Samsung churning out faster 256GB SSDs

Slashdot It! Samsung Electronics today announced that it is mass-producing 256GB solid-state disk drives that deliver double the performance rate of its earlier 64GB and 128GB drives. The new SSDs are designed for use in laptop and desktop PCs and are available for resellers today. Samsung said it has been able to narrow the disparity between read and write speeds on the drive from previous models to about 10%. That yields a sequential read rate of 220MB/sec. and sequential write rates of 200MB/sec. The company said it was also able to increase the erase cycles, allowing for the entire drive to be rewritten faster. Previously, Samsung's SSDs required data blocks marked for deletion to be erased only when data was ready to be written. Now the blocks are erased as they are marked for deletion. According to Steven Peng, SSD technical marketing manager at Samsung, the additional speed in the new drives is achieved through multichannel interleaving (eight channels total), "though the basic architecture remains unchanged. "However, there are design improvements such as optimized firmware, and improvements to the controller," he said. In September, Intel launched its first SSD, the X25, which has up to 80GB of capacity and uses 10 parallel channels to achieve an average read speed of 230.2MB/sec. Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung, said the new 256GB drive can store 25 high-definition movies taking up 10GB of space each in just 21 minutes, which he said is a significant advancement over a 7200rpm hard disk drive, which takes about 70 minutes. "Furthermore, the 256GB SSD launches applications 10 times faster than the fastest 7200rpm notebook HDD," Samsung said in a statement. Samsung's 256GB SSD is also available with optional proprietary encryption. Samsung would not release the price of the drive because, it said, the product is targeted at the reseller market and those vendors would have to determine the mark up for the drive in their desktops and laptops. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Judge orders Ballmer to testify in 'Vista capable' case

Slashdot It! A federal judge in Seattle has ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to testify in a class action lawsuit against Microsoft that alleges the company misled consumers in a marketing campaign for its Windows Vista operating system in which computers sold with an older Microsoft OS were labeled 'Vista Capable' when in fact they could only run a basic version of Vista. Ballmer has unique personal knowledge of facts surrounding the case, therefore he must face questioning, Judge Marsha Pechman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle ruled, according to court documents released late Friday. Lawyers for the plaintiffs will have no more than three hours to take a deposition from Ballmer at the time and place of his convenience, the documents said. The deposition must take place within 30 days of the order. The case against Microsoft was launched early last year. The plaintiffs allege that most computers labeled 'Vista Capable' in the marketing campaign, which began in early 2006, cannot run or run poorly Vista Premium, the version of Vista with the most popular features. Microsoft had sought to exclude Ballmer from questioning, saying he was not involved in operational discussions around the 'Vista Capable' program, the court documents say. Microsoft had offered up then co-president Jim Allchin and then-senior vice president Will Poole instead of Ballmer, saying the two had superior knowledge of the program. The plaintiffs won the argument to question Ballmer by pointing out conversations between Ballmer and Intel CEO Paul Otellini in which the two discussed possible changes in the Vista Capable requirements. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Europe Nears Price Cap on Mobile Text Messaging

Slashdot It! European Union telecommunications ministers are set to endorse on Thursday proposed price limits on cross-border text messaging and mobile Web surfing, according to a copy of the plan obtained by The International Herald Tribune. The ministers plan to adopt almost verbatim a proposal made by the European telecommunications commissioner, Viviane Reding, the author of similar price restrictions on roaming charges for international voice calls involving cellphones. But the ministers, meeting in Brussels, intend to reject a broader call from Ms. Reding to harmonize telecommunications costs and regulations within the 27 countries in the European Union. That proposal called for the European Commission to create a centralized regulator with the power to intervene in national telecommunications markets. The ministers’ support for price controls on data roaming makes it a near certainty that the new restrictions will take effect July 1, after final negotiations next spring with the European Parliament. That body in 2007 overwhelmingly supported the limits on voice roaming charges. The ministers have agreed to cap the retail charge for sending a cross-border short text message at 11 euro cents, or 14 American cents. If the council’s position were adopted as it stands, charges for sending text messages across European borders would fall by an average of 62 percent from the current 29 euro cents, according to European Commission data. A similar percentage decline is possible in data roaming charges. “It’s good that the council is endorsing the data caps,” said Levi Nietvelt, an economist with the European Consumers’ Organization in Brussels. “We would like to see the prices go down even further.” Mobile operators have generally opposed the controls, arguing that the market should determine price levels. While supporting data roaming caps, the ministers plan to send a message to the European Parliament and to Ms. Reding by opposing the attempt to allow Brussels to exert a greater influence over telecommunications pricing. The national governments of two-thirds of member countries still own either a majority or a large stake in the former phone monopoly, which in many cases controls access to the main fixed-line network. In most European countries, the national telecommunications regulator works for the same government that owns a stake in the former phone monopoly. Ms. Reding’s proposed regulatory overhaul, which gained support from the European Parliament, was aimed at dealing with this situation, which she considers a conflict of interest. But the council intends to reject most elements of the regulatory package, which is also aimed at spurring cross-border competition among network operators. Instead of supporting Ms. Reding’s call for a powerful regulator, the council plans to propose that a current advisory panel of 27 national regulators, called the European Regulators Group, be transformed into a private corporation — similar to a lobbying group — that will try to address issues of coordination. Paul Rübig, a member of the European Parliament from Austria, who was a sponsor of the voice roaming legislation in 2007, said he was confident that Parliament and the ministers’ council would reach a compromise in the spring to create a new Europe-wide regulator. The ministers also are opposing a plan to compel countries to ensure that their national regulators remain free of local government influence, removing the word “independent” from the text approved by the commission and Parliament. The issue has gained prominence after the prime minister of Romania twice in three years dismissed the country’s top national telecommunications regulator. Malcolm Harbour, one of three sponsors in Parliament of the telecommunications legislation, said he was confident lawmakers would reach agreement with telecommunications ministers to pass a revised package into law. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Symantec sees spike in dangerous Microsoft attacks

Slashdot It! Symantec is warning of a sharp jump in online attacks that appear to be targeting a recently patched bug in Microsoft's Windows operating system, an analysis that some other security companies disputed Friday. Symantec raised its Threat Con security alert level from one to two because of the attacks, with two denoting "increased alertness." But other vendors, including Arbor Networks and McAfee, said they were seeing no such activity. The attacks spotted by Symantec target a flaw in the Windows Server Service that Microsoft says could be exploited to create a self-copying worm attack. Late last month, Microsoft took the unusual step of rushing out an emergency patch for the bug after it saw a small number of online attacks that took advantage of it. Since then, security experts and Microsoft have said that the attacks have not been widespread, but that may now be changing, according to Symantec. The security vendor said it had seen a "dramatic rise" in attacks targeting TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) port 445. A TCP port is a number assigned to packets of data sent over the Internet to help computers know what program should be processing the information. Web browsers, for example, typically use port 80. Port 445 is one of two ports used to connect with the Windows Server Service. This activity "appears to be related to the exploitation" of the Windows Server bug, Symantec said in a note on its Web site. Most firewalls block port 445, as well as the other port used by Server Service, port 139, but Symantec said Windows users should still make sure they've applied the MS08-067 patch for the bug. Attacks on the bug had focused previously on Chinese versions of Windows, but the latest attacks target English versions, Symantec said. Arbor Networks disputed Symantec's interpretation, saying, "we're not seeing this rise, not on TCP port 445 and not on TCP port 139. Looking over the last month we don't see this rise in MS08-067 attacks that would raise any alarms for us," in a Friday blog posting. Both McAfee and Microsoft echoed those sentiments. "Microsoft continues to see limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit this vulnerability," Microsoft said in a statement. On the other hand, the Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which monitors research and university networks, reported that it had seen a bump in port 445 activity. Security experts say that if criminals are targeting specific networks with their attacks, it could account for the discrepancy. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Digital Sales Surpass CDs at Atlantic

Slashdot It! Since MP3s first became popular a decade ago, music industry executives have obsessed over this question: when would digital music revenue finally surpass compact disc sales? For Atlantic Records, the label that in years past has delivered artists like Ray Charles, John Coltrane and Led Zeppelin, that time, apparently, is now. Atlantic, a unit of Warner Music Group, says it has reached a milestone that no other major record label has hit: more than half of its music sales in the United States are now from digital products, like downloads on iTunes and ring tones for cellphones. “We’re like a college basketball team on an 18-2 run,” said Craig Kallman, Atlantic’s chairman and chief executive. At the Warner Music Group, Atlantic’s parent company, digital represented 27 percent of its American recorded-music revenue during the fourth quarter. (Warner does not break out financial data for its labels, but Atlantic said that digital sales accounted for about 51 percent of its revenue.) With the milestone comes a sobering reality already familiar to newspapers and television producers. While digital delivery is becoming a bigger slice of the pie, the overall pie is shrinking fast. Analysts at Forrester Research estimate that music sales in the United States will decline to $9.2 billion in 2013, from $10.1 billion this year. That compares with $14.6 billion in 1999, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. As a result, the hope that digital revenue will eventually compensate for declining sales of CDs — and usher in overall growth — have largely been dashed. “It’s not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,” said John Rose, a former executive at EMI, the British music company, who is now a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group. Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. “The real question,” Mr. Rose said, “is how does the record industry change its rights structure so it captures a fairer percent of the value it creates in funding, marketing and managing the launch of artists?” Ever since 1999, when the popular file-swapping service Napster was created, the music industry’s fate has been closely watched by other media companies — television, film and print publications like newspapers — whose traditional businesses are also under siege. In virtually all these corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal’s chief executive, Jeff Zucker, has described as “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.” In each of these sectors, digital remains a small piece of the business. NBC has said it expects $1 billion in digital revenue by 2009; over all, the company’s revenue last year was more than $15 billion. Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher, with publications like Sports Illustrated, People and Fortune, said that about 9 percent of its $2.2 billion revenue in the first half of this year was derived from digital. In October, The New York Times Company said that online revenue accounted for 12.4 percent of its overall revenue. On Tuesday, the Warner Music Group reported that digital revenue for the full fiscal year rose 39 percent, to $639 million, or 18 percent of the company’s total revenue. Over all, the company topped the expectations of Wall Street analysts — who on average were forecasting a small loss, according to Reuters — by reporting a net profit of $6 million in the fourth quarter. Revenue fell 1 percent, to $854 million. Atlantic, whose artists include the Southern rapper T. I., the rock band Death Cab for Cutie and Kid Rock, appears to be the first of the major labels to claim that most of its revenue is coming from digital sales — and it says it has done so without seeing as steep a decline in compact disc sales as the rest of the industry. This performance is sharply at odds with the trends in the music industry over all, where data show that sales of compact discs still account for more than two-thirds of music sales. Forrester Research does not expect digital music to reach 50 percent of the overall pie until 2011. Analysts said they were surprised that Atlantic — with the highest overall market share in the industry this year — had such a high percentage of digital revenue. “That’s a lot,” said David Card, a digital music analyst at Forrester Research. “That’s very high. No one is near that.” The question, then, is whether Atlantic’s performance is an outlier or a signal that the music industry is reaching a pivot point as it moves toward a new business model. “I think we’ve figured it out,” said Julie Greenwald, president of Atlantic Records. “It used to be that you could connect five dots and sell a million records. Now there are 20 dots you can connect to sell a million records.” In making that transition to a digital business, the music business has become immeasurably more complicated. Replacing compact disc sales are small bits of revenue from many sources: Atlantic Records’ digital sales include ring tones, ringbacks, satellite radio, iTunes sales and subscription services. At the same time, record labels — Atlantic included — are spending less money to market artists. In the pre-Internet days, said Ms. Greenwald, “we were so flush, we did everything in the name of promotion.” Among the cutbacks are less spending to produce videos and to support publicity tours when a new album is released. “Today you have to be like Leonard Bernstein,” said Mr. Kallman, “making sure everyone is hitting the right notes at just the right millisecond. The tipping point, if you will, is when everything converges and your timing with everything is impeccable.” Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Gift basket

With Christmas coming, you might want to buy something for your family this coming christmas. You might want to buy some flowers for your father to show your love to them. It is tougher to show your love to your father as most of us would be closer to our mothers. However, one good thing about having to thank your fathers are much easier then having to thank your mothers, simply because mothers are more fussy then fathers. Males and females are different. Females are more fussy. So I suggest you get a flower for your father would do. gift baskets The website I am reviewing today is called chsapeakebaygiftbasket.com. They are a nice bunch of people whom are experts in this field which would do a very good job for you this christmas. You can even choose the type of flowers that you would wish for for different occasions like memorial, father's day or mother's day. Reminder Service They also have a reminder service were you fill up the important dates of your family member's birthday or any occasion and then they would send you reminders on the day to buy something for them. Nice feature. Check them out now.

Bed Frames

Are the people next door making a lot of noise till you are not able to sleep? THen you better read this review as I am going to review this website that would bring a lot of relief to you. bed frames The website I am reviewing today is called thesleepshop.com. They are a nice bunch of people whom are selling bed frames for you to sleep in. They also have a toll-free number that you can call to enquire about their products. Check them out

#65 Seasonic 850W Power Supply

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#64 EverCool Formula 2 VGA Cooler

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#63 Lamptron FC2 Fan Controller

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Verizon fires employees over snooping on Obama’s phone records

Slashdot It! The curiosity in President-elect Barack Obama's phone records came with a high price tag for Verizon Wireless employees. According to CNN, the workers who snooped on Obama’s phone records have been fired. "This was some employees' idle curiosity," a company source told CNN and added "we now consider this matter closed." Verizon Wireless previously had said that the security breach did not involve a Blackberry smartphone, but a “simple” phone. The company conceded that the employees had access to the full records of calling data, including the phone numbers of calls made and received. However, they had no access to the content of the calls, Verizon said. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Internet Explorer 8 delayed until 2009

Slashdot It! Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 8 will not be officially released until 2009. According to a blog posting on the Internet Explorer 8 development site, a release candidate of the browser will be released in the first quarter of next year, to be followed by a final release at an unspecified date. "Our plan is to deliver the final product after listening for feedback about critical issues," says Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager for Internet Explorer "We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release. We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release." The Redmond giant was widely expected to push the latest version of its dominant browser out of the door by the end of the year, but the company says "we're taking feedback and won't ship until we're ready." In related browser news, Google has suggested it may look at bundling Chrome with new PCs. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

H.P. Results Match Preliminary Numbers

Slashdot It! When Mark V. Hurd took over as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard in 2005 and started looking at the company’s businesses, he found a neglected little unit called ProCurve that made networking gear used to connect computing systems on corporate campuses. ProCurve had been stifled under H.P.’s former chief executive, Carleton S. Fiorina, who served on the board of Cisco Systems, the dominant player in the industry. Ms. Fiorina supported the traditional alliance between H.P. and Cisco, in which H.P. sold computers and Cisco sold network equipment to the same customers. Mr. Hurd decided on a different approach. He championed the ProCurve business, helping nurture it from a few hundred million dollars in annual sales to about $1 billion. It is now H.P.’s second-most-profitable business and one of its fastest-growing. Now H.P. is directly attacking Cisco in a bid to capture a larger chunk of the $20 billion market for local area network and wireless switches. “H.P. has declared war,” said Mark Fabbi, a networking analyst at the research firm Gartner. “H.P. has the potential to completely change the dynamics of the networking industry.” Hewlett-Packard’s strategy with ProCurve — expand revenue and profit by biting into a leader’s lucrative franchise — is vintage Mark Hurd. And it offers some insights into how the company has outperformed its peers financially even as the technology industry faces a global slowdown. On Monday, H.P., the largest maker of computers and printers, formally reported net income of $2.11 billion, or 84 cents a share, for its fiscal fourth quarter, about flat with the previous year. Revenue rose 19 percent to $33.6 billion. Laptops, compact servers and software were strong, as H.P. continued to pressure rivals like Dell and I.B.M. Although the company did not break out figures for ProCurve, which was a tiny part of H.P.’s revenue of $118 billion for the 2008 fiscal year, Mr. Fabbi estimated the business had gross profit margins of about 50 percent — second only to the lucrative printer cartridges that are H.P.’s cash cow. He said H.P.’s network hardware revenue had grown 40 percent over the last two quarters, cementing the company’s position as the No. 2 player in the market. H.P., based in Palo Alto, Calif., now accounts for 7 percent market share by revenue, compared with Cisco’s 77 percent. In June, Mr. Hurd made his ambitions for ProCurve clear by selecting a senior vice president of H.P., Marius Haas, as the new chief of the networking business. Mr. Haas had spent the previous five years as the head of H.P.’s strategy and corporate development team, overseeing more than 25 mergers and acquisitions. The last deal cleared by Mr. Haas was the $13.9 billion purchase of Electronic Data Systems, a computer services giant that H.P. is using to challenge I.B.M., the leader in that business. This month, H.P. placed the ProCurve line under its Technology Solutions Group, the $38 billion business run by an executive vice president, Ann Livermore. “This was one of our best-kept secrets for a long time,” Mr. Haas said. “Now, everybody knows about it.” Cisco, based in San Jose, Calif., declined to directly discuss H.P.’s push into its core business. Ish Limkakeng, a vice president in Cisco’s switching group, said the company “takes all competitors very seriously.” But while Cisco plays down the changing competitive situation, customers have taken notice. Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., has switched to H.P. as a supplier. “A lot of people in the industry say that Cisco has a certain arrogance,” said Scott Lowe, the college’s chief information officer. “With real competition in the marketplace, I think you will see there is a desire for people to get away from that arrogance.” Some of Cisco’s strongest critics are hardware resellers. They are hoping that a muscular competitor like H.P. will place pressure on Cisco to give them more favorable sales and services terms. Although Cisco itself makes about 70 percent gross profit margins on its LAN switching gear, the resellers “can’t make any money on Cisco,” said Brad Reese, who sells refurbished Cisco equipment. Under Ms. Fiorina, H.P. and Cisco had an unusually close partnership. H.P. actually rewarded sales representatives for selling Cisco’s network hardware without offering similar compensation for H.P.’s own products.Despite its stepchild status, the ProCurve business grew during Ms. Fiorina’s tenure. H.P. became a trusted supplier of switch equipment used by small and midsize companies, outflanking suppliers like Nortel Networks and 3Com. Upon his arrival, Mr. Hurd changed the way H.P. sold its network hardware. Rather than being encouraged to sell Cisco products, H.P. sales representatives were rewarded for selling H.P. equipment. “You should be assured that Mark is a very pragmatic guy and wants people incented to sell H.P.,” Mr. Haas said. “Cisco has had such a dominant position, but the doors are opening.” Cisco continues to receive high marks for the breadth and quality of its products. Still, it has largely been able to operate in this part of the market without facing a competitor of its size or stature. Analysts also say that H.P.’s networking plans may receive a lift from the addition of E.D.S., which assembles and manages computer systems for corporate customers and has done a lot of business with Cisco, possibly even doubling sales of its network products in less than two years. “H.P. is a much more formidable challenger to Cisco, and it has sent an obvious message,” said Nikos Theodosopoulos, an analyst at UBS Securities. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Cost Cutting Helps Dell Profit Exceed Forecasts

Slashdot It! Dell, one of the world’s largest makers of personal computers, reported better-than-expected earnings on Thursday as the company’s cost-cutting efforts — including the elimination of 8,300 jobs over the last year — blunted the pain from falling revenues in the early stages of the world economic slowdown. With most economists predicting that the deepening slump will hammer corporate technology spending over the next year, Dell said it intended to keep slicing costs and would be cautious with its $8.9 billion cash hoard even as it realigns its business model from a direct-sales model to one that relies more on retailers to sell its laptops and desktop PCs. Dell, based in Round Rock, Tex., reported revenue of $15.16 billion in the third quarter, which ended Oct. 31. That was a 3 percent drop from the same quarter a year earlier and more than a billion dollars shy of the $16.22 billion that analysts had expected, according to Thomson Reuters. But the company’s profits greatly exceeded Wall Street’s forecasts, largely because of the company’s strong emphasis on cost cutting and a gradual shift toward more profitable products. Dell posted net income of $727 million for the third quarter, a 5 percent drop from the $766 million it earned a year ago. However, stock buybacks reduced the number of shares outstanding by 14 percent over the last year, so on a per-share basis, net income for the quarter rose 9 percent to 37 cents, compared with 34 cents a year ago. Wall Street analysts expected net income of 31 cents a share. Dell’s shares, which have tumbled from $28.40 over the last year, closed at $9.81 in regular trading Thursday, down 54 cents. The stock recouped those losses in after-hours trading as investors digested the earnings report, which was released after the market closed. Over the last two years, Dell’s earnings have often arrived well outside of Wall Street’s forecasts. The company has oscillated between increasing profits and reducing prices to chase market share. For about the last year and a half, Dell has been revamping to increase its retail presence and shift a greater percentage of its sales to higher-profit products like laptops, computer servers and services. Dell embarked on this strategy after rivals, especially Hewlett-Packard, proved more competitive on cost and wooed away consumers who wanted to see products in stores before buying them. But Dell is seeing far more immediate effects from layoffs and changes in its production model. After years of making all of its products at company-owned plant, Dell said on Thursday that it now builds one-quarter of its products through contract manufacturers, mimicking its rivals. Dell now finds itself trying to navigate difficult product and structural transitions while consumers and businesses have curtailed their spending on all technology products. Companies ranging from technology giants like Intel and Cisco Systems to retailers like Best Buy have warned of a sudden, drastic drop in sales. Dell, however, has tried to turn the poor economy into a positive by claiming that its sophisticated supply and order systems let it react more quickly to fluctuations in demand. “We are ahead in seeing the decline in the market given our model, versus being buffered by a distribution channel,” said Brian T. Gladden, Dell’s chief financial officer. The company had plenty of declining markets to contend with. Sales of PCs fell 14 percent, and sales of servers and networking gear dropped 5 percent. In the Americas, where Dell gets 48 percent of its revenue, sales fell 8 percent. Still, some analysts focused on Dell’s bright spots during the quarter, which included rising sales to consumers, higher services revenue and significant cost reductions. “In any kind of turnaround situation, results can be choppy,” said Louis Miscioscia, an analyst with Cowen & Company. “But Dell’s performance here was well above our expectations, especially given that the environment was very difficult.” H.P., one of Dell’s major rivals, issued preliminary fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, reporting a modest increase in sales after excluding revenue from its recent acquisition of Electronic Data Systems. More important, H.P. felt comfortable enough to present Wall Street with relatively upbeat guidance for its next fiscal year, sending its shares soaring. H.P. benefits from a vast amount of revenue from software, services and printer ink. Sales in these areas tend to repeat like clockwork and are often tied to long-term deals. Dell, by contrast, is more dependent on consumer and corporate spending fluctuations on hardware. Because of the state of the economy, Dell declined to provide any projections of how results might look in the next quarter or the next year. The rise of wireless technology and slicker, lighter, cheaper products have driven customers toward laptops. Many consumers prefer to ogle and handle laptops in retail stores rather than buy them online or by phone. Dell was late in getting into such stores, where H.P. and its sister brand, Compaq, hold a leading position. As of the most recent count, Dell is in 20,000 stores worldwide. Dell also once outflanked competitors by putting the latest and greatest components into new computers and quickly passing on lower component costs to customers. Over the last few years, rivals have largely caught up. Customers also seem less driven to chase the latest chips since software makers have failed to produce applications that can tap into all that current chips have to offer. Ultimately, however, Dell appears capable of weathering these challenges — and the wobbly economy — about as well as its peers. The question is how Dell’s cost cutting and its decision to turn down low-margin deals will fare in a protracted slump, which might encourage rivals to start a price war. “It’s difficult to continue to show profits when the top-line revenue is going down,” said David Bailey, an analyst with Goldman Sachs. An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the number of stores where Dell is selling computers. It is 20,000, not 17,000. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Web Sites Wage Holiday Price Wars

Slashdot It! As deserted malls and department stores struggle to court cash-short consumers with steep discounts this holiday season, a similar and even more ferocious price war is being waged online. Internet retailers, trying to navigate what is shaping up to be the first truly dreary holiday shopping season ever on the Web, are engaging in price-cutting and discounting so aggressive that it threatens their profit margins and, in some cases, their very survival. For example, Sony introduced its HDR-SR11 high-definition digital video recorder in April with a suggested retail price of $1,200. This week, Dell.com was selling it for $899, and the electronics retailer Abe’s of Maine had it on its site for $750 — and both were throwing in free shipping. At Lori’s Designer Shoes, a Web site that sells women’s accessories, a brown leather Hype tote bag started at $338, fell to $246 and is now available with a 20 percent discount coupon for $196.80. Lori Andre, the owner, said she generally tried to avoid online promotions “because then you train the customer and they’ll expect that, and you’re not going to make any money.” But last week, traffic hit a wall and sales on the site fell by nearly a quarter. “We’ve been in business for 25 years, and never seen the bottom drop out like this,” she said. Traditional retailers are facing the same problem, of course, and discounts are proliferating from suburban malls to Fifth Avenue. But the price-cutting is fiercest on the Web, where customers can easily shop for the best price with a quick search on Google or on specialized shopping engines like Shopping.com. Online, the competition is only a click away. For many Web sites, the discounts and price cuts are the only way to hold on to customers as online buying unexpectedly plummets. The research firm comScore reported Tuesday that sales growth on e-commerce sites slowed to a meager 1 percent in October compared with the previous year — the lowest rate ever for online retail and well down from the industry’s typical 20 percent gains. Sales of music, movies, books, computer software, flowers and gifts have been hit the hardest, with double-digit declines, comScore said. “A lot of these retailers aren’t running on big margins to begin with, so it’s pretty challenging,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore. “But it’s a Catch-22 situation: They have to run these deals because that’s what consumers are looking for this season.” To preserve the sanctity of their brands and some level of pricing control, some Web companies are promoting discount sites separately from their main brands. Zappos.com, a shoe retailer based in Henderson, Nev., never runs promotions on its site. Instead, it quietly moves shoes that do not sell in six months to 6pm.com, a clearance site it acquired last year, but runs separately. This month, the company is buying more search ads for 6pm.com, where a pair of colorful slip-on Keds sneakers is on sale for $12.73 — 74 percent off the original price on Zappos.com. Even when these extreme discounts mean selling shoes for less than Zappos.com paid for them, it is better to recoup some cash than none, said Tony Hsieh, the company’s chief executive. The discounting is not just drastic, but is also occurring unusually early in the season. Kmart, a division of Sears Holding, initiated Black Friday prices on electronics — 40 to 50 percent off — on Nov. 2, nearly four weeks before the real Black Friday, the busy shopping day just after Thanksgiving that usually marks the beginning of the holiday buying season. Kmart’s discounts are available both online and in stores, but the retailer is throwing in free shipping on Web purchases of $49 or more this week, a measure it has never taken before. E-commerce experts said they expected the cutthroat price competition to be fatal to some struggling retailers. “Folks that have been on the ropes or near the ropes during the good times are going to go under. There is no question about it,” said George Michie, co-founder of the Rimm-Kaufman Group, a search marketing company. Many boutique stores opened e-commerce sites because they were simple to build and inexpensive to run, yet those same advantages also forced them to compete with thousands of other sites selling similar products, each offering steeper discounts. Plasticland, now an online boutique selling clothes, home décor and jewelry, started in 2002 as a single store in San Diego. The owners, lured by the global audience of the Web, moved it online in 2005. They were caught off guard this spring, when sales started to plummet. The company, now based in Plano, Tex., switched to lower-priced merchandise and began moving unsold goods onto its clearance pages a month earlier than usual. A necklace with a red apple pendant now sells there for $32.50, down from $65, and a serving platter for $37.80, down from $54. “Our profit per piece obviously drops, which means that we have to ship a lot more merchandise to make the same amount of money,” said Rebecca Nyhus, the store’s co-owner. “Lowering price points has helped us weather the downturn, but it has really bogged us down because shipping is so time-consuming” and expensive. Like many other small e-tailers caught in the holiday margin squeeze, Plasticland was forced to raise its minimum order for free shipping to $100, from $50 to try to recoup some of the lost profits. Free shipping is becoming a painful imperative for all e-commerce sites. Three-quarters of online shoppers said in a comScore survey that they would shop elsewhere if a site did not offer free shipping, and nearly all sites offered it for at least some purchases. E-commerce giants like Amazon.com, which offers free shipping on orders over $25 and eliminates even that minimum for customers who pay a flat annual fee, can easily absorb shipping costs. But small online vendors struggle. Powell’s Books, a bookstore in Portland, Ore. with a site that competes for customers with Amazon.com, offers free shipping on orders over $50. “In our business model, we could not afford to give free shipping on every package. It just would not work,” said Dave Weich, director of marketing at Powell’s. To exacerbate matters, a major expense for online retailers seems to be rising: the cost to advertise products on the search engine Google, the source of considerable traffic and visibility for most e-commerce sites. Over the last year and a half, prices for text ads related to women’s fashion have quadrupled, say apparel retailers. In the popular gifts category, the price to advertise alongside results for common search queries like “gift baskets” jumped 50 percent from the 2006 holidays to 2007 and is expected to climb again this year. For Delightful Deliveries, a 10-year-old company that was selling gift baskets online, that extra expense — plus the challenge of competing on price against its own wholesalers, which also sell on the Internet — proved too much. The eight-employee company, based in Port Washington, N.Y., closed in September. Eric Lituchy, the founder of Delightful Deliveries, is now watching the Internet price war from the sidelines. “I think everyone is praying that this economy does not get any worse and that people find reasons for optimism and spend some money at Christmastime,” he said. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

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PC Magazine, a Flagship for Ziff Davis, Will Cease Printing a Paper Version

Slashdot It! Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only. It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises. “The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview. While most magazines make their money mainly from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years. The change will not require much of an adjustment, because the focus has been on getting articles to the Web first, said Lance Ulanoff, the editor of the PCMag Digital Network, which is what PCMag.com and its accompanying Web sites were renamed on Wednesday. “All content goes online first, and print has been cherry-picking for some time what it wants for the print edition,” Mr. Ulanoff said. Circulation at PC Magazine has been declining since the late 1990s, when it hit a peak of 1.2 million. This year, the magazine’s rate base was 600,000. Mr. Young said that while the print magazine would be profitable in 2008, he forecast that it would lose money in 2009 because of fewer advertisements and rising costs. The final print edition will be the January 2009 issue. “Obviously, the macroeconomic condition is putting pretty significant pressure on all forms of advertising,” Mr. Young said. Seven production, circulation and advertising employees will be cut as a result of the move, out of a total of about 140 who work on PC Magazine and PCMag.com. Mr. Young said the company was considering taking its other print magazine, the video-game publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, into an online-only format, but would not make a decision before the end of the year. Other publishers have also moved publications online only. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a small publication that was established in 1945 and won a National Magazine Award last year, recently announced it would go online only beginning in January. “We’re trying to deal with the cost pressures,” said Jonas Siegel, the Bulletin’s editor, in an interview. The Christian Science Monitor announced in October that it would cease printing its paper weekday edition in favor of its Web site; also in October, the Hearst Corporation closed CosmoGirl but kept its Web site. “If you look at the list of the magazines that have gone to online, almost all of them have been magazines in trouble,” said John Fennell, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “Magazines in general are going to be dependent on print advertising for a long time into the future,” he said. But magazine and newspaper publishers have been contending with a decline in advertising at the same time that their costs, including ink, printing, and distribution, are rising. Advertising pages for the December issues of monthly magazines are down more than 17 percent from the December issues of 2007, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, and that is leading to layoffs and the closing of titles. On Tuesday, Time Inc. said that it would shut down Cottage Living, part of the Southern Progress division of Time Inc., along with the CottageLiving.com Web site. Nine of the 47 staff members will get jobs elsewhere in Time Inc., and the 38 others will be laid off, said Debra Richman, a Time Inc. spokeswoman. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Microsoft Announces Plans for No-Cost Consumer Security Offering

Slashdot It! To address the growing need for a PC security solution tailored to the demands of emerging markets, smaller PC form factors and rapid increases in the incidence of malware, Microsoft Corp. plans to offer a new consumer security offering focused on core anti-malware protection. Code-named “Morro,” this streamlined solution will be available in the second half of 2009 and will provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs. As part of Microsoft’s move to focus on this simplified offering, the company also announced today that it will discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare subscription service effective June 30, 2009. “Customers around the world have told us that they need comprehensive, ongoing protection from new and existing threats, and we take that concern seriously,” said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft. “This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware.” Built on Microsoft’s award-winning malware protection engine, “Morro” will take advantage of the same core anti-malware technology that fuels the company’s current line of security products, which have received the VB100 award from Virus Bulletin, Checkmark Certification from West Coast Labs and certification from the International Computer Security Association Labs. The new solution will deliver the same core protection against malware as that offered through Microsoft’s enterprise solutions, but will not include many of the additional non-security features found in many consumer security suites. Windows Live OneCare, one of the first all-in-one suites to be launched in the consumer market, includes a number of non-security features, such as printer sharing and automated PC tune-up. By shifting to focus on the core anti-malware features that most consumers still don’t keep up to date, “Morro” will be able to provide the essential protections that consumers need without overusing system resources, and will help more consumers have better protection against online threats. “Because uptake of standard anti-malware is low around the world, particularly in developing nations, the availability of basic protection for anyone who wants it is all the more important,” said Roger Kay, founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. “By offering such basic protection at no charge to the consumer, Microsoft is promoting a safer environment for PCs, service providers and e-commerce itself, since it is through unprotected PCs that the worst threats are introduced to the system as a whole.” “Morro” will be available as a stand-alone download and offer malware protection for the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems. When used in conjunction with the ongoing security and privacy enhancements of Windows and Internet Explorer, this new solution will offer consumers a robust, no-cost security solution to help protect against the majority of online threats. Windows Live OneCare will continue to be sold for Windows XP and Windows Vista at retail through June 30, 2009. Direct sales of OneCare will be gradually phased out when “Morro” becomes available. Regardless of their method of purchase, Microsoft will ensure that all current customers remain protected through the life of their subscriptions. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

Why developers prefer Macs

Slashdot It! When Terry Weaver wants to create .Net applications, he fires up Visual Studio and types away like any other .Net programmer. The setup gets a bit weird when he wants to test how the .Net application might appear to a Mac user visiting the Web site. Instead of starting up another machine, asking a colleague with a Mac, or simply ignoring those crazy followers of Steve Jobs, Weaver just pops over to the browser in another window. That's easy because Visual Studio is running on Windows inside a Parallels virtual machine, which, in turn, runs on his Mac. He has a PC, a Mac, and a Unix development box all in one. "I set up the networking so that I can type the IP address of my dev Web server to test my ASP.Net pages to see how they look and behave on Mac systems," said Weaver. "I think that's a good thing since I don't believe many developers of .Net take the time to test their applications on browsers in other operating systems." Stories like Weaver's are increasingly more common as the Mac's popularity among programmers continues rising. Apple's decision to move to Intel chips and embrace virtualization of other operating systems turned the platform into a very flexible tool for programmers. Macs let coders work with most of the software standards that live in boxes that range from the smallest smartphone to the biggest cluster of computers. This newfound success has been evolving for some time. One team manager interviewed for this article said that his programmers started switching from Dells and ThinkPads at least three years ago. Now 80 percent of his group uses Apple laptops. The explosion of interest in smartphones is helping the trend. The Miami-based Weaver says the fact that he's using a Mac made it simple to start experimenting with the iPhone development kit, available only on the Mac. Google's Android SDK and RIM's BlackBerry SDK both run in Java, a language that's usually well-supported on the Mac (though Java releases for Mac tend to lag behind those for Windows, Linux, and Solaris). Developers for the Palm OS also seem to gravitate toward the Mac OS X. All the major handheld operating systems except Windows Mobile run directly on Mac OS X, and Windows Mobile runs in Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. Are you ready for event-driven business? - watch this webcast. Programmers who concentrate on enterprise development and server applications are often devoted to Apple's hardware, although they're usually able to cite several dozen glitches and incongruities that annoy them. Developers building code for the Unix-dominated world of servers naturally feel more at home on the Mac. Although the surface layer is dripping with consumer-friendly eye candy, the underpinnings are close to those of BSD. This makes OS X a kissing cousin to Sun's Solaris and many versions of Linux. If you're developing for Sun servers, a Mac laptop offers a portable environment that's comfortably familiar. Each developer, though, will curse at some difference that drives them insane. The Mac, for instance, insists on using a carriage return to end lines, a historical anomaly that clashes with both Unix (line feed) and Windows (carriage return and line feed). Problems like these are disappearing as more developers grouse, but change is slow. The newest versions of the file system on the Mac, for instance, are now both case preserving and case sensitive, but you can still type "ls /library" in a command-line window and get the same results as typing "ls /Library" -- not so in most versions of Linux or BSD. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

FOIA docs show feds can lojack mobiles without telco help

Slashdot It! Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target's location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that "triggerfish" technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all. Triggerfish, also known as cell-site simulators or digital analyzers, are nothing new: the technology was used in the 1990s to hunt down renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick. By posing as a cell tower, triggerfish trick nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data to law enforcement. Most previous descriptions of the technology, however, suggested that because of range limitations, triggerfish were only useful for zeroing in on a phone's precise location once cooperative cell providers had given a general location. This summer, however, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice Department, seeking documents related to the FBI's cell-phone tracking practices. Since August, they've received a stream of documents—the most recent batch on November 6—that were posted on the Internet last week. In a post on the progressive blog Daily Kos, ACLU spokesperson Rachel Myers drew attention to language in several of those documents implying that triggerfish have broader application than previously believed. As one of the documents intended to provide guidance for DOJ employees explains, triggerfish can be deployed "without the user knowing about it, and without involving the cell phone provider." That may be significant because the legal rulings requiring law enforcement to meet a high "probable cause" standard before acquiring cell location records have, thus far, pertained to requests for information from providers, pursuant to statutes such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and the Stored Communications Act. The Justice Department's electronic surveillance manual explicitly suggests that triggerfish may be used to avoid restrictions in statutes like CALEA that bar the use of pen register or trap-and-trace devices—which allow tracking of incoming and outgoing calls from a phone subject to much less stringent evidentiary standards—to gather location data. "By its very terms," according to the manual, "this prohibition applies only to information collected by a provider and not to information collected directly by law enforcement authorities.Thus, CALEA does not bar the use of pen/trap orders to authorize the use of cell phone tracking devices used to locate targeted cell phones." Perhaps surprisingly, it's only with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 that the government has needed any kind of court order to use triggerfish. While previously, the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology. Under the updated definition, these explicitly include any "device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information." Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

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Why is Google Running Ads for Known Malware Sites?

Slashdot It! While researching an antivirus article here at Maximum PC, we noticed something very curious: a Google AdWords link called “Antivirus xp 2008,” which led to the url “antivirus-world-2009.com.” (Don't go there) Anyone who’s been paying attention during the last year or so know that "Antivirus xp 2008" is the name of one of the most widespread and obnoxious bits of malware floating around the internet. It hides itself in your system and launches a bogus antivirus program at intervals to warn you that you’ve got spyware and trojans and the sky is falling. Then, it recommends that you buy the pro version of the program, which presumably also does nothing except rip you off. The virus is frequently updated to evade malware removal tools, and is just generally a pain. So why is Google advertising for it? It’s not exactly tough to figure out that the site is hosting the virus; the link is called “antivirus xp 2008” after all. Well, maybe we should say that it’s not tough for users like us to figure out that it’s a virus—we suspect that less-experienced surfers (our moms, for instance) could very easily be duped into clicking the link, particularly if they were already searching for antivirus software. And there’s reason to believe that Google knows the site hosts malware. We know that Google purges so-called “attack sites” from its index, and when we searched for “site: antivirus-world-2009.com,” which ought to turn up all pages at that domain indexed by Google, we got zero results. This isn’t conclusive, of course; there are other reasons that a site might not be indexed by Google, but it is suspicious. Malware-hosting sites are generally designed to try to climb to the top of the Google results page, and it’s probably safe to assume that a site that advertises with Google would be search-savvy enough to get its page indexed, if it weren’t blacklisted. So what’s the deal? Are cases like this simply oversights, or is it Google policy not to subject its advertisers to the same scrutiny that the rest of the web undergoes? A Google spokesman responded to this question in typical form, saying "Google is committed to ensuring the safety and security of our users and our advertisers. As soon as we are aware of any violations of our policy, we work quickly to investigate and remove sites that serve malware in both our ad network and in our search results. As such, we've removed this site from our ad network." Us? We're not totally convinced. It seems like there's more Google could be doing more to insure that its advertisers aren't trying to hurt its users, and that it ought to be performing those checks before it hosts the ads. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare

1.5TB Barracuda users complain of random freezes

Slashdot It! Seagate's 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive didn't particularly enthrall us when we reviewed it last month, but we didn't run into show-stopping problems on our Windows XP-powered test rig. Judging by several forum threads—including an eight-page discussion on Seagate's own support forums—users of Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows Vista aren't so lucky. The starter of the Seagate forum thread, who identified himself as Nick, said his Ubuntu 8.04 PC started suffering intermittent 30-second freezes after he upgraded his mirrored RAID setup with two 1.5TB Barracudas. "Each time it freezes the kernel log indicates an error 'ata frozen', 'resetting' and the command looks to be a flush-cache-to-disk command," he explained. A good number of other users replied complaining of similar problems, and by sound of it, the freezes typically occur when streaming recorded TV shows or movies and transferring data to or from the Internet at slow speeds (70-100KB/s). One responder's log suggests RAID controllers mark freezing drives as faulty and disable them, too. Nick claimed he was able to work around the issue by turning off write caching, but unsurprisingly, someone else reported a significant performance drop after trying that solution. This problem doesn't seem to affect only RAID configs in Linux, either. Mac OS X and Windows Vista users have complained of similar problems in the same thread, as have others who tried 1.5TB 'cudas on Serial ATA controllers without RAID support. And getting in touch with Seagate technical support didn't help. Alleged quotations from the company's support staff include, "Unfortunately, we do not support Linux," and, "Again, these drives are not meant to be used in a RAID environment so we are not going to be working towards a solution for this environment"—a puzzling reply, considering Seagate's own product page for the 1.5TB 7200.11 mentions desktop RAID as a "best-fit" application. One user got somewhat luckier. He says a Seagate support person told him, "This is an issue we are currently working on. I know it's a hassle for now, but we're working on it as quickly as we can. As soon as we have more information we'll let you know." That was over a week ago, though. Since we've also spotted complaints on the MacRumors forums, Slashdot, and Newegg, it seems like something is up indeed. We asked Seagate for its official take earlier today, and company spokesman Mike Hall told us, "I'm looking into this and will get back to you once I know more." Stay tuned. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare