theconservativearmy.com

CBS announced Monday it completed its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET Networks, publisher of many Web sites including CNET News.com, setting the stage for expanding its CBS Interactive division into five categories.

Under the acquisition, CBS Interactive will include such categories as technology, entertainment, sports, news, and business. The division will be headed up by Quincy Smith, former CBS Interactive president, who will now serve as its CEO. Neil Ashe, former CNET Networks CEO, will become president of the business unit.

CBS Interactive will also incorporate the news category, serving as home to CNET News.com, for technology news, and CBSNews.com, which features global news and current events. The business division will operate BNET.com, as the anchor to its business-related content, as well as ZDNet and TechRepublic, which serve readers who use tend to use technology for large corporations.

CBS Interactive’s technology category will include CNET.com, CNET Reviews, Download.com, and others. The entertainment category will include TV.com, GameSpot.com, Chow.com, CBS.com, TheInsider.com, Last.fm, and the CBS Audience Network, while the sports category will include CBSSports.com, CBSCollegeSports.com, and NCAA.com.

Then again, DHS grapples with deeply rooted bureaucratic challenges. Few experts want to talk on the record but check out this recent Washington Post piece. It paints a damning picture of an organization struggling with high-profile projects going nowhere. And the piece doesn’t even begin to get into the cybersecurity question. The reason: despite all the reams of paper and la-di-da speeches, it remains on the political back burner in Washington.

President Bush celebrated the five-year anniversary of the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday. In conjunction with the event, DHS dutifully released a fact sheet marking the department’s priorities and progress since the inception.

Here’s the part relating to IT:

Wish I could report otherwise, but when it comes to network security, DHS appears to be more of a wet noodle than even its sharpest critics assumed. The truth is they still don’t have much to celebrate when it comes to cybersecurity.Talk with security consultants and former government officials involved with DHS and you come away wondering what these folks do all day. I’ve listened to countless government leaders since 2003 promise big advances just around the bend. I’m still waiting for something important to write about.

Michael Chertoff: Where's the beef?

Obviously, it’s easy to take shots at DHS from the peanut gallery, but come on, already. The government-led effort to shore up the nation’s cybersecurity still remains a work-in-progress.

(Credit:
DHS)

“Increasing Cyber Security: DHS established the Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to provide a 24-hour watch, warning, and response operations center, which in 2007 issued over 200 actionable alerts on cyber security vulnerabilities or incidents. US-CERT developed the EINSTEIN intrusion detection program, which collects, analyzes, and shares computer security information across the federal civilian government. EINSTEIN is currently deployed at 15 federal agencies, including DHS, and plans are in place to expand the program to all federal departments and agencies. In addition, the Secret Service currently maintains 24 Electronic Crimes Task Forces to prevent, detect, mitigate, and aggressively investigate cyber attacks on our nation’s financial and critical infrastructures.”

Somebody, pass me the No-Doz before I fall off my chair.

And that’s where it will stay, I’m afraid, until we get nailed by a real cyber-disaster.

Microsoft Office is not just overpriced–for most users, it’s overkill. That’s why I’ve been increasingly recommending IBM Lotus Symphony, a well-rounded office suite that just so happens to be free. It’s built on open-source favorite OpenOffice, but sports a sleeker, friendlier interface.

Symphony (available for Windows and Linux) offers word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. It supports Office 2003 file formats as well as OpenDocument and others. And it relies on an ingenious tabbed interface that keeps all your documents under the same roof–no switching between apps like with most other suites. I particularly like the sidebars, which keep frequently used settings close at hand while reducing toolbar clutter.

(Credit:
IBM)

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

What’s the bad news? Symphony is still in beta, and it has the bugs to prove it. It’s kind of slow, too. But you can’t argue with the price. Why spend upwards of $400 on Office when you can get most of the same features (and a less intimidating interface) for nothing?

Disclosure: CBS College Sports is a unit of CBS, as is CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.

Guthrie said he feels pretty good that Silverlight is already at the one in four number and said that the company will continue to do deals to boost penetration, as it has with HP which includes Silverlight on its PCs.

On a conference call, Guthrie said that in some countries, Silverlight already has 50 percent penetration. He said he expected deployments would “accelerate quite nicely” as some of the sites that require Silverlight 2 get up and running. In all, he said he expects hundreds of millions of PCs to be running Silverlight 2 “very quickly.”

Overall, Microsoft said the Olympics helped boost Silverlight’s U.S. penetration by 30 percent, the software maker said.

Existing users of both Silverlight as well as the Silverlight 2 beta will be automatically be upgraded to Silverlight 2 over the coming weeks, he said.

“We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed,” Microsoft developer unit VP Scott Guthrie said in a statement.

Later in the call, Guthrie reiterated Microsoft’s interest in trying to see Silverlight running on the iPhone.

Microsoft also disclosed some numbers for the Olympics work it did with NBC. Over a 17-day period, Microsoft said NBCOlympics.com had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video watched.

Still, that means Silverlight continues to have a very long way to go to compete with Flash, which is installed on nearly all Windows PCs.

Silverlight 2 will be available for download starting Tuesday, Microsoft said. Among the new features are support for digital rights management technology, improved cross-platform support and deep zoom technology. Microsoft also announced a range of new partners including AOL, Blockbuster, CBS College Sports, Toyota, and Yahoo Japan.

However, he said that Apple ultimately controls what types of software run on the iPhone and right now they are not looking to enable browser plug-ins of any flavor.
“They might in the future,” he said. “Right now that isn’t an option for any vendor”

Updated 9:20 a.m. PDT, with comments from conference call and at 10:20 with additional comments regarding Silverlight and the
iPhone.

“We have talked with Apple,” he said. “We are very interested in being able to run on the iPhone.”

As for compatibility with Google’s Chrome browser, Guthrie said the initial release had a couple of issues with Silverlight, but he said that in the latest developer release of Chrome, Silverlight 2 works “fantastically well.”

Google’s G1 Android phone is another story, Guthrie said. “That is an open platform,” he said. “That is something we are going to look at.”

Microsoft on Monday announced, as expected, that it is ready with a final version of its Silverlight 2 media player.

“Certainly coming out with a new browser plug-in is an ambitious project,” Guthrie said. “We knew it was going to take a couple of years to get where we need to be.”

Two weeks after announcing two new high-speed solid-state drives (SSD), Super Talent Technology on Tuesday announced it will release the MasterDrive LX as a budget solid-state drive later this week.

(Credit:
Super Talent Technology)

The low prices do come with a shortcoming: the throughput speed. The new MasterDrive LX drives are significantly slower than other SSDs; it’s even slower than some regular SATA hard drives. They support sequential read speeds of up to 100MB per second and sequential write speeds of up to 40MB per second. To put this in perspective, regular SATA hard drives can offer about 100MB per second, while the new Intel SSDs reportedly offer up to 240MB per second throughput speed.

However, the MasterDrive LX is still more desirable than regular hard drives in terms of battery life and durability. I hope this is just the beginning and soon you’ll be able to buy SSDs for the same prices you currently pay for regular SATA hard drives.

The MasterDrive LX comes in 64GB and 128GB versions and will cost about $179 and $300, respectively. Both drives are SATA-II and use NAND flash technology. They will be compatible with computers that support the ever-popular 2.5-inch SATA hard drive.

All these negatives add up to a cruel market that is forcing some companies to either merge or perish. “This is leading to a new wave of forced consolidations and partnerships. This industry will look very different a year from now with very few players controlling much larger market shares and with a much better ability to control production and pricing,” said Cohen.

“Memory manufacturers who have already been losing money for several quarters are now looking at another six months to a year of absolutely ominous conditions,” said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities.

The PC market has also turned bleak. “The PC business was plugging along pretty well and then all of sudden in the last months the demand profile has just really dropped off,” according to Foster.

Not everything is doom and gloom. The market for solid-state drives–which use NAND flash–is poised to grow. Appleton cited the burgeoning netbook market as an opportunity for SSDs. The enterprise is a target market too: SSDs based on single-level cell (SLC) technology can offer many times the performance of hard disk drives for customers such as credit card companies and airlines.

Companies are now in survival mode, according to Cohen. “It is a matter of survival and everyone needs to figure out how to stay in business over the next year or how to scavenge something if one (company) decides it cannot survive,” said Cohen.

The memory chip market–and industry–is caught in a particularly brutal downward price spiral that is threatening the viability of even the largest players.

Pricing has fallen off a cliff in the last few months, making a bad situation worse. Micron said Wednesday that the average selling prices of DRAM chips–the main memory used in PCs–was down between 15 percent and 20 percent from last quarter. NAND flash prices were down between 30 percent and 35 percent. (NAND flash is used as storage in portable music players, digital cameras, and the nascent solid-state drive market.)

Ultraportable laptops, such as the ThinkPad X301 and Dell Latitude E4200, are also beginning to use SSDs as a storage replacement for hard disk drives.

Currently, two major memory chip manufacturers are seeking investment lifelines. Hynix, the world’s second largest maker of memory, is trying to scare up cash by seeking buyers for a 36 percent stake in the company. So far, the only likely bidder to emerge is Samsung–which has also made a play for struggling SanDisk, the largest supplier of retail flash memory cards.

All of this turmoil was underscored this week when Micron Technology, the largest U.S. maker of memory, announced that it had lost $1.6 billion in fiscal 2008.

“Overall, the NAND market continues to be in an oversupply condition,” said Micron’s Foster.

This is affecting investment. “The capital expenditure for the NAND market in 2008 is going to be down sequentially (year-to-year), which is the first time that’s happened since the inception of the market,” said Steven Appleton, chairman and CEO of Micron on Wednesday.

This consolidation is not only affecting manufacturers but players in the retail channel too. SanDisk–which does not manufacture flash chips but sources them from a Japan-based joint venture with Toshiba–has seen its stock price plunge more than $60 per share over the last two years. This has made it vulnerable. SanDisk’s chairman and CEO, Eli Harari, said last month that the $26-a-share bid from Samsung was “opportunistically timed at the trough of an industry-wide downturn.”

The NAND price crash has forced Micron and Intel to delay the “build out” of manufacturing capacity in Singapore, which is part of their joint flash memory venture, IM Flash Technologies, Micron said Wednesday.

“The DRAM business–it just doesn’t feel like that, for many companies, it’s sustainable,” said Ron Foster, chief financial officer at Micron, speaking during the company’s earnings conference call on Wednesday.

Memory chipmakers are fighting for their life.

The other ailing memory maker is Qimonda AG–an Infineon Technologies subsidiary. Rumors have been rife
that the manufacturing assets of the loss-ridden company will be snapped up.

The price decline for solid-state drives over the last quarter makes these drives “more attractive from an end user’s perspective,” Micron said Wednesday, adding that “NAND far exceeds DRAM growth demand rates.”

The average selling price for NAND and DRAM has dropped sharply since May.

(Credit:
Micron Technology)

Power Management
First, I installed the powertop package, ran it as root, and followed its suggestions for improving power management. Powertop is a nifty tool that analyzes your power consumption and recommends tweaks based on the most active processes.

Note: Kevin, my intrepid IT guy wrote most of this up for me. If it says “I” it probably actually means “we” or “us” or probably just Kevin himself while I sat around eating bonbons. Also, we reconstructed the shell commands as best we could remember. Apologies if we got it wrong and you end in some kind of wormhole. There were also a number of other Ubuntu sites that we pulled information from. The Ubuntu community is utterly amazing at pulling together information and helping users solve problems.

I was able to run
Microsoft Office with no problem via CrossOver, and it loads faster than on Windows or the
Mac by a shocking margin.

Application performance inside of Windows was fantastic, due in large part to the solid-state hard drive. Additionally the add/remove function is at least four times faster than any other Windows machine I’ve had the pleasure to work on be it a laptop, desktop, or server.

Fan
The fan is a bit noisy under Ubuntu, so I created a few scripts to manually set the speed to the minimum, the maximum, and auto. The script just calls this master script with 3 different variables -

Shout-outs
http://koo.fi/tech/2008/06/05/lenovo-thinkpad-x300-ubuntu-804-installation-notes/
Stephen O’Grady

Section “InputDevice” Identifier “Configured Mouse” Driver “mouse” Option “CorePointer” Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice” Option “Protocol” “ExplorerPS/2″ Option “Emulate3Buttons” “on” Option “Emulate3TimeOut” “50″ Option “EmulateWheel” “on” Option “EmulateWheelTimeOut” “200″ Option “EmulateWheelButton” “2″ Option “YAxisMapping” “4 5″ Option “XAxisMapping” “6 7″ Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
EndSection

Pre-installed OS
Pre-installed copies of both Windows XP and Windows Vista are so gummed up with extraneous software and utilities that the purist has the immediate urge to format the hard drive.

#!/bin/sh #
# Control fan on a ThinkPad.
#
# Be sure to add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/options:
#
# options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1
#
# and reboot, before using this script. usage() { echo “$0 ( is 0-7, auto, disengaged, full-speed)” exit
} if [ -z "$1" ]; then usage exit sudo sh -c “echo level $1 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan”

#!/bin/sh
# Enable/disable builtin Bluetooth on IBM Thinkpads if grep -q enabled /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth; then
echo disable > /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth
else
echo enable > /proc/acpi/ibm/bluetooth
fi

Network
Ethernet and wireless worked right out of the box!

Touchpad / Trackpad
I dislike the Trackpad, so I went into the BIOS and disabled it. I then added some additional content to the mouse input device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf -

In light of my chronic Mac problems, I decided that I would take a shot at Ubuntu running on a Thinkpad X300.

I’m a power business user who has enough technical background to use the command line and utilities, so Ubuntu didn’t scare me. However, there were a few quirks that I ran into. For example I had to reinstall Pidgin three times, and it seems to get corrupted on a whim. I also had a day where
Firefox would crash every few minutes. These are not things the average user can deal with gracefully.

Out of the box
I installed Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) off of the alternate install CD after having a small problem booting from the Live CD (apparently the ‘nosplash’ option will alleviate the blank screen I was getting, but I did not test this.).

Skype
The Webcam in Skype worked right out of the box. Sweet! The only thing I struggled with was getting the microphone working. Eventually, I worked out that the Capture device needs to be enabled in the Recording tab and Internal mic enabled and selected on the Switches tab.

Virtualization
After turning on Virtualization for the CPU in the BIOS, I installed the kvm and qemu packages. Using qemu-img, I created a virtual image for WinXP and installed XP using kvm. The performance is decent and I can now run Windows apps inside this VM in a pinch or use it to test our Web sites with the various versions of Internet Explorer. With the sound flags turned on, I can even use the Rhapsody thick-client inside of XP to listen to tunes.

The positive side of those experiences was the Synaptic package manager worked flawlessly to reinstall the applications that were acting weird. I also was able to get Adobe AIR and Twhirl running with no problems.

(Credit: Ubuntu)

I did however run into one major application issue. No Photoshop. Admittedly, I don’t use Photoshop all the time, but I needed to yesterday and the Gimp just wasn’t happening for me. If one more person tries to tell me that Gimp is just as good as Photoshop, I will physically attack them.

Firefox / Flash
Flash is not installed by default, but installation was trivial and worked immediately. This is in sharp contrast to the effort I’ve had to put into getting Flash working inside a browser on older Linux distributions.

Bluetooth
I’m not using Bluetooth at the moment, so I created a script to toggle Bluetooth on and off in an effort to preserve battery life -

Battery
I attempted to hotswap the DVD for the secondary battery and Gnome-power-manager did not recognize it. However, following a reboot, it properly found both batteries. Unfortunately, the batteries are drained in a serial fashion (same behavior in Windows). Also, I allowed the machine to completely run out of juice, and I noticed that it did not properly hibernate the machine. See Suspend/Hibernate for the fix.

Joystick
My USB Sidewinder gamepad worked flawlessly with SDLMAME after installing and running the joystick calibration package.

Ubuntu on Thinkpad

Sound
I removed the old ALSA sound modules, installed the build-essential package, and compiled the latest ALSA snapshot, and rebooted to some of the loudest sounds I’ve ever heard from a built-in laptop speakers.

Office
OpenOffice has come a long way and I believe it is a suitable replacement for the bloatware of Microsoft’s Office solution. However, for 100 percent compatibility, I decided to take CrossOver Office + Office 2007 for a spin. I can report that the installation went smoothly and the applications have been solid as a rock. Word and Excel launch in 2 seconds, which is faster than they launch on just about any other machine I’ve worked with. Truly amazing performance!

DVD
The DVD player reads and writes data right out of the box. Commercial DVD playback is another story altogether. First, I installed the regionset package to set the region on the DVD player. Next, I installed the totem-xine package as the gstreamer version that comes preinstalled was not working properly. Finally, I went to the Medibuntu site, enabled its repository and followed the instructions for playing encrypted DVDs.

Upgrades
I upgraded the machine to 4GB of RAM. I also purchased the six-cell battery and the supplemental battery that can optionally replace the DVD.

Suspend/Hibernate
I first edited /et/cpm/config.d/local and added the line SUSPEND_MODULES=”e1000″ so that suspend knows to shutdown the network first. Next, I edited /etc/default/acpi-support and enabled Laptop Mode. Finally, I edited /etc/laptop-mode-tools and set Minimum Battery Charge Percent to 1, Enable Auto Hibernation to 1, Hibernate Command to /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh, Auto Hibernation Battery Charge Percent to 3. Following a reboot, the critically low battery event properly triggered the hibernate script.

The install was uneventful, and I was up and running inside of X Windows (I chose to use Gnome) well within an hour of booting the CD.

It’s the end of the workday, and my hands hurt from typing. I suspect I’m not alone on this one–thus the proliferation of ergonomic keybords and mice. On Tuesday, Logitech announced its latest contribution to the genre, the Cordless Desktop Wave Pro.

The desktop set also includes the MX1100 laser mouse, which is contoured to fit more comfortably in your hand (read my colleague Rich Brown’s Logitech MX1100 review). The mouse also incorporates Logitech’s handy MicroGear Precision scroll wheel, which has two modes: hyper-fast, to scroll quickly through pages with a single flick of your finger, and the click-to-click scrolling mode common on all computer mice.

Like its predecessor, the Cordless Desktop Wave Pro features both a varied key height to accommodate the different lengths of your fingers and a gently curved layout designed to keep your wrists and arms at a more natural angle. A cushioned palm rest gives your hands a comfortable landing spot between paragraphs.

(Credit:
Logitech)

Both devices use a 2.4GHz wireless connection, and the keyboard includes built-in 128-bit AES keyboard encryption. The set requires three AA batteries (two for the keyboard, one for the mouse).

The Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave Pro will start shipping in September for $129–not bad for an entry-level ergonomic set, but more than the current going rate of the similar Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Desktop 7000.

The chipmaker also announced that it is shipping its triple-core Phenom processors, a first for the PC market, as Brooke Crothers of CNET’s Blogger Network details in a related blog post.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company further announced what it calls “the world’s first energy-efficient desktop quad-core processor, providing customers with a cool and quiet digital media workhorse.” The Phenom X4 9100e operates at a maximum of 65 watts.

As had been expected, AMD on Wednesday announced updates to its Phenom processor line, including four new high-end quad-core chips it claims “can improve performance for gaming and multi-threaded applications,” according to a company release. Among those new chips is the Phenom X4 9850, which CNET has already reviewed.

IBM researchers have reportedly demonstrated technology that will increase hard drive capacity 100-fold, as well as offer major improvements in energy consumption (leading to much longer battery life) and better reliability. Production is estimated in seven to ten years.

In seven years, we'll be measuring hard drive capacity for portable devices in terabytes.

(Credit:
Apple)

The reports summarizing the researchers’ findings, which were published in Science (subscription required), use the shorthand “500,000 songs on a portable MP3 player” to describe the advance.

Today’s
iPod lineup contains no product advertised to hold 5,000 songs, so I’m not sure where the 500,000 figure came from. In fact, the current highest-capacity iPod is 160GB, and is advertised as being able to hold 40,000 songs. So this shorthand would imply a hard drive size of just under 2TB–only 12.5 times bigger than today’s largest iPod.

That’s actually well short of what Kryder’s Law predicts–if hard drive capacity continues to double every year, then the hard drives of 2015 should be 128 times larger than today’s. So the IBM researchers’ claims of up to 100x capacity, while impressive, are not particularly surprising given the trends of the past decade. According to my calculations, 100x would mean the biggest iPod would have a 16,000 GB hard drive, which would be enough to hold more than four million songs at the current advertised compression rates. Or if you assume that Apple’s lossless codec compresses the typical song to about 25MB, it could hold about 650,000 songs–with no loss in audio quality.

Of course, few people would use a portable hard drive of that size solely to store music–movies, games, and applications will probably take up most of that space. Still the idea that we’ll be carrying terabytes of data in our pocket in a few short years explains why Apple, Microsoft, Google, and the rest of the industry are focusing so much attention on mobile computing.