http://www.w3exchange.com W3Exchange en http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7832#7832 7832@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: AMD unveils low-power Opteron processor Message: Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today unveiled five low-power quad-core server processors, and said that manufacturers are planning to use the chips in both blade and rack-mounted servers.The x86 Opteron HE processors are designed to run in a 55-watt ACP thermal envelope. They are available in the 2300 and 8300 series product lines for two-, four- and eight-way rack servers and blades.Today is the latest in a series of AMD announcements featuring low-power chips.Late in April, AMD released two 45-watt, energy-efficient Athlon desktop processors -- the Athlon X2 4450e and the Athlon X2 4050e. Both are dual-core processors designed to reduce power consumption and offer greater performance per watt. And early in March, the company announced it was shipping a 45-watt, X2 4850E chip."Our new quad-core AMD Opteron HE processors were designed to help data center managers who see power consumption and virtualization as the keys to solving their overall performance equation," said Randy Allen, a corporate vice president and general manager for AMD, in a statement.Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., said that as more and more IT executives worry about power consumption, this is a good move for AMD, which began struggling financially and with market and mind share last year.'The issue around power efficiency and power consumption has really been gaining a lot of forward momentum in the server and data center space," added King. "Processor power consumption is certainly part of the data center power issue. It's one part but a significant part of it. From a percentage basis, virtualization probably has the biggest impact. But this next-generation of Opteron and other low-power x86 chips is going to help."King also said that coming out with low-power Opteron processors will help keep the chip a strong performer for AMD."I think Opteron has been a great success for AMD, and it's really given the company the opportunity to be both a thought and product leader in the server space," he noted. "Coming out with a lower-power product will help them continue to do that." Mon, 12 May 2008 01:51:45 -0700 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7550#7550 7550@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Nokia 'Tube' seen as iPhone challenger Message: Nokia Corp. has begun publicly discussing what some are calling the cell phone maker's biggest product response yet to the Apple iPhone -- a device code-named Tube.In an interview today, Nokia spokesman Kasey Farrar said the device, due in the second half of the year, will be the first phone with a touch-based interface on the most recent Symbian operating system, called the S60. He said Nokia has already released more than a dozen touch-based wireless devices running on Linux, such as the N810 and the N800.According to reports, Forum Nokia Vice President Tom Libretto, speaking yesterday at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Redwood City, Calif., said the proposed phone, code-named Tube, will support Java and allow photos to be uploaded.But the Nokia spokesman would only confirm that Libretto appeared at the event and would not provide further details about what Libretto said.Both Libretto and Farrar compared Apple's iPhone sales of 4 million through January against the number of phones Nokia sold globally last year. In 2007, Nokia sold 60 million converged devices, in which voice and other functionality, such as a camera or MP3 player, are combined, with a total sales of 437 million wireless devices, Farrar said.Apple spokesman Simon Pope today confirmed that Apple expects to   10 million iPhones this year.Nokia's sales are overwhelmingly outside the U.S., however, according to analysts. Globally, Nokia has a 53% market share for wireless devices, Farrar said.Regarding the challenge iPhone has given Nokia and other device makers, Farrar said that the "iPhone has not been a headache at all for us, and it actually validates our current strategy with converged devices in our N and E series." Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:21:55 -0700 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7531#7531 7531@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: IPhone price cut in Germany Message: Germans can now get an iPhone for just 99 euros ($155 U.S.), a big departure for the Apple phone, which hasn't been subsidized by operators before. The low price fans the flames of rumors about an imminent new 3G model.  "This price cut will raise a few eyebrows and is very interesting indeed," said Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight.  It's interesting both because the iPhone hasn't been subsidized before, and because it could mean that the launch of a new 3G-capable model is getting close, according to Wood.  "That could mean T-Mobile is clearing the channel for a new model," said Wood.  The 16GB model still costs 499 euros. The promotional price for the 8GB model is valid from April 7 to June 30 for customers signing up for T-Mobile's most expensive calling plan, the Complete XL, which costs 89 euros per month. The price of the iPhone rises to 249 euros when bought with the Complete S contract, which includes fewer minutes and text messages, and costs 29 euros per month.  T-Mobile's pricing strategy is a big departure for the iPhone. So far, Apple has gone to great lengths to stop carriers from selling its phone at lower prices to protect it's music player market, according to Wood, who questions whether Apple is happy with the price.  "Now we'll have to see if O2 and Orange decide to offer similar price cuts to get the market moving again. The feedback we are getting from the channel is that sales have slowed down quite considerably during Q1," said Wood.  The cost of the phone has been a significant barrier in Europe, according to Wood.  "You could go into a store and get a Nokia N95 for almost nothing; 400 euros for an iPhone has been one step too far," said Wood.  According to T-Mobile, it's business as usual.  "I don't want to talk about subsidies. After a phone has been out for five months, its quite normal to do sales promotions. And Apple is, of course, onboard," said Alexander Graf von Schmettow, a spokesman at T-Mobile.  Schmettow didn't have much to say about new models: "No comment. You have to ask Apple about that." Sun, 06 Apr 2008 02:07:30 -0700 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7463#7463 7463@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Ericsson unveils next-gen LTE wireless broadband platform Message: Ericsson today unveiled its first commercially available LTE capable platform. Products in the M700 series will deliver bandwidth of up to 100Mbit/sec. in the downlink and up to 50Mbit/sec. in the uplink.Long Term Evolution is one of many alternatives competing for next-generation mobile networks. The launch is a way for Ericsson to show LTE is on track, during a week when it's going head to head with WiMax and other mobile technologies at CTIA 2008 in Las Vegas.  "We want to show LTE is real, and on the way," said Björn Ekelund, vice president of product management at Ericsson.  Commercial release is set for next year, although samples will ship this year. Real products based on the platform are expected to be ready in 2010, Ericsson said.  It is a statement of readiness for the new standard, according to Gartner Inc. analyst Alan Brown.  "But in my opinion, it does seem rather early for an announcement as the first products, according to Ericsson's own statement, will not appear until 2010," said Brown.  The first products based on M700 will not be phones, but data centric devices, such as different kinds of laptop modems, according to Ekelund.  One presumptive customer is Sony Ericsson, but it doesn't want to give any details about upcoming products. It will wait until there is customer demand, according to Rikard Skogberg, category manager at Sony Ericsson.  Besides the need for capacity that can challenge fixed networks, Ericsson also underscores support for a multitude of different frequencies.  "New frequencies are popping up left and right, and supporting them all is difficult, but we have to keep up," said Ekelund.  He singles out 700 MHz in America, and 1500 MHz in Japan, but the platform can support up six different bands. Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:03:14 -0700 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7462#7462 7462@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Microsoft unveils enhancements to Windows Mobile Message: Microsoft Corp. today announced improvements to Windows Mobile, including a plan to add desktop-browsing quality seen in Internet Explorer 6 for new smart phones by the end of the year.  The new version of IE Mobile will make it easier to pan and zoom through Web pages and to access the Web at the outset from a phone, said John Traynor, senior director of mobile communications at Microsoft. "It's going to be much closer to the desktop experience," he said.  IE 6 technologies such as Adobe Flash, H. 264 video and Microsoft Silverlight will be added to the new IE Mobile, Microsoft said.  Other innovations being announced today at CTIA Wireless 2008 include a 6.1 version of Windows Mobile, the first update since 6.0 was announced in February 2007. It should appear on phones in the second half of the year and will offer quicker phone setup and one-click setup of a Bluetooth headset. In addition, users will find it easier to flag, delete or move groups of text messages, Traynor said.  For IT managers, the biggest improvement Microsoft announced is System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, available immediately through mobile operators. When used with Windows Mobile 6.1 devices, IT managers can bring more management functions and security to Windows Mobile phones than are currently possible, Traynor said.  Previously, IT managers had to rely on ActiveSync in Microsoft Exchange to manage Windows Mobile phones, Traynor said. Device Manager 2008 provides more than 100 management capabilities not previously available, he said. It will enable IT administrators to allow or deny certain applications to run on a phone, such as turning off a phone's camera. In addition, it will allow encryption of information on a storage card used in a phone, so that if the card is removed from the device, it remains encrypted, Traynor said. Microsoft said it would announce the first mobile operators offering the management capabilities today. Details, including pricing, were not released.  Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said the new management capabilities will keep Windows Mobile among the most secure and manageable devices on the market, along with BlackBerry devices from Research In Motion Ltd. It will help Windows Mobile keep a management advantage over the iPhone, he added, noting that it takes management beyond what will be available in ActiveSync through Exchange. With Windows Mobile 6.1, Microsoft is taking the steps needed to strengthen its offering to both consumers and enterprise customers, said analyst Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies. "With 6.1, they have made some appealing updates to the user interface and Web browsing that appeal to a broader consumer audience as well," he said. Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:52:31 -0700 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7403#7403 7403@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Dell updates Inspiron laptop with Blu-ray drive for under $900 Message: Dell Inc. today began selling an updated version of its Inspiron laptop with a Blu-ray drive for less than $900.With Blu-ray technology the recent victor in the HD disc format wars, Dell is quick to take advantage of the move. The company announced that the Blu-ray laptops, with a starting price of $879, will be sold on its Web site starting today.The Inspiron 1525 with optional Blu-ray disc playback also has an optional Blu-ray burner drive. The computer has a 15.4-in. high-definition display with 720p resolution, according to Dell. The laptop is designed to be fully backward compatible, playing and burning traditional DVDs and CDs.Optional accessories for the Inspiron 1525, which is available in the U.S., Canada and Europe, include a slim travel power adapter, noise-isolation earphones and a Dell travel remote control that goes into the ExpressCard slot. Sun, 30 Mar 2008 01:43:15 -0700 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7230#7230 7230@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Intel: Six-core chip to ship by second half '08 Message: Intel Corp. today announced that it expects to ship a six-core processor to resellers in the second half of this year.   With 1.9 billion transistors and 16MB of Level 3 cache, the six-core chip, code-named Dunnington, will be built with Intel's new 45 nanometer technology, according to Pat Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group.  "The big cache and six cores will give customers a nice bump in performance," Gelsinger said during a press briefing today about the company's product road map and its upcoming Intel Developer Forum, slated to be held next month in Shanghai. "We're quite excited about it."  He said that the company plans to demonstrate the Dunnington chip at the IDF.  Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc., said moving beyond quad-core processors, which to date have been the high-water mark in the semiconductor industry, is a major step -- one that keeps Intel well ahead of rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Just last week, AMD confirmed that it started shipping its triple-core Phenom processors.  "For AMD, it just means that they're falling a little bit further behind, unless they have some plans in the works that we're not privy to yet," added Olds. "A six-core is a big deal … but most desktop software can't really take advantage of dual-core yet, so this means that this chip is aimed directly at servers -- at least until consumer software gets better at multicore threading."  Intel, which only moved to the 45nm process late last year, also announced today that it plans to start producing 32nm chips in either 2009 or 2010. Gelsinger said the first 32nm chip is slated to be a shrunken version of Nehalem, an upcoming four-core chip. The 32nm chips are code named Westmere.  During the press conference, Intel also said that it plans to start production of the Nehalem chips in the fourth quarter of this year. The 45nm Nehalem chips will include an integrated memory controller, eliminating the need for a front-side bus. Gelsinger explained that the new Nehalem architecture is modular, which means Intel should be able to build a chip using different building blocks that should be able to scale from two to eight cores.  Nehalem is also being designed to have two-way, simultaneous multithreading, to use Intel's QuickPath interconnect, and to have a three-level cache hierarchy.Gelsinger said more information on the Nehalem specs will be disclosed at the IDF.  Intel also reaffirmed to reporters that its upcoming Tukwila chip, an upgrade from the Itanium family, is due out by the end of the year.  Tukwila, a quad-core, 65nm processor, will run at up to 2 GHz, have dual-integrated memory controllers and use Intel's QuickPath interconnect instead of a front-side bus. The processor also will have 30MB of cache and 2 billion transistors on one chip.  "Development is proceeding quite smoothly," said Gelsinger.  Gelsinger also updated information the company is giving out about Larrabee, an upcoming processor family that will have multiple cores and focus on high-end graphics applications. It also will qdfsk157 a new cache architecture.  "At the time, it was just a bunch of crazy people in the lab [working on multicore research], but now we have real product development going on," said Gelsinger. "It will scale into teraflops on an individual chip." Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:36:52 -0700 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7208#7208 7208@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Intel to deliver quad-core chips for notebooks Message: Intel today confirmed it will ship quad-core chips designed specifically for notebooks, most likely for desktop replacement laptops, later this year.The quad-core chips will be based on the Core 2 Duo microarchitecture and will ship in the third quarter, Intel officials said.Intel declined comment on chip details, though enthusiast Web sites reported the chip is Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9300. The chips will be manufactured using the new 45-nanometer process.The chip will be released after Intel's Centrino 2 platform, code-named Montevina, is launched in the second quarter. Montevina is an upgrade to the current Centrino mobile platform that puts WiMax and Wi-Fi networking capabilities on a single chip. Montevina will include processors based on the Core 2 microarchitecture and the quad-core notebook processor could be included in the platform.The initial quad-core laptops will be desktop replacements to appeal to gamers and office workers requiring processing power, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64. The chips won't reach smaller notebooks like the MacBook Air anytime soon, Brookwood said.A quad-core laptop with a separate graphics card could be a powerful desktop alternative, and it will be portable, he said.Notebooks are still being driven by battery life, and the number of people who need huge performance is still small, he said. The quad-core CPU (central processing unit) is going to require more power than a dual-core CPU even if the CPU clock is slowed down, he said.Intel officials in the past have said that users expecting quad-core mobile processors may have to wait until issues surrounding power consumption are resolved.The initial quad-core processors will strain battery life and may first make their way to the high-end gaming and workstation notebooks that require heavy processing power, said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager, Intel Mobile Platforms Group. Sat, 15 Mar 2008 23:10:54 -0700 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=7025#7025 7025@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Adobe ships AIR, Flex 3 open-source development tools Message: Adobe today announced the availability of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) cross-operating system for taking rich Internet applications (RIA) to the desktop.   Adobe also released Flex 3, an open-source development tool set aimed at helping developers build RIAs.  AIR is a runtime environment for building RIAs in Adobe Flash, HTML and AJAX. The product includes the Safari WebKit browser engine, SQLite local database functionality, and APIs that support desktop features such as native drag and drop and network awareness.  Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. and the American Cancer Society are among several organizations running beta versions of AIR to bridge the gap between the Web and the desktop. Both said they turned to the technology because it doesn't require that developers learn new skills.  "AIR takes the capabilities of Flex and Flash and extends that to the desktop," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of Adobe's platform business unit. "With the release of AIR, we've expanded our developer base to the millions of AJAX and HTML developers of the world."  Wadhwani added that FedEx Corp. has developed an AIR application to track packages in real time on the desktop, and Deutsche Bank AG is using AIR to provide alerts about financial transactions.  In addition, business intelligence software vendor Business Objects SA has been working with Adobe to develop reports on transactional data that run in AIR and can be e-mailed to multiple users who can then access live feeds from those reports to do an analysis, he said.  Adobe also released Flex Builder 3, its commercial Eclipse-based plug-in for developing RIAs. Flex Builder 3 integrates with Adobe's Creative Suite 3 set of tools to make it easier for designers and developers to work together, Adobe said. It will be available in two versions: The standard edition is $249, while the professional version costs $699.  Finally, Adobe also made available its BlazeDS open-source tool that promises to help developers boost the data transfer capabilities and performance of RIAs. BlazeDS is made up of components from Adobe's LiveCycle Data Services suite. Mon, 25 Feb 2008 02:00:15 -0800 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=6935#6935 6935@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: HP builds blade system for memory-intensive apps Message: Hewlett-Packard Co. is beefing up its Integrity BladeSystems with a new model released this week that's intended to handle memory- and CPU-intensive applications, such as databases.   HP's BL870c allows two separate blades, each with a two-socket CPU, to work as one four-socket blade, said James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. The system, which uses Itanium 9100 dual-core processors, can also support up to 96GB of memory.   "They are not saying blades are just for the low end; this is a major step forward for them," Staten said of HP's new system. The system will allow companies to take relatively large databases, ERP systems and business intelligence applications and move them to a blade.   While this blade system has more power, it won't necessarily replace a rack system, Staten said. Racks have more capability and support, for instance, and terabytes of memory.   The system, which supports Windows, HP-UX, OpenVMS, RedHat or SUSE Linux operating systems, is available now. Pricing begins at $8,000. Mon, 18 Feb 2008 02:05:09 -0800 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=6861#6861 6861@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Mozilla delivers Firefox 3 Beta 3 Message: Mozilla Corp. released the third beta of Firefox 3 yesterday, eight weeks after it made the last major milestone for its open-source browser, and right on a schedule it set a dozen days ago.   Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's interface designer, touted additions and enhancements to Beta 3 in a post to the company's Web site Tuesday, touting several new or enhanced security features, an improved download manager, one-click bookmarking, offline application support, faster page rendering, and new progress on plugging the browser's noted "memory leaks."   As he has previously, Beltzner discouraged casual users from trying the new code. "We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 3 milestone release," he said. "It is intended for testing purposes only."  Mozilla has already committed to at least one more beta before Firefox is allowed to move on to the release-candidate stage. A week and a half ago, however, Beltzner declined to set a release schedule for the next beta, saying then only that "our goal is to do a quick turnaround on Firefox 3 Beta 4."   In its release notes, Mozilla trumpeted the fact that Beta 3 includes more than 1,300 changes made since mid-December's Beta 2 and boasted that its developers had also plugged over 50 new memory leaks in the past eight weeks.   Firefox has long been criticized by users for consuming increasing amounts of memory the longer it remains open, to the point where the browser hinders overall performance on the computer. The company made leak plugging a top priority, particularly after a member of the Mozilla board of directors said late last year that memory problems would make it tough to compete in the mobile browser market.   Firefox 3 Beta 3 also uses an XPCOM cycle collector that, said Mozilla, "completely eliminates many more [leaks]." The cycle collector, which periodically checks memory usage and tries to free any unused memory, has been in play since last summer, but as Beta 3 development has proceeded, more of its code has been written or rewritten to support the collector.   One noted addition to Firefox 3, however, is still buggy. Places, a souped-up bookmarking and browser history management tool that was once slated for Firefox 2, does not yet allow users to shuffle bookmarks by dragging and dropping. According to notes from a Tuesday Firefox 3 status meeting, Places is stuck.   "Cannot drag-and-drop items across different views/menus," the notes read. "This is blocking on resolution of platform bug 389931, which is a P1 [Priority 1] blocker regression from the thread manager rewrite, and seemingly unowned (no response from owner since July 2007). This is the cause of much weeping and gnashing of teeth."   Firefox 3 Beta 3 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 32 languages from Mozilla's site. Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:16:57 -0800 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=6802#6802 6802@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Mozilla patches 11 Firefox bugs Message: Mozilla Corp. late yesterday patched Firefox to quash 11 bugs, including one from three weeks ago that posed a threat to users who had installed any of the more than 600 add-ons for the open-source browser.Firefox 2.0.0.12 fixed four vulnerabilities that Mozilla ranked "critical," one it pegged "high" and three each rated as "moderate" and "low," according to the security advisory posted Thursday. The new edition patched more flaws than any update since July 2007. Mozilla last patched Firefox in November.Although it didn't receive Mozilla's highest threat ranking, the vulnerability in the browser's chrome: URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), disclosed by researcher Gerry Eisenhaur, got the most attention. That bug, which Eisenhaur said could be exploited through a huge number of Firefox's extensions, had been the subject of several blog postings by Window Snyder, Mozilla's chief of security.   She added another today. "This security update addresses the directory traversal issue," Snyder said.   The update also patched several critical vulnerabilities that had not been publicly revealed, including one that could allow attackers to steal users' browsing histories -- perhaps to gain information such as account passwords entered in earlier sessions. Other vulnerabilities included one that could be used for cross-site scripting attacks and one that crashed either the browser or the JavaScript engine, or both.   Unlike other vendors, Mozilla labels vulnerabilities as "critical" even when it's not certain that an exploit could result in an attacker introducing malicious code. The description for the browser and JavaScript engine flaw, for example, illustrated Mozilla's conservative approach: "Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code," the write-up read.   Also late yesterday, the company announced that final testing has started on Firefox 3.0 Beta 3, the most recent build of the major upgrade expected to ship in the next two months. If all goes according to plan, Mozilla said, Beta 3 will be released on Tuesday.   Previously, Mozilla had said it would need at least one more beta before moving Firefox 3.0 into the release candidate stage.   Firefox 2.0.0.12 can be downloaded from Mozilla in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Forty localized editions, including a beta of the Kurdish Firefox, are available. Current Firefox users should be notified of its availability in the next day or two by the browser's automatic update tool. Sat, 09 Feb 2008 19:46:58 -0800 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=6686#6686 6686@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Google plays antitrust card on Microsoft's Yahoo bid Message: Definitely he has a point. Those who say MS+Y is smaller than G are just talking about search. But it is more than that. In portal and mail serive, the combined entity is going to be the biggest player by a large margin. Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:23:21 -0800 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=6665#6665 6665@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Google plays antitrust card on Microsoft's Yahoo bid Message: Google's chief legal officer today fired the first shot of what will likely be an antitrust salvo at Microsoft Corp. over its unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo Inc. Within two hours, Microsoft countered.   Saying that the offer "raises troubling questions" about Microsoft's moves, and arguing that a deal might threaten the "underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation," David Drummond, Google Inc.'s chief legal officer, explicitly laid the antitrust card on the table.   "Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?" Drummond asked in a post to Google's corporate blog on Sunday. "While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets."   In a statement released about 90 minutes after Drummond's post went live, Microsoft's chief counsel, Brad Smith, shot back, saying that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would "create a more competitive marketplace," not stymie competition.   Drummond cited instant messaging (IM), Web-based e-mail and portals as areas of concern. "Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web e-mail accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet," Drummond claimed. "Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' e-mail, IM, and Web-based services?"   But those number bear more objective examination. According to data from comScore Media Metrix, a combined Microsoft and Yahoo would be the No. 1 Web property. Together, the two companies in December attracted 1.02 billion visitors, nearly double Google's 588 million visitors during the same month. Google, however, has the lion's share of the search market; comScore's most recent numbers peg Google's worldwide share at 62%, a combined Yahoo and Microsoft at 16%.   Google has brought up antitrust issues before when it thought Microsoft was trespassing on its turf. In late 2006, for instance, it complained to the U.S. Department of Justice that Windows Vista's integrated desktop search "violates its agreement with the government and hurts consumers." Google argued that Vista did not let users choose an alternate search engine, presumably Google's own.   In June 2007, Microsoft conceded the point in a deal with the DoJ and other antitrust regulators, and promised that it would open Vista to other search engines as of Service Pack 1 (SP1). That update is expected to appear soon, perhaps as early as Monday. Mon, 04 Feb 2008 03:15:37 -0800 http://www.w3exchange.com/view_topic.php?pid=6651#6651 6651@http://www.w3exchange.com Topic: Tandberg launches OCS integration for easy videoconferencing Message: Videoconferencing device maker Tandberg in New York announced today that its products will interoperate with the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, bringing users greater flexibility in setting up sessions.Users of OCS can connect face-to-face with colleagues and others who are using Tandberg room-based and telepresence systems, Tandberg said in a statement today.  A user of OCS can click a name in his or her contact list and visually connect with any Tandberg MXP device that has been registered with that OCS server, Tandberg said. The Tandberg software upgrade that provides the new capability is available today free to those Tandberg customers with maintenance contracts.Through an extension in the Tandberg Codian MCU 4500 series, videoconferences can also be conducted with any standards-based video system or multipoint video call, Tandberg said.The innovation is a "leap forward in ease of use," said Ira Weinstein, an analyst at Wainhouse Research. He said that "as far as we know," Tandberg is the first company to announce the integration with OCS, although many companies that compete with Tandberg are preparing similar efforts. Competitors include Polycom Inc., Radvision and Avistar, he said.The new capability supports videoconferencing between two people in two sites using laptops and webcams, as well as larger meetings with three sites or more using Tandberg's higher end systems, he said. Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:01:10 -0800