Tech Blog

Category: General Technology

Microsoft pulls plug on MSN direct, maybe on your GPS device, too

Own a GPS device that gets traffic 'over the air?' How about a self-setting watch? Or a desktop weather station? They might stop getting updates in 2012 when Microsoft discontinues its MSN Direct service.

MSN Direct is a technology that utilizes part of the FM radio spectrum to send data to equipped devices. Many units in Garmin's Nuvi series, for example, depend on MSN Direct to get real-time traffic for display or automatic rerouting. Those so-called 'atomic' watches and clocks that never need to be set also frequently use the same service.

Microsoft says the decision was made because the FM-spectrum technology of MSN Direct is largely being superseded others, including WiFi, Cellular, FM RDS and other digital networking systems.

In addition to traffic, other information available through paid channels on MSN Direct includes weather, horoscopes, stocks, news, sports results and calendar notifications.

Microsoft has set up a page to explain what it means to customers of the service.

Don't know if your device uses MSN Direct? You've still got time. But make certain you check the requirements of any information-based device you buy for yourself or others during the upcoming holiday season.

Category: Windows

Did anyone else have any Win 7 issues last night?

Two machines at my house went belly-up Wednesday night -- both of them running Windows 7 -- on the eve of the launch of Microsoft's new operating system.

One was a desktop PC. The other was a Win7 installation in the Boot Camp partition of a Macbook Pro.

I'm reluctant to blame it all on Microsoft, but it seems a little odd to just be coincidental.

I'm still not sure what fubared the Macbook. The way Boot Camp partitions work makes it tough to diagnose. Windows attempts to boot, fails with a quickly-flashed blue screen, the Boot Camp reboots and launches OS X. No amount of repairing seems to fix it. A reinstall is probably necessary.

My desktop PC repeated many of the same symptoms. But it offered a clue. Because it didn't have Boot Camp to contend with, the failed boot and subsequent reboot got stuck at a prompt at which I'd ordinarily be able to select between Win 7 and my old Win Vista installation or to "Set Up Windows."

Since Win 7 was missing as an option, and I didn't want Vista, I chose "Set up." Windows started to boot, then failed with a black screen and a warning that a Microsoft update failed and would have to be reverted.

Okay. I rebooted. That failed, too, with a request to insert my original Windows 7 installation disk. I did, rebooted again, and -- like magic -- Win 7 was back.

My PC is functioning again, but I'm wondering what will happen when the next update installs overnight. We'll find out in the morning. More disconcerting is the fact that my Boot Camp installation appears completely unrecoverable.

I guess, once I'm reinstalled, it's time to test out that new Windows 7 feature that helps you create a back-up disk image of your drive. After my glowing review, I didn't think I'd need it this soon.

Anyone else running the trial of Vista notice anything odd?

Category: iPhone

Tiny Photoshop makes huge impact

Adobe today announced that its Photoshop.com Mobile for iPhone application has been downloaded over 1 million times from Apple's App Store, a milestone reached in less than one week of availability.

Additionally, the application has held the No. 1 position for all "Top Free" applications as well as the "Top Free" application in the Photography category for 10 consecutive days.

If you haven't tried it, and you own an iPhone, it's definitely a 'must have' app. And you can't beat the price.

The app acts as a sort of replacement for the iPhone's built-in camera. You can shoot then immediately any of a handful of one-touch filters to brighten, color-correct, or color-style pictures directly on your iPhone. Sure, it's only a shadow of what the real Photoshop can do, but it's handy for quick fixes, especially when you're shooting and sending pictures on the fly, or applying them as wallpaper.

With a free Photoshop.com account, consumers have access to their entire Photoshop.com image collection directly from their phone, and edited photos can be shared through Photoshop.com or using the iPhone's native sharing features.

For more information, please visit: http://mobile.photoshop.com/iphone.

Category: iPhone

Apple updates iPhone to fix issues. We hope.

The jury is still out on Apple's 3.1.2 update to the iPhone operating system. Many users on the 159-page-long Apple message board thread created after 3.1 screwed up their phones, say they've found success. But there are a few who seem happy because their phone only went into 'coma mode' once since the update.

How sad.

Perusing the thread, you'll find stories from folks whose phones have gone to sleep -- and stayed there -- at inopportune times or, worse, without them having a clue. Like the Australian fellow who never received the call from his wife that his son was being transported to the hospital for an emergency surgery.

Throughout it all, for the last few weeks, Apple has been absolutely silent until this week's update. If I didn't like the iPhone so much, that arrogance -- the kind of thing Justin Long seems to accuse Microsoft of in those commercial, ironically enough -- would drive me to another phone.

I've not tried the 3.1.2 update myself yet. I'm doing some things this weekend that require my phone to work (my old one was replaced at the Apple store with one still equipped with the highly functional 3.0.1 OS -- and it works just fine.

Anybody else give it a go yet? If so, what do you think?

Category: iPhone

Thanks, Apple. My iPhone is now nearly useless

Got an iPhone? Got the 3.1 update? Then you might have troubles. I do.

My expensive cell phone from the fine folks at "It Just Works" Headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., has become as unreliable as -- well -- as the folks in Cupertino would have us believe Windows PCs are. And I'm not alone.

I found a 30-page thread less than a week old on Apple's own message boards in which they refer to it as iPhone "coma mode" -- so called because the phones go to "sleep," but never wake up. Under normal operation, the iPhone blanks its screen after a short period of non-use. If you have any sense of security (or if, like me, you use the phone's Mail app to sync up to your corporate e-mail servers), the phone takes the extra step of locking itself as a predetermined interval of 1 or 5 or 10 or 15 minutes. Pushing the phone's home button is supposed to re-awaken the screen, allowing you to enter your four digit code to unlock it.

But, for a lot of us, that just hasn't worked since we updated our phones from the 3.01 system to 3.1. Instead, we find a phone that just does nothing. I can't tell if it's on or off and no combination of keys will revive it except for one: holding the home and lock buttons down for 10 seconds and forcing a reboot.

I followed this procedure four times Monday after picking up a lifeless iPhone. Then, on Tuesday, after believing I might have solved the problem by turning off all push notifications for third-party apps, I discovered the next glitch: My phone mysteriously went from a nearly fully charged state to nearly dead while sitting unused over the course of about two hours (reminder: notifications were off, so it should have been using less battery, not more).

A search of forums suggested one problem contributing to Coma Mode might stem from that aforementioned predetermined passcode interval. A number of iPhone owners, like me, kept their phones set so they didn't fully lock until a full hour had passed. But the 3.1 update, for reasons I don't know or understand, changed the maximum interval to 15 minutes. Some have theorized that those of us who previously had our phones set to 60 might have a bug stuck in the matrix with the new 15 minute max.

Others are suggesting bad apps as the root cause.

I'm not sure, but I've noted anecdotally that a) my phone didn't misbehave at all during travel on Monday while it spent a good portion of time in Flight Mode. Of course, I also made one other change as a test: I disabled all notifications by third party apps. My personal theory is that there's a bug in there somewhere; that one of the apps is crashing while trying to update itself automatically in the background while the phone is 'asleep,' causing a crash and an unresponsive device.

Anybody else experiencing this? Or have any ideas? So far, Apple seems mum. Of course they rarely admit when they've screwed up, preferring to quietly issue another update and hoping John Hodgman doesn't notice.

Category: Internet

The Net's most notorious 'hits'

The Internet turned 40 today. And, just like a living organism, has had it's share of illnesses. The folks at Symantec have assembled their own Top-10 list of Internet viruses and security threats.

How many of these impacted you?

1. I Love You (2000) - Who wouldn't open an e-mail with "I Love You" in the subject line? Well, that was the problem. By May 2000, 50 million infections of this worm had been reported. The Pentagon, the CIA, and the British Parliament all had to shut down their e-mail systems in order to purge the threat.

2. Conficker (2009) - The Conficker worm has created a secure, worldwide infrastructure for cybercrime. The worm allows its creators to remotely install software on infected machines. What will that software do? We don't know. Most likely the worm will be used to create a botnet that will be rented out to criminals who want to send SPAM, steal IDs and direct users to online scams and phishing sites.

3. Melissa (1999) - Melissa was an exotic dancer and David L. Smith was obsessed with her and also with writing viruses. The virus he named after Melissa and released to the world on March 26th, 1999, kicked off a period of high-profile threats that rocked the Internet between 1999 and 2005.

4. Slammer (2003) - This fast-moving worm managed to temporarily bring much of the Internet to its knees in January of 2003. The threat was so aggressive that it was mistaken by some countries to be an organized attack against them.

5. Nimda (2001) - A mass-mailing worm that uses multiple methods to spread itself, within 22 minutes, Nimda became the Internet's most widespread worm. The name of the virus came from the reversed spelling of "admin."

6. Code Red (2001) - Websites affected by the Code Red worm were defaced by the phrase "Hacked By Chinese!" At its peak, the number of infected hosts reached 359,000.

7. Blaster (2003) - Blaster is a worm that triggered a payload that launched a denial of service attack against windowsupdate.com, which included the message, "billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!"

8. Sasser (2004) - This nasty worm spread by exploiting a vulnerable network port, meaning that it could spread without user intervention. Sasser wreaked havoc on everything from The British Coast Guard to Delta Airlines, which had to cancel some flights after its computers became infected.

9. Storm (2007) - Poor Microsoft, always the popular target. Like Blaster and others before, this worm's payload performed a denial-of-service attack on www.microsoft.com. During Symantec's tests an infected machine was observed sending a burst of almost 1,800 emails in a five-minute period.

10. Morris (1988) - An oldie but a goodie; without Morris the current threat "superstars" wouldn't exist. The Morris worm (or Internet worm) was created with innocent intentions. Robert Morris claims that he wrote the worm in an effort to gauge the size of the Internet. Unfortunately, the worm contained an error that caused it to infect computers multiple times, creating a denial of service.

• Enlarge

Category: Odd stuff

When Photoshopping goes bad

Microsoft is taking heat for a pair of promotional photos found on the net in which an African-American man's head was swapped out for a caucasian's, apparently to tweak the photo for the company's Polish web site.

The photo appeared on the company's U.S. Web site and depicted three businesspeople: one black, one white, and one Asian, as part of a pitch for Microsoft's business productivity software. But when the 'same' photo was also published on the site of Microsoft's Polish subsidiary, a white head was cut-and-pasted over the black man's body. His hand remains unchanged.

Microsoft gave no explanation for the edit, but quickly apologized online and via the company's Twitterfeed after the online buzz began to grow. The photos were to be pulled from the websites, but you can still see them here at Cnet, where screen grabs have been saved and posted.

• Enlarge

Category: mobile telephones

Microsoft and Nokia join forces to develop Office for Symbian smartphones

After launching Bing and signing a search agreement with Yahoo, Microsoft announced an alliance with Nokia during a live teleconference on Wednesday in New York City.

The companies will collaborate to deliver an enterprise version of Microsoft Office for Nokia's Symbian devices and optimize data access for corporate customers using Exchange ActiveSync.

By next year, Nokia hopes to ship Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile on its smartphones, starting with its E-series models. Other features the alliance will develop include mobile-optimized versions of enterprise instant messaging and conferencing with Mobile, access to corporate intranets and extranets based on Microsoft SharePoint Server, and enterprise device management with Microsoft System Center.

According to Kai Oistamo, Nokia's executive vice president for devices, forming an alliance with Microsoft does not mean Nokia will develop a Windows Mobile device.

"There are no such plans," said Oistamo. "This is about combining the best of the mobility world."

Although it looks like Microsoft is reconsidering Windows Mobile, Stephen Elop, Microsoft's business division president, says Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones will still compete with each other and against other handsets in the market, such as Apple's iPhone, RIM's Blackberry and the Palm Pre.

"What we're focused here today is saying, 'We need to take the broad productivity experiences as far as we can, to put it in the hands of many people as possible,' and that's clearly what we're doing with this relationship," said Elop. "I think what it really speaks to is an ongoing pattern at Microsoft where we partner with significant players in the industry. You saw in recent announcements with HP for example, where in some quarters we compete, in other quarters we collaborate. And I think the same is true here."

Microsoft hopes to establish its Mobile Office software as the leading rich office mobile application, which will integrate with Nokia's Symbian operating system and hardware devices.

According to data by Gardner, Nokia has 45 percent of the global smartphone marketshare. Recently Nokia entered an alliance with Intel to work on sharing technologies and collaborate on mobile Internet devices.

"With more than 200 million smartphone customers globally, Nokia is the world's largest smartphone manufacturer and a natural partner for us," said Elop. "Today's announcement will enable us to expand Microsoft Office Mobile to Nokia smartphone owners worldwide and allow them to collaborate on Office documents from anywhere, as part of our strategy to provide the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser."

"It is about creating the best possible tools to accomplish what you want to do, both professionally and privately, and that's how we want to address the market," said Oistamo.

• Enlarge

Category: Operating systems

Google targets Microsoft Windows with Chrome OS

Yep, it's official, sort of. Google really wants to whack Microsoft with its latest salvo to crack open the Windows juggernaut.

On Wednesday, the tech world was buzzing about Google's announcement of Chrome OS, an open source Linux-based operating system. Basically, Chrome OS will use a Linux kernel with its Chrome Web browser as the graphical user interface. It will run on x86 and ARM processors and will be initially available for netbooks, a growing segment of the notebook computer market featuring compact designs and low prices.

By using a browser as the interface, developers can create web-based applications, similar to what the Palm Pre does with its Web OS. And since these programs are based on Web standards, they will also run on regular Web browsers.

Chrome will be released later this year as open source software, and Chrome OS-based netbooks will follow in the second half of 2010. Google is talks with several manufacturers about building these netbooks.

It seems that Google's attempt grab a piece of Microsoft's Windows marketshare seems misguided, but I think this move is logical because Chrome OS will leverage Google's web applications with its investments in bandwidth and servers.

For example, Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar offer online versions that mimic Microsoft's Outlook, Office and Exchange software, respectively. Sure, Google's offerings don't offer as many features as Microsoft's offerings, but most people won't use or care for those extra features. And they work wherever there's a high-speed Internet connection, letting people take their digital life with them.

Also, with Chrome OS, Google is attempting to bring cloud computing to an operating system level. Cloud computing is essentially data and software stored in a "cloud" that allows users to access them wherever they are. Google has lots of bandwidth from years of buying unused dark fiber and lots of custom servers needed to transmit and store cloud data for their Chrome OS users.

However, I think that Google could face a couple of pitfalls with their Chrome OS. Privacy could become an issue. For example, the cloud servers could lose track of users' accounts and accidentally allow users access to other users' files. Earlier this year, some Google Docs users had their documents accidentally shared with other users who didn't receive permission to see those files.

Also, no one's attempted this before, making an operating system completely reliant on a continuous connection to the Internet. What happens if you lose your connection or live in a rural area? After all, high-speed Internet access through Wi-Fi hotspots and 3G cellular access isn't quite everywhere, and dial-up is a joke for Chrome OS.

For Google fans, years of Google PC rumors have finally come true. As long as it doesn't turn into vaporware, a la "Duke Nukem Forever," I think that Microsoft will soon wish Chrome OS had remained a rumor.

• Enlarge

Category: mobile telephones

iPhone app RunPee makes movie bathroom breaks less stressful

You've spent $9 -- or more -- on a movie ticket. Who wants to miss a key plot point just to relieve yourself of the 48-ounce soda you foolishly bought on your way in?

Not the folks at RunPee, who first started a website, and now offer a 99-cent iPhone app to help you figure out which parts of a movie are safe to skip out on.

It's brilliant, I say. I thought the website was a neat idea: You browse in, find the movie you're seeing, and it lists out key plot points along with key non-plot points, letting you know the best times -- in minutes and seconds -- to dart away from the silver screen and off to the porcelain throne.

But I feared that using the site to plan ahead would allow me to see spoilers that might ruin the experience. Worse, I worried that firing up the site on my iPhone's Safari browser in the theater would raise the blood pressure of those sitting around me.

But the iPhone app is well-thought. Its yellow and off-white text on a black background isn't likely to get you tossed (or to get popcorn tossed at you). Like the website, you browse for the movie you're seeing, and you're presented with a series of times (displayed in terms of minutes into the movie) and cues (usually a line delivered by an actor) telling you when it's safe to run and for how long. The app includes a timer for tracking your progress into the film. A planned update not yet implemented can even alert you by vibrating the phone as each potential bathroom break approaches.

Before the iPhone app version of the service, creatore Dan Florio came up with the idea for the website RunPee.com during the 3-hour run time of Peter Jackson's King Kong, where he said he wished someone could have told him when to duck out from the movie and, well...run pee. Since then, Florio has seen a lot of movies, paying closest attention to the parts that are okay to miss. The Global Mail reports, "Florio looks for scenes that can easily be summed up in words "like a long car chase" or (are) simply so unexciting they can be recapped without sacrificing drama."

Oh, and there are other bonuses: If you do miss something, you can read the spoilers while you're in the restroom to keep up with what's happening. And, because the app tracks everything that happens, it'll even let you know when a movie has those extra bonus scenes tucked into or after the closing credits.

Finally, a way to take advantage of movie theater refill policies.