Experts predict the creation of hundreds of new jobs in the computer software industry in Tayside.

I rushed through this in my piece about Leopard a couple of weeks ago, I do things other than review software, so I don't always have enough time to go into depth. And I wanted to be reasonably sure it was as bad as I thought it was. But now I am reasonably sure, but maybe I'm still missing something, if so, I bet a lot of other people are too. Here's the problem with networking under Leopard. In the previous version of Mac OS X, you would mount a remote volume, and from then on it was as if it were one of your local disks. That's how networking has worked on Macs since the 80s, and it's the way it works on Windows (not sure when it came in there, but it was present on NT and XP). It's the way networked OSes should work, it's hard to imagine them not working this way. However, amazingly, that's not how it works on Leopard. Here's an example. I have three computers on my LAN that I can access from the laptop I'm writing this piece on, Bucharest, Darkstar and Illium. They are conveniently listed in the Shared section in every Finder window. This is a small improvement, in previous Macs, you had to 2click on a Network item in the same place, and choose the computer from a dialog. Now you can see the names without clicking (It's a small improvement because believe me, I've got these names memorized.) Let's say I want to look at the disk named Ohio on the computer named Darkstar. I click on Darkstar, and a list of disks appears, among them Ohio. I double-click on Ohio and the list of disks is replaced by the files and folders in Ohio. Nothing has changed in the left pane of the window, no disk has been mounted, I can access the contents of this disk only in this window, and only as long as it stays open. If I navigate to another disk or folder, I no longer have access to this disk. This is the first major step back. (There were some minor reverses on the way here, each of the steps in this process take much longer for some reason than they did on the earlier version of the OS. I have two machines that haven't been Leopardized, so I can compare, and the delays can be really long, and yes, I've rebooted everything numerous times. The pre-Leopard machines are faster. I actually replaced one of my Mac Minis because it was too slow, now after "upgrading" it's just as slow as the one it replaced. Oy.) But here's the real kicker. Suppose I want to save a file to the Ohio disk from inside one of my apps. There's no way to do it! This is the part I can't believe. I can't even go through the navigation process to locate the disk (a lot of extra steps from the old method, where I could just access it as if it were a local disk). It's not that it's hard to do, it's that you can't do it. This is a basic feature that goes back to the 80s. How do they get away with removing it, and no one calls them on it, and they don't explain it anywhere? (Or did they and I missed it. In a Steve Jobs keynote, did he say "Oh and one more thing, we removed a feature so basic you don't even realize it's there.") Now, as I said earlier, it's possible it is there, staring me in the face, and I just can't see it. I've been using computers long enough to know that that sometimes happens. If so, show me how to do it. How do I save a file to a server volume from inside an app? Update: You can navigate to shared disks in some apps, and not in others, as has been pointed out in the comments. Note that in earlier versions of the OS you could save to network disks in all apps. Here's a video that illustrates how the Finder doesn't let me mount a network drive in Leopard.

(InfoWorld) - Steve Jobs took the stage at San Francisco's Moscone West expo center promptly at 10 a.m. Wednesday morning to thunderous applause from the crowd. "Today we're here to talk about music," Jobs said. "We've distributed 600 million copies of iTunes so far, and customers have bought and downloaded over 3 billion songs from iTunes. iTunes is the number one online music store in every single one of the 22 countries it operates in," he explained. "We started with just 200,000 songs, and we have over 6 million songs in every single one of those stores." Jobs told the audience that the iTunes Store -- now the No. 3 music retailer in the United States behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy -- carries more than 550 television shows and has sold 95 million TV shows to date. The service features links to more than 125,000 podcasts, with more than 25,000 of them featuring video. "This last stat I want to share with you blew my mind. In the U.S., of all the music releases in 2006, 32 percent were digital-only releases," said Jobs. "They were not released on a CD. Wow. Look how far we've come: A third of the music released in this country was not on a CD. "So that gives you a feeling for how far we've coming in the last five years in the digital music revolution." Jobs revealed that Apple plans to release a new version of iTunes on Wednesday evening that will support the products that are being announced Wednesday -- and the biggest new feature in iTunes will be ring tone support for the iPhone. "We're going to do ring tones in our own special way," explained Jobs. "And, of course, these are for the iPhone. And what we want is rather than having someone make ring tones for us, we're going to make a custom ring tone maker. We're going to build it into iTunes, and you can make ring tones from many songs available on iTunes, including some songs you've already purchased." Jobs compared iTunes ring tones to the competition, which cost up to $2.49. "Our ring tones, make 'em yourself, you pay another 99 cents to make the ring tone," he said. Jobs demonstrated how the new feature works using Aretha Franklin's classic soul number "Respect." All of the songs on the iTunes Store that are "ringtonable" will feature a bell icon column in the music list. You click on the bell, the ring tone maker pops up, and you can click and drag to find the part of the song you want to use as a ring tone. iTunes creates a new file in the ring tone folder, and a new tab in Tunes then lets you decide what to sync to your iPhone. Jobs played "Give Peace a Chance," then added, "That's [for] when NBC calls," referring to Apple's recent dispute with the TV network, which said it will end its partnership to publish shows on the iTunes Store in December. iPodnews Jobs said that Apple has sold 110 million iPods to date. "The place when the sales curve is strongest is the holiday season," said Jobs. "We're approaching the holiday 2007 season, and we want to get ready. "Today we're going to refresh or replace every product in the lineup," said Jobs. The iPod Suffle is being updated with "some really nice new colors," said Jobs. Apple is also adding a Product(red) Shuffle model, with proceeds going to help fight diseases in Africa. "Now let's move on to something more substantial: the iPod Nano," said Jobs. The iPod Nano is the most popular music player in history, said Jobs. People love it, he added, but Apple wanted to make it better based on customer feedback. New features of the redesigned iPod Nano include the ability to watch video on a larger, brighter display. The new iPod Nano also features Cover Flow, the ability to scroll through album artwork visually. What's more, the new Nano also has games support, more storage features, and a full metal design. The redesigned iPod Nano comes in five colors -- red, black, silver, blue, and green. "It's incredibly tiny, it's incredibly thin," said Jobs. The iPod Nano now includes a 2.0-inch display that features the same resolution as the previous-generation full-sized iPod: 320 x 240 pixels. "We've achieved this with a screen with the highest pixel density we've ever shipped: 204 ppi," explained Jobs. "And the screen is just gorgeous. When you see it, you're going to really love it." The user interface has been enhanced on the iPod Nano -- the left side has the traditional iPod menu, and on the right, a preview of what you're selecting. Jobs also indicated that the new iPod Nano ships with three games; Vortex and Sudoku were both named specifically. Jobs demonstrated the iPod Nano playing video by watching an episode of The Daily Show featuring John Hodgman, the actor who appears as the PC in Apple's "Mac and PC" television ads. Jobs said the new iPod Nano provides 24 hours of audio and 5 hours of video playback on a single battery charge. The redesigned iPod Nano comes in two versions: a 4GB version in silver, for $149, and 8GB version in colors, for $199. "These new Nanos have left our factories already. They shipped Wednesday, they're on planes, they should be in stores by this weekend," said Jobs. "'A little video for everyone' is our new line." The "classic" iPod "Now the iPod's got a funny name," mused Jobs. "It's just called 'the iPod' because it was the first one. We thought, 'It's time to give it a name.' We're going to call it the iPod Classic." The new iPod still features a click wheel, and it's now a full metal design in silver and black. The low-end iPod classic (at 80GB) is now thinner than the 30GB thin model that preceded it. Jobs claims the new iPod gets 30 hours of audio playback and 5 hours of video playback on a single charge. Like the iPod Nano, the new iPod Classic features an enhanced user interface. Apple is also offering a model that features 160GB of storage. "This boggles the mind," said Jobs for emphasis. "The first iPod put 1,000 songs in your pocket. This new iPod puts 40,000 songs in your pocket. It's amazing." The new 80GB model costs $249, while the 160GB model costs $349, with availability beginning Wednesday. The iPod Touch "You know, when we introduced the iPhone in January, we said it was the best iPod ever. And iPhone owners agree with us. It's incredible, with its multitouch UI, its incredible album artwork and video, it is the best iPod ever," said Jobs. "And people have been wondering, when are we going to bring this tech to the iPod? The answer is, we're going to do it today, and this is what the product looks like."  8mm thinner, according to Jobs, who said, "We think it's one of the Seven Wonders of the World." The iPod Touch sports a 3.5-inch widescreen display, and along its bottom run music, video, and photo icons. "Just like the iPhone, this is the best way to share photos on a portable device ever," said Jobs proudly. The iPod Touch's button-driven interface also showed icons for a calculator, contacts, clock, calendar, and settings icons. What's more, the new device has Wi-Fi -- the iPod Touch is the first iPod to feature wireless networking capabilities, with support for 802.11b and 802.11g networks. "Others have done this and have failed," said Jobs, referring to wireless networking -- and perhaps making a casual swipe at Microsoft's 'iPod killer,' the Zune. "We think we know why it's failed. What's the problem with adding Wi-Fi? Part is getting on Wi-Fi itself." "When you're at home, you might need a password. When you're in the office, you might have a password," said Jobs. "But everywhere in between can be challenging. You go to any hotel, and to log in, they throw up a Web page. "Portable devices don't know how to deal with Web pages. You go to an airport, you'll see a Web page. Even walking through Stanford University, to use their Wi-Fi, you have to log into a Web page." The solution, said Jobs, was to add Safari to the iPod Touch. "So you can view all those Web pages, zoom in, log into any Wi-Fi network pretty much. But beside that, you get an incredible Web browser ... the best Web browser on any mobile platform," said Jobs. YouTube is also supported. The iPod Touch's battery lasts for 22 hours of audio playback and 5 hours of video playback per charge, according to Apple. The iPod Touch is a worldwide product launch, said Jobs. It's the first touch product Apple has shipped outside the United States, and it's been localized into many languages. The iPod Touch is coming in two configurations: 8GB and 16GB, for $299 and $399, respectively. Both models are expected to be available "in just a few weeks," according to Jobs, who said that Apple will ship them in September, "in plenty of time for the holiday season." One more thing "But there is one more thing, if you'll bear with us," said Jobs. "You might have noticed that there's an empty spot on that dock of the new iPod Touch," said Jobs. "What could that possibly be for? Well, it's for a new app we've written called the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store." "'Finally,' some of you are saying," said Jobs. "It's so cool. So let's take a look at what it is." Opening the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store displays four buttons: Features, Top Tens, Search, and Downloads. You can pick Top 10 songs from all of iTunes or only from specific genres. If you see a song you like, you can preview it, and if you like it, you can tap it to buy it using a Buy Now button. You'll download the song, and the next time you dock your iPod Touch to your computer, it will sync back to iTunes. Jobs demonstrated the new software's capability by buying John Lennon's "Imagine." The song was visible in a playlist on the iPod Touch called "Downloads." "Isn't this incredible?" asked Jobs. The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store is available internationally in every country where Apple operates an iTunes Store, said Jobs. "And we're going to bring it to the iPhone," he added. Jobs said the new software will be delivered to iPhone users via an iPhone software update later this month. Apple and Starbucks partnership "There's even one more incredible part of this," said Jobs, who revealed that Apple has been working on this for two years. "I cannot tell you how much pleasure it gives me to announce we've got a great partnership with Starbucks today." Jobs called Starbucks "an incredible phenomenon in our culture" and added that a lot of Apple employees are great customers. Apple wanted to combine iPods and their love of music with Starbucks' coffee and love of music. "In the new iTunes Wi-Fi Store, when you get near a participating Starbucks, automatically a fifth button is going to pop up in the store with a Starbucks button," he said. "You will know what songs they're playing in Starbucks, and you can buy it with one tap of your finger. And if you just missed it, you can look at the last 10 songs they've played. They're going to program some cool music for us in terms of their collections," Jobs said.

(InfoWorld) - The last thing you need when you're unemployed is a bank account that's suddenly emptied. But that's exactly what some unwary users of employment search site Monster.com faced after identity thieves made off with the personal information of more than a million people looking for jobs. This still-developing story has enough nooks and crannies to confuse a gumshoe, but some facts are clear: Monster's resume database was looted, and the personal information taken was used to forge convincing messages that deposited password-stealing Trojans and ransomware on users' PCs. Calculated and ambitious, the attack is striking for how it blended several elements -- stolen credentials of legitimate users, phishing e-mails, Trojan horses, money mules and more -- into a slick assault. Here's what we know so far. Was Monster.com hacked? No, as Symantec said immediately. Instead, the attackers accessed the resume database with legitimate usernames and passwords, probably stolen from professional recruiters and human resource personnel who use the "Monster for employers" section of the site to look for job candidates. But it wasn't until Thursday that Monster.com admitted as much. "By gaining unauthorized access to employer accounts, the software was obtaining job seeker contact information," a new alert said. What was snatched from the database? Names, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and resume IDs, said Symantec. Yesterday, Monster.com added that only about 5,000 of the people whose data was filched live outside the U.S. That squares with what Symantec's Amado Hidalgo said in an e-mail: The information-stealing Trojan was hard-coded to dig through only the "hiring.monster.com" and "recruiter.monster.com" domains, limiting their theft to the Monster USA site's database. "They only targeted the U.S. Monster site and not any other international Monster [Worldwide] Inc. sites, such as those in the U.K., Spain, etc.," said Hidalgo. How was the information stolen? The Infostealer.Monstres Trojan runs batch searches by sending HTTP commands to the Monster Web site to navigate through folders, said Hidalgo. The malware then parses the output that appears in a pop-up window that holds the job seeker profiles that match the search criteria. Essentially, the Trojan worked as an automated search bot that located candidates, captured their contact information and sent it to a remote server controlled by the criminals. Symantec said that the server, though located in Russia, was hosted by a company out of Ukraine. By using Infostealer.Monstres to do their harvesting, the attackers also covered their tracks -- the Trojan could be planted on any computer previously compromised, with the search seemingly originating with that computer's owner -- and could easily spread the work out among a number of IP addresses, probably to slip under any Monster radar potentially watching for unusually large numbers of search requests coming from any one location. (There is no evidence at the moment that Monster deploys such radar.) How many people are affected? Initially, Symantec's researchers played it vague, saying only that "several hundred thousand" were at risk. Thursday, though, Monster said that it had found contact information on the hackers' server for about 1.3 million people who had posted resumes. The other number that's been bandied about -- 1.6 million -- represents the tally of contact entries Symantec counted on the server last week; a significant number of Monster users apparently post more than one resume. How did the hackers manage to grab so many contract records without Monster.com noticing? That's a good question. Monster itself hinted at one explanation: automated searches like the ones Infostealer.Monstres ran aren't unusual. "Many of our customers use automatic or semiautomatic means to search our database," said Monster spokesman Steve Sylven last Sunday. "Moreover, many of our larger customers rely heavily on our database, and their use may be similar to programmatic or scripted access." Translation: The searches conducted by the bigger Monster customers are as bot-like as those run by the Trojan. The thieves also probably relied on some standard tactics to avoid detection, including running the searches from innocent PCs and spreading out the work (see "How was the information stolen?" above). Spammers and malware spreaders use zombies to send junk mail and malware for the same reasons. What did the criminals do with the Monster data once they had it? No one's arguing the facts: personal information purloined from the Monster resume database was used to create, then send, targeted phishing e-mails -- the term is "spear phishing" -- that spread other malicious software or recruited "money mules," the middlemen who transfer money from a phished bank account to a foreign bank account. It's the emphasis where Monster and Symantec part. Monster has focused on the mule-recruiting angle or even depicted those e-mails as run-of-the-mill phishing. "The purpose of gathering this information appears to be sending email disguised as Monster in order to gain recipients' trust, and then attempting to convince users to engage in financial transactions," the company now says on its revised security alert. Only in passing does it also call out "or lure them into downloading malicious software." That, however, is the prime use of the stolen information, said Symantec's Hidalgo, who traced connections between Infostealer.Monstres and at least two other Trojans. The first, Banker.c, watches for, steals, then transmits back to hacker HQ online banking log-in information for accounts at Bank of America and the German arm of Citibank. The second, Gpcoder.e, is "ransomware," a Trojan that encrypts files on the infected PC's hard drive, then informs its owner that the files will be unusable until a fee is paid. In Gpcoder.e's case, the ransom was $300. What good does the other stolen information do the thieves? Two words: response rate. According to research conducted by an Indiana University team in 2005, people are much more likely to click or give up information if the message contains clues of legitimacy, as when the message appears to come from a close friend. In fact, 72 percent of the people in the study who received phishing mail from someone in their social network took the bait and divulged their log-on information, four and a half times the number in the control group. Spear phishing, then, can be incredibly effective, at least from the criminals' point of view. By using the Monster resume data to target the recipient and flesh out the e-mail with the recipient's real name -- often usually difficult or impossible to guess from the e-mail address itself -- the crooks can expect more people to let down their guard and actually launch the attached file. (In the case of Gpcoder.e, the file posed as Monster Job Seeker Tool, fictitious software of course, but likely enough to get people to click; when they did, they installed the Trojan, not a job search assistant.) So the goal of the attackers is...what? Bank account log-ons, clearly. Ransomware, though not uncommon, usually flops because someone -- often one or more security vendors -- cracks the encryption used to lock up the files and makes that public, eliminating the need to pay up. Another clue that bank accounts are the endgame is the effort spent on recruiting money mules. The group wouldn't need mules unless it had, or anticipated having, access to bank accounts. When did this start? We don't know, and so far, Monster has not talked about this. But one self-described Monster user claimed here to have received money-mule messages between June 3 and June 13, and had reported them to Monster. "Monster only said it was not from them and did not admit that they had let my information get away from them," said "Anonymous." Symantec first alerted Monster of its findings last Friday, Aug. 17, both the security company and Monster have said. Evidence of the Gpcoder.e seeding -- using phony Monster messages touting a nonexistent tool -- goes back at least as far as early July, according to analysis by U.K.-based security company Prevx Ltd. It may have started days or even weeks before that. Some reports, in fact, have claimed users started seeing phishing mail built atop the stolen personal information as early as February of this year. What can Monster users do to protect themselves? For the 1.3 million whose resumes have been pillaged, it's too late; the horse has left the barn. Even so, some users decided to cancel their accounts as a way to block any future malware-based searches. "I can still search for jobs and submit my resume to postings, but employers/recruiters cannot find me in their searches," said a Chicago user identified as "Greg" in a comment on a Computerworld story that ran Thursday. "I certainly would encourage others to protect themselves and delete their Monster accounts as well." Monster hasn't disabled batch or automated searches, or if it has, it's not said as much. (On Sunday, company spokesman Steve Sylven seemed to say that because large corporate customers of the service used automated searches, banning them would be out of the question.) It has, however, shut down the server that the gang was using to store its stolen data and presumably disabled the legitimate accounts used to access the database. (Symantec's Hidalgo said last week that his team had forwarded those accounts to Monster.) We say "presumably" because while we have asked Monster if those accounts have been closed, the company has not explicitly acknowledged doing so. Other than that, the only advice being given by Monster or Symantec is the usual: Be suspicious of all unsolicited, unanticipated e-mail, run up-to-date antivirus software -- to stop Trojans such as Banker.c or Gpcoder.e at the door -- and refuse to give out personal information.

(InfoWorld) - It has become a routine part of any given week to hear from IT companies about "green" innovations -- products or prototypes designed to have less of an effect on the environment. [ See also: The realities of green computing ] Companies of all sizes and types are part of this trend, and besides developing greener products, they also are more focused internally on operating with greater energy efficiency, cutting their own costs, and reducing the "carbon footprint" they leave. What follows are just two examples, one from the large Xerox, and the other from the small Userful Corp. In the case of Xerox, the company announced a new type of paper that is more environmentally friendly. With Userful, the news was that the company figured out how much one of its products cuts in CO2 emissions, putting concrete figures on an environmental component to its software. 'Breakthrough' printing paper saves trees, costs less Ask Bruce Katz how long it took Xerox to develop its new High Yield Business Paper, which uses less wood pulp, water, and chemicals to manufacture, and he laughs and says "about 30 years." The project manager for paper design and quality, "paper technologist" for short, Katz has been with Xerox for 27 years, and throughout that time, the company has talked periodically to newsprint makers about designing better newsprint, but none of them was ever interested in taking the idea beyond that step until October 2006. Once his paper team got rolling with the idea, it was on the market fairly quickly with the company taking orders for the new product now. The new paper is made using a mechanical pulping process, which is the method for making newsprint and offset-printing paper common for directories, catalogs, and flyers. It's not archival quality, isn't suitable for inkjets, and shouldn't be used for documents that are meant to be kept for a long time or that are official, such as contracts and the like, but it's fine for transactional jobs, such as printing up invoices or for use in ordinary office black-and-white printing. Xerox says that the paper is the first of its kind that works reliably in digital printers and copiers, partly because it doesn't curl. The paper comes from a mill using hydroelectricity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent compared to other mills. The paper also weighs less than paper made using traditional chemical processes, so it comes with about 10 percent more pages per pound, making it less costly to ship and mail and less expensive in cost overall. Comparatively, it's about 5 percent less than the company's 4200 business paper, says Maggie Ochs, a marketing manager. Wood chips are ground in machines to loosen their fibers and make pulp, but wood chemicals stay in the fiber, so twice as much paper is produced per tree, according to Xerox. "We knew up front that there was an environmental story," Katz says. That's because of the physical characteristics of newsprint, which is lighter than typical office paper, so he and other Xerox engineers knew that when the wood was ground for pulp, the capacity of the newsprint would be better than chemically produced fiber. They knew it would cost less to produce and use fewer trees in the process. "That's when we really saw a big, big opportunity on the environmental side." That's a concern that is always top of mind at Xerox, based in Rochester, New York, according to Maggie Ochs, a marketing manager there. "We do look at the environmental impact with every product." Useful's carbon-cutting software While most of the movement in green computing tends toward hardware that operates with greater energy efficiency or products whose manufacture takes less of a bite out of the environment, Userful's bailiwick is software. The company's DiscoverStation operating system software enables 10 employees to work from one PC, though the typical configuration used by cusomers is to have six workstations per computer. Using a central Web portal, the software can be centrally managed and controlled with locked-down desktop configurations. The idea behind it is that most of the time, office workers spend their time typing documents or e-mail or they're reading a document, e-mail, or Web site. Most of the computing power just idles and isn't really needed, so Userful's approach is to attach more users to each desktop PC. Libraries, schools, and military installations are primary customers for DiscoverStation. Sean Rousseau, who is in charge of marketing and public relations for Userful, which is based in Calgary, Alberta, and was founded in 1999, got to thinking about the environmental aspect of that power savings. He counted up the number of PCs that don't have to be used because customers have deployed DiscoverStation and ran a calculation based on how much electricity it takes to produce a typical PC, how much electricity is required to operate it for a year and translated that into carbon dioxide emissions. What he came up with is that the company's software had saved more than 13,250 tons of such emissions per year, "and, boom, that's like taking 2,300 cars off the road right there, in one year," he says. "I realized this is a really green technology.... It blew my mind." Userful, which has about 30 employees, plans to make that green element of its OS more outright. "We're building into the OS a meter that actually detect how much power your computer is using and converts that into how much CO2 you're using, so it will explain it right there on your computer," he says.

(InfoWorld) - PC vendors are launching more and more computers with dual- and quad-core processors, promising users that the expensive machines can juggle more applications at work or play better games at home. But amid the marketing blitz, some consumers are asking whether all the extra power is really necessary, since their basic desktop software runs fine on traditional Athlon and Pentium chips. "Most users don't even use the processor that they have now if they've purchased something within the last year or two," says Gary Wallin, director of technical services for Incentra Solutions, an enterprise IT services firm in Boulder, Colo. "Those people can totally 'get by' with older single-core processors. My current laptop is not a dual-core anything, and I'm able to do my job without lag." Despite that reluctance, chip vendors are rushing new designs to market, such as Intel's product launches last year: Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad for desktops, and its dual-core Woodcrest and quad-core Clovertown Xeon chips for servers. At the same time, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is developing a Phenom quad-core desktop chip, due out later this year, to complement its dual-core Opteron and quad-core Barcelona server chip, which is due out in August. Power users will certainly find a way to use the extra boost in multicore chips for high-end games, IT administration, software development, or virtualization, Wallin said. But single-core chips offer the average user plenty of processing capacity to handle tasks such as sending e-mail, surfing the Web, displaying pictures, and playing an occasional simple game. Those users can find a sweet spot of PC value by purchasing a computer one or two levels below the latest release, buying perfectly capable machines for pennies on the dollar, he said. In fact, users lose out when they make purchases based on advertisements for trendy gadgets such as quad-core processors or Apple's iPhone, said Davood Sedaghatfar, an IT management consultant in Virginia. "The multicore technology is way overrated for public use. I think the manufacturers use these terms and technotalk to make people think they are getting the whiz-bang stuff! But in reality, I do not think the public uses even 2 percent of the power and functionality," Sedaghatfar said. However, chip vendors insist that consumers are getting their money's worth, since modern processor design offers more benefits than simply computing power. Multicore chips can generate less heat than conventional processors, allowing them to fit in smaller, thinner PCs. They are also more power-efficient since they use small 45-nanometer or 65nm transistors instead of 90nm parts. Combined, those features make quad-core processors an important tool for users who want to use their desktops for intense multimedia applications, according to Intel. A quad-core desktop processes data 50 to 80 percent faster than a dual-core computer in applications such as streaming movies, 3D gaming, and content creation, Intel said. Likewise, Dell promises users that its multicore desktops can more efficiently perform many applications at once, letting them multitask jobs such as scanning for viruses, burning MP3s, and playing video games. PC vendors also use multicore chips in mainstream servers, which have increasingly similar performance to high-end desktops. Guests at Boston's Seaport Hotel can use free thin-client PCs installed in each room, powered by Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL380s servers using dual-core Intel chips. "The performance is outstanding; they just scream," said John Burke, the hotel's vice president of technology. He manages a fleet of 85 thin clients from IGEL Technology and plans to soon install those units in the rest of the hotel's 426 rooms. "I'm not worried about the back end at all. With what we have now, I can't foresee having to add any hardware," Burke said. Because of such performance, PC vendors are on track to use quad-core processors in half of all mainstream PCs by the fourth quarter of 2009, according to the analyst firm iSuppli. That forecast marks a steep rise from the first quarter of 2007, when quad-core chips appeared in just 16 percent of high-end PCs, and in no mainstream or value-priced PC models at all. By the first quarter of 2009, quad-core chips will be used in fully 85 percent of performance PCs and 25 percent of mainstream models, although vendors will still not use the chips in value models, according to the iSuppli forecast. The increased use will be driven mostly by dropping prices, as Intel is expected to cut its prices to compete with quad-core chips from AMD scheduled to reach markets by the end of 2007, said Matthew Wilkins, iSuppli's principal analyst for compute platforms. "You could say that arguing about whether the average user needs higher-performance processors is irrelevant, because Intel and AMD are going to continue to deliver processors with increasing performance to market," Wilkins said. "We have seen both AMD and Intel highlight multicore as the key design philosophy for future microprocessors."

(InfoWorld) - Apple's just-released public beta of the Safari 3 Web browser -- the first version to run on Windows as well as Mac OS X -- is drawing fervent and sometimes heated reactions from early testers. The following is an unexpurgated sample of what bloggers, ranging from grumpy Windows users to Mac fanboys, had to say in the immediate aftermath of Monday's Safari 3 announcement: Is Safari faster than Steve Jobs speeding on Hwy. 280 in his Mercedes SL AMG? "I miss the spell-checking, but damn -- this gives Opera a run for it's [sic] money in terms of speed. I just tested loading my homepage with both of them, and I have no doubts about it." -- Griffith, Forever Geek "After downloading and installing Safari on XP (w/ 1GB RAM, P4 3Ghz, yada yada yada), I have to say that it is a complete joke ... the browser is just so horribly slow. Did they test this? It takes literally at least 5x longer to render pages in Safari than Firefox. Sometimes even longer. Very sad." -- Doug, Read/ Write Web "I did a comparison of loading CNN on both browsers,and Safari beat Firefox by a mile." -- Hoobam, Download Squad "The more I run Safari on Vista, the faster it launches. Am I hallucinating? Is there a cosmic force that means just when I complain about Safari taking 57 seconds to launch, as soon as that complaint is made public, it launches much more quickly? Am I going insane? Or is someone playing a clever prank on me?" -- Joel Spolsky, Joel On Software Fonts: fuzzier than a peach skin? "If you sit really close to the monitor, then the Windows way is better. However, if you move back a couple of feet (3 feet or so from the screen to your eyes), then the Apple way seems more readable. The Apple rendering is definitely darker." -- Brendan Dowling, Coding Horror "It looks like they've skewed the contrast of the fonts to an absurdly low level. I'm curious why Apple's default font rendering strategies, to my eye -- and to the eyes of at least two other people -- are visibly inferior to Microsoft's on typical LCD displays. This is exactly the kind of graphic designer-ish detail I'd expect Cupertino to get right, so it's all the more surprising to me that they apparently haven't." -- Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror "In Safari, go to Edit/Preferences ... and then select the Appearance tab. For "Font smoothing," choose Light (the default is Medium). Much better now. Not perfect, mind you, but much better." -- Tom, Coding Horror "I also noticed that if I increase the font size, Apple-style anti-aliasing becomes tolerable. I'm beginning to think that the differences are. 1) Apple doesn't hand-tune the font aliasing hints for smaller font sizes. 2) Apple chose a much, much darker contrast level for its anti-aliasing algorithm." -- Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror And now for today's bug report.... "Seems like the only website my Safari works with is Apple's own homepage. Crashed about 15 times and I've only been _trying_ to use it for an hour." --  Brandon, Download Squad "I installed Safari, and every single time I attempt to bookmark something, it crashes -- hard." -- EJ Passeos, TechCrunch "The only browser unable to correctly display a Google result page. Wow." --  Xavier, TechCrunch "Oh damn, I just crashed with Safari at the 1st Google request by entering Japanese characters." -- Eirikur, Engadget "ALL the menu dropdowns don't work (they are just empty). Half the text is missing on many pages. URL bar doesn't work. Selects a non standard font for the pages. Need some more?" -- ScOObyDoo, Engadget Well, how about the new features? "The most notable new feature is an improved Firefox-style way to search for text on a Web page. Hit Control-F, and an oval search box appears towards the top of the window. Type your search term, hit enter, and watch the page go gray with your search terms highlighted in white or bright orange (that's the selected result)." -- Narasu Rebbapragada, PC World "Tabbed browsing? Been done. Easy Bookmarks? Been done. Popup blocking? Old news. Inline Find -- stunning visually but also been done. SnapBack? This is a gimicky [sic] back button -- not good enough. Forms autofill -- zzz. Built-in RSS -- yawn. When are we getting to the good stuff? Er ... okay, so that's it, there is nothing new here." -- Vincent Maher, Media in Transition "The display window is VERY clean; even the status bar at the bottom of most Windows applications is missing (configurable to have it return) to give maximum viewable area. Notably absent are the OS X style green, yellow, and red Window controls in the top right of every dialog window -- stylized but otherwise standard Minimize, Maximize, and Close buttons are found instead." -- Scratching The Surface "If it wasn't so damn ugly, and made use of more than 2 mouse buttons (no middle button click-to-scroll or back/forward at present), it may be useful. I admit the WebKit is rather snappy at displaying web pages but I can't stand the interface." -- Lizard.boy, Download Squad The final word(s)? "The new version is 3 and really it does what they claim, SPEED. The only problem is I have become so comfortable with Firefox that just speed isn't enough for me to switch." -- Jeremy Jones, Multimedia-PCs.com "It's like software from a different world installed on a Windows-powered computer (much like how Windows users might initially find iTunes)." -- J. Angelo Racoma, J Spot "I've used it for a good 4 hours straight just surfing along a bunch of websites and stuff. It is a lot faster than Firefox, which was my browser of choice, and it is much faster than IE. There are a bit of glitches on it, which is understandable since it is a beta. Once all the features are perfected and the glitches are fixed it'll be a find [sic] browser." -- Jae, Engadget "I'm surprised nobody has said that XP/Vista is making Safari crash ;) After all you know, Apple can do no wrong." -- ssummer, EngadgetADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from over 800 sessions. Register today!

(InfoWorld) - The U.S. government needs to do a better job of supporting and training IT and other workers who have lost jobs to offshore outsourcing, two economists on the opposite side of the offshoring debate said Tuesday. Many other countries have better benefits and retraining programs, Alan Blinder, an economist from Princeton University, told the U.S. House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee. "The U.S. government now offers disgracefully little help for workers who are displaced from their jobs," he said. "I'm talking about stingy unemployment insurance ... the prospect of losing your health insurance, your pension rights, and so on. I can't believe our country can't do better than that." Blinder, who has suggested that 30 million to 40 million U.S. jobs could potentially be replaced by offshoring, found support for stronger worker benefits from Martin Baily, senior academic advisor at the McKinsey Global Institute and a defender of global outsourcing. "We do very little with the training of workers," he said. But the witnesses at the hearing on the impact of offshoring U.S. research and development found little other common ground. Baily suggested the benefits of a global economy to the U.S. far outweigh the downsides. About 80 percent of the available investments in the global economy is coming into the U.S., instead of it flowing outside the country, he said. Globalization has "brought tremendous benefits to the United States," said Baily, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during President Bill Clinton's administration. "It's made the U.S. much more competitive. We've had access to better technology." More than a quarter of the people with doctorate degrees in the U.S. are foreign born, he added. "We're actually benefiting from the education that's being provided to people overseas," he said. The U.S. also benefits from computer hardware and software made overseas, he added. "At some level, we have to embrace the fact that science and technology is a global endeavor," he said. But Blinder and Ralph Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, suggested there are significant downsides to offshore outsources. Under current U.S. policies, there's a "large-scale occupational migration" on the way, and the U.S. government needs to prepare for it, Blinder said. While many U.S. lawmakers support free trade, globalization is different, added Gomory, former senior vice president for science and technology at IBM Corp. Typically, free trade involves countries migrating to create the goods they are most efficient at producing, then trade with other countries that produce other goods, he said. But in globalization, the U.S. is moving much of its important production capability overseas, he added. "When the U.S. trades semiconductors for Asian sneakers ... that is trade," he said. "This type of exchange clearly benefits both countries." But U.S. companies build semiconductor plants in other countries instead of the U.S., that's not free trade, he said. "Neither economic theory nor common sense asserts that shift is automatically good for the United States," Gomory added. Lawmakers said they will consider the testimony as they look at ways to address offshoring. "What we want to do is make sure that companies find that U.S. scientists, engineers and students are the best in the world," said Representative Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat and chairman of the committee. "We want to make sure we enact policies that keep us from having to offshore our future."ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from over 800 sessions. Register today!

(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. is sticking with processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) in a new family of blade