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Atlanta's Clear WiMAX launch only weeks away

Publié: mai 18, 2009, 11:49pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Sprint's and Clearwire's WiMAX joint venture Clear is expected to gain 15 new markets by the end of 2010. Following up on the announcement that the company had aligned with Cisco for infrastructure, Clearwire confirmed the next 4G connected city will be Atlanta.
CEO William T. Morrow said in Clearwire's earnings call, "We remain on track to launch our next two markets this summer. In June, we'll be expanding to Atlanta, adding nearly 3 million people to the Clear coverage footprint in a city that will be our largest market to date. With the network covering upwards of 1,200 square miles, we have validated that we can design and deliver large scale markets with our low cost network architecture, another key differentiator for Clearwire. And as with all of our pre-WiMAX markets, we are utilizing a hybrid approach of microwave rings and dark fiber across approximately 90% of our sites. We believe that this is the lowest cost, most scalable back haul approach to transport the immense 4G data payload from our sales side."
Morrow continued, "We have been readying Atlanta distribution channels, building up six retail outlets, hiring and training sales teams and engaging national players, including Best Buy and Radio Shack."
Widespread availability of consumer equipment will make Atlanta's launch vastly different from the Baltimore deployment in which Sprint initially only sold equipment through neighborhood computer repair shops or through its Web site.
Las Vegas is the next city in Clearwire's rollout plans, Morrow said, with a late summer launch planned there. "Network construction and preparation of our sales channels [in Las Vegas] is also progressing."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Upgrading from XP to Windows 7: Does Microsoft's method work?

Publié: mai 18, 2009, 10:57pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Three months ago, Betanews experimented with a process for converting a Windows XP-based system to Windows 7 even though a direct upgrade process was not officially supported by Microsoft. Our process involved borrowing a Windows Vista installation disc, and going through the upgrade motions twice except for the part where you register and activate Vista. This way, you would only have to register Windows 7. Although our tests involved an earlier build of Win7 than the current public release candidate, we discovered the process, while slow and laborious, was at least workable.
To make certain of this, we installed Office 2007 in our XP-based test system first, then ran Word, Excel, and PowerPoint perfectly well in Windows 7 after the installation was complete. We did have to re-activate Office, but that only took a moment.
But wait a minute, Microsoft told us, there is a way to migrate from XP to Win7. Really? Well, in a sense. It involves the latest version of what in prior editions was called the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, and which in Win7 goes by the name Windows Easy Transfer. As the documentation on Microsoft TechNet explains, "To maintain settings when installing Windows 7 on a computer running Windows XP, you must migrate files and settings using a tool such as Windows 7 Easy Transfer and then reinstall your software programs."
So if you have to reinstall all your old software anyway -- which, technically speaking, creates most of the "settings" which this new Easy Transfer would be migrating anyway -- just what does this wizard actually do? Does it just back up your private documents, or your My Documents folder? And if that's all it does, then wouldn't depositing that folder on a separate hard drive make the migration process easier to manage?
We decided to try to answer these questions for ourselves rather than cast more rhetorical questions to the wind. What we discovered wasn't exactly hopeful news:
Your XP installation evidently needs to be squeaky clean. Rather than create a very clean XP installation, we used a duplicate of a very, very well-used XP installation, with Registry settings dating back to practically the Middle Ages. We could not get Easy Transfer to survive the initial scan of the Documents and Settings folder, after numerous attempts, despite our having disabled all anti-malware software, including firewalls. In an attempt to clear the system of any possible conflicts with system drivers, we tried to run Easy Transfer in Safe Mode, only to discover...
You can't run Easy Transfer in Safe Mode. You'd think since this is essentially a system tool, Microsoft would have designed it to run in Safe Mode, which is where many Windows 95 / Win98 veterans performed many system upgrades to XP after all. Perhaps our choice of USB-based storage device was giving the wizard fits -- surely with 100 GB of free space, it shouldn't be a problem. In any event, we tried choosing to network two computers together, bypassing the remote storage option. And that's where we learned...
If you want to network a second computer, its Windows must have the same bit-width as the one you're transferring. The setup program assumes that any network computer where you want to store the files and settings is the same one where you want them finally installed (we discovered this in the Help file which, granted, is where folks more sane than we are tend to look first). So if you're transferring settings from a 32-bit computer, no, you can't use another computer on your network as a temporary storage device, so a 64-bit Vista is right out.
We got the distinct impression that the only XP system that Easy Transfer will work with, is one that only has a single hard drive and whose My Documents directory is stored on C:\. As I've advised folks for decades, this isn't the way you should set up your computers anyway -- your personal documents should always be on a separate disk from your system disk, for both performance and safety reasons.
So for now, we'll continue to advise our readers and friends to continue using the method we prescribed: Borrow a Vista installation disc, upgrade to Vista, then upgrade again to Win7. It's not pretty, nor is it particularly any fun, but it's manageable.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
ZigBee aims to cut energy costs through IP-based metering

Publié: mai 18, 2009, 10:57pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is a non-profit international board which drafts and publishes standards for a huge range of electric and electronic technologies. Among the hundreds of standards put out by the IEC, some of the most notable include VHS/S-VHS video cassette technology (IEC 60774), digital audio based on compact discs (IEC 60908) and electromagnetic compatibility (IEC 61000).
You may not be familiar with ZigBee just yet, but if the IEC gets its hands on it, that could change. ZigBee is a low-power wireless protocol similar to Bluetooth that fits under the 802.15.4 personal area network standard. Its current largest deployments are in home utility wireless networks and smart meters, and because of its conservative use of electricity, the ZigBee Alliance is attempting to make it the preeminent standard for smart energy metering. Today, the group announced that it will be submitting its ZigBee Smart Energy profile to the IEC for as the basis of a new standard in smart grid technology.
Ideally, all your home appliances would be able to communicate their energy consumption to your wireless router, where you could track usage, and subsequently transmit that data to the utility company for more granular billing.
The IEC's Technical Committee 57 is dedicated to developing and maintaining the standards for an interoperable communication architecture for power systems and control equipment in such systems as Energy Management Systems (EMS) and Supervisory Control and Data Aquisition (SCADA).
Greg Robinson, of TC57's working group 14, said the ZigBee Smart Energy profile could, "improve data fidelity and minimize overall life cycle costs for exchanging information among home area networks, metering systems and utility back office systems."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Napster will slash its subscription fees

Publié: mai 18, 2009, 8:58pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
After nearly six years as a subscription-based service, Napster will make its library of over 7 million tracks available tomorrow for as low as five dollars a month. In addition to unlimited streaming, users get to keep five DRM-free tracks per month, essentially making the streaming service, which formerly cost $12.95 per month, free.
Napster's leaked press release describes streaming as "CD Quality," and most MP3s available for download in the service are encoded at 256 kbps, but there are also tracks currently only available in 128 kbps. The bitrate of each individual track will be listed when purchasing.
The service includes 60 commercial-free radio stations with formats from Oldies to Electronica to an all Wu-Tang clan station and a station that plays only Christmas-themed Jazz. Napster also includes 1,400 built-in playlists, and playlists arranged according to Billboard chart rankings that go back as far as 50 years.
Microsoft has likewise been making an advertising push for its own subscription service, Zune Pass. Using the logic that at $1 per song, it would cost $30,000 to fill an iPod, Microsoft touts the practicality of a subscription service with unlimited consumption. During last year's holiday season, Microsoft began to let Zune Pass subscribers keep 10 DRM-free tracks per month as a part of the $14.99 subscription cost.
Interestingly, this is the exact same approach that Napster took in 2005 when it advertised Napster to Go during the Super Bowl in a slot called "Do the Math." That commercial said it would cost $10,000 to fill an iPod with $1 songs, when it would cost only $15 a month for unlimited streaming through Napster. Maybe with these updated figures, Napster's value proposition makes more sense.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Microsoft tries to patent a working 'Magic Wand' for Xbox 360

Publié: mai 18, 2009, 7:33pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
With this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (better known as E3) less than two weeks away, speculation has been steadily increasing about the big game companies' announcements. One of the major topics of chatter has been updated controller schemes, and entries for both the PlayStation3 and the Xbox 360 in the Wii-like motion controller category.
The latest application for a patent for such a device to come to light was filed by Microsoft in November 2007. Attributed to Chief Experience Officer James "J" Allard, it covers the architecture of a multi-sensor control environment.
The application says, "The architecture can include a variety of I/O components such as keys/keypad, navigation buttons, lights, switches, displays, speakers, microphones, transmitters/receives, or substantially any other suitable component found in or related to conventional user-interfaces...[It] can also include or be operatively coupled to a set of sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, cameras, range-finders, biometric sensors and so on. One or more sensor can be utilized to determine an orientation of the wand, wherein the orientation can relate to or include the position of the wand, the direction of focus of the wand (or a targeted environmental component) as well as a gesture or recent trajectory of the wand. Based upon the orientation of the wand, the architecture can determine a suitable instruction, which can be transmitted to the targeted environmental component and result in a change in the state of the targeted environmental component. "
Without a doubt, the best part of the application is its explanation of the choice of "Magic Wand" as a patent name. It says, "It is readily apparent that a number of communities or demographic segments are enamored with the idea of magic." To which it references by name Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Dungeons & Dragons. However, it says, "even the most pragmatic individual would have trouble arguing against the merits or utility of, say, a magic wand that actually worked to control or communicate with objects."
Just imagine reading this patent application if the Wii didn't already exist.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal "confirmed" the existence of a camera-based controller similar to the old EyeToy, but purportedly capable of headtracking that can give gamers "more accurate control over games than earlier game cameras did." The peripheral would come from local Redmond startup 3DV Systems, which Microsoft has been courting for acquisition since February.
In late April, Variety Magazine blogger Ben Fritz cited "a good source" as having seen a working prototype device based upon a Sony patent application for a Wiimote-like motion controller from May 2006. Fritz, too expected a new peripheral to be shown off at this year's E3.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, .NET 4 Beta 1 for general release Wednesday

Publié: mai 18, 2009, 5:25pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that today, May 18, will be the release date for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1, for MSDN subscribers. The general public will get their first shot at both new technologies on Wednesday.
Though last September's preview edition showed the addition of new tools for application architecture modeling -- moving deep into IBM territory there -- as well as for development team management, it was all being shown under the auspices of the old VS 2008 front end. Soon after the preview edition was released, the company revealed that it was scrapping that more traditional front end in favor of a design based on the Windows Presentation Foundation platform.
That design made its way to select testers first, who we've learned did not like one of the new design changes: the use of different pointing triangles to denote collapsed and expanded code section blocks. As Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander blogged last week, the feedback essentially boiled down to, why change a good thing? So the [+] and [-] boxes from VS 2008 have returned in Beta 1.
The new IDE will also give developers their first chance to build .NET services in the cloud, a huge new addition to that platform. In fact, the addition itself is a platform, up to now code-named "Dublin," and will give a way for developers in local .NET code to leverage just as much cloud-based services as they may require, including deploying their entire applications to cloud-based services such as Windows Azure.
BETA CAPSULE
Dublin
The Windows Applications Server extension project is Microsoft's platform for distributing .NET applications in the cloud.
Microsoft's objective is to leverage its existing investment in the .NET Framework so that businesses can readily deploy applications, using the tools and resources they already own (including Visual Studio 2010), on a cloud computing platform such as Windows Azure.
Dublin architecture asks developers to build "event handlers," borrowing a phraseology from another era of Windows programming, except that these events are generated by Web users, not by the end user of a GUI. These events are then handled through "virtual ports" that capture and interpret the events asynchronously, and then respond. While conceivably Dublin could deploy an existing .NET application to the cloud, you'd lose the point. Truly distributed applications respond to events that have been "published," and to which customers "subscribe" -- a signal which the application can recognize and accept. Using tools such as Workflow Foundation (WF), developers can build .NET code that responds to published events through what's called a service bus in Windows Communication Foundation. (This is the technology which Microsoft engineers predicted in 2004 would have already rendered IIS obsolete by now.) The result is an asynchronously behaving component that can be deployed as a component in a distributed composite application.
It is classic Microsoft to leverage its strengths in one area to build in another. It absolutely differentiates Microsoft's approach to cloud computing from its competitors in that it enables customers to build their own services to be deployed in the cloud, rather than 1) float an image of Windows Server in the cloud and pretend it's on-site; or 2) try to adapt someone else's cloud-based "out-of-the-cloud" application to suit their own purposes explicitly.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Acer increases netbook size with new Aspire One

Publié: mai 18, 2009, 5:10pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Acer unveiled its second-generation netbook products today, which include the 11.6" Aspire One 751h, a unit that goes for the bigger overall footprint but with a marginally slimmer profile.
Besides its 11.6" LCD screen (1364 x 768, 16:9), the Acer Aspire One 751h is equipped with a 1.22 GHz Intel Atom Z520, 1 GB SDRAM, and a 160 GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive. Not a lot has changed since the last generation, It comes installed with Windows XP Home SP3, has a multi-card reader, and supports 802.11b/g wireless. The suggested baseline retail price is even the same as the last generation: $349.99, or $379.99 with a six-cell battery.
What makes this line unique among Acer's netbooks and more like its competitors is its multi-touch gestural trackpad, and its two-inch growth in overall size. Netbook innovator Asus recently took the same tack with its "Seashell" Eee PC, which slimmed down its traditional Eee PC netbook, and equipping it with a multi-touchpad.
The Aspire line debuted in the Summer of 2008 with a uniform chassis size of 9.8" x 6.7" x 1.14" and a weight of 2.17 pounds, the 751h increased the One's surface area by 22% and now comes in at 11.18" x 7.79" x 1" and 2.75 pounds. The company says it's the first of its netbooks to come equipped with a full-sized keyboard.
Acer, Asus, HP, MSI, and Dell are the top five companies in netbook market share according to DisplaySearch, and Acer has recently held a substantial lead over HP, MSI, and Dell.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
AT&T re-enters the data services field by way of the cloud

Publié: mai 18, 2009, 4:53pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
It was literally during the 1960s when engineers first envisioned a realistic concept for remote storage of electronic data. It would be stored and retrieved using a radically redefined telephone network, one which folks might have to wait until 1980 or so to finally witness. And since it required the telephone, the master of the new concept seemed inevitably to be the Bell System -- AT&T.
The reason it didn't happen that way (the breakup of AT&T aside) was because local storage ended up being relatively cheap, and hard drives made sense. But four decades later, in a vastly different global economy, businesses' appetite for storage space is exceeding the ability of even cheap technologies like hard drives to keep providing it. So businesses are once again investigating a telecommunications-based option, and it is amid that backdrop of historical irony that AT&T is re-entering the picture. This morning, the company announced a programmed, systematic entry into the cloud-based data storage market, choosing a few customers at a time for a new on-demand storage service model it's calling Synaptic Storage as a Service.
The value proposition is this: Businesses preparing to invest in massive data storage infrastructures for such functions as historical backups of financial transactions, medical records management (a huge new legal requirement for hospitals), and handling duplicates of company webcasts, could be spending millions up front for capacity they may end up not needing. What's more, the service lifetime of that capacity may expire and need replacing long before the company has fully amortized that investment. AT&T's service will cater specifically to businesses that need high capacity, while trimming their costs in accordance with only the capacity they consume.
It's by no means a new field: Amazon is the trailblazer in cloud services, and IBM has been steering its Tivoli customers in the direction of the cloud since 2007. Meanwhile, startups like Zetta Technologies -- founded by a handful of Netscape veterans -- are already doing a splendid job of making the case for applying the public utility service model to mass data storage.
A recent Zetta white paper (PDF available here) makes its case more succinctly than even AT&T: "Large-scale managed NAS arrays...are very complex and expensive to operate, and this complexity increases exponentially as the scale of the storage increases. Good storage administrators are a scarce, expensive resource, and storage consumes extensive, costly space, cooling and power in the data center. Storage vendors also play too large a role in dictating both purchase quantity and purchase interval, based on confusing hardware/software bundling and configuration requirements, which may or may not align to your needs. And vendor lock-in is a real concern ??" moving to another storage vendor can involve an expensive forklift upgrade in technology and significant training on a whole new set of processes and tools."
The ace that AT&T expects to play in order to trump IBM, Amazon, and Zetta in this game comes from EMC, recognized everywhere as the leading network storage provider, though its market share is said to be on a bunny-slope slide toward 25%. Still, EMC has been working on a technology called Atmos -- a networked storage infrastructure on such a massive scale that the only real way to provide it to customers, as EMC itself has said, would be through some well-known third party.
"One way end-users will utilize cloud computing is to access their applications and information from a third-party provider -- like a large telecommunications company -- that has built a global cloud infrastructure," states a recent EMC online brochure entitled "Cloud Optimized Storage." "That cloud infrastructure will make massive amounts of unstructured information available on the Web, and will require policy to efficiently disperse the information worldwide."
What EMC means by "policy" is a way for systems on the customer end to utilize rules determining when systems use local storage, locally accessible network storage, and/or cloud storage. As an EMC white paper explains (PDF available here), "EMC Atmos improves operational efficiency by automatically distributing information based on business policy. The user-defined policies dictate how, when, and where the information resides."
These policies also determine by what means this data may be accessible. Though Atmos provides "legacy" file storage architectures such as CIFS (some may be surprised to consider that "legacy"), it also is capable of mandating that certain storage only be made accessible through Web applications, using protocols such as SOAP and REST. This may require a great deal of customer education as to how policy works in this context and how it should be managed, which may be why AT&T is rolling out its SSS service in what it's calling a "controlled" manner. While the rollout begins this month, the company has not yet revealed any interim milestones for wider availability, and is also not revealing any plans for offering smaller-scale services ("SSS sss?") to the general public.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009