Author Archive | Ed Oswald

Comcast to Debut Bandwidth Usage Tracking Tool

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 5, 2008 at 10:16 am

comcast_c2DSL Reports says Comcast sources are saying the cable provider is set to begin offering subscribers a method to track their bandwidth usage through the company’s online account management tool. The company had previously implemented a 250GB cap in October after mulling a limit for almost a half a year.

Data would not be delayed three hours, although it would have the ability to store up to three months of usage history and provide data on multiple MAC addresses (cable modems).

Comcast is not commenting on DSL Reports’ claims, only saying that it is “currently evaluating this service” according to BetaNews.

The cable provider has recently gotten much more heavy handed with its bandwidth management. It now is terminating chronically heavy users,  sending them a letter informing them of their usage and blocking their accounts.

However, up until October there wasn’t an official limit, and these letters did not indicate how much bandwidth the guilty party was using.

Head on over to DSL Reports (link above) for as screenshot of this new functionality in action, set to debut in January .

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Macworld Exhibitors Pulling Out, Downsizing

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 5, 2008 at 9:18 am

maclogoHarry reported on Monday about the shrinking size of CES 2009. Well, the same economic pressures that are affecting the world’s largest electronics trade show is also putting a damper on Macworld 2009, which is presented by IDG. AppleInsider reports that some big names are altering their expo plans, including Adobe, Belkin, Google, and Seagate.

Adobe was the first to pull out of the trade show, and did so on Wednesday. While it will still maintain a presence at the show through developer sessions, it will not have a booth in the expo hall.

Belkin, which has typically had a large presence at IDG’s show, has pulled out completely, as has Creative Labs. Its booth space would be taken over by software tutorial company VTC, and Seagate is also notably absent from the exhibitor roles.

Even Google is taking a step back: it’s booth will shrink considerably. AppleInsider also claims at least two more companies are either pulling out or in discussions to scale back their presence.

IDG is said to be working overtime to keep these exhibitors, and is also reportedly seeing a 20 percent drop in attendance over last year’s show.

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Windows 7 Beta 1 Looks Good for January Release

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 4, 2008 at 2:13 pm

Although Microsoft earlier this year had been maintaining that we’d not see Windows 7 until 2010, most Redmond watchers kind of figured out a long time ago that the company had for all intents and purposes given up on Windows Vista.

We reported earlier this week that even two years after release, Vista is running on about 20 percent of computers according to Net Applications. By contrast, Windows XP is running on over three times as many. So, by that measure Vista has not been a success at all.

However, in a (possibly inadvertent) comment posted to his personal web log on MSDN, Southeast District Architect Evangelist Chad Brooks says that the company is guessing that Windows 7 Beta 1 will probably be out by the January 13th.

That will be an exciting week — on the 13th, a new version of Windows, and the following Tuesday, a new president of the United States. Talk about change! But I do digress…

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Windows Stands to Benefit From Mac-Like Functionality

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 4, 2008 at 1:27 pm

Two prominent Microsoft bloggers in the past week or so have stepped out and voiced concerns over what they see as the increasing Mac-like feel of Windows 7. Paul Thurrott has blogged on his concerns that Microsoft doesn’t understand “simple” and “easy,” and says it’s copying the worst of Mac OS, while meanwhile my good friend Mary Jo Foley has made an impassioned plea to the Microsoft team to keep the Windows in Windows 7.

While I agree with Thurrott’s general premise that Microsoft really doesn’t understand how to do things in a simple manner, and with Mary Jo that maybe Windows 7 is a little too much like the Mac, I firmly believe that Windows users stand to gain far more than they would lose.

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Boxee Adds Netflix, But Not on AppleTV or Ubuntu

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 4, 2008 at 10:27 am

boxee_logoOpen source media center platform Boxee said Thursday that its latest release would add support for Netflix, however only for users of its Mac OS X port. While the company offers both a version for Ubuntu Linux and AppleTV set-top boxes, neither are supported in this initial release.

Boxee says the issue with not being able to offer AppleTV users the functionality has to do with the processing power of the unit, currently at 1GHz. Apparently, the application bogs down, but developers are working on getting that working as soon as possible.

The company says it received a lot of requests for Netflix on Boxee, which provided the impetus to begin discussions with the online rental service. No word on whether the Netflix app would make it into an upcoming Windows version of the service — due out soon — however Linux support seems a bit off.

(Note: this is more due to the fact that Netflix itself does not yet support Linux, although it has said it would do so later next year.)

Netflix is not the only new content to be added: users are also gaining photos from the Boston Globe, music videos from MTV, and content from TheWB.com. Improvements to the content offerings from Hulu, CNN, Flickr and Picasa are also included in the update, as well as quality enhancements for YouTube videos.

Those interested in testing out Boxee should head on over to the company’s website and submit their information.

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All Hail iPhone, Savior of the Smartphone Market?

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 4, 2008 at 12:09 am

jobsiphone… that’s the way investment banking firm Needham is angling it. Along with reporting that the iPhone now controls 16.6 percent of the market for the quarter ending in September, it also said that the iPhone 3G’s success alone is helping to keep the entire smartphone market from collapsing.

Growth was flat from quarter to quarter at 28.6 percent, and Apple’s hit phone helped to keep the industry from going into the crapper much like the rest of tech.

In a way, this contracts some earlier data by iSuppli which suggests that overall the mobile device market shrunk by 1.1 percent in the same said quarter. However, there was no break down on numbers by device type, so there’s no way to really compare and contrast with confidence here.

Either way the biggest loser here is Nokia. Their share has collapsed as the iPhone became a hit. This time a year ago, the company had a commanding 63 percent of the market. Now, that has fallen to just below 44 percent for this past quarter.

Nokia’s strength remains in Europe, Needham notes. Here in the US enterprise clients, who still are a significant chunk of smarphone users, are showing a preference for RIM and Apple’s platforms. Analyst Charlie Wolf chalks this up to the fact that Symbian (Nokia’s OS) is considered “less robust” that either of its two competitors, and Microsoft’s struggles in signing on handset manufacturers.

There’s one caveat to this, and that’s Android. Wolf says he is unsure of the effect of Google’s mobile OS, but if the success of the T-Mobile G1 is any indication, Steve Jobs might want to watch his back.

(Hat tip: Electronista)

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Apple: Somebody’s Behind Psystar, And We’ll Find Out.

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 3, 2008 at 9:07 pm

Well, the neverending saga that is the Apple v. Psystar court drama continues to get even more interesting. According to a copy of an amended complaint filed by the Cupertino company, and initially reported by Groklaw, it appears as if the company now believes there is either a major backer or corporation behind Psystar.

Jobs and Co. must have some pretty trustworthy leads if they are going as far as to include such an accusation in a legal document. Here’s what they are saying:

“On information and belief, persons other than Psystar are involved in Psystar’s unlawful and improper activities described in this Amended Complaint … the John Doe Defendants are various individuals and/or corporations who have infringed Apple’s intellectual property rights, breached or induced the breach of Apple’s license agreements and violated state and common law unfair competition laws.”

These John Doe suits have been used in the past, most notably in RIAA/MPAA anti-piracy suits. Here, it seems to be that Apple has reason to believe that as many as ten individuals and/or companies may be supporting Psystar in its efforts. What happens next, now that essentially all of Psystar’s case has been thrown out, is in the hands of the law.

The company will now be either found guilty or not on Apple’s own claims, while at the same time Apple will be working to uncover the identities of those who may be supporting Psystar. If these companies are revealed, you bet Apple will publicly expose these folks, and likely sue them too.

Not everybody’s buying it though. Devin over at CrunchGear had this pithy little comment:

Good lord, how mysterious! Can they really think that someone like Dell for example, jealous of Apple’s increasing market share, would set up a shell company to sell pieced-together Frankenmacs? I think Apple needs a drink.

Yeah, it does smell a little bit of paranoia, and I do support the effort to break free Mac OS of Apple’s complete control (I’m one of those folks who believe an open OS X will be the only way to truly compete with Microsoft). But Apple does have its right to find out if its rivals are attempting to sabotage its business.

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Mac’s Internet Share Rises, Firefox Above 20%

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 2, 2008 at 10:28 am

Internet research firm Net Applications has somewhat stunning news: Windows share of the operating system has fallen below 90 percent according to the company for the first time since the mid 1990s. Furthermore, its share of the browser market has also fallen, now below 70 percent for the first time in nearly a decade.

IE now stands at 69.77 percent, down 1.5 percent or so from the previous month. Contrast this with Firefox, who now has about 20.8 percent of the market, up about .8 percent from the last month.

This has to have Redmond worried. I clearly remember pinging my Microsoft sources back a year or two ago when Mozilla really began to pick up market share. The response was “oh, they only expect them to peak at 15 or 20 percent and that will be it,” or something to that effect.

Well, we’ve now blown through that, and look to be poised for more gains. Firefox is beginning to move from the alternative to the competitor catagory when it comes to browsers. That’s something many — including Microsoft — did not expect.

The bad news doesn’t end there. Apple’s Mac OS is resurgent. It’s share is now up to 8.9 percent, the highest market share ever recorded by the firm for Apple. Contrast this with Microsoft, whos .8 percent drop to 89.6 percent was the biggest drop in over two years.

Vista’s adoption is still awful: only one in five users use it two years after it was released. While it has generally grown by about a percentage point each of the past few months, this shows that the computing public has generally given Microsoft’s latest OS the Windows Me treatment.

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Swoopo Makes Some Changes, Lowers Bid Fee

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 1, 2008 at 1:15 pm

Swoopo logoAs you saw in Harry’s earlier post, our Swoopo coverage still tops the charts as some of Technologizer’s most frequented articles. This has obviously put us on the radar of the folks at the auction site, so they have been keeping us informed of the goings on with the company. This latest round of changes aren’t all that surprising: many of them we already new about from our interview with US business chief Chris Bauman in October.

Beginner auctions are now live on the site, which Bauman claims will help first-time and new users learn the ropes of what is obviously a new method of online auctions. It will also prevent experienced users from taking advantage of the inexperienced ones as they are barred from bidding.

Many across our pages have also complained about the bidding fee of Swoopo’s auctions, which cost $1 per bid placed. Swoopo has lowered the this to 75 cents, which it claims has increased bidding on items.

While for many, the per-bid charge is a turnoff, at least they look to be realizing that a $1 per bid is a little steep. I’m not sure how much this will do since you’re still paying for those bids even when you lose — my biggest problem with the site — but I guess this is a step in the right direction.

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A “Disastrous” Year for Memory Chip Makers

Posted by Ed Oswald on December 1, 2008 at 11:30 am

memory chipData compiled by research firm iSuppli indicates that 2008 will be a tough year for memory chip suppliers. Overall, global semiconductor revenue will drop by two percent thanks to a 16 percent plunge in sales of memory. This would be the second year in a row of falling revenues, the firm said.

“For the memory IC business, 2008 can only be described as disastrous,” iSuppli’s Dale Ford says.

The effects of this downturn are broad: of the top 29 memory chipmakers, only two will see positive gains for the year in terms of revenue. This is dragging down the entire semiconductor market — without memory chips, revenues would have been up 2 percent.

iSuppli cautions to not blame memory solely for the industry’s problems, as six of the top ten semiconductor producers will see falling revenues. But overall, the biggest losers are the memory chip makers. Hynix will see revenues fall nearly 30 percent, and Micron and Samsung 9 percent each.

There is some silver lining to this. Even though this year’s decline was pretty steep, it is by far not the worst. In 2001, memory revenues plummeted 48 percent.

“However, the dot-com-bust decline in 2001 was preceded by a 42.7 percent surge in 2000,” Ford says.

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