brainlessgeorge.com

I’ve long known that Miguel didn’t have his heart in that tie-up, so it was refreshing to see him go on the record at Microsoft’s own conference about Novell’s mistake in entering into the agreement:

I’m not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, but [the decision] was above my pay grade; I think we should have stayed with the open-source community.

For once, I have nothing to add.

In the past I’ve criticized Miguel de Icaza, Novell’s rock star open-source developer, for getting too cozy with Microsoft. Even so, I’ve never doubted Miguel’s commitment to open source.

All the worse for him, therefore, that he has to live with Novell’s mistakes. Microsoft convinced Novell to go along with its strategy to create a walled garden of “safe open source” (meaning, all open source that pays Microsoft a fee) versus “risky open source” (meaning, all open source that doesn’t pay Microsoft a fee). Red Hat was right to resist and push Microsoft to open up. Novell was wrong to capitulate.

commentary

Hit hardest are companies in the health care sector, which reached its lowest funding quarter in two years, at $1.74 billion. The customary six weeks of diligence for venture deals in the sector has ballooned to two to three months at some firms, Brian Atwood, managing director of Versant Ventures, told The Wall Street Journal.

IT providers–including companies focusing on communications, electronics, information services, semiconductors, and software–garnered a total of $3.88 billion in the quarter, marking a 20 percent gain year over year, led by information services. The “business/consumer/retail” category garnered 29 percent more venture dollars, led by a very strong media sector, which enjoyed a tenfold increase, growing from $21 million to $236 million during the same period.

Overall United States-based VC spending in the first quarter of 2008, totaling $6.8 billion in 603 deals, is down 7 percent year over year and 9 percent since last quarter, according to the research, indicating that venture firms are keeping a tighter grip on their wallets in a time of market volatility and uncertainty.

Investment in the catchall “other” category, which includes the ever-popular clean-technology sector, remains steady, up 0.5 percent year over year.

VC investment in biopharmaceuticals endured a 59.2 percent drop since last year, while investment in health care services dropped 52.8 percent. Companies focusing on communications and networking technology also attracted 60 percent less venture capital than they did a year ago.

Companies seeking venture capital dollars have had a bit less luck in the past year, according to research released Saturday by Dow Jones VentureSource and Ernst & Young.

But while funding in those markets has dropped dramatically, venture investment in most others remains quite healthy.

With the hype around Apple’s near-certain upcoming tablet PC seemingly cooling off, our attention now turns to Microsoft–as the company is rumored to be preemptively working on its own Apple-tablet killer.

ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley reports that Microsoft plans to create a tablet, which is based in part on the technology behind the company’s Surface project and has been developed under code names including “Oahu” and “Alchemy Ventures.” In charge of the project–Chief Experience Officer J Allard, who was the main guy behind the
Xbox brand for several years.

But don’t look for it any time soon. Mary-Jo says she “wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft is waiting for Apple to show its Tablet hand before trotting out its revamped Tablet.”

A key difference between a Microsoft tablet and an Apple one would be that Microsoft would design the basic spec, and let hardware partners build the actual devices–allowing MS to sit back and enjoy revenue from
Zune-like subscription services, rather than be in the hardware-manufacturing business (and judging from the Xbox 360’s high failure rate, that might not be the worst idea).

After being named world champion of Crave’s nonviolent robot tournament, most robots would probably have been content to rest on their laurels, put on a little weight, and settle into a sad, drug-addled existence only to wake up 10 years later and realize that they’re out of money, and their fans have moved on. But Honda Motor’s Asimo is not like most robots.

(Credit:
Honda)

After handily taking that title, Asimo has a new role now. He’ll be conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on May 13, leading the orchestra on just one song, “Impossible Dream” from Lost in La Mancha.

Famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma will also be performing that night, though not on that particular number. Both celebrity appearances are part of a program that will benefit music programs at Detroit schools. Honda has given more than $1 million to the symphony orchestra to create The Power of Dreams Music Education Fund, which will help fund master classes, an introductory class, and private lessons for Detroit students. (More details on the program are here.)

You may remember that a few months ago, Toyota unveiled a robot that can play the violin. Let’s just hope that the two companies don’t team up, or those music-loving robots are bound to figure out that they can get rid of us pesky humans altogether.

The maker of the CinemaNow video service says it wants to start adding 3D movies to its repertoire.

Sonic Solutions is working with Nvidia, Samsung, and Mitsubishi to start delivering video in a variety of 3D formats to PCs and some 3D-capable TVs. Whenever it does become available–which is not clear yet because Sonic isn’t ready to discuss which hardware partners it’s working with–the movies will be delivered via the same method as the company’s CinemaNow service.

You'll need these glasses at home if Sonic Solutions' 3D download service gets off the ground.

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET)

The technology, however, is still new. It will only work with devices with graphics processors optimized for 3D, which mostly means it will work on PCs with 3D-capable monitors. Some Samusng and Mitsubishi TVs that are 3D-enabled might also work. In all cases, you’ll still need plastic 3D glasses.

Though Sonic Solutions actually sees Blu-ray as the best way of delivering 3D content, there are several issues holding that up: the technology has not been agreed upon by all the parties that subscribe to that standard. In the meantime, Sonic says its video service will be a great way to fill the gap, since there are a growing number of 3D movies in the theater.

“We see an opportunity to bridge that time gap,” said Michael DiMaria, vice president of product management for CinemaNow. “Ultimately, we believe Blu-ray will be the dominant format for the distribution of 3D content. In the meantime, there’s plenty of content available and several ways to display it.”

Sonic is working closely with Nvidia to ensure that it takes advantage of the company’s graphics-processing technology used in many 3D-capable displays so that the videos are properly formatted.

They’re also making sure that a variety of 3D display formats can be handled by the CinemaNow delivery service, according to DiMaria.

“People are going to have content from a wide variety of sources–DVDs, downloaded from the Web, Blu-ray, CinemaNow–and they all may be in different formats or different resolutions,” he said. “We think anyone who’s buying this technology, especially in the early-adopter stages, they’re gong to want to throw at it what they can find. We want to make sure our player can play back whatever content someone reasonably has.”

While this technology still has a ways to go, 3D is clearly starting to get a bit of momentum. Box office sales have been a success this year, more 3D-enabled TVs are hitting the market, and several companies are working on how to make movies viewable in 3D in the home. That also goes for non-professional content, such as YouTube’s nascent efforts to bring 3D to the online video service.

LAS VEGAS–Microsoft offered its first public demonstration of Internet Explorer 8 on Wednesday, a prospect that had general manager Dean Hachamovitch struggling to figure out what to cover.

“I’m so excited that I had to figure out how to focus,” he told the crowd. The marketing folks naturally suggested he point to three major advances, but Hatchamovitch disagreed.

“These are developers,” he said he told the marketers. “They can count higher than three.”

So, instead he said he would talk about eight features: CSS 2.1 support, CSS Certification, performance, start of HTML 5 support, new developer tools, activities, Web slices and one he hasn’t named yet.

Microsoft also said that the first beta of the browser, intended for developers, will be available after today’s keynote.

One of the new features, WebSlices, allow users to break a Web site into parts and only get updates from the part they want.

In
IE 8 users can subscribe to parts of Web page,” Hachamovitch said. He showed an example in IE 8 where users can use Web slices to subscribe to a single eBay auction.

Apple has its own Web-clipping subscription method that is part of
Mac OS X.

Separately, Microsoft said it was making available a beta version of Silverlight 2, which will move the technology further beyond delivering video and into creating rich Internet applications.

Among the features of Silverlight 2 is what Microsoft calls adaptive streaming: the ability of the client PC to decide how large a streaming file it can handle at any given moment based on its CPU and network resources.

“If the network gets congested it can drop down to a lower bit rate,” said Scott Guthrie a vice president in Microsoft’s developer division.

With IE8, Hachamovitch discussed Microsoft’s commitment to compatibility. He relayed a story of what his kids used to say whenever they had Internet problems.

“They’d ask ‘Daddy, did you break the web?’” Hachamovitch said. “Most of the time I could honestly say ‘No.’”

In a broader sense though, Hachamovitch said, that others might disagree that Microsoft, had in fact broken the Web. “Web developers might answer the question differently,” he said.

Hachamovitch then went on to talk about Microsoft’s commitment to interoperability and steps that it has taken. Microsoft announced earlier this week that IE 8 would use its most standards compliant mode by default. The company said it believed that move would assuage developer concerns as well as regulatory and competitive issues.

However, a top Opera executive told CNET News.com yesterday that Microsoft’s move addresses only one of several concerns that the browser maker had raised with the European Commission.

Representatives from Joost were not immediately available to confirm that a Web-based version of the video player is on track for later in 2008.

Portfolio’s Kevin Maney wrote a lengthy profile of the once-hot company, and buried inside is a juicy tidbit about a future development: “This year, viewers will be able to watch Joost videos in a browser window,” the profile read. Right now, Joost requires a software download, which critics have said is one of its prime setbacks when just about every other online video start-up is browser-based. “Go to Joost’s Web site, click on shows like Seth Green’s edgy Robot Chicken or an old Rocky and Bullwinkle episode and you can watch them as easily as you’d watch a video on YouTube.” Well, that all depends on the technology working as smoothly as YouTube, and the quality being up to par.

And perhaps Joost can resuscitate itself. While the Web-based Joost remains shadowy, the company has been making other moves: experimenting with live TV programming, for one, starting with the NCAA basketball championship. It’s a good PR move, as the availability of “March Madness” games has, at least for now, put Joost back into the vocabulary of Web users–and onto the computer screens of workplace procrastinators.

Joost could use a boost. Once touted as a “YouTube killer” that would address rampant online video piracy by offering professional content creators access to a high-quality video platform and revenue from top-notch advertisers, it fell from favor when the content proved tepid and more enticing competitors sprang up–namely Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

Could a browser-based version of its peer-to-peer software save Joost, the heavily hyped video start-up founded by the creators of Skype and Kazaa?

This post was updated at 10:12 AM PT to correct the spelling of Joost CEO Mike Volpi’s name.

Recently, CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith, whose company counts Joost among the partners in its “Audience Network” of online video outlets, said that he hasn’t given up on it and that CEO Mike Volpi “knows what he’s doing.”

In a recent interview, an Intel manager in the NAND products group discussed the “physical limitations” of flash data recording and the challenges of making solid state drives (SSDs) more reliable. Samsung also addressed SSD durability.

(Credit:
Toshiba)

Update: Dell has refuted this report and called it “unfounded and wholly inaccurate.”

Samsung has also addressed the reliability issue. Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, said a flash device that is rated at 100,000 write cycles can write 100,000 times “to every single (memory) cell within the device.” In other words, the device doesn’t write to the same cell over and over again but spreads out the writes over many different cells. He said when failures do occur, they typically occur in the controller silicon, not in the flash device itself.

The comments from Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, are particularly pertinent after a report was released Monday by Avi Cohen, head of research at Avian Securities, stating that the “return rates of current SLC based SSDs at Dell are running 20 percent to 30 percent due to a combination of performance issues and failures.”

Cohen said this compares unfavorably with hard disk drives. “Currently failure rates for SSDs are running a full order of magnitude higher than that of disk drives (10 percent to 12 percent vs. 1 percent to 2 percent) and these issues only get magnified” in the move to next-generation technology referred to as “Multi-Level Cell,” or MLC.

Though Winslow didn’t address failure statistics specifically, he did speak generally about inherent flash limitations. “There are physical limitations to flash (SSD) cycling. Just like a hard disk drive will eventually wear out,” he said. “Cycling” implies writing data to the SSD. “NAND flash cycled to certain number of times will eventually start failing,” he said.

As reported earlier, Intel is expected to make an announcement in the near future about its entry into the high-capacity SSD market with drives ranging from 80GB to 160GB.

Toshiba 128GB SSD

Winslow said the challenge for Intel is to make drives reliable despite this. “The ability to manage those failures and ensure that no data ever gets lost and…does not affect the operation of the unit. That’s the challenge,” he said. “Reliability will be a key differentiation point among the solid state drive vendors.” He added that Intel intends to excel in this area.

Notebook PC makers are increasingly adopting SSDs in popular notebooks such as the MacBook Air and the ThinkPad X300. Toshiba’s new Dynabook SS RX series was announced Monday with a 128GB SSD option. Typically, notebooks to date have come with 64GB SSDs. (Toshiba announcement here).

MacForge is not nearly as feature-rich as Sourceforge is, but if you’re looking for a great repository of Mac-based applications, MacForge is a useful destination.

commentary

You like open source, and you prefer the
Mac. You’re in luck! I stumbled across a great site today - MacForge - which hosts over 50,000 open-source applications written for the blessed operating system, Mac OS X.

Google on Monday unveiled a new Web-based tool, Map Maker, that lets people add roads, lakes, businesses, and other features to unmapped regions of Google Maps.

Overall, I think my first reaction will carry the day for me.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s great that this kind of activity can be crowd-sourced (please excuse the jargon) so the community (please excuse the jargon again) can contribute to a project that reduces the amount of digitally uncharted terrain. Google has given us a way to help make a difference that, while small, could collectively become quite large.

That’s because, fundamentally, Google Maps is a service not just consumed by many but also repackaged by many through the availability of the Google Maps API (application programming interface). So until the day Google flips its Don’t Be Evil switch to the “off” position, Google Maps is in effect a public utility, and many can benefit from contributions to the service.

Google Map Maker looks slick, but it would be slicker with better satellite imagery. Parts of Iceland, one of my favorite places on Earth, are too coarse for any tracing.

Google Map Maker lets people add details to maps in some countries.

With the tool, people can using tracing tools to build maps in Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, and Vietnam, according to the Google LatLong blog. Also open for cartographic contributions are several Caribbean nations: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Grenada, Jamaica, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

(Credit:
Google)

But on the other hand, I can think of worthy causes in greater need of charity or free labor than Google. If we’re all going to be augmenting Google Maps with user-generated content, wouldn’t it be nice if we could do it through a more neutral mechanism that lets others benefit from the work, too? Geotagged entries in Wikipedia show on Google Maps, but not Google Maps alone, at least theoretically.