‘IT Mergers and Acquisition
Google to merge with Apple or Apple to merge with IBM. Before you run to check The times or The Telegraph, take a breath, we try and contemplate what the new company would like if these companies were to merge and how, we the consumers, of their products may reap the benefit of such mergers. This may not seem a possibility in the distant future, but definitely not something that is unthinkable.
Google”s revenues: $6.77 billion for the 1st quarter of 2010.
Apple”s revenue:$11.4 billion
IBM”s revenue:$13.4 billion
Go
Corsair launches 60, 120 and 240GB Force SSDs
Corsair has announced three additions to its ultra high-speed Force Series SSDs. These new additions include the F60, F120, and F240 Force Series SSDs with 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB densities respectively.
The Force SSD”s are famous for the Sandforce SF-1200 SSD Processors which have provided unparalleled write endurance, superior ECC data protection, and outstanding performance. The blazing fast 4K random write performance of 180 MB/s measured using the ATTO benchmark is a result of Corsair and Sandforce working in tandem. This increased 4K write speed generates 15K IOPs which further results in excellent system performance and responsiveness. The Force Series SSDs implement the ATA TRIM command which is natively supported by Windows 7.
The F60, F120, and F240 Force Series SSDs all support the maximum throughput specification of 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write. The F60 is an ideal boot drive for a system where the traditional HDD”s can be used for mass storage.
“We have had excellent feedback on our Force Series F100 and F200 from both reviewers and customers, and we are excited about expanding our Sandforce-based offerings,” stated Jim Carlton, VP of Marketing at Corsair. “These solid-state drives are an excellent option for any enthusiast looking to build their system using the best storage system performance that is currently available.”
The Force Series F60, F120, and F240 SSDs are expected to be available in June, 2010, from Corsair’s worldwide network of authorized distributors and resellers.
Google captured personal data while Street Mapping, says Sorry!!
Reuters
The company said on Friday that it is currently in touch with regulators in several countries, including the United States, Germany, France, Brazil and Hong Kong, about how to dispose of the data, which Google said it never used.
“It”s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks,” Google Senior VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google”s official blog on Friday.
Google, the world”s largest Internet search engine, did not specify what kind of data it collected, but a security expert said that email content and passwords for many users, as well as general Web surfing activity, could easily have been caught in Google”s dragnet.
“The bottom line is a lot of personal content is definitely available in open WiFi hotspots,” said Steve Gibson, the president of Internet security services firm Gibson Research Corp.
He noted that most non-Web based email products, based on the POP and IMAP standards, do not encrypt log-in information or the messages people send. And he said that Google”s own web email product, Gmail, has only in recent months encrypted the email messages that users send after their initial sign-on, which has been encrypted.
Google”s Street View cars are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city streets, which the company displays in its Maps product.
Collecting the WiFi data was unrelated to the Google Maps project, and was done instead so that Google could collect data on WiFi hotspots that can be used to provide separate location-based services.
Google said the collection of data was a simple mistake resulting from a piece of computer code that was accidentally included from an experimental project. Google said it became aware of the mistake in the past week, shortly after telling a German regulator that it was not collecting such information.
A Google spokesperson said the Street View cars have been collecting the information since 2006 in more than 30 countries.
“As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible,” Google”s Eustace said, noting that Google had “failed badly” in maintaining its users trust.
Rovio Mobile Webcam
Rovio™ is the groundbreaking new Wi-Fi enabled mobile webcam that lets you view and interact with its environment through streaming video and audio, wherever you are! With Rovio, you will always be just a click away from the people and places that are important to you.
* Easily control Rovio remotely 24/7 from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. Use any web-enabled device: PC or Mac, cell phone, smartphone, PDA or even your video game console.
* Rovio detects your computer settings and guides you through the setup process.
* Its head-mounted moveable camera and wide range of vision enable you to see and hear exactly what Rovio sees and hears, on your screen.
* Set waypoints so that Rovio can navigate itself around your home, without having to control each step yourself!*
* At the click of a button, send Rovio back to the charging dock using its self-docking capabilities – even when you are not at home!*
* Guide Rovio through dimly lit locations with the aid of its built-in LED headlight.
* Rechargeable NiMH battery included
* 1 x Charging dock with built-in TrueTrack Beacon
* 3 x Omni-directional wheels
* 1 x Head-mounted VGA camera
* LED illumination
* 1 x Speaker and 1 x microphone for 2-way audio
* USB connectivity
* Wi-Fi connectivity (802.11b and 802.11g)
HDWiFi : NetGear”s WNHD
NetGear is stipulated to launch by Fall 2010, a WiFi system that can relay simultaneous seamless full HD video wirelessly though out your home. With 802.11a/n 5 GHz wireless LAN chipset. The kit has two wireless adapters; one links to an Internet router to capture Internet TV shows, and the other links to home theater devices such as Blu-ray players, Xbox 360s, and Internet TVs. The product achieves reliable transmission with technologies fairly new to the consumer market, including multiple-output antennas and dynamic digital beam-forming.
Apple adopts HTML5 buries Adobe Flash in public
In an article, termed as ”Thoughts on Flash”, on Apple”s corporate site, Steve Jobs said Flash is by almost any definition a closed product and all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.
Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.
Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.
Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?
Fourth, there’s battery life.
To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.
When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.
Fifth, there’s Touch.
Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?
Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.
Sixth, the most important reason.
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
Conclusions.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
Google Cloud Print Will Allow Printing From Any Device to Any Printer, Anywhere
Computer users who hate installing a new driver for each printer they use might want to keep an eye on the Google Cloud Print project. The folks at Mountain View have unveiled early designs for a service that would allow any web, desktop or mobile application on any device to print to any printer.
Google Cloud Print alone would submit and manage print job requests, by matching print jobs to appropriate printers with the user-specified options (“Four copies, black ink only”). This being part of Google”s Chromium OS projects, the code and documentation are also public here.
Having the ability to use any printer in the cloud from your smartphone or laptop sounds good for convenience, but might still run into challenges when it comes to implementation. Google notes that the management user interface will allow users to view only printers that they have registered, or printers that have been shared with them.
That at least might prevent freeloaders from running hog wild, but at what cost to Google”s promise of easy-breezy printer access anywhere? We imagine there”s a bit of a balance to be found there.
But perhaps the biggest question is how “legacy” printers, aka every printer in existence today, fit into Google”s vision. Google says that a small proxy piece of software will be available for anyone with Google Chrome installed on their computer, so that it can register legacy printers with Google Cloud Print. A Windows version is currently in the works, with Mac and Linux coming at some unspecified later date.
Google ultimately wants device makers to come out with “cloud-aware” printers which don”t require print drivers or even a PC connection. Such standalone printers would simply be registered with cloud print services, and voila.
“We are confident that cloud-aware printers will soon be a reality,” says the Google Cloud Print team. For their vision to come true, they better hope so.
McAfee identifies Windows XP components as virus
Buggy McAfee Antivirus update caused several computers across the world to crash and reboot itself in a loop. Even the Corporate customers were impacted as result of this.
The impact was felt far ad wide, affecting hospitals who stopped treating patient other than emergency. Police cars were asked to shut down their computers in patrol cars in Kentucky. Some of Australians supermarket”s point of sale went off-line affecting at least 10% of their sales.
McAfee is second Antivirus company next only to Bitfinder to have suffered this kind of problem in a space of two months. McAfee has dedicated a support page for this on their site.
UK Broadband speeds
Richard Branson has promised 100 Mbps broadband speeds in UK by the end of 2010 through it”s Virgin Media Services arm. Which means an HD movie downloaded in 71/2 minutes flat. What with current speeds of less than 5-8Mbps across UK, this will be a real game changer.
Check where”s your Broadband”s exchange and how far you are located, which impacts the actual Broadband speed you receive from your ISP.
Gartner Identifies the top Strategic Technologies for 2010
1 . Cloud Computing
2. Advanced Analytics
3. Client Computing
4. IT for Green
5. Reshaping Data Center
6. Social Computing
7. Security – Activity Monitoring
8. Flash Memory
9. Virtualization for Availability
10. Mobile Applications
MicroStrategy offers free business intelligence training:
MicroStrategy Inc announced on Monday that it is offering over 200 hours of online training for BI professionals, at no cost.
The company said that to address the market demand for MicroStrategy trained personnel, it is offering a free online training curriculum that covers a wide range of training needs.
Business Intelligence in the Cloud – Benchmarking Possibilities
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