01 am

I've been programming in C for over 20 years now. I've written C compilers, C debuggers, other languages, games, clients, servers, you name it. Dog-eared editions of K&R and Steele decorate my shelves. So I know C. And yet, I'm sick of it. SICK.

So it was with some trepidation that I read a blog on why every programmer should learn C. Turns out it's good for a laugh if you're a professional developer, though the author probably didn't intend it that way. This rebuttal makes a bit more sense, but still doesn't capture the essence of why C should go the way of the dodo. So let me turn it around. Here are 5 reasons why developers who know and use C now should not just use something else, but UN-learn all the bad things they learned in C.

1. Memory allocation. I could write a whole article just on this one. A book. Maybe a small wing of the library. Memory allocation and deallocation is the bane of my existence. Either you allocate too little and write off the end, or too much and waste it. Then there's the question of whether to zero it or leave it uninitialized. But freeing memory is the worst. Entire toolkits have been written to help you make sure you have freed every little bit you allocated, never use it after freeing, and God forbid, never free it twice. To add insult to injury, allocations and frees are slow in C, very slow. I don't want to even think about all the special cases I've had to put in to *avoid* memory allocation and use stack or pre-allocated structure space if the problem size fit. Well, I've got better things to worry about. Whoever invented garbage collection should win a Nobel.

2. Multi-threading. I used to like C, really. Until I started to develop and maintain multi-threaded servers with it. C doesn't help you at all with protecting data from access by conflicting threads. Every intuition you had from single-threaded days is wrong. At least Java has the synchronized keyword, and a documented (but weird) memory model, but even that falls apart on massively parallel machines unless you use the new javax.concurrent stuff. Flashback - in C: 1 week standing up (true story) in a data center debugging a deadlock problem in a simulated production environment. In Java: Ctrl+Break! Ahhh.

3. Pointers. Pointers are insidiously evil; there's just no polite way to say it. Months of my life are just gone from debugging problems with wild pointers. I used to go for all the tricks, such as incomprehensible casts and unions and offsetof and reusing the last couple of bits for flags, and all that. It's just not worth it. Statically typed references are your friend.

4. Premature optimization. Speaking of tricks, have you ever wasted any brain cells wondering if *p++ was faster than p[i]? Have you spent time trying to do shifts instead of multiplies, or reversing for loops to try and make them run faster? Agonized over the speed of passing parameters as opposed to filling in a structure and passing that? STOP IT! Algorithms are the key to speed, and developer productivity is the key to algorithms. Get the idea that you can make your program any better or faster with little tweaks out of your head. Yeah, there are a few cases where maybe… no, just don't go there.

5. Tests. What's your favorite C unit testing tool? Umm….. can't think of one? Unit testing must not be important then, right? Or too much trouble. Hard to keep up to date. Waste of time. You could spend that time shaving .001% off your execution time. Or debugging that problem that only occurs with 100 simultaneous users, in the data center, on an optimized image with no symbols.

I could go on, but 5 is enough for now; I feel better already. C was wonderful… in 1984. It amazes me that new code is being written in C, even today. C++ is only marginally better if you ask me. If you want to learn something old, try Forth, Lisp, or APL. At least those can teach you some different and elegant ways of thinking about programming.

The truth about the IPv6 transition

2006-11-17T08:25:00.000+07:00

Posted by George Ou @ 1:02 pm

Just about everyone in the IT business has heard the promises of IPv6. Why continue leasing Class A blocks to individual companies when most companies have to beg for a Class C block of 256 IP addresses?Many have read that IPv6 will solve everything from spam to security to saving the Internet. But has anyone read the fine print on what an IPv6 transition will encompass and what it actually buys? To understand where we are with the current Internet IP addressing scheme, let us start with a telephone system analogy.

Everyone knows that a telephone in North America has 10 decimal digits which theoretically supports 10 billion devices but in practice it's far less than that because of the way area codes are broken down. The reality is that there really aren't enough phone numbers to give every company and organization a large pool of phone numbers and those who have blocks of phone numbers pay for the privilege. As a result, many organizations don't have enough public phone numbers for every telephone in their organization so they use private phone extensions that are typically 3 to 5 digits long. This means that a single public phone number can translate to 100,000 (counting from 0 to 99,999) phones in the case of a 5 digit extension.

In the current world of IPv4 networking, the same kind of scarcity exists and many companies simply can't afford to buy large blocks of IP addresses nor are there enough IP addresses to go around. NAT (Network Address Translation) was created to allow a single public IP address to support hundreds or even thousands of private IP address. This is analogous to the private telephone extension scheme in the previous paragraph where a public phone address is translated to many private phone addresses.

But a lot of people don't like the use of NAT because they were initially hard to deal with just like a lot of people don't like the use of telephone extensions. NAT has a tendency to break things like VoIP (Voice over IP) and VPN (Virtual Private Networking) technology which lead to many headaches. But in recent years, VoIP and VPN technologies have matured and gotten smart enough to work around the intricacies of NAT. Technologies like Skype and STUN have fixed the NAT issues for VoIP. Technologies like NAT-T and SSLVPN have made VPN NAT issues a thing of the past. But many people still yearn for the day that NAT itself will be a thing of the past and IP addresses will be as abundant as the number of atoms in the oceans and the IPv6 address standard was created. IPv6 has four times the number of digits as IPv4 and has a pool size of 34 with 37 zeros behind it which is a massive number. But before we sing for joy, let's see what it takes to get to the promised land.

Let us imagine that telephone companies started offering a new telephone service that used a 40 decimal digit phone number which is practically limitless. You'll need brand new telephones for it and you'll need to replace all your phonebooks and personal address books. The catch is that you can't call any 10 digit telephones. If by chance you actually want to call any of the other billion people on the planet, you'll have to also set up and pay for a traditional 10 digit telephone number. Don't be surprised if the thickness of the phone book doubled since it now lists everyone's 40 and 10 digit telephone numbers. You will also need some extra equipment and some changes in your infrastructure to translate the new phone signals in to the old phone signals since the existing public phone infrastructure doesn't always support the new phone signals. That may slow performance down but it's probably a small price to pay for such a massive pool of phones, or is it?

This 40 digit telephone system is just an example I made up, but it's the perfect analogy to IPv6 and the nightmare of a transition some Governments are headed for. An IPv6 migration will involve upgrading all applications, hosts, routers, and DNS infrastructure. Anyone who moves to IPv6 will have to bear the burden of backward compatibility and the idea that those who move to IPv6 first will leave everyone behind is nonsense. Who in their right mind would move to a network without the ability to talk to the old network where the rest of the world lives? Any organization moving to IPv6 will also have to maintain a complete IPv4 infrastructure parallel to the new IPv6 infrastructure along with all the transitional technologies that make NAT issues look like a walk in the park.

What about the support issues? Has anyone checked what it's going to take to teach the helpdesk staff how to troubleshoot basic networking problems with a dual IPv4/IPv6 stack? Does the networking staff understand what 6to4, Teredo, and ISATAP is and how they work let alone the helpdesk? Anyone who has worked for the helpdesk knows what it's like to have to call out IP addresses to an end user on the phone. Has anyone ever tried to call out and explain 23DF:84FA:5423:3300:2341:CB3S:384A:042B over the phone to another engineer let alone an end user?

The primary benefit of going to IPv6 if we get past all the IPv6 hype is that it practically offers a limitless supply of IP addresses which leads some to think that the need for NAT would end. But is ending the use of NAT really that important? Many IPv4 companies with abundant supplies of IPv4 addresses at their disposal still choose to use NAT as a way of masking their internal network topology as a form of security so what is the business case for migrating to IPv6? IPv4 is kind of like prime real-estate where the short and simple IP addresses are and where everyone lives and it's not going away even if a majority of organizations have successfully transitioned to IPv6. Those who migrate to IPv6 will bear all the costs of upgrading and maintaining dual compatibility while those who do nothing and remain on IPv4 will bear none of the costs. If anything, waiting will only result in fewer application compatibility problems and cheaper/simpler transition technologies in the future.

If it ever gets to the point where IPv4 addresses are running low and address rationing starts, there is absolutely no reason that a company couldn't be perfectly happy with a block of 32 public IP addresses for the main site and a single public IP address for branch offices. Even something like www.google.com with tens of thousands of servers only needs a single public IP address per physical site with modern load balancer technologies.

Furthermore, do corporations like GE or Apple actually need 16.8 million public IP addresses just because they registered early when they don't use most of them publicly? Since IP address leases are worth a lot of money between 10 cents to a dollar per IP per year in smaller lease increments, companies hogging Class A (Class A = 16.8 million block of IPv4 addresses) leases could be compensated for the trouble of being forced off those blocks. Why continue leasing Class A blocks to individual companies when most companies have to beg for a Class C block of 256 IP addresses? If a company hogged 16.8 million IPv4 addresses, why not chop them down to 65 thousand IP addresses, offer them some shared revenue from the recovered IP addresses to pay for the transition costs to private IP address and call it even. Heck, we can even offer them a block of 4.3 billion IPv6 addresses as a bonus. Just get rid of Class A leases and we'll all be saying "what IPv4 shortage" 20 years from now.

HP unveils printing technology for high-end office market

2006-10-05T10:07:00.000+07:00

By Erica Ogg, CNET News.com

SAN FRANCISCO--Hewlett-Packard's newest ink-based printing technology, HP Edgeline, will be built into printers geared toward the high-end office market, the company announced Tuesday. The technology was first introduced last spring in in-store retail photo-printing kiosks.

"It's ink-based printing for huge-volume workloads," said Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of the HP Imaging and Printing Group, as he introduced the technology at a press conference in downtown San Francisco. The technology is aimed at companies that print hundreds of thousands or even millions of brochures or direct mailings.

HP will begin incorporating the patented technology into some business printers in spring 2007. Edgeline technology refers to HP printers constructed so that the print heads are laid in wide arrays, or side by side, to stretch across a whole page. Instead of the print heads moving and squirting ink onto a page like most inkjet printers, with Edgeline, the paper will move while the print heads remain stationary, and the job can be completed in just one or two passes.

"It's four times faster than anything we've done before," Gary Cutler, vice president of digital printing technologies at HP, said in an interview following the press event. And because the print heads are motionless, that amounts to more accurate ink placement and better image quality, he added.

Joshi said printers with Edgeline technology will also dispense smaller drops of ink at a rate of 1.8 billion per second. Previously, HP's best was in the "low hundreds of millions" of drops per second, according to Cutler.

The design is cheaper to build and more reliable because there are fewer moving parts, Hatem Mostafa, senior vice president of inkjet systems said in an interview.

Between now and 2009, there's about $30 billion worth of business in the retail, industrial and high-volume office printing markets that HP hopes to grab, Cutler said.

Google's Universal Gadgets woos developers

2006-10-05T10:06:00.000+07:00

By Tom Espiner, Builder UK

Search giant Google has announced it is opening up its Gadgets framework to Web developers, allowing them to add Universal Gadgets to their pages.

Google Gadgets has been available to end users to add to their Google home pages and desktops since the May release of the Desktop 4 beta. Google announced on Tuesday that users will now be able to use Gadgets in their own Web pages.

Like many other widget frameworks, Google Gadgets use HTML, XML and JavaScript to create mini applications. These applets have typically accessed data from other Google services, such as Calendar or Maps, or from independent applets created by developers. The applications are promoted as an easy way to add dynamic content to Web pages.

Web page creators have been able to create their own Gadgets for some time using the Google Gadgets API, and can use pre-existing Universal Gadgets from Google or third parties--which include date and time, jokes and horoscopes--to add to their own sites.

Google is encouraging developers to share their code with others by publishing them in its Gadgets directory.

"Google encourages gadget authors to share their specifications," states the Google Gadgets API developer guide. One of the advantages to developers is that you "can get your name out there," according to Google blogger Matt Cutts.

"Now anyone can have a great-looking Web site with automatically updating content," said Adam Sah, Google Gadgets architect. "By making Google Gadgets available for you to add to your Web page, we're working to connect developers with enthusiastic consumers and to make information universally accessible and useful to the individual user."

The code for Gadgets is published as XML files on the Web, where Google's servers can access them and process the code. The XML file can contain all of the data and code for the gadget, or have a manifest of components that includes URLs for finding the rest of the elements. Gadgets are used by including some JavaScript in the developer's Web pages, and because they do need to pass through Google's systems, they can't be used offline or independently of the company.

Tom Espiner of Builder UK reported from London.

Activists unveil stealth browser

2006-09-26T13:53:00.001+07:00

By Matthew Broersma, ZDNet (UK)

Hacktivismo, a group of human-rights advocates and computer security experts, has released a Firefox-based browser designed to allow anonymous Web surfing.

The Web browser, called "Torpark," is a modified version of Portable Firefox. Released last week, it can be run directly from a USB drive, meaning it can be used on public terminals in cybercafes. It creates an encrypted connection to the TOR (The Onion Router) network, which supplies a succession of different IP addresses.

"Torpark causes the IP address seen by the Web site to change every few minutes, to frustrate eavesdropping and mask the requesting source," Hacktivismo said in a statement.

For example, a user could be in London and Web sites would see an IP address from a university in Germany, or other addresses belonging to the TOR network.

Hacktivismo operates under the aegis of the influential group the Cult of the Dead Cow. Developers said the browser is different from other anonymous browsers, such as Anonymizer or SecretSurfer, in that it doesn't cost anything and is small and portable.

Torpark uses English by default, but includes language packs for Arabic, German, French and simplified Chinese. More than 30 other language packs are available via links built into the browser, which is available here.

The Torpark site was available intermittently this week, because of heavy download traffic, developers said.

The browser encrypts data sent to the TOR network, but data isn't encrypted between TOR and the destination Web site, Hacktivismo cautioned. "Therefore, the user should not use his or her user name or password on Web sites that do not offer a secure login and session," the group stated.

The browser session is somewhat slower than with an unmodified browser, testers have reported. The browser resembles Firefox, but displays the IP address being used at the time, and includes a button for resetting the server connection.

The official launch follows more than a year of development work on Torpark. A sister application called Torbird is also available; it uses the TOR network for e-mail.

Matthew Broersma reported for ZDNet UK from London.

Taking passwords to the grave

2006-09-26T13:52:00.001+07:00

By Elinor Mills, CNET News.com

William Talcott, a prominent San Francisco poet with dual Irish citizenship, had fans all over the world. But when he died in June of bone marrow cancer, his daughter couldn't notify most of his contacts because his e-mail account--and the online address book he used--was locked up.

Talcott, 69, a friend of beatnik Neal Cassady, apparently took his password to the grave.

It's a vexing, and increasingly common problem for families mourning the loss of loved ones. As more and more people move their lives, address books, calendars, financial information, online, they are taking a risk that some information formerly filed away in folders and desks might never be recovered. That is, unless they share their passwords, which poses security threats.

"He did not keep a hard copy address book. I think everything was online," said Talcott's daughter, Julie Talcott-Fuller. "There were people he knew that I haven't been able to contact. It's been very hard."

"Yahoo (his e-mail provider) said it wouldn't give out the information due to privacy laws, but my dad is dead so I don't understand that," she said.

But it's not a question of privacy rights so much as property rights, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"The so-called 'Tort of Privacy' expires upon death, but property interests don't," he said. "Private e-mails are a new category. It's not immediately clear how to treat them, but it's a form of digital property."

Attorneys advising clients on estate planning should ask them to determine who they want to have access to their computers when they die, Rotenberg said.

That's exactly what San Francisco-based estate planning attorney Michael Blacksburg does. "I advise clients to put all their passwords to things online in an estate planning document," he said.

Blacksburg also asks his clients what they want to have happen with their electronic media, like music in iTunes and photos in Shutterfly.

"The older generation is just getting in the habit of using computers," Blacksburg said. This problem will become more acute in coming years as more and more people become computer savvy, he added.

The situation poses a dilemma for e-mail providers that are pilloried by privacy rights advocates at the mere suggestion of sensitive data being exposed, at the same time they are expected to hand over the digital keys to family members when a customer dies.

Last year, Yahoo was forced to provide access to the e-mail of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq to his father, who got a court order in the matter.

"The commitment we've made to every person who signs up for a Yahoo Mail account is to treat their e-mail as a private communication and to treat the content of their messages as confidential," said Yahoo spokeswoman Karen Mahon.

Beyond acknowledging that Yahoo complies with court orders, Mahon declined to discuss Yahoo's requirements for providing family members access to the e-mail accounts of their deceased loved ones.

Google will provide access to a deceased Gmail user's account if the person seeking it provides a copy of the death certificate and a copy of a document giving the person power of attorney over the e-mail account, said a Google spokeswoman.

America Online follows the same policy, according to spokesman Andrew Weinstein.

"In terms of tips for estate planning, it's much easier if a family member already has the password, or a person could entrust their key passwords (for online access/banking/stock accounts, etc.) to a trusted friend or attorney," Weinstein wrote in an e-mail. He said the situation comes up "fairly regularly."

And "Microsoft's policy allows next of kin to gain access to the content of the Windows Live Mail account (burned on CD/floppy disk) of the deceased upon proving their relationship," a Microsoft spokesman wrote in an e-mail. "We have tried to institute a policy that is very focused on privacy, but at the same time honors the request of bereaved family members going through a difficult time."

Talcott didn't leave a will, unless it is stored on his computer somewhere, so his family is still working out who will be his executor, his daughter said. Once that is established, Talcott-Fuller said she will approach Yahoo again for access to his e-mails.

However, an electronic will is not necessarily valid, according to Ronald Cooley, an estate planning attorney in the retirement enclave of Sun City, Ariz.

"A will in a computer is no good. It has to be printed out, signed and witnessed" to be valid in California and Arizona, Cooley said. "You can't leave it in a Word document on your computer."

Although his password remains a mystery, Talcott, who worked as a mainframe programmer when he wasn't traveling around Europe, acknowledged the importance of data retention for posterity in a poem titled "Eating Salad With My Fingers:"

"Our office romance is over because I am no longer employed," Talcott wrote. "Where is our offsite backup tape?"

Who is killing desktop Linux?

2006-09-22T15:53:00.000+07:00

C. Marc Wagner

Services Development Specialist, Indiana University "An education IT veteran"

Last week my colleague, Chris Dawson, wrote Will Vista kill Linux for Ed Tech? and he did a really nice job of it. Of course, he wasn't talking about Linux as an OS, or as a subject of serious study or utility. What Chris was referring to was Linux as a desktop computing environment geared toward personal productivity. Chris reminds us:

Indiana claims to be saving about 1 million dollars by rolling out Linux at 25 high schools (see Million Dollar Linux), but we have yet to see any information on end user experiences, long-term support and training issues, and, most importantly, total cost of ownership.

And then Chris shares his own experience:

I even gave Linux a shot, attempting to save Windows licensing costs on a bunch of donated computers, but ran into enough hurdles that $70/machine (roughly what we're paying per seat for XP pro) seemed a small price to pay for easy network integration and minimal training for students and teachers (see Back to Windows?).

I've long preached that life-cycle funding is a critical component of any IT infrastructure and each new project needs to be developed with TCO (total cost of ownership) in mind.

Before I go any further, it's worth noting that things are different in higher education. We still face the challenges of limited funding but projects are more compartmentalized — and are usually amortized over a three-to-five year time horizon. Nothing is open-ended and budgets are not built upon one-time funding. Instead, one-time funding is used to establish projects which are then provided a budget for ongoing 'care and feeding'.

Despite the opinion of many readers, in such an environment purchasing decisions are not based on "inertia" — each new project has its own set of requirements. Most of those project requirements can be performed equally well by UNIX, Linux, or Windows. Some require Windows interoperability but many don't. The deciding factor is most often total cost of ownership.

Given these facts, why isn't desktop Linux a serious contender? And don't tell me it is…

At my university, my group is by far the largest single provider of student computing workstations. Of those workstations that we own or support, 3000 are running Windows, maybe 450 are running MacOSX, another 50 or so are running some (other) flavor of UNIX/Linux. That's 14 percent non-Windows.

These numbers have certainly changed over time — based upon shifting demand from our students and our faculty, but the shift has always been away from Macintosh — and especially from UNIX/Linux as more and more applications have been ported to Windows. (At one time we were maybe 40% non-Windows.)

Admittedly, we are one of the smaller providers of UNIX/Linux workstations at the university but the total number of such workstations on campus is in the hundreds while the total number of Windows workstations most certainly exceeds 10,000!

So why ISN'T desktop Linux a serious contender?

The answer to this question may be less clear in the consumer space than it is in education since the vast majority of consumers are interested only in e-mail, surfing the web, word processing, and spreadsheets — and we all know that Linux can do all these things for absolutely no cost. Right?

Well, not quite …

While one can download and install Linux and OpenOffice for free, you need to know HOW to do that. Few consumers are daring enough to do any thing more than stick a CD in a drive click OK when asked in order to install new software.

Unless you have the bandwidth and the patience to download hundreds of megabytes of data and the knowledge to burn bootable CDs, a copy of Linux will cost you $60. Granted, that's for a feature-rich release of Linspire (http://linspire.com/) and includes an office suite but Linux is NOT 'free' unless you have the knowledge and the patience to install it from scratch. Very few consumers are even willing to do that with Windows.

What about availability?

Today, the consumer can walk into almost any retailer selling electronics and buy a computer with Windows (and usually MS Office) pre-installed — no muss, no fuss. Finding an Apple retailer is much more of a challenge but at least the consumer knows about Apple and can find a retailer if they are looking. How easy is it to find a Linux workstation retailer?

To be sure, you can find a handful of mostly-unheard-of computer vendors selling entry-level systems running Linspire but what about SuSe or RedHat? They've got great software but where are their Linux desktop hardware offerings? Sure, Dell sells RedHat servers and the big guys like IBM and Sun will sell you Linux desktops if you ask for them but that doesn't cut it for the consumer.

Enter Ed tech …

As Chris has alluded to, his time is worth more to him (and his employer, the school district) than the cost savings of him downloading a free (and unsupported) Linux distribution — making it work on a variety of, often outdated, hardware, and then distributing it across multiple machines with varying configurations.

Window's ability to detect most major brands of hardware, and the willingness of most major component makers to provide Windows drivers greatly simplifies his job of installing Windows on as many machines as he wants.

And what about specialized software? In an educational setting (as in a business or industrial setting), dependence upon specific applications software plays a large role in the TCO equation. If introducing a new OS (or supporting multiple operating systems side-by-side), one must assess the costs associated with cross-platform compatibility. Most specialized software is available for both Windows and Macintosh — and many UNIX/Linux titles are easily ported (by vendors) to Windows (and now Macintosh) but the transition from Windows (or Macintosh) to UNIX/Linux is far less straightforward.

So who is killing desktop Linux?

The answer is clear. It's the Linux vendors who are 'killing desktop Linux' — or more accurately, letting the Linux desktop die a slow agonizing death.

Some would argue that Microsoft is keeping Linux off the desktop but how could Microsoft possibly stop IBM or Sun Microsystems, Novell or RedHat from making Linux on the Desktop as easy to buy from Dell or HP as Microsoft Windows? They simply couldn't!

HP even certifies it's hardware on a number of Linux distributions but do they sell hardware with Linux pre-loaded? Not that I can find!

Microsoft gained market dominance by offering Windows preloaded on every commodity OEM workstation it could from 1987 forward. (It all started with Windows 2.11 on the IBM PS/2 line of workstations.)

Today, Windows is competing for the lucrative machine-room market. UNIX is fighting on two fronts to keep both Windows and Linux at bay. In this environment, where TCO rules, the competition is fierce. So why not on the desktop?

It's not because Windows is technically superior to the UNIX/Linux. It isn't!

It's simpler than that. The bottom line is that there is not enough profit margin in the commodity desktop market for any of the front line Linux vendors to pursue it. Instead, the big UNIX/Linux vendors have decided to concede the commodity desktop to Windows. (Just as Apple conceded that market to Microsoft in the 1990's.)

The lone exception is Linspire, a small company who has done remarkably well in developing a consumer-oriented product and made it easily available on-line. But once again, Linspire suffers from not having a first-tier OEM hawking Linspire workstations. Even Novell, who has gone out of its way to position NLD and SuSe LED as desktop Linux solutions has done little to market them.

No matter what the Linux aficionados (some call them zealots) might want, until desktop Linux is available pre-loaded on a variety of workstations at [insert your favorite electronics retailer here], Linux is not going to found on many of our dining room tables or in many of our schools.

Sun Fire X4500, world's first hybrid data server

2006-09-22T14:52:00.000+07:00

Meet the world's first hybrid data server.

Creating a new compute category, the Sun Fire X4500 Server includes integrated server and storage technologies and is being called the best server for Web 2.0, the next wave of the Internet. The Sun Fire X4500 Server is one of three new enterprise systems Sun introduced on July 11.

Web 2.0 encompasses a second generation of online services built on wide-scale sharing and participation. At Sun's product announcement last week, Tim O'Reilly, president and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., described Web 2.0 as "systems that get smarter the more people use them."

O'Reilly calls Google the prototypical Web 2.0 service, but notes that the company "did it the hard way - they have kind of rolled their own." Many companies now emulate the Google model, yet they "don't want to roll their own, or grow [their infrastructure] from the ground up."

That's where the Sun Fire X4500 Server makes such a difference. "This is the Web 2.0 server," says O'Reilly. "[The Sun Fire X4500 Server] doesn't quite fit into any existing category, and I really think it's the category of the future. Now companies can get hardware like this and build next-generation applications."

"Sun is clearly not just in the x64 space," says Jonathan Eunice, one of the founders of industry analyst firm RedMonk. "It is innovating there--and with gusto."

Scott Yara, CEO, Greenplum and Tim O'Reilly, CEO and Founder, O'Reilly Media, Inc. - Watch the Video

Hybrid Server, High Performance

The Sun Fire X4500 Server (code-named Thumper) brings together state-of-the-art server and storage technologies in a single box to deliver high-performance I/O. The server combines a four-way x64 server with up to 48 disk drives and 24TB of storage. Those specs yield a storage cost starting as low as $2/GB.

And because the Sun Fire X4500 Server comes bundled with Solaris ZFS, you can count on data integrity across very large datasets. "One of the most exciting things to see is companies joining massively parallel databases," says Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun chief architect and designer of the Sun Fire X4500 Server. "This new machine has a cost-performance that people could only dream about until now."

Those efficiencies are far-reaching, according to Ian Dwyer, Oracle's Senior Director of Global Alliances. Dwyer sees the launch of the Sun Fire X4500 Server as a real-estate announcement, not simply a hardware announcement: "You don't have to acquire new data centers to use this latest high-performance technology. Likewise, you're seeing greater energy efficiency, thereby reducing costs."

"Beautiful Machine"

When the Tokyo Institute of Technology set out to build one of the world's fastest supercomputers, it turned to Sun. Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, the Institute's Head of Research Infrastructure, led the project, and he spoke at last week's product announcements to tell the story of the supercomputer.

Getting to the desired level of performance required the compute grid be fed an astonishing amount of data. To store that data, and make it accessible at the speed needed by an HPC environment, the Institute's grid relies on Sun Fire X4500 servers.

The supercomputer operates at a capacity of 85 trillion floating point operations per second, or teraflops, making it the seventh-fastest supercomputer in the world.

"It's such a beautiful machine," says Matsuoka.

Systems Innovation

For Hector Ruiz, chairman and CEO of AMD, the Sun Fire X4500 Server is impressive: "This new class of products, a server and storage hybrid, will dramatically change how people address and solve their problems. I'm sort of in awe by the tremendous work Sun's engineering team has done and very proud that AMD x64 [processors] are a part of it."

Sun innovation extends to every level of a system. "When we develop a system, we look at every possible way we can attack customer problems because we have the breadth and depth of R&D to do that," said Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz at the launch of the Sun Fire X4500 Server. "These systems are true innovations, and they give customers what they are looking for."

Adding VoIP to your legacy networks

2006-09-22T14:51:00.000+07:00

Speaker: Jennifer Stafford, voice engineer, CNET

Description: If you think switching to VoIP means ripping out your traditional phone network, think again. CNET's Jennifer Stafford shows how a few simple steps can make the transition less daunting.

Hi, I'm Jennifer Stafford and I'm a Voice Engineer here at CNET Networks. I'm here today to talk to you about adding voiceover IP to your legacy network. So most companies have spent a good deal of money on their existing PBX and voicemail infrastructure. Generally they don't want to just tear that out in the interest of trying something new. So we're going to show you how you can introduce VoIP a little at a time to your legacy network.

In the traditional model you have a PBX connected to a separate voicemail system and generally you would connect your remote office using the public switch telephone network or telephone companies. And this calling generally has a permanent cost associated with it.

So before I show you how to add VoIP to your legacy network, let's define a few terms. The call control is really the set-up and tear-down or beginning and end of each call and monitoring readiness of each line. The gatekeeper is really a table or list of numbers and information responsible for knowing where each line in the system and each extension lives relative to each other.

The gateway is really just a piece of equipment, a switch usually that's used to join your legacy equipment to the IP network. So let's put this into action. We'll start by installing a gateway at headquarters. We'll connect it with perhaps a T1 or perhaps even just a cable. We'll install another gateway here at the remote office. And between them, connect them with our IP network or WAN.

The great thing about this, fixed cost compared to the recurring charges. So no per-minute charges for your phone calls here. The functions of the call control and the gatekeeper, which are basically software, live here next to the gateway and enable us to connect IP phones connected on our LAN and over the VPN we can extend the same high quality phone service to the user at home. Same service as the user in the headquarters office and remote office.

So as you can see, with a little bit of equipment and software you're able to add voiceover IP to your legacy network without ripping out the guts of the system.

Web Office will be much different than Microsoft Office

2006-09-22T14:48:00.001+07:00

Posted by Richard MacManus @ 7:24 pm

There's been a lot of talk about the pros and cons of a web-based office lately, prompted by Nick Carr's excellent post entitled Office generations. In it he suggested the following timeline for office software:

Office 1.0 (1980s): a set of discrete and often incompatible applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation creation, and simple database management. Archetype: Lotus 1-2-3.

Office 2.0 (1990 - present): integrated suites of PPAs, with expanded, if still limited, collaboration capabilities. Archetype: Microsoft Office.

Office 3.0 (present - early 2010s): hybrid desktop/web suites incorporating internet-based tools and interfaces to facilitate collaboration and web publishing.

Office 4.0 (c. early 2010s): fully web-based suites.

I was at first quite surprised that Nick Carr thinks a fully Web-based office suite will be common place by the early 2010s. The key point about the current and near future generation of office software is that Web technology is driving the change I had kind of pinned him as a 'Web/desktop hybrid' guy - but no, he's convinced (like me) that the office suite will be fully web-based in 5 or so years. Of course I've been banging on about Web Office for some time on this blog. Indeed my most popular post ever here was a September 2005 piece entitled The Web-based Office will have its day. Although I have learned much more about Web Office apps since I wrote it a year ago, I stand by the main message from that post:

"The time for the web-based office will come, mark my words. When broadband is ubiquitous, web functionality is richer, issues of security and reliability have been put to rest, and most importantly of all - when Corporates are ready to make the jump. It may be 5-10 years down the track, it may be longer."

So I generally agree with Nick Carr's timeline of a Web Office suite being commonplace by early 2010s. I don't think it's worthwhile arguing over version numbers (Office 2.0, 4.0, etc), as some commenters have done. The key point about the current and near future generation of office software is that Web technology is driving the change.

On that point, it's important to remember that with new technology comes new functionality. A term I use for this is 'Web native', meaning that the next generation of office software will not necessarily be the same as the past PC-based generation (typified by Microsoft Office). The new generation will have Web native functionality - including, but not limited to, collaboration. Rod Boothby likes to say that blogs and wikis are the first major 'office 2.0' apps, but I think a web-based suite will be so much more than publishing and collaboration features.

One new feature that I think will be common place is 'mashups', whereby data is sourced and combined from a variety of internal and external sources. Imagine an online spreadsheet for a marketing report where you gather data from all over the Web and across internal business units too.

There will be other Web native functionality too, things that we can't yet predict. On this point I liked Michael Bernstein's comment on the Bb Gun blog:

"The main problem that most of these 'Office 2.0' apps have is that they are ‘Horseless Carriages’, still pretending to be something they’re not, rather than Automobiles. […] a new breed of productivity apps that bear as little resemblance to desktop PC productivity apps as VisiCalc did to minicomputer apps will arrive soon enough and surprise us all."

We're beginning to see those kinds of apps appear on the scene - Zimbra is not a traditional office suite, even though they recently added word processing and spreadsheets. Their main strength is as a messaging collaboration system, for example the ability to do all kinds of mashups inside email (integrating salesforce data, Fedex tracking numbers, yahoo maps, etc). I'm also keeping my eye on fledgling startups such as DabbleDB and Morfik, which are creating totally new types of web-based office functionality.

Web Office specialists such as Zoho and ThinkFree are also building up a lot of expertise in web-based office systems, which will over time result in new functionality. Plus as Dan Farber pointed out, Microsoft is well aware of these trends and is working to web-enable its office products (Office Live is just the beginning of that process, I believe).

The Web Office will happen and probably in the early 2010s, as Nick Carr predicts. It's still too early to tell what form the Web Office will take, but one thing I know is that it will be something very different to Microsoft Office.

The 100 Best Products of 2005

2006-09-18T10:55:00.000+07:00

The Editors of PC World

All Products Listed by Ranking

Mozilla Firefox Web Browser
Google Gmail Web Mail
Apple Mac OS X Version 10.4 (Tiger) Operating System
Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router and Notebook Network Card Wireless Networking
Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW 24-Inch Wide-Screen LCD
Alienware Aurora 5500 Performance PC
Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Drive Portable Hard Drive
Skype VoIP Service
Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT Digital SLR Camera
PalmOne Treo 650 PDA Phone
Zone Labs ZoneAlarm Antivirus Antivirus and Firewall Software
Mysoft Technology Maxthon Browser Plug-In
Rio Carbon Midcapacity MP3 Player
Webroot Window Washer 5.5 Utility
Maxtor H01R300 Shared Storage Drive Network Hard Drive
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OnlyMyEmail Pro Spam Filter
Sony PlayStation Portable Handheld Gaming Device
NVidia GeForce 6600 GT Graphics Board
APC Back-UPS RS 800VA 120V Uninterruptible Power Supply
2BrightSparks SyncBackSE Utility
Moon Software Password Agent Password Manager
HP Officejet 7210 All-in-One Multifunction Printer
Winternals Software ERD Commander Data Recovery Software
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Mozilla Thunderbird E-Mail Program
Cloudmark Anti-Fraud Toolbar Browser Security Plug-In
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SE W950i, Ponsel Walkman dengan Touch Screen

2006-09-18T10:12:00.000+07:00

Dewi Widya Ningrum - detikInet

W950i (ist)

Jakarta, Sony Ericsson mengumumkan peluncuran ponsel terbarunya, W950i yang dilengkapi fasilitas UMTS (3G), memiliki kapasitas penyimpanan sebesar 4GB dengan fasilitas touch screen (layar sentuh). Tidak hanya mendengarkan musik, W950i juga bisa untuk mendukung aktifitas ber-email dan browsing situs.

"Sony Ericsson W950i adalah ponsel walkman ke-6 yang telah diperkenalkan sejak pertama kali. Perilaku konsumen dalam mendengarkan musik pada ponsel semakin berkembang pesat," ujar Alino Sugianto, Country Manager Sony Ericsson Indonesia melalui keterangan tertulis yang diterima detikINET, Minggu (17/9/2006).

Berbasiskan Symbian v9.1, W950i diklaim memiliki kemampuan dan kualitas suara yang selaras dengan alat stand alone. Grafik antarmukanya diharapkan dapat memudahkan pemutarkan lagu dengan menggunakan stylus dan touch screen. Kualitas suara stereo juga dihasilkan pada ponsel W950i didukung dengan Bluetooth streaming. (dwn)(dwn/)

Selamat Ulang Tahun Harddisk!

2006-09-18T10:06:00.000+07:00

Usia Ke-50
Selamat Ulang Tahun Harddisk!
Oktoria Yulius Darmawan - detikInet
RAMAC (Wikipedia.org)

California, Kemarin tepatnya tanggal 13 September, usia harddisk telah mencapai 50 tahun. Untuk merayakan hal ini IBM dan Hitachi memamerkan produk-produknya pada Computer History Museum di Mountain View, California.

Pada 1956 silam, untuk yang pertama kalinya IBM memperkenalkan hard disk magnetik IBM 305 Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC).

Keluarnya harddisk ini menandai berakhirnya era punch card dan magnetic drum sebagai media penyimpanan utama.

Kapasitas penyimpanan RAMAC saat itu hanya sebesar 5 MB dengan jumlah piringan mencapai 50 buah, dimana masing-masing piringan berdiameter 24 inci. Ukuran perangkat ini sendiri kira-kira bisa disamakan dengan dua kali ukuran kulkas besar dengan berat beberapa ton.

Menurut Wakil Presiden IBM divisi Storage Portfolio Management mengatakan, harga produk tersebut diperkirakan mencapai US$ 50 ribu (US$ 1 = Rp Sumber: detik.com) pada saat itu. Saat ini ukuran kapasitas penyimpanan telah meningkat hingga 70 juta kali lipat, dengan ukuran yang semakin mengecil.

Saat ini Seagate Technology sendiri telah mengeluarkan harddisk berkapasitas 750 GB atau sekitar 3/4 Terabyte.

Dengan kapasitas besar, penggunanya diklaim mampu menyimpan data-data yang luar biasa banyaknya. Seagate mencontohkan, harddisk ini mampu menyimpan 15.000 lagu, 15,000 foto, 50 jam film, 50 game komputer, serta 25 film DVD dengan masih menyisakan tempat sebesar 300 GB untuk menyimpan data-data komputer lain. Demikian dikutip detikINET dari Vnunet, Kamis (14/9/2006).
(oyd/)

Intel server revamp to follow AMD

2006-09-14T11:32:00.000+07:00

By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com

Intel is getting ready to introduce a chip communications technology that mirrors an approach central to recent successes of rival Advanced Micro Devices.

If Intel's newly competitive chips recently brought to market act as the brains of a server, then the Common System Interface (CSI) is its nervous system. The technology, set for release in 2008, provides a new way for processors to communicate with each other and with the rest of a computer.

And alongside CSI, Intel plans to release an integrated memory controller, which is housed on the main processor rather than on a separate supporting chip. This will speed memory performance and so dovetail with the new communications system, the company expects.

Together, they could help Intel provide a much-needed counterpunch to AMD, which in 2003 introduced an integrated memory controller and a high-speed interconnect called HyperTransport in its Opteron and Athlon 64 processors. The two communication technologies, marketed together as "Direct Connect Architecture," deliver lower processor costs and chip performance advantages, which AMD has used to win a place in the designs of all of the big four server makers.

"Intel is hoping CSI will do for them in servers what 'CSI' did for CBS in ratings," said Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood, referring to the hit TV series "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

Intel has been tight-lipped about CSI. However, Tom Kilroy, general manager of the company's Digital Enterprise Group, did confirm some details in a recent CNET News.com interview. Further glimpses have come from server makers, who are eager for CSI's debut in the "Tukwila" Itanium chip, due in 2008.

Tracking CSI
CSI brings two major changes. First, it will boost processor performance compared with Intel's current chip communication technology, the front-side bus.

"From a pure performance perspective, when we get to Tukwila and CSI, and we actually get some of the benefits of that protocol introduced into our systems, I think it's going to be really a big deal," said Rich Marcello, general manager of HP's Business Critical Server group.

CSI will be instrumental in helping double the performance of the Tukwila generation of servers, he noted.

Second, CSI will help Itanium server designers take advantage of mainstream Xeon server technology. Both chip families will use the interface, Kilroy said. That's particularly useful for companies such as Unisys, whose servers can use both processor types. It will make it possible for elements of a design to be used in both kinds of machine, reducing development costs and speeding development times.

"CSI allows us to continue to consolidate and standardize on fewer technologies," said Mark Feverston, Unisys' director of enterprise servers. "We can now go to a more common platform that allows us to build the same solutions in a more economical fashion."

CSI hasn't been easy to bring to market, though. In 2005, Intel dramatically altered the schedule for its introduction. Initially, the plan was for it to debut in 2007 with the Tukwila Itanium processor and the high-end "Whitefield" Xeon. But in October, Intel delayed Tukwila to 2008 and canceled Whitefield.

Whitefield's replacement "Tigerton," and a sequel called "Dunnington," both use the front-side bus for communications. That means CSI won't arrive in high-end Xeons until 2009.

In the meantime, Intel has used other methods to compete with AMD--speeding up the front-side bus and building in large amounts of cache memory, for example.

"We've taken a different road, but down the road we'll end up getting an integrated memory controller and CSI in our platform," Kilroy said. "It's just a matter of priority for us."

Why add CSI?
Memory communication speed is a major factor in computer design today. In particular, its increasing performance sluggishness compared with processors is causing problems. To compensate, computer designers have put special high-speed memory, called "cache," directly on the processor.

But in multiprocessor systems, cache poses a problem. If one processor changes a cache memory entry, but that change isn't reflected in the main memory, there's a risk that another processor might retrieve out-of-date information from that main memory. To keep caches synchronized--a requirement called "cache coherency"--processors must keep abreast of changes other processors make.

With Intel's current designs, an extra chip called the chipset coordinates such communications between processors via the front-side bus. In contrast, with HyperTransport and CSI, the processors communicate directly with each other.

Intel also relies on the chipset to help with the communication between chips and the main memory. But technology such as CSI makes it easier for processors to communicate directly with memory. That's because one processor can quickly retrieve data stored in memory connected to another chip.

"The biggest advantage CSI offers is performance and the fact that you basically get a direct connection between the processors. That results in reduced latency between the processors," said Craig Church, Unisys's director of server development. The integrated memory controllers, too, will reduce latency, or communication delays, when a chip is fetching data from its own memory, he added.

AMD has adopted the integrated memory controller in all its x86 chips, but it's not alone in endorsing the approach. IBM's Power and Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc, which compete with Intel's server line, have had integrated memory controllers for years.

With a chipset controlling memory instead of the main processor, "You basically have this middleman, and that introduces a significant amount of latency in the memory transaction," said Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron.

An integrated memory controller not only lets main memory respond faster, it also allows cache sizes, and therefore chip-manufacturing expenses, to be reduced. Indeed, smaller cache sizes have helped AMD remain competitive with Intel, even though it's about a year behind in its transition to more advanced manufacturing with smaller circuitry elements.

Intel defends its decision to stick with the front-side bus as long as it has, arguing that the choice has given it flexibility in memory standards and that it's been able to compensate elsewhere to keep up with performance.

"Our competition had to go to an integrated memory controller because they can't get the same...amount of cache on a die as we can," Kilroy said. "And we've been able to scale the front-side bus far greater than ever thought. We're now at 1333MHz. The speculation was that we wouldn't be able to scale to that."

Lowering design barriers
CSI is designed to lower hardware barriers, making it less expensive for server makers to design servers using both chips. Indeed, the word "common" refers to the fact that Itanium and Xeon use the interface.

With CSI, a server could be designed to be totally "plug-compatible," meaning the chips would be interchangeable, Church said. "From a Unisys perspective, if a customer wants an Itanium system, we take an Itanium processor and plug it into our common platform. If they want Xeon, we plug a Xeon into our common platform," he said. "That essentially is the nirvana, and it is the goal."

Nevertheless, server makers are faced with some differences in CSI for Xeon and Itanium, Marcello said. "The CSI implementations are 95 percent the same, but there's a little bit of difference there. For that reason, we'll be close but not exactly the same," he said. However, they will be similar enough that some joint design work can be shared, he added.

Keeping up with the Joneses
Once Intel matches AMD's chip communication technologies, it will become a better competitor, Brookwood said.

"The big issue for Intel is moving from the front-side bus architecture to more of a distributed architecture," Brookwood said. "Once they get that in place and have workable schemes for managing cache coherency and memory access across processors, then they will be well-positioned to compete on almost any basis with what AMD has been doing. The Direct Connect architecture has been AMD's not-so-secret sauce for the last four years."

But AMD has plans of its own. In 2007, it will move to HyperTransport 3.0. The update increases communication speeds and enables construction of 16-processor servers instead of the eight-processor machines that HyperTransport currently permits, said Marty Seyer, a vice president in AMD's commercial business unit.

In addition, the company believes the openness of HyperTransport is an advantage. The technology is governed and licensed by the HyperTransport Consortium.

One company very interested in HyperTransport's openness is Cray. "It's a huge benefit," said Jan Silverman, senior vice president of corporate strategy at the supercomputer maker. "It's not free, but the terms are much more palatable than anything that I have seen from Intel in the past."

The openness also means Cray can use HyperTransport to connect Opteron chips to its own networking chips. And when it wants to use HyperTransport to plug calculation acceleration engines into a computer, it can buy them from a company called DRC Computer that specializes in the engines, instead of having to make its own.

AMD's Opteron years have left an impression on Silverman that Intel will have to work hard to reverse. "There was a point in time when Intel used to lead the industry. Now they're following AMD on 64 bits, following on dual-core, following on low-power consumption chips, and now they're going to follow AMD in exposing their Intel architecture," Silverman said.

FreeDOS finally hits 1.0 milestone

2006-09-14T11:25:00.000+07:00

By Graeme Wearden, ZDNet (UK)

The FreeDOS project, an attempt to create an open-source alternative to Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system, has finally reached a major milestone.

After years of work, version 1.0 of FreeDOS is now available for download from the project team's Web site.

The operating system can be installed on a PC and used to run DOS programs. It can also be used in embedded devices such as cash registers.

The FreeDOS project began 12 years ago, after Microsoft released the last official standalone version of MS-DOS.

"FreeDOS 1.0 is a major milestone that has finally been released. By now, we have a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement," the project team said this week. Recent improvements to the package include long file name support in several applications, including a free CD-ROM driver, FAT32 file system support within the kernel and most other applications, and improved stability within the HIMEM device driver and EMM386 memory manager.

Earlier versions of FreeDOS have been available for some time and are sometimes shipped on PCs that don't come with a commercial operating system.

Microsoft recently urged system vendors not to sell so-called naked PCs, though such computers can appeal to people who want to run Linux on their new machine or IT managers who have a volume-licensing deal with Microsoft and don't want to pay for another copy of Windows.