Ashley Bell

This past week's Microsoft-T-Mobile-Sidekick data loss mess is the latest in a string of high profile cloud computing outages that have grabbed headlines over the past couple of years. Here's a short history of cloud computing SNAFUs: Microsoft Danger outage: Contacts, calendar entries, photographs and other personal information of T-Mobile Sidekick users looks to be lost for good following a service disruption at Sidekick provider Danger, a Microsoft subsidiary. Inevitably, the coverage of the initial outage (as well as cloud security breaches) is followed by explanations of why the outage happened (human error, network equipment, hackers, etc.) and analysis stories pointing out the pitfalls of putting your faith in the cloud.

The amount of data and number of users affected wasn't disclosed by Microsoft or T-Mobile, but Sidekick support forums were buzzing with pleas from users looking for tips on how to restore their devices or get their data back. Various explanations have been served up by the vendor, from routing errors to server maintenance issues. Google Gmail fails…again:  When Google's Gmail faltered on Sept. 24, it wasn't down for more than a couple of hours, but it was the second outage during the month and the latest in a disturbing string of outages for Google's cloud-based offerings, including Google search, Google News and Google Apps over the past 18 months. Some have come to Google's defense, saying that even though the company has had its share of outages, we are talking about mainly free services (you get what you pay for, in other words). Twitter goes down…and yes, that's news:  While Twitter had been keeping its Fail Whale in hiding more often than not, a big Twitter outage that lasted throughout the morning and into early afternoon in early August had social networking types fuming. eBay's PayPal crashes: The PayPal online payments system failed a couple of times in August, leaving millions of customers unable to complete transactions.

A denial-of-service attack was blamed for the problem. A network hardware issue was fingered as the culprit for the outage, which lasted for between 1 and 4.5 hours, depending on how you look at it. Rackspace pays up:  Rackspace was forced to pay out between $2.5 million and $3.5 million in service credits to customers in the wake of a power outage that hit its Dallas data center in late June. It cost PayPal millions of dollars in lost business; it's unclear how much it cost merchants. Rackspace, which offers a variety of hosting and cloud services for enterprise customers, suffered power generator failures on June 29 that caused customer servers to go down for part of the day.

This was only a test release of Azure, so observers noted that this obviously wasn't as big a deal as a production service outage. More disruptions followed and Rackspace kept customers up to date via its blog.  Windows Azure test release goes down:  Early adopters of Microsoft's cloud-computing network Windows Azure suffered an overnight outage over a weekend in mid-March during which their applications being hosted on the network weren't available. Separately, Microsoft also suffered a Hotmail messaging system outage in March.  Salesforce.com kicks off the Year of the Cloud Outage:  As CIO.com's Thomas Wailgum reported in January, Salesforce.com suffered a service disruption for about an hour on Jan. 6 due to a core network device failing because of memory allocation errors. IDG News Service contributed to this story. Amazon S3 storage service knocked out:  We actually have to go back to summer of 2008 to find coverage of the last major Amazon S3 cloud network outage, which lasted for 7 to 8 hours and followed another outage earlier last year caused by too many authentication requests.

Lifted by fast-growing notebook shipments, Taiwan's Acer Inc. grabbed the No. 2 spot in the global PC market for the first time over Dell Inc., according to iSuppli Corp. That helped it leap ahead of Dell. The market researcher also confirmed that the PC market is starting to rebound, and now expects this year's sales to be almost flat compared to the prior year's. Boosted by a 17% year-over-year growth in notebook (including netbook) shipments, Acer had 13.4% of the 79.9 million PCs shipped globally in the third quarter, said iSuppli. Hurt by sluggish corporate IT spending, Dell's sales fell 5.9% and it recorded a 12.9% share.

On the rebound, Lenovo's shipments growing 17.2% year-over-year, giving it fourth place. "Acer's rise to the No. 2 rank in the global PC business reflects not only its strong performance in the notebook segment, but also the historic rise of Asia as a primary force in the computer industry," said iSuppli analyst Matthew Wilkins in a statement. Another Asian manufacturer, Lenovo Corp., also had a standout quarter. Acer and Lenovo were ranked just No. 6 and No. 8, respectively, in 2003, Wilkins said. "The Asian manufacturers are a growing force in the global PC business due to their aggressive pricing along with their ability to quickly react and embrace new developments, such as the netbook PC," Wilkins said. Both IDC Corp. and Gartner Inc. had already ranked Acer ahead of Dell. iSuppli is the third market tracker to note Acer's rise to number two. HP remained atop the heap for the 13th straight quarter, with 19.9% of the market.

iSuppli also said that Q3 shipments overall grew year-over-year (1.1%) for the first time in a year, while growing 19% from the second quarter. "The sequential and year-over-year shipment increases show that the PC industry emerged from the downturn and began to grow again in the third quarter," Wilkins said. Toshiba is No. 5 globally, with a 5.0% share, iSuppli said. Notebook shipments were "critical in driving growth," as they never wavered into the negative even during the worst quarters, he added. As a result, the PC market is now expected to decline just 0.9%, rather than iSuppli's earlier prediction of a 4% decline. Christmas and Windows 7 will conspire to "bring more good news for PC makers," said Wilkins.

Over the past decade, the Internet has become a major source of donations for political campaigns and non-profit groups. But it's not just about campaign cash: Piryx also lets groups receive digital reports on their donation activities, review and audit all online donation filings and keep track of potentially inappropriate donations. Piryx, which made its official debut at Network World's DEMOfall '09 this week, is trying to become a one-stop shop for non-profits and politicians who are looking to raise serious cash for their causes. Among other things, Piryx has helped launch the campaign for rocker Jon Bon Jovi's Soul Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at alleviating poverty and homelessness.

What is Piryx's target audience and what is Piryx providing them that PayPal currently cannot? In this interview, Piryx founder and CEO Tom Serres talks about the inspiration for his company, what it costs to use Piryx and how he plans on dealing with the threat of politically motivated DDoS attacks. We were originally aimed at political organizations who needed help doing rapid response for online fundraising and who were doing the same things that Barack Obama did, but having the added capability seeing where the donations and support are coming from through all points of virtual connectivity, whether that's through Facebook, Twitter or blogs. Joe Wilson, who became famous for calling the president a liar earlier this month. One recent client we signed up was Rep.

There was a massive surge in both support for and opposition against him. Once he got up and running, he was raising $1.5 million through our system in a matter of days. And he came to us to set him up with an online fundraising page because for him to set up a processing account and then track where all the donations were coming from would have taken a long time using the PayPal API. So we had him up and running in about five to ten minutes and in real time he was able to track where his messages were going, why people were donating to him and so forth. Had he relied on traditional payment processors he wouldn't have had that kind of customization and he wouldn't have been able to deploy it as rapidly as he did. When you create a payment page you can tie it to an affiliate tracking code.

How exactly does it let the user have that level of detail? Then you can push it out to a particular channel such as Facebook, a blog, a social evangelist, a product evangelist or an e-mail marketing campaign. So as a donor you can navigate to that donation page and you can make that donation and then the organization that initiated that page can determine why you were there. It's a gateway for you to communicate with people who might be receptive to your message. They can determine how much of their money they raised from Twitter, Facebook and so forth and get a better understanding of what messages people are reacting to. What steps would I have to go through.

So let's say I'm a politician looking to set up an account with Piryx. When our clients go through our setup process we're going to ask them for things such as bank account numbers and routing information. There's a verification process and we have automated ways of setting them up through that, and we do that to make sure they aren't fraudulent users. If they're a corporation we want their employer ID number, their corporate tax ID, things like that. The basic process is that you fill out a form with all the pertinent information, you submit it, it activates your account and then sends you a link to authenticate your e-mail address.

Basically Piryx gets 4.5% every donation to start. What percentage of each donation made through the system goes to Piryx? Then once your campaign or organization raises $100,000 we gradually cut the rate we take per donation. You were hit by a DDoS attack after Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" at President Obama earlier this month. Then once you get over $1 million in total donations, we take 4% per donation.

Do you think that as Piryx becomes more of a home for politicians and political organizations it will become more of a target for DDoS attacks? Yes we are and despite getting hit with that DDoS attack, we're even further along in shoring up our protection mechanisms than we thought we'd be at this point. How are you preparing for that possibility? Keep in mind that we're still a small startup company and we have around 150 users nationwide, up from around two users back when we first launched in February. This is our big coming out party. We've been under the radar until DEMO rolled around this week.

NetApp and VMware have each built highly efficient new data centers designed to provide millions of dollars of savings on energy costs each year, the vendors announced separately this week. With average temperatures of 74 degrees Fahrenheit, and efficient ways of delivering cool air to machines, the $45 million building's energy costs will be about $7.3 million less per year than a data center with average efficiency, according to NetApp. "This is one of the most efficient data centers in the world," says NetApp founder Dave Hitz. "We did this using very innovative design, but mostly off-the-shelf components. Inside a green data center NetApp built a 132,000-square-foot facility in Research Triangle Park, N.C., which will house the bulk of its engineering operations and provide a disaster recovery site.

This is a style of building data centers that pretty much anyone can do. A typical PUE is about 2.0. VMware's new data center, in East Wenatchee, Wash., will have a PUE between 1.2 and 1.5, and save the company about $4 million a year in energy costs, VMware said. It's normal stuff, just configured well." The NetApp data center has a PUE (power usage effectiveness) rating of 1.2. That means for each watt of power used by IT equipment, an additional two-tenths of a watt is needed to distribute power to and cool that equipment. The VMware data center uses hydroelectric power, airside economizers to take advantage of cool outside air, a hot aisle containment strategy and virtualization to meet its efficiency goals, the company said. Many data centers run as cold as 65 degrees, Hitz says. "Lots of data centers use very cold air, much colder than you need," he says. "We can run the air up to 74 degrees if we're very careful about how it's routed through and actually pressurize some of the rooms." Inside the data center, NetApp is using its own storage along with virtualized servers running at least eight virtual machines apiece.

NetApp, meanwhile, said it is using cold aisle containment and pressure-controlled rooms that "regulate the volume of air to avoid oversupplying air and wasting energy." Airside economizers let NetApp use outside air 67% of the year, a strategy enabled by NetApp's decision to keep an average temperature of 74 degrees. A cloud-like network will provide remote access to the data center for NetApp engineering laboratories worldwide. About half of the facility is powered up so far, and NetApp expects it will be able to accommodate the company's growth through 2019. Prior to building the new facility, NetApp's engineering data centers were scattered randomly around various office buildings, and the company is in the process of shutting down many of those little IT operations. "For engineering, our goal is to consolidate as much as possible into this data center," Hitz says. The data center supports 2,166 racks and a designed power load of 25 megawatts.

What do you get when you combine the smarts of a computer scientist and a doctor of sleep medicine? The new test, known as thermal infrared imaging (TIRI), uses a thermal infrared camera to monitor breathing waveforms and airflow as a patient breathes in and out of his or her nose. A cool, less invasive way to figure out if patients have sleep apnea, a common problem that causes a snoring a person to momentarily stop breathing while sleeping.

The measurements are processed using computer algorithms and produce results that have proved to be as accurate as traditional test for apnea known as a polysomnography. If you have ever undergone a sleep apnea test, you know how terribly uncomfortable they are. NetworkWorld Extra: 15 genius algorithms that aren't boring The new method also provides doctors with more information about the patient's breathing, according to its creators Ioannis Pavlidis, Eckhard-Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston and Jayasimha Murthy, M.D., assistant professor of medicine from the Division of Pulmonary Critical Care Sleep Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston UTHSC at Houston. Traditional sleep tests use a variety of leads and probes on the patient's head, in their nose, one their legs, arms and chest to gather data. Data is collected from a distance by a thermal camera.

TIRI eliminates the needs for the two most obtrusive probes under the nose, the thermistor and nasal pressure probe. As the patient breathes in, cooler air is brought into his or her nostrils, creating a unique thermal signature for inhale. TIRI not only makes it more comfortable for the patient to sleep during the study, but it gathers much more data from an array of points across the patient's lower face. On exhale, the air blown from the lungs is warmer. The traditionally used thermistor only yields information about a specific point, the researchers stated in a release. "During a sleep study a subject has an average of more than 20 sensors attached to the head and body. However, these sensors can disturb sleep and contribute to the patient's anxiety," said Murthy.

It's a very complex procedure where many physiological parameters are simultaneously monitored to help in the diagnosis of sleep disorders. The researchers believe that this new technology could change the way sleep apnea is diagnosed, potentially helping millions of Americans sleep better and possibly live longer, researchers stated. . Approximately 24% of men and 9% of women experience sleep apnea, the researchers stated. The National Science Foundation-funded sleep research will be published in this month's issue of Sleep.

A new service designed to let Twitter users make short, tweet-like phone calls to one another begins its beta testing period today. It's set up to allow Twitter users to launch two-minute, two-way voice chats with any other Twitter user - even without knowing the other person's phone number. Jajah, Inc. , an IP communications company based in Mountain View, Calif., launched the free service, called Jajah@call today.

To use the new service, people have to be users of both Twitter and Jajah, the person receiving the call has to be a Twitter follower of the person making the call. That will certainly be something to behold - and perhaps a sign of the apocalypse." Social networking seems to be leaving the realm of text-online behind. In a statement, Jajah said the system should work on any Twitter platform - from a computer to a mobile phone. "Essentially, this is adding Skype-like functionality to Twitter," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "This is certainly a valid extension for the Twitter platform, but the one-to-one nature of the feature as it is now is a bit different than the existing Twitter model. "If this catches on," he added, "further developments might include the ability for Twitterers to call all of their followers, which would certainly make it a lot easier for them to stream their every thought and activity without even having to take the trouble to type. Earlier this week, Vivox, a Boston-based company, announced that engineers there are working on an application that should enable Facebook users - whether individuals or groups - to have voice chats online. Vivox said it's looking to add a new dimension to online reunions or meetings. "With Facebook adding much the same functionality, it looks like social networking is moving away from typing all of a sudden," added Olds. "These new mechanisms will be used, but voice probably won't prove to be a must-have feature for most users."

Microsoft made its holiday pitch Tuesday in New York giving a sneak peak at what its gadget lineup will look like. The OS adds improvements to Internet Explorer Mobile, new navigation tools, Flash Lite support, and the introduction of Windows Marketplace for Mobile - a new app store. (See Related: Review of Windows Mobile OS 6.5 HTC Pure) To me Windows Mobile 6.5 seems like a transitional step to a future OS - might it be called Windows Mobile 7? - that could pose a more realistic challenge to Android, iPhone, and other mobile operating environments on the consumer side. Here Microsoft stressed its portable music player Zune, Xbox, Windows Mobile 6.5 OS phones, and Windows 7. Microsoft's Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, said this season it will stress the integration of "lifestyles" with "work-styles." All eyes were on Microsoft's Mobile 6.5 operating system which was announced today.

As for Zune and Xbox, Microsoft says it will be rolling out a new feature that enables content downloaded to one of these devices to be played back on the other. Microsoft Zune representatives say the move will represent the first in a series of steps by Microsoft toward greater integration between various Windows-enabled hardware devices. The video quality will support an impressive 1080p high-definition (HD) video. In attendance Tuesday was phone makers Samsung, HTC, LG, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba were all on hand delivering first looks at Windows Mobile 6.5 devices. Microsoft, though, faces increasingly visible competition from both the Google Android and Apple iPhone camps in a struggle to expand beyond its relatively good position in the corporate smartphone space.

Also on hand were mobile carriers Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, Telus and Bell Mobility. Today Verizon and Google announced a partnership to bring Android-based smartphones, PDAs, and netbooks to market later this year. At the CTIA show in Dallas, TX this week, Samsung and T-Mobile introduced the Behold II, a touchscreen phone that brings together the Linux-based Android operating system with Samsung's new TouchWiz user interface for one-touch access to the user's favorite features and applications.

Snow Leopard users have reported that they've lost all their personal data when they've logged into a "Guest" account after upgrading from Leopard, according to messages on Apple's support forum. The MacFixIt site first reported the problem more than a month ago. The bug, users said in a well-read thread on Apple's support forum, resets all settings on the Mac, resets all applications' settings and erases the contents of critical folders containing documents, photos and music.

Users claimed that they lost data when they'd logged into their Macs using a "Guest" account, either purposefully or by accident. Specifically, Snow Leopard's home directory - the one sporting the name of the Mac's primary user - is replaced with a new, empty copy after users log-in to a Guest account, log out, then log-in to their standard account. Reports of the bug go back to Sept. 3, just six days after Apple launched Snow Leopard , or Mac OS X 10.6. Users who said they'd encountered the bug said that they had upgraded their systems from Mac OS X 10.5, known as Leopard. All the standard folders - Documents, Downloads, Music, Picture and others - are empty, while the Desktop and Dock have reverted to an "out-of-box" condition. "I had the Guest account enabled on my MacBook Pro," said a user identified as "tcnsdca" in a message posted Sept. 3. "I accidentally clicked on that when I went to log in. All of doc, music, etc. gone." "Add my parents to the list of people waxed by this bug," added "Ratty Mouse" today on the same thread. "Brand new iMac, less than one month old, EVERYTHING lost. It took a few minutes to log in, then after I had logged out of that account and back into mine, my [entire] home directory had been wiped.

Just as I convinced them to go Mac after years of trying." On the thread, several users urged others to disable any Guest accounts to prevent any accidental data loss. This morning I had access to Guest Account and than all my data were lost!!!" bemoaned someone tagged as "carlodituri" last Saturday. "I had 250GB of data without backup and I lost everything: years and years of documents, pictures, video, music!!! Some people were able to restore their Macs using recent Time Machine backups, but others admitted that they had not backed up their machines for weeks or months. "Just my luck I hadn't made a backup since 11th August," acknowledged "rogerss" on a different support forum thread. "So annoyed now, in the process of restoring from Time Machine, but have lost loads of my work due to this fault." Others users, however, had neglected to back up their Macs. "Nooooo!!! Is it possible to recover something? Some, for instance, wondered if the data loss would be triggered on Macs upgraded to Snow Leopard when the Guest account was simply set to "Sharing only," which is the default.

Please help me!!!!" Not surprisingly, users unaffected by the bug were reluctant to attempt to reproduce the problem. Apple did not respond today to questions about the bug.

In good news for the semiconductor industry, IDC today reported that worldwide computer chip shipments skyrocketed in the third quarter. IDC reported that shipments of mobile PCs, including netbook computers based on Intel's Atom processor , grew by 35.7% from the second quarter. After chip makers struggled through quarter after recent quarter due to a down economy that tightened consumer and corporate budgets, third quarter PC microprocessor shipments jumped 23% compared to the previous quarter, according to IDC. Analysts there credited the sharp uptick on the increasing popularity of low-cost mobile computers. Meanwhile, desktop PC processors grew at a more moderate 11.4% quarter over quarter while shipments of x86 server processors grew at a rate of 12.2%. "The story about 3Q '09 leads with Atom processors being sold in mini-notebooks manufactured and sold in China," said IDC analyst Shane Rau in a statement. "While Atom processors led the PC processor market to reach record unit shipments, on the revenue side, their low average selling price led to notable price erosion, more than 7%. As a result, while market shipments rose 23% compared to 2Q '09, market revenue grew less, 14.1% compared to 2Q09." Rau added that one of the most notable aspects of third-quarter performance is that PC processor shipments overall exceeded shipments in the third quarter of 2008, which was a record quarter at the time. "We know that the processor market is recovering," he said.

That's a big change from IDC's February projection that processor shipments would decline in 2009. Microprocessor unit shipments will decline by about 15% in 2009 compared to last year, noted Rau 9 months ago. Based on the market's recent performance and strong indicators moving into the fourth quarter, IDC today raised its forecast for PC processor shipments in 2009 to more than 300 million units and a unit growth rate of 1.5% compared to 2008. "Compared to where the market was at the beginning of 2009, PC processors have come back remarkably strong," said Rau. In today's report, IDC said it remains cautious in projecting processor shipments for 2010. "While it's clear our concerns about the second half of the year weren't necessary, we're still watching for a 'gotcha', possibly in 1Q '10," said Rau. "The market's growth has been due to shipments of inexpensive Atom processors being sold into markets like China, which is being stimulated by government incentives there. There are lots of places where inventories can hide. The Chinese market can be very opaque.

We have to be on the lookout for when China decides it can't consume more processors. Meanwhile, the U.S. market is still hamstrung by housing foreclosures and rising job losses."

A proposed amendment that would have given Congress more oversight over the White House cybersecurity czar and at least 17 other czars appointed by President Obama was shut down in the U.S. Senate today. Susan Collins (R-Maine), sought to restrict federal funds for the expenses of White House-appointed czars unless two conditions are met. The amendment, proposed by Sen. One of them was to require the president to agree that every czar would respond to "reasonable requests" to testify before Congress on matters related to the office.

The proposed amendment was in an Interior Department environmental appropriations bill on the Senate floor. The other required White House-appointed czars to issue a report to Congress twice a year. In a statement , Collins said the amendment was needed to ensure greater transparency and accountability. The amendment however was ruled "non-germane" to the pending bill in the Senate this afternoon and will not move forward, a spokesman for Collins said in an e-mail. "The amendment fell," following an objection by Sen. She had claimed that direct White House appointees were largely insulated from congressional oversight and often duplicated or diluted the statutory authority and responsibilities of Cabinet-level appointees who had been vetted by Congress. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), he said.

At a committee hearing in May on strategies for securing cyberspace, Collins had said that putting the White House in charge would make it harder for Congress to exercise oversight over critical cybersecurity policies and budgets. Collins, who is the ranking minority member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had raised similar concerns previously, especially with regard to Obama's plans to appoint a White House cybersecurity czar, or agency coordinator. Collins proposed instead that the government consider adopting the model used in setting up the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The NCTC, which was established in August 2004 on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, works in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a setup that allows for greater congressional oversight, she had said. The president announced the position in May and stressed the need for a national strategy for securing U.S. interests in cyber space. The developments come amid a delay by the White House in naming a new cybersecurity coordinator.

The delay in making the appointment has fueled speculation about the likely candidates and the nature of the job . Earlier this month, the Reuters news service. quoting an unnamed source with "direct knowledge" of the matter, said the front runner for the post was Frank Kramer , an assistant defense secretary under President Bill Clinton.

Intel Corp. announced the availability today of a tool kit to optimize the performance of its X25-M consumer-class solid state disk (SSD) drive with Windows 7 operating system. The Intel SSD Toolbox allows users to more effectively monitor and manage the SSD's health. The Intel SSD Toolbox with Intel SSD Optimizer and firmware update was created for the company's latest 34nm Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSDs, which were released in July . The tools are designed to help better manage and retain the out-of-box performance of Intel SSDs, Intel said in a statement. The firmware upgrade and Intel SSD Optimizer use the Windows 7 ATA Data Set Management Command (known as Trim) to help keep the Intel SSD running at continued high performance.

The Trim attribute of Windows 7 synchs the operating system's view of deleted files with those that are deleted, but not erased on the drive. In addition, the SSD Toolbox and Optimizer also allow the respective enhancements to work with Windows XP and Vista. "Not only will Windows 7 users receive the performance enhancements of the Trim command, but so will our Windows XP and Vista users," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing, Intel NAND Solutions Group. Trim tells the SSD which data blocks are no longer in use. For X25-M owners with 160GB of capacity on the dive, the firmware update also offers a performance boost to sequential write speeds by delivering up to 100MB per second, a 40% performance improvement over the existing firmware version. Intel said this helps stabilize the performance and health of the SSD over time. The Intel SSD Toolbox provides SSD management tools and information about the drive, including comparing Self-Monitoring and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) drive attributes to manufacturer threshold.

The Toolbox also features a graphical user interface that will allow end users to schedule and run the Trim command independent of the operating system. It provides basic and full diagnostics, along with recommended actions. Intel recommends users install the firmware update and toolbox, and run the Trim function daily to ensure best performance.

Hewlett-Packard has added support for an additional 38 printer models or printer series to Snow Leopard, delivering on a promise made shortly after the release of Apple 's new operating system when angry users complained that older devices didn't work after upgrading. According to HP, 38 DeskJet, OfficeJet, and LaserJet drivers were added to those made available on Aug. 28, when Apple launched Snow Leopard . Although a list showing only the new drivers has not been published on either Apple's or HP's Web site, the complete list available on the former has been updated to include the new drivers, said Rick Spillers, a member of HP's Mac Connect team. On Thursday, Apple posted a printer driver update for Mac OS X 10.6 , aka Snow Leopard, but did not call out the specific drivers added to the 51MB driver download.

Among the newly-supported printers are the HP 910 inkjet printer, the DeskJet D1300 series, the OfficeJet 5500 series and the LaserJet M1120. Almost immediately after Apple started selling Snow Leopard, users who upgraded began griping on the company's support forum that their long-reliable printers were not being recognized by the new OS. Others became angry when an HP representative told them they should buy a new printer if a driver wasn't available for Snow Leopard. HP 1280 working!!!" crowed another user, "omarz," in a message Thursday. "I just update[d] to Snow Leopard 10.6.1 and now suddenly it was detected and it's working!" A driver for HP's PSC 1200 series was one of the 38 included in yesterday's update. After Thursday's update by Apple, several users reported on the same support forum that they were now able to use their formerly-bricked printers. "Today, I downloaded all the update software for printers and Mac [Snow Leopard], and everything now works fine," said someone identified as "AndyGump" on the same thread where users complained two weeks ago. "Incredible! HP's Spillers recommended that users update to Mac OS X 10.6.1 before applying the separate driver update. "Make sure that the printer is turned on and connected via [a] USB cable before launching Apple Software Update," said Spillers in an e-mail reply to questions. Apple built support into Snow Leopard for some printer makers' all-in-one devices, adding the functionality to the Image Capture application.

Spillers also said that there has been confusion about how owners of HP all-in-one devices - which both print and scan, and in some cases also fax, documents - get their hardware to work with Snow Leopard. "The other interesting thing I've found is trying to educate customers on the new scan interface for HP inkjet All-in-Ones that we've integrated with Snow Leopard," he said. HP has posted instructions on how to use its all-in-one printer/scanner hardware with Snow Leopard on its customer support site. Looking at the [support] forums, it seems that HP is the only print vendor really participating ... not sure I see much input from other print vendors." Snow Leopard users can manually download the HP driver update from Apple's site, or install it using the Mac's integrated update service. Spillers also took a shot at HP's rivals. "In general," he said, "HP did a great job providing full updated 10.6 drivers for almost all of our products, including LaserJets going back 10+ years.

HP this week unveiled updates to its HP-UX Unix OS and Serviceguard high-availability software, offering capabilities in data protection, data privacy, and business continuity. The software packages run on HP Integrity and HP 900 servers. [ Check out InfoWorld's report on how HP has been looking to lure Sun Solaris Unix users to HP-UX. ] The Unix upgrade offers automated features to reduce maintenance requirements, improve availability, and enhance security, the company said. Update 5 of HP-UX 11i v3 and Serviceguard restore application services in the event of hardware or software failure, HP said.

Users can lower operational costs and increase efficiency in such demanding applications as online transaction processing or business intelligence, according to HP. "Comprehensive" data protection is provided through encryption for data in transit and at rest, HP said. Update 5 provides as much as 99 percent of raw disk performance, enabling reduction in operational costs for large databases and accelerated access to business-critical information. Enhanced data privacy is provided through Bastille, an automated system-hardening tool that configures a system to protect against unauthorized access. Administrator productivity is improved with expanded security bulletin analysis and patch maintenance. Business continuity is improved through minimization of downtime in the OS's Logical Volume Manager. Security issues are identified for as many as 100 systems in a single view when integrated with HP System Insight Manager.

Simplified standards compliance is offered through PCI (Payment Card Industry) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act report templates HP Serviceguard, which is part of the HP Virtual Server Environment software suite, is integrated with HP-UX 11i to protect applications from down time, HP said. Another improvement is elimination of business interruptions with Online Package Maintenance capabilities that run routine maintenance and upgrades while the system is active. Business connectivity is enabled during Serviceguard upgrades through a Dynamic Root Disk tool that reduces server network down time by 75 percent, the company said. Management of server connections is improved with a graphical cluster topology map for administration and configuration.  Also, traffic is coordinated between clustered servers and storage arrays.

The overall number of defects in open-source projects is dropping, a new study by vendor Coverity has found. The vendor has set up a Web site through which open-source projects and developers can submit code to be analyzed. Coverity, maker of tools for analyzing programming code, received a contract in 2006 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help boost the quality of open-source software, which is increasingly being used by government agencies.

The vendor assigns projects to a series of "rungs" depending on how many defects they resolve. "Defect density" has dropped 16 percent during the past three years among the projects scanned through the site and some 11,200 defects have been eliminated, according to Coverity's latest report. They are Samba, tor, OpenPAM and Ruby. Four projects have been granted top-level "Rung 3" status, after resolving defects discovered during Rung 1 and 2, Coverity said. The Scan site has so far analyzed more than 60 million unique lines of code from 280 projects, according to Coverity. Coverity's scanning service employs static analysis, which is used to check code for security or performance problems without having to run an application itself. More than 180 projects have developers actively working to scan open-source projects.

This is preferable because "testing every path in a complex program as it runs requires constructing a large number of special test cases or structuring the code in special ways," Coverity said. "Static analysis [tools] won't tell you that your business process is working correctly ... but they will tell you that the code itself is technically solid, and follows the kind of programming best practices you'd expect to see from code that has gone through a proper code review," said Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond via e-mail. The tools tend to be most helpful for finding "structural 'anti-patterns' in code, poor programming practices that can result in performance and security issues like memory leaks and buffer overflows as well as more exotic conditions like errors due to parallel execution of code in a multicore CPU environment," he added.

A lawsuit consolidating 16 separate class-action complaints brought by financial institutions against Heartland Payment Systems Inc. has been filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. The complaints allege that the payment processor was negligent in its duty to protect card holder data. The claims stem from the massive data breach disclosed by Princeton, N.J.-based Heartland in January.

The amended complaint includes for the first time several statements that Heartland is alleged to have made regarding the controls it had in place to protect credit and debit card data just prior to the breach. The lawsuit seeks compensation from Heartland for the costs that the financial institutions say they've had to bear in notifying customers about the breach and in reissuing new payment cards. The fact that the company suffered the breach despite its claimed security measures shows that Heartland either negligently or deliberately misrepresented the facts, the lawsuit alleged. Among the financial institutions listed are the Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union, Lone Star Bank of North America and Amalgamated Bank of New York. "There were multiple lawsuits filed all over the country on behalf of financial institutions, and all of those cases were sent to federal court in Houston" for consolidation, said Joseph Sauder, an attorney with Chimicles & Tikellis LLP. The Haverford, Penn.-based law firm is representing some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. "This complaint incorporates the strongest claims from all of the financial institution class-action lawsuits," Sauder said. "The next step is for Heartland to file a response to this complaint," he said. The breach, which is considered the biggest involving payment card data, compromised more than 100 million credit and debit cards.

Heartland on Jan. 20 disclosed that unknown intruders had broken into its network sometime last year and accessed payment card data belonging to an undisclosed number of customers. So far, Heartland has publicly admitted to spending nearly $13 million on breach-related costs, and analysts expect it will cost the company millions more in the coming years. The cases were consolidated in federal court in Texas because Heartland's data centers are located in that state, Sauder said. Heartland, one of the biggest payment processors in the U.S., manages about 100 million credit and debit-card transactions per month. A "separate track" of cases involving consumer lawsuits against Heartland is also being heard in the same court, Sauder said.

BJ's Wholesale Club, Hannaford Bros. and Dave & Buster's restaurant chain. In September, Albert Gonzalez, 28, of Miami pleaded guilty to the data heist at Heartland and several other retailers, including TJX Companies Inc. Gonzalez is scheduled to be sentenced in December and faces 15 to 20 years in prison under the terms of his plea agreement. Heartland did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pod to PC is one in a growing genre of apps designed to make up for an iTunes flaw: The inability to copy music and video from the device. Pod to PC does what it says it does, and it works swiftly and well. Pod to PC ($10, free demo, temporary unlock code for PC World readers) allows you to automatically or manually copy any music, video and playlists from your iPod or iPhone directly to your iTunes library. You can check tracks on a one-by-one basis, or you can use the automatic transfer feature that takes every music file, video file or playlist file on your iPod and copies it over with one click.

Using only a minimal amount of RAM and system resources, Pod to PC only requires iTunes to be installed and running. Pod to PC even has a handy media player built in for previewing files before copying-just in case you forgot what Slipknot sounds like. The only drawback is that the demo version is really irritating to use. First, the Auto-transfer button is clickable instead of being grayed out, and you can even click OK on the next screen. The demo of Pod to PC crosses a line from informing the user about the full, paid version to the realm of the obnoxious. Instead of auto-transferring, though, it instead pops up a nag screen telling you that auto-transfer is disabled in the demo and that only 10 songs at a time can be transferred.

There's getting people to buy the app, and then there's the ridiculous, and this is the latter. Not only that, but from the second manual transfer onward, that same screen comes back, but this time with a 60 second counter; the entire app is frozen (including any app windows you have open) until the timer counts down. Irritation aside, the full price of $10 makes it a bargain compared to similar-performing competitors such as CopyTrans and iPodRobot iPod Video Converter (each $20). Unlike CopyTrans, Pod to PC automatically checks for duplicate files throughout your iTunes library, and won't just create a big mess of duplicates-Pod to PC will automatically skip any files that already exist on the host computer. Any digital rights management will still be in full force, so your iTunes will have to be authorized to play those tracks. As with all products of this type, being able to copy from any iPod doesn't guarantee you'll be able to play the files. Out of all iPod copy apps I've reviewed, this one is the cheapest and works the best-but you'll want to go ahead and get that $10 registration code immediately.

Note: The demo transfers only up to 10 songs at a time, and auto-transfer is disabled. It'll save you a lot of headaches. Also, after the first few transfers, a 60-second nag screen pops up, halting performance until the timer reaches zero. Vendor myPod Apps is extending a free registration code to PC World readers. The full version costs $10. Editor's Note: An earlier version of Pod to PC covered by PC World was free of charge. The code PCWORLD2009 will unlock the latest version of the software.

This code must be entered in Pod to PC before October 10, 2009; refund requests must also be received by the same date.

An Oakwood, Virginia, man who used a social-networking Web site to make threats of school shootings throughout the country has been sentenced to four years in a federal prison. Sammons sent several e-mail messages and posted several messages on the social-networking site LiveJournal.com, the DOJ said. Allen Leon Sammons, 28, was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia after pleading guilty in June to five counts of transmitting threats to others across state lines, the U.S. Department of Justice said. In addition, Sammons also posted long essays on LiveJournal.com expressing his frustrations with the university system, his inability to afford college and his aggravation with "traditional students" whose parents pay for everything.

Its something you will have to live with for the rest of your lives, you should have just let it go and left me alone. On Dec. 29, 2007, Sammons posted on LiveJournal.com: "the blood of [two others], and my own is on your hands. Only thing im waiting for is the rejection letter. If you could have just let us part ways than [another person] would not be dead." On Jan. 9, 2008, Sammons received an e-mail from the Rice University Admissions Department requesting SAT subject scores. You are at fault." One minute later Sammons posted this message: "I will be killing them with luck I'll be killed also..if not I'll plee insanity...doesn't matter anymore...you are at fault...the blood is on your hands..." Later in the evening he continued, "I know you think it's a joke and not real." On Dec. 30, 2007, Sammons again posted a message on LiveJournal.com, threatening violence to others on the site: "You should have let it go, you should have let it go, but you had to pretend to be a bad [expletive] and now I've been pushed to far and tragic things are going to take place.

Sammons replied with the following: "I have a highschool diploma thats all you should ... need. AK-47 on your campus for destroying lives." As the result of one of his e-mails, some workers at the Rice department left their office that day and decided to work from home, the DOJ said. Classist and elitists. In one post, Sammons stated that he intended to take over a university by force in order to make his point. He also said he intended to commit "suicide by cop" while in the process of taking over the campus. At times, he stated he bought a cheap, imitation AK-47 assault rifle, which he would use.

During a search of Sammons' hard drive, law enforcement officials found a document labeled "People to Kill." The document contained the names of various people and their addresses. He wrote that he waited outside the apartment door of these individuals, but changed his mind about his course of action. In August 2007, Sammons traveled to the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana to confront some of the students he had posted threats to on LiveJournal.com.

EMC executive Alan Atkinson is taking over as CEO of Xiotech, a storage company that just secured $10 million in new financing. Glassmeyer is also general partner of Oak Investment Partners, which owns a majority stake in Xiotech. Nine data storage companies to watch Atkinson was co-founder and CEO of WysDM, a data protection vendor sold to EMC in April 2008. Atkinson remained at EMC as vice president of the company's Storage Software Group, but on Thursday was announced as Xiotech's new CEO. Xiotech said its previous CEO, Casey Powell, will remain on the board of directors and will be a "strategic advisor to Atkinson." "With his extensive knowledge of and experience with data storage, Alan Atkinson is the right leader to take Xiotech to the next level," Ed Glassmeyer of Xiotech's board of directors said in an announcement.

Atkinson's 21-year career includes positions at StorageNetworks, Goldman Sachs and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Xiotech, based in Eden Prairie, Minn., plans to use the cash to expand its Intelligent Storage Element technology with new products to be released early next year. He takes over at Xiotech just after the company announced a $10 million funding round from private investors. Xiotech says its ISE architecture is designed to provide 100% usable storage capacity, to improve efficiency but without a performance hit. Atkinson marked his first day on the job at Xiotech with a blog post. "I can honestly say, after 20+ years in the storage industry (I'm really not THAT old), I've never seen a company this size with so many talented storage folks," he wrote. "We have more patents than most companies five times our size." Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter

As IBM moves to upgrade its cache of social networking tools, some users are taking a cautious approach to the technology while figuring out where it will apply and how to measure its effectiveness. The new 2.5 version software includes micro-blogging, file sharing and new mobile capabilities. Where IT pros do their social networking IBM Tuesday unveiled Lotus Connections 2.5, its upgraded lineup of social networking tools that are a major expansion to the company's suite of collaboration software.

But some of the features are expanding faster than users' plans to utilize the software. The company's manager of messaging and collaboration asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. One Connections 2.5 beta tester, a global consumer product corporation, is taking a deliberately slow approach to rolling out the social collaboration tools. The company started slow with a few hundred users who were only allowed to communicate with each other. At that point, the manager says, the number of users exploded by 650% to a few thousand. The group's size was eventually doubled and then the tools were opened up companywide.

Despite the growth, the company is still "seeding the environment," said the manager, but a broader rollout is planned. We will likely "wind up doing it anecdotally," said the manager. "The things we're struggling with there is that this doesn't match the ROI [metrics that executives] are used to looking at. The harder part to plan is the expected results because the company has yet to figure out how to measure its return on investment. How do you measure, 'we recruited this person because of the [collaboration tool]?'" While results are hard to gauge, the broader, anticipated benefits are being defined in the context of capturing and recording corporate knowledge. The worker could develop a how-to guide for use by others, he said. For example, a certain administrative assistant may routinely be tasked with booking a certain type of event, said the manager.

The manager said it is a good time to ramp up internal communities and knowledge-sharing because as the economy and job markets rebound, workers who may have suffered pay or benefit cuts amid the recession will be looking to move on. "Now is the time to get people to put information in, so you're not losing it on the back of a Post-it note." Follow John on Twitter. -Kanaracus is with the IDG News Service Follow Chris on Twitter.

A dangerous combination of a massive increase in Web server attacks and poor patching practices is a major cause of concern for experts, according to a report issued today by several security organizations. Hackers are after a foothold in the corporate network, to conduct client-side attacks against visitors of the site, but also once they have that foothold, to gain much higher privileges and use those to also steal data." Dhamankar pointed to the recent spread of malware from the New York Times Web site as a perfect example of the alarming increase in server attacks. In a groundbreaking study that matched attack trends with patching cycle data, some conclusions came as a shock, said Rohit Dhamankar, the director of security research at 3Com TippingPoint, which contributed real-world attack information - acquired from its intrusion detection systems - to the report. "The sheer number of attacks against Web servers was surprising," said Dhamankar. "In terms of attack volume, they were almost 60% of all so far this year.

Over the weekend, hackers duped the newspaper into using a malicious ad, which in turn tricked users into downloading and installing fake antivirus software . "The New York Times is a respected brand, and so it's a perfect avenue to infect lots and lots of users," he noted. The report - which can be read on the SANS Institute's Web site - correlated the high number of Web server attacks with another trend: poor patching practices by the Web's highest-profile third-party applications. "Applications that are widely installed are not being patched at the same speed as the operating system," said Wolfgang Kandek, the chief technology officer of Qualys, which contributed its patching data to the study. "For Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Sun Java, Microsoft Office, Apple QuickTime, the patch cycles are much much slower than for operating system," he added. Some servers, once compromised, are even attacking other servers to pillage back-end information and to host malware fed to unsuspecting users, said Dhamankar. That's a major problem. "From our point of view, this is a big deal, said Kandek, speaking for security professionals in general. "There are real-life examples, where you can see attackers attacking corporate Web servers, then from there infecting client machines, until eventually a client machine is compromised that has full access to the network. The combination of hacked servers and unpatched client applications is critical. "The lack of patching opens up a huge window of vulnerabilities," Kandek acknowledged. "It shows that patching is crucial." Adding salt to the wound, said Dhamankar and Kandek, is that while users are patching, they're patching the wrong software. Then [attackers] are stealing that corporation's data." "Attackers have realized that patching of these third-party apps is complex," added Dhamankar. "They know that a lot of people are focused on patching operating systems rather than patching applications like Flash or Reader." And thus they dig into the most widely-installed applications, looking for flaws.

While operating systems, particularly Windows, are patched by users and organizations at a relatively rapid - and complete - clip, the number of attacks exploiting OSes has dropped precipitously. "Enterprises are focused on OS patching rather than on application patching," said Dhamankar. "They don't have their resources allocated properly." Putting a stop to the threat trend won't be easy, but it is possible, argued Kandek. "Some enterprises have patching policies in place for third-party applications, and there are industry-standard tools to do this," he said. "The technical solutions are out there. [Third-party] patching could be much better, and I see vendors being pressured to do more to integrate their patching into these tools. "But we've done this before," Kandek continued, referring to the security situation several years ago, when Windows was the main target of attackers. Microsoft beefed up its then-OS, Windows XP, dedicated itself to writing more secure code and pushed customers to update religiously. "That means we can do something about this, too," Kandek concluded.

Microsoft Corp.marketed i4i Inc.'s XML software to potential customers at the same time it planned to drive the small company out of business by infringing on its patent for the technology, according to court documents filed last week. Federal Judge Leonard Davis issued the injunction in August, barring Microsoft from selling Word 2003 and Word 2007 after Oct. 10. The decision came about three months after a Texas jury found that Microsoft had illegally used patented i4i technology to build XML features into its word processing software. In a brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District in Washington, Toronto-based i4i argued that an injunction blocking Microsoft from selling current versions of Word should stand. The jury had awarded i4i $200 million, but Davis increased the amount to just under $300 million when he issued the injunction.

Earlier this month, the three-judge appeals panel decided to stay the injunction while it weighs Microsoft's appeal . I4i filed the patent infringement lawsuit in 2007. The new i4i brief charges that in 1991, "at the same time Microsoft was praising the improved functionality that i4i's product brought to Word, and touting i4i as a 'Microsoft Partner,' Microsoft was working behind i4i's back to make i4i's product obsolete." According to the brief, just days after a 1991 meeting in which Microsoft had sought to find ways to work with i4i, Microsoft executives discussed XML plans for Word that would eventually "make obsolete any competitive attempts by third parties to conquer that market." Microsoft must file its rebuttal to i4i's brief by Sept. 14; the appeals court is slated to hear oral arguments from the two sides on Sept. 23. Asked to comment on i4i's briefs, a Microsoft spokesman said, "We're looking forward to the hearing on the merits of our appeal." This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld 's print edition.

With three spacewalks behind them, the International Space Station restocked with supplies and a new tank of coolant in place, the space shuttle today Discovery is undocking and heading for home.

The shuttle, set to undock from the space station at 3:26 p.m. EDT, is scheduled to land at Cape Canaveral in Florida on Saturday. But first, after today's undocking, the shuttle craft will move about 450 feet away from the orbiter so the station crew can examine the outside of the shuttle to see if there's any damage. At the same time, the shuttle crew will inspect the space station for any as-yet undiscovered damage.

The fly-around maneuver is standard procedure for every shuttle that undocks from the space station.

After the space station crew checks out the exterior of the shuttle, Discovery's own crew will use its onboard robotic arm, with an attached boom and camera, for one last inspection of the shuttle's heat shields before heading for re-entry with the Earth's atmosphere. Engineers on the ground will examine the images and data to check Discovery's thermal protection system.

NASA has been especially diligent about studying the heat shields since the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry on Feb. 1, 2003. According to NASA, an investigation found that the disaster was caused by a hole in the heat-resistant panels that protected the wing from the high temperatures of reentry.

On Saturday, the shuttle's crew wrapped up the third and last spacewalk of the 13-day mission, installing two GPS antennas, routing avionics cables and installing a payload attachment system.

In the two previous spacewalks, astronauts uninstalled an empty ammonia tank and then installed a new, full tank. The ammonia is used to cool the interior of the space station.

The astronauts also used a spacewalk to move the new Colbert treadmill into the space station.

NASA in April had named the treadmill after comedian Stephen Colbert , who had waged a massive online effort to have the new wing of the space station named after him.

NASA had launched an online poll to choose a name for the new wing, which will house life support equipment, controls for the space station's robotic arm and the new treadmill. Colbert rallied his fans , known as Colbert Nation, to go to NASA's Web site to cast write-in votes for "Colbert" as the new name. The name "Colbert" got more than 230,000 votes - 40,000 more than "Serenity," the top-ranked NASA-suggested name.

Naming the wing Colbert didn't sit right with the folks at NASA so they named the wing Tranquility and named the treadmill after the enterprising comedian.

One day after reports of vulnerabilities in XML libraries, an analyst is warning companies not to ignore the danger of attacks that exploit those flaws.

"Hackers are moving up the stack to the application level," says Neil MacDonald, a vice president at research firm Gartner. XML-based attacks can be expected to be "the next big thing for hackers," he says.

20 useful IT security Web sites

Yesterday security test toolmaker Codenomicon and the Finnish Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-FI) disclosed security risks in XML libraries that could result in successful denial-of-service attacks on applications built with them.

A wide variety of applications have implemented the vulnerable XML libraries, which include those from Python Software Foundation, Sun Microsystems and Apache Software Foundation. Developers are being advised to follow instructions for remediation from vendors to prevent the exploits detailed by CERT-FI and Codenomicon.

"The effects of the vulnerabilities include denial-of-service and potentially code execution," the CERT-FI advisory states. "The vulnerabilities can be exploited by enticing a user to open a specially modified file, or by submitting it to a server that handles XML content."

The vulnerabilities relate to the parsing of XML elements with "unexpected byte values and recursive parentheses, which cause the program to access memory out of bounds, or to loop indefinitely," the advisory notes.

Some updates for remediation are available, and CERT-FI is providing information about that. But as of early today, an update for Python was not yet available. "We are working on it," reads a simple statement available through CERT-FI.

MacDonald says Codenomicon has been researching XML-related flaws for some time, and the issue isn't wholly new. The bigger issue is that many developers have implemented open-source XML libraries in custom and commercial applications, and over the years, people may be unaware what has been used in an application, he says.

"Use of these libraries is pervasive," MacDonald says. But people don't always keep track of the open-source third-party libraries they're using, and a developer may have moved on to another project without recording that detail. "It becomes hard because you don't even know what applications are vulnerable."

Microsoft has not made clear how it will incorporate Windows Azure pricing into the long-term contracts it signs with its enterprise customers, but a company executive said this week Microsoft intends to make it as simple as possible for them to take advantage of the new cloud-computing service.

At its Worldwide Partner Conference this week, Microsoft said Azure would be available commercially in November and unveiled the pricing for the cloud-based application-development and deployment platform.

The company also said it would be included as part of the volume licensing contracts through which many large customers pay for Microsoft products, though it did not clarify how these contracts would incorporate both a pay-as-you-go model and licenses calculated on a per-CPU basis.

Doug Hauger, a Microsoft general manager, said that Microsoft would have much more detail on the specific integration of Azure pricing into enterprise contracts in November. But he said Microsoft would keep Azure separate from its traditional software licensing so as not to confuse customers.

"We'll make sure it's integrated into enterprise agreements and not complicated," Hauger said. "It will be just another page in the agreement. We want simplicity in how we license and [provide] access."

Despite these good intentions, Microsoft has already run into some complexities as it tries to integrate new pricing models for its more Web-oriented offerings into traditional enterprise contracts and the licenses they require for users.

In particular, pricing for its hosted Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) - which includes hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint, LiveMeeting and Office Communications - is causing customers some concern, said Paul DeGroot, an analyst with research firm Directions on Microsoft.

If a customer purchases a BPOS subscription for employees who will access only those services, the customer must still purchase CALs for those users, DeGroot said, even though they are not accessing the on-premise software as well. Microsoft gives customers a discount on other parts of their license in such scenarios - on the Software Assurance (SA) maintenance program required for enterprise agreements, for example - but they still end up paying for something they are not using, DeGroot said.

Depending on how it wants to give companies access to Azure beyond the pay-as-you-go pricing model, the company could run into the same trouble with its cloud-computing platform, he said. "With Azure it could get even more complicated," DeGroot said, though it remains to be seen until Microsoft unveils specific terms of Azure's integration into enterprise contracts.

To mitigate any complexities, Hauger said Microsoft is, on request, giving customers options for how they can license Azure, pricing that is separate from software they already pay for.

In addition to an option to pay only for what users consume, Microsoft also will offer what it's calling a development accelerator that will allow people to pay a one-time fixed price for six months of access to Windows Azure as a more predictable pricing option, he said.

"We consider what it would take to run that application full time for six months and discount that 45 percent," Hauger said of how Microsoft is pricing Azure in the accelerator program. "It's a set amount."

What Microsoft is going for as it adds more pricing options beyond per-CPU pricing is a more continuous revenue stream, said Directions on Microsoft founder and CEO Rob Horowitz on a conference call with financial analysts this week.

"They're trying to go back to the old mainframe model where customers have to pay you something every year," he said. "It's like 'Hotel California,'" Horowitz continued, referencing a song by American rockers The Eagles with the lyrics, "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

He added that there likely will be some "transition issues" as Microsoft moves enterprise customers to these new pricing models.

Turning criminals into law-abiding customers is always a dicey business, made even more so when easy thievery was your company's primary reason to exist. That's the challenge facing the "new" Pirate Bay as the file sharing site tries going legit.

Put another way: What's Pirate Bay without the piracy? Not much.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," said Pirate Bay's new owners in a statement.

A Swedish company, Global Gaming Factory X, announced today that it was purchasing Pirate Bay for $7.7 million with plans to turn the file-sharing site into a legitimate business.

How easy will this be? My colleague Daniel Ionescu took a measure of reactions from Pirate Bay users, and isn't very upbeat about the site's chances.

I stay away from associating with people who steal stuff, so I just look to history for the answer.

Remember Napster, the original "we're not supporting theft of copyrighted material site"? Sure you remember, but have you thought about Napster lately? Didn't think so, but the site is still in operating, selling downloads and streaming music at discount prices.

I wouldn't go near Napster-legit or not-with a ten-foot pole. I don't want to support such a brand, given its history. And I feel the same way about Pirate Bay, whose four founders sit in a Swedish jail, presumably thinking about what they will do with the money they are getting from selling the site.

Presumably, they will pay $3.6 million in fines that they face, followed by some huge legal fees, which continue to mount while their appeals roll forward. They started their one-year, slap on the wrist, sentences in April.

Meanwhile, as Pirate Bay tries making deals that will allow it to offer content legally, I'd have to guess that the pirated content, estimated to be about 90 percent of the site, would disappear. When that happens, current users, who pay about $27 for a lifetime membership, will take their criminality elsewhere.

Honest people, like you and me, don't get a thrill from supporting convicts, even Swedish ones, so we won't make the "new" Pirate Bay our destination. There are too many legal ways for honest people to get online content.

I'll be happy when Pirate Bay just falls over dead. Crime should not pay.David Coursey tweets as techinciter and can be reached using the contact form at www.coursey.com/contact. Need we mention that he is not a Pirate Bay member?

China plans to tap Taiwanese companies to put LED (light emitting diode) technology into street lights in 10 Chinese cities, groups from both places said Thursday.

The project aims to cut electric bills in Chinese cities by using LED in city lights. LEDs give off less heat, consume less energy and last longer than traditional lights, according to China's National Semiconductor Lighting Industry Alliance, which oversees the project to light up China with LEDs. The technology is also inexpensive because it's used in a range of projects, from Christmas lights and the displays of alarm clocks, DVD players and digital music players, to the backlights in LCD laptop screens.

The agreement was part of deals signed at a two-day conference between LED industry leaders and government officials from Taiwan and China.

Delegates from the conference also signed a letter of intent to work together to promote LED technology, including in research, development, qualification and the creation of new standards. Over 200 Taiwanese companies and 71 Chinese companies took part in an exhibition related to the conference, and around 80 government officials from China attended the event, according to Taiwan's economics ministry.

The cooperation highlights increased cooperation between Taiwan and China over the past year. A new president elected last year in Taiwan has pushed forward a number of initiatives to strengthen ties with China, mainly economic, a far different tack than the previous administration, which advocated Taiwan independence. China and Taiwan separated in 1949 amid civil war, and China has vowed to attack if Taiwan moves toward formal independence.

A number of new policies have been implemented by the new administration in Taiwan, including direct flights between Taiwan and China for the first time in decades and greater business ties between the two places. Another example in the high tech area was last week, when Taiwan hosted the first ever China pavilion at the Computex Taipei 2009 electronics show.

LED sales to China's lighting industry stand to be big business for Taiwanese companies, according to investment firm CLSA Asia Pacific Markets in Taipei.

"The fast-growing economic growth in China will inevitably lead to urbanization and higher electric lighting consumption," said analyst Andrea Su, in a report on Thursday.

She believes China will increase spending on LED lighting to lower energy costs and that currently, lighting consumption per capita in China is only 10 percent that of North America.

Broadcom turned up the heat Wednesday in its attempt to convince Emulex shareholders to allow Broadcom to purchase the company, as the chance of an amicable outcome to its unsolicited takeover bid appeared even more remote.

Broadcom again asked Emulex's shareholders to approve a proposal that would allow them to present their views on the merger at a special meeting. Emulex's board of directors has rejected Broadcom's offer to buy the company for US$9.25 per share.

Broadcom also presented a new analysis that it said shows its all-cash offer of about $764 million would be more advantageous for shareholders than leaving Emulex as a standalone company.

Broadcom presented its case in papers filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and posted on its Web site.

"Our proposals in the Consent Solicitation would give Emulex stockholders the ability to be heard in the most important matters affecting their investment," Broadcom President and CEO Scott McGregor said in a statement. "Contrary to misleading statements by Emulex about our proposals, support for the consent solicitation does not obligate Emulex stockholders to tender their shares to Broadcom or to elect new Board members."

Emulex did not immediately reply to request for comment Wednesday.

Broadcom's renewed pressure comes after Emulex filed suit against Broadcom on Monday for unfair business practices, citing the drug-trafficking and securities-fraud indictment of Broadcom's former top executive, among other things, as proof to its shareholders that Broadcom officials can't be trusted.

Emulex has been fighting off a takeover by Broadcom since late last year, when Broadcom first approached Emulex about a deal.

Broadcom made its bid public in a letter to Emulex shareholders on April 21, following a breakdown of talks in January. Emulex's board rejected the bid, saying it undervalued the company, leading Broadcom to make its tender offer to Emulex shareholders on May 15.

Broadcom produces semiconductors used mainly in communications products, such as wireless networks, cell phones and cable set-top boxes. Emulex provides technology for connecting storage, servers and networks in data centers, working with large storage vendors such as EMC, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Both companies operate in Orange County, California - Emulex in Costa Mesa and Broadcom in Irvine.