merrifield-roberts.com

Still, I’m a glass half full kind of person, and I can’t help but appreciate how much more is possible now than was just two years ago. And I am counting on things to be even better (read full HD) by the next games.

It’s one of several issues I have with the coverage. Unlike others, I’m not dinging NBC for saving a few events for the TV coverage. To me the real benefit of online video is to be able to see the events that are not and would not be on TV.

But considering it is more likely to be die-hard fans that tune into full games online, the least they could do is respect the sports fan audience. And that gets to my biggest beef, which has to do with the on-demand video, in which the score is shown constantly above the video. It’s one of the main reasons I am staying up to watch the game, as opposed to watching it on-demand tomorrow. Live is the only way I can watch the game without also seeing the outcome first.

At first I found the online commentary helpful, right up to the point at which it told me that a particular player flied out a good 30 seconds before it appeared on video. NBC officials assured me that wouldn’t happen. Moments ago, they told me Crystl Bustos would hit a home run just before she did. To avoid a repeat, I turned off the commentary.

Monday night offered me the first chance to really test NBCOlympics.com’s live video. It was the first time I was home to watch the events and there was something live that I wanted to see more than what was on one of the television channels.

Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive.

I stayed up late to watch USA Softball in its first match against Venezuela. The video quality was mixed–from a bit pixelated to quite excellent–but overall acceptable.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

I submitted the talk, and later sent a second submission using the same system to then ask to be removed from consideration. As an alumni speaker, I know from experience that the entire Black Hat organization is run extremely well. Why they cannot find me in their system, I cannot speak to.

It is correct that the reason I did not give the talk was due to various nondisclosure agreements; however, Apple was, to my knowledge, not aware of the talk, and there was no contact between them and myself, nor between them and anyone from my company, 318, in regard to the talk prior to my asking to be removed from consideration.

LAS VEGAS–On the eve of this year’s Black Hat Briefings here, officials disputed a researcher’s claim that his talk had to be canceled. They say the talk never even existed.

Last Thursday, researcher Charles Edge told Brian Krebs of The Washington Post that a talk on a previously disclosed flaw within the encryption for Apple FileVault had to be canceled because of a signed agreement with Apple.

Click here for full coverage of Black Hat 2008.

This post has been updated with Charles Edge’s response.

But on Tuesday, two different Black Hat officials told CNET News that Edge never submitted a paper for this year’s conference.

Meanwhile, a Black Hat representative confirmed that a panel discussion titled “Meet the Apple Security Experts” was canceled by its moderator. The panel still appears in the printed schedule for the conference because the cancellation came too late to change the printing. All other references have been removed.

In comments to CNET News, which have been edited for readability, Edge had a lot to say:

The story had the individuals at Black Hat who handle the Call for Papers–the process by which a researcher submits a request to make a presentation and then waits to hear back from the conference–scrambling. Edge, who goes by the nickname “Krypted,” is a well-known Apple security researcher who has previously presented at both Black Hat and its Defcon sister conference.

If it was by some error on my part that the talk was not submitted properly, then this further underscores why this issue is not a big deal. Submitting and then rescinding it has a similar effect to not having submitted at all. If the abstract never made its way into the CFP system, then it simply narrows down the list of people who I need to touch base with that could have been Brian’s initial source.

When this story first came to light, it was The Washington Post who contacted me, asking why the talk had been removed from consideration–and not I who contacted them. I had not, in fact, discussed the talk with anyone between the time that I rescinded the talk and the time I received the call from The Washington Post, and…their source (remains unclear).

“We’ll be able to address 90 percent of the databases with a single drop-in card. Most databases are less than 1TB in size,” he said.

Flynn continued: “What we’re finding is that putting an entire database on silicon has enough benefit, that you don’t have to futz around with putting some of it on mechanical disk, some of it on silicon.” The company is telling potential buyers to think in terms of $30 per gigabyte.

Fusion-io’s technology is pegged to IOPS (input/output operations per second). And companies such as Citibank and American Express are increasingly looking at server performance through the IOPS lens, according to Samsung, which makes both hard-disk drives and solid-state drives. Enterprise SSDs process 100 times the number of IOPS per watt as a typical 15K 2.5-inch server hard disk drive, according to Samsung data.

Lower power consumption is also a plus. Enterprises solid-state drives consume less than 25 percent of the power of a 15K hard-disk drive, according to data provided by Samsung in October.

“SSDs are only the tip of the iceberg,” said Flynn. “How silicon will change storage infrastructure…It’s a huge thing around messaging and how a disruptive technology will impact all of this.”

A key role for Steve Wozniak at Fusion-io, says CTO David Flynn, is ‘not just the visionary part, but involving him in the public eye.’

“We intend to greatly simplify things that have been a bastion of proprietary, high-margin, vertically integrated (storage) companies,” Flynn said.

And what will Wozniak do? “Not just the visionary part, but involving him in the public eye,” Flynn said. “He is (also) helping us change the architecture and focus of our technology.”

What does Steve Wozniak know about solid-state drives that we don’t? David Flynn, the chief technology officer of SSD start-up Fusion-io, provides some insight into why the Apple co-founder is joining the company as chief scientist.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Enterprise solid-state drives typically offer much better performance than even the fastest hard-disk drives. Fusion-io claims that its IoDrive improves storage performance by as much as 1,000 times over traditional disk arrays while operating at a fraction of the power and at a tenth of the total cost of ownership.

Flynn offered an analogy to describe what his company hopes to achieve. “The 3D accelerator decimated the vertically integrated companies like SGI, Evans, and Sutherland,” he said. “They used to be able to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for workstations.” But inexpensive, off-the-shelf 3D graphics cards from companies like 3dfx, Nvidia, and ATI Technologies in the late 1990s changed all of this, Flynn said.

I talked with Flynn on the phone about what the Salt Lake City start-up, founded in 2006, does and what attracted Wozniak.

“We are not replacing a 15K-rpm disk drive,” Flynn said. (Hard-disk drives spinning at 15,000 revolutions per minute are the highest-performance disk drives used in enterprise servers.) “We are miniaturizing an entire (storage area network) of multiple drives by making it out of silicon. While a 15K-rpm drive may cost $2 to $3 per gigabyte, a high-performance SAN costs $50 per gigabyte and up–built from those same HDDs, mind you,” he said. “Our ioDrives are made up of chips that cost only $2 to $4 per gigabyte, but when we integrate them into a miniaturized silicon SAN, we charge $30 per gigabyte.”

“The storage accelerator (that Fusion-io sells) is ultimately going to liberate the proprietary storage market,” according to Flynn. And Fusion-io is not just whistling Dixie–it has some big backers. Dell was an early investor, and Hewlett-Packard–though not an investor–plans to deploy Fusion-io’s drives across its server line, Flynn said. (An announcement that updates the HP deal is coming later this spring.) IBM has also certified the drives for use in its servers.

Performance and low power consumption, however, aren’t enough, according to Flynn. Because enterprise solid-state drives are a relatively new technology, reliability is crucial. Fusion-io offers a technology called “Flashback” protection–extra chips that can jump in to take over immediately if there is a failure. “This is at the chip level. It’s not wear-out that’s the problem, it’s chips that short out” because of the high voltages, Flynn said.

So how will Fusion-io’s solid-state drives change all of this? “We have the ability to put five and soon 10 terabytes within a standard 4U server,” he said. (”U” is the term used for rack unit in a server, equivalent to 1.75 inches, or 4.45 centimeters.) “In the near future we will be announcing a card which holds two of our I/O memory modules, therefore doubling the capacity but also the performance per slot,” Flynn explained.

In a statement earlier this month, Wozniak invoked the potential for “innovation and radical transformation” and said, more prosaically, “Fusion-io’s technology is extremely useful to many different applications and almost all of the world’s servers.”

Here are some more specifics Flynn offered. Currently, Fusion-io can achieve just shy of 1 terabyte of storage by using three 320GB cards. “We’re doubling density per module and doubling the number of modules per card so we’re going to have 1.3TB on a single PCI Express card,” he said.

The new funding round is led by two companies: the Omidyar Network, the venture form of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; and Wellington Partners. Omidyar will join the Seesmic board in an observer role and Wellington GP Eric Archambeau will take a board seat.

In Seesmic product news, the company also updated its embeddable video player. It now supports message threading and replies from the embed. It’s a useful and interesting feature, although it does make Seesmic a bit of a competitor to existing comment services like Disqus. Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur says, “We are partnering with them, in fact.” Will be interesting to see how that goes. And as TechCrunch points out, the new embeddable video conversations could “hijack” blog-based user discussions.

Seesmic raised an A round of $6 million in February of this year.

See more Seesmic posts on Webware.

The video conversation service Seesmic, now better known for the popular Twitter client Twhirl it acquired in April, has secured $6 million in series B venture funding, bringing the total amount raised to $12 million.

Verizon Communications has been building a fiber-to-the-home network, which will allow the company to continually upgrade capacity by simply changing some of the hardware on the network. And AT&T has been upgrading its network, pushing fiber deeper into neighborhoods to provide more capacity over shorter loops of its last mile copper networks.

Comcast has argued that it was only targeting protocols such as BitTorrent in order to manage its network, which has been flooded with P2P traffic. This is a common complaint among Internet service providers, particularly cable operators, whose networks were originally built for one-way communication and also share capacity at the neighborhood level.

This might mean that at peak times, it could take much longer to upload or download content. If subscribers get frustrated with the slower speeds, they could upgrade to a higher tier of service with a faster minimum speed. Or ISPs could offer a service that allows users to pay for short bursts of speedier connections.

That said, Cerf writes in his blog that he’s encouraged by the talks he has had thus far with Comcast.

That said, Cerf acknowledges that ISPs, such as Comcast, need to be able to manage their networks. But instead of using volume caps, he thinks ISPs should introduce transmission caps. These would allow users to purchase access to the Internet at a given minimum data rate, which would be guaranteed even during times of congestion. Subscribers could download or upload data of any size, anytime they want, at the guaranteed rate. When the network isn’t congested, like in the middle of the night, users could get faster speeds. But during times of congestion, the broadband pipe would be limited to the minimum guaranteed rate.

Vint Cerf, Google chief Internet evangelist

His comments come just days after the Federal Communications Commission’s symbolic ruling against Comcast for violating the agency’s Net neutrality principles. The FCC came down hard on the cable operator for blocking access to peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols such as BitTorrent.

The technology to create such a service has existed for some time. And network operators have been offering corporate customers data connections with minimum data rates spelled out for years.

(Credit:
Google)

“I’ve been pleased so far with the tone and substance of these conversations, which have helped me to better understand the underlying motivation and rationale for the network management decisions facing Comcast, and the unique characteristics of cable broadband architecture,” he said. “And as we said a few weeks ago, their commitment to a protocol-agnostic approach to network management is a step in the right direction.”

Internet papa Vint Cerf said broadband speed limits rather than broadband data caps would be more useful in managing congested networks.

Cerf, who is Google’s chief Internet evangelist, on Monday wrote a post on the company’s public policy blog blasting the idea of applying data caps and metered rate plans. Instead he proposed a plan that limits network speeds.

In response to the controversy, some ISPs are looking into consumption-based billing or putting volume caps on the amount of data that subscribers can use. Time Warner Cable started testing such a metered bandwidth service in Texas. The way it works is that customers pay for a certain amount of data capacity per month that can be either uploaded or downloaded using their broadband connection. And if they go over the cap in a given month, subscribers are charged $1 per megabyte.

It’s difficult to say whether broadband providers will heed Cerf’s recommendations, especially since the cable operators, due to how their networks are designed, are the ones in greater need of help. The phone companies, which have always had networks built for two-way communication, have also been aggressively upgrading their networks with fiber, which offers greater capacity.

But network operators typically oversubscribe their networks to squeeze more profit out of their customers. The idea is that all subscribers don’t use the network at the same time, typically leaving enough capacity so that when they do use the network, most users can get close to the maximum capacity offered. Selling services with minimum bandwidth guarantees means that operators wouldn’t be able to oversubscribe the network as much, because during times of heavy congestion they might not be able to deliver the minimum data rates. It would also force these providers to enter into strict service level agreements with individual customers, which could potentially cost them a lot of money if they can’t deliver the minimum guaranteed speeds.

The problem is that carriers don’t want to sell consumer broadband services this way for a couple of reasons. For one, broadband providers prefer to advertise peak speed connections rather than minimums. A service that offers up to 10Mbps sounds a lot sexier than one that guarantees a 1Mbps download.

Cerf, who helped create the TCP/IP protocol used as the foundation of the Internet, says that he doesn’t think applying a “volume cap” is very “useful.” He also said that metered pricing instead of the flat fee plans “could end up creating the wrong incentives for consumers to scale back their use of Internet applications over broadband networks.”

I wish that it were Ballmer’s core team advertising for the position, as that would be a clearer signal of Microsoft’s intent, but I’ll take what I can get.

I like it. It’s classically Microsoft: push forward with limited hand-wringing about the past. Give it credit for being gutsy.

Is this position an exercise in masochism? Perhaps, but I also believe that it’s likely sincere. Microsoft does need to figure out open source and certain groups within the company have demonstrated integrity in doing just that. I do think it’s somewhat of an exercise in futility until Microsoft figures out its patent story, but perhaps this position can help Microsoft to do just that.

commentary

As we continue to grow our investments around open source, we’re looking to add a new Community Manager to our team. This position will be part of the Platform Community team and will be responsible for growing Microsoft and open source communities together. More specifically, this individual will be a core contributor to our long-term open source strategy & how we increase the potential of all developers, everywhere.

Microsoft has announced that it’s hiring an open-source community manager, declaring that “Microsoft is committed to the long-term growth of open source.” Microsoft seems to be more committed to a certain type of open-source growth than general open-source growth, but let’s not quibble.

commentary

…[P]atents are very much used to stop competition, which is undeniably the most powerful way to encourage innovation. Anybody who argues for patents is basically arguing against open markets and competition…

In an excellent interview posted on Simple-Talk, Torvalds covers a range of topics, including the Linux operating system’s place in history:

A level-headed, mature commentary on the future of Linux, the value of patents, and the likelihood of Torvalds going to Microsoft. No wonder we love this guy.

And on working for Microsoft:

Other interesting tidbits from the interview are Linus’ comment on patents:

I admire Linus Torvalds’ candor (this is the guy who freely admits his own family doesn’t use the Linux desktop, after all), as well as his foresight.

I find it unlikely that MS would ever offer anything that I would consider relevant. Money? Hey, they have it, and I like it, but I obviously don’t value it over everything else. And they are unlikely to offer the things I really value.

He is absolutely right. Much as we may pine for this or that project to achieve market dominance, it is one of the cardinal virtues of open source that there are no legal or business policies that would entrench it as a monopoly. People may choose to use it for a long period of time and to the exclusion of other products/projects, but there are no nefarious designs in the code to make it so.

I can certainly imagine the Linux kernel becoming obsolete–anything else would just be sad, really, in the big picture.

Hence, Linux may fade away. At some point, we should certainly hope so, in order to make way for the next phase of operating system, one that is preferably open source.

Sony and Samsung tend to set the pace on price reductions, and Gagnon of DisplaySearch says the other brands will all react in order to maintain their brand position in the market. If Samsung drops its 42-inch LCD $100 in the coming weeks, expect Panasonic to do the same on its 42-inch plasma.

And LCD prices have still been dropping more quickly than plasma. With major shopping opportunities like Labor Day, the beginning of football season, and Black Friday fast approaching, plasma’s recovery could be brief.

The result has been a resurgent plasma TV business. DisplaySearch is reporting that shipments of plasma worldwide increased 52 percent from the same quarter a year ago, or 3.4 million units. That’s way behind LCD TV shipments, but it’s encouraging for a technology that many of the biggest vendors had basically left for dead.

Despite LCD’s established presence in many North American living rooms, it appears that the introduction of smaller sizes and lower prices are helping retailers to move plenty of product. Last year, LCD shipments to the region were dropping. But second-quarter shipments increased almost 30 percent from a year ago.

But it doesn’t appear there are going to be bold moves on the part of plasma to steal some more share and get ahead. For all the brands, said Gagnon, “it’s all about maintaining price differential.”

Still, the news is encouraging to an industry that was wringing its hands back in March over running out of places to sell its rapidly maturing, but still-pricey sets.

The second-quarter check-up is in, and the industry is in far better health than a year ago. DisplaySearch’s Quarterly Global TV Shipment and Forecast Report was released Thursday, and worldwide TV shipments increased 11 percent from the same period in 2007, but just 3 percent from first quarter of 2008.

To be sure, LCD TVs are still the new television of choice for most. LCD shipments jumped 47 percent in the last year to reach 23.7 million units (compared to plasma’s 3.4 million units) in the second quarter worldwide, DisplaySearch says.

(Credit:
LG Electronics)

Plasma shipments are on the rise everywhere, but they are particularly healthy in China, where they rose 285 percent in the last year.

Around that same time, some of the bigger tier-one manufacturers began pushing smaller screens in an attempt to attract buyers who might be tightening their budgets as gas and food prices rose.

Vizio’s 32-inch plasma sells in club stores for about $550, while Samsung and Sony’s 32-inch LCDs each retail for $699, the lowest price each has ever offered for that size TV.

It appears the TV industry’s self-prescribed medicine of pushing smaller flat-panel sets is working.

“Sony and Samsung launched what we termed ‘fighter models,’ because they were designed to reach new pricing lows,” said Paul Gagnon, who monitors the TV industry for DisplaySearch. Vizio’s smaller plasma was specifically launched “to blunt the impact” of Samsung’s and Sony’s moves into smaller-and-cheaper sets, he added.

Vizio made a splash with its 32-inch plasma, a size that hasn’t been available in that technology in the U.S. for a while. Even the big guys like Panasonic, LG, and Sony and Samsung were going small: 32, 40, 46 inches.

Separately, Best Buy narrowed its financial outlook. Best Buy on Friday said its holiday revenue was in line with revised expectations, but same store sales fell 6.5 percent.

In a statement, Circuit City said:

Circuit City said Friday that it is in talks with “two highly motivated and interested parties” about selling the company as a going concern. Meanwhile, Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer in the U.S., reckons it continues to take market share.

This was originally posted at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

If these transactions don’t occur by Jan. 16, Circuit City could liquidate.

Here’s the breakdown of sales by category:

• Revenue was up 4 percent for the month ending Jan. 3 to $7.5 billion, in line with expectations.
• Best Buy narrowed its earnings targets. The company is predicting fiscal 2009 earnings to be $2.50 to $2.70 a share, excluding a $111 million investment impairment charge. The company had projected 2009 earnings between $2.30 and $2.90 a share.
• The company will take a fiscal fourth quarter charge of $60 million for its voluntary severance program.

By the numbers:

These interested parties are considering providing additional financing to allow the company to sustain operations and move forward with a subsequent restructuring through a stand-alone plan and/or purchasing the company or all or substantially all of the company’s assets. The parties have substantially completed due diligence and now are in negotiations with the company and the company’s major stakeholders in order to finalize such a transaction. While the company is optimistic that a transaction can be successfully finalized, no assurance can be given that this will occur.

The electronics retailing giant made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Circuit City asked the bankruptcy court to approve procedures that officially would sell Circuit City in total, by business units, or by assets such as inventory.

You don’t mess with Craigslist, apparently.

When White launched the Craigslist Blog last month, Craigslist did not have its own blog. That’s changed recently, as Buckmaster now authors an official Craigslist blog. A report earlier this week estimated that Craigslist’s annual revenue is likely around $80 million and could be significantly higher, except that the company is “not about the money.”

Buckmaster seemed none too pleased with White’s response, and in a second e-mail that White posted to his blog, he reminded the blogger that Craigslist’s law firm of choice, Perkins Cole, “also does intellectual property work for Google, and for a lot of other prominent companies.”

(Credit:
Craigslist)

Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO

In response, White agreed to stop excerpting Craigslist content, and the unofficial Craigslist Blog now prominently displays the phrase “(the unofficial one)” in its masthead. But White wouldn’t back down on the domain.

A fan-run blog called Craigslist Blog has been served a takedown notice from the massive classifieds site, according to a post from blogger Tim White on Thursday.

“I think you have received bad legal counsel and that this is potentially a really bad PR move for (Craigslist),” his e-mail response to Buckmaster said, an allusion to the company’s friendly, hippie image.

White posted the e-mail he’d received from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster, which claimed that White’s URL “craigslistblog.org” was “infringing” and that its name was “needlessly confusing to members of the media and the general public, and must be changed.” Buckmaster did not demand that White stop blogging, but he did request that he stop using the domain, turn it over to Craigslist, and additionally stop posting excerpts from Craigslist on the unofficial blog.