When Microsoft was developing Vista, or Longhorn, as it was known way back when, company officials were fond of making promises about ways that Microsoft would improve on Windows XP with its next-generation Windows release.

With Windows 7, Microsoft’s goal seems to be to provide as few promises as possible against which the final product can and will be compared and measured. That said, over the Labor Day weekend in a post by Distinguished Engineer Michael Fortin — who leads the Fun****etals feature team in the Core Operating Systems Group — Microsoft did dangle one tangible tidbit about Windows 7. From the post:

“For Windows 7, a top goal is to significantly increase the number of systems that experience very good boot times. In the lab, a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds.”

The August 29 post goes on to discuss how Microsoft is aiming to reduce the number of system services in Windows 7, “as well as reduce their CPU, disk and memory demand” as part of the quest to improve overall system performance with Windows 7. Windows 7 will include more enhancements to pre-fetching, which was introduced initially as part of Windows XP, according to Fortin’s post, and more parallelism in driver initialization — two more ways Microsoft is counting on speeding up initial system boot times.

Microsoft also is working with PC makers to show them ways to improve Windows 7 system performance, as well, Fortin blogged. He wrote:

“(W)e’d like to point out there is considerable engagement with our partners underway. In scanning dozens of systems, we’ve found plenty of opportunity for improvement and have made changes. Illustrating that, please consider the following data taken from a real system. As the system arrived to us, the off-the-shelf configuration had a ~45 second boot time. Performing a clean install of Vista SP1 on the same system produced a consistent ~23 second boot time. Of course, being a clean install, there were many fewer processes, services and a slightly different set of drivers (mostly the versions were different). However, we were able to take the off-the-shelf configuration and optimize it to produce a consistent boot time of ~21 seconds, ~2 seconds faster than the clean install because some driver/BIOS changes could be made in the optimized configuration.”

The much-touted official “Engineering Windows 7″ blog has provided a lot of words about how Microsoft developers think about building an operating system and how/why certain trade-offs are made. But specifics on Windows 7 features? Sounds like Microsoft won’t be sharing anything substantial on that until it releases a broader test build of 7, which is expected around the time of the Professional Developers Conference in late October.

Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 now available and Dell is pushing the netbook is available on its site. Meanwhile Vodafone is going to sell the Mini in Europe.

While Dell’s move could be viewed as playing catchup to other rivals such as Asus the Vodafone deal is notable. Vodafone says it will sell Dell’s Mini in Europe in a move that was previewed by Michael Dell on Wednesday. Dell said at the Citigroup Technology Conference that telecom carriers will sell netbooks to push 3G services. What U.S. carriers will follow?

The Inspiron Mini (statement) will run $349 with Ubuntu $399 for one with XP. Also as expected Box.net is bundled in with the system. In a nutshell, Dell’s Mini (see Dell’s blog) looks like a lot of netbooks such as the Asus eeePC.

Some specs:
- It weighs 2.28 pounds;
- Has a solid state drive;
- 8.9 inch display;
- Comes with Ubuntu and XP with “custom Dell interface.”

Picasa Web Albums, Google’s free and therefore widely-popular photo-sharing tool, added facial recognition technology to online photo albums Tuesday.

The system now lets you automatically tag your photos with your friends’ names (pulled from your Gmail contacts, if you have them). The technology is frighteningly intuitive and quick to learn, suggesting the appropriate name tag when it recognizes your friends in photos you’ve uploaded.

Turn on the “name tags” feature and Picasa will automatically scan the pictures you’ve uploaded, picking out the ones it thinks have faces in them. Then, you can attach name tags to individual photos of people, or to groups of photos the software has identified as showing similar faces. It makes for a fun little game, tagging the people you know with the matching Gmail contact. Picasa quickly starts learning who’s who as you continue to tag your way through your pictures. After tagging for a bit, it will be able to recognize your friends and automatically suggest name tags of the people in your photos. Once the photos have been tagged with names, you can cluster or filter photos based on who’s in them, then create and share slideshows featuring specific friends.

While Apple's iPhone sales continue to succeed, things just aren't looking any better for AT&T's network woes, and their dysfunctional relationship has given birth to a second lawsuit.

Several iPhone users on Wednesday morning reported a complete outage of AT&T's data service. Reports have surfaced in Boston, Chicago, Washington DC and St. Louis; users have claimed in the Apple support forums that a call to AT&T's support line confirms the outage. AT&T's Brad Mays confirmed a "routing issue" in the Northeast region affecting wireless data in the early morning. He said technicians restored the service by about noon EDT.

The reports of a network outage work to the advantage of customer William Gillis, who filed a lawsuit late last week. In his 18-page complaint, Gillis -- a retired Chicken of the Sea executive -- alleges that AT&T's network is not strong enough to support the millions of iPhone 3G users, and therefore the handset is not performing as advertised, according to Michael Ian Rott, Gill's attorney.

"The bottom line is iPhone 3G users are not getting what has been represented to them," Rott said in a phone interview. "[The iPhone 3G] is kind of like a Dragster: A Dragster can go 500 miles an hour, but you only have a short amount of track space so you'll never reach that 500 miles per hour.... Similarly the 3G iPhone isn't working to the specifications Apple represented."

Gillis's hypothesis of 3G networks being strained coincides with observations made in Wired.com's recent study conducted on iPhone 3G download speeds around the world, in which we discovered network performance varied greatly based on carriers and countries. Users reported the fastest 3G download speeds in Europe, which possesses some of the most mature 3G networks that have been developed since 2001. By contrast, AT&T's U.S. 3G network is relatively young, having been introduced in 2004.

Before today's reported outage and Gillis's lawsuit, femtocell developer Dave Nowicki also theorized that in the United States, the iPhone 3G is straining AT&T's young 3G network. He explained that AT&T installed the 3G cells on preexisting EDGE transmission towers -- meaning those towers were spaced based on the requirements of earlier, 2G technology, which has a longer effective range than 3G.

User complaints about the 3G network have been passionate and widespread ever since the iPhone 3G's July 11 launch. The problems have varied from slower-than-advertised 3G performance to getting no 3G connection at all.

Alabama resident Jessica Alena Smith was the first customer angry enough to file a lawsuit, alleging false advertising on Apple's part for touting the handset as "twice as fast for half the price" compared to the original iPhone. Smith claims in her complaint that the handset's network performance is grindingly slow and only stays on the 3G network 25 percent of the time.

Apple's public relations department has said recently that the latest iPhone software update -- 2.0.2 -- would improve 3G performance, but very few user reports have backed the company's claims.

Regardless of what's said about 3G performance, Apple is continuing to ride the high tide with the iPhone's popularity. Insiders have said the corporation plans to produce 40 to 45 million more iPhone 3Gs in the next year.

SEATTLE (AP) -- The next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Web browser makes it easier for people to surf the Internet without leaving a trace.


Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer allows users to search the Web without leaving a trace.

Companies that sell advertisements online -- including Microsoft -- can electronically gather tidbits about Web surfers' habits, and then use that information to help decide what kinds of ads to show.

However, in the newest "beta" test version of Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer 8, which was made available Wednesday, a mode called InPrivateBrowsing lets users surf without having a list of sites they visit get stored on their computers.

Looking back through the numbers, the 2.93GHz Nehalem naturally comes into its own when the cores, be they physical or virtual, are pushed by the software. When this happens, it's up to 33 per cent faster than a 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770, and some 50 per cent quicker than an equivalently-clocked (Kentsfield-based) Core 2 Quad CPU.

Talking about the consumer space, Intel has enjoyed a performance lead over AMD for some time, and it's only going to continue, unabated, with the release of the Nehalem core. AMD's response will come in the form of a Phenom-upgraded processor, Shanghai, but it will need to be something special, really, really special, for it to effectively counter the Nehalem threat.

According to a Microsoft representative, you will be able to activate new XP installations for the foreseeable future. The fact that the company longer sells XP "has no bearing on one's ability to activate XP installations..." Of course, the current rules about moving a Windows installation from one PC to another will still apply:

You can only do this with a retail version of Windows. The copy of XP that came with your computer stays with your computer. You must remove Windows from the old computer. Automatic activation will fail on the new computer. When that happens, call the toll-free number displayed on the screen and explain your situation to a human being. They will help you manually activate XP.

Building off work unveiled last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, Intel Corp. on Thursday demonstrated how to make a 60-watt light bulb glow from an energy source 3 feet away. The Intel team did it with relatively high efficiency, losing only a quarter of the energy the researchers started with.
...
Wireless transmission of electricity makes use of some basic physics. Electric coils that resonate at the same frequency can transmit energy to each other at a distance.

But this technology has a long way to evolve before it becomes a commercial product. In both the MIT and the Intel work, researchers used charging coils far too large for wide-scale use.

Even so, Rattner said Intel is in the early stages of trying to modify a laptop to accept wireless power. One challenge is figuring out how to prevent the electromagnetic field from interfering with the computer's other parts, he said.

OCZ Technology introduces the enhanced Core V2, the latest addition to the SSD series with New Features, Performance Gains, and Increased Storage Capacity

Sunnyvale, CA—August 14, 2008—Responding the demands of enthusiasts and high-performance mobile computing consumers, OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, today unveiled the newest addition to their industry-leading OCZ Core Series SATA II 2.5” Solid State Drives. The Core Series has established OCZ as a pioneer in the SSD market by offering consumers the benefits of solid drives technology at an affordable price. With the industry continuously shifting in this direction, OCZ strives to place its Core Series at the forefront.

“OCZ continues the trend of enabling consumers with the latest in cutting edge solid state disc technology with the introduction of the new Core V2 SSD,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. “As SSD technology progresses, OCZ will continue to release updated and enhanced solutions to ensure our customers stay on the leading edge. The new Core V2 drives offer consumers and system integrators increased capacities up to 250GB, improved read and write performance and faster seek time, all coupled with a new mini USB port empowering customers with the ability to further improve performance and compatibility by updating firmware in the future.”

Featuring new architecture, the Core Series SSD V2 will be available in up to a massive 250GB capacity and delivers enhanced speeds of up to 170 MB/s read and 98 MB/s write speeds with an improved seek time of less than 0.2-0.3ms, making the Core V2 significantly faster when it comes to both Read/Write and seek-time performance. The addition of a mini-USB port also makes it possible for customers in the field to update the Core V2’s firmware should new versions become available, to further enhance compatibility or performance with future platforms.

The OCZ Core Series V2 delivers additional performance and reliability of the latest SSDs at a 50% less price per gigabyte than other high speed offerings currently on the market. OCZ continues its quest to make SSD technology within reach of the average consumer, and to deliver on the promise of SSDs as an alternative to traditional hard drives in consumer targeted applications, both mobile and desktop.

OCZ Core Series Solid State Drives enable enhanced productivity in everyday computing and intensive multi-tasking applications. With performance benefits that extend beyond the use in notebooks, the Core Series is ideal for an energy-efficient mobile or a RAID configured desktop to provide blazing speeds and advanced access and seek times. Because SSD drives feature no moving parts, the Core Series V2 will keep your laptop or desktop environment cool and quiet and provide a durable alternative and superior shock resistance. With even greater capacities up to 250GB, Core Series V2 now offers sufficient storage for large media files.

Designed for ultimate reliability, Core V2 SSDs have an excellent 1.5 million hour mean time before failure (MTBF) ensuring peace of mind over the long term. All Core Series SSD drives come backed a two year warranty and OCZ’s legendary service and support.

For more information on the OCZ Core Series V2 SATA II SSD, please visit our product page here.

As if the whole defective NVIDIA GPU situation couldn't get any more confusing, The Inquirer is now reporting that the previous batch of bad GPUs may be far from the end of NVIDIA's problems. Apparently, four unspecified board partners are now saying that they're seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad at "high rates" as well, and in both desktop and laptop cards no less. That includes 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS graphics cards, "several mobile flavors" of the 8800, "most" of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 variants, all of which are based on the G92. As for the G94, it seems the only card affected is the 9600GT. Of course, none of this is nearly as set in stone as the previous lot of problems, but we have a sneaking suspicion this won't be last we hear about it.

Following the media hit that was VIA's Nano processor, VIA says that it's now quitting the motherboard chipset business that used to be its bread and butter product for years. VIA's vice president of corporate marketing in Taiwan, Richard Brown, explained that: 'Intel provides the vast majority of chipsets for its processors and, following its purchase of ATI, AMD is also moving very quickly in the same direction.' VIA will still be developing chipsets for integrated motherboards featuring the Nano CPU, but will no longer produce chipsets for Intel and AMD CPUs. Was this the right decision, and where does this leave other third-party chipset manufacturers such as SiS?

Tuesday (August 12th), Microsoft will ship 12 security bulletins with fixes for serious vulnerabilities in a wide range of of widely deployed products.

Seven of the 12 bulletins will be rated “critical,” Microsoft’s highest severity rating.

The critical bulletins will cover remotely exploitable flaws in Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Access, MS Office and the Windows operating system.

The other five will carry an “important” rating and will include patches for bugs in Windows, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Messenger and Microsoft Word.

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are affected by five of the bulletins.

It is very likely that the critical MS Access fix is for a known — and under attack — ActiveX control vulnerability in the Snapshot Viewer for Microsoft Access.

School starts early in Georgia. The kids are all back at it.

It was on a pre-semester visit to my son’s high school that I got a shock on Friday.

The PCs were gone. In their place were banks of terminals, with small flat-panel screens, all hard-wired to the desks. A teacher’s son was messing with one, causing a reboot.

And that’s when I got the shock. Linux.

Apparently my son’s school spent the summer ripping out the old PC system and replacing it with a centralized Linux server and terminals.

Now here’s the real shocking part.

No one noticed. There’s not even a mention of it on the school Web site.

The kid who re-booted his machine didn’t notice. Within a few minutes he’d found the Firefox icon and was back on Cartoonnetwork.com. (I think he was 7.) His brothers and sisters were all happily online as well.

The new system should be more rugged than the old, the terminals are cheaper to replace, and the central system is physically inaccessible, so there will be less mischief. Before any kid can hack into it they have to learn some Linux.

Our previous years’ experience with computing has been a terrible disappointment. A few teachers got themselves Web pages, where they listed assignments and grades. Most didn’t.

Why? Because not all the kids have home access to the Web like my son. And the school system was unreliable. Let’s see what happens with Linux.

The real story is how transparent all this is. It’s much like the system my pharmacist got last year — a vendor did it and there’s no learning curve because all his applications are still there.

This is how Linux is slowly taking over. The pharmacist’s salesman gave him a better deal on printers and integration. The school system is delivering more power to more kids, with less maintenance.

Where have you seen Linux lately?

The Large Hadron Collider, soon-to-be the world's most powerful atom smasher, begins testing this weekend.

CERN will fire the first test beam through one of the particle accelerator's sectors.

“It’s, ‘Let’s see what happens,’ ” Judy Jackson, head of the Office Communications at Fermilab, told Popular Mechanics. “It’s a very complex machine. This is a step towards getting ready.”

Then, on September 10th, a full-power beam will travel through the accelerator's entire 17 miles of tunnels, reaching up to 99.99 percent of the speed of light. And finally, assuming all goes well, the first real science experiments will begin some time in October.

Though the initial test beams won't be nearly as energetic as physicists hope subsequent beams will be, they mark an important milestone for the world's largest machine. It's cost something like $8 billion and taken 12 years to build it and now we all get to see if it actually, you know, works. After it's up and running, researchers hope to use it to answer some remarkably important questions about the nature of mass, dark matter, and the earliest moments of our universe.

Via >> io9.com

Steve Jobs has announced the number of iPhone applications sold through the App Store in the month since its launch. The number? A staggering 60 million, or two million downloads a day. The revenue from this is around $30 million, which means that for every one of the eight copies of I Am Rich, Apple probably shifted plenty of freebies, too.

Whichever way you cut it, that's a big number, even if, as Gigaom's Om Malik suggests, people aren't actually using most of those applications. Even more interesting for us, though, is the strangely open and forthcoming answer Jobs gave when asked about the remote kill switch for iPhone applications. Jobs confirmed that it is indeed possible for Apple to reach into your phone from afar and disable applications: "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull" he told the Wall Street Journal.

While it's good to know that a malicious application can be immediately yanked from all iPhones at the press of a button, it's a little worrying, too. Given the level of secrecy inside Apple, we have a picture in our heads of some kind of virtual Guantanamo Bay inside One Infinite Loop, where bad applications are kept locked up indefinitely and tortured to find their secrets.

"Oh, you like phishing, do you" the ex-CIA interrogator will ask as he tips the imprisoned code back on a board and reaches for a bucket of water "Then why don't you take a SWIM?" he'll shout, up-ending the bucket on the victim's face.

AT THIS WEEK'S Black Hat security conference, two security researchers will discuss their findings which could completely open Windows Vista to hackers.

Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems and Alexander Sotirov, of Vmware Inc. have together discovered a hack that can be used to bypass all memory protection safeguards that Microsoft programmed into the much-maligned Windows Vista.

The methods employed have enabled the researchers to bypass Vista's Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and other protections by simply loading malware through a standard web browser.

Dowd and Sotrirov were able to load any content they desired anyway on a user's machine using a variety of scripting languages, including ActiveX, Java, and .NET objects.

From a distance these seem like the usual standard exploiting of bsic-security, however other researchers have confirmed that this exploits is a major breakthrough - and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems.

Apparently, these attacks work differently than the majority of other hacks, as they take full-advantage of the way Microsoft chose to secure Vista's fundamental architecture.

Other researchers have since commented that they believe that we may see similar techniques applied to other operating systems, including previous version of Windows.

Microsoft has yet to officially respond to the findings, Mike Reavey, group manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, said the company is aware of the research and is interested to see the results once they have been made public.

More over at Neowin.net.

SO THE INITIAL desktop Nehalem became Core i7. It is a bit of a surprise - something like "Core 3" fit the purpose better if you ask this writer. What could be the root of this new name?

The seventh generation of a CPU family has always been a watershed for Intel. A decade ago, when P6 was Pentium Pro, P7 was supposed to be "Merced" later known as the infamous Itanium.

We all know that Itanium didn't exactly prove to be a replacement or successor to the X86 nor will it ever be. In the meantime, the wayward uberclocked offspring called Pentium 4, or internally coded as P68, was also, with the advent of Core family, pushed into history. As the Core is architecturally a continuation of the Pentium Pro and Pentium III line, they could - in a very vague way - also be sorted under the P6 grouping.

So, if Itanium was out of the P7 moniker race, and the Prescott P68 progeny had no further offspring, the upcoming "quantum leap forward" Nehalem could take the seventh-generation symbol for itself: i7 then is just another way of saying P7.

At any rate, it looks like the part is finally ready for launch. No, not at the upcoming IDF this week we think, but by the end of September.

Both "Bloomfield ", now Core i7, and "Gainestown" DP workstation "Xeon letter-numeral" parts are ready. The 3.2 GHz top launch speed bins still leave plenty of speed headroom even at the current steppings, providing at least 15 per cent - 20 per cent overclock potential even with air cooling.

Remember that the Nehalem pipeline design and vastly relaxed cache timings should allow higher top speeds compared to even the E-0 stepping of the current Penryn part.

We may have to wait for subsequent Nehalem steppings to enjoy that - it's to be expected with a brand new architecture anyway. We expect stable Bloomfield clocks in the last stepping prior to the 32nm jump to go as high as 4.5GHz. You may need a power drive like the one on Asus Rampage Extreme mobo to feed that Core i7 properly.

And if they don't get that far by mid next year? Shame on them then - go back to the drawing board and reduce those latencies, hehe.

Are we going to see the Core i7, at least the extreme edition part, launched by the end of this quarter? Quite possibly. By the end of October latest? Very likely we hear. That latter time-frame would apply to the DP Gainestown too.

We're looking forward to see who'll be the first to have an overclockable top-bin DP board here. Not only the performance gains will be improved, but the design job will be far easier than with Skulltrail. For a start, no ugly FB-DIMMs: the memory is the same DDR3 on both UP and DP mobos, just double the channels on the latter ones. µ

MICROSOFT HAS signed a licensing deal with the graphics physics folk Havok.

The deal makes the Havok's core Physics, Animation and Behaviour products available to Microsoft internal studios and all its development partners worldwide.

Microsoft game developers will receive Havok Animation, Havok's physics engines and software tools.

Some Microsoft titles currently in development that use Havok tools include Fable 2, Halo Wars and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.

Microsoft has been licensing Havok products since 2001 and the engine has already been used in several Microsoft titles including Halo 3, Halo 2, and Age of Empires III.

JOINTECH'S claim that its new JL7100 laptop would be sold for $99 appears to be extremely misleading.

The electronic systems company seemed to be selling this mini laptop as cheap as chips at $99 – that’s around £50.

In fact a price list revealed by Cody Zhao from Jointech laptop sales shows a very different story.

The true figures show that to get the machine for $99 you have to buy a minimum of 10,000 of the blighters.

Here's the full list:
10000 units or above price US$ 99.00 FOB HK
1000 units or above price US$129.00 FOB HK
100units or above price US$139.00 FOB HK
Sample price US$299.00 FOB HK

Zhao also confirms that Jointech has not yet determined which partner it will cooperate with in the UK.