Archive for October, 2011

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This Just In: HP Staying In The Personal PC Business

October 28th, 2011
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Perhaps it’s not a major surprise that Meg Whitman is making a stamp on the future of HP by not acting impulsively, but still, pulling the company’s massive personal computing devision back from the brink is newsworthy in the finest sense of the word. While it’s not quite as jarring as the thought of reviving webOS, HP has today announced that it has completed its evaluation of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) and has decided the unit will remain part of the company.

Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, offered the following comments: “HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees. HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”

Those are bold words. Words that will no doubt be attributed to her for years to come. This marks a monumental day in the direction of HP. After evaluation, HP found that the cost to recreate these in a standalone company outweighed any benefits of separation. It is the No. 1 manufacturer of personal computers in the world with revenues totaling $40.7 billion for fiscal year 2010, so one may wonder why they ever considered busting it out in the first place.

Not like it matters now. Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP, offered the following: “As part of HP, PSG will continue to give customers and partners the advantages of product innovation and global scale across the industry’s broadest portfolio of PCs, workstations and more. We intend to make the leading PC business in the world even better.”

Looks like HP better get those supply channels cranking in the lead-up to the holiday sales season. If they’re in, they might as well be in it to win it.

Source:http://hothardware.com/News/This-Just-In-HP-Staying-In-The-Personal-PC-Business/

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How to Calibrate Your Monitor

October 28th, 2011
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If you’re an avid photographer, you’ve probably shot tons of photos, investing a large chunk of your time and disposable income in a digital SLR camera. And you’ve spent even more time learning the ins and outs of photography, including lighting, composition, and image editing. So why don’t your photos look better than they do?

Maybe it’s your monitor.
Why Should You Calibrate?

Calibrating your PC display is an important step, for one simple reason: You want the colors and black levels to look as accurate as possible. The most obvious benefit of proper calibration is that it ensures the best results when you’re editing or viewing photographs. But accurate colors and black levels also make videos and games look better on your monitor–you’ll be viewing content in the way the content’s creators intended.

In this article, I’ll talk about how you can use Windows 7’s built-in tools to perform a quick calibration. Then I’ll mention a website or two that can aid in calibrating your display. Finally I’ll discuss a low-cost hardware tool, to give you a feel for how you might use something similar to calibrate your monitor.
Consider the Monitor’s Capabilities

Before diving into the minutiae of monitor calibration, I’ll talk a bit about displays themselves. At first blush, it’s a great time to be a computer user: Big, bright displays with very fast response times cost a couple hundred dollars. What’s not to like?

Well, they may not be very good. Most low-cost LCD screens use TN (twisted nematic) technology. The response time of TN displays can be fast, but most of these monitors are limited to a color depth of 6 bits per pixel. With three pixels representing the red, green, and blue primary colors, this means the number of simultaneous colors on screen is limited to 262,144. Such displays simulate higher color depths via dithering–a process that digitally simulates greater color depths than are really available. That’s why, if you’re looking at an image with finely shaded color gradations, you may see color banding.

You really want a monitor with a color resolution of 8 bits per pixel, since such a display is capable of showing over 16 million simultaneous colors. A few monitors capable of 10 bits per pixel are shipping now, too.

Most of the higher-end displays that support 8 bits per pixel use either a version of IPS (in-plane switching) or some flavor of PVA (patterned vertical alignment). Both technologies are more costly to manufacture, but you can find relatively good, 24-inch IPS-based displays for around $400. The point isn’t to focus on the LCD tech as much as it is to pay attention to better color depth.
Set the Color Gamut

You often see higher-end monitors touted as having wide color gamuts. Although many models let you set your color gamut of choice in their on-screen menus (aka on-screen displays), some high-end 30-inch monitors have no built-in video-processing chip. If that’s the case with your monitor, you need to use Windows’ display controls to adjust the color gamut. I’ll give you a closer look at the advanced Windows display control panels shortly.

A good rule of thumb is to set your monitor’s color gamut to match your target output device. If you’re mostly editing photos that go up on websites, good old sRGB works just fine, even though it’s “only” 78 percent of the NTSC color gamut. If your printer is the target device, you may want to set a higher color gamut, depending on the printer model. But then you have to worry about the color settings on the printer. Calibrating for printer output is a whole other topic that requires its own article.

I want to focus on monitor calibration for everyday use and for uploading photos to the Web. I’ll mention calibrating for video in passing, but the assumption is that you’ll view the video on your monitor, rather than burning it to a Blu-ray Disc for playback on an HDTV.

Source:http://www.pcworld.com/article/241957/how_to_calibrate_your_monitor.html

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Intel chips let Web sites check your computer’s ID

October 28th, 2011
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Passwords can be phished, and carrying an extra key fob security device for accessing sensitive sites can be inconvenient. So Intel is putting authentication technology into its chips that will allow Web sites to verify that it’s your PC logging into your online account and not an imposter or thief.

Intel Identity Protection Technology is being added to the chipsets of some Core and Core vPro processor-based PCs from HP, Lenovo, Sony and others, that began shipping to consumers this summer, according to Jennifer Gilburg, marketing director for the authentication technology unit.

This is two-factor authentication, which adds an extra layer of security so that even if your password gets stolen whoever knows your secret code can’t get into your account without offering more identification or proof of account ownership. In two-factor systems, the first part of the equation is what you know–password and username. The second factor is what you have–usually a hardware token, but in this case it’s a token that’s embedded in the chip.
“My three brothers have had e-mail accounts hijacked. My younger brother gets his Facebook account hijacked like once a month,” she said in a recent interview with CNET. “This s a friction-less log in that can’t be hijacked or phished or compromised.”

Here’s how it works. When you visit a Web site that offers this two-factor authentication service you will be asked if you want to use the Identity Protection Technology. If you opt in, you log in with username and password a unique number is assigned to that PC so the site will know it is associated with your account. Thereafter, when you visit that site and type in your username and password an algorithm running on the chipset generates a six-digit code that changes every 30 seconds from the embedded processor that is then validated by the site.

“It’s seamless to the user after set up,” Gilburg said.

The Web site needs to be using technology that works with the Intel chip to enable this two-factor authentication. For example, VeriSign sites use Symantec’s VIP (Validation and Identity Protection) Service technology on their end to communicate with Intel’s chip-level technology on the customer’s computer. Symantec acquired VeriSign’s authentication services unit last year.

Some sites will be rolling the service out over the next few months and they will be using a Javacode-based software, according to Gilburg. She couldn’t say how many sites are now offering the authentication support, but according to a list on Intel’s site they include eBay and PayPal.
“They need to get Amazon, Google, whoever does authentication (on sites) and sells you stuff” on board, said Jack Gold, founder of tech analyst firm J. Gold Associates.

The technology could also be used for activities like downloading songs, he said, adding “It’s basically a way of protecting the user and telling the site at the other end that this really is the legitimate user.”

If you want to use the authentication but you aren’t at your regular computer, some Web sites offer an SMS option in which a code can be sent to a customer’s phone.
The new Intel technology comes at a good time, with stolen passwords and hijacked accounts are becoming commonplace and at a time when traditional hardware token-based systems are running into problems. Earlier this year, there was a serious hacker break-in at RSA that prompted some corporations, government agencies and other organizations to replace their SecurID tokens.

“The RSA breach showed the vulnerability of hardware tokens from a disaster recovery perspective,” Gilburg said. “It took months to remanufacture, reseed (pair codes with tokens and accounts) and reship out the tokens. Here you can revoke and reprovision in minutes.”

The Intel solution is a good one for now, said Charlie Miller, principal research consultant at security firm Accuvant.

“It seems like a pretty natural migration as many security related things are moving from software to hardware to protect them from prying eyes,” he said. “As for drawbacks, there might be a privacy issue, but it’s hard to think how it would be significantly worse than tying a computer to a website via cookies and other current software mechanisms.”

Source:http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20126770-245/intel-chips-let-web-sites-check-your-computers-id/

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Closer to faster computing

October 28th, 2011
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Scientists have overcome a major barrier to quantum computing by getting their different components to chat with one another, just like memory and logic circuits do in existing computers.

Quantum computers are the ones which use the power of atoms to perform memory and processing tasks. They can perform certain calculations faster than the regular computers.

The goal to develop quantum computers to solve problems way beyond the capacity of current ones has egged on scientists to come up with new devices that run these machines.

Many of these tiny devices use particles of light or photons to carry the bits of information that a quantum computer will use, the journal Physical Review Letters reports. However, these tiny devices frequently create photons of such different characters that they cannot share information with one another. A team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has now shown that it is possible to take photons from two disparate sources and merge them while retaining their basic properties.

The breakthrough opens the way to connecting various types of hardware devices into a single quantum platform, according to a NIST statement. The team’s achievement also demonstrates for the first time that a “hybrid” quantum computer might be assembled from different hardware types.

Source:http://main.omanobserver.om/node/70181

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How Computer Hardware Is Tied Up With Climate Change

October 28th, 2011
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An aspect of climate change we’re already beginning to feel is extreme weather situations, from harsher droughts to more dramatic flooding. And when it comes to technology, there’s no more real wake-up call for how interlinked our gadgets are with the weather than when factories are flooded out, as has happened in Thailand as shown in the photo above taken on October 22, 2011. As Thailand struggles with flooding, electronics companies are facing a drought of products.

Thailand has experienced incredible amounts of flooding since July, which has left hundreds dead and billions in damage.

BusinessWeek notes that around 9,850 factories have been flooded, which include factories in the supply chains of companies like Apple and Toyota.

Dvice points out, “Western Digital, Hitachi, Seagate, and Toshiba are all facing direct production issues as a result of the flooding, and even Korean companies such as Samsung are having trouble getting the specific components that they need to build their own drives, like a motor � responsible for spinning the disc in hard disc drives.”

The first priority of concern is the lives of the people in the area. But we are also reminded where our electronics come from — and it’s not just the companies whose names are etched into the cover. Our electronics are made possible by people who are living in areas that are subject to extreme weather conditions that are affected in some part by climate change.

Dvice writes, “Most customers have about two weeks of inventory, and distributors may have an additional two weeks, but beyond that, things are looking gloomy. On Apple’s earnings call this week, CEO Tim Cook said that he’s ‘virtually certain there will be an overall industry shortage of disk drives as a result of the disaster.’

“According to Thailand’s prime minister, the flooding may take up to six weeks to recede, and after that, who knows how long it’s going to be before factories resume production and there’s enough logistical infrastructure back up to get drives and parts out of the country. On top of all that, China’s cuts to rare earth supplies are just going to make everything worse by the time the holiday season rolls around. This isn’t just speculation, either: it’s already getting bad out there.”

Yes, it’s already getting bad out there for electronics companies and people who are trying to buy up the gadgets — but it’s also already getting bad out there for places that face monsoons or seasonal flooding. And for people living in areas with dry seasons that are becoming intense droughts. And for people living along coastlines that are seeing the waves lap farther and farther up the shoreline.

The shortage of electronic devices we’re likely to face through the end of the year and possibly into next year is hopefully a big fat slap in the face to tell us yep, we need to care about the fact that things are changing around the world because it affects all of us in ways we can’t even count.

Source:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/10/how-computer-hardware-is-tied-up-with-climate-change.php

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HP’s Whitman Focuses on Hardware, While Lane Leads Software

October 28th, 2011
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Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman, who scrapped a proposal to spin off the company’s personal-computer unit today, says she has split up operational duties with Executive Chairman Ray Lane.

While Whitman has taken charge of computer hardware and corporate functions, Lane is focused on software and technology services, she said in an interview. That lets the executives “cover more ground,” Whitman said. Lane, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is spending 30 percent of his time working on Hewlett-Packard business, she said.

Whitman and Lane assumed their current duties on Sept. 22 after the ouster of CEO Leo Apotheker, who had proposed the spinoff in August as part of a sweeping overhaul. Following an evaluation, the company found that Hewlett-Packard’s role as the largest PC seller was too valuable to its brand, procurement power and customer relationships.

“If you try to hive a division off, it’s really hard because you almost have to recreate the whole thing,” Whitman said in the interview.

Offloading the division also would have rung up $1.5 billion in one-time expenses and $1 billion a year in ongoing costs because Hewlett-Packard would have had to replicate functions, Whitman said. The spun-off company also would have potentially competed with its parent in servers and other markets, she said.

Compare Notes

When Whitman agreed to become Hewlett-Packard’s CEO in September, it was on the condition that Lane be executive chairman, according to a person close to the company. The two executives compare notes on a daily basis and hold a more detailed meeting once a week, Whitman said today.

Apotheker was ousted a month after announcing the spinoff idea, dogged by a slump that forced him to cut sales forecasts three times in less than a year. He also undermined investors’ confidence with a $10.3 billion agreement to buy software company Autonomy Corp., announced the same day as the PC group review, and by killing the company’s TouchPad tablet computer less than two months after its high-profile debut.

Hewlett-Packard hasn’t given up on tablets, despite the dominance of Apple Inc.’s iPad, Whitman said today. The company is working with Microsoft Corp. to use the pending Windows 8 operating system on tablet computers, and Hewlett-Packard may come back to market with a tablet running its own WebOS software, she said.

“The market was created by Apple,” she said. “That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a strong No. 2 player.”

Source:http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-27/hp-s-whitman-focuses-on-hardware-while-lane-leads-software.html

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IBM launches cloud computing software and packaged hardware configurations

October 27th, 2011
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IBM launched a portfolio of cloud offerings, called IBM SmartCloud, which are designed to simplify the implementation of private cloud services. SmartCloud packages are available to help organizations create Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) services for use on-premise, off-premise or some combination of the two. Let’s look at each of these packages in turn.

IBM SmartCloud Foundation is a set of software products to ease the provisioning, management, and deployment of cloud environments for virtual servers based upon IBM’s System X and Power host systems. The packages include IBM SmartCloud Entry, SmartCloud Provisioning, and SmartCloud Management. The SmartCloud Foundation makes it possible for organizations to allow business units or departments to create their own highly manageable, reliable virtual images or workloads. The SmartCloud tools offer a number of analytical tools for capacity planning and determine the best placement of individual virtual servers to achieve high levels of performance. The tools also offer improved levels of security for virtual resources. With its own Self Service portal and metering, SmartCloud Foundation is robust cloud technology put within easy reach.

IBM SmartCloud Provisioning is an offering designed to help organizations to very quickly provision and scale to a large number of images. This offering supports a broad range of virtual machine software products (hypervisors), servers, storage and networking systems. Tools to assist organizations in converting from one platform to another are also provided. SmartCloud Provisioning enables automated recovery from failures. It also provides the tools for virtual image protection and patching to assure regulatory and business policy compliance

IBM SmartCloud Monitoring is an offering designed to provide a unified management layer for a heterogeneous mixture of hardware and software platforms. The tool also makes it possible for IT and business policies to be monitored to ensure compliance. Predictive analytics are also offered to evaluate trending and historical operational data and then make suggestions on how to optimize the environment.
IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud

Earlier this year, IBM introduced IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud, a set of hardware configurations designed to make it easy for IBM customers and partners to design, acquire and implement their own cloud environments with a high performance, reliable and scalable virtualization platform. It provides an integrated platform for virtualization, including servers, storage, networking, platform management and virtualization management. SmartCloud Entry is a seamless add-on to BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud, that helps clients move quickly from a virtualized to cloud environment.

Three different configurations of the IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud were presented. The idea was to make it easy for small, medium and large organizations to build their own cloud. Each of the configurations come prepackaged in their own rack, include the necessary management server, keyboard, monitor, cables and small-form pluggable fibre channel connectors (SFP).

Let’s look at them separately:

* IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud small configuration – this configuration is priced at roughly $180,000 US and is designed to support up to 150 virtual servers. The configuration includes:
o 4 compute capacity blades
o Redundant 10GbE/8Gb Networking
o Direct connections to LAN/SAN
o Raw Storage Capacity = 7.2 TB
o VMware Enterprise and vCenter licensing
* IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud medium configuration – this configuration is priced at roughly $380,000 US and is designed to support 500+ virtual servers. This configuration includes:
o 14 compute capacity blades
o Redundant 10GbE/8Gb Networking
o Direct connections to LAN/SAN
o Raw Storage Capacity = 29 TB
o VMware Enterprise and vCenter licensing
* IBM BladeCenter Foundation for Cloud large configuration – this configuration is priced at roughly $750,000 US and is designed to support 1000+ virtual servers. This configuration includes:
o 28 compute capacity blades
o Redundant 10GbE/8Gb Networking
o Direct connections to LAN/SAN
o Raw Storage Capacity = 58 TB
o VMware Enterprise and vCenter licensing

Configurations based upon other virtualization products can be expected in the future based upon customer demand.
Snapshot analysis

IBM’s efforts to package all of the hardware and software to create simple, easy-to-use configurations for partners and customers remind me of efforts I was involved with while working at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The goal then as now was to make it easy to configure and purchase pre-tested, supported configurations for specific workloads.

While I was at DEC, the goal was offering pre-packaged Intel/UNIX server configurations to support database, accounting and collaborative workloads. As far as I know, this effort was one of the first to package all of the hardware, software and services to deploy a specific workload. DEC exhaustively tested the configurations and knew that the appropriate amount of memory, storage and networking capacity were included.

IBM appears to be using a similar approach for cloud computing. The software and hardware products have all been pre-packaged and pre-tested to support the type of cloud computing functions customers and partners might need. This approach should assure very quick installation of reliable, supportable configurations.

IBM appears to be on the right track with these software and hardware products.

Source:http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/ibm-launches-cloud-computing-software-and-packaged-hardware-configurations/4005

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