There, he said it. Microsoft is interested in making money. That’s what CEO Steve Ballmer said in reference to Microsoft’s motivation in the mobile space. Google and Nokia, on the other hand? Who knows what their goal is with all their not charging people for mobile operating systems, Ballmer said.

Microsoft plans to continue charging licensing fees from handset makers for using its mobile operating system and not follow the free offerings of Google and Nokia, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday.

The pressure on Microsoft’s high licensing fees has increased over 2008 with Google rolling out free Android technology and Nokia offering to buy out others from Symbian and also make its software royalty-free.

“We do,” Ballmer told Reuters, when asked whether his firm would stick with licensing fees. “We are doing well, we believe in the value of what we are doing.”

Who Benefits?

“It’s interesting to ask why would Google or Nokia, Google in particular, why would they invest a lot of money and try to do a really good job if they make no money. I think most operators and telecom companies are skeptical about Google,” he said.

Google tries to promote Web surfing on phones and the use of their services such as e-mail and search so they make advertising revenue.

“In the case of Nokia — are they really open sourcing, or are they really making Symbian their own operating system? We have to wait and see,” Ballmer said in an interview.

Motivated by Money

Microsoft’s market share in smartphone operating systems has stayed at about 10 percent for several years, despite the U.S. technology giant’s efforts to win more.

Microsoft charges US$8 to $15 per phone, according to Strategy Analytics.

“Handset makers are skeptical of Nokia, operators are skeptical of Google, I think by actually charging money people know exactly what our motivations are,” Ballmer said.

Not Into Hardware

He said there was no reason to expect Microsoft to enter the mobile phone making business, like some analysts foresee.

“I do not anticipate us building a phone. Sorry, we are not going build one,” Ballmer said.

Source: Tech News World

Firm urges two IT budgets: one based on execs’ guidelines, another for growth should the economy improve

IT spending is faring better than the overall economy, and the sector “will avoid a recession in 2008,” according to Gartner Inc. But in a report sent to clients this week, the analyst firm said it believes IT budgets will show “very low year-over-year growth rates until business growth significantly improves.”

Gartner and Forrester Research Inc. do not see tech spending traveling into negative territory, but the word “slow” and “slowdown” is used often enough in their reports to get the message across about what’s ahead. Forrester released its forecast last week.

Gartner is nonetheless advising clients to hedge a little and not assume that the economy won’t improve next year. It’s recommending that IT managers prepare two budgets: one “based on guidelines and directions of senior executives,” and another “growth budget for 2009 in the event that healthier economic growth rates begin to return next year.”

Gartner said that overall U.S. economic growth and IT growth are moving at two different speeds and that the tech industry may be “even more resilient than we had originally imagined.”

In the Gartner report, analysts Ken McGee and Mark McDonald cite government data, results of a survey of about 1,000 CIOs, and recent quarterly reports from top vendors to reaffirm an assessment made earlier this year that IT spending won’t turn negative. Tech stocks have taken a beating on Wall Street but have recovered some this week.

Gartner noted in the report that after the last recession, U.S. IT budgets grew slowly. But it said that “executives should not blindly follow history and automatically cut IT costs in 2009 until they are certain that IT’s current counter economic-trend performance isn’t being contributed to, in part, by their competitors.”

In a Sept. 24 report, Forrester said technology purchases were stronger in the first half of 2008 than its projections, but that it was cautious nonetheless. “The U.S. recession and the resulting tech market slowdown have only been delayed, not cancelled,” the report said.

Forrester projects a slowdown in tech purchases in the remainder of this year and that the trend will carry into the first half of 2009. But it has now raised its forecast in 2008 growth in the purchases of IT goods and services by business and government to 5.4%, compared with its May forecast of 3.4%. But it has lowered its projected growth rate of 10% for next year to 6.1%. Forrester noted that software and outsourcing are two strong areas.

The Forrester report’s author, analyst Andrew Bartels, said with regard to financial firms, he expects 10% cuts at most in IT where firms have been acquired or merged. In the case of the bankrupt firms whose assets where purchased, the IT reductions could be as much as 20% to 30%, he said.

Source: Computer World

Oracle is adding to its retail software lineup by acquiring Advanced Visual Technology, a maker of 3D space planning software for retailers.

AVT, based in Hertfordshire, England, sells a product called Retail Focus, which lets retailers plan store floors and shelf space. An add-on product, called Retail Focus Merchandiser, gives retail planners a three-dimensional view of retail space that they can “walk” through virtually.

No terms were disclosed. Oracle said the transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2008.

Oracle plans to add AVT’s employees and management to its Retail Global business unit. AVT’s products will be combined with Oracle Retail’s application suite. The company said it expects the combination will help retailers to increase their profits through better space allocation and monitoring of sales.

Source: CNET

Breaking with its preferred business model, Apple has released an unlocked version of the iPhone 3G in Hong Kong, allowing users to pick their preferred carrier.

The phones will go on sale in Hong Kong at prices of $695 for the 8GB model and $798 for the 16GB version. If those numbers look strikingly high, it’s only because Apple’s business plan has been to pair the iPhone 3G with a carrier in a given market–for instance, AT&T Mobility in the United States–which subsidizes the cost of the phone because customers are required to sign a service contract and pay for data plans.

Previously, the iPhone was only available in Hong Kong paired with a two-year service contract from Hutchinson, and included a $188 monthly fee.  Now customers will be able to put their old SIM card into the iPhone and activate it in iTunes. It’s not clear whether this gamble will pay off, though it could put more pressure on Apple to unlock the phones in other markets.   

Source: FierceWireless

Microsoft on Monday announced its latest software release, Windows HPC Server, at the 2008 High Performance on Wall Street Conference in New York. The application, aimed at industries like financial services, marks Microsoft’s latest entry into the high-performance computing (HPC) market.

The announcement comes in the wake of news last week that supercomputer manufacturer Cray and Microsoft have teamed to offer a deskside-sized supercomputer for less than US$60,000. Those machines will come preloaded with Windows HPC Server 2008.

HPCs on Deck

HPC Server 2008 picks up for Microsoft where Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) left off. CCS was the first HPC cluster technology offering from the company, designed to enable businesses to deploy multiple computers in a high-performance compute cluster in order to achieve supercomputing speeds.

Based on Windows Server 2008, HPC offers administrators simplified deployment and improved productivity of systems administration and cluster interoperability. The software will also speed application development through its integration with Visual Studio 2008.

It also supports standard interfaces, including OpenMP, multiprocessor interconnect (MPI) and Web services, along with third-party numerical library providers, performance  optimizers, compilers and debugging toolkits.

How Super, Really?

The term “supercomputer” has lost a great deal of its power lately since most “high-performance computing” is done with clusters of small computers that can be indistinguishable from those running non-HPC workloads, explained Gordon Haff, an Illuminata analyst.

“Microsoft and Windows have limited presence in ‘classic’ HPC — large pools of systems in academia or national research labs,” he told TechNewsWorld.

That said, however, more and more HPC workloads are being run in regular companies that design and build products, Haff continued.

“These are mostly smaller installations than you find at a Los Alamos [National Laboratory], but they’re still huge computing resources by historic standards,” he noted.

As Microsoft owns some 90 percent of the traditional desktop computing environment and offers users as well as developers a high level of familiarity, its push into the HPC market should start with those facilities, he said.

“Whether for reasons of familiarity, developer tools, or software compatibility, these sorts of sites are often more amenable to Windows than is the case elsewhere,” Haff concluded.

Source: TechNewsWorld

Scientists expect startup glitches in the massive, complex machines they use to smash atoms.

But the unique qualities of the world’s largest particle collider mean that the meltdown of a small electrical connection could delay its groundbreaking research until next year, scientists said Sunday.

Because the Large Hadron Collider operates at near absolute zero — colder than outer space — the damaged area must be warmed to a temperature where humans can work. That takes about a month. Then it has to be re-chilled for another month.

As a result, the equipment may not be running again before the planned shutdown of the equipment for the winter to reduce electricity costs. That means Friday’s meltdown could end up putting off high-energy collisions of particles — the machine’s ultimate objective — until 2009.

“Hopefully we’ll come online and go quickly to full energy a few months into 2009 so in the long term, this may not end up being such a large delay in the physics program,” Seth Zenz, a graduate student from the University of California, wrote on the site of the U.S. physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

“It’s obviously a short-term disappointment, though, and a lost opportunity,” he wrote.

CERN spokesman James Gillies said the repair operation will last until close to the usual winter shutdown time at the end of November. There has been some discussion that the new equipment could operate through the winter, but no decision has been made, he said.

The melting of the wire connecting two magnets Friday would have taken only a couple of days to repair on smaller, room-temperature accelerators that have been in use for decades, Gillies said.

Gillies said particle accelerators using superconducting equipment at Fermilab outside Chicago and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state had similar problems starting up, but have been operating smoothly since then.

“Once they settled in they seem to be pretty stable,” Gillies said.

At the Sept. 10 launch of the collider, beams of protons from the nuclei of atoms were fired first at the speed of light in a clockwise direction though a fire-hose-sized tube in the tunnel. Then proton beams were fired in the counterclockwise tube.

Jos Engelen, CERN’s chief scientific officer and deputy director-general, said the startup showed that the LHC can handle complex operations.

“We have encountered a weakness in one particular connection during very final hardware commissioning,” Engelen told The Associated Press by e-mail. “It is tough, but it can happen. We will make the repair and resume the very successful operation of the accelerator.”

A transformer failed outside the cold zone about 36 hours after the collider’s launch. That was repaired and the machine was ready again a week after it was shut down.

But the goal of the LHC — shattering protons to reveal more about how the tiniest particles were first created — was still weeks away because the equipment has to be gradually brought to the higher energies possible at full power.

“This was the last circuit of the LHC to be tested at high current before operations,” Gillies said. “There are an awful lot of these connections between wires in the machine. They all have to be very well done so that they don’t stop superconducting, and what appears to have happened is that this connection stopped being superconducting.”

Superconductivity — the ability to conduct electricity without any resistance in some metals at low temperatures_ allows for much greater efficiency in operating the electromagnets that guide the proton beams.

Without the superconducting, resistance builds up in the wires, causing them to overheat, he explained.

“That’s what we think happened,” Gillies said. “This piece of wire heated up, melted, and that led to a mechanical failure.”

Gillies said experts have already gone down into the 27-kilometer (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border to inspect the damage.

“By Monday I suspect we’ll know more,” he said.

Gillies said there is plenty for scientists at CERN to do between now and the startup of experiments, including studying cosmic rays that pass through collider’s massive detectors.

Source: Associated Press

Apple is recalling the USB power adapters sold with the iPhone 3G in North America and Japan amid concerns they are prone to breaking.

The company announced the Apple Ultracompact USB Power Adapter Exchange Program Friday, which applies to iPhone 3G owners who bought the device in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Japan, and selected countries in South America. Apple included a USB power block, shown at right, inside the box for the iPhone 3G in these countries, and the company has received reports that the prongs on that power block can break off and remain inside your wall socket, which is not good. The power adapters sold with the original iPhone as well as the ones sold in other countries are not included in this recall.

No injuries have been reported, but Apple is warning users of those power adapters to stop using them immediately until they obtain a redesigned adapter. Check the bottom of your adapter: if there’s a green dot, you’ve got the redesigned one and don’t need to do anything. If there’s no dot, it’s time to replace that unit.

You can get a replacement unit at your local Apple store starting October 10, or you can order one from Apple’s Web site here.

Source: CNET

What your parents told you about taking candy from strangers applies to iPhone games as well. iPhone owners should be wary of e-mails purporting to feature a free game for the mobile device. What’s attached to that e-mail isn’t a game — it’s a Trojan. However, it won’t infect your iPhone, or even your Mac. The Trojan targets Windows PCs. It does nothing to the iPhone; it only uses the device’s popularity as bait.

Security firm Sophos issued a warning Thursday about e-mails purportedly offering free iPhone games. The missives profess to feature a free game for the smartphone, but the only thing those who download the attachment receive is malware designed to infect PCs running Windows.

In the subject line, the hackers tout the file as “Virtual iPhone games!” or “Apple: The most popular game!”, “Virtual iPhone toys!” and appeal to users to “Take a break!” or to “Beet (sic) my score! (7000 points).” However, the attached file, Troj/Agent-HNY, is a Trojan.

“It’s a regular Trojan horse, spammed out via e-mail attachments. If you run it on your Windows PC it installs itself and tries to download further malware from the Net. Unlike some other Trojans it doesn’t waste time with a celebrity theme or pretending to be a breaking news story — instead it pretends to be a hot game for the Apple  iPhone,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, told MacNewsWorld.

Infection Via iPhone

It’s important to note that the malware does not infect the iPhone itself. Rather, it infects Windows PCs when the user downloads the attachment while checking e-mail on a computer, presumably expecting to load the game onto an iPhone after connecting the handheld to the PC. Sophos is not aware of any versions that will run on the Mac OS X operating system, the iPhone or other mobile devices.

“Why not Mac? Probably because the hackers believe they can be successful just infecting Windows — which is, after all, what most malware authors concentrate on. There’s no technical reason why they couldn’t write a Mac version too — but they clearly don’t think it’s worth the effort,” said Cluley.

“The hackers are using an iPhone-related disguise in the hope that people will be tempted into running the program,” he explained.

Perils of the Web

Although this latest Trojan does not execute on iPhones themselves, it uses the broad familiarity of the iPhone as bait, again underscoring hackers’ proclivity to lure in victims using whatever will attract popular recognition, be it a hot phone or a scandalous fake video of a political candidate.

Popularity also rules when targeting platforms to infect — they regularly set their sites on market-dominant Windows PCs. However, as smartphones become more popular, more sophisticated and more able to surf the “real” Web, the danger of cybercriminals manufacturing malware for them increases.

“The biggest weakness of the cell phone has been the inability to access the ‘real Web,’ cloistered instead in the mobile Web, having little functionality. The second problem has been the fragmentation of the technology, with hundreds of real-time operating systems. Those weaknesses, however, were the very things that made cell phones so unattractive to hackers,” David Chamberlain, an In-Stat analyst told MacNewsWorld.

“There will definitely be more interest by the bad guys, though, as more people use cell phones to access the real Web, and more smartphones — with their common operating systems — will be in use. That weakness, however, has prevented the bad guys from showing much interest in cell phones,” he continued.

In-Stat expects the number of smartphones in use to increase more than 50 percent over the next five years. The research firm calculates that more than 200 million smartphones will be sold in 2012 alone, an increase of over 40 percent from 2008. That will make the devices an appealing target for hackers.

“Viral attacks on operating systems is nothing new. We’ve seen it on other operating systems, whether it be Symbian, Windows Mobile — which gets it all the time — and Blackberry, so this is not new. We are not facing a brand-new threat,” Ramon Llamas, an IDC analyst, told MacNewsWorld.

In some ways, the standardization of phone operating systems is a hacker’s dream, explained Chamberlain.

“Think about it: For years, we’ve been hearing, ‘There are no Apple viruses because there aren’t enough Apple computers to make it worthwhile for the hackers.’ Cell phones have been incredibly fragmented with hundreds of different proprietary real-time operating systems. Somebody would have to write 100 or more variants to infect all of them. You get a big population of a single operating system, and you’ve got a target,” he added.

What’s In It for the Criminal

One possible reward for cybercriminals able to distribute such malware: The e-mail addresses stored on the handsets, according to Chamberlain.

“This malware is largely a way to steal live e-mail addresses and turn the computer into an outlet for spam messages. In that regard, perhaps they’re looking for access to other phone numbers and e-mail addresses to use for spam. The other things might be for personal information such as bank accounts and passwords and other financial rip-offs,” he pointed out.

However, smartphone-targeting criminals may also go after something other than lucre: good, old-fashioned bragging rights. If a hacker developed a viable bit of malware for the iPhone and released it into the wild where it was able to infect many of the devices, that person would also have substantial street cred within the hacker community, according to Llamas.

“A lot of it is the thrill of being able to say ‘I took down or crippled or put a virus out there and it caused mayhem and destruction.’ There really is no financial or monetary gain. There is notoriety, but that doesn’t translate into the dollars. It is the thrill of causing problems for someone else,” he posited.

Beyond that, putting out this sort of malicious software could be an effort to test the support system surrounding a device, Chamberlain noted.

“Perhaps [the] infection is only the opening volley. You make an inconsequential attack and wait to see what the response is. If the good guys spot it and react, you know you need to find another way in. This almost makes you wonder what else might be on your iPhone that hasn’t been detected,” he theorized.

Microsoft’s big-budget effort to battle more than two years of Windows-bashing ads from rival Apple took a new turn Thursday.

After two weeks of three teaser ads “about nothing” featuring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and comic Jerry Seinfeld, the company launched a new TV ad that directly addresses the long-running Apple campaign that personifies its Mac as a young, hip guy and a Windows PC as a clueless geek.

The commercial opens with a real Microsoft software designer who looks like the PC character — and is dressed to match: “Hello, I’m a PC,” he says, “and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”

The ad then cuts to a series of upbeat “I’m a PC” testimonial clips of PC users doing what they do, including a shark-cage diver, a fishmonger, a fashion designer and celebrities such as actress Eva Longoria.

Microsoft employees and founder Bill Gates also appear to declare themselves “a PC.”

That ad and others to come will showcase the “diversity” of Windows users, says David Webster, Microsoft general manager of brand and marketing strategy.

“Our competition would have you think that PCs aren’t interesting and interesting people don’t use them,” he says. Microsoft had “to take back the PC brand and tell the truth about it.”

Webster says he’s not worried about reinforcing a negative image by mimicking a character and tagline created by its nemesis. “The overwhelming bulk of the ad” showcases a wide range of personalities, he says.

Other elements will include print, outdoor and online ads.

Microsoft also will tap “consumer-generated content.” Starting Thursday night, PC fans could upload “I’m a PC” testimonials, including photos and videos, at Windows.com. Microsoft will use select images on a Times Square video billboard, feature them in online banner ads and post them on Windows.com.

The new ads come two weeks after Microsoft launched the offbeat teasers with the unlikely pairing of Gates with Seinfeld. The TV spots — which have no clear plotline or overt Windows branding — showed them living with a suburban family and shopping at a discount shoe store. Those ads were meant to be an “icebreaker,” Webster says.

But mixed reviews from bloggers and ad pros stoked Web rumors Thursday that the new ads meant Seinfeld had been fired.

That speculation is completely off-base, says Webster. “We needed to move on and start to talk about Windows,” he says. “We’re ready for chapter two.”

They “don’t have any plans” now for more Seinfeld ads, but Webster wouldn’t rule out it out. “Down the road, it wouldn’t surprise me. … He really hit it off with Bill (Gates.)”

Souce: USA Today