IBM confirms job cuts
A union that is trying to organize workers at IBM is reporting that the company cut more than 2,800 jobs recently, but an IBM spokesman would only confirm that some layoffs have occurred.
IBM eliminated 1,419 positions in its software group and 1,449 sales and distribution jobs, according to the Alliance at IBM/CWA Local 1701's Web site.
[ Just how severe is the impact of the economy on IT? Find out in "Is tech in more trouble than we think?" And also learn the "Five top spending priorities for hard times." ]
The site has been ablaze for weeks with comments from individuals who say they have been laid off or are concerned about their status.
One anonymous post on Tuesday claimed that 200 research jobs were being eliminated, and a number of others said IBM had begun laying off workers at its Burlington, Vermont, facility.
A union spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
IBM began notifying affected employees last week, said spokesman Doug Shelton. He declined to provide any information about the number of employees affected, where they were stationed or the business units involved.
Many tech companies are cutting staff amid the world's persistent economic woes, but IBM also trims jobs on a regular basis, referring to the process as "workforce rebalancing."
The company spent $700 million on such activities during its fiscal 2008, an increase of about $380 million over 2007, chief financial officer Mark Loughridge said during the company's Jan. 21 fourth-quarter earnings call.
Loughridge also indicated that job cuts were imminent. While the company expects its "rebalancing" spending to be in the usual range of $300 million to $400 million this year, the cutting may be skewed toward the first quarter, he said.
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Malicious Web sites on the rise, AVG notes
Web sites rigged with malicious code are becoming more numerous by the day, but the time those sites are online is declining, according to new research from security vendor AVG Technologies.
AVG is seeing between 200,000 to 300,000 new Web sites per day hosting code that can in some cases result in a PC being infected with malware just by visiting the site, said Roger Thompson, AVG's chief research officer.
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Up to 70 percent of those Web sites are regular ones that have been hacked in order to host malicious code, a statistic that shows how poor Web site security is across the Internet. The remainder are custom-built sites, he said.
Of those custom-built sites, however, there is some positive news. One common social-engineering trick is to put up a Web site offering codecs, or bits of software used to encode and decode video files. While purporting to be a codec, the file is often malicious software designed to steal data.
AVG found that up to 94 percent of the fake codec Web sites are taken offline within 10 days, with 62 percent taken down in a day or less. In the past, the sites may have stayed online as long as two weeks, showing that ISPs (Internet service providers) appear to be acting faster to remove them and current mechanisms for reporting bad Web sites are having an impact.
Still, the sheer number of sites infected may mean that the time online is less important as long as the hackers are attracting traffic.
Thompson said many hackers seek out less-professional Web sites with unpatched versions of "htaccess," a configuration file used to manage access to certain pages on a Web site.
Htaccess is a powerful file, since it can be manipulated to redirect users to other Web sites depending on how they came to the Web site, Thompson said. For example, it can be configured to direct users who found the Web site through Yahoo or Google to a different, hostile Web site which looks to see if the PC is potentially hackable.
But if the hostile Web site is being visited by a bot and not coming from a search engine, the site will refuse to serve up any exploits, making it difficult for security analysts to automatically scan the Web for bad sites, Thompson said.
However, hackers are getting lazy. They often reuse the same JavaScript and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code used to launch attacks, which makes those attacks easy to identify. That's good, since the underlying binary attack code can often also be tricky for security software to identify.
"That's a pretty good bottleneck," Thompson said. "It's like having a letter bomb with the outside of the envelope saying 'I'm a bomb'."
Thompson developed a product called LinkScanner that scans Web sites to see if it hosts malware. He sold his company, Exploit Prevention Labs, to AVG -- then Grisoft -- in December 2007. AVG has since incorporated LinkScanner into its free product, AVG 8.0 Free Edition.
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Brocade aims backbone switch at SMEs
Brocade has launched a multi-blade switch aimed at bringing enterprise class technology to smaller businesses.
The DCX 4S is a four-blade-slot version of the 384-port, 8Gbps DCX chassis switch.
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"It uses the same blades as the larger model," said Paul Phillips, Brocade's sales director for UK and Ireland, "but the chassis is half the price, making it a cost-effective option for businesses who don't want to pay for the DCX." The DCX 4S offers users 192 ports but has the same 8Gbps backbone.
HP has already signed up to take on the product and is selling it now, said Phillips pointing out that HP was particularly strong in the SME space and saw the product as a good fit for its storage products. He added that he expected to see other Brocade's partners take on the product shortly.
The switch would also work as an edge product within larger enterprises, ones that were already using the DCX, said Phillips. "There are still a large number of companies that use the core and edge type of set-up," he added.
In addition, the DCX-4S can be managed by using Brocade's Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM) as a management tool or can, alternatively can continue to use Brocade Fabric Manager or Enterprise Fabric Control Manager (ECFM) to manage their backbones.
Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Cisco launches major green push with EnergyWise
Cisco System launched a major green initiative Tuesday that includes free software to help customers use their networks to automatically turn off computers and network gear at night and whenever they aren't being used.
By next year, Cisco is aiming to expand the new technology, EnergyWise, to allow building managers to control lights, heat, and other systems as well, said William Choe, director of Cisco's Ethernet switching group.
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The software has been in development for three years and will run on the Cisco Catalyst switching line, available as a free download now for existing Catalyst users, or available with new Catalyst purchases.
Cisco also said today it will be acquiring Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence Inc. of Santa Barbara to provide the intelligent middleware used by EnergyWise.
Inbar Lasser-Raab, a senior marketing director for network systems at Cisco, said the software could be used in a variety of businesses, from helping shut off power to empty guest rooms in hotels to controlling bank branch usage of wireless access points, switches and IP phones.
Because the software puts Cisco in a large market for building systems controls, analysts said it could be an important new direction for Cisco.
"I think it could be huge, honestly," said Zeus Kerravala , an analyst at Yankee Group. "It shows that more and more things are going to be connected to corporate networks, including intelligence from building systems to make better decisions [about energy conservation.]"
For example, the software could be used to track how many employees have left a plant or office complex at the end of a shift based on the number of workers with badges who were still inside. If everybody has left, "why keep the systems working?" Kerravala said. "It has a lot of benefits."
Kevin Smith, CEO of Global Access Point, said he implementing the EnergyWise software to cut energy uses on Global's data center operations, which are used by third parties for off-site storage and data recovery.
"It will give me broader ... energy information than I could have had myself," Smith said. He expects the software can be used to cut his electricity usage by one-third, or even by half, when rewards for energy conservation from his energy suppliers are included. He now pays about $38,000 a month for energy costs.
Smith said the EnergyWise software will be a useful addition to Global's efforts to erect facilities with green in mind. The company's newest building has natural ventilation and its reflecting ponds act as cooling towers for data center cooling.
Eventually, the software will be used to help Global integrate its data centers in South Bend and elsewhere together so that energy consumption is passed between sites where needed, Smith said.
Smith hopes he can connect every conceivable energy-using device to the network, in order to turn down its energy consumption, or turn it off when not needed.
At first, Cisco plans to allow devices that are powered over Ethernet, such as network switches, to be automatically controlled. By the middle of this year, Cisco expects to give IT control of non-Power over Ethernet gear, such as laptops and PCs by installing software agents on those computers, Choe said. The vision for 2010 is that overall building automation control will be available through EnergyWise.
Jeff Ton, the vice president of IT at Lauth, a privately held developer of office and industrial spaces, said it would be valuable to have a central management console that looks at disparate systems that consume energy. Eventually, he hopes the EnergyWise system can be used to monitor devices that are not connected via Internet Protocol, such as garage door openers.
"You do have a view into your heating and air conditioning now, but one of the big drains on power is all the other stuff, what's known as the total plug load," Ton said. "It would be great to manage those devices too."
Ton said EnergyWise, coming from a large vendor such as Cisco, will "give the green building movement a nice boost." "It underscores the validity of the green building and energy conservation movement," Ton said.
Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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ICANN ponders ways to stop scammy Web sites
The overseer of the Internet's addressing system is soliciting ideas for how to fix a problem that is enabling spammers and fraudulent Web sites to flourish.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has issued an initial report on fast flux, a technique that allows a Web site's domain name to resolve to multiple IP (Internet protocol) addresses.
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Fast flux allows an administrator to quickly point a domain name to a new IP address, for example if the server at the first address fails or comes under a denial-of-service attack. It is legitimately used by content distribution networks such as Akamai to balance loads, improving performance and lowering data transmission costs.
But the technique has also been embraced by hackers and cybercriminals, who use it to make it harder for ISPs (Internet service providers) and law enforcement officials to close down phishing Web sites and other sites illegally hawking goods such as pharmaceuticals.
"Those engaged in these activities can frustrate the efforts of investigators to locate and shut down their operations by using fast-flux service networks to rapidly and continuously change the topology of the network on which their content is hosted," according to the report.
The main aim of cybercriminals is to keep their fraudulent Web sites up and running longer. Fast flux "is not an attack itself -- it is a way for an attacker to avoid detection and frustrate the response to the attack," the report said.
That's done in part by modifying how long name servers around the Internet cache the IP address corresponding to the domain name. When a person visits a Web site, a local name server caches the IP address of the domain name. How long the local name server refers to its cached record for a Web site is controlled by the "time-to-live" setting in the official DNS (Domain Name System) record for a site, set by Web site's operator.
While "time-to-live" is typically set to hours or even days, a Web site's IP address can be change as often as every few minutes, redirecting to countless servers belonging to different ISPs, all of which would have to be taken down. In combination with the use of proxy servers and redirect commands, antiphishing efforts can turn into endless game of chase.
Consumers can be defrauded, as cybercriminals try to hack into Web hosting accounts in order to set up new nodes on their fast-flux networks, the report said.
The security community is faced with the challenge of trying to mitigate criminal use of fast flux but also not inadvertently restricting its legitimate uses.
One solution is quicker identification and shut down of domain names identified with abusive activity. Domain names could be revoked by a registrar, which in most cases would stop the site from working. Another solution would be to limit the ability of a registrant to repeatedly change name servers or eliminate automated name-server hopping, the report said.
The 121-page report, written by ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) lays out a series of other methods that could be used to mitigate the problem. GNSO will accept comments for 20 days and then do a final redraft of the report.
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Sentilla measures datacenter power use at the server level
Sentilla has released a product that measures the electricity being consumed by individual servers in a datacenter and makes recommendations based on those usage levels to help cut energy bills, the company announced Tuesday.
Called the Sentilla Energy Manager for Data Centers, the product uses small Java-based devices that plug into the back of each server and measure the actual and "reactive" power flowing to each machine. The devices aggregate the data over a wireless mesh network and send it to a Web-based administrative console to give a granular view of the power being used by each server.
[ Keep up on green IT trends with InfoWorld's Sustainable IT blog and Green Tech newsletter. ]
The product can identify servers that are drawing power but not running any load, or be used to compare energy use among servers from different vendors or in different configurations, Davis said. It also works with storage gear and can help administrators to figure out the best time to replace their storage arrays, for example, which become gradually less energy efficient over time, he said.
Sentilla claims to have already signed one large customer for the product, a telecommunications carrier that it can't yet name publicly. It is also being endorsed by Sun Microsystems, which uses its product to demonstrate the energy efficiency of its servers, Davis said.
Sentilla charges for the product by the number of power measurement devices being used. They start at $250 each but larger volumes cost less, and an order for 1,000 devices would be about $100,000, including the administrative software, Davis said.
The devices plug into a standard electrical cable between the power source and the piece of equipment, a bit like a mini-version of the power adapter used with a laptop. For server racks, instead of attaching the dongles loose to each machine, Sentilla makes a 1U component that slides into the rack and connects to the other servers.
Sentilla originally developed its technology for use in the manufacturing industry, where it's used to measure the energy consumption of large aluminium smelters, Davis said. Last year it adapted the technology for the data center, where reducing energy use has become a top priority for many companies.
"The thing we're told time and again by various sorts of customers is that they want to know what's happening at the equipment-level." Davis said.
Sentilla is one of several startups taking a variety of approaches to cutting energy use in data centers. SynapSense uses wireless sensors around the data center to create heat and humidity maps that can help manage cooling systems. Another, Cassatt, develops software that balances server workloads and turns machines off when they're not in use.
"I think we differentiate ourselves with the granularity of what we measure,"Davis said.
Sentilla plans to work with partners to broaden how its technology can be used. It could work with load balancing or virtualization software, for example, to steer workloads toward the servers that are operating the more energy-efficiently, he said.
"That's something we definitely intend to do, but for this first version we grabbed onto the notion that you can't manage what you can't measure, and let's get that out there first," he said.
Sentilla is based in Redwood City, Calif. It was founded in 2000 and became incorporated in 2003. The company recently closed a second round of funding worth $7.5 million.
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Microsoft repeats IE8 lock-in warning for XP users with SP3
Microsoft again warned users of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) that they may not be able to uninstall either the service pack or Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).
The warning, made by Jane Maliouta, a Microsoft program manager as the company delivered Release Candiate 1 (RC1) on Monday, was a repeat of a caution she gave last August when Microsoft launched the browser's second beta.
[ Interested in how IE8 stacks up against Google Chrome? Check out InfoWorld's lab test. ]
In a post to the IE blog, Maliouta recommended that users who had installed IE8 Beta 1 or Beta 2 before upgrading Windows XP to SP3, manually uninstall the older IE8 previews. Users who don't take her advice will be stuck with both IE8 RC1 and Windows XP SP3.
"Windows XP SP3 and IE8 RC1 will become permanent," Maliouta said. "You will still be able to upgrade to later IE8 builds as they become available, but you won???t be able to uninstall them." As in August, when Windows XP SP3 users ran into the same situation as they upgraded from IE8 Beta 1 to Beta 2, a warning dialog will appear.
To avoid lock-in, Maliouta told users to first uninstall Windows XP SP3, then uninstall IE8 Beta 1 or Beta 2; they should then reinstall XP SP3 and follow that by installing IE8 RC1.
The big change in RC1's deployment, Maliouta said in a video question-and-answer posted to the TechNet site, is that Microsoft no longer asks users of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to manually uninstall earlier IE previews before installing RC1. "We definitely heard feedback about how difficult it was," she said, referring to the earlier requirement.
Because of the change, Microsoft will be able to push the RC1 update to all users running IE8 Beta 1 or Beta 2 via Windows Update, a change from August when people running Vista and Server 2008 had to manually do a download. Microsoft, however, has not said when it will trigger the RC1 update, nor did Maliouta specify a date today.
Also unknown is a timetable for delivering an update to people running Windows 7 beta, Microsoft's preview of its next operating system. The company unveiled the public beta Jan. 10.
Because of the timing of Windows 7's beta, its version of IE8 is a "pre-RC," according to James Pratt, a senior product manager for IE. Microsoft will upgrade IE8 in Windows 7 to RC1 via Windows Update, Maliouta said, although she did not disclose a timeline. Users will also be able to download IE8 RC1 manually from the company's Web site, she added.
At least one additional update is required before IE8 RC can be installed, or before it will run. Without one of the two slated for Vista, IE8 RC1 will balk during setup and show an error message of "Setup cannot continue because one or more updates required to install Windows Internet Explorer 8 are not present.??? That patch is a revised version of a Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) prerequisite that in February 2008 sent machines into an endless round of reboots.
Systems already running Vista SP1 will have that update in place.
Microsoft has also posted a support document that offers installation trouble-shooting tips, as well as release notes that spell out compatibility problems with a variety of software, including Intuit's popular TurboTax tax preparation program, Google's Toolbar and older versions of the Skype voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) add-on. Older editions of Microsoft's own Windows Live Login add-on -- which was installed with earlier versions of the Windows Live Essentials suite -- are also incompatible with IE8, and are, in fact, unstable.
Users can download IE8 RC1 for Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 from Microsoft's site. The new browser will not run on Windows 2000.
Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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A Mac user's take on the Windows 7 UI
After I installed Windows Vista in November 2006, I was perplexed. Why was it suddenly so much harder for me to use my computer? I knew XP cold, and I could use it without thinking. But with Vista, I felt a little lost and began to notice the extra work required to perform tasks that had become second nature. By hiding various features in an attempt to simplify Vista's interface, Microsoft was in fact adding overhead to my Vista transition, forcing me to learn a new UI.
Like many, I just couldn't see how Vista's "new look" benefited the Windows experience. I became further entrenched in my belief that Microsoft's ongoing divergence from the well-established menu approach pioneered by Apple is fundamentally wrong.
[ Which OS wins the UI contest? See Windows 7 vs. Mac OS X? side by side in InfoWorld's comparative slideshow. ]
Microsoft Office -- and to a lesser extent Internet Explorer -- went nuts in this direction, relying on buttons, variable menus, and right-clicking for almost everything. These UIs made Vista's user interface appear intuitive by comparison, yet they also hinted at further UI confusion to come. It was as if Microsoft's strategy for UI design was to leave its customers at a loss for where to start or what to do next. Not surprisingly, users have rejected Microsoft's latest offerings in amazing numbers.
Me, I took the easy route: I switched to a Mac and have been happy ever since. Tiger, the Mac OS X version available at that time, proved robust, offering a modern yet familiar UI. The current Mac OS X Leopard is even better. But here comes Windows 7, seeking to breathe life back into Windows where Vista had stumbled. Less than a year from being released, Windows 7 aims to fix the many Vista flaws, including its UI. I decided to test-drive the Windows 7 beta to see whether Microsoft had redressed its UI sins.
The bottom line: Nothing in Windows 7 will tempt a Mac user back to the PC. There are some cool, useful enhancements, but overall, the UI remains largely unchanged. In other words, those who upgrade from XP to Windows 7 will still have to relearn Windows.
A caveat: Windows 7 is in beta stage, so it's not complete. Who knows what Microsoft will change before it ships sometime in the next year?
Where Mac OS X beats the Windows 7 UI
Finder toolbar and search: Known for delighting its users, Mac OS X offers extras that you grow to love the more you use them. Take the Finder toolbar, which you can customize to burn contents to disc, for example, or to get a quick look at an item's contents. File search in Mac OS X is much more sophisticated and easier to use than it is in Windows, allowing you to search and sort by practically any criteria in a simple window UI. Windows 7, for its part, offers very limited per-search controls; you can use them only before you start a search. By comparison, you can easily add and refine search criteria at any time on the Mac, refining your results live as you do so. Plus, Mac OS X's special folder views -- columns and the CoverFlow image browser pioneered in iTunes -- make it much easier to navigate large file stores and image sets, respectively.
[ See what has changed in Windows 7 with InfoWorld's performance tests, comparison to Vista, and video tutorial. | Can your PC run Windows 7? Find out with the Windows Sentinel compatibility checker. ]
Default desktop configuration: Microsoft clearly loves the blank slate, leaving its default desktop configuration for Windows clear except for the Recycle Bin. That's another reason I prefer the Mac: My hard drive is always in the Finder, giving me quick access when I need it. Sure, you can create an alias on the Windows desktop, but why require that step or the need to go through several mouse clicks in the Start menu? People access their files and folders frequently, so why bury them? Take a tip from XP and give your users the choice of removing default items on the desktop rather than burying them from the get-go, a philosophy Windows 7 carries over from Vista, unfortunately.
Control panels: Like Vista, Windows 7 insists on putting controls every which way. Say you right-click the desktop to change display settings. In XP, you get the settings in one window, with tabs to switch among them (the Mac has two system preferences, each with tabs, to switch between). In Windows 7, you get a window that has three sets of option lists, many of which open their own window. Soon your screen is littered with windows, each of which does one small piece of the customization task you wanted.
And I still wish Microsoft would get rid of its "friendly" view of control panels, which ask you to guess what Microsoft was thinking in terms of how it grouped its panels. Even if you know where each control panel could be found, the approach adds a second step to get to them. (As with Vista, you can switch to XP's more sensible "Classic" view.)
By contrast, the Mac system preference layout is better designed. It's easier to move among the panels, thanks to navigation controls and a menu that shows all available preference panels for quick access.
Hardware-dependent feature display: Speaking of control panels and system preferences, Windows 7 includes BitLocker encryption capabilities that you set up with a control panel, but only after you turn on this feature will Windows tell you that your PC doesn't have the required TPM module. I much prefer Apple's approach: System preferences that are hardware-dependent appear only if that hardware is installed, and system preferences typically don't show options your Mac doesn't support.
Taskbar preview: Windows 7 is slated to add a preview feature to the taskbar: If you hover over a running app, you're supposed to get a preview of what it is doing (the feature isn't working in my Windows 7 beta) -- a great idea that the Mac has had for years. All open windows display in the Mac's Dock with a preview of their contents. Also, the Mac Dock shows both apps and content windows, while the Windows 7 taskbar shows just running apps, which is why adding pop-up previews to those taskbar apps is so useful for PC users. Plus, the Mac's previews are always visible, while the Windows 7 preview disappears as soon as you stop hovering over the selected application's icon.
System utilities: Apple's system utilities are night and day ahead of Microsoft's. Some examples: The Startup Disk utility lets you boot off any drive easily; try that with Windows. The Sharing system preference makes it much easier to control your Mac's security than Windows' tools do; plus, you get more control in one place with Mac OS X. (And the Secure Delete feature is an easy way to secure deleted files when you empty the trash -- another feature Windows doesn't offer.) The Time Machine software is an incredibly easy, powerful backup utility bundled with the OS that makes Windows 7's look like a holdout from the DOS era. Backup is automatic, sure. But recovery is where Time Machine really shines; just zoom to a past state and select it to go back to that point. If you're in an application, you can restore just that application's state, so changes elsewhere aren?t also rolled back.
You see the same sophistication in the other system utilities. The Address Book, iCal, and Mail apps are well-integrated, and your system information -- even your log-in photo, if you take one -- is automatically synced across all of these.
Stability: A big reason I moved to the Mac was OS stability, which admittedly is more about user experience than user interface. The Mac OS rarely crashes, and it recovers much better when apps freeze. You can even restart the Finder without taking down the OS. My experience is that Windows not only crashes more often, but it also more often needs a full reboot. I can?t tell whether Windows 7 is more stable than Vista yet, as stability only reveals itself over time. The Mac, however, doesn't offer the same registry madness that Windows does, so it seems to resist corruption better.
Where Windows 7 beats the Mac OS X UI
Gadget sidebar: My favorite aspect of the Windows 7 UI is in fact a carryover from Vista: its gadget sidebar. With Windows 7, however, the sidebar is no longer displayed automatically. As such, your desktop is no longer partly obscured by "gadget" utilities that, quite frankly, you won't use often. Instead, you can toggle the gadget sidebar when you want it -- just as you can with Mac OS X. And you can drag them out of the sidebar and let them free-float where you want. The big difference is that Mac OS X's sidebar equivalent covers your entire desktop, rendering everything else inaccessible, and the individual gadgets can't be pulled out of that covers-everything sidebar. The Windows 7 approach to gadgets shows the kind of elegance and simplicity that Microsoft needs to do more often.
Network and Sharing Center: Windows 7's new Network and Sharing Center provides a worthwhile visual cue as to your network's setup. It also includes straightforward setup tools to diagnose the network and switch location-specific configurations. Although it is easier to actually connect to other Mac users in Mac OS X than it is to connect to other PC users in Windows, the latter provides a better overall picture of your network state than the Mac OS does.
Window resizing: Another plus for Microsoft, Windows has long let users resize application and other windows by dragging any side. Mac OS X still forces you to use the lower-right corner, which the Dock sometimes obscures.
Dialog box actions: Although this breaks with Apple's purist mentality, I've always liked the fact that in Windows when I'm using an Open or Save dialog box I can rename or otherwise manipulate files and folders through that dialog box, without having to close the box and switch to Finder. Yes, I know that breaks the architectural line between applications and the OS, but it makes life easier. And, yes, I know you can usually create folders from apps' Save As dialog boxes on the Mac, but that's not enough.
Uninstall: The one big deficit in the Mac OS is its lack of a central way to uninstall applications and their support files. Although the Windows uninstall doesn't always clean up everything, the Mac provides no facility for finding and removing these stray files. They don?t seem to do harm, but why leave them around?
Where Mac OS X and Windows 7 even out
Security warnings -- or lack thereof: Windows 7 reduces the UAC security nagging of Vista, putting it on par with XP and Mac OS X. I really noticed the difference, so I rarely canceled an action I wanted because of incessant, confusing security warnings -- a frequent problem in Vista.
Taskbar vs. Dock: Windows 7's taskbar works more like the Mac OS X dock, making the "pinned" (docked) applications more visible than the XP/Vista taskbar's quick-launch icons. Plus, they animate when opening, copying a concept from the Mac OS Dock. (In what I assume was a beta bug, the taskbar's pinned icons appeared only after I dragged an application onto the taskbar to pin it there; using the Pin to Taskbar contextual menu didn't toggle on their display in the taskbar.) Beyond the strictly visual design, the biggest difference between the Windows 7 taskbar and the Mac OS X dock is that you can add status controls, such as checking on available networks, to the taskbar. In the Mac OS X, such controls reside in the taskbar at the edge of the application bar, not in the Dock. Either way, you get quick access to essentially the same things. And the stacks capability for displaying folder contents in the Mac OS X Dock is more customizable in terms of its display than Windows' equivalent.
File and folder navigation: The file-and-folder approach to navigating storage media is essentially the same in Mac OS and Windows, and both Mac OS X and Windows 7 (like Vista) let you put your favorite directories into the easy-access lists in the folder windows, as well as offer quick-look file previews. I've always liked Mac OS' ability to let you color folders, as a visual mnemonic; Windows can't do this, but a lot of Mac users don?t use it, either.
Overall, Windows 7 does not yet present a clear step away from Vista in terms of user experience. There are some nice UI enhancements, but nothing to undo the learning curve necessary to transition from XP. Then again, at least it hasn't gotten worse -- a real possibility given what Microsoft has done to Internet Explorer and Office.
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AMD sees no Geode chip replacement in sight
AMD on Monday said it has no replacement planned for the aging Geode low-power chip, creating uncertainty for its use in products like future XO laptops made by One Laptop Per Child.
There won't be a Geode successor, and the company has no core microarchitecture planned to replace the chip, AMD executives said. The comments end speculation about the future of Geode, an integrated chip used in netbooks like OLPC's XO laptop, ultramobile PCs and devices like set-top boxes.
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"There are no plans for a follow-on product to today's available AMD Geode LX products, but we expect to make this very successful processor available to customers as long as the market demands," said Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman.
The chip is too old for further development, said Dean McCarron, president for Mercury Research. Chip designs and manufacturing processes have improved since it was first introduced.
AMD is also trying to channel its resources smartly during tough economic times and Geode isn't high on its list of priorities, McCarron said.
"Geode was a nice niche market for them, but we are in a very different environment. You can't split your attention too many ways," he said. Geode doesn't contribute to AMD's bottom line like the mainstream chips.
AMD could re-enter the ultra-low-power-chip space after its fortunes improve, McCarron said. It could shrink down existing low-power chips like the Athlon Neo, which are based on newer designs, McCarron said. AMD earlier in the month launched Athlon Neo for ultrathin laptops.
But company executives say that's unlikely.
"We'll continue to sell the Geode line of products, but as far as are we going to be bringing out a new core microarchitecture specifically targeted at that space -- no, we won't be doing that. It's not a part of our future product road map. You are going to continue to see us offer lower-power processors just like the Neo being offered at 15 watts," said Randy Allen, senior vice president of the computing solutions group at AMD, in an interview earlier this month.
Geode bundles an x86 processor core, a graphics core and other components on a single chip. The Geode LX series of chips runs at speeds of up to 600MHz and draws between 0.9 watts and 5 watts of power.
Without an updated version of the Geode, AMD may struggle to win a contract to supply the next-generation OLPC laptop, the XO-2.
OLPC representatives did not respond to a request for comment about Geode's future. But in an e-mail sent in late December, a spokesman said the group hopes to make some changes with the new laptop. "One challenge with [XO-2] has been to obtain the desired system-on-a-chip, while at the same time avoiding an exclusive arrangement with a single processor vendor," Jim Gettys of OLPC said at the time.
A Wiki page for the OLPC cites Intel and Via among companies that could potentially supply chips for the XO-2.
AMD is working with OLPC on its vision and discussing chips from the product road map that might fit into XO-2, Allen said. "But I don't think we have any specifics in terms of the XO-2," Allen said.
Geode's origins can be traced back to the mid-90s when Cyrix developed the MediaGX integrated chip for sub-$1,000 mainstream PCs, according to McCarron. Cyrix merged with National Semiconductor in 1999 and developed the first Geode chips for embedded devices from MediaGX design. AMD ultimately bought the Geode business from National Semiconductor in 2003.
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HP readies for Cisco's datacenter assault
HP ProCurve will unveil this week its first switches built specifically for datacenter applications, as well as a server module for existing switches that enables users to begin integrating and consolidating switching and application processing.
HP, a fixture for decades in datacenter server racks, is broadening the role of its ProCurve networking arm in those compute-intensive environments just as Cisco is about to step into the datacenter server fray. Cisco's 'California' blade servers, which will reportedly integrate switching, application processing, and virtualization in a single platform, are expected late in the second quarter.
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The release of California also is expected to strain relations between Cisco and HP (and also IBM), which previously have collaborated on complementary datacenter opportunities for networking and servers.
"This is clearly a demonstration of HP really taking ProCurve in the enterprise and leveraging other HP strengths," says Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "HP's certainly in the datacenter business and for the first time ever they're talking about handling all communications, too. HP is looking at where it can succeed in the enterprise networking market and picking its battles strategically."
HP's weapons for this battle include a new 1RU switch line optimized for top-of-rack datacenter switching applications. The 6600 line includes five 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches, available in a variety of configurations.
The 6600 24-G sports 24 1Gbps RJ-45 ports and four 1Gbps SFP ports. It has a 48Gbps switch fabric and a throughput of 36 million packets/sec.
The 6600 24-G-4XG has 24 1Gbps RJ-45 ports, four 1Gbps SFP ports and four 10Gbps SFP+ interfaces. It has a switching capacity of 101Gbps and a throughput of 74 million packets/sec.
The 6600-48G features 48 1Gbps RJ-45 ports, four 1Gbps SFP ports, a 96Gbps switch fabric, and throughput of 72 million packets/sec. The 6600-48G-4XG has four 10Gbps SFP+ ports instead of the four 1Gbps SFP interfaces. It has a switching capacity of 152Gbps and a throughput of 131 million packets/sec.
The 6600 24-XG has 24 10Gbps SFP+ ports, a switching capacity of 336Gbps and a throughput of 214 million packets/sec.
HP ProCurve also is unveiling a management application designed to provide automated, policy-based provisioning of network and server resources. The ProCurve Data Center Connection Manager coordinates common datacenter workflow activities, helps ease compliance and troubleshooting, and works with multivendor servers and networks, HP says.
The server module for HP ProCurve's 8200 and 5400 zl switches is called the ProCurve ONE Services zl Module. It is based on an Intel T7500 Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB of memory, 4GB of Flash memory and a 250GB hard drive.
It sports two 10Gbps Ethernet connections to the switch backplane, and future capabilities include virtualization, scalability, other form factors, and closer coupling with the switch management and forwarding plane, HP says.
The modules runs software applications from Microsoft (security and network access), McAfee (Web security, filtering and IPS), Avaya (unified communications), F5 Networks (application delivery control and load balancing), Riverbed (WAN optimization), and others. The zl module can only run one application per module, but two modules can run in one 8200 or 5400 switch chassis.
"It provides best-of-breed options for the customer -- if you look at the list of partners, it's a Who's Who of those markets," says Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group. "On the downside, Cisco's able to integrate a lot of the capabilities together. Cisco gets a little bit of an advantage there because they can use the feedback from one [application] to modify another, etc."
The City College of San Francisco is using the zl module to run a network monitoring application from HP partner InMon Corp.
"InMon's Traffic Sentinel on the module handled all the sFlow reporting we threw at it with lower CPU utilization rates than our production server," says Glen Van Lehn, network engineer at the college. "A real-time query like 'list TCP:25 [e-mail] connections for past week made by any station where destination isn't our e-mail server' identifies possible virus infected stations. The module's drive capacity allowed me to collect 90 days of traffic data. The integrated USB port powered an external drive to back up the data. It worked well."
Traffic Sentinel is a Web-based Linux application that does not require direct keyboard, mouse and monitor access. Van Lehn can configure the application from any Web browser.
"This gave me a server with zero footprint -- no extra space (assuming empty slot), no extra electrical outlets or UPS outlets, and no extra Ethernet ports as the two 10Gb interfaces plug directly into the backplane," he says.
The 6600 switches are priced from $4,699 to $17,999 and will be available in the first half of this year. The Data Center Connection Manager software costs $27,100, and the controller for the software costs $32,000. Both will be available in the second quarter.
The Services zl Module costs $5,995 and will be available in February.
Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Talend eyes master data management, parallelism
Open source data integration vendor Talend is planning to release a master data management product by the end of the year, as well as to offer a massively parallel processing architecture in current products, according to company executives.
With master data management (MDM), Talend is looking to resolve conflicts with data, such as a customer being defined in multiple ways in applications.
[ See InfoWorld's December 2008 review of open source data integration technology. ]
"MDM is about consolidating the data assets of the enterprise in a centralized and unique repository," said Yves de Montcheuil, Talend vice president of marketing.
Focusing on integration between databases and applications, the company currently offers Talend Open Studio and Talend Integration Suite. The suite is a commercial open source product in which code is visible but provided under an annual subscription license.
A massively parallel processing architecture planned for Open Studio and Integration Suite will "increase the speed and efficiency with which we process large volumes of data," de Montcheuil said. This architecture will be featured in version 3.1 of both Open Studio and Integration Suite this spring.
Open Studio was launched in October 2006 and has had 3.3 million downloads, Talend said. Offering connectors to 400 data sources, the company said it provides a tool for users who could not afford a much higher-priced proprietary product. A subscription price for Integration Suite is $5,000 for one year.
Talend said it is taking away market share from tools such as Informatica PowerCenter and IBM WebSphere DataStage.
By offering its product under an open source format, vendor dependencies are decreased, according to Talend. The company leverages JDBC, ODBC, WSDL, SOAP, and REST.
Talend on Monday is announcing has secured $12 million in Series C financing to help fund worldwide growth and expansion.
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Microsoft delivers IE8 release candidate
As expected, Microsoft launched on Monday a release candidate of Internet Explorer 8, the first update to the browser since last August.
The build, dubbed IE8 Release Candidate 1, runs on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008, but not on the two-week-old Windows 7 beta .
[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]
While Windows 7 's preview includes a version of IE8, it's actually a interim build, somewhere between the Beta 2 of five months ago and today's RC1, said James Pratt, a senior product manager on the IE development team. "It's a pre-RC of IE that we specifically tuned for the new features in Windows 7, such as jump lists and touch support," he said.
Because of its reliance on Windows 7-only features, IE8's release candidate will require additional testing to qualify on that operating system, said Pratt, who declined to give a timetable for when the Windows 7 version will be ready, or when IE8 will be synchronized across all versions of Windows. "That depends on the development cycle progress," Pratt said. "We don't have a plan that we can talk about."
Nor would Pratt set a release date for a final shipping version of the browser. "The release date will be defined by the feedback we receive," he said, also declining to say whether today's build would be the sole release candidate and, if not, how many Microsoft expects.
That may be a clue that Microsoft has changed its plans. Back in November, for example, IE's general manager, Dean Hachamovitch, said that the company would roll out just "one more public update" of the browser before following that "with the final release."
Questions of IE8 RC1's place in the road map aside, Pratt said that the build is "platform-complete, feature-complete," which means Microsoft doesn't anticipate adding or subtracting any features from the build.
It does sport changes from Beta 2, which Microsoft unveiled last August, however, including one that Hachamovitch touted last month when he said IE8 RC was "just around the corner" and urged Web developers to get ready to test their sites and services with the new browser.
"We're shipping IE8 RC1 with list of sites that we have learned through feedback that should be run in compatibility mode," said Pratt, echoing Hachamovitch's news last month of a feature that will automatically engage IE8's backward-compatibility mode and render sites on that list as IE7 does.
The release candidate also includes several user interface tweaks -- IE8 no longer searches through RSS feeds by default when users type in text in the address bar -- and a new security tool that Pratt said protects users from "clickjacking" attacks.
Clickjacking is the term given to a new class of browser-based attacks last September to describe tactics that can be used by hackers and scammers to hide malicious actions under the cover of a legitimate site.
While Mozilla's Firefox can be protected against clickjacking attacks by installing the "NoScript" add-on , IE8 RC1 includes build-in anti-clickjacking technologies, said Prat. He declined to reveal how they work, saying that Microsoft would disclose more information in future posts on its IE blog.
Pratt also claimed that IE8 RC1 is faster than the last public preview, Beta 2. But like Hachamovitch, he dismissed the benchmark bragging of competitors such as Mozilla and Google Inc., which have trumpeted JavaScript test scores for Firefox and Chrome, respectively, for months. Pratt even used the same term -- "drag race" -- to describe what Microsoft thought of JavaScript benchmarking.
"We took a critical look at performance, and looked at when users load real Web pages," said Pratt, arguing that Microsoft's internal tests are more realistic than JavaScript benchmarks such as SunSpider. "IE only spends about 20 percent of its time handling JavaScript," said Pratt, "and 80 percent doing other things, like processing [cascading style sheets]. To us, it seemed like we could deliver better performance if we focused holistically. To say that a browser engine is just a JavaScript [engine] doesn't match the reality of how the Web is built today.
"We're at the point, with what people do in the browser, that users can't really tell the difference between browser [performance]," he said.
Users who have already installed a beta of IE8 will soon be offered an upgrade to RC1 automatically via Windows Update, said Pratt. Others, or the impatient, can download the release candidate from the company's Web site.
Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Reflex offers secure virtual systems management
Reflex Systems announced Monday it had added virtual systems management technology to its security offerings in an effort to provide enterprise IT managers with the resources they need to both manage and secure datacenter resources.
Reflex Systems, formerly Reflex Security, changed its name and broadened its product focus to not only secure but also manage virtual server resources. The company launched earlier this decade and offered customers its VSA (Virtual Security Appliance), which installs inside a virtual environment to provide discovery, antimalware, firewall, network-access control, and intrusion detection/prevention systems capabilities. Now with VMC (Virtualization Management Center), Reflex says it will also give customers availability, performance, and configuration management capabilities for the virtual server infrastructure.
[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]
"Every time you see a change in the network, it will impact performance -- either negative or positive," says Hezi Moore, CTO and founder of Reflex Systems. "We track every configuration change while also doing intrusion protection and prevention. Management and security for virtual environments should be tied together."
VMC is deployed as a virtual machine, with one typically serving most customers' needs. The software provides centralized management and includes a configuration management (CMDB) for the virtual environment. VMC monitors performance of virtual infrastructure as well as applications using virtual resources. It can be used to troubleshoot performance problems and performs forensics and root-cause analysis. And VMC works with VSA, which sends all the security data to VMC and safeguards communications between virtual machines.
Competing with vendors such as Akorri, Vizioncore, and VMware, Moore says Reflex will differentiate with its converged security and management capabilities.
"If we can help you manage the infrastructure, we can help you make it more secure and efficient," Moore says. "Using the clients we provide, we can discover, map, secure and manage the environment."
VMC is available for a free trial download here.
Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Citrix invests in desktop virtualization startup
Citrix has spent the past year and a half redefining itself as a virtualization company, first purchasing the desktop and server virtualization vendor XenSource and then placing the "Xen" name on its flagship application delivery software to reflect a focus on virtualization.
Now Citrix is betting on a desktop virtualization start-up called Virtual Computer, which was founded in November 2007, to focus on the provisioning, publishing, and patching of desktop and laptop operating systems. Virtual Computer, whose NxTop software is in beta and is based on open source Xen software, exited stealth mode in September and on Monday is announcing Citrix as a key investor.
[ Stay up to date on the latest virtualization developments with InfoWorld's Virtualization Report blog and newsletter. ]
At a time when venture investment in the IT industry has hit its lowest point in a decade, Virtual Computer has snagged $15 million in a funding round led by Highland Capital Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners. Citrix continued an undisclosed but "significant" portion of the $15 million, says Virtual Computer CEO and co-founder Dan McCall. Virtual Computer previously secured $6 million from Flybridge and Highland early in 2008.
"This is an interesting and exciting young company and we have a shared vision abut what's going on in the space," says Andy Cohen, Citrix's senior director of strategic development. "We think it's important to help support people who are coalescing around Xen-based technologies."
When asked if this might be the first step toward acquiring Virtual Computer, Cohen said, "We own a small percentage of them now. Because of the shared vision ... that's certainly a possibility."
Although Citrix and Virtual Computer both make desktop virtualization products and could potentially compete against each other, Virtual Computer is going after a part of the market that Citrix has not yet addressed, Cohen says.
Virtual Computer's NxTop software is a bare metal, or "Type 1" hypervisor, whereas most desktop virtualization products are "Type 2" and thus run on top of an operating system, McCall says. Type 2 hypervisors are sometimes vulnerable to various security, management and performance problems, according to McCall. (Compare client management products.)
NxTop creates a layer of independence between the hardware and operating system. The software allows central management of PCs just as other virtualization products do, but McCall says Virtual Computer provides a "loosely connected" model in which PCs can be easily customized and run smoothly even when disconnected from the central server.
NxTop pushes a base operating system image out to desktops and laptops, and then customizes individual devices by adding from a list of optional applications. Patches are delivered centrally, but if a patch fails then each device's desktop image automatically rolls back to the previous version to prevent downtime.
Although Virtual Computer relies on virtualization software, the company is describing itself more broadly as a PC life-cycle management vendor.
"In the centralized server, you create one operating system," McCall says. "We try to make it as easy to manage 1,000 computers as it is to manage one."
Citrix currently does not offer a Type 1 or Type 2 desktop hypervisor, instead using a server-based virtual desktop infrastructure, which is completely centralized and streams the entire virtual machine out to clients, Cohen says.
However, Citrix recently began collaborating with Intel to create a Xen-based Type 1 desktop hypervisor, which would be more along the lines of what Virtual Computer has developed.
Virtual Computer's software can virtualize Windows and Linux, letting multiple operating systems run on the same desktop. The vendor's product does not work on thin clients, and does not work with Macs because of licensing issues.
When asked if Citrix and Virtual Computer might forge a go-to-market partnership, Cohen said the relationship is still in its "early stages." Citrix made the investment in Virtual Computer this month after being impressed by the company at last September's VMworld conference.
"The Citrix guys approached us after we launched our product at VMworld and really were interested in how we were doing things and were very attracted to the technology," McCall says.
McCall was previously co-founder of Guardent, a security services vendor acquired by VeriSign in 2004. He stayed on at VeriSign for a couple years as vice president of corporate development before founding Virtual Computer.
McCall's co-founder is CTO Alex Vasilevsky, who was previously co-founder and CTO of Virtual Iron, another Xen-based virtualization vendor. McCall says Virtual Computer plans to make its product generally available by the end of March.
Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Spam surges again despite McColo takedown
Spammers have regrouped and are finding ways to send more junk mail despite recent efforts by security experts.
Spam levels dropped by almost half when rogue ISP (Internet service provider) McColo was taken offline in November. But some new botnets and even older ones are churning out more spam.
[ Related: One for the good guys | Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]
"At the current rates, we'll be back at those pre-McColo takedown levels probably within the next three to five weeks," said Adam Swidler, senior product marketing manager for Google Message Security, also known as Postini.
Google said Monday it has seen a 156 percent increase in spam since McColo went offline. McColo hosted the so-called command-and-control servers for botnets that are used to instruct PCs to send spam. The botnets included Rustock, Srizbi, Pushdo/Cutwail, Mega-D and Gheg.
McColo's takedown for the most part killed off the Srizbi botnet, which was blamed for sending a large proportion of the world's spam. But other botnets -- which are essentially legions of hacked computers configured to send spam -- are picking up the slack.
Mega-D, also known as Ozdok, is comprised of at least 660,000 PCs, according to MessageLabs, an e-mail security outfit now owned by Symantec. On average, PCs infected with Mega-D send out an astounding 589,402 messages per day, or around 409 per minute. All told, Mega-D is sending out 38 billion messages per day.
According to MessageLabs' latest figures released Monday, 74.6 percent of all e-mail was spam this month, a 4.9 percent increase over December. Percentages of spam can vary by vendor depending on the pool of PCs using their services, which are used to collect statistics on spam.
"We've seen a steady increase over the last two months," said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Analyst with Symantec.
MessageLabs saw spam drop to around 58 percent of all e-mail when McColo went down, but rising to around 69 percent in December, Wood said.
Spammers are also changing their tactics to ensure their messages are not blocked, said Richard Cox, CIO for the antispam organization Spamhaus.
When a computer is infected with code used to send spam, it sets up a mail server on the PC, which proceeds to pump out spam directly onto the Internet. But if that computer is noticed sending spam, it is added to a block list of end-user IP (Internet Protocol) address ranges that shouldn't be sending unauthenticated mail.
As an alternative, spammers are using programs that detect a person's ISP and then route the mail through that ISP, which avoids it getting block when it is checked against the list, Cox said. The spam could be blocked, however, through other detection methods and analysis at a later point.
ISPs are "not really set up for" stopping that kind of abuse as of yet, Cox said. Further, many ISPs do not have security staff available constantly to act quickly when abuse is reported, he said.
Spamhaus is in the process of tracking which ISPs are hosting the command-and-control servers for some of the current flagrant botnets. Cox said he could not release more information.
McColo's shutdown came after a report appeared in the Washington Post in combination with pressure from computer security analysts. Although McColo was linked to Web sites hosting child pornography, it was the community of researchers rather than law enforcement that caused McColo's upstream providers to disconnect it from the Internet. Although McColo's servers were in the U.S., the people believed to run the operation were likely overseas.
(Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this report.)
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