Business, Financial & Legal - Page 167

I tell you it must be the time of year. It seems like most of the new traveling around is a lot of mudslinging. After the round of bad FUD over NVIDIA (stupidly) showing off a fake card (I still think it is not a big deal). We now hear that someone is throwing mud at Microsoft's Project Pink.

This one comes from Apple Insider and reads like a disgruntled employee lashing out; in fact it might be the same one that leaked the original hate about the project.

This brings many, many doubts to mind about the project and what is going on behind the scenes here. Why would someone leak information to an Apple oriented site about an MS project? Why would they then follow up there if they are trying to give context?
There is really one thing that jumps top mind. The Zune HD launch was successful, Microsoft out did themselves with it and now someone, is worried about the chances of a phone in this device, or about a phone with the same type of functions the Zune HD has. This type of mud slung in the right directions pulls the attention away from the success of the Zune HD. Most people remember bad news before they remember good news (and of course recent news better than older obviously). If you throw in a scandal, name names, and "leak it" from an inside source it is a readers' dream. Once the seeds are sown and the news makes its rounds, well the damage is done.

So in the next few months I would keep your heads down. Otherwise you might get hit by a flying mud.

Someone over at Google might be having one too many at lunch recently. For some reason they have sent a cease and desist order over to Cyanogen.
If you are not familiar with Cyanogen it is a software that allows you to root your Android Phone.

So why would Google do this? My thoughts are that someone jumped the gun on this and in typical corporate lawyer fashion; they do not understand the technology or method so they jump in it as a threat. Why do I think this? Well take a look at the order from Google and you will easily see it.

The order is asking the developer of Cyanogen to stop distributing the closed-source Google apps like Gmail, Maps, and YouTube as these are meant for "Google Experience" devices. All sounds ok so far, that is until you discover that Cyanogen is targeted those same devices and not at non Google Experience products.

The developer of Cyanogen is working to start up talks with Google to see if he can not only talk some sense to them but to actually find out what they are really talking about.

Ah the game of leapfrog is so much fun, your ahead, I'm ahead. It never stops. This game is even more fun for the IT industry. The four major players (well three actually) fight for position in the market place. Each wants to be "first" at something. For example AMD was able to say they have the "First" Native Dual and Quad Core CPUs. Intel can say they were "First" to 32nm. ATi (AMD) can say they were "First" to use Physics on the GPU and the First to leverage the GPU as a processor. NVDIA...First with PhysX and Full scale GPGPU support...

Well you get the picture. So, why do I bring this all up? Simply because Intel is announcing that they will have a 22nm process for 2011. This means that by the time that AMD (Global Foundries) is hitting bulk production of 32nm CPUs, Intel will be cranking out a full node smaller.

They are getting to this size with a reduction in leakage thanks to a new version of their Hi-K Metal Gate (HKGM) material. This reduction in size (and leakage) means more energy and heat efficient CPUs. A reduction in process also means being able to pack more transistors into the same space, which of course means more functionality.

Of course all of this comes as we see Intel gearing up for a Q4 production of the new 32nm Gulftown Hexa-Core CPU. Intel is also showing off its new Sandy Bridge 32nm architecture. All in all it looks like a pretty good future for Intel.

Hmmm, you know that we do not like FUD here. We try our best to qualify rumor from verifiable facts. That having been said we have some interesting news this morning.

It is about the much talked about GT300. You see there is a rumor that nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be heading out to TSMC very soon to talk about yield, pricing and a few other finer points. Now this all on its own is an interesting item, but when you add in the fact that a few of the OEMs I talk to are also saying they have meetings with Huang about the GT300 coming soon, you have a good likelihood that we may see a GT300 very soon.

How soon? Well that is the tricky part. According to a few of my contacts I am hearing that yields are around 40-50%. These are not substantiated as I do not know anyone that works directly for TSMC. However, the idea of a Visit to TSMC by Huang would usually mean a couple of things. Either the yields are below where they need to be for a launch. Or they are there and it is time to finalize price.

I am leaning toward the later as everything I am hearing puts the launch around the beginning to middle of November with retail availability in mid-December. Again, bear in mind that this is information that I cannot confirm but some of the evidence at hand would seem to back it up.

I think it is time for another award around here. This one goes to Steve Jobs. That is right, the master mind behind Apple. Apple is arguably one of the most successful marketing companies on the face of the planet. They could hype a pair of old shoe laces into something revolutionary and spectacular. They know the market they are playing to and know how to cater to their frenzy.

So when Steve made the comment "Originally, we weren't exactly sure how to market the Touch." many people thought he was joking or simply covering something up. I do not think ANYTHING at Apple is ever even considered without knowing how market it and exactly who it is marketed to. The comment came in response to questions about why a camera was not included with the iPod Touch. Apple chose to shove a low end camera into the iPod Nano instead.

Jobs said in the same comment "What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine." I am not sure how this is true when the iPhone was not see that way until the 3G S. Granted the touch has all of that now.

Still this week's award for most foolish (and obvious) inconsistent statement goes to Steve Jobs.

Ok on the rumor meter we are keeping track of the ones that come true and the ones that do not.

For this update we have;

No new iPod Touch (delayed launch) - could be due to camera issues reported earlier

New iPod touch is out but not with the camera mentioned. So far it is a small update (using similar hardware to the iPhone 3G S) prices will shift down a little 8GB will be $199 32GB $299 and 64GB will be $399.

iPod Nano - Getting bigger screen and Nike + improvements not larger capacity

iPod Nano is getting a camera and microphone (on the 8GB version) instead of the iPod Touch, and FINALLY FM Raido. Of course the Zune HD will have HD radio so the Nano is going to be behind in that regard. The Nano did indeed get an update to Nike +, and also has a voice over control.

HD video to the iPhone - Rumor is help up by Harmon Kardon listing HD output as an option on one of their dock products.
Nothing on this yet.

iPod Classic - Getting a 160GB flavor
True 160GB will come out at $249.99 spot

As the camera was the "One more thing" I have serious doubts that the iPod Touch will get a camera any time soon. We will have more as things develop.

Hmmm, methinks AMD might have a new marketing strategy. So think on this...AMD cannot compete one on one with Intel. If you put them up clock for clock there is very little chance that an AMD CPU will beat the correspondingly clocked Intel CPU.

So if you are AMD what do you do? Well you start by pricing your products lower than the other guy and say that Dollar for Dollar you have the better product. Now that marketing strategy is great, but really will only last so long. So what else can you do?

To put it simply to take CPUs with Cores and Cache that do not meet full QC. This is not to day they are bad, just that they do not meet full QC. You market these as less expensive products so as to mitigate the normal loss you would have with these "failed" parts.

Now this is a good enough solution as you can sell them for less to the consumer but it is not enough to combat Intel and its dominance. To do that you need an extra...edge. This comes in the form of small BIOS tweaks that magically turn on extra cores and cache that is disabled. Suddenly that X3 you bought is a Quad and that Cacheless Athlon II X4 is a Phenom II X4. Not a bad move at all, but a tad sneaky.

Still when you are dealing with a performance powerhouse like Intel you need all the help you can get. You are still not beating them clock for clock but you are able out price them in a very underhanded way.

The future looks bright for ATi, Microsoft and DX11. Windows 7 is receiving some of the best press that MS has received in the last 5-7 years. This is a great comeback after the technical press and bloggers condemned Windows Vista before it even hit the shelves. Of course this has all changed.

DX11 is taking off much faster than DX10 did and we have even seen some game developers postpone games to recode their engines to take advantage of the new DX. We know of roughly 4 games that should be DX11 and available at the time that Windows 7 Launches.

Two of these titles Grid and DiRT are popular games that should help to bolster sales of Windows 7 for gaming. But on the opposite side we have ATi already showing off DX11 hardware and with highly anticipated titles (like Grid and DiRT). Meanwhile nVidia might show off DX11 capable hardware in September. ATi has already promised DX11 hardware on the shelves for the Windows 7 Launch.

We also see faster driver support from hardware manufacturers. At the same time in Vista's life many hardware companies were still waiting and reluctant to port their existing drivers over. Not so with Windows 7. Many products are already shipping with working and stable drivers for the new OS despite it not actually available for purchase yet.

All of this spells a very good holiday season for these three companies as tech enthusiasts scramble to get DX11 hardware, games and OS as quickly as possible. Unless nVidia can get something out in working form very soon they might lose some of that money this year and have to wait for next.

nVidia is going after AMD and their "Dragon" platform. To do this they are leveraging the new Intel P55 Chipset.

You see they really do not have a complete platform solution like AMD did and now they are rapidly building one.

Referred to as "Power of 3" in the PR Slides that have gotten out into the public eye, nVidia claims that P55 with built in SLI support is perfect for their new SLI + PhysX design.

They start off with a mainstream board that has 1 full x16 PCI-e 2.0 slot and a 2nd x4 electrical slot for an additional PhysX enabled GPU. The next level is the performance level. This has at least two x16 physical slots that can adjust to x8 each with SLI. The board should also have one additional x4 electrical slot for a PhysX enabled card.

The top tier is the Extreme, this will have up to 3 x16 PCI-e Slots with full x16 in each provided by nVidia chips like the BR-03 or NF200. This will allow for 3-way SLI. But the Extreme board will usually also have a fourth x4 slot for,...you guessed it; a PhysX enabled GPU.

Asus has maintained its lead over Apple in RESCUECOM's reliability report for the second quarter running.

Now the report is interesting as it only deals with trouble calls that are placed with RESCUECOM directly. This makes it at the very least inaccurate in terms of true reliability.

Still we can see an interesting localized trend here. Asus has been increasing its market presence beyond of the Ad-in and component segments for the last few years. They are increasingly a one stop shop for many, many products. These products on the whole are well put together and designed for the average consumer. Typically when a manufacture does this there are growing pains involved.

These pains are usually product reliability ad service related. Asus seems to have somehow avoided these and are pushing good quality out of the gate.

Of course Asus has had its share of problems, they have recently had to change the way their support site works (it is now its own separate site) and revamped their customer support as whole to keep up with the massive presence in the market.

Only time will tell of Asus can maintain the apparent high-quality of their products. But if they do I imagine that we might see a few new Apple adds about it.

AMD had some good news this morning. It seems that although they are running far behind Intel in the CPU market and behind nVidia in the desktop GPU market they are the leader in the Discrete Mobile GPU market.

This is an interesting turn of events since nVidia has been shoving its higher end mobile GPUs into everything it can. The reasons for the change are probably less complex than you would think.

The biggest reason is going to be the lingering effect of the defective bump material that is still hurting nVidia. Since the effects of this appeared to be confined to the mobile GPU space it has only impacted consumer confidence in this small area.

AMD for its part was quick to take advantage of the situation and managed to release a few 40nm parts that offer good performance/power/cost ratios. This caused more than a few OEMs to take note and make the switch to AMD products. With a larger number of AMD GPUs and low consumer opinion of nVidia mobile products AMD managed to grab a nice 53% market share. This is a 36.5% increase in market share in the first six months of 2009.

If AMD can turn this new consumer confidence to their advantage (and not sit back and relax) they can possibly gain market share in the desktop market as part of a trickle effect.

More news about the iPhone but this one has a little twist. We always hear about how insanely popular the App Store is. It is on the TV, on the web you name it, there is Apple telling you that.

But you know what? It is not the App store at all, it is the Apps. Yes here I am to state the obvious. People like the idea of downloading and installing different applications for their mobile devices. To prove this point Cydia, the most popular of the third party applications repositories has just passed over 53,000 purchases totaling in almost $.25 million US dollars.

This number will only grow as Apple continues to ostracize its own developers. Look at what happened to GV Mobile, Apple rejected it and now it is available on Cydia. The more arbitrary and inane their approval process the more people will jailbreak their phones just to have access to freedom of choice.

Apple will continue to try and make jailbreaking illegal by tell the lawmakers every lie under the sun from it can cause massive cellular failure to it causes acid rain. But in the end I do not think they will be able to stop the flood of people wanting to use their phones the way they want.

With the advent of possible new CPU manufacturing processes and materials come an interesting article saying that they GPU may reach its limit by 2020.

The article is not an Intel product (in response to nVidia's repeated claims that they CPU is dead). No this is from Tim Sweeney, CEO and Founder of Epic Games.

In a recent presentation Sweeney says that by 2020 developers will move away from the highly optimized GPU and push for more flexible code. Thie code will take advantage of parallel processing and move most hardware "fixed functionality" features to software.

The core argument is that processing technology will move forward considerably and that Intel will have success with Larrabee and also factors in nVidia move away from the traditional GPU. Instead working on a GPGPU style.

Sweeney also dives back in time to when many 3D Engines were rendered completely in software this includes games like UnReal, HalfLife and many others. He foresees a future where rendering engines will move back to software eliminating the need for highly specialized architectures and pipelines present in today's GPUs.

If everything can come together (including improvements in storage and memory) then we can expect to see some impressive changes to the PC as we know it in the next 10 years.

With the rumor of an Apple special event in September of course there are rumors about possible new Apple products.

One that is gaining ground is a rumor that the next gen iPod Touch will have a built in camera. This would be a great idea and would give the Touch a feature that many have asked for.

But is this one of the announcements that is really going to happen? With Apple's track record of leaks and hints and hype it very well could be.

Although there is always the possibility that Apple is going to announce new products based on the Core i5 which is set to debut sometime in September also.

Wow this will be of interest to anyone that has an iPhone in the US. Apple and AT&T might have a price to pay for their heavy advertising of features that they will not support.

In the state of Louisiana there is a class action law suit that is being filed against Apple and AT&T for the continued lack of MMS (multimedia messaging system) despite ads by both companies showing this as a major feature.

The suit claims that AT&T has not upgraded its towers to support MMS properly on their network but continue to advertise this service for other phones and even have a package plan for it.

So I am not sure what they are trying to say here, there is a simple fact that AT&T does have MMS support for other phones but not the iPhone. Apple did state that was a major feature of the new iPhone OS 3.0 and the 3G S. But for some reason there is still no support for this option from AT&T.

This law suit could get interesting if more states pick up the torch and march on Cupertino.

This is not the normal tech news, it is sort of an off the wall story that I found funny.

In Texas a judge has banned Microsoft from Selling, Demonstrating or otherwise advertising Word. This is a permanent injunction put in over a patent dispute between MS and I4I.

I4I claims that MS ran off with their code and has been using this in Word 2003 and 2007. The code they are talking about has to do with XML and the way that Word uses it.

I am not going to go into major technical details, but it is sort of funny to hear that MS cannot even demo the products, this means that they are in violation of the order if they send updates, show it on their office.com website.

Now what makes this funny is that apparently other applications use this functionality. It is just MS that is in the hot seat. Apparently there is no money in going after Sun, or Apple. The injunction "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML,"

This is on top of a $200 Million fine from May, an additional $40 Million and just for good measure $37 Mill in interest.

Microsoft says they will appeal

Yesterday we covered a tale of Apple and the Dictionary. This is a harrowing tale of an intrepid developer against the mongering troll.
Nah not really, it is a story about a developer getting the shaft from Apple and after the internet press got a hold the story Apple back peddling.

The complete story is very long and can be found at Daring Fireball as can the follow on part of this particular drama.

After the press splashed this all over the internet Phil Schiller from Apple has written to explain that this was all a misunderstanding.
Apparently Apple did not ask Ninjawords to censor the dictionary because of the words F&(k and S^&t but because there are even MORE vulgar urban slang terms that can be found through Ninjawords.

Ninjawords could not be submitted to the App store as it was at the time since there were not parental controls at all. The developers of Ninjawords chose to edit the dictionary and resubmit. This is when all the fun started; it ended with someone thinking that Apple was requiring both the censorship AND a 17+ Rating.

I am not sure what is the truth in this one, both stories sound a little odd to be perfectly honest with you. For example in one of the actual letters about the rejection they specifically mention F*(k and Sh*& but you can find them in "Dictionary!" which is free on the iTunes store and has a rating of 4+.

Foxconn is trying very hard to dig itself out of a hole. The hole is not a financial hole; it is not a manufacturing hole. No this hole is a potential disaster for the large OEM manufacturer.

The problem started when a 25 year old technician committed suicide over the report of a missing fourth generation iPhone prototype.

According to the time line that is generally accepted on July 9th 16 fourth generation iPhone prototypes were delivered to Young Sun Dan. Young was responsible for packaging, sealing and shipping these to Apple.

There are differing reports about whether Young reported the missing phone before or after Apple received them but either way Foxconn began an investigation.

On July 16th Young jumped from a 12th floor window and fell to his death.

In between the 9th and the 16th there are reports of physical interrogation, unlawful searches, solitary confinement and worse. Foxconn began by denying the accusations but saying the event was sad. Apple followed suit.

The hole began when the suspended the director for Central Security, the turned him over to local police. Then released a statement that Young had a history of losing items (you would think after the first he would not be handling them again). Then they paid the family $44,000 and gave them a Mac PowerBook laptop.

Now they are increasing the payment amount to the family and including a yearly payment. Over in the US that would be called something like "hush money" but in the US the amounts are usually significantly larger.

Either way Foxconn is now, more than ever, under the microscope as all eyes turn to them to see how they handle or fail to handle the situation.

The outcome could affect their relationship with Apple, as Apple will continue to try and distance themselves from the event.

In a surprising case of Anti-Microsoft FUD there are reports on a survey conducted by ScriptLogic that people are using to claim 60% of businesses will not be upgrading to Windows 7.

The Survey is interesting. Here are some of the facts behind it. ScriptLogic sent out 20,650 questionnaires. Out of this 20,650 they received 1,100 back. This represents about 5.3% of the sampling.

Out of this 5.3% 59.3% said they had no plans to migrate to Windows 7. Now this is a misleading result as the question was:
"Which below represents the most accurate statement about your plans to deploy Windows 7?"

Possible responses were:
We have no plans to deploy Windows 7
We will likely deploy Windows 7 by the end of 2010
We plan on deploying Windows 7 by the end of 2009
We have already deployed Windows 7

Looking at the responses, if you are undecided you get lumped into the "We have no Plans" category and are part of an inaccurate data sampling.

A portion of the 59% may change their minds in the next month, we cannot know. As such this survey gives a misleading impression that a majority do not want to move to the new OS.

The very next question asked what was the biggest barrier to deploying Windows 7 with 42.7% saying Time and Resources, while 39.1% said application compatibility.

Now I am sure you would think these are very telling, but if you asked the same question about ANY upgrade you would get the same answers. This is where the survey fails. To make it valid they would need to ask if the companies in question have any planned upgrades and what are the reasons for/ for not doing them. If they correspond to the same reasons for not upgrading to Windows 7 it is likely that the cause is not the OS but maybe the fact that many companies are on spending holds. In thin economic times it is usually the IT budget that is the first thing to get cut. This could account for more than a few companies not upgrading anything at all in the next few years.

In the final analysis, the ScriptLogic Survey is misleading to say the least and is being used by many websites to show a lack of desire to use Windows 7 in the business community. It is further being spun to show a lack of confidence in MS products in general. Yet these articles often fail to point out that 39.4% plan on upgrading to Windows 7 within the next two years and that pre-sales of Windows 7 were sold out in many areas the same day they were made available.

First it was Norton now CA is having issues where their latest AV profiles are targeting Windows system files as malicious code.

It is simply not a good thing when your Anti-Virus starts listing off system files and says they are quarantined. It can really ruin your day.

According to posts at CA's Forum many people were receiving these false positives and causing systems to crash.

File infection: C:\WINDOWS\system32\net.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZNPB infection. Quarantined

CA users we certainly upset and were told that a fix was on its way when they contacted technical support. Unfortunately the "fix seemed to make things worse.

CA has posted an official statement apologizing for the incident and says that they are working to fix the issue caused by an errant file.