Software business model challenged by SaaS, says Plattner

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1. Software business model challenged by SaaS, says Plattner - 2007-07-04 05:04:39-04
   Remarks by SAP chairman and co-founder Hasso Plattner last week caused a bit of a kerfuffle back at SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Speaking last Tuesday at his own Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Plattner (pictured) said that "delivering software over the Internet would present a critical challenge to traditional business models used by software makers such as SAP who mainly install software for their customers at their premises," according to Reuters. "This model will compete with our current model, and 99 percent of our installations are on site," Plattner said. But by Friday, Plattner was backpedaling rapidly to explain that, while the SaaS model might make inroads into SAP's licensed software base, SAP's own SaaS offering A1S won't partake...
   
2. All that AMD is left with is spinning the numbers - 2007-07-04 07:25:49-04
   AMD is so broken that all it has left in the battle against Intel is marketing spin.  What's AMD going to try to sell me next? A special secret sauce to boost Barcelona performance to that being claimed in the benchmark results? Or maybe some magic beans??I used to feel sorry for AMD.  The company pretty much came from nowhere to become a powerful force in the processor market.  A series of poor management decisions and a prolonged price war with Intel left the company battered and bruised.  But over the past 12 months I've seen AMD slip from being a company that walked its talk when it came to ethics into one using tactics that are so underhanded as to be deplorable....
   
3. Let your iPhone run wild and free ... free of AT&T that is - 2007-07-04 07:37:30-04
   Jon Lech Johansen (aka "DVD Jon") has done it again.  Once again he's sticking it to the man and come up with a way to activate an iPhone without having to sign up with AT&T. I've found a way to activate a brand new unactivated iPhone without giving any of your money or personal information to AT&T NSA. The iPhone does not have phone capability, but the iPod and WiFi work. Stay tuned! In order to be able to pull off this stunt you'll need to download his special iPhone Activation Server Software.  But he's not made it simple for those wanting to break free of AT&T's grip - you need to be able to make sense of the magic numbers!...
   
4. iPhone - Beyond the iHype - 2007-07-04 07:41:05-04
   Here's pretty much everything you need to know about the iPhone launch ... Out of a batch of 3 million units, an estimated 500,000 - 700,000 have been sold. Polls seem to suggest that people are going for the 8GB version over the 4GB. The main problem early adopters seemed to have had is activating the iPhone.  For some this process took longer than 24 hours. A six-hour AT&T network crash on Monday didn't help things. Sporadic crashing/lock-ups also seem to be an issue discussed in length on the Apple support forum. Check your iPhone for dead pixels - I've seen numerous reports over the past couple of days from customers who have discovered a number of dead screen pixels.  If your...
   
5. Second Life: avatar sued for copyright infringement - 2007-07-04 10:32:37-04
   When Second Life's makers, Linden Lab, made the decision to allow users to retain all intellectual property rights for virtual items that they created, it was always likely that the virtual world would someday be dragged into court. And that's exactly what's set to happen. As Reuters reports: Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman filed a copyright infringement lawsuit on Tuesday against Second Life resident Volkov Catteneo, and Alderman's lawyer said he plans to subpoena Linden Lab to force it to disclose Catteneo's real-world identity. Catteneo's operator is accused of selling copies of a virtual sex bed, without the permission of the copyright holder, Alderman. However, the first thing Alderman's legal team have to achieve is persuading the court to force...
   
6. HortiBot, a weed-removing robot - 2007-07-04 13:18:32-04
   According to the Ludington Daily News, Michigan, Danish agricultural engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds. The Hortibot is about 3-foot-by-3-foot, is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS). It can recognize 25 different kinds of weeds and eliminate them by using its weed-removing attachments. It's also very environmentally friendly because it can reduce herbicide usage by 75 percent. But so far, it's only a prototype and the Danish engineers need to find a manufacturer for distribution. You can see above an illustration showing how the synergy obtained by combining the commercial remote controlled robot named Spider with the autonomous AgRobot research platform from Aarhus University, Denmark. On the right, you can see the Spider mounted with...
   
7. News to Know: AMD benchmarks, iPhone hacking, SAP's new day - 2007-07-04 13:23:24-04
   NEWS TO KNOW on a slow news day George Ou: AMD posts blatantly deceptive benchmarks on Barcelona Jon Lech Johansen: iPhone Independence Day Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: Let your iPhone run wild and free … free of AT&T that is Photo Gallery: Cracking open the iPhone...and putting it back together again GigaOm: Why AT&T should offer free Wi-Fi BBC: Gadgets 'threaten energy savings' TechDirt: Is It Copyright Infringement To Embed An Infringing YouTube Video On Your Blog? Greg Sandoval: Craigslist grapples with competitor on board Paul Kedrosky: eBay back to punching itself in the head Phil Wainewright: Software business model challenged by SaaS, says SAP's Plattner Charlie Cooper: If you're Steve Ballmer, don't read this Steve O'Hear: Second Life: Avatar sued for...
   
8. Nokia E90 Communicator available for ordering on Dell.com - 2007-07-04 13:53:02-04
   I am still testing out the Apple iPhone, but I am also discovering that it is basically a feature phone with iPod functionality that is missing basic phone functions and many smartphone functions. Granted it isn't really designed for power users like me, but the dang interface keeps drawing me in. There is another device that I have been seriously thinking about that I just discovered is available from Dell and that is the Nokia E90 Communicator. The listed price is just under US$900 and after adding it to my cart and seeing I have to pay tax the total is just under US$1,000. I am thinking of selling off my E61i to offset the cost and may go for...
   
9. HTC Omni looks like one slick Windows Mobile device - 2007-07-04 14:30:55-04
   Apple has done a good job with the design and usability on the Apple iPhone, but they are not the only player in town and HTC makes the best Windows Mobile devices on the market. They are also quite innovative as seen with the HTC Touch and other devices. After checking out jkOnTheRun and following the link to Unwired View I have to say the HTC Omni looks like another slick device. It looks like a competitor to the Nokia E90 Communicator and we may see it launching in October. Credit: Unwired View.com Specs for the rumored HTC Omni include Windows Mobile 6, UMTS/HSDPA connectivity, WVGA 4 inch 800x480 pixel display and outside display, TV and VGA out, 256MB ROM,...
   
10. iPhone tip: working with tasks - 2007-07-04 15:35:53-04
    Like many GTD and productivity oriented folks, I've been looking at web-based solutions (TaDa List is looking most promising so far) but I've become very fond of iGTD and am not prepared to completely overhaul my entire workflow just yet. In poking around today, I found a good short-term workaround. Drag any task in iCal (which iGTD syncs beautifully with) to the calendar and make it an all day event. Sync to the iPhone and your tasks are now accessible in the iPhone Calendar. You lose the categorization iCal/iGTD makes available as the iPhone doesn't do the multiple calendar thing but it's workable in a manual sort of way.
    
11. As goes Ohio, so goes the country - 2007-07-04 21:19:42-04
    * Ryan Naraine is on vacation. Guest Editorial by Paul F. Roberts What do 225,000 Ohio taxpayers, 64,000 state employees and 600 lucky holders of winning lottery tickets have in common? They were all unlucky enough to have some of their personal information -- names, social security numbers, and bank account numbers -- stored on a "data backup device" in the back seat of 22 year old Jared Ilovar's Chevy Cobalt, on the evening of June 10th. An unidentified passerby noticed the tape (and Mr. Ilovar's radar detector), and decided to help him or herself to both. The news from Ohio was depressingly similar to prior data leak mishaps: the misplaced storage device -- magnetic tape, CD, DVD or laptop...
    
12. The dark side of search engines - 2007-07-04 23:33:56-04
    Ryan Naraine is on vacation. Guest Editorial by Roger Thompson As a malware researcher, I spend the majority of my days days studying the dark side of the web, (is that a good job or what?), and one of the most interesting things I get to see are the weird, and sometimes wonderful, search engine queries that result in dangerous Web sites. Most people probably think that as long as they don't visit Web sites of ill-repute, they'll be quite safe, but that's not quite true. Yes, it's undoubtedly dangerous to walk on the virtual wild side, but we've noticed a disturbing trend towards hacking innocent websites, and turning them into unwitting lures for the exploit servers. The first important...
    
13. HP vs. Compaq: the 100,000 foot financial view - 2007-07-05 03:15:39-04
    Here are three extracts from a September 4th, 2001 New York Times story about HP's plan to acquire Compaq: Investors in both Compaq and Hewlett-Packard have suffered in the current decline in technology stocks, although Compaq's woes have taken a greater toll. That stock is down 76 percent from its peak, reached in early 1999, while Hewlett-Packard is off 66 percent from its peak, reached last summer. Combined, the company will have about 145,000 employees, after layoffs announced earlier this year are completed -- 8,500 jobs at Compaq and 9,000 jobs at Hewlett-Packard. Further reductions seem likely, as the companies said that they expected annual cost savings of $2.5 billion by the middle of their fiscal year in 2004. In...
    
14. Catbird secures virtualized environments - 2007-07-05 06:00:22-04
    A short while ago, I had a wonderful conversation with Edmundo Costa, CEO, and Tamra Newberger, VP of marketing, of Catbird , about a new product they were launching. Since I've spoken with them many times in the past when they were associated with Tarantella and the Santa Cruz Operation, it was a chance to catch up with old friends as well as an opportunity to see the first entry in what might be a new product category, a security solution for virtualized networks. Quick summary of Catbird's V-agent Here's how Catbird describes their new product V-agent™: The new Catbird V-Agent™ delivers broad hacker protection to virtual networks - for the first time enabling rogue virtual-device monitoring; Intrusion Prevention Systems...
    
15. Open source security arrives with Untangle - 2007-07-05 08:14:49-04
    A few months after launching this blog I asked why there was no open source security. Now there is. Untangle has released its network gateway under GPVv2. CEO (and blogger)  Bob Walters compares his product to SONICwall and Watchguard, saying "we'll sell services and premium products on top of it." Load the software onto an unused server and you have the 14 applications security experts crave, everything from anti-virus and intrusion detection to anti-spam, anti-phish, and VPN applications. "For the FOSS players we snapshotted the signature base as of last Tuesday and that's free," Walters said. "You can also incorporate open source signature bases as they come up, running our scripts." Even with paid updates on signatures and code we're talking here...
    
16. The iPhone might never be free of AT&T - 2007-07-05 08:16:53-04
    I've been taking a look around the web at the efforts by hackers to free the iPhone from the AT&T shackles so that it could be used as an iPod or with other network providers, both in the US and abroad.  I've come to the conclusion that while it might be possible to unlock the iPhone, it'll never be truly free of AT&T.  Here's why. For each new AT&T customer that signs up, Apple gets a cut. It's the gift that keeps on giving.The iPhone has changed how cellphones are sold, and when you look closely at the implications of this change, you'll see that it's not for the better.  So far the model that we've seen is that the...
    
17. Let users virtualize Vista because hypervisor rootkits are no threat - 2007-07-05 08:47:10-04
    * Ryan Naraine is on vacation. Guest editorial by Thomas Ptacek Several weeks ago, reports surfaced that the threat of super-sophisticated "hypervisor malware" was preventing Microsoft from allowing their Windows Vista Home Edition operating system from running within virtualization software. Now, Microsoft may have a lot of good reasons for restricting Vista virtualization. But hypervisor malware shouldn't be one of them, and at this year's Black Hat security conference, a team of researchers including myself, Nate Lawson from Root Labs, and Peter Ferrie from Symantec will take the stage to prove it. Some back story is in order. At last year's Black Hat conference, security researcher Joanna Rutkowska made a splash with "Blue Pill", a prototype rootkit (.pdf) that "invisibly"...
    
18. How will open source do in a talent-short age? - 2007-07-05 08:51:34-04
    We're not partying like it's 1999, but a Deloitte survey of CEOs finds that there is a growing shortage of technology talent, and some companies are trying to accommodate programmers' needs again, rather than try to squeeze them into penguin suits. How will open source do in this new environment? Very well, I think. (The picture is from a Deloitte study on talent shortages in life sciences.) Open source brings resources to a talent-short business that no closed system can. All that code, for instance. An open source programmer can also collaborate with others, outside the company, to solve problems. You're no longer just dependent on your own staff for answers. If you lose a talented programmer, their replacement is no...
    
19. Creative charging $9.99 for Vista drivers? - 2007-07-05 09:02:26-04
    From the "that's gotta be a dumb PR move" files, Creative Labs decides to try to charge $9.99 for Vista compatible drivers for the Audigy range of sound cards. No, this isn't April 1st and I kid you not.  Creative really does think that people are going to pay money for a driver.  Understandably, Creative customers are getting emotional over this.  Destroying your reputation over $9.99 ... bad move. This charging money for drivers game is getting real old.  Any company that tries to pull this kind of stunt is underhandedly double dipping customers.  There's no excuse for it.  I for one won't be buying any more Creative Labs gear until they get the message that providing drivers is a service that...
    
20. Can ISPs police illegal P2P downloads? - 2007-07-05 09:41:54-04
    A Belgium court ruled that ISPs have to take steps to thwart peer-to-peer networks and piracy. Good luck delivering on that one. The ruling could be significant since it sets a precedent in the European Union, but there are a few nuts and bolts to figure out on the technology side. How exactly will an ISP turn these P2P networks off? How many customers will be alienated? And TorrentFreak raises the biggest question of all: How will an ISP determine a legal packet of data from one that infringes on a copyright? I don't have the answers ready, but that's OK--rest assured the Belgium court doesn't either. It's presently unclear how this ISP (Scarlet) is going to conform to...