Posted 11/23/09 at 10:30:35 AM by David Murphy

Widescreen monitors are, in a word, awesome, and not just because they offer some kind of enhanced quality over their four-by-three ratio brethren. Depending on what you're using them for, like movie-watching, you'll simply see more of a given scene than you otherwise would on a standard display. The increased screen real estate (on the horizontal plane) also allows you to make more effective use of your desktop... provided you have the right software tools to create this enhanced productivity. 

In fact, one of the biggest complaints surrounding the use of widescreen monitors is just that--the elongated desktop space is just too hard to navigate, and applications frequently don't make the best use of this additional room. I can't promise that everything out-of-the-box (or out-of-the-browser window) will look great on your widescreen display. However, what I can do is offer you a suite of tools designed to make your 16-by-9 or 16-by-10 experience as great as it can be. I've been using widescreen monitors for quite some time now. I know how it feels. That extra background space on the sides of every Web page you load? Maddening.

Let's take care of that issue, and more, with some awesome widescreen monitor apps.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 08:08:28 AM by Paul Lilly

Remember when Juliet told Romeo that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet? We suppose the opposite must also be true, and America Online, whether abbreviated AOL or Aol, is still, after all, America Online.

The ISP on Sunday previewed its new brand identity, which it describes as a simple, confident logotype. The full identity won't be fully unveiled until December 10, when AOL common stock begins trading on the NYSE.

"Our new identity is uniquely dynamic," said Tim Armstrong, CEO of Aol. "Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people -- employees, partners, and advertisers. We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the AOL brand we take the company into the next decade."

Judging by the all-caps used throughout the press release, the new Aol branding looks to apply only to the company's "ever changing" logos, which were developed by branding outfit Wolff Olins.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 07:40:09 AM by Paul Lilly

We've been seeing signs of a market shift for some time now, and by the second quarter of 2010, global DDR3 shipments will finally surpass DDR2 for the first time, says market research firm iSuppli.

According to iSuppli, DDR3 is on pace to claim 50.9 percent of the market in Q2 2010, barely edging out DDR2. But what's most impressive is that DDR3's market share sat at only 14.2 percent in Q2 2009, and just 1 percent in Q2 2008.

"DDR3 is 50 percent faster than today's dominant DRAM technology, DDR2, while using about 30 percent less power," said Mike Howard, senior DRAM analyst for iSuppli. "For PC users across the board, this means faster performance. For notebook users, it can result in longer battery life."

Claiming a little over half of the market will be just the beginning, and iSuppli forecasts DDR3 will account for 71 percent of all DRAM by the end of next year.

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Both Intel and AMD fully embrace the DDR3 standard, and while DDR2 used to enjoy a pricing advantage, that gap recently closed all but completely.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 07:18:43 AM by Paul Lilly

Living up to a promise made several weeks ago, the Roku Channel Store is now open. Unfortunately, rumors that the open platform for delivering content to Roku boxes would include support for Hulu turned to out to be false, at least so far. According to an article in Playboy magazine, "Hulu support is coming," but the video site wasn't among the first ten channels released, which includes Pandora, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Mediafly, TWiT, blip.tv, Flickr, FrameChannel, Motionbox, and MobileTribe.

"The Roku Channel Store turns the Roku player into the world's first open platform designed specifically for the TV," Anthony Wood, founder and CEO of Roku, said in a statement. "Now content producers and distributors -- from single person shops to billion dollar corporations -- can deliver their content directly to consumers without having to go exclusively through cable operators, satellite networks, or TV affiliates."

Roku said a free SDK is available upon request, which would allow developers to add to the Store's selection. As for the Channel Store itself, it's also free and is being distributed through automatic upgrades within the next couple of weeks. No Roku owners will be left out in the cold, as the Channel Store works on all Roku devices, the company said.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 07:03:27 AM by Paul Lilly

Internet Explorer users who have yet to upgrade to IE8 should take note. According to security firm Symantec, there's a pretty nasty Zero Day exploit that affects both IE6 and IE7.

"The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, but we expect that a fully-functional reliable exploit will be available in the near future," Symantec explained in a blog post. "When this happens, attackers will have the abilty to insert the exploit in websites infecting potential visitors."

Symantec said the attack requires JavaScript and recommends that users disable it. The security firm also suggested potentially affected users limit web surfing to only trusted sites until Microsoft releases a fix.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 07:02:14 AM by Paul Lilly

Who would've guessed that 18 of the top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers on the planet are built with IBM hardware? Let's be honest, who wouldn't have guessed it? This isn't the first time IBM has dominated the Green500 list, which includes a range of energy efficient supercomputers all around the globe, but it's hard not to be impressed that the company holds 69 of the top 100 positions on the list.

"Supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance. The era of simply adding more processors is coming to a close," said David Turek, vice president, deep computing, IBM. "Clients need to be able to run supercomputers anywhere, not only places that have cheap power. As the Green500 proves, IBM has focused on this issue for some time and is well positioned to usher in performance breakthroughs along with efficiency gains."

IBM also claims the most energy efficient system in the world with a supercomputer built at the Julich supercoming center in Germany. The machine is capable of producing more than 732 Mflops per watt of energy.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 07:02:02 AM by Paul Lilly

Oracle will have to wait a little bit longer before deciding on its next step in its planned $7.4 billion takeover of Sun. That's because European Union regulators on Friday said they have extended the deadline of its review until January 27 in response to Oracle asking for more time "in order to have the opportunity to further develop its arguments in response to the Commission's concerns."

The new deadline gives Oracle six additional days to plead its case, which consists of convincing the EU that the purchase of open-source database software MySQL isn't a conflict of interest and won't hamstring competition.

While the U.S. has already approved the multi-billion dollar deal, the EU contends that should Oracle acquire Sun, it would purposely kill off the free and open-source MySQL so as not to cannibalize its own paid server database software. But Oracle has accused the EU of not understanding the database market, particularly how it applies on the open-source level.

Should the EU ultimately rule against the deal, Oracle said it would fight the decision in court.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 07:01:52 AM by Paul Lilly

Oracle, in collaboration with SpringSource, has proposed a new Eclipse project called "Enterprise Modules," or "Project Gemini" if going by the platform's codename. The project is intended to provide a home for subprojects integrating existing Java enterprise technologies into mobile-based platforms, according to the proposal.

"The primary goal of the Gemini project is to provide access to standard enterprise technology implementations within a modular framework," the proposal states. "The OSGi [Open Services Gateway Initiative] Alliance has developed specifications for the application and usage of many of the enterprise technologies within OSGi. These specifications describe how vendors should implement and interoperate with existing services, and how the OSGi modularity, life cycle, and service models should be applied with respect to those technologies. Gemini will provide implementations of many of these specifications."

The Project Gemini proposal went on to claim that OSGi has been gaining in popularity among enterprise developers, and that the natural evolution is to now start creating standards for integrating popular enterprise technologies in module-based systems before serving up implementations for the general public.

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Posted 11/22/09 at 08:39:00 PM by Justin Kerr

When Rupert Murdoch announced that he was thinking of taking his News Corp web properties out of the Google search index, speculation as to Microsoft and Bing's involvement was rampant. Turns out, there might have actually been something to the rumors for once. According to the folks over at The Financial Times, Microsoft is willing to grease Murdoch palms to go exclusive with Bing, a move that newspapers will no doubt welcome.

The idea is essentially to force Google to pay for content, something it has historically never done. The news certainly came to the disappointment of Google which tends to endorse the "openness of the web", but Google's UK director Matt Brittin told a conference last week that Google doesn't need news content to stay afloat. "Economically it's not a big part of how we generate revenue" he said. In the end Google will likely still gain indirect access to the content by crawling third party websites that link to News Corp stories, but it will certainly impact Google News and start a new and possibly disturbing trend.

Steve Ballmer has admitted that he is willing to spend heavily for many years to make Bing a serious rival to Google, and Rupert Murdoch is but one of many struggling old media mongrels eager to cash in on the competition in search. If the two parties do end up inking an agreement, expect to see Bing advertise heavily as the only place to find The Wall Street Journal and possibly more deals to come.

Will this earn Bing market share? And what effect do you think this will have on the open web?

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Posted 11/22/09 at 03:25:23 PM by Justin Kerr

Anyone who follows Intel closely knows that they don’t just pump out high end CPU’s, but they actually dedicate entire teams to “pie in the sky” ideas of what future technologies might look like. This could be anything from an x86 cluster of CPU’s to render video, or in this case, using your brain to control a computer. It may sound farfetched, but its something Intel and its researchers have been actively studying for sometime now.

Currently scientists are focusing on how the brain reacts when interacting with a computer, and then learning ways to interpret this data to execute commands on the machine. The idea here is to allow your thoughts to take over for your mouse and keyboard. Intel is of the belief that an implant would make this easier, though I’m not entirely sure how many volunteers they are going to get with that idea. “Eventually people may be willing to be more committed… to brain implants" said Intel’s Vice-President of future Technology, Andrew Chien. "Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts”

You may have your doubts, and so do we, but it might interest you to know that researchers have already made significant strides in the field of reading brain patterns, and have already identified certain words such as “bear” that cause everyones brain to react in a similar manner. “I think human beings are remarkably adaptive,” said Chien, “If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said I don’t want that, I don’t need that. Now you can’t get them to stop. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think implanting chips into human brains is well within the scope of possibility”. Chien speculates we will be lining up for implants as early as 2010.

Are you comfortable with this idea?

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