Computing » Is Microsoft Linux's New BFF?

"M$ hates Free Software of any kind," asserted blogger Robert Pogson. "They have attacked Linux, the GPL, copyleft, etc. -- stuff that would be of no interest to them at all except their customers see the advantages of Free Software. What the world does with Linux, the GPL and copyleft is the world's business, not M$'s. We should not do any more than allow M$ to use Free Software if they want."

Those of us who have been around the block a few times here in the Linux blogosphere have seen it many times before: With one hand, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) holds out a small olive branch to the Linux community, while with the other it prepares a new patent attack, posts a "cautionary" FUD-filled video, or perpetrates some other kind of anti-FOSS mischief.

That's why it felt like deja vu all over again last week, when we learned not only that Microsoft is apparently one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel, but also that it had sent an early birthday present to Linux in the form of an apparently lighthearted video.

'Microsoft and Linux?'

Featuring cartoon versions of Bill Gates and Tux, the video begins by recounting the "rocky start" the two experienced, including the famous Halloween Documents exchanged among Microsoft executives about Linux and the "bickering" that continues today.

Also shown is Tux throwing a rock at Gates' "window."

"There's no truce in sight," the video reads... "Or is there?"

The final line then concludes by changing the text "Microsoft vs. Linux?" to "Microsoft and Linux?" followed by birthday wishes.

Is it conciliatory? Is it touching? Is it passive-aggressive? Linux bloggers have been struggling to decide.

'Pigs Still Don't Fly'

"Is it time to start trusting Microsoft?" was the title of an open ballot over on TuxRadar, for example, and respondents weren't shy with their opinions.

"No way!" exclaimed kaaposc, for instance. "Remember, pigs still don't fly."

"Nope," agreed mfraser. "Under no circumstances should we start trusting them, they are still trying to use their patent portfolio to extract money from companies making Android phones."

'I Needed a Good Laugh'

On the other hand, "they can be trusted... sort of," countered Vredfreak.

"Microsoft can be trusted to do one thing: whatever it takes to make money," Vredfreak added. "For years they accomplished it by simply exercising its monopoly on the desktop space. There are too many avenues open for this to work anymore, so they have to find new strategies, mainly patent trolling and the appearance of integration and cooperation with competitors."

Then again, "trust Microsoft?" wrote reup. "wharfff wharfff wharfff ! Cool, I needed a good laugh today."

TuxRadar's post was soon followed by a two-part series on OStatic (here and here) on much the same topic, so it quickly became clear the topic was gaining momentum.

Linux Girl took to the heavily air-conditioned Broken Windows Lounge to learn more. Was the birthday video a genuine gesture -- or just one more Machiavellian maneuver?

'They Need to Quit with the Lawsuits'

"It really did seem conciliatory, especially when they referenced some of their own contributions to the hostility, such as the Halloween Documents," consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack told Linux Girl.

Still, "if they really want to make peace, they need to quit with the patent threats and lawsuits," Mack added.

Others took a stronger view.

'Nothing But a Series of Lies'

"Passive-aggressive doesn't begin to cover it," Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza told Linux Girl, for example.

"The first hostility in the video is a penguin (Tux?) throwing a rock at a Windows-logo window with Bill Gates behind it, followed by Microsoft trying to 'scare' Linux 'at Halloween,'" Espinoza explained. "This is immediately followed by the assertion that Microsoft found Linux's ideas 'childish,' which directly contradicts the stance of the Halloween Documents, which prove that Microsoft saw Linux as a threat."

Chronologically, "this video is nothing but a series of lies presented to make Microsoft look like the good guy, which could not possibly be further from the truth," Espinoza concluded.

'The Thin Edge of the Wedge'

Indeed, "M$ hates Free Software of any kind," blogger Robert Pogson agreed. "They have attacked Linux, the GPL, copyleft, etc. -- stuff that would be of no interest to them at all except their customers see the advantages of Free Software.

"What the world does with Linux, the GPL and copyleft is the world's business, not M$'s," Pogson added. "We should not do any more than allow M$ to use Free Software if they want."

Accepting any kind of offering from Microsoft is "the thin edge of the wedge," Pogson cautioned. "Their hypervisor is of value to M$'s customers and it does not hurt freedom to have M$'s customers using GNU/Linux. We should, however, also promote and improve KVM, which is pretty cool."

Finally, "for any who think M$ is just a business competing in the real world on price/performance," Pogson offered the following reminders:

" M$ paid UUNET Pipex, an ISP, big bucks to ship Internet Exploder so as to cut Netscape out of the market";

"M$ has a deliberate policy of shortening the life of PCs to maximize revenue"; and

"M$ charges different prices for essentially the same technology."

A 'Tarnished' Reputation

Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project, had a more measured outlook.

"What's going on here is that Linux has become deeply embedded in the server market," Travers told Linux Girl.

That, in turn, has created two problems for Microsoft, he suggested.

"First, they have invested a LOT of effort trying to keep that from happening," he pointed out. "This has reduced their credibility regarding further attacks on Linux."

Second, however, is that while it's getting better, "Microsoft has not been the best at interop in the past," Travers added. "This too has tarnished their reputation."

Bottom line? "What I think Microsoft is trying to do here is make an about-face to undo the embarrassment that they are facing."

'Why Would the Community Care?'

Last but not least, Slashdot blogger hairyfeet answered Linux Girl's question with another question: "Why would the Linux community care one way or the other?"

The fact that it does indicates a "serious problem" in the Linux community, hairyfeet suggested: "the community fixates on the last war instead of trying to plan for the next one.

"Want to see the most likely future for MSFT in 15 years? Look at IBM (NYSE: IBM) now," he asserted. "Once upon a time everyone was scared of old 'big blue' -- nobody dared to try to mess with the big dog. Now? Just another company -- a big company, but just a company."

'Say Thanks and Move On'

Microsoft will likely "rule the desktop" for as long as there is one, hairyfeet opined, "but more and more of people's lives are being held off of the desktop, in tablets and phones."

Rather than adapt to that new market, meanwhile, Microsoft "shows their 'I don't understand my customers' problem by putting Windows 8 on everything, including ARM (Nasdaq: ARMHY), instead of focusing on making winPhone a top notch OS," he said. "They are gonna royally burn their customers."

So why should the community care about the video birthday greetings?

Hairyfeet's advice: "Just say 'gee thanks' and move on."

Computing » How Google Could Murder Your Digital Identity

Until Google puts in place a clear customer service organization, make sure you keep a copy of your stuff on your own hardware. This is likely good advice for any online service. Google really needs to start focusing on customer satisfaction, though. Its current perceived position of "hey, it's free -- take what we give you" isn't likely going to work in the long term.

I'm in the midst of doing the biggest tablet review I've ever attempted, and I have to admit I'm rather impressed with a number of the Android offerings. The funny thing is, the ones closest to the phone work the best, suggesting there is a bit of a Windows XP/Vista event going on in this space.

While I was doing this, I was sent a link to a Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) customer who got royally screwed when Google effectively gave the death penalty to everything he had stored across Google's online applications. There is a huge warning here.

I'm going to make the product of the week the best of the Android tablets I was sent, and that's the Asus Transformer -- largely due to the keyboard integration and extra battery (the thing has been running for more than two days unplugged).

Google Warning

Let's start out with the Google warning. Evidently, Dylan M., who goes by the name "Thomas Monopoly" on Twitter, had a bit of a problem with Google. A long-time supporter, he recently woke up to find Google had pulled the plug on his digital identity.

Now he had pretty much converted everything to Google services. He used its storage (and paid for extra capacity), used its social network, used its email and used its applications. He is a grad student and had more than 500 articles cached for research in his Google reader (gone); he had migrated all of his bookmarks to Google bookmarks (gone); he had consolidated on Google his 200 contacts (gone), his backup files (gone) and his docs (gone).

The guy even put all of his calendar items (doctors' appointments, meetings, dates) onto Google, and they are now gone. He had used Google Maps extensively, and all of those records are gone. Oh -- and it isn't just access to new items either. His entire mail account and documented history have been deleted.

In effect, and you can read it in his words here, Google wiped his digital life from existence. Google pretty much gave him the digital death penalty, and there was no due process, no warning, and no real explanation.

Now he doesn't have access to his files, can't get his email, can't contact his friends, and is pretty much screwed. Google doesn't provide someone you can call, and so getting reinstated has been problematic. Actually, a better way of saying this is there is no real appeal process. In effect, he was tried and told about the guilty verdict after his digital identity had been executed -- and, apparently, he has no recourse.

I'd put this down as an isolated instance, but there is a great deal of hacking going on at the moment. My own MSN account was hacked a few months back. Someone phished through MSN support and got my password reset and entered that way. Fortunately, MSN has live bodies you can call -- otherwise, I would have been as SOL as Dylan.

My point here is that someone hacking into your account could cause you to be terminated by Google depending on what happened -- or termination could be a random thing based on a metric Google hasn't disclosed.

So, word of warning: Until Google puts in place a clear customer service organization to deal with issues like this -- and maybe even if it does -- make sure you keep a copy of your stuff on your own hardware. This is likely good advice for any online service.

Google really needs to start focusing on customer satisfaction, though. Its current perceived position of "hey, it's free -- take what we give you" isn't likely going to work in the long term. Just wait till Google screws some senator or billionaire's kid, or pisses off Anonymous. That'll be the gift that keeps on giving.
Tablet Wars: iPad Rules, Android Getting Better, Windows Has a Shot

I'm currently reviewing the Asus Transformer, Acer Iconia, Samsung Galaxy 10, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) 7" and 5", and have an iPad 1 and 2 for comparative reference. I was one of the first reviewers of the Motorola (NYSE: MMI) Xoom, I've kept up on the HP (NYSE: HPQ) Touchpad reviews, and I was briefed on both the Lenovo IdeaPad and ThinkPad tablets but haven't tried them myself yet.

My overall take was that the first Honeycomb release, which the Xoom exemplified, was Google repeating Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Vista mistake and trying to outshine that company with sloppy work. Honeycomb 3.0 made Vista look good. The 3.01 helped a bit, but the recent 3.1 drop eliminated most of the OS problems.

Ironically, the Dell Streak tablets, which are based on Android 2.2, have been more consistently reliable and more useful than the Honeycomb products. This is because they have access to the full smartphone application set (the Honeycomb products get a vastly smaller number of applications), and that older platform is now comparatively mature (crashes less often).

The products with the most promise for business are the coming Panasonic Toughbook tablet, which has an outdoor viewable screen, and the Lenovo ThinkPad tablet. Both of these have digitizers and were designed to meet a higher quality standard. I should have them to review when they launch later this year, and I think they are worth waiting for.

Overall, the Android products were great for videos (once I figured out how to get videos on them), great for music and browsing the Web, great for light games ("Angry Birds") and had wonderful all-day battery life. However, productivity apps sucked (no spell checkers in the word-processing apps for instance), and a number of the applications that came with them crashed or simply didn't work.

Only one, the Lenovo K, ran Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) -- and I couldn't get it shipped to arrive in time for this review. My sense is these are still generally best for folks who like to tinker. They aren't where they need to be for a general customer, but they are closer than they were a few months ago.

Based on all of this, I have drawn a few conclusions. One is that the tablet market remains an iPad market for this round. Two, the hardware for the Android products is more than competitive, but the software and services aren't where they need to be to truly compete with Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) yet. Three, Google needs a tighter focus on customer satisfaction. And four, all of this suggests that Microsoft still has a shot -- and my experience with the Dell products clearly shows it could have had one of the top tablets this year if it had offered a Windows Phone 7 tablet. (Currently, Windows Phone 7 has higher customer satisfaction than Android).

Wrapping Up: Google Needs to Step Up

Google shut down its Labs this week to better focus on existing products, and it desperately needs that focus. Part of that focus needs to be on customer satisfaction. It is lagging badly both with Android and with customer protection, as poor Dylan pointed out, for its services.

The massive legal challenges, issues with antitrust, and problems with customer care and product quality indicate a company in trouble, and these troubles could all peak at once and cripple the firm. In short, Google needs to step up or step out of some of these efforts.

Google's No. 1 problem isn't Apple, Microsoft, or the U.S. Government -- it remains Google itself. With its customers' support, there are few things Google can't do, but there are few things it will be able to sustain if it doesn't start taking better care of those customers.

One final comment: Apple isn't standing still, and the recent filing of a 3D patent application suggests it will be making another breakout move with the iPad 3 or 4.

Product of the Week: Asus Transformer

Product of the Week Building a better iPad is a losing game, and most of the competing products are iPad-like slates. The most different of the products I'm currently reviewing is the Asus Transformer.

This product is amazing, and what makes it so is the keyboard integration. The keyboard not only attaches securely to the tablet, turning the result into a small laptop, but also has enough weight so that touch still works. Part of this weight is a second battery, creating truly legendary battery life.

It has multiple SD card slots (full SD in the keyboard and micro SD in the tablet), an HDMI port out, and even a full USB port on the keyboard. It actually has a better port out than a MacBook Air when it has the keyboard attached.

The product does have some issues: One of my key applications, Netflix, isn't available on it yet. Also, the Asus desktop sync application and calendar don't work, and the included word processor doesn't appear to have a spell checker.

These problems can largely be fixed with third-party Android apps -- and with Netflix approved on Lenovo's Android tablets, hopefully it will soon show up on the others.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer

On Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), the price for the Transformer tablet is US$489 (32 gig version). For the keyboard/dock, it's $155, or a little over $640 for both. That compares to the 32 GB iPad without keyboard for $669. Its keyboard and epic battery life make the Asus Transformer my product of the week. It is just geeky cool.

Computing » Android Apps and the Honeycomb Holdup

Android Honeycomb, the version of the mobile OS built specifically for tablet devices, was first rolled out many months ago. Several Honeycomb tablets are on store shelves. Yet the number of Android apps built specifically for Honeycomb remains relatively small compared to the tens of thousands of iPad apps Apple claims. What's the holdup?

Android Honeycomb tablets are now on store shelves and vendor websites. Six months from Honeycomb's release, tablet makers have finally optimized their hardware to fit the new made-for-tablets OS version to their larger-than-smartphone screens.

But where are the apps? Buyers of shiny new 8- and 10-inch touchscreen Android tablets suffer from a glaring lack of Android 3.0 -- aka "Honeycomb" -- apps specifically designed to use the increased functionality of the latest tablet-sized OS. Consumers now enjoy a growing number of tablet choices other than the iPad. But the Android market comes nowhere near matching Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) claim of 100,000 apps made specifically for the iPad.

Tablet developers are promising consumers, however, that Honeycomb-quality apps are on their way. And if you believe the hype, these apps will have matching screen resolution. That means Android users will not see blurry interfaces or apps that sit in a tiny window in the center of a big screen as often happens with current Android smartphone apps that run on the tablets.

"It's a similar pattern to what we saw when the iPad first came out. Clearly, there is a lack of apps that are optimized for the Android tablets. We already see this changing quite a bit," Amit Rohatgi, principal architect for mobile at MIPS, told LinuxInsider.


Android Antics

From an app developer's viewpoint, the situation facing the Honeycomb release mimics similar sluggish starts of any new technology. Until the dust settles, app writers have little impetus to rush Honeycomb apps to market.

But by the end of this year, the Android app market will clearly explode, Rohatgi said.

"We are already seeing it happen in Asia. It is falling to the local developers to bring forward applications for those devices," he explained.

Slow Go

The scarcity of Honeycomb-specific apps has something to do with the way the OS was released. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) released the first- and second-generation Android code almost immediately. This created a feeding frenzy for apps as Android phones proliferated.

"Google started out withholding the Honeycomb code from a lot of device makers. This is still the case. Google started out targeting the Honeycomb code specifically for the tablet. In the past Google would release code as open source within four weeks," Kevin Kitagawa, marking director for digital homes for MIPS, told LinuxInsider.

This strategy was Google's way to prevent fragmentation of the Android platform. That plan seems to be based on the notion that only developers who agreed to support both the tablet and the smartphone would get the Honeycomb code, he said.

MIPS is not an app developer. The company provides OEMs with processor IPs. Even so, MIPS had to sign Google's anti-fragmentation agreement to get an early access license, said Kitagawa.

More Push Needed

The current state of Android's Honeycomb market compared to iPad's offerings might be an opportunity for Android to become better than the Apple App Store, according to Giles Nugent, financial technology expert at SAE Institute. He has over 20 apps for iPad in the App Store but so far is not developing for the Honeycomb platform.

"I haven't found it worthwhile to develop apps for the Android tablet market because there aren't that many people who buy them or use them," Nugent told LinuxInsider.

That view, he contends, speaks to the general condition of the Honeycomb market today. Consider iPhone versus Android phones.

"Obviously Android is exploding fast. Android is a great market. But some of its weaknesses are magnified by the user base that you have," he said.

Leveling the Landscape

The pre-Honeycomb Android market has been plagued with apps that work on some phones and tablet devices but not on others. Andorid 3.0, or Honeycomb, will correct that issue. The hardware is now in place.

"This will encourage app developers to start doing one or two things or both together. They will either start developing apps for the Honeycomb tablets or start migrating their existing apps to higher resolutions," suggested Rohatgi.

Apple is going to continue being the dominant player in the tablet marketplace for a period of time. But that will change, according to both Rohatgi and Kitagawa. In a short period of time, there are tons of OEMs out there who will start to turn out devices.

Pixel Pleasure

Some evidence of better-performing apps for Honeycomb is seen in recent notes Google put on its website. Google appears to have standardized specs about pixel density and settings for certain parameters for differing device sizes.

"That alone will drive developers to create apps for paid and advertising-based support. It is a pure money game so they can get more eyeballs on it," said Rohatgi.

Google's Android blog recently announced the next upgrade of Android will have a button to re-size an app's interface on a tablet. Is that the cure, or is it just a temporary solution?

Maybe and Maybe Not

"That is part of the way there. It may be all of the way there. It will come down to seeing it is believing it, due to the second part of that solution," said Nugent.

As an app developer, he needs to know how it re-sizes. For instance, does it just stretch everything? Or can the developer dictate how it does it between the phone and the tablet?

"So just stretching it is a help. But the real issue is, how does it stretch things?" Nugent noted.

More To It

Not only is the pixel count important. The process Honeycomb will use is essential.

For example, let's say you are playing "Angry Birds." The ratio of the screen X:Y on a phone is not going to be the same as on a tablet. On an iPhone, is it 2:3. On a tablet it is 3:4. The width is three-fourths of the height, Nugent explained.

Secondly, it would help if it did the stretching automatically for you. So the user experience isn't necessarily as good, he said.

Is this a real solution, or just a half-measure? It seems like it would be a one-up on the way iPad handles iPhone apps -- they look highly pixelated when expanded to full screen. But running a phone app on a tablet is still different than using a tablet app on a tablet, regardless of whether its appearance has been cleaned up.

For example, since tablet apps are designed with more screen real estate in mind, they're capable of offering more detail and finer interfaces.

"I don't know that that is a show stopper. But it makes you wonder what other issues will evolve. It is an unknown. Certainly up until now that has been a problem," said Nugent.

Does Core Count?

Another issue still unresolved is whether Honeycomb tablets will come pre-installed with a core set of specifically optimized apps for Android 3. Unlike desktop and laptop computers, OEMs have yet to settle on a standard library of installed apps. That is also true for the iPad.

"I find that that there are some core apps on the iPad, but most of it is user-selected. It is more about custom apps for the user. It is just a mobile device just like the phone. Each user tweaks it," said Nugent

On the desktop and laptop computers -- either Mac or PC -- the core products are geared to labor-intense data entry. That is not what you do with smartphones and tablets, he added.

Random Reality

Tablets so far rely on a random set of applications. The question, as Nugent sees it, becomes, what is the range of available products for the user to enjoy on a tablet versus the iPad, and how well do those applications work?

"I hear no noise about the Android tablet. I hear a lot of noise about the Android phones in terms of available apps," he said.

Related to this issue of Honeycomb-specific apps is the current lack of a consistent marketplace for Android tablets and phones, noted Nugent. Consumers don't want to have to hunt very hard for apps.

"So that is just a huge advantage for the Apple Store. And until the Android -- and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) is trying to do it -- consolidates into a single market store delivery platform, it will be very difficult for people to get comfortable with Android tablets," warned Nugent.

Fracturing Factors

Discontent about a not-yet-there store of Honeycomb-specific apps may not be as critical for consumers as other factors. The software and user interface issue will be resolved by the developer ecosystem within the next year or so, according to Nizar Assanie, vice president of research at IE Market Research Corporation in Canada.

"The real crucial issues are the pricing, sales channel and product differentiation issues around Android tablet devices," Assanie told LinuxInsider.

For example, his company's surveys show that 65 percent of U.S. consumers feel that price is an important issue when they are making a decision to purchase a tablet device. The average price consumer expect to pay is only about US$250, down from over $550 only one year ago, he said.

According to responses from 1,500 U.S. consumers, the number of available applications is one of the three most important features to only 25 percent of U.S. consumers. That is nowhere near the purchase cost or data plan contract flexibility in deciding on a tablet purchase, concluded Assanie.

Computing » Fulcrum Microsystems - Levering Up Intel's Cloud Ambitions

The expanding role of 10 GbE in cloud computing environments is the bigger story here. Intel's Xeon CPUs play critical roles in the vast majority of cloud and hyper-scale computing infrastructures and are critically important to cloud service providers of every sort. The company is also working closely with cloud storage vendors to enhance performance and efficiency.

Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) recently announced plans to acquire Fulcrum Microsystems, a privately held fabless Ethernet semiconductor company, may seem counterintuitive to some. Founded in 1999, Fulcrum develops integrated, standards-based 10- and 40-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch silicon designed to deliver low latency and workload-balancing capabilities, along with superior network speeds.

By way of explanation, Intel said that Fulcrum's silicon complements its processors and Ethernet controllers, thereby enhancing solution performance, energy efficiency and service delivery. Intel also noted that 10-GbE networks are one of today's fastest-growing data center market segments, and that they can also be used to support evolving cloud architectures and converged enterprise networks.

Good enough. But what does any of this have to do with Intel -- a vendor that most associate with PCs and servers?

Change may be inevitable, but public understanding of IT vendor evolution is mostly apparent in its absence. Businesses typically succeed by creating quality products and brands, and establishing them in the public consciousness via clever marketing 6 Ways to Use Social Media for Business. Free Guide. campaigns. Those memorable impressions tend to stick to businesses long after they have expanded into other markets or focused on other areas of interest.

Intel's Bigger Story

Why bring up Intel here? First, the company's "Intel Inside" campaign has long been recognized as one of the IT industry's signature advertising strategies, driving more fundamental value (both in brand recognition and revenues) than virtually any other IT vendor promotional effort. Intel Inside cemented the company's qualities in the minds of consumers and business owners, and helped its Pentium solutions literally dominate personal computing.

However, its value in other Intel efforts was less clear -- or even questionable, as when the company shifted attention toward wireless connectivity and ultra-mobility solutions.

Moreover, it has had little impact on the server and other solutions developed by Intel's Data Center Group (DCG). Not that it did anything to hinder those efforts, either. Depending on which market research firm you talk with, sales of various Intel server CPUs have roughly doubled over the past decade and occupy some 90 percent (by volume) of servers sold worldwide.

That point is certainly well known in the IT industry, but the company is also a major, if less recognizable, leader in numerous other data center markets.

Data storage has been a key Intel success story over the past few years, with its Xeon and other silicon powering everything from home and small office solutions (often based on Intel reference architectures) to a large majority of leading enterprise-class storage systems and RAID controllers.

Similar Intel success stories exist for other DCG focus markets including virtualization, cloud and supercomputing.

Look for the Intel Lining

The company's market leadership position also casts light on the Fulcrum deal. Intel collaborates with numerous networking vendors, including Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), and Fulcrum isn't the first networking technology company it has acquired. But the move reflects a pair of core Intel strategies.

The first is a bet on high bandwidth Ethernet -- the architecture of choice for growing numbers of networking companies and enterprises. Fulcrum's no/low latency and workload-balancing capabilities should make the company's offerings attractive to a variety of 10-GbE and 40-GbE solution providers and their customers.

Still, the expanding role of 10 GbE in cloud computing environments is the bigger story here. Intel's Xeon CPUs play critical roles in the vast majority of cloud and hyper-scale computing infrastructures and are critically important to cloud service providers of every sort. The company is also working closely with cloud storage vendors to enhance performance and efficiency (its collaboration with EMC (NYSE: EMC) on Atmos is a good example).

With these and other points in mind, Fulcrum should provide Intel with many of the technologies required to develop and deliver a broad portfolio of highly integrated, optimized, end-to-end cloud silicon solutions. That, in turn, will be of interest to Intel's traditional server, storage and networking OEM partners, as well as cloud service providers that prefer "rolling their own" system components.

A generation ago, Intel Inside described the company's singular effort to enhance any user's personal computing experience. Today, the company's acquisition of Fulcrum Microsystems underscores Intel's ambitious goal of being inside every part of the cloud.

Computing » Mozilla's Head Is in the Cloud With New Mobile OS Idea

A new project has taken root at the Mozilla Foundation to create a new mobile OS called "Gecko." The Boot to Gecko project aims to create a mobile OS based on the Android kernel that would use the Web to displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for app development. It's been compared to Google Chrome OS, only for mobile devices instead of laptops.

The Mozilla Foundation is looking into creating a standalone mobile operating system for the open Web.

A team of programmers from the organization has set up the Boot to Gecko (B2G) project to work on this idea.

This OS is based on the idea that the Web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development.

The team will work on new Web APIs, a privilege model for security, and choose to either port apps or build apps out for the OS.

The B2G project will use various technologies from Android, including the kernel.

Its developers pledge to keep the project open source and adhere to standards.

"This is about the transformation we are living through in devices and Mozilla desiring a place at the table," Al Hilwa, a program director at IDC, told TechNewsWorld.

That transformation's about mobile devices increasingly taking over from PCs and an accompanying movement to the cloud, which "means lightweight interfaces on lightweight operating systems have a chance to break through in the next few years," Hilwa said.

However, Joshua Greenman, president of Mercury Development, is skeptical.

"Why hasn't this been attempted by companies with more perfect market information and enormous financial incentives to do so, like HTC, Samsung or Nokia?" Greenman asked.

"Boot to Gecko is an early-stage, exploratory project with the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open Web," Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of technology strategy, told TechNewsWorld.

"It's not a product offering but, if successful, could form the basis for one," Weaver stated, adding that Mozilla's "very early in the project, soliciting suggestions and contributions" from a variety of sources.

Lizard Love

B2G is aimed at making open Web technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile devices and desktops.

To that end, the team behind the project plans to build prototype application programming interfaces (APIs) for exposing device and operating system capabilities to content such as telephony, SMS, camera, USB, Bluetooth and near-field communications (NFC).

To ensure security, the B2G team will implement a privileges model that ensures the new capabilities will be safely exposed to pages and applications.

The question of privileges, which means the right to access an application or OS, is a thorny one. Android, for example, gives downloaded applications a wide range of privileges, and some security analysts contend this is one of the reasons malware is spreading on that OS.

B2G will use the Android kernel, drivers, the GNU C library, and "ancillary stuff," Mozilla's Shaver said in a Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) forum on the project.

The B2G team consists of three people, according to the project's FAQ.

The project will use technology from Firefox mobile and Mozilla's Gecko layout engine.

B2G will not affect Mozilla's relationships with Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Google or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), according to the FAQ. The project's different from Google's Chrome OS in that Mozilla's aiming at mobile and tablet devices rather than a notebook form factor, the FAQ states.

The B2G team hasn't yet settled on what hardware to run the OS on, but it's likely to select a device running Nvidia's (Nasdaq: NVDA) Tegra 2 mobile super chip because that supports VP8 hardware acceleration.

VP8 is an open video compression format from Google, which purchased the technology's developer, On2 Technologies, back in 2010.

Reactions to B2G

The B2G project "has a similar value proposition to Google Chrome OS," IDC's Hilwa remarked. Both deal with data, content and device engagement in the cloud.

Mozilla's driven by "a Web OS agenda" in working on B2G, and the putative OS may not be well-accepted by device makers, Mercury Development's Greenman warned.

Device manufacturers such as HTC, Samsung and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) are "not likely to switch OSes from a financially successful model and an entrenched OS," Greenman contends.

HTC and Samsung are best known for their Android smartphones, although HTC also makes Windows-based mobile devices. Nokia is teaming up with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7.

Is Android Safe?

Right now, some Android device manufacturers are being put under legal pressure by Microsoft, Apple and Gemalto over what these three contend are patent infringements. Microsoft has already convinced some Android device makers to shell out royalties.

Meanwhile, Gemalto is suing Google over patents to the Dalvik virtual machine, which is at the core of Android, and other technologies. Google's also being sued by Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), which asserts rights to Java IP being used in Android.

Given all this, isn't the B2G project's relying on Android technologies akin to diving into a pool of sharks in a feeding frenzy?

"Relying on Android IP may be problematic, as it exposes Mozilla to some potential legal issues and patent claims," IDC's Hilwa said.

Computing » Dealing With Emotional Data

Is curation the end result of the analytics phase? That implies analytics is all that's important. But thinking from a pure analytics perspective might simply put us into a different box. curation is not part of the analytics cascade and is, I believe, on the spectrum between qualitative and emotional. Think of curation as the kind of analytics that only a human mind can achieve.

Someone (you know who you are) recently commented on my post about curation.

In part, the comment read, "Do you mean that it is the end result of the analytics phase, where relevant information on a specific topic is collected and acted upon?" The answer is yes and no, and I thought it would make a worthy topic to occupy the next couple of minutes.

First, I was intrigued about the idea that curation might be "the end result of the analytics phase" because it implies that analytics is all that's important. Now, analytics is uber-important, but it's not the only way to gather information from all the social data we suddenly find ourselves immersed in.

In fact, thinking from a pure analytics perspective might simply put us into a different box. Some data isn't quantitative and therefore subject to analytics, and we run the risk of collective Asperger's Syndrome when we think it is. Lots of the data we deal with isn't quantitative and it might not even be qualitative either, it might just be, shall we say, emotional.

The Human Touch

There was a speaker at the Sage Summit event recently who wrote a book on emotional intelligence -- wish I could remember his name. His point is that it's not the smartest kids in the room who succeed, but often it's those who understand the other people. I think he was right. Handiwork of the smartest kids in the room gave us the Wall Street financial debacle and Enron, and I think there's a book with "smartest kids in the room" in the title related to one of them. It is not a complimentary title; more sardonic at best.

OK, at any rate, my point is that analytics is a tool -- be careful how you use it. Also, curation is not part of the analytics cascade and is, I believe, on the spectrum between qualitative and emotional.

Think of curation as the kind of analytics that only a human mind can achieve. It's re-tweeting gone a little hyper. But rather than being able to re-tweet a tweet, curation lets you glom (regrettably more technical jargon) together into that re-tweet all sorts of valuable social jetsam and flotsam, including the original tweet, other tweets, Facebook entries, YouTube and other videos, blog posts and anything else that can be linked -- music, perhaps?

Curation shines by enabling people to bring together thematically related elements into a package that perhaps elicited an original feeling or thought or even an emotion. It may be the closest thing we have for conveying a zeitgeist, which in German means "the spirit of the time or the general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time." So says Dictionary.com, and so do I.

Persuading Without Pomposity

So curation gives each of us the chance to cobble together things and ideas that made us think. It's a bit like presenting a coherent argument, but rather than a lot of tight logic, the recipient is left to sort through the data and come to a conclusion. That's why I think it's a powerful tool for persuading people. No one likes to be led from premise to conclusion, especially in front-office-oriented business processes like sales and marketing 6 Ways to Use Social Media for Business. Free Guide.. Curating evidence from multiple sources gives us the ability to be persuasive without some of the cant of broadcast advertising for instance.

So, that's it. In a future which I envision that includes much higher travel costs, we'll need as many ways as possible to let the Internet do our bidding so that we don't need to get on a jet or into a car as we do now. Video is certainly one way to get the job, but so is curation and bringing together persuasive information, which may include video. It is certainly another thing to look at. That's why it interests me so much.

Computing » For Personal Finance Tracking, You Can Bank on Eqonomize

Eqonomize's approach to its GUI makes it more than a mere checking and savings account ledger. The drop-down menus, tool bar and action panel make a click-and-view style natural and efficient. Despite a few missing features, Equonomize takes the sweat and toil out of personal bookkeeping and banking tasks.

Eqonomize is a personal accounting package that is fast becoming my app of choice for all things financial. It is packed with features and is simple to learn. Plus, its KDE interface makes it an ideal solution to handle my small household economy.

Keeping track of personal and business finances is one of my essential computing tasks. That activity takes a secure browser to access financial institutions and a reliable, easy-to-use personal accounting app. The Linux platform has several really good financial apps that fit my needs. These include GnuCash, HomeBank and Skrooge.

Eqonomizer

Eqonomize goes head-to-head with these other Linux personal accounting packages. It is not as well-suited for small-business accounting as is GnuCash. But it has the simplicity of Homebank's single-entry accounting system despite its double-entry ledger structure. Other features that have endeared me to Eqonomize are its ability to handle recurring transactions and its resources in keeping me tuned into my budget.

Smooth GUI

Wrapping Eqonomize around KDE 4 was a good decision. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) goes a long way to making it easy to use this app without a financial degree.

That said, the features and performance available in the latest rendition, Version 0.6, could well be the end of the line. The last release was November 2008. Still, what you get in Eqonomize is a stable and polished personal accounting application that handles budgets, multiple bank accounts and securities transaction record keeping with relative ease.

The interface itself is clean and well-designed. Its approach makes Eqonomize more than a mere checking and savings account ledger. The drop down menus, tool bar and action panel make a click-and-view style natural and efficient.

Missing Stuff

What you do not get in Eqonomize is a connection to your bank or investment center from within the app. This app is strictly for planning and records analysis. For most users, this limitation is fine. I prefer to keep my banking records and online transactions isolated.

Another thing you do not get is the ability to reconcile checking account transactions. That could be a more serious omission if you rely on this app to handle your checkbook transactions.

Otherwise, Eqonomize comes close to being an all-around ideal choice for monitoring your personal finances. You can use a Web browser and a calculator to work around these two missing features.

Look and Feel

Eqonomize's layout works much like you would expect a personal finance app to function. Drop-down menus make short work of creating new accounts, setting up and maintaining new transactions and viewing account statistics.

Some financial programs expect you to start from scratch. Not so with this one. It is easy to import financial records from any application or online banking file download in CVS or QIF file format. Eqonomize's import function provides options for how to handle categories, columns and more. You can save or export tables as HTML files and charts in a number of different image formats, including PNG and JPEG.

The Settings menu makes it quick and simple to configure the tool bar and shortcuts. The Transactions and the Securities menus are loaded with options.

One of Eqonomize's biggest strengths is its action panel along the left edge of the app window. This puts access to Accounts, Expenses, Incomes, Transfers, Securities and Scheduled events a mouse click away. Clicking on any of these tabs opens the appropriate forms and fields for data entry in the large viewing window that consumes most of the Eqonomize window.

Feature Functions

Eqonomize provides an impressive list of bookkeeping features in five categories. The most significant ones in Bookkeeping are the ability to edit transaction properties and enter split transactions, refunds and repayments. You can set the parameters of the last entered transaction so it is automatically filled in when a description is entered.

Budgeting is less daunting with the ability to handle incomes and expenses separately as well as exclude categories from the budget. Eqonomize displays the previous month's performance and predicts future account values based on the budget and scheduled transactions.

Eqonomize displays the value, cost, profit and yearly rate for stocks, bonds and mutual funds. It can display a present total or show results for a specific period. It also estimates future value and profit based on previous quotation changes and dividends. Statistical readouts are readily available. For example, the main account view displays total values of accounts and categories for at present or a specified date and value change, as well as the budget/remaining budget for a designated period.

The application also shows line charts and tables for change of profits, incomes and expenses over time for your choice of all categories, a specific category or a specific description within a category. Similarly, pie charts and tables show comparisons of expenses or incomes between different categories, descriptions or payees/payers. You can display value, daily average, monthly average, yearly average, quantity and average value for a quantity.

Pick and Choose

Another strong attribute of Eqonomize is its compartmentalized structure. Unlike other personal financial applications, you do not have to buy into using all of this app's components.

For example, you might only need an electronic checkbook register or a simple way to track expenses and income to stay within your household budget. Eqonomize lets you use just what you need and ignore the other functions. What you do not need or do not use will not get in your way.

Whatever portions of the app you need, the forms are simple to complete. Clicking on any item in the display opens a detail window for data entry.
Using It

Eqonomize has a lot to like. The accounts view provides a concise summary of incomes and expenses by categories. You can edit each category and link it to a monthly budget. A data file at the bottom of the display makes adding new expenses a snap.

The Transfer tab has a similar display list with an editing form below it. This makes is a no-brainer to enter transfers among multiple accounts. Everything is in one accessible place.

Scheduling recurring events works almost the same. To enter a new event in the Schedule tab you must click on the New Schedule button and select Expense, Income or Transfer. Keyboard shortcuts makes this function even faster. Then fill in the details in the expense and recurrence tabs on the pop-up window.

Adding securities entries follows a similar approach. Select the New Security or New Transaction buttons after clicking the Securities tab. Then select the appropriate category. A sometimes complicated task could not be easier than Eqonomize makes it.

Bottom Line

Eqonomize takes the sweat and toil out of personal bookkeeping and banking tasks. The application shows an understandable overview of past and present banking histories.

Tracking your transactions, income and expenses with useful tables and basic charts could not be easier. Eqonomize's use-what-you-need mentality is a win-win solution to personal finance management.

Computing » Microsoft Throws a Juicy Mango to Manufacturers

Microsoft has released Mango to handset manufacturers. The new update to Redmond's Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system features new multitasking abilities, threaded communications systems, and a mobile version of Internet Explorer 9. It's a sizable update for the young OS, but will it be enough to help Microsoft catch up to Android and iOS?

Mango, the largest update yet to Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) still-young Windows Phone 7 mobile OS, was released to manufacturers Tuesday in what the software company called an "important milestone" in its fight to gain some ground in the competitive smartphone marketplace.

The update was first shown off in May and is being viewed as a dramatic upgrade from the basic Windows Phone 7 platform, released in 2010. Mango sports over 500 new features and has a much greater focus on apps and communication tasks now regularly performed on smartphones.

The first phone to roll out with the update is the ISI12T, manufactured by Fujitsu Toshiba Mobile Communications.

The update should be available to handsets beginning this fall, but no specific release date was given. The as-yet-unreleased iPhone 5, expected to be a chief smartphone competitor, is the subject of rumors of a September release as well.

New Features

Since the platform was previewed in May, researchers and developers have had time to look over some of the new features the company is touting for Mango's release. Giving attention to data that shows smartphones are becoming mainstream methods of communication, the company has attempted to integrate social networks, business tasks and personal data needs into one platform.

Developers didn't want to tangle the different functions, however, so one of the key updates on Mango is its emphasis on multitasking. Known as "App Multitasking," the feature lets users pop in and out of different apps efficiently.

"The multitasking -- switching between apps -- UI looks to be intuitive and useful," Daniel Ashdown, research analyst at Juniper Research, told TechNewsWorld.

Another attempt at efficiency is the threading feature. Using threading, a user can put all different types of messaging into one -- combining a text, e-mail and instant message, for instance, into one, easy-to-see conversation. The option also exists to combine personal e-mail accounts into one app to cut down on going back and forth between the two.

Another feature, Groups and Messaging, is probably the most talked-about service. It allows the user to put filters on social networks such as Facebook, so if there are only a handful of News Feed updates someone cares about, those are they only ones they have to see.

Groups can also come into play with the threading feature. A user could start a conversation -- say a Facebook chat with one of the select people in their Facebook group -- then continue in e-mail without a complicated switch. The history of that conversation will then be in a profile stored in the phone.

Microsoft is also excited that the platform will debut the mobile edition of Internet Explorer 9.

"The addition of IE9 is important, as Microsoft claims it can render webpages faster than browsers running on competitors devices," said Ashdown.

Also to be added are enhanced search features with Bing. Instead of just typing in something to the engine, a user can use a feature called "Local Scout" to find information on things like restaurants and shopping near his or her exact location.

Mango comes with a visual search, wherein a user can scan an item such as a DVD and then get directed toward a list of prices or reviews for the product. With a book, the user could be directed toward the Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle app and have it downloaded almost instantly. The visual search scan can also translate text into different languages.

Even with enhanced Internet access and capabilities and the compelling search features, the focus with Mango is on integration across social networks, e-mail and apps.

"The biggest thing with Mango is multi-tasking, but it is really feature-packed and represents what an annual release might look like for this platform," Al Hilwa, program director of application development software at IDC told TechNewsWorld.

Is It Enough?

Even with the draws from multitasking and compelling search and Internet features, it's unclear whether Mango has what it takes to make Windows Phone 7 a leader in the smartphone race for domination.

"It's definitely something that will bring Microsoft back into the game, but as far as the smartphone race, there's still a lot of challenges, obviously. Android and iPhone have made it a two-man race at this point," Brent Iadarola, research director for mobile and wireless devices at Frost & Sullivan, told TechNewsWorld.

One key will be to make sure a variety of prices and models of mobile devices can support WinPho7.

"I think it will take them some time to build up the level of sales. The most crucial aspect is having a variety of devices across prices and capabilities," said Hilwa.

Drawing innovative developers to Microsoft's platform, rather than Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iOS or Android, is also key. Microsoft's relationship with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) could be a great draw for developers.

"The largest attraction is the Microsoft-Nokia relationship. There's just such a large existing base of users globally of Nokia, that there's an instant attraction in that area. That can provide a very large addressable market without having to build it organically," said Iadarola.

The bottom line appears to be that while the updated platform features many draws, it alone may not be enough to attract a flock of customers.

"Some of the key elements of the update they talked about were threads and social network integration. Those are all definitely attractive to the platform and a great thing to highlight, and those will provide a unique differentiator, but I'm not sure it's enough to be a huge draw," said Iadarola.

Computing » Farewell, My Little Plastic Discs

The new Mac mini lacks an optical drive, as does the MacBook Air, which now holds the role of Apple's entry-level MacBook. Is the DVD drive headed the way of the 3.5-inch floppy drive? With all the content available online, from movies to software to music, most consumers probably won't miss the death of the plastic platter ... that is, unless ISPs begin changing the ways they do business.

I'm not sure that we can say Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) is the barometer for the consumer tech industry, but it's been either eerily prescient or a powerful catalyst in the demise of certain technological habits.

Apple ditched the old 3.5-inch floppy drive back in the '90s and followed up by creating the iPod, which brought attention to digital MP3 players and then dominated the mobile music space, even changing how people buy and consume songs. I can barely remember Sony (NYSE: SNE) WalkMan disc players now, and I can't remember the last time I actually bought a CD that I had to fight to unwrap.

And then there's the touchscreen iPhone. Remember having physical keyboards with buttons on smartphones? Sure, they still exist, but they are surprisingly marginalized and frequently absent from lists of top-of-the-line smartphones coming from the major manufacturers.

The latest bit of Apple game-changing action: removing the optical disc from the Mac mini. So why is this a big deal? After all, the previously underpowered Mac mini hasn't been a particularly amazing seller for Apple, at least not compared to the MacBook Air, MacBook and crazily popular iPad line. Why would such a simple move in a relatively unassuming little box mean anything at all?

A Tipping Point

On the surface, it seems like a clear signal from Apple that it doesn't really believe consumers need optical disc drives any longer. Want? Maybe. Need? Not so much.

Sure, Apple's iCloud storage facilities in the sky aren't here yet, but they aren't exactly a replacement for an optical drive, are they? So what's the drive for, anyway?

Loading software? With the Mac OS X App Store, it's not needed. Downloading and instantly installing software for my Mac ... I've got to say, I like that a lot.

Creating backups? I can back up a lot of documents on a basic compact disc, and even more on a DVD disc, but for many key backups, those discs are useless. My iPhoto library alone would take a stack of burnable DVDs for a backup.

An external hard drive is a faster, better solution. Speaking of photos, what about burning them to a disc and then heading over to a self-serve photo-printing kiosk in major retail stores? You can email them in advance and then simply pick up your photos. Or print them yourself at home.

Movies! Blu-ray!

Look, DVDs are still popular with millions of people, but for those who dance around the edge of new technology, they are fading fast. I'm a Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) subscriber, but I've got to say, I have a love-hate relationship with DVDs, and it's mostly hate. I hate feeding the DVD player in the living room. I hate waiting for the mechanical action to do its in-and-out and spin thing, and I'm particularly annoyed by waiting for DVD menus to load. I just want the movie, thank you very much, not a bunch of fancy DVD menu action. And I still can't shove a DVD into my iPhone or iPad and go mobile without ripping the DVD, which, again, is a hassle.

As for Blu-ray, for me the expense isn't worth the bother to get the extra quality, which doesn't matter if I want to watch something on my iPad anyway. Besides, it seems that Apple hasn't been particularly interested in supporting Blu-ray, well, ever, and shipping a Mac mini without any optical drive just pounds a nail into the Blu-ray-on-a-Mac hope altogether. Sure, I would have liked the idea of getting a Mac mini to use as a Home Theater PC (HTPC) for my living room, but with a $99 Apple TV available, I just can't seem to find enough desire to shell out for a whole HTPC at all. If I want to surf the Web or email from my couch, the iPad is just a superior option altogether.

If you haven't noticed, I'm trying hard here to find a reason why Apple is wrong ... or even a reason to care. In fact, I'm considering buying a Mac mini to replace my aging MacBook, and the lack of an optical disc drive barely comes into play at all. Would I miss having an optical drive enough to shell out US$79 for the MacBook Air SuperDrive, which connects with a simple short USB cable? Probably not. And burning music CDs for my vehicle? It's been months since I've bothered. I'm far more likely to use my old iPod nano or even iPhone in my pickup to listen to the music I've purchased.

Meanwhile, there are rumors that the hot-selling MacBook Air, which has never had an optical drive at all, might get a large sibling with a 15-inch display. Either way, the MacBook Air has now effectively replaced the low-end white MacBook, which has been discontinued for sale to everyday consumers. MacBook Pros, iMacs and the Mac Pro are now the only Macs that have optical drives. For how long?

Any Fallout?

There is one thing that concerns me about the seemingly inevitable death of the optical disc drive, and that's our Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Right now, Netflix's unlimited instant streaming service is so popular that the company is responsible for nearly a third of all peak-period downstream Internet traffic. If the DVD is fading in favor of Netflix, as well as iTunes purchases and rentals, might all this Internet traffic help push ISPs to really ditch their unlimited download service plans in favor of more tiered pricing? If my ISP right now started limiting my ability to download whatever I want when I want it, that would make DVDs more valuable for my movie-watching habit. And if I were a new Mac mini owner, that would be one less spot I could watch a movie from.

Of course, it seems to me the death of optical drives might help increase the ubiquity of USB-based thumb drives and lower the cost even more, making it possible to actually sell content on them in a retail form. Still, I think we're a ways away from a RedBox or Netflix or BlockBuster shipping out content on USB thumb drives.

As far as retail sales go, it's only a matter of time before the PC world becomes dominated by its own online application stores, removing yet another perceived need for optical drives in the larger PC world.

And the thing is, in another year, I don't think most consumers will miss optical drives at all.

Computing » New Initiative Aims to Stamp Out Cloud Lock-In

The Open Cloud Initiative made its debut at OSCON this week. The organization is set up to provide a common set of standards cloud providers can adhere to in order to let clients know their clouds are easy to migrate into and out of. Open cloud systems must represent all user data and metadata in open standard formats and expose all functionality through open standard interfaces.

Members of the cloud computing industry this week announced the Open Cloud Initiative, a non-profit organization to advocate open standards in cloud computing, at the OSCON 2011 open source convention in Portland, Ore.

The organization maintains a set of Open Cloud Principles, adherence to which will determine whether a given product or service can indeed bear the open cloud label.

It was set up because there is no common set of standards cloud service providers adhere to, which means data often can't be migrated between cloud service providers.

The open cloud standards seek to ensure interoperability and make it easy to enter and leave cloud services regardless of what systems they use.

This is the industry's second attempt at setting up an open cloud standard; Sun Microsystems launched an open cloud platform in March of 2009, but Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) entered an agreement to purchase the company the following month and nothing's been nothing heard about Sun's platform since.

It's not clear exactly how useful an open cloud initiative will be.

"People aren't doing as much with public clouds because they're concerned with security and other issues such as application behavior and legal issues, and you're seeing private clouds being installed," Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics, told LinuxInsider.

"As far as standards go, I don't see the private cloud space being that fragmented," Greg Potter, a research analyst at In-Stat, told LinuxInsider. "I don't see the OCI as having much of an impact."

Opening Up the OCI

One of the members of the OCI board of directors is Sam Ramji, who headed Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) CodePlex Foundation briefly after it was launched. The foundation has since been renamed the "OuterCurve Foundation.

Others include Shanley Kane, who's head of developer relations at Apigee; Marc Fleischmann, CEO and cofounder of RisingTide Systems; Rick Clark, a principal engineer at Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) and the chief architect for Openstack; and Noirin Plunkett, who's executive vice president of the Apache Software Foundation.

The Open Cloud Principles used by the OCI require multiple full, faithful and interoperable implementations, at least one of which is open source so that users have an alternative system that they can deploy and don't have to hire developers to implement open standards for them.

About the Open Cloud Principles

Users must be able to enter and leave open cloud services easily no matter who they are and what their IT systems consist of.

Open cloud systems must represent all user data and metadata in open standard formats and expose all functionality through open standard interfaces.

Open standards must be documented in all their details, published and be made both accessible and reusable at no charge. Any patents present on parts of the standards must irrevocably be made available royalty-free.

Other requirements for open standards are that any trademarks possibly present on identifiers must be used for non-discriminatory enforcement of compliance only, and that there must be multiple, full and faithful implementations, at least one of which must be licensed under an Open Source Initiative-approved license or placed into the public domain.

Examples of OSI-approved licenses are the Academic Free License 3.0 (AFL-3.0), the Apache License 2.0, the BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" license, the Eiffel Forum License V2.0, and various GNU General Public Licenses.

OCI: A Real-World Guideline or Just Vapor?

It's difficult to discern whether or not OCI will have much of a future.

Its principle -- to make data fungible between different cloud service providers in order to avoid vendor lock-in -- may well be moot for all but the smallest companies.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) has been offering both private and hybrid clouds for some years now, and June saw a slew of other vendors stampede into or expand their private or hybrid cloud offerings.

They include NTT America; HP (NYSE: HPQ), which extended its Hybrid Delivery solutions portfolio; and Dell (Nasdaq: DELL).

"I think the world will shake out into hybrid clouds," Clabby said.

Computing » The Patent World War

Apple's battling Android tablets in Europe, winning an injunction in a German court that bars Samsung from importing its Galaxy tab into most of the continent. The timing couldn't be worse for Samsung -- even if it manages to change the court's mind, its European launch of the device has already been hindered. Meanwhile, Kindle goes webby, Symbian says goodbye to North America, and Anonymous is not unanimous.

Even though Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) lawyer David Drummond laid into Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) in his public critique of their anti-Android patent lawsuits, it was Microsoft that really ended up tussling with the search giant on open ground. But that doesn't mean Apple and Oracle are easing up their own patent battles; so far, they're just saving their arguments for the courtroom.

Apple in particular is landing some big blows against one of Android's top device makers, Samsung. One of its targets is Samsung's Galaxy Tab, which Cupertino claims runs afoul of several of its patents. So far, Apple's managed to trip up an entire Samsung launch campaign. Just before the tablet was about to go on sale in Europe, Apple scored an injunction from a German court barring sales of the device across the entire continent -- except in the Netherlands, but Apple's hard at work giving it the business there too.

Apple's also said to be aiming its legal guns at the Motorola Xoom in an attempt to blockade that Android tablet from Europe as well.

In this particular case, though, Apple's claims have nothing to do with hardware or software. It's all about looks. Apple owns a Community design right on the iPad in Europe, which covers the appearance of the product. And of all the tablet computers out there, the Galaxy Tab might be the one that looks most like an iPad.

Still, when you get down to the appearance of something as simple as a tablet, how convincingly can you argue that one ripped off the design of another? If you're not talking guts or software, then you're talking about two flat, rectangular objects, glass on one side, metal and plastic on the back.

Yeah, they really do look a lot alike, because how else are you going to make a tablet? Are you going to make it circular? Tubular? Rhomboid? They might be about the same size, but that's just the size that fits well in human hands. Will Samsung be able to get out of this by just painting a racing stripe on the back and calling it a day?

Anyway, the court has issued its injunction, and regardless of how silly the argument may appear, perhaps Apple's real goal has been accomplished. For the price of its lawyers' fees, it's put a major banana peel under Samsung as it tries to capture European market share. At this point in the tablet game, that may be well worth the money.

Tunneling Under

A couple of weeks ago, various iOS apps -- like Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle e-reader app -- pushed out updates that actually removed a feature. In Kindle's case, it took away the ability to go directly from the app to a Web page where you could buy new e-books. That little button disappeared from the face of the app, and the whole Kindle system became that much clunkier to use.

It was done to abide a rule Apple recently began enforcing. If you can buy something through a native app, Apple insists that it's handled by way of a so-called in-app purchase -- Apple handles the transaction, payment is very easy on the customer's part because it's done through the iTunes account, and Apple gets a 30 percent cut for its trouble.

If an app maker doesn't want to go along with that, fine -- nobody's being forced to pump customers through Apple's payment system and give it nearly a third of its revenues. But app makers who shun in-app purchases aren't allowed to offer an easy alternative either. They can't drop in a convenient "buy it from the Web" button, like the one that was found on the Kindle app until recently. Instead, customers have to figure it out for themselves. It's not really that hard if you know your way around the Web, but still -- clunkier to use.

But now Amazon has found a new way to counter Apple's rules by taking a page from iPhone history. Back before the App Store existed, all iPhone apps were Web apps -- that is, Web pages accessed through the Safari browser that are designed to look and behave less like pages and more like apps running natively on the phone. As long as a Web app is coded correctly for Safari, Apple has zero control over what it can do. Cupertino's tastes, sensibilities and profit motivations are irrelevant as far as Web apps are concerned.

And that's what Amazon's done with its latest Kindle app, Kindle Cloud Reader. It's a Web app you access through Chrome or Safari on a desktop, or Safari on an iOS device. You can read all your Kindle books through it just like with the native iOS app, but you can also access the Kindle store very easily, add more books, and get right back to reading.

Of course, native apps have the benefit of being usable when you don't have Web access. But Amazon's given its Cloud Reader the ability to cache 50 MB of data, so you can access quite a lot of reading material until you get back to a data zone.

Web apps may never be quite as robust as native ones, but there's a lot you can do with HTML5, and other app makers may already be thinking about following Amazon into Web territory in order to escape Apple's requirements.

Landline Disconnect

All is not well at Verizon. The company's landline phone business is fading fast, and is it any surprise? Cellphones are more convenient, they have better features, you don't have to change your number if you move to another state, and the nicer ones are basically pocket-sized computers. Plus, wireless coverage in the U.S. is nearly universal for places with much of a population to speak of. Who needs a landline?

Yeah, I'll admit that landlines sometimes sound clearer, and you don't get that crazy-making half-second delay between the time you say something and the time the other person hears it. But the trend is clearly there. Landlines are on their way out.

That's caused Verizon to have to make some cuts to its landline business, and that includes making workers in that division make greater contributions to their pensions and health plans. But the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Communications Workers of America say what Verizon wants to do would steamroll half a century of collective bargaining gains. No agreement was reached, and 45,000 Verizon workers went on strike.

Service-wise, the most widely affected regions will be the Northeast U.S. and the Mid-Atlantic. Verizon says it has contingency plans on hand that will keep service disruptions to a minimum. But I'd guess that it's kind of hard to lose 45,000 workers overnight without anyone noticing.

The fact that Verizon would want to adjust its business to deal with the changing ways people are using technology doesn't come as a surprise. It's a given that some kind of cut is going to happen when one part of your body is shriveling up and falling off. But from the workers' perspective, those cuts might be a little easier to swallow if the entire company was also suffering, and with Verizon, that's not really the case. Its home Internet service is doing fine, and its wireless business is the biggest in the U.S.

Those leading the strike aren't exactly leading Verizon's wireline workers down a very easy path either. They're getting people to walk away from their jobs in a recessed and very gloomy-looking economy with high unemployment. But perhaps considering the shrinkage of landline business across the entire market, it may be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't predicament.

Unhedged Bets

Nokia's (NYSE: NOK) North American division finally got around to burying that corpse in its yard. In an interview with AllThingsD, the head of Nokia's U.S. operations, Chris Weber, said the handset maker is giving up on selling smartphones with the Symbian operating system in the U.S. market.

If you're a U.S. resident and you happen to notice this change take effect, then I guess you're paying really close attention, because it's already hard to spot a Symbian phone in the wild in this neck of the woods. The OS has been big in other parts of the world, where people are used to paying the full cost of a phone up front. But in America, customers are used to the service carrier footing most of the bill for a pricey phone and locking the buyer into a contract. Until recently, Nokia hasn't been very comfortable playing that game. Especially since iPhone and Android came around, Symbian has been in the shadows in the U.S., and now it's just going to fade to black.

But Weber didn't stop there. He also said Nokia's abandoning feature phones in the U.S. too. "Feature phones" is a nice way of saying "dumbphones" -- phones that work just fine as phones but don't have the guts or brains to run a wide selection of apps or handle the other kinds of tasks smartphones can. It's all a matter of degree, I guess, but you kind of just know them when you see them.

For example, most prepaid phones are feature phones. And Nokia has sold a fair amount prepaid feature phones in North America. But it's backing out of that game too, because selling cheap, prepaid phones was another way Nokia did business without the involvement of carrier subsidies, and starting now, Nokia needs carriers to be its friends.

Its focus on selling very expensive and very cheap phones, all without pushing buyers toward a carrier contract, was not a hit with the likes of AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint (NYSE: S). Those guys want customers locked in, and Nokia has decided it can't make gains in North America without appeasing them.

With this decision, Nokia's placed a very large bet on Microsoft. It's going all in on Windows Phone 7, and it'll need that platform to catch fire fast if it ever wants a real foothold in this corner of the world.
Remember, Remember the 5th of November ... or Just Go Ahead and Forget About It

Facebook has been speaking up more lately about the perils of online anonymity, stating that people usually are kinder, gentler Web users when they're made to use their real names during online interactions. This was probably not a welcome message to the hacker group Anonymous, for obvious reasons.

But certain members of Anonymous have bones to pick with Facebook that lie much deeper than the social network's stance on using an alias. Last month, a video was posted on YouTube by someone claiming to represent Anonymous, and it accuses Facebook of selling personal information to government agencies and clandestine security firms in order to help them spy on users. For that, Facebook must be destroyed, according to the video's narrator, who then goes on to explain a big Facebook attack will be coming on Nov. 5.

That's Guy Fawkes Day. And Anonymous members always run around in those Guy Fawkes masks. So this is totally legit, right?

Maybe not so much. The way that video came to public attention was a little odd. It was originally posted on YouTube over a month ago -- only this week did it start gathering widespread attention. It was promoted via a Twitter handle called "Op_Facebook," and as of Wednesday, that handle had posted exactly one tweet during its entire existence.

That's different from the way Anonymous usually makes its pronouncements. It's a pretty amorphous group without much in the way of a hierarchy, but when it wants to make a big all-points bulletin like this, it usually speaks through a mouthpiece like the AnonOps Twitter handle. And whoever was in charge of that handle this week didn't much care for the idea of attacking Facebook. Messages were posted on AnonOps stating that the so-called OpFacebook plan is being organized by some Anons, that not all of Anonymous agrees with it, and that attacking the messenger is not Anonymous' style.

One AnonOps message stated that the group prefers to face the real power, not the media it uses as tools.

Later it was reported that OpFacebook was actually an old Anonymous project intended to bring attention to what the organizers saw as the network's privacy deficiencies. But nothing ever got rolling on it, people got bored, and they gave up. But they forgot to clean up after themselves, that video was left hanging around, and suddenly there was a big panic over it.

But what if some part of Anonymous really did want to blow up Facebook? How would they even do it? The logistics would be really tricky. The site's highly fortified against DDoS assaults, so it would take an incredible amount of resources to knock it out cold. But there are other ways to screw around with a social network, including hacking into lots of users' profiles, or breaking into the site's own corporate servers and stealing inside intel.

So on the off-off chance this attack really does happen and it results in anything worth talking about, will it be fair to call it an "Anonymous" attack? If anyone can declare themselves a member of Anonymous and instigate an attack in its name, then perhaps technically you could. But it seems some Anonymous actions are more anonymous than others.