annabellas blog's

(Credit:
Microsoft)

After appearing briefly as the Valentine edition of the
Zune 80, today Microsoft has brought back the red version of the Zune 80 through their Zune Originals online store. Unlike the fumbled Valentine’s edition, however, these red Zunes won’t come cheap. In fact, Zune Originals is now charging an extra $15 for the artwork engraving service that they initially offered free of charge.

Still, for those of you who really want to fly your Zune freak flag high, the red Zune 80 definitely looks like it will get some attention.

Want a red Zune 80 without all the lovey-dovey sentiment? They're now on sale at Zune Originals.

Intel says it plans to roll out a bevy of midrange processors, all built on its new 45-nanometer manufacturing process, on Monday. Game computer vendors, among others, are expected to follow suit with new machines.

(Credit:
Intel)

The Core 2 Quad Q9650 heads the list of updated chips, according to Intel. It has a core clock speed of 3GHz, a 12MB level-2 cache, a 1333MHz front-side bus, and is rated at 95 watts. Generally, the larger the level-2 cache memory, the better the performance. The front-side bus (FSB) carries data between the processor and other silicon.

Core 2 Duo chips will also get a refresh. The E8600 has a clock speed of 3.33GHz, 6MB of cache, and a 1333MHz FSB. The E7300 runs at 2.66GHz with 3MB of cache, and has a 1066MHz FSB.

Update on August 10 at 11:00 p.m. with official Intel pricing:

A bit further down the list is the Core 2 Quad Q9400 with a clock speed of 2.66GHz, 6MB of cache, and a 1333MHz FSB. This has a list price of $284 on TheNerds.net.

Game PC vendors such as Falcon Northwest and Dell’s Alienware unit plan to announce new systems based on the processors Monday, according to sources.

The Xeon X3660 is reduced from $530 to $316.

Existing Q9550 drops from $530 to $316. Pricing for new processors: Q9650 priced at $530, Q9400 at $266, E8600 at $266, and E7300 at $133.

Intel Core 2 Quad processor

Several retailers already have the new processors listed on their Web sites. TheNerds.net has the Q9650 listed at $576, one of the lowest prices on the Web. Retailers’ prices are typically higher than Intel’s official list prices, so the prices announced by Intel Monday will likely be lower than those retailers’ offerings.

The first test satellite, Giove-A, was launched in December 2005. Giove-B will test the program’s high-precision atomic clock and signal transmission, Reuters reported.

The European Union on Sunday launched Giove-B, the second (and last) test satellite in its $5.3 billion Galileo project, according to Reuters.

And while Galileo is still getting off the ground, demand for phones with GPS services is skyrocketing. The number of GPS-enabled handsets is expected to more than triple during the next five years, according to analysts. The rise of such devices in Europe will increase 18-fold by 2012.

The project’s launch date has been pushed back several times, from the original goal of 2008 to the current goal of 2013. And unlike the United States’ Global Positioning System, or GPS, which was designed primarily as a military system with a free public side to it, Galileo was initially conceived of as a largely commercial venture. But the project proved too ambitious to be sustained by the original public-private partnership.

The fully deployed Galileo system planned will consist of 30 satellites, positioned in three circular Medium Earth Orbit planes.

Uncertainty about when Galileo will actually be up and running, and how effective it will be compared to GPS, has reportedly caused confusion among some companies in the mobile industry, who have been unsure which technology to support in their products (or whether they should support both).

(Credit:
European Space Agency)

Although it has been a rocky road for the Galileo program, EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot told Reuters that high demand for navigational services means that Galileo has the potential to be profitable from the get-go.

After some companies pulled out of the project, the EU voted to put more public funding toward it. Now even that support isn’t guaranteed. Fears that the project might spiral out of financial control prompted some U.K. lawmakers last November to call for a complete review of the United Kingdom’s involvement in the program.

Galileo is Europe’s upcoming satellite radio navigation system, and it’s the EU’s largest space program. Galileo will eventually become an ultraprecise system of 30 satellites, but it has hit a few bumps along the way.

(Credit:
Environmental Defense Fund)

I’ve had it. Watching years of endless debate over global warming play out without a final denouement, why not face the hard truth that we’re going about it all wrong? Both sides invariably trot out reams of competing statistics or quote scientific tomes to support their positions in a conversation that goes stale fast.

I wouldn’t exaggerate the swing of the political pendulum–there’s still a lot of resistance–but as the Bush administration finishes out its term, there’s suddenly more movement on this front than at any time in the last eight years. I’ll be publishing a Q&A on Saturday with Krupp where he talks in more detail about technology’s likely role. In the meantime, here’s the nagging question I still can’t answer: Is this issue so bound up with interest-group politics that hopes for a national movement are just a pipe dream? The debate seemingly goes on and on without resolution. Now that there’s new hope for real change just over the horizon, I hope we’re not about to get let down again.

But I’ve got a better idea. If you could sit down with a big global warming skeptic like United States Sen. James Inhofe, or even with President Bush, forget the “woe is us routine.” Instead, why not appeal to their capitalist greed–and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. You don’t have to believe in global warming to agree that fossil fuel emissions aren’t doing any good for the air we breathe. But the sharp disagreements flare up when the topic turns programmatic. That is, how do you go about the cleanup without wrecking the economy? Good question, but unless the smart money is wrong, the answer will make fortunes for a lot of people.

The environmental movement got hip to that idea awhile ago, making the right calculation that appealing to business’ self-interest would pay dividends later on. Apropos, I was reminiscing on Friday with Fred Krupp, who heads the Environmental Defense Fund. Time was when the EDF’s informal motto was, “Sue the bastards.” But Krupp, who joined EDF in 1984, has become a big proponent of working with business on this issue.

EDF President Fred Krupp

Call it constructive engagement, if you will, but he’s making progress even though there remains much skepticism among business interests. But in the last year, a number of heavy-hitter CEOs have made strong statements about climate change, including Jeff Immelt from General Electric, Rick Wagoner at General Motors, and Jim Rogers at Duke Energy. We’re not exactly talking about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin here. These are members of the U.S. corporate aristocracy, and if these boys are singing a new tune, change is in the air. Check out the United States Climate Action Partnership, which is an alliance between big-time companies and climate and environmental groups teaming up to support a market-driven approach to climate protection. At the same time, there’s a pending bill in Congress, S. 2191, better known as America’s Climate Security Act, designed to help reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Now it’s your turn to weigh in.

While the pace of investment in Web 2.0 start-ups is waning, clean tech is booming. Venture capitalists sank more than $3 billion into the sector in 2007, and they’ll break that record this year.

Carr’s lawsuit does admit that Apple has a notice on its Web site explaining that support for MMS would be available from AT&T in late summer. However, the suit characterizes the note as a “mouseprint disclaimer,” referring to the small print.

“We absolutely will offer MMS on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G with 3.0 upgrades in late summer, once we complete some system upgrades that will ensure our customers have the best experience with MMS,” an AT&T representative said in a statement cited by Wired.

That seems rather strange, considering that Apple and AT&T announced on June 8, during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote that MMS would not be available until later in the summer. AT&T confirmed that time frame to Wired on Friday.

According to the latest lawsuit, first reported by InformationWeek, customers were told that MMS would be enabled on June 17, 2009, when iPhone OS 3.0 was released.

Two similar cases–one in Illinois and another in Louisiana–were also filed against the companies in August.

(Credit:
Apple)

Filed in the Northern District of Ohio on Wednesday (PDF hosted by Wired), plaintiff Deborah Carr says Apple and AT&T misled the public into believing that the iPhone 3GS was capable of sending and receiving MMS messages on the device. The lawsuit claims that Apple’s “print and video advertisements…on television, the Internet, the radio, newspapers, and direct mailers” all mention the availability of MMS on the device.

For at least the third time this month, Apple and AT&T are being sued by a consumer complaining of being duped into believing that multimedia messaging, or MMS, was already available on the
iPhone.

Technically, Apple has enabled MMS in iPhone OS 3.0. The proof is that 29 carriers around the world activated MMS on the iPhone when the new operating system was released on June 17. It’s not available in the United States because AT&T isn’t ready to activate it yet, which was disclosed on June 8.

Mozilla has launched its Extend Firefox 3 contest, with some cool prizes in the offing, including a MacBook Air.

The purpose? To encourage additional and improved add-ons for
Firefox, of course.

Bounty programs have been around for years. The Ximian team used these somewhat effectively early on at Novell (and prior to that), which was my first experience with them. Since then, the number of bounties has grown considerably within the open-source world.

It’s similar in many ways to Atlassian’s bounty program, which is giving away six $5,000 bounties for individual plug-ins built for Jira, Confluence, and its other software.

I personally am not a big fan of bounties because I don’t think they go to the heart of why many developers write open-source code in the first place: pride of ownership, experimentation, intellectual pursuit.

commentary

It’s not as if Mozilla is hurting for Firefox plug-ins. But it may be that it’s trying to remind developers to update their Firefox 2 plug-ins for Firefox 3, and this offers a convenient, relatively inexpensive way to do so.

But, if nothing else, they do call attention to a need: more plug-ins for Firefox and the Atlassian projects, in these cases.

Perhaps Microsoft doesn’t want anyone using the uber-cool (and getting cooler all the time) AwesomeBar?

Microsoft used to tell
Mac visitors to its web pages to use Internet Explorer. When the company stopped developing IE for the Mac, it instead suggested that “Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple’s
Safari.”

commentary

But now? As discovered by iTnews, Microsoft is now asking Mac and Windows users to use the open-source Mozilla
Firefox browser, albeit a slightly outdated version (2.0).

At least Microsoft is finally recognizing that there are technologies beyond those that it develops. It seems like a small thing to suggest that its site visitors could try something other than IE, but for me this marks a significant step forward for the software giant.

Nokia made the announcement Monday, though Laurel’s blog post is dated last Monday, February 4. Go figure.

Twango originally pitched itself as a more functional alternative to photo-sharing sites like Flickr; people can also share video and audio, organize it into “channels,” and selectively share it with other individuals. Back in 2006, we billed it as a “great sharing site that no one uses.”

Nokia acquired media-sharing start-up Twango last year, and now it’s finally doing something with it.

“The Twango brand will be a fond memory,” a blog post from Twango director of service development Jim Laurel reads. “We are now Share on Ovi.”

Twango has been folded into Ovi, a new brand for Nokia’s mobile Web services such as gaming, social networking, and mapping.

Also part of Ovi is Nokia’s new navigation service, which was announced Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The main Ovi.com home page gives a few teasers as to impending services from Nokia, and encourages visitors to “come back soon and see what’s new.”

Twango users without Nokia devices will still be able to use Ovi for media-sharing, but they will apparently be missing out on some perks. Laurel’s blog post goes on to say that the former Twango team has developed downloadable software so that Nokia handsets (N95, N82, and N73) can automatically upload media to the service.

Dell executives will address investors at a Bank of America conference Tuesday in San Francisco.

Dell warned investors Tuesday that it expects to see “further softening in global end-user demand in the current quarter,” a month after it reported a decrease in second-quarter profits.

Last month, Dell reported that second-quarter profits were down 17 percent year over year to $616 million. The company posted earnings of 31 cents per share, missing analysts’ expectations of 36 cents per share. At the time, the company said conservative IT spending in the U.S. had spread to Western Europe and several countries in Asia.

Dell didn’t give specific financial details, but said it expects to incur costs as it realigns its business. The company said it is “committed to working aggressively on cost initiatives” designed to generate improved growth, profitability, and cash flow.

The announcement comes a day after Hewlett-Packard announced it will eliminate tens of thousands of jobs over the next three years, and as the stock market reeled from news of major troubles at U.S. financial institutions.

On tap for Wednesday is a keynote speech from Jerry Dixon, former director of the National Cyber Security Division, Department of Homeland Security. Following the keynote address will be two parallel tracks of programming–Web app and wireless–including presentations from Chuck Willis of Mandiant on forensic challenges of cross site scripting, Adam Laurie on practical RFID hacking, Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios on beating phishers, Sachin Joglekar and Sundeep Patwardhan on attacks on VoIP through IPSec tunnels, and Neal Krawetz on image analysis.

WASHINGTON–On Wednesday, Black Hat D.C. 2008 gets under way, after two days of intense training sessions. The D.C. Black Hat security conference is much smaller than the summer Black Hat USA in Las Vegas. But what D.C. lacks in size, it makes up for in sessions and talks.

Thursday will continue with two parallel tracks–defense and hardware/embedded–and will include Christopher Tarnovsky discussing security failures in secure devices, Zac Franken on biometrics, as well as others.

Throughout the two-day event there will be various birds-of-a-feather talks, opportunities to talk to session speakers, and on Wednesday evening, additional speakers.