rbytes.org software news

The legacy of Khan: Star Trek’s first collision course with the mainstream

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
My best friend Jeff saved me a copy, because he knew I’d not only want to see it but dissect it, the way a hungry crow goes after a freshly slammed armadillo in the middle of I-35. I was a Star Trek fan the way a New Yorker is a fan of John McEnroe or an Oklahoman is a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, loving to see them in the spotlight but always critiquing their style. Jeff was the assistant manager of a movie theater with four (four!) screens, so he got the advance promotional kit for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Jeff saved me the first promo poster with stills from the movie. Between the premiere and my high school graduation, the premiere was — at least at the time — the more exciting event.
I can’t think of Star Trek movies [...]

Original post — original post

Canada’s Rogers to get both ‘Google phones’

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Canada’s largest mobile carrier Rogers Wireless announced today that in addition to carrying the iPhone, it will soon have both “Google phones” from HTC, the Dream (also known as the G1) and the Magic.
Rogers has a countdown timer on its site, which promises that the “revolution” will occur on June second, but details of subscription packages and subsidiaries have not yet been mentioned.
The launch of these devices in Canada will closely follow the long-awaited Android 1.5 (also known as “Cupcake”) upgrade for users of the G1 in the United States, and will give Rogers four of the top five most popular smartphones according to recent NPD reports. Rogers will have the BlackBerry Curve and Pearl, Apple’s iPhone, and HTC’s Dream. The only device Rogers does not currently carry from NPD’s list of popular devices is the BlackBerry Storm, which is carried by number three wireless operator Telus.
Copyright [...]

Original post — original post

Here comes WiGig, another shot at wireless HD

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
With support from more than fifteen major companies including Microsoft, Intel, Marvell, Nokia, and NEC announced today, the new Wireless Gigabit Alliance is pushing for yet another brand name wireless standard in the already overcrowded wireless spectrum. WiGig works on the 60 GHz frequency band and promises a 6 Gbps data transmission speed.
The 60 GHz band is an unlicensed portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that has typically been used by the intelligence community for point-to-point data links. It’s best suited only for very short distance communication (under 2 kilometers) because it falls within the “absorption band” for oxygen. In other words, oxygen molecules readily absorb a 60 GHz wave’s energy and weaken the signal. In satellite-to-satellite communication, the vacuum of space allows these types of waves to travel greater distances while the Earth’s atmosphere acts as a huge shield against terrestrial signal interception.
Because of its short range [...]

Original post — original post

Top 10 Windows 7 Features #7: ‘Play To’ streaming media, courtesy of DLNA

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Perhaps you’ve noticed this already: Getting media to play in a Windows-based network is a lot like siphoning water from a pond using a hose running uphill. If you can get enough suction, enough momentum going, you can get a decent stream, but there are way too many factors working against you. Foremost among these is the fact that you’re at the top of the hill sucking through a hose, rather than at the bottom pushing with a pump.
So home media networking is, at least for most users today, precisely nothing like broadcasting whatsoever. That fact doesn’t sit well with very small networked devices like PMPs, digital photo frames, and the new and burgeoning field of portable Wi-Fi radios like Roku’s SoundBridge. Devices like these don’t want or even need to be “Windows devices;” and what’s more, they don’t want to be the ones negotiating [...]

Original post — original post

Blu-ray sales skyrocket, provided you lower the sky

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Market data from the NPD Group released this week shows that in the first quarter of 2009, more than 400,000 standalone Blu-ray players were sold, constituting a year-over-year increase of 72%. Dollar sales likewise increased by 14% and hit $107.2 million.
Last month, Futuresource Consulting predicted that 2009 will be the year that Blu-ray breaks, estimating shipments of more than 12 million standalone Blu-ray players for the total year. Futuresource’s Jack Wetherill said his group anticipated 1.2 million units would ship in Q1 2009, some three times more than NPD says were sold to consumers.
If sales maintain their first quarter pace, 2009 will end with only 1.6 million players sold, meaning Futuresource projected an oversupply of 10.4 million units. Of course, the group expects the fourth quarter holiday shopping blitz will greatly impact Blu-ray sales as it has in previous years. Last year, for example, holiday Blu-ray [...]

Original post — original post

Xerox rolls out pioneering ColorQube printer with crayon-like ink

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews
Formerly codenamed Jupiter, the ColorQube 9200 series printers unveiled today will bring groundbreaking cost efficiencies to color printing through a combination of solid ink technology and per-click pricing plans, Xerox officials contended, in a series of press launches.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that, for the first time, you can release your ‘true colors’ in the office,” declared Xerox Corp. President Ursula Burns, touting ColorQube as the “most significant change in office printing in the past 30 years.”
Of the roughly two trillion pages printed out in offices last year, almost all were printed on laser printers, but only 15% were done in color, Burns noted, during a launch event broadcast over the Web from Chicago.
“I know that the world is not black-and-white,” she said. “[But] companies have put a lock on color printing.”
“Price is the number one barrier to color printing,” concurred David Bates, director [...]

Original post — original post

Even more fusion after the latest AMD reorganization

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
In the business press and in business marketing, the term “merger” is often used quite loosely, sometimes to mean the incorporation of another company as a division of the acquirer. When AMD acquired ATI in July 2006, the merger was touted as a pairing of equals, and the forging of a permanent fraternity between two giants in their respective fields. But almost immediately afterward, talk of ways to build processors that used AMD cores and ATI pipelines together led to discussion about truly fusing the two divisions’ business units; and the first sign of the fallout from that discussion was former ATI CEO Dave Orton’s departure from the AMD executive ranks in July 2007.
Almost precisely one year ago, the actual fusion of the two divisions began, with the creation of a Central Engineering group that would conduct research and development for all the company’s processors. [...]

Original post — original post

Muzu strives for fair music video compensation

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Since launching in beta last July, Ireland-based music video site Muzu.tv has secured a decent amount of recognition for its monetization priorities. The site gives 50% of the net ad revenue generated by an artist’s content back to the artist (or label) without any exclusivity contracts.
Banner ads and in-video advertisements are embedded in an artist’s content in the Muzu player, which is itself embeddable in sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Anybody or any band can create a channel on Muzu dedicated to their personal music, and monetize their video content. While monetization has been somewhat problematic on YouTube, the option to make money there does exist.
Muzu takes exclusivity to a different level. The site will digitize old film and video content in exchange for exclusive hosting rights, and it even has a studio in Dublin where artists can freely film their own live shows for [...]

Original post — original post

EU Parliament approves law ensuring Internet access as a fundamental right

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
For years, the European Commission has been planning a comprehensive package of telecommunications reform, with the aim of creating a “bill of rights” spelling out what individual European citizens should have a right to do online, and what kind of business environment they should expect. For instance, consumers should have the right to change their carriers while keeping their old phone numbers, reads paragraph 1 of the Telecoms Reform bill; and in paragraph 3, when a member state imposes a measure that a telecom business believes threatens free competition, it may raise the issue before a higher, continental authority that may trump national lawmakers.
But it’s paragraph 10 that’s been the cause of considerable debate. After the EC submitted the reform bill to the European Parliament (the lower house of the EU’s legislative branch) it amended that paragraph with stronger language about the rights of a [...]

Original post — original post

Is your privacy anyone’s priority?

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
So I’m launching a security column on the anniversary of the Hindenberg disaster. Seems right.
Speaking of things that blow up and embarrass political figures: Did you enjoy the excitement recently when a Fordham law-school class tested Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s assertion that consumers don’t really need more personal-privacy protections? If you missed it, Joel Reidenberg’s class went online to see how much free, publicly available information it could turn up on the justice, who has stated previously that he doesn’t see a need for greater legal protections for privacy.
The class did well, compiling a 15-page dossier that includes Scalia’s home phone number and address, the value of that home, his favorite food and movies, his wife’s e-mail address, and photos of his grandchildren. In response, Scalia told the Above The Law blog that “It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be [...]

Original post — original post

Apple’s FileMaker releases $4.99 mobile database to App Store

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews
The new Bento for iPhone and iPod touch comes with about 30 pre-designed templates for on-the-go organization of car maintenance logs, expenses, recipes, and sundry other aspects of home and work life, said Ryan Rosenberg, FileMaker’s VP of marketing and services, in a briefing for Betanews.
Most, but not all, of the templates and features in the new mobile database are the same as those included in the desktop edition of Bento, first released at Macworld 2008 and updated in October with spreadsheet-like functionality.
While the Apple arm’s FileMaker Pro database has long run across both Mac and Windows, the newer Bento desktop database is specifically designed for Mac OS X v. 10.5 Leopard — and no database programming skills are required.
Rosenberg told Betanews that information in the desktop and iPhone/iPod editions of Bento can be synchronized both ways over a wireless connection, a function that comes in [...]

Original post — original post

Google Chrome grows up, joining the realm of everyday exploitability

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
When the first public beta of Google Chrome arrived on the scene last September, it was given a rather rude welcome: It immediately faced the problem of averting a vulnerability. But this was only by virtue of the fact that it uses the open source WebKit rendering engine, whose exploitability had been discovered in Apple Safari just a few weeks earlier.
Now, however, Chrome is coming unto its own, but in a good way: Developers discovered some serious vulnerabilities in the browser apparently before malicious users did. In perhaps the most potentially serious dodged bullet, one of the Chromium project’s lead contributors discovered a buffer overflow condition that occurs when a bitmap is copied between two locations in memory. The pointers to those locations may point to different-sized areas without any type or size checking, theoretically enabling unchecked code to be copied into protected memory and [...]

Original post — original post

Kindle DX debuts, signs up for fall classes

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Amazon officially debuted the Kindle DX today, following several days of leaked images and information that resulted in almost full disclosure.

The Kindle DX has a 9.7″ e-ink display and offers 3.3 GB of storage versus the Kindle 2’s 6″ screen and 2 GB of storage. Rather than knock down the $359 price of the only three-month-old Kindle 2, the Kindle DX simply enters the market at $489 and creates a new size-based tier.
Only a few genuinely new bits of information about the Kindle DX hardware came out today, one is that it has automatic portrait/landscape screen swapping a la iPhone, and another is that it has native PDF support unlike its smaller counterpart, which requires conversion.
Less surprising, but no less intriguing, is the support Amazon has received from The New York Times Company, which announced that all New York Times best sellers and new releases [...]

Original post — original post

A year later, AT&T releases an account management app for iPhone

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Nearly a year after the iTunes App Store launched, AT&T has finally made a wireless account manager available for the iPhone. This week, the mobile carrier debuted “myWireless Mobile,” which lets iPhone users manage their wireless bills and plans, and track their voice, data and text message usage.
The app is free and is an extension of the Web-based “myWireless” account manager found on att.com. To access your records, you must first be registered myWireless user. Similar to T-Mobile’s MyAccount, which was launched in the Android market in March for users of the popular G1 handset, myWireless allows management of not only a single handset, but also a whole family’s set of phones.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

Original post — original post

First Windows 7 RC patch turns off ‘hang time’ correction in IE8

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Perhaps Google Chrome’s most innovative architectural feature is the way it relegates Web page tabs to individual processes, so that a crash takes down just the tab and not the whole browser. In addressing the need for a similar feature without overhauling their entire browser infrastructure, the engineers of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 added a simple timeout mechanism that gives users a way to close a tab that appears unresponsive.
As it turns out, there’s quite a few legitimate reasons why a Web page might appear unresponsive although it’s really doing its job. One of them concerns debugging with Visual Studio, as this user of StackOverflow.com discovered.
When a tab goes dead in IE8, not only is a message sent to the user giving her a way to dismiss either the tab or the message, but another message is sent to Microsoft as well — and that’s [...]

Original post — original post

Android gets femtocell ‘chameleon phone’ app

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Today, Intrinsyc Software announced an Android app called UX-Zone that detects when the user has entered a particular femtocell coverage area, and switches to a new home screen with appropriate apps for that area.
Femtocell is a relatively young technology, which acts as an indoor miniature cell tower, giving users additional wireless coverage with the help of their home or office broadband connection. With UX-Zone, a user’s Android home screen automatically changes to “Home” and “Office” modes when femtocell presence is detected.
Intrinsyc today said the possible uses extend much further than just Home and Office, though. For example, when a user enters a museum or particular retail store, the phone interface could change automatically to provide an optimized experience there.
The use of Android is only natural, as UX-Zone is part of the Femtoapps initiative from Ubiquisys Ltd, the femtocell company in which Google invested more than $42 million [...]

Original post — original post

Function is the key: Why BlackBerry rules

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

From the workaday businessman to the President of the United States, for years, the American white-collar workforce for years has found itself choosing the Canadian BlackBerry. But after a recent period of aggressive marketing and promotion by Research in Motion which has coincided with a flare-up in consumer smartphone spending, the BlackBerry is also looking like the choice of the general populace.
As Verizon’s exclusive entrant in the four-runner race of touchscreen smartphones, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Storm has proven to be a success among business and non-business users alike. RIM CEO Jim Balsillie has been widely quoted this week as saying, “That product was a huge success in terms of sales and adoption,” adding that a next-generation device is on the Storm roadmap, off-handedly confirming rumors that began in April.
Even though more than half of RIM’s 25 million subscribers now come from outside of the corporate [...]

Original post — original post

EA does Apple folk a Sim-ple kindness

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Electronic Arts reported the results of its recently concluded fourth quarter on Tuesday as rumors fluttered concerning a possible buyout by Apple. EA also discussed the progress of its digital-delivery efforts, which company executives say are entering a new phase.
The Apple-buy rumor was going around this morning about Twitter as well, and didn’t merit discussion on the hour-long earnings call. But there is good news for Mac and iPhone users, who for the first time will have versions of the newest edition of The Sims available to them on the first day of sale for the hotly anticipated title: The Sims 3 will launch on June 3, and the “Let There Be Sims” ad campaign should start flooding your consciousness in the next few days.
The company posted a GAAP net loss of $42 million, working out to 13 cents a share, for the quarter ending in March. [...]

Original post — original post

Top 10 Windows 7 Features #8: Automated third-party troubleshooting

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Among the stronger and more flourishing cottage industries that have sprouted forth as a result of Microsoft Windows has been documenting all of its problems. One of the most successful of these efforts has been Annoyances.org, which sprouted forth from “Windows Annoyances” — much of what Internet publishers have learned today about search engine optimization comes from revelations directly gleaned from the trailblazing work of Annoyances.org. Imagine, if you will, if the instructions that Annoyances.org painstakingly gives its readers for how to eradicate those little changes that Microsoft makes without your permission, were encoded not in English but instead in a language that Windows could actually execute on the user’s behalf.
Windows 7 is actually making such an environment — a system where, if you trust someone else other than Microsoft to make corrections to your system, you can accept that someone into your circle of [...]

Original post — original post

Congress debates whether P2P users should be warned like cigarette smokers

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Literally millions of unauthorized documents — some of them personal, easily too many of them classified — have made their way freely through P2P networks, many of them without any malicious user whatsoever even requesting or copying them. Sometimes, literally, they just show up. If the problem isn’t P2P itself but the people using it, then shouldn’t the users of P2P services be given warnings? That’s the question being tackled by the US House of Representatives today.
H.R. 1319 or “The Informed P2P User Act” was heard today by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. The bill seeks to curb the inadvertent disclosure of tax information, health records, and confidential or personal documents over peer-to-peer file sharing networks.
“In the past, we have tried to rely on voluntary self-regulation, and it has failed,” said Thomas D. Sydnor, Director of the Center for the Study of Digital [...]

Original post — original post