(Credit: CNET reviews)

Let’s leave aside the question of whether the world needs yet another end-to-end hardware-software-services play in the MP3 player space. (Ask Microsoft how that’s going with
Zune.)

According to a report in today’s Wall Street Journal, Dell is considering re-entering the MP3 player market later this year. This time, the company is considering building its own software based on technology it gained in its acquisition of Zing, as well as a modified version of somebody else’s subscription music service, most likely Rhapsody’s.

Which raises the question: how much marketing should Microsoft do for Windows anyway? Rumors have been flying about a $300 million rehabilitation campaign for Vista. Why bother if OEMs like Dell are going their own way anyway? Instead, Microsoft should focus on building the most reliable, secure, multipurpose operating system it can, one that the OEMs will be happy to put on their PCs and that end users will be happy to adopt. Forget the user interface bells and whistles. Scale back on the included apps, which Microsoft now has to pay OEMs to place anyway. Just build a great OS, let the OEMs figure out how to use it, then leave the sales, marketing, and user experience details to them.

Dell gave up on MP3 players in 2006, after three years of fighting the
iPod juggernaut. Initially, Dell’s players relied on Musicmatch software for library organization, content syncing, and online music purchases, although they synced with the Windows Media Player as well in case of problems with Musicmatch (which CNET reviewer John Frederick Moore encountered back in 2005 with the flash-based Dell DJ Ditty). The reviews were middling at best, and the players never got much above 3 percent market share.

This is about something much bigger and more interesting: the shift of power in the PC market away from Microsoft and toward the hardware manufacturers. The process has been going on since the Department of Justice’s antitrust settlement with Microsoft back in 2001–a lot of onlookers derided that settlement as toothless, but it actually made a difference with regard to Microsoft’s relationships with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers–Microsoft parlance for the big PC makers like Dell and HP). Instead of being allowed to push them to include whatever software Microsoft bundled with Windows, the OEMs were free to choose their own bundling strategies. If Microsoft wanted placement, it would have to pay like everybody else.

Instead of relying on Microsoft to fight back against Apple, Dell’s taking matters into its own hands. The company’s been focusing on better design for some time now–that’s phase one, since Apple consistently wins praise for its hardware design. Phase two: create a differentiated consumer experience for digital media and entertainment, and make it available only on a Dell. The MP3 player’s just a side note.

Fast forward a few years. Vista launches to mostly bad reviews. Apple launches a series of brilliant advertisements slamming Vista. These advertisements, combined with the popularity of the iPod and a generally smoother experience on the
Mac (even Ballmer admitted it last week) create a big spike in Macintosh sales. That hurts Microsoft a little bit, as Windows still has more than 90 percent of the market for personal computing operating systems. But it hurts the PC makers more: even the biggest ones, Dell and HP, have only about 30 percent share.

For details of Squirrelfish’s techniques–bytecode optimization, a polymorphic inline cache, a context-threaded just-in-time compiler, and a regular expression just-in-time compiler–check the WebKit blog.

WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme is faster than its three-month-old predecessor on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.

Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. The latest development is from the programmers behind Apple’s
Safari.

It’s called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it’s more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.

Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in
Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google’s Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple’s Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of the KDE interface software sometimes used on Linux systems, have a new version of their JavaScript technology.

“SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance,” the programmers said.

Charles Ying also performed SunSpider tests that showed Squirrelfish beating Google’s V8 and Mozilla’s Tracemonkey on a 2.4GHz iMac.

(Credit:
WebKit)

Google Street View now blurs some faces in Manhattan.

Update 10:40 a.m. PDT: I added comment from Google and its confirmation that it has indeed begun photographing European cities.

“Making pictures everywhere is certainly going to create some problems,” EU Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx said at a news conference to present his annual report, according to a Reuters report.

“Apparently there is the capacity to adapt this in different modes,” he said.

Google confirmed it’s begun photographing European areas to expand Street View, but said the service will be legal.

Google Street View
cars sporting cameras have been spotted driving around Paris, Milan, and Rome, but so far the service to provide a driver’s-eye view of the world only has U.S. cities online.

Hustinx also said he expected Google would be able to comply with laws.

Google Street View would raise problems if brought to Europe, an official with the European Union’s data protection agency said Thursday.

Indeed, to address privacy concerns, Google this week began blurring faces shown in Street View.

(Credit:
Google)

Publicly the company is still sticking to the revised June deadline, but Microsoft has shown a willingness to make changes in the past. My big question is whether it will extend the deadline only for certain types of computers. There are plenty of mainstream models today where XP remains an option, particularly on build-to-order machines from the likes of Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.

Outlook for Vista
Are you ready to move to Windows Vista?

“We’re seeing great interest from our OEM partners in having Windows on these machines, such as pre-installing them with Starter edition in over 100 emerging market countries worldwide,” Microsoft VP Mike Nash said in a statement in September. “That continues to be a trend we’re keeping our eye on, as even though we expect hardware costs to continue to drop, it reaffirms for us that not all customers want the same thing from their computers.”

Although Microsoft is pushing hard to move everyone to the latest version of Windows, there are some market realities that are going to keep Windows XP around for some time–likely well beyond the current June deadline for large computer makers to stop selling the older operating system.

I’m there already
Yes, it’s finally time
I’m holding out as long as I can
Never

With deference to my colleague (and boss), not ALL roads lead to Vista.

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results

Speaking of starters, another area where XP is likely to persist is in emerging markets. Microsoft conceded as much when it first extended the XP deadline last year. In addition to offering a few months reprieve for XP broadly, the software maker said it would offer the entry level Windows XP Starter Edition through 2010 for use on ultra low-cost PCs.

The biggest area where XP is likely to stick around is in the nascent but growing market of low-cost, flash memory-based notebook computers, such as the Asus Eee PC. These devices are fertile ground for Linux, benefiting from its low cost and low memory requirements. Microsoft had to do some work just to get Windows XP onto the Eee PC and Vista would seem to be a non-starter.

Microsoft has already extended the deadline once (XP was originally supposed to stop showing up on big-name PCs in January) and I would expect another extension to be announced soon.

Microsoft is again trying to convince the partners that sell its software that they can make money in a world in which customers are getting their software as a service directly from Microsoft.

There’s also room for companies to make money hosting Microsoft’s products, she said. The key, she said, is for companies that want to host the same products Microsoft does to make sure they are either tailoring their product to a specific market, combining it with other elements of their customer’s workflow or offering additional uptime guarantees that aren’t part of Microsoft’s product. “Our partners are not offering just a vanilla service,” Watson said.

At its annual partner conference, which is taking place this week in Houston, Microsoft offered more details on the finances that buttress that claim. For example, partners that sign up customers for the new $15-per-month bundle of hosted SharePoint, Exchange and Office Communications Server can get a 12 percent referral fee. The partners can also get a 6-percent cut of renewal fees provided they continue to be associated with the customer and get positive evaluations.

As part of Tuesday’s keynote, partners also got to see a series of demos of unreleased products, such as efforts in robotics, Microsoft’s online telescope, and Silverlight running on Windows Mobile (though that is still a year a way from being on the market, Watson said.) The company also showed off something it dubs a “replaceable PC,”–basically a combination of SoftGrid application virtualization and other technologies used to allow businesses to replace a worker’s computer with new hardware and have them up and running in a few minutes’ time.

“We expect that to be a competitive entrant,” Microsoft partner program VP Allison Watson said in a telephone interview following Tuesday’s keynote speech

Microsoft has a few more announcements scheduled for Wednesday, including a program designed to help fill the talent gap by connecting partners with the students who take part in the company’s annual Imagine Cup.

The company has about 600,000 subscribers for Office Live, which offers, among other things, free e-mail accounts and Web site creation and hosting. The service is tailored to the smallest of businesses that have neither an IT staff nor an outside technology consultant. Microsoft first announced plans for Office Live in November 2005 as part of its Live services push. The service launched in test form in February 2006 and dropped the beta tag in November 2006.

The move comes as Yahoo made several changes to its small-business offering, including adding unlimited storage and transfer for its Web site hosting service. Of course, those products could become one at some point if Microsoft gets its way.

Microsoft is also bulking up the ability to use Office Live sites to sell stuff, adding paid options for creating a storefront, selling items on eBay, and e-mail marketing.

As part of the changes, Microsoft is consolidating its three separate service plans into one, while making all of the paid services an a la carte option.

“What we have been providing so far is a lot of basic IT services,” said Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Office Live. “Now we are also making a bigger investment into digital marketing tools.”

Microsoft recently renamed the service Office Live Small Business as it looks to use the Office Live brand for other products, including its Office Live Workspaces, an online document-sharing service.

Domain name registration will continue to be free for the first year. But each subsequent year Microsoft will charge $14.95, though it will add the ability for so-called private registration, where customers can keep their personal information out of the public Whois database. Microsoft said that those who have already signed up for Office Live will continue to have their domain name registered for free “in perpetuity.”

With the new release, Microsoft is adding support for
Firefox, specifically version 2.0, on both Macs and PCs.

Microsoft is making a series of changes to its Office Live Small Business service, offering some previously paid-for services free, while adding a new charge for domain name registration after the first year.

You get more granular control over UAC’s behavior via the Local Security Settings. To access these options, you must be logged in as an administrator, and the PC must not be on a domain. Press the Windows key, type secpol.msc, and press Enter. (Note that the Local Security Settings aren’t available on all Vista PCs.)

Espiner quotes Cross telling the security-conference audience that negative user reaction was the only way to coax independent software vendors to update their applications for Vista. As fewer programs violated Vista’s rules, users would have to click through fewer UAC prompts.

Alter Vista's User Account Control setting via the User Accounts Control Panel applet.

If you’re experiencing a UAC-related problem, Microsoft offers a list of potential solutions on its Help and Support site. For everyday computing, you’re better off with UAC than without it.

Well, Microsoft has finally come clean about the real motivation behind Vista’s User Account Control feature. As Tom Espiner’s reports from the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft UAC Program Manager David Cross admits that UAC was designed to annoy users.

I’d feel worse about being manipulated by the biggest corporation in the world if UAC weren’t such a good idea, though less-than-perfectly implemented. It’s true that disabling the feature may allow a balky application or process to work, but too many important Vista features rely on UAC.

To change your UAC setting, press the Windows key, type user accounts, and press Enter. Click “Turn User Account Control on or off,” and check or uncheck Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer.”

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Tomorrow: low-tech Office alternatives.

Issa also is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which is holding a closed hearing on Thursday devoted to the Bush administration’s so-called Cyber Initiative. In January, President Bush signed a pair of secret orders–National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23–that apparently deal with detecting and preventing Internet disruptions.

Mueller: That’s correct.

Here’s the relevant section of the transcript from the House Judiciary hearing on Wednesday:

Mueller: With a search warrant, quite honestly.

Rep. Issa: Mr. Chairman, I do hope that when we look at the Cyber Initiative, we view ourselves as the primary committee that has to clear the way for appropriate action on behalf of our government, all branches.

But more importantly they want to take control of computers, they want to hack them, they want to steal information. This is also true of the .mils and .govs. Every one of our congressional offices, every day, is under attack.

Now, I’m a civil libertarian. I was with Bob Barr arguing some of the elements of the Patriot Act that we still don’t agree should have been there. But when I set up the crime scenario, how is it that you’re going to get the right to react when today, people would say that if they, if you’re addressing an action from an American person, you don’t have that right? How are you going to do it, and how can we help you do it appropriately and constitutionally?

Mueller: I think legislation has to be developed that balances on one hand, the privacy rights of the individual who are receiving the information, but on the other hand, given the technology, the necessity of having some omnibus search capability utilizing filters that would identify the illegal activity as it comes through and give us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point as opposed to the point where it is diffuse on the Internet.

Mueller: I think that’s going to require some thought because an individual company can say “OK, I consent to have somebody protect me.” But if the filter is inappropriately placed just protecting that particular company, it may have to be one or two or three institutions or ISPs off, and that’s where you would have a problem. whether it would be, i forget what company you mentioned, but Lockheed Martin saying,” I’m willing for somebody to protect me,” but the protection may be two or three companies off. Lockheed Martin has no mechanism in order to affect the company that’s two or three off, if you see what I’m getting at.

(Credit:
Anne Broache/CNET News.com)

When the FBI suggested that it should be able to perform wide-scale Internet monitoring to detect “illegal activity” on Wednesday, the bureau raised more questions than it answered.

Rep. Issa: With a search warrant. Today every ISP is being maliciously attacked–this goes beyond the .mils and .govs–but I think that’s the important reason that we approach it today. Every ISP is being attacked, maliciously both from in the United States and outside of the United States, by those who want to invade people’s privacy.

Rep. Issa: Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Chairman. Hopefully 163.33.33.0 will be protected if they ask to be, whoever they are. (Editor’s note: 163.33.33 seems to be an Internet protocol address near San Jose, Calif.)

If you go into a place and there’s a crime actively being committed, let’s say there’s a bookie joint, and there’s tens of thousands of illegal transactions going on every minute. And you know that. And you have proof of that. You don’t question your ability to go in and to harvest the fruit of all the activities in there, is that correct?

Rep. Issa: Director, there isn’t enough time in five minutes to open and close the subject of the Cyber Initiative, but this committee, in my opinion, is going to be the lead committee on, ah, the actual effectiveness of that initiative. As we both know it’s compartmented, highly classified. But I’d like to concentrate just on what laws or changes that you would need from this committee if you were to do the following, and I’ll set out a scenario.

Rep. Conyers: As you wish, Mr. Issa.

And it is a question of the legislation catching up to the technology. Understanding that these crimes are being committed every moment. But then identifying our ability to focus on the particular criminal element as it’s coming through and preempt that criminal element, whether it be .mil, .gov, .com, whichever network you’re talking about.

Rep. Conyers: (Nods)

To help clear things up, we’re providing the transcript of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s exchange at a House of Representatives hearing with Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican. Issa made his fortune by founding Directed Electronics, a publicly traded company that sells
car alarms and home theater loudspeakers.

FBI director Robert Mueller, shown here at Wednesday’s hearing, says ‘legislation has to be developed’ that would ‘identify the illegal activity as it comes through and give us the ability to preempt that illegal activity.’

That crime is going on, every day, on a single entity known as the Internet. What authorities do you need to monitor, looking for those illegal activities, and then act on those, both defensively and, either yourselves or certainly other agencies, offensively in order to shut down a crime in process?

Rep. Issa: OK, and one follow-up question, or two follow-up questions, because I know we’re not going to get it all resolved today. One, can you have someone on your staff designated to work with members of Congress on trying to craft that legislation? I’d appreciate being able to work with that person.

And secondly, and this goes to a legal opinion you may or may not be able to help us with today, but I’d like you to try to work on it. If ISPs or other private entities, a Lockheed Martin on one hand, and my old company, Directed Electronics on the other, if they consented to participation voluntarily in being, in fact, defended in a Cyber Initiative–and that includes ISPs that hypothetically got consent from every single person who signed up to operate under their auspices.

If that consent were granted, do you believe that current laws either can or reasonably easily could be made to protect them? In other words, a voluntary program that would begin allowing federal agencies to counter-attack and to defend on behalf of those who waive current possible restrictions in that sense. And that’s probably my most important question to get this committee thinking of.

The third folder should be for VIP senders. Create a short list of people in your company or inner circle that should go directly to your inbox. People like your CEO, boss, boss’ boss, or family members. You can also set it up to give you a desktop notification, just in case you have them turned off by default.

A few weeks back at the Web 2.0 Expo, I got to catch up with Amit Mital, general manager of Microsoft’s Live Mesh (review), and formerly of Office Live Meeting and BizTalk who told me some of the ways he deals with the hundreds of e-mails he gets every day. His solution deals with Outlook specifically, but the same techniques could be used to manage an in-box in Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or even Gmail with good use of its labels and filters. With Outlook helper Xobni opening up its doors to all today (story) I thought it would be a good chance to share some of these tips that will keep your e-mail in check.

The first one should be just for you, so set up a rule in whatever service you’re on that will take e-mails that have been sent to you specifically, have them sent straight to your in-box, and flag them red.

Some of the below steps are set up to manage an in-box that gets in excess of 200 new e-mails a day, it can be scaled to an account that gets anywhere from 50-100 new e-mails a day from various people. While Bill Gates has gone on the record saying he uses a three display set-up to deal with deluge, this method will let you get by with just one.

2. Delete the old stuff: Archiving is easy, but it leads to massive local files that can make start up and portability a problem. Instead delete or archive items as soon as they’re tended to. For everything else, create a smart folder that pulls in any messages older 30 days. Set up a reoccurring calendar event to tell you to check that folder and you’ll find you can delete almost everything that’s not important or worth holding on to somewhere.

Mital’s other tip? Don’t leave the office until your tasks for the day are complete, and your in-box is back at square one for the next day’s work.

The second folder should be for any messages where you’re on a list with other recipients. Mital’s got his set up to filter messages that include up to 50 other people. If it’s more than that, have it sent to an alternate folder that’s to be looked at after direct messages.

1. Folders: Start new by setting up three folders. Each one will have rules that will help you sort through the influx of mail without dealing with it yourself.

For another take Outlook and its place in the world, check out the rant by Charlie Cooper of News.com about bringing Outlook into the post-1997 era e-mail world.

Mital’s approach follows a pretty standard “zero in-box” solution, designed to keep you from having to maintain or parse through an endless inbox full of messages–both read and unread.

How do you manage your in-box?

( surveys)

3. Turn e-mails into tasks: Mital’s a big user of Microsoft Outlook’s to-do bar. To turn any e-mail you get into something that needs your attention, just drag-and-drop it into the “today” category. The list can be prioritized and managed without needing to open another application, and information about what you need to do is often contained solely within that e-mail, which is now linked up to the task directly.

I tried a few games with Game Booster and they actually made the performance slightly better, especially the load time, with some improvement in frame rate. The difference will vary depending on your system. My computer is generally very clean, so there weren’t many unnecessary services to turn off. If your computer has a lot of junk, you will see an even bigger improvement.

It’s important to note that most services that get stopped are necessary for the computer’s normal operation and need to run while you’re not playing a game. But Game Booster also allows you stop them selectively, which is very helpful.

Normally, I am very skeptical of software that claims to make your computer faster or increase the speed of your connection to the Internet. I’ve never seen any of them actually deliver.

The application is very simple. Once launched, it gives you a list of services running and software running in the background that it deems unnecessary for gaming. There’s also a big button labeled “Switch to Gaming Mode.” Pressing this button will stop everything on the list, making the system even more ready for the real action.

To put this in perspective, say if your computer is a car that you want to use for track racing, the software is not something that makes the engine any stronger. It only helps you take off all the extra seats, spare tires, carpet, or maybe even removes the roof and the windshield so that it will run faster during the race.

First off, the app works. It improve your games’ performance by turning off other software and services that would otherwise run in the background the whole time. This helps free up the system resources, making them available for the game you are about to play.

And it does that very well. Best of all, it does that for free. But don’t take my word for it. The software is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000 and is available now at Download.com.

So when I came across Game Booster, released by IObit on Monday, I thought, “Ah! Another useless piece of junk. It won’t boost anything!” Curiosity made me try it anyway. And I have to admit that I was wrong, though not entirely.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET)

Regardless of how your computer is, Game Booster seems a fast way to make sure that it’s at its best for playing games. It took about 10 seconds to switch my computer between gaming and normal modes.

Once you are done with the gaming, you can click on the same button–now labeled “Back to Normal Mode”–and Game Booster will restart all the services it stopped earlier to bring the computer back to normal operating status.