by MBrandhorst 10.14.2009
We all want to keep our software up to date and we don’t even think twice on compatibility issues. Well maybe we should. I am running an older version of WebcamMax (I believe it is 4.3, but I could be wrong). A pop-up on my Skype stated a new version of Skype was available. I didn’t think twice, and downloaded the update. It installed fine no issues. Then…
I started Skype as I normally do verify my settings, audio check, and the video check. POOF
BSOD
Turns out the issues was, I had Skype use WebcamMax as the video source and apparently it is not compatible.
Go figure, the previous version no issues.
Started to search on Google.com for answers, haven’t found one. I un-installed Skype and reinstalled an older release. The issue is no longer there.
One a side note: A temporary fix is to make sure that Skype is using the webcam as the video source and not Webcam Max.
So the next time it says updates are available check your sources before you dive in…
By Jack M. Germain
LinuxInsider
10/14/09 4:00 AM PT
ubuntu
On Oct. 29, Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10 will be made available. It features Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, an open source cloud computing environment based on the same application programming interfaces as Amazon EC2. Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition will be available on the Amazon EC2 environment as an Amazon Machine Image.
Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition will become available for free download on Oct. 29, and it may be able to give companies a quick on-ramp to cloud computing .
The server software’s list of new features is topped with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as a fully supported technology. UEC is the umbrella name for several cloud technologies, including the open source Eucalyptus project. Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the open source Ubuntu OS family, collaborated with the Eucalyptus community to fully integrate that core technology and then tweak it for Ubuntu server performance, according to Gerry Carr, head of platform development for Canonical.
“The growing attraction for cloud computing drove our development of the UEC. It is probably the most notable new feature,” Carr told LinuxInsider.
One aspect of the new Ubuntu Server release likely to drive its adoption is its ability to allow enterprises to set up their own private clouds. UEC is a an open source cloud computing environment based on the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) EC2.
“Not everyone is using the clouds yet,” said Carr. So, he said, the UEC feature will give enterprises a new way to make the migration.
Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition will also be available on the Amazon EC2 environment as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from Oct. 29, Carr. said.
That arrangement enhances portability between the two platforms. Ubuntu’s UEC images are identical to Ubuntu’s AMI. Work done in one environment can be uploaded to the other.
User Benefits
The UEC features allow system administrators to set up, deploy and manage a cloud environment. Users already familiar with elastic compute environments can build a similar infrastructure behind their own firewalls, avoiding regulatory and security concerns that prevent many enterprises from taking advantage of cloud environments, explained Carr.
Another benefit of the UEC integration is a tight integration with power management tools. For example, the new Canonical-sponsored PowerNap project allows users to put the server to sleep when they are not actively used.
“This will be a big step for many enterprise users. It will be a big boon to adopting cloud technology,” said Carr.
More Added
Canonical re-engineered the core server and kernel in this release. Numerous kernel improvements better support both Xen (guest) and KVM (host and guest) virtualization, and caching performance.
Also, USB 3.0 protocol will support super speed transfer rates when devices become available. In addition, the new server package, called “Django,” includes fully supported framework-enhancing Web server options.
Canonical added support for system management extended through support for the WBEM (Web-based enterprise management) protocols. This opens the Ubuntu environment to support many popular system management tools currently deployed in enterprises, according to Carr, and allows them to interact more easily with Canonical’s management tool for Ubuntu, called “Landscape.”
Other improvements include the addition of MySQL 5.1 and a directory stack and Single Sign On tools upgrade for improved directory integration.
Pricing and Availability
Beta versions with some but not all of the final features are currently available at the Ubuntu Web site.
The full release of Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition will be available for free download on Oct. 29.
Shaun Nichols in San Francisco V3.co.uk, 15 Oct 2009
Apple has reportedly added additional security protections to its iPhone 3GS handsets designed to prevent user modifications.
Apple iPhone
The new protections are said to be aimed at slowing the practice of ‘jailbreaking,’ or unlocking the handset to allow the installation of software not offered on Apple’s App Store service.
According to reports from the iPhoneDevTeam research group, the latest versions of the iPhone 3GS handset are shipping with an updated ‘bootrom’ component which prevents users from removing software protections on the device.
Older 3GS handsets and previous models are still susceptible to the procedure, which can be performed by connecting the handset to a PC and running a specialized software tool.
The move is the latest in an ongoing game of cat and mouse between Apple and hobbyist developers that began shortly after the release of the first iPhone model in 2007.
The ‘jailbreaking’ procedure was initially developed to allow users to install additional software in the days before the App Store was launched.
While the company has never taken direct action to shut down the iPhone Dev Team developers, iPhone updates frequently erase jailbreaking software and in some cases have damaged jailbroken handsets.
Opera Software Opera 10 Review Sep 3, 2009 by Preston Gralla, PC World
http://www.opera.com/browser/
Opera has always been packed with features, but it has yet to garner the same kind of publicity that Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome enjoy. And that’s a shame, because version 10 of the venerable Web browser adds a slew of clever features that anyone who surfs the Web will welcome.
Like previous versions, Opera 10 is fast, configurable, and clean-looking–and it offers just about everything you’d expect in a modern browser, including a pop-up blocker, plug-ins, an RSS reader, and an antiphishing tool. Unlike competing browsers, it also has a surprisingly good built-in e-mail client, with support for POP3 and IMAP servers, the ability to create incoming message rules, and a spam filter. And, once again in this version, Opera bristles with features too numerous to mention in this short review, yet it packs them all into an elegant, simple-to-use interface.
The new features don’t clutter up the browser or make it more difficult to use. Overall, Opera 10 is sleeker-looking than previous versions. But Opera’s added beauty is more than skin-deep. Tab handling, for example, has improved, in that you can now configure the browser so that thumbnails of all of your tabs appear above each tab; the thumbnails are resizable as well.
Another worthy addition is the new Speed Dial feature (pictured above). Speed Dial improves on Safari 4′s similar Top Sites feature by virtue of being more configurable. You can customize the page that appears whenever you open a new tab in Opera so that anywhere from 4 to 24 of your favorite Web sites display as thumbnails. That way, you can more quickly get to the sites you visit most often, with a simple click on a thumbnail. The feature is turned on by default, and the settings seem to offer no way to turn it off–not that you’d want to, though, because it has no downside.
Opera has always displayed pages quickly, and the newest version is even speedier, particularly on interactive sites that use a lot of resources, such as Facebook and Gmail. Opera claims a 40 percent increase in speed, but we couldn’t verify that.
Among other new features are an inline spelling checker (which will be particularly welcome to bloggers) and Opera Turbo, a compression technology that Opera says will allow you to surf faster on slow connections, such as via dial-up. As a broadband user, I was not able to test this feature, so I can’t vouch for it.
Surprisingly, given how many features Opera has, it still lacks one feature that IE, Firefox, and Chrome all have: a privacy mode that makes all traces of your Web-surfing session vanish after you close the browser. If such a feature is important to you, Opera isn’t the best choice.
Should you replace your current browser with Opera? Which browser you use is a personal decision, so we can’t give a one-size-fits-all answer. But anyone who has ever wished that their browser were faster and more feature-packed will certainly want to give Opera 10 a try.
Lawyers working on a $1 billion copyright lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google’s YouTube may have uncovered evidence that employees of the video site were among those who uploaded unauthorized content to YouTube.
In addition, internal YouTube e-mails indicate that YouTube managers knew and discussed the existence of unauthorized content on the site with employees but chose not to remove the material, three sources with knowledge of the case told CNET.
The e-mails, according to the sources who asked for anonymity because of the ongoing litigation, surfaced during an exchange of information between the two sides of the legal dispute. They are one of the cornerstones of Viacom’s case, as well as that of a separate class action lawsuit filed against Google and YouTube by a group of content owners, the sources said. The group includes a European soccer league and a music-publishing company.
Such evidence could be a major blow to YouTube’s defense. If managers possessed “actual knowledge” of copyright infringement on the site and did not quickly remove it, the company may not be entitled to protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe-harbor provision, according to legal experts.
“The facts you described could very well be the smoking gun that puts a hole through Google’s case,” Roger Goff, an entertainment attorney not involved in the case, told CNET News. “(If the facts are accurate), Google will have a very difficult time claiming that (its staff members) don’t undermine its protection.”
The provision, established in 1998, was designed to give online services a measure of protection from liability for infringing materials uploaded to their sites–as long as they meet a certain criteria, including:
(A)(i) The services don’t have actual knowledge that the material, or an activity using the material on the system or network, is infringing.
(ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or
(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material.
The entertainment industry has been skeptical about YouTube’s claims that it did not have knowledge of the once-plentiful amounts of infringing content available on the site. Clips from popular TV shows, feature films, or sports events would often bubble up in YouTube’s Most Viewed or Most Discussed sections.
It should be noted that the correspondence described by sources likely make up only a sliver of the material exchanged, and there’s no way to know the full spectrum of internal discussions regarding copyright at YouTube.
“The characterizations of the supposed evidence, made in violation of a court order, are wrong, misleading, or lack important context and notably come on the heels of a series of significant setbacks for the plaintiffs,” Aaron Zamost, a YouTube spokesman, said Monday evening. “The evidence will show that we go above and beyond our legal obligations to protect the rights of content owners.”
Any questions about what YouTube employees may or may not have uploaded to YouTube must also be asked of Viacom’s employees. Court documents show that on August 25, Viacom agreed to turn over records that shed light on “Viacom’s decisions to upload or authorize the uploading of videos to YouTube” and on the company’s policies “for allowing videos to remain on YouTube for marketing promotional or other business reasons.”
This suggests that Viacom employees also uploaded clips to the site. A company representative declined to comment.
YouTube’s argument: How is it supposed to know the difference between pirated and legally uploaded clips when companies like Viacom are among those uploading material?
Viacom has long acknowledged that it was one of the first to promote shows online by posting clips to YouTube. But the conglomerate has also said the uploading of clips does not undermine or diminish its copyright claim.
YouTube’s counterargument has always been, how is the company supposed to know the difference between pirated and legally uploaded clips when companies like Viacom are among those uploading material?
Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006, a price tag that set the bar for Web 2.0 acquisitions. Long before that, many in the film and television industries claimed that YouTube was building a big audience by enabling people to pirate professionally produced television shows and films.
Since Viacom first filed its suit in March 2007, accusing Google and YouTube of encouraging users to commit intellectual-property theft, many online services and entertainment companies have closely watched the case because of its broad implications. What the YouTube-Viacom suit could help settle, to some degree, is who is responsible for policing and initiating the removal of pirated materials–the copyright owners or the operators of online services?
But should the case ever go to trial, the outcome may be less significant than legal experts once predicted. While the lawsuit has meandered in the courts for 30 months, other legal battles featuring companies with less marquee value have already gone a long way toward determining Web services’ key issues surrounding copyright.
Two weeks ago, U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz issued a decision saying video site Veoh was not responsible for copyright violations committed by users because it was entitled to protection under the DMCA. Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company, had filed a copyright suit against Veoh that experts said was very similar to the YouTube-Viacom case. Matz’s decision appeared to set an important precedent that would help YouTube and Google argue against Viacom, the parent company of MTV Networks and Paramount Pictures.
“The issue is whether Veoh takes appropriate steps to deal with copyright infringement,” Matz wrote. He concluded that it had.
YouTube supporters cheered Matz’s ruling, believing that it would apply to YouTube’s situation because the Web’s largest video site had long established and enforced a “takedown policy,” whereby the company removed infringing content, once notified by a copyright owner. And later, the video site took steps not required by the DMCA by establishing a state-of-the-art filtering process that helps block material from being uploaded to the site.
But attorneys for Viacom and members of the class action are expected to argue that YouTube’s filtering system is a gaping hole in YouTube’s defense. One of the major complaints that content owners had about YouTube was that before the company launched its filtering technology, they were forced to file takedown notices for every instance of infringement. In some cases, an entertainment company could remove a popular clip, only to see someone else upload it again seconds later.
Lawyers for Viacom and the class action group are expected to argue that if YouTube was notified that a specific clip was pirated, and had the power to prevent copies from going up but did not act to remove them, the company violated the DMCA.
The plaintiffs use as evidence a paraphrased statement from Chad Hurley, YouTube’s CEO, and one of its three co-founders, which appeared in The New York Times in February 2007, the sources said.
“(Hurley) said the company was still working on its filtering technology,” the Times wrote. “He said it had agreed to use it to identify and possibly remove copyrighted material from Warner Music, and it would discuss a similar arrangement with Viacom as part of a broader deal.”
A Viacom representative said at the time, “They are saying we will only protect your content if you do a deal with us–if not, we will steal it.”
The YouTube-Viacom suit is unlikely to go to trial before next year. Certainly, with YouTube wooing entertainment companies as it attempts to battle Hulu, Netflix, Crackle, iTunes, and other digital-video outlets, there exists the possibility that YouTube and Viacom will come to some kind of settlement.
A settlement might be anticlimatic, but could be the best for all concerned.
by Brooke Crothers
Nvidia’s new Fermi chip is being billed as a supercomputing chip but Nvidia doesn’t want you to forget that it is also aimed at Apple’s Snow Leopard and Windows 7.
The Fermi chip was announced with much fanfare on Wednesday as key silicon in a future supercomputer from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But, wait, Fermi is also going to be great at accelerating stuff in Snow Leopard and Windows 7–not to mention a great gaming chip, according to Bill Dally, chief scientist at Nvidia who spoke during a conference call with analysts on Thursday.
The Fermi graphics processing unit (GPU)–which packs 512 processing cores–will support DirectX-11, a technology for speeding certain multimedia software in Windows 7, and also support an analogous technology in Snow Leopard, OpenCL.
“A lot of (the chip’s new) features accelerate key consumer applications. Both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 enable the GPU to be used as a co-processor to accelerate third-party applications,” Dally said. With a “discrete (standalone) GPU they can get very good performance on these applications,” he said.
Applications that Nvidia says will be accelerated by the Fermi chip
(Credit: Nvidia)
Dally gave examples (see graphic) of consumer titles such as Adobe’s Creative Suite, Motion DSP’s vReveal (for fixing photographs), and Badaboom (for creating iPod video).
He offered a qualifier, however. “We are paying a bit of a compute tax in that we launched a part where a lot of the consumer compute applications haven’t really taken hold yet. But over time as more consumer computer applications are developed that take advantage of our compute (consumer) features…I think it’s going to give us a big leg up,” he said.
And being an Nvidia chip, games are a big target market. “Fermi adds value to games by doing exactly the same kind of scientific simulations that we use to predict climate and to understand the genome and other things,” according to Dally. “A great example of that is our PhysX package that basically does physical simulations to make games appear more real.”
He also explained why the chip was billed as a supercomputer chip initially and not a gaming chip. “It’s a zero-sum game. You have a certain amount of die (chip) area, a certain power budget. It is the case that we put a bunch of die area into double-precision floating point, a bunch of die area into ECC. And for gaming graphics applications, those give less returns than they do for the scientific applications,” he said. Double-precision floating point operations are used heavily in scientific computing. ECC, or error correcting code, is a technology that can correct data errors on the fly.
And Dally explained how Fermi can be scaled down to lower-end chips used in the gaming and consumer segments. “We’re not talking about other (chips) at this point in time but you can imagine that we can scale this part by having fewer than the 512 cores and by having these cores have fewer of the features, for example less double-precision,” he said.
All the Fermi products, including gaming and professional workstation chips, will be announced “pretty close together.” Chips are expected sometime in the coming few months.
And how does Fermi stack up against current public information about Intel’s future “Larrabee” graphics chip? “We can’t compare anything to Larrabee until it shows up and can actually be measured,” said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research, which tracks the graphics chip market. “But remember, Larrabee was started over two years ago and both ATI and Nvidia have had two new designs out since then,” he said. “So the pressure will be on Intel to chase fast-moving ATI and Nvidia,” Peddie said. ATI, which is Advanced Micro Devices’ graphics chip unit, already has a chip in stores–the Radeon HD 5800– that supports Windows DirectX-11.
By Brian Kraemer,
4:35 PM EDT Fri. Oct. 02, 2009
Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s Bing has lost market share to Google over the past month, prompting some to start digging the decision engine’s grave. But with Bing just a few months into real competition with Google (NSDQ:GOOG), that evaluation might be a bit premature.The drop in Bing’s search engine market share doesn’t mean that Microsoft should close up shop and throw in the towel, of course. Google, after all, didn’t become the ubiquitous entity that it has become in just a few short months. Microsoft, somewhat ironically, is in as good a position as anyone to understand this.
Microsoft Internet Explorer has been the dominant Web browser since driving out Netscape over 10 years ago. But for several years now, Internet Explorer has been competing against Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser.
Firefox currently has the second biggest share of the Web browser market with about 22 percent, according to September numbers from Net Applications’ Market Share report. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, claims slightly more than 60 percent of the Web browser market.
Version 1.0 of the Firefox Web browser was rolled out in November 2004 and has been competing against Internet Explorer for almost five years. The fact that the open-source browser has even 22 percent of the market is seen as somewhat of a victory.
Microsoft’s Bing went live on June 3 and is entering its fourth month of competition against Google. In September, Bing lost about 1 percent of market share, with Stat Counter reporting that in the U.S. Microsoft’s search engine owned 8.51 percent of the search engine market, down from 9.64 percent in August. Google, meanwhile, saw its share increase to 80.08 percent in September from 77.83 percent in August.
While things do change quickly on the Web, it may be a little too early to consider Bing becoming dead in the water. The huge advertising campaign that Microsoft instituted to promote its decision engine probably accounts for that fact that Bing is even close to 9 percent of the search engine market.
But the fact that Bing lost market share over a month shouldn’t be too much of a concern. After all, Microsoft has a perfect template in Firefox to refer to when figuring out how to compete with an established giant in any field.
Author:
Gareth Halfacree Published: 22nd September 2009
AMD’s Thuban – likely to be shipped as the Phenom II X6 at retail – is based on the company’s server-oriented Opteron chips.
If you’ve been salivating over the thought of getting your hands on one of AMD’s six-core processors but didn’t want to spend the extra associated with the company’s server-oriented Opteron label, there’s good news: enter Thuban.
The guys over at MaximumPC have confirmed with AMD that the six-core technology which has gone into its Opteron server processors is due to hit the mainstream early next year with a consumer-grade chip codenamed Thuban. Interestingly, the processor will be fully backwards compatible with existing AM3 and AM2+ motherboards – although not ones based around the older AM2 standard.
Thuban processors will feature an on-chip DDR2/DDR3 memory controller, and will be fabricated using AMDs current 45nm technology. While official branding for the product has yet to be confirmed, it’s thought that Thuban chips will be sold as Phenom II X6 at retail.
While clock speeds are thought to take a hit compared to quad-core parts in order to keep down the TDP, the Thuban chips will have a decent stack of cache memory with 3MB of level 2 in total and 6MB of level 3 unified cache on-board.
While it’s good to see server-side technologies trickling down to the desktop, AMD might have misjudged this release: rival Intel’s own Gulftown technology – which is a six-core processor using HyperThreading to present twelve logical processors to the operating system – is also backwards compatible to the company’s LGA1366 motherboards and is expected to hit the market first.
Will you be rushing to upgrade to AMD – or Intel’s – six-core desktop processors, or are you struggling to make the most of a four-core system? Is the future of computing simple raw power or a greater number of slower processing cores?
Six-core Intel CPU will be called Core i9
Author: Clive Webster
Published: 1st October 2009
Gigabyte confims what everyone else is thinking (and what Intel still denies): Gulftown will be Core i9.
After the launch of a whole new range of Core i7 CPUs that are incompatible in every way with the current range of Core i7 CPUs, there was a lot of head-scratching in the office. Even more so because Intel was adamant that this new branding actually made sense. Come on, Intel, you could’ve at least called the Hyper-Threaded Lynnfield CPUs Core i6s – or do odd numbers just sound cooler?
Anyway, with Intel’s insistence that the LGA1156 Core i7 branding makes perfect sense, and the news that there’s a six-core LGA1366 CPU, codenamed Gulftown, on the way most people were assuming that the new CPUs will be branded Core i9. Even we’ll admit that Core i8 is too much of a mouthful. Asked explicitly whether the new CPUs will be Core i9, Intel has always told us that it can’t comment about forthcoming products.
But it seems Gigabyte can.
As part of it’s latest competition – Beat Me If You Dare – Gigabyte explicitly forbids the use of ‘Gulftown (Core i9)’. This is nothing new, as Intel denied that any Lynnfield CPU would be called Core i5 despite months of (entirely accurate) rumours circulating for months.
