The biggies on the list were deals on Norton Internet Security and Kaspersky Antivirus. Though I had planned to pass out the post card sized flyers to the people during the celebration, that never happened, as other things intervened, and the stacks of the flyers got left on a table.

A few days ago, I realized I had not given the flyers out and tried to download the 1 year trial of the AV product, so that I was sure that I would not be wasting my time to call, or otherwise notify, the party attendees that they could get the software free before November 30.

When I got to the site, I entered the information, and was told that all the copies of the product had already been downloaded. I knew this was bogus because only my son and I had ever seen the URL to go to, to claim the software.

I contacted the company through their site, and was given a case number with some truly unhelpful choices to pick from, to categorize the problem. Now I am the very first to know that there will never be a category that catches every problem, and if there was, the page would be the kind that scrolls forever. However, a simple box for Other, would have been nice.

Two days later I got some lame form letter with instructions to do something I could not do, as I have no serial number to begin with, so retrieving it would be difficult. I did try however, thinking that there might be a communication problem relating to the written form of the English language, but no, I was told since I had no serial number in the first place, there was nothing to retrieve.

Another contact, and this time nothing, no contact in return. I wonder how many other house party participants had this problem? It certainly would not surprise me. Also, it does not make me very favorably inclined toward their products in the future. I have no problem with not getting things free, but if you, as an individual, or you, as a company, invite me to receive something gratis, I damn well better get it.

Kaspersky Labs is on the SHorT list.

Fortunately, the nice people at McAfee have an offer that is better than what Kaspersky was offering. It is available to everyone (you need not have attended a Windows 7 Launch Party) and it covers 3 machines! Yippee!

The URL is here, enjoy and be wary of offers from strangers named Kaspersky!

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This morning, which is odd enough, as not much news in the computer business breaks on Saturday, a story comes from Bright Side of News, telling us that Intel is contacting possible partners who will build the upcoming Larrabee graphics cards.

Currently, there isn’t a project in Intel that is pulling more resources [both human and financial] than Larrabee. Given the status of the program, we are not surprised to see top engineering dogs from CPU divisions flying between Larrabee centers, pulling everything together in order to get Larrabee out the door during 2010. Our sources still say that product introduction prior to CeBIT 2011 is unwise and risks damage to Intel’s brand image, given the immature state of the project.

So it is not something coming out at CES in a couple of months; the information up until now has been correct, things are coalescing, but nothing is solid just yet.

Then again, we’ll see who will win - engineering attitude is now in the front seat. It is more than obvious how marketing had its way with Larrabee so far, and while talking crazy promises to the press or analysts ["We'll have a 32nm CPU die and 45nm Larrabee die for notebooks in May 2009" - former Intel Exec] can’t cost you more than a temporary stock bump or downgrade, talking the same to eco-system who then has to invest serious money into preparing their own infrastructure - can cause a loss of several million real-world dollars. For instance, we learned that one whole marketing campaign [digital future livelihood] was created for Larrabee and ultimately used on a product line from Intel’s competitors speaks volumes in what situation some AIBs found themselves in.

I find it odd that Intel feels it needs partners on this, I would have thought all Larrabee parts would be coming from some yet-unknown location with a genuine Intel branding.

In order to compensate for the lost investment that angered partners who signed and invested significant resources in preparation for “Larrabee coming in first quarter 2009″, Intel had to change the attitude from “we’re almighty” to “we know we screwed up”. In fact, in conversations with our sources, it was interesting to see the change that showed to them how Intel managed to eat a humble pie and wants to talk on equal terms.

That Intel would ever have to eat crow in this day and age is amazing. Again, there simply seems to be no explanation I can think of, other than the fact that Intel may feel that add-in-board status for graphics is dying and will see one generation from Intel, and one generation only, that it has not been planning to release everything Larrabee as Genuine Intel.

This is quite significant change, since back in 2007 and 2008, we were hearing AIBs telling us of the attitude by top Intel Larrabee guys such as Patrick P. Gelsinger, Jim Woodruff and others. That attitude was that “AMD is harmless, nVidia is dead.” The only two companies that signed on-board were EVGA and XFX, with several other vendors being refused due to lack of global presence. Allegedly, it was this attitude that annoyed AIB [Add-In-Board] manufacturers with some major partners refusing to commit to the program. However, in the light of Larrabee troubles and missed deadlines, Intel actually turned into a more responsible company. Intel also had one unexpected ally - according to our sources, nVidia is refusing to eat the humble pie even though they massively screwed up with GT300/Fermi/Furbie and that’s angering a lot of people in their ecosystem.

The difference in attitude between companies with delayed products is quite interesting: while nVidia is now putting majority of GT200 chips in Tesla cards [due to a recent sea of orders] and leaving their GeForce partners bleed to dry, Intel has re-approached its previously signed partners and some hopefuls with a new attitude. The chip giant is now offering to bundle chipsets at “rock-bottom to free” prices with Larrabee cGPUs as a compensation for created expenses. Before you cry foul and “antitrust”, this is a standard business practice of compensating for previous screwups made by one party. This is nothing unusual.

Nothing changes allegiances like money, or the prospect of it. By bundling chips like this, the manufacturers can offer the video cards at lower prices (to sell more of them) yet be making more profit per board, which of course, is aces with them. It tends to make them sit up and say, “Yes, please!”

BSN believes that the differences in the market will be good, with nVidia and ATi having to sit up and act like grown-ups at the graphics table, ready to treat their customers with respect. Perhaps little S3 will get more serious about things also, knowing it might just be time to put up or shut up, before it gets squeezed out of the graphics market permanently.

We know that’s a good thing. And should prices go down for middle to top line cards, so much the better.

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Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana

Prayers for, and condolences to, all those involved in the Ft. Hood difficulties this week.

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What does the industry expect? The upgrade cycle of three years ago was weak because people quickly became aware of the porcine qualities of the original release of the Windows Vista product, so underwhelming that two sets of collected updates could do nothing to remove the stigma (or smell of pork).

Now we have a Windows product that is only 5 years late and the world has lost confidence in itself. These conspire to bring an air of caution of the unknown, so that the only ones fully excited about the Windows 7 experience are those who were hoodwinked into Windows Vista, and then, trying to get some relief, put Windows 7 Beta and/or Release Candidates on their machines.

Those people involved in Mr. Ballmer’s great experiment found that the earlier upgrade had given them the ability to run Windows 7 without many problems, so any hardware switching desire was minimal. (And though now it seems as though the experiment was a great move, hindsight tells that it was the only sensible move, as no one not involved in the beta program was going to believe that the smell of pork no longer permeated the product that was Windows).

The only section of the hardware market that could have expected a really large boost, graphics card manufacturers, have been let down miserably by production problems (nVidia and ATi) or engineering problems producing nothing but vapor (Intel). S3, with its small continuing, and upcoming, products, has been the only bright spot in the graphics market, and that is only a small flicker of light and hope.

So the rabbis gave the seal of approval to Windows 7, but that was not enough to overcome the economy and the Microsoft self promotion, where Microsoft wins relatively big, but does nothing to pull the OEM PC makers along because the public can upgrade at roughly the half the cost of any other recent cycle.

With the only section of the computer market that has shown growth being netbooks, Intel is happy, but Microsoft loses because Windows 7 is still a bit stodgy for the Atom powered netbooks.

Many people are thinking about the upcoming Black Friday festivities (only festive if you aren’t on the key punching side of the register). With deals like the HP Celeron laptop for $299 at Walmart, it might seem as though the holiday season will boost things greatly, but some economists are predicting a shallow sales slump during the season. One goes so far as to say that, due to huge discounts on Black Friday, it will be the largest BF on record, followed by a complete flop for the rest of the season, making everyone wonder what has happened.

So Mr. Ballmer will be slightly pleased, but has to wait to do the monkey boy dance until the corporate citizens start to make the jump to Windows 7, and Mr. Dell will have to hope he and the other OEMs can get a huge bounce when alien beings come down during the holidays and remove current PCs, taking them back to the home world for study.

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the computer industry’s new spokesperson – chosen to show faith in the arrival of an eventual upgrade cycle

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Quote of the day:

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.

- Bertrand Russell

Everyone who reads certainly must know by now that Internet Exploder is the slowest  of the most used browsers, and it has only been in recent memory that it could make any sort of claim as being somewhat safe. Internet Exploder 8 had been sped up by a fair amount over IE7, but has recently lost ground due to reliability fixes sent out in the last 30 days.

Though that may be true, I don’t think many expected Chrome to be placed as the default, but it certainly has to do with companies like Sony grabbing some change for a little work on the assembly line.

Download Squad says that several more manufacturers are on board with jumping ship to Chrome. Why not? It makes those OEMs some dollars, and if the customer doesn’t like it, it is changed to IE easily enough.

The EC might be content with Microsoft’s browser ballot screen, but that’s not stopping Google from getting OEMs to turn away from Internet Explorer on their own.

Google already has deals with several OEMs to include their software, of course. They’ve been shipping Google Desktop on OEM pcs for quite some time now, and their plans to drop Google Chrome on new users have come to fruition as well.

As you can see, I unboxed a new Sony Vaio laptop running Windows 7 yesterday. Nestled amongst the other desktop icons was the tri-color Chrome orb.

Not only was Chrome pre-pinned to the Windows 7 taskbar, but a quick look at the internet options on the laptop revealed sad news for Internet Explorer: it had been bumped from default web browsing duties.

If we weren’t already in the middle of an all-out browser war, the introduction of Google Chrome as the preinstalled default on Windows PCs could well set things off.

While I’m all for dumping Internet Exploder like last week’s garbage, I’m not sure about the reasoning behind putting Chrome as the default. You see, for many sites, the expectation is some version of IE, and certain business sites balk on anything but IE, and lately, but still less than always, Firefox.

Certainly there is no money in using Firefox as the default, but it is going to make for happier customers, that don’t get the message that a site can’t be accessed (properly) by anything other than IE or Firefox. Since nothing is stated about it, and I have not tried out a PC that has Chrome as default, I can’t say as fact, but I feel confident that there are some support calls to Sony about getting IE back, or Firefox installed.

Hopefully those people with Chrome on their PCs as the standard browser haven’t read about the exploits to that browser that are being reported in the security section of ZDNet.

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Yes, it’s still true…

In the articles covered are making the jump, getting around at first on OS X, getting your files moved to the new machine, running Windows on the Mac (should you need to), moving hardware (if possible and needed) and software to that Apple machine, and then understanding the security  of the Mac.

Each one of the articles is just one or two pages, and is packed with information. Since the man uses both of the operating systems almost daily, he has the easily understood instructions to make the changes, and keep using Windows on a Mac, if needed.

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Is it true that once you go Mac , you never go back?  Steve Ballmer sure hopes it isn’t.

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An AMD/ATi 5870 with 2 GB of GDDR5 is shown in a blurb on Tech Connect, and also shows that, both to be able to easily work in the AMD Eyefiniti setup, supporting up to 6 monitors per video card, and to be able to give adequate cooling through the second slot, the Display Port connectors make the job almost child’s play.

Pretty cool.

Although not yet announced an interesting new Cypress-based card has popped up online, a Radeon HD 5870 boasting 2GB of GDDR5 memory, which is double the amount found on current models, and featuring no less than six Mini DisplayPort outputs. Dropping the dual DVI and HDMI ports for more DP connectors enables AMD to offer a top notch, DirectX 11 solution that supports multi-monitor configurations of up to six displays via the ATI Eyefinity technology - pretty sweet if you can afford the setup.

Apart from the I/O change and extra VRAM, the new card also comes with an 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connector, as opposed to the ‘regular’ HD 5870 which makes use of two 6-pin plugs. The 6DP Radeon HD 5870 packs 1600 Stream Processors and has stock GPU/memory clocks of 850/4800 MHz.

The Eyefinity-crazy card’s price is yet unconfirmed.

For the programmer, the insane multitasker, or the guy just wanting to impress, this Eyefiniti setup is an incredible stride in computing. Though I doubt too many home users will want, or be able to, take this to its possible limits, of 4 cards and 24 monitors, I can see many people wanting to easily use 3 or 4 monitors, especially since it has always been cheaper to get more screen real estate by going with smaller monitors, and more of them.

Thirty inch monitors are still quite pricey, but 23″ monitors are getting to be almost the sweet spot, so 3 or four of these will be much cheaper than 2 - 30″ monitors on  a standard video card with two outputs.

It makes imagining yourself as Hugh Jackman in the movie “Swordfish” much easier. You don’t need 50KW to be funky either…

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more pixels are always better, don’t you agree?

•

That could be the forecast for Intel, as we have news that the Federal Trade Commission might jump on the dogpile that is forming on Intel. The suit expected to come is said to parallel the one filed by AMD in 2005 and may be huge in its scope.

I think we have more than enough information to see that at least some of what is alleged will be proven. Think back, if you will, and try to remember without any lenses or filters of any kind, the landscape of computing in 2003 – mid 2005. AMD clearly had the best performing chips, both on the desktop and on the server. It was being heralded as amazing by the press, and everyone, including AMD, was awaiting the huge adoption of AMD chips for that iteration of the upgrade cycle.

It never really happened, and in a market where performance always trumps any sort of loyalty that was very strange.  Remember, just as has happened now, with the Core2 architecture, back then the K8 architecture was massively faster than anything from Intel, along with being more efficient. AMD should have zoomed to at least 35% of the entire market,

A story from the same author that I quoted on the New York AG’s suit, from ComputerWorld fleshes out this story a bit more -

With New York filing antitrust charges against Intel Corp. this week, industry watchers say the Federal Trade Commission will join the fray against the chip maker, maybe even before the end of the year.

N.Y. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo leveled the state’s suit against Intel on Wednesday, adding one more log on the legal pile for Intel, which has been dealing with related legal issues in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Korea.

This latest suit piggybacks on a lawsuit filed by Intel’s biggest rival, AMD, in U.S. District Court in 2005, and expected to go to trial this coming spring.

But industry analysts say if the FTC launches its own legal attack against Intel, it will be a whole new ball game for the chip company.

“It wouldn’t surprise me to see the FTC jump into the fight with an antitrust action of their own against Intel, if only so that they don’t look like they’re being lazy in the face of actions from the European Union and now New York,” said Dan Olds, principal analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group.

“If this happens, it could result in a very long, drawn out legal battle that could make WWI trench warfare seem quick and efficient by comparison,” he said.

Rumors started circulating on Wednesday that Cuomo’s office had been in talks with the FTC before it filed its own charges this week.

John Balto, a former policy director at the FTC and currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told Computerworld that the FTC has been working long and hard on a case against Intel. He contends the FTC probably will seek an injunction against the company, and that there’s a good chance it would come in the next few months.

The article continues with the statement that when the FTC jumps into the fray, it’s time for Intel to worry. The problem is likened to a suit that took nearly 13 years in the last century nearly breaking the back of IBM in the process.

Though the impetus from the suit might seem to come from the past, the quoted person, John Balto, states that it comes instead from what is to be avoided in the future.

“The New York case is a case about the past,” Balto said. “The FTC case will be a case about the future. It will be focusing on dynamic competition, the impact on innovation, on how Intel’s conduct … is going to harm competition and consumers in the future, stifling the ability of new rivals to emerge…”

“It will take Intel’s case from a whole different perspective and bring a whole new dimension of concerns,” he said.

Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, said he thinks Cuomo timed the New York suit so it would precede the FTC’s own action.

“I doubt [New York] would do this if they weren’t pretty certain the FTC was going to act relatively soon,” added Enderle. “My guess is they are just trying to grab the spotlight before the FTC, which has more money, gets it.

Hillard Sterling, an antitrust attorney at law firm Freeborn & Peters LLP, also sees New York’s lawsuit as a signal that the federal government will be taking action soon. He said that if the government gets involved, other defendants may be quick to jump on the bandwagon and try to take advantage of an Intel under siege.

The main takeaway here is that the Intel position is really untenable, in that it clearly did do things to stifle competition from AMD, and anyone else for that matter. No amount of Intel fanboy whining can make that go away. It is not a question of current performance, for the “i” series processors are clearly superior to anything AMD currently has, but one of what might have been, had AMD not been put on the ropes by unsavory means, and brought to the point where many wondered if the company could continue.

Now, with AMD still in a tremendous money crunch, it might not be able to take full advantage of the drag this will put on Intel, but, on the other hand, nVidia might possibly be able to open that can of ‘whoop-ass’ that the company’s head spoke about a while back. nVidia you see, for all of the troubles it is supposedly experiencing, is doing quite well financially, and those rumors of a CPU could not only be true, they could be game changing.

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Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others. Oscar Wilde

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A very good idea for very casual users, or others that realize that the usual post paid plans are no deal (5GB per month for $60).

Following in Virgin Mobile’s footsteps, Verizon is offering a prepaid laptop broadband wireless service.

The offering will let people pay for broadband wireless access as they need it, rather than subscribing to a monthly plan. It could appeal to infrequent business travelers or people on vacation.

After buying the US$130 USB modem, users can pay for broadband wireless access from Verizon in three different increments that cover time and data consumption. For one-day usage, people will pay $15 and get 75MB of data. Weekly prepaid access costs $30 and includes 250MB. The monthly offer costs $50 for up to 500MB of usage.

Because most people have trouble calculating how much data they use, Verizon offers a chart showing about how many one-page e-mails, typical Web-page downloads and low-resolution photo downloads would be included in each payment plan.

Virgin, which uses Sprint’s network and launched its service in June, offers better deals. Virgin’s $10 offer gives users 100MB of access over 10 days. Its $20 offer is good for 30 days and allows 250MB of access. For $60, Virgin customers get 1GB that they can use over a month.

Verizon’s offer goes on sale from its stores on Nov. 15 and at national retailers, which have not yet been named, on Nov. 20.

Verizon and Sprint both offer subscription plans that cost $60 per month and include 5GB of data.

As far as the user accustomed to wired connectivity is concerned, these are all ridiculously high in cost, but the offers are there for the user who needs connectivity in a pinch.

Perhaps if WiMAX really gets going the user base might see these costs per megabyte go down, but it is not going to happen soon. This is the provider’s baby, one of the last means of really soaking the public on a limited service.

Use a wire if you can.

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The Information Week article speaks out on the bad name, and other things-

Sure, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd and IBM CEO Sam Palmisano spit nails at each other over most things, but on this they agree: while cloud computing has tremendous potential as a technological approach, the term itself is a lousy name. We’re with you, guys, but please: whatever the new name is, no more three-letter acronyms, okay?

As we discussed last week, Hurd’s bullish on the concept but can’t stand the name: “I don’t like the term—no, I don’t like the term.”

And at least some of his distaste must stem from a recent related round of boos he received from an audience of CEOs:

“I had to give a presentation to a group of CEOs, and I was representing us as an industry (circles his arms to crowd as indicator of inclusion), and here I am talking about the cloud and all kinds of cool things that can happen with the cloud, and, and I got a lot of boos, um, after that, and it started with the whole term, ‘cloud.’ From a non-technical CEO perspective, cloud computing doesn’t sound very clear to them. So their view was, ‘Can you guys ever come up with terminology that sounds a little more business-friendly than ‘cloud computing?’

I don’t care at all about business friendly. I simply don’t like stupid naming conventions that try too hard to be cute. (I’m certain that is why I truly hate the KDE naming conventions – they are way too precious for me.) It’s also why I hate other terms like ‘mashup’ , when collage would have worked well, and does not sound like something done to a child’s serving of potatoes.

” ‘Because,’ ” Hurd said in speaking for the CEOs in that earlier audience, ” ‘we’d like to be in the clear skies—we’d like to be with simple things we can understand—so if this cloud computing is so cool, try to break this down into more simple, clear services that people can actually get from this thing that’s gonna help my business be a better business.’ ”

Closely reflecting Hurd’s sentiments, IBM’s Palmisano earlier this week referred to the cloud-computing name as “an unfortunate name,” and shared his preference for the alternative of “highly virtualized infrastructure” in this context:

“”Cloud computing—what we’re really talking about is ‘highly virtualized infrastructure’—it’s also just beginning, but it’s an unfortunate name.

“There’s tons of hype in the beginning and then the industry starts to ascertain what’s real and what’s not, and that’s where we are now. It’s starting to take off on the consumer side, which has been very visible, but we don’t play there, we’re an enterprise company—but even with all the talk and rhetoric about cloud starting to slow down, the real thing behind the name is starting to ramp up . . . .”

And since Oracle’s Larry Ellison has certainly made fun of the cloud-computing name on more than one occasion, it looks like we have a consensus. So the next question is, what should this computing platform with the high potential but the lousy name be called? Please send your suggestions to me at bevans@techweb.com, and after I go through the entries and pick out the best of all, my colleague Rob Preston will dip into his own pocket and send the winner $100,000 cash. Enter early, enter often!

I propose it be called sub-space computing, as a nod to the fact that many computing people are also rabid Trek fans. After all, sub-space is where things go to travel long distances, with no intervening things to muck things up.

Sounds perfect to me.

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Death Star computing? Nope, that won’t do …

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A new note popping up in Maximum PC tells of a BF Only Xbox 360 for $99. It’s not strictly $99 that day, but if you’re the patient type it can be. Sort of a Black Friday every Friday (or Saturday) in November.

It looks like Walmart is gearing up for Black Friday a little early this year. How so? The mega-chain has begun advertising several one-day in-store specials slated for this Saturday November 7th at 8AM.

Among the sale items is an Xbox 360 Arcade console for $199, which will be accompanied by a $100 gift card. That essentially brings the price down to just $99, provided you can make use of the gift card.

Other sale items on tap for the one-day special include a 15.6-inch HP notebook with an Intel Celeron processor for a shade under $300, a Blu-ray player for $150, a 42-inch 1080p Sharp LCD TV for $498, and a few more items.

According to Fudzilla, this is just the first of ongoing Saturday specials that will continue until Black Friday.

I wonder why Walmart is the recipient of this deal, as Microsoft is not known for working heavily with discounters. This has more of a shady, too-good-to-believe  Best Buy feel to it.

No doubt the lines will form early – they should probably simply line the stuff like this up in the aisles on the way in, so that the price hawks can dive on it quickly.

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•

The market price usually settles down around the middle of the following February, and once again, the small builder gets the green light for economical RAM purchases.

Unfortunately, there appears to be a perfect storm brewing, with the release of Windows 7 conspiring to increase computer purchases, the usual number of holiday computer purchases, and the simple fact that the possible end of an unnatural memory price slump is about to occur.

Maximum Computer puts it this way -

The DRAM market slumped to a 15-year nadir last year. But it is now moving briskly on the road to recovery. According to DRAMeXchange, contract prices for 1Gb DDR2 and 1Gb DDR3 chips shot up by 15.7% and 10.9%, respectively, in the late part of October. Nanya Technology’s vice president and spokesperson Pai Pei-Lin expects an encore from the DRAM market in November. He believes November will bring yet another double-digit rise in contract quotes for DRAM memory.

If you are a computer OEM, this doesn’t really affect you, as you have already bought ahead at a set pricing for some time. This is, in fact, what is driving up the holiday prices, as those OEMs knew ahead of time that their demand would rise, and bought (some would say sucked up) larger quantities planned for the fourth quarter.

For the small builder on a budget, it might be a good idea to wait until February, giving a way to collect more money for that stupendous upcoming build, and then get the best prices, while also being able to choose from some newer things which are always debuted at CES in January.

When you see those new pieces from the Consumer Electronics Show come around, and the lower prices of memory coming back, you’ll be glad you waited.

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turn to more productive things during the holidays, worrying about DRAM pricing does nothing to change it…be calm Grasshopper, the binary spirits will guide you in times of quiet.

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Explaining that it will be a two step transform, we are not allowed to know the exact reasons why. It might be a process that the developer’s believe is too much for one jump, from a programming standpoint, or, perhaps it is being considered too large a stride for the users.

The developer’s fully admit that the Firefox look is frumpy and dated, and the story in ComputerWorld tells why -

Noting that Firefox’s current Windows interface feels “dated and behind,” Mozilla wants to spiff up Firefox 3.7 by embracing the “glass” style Microsoft debuted in Vista, moving to a more neutral color palette, hiding the menu bar, trimming the menu to just two items — “Page” and “Tools” — and combining “Stop” and “Reload” into one general-purpose button.

The decision to hide the menu bar, which Mozilla initially said would be replaced by a “ribbon”-style design similar to the often-derided look of Microsoft’s Office 2007, raised a ruckus in September when users expressed their displeasure. Mozilla later clarified its planning documents, and denied it would “ribbonize” Firefox.

Firefox 4.0 will continue the interface changes. Current ideas for that 2010 release include giving users the option of moving the browser’s tabs to the top of the application’s display, a so-called “tab-on-top” look that other browsers, notably Chrome, have adopted.

The Firefox interface was dated and behind from the start. That splash of color with vast expanses of overwhelming beige was advanced for Windows 3, but nothing more.  The dearth of beige was one of the things I found so enticing about Opera.

Other possible interface changes in Firefox 4.0 would combine the browser’s address and search bars — another visual element within Chrome — and remove the status bar at the bottom of the display.

The Firefox interface design plans have been spelled out in a long entry on Mozilla’s wiki.

Since I no longer use Firefox (whenever I install a BSD or Linux distribution on a machine, the very first addition is Opera. I find the Opera way of doing things much easier, and I don’t have to ever put up with the ’sea of beige’.) I can’t say I speak for the average user, but I do know that the combined address and search bar in Chrome for lots of people I interact with is one of the deal breakers.

Mozilla preempted criticism of some of those moves by saying it is not copying Chrome in particular, or other browsers in general. “We are not trying to make Firefox look like any other browser,” Mozilla stated in the planning document. “Firefox is Firefox. Similarities between browsers are unavoidable. They all have shared lineage and are based off of their predecessors. The basics of what a browser does and how it does it is already established. Browsers are all trying to solve the same problems so evolutionary ideas that are similar are inevitable.”

I find this very disingenuous. Clearly the Mozilla people are trying to increase share, and include the things it thinks are best from other browsers. No one can assess blame for that, but ‘lifting’ pieces from other browsers directly is not good form.

I find I use Chrome as a secondary browser, and I don’t expressly dislike it, but other than using it to be familiar, I don’t find anything about the interface especially innovative, usable, or handsome. I believe that 8 out of 10 would answer “speed” when asked why they use it. It is like that quick and dirty batch file that used to be thrown together to accomplish something that no other program would do – you used the batch, got the results, and put it away until next time, because there was nothing to look at.

Firefox has become big because it is not Internet Exploder, but also because of its modularity, with the various extensions. If the developers wanted to make Firefox truly innovative, it would make large chunks of the code interchangeable, kind of like a Lego approach. If you could add the interface of Opera, with the extensibility that Firefox has already, and a dose of speed from Chrome, with a possibility of substituting a Chrome-like face if that becomes the user’s preference. you could really ‘clean up’ because most everyone’s choices could be accommodated.

The article goes on with -

Firefox, he said, didn’t mimic Microsoft’s Internet Explorer look and feel when it debuted. “We innovated,” Beltzner said. Now, however, things are different. “All the browser UI designers have been experimenting, [drawing] from each other,” he said.

As an outside observer, I look and see that not much has happened to the Firefox interface from the start, and, when I did use it, I wasn’t overly enthused – the best thing was that it was not IE. I later became fond of extensions, but they were always lagging behind the development of the main program – sometimes far behind.

Opera has been an innovator, and when I see things in Firefox or Chrome, much of the time they have previewed in Opera. Also, it is not as if the lifted ideas were being better executed. Many times the execution was not as well done. It really does amaze that Opera has not grown much more rapidly – the only answer I’ve been able to posit is the fact that Opera, though free, is not open source. Lots of people are on the bandwagon due to the idea of open source, and I certainly understand.

The new look and feel will most likely please Windows users, but how will it work on other operating systems? Time will tell if changing to try to capture the latest fashion look is a smart move. (Still, I’m all for as much beige removal as possible.)

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Quote of the day:

Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

- George Bernard Shaw

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It’s strange how many times things can be fluffed over in such a way that to the casual observer they seem completely different. At least that’s what we are requested to believe.

From slashdot we have a little note -

As Windows 7’s market share passes 3.6%, up from 1.9% the day before launch, llManDrakell notes an experiment they did over at Sophos. They installed Windows 7 on a clean machine — with no anti-virus protection — with User Access Control in its default configuration. They threw at it the next 10 virus/worm samples that came in the door. Seven of them ran; UAC stopped only one baddie that had run in the absense of UAC. “Lesson learned? You still need to run anti-virus on Windows 7.”

I suppose someone had to say it, but not in any way you would notice. You see when you install there is a notice almost immediately that no antivirus program is running, coupled with the suggestion that you try out their spiffy new product, called Microsoft Security Essentials.

I would think that the coupling of those two things just might clue you in.

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certain things need to be pointed out to some more than once…per day.

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Now it is seen that Andrew Cuomo is trying to earn another stripe by righting the wrongs done by Intel for a number of years. It seems like things have been going bad for Intel for a while this year, as the European Union has been haranguing the company for the better part of this year, for the exact same thing.

The story is further elaborated on in an article from Tech Connect -

The 2009 legal nightmare continues for Intel as just six months after being fined a massive €1.06 billion by the European Commission, it is now taken to court in the US too on antitrust charges. Today New York’s attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo filed a complaint against Intel claiming that the number one microprocessor manufacturer has violated state and federal anti-monopoly laws by engaging in illegal actions in order to maintain its monopoly power and prices in the market for microprocessors.

This is not the first time that Intel has had to fight off these kinds of allegations. The problems began almost as soon as upstart AMD had the temerity to try to compete with Intel, instead of simply being a second source for them.

According to Cuomo’s complaint, the last few years have seen Intel offering computer makers billions of dollars in ‘rebates’ in exchange for agreements to use only its CPUs and not those of main rival, AMD. Apparently, Intel also threatened to and punished PC builders that were thought to be working with its competitors. The ‘penalties’ included cutting off payments the PC makers received from Intel, directly funding the manufacturers’ competitors, and ending joint development ventures.

Ooh, payola, courts don’t like that kind of talk. Some little nit to pick about fair-play. It’s sad it takes so very long for these things to come to a head, for if it had actually come sooner, say when the Opteron and Athlon 64 were trouncing anything with a little “i” on it, and Netburst architecture had become a dirty couple of words, AMD might have had the development money to jump out with another set of winners.

“Rather than compete fairly, Intel used bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “Intel’s actions not only unfairly restricted potential competitors, but also hurt average consumers who were robbed of better products and lower prices. These illegal tactics must stop and competition must be restored to this vital marketplace.”

Nothing like getting your unfair share…if you’re Intel. Hopefully this will progress through the courts while people still have memory of the comparative performance of the early Opteron and Athlon 64. Many people today seem to think that AMD has always been an also-ran, with no idea of the earlier triumphs of the K7 and Thunderbirds, while Intel was trying hard to keep up with a Pentium III.

Intel is said to have paid Dell no less than $2 billion in rebates in 2006 alone, and to have granted the company a privileged position over other PC makers in order to not adopt AMD’s CPUs for its products.

Dell arch-rival, HP also received hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates but for capping company sales of AMD-based products at 5% of its business desktop PCs. HP was also threatened by Intel with the derailment of its server development if it wouldn’t slow down the promotion of AMD products.

Not sure if Carly Fiorina was at the helm of HP during this time, but I’m certain if she was, it will come out, now that she has announced she is running in California for Barbara Boxer’s seat in the Senate.

As for another major player, IBM, it was threatened to not promote AMD-powered servers, but also got a cool, cool but illegal, $130 million from Intel to not release AMD servers.
To read the complaint against Intel in full click here (PDF file).

It shows that greed seeks its own level, and it does not matter how much money a company makes, greed always wants more, many times to exclusion of laws, morals, and scruples.

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Quote of the day:

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn’t any good.

- Robert Pirsig

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The Phenom II X4 965 is now rated at 125W instead of 140W, which will certainly allow its usage in many more motherboards. Since the price is quite low, it makes for a very powerful system on the cheap.

The story about the chip is otherwise the same, as verified in the article in Tech Connect -

Today AMD updated its processor list to include the C3 revision of its Phenom II X4 965 processor. The new X4 965 BE has the same price ($195) and frequency (3.4 GHz) as the older 965 model, it still features 2MB of L2 cache and 6MB of L3 cache, but has a lower TDP - 125W as opposed to 140W.

The ‘C3′ 45nm AM3 quad-core also operates at a lower voltage and thus comes with a higher overclocking potential.

New, 125W TDP 965 (left) and the 140W 965

Photo courtesy of Overclockers Club.

Perhaps this one will be able to let almost every chip on the wafer get to 4 GHz on nothing more than a better heat sink and fan.

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