Memory chipmakers Qimonda, Hynix, and Samsung are shipping chips using the JEDEC-specified GDDR5 interface.

Nvidia may use GDDR5 if the segment calls for it, Wagner said. “If it looks like it makes sense for some segments of our business, we would adopt it.”

The new AMD boards will be based on AMD HD 4850 and 4870 graphics chips, as widely reported.

Qimonda said it collaborated with AMD. “Qimonda has worked closely with AMD to ensure that GDDR5 is available in volume to best support AMD’s next-generation graphics products,” said Thomas Seifert, Chief Operating Officer of Qimonda AG in a statement.

“The higher data rates supported by GDDR5–up to 5x that of GDDR3 and 4x that of GDDR4–enable more bandwidth over a narrower memory interface, which can translate into superior performance delivered from smaller, more cost-effective chips,” AMD said in a statement.

He added that GDDR4 did not always perform as well in the market as other interfaces.

Nvidia will announce its next-generation GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics chips in mid-June, according to sources familiar with Nvidia’s plans.

Nvidia is supporting the technology but taking a more cautious approach. The Santa Clara, CA-based graphics chipmaker is a vice chair in the GDDR5 task group, said Barry Wagner, director of technical marketing at Nvidia. “We’re involved in the specification of GDDR5 so if we want to build products around it, at least the spec is architected in a way that we would be content with,” Wagner said.

“We aren’t particularly attached to any given interface technology,” Wagner said. Nvidia does support GDDR3 in its products but did not use the GDDR4 interface. Wagner said Nvidia didn’t use GDDR4 because “at the end of the day, we built a better architecture and better product line and were able to attach a better price-performance memory to it.”

AMD also cited GDDR5 for stream processing: “In addition to the potential for improved gaming and PC application performance, GDDR5 also holds a number of benefits for stream processing, where GPUs are applied to address complex, massively parallel calculations.”

AMD announced Tuesday that it will adopt the first commercial implementation of Graphics Double Data Rate, version 5 (GDDR5) memory in its forthcoming next generation of ATI Radeon graphics board products. (See: AMD: We’re first with GDDR5 memory)

So it was with more than slight interest that I read Nova Spivack’s very nuanced piece on the future of the desktop, with a thesis that is spot on:

But Spivack says this far better than I can. Read his piece through and let me know whether you agree. And if not, what’s your best guestimate how this is all going to evolve? However it turns out, we’re long overdue for a big change.

“Web desktops to date have simply have been clunky and slow imitations of the real thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: none of them have nailed it.”

Predicting when and how was the hard part.

After coalescing around the desktop metaphor during the Windows years, the industry seemed stuck for new ideas. The status quo arrangement, where human beings played second fiddle to the computer, was getting set in stone. The late, great MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos had railed against this lousy relationship, which defined man-machine interaction from the beginning of the mainframe era. The good news was that he was convinced it was all going to change one day.

(Credit:
CNET News)

Today we think of our Web browser running inside our desktop as an application. But actually, it will be the other way around in the future: our desktop will run inside our browser as an application.

Spivack instead envisions a future where your computer interface gets spread across different devices connected by a hosted Web service. Instead of a single “desktop” where you must log in front of a specific local device, your access would get spread across any of your devices as the line between Web and desktop blurs. (He calls it the Web 3.0 desktop.)

When the Comdex trade show was the big technology showcase, the folks back home would always ask me what I saw that qualified as new and exciting. Sure enough, there always was a ton to gossip about. But by 2000, though, the really interesting innovations increasingly revolved around the Internet. Sure, cheaper, smaller, faster continued apace–but how many times can you really get worked up around Moore’s Law?

Emerging Technology: Big Lots (www.biglots.com). Using JBoss Enterprise Platform and JBoss Seam to develop and implement a next-generation store inventory management system.
Joint JBoss Enterprise/Red Hat Enterprise Linux: CompuCredit. Using JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to construct an XML Gateway to serve as the company’s main real-time transaction hub.
Migration: Sakonnet Technology. Migrated its main application, Xenon?, to JBoss Application Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
User Experience: Daiwa Securities America. See above.
Business Process Automation: SK Telecom. Using JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss jBPM to build and streamline its wireless data portal (WDP).
Ecosystem: Rivet Logic. Selected for its use of Alfresco’s open-source content management platform in support of the upgrade of Kaplan’s online presence from a legacy system to a JBoss-centric solution. Rivet Logic employed JBoss Seam (and Facelets), JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and jBPM to create Kaplan’s newly updated www.kaptest.com site.
Return on Investment: Alintec. Achieved a high return on investment (ROI) it achieved after the implementation of multiple JBoss technologies within its Internet-based Library Management System (LMS) for the Province of Bergamo.
Service Oriented Architecture: Vivat. Moved US Trust’s main revenue stream, the Client Fee Calculator, from an antiquated legacy system to a new SOA system built on JBoss technologies, including JBoss Rules and JBoss Application Server.

Amazing what customers will do if you let them.

Here’s just one winner that demonstrates the power that open source gives back to customers:

Update: I neglected to actually mention who the respective winners are. By category they are:

Red Hat just announced the results of its JBoss Innovation Awards. As one of the judges, I can attest to the impressive quality of the submissions and the innovation they represent. Most importantly, the awards demonstrate one of the most interesting things that open source enables: customer innovation, as opposed to mere vendor innovation.

commentary

Daiwa Securities America (www.daiwausa.com), focused on the sales and trading of Japanese and U.S. equities, was selected based on its migration to JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to enhance the experience of its user base. Its migration from another technology [BEA's Weblogic] to JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform increased the company’s user portal’s speed, reliability and ease-of-?use. The new solution also allowed the company’s developers to create new, user-?requested applications at a much faster rate, compiling programs in under one second as opposed to five minutes previously.

Very, very cool stuff.

The Awards consisted of eight categories, ranging from business process automation (BPA) and service?oriented architecture (SOA) implementation to user experience and ecosystem. Entries were judged based on the solution’s creativity and innovation, measurable return on investment (ROI), identifiable improvements to the business, improvement of processes and ability to overcome technology challenges.

Computerworld tracks through a range of reasons for why people pay for commercially-supported open-source software. Enterprises pay for perceived and actual value, of course, which can come in the form of support, proprietary extensions, etc. No one pays out of charity to ensure the vendor will still be around a year from now, though that is probably the top reason that enterprises should pay.

Gautam Guliani, the executive director of software architecture at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions (Disclosure: Kaplan is an Alfresco customer), gives a few reasons why open source makes so much sense:

What open-source vendors offer to his business, he said, is lower costs for support, deepening maturity, code flexibility, “a much deeper level of transparency into the software products,” and a higher rate of innovation.

Indeed. What’s interesting, however, is just how many enterprises run open-source software without paying a dime for it, even in mission-critical applications.

This is possible because more and more enterprises are “rolling their own” IT. Like the vendors from which they buy, they are increasingly spending money on people rather than software. I know a wide range of enterprises that have adopted MySQL, Spring, etc. and modify these to suit their needs. They often don’t pay for support contracts because they have the developers in-house to support themselves.

Is this a good thing? Well, from the standpoint of the vendor selling support, it’s not. No support equals no payroll.

But it’s also a kick-in-the-pants to open-source vendors to sell more than support. Most enterprises are going to pay for support if they’re running your software in a mission-critical application. If your application isn’t mission-critical, however, you’re going to have to deliver ancillary value to compel customers to want to pay.

This is why open-source companies seem to all either offer proprietary extensions or customer-only networks (Red Hat Network, JBoss Operations Network, MySQL Advisory Service, etc.). While I like the lower sales and marketing costs associated with the latter option (networks), it’s clear why commercial open-source projects seek to add something beyond the core code.

They don’t really want to be someone’s free lunch. Can you blame them?

In this case, the unvirtuous Fed is named Rafael Pacheco, an agent with the U.S. Customs Service in Florida. And the database in question is the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS, which contains more than a billion records used by Customs and other federal police.

Pacheco was, to put it bluntly, a corrupt cop. He sold access to TECS for money.

He got caught when a Mexican man named Fidencio Estrada was nabbed by state police in a traffic stop near Houston. Estrada had Pacheco’s business card with him, and the state trooper asked him about it. After receiving a suspicious answer, the trooper phoned Pacheco, who called back and said that Estrada was a “huge” confidential informant and demanded that the trooper “let him go now.”

You can imagine what the truth was. The U.S. Customs Service, which was subsequently renamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would later say that Estrada was never a confidential informant. Instead, Estrada and his family had sent about $18,000 in Western Union money transfers to the Customs agent, who deposited the cash in his personal bank account and used it to pay off a vehicle loan with the Florida Customs Federal Credit Union. Estrada is, according to ICE, a drug trafficker.

In return, in February 2000, Pacheco accessed TECS to check for records on Estrada. He searched for Estrada under two aliases and looked up records for those aliases in the NCIC database, which lists outstanding warrants against a person. He also helped Estrada’s family members in Mexico obtain visas.

TECS, by the way, is described in a Justice Department report as including a watch list mechanism and, more generally, is: “Designed to identify individuals, businesses, and vehicles suspected of or involved in violation of federal law. TECS is also a communications system permitting message transmittal between law enforcement offices and other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. The database provides access to the FBI’s NCIC and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. The TECS database serves as the principal information system supporting border management and the law enforcement mission of the DHS’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal law enforcement agencies.”

So what eventually happened? Thanks to the happenstance of the traffic stop, the access-for-cash scheme unraveled, and Pacheco was convicted of receiving a bribe, hindering law enforcement, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and unlawfully accessing restricted federal computer databases. He was sentenced to 87 months in prison (and a separate 60-month sentence to be served at the same time).

As for Estrada, a U.S. permanent resident, he was found guilty by a jury of conspiring to bribe a public official, conspiring to launder money, 5 counts of bribery, and 10 counts of money laundering. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison, followed by 36 months supervised release.

He appealed, claiming that there was insufficient evidence, that the convictions were based on inadmissable hearsay, and other technical grounds. But the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his convictions last Monday.

The company hinted that it would make this move last week, saying it planned to increase its presence in China and India, two of the world’s biggest emerging markets for computers. Dell already has a relationship with one of China’s largest retail chains, Gome.

Some Inspiron notebooks will be sold through Indian retailer Croma.

(Credit:
Dell)

In the announcement, Dell said it plans to offer Inspiron desktops and notebooks, and XPS notebooks through Indian electronics outlet Croma. Dell has a presence in India, but prior to this announcement, only via direct sales channels where customers could call or order a PC online.

The move to make its PC available in retail stores follows a strategy the company began laying out almost a year ago when it first announced it would offer some PCs through Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. Since then the Texas PC maker has added U.K. electronics retailer Carphone Warehouse, Bic Camera in Japan, Gome in China, Staples, and Best Buy.

Under the earlier plan with T-Mobile, Starbucks customers needed a paid subscription to access the in-store Wi-Fi service, and T-Mobile HotSpot subscribers will continue to have access to Starbucks Wi-Fi thanks to an agreement between AT&T and T-Mobile. But the new AT&T plan allows all customers 2 free hours per day, with a $3.99 fee for additional 2-hour chunks of time. Monthly subscriptions will cost $19.99 and will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks.

In addition, AT&T broadband customers will be able to surf at the more than 7,000 Starbucks locations in the U.S. for free. The new Wi-Fi partnership is expected to be introduced gradually at Starbucks locations this spring.

It’s an understandable move on Starbucks’ part; the coffee chain has a number of deals in place with Apple and its iTunes Store. Apple uses AT&T as the mobile service provider for the
iPhone. Rumors of a Starbucks mobile ordering interface for the iPhone have been circulating for months.

The new partnership also extends to the business side of Starbucks: AT&T will also power an “enterprise class” network for internal operations.

Tech/culture connector Scott Beale turned me on to Muxtape, a super-simple site that streams a list of MP3s via the browser. Playlists you create get their own simple URLs and the interface for controlling the stream is plain and intuitive: Click a track to play it. Click again to pause.

You have to upload MP3s to the site to create your playlists, though, and while the interface for doing so is simple, it’s rather a drag. There’s no bulk uploader. You have to select each file from your disk and upload it individually.

The player looks great in a browser and would look great on an iPhone too.

Unfortunately, the site is Napster-esque in its disregard of digital rights. You can upload any MP3 file to the service and distribute the playlist URL far and wide. I strongly doubt the site’s legal notice on the upload page is enough to shield the service and its users from the law: “By uploading a song you agree that you have permission to let Muxtape use it.”

That’s a shame, because it really is a nice service. To use Muxtape is to replicate very well the old experience of making a cassette mix tape (if you’re old enough to remember that). The differences will kill the site, though: your Muxtape site can be instantly played by millions of people, and the audio is a perfect digital copy of what you upload.

Pastie is a new
iPhone app that makes it possible to send ready-made text messages or e-mails to people on your contact list. This feature has been around on other phones for ages, but the iPhone has long gone without one.

Pastie’s method for improving the sending of e-mail or SMS messages is to let the user create a directory of pre-written messages. These can be set up to be copied to the clipboard, or sent to the SMS or e-mail applications. As a user you can decide this at the time you click on it, or when you’re building the preset.

If you frequently find yourself sending an e-mail or a text message to a particular contact, this app can be immensely helpful since there’s the option to assign it to a specific number of e-mail address. For instance, several times a day I send out group e-mails telling my colleagues at work what story I’m currently working on. With Pastie you can create a preset that fills in the recipient and subject lines for you, which can save much keyboard pecking.

Each Pastie has an icon to let you know what will happen when you click on it, and if it's assigned to one of your contacts, you can see who it is with a little thumbnail.

(Credit:
CNET)

A few things that are on the way in a future version of the app is a way to send e-mails to multiple contacts at once, as well as being able to add text to the body of the e-mail (currently you can only fill out the subject). There will also be a Coverflow-like way to browse through your items, besides the current list form. One thing that’s not in the cards–and that I hope is added, is a text countdown meter so that you know if you’re reaching the limit of a text message, or a reoccurring Twitter update template you’ve created.

There are two flavors of Pastie–the lite which is free, and the full version which costs $1.99. The free version is just as capable as the full, but limited to just three presets at a time. You can make as many as you want, but you’ll have to get rid of one anytime you want to make a new one.

The enormous demo video of how it works is after the break.

Pastie - in action from Jeff Schilling on Vimeo.

Nick Carr

(Credit:
Nick Carr)

So it goes. The chattering class always gets irritated when convention gets challenged. After Carr published his thoughtful Harvard Business Review article in 2003, “Why IT Doesn’t Matter,” many technology leaders and trade press opinion makers reacted harshly.

They so caricatured Carr’s nuanced thesis that they entirely missed his bigger point about IT’s declining importance as a competitive asset. In the end, of course, it turned out Carr was quite right.

Now history is repeating. Part of the problem, I suppose, is Carr’s headline. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Catchy? I’ll say! That headline rates right up there with the New York Post’s 1982 gem, “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”

But that’s just a tease to draw in readers. Carr’s real concern is less with Google as the new bogeyman than on how our reliance on the Web might be turning us into multitasking scatterbrains.

He may be onto something, though all we can do at this point is share anecdotes. Apropos, I came across a doozy that speaks to Carr’s point.

Former chess champion Josh Waitzkin returned to Columbia University, where he sat in on a class taught by a former professor. The class was taught by Dennis Dalton, who Waitzkin described as “the most important college professor of my life.” Here’s what followed:

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief). From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes! When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom. Students defend this trend by citing their generation’s enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing.

How much blame does the Internet deserve here? What about the effects of too much television, or poor parenting? Maybe all of the above. In his essay, Carr observes that the Internet is projecting its influence in other parts of the culture. For example, the old-media world, anxious not to wind up in history’s dustbin, is adopting some of the popular conventions of the Internet. He notes:

As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

It’s a provocative idea, though even Carr is not entirely certain how far to push it. He acknowledges that any final determination of how Internet use impacts cognition must await extensive neurological and psychological testing. That’s as it should be.

Until then, Carr may remain a voice in a snarky wilderness, but at least credit him with initiating a important conversation.