BT Vision throws Microsoft Mediaroom under a bus for Linux
UK hybrid TV service BT Vision plans to be the first customer to discard Microsoft's Mediaroom software, almost imminently, after at least a year-long effort to put in completely new software building blocks to rejuvenate the service.
BT controversially refused to launch a fully-fledged IPTV service when it finally got Vision out of the door in 2006, instead insisting that competing with a free-to-air digital terrestrial Freeview system, based on DVB-T, was pointless, and offered instead a system which merely used IPTV for the VoD delivery and also accepted the Freeview DVB-T linear broadcasts.
The BT Vision launch relied on consumer research from the 1990s when BT wanted to introduce a movies-only VoD system, but was initially prevented due to its communications dominance at the time. So as the rest of Europe introduced full multicast IPTV, BT went ahead with this hybrid, but bizarrely chose Mediaroom set-top boxes and software, whose real strength was in multicast. Later it began using the MPX content management system from ThePlatform, a US subsidiary of Comcast, but retained the Mediaroom set tops. Read more...
Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 DNA splice is on – report
Windows 8 and Microsoft's next major phone operating system will merge, if reports are correct.
Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo, will reuse code from Windows 8, due this year - specifically the kernel, network stacks, security and multi media. That means Windows Phone 8 will ditch the current Windows Phone 7.5 core that uses Windows Embedded Compact.
The report, here, is based on a supposed leaked Microsoft video featuring Windows Phone manager Joe Belifore. The presentation was intended for partners of Microsoft's phone BFF Nokia. The video was not posted. Read more...
H-1B workers are better paid, more educated, study finds
H-1B workers are better educated than U.S. born workers and earn more, according to a new study by an independent research group.
The report by two economists at the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, also found that, on average, H-1B workers are about 10 years younger than U.S. born workers.
The report's findings concerning pay indirectly challenge beliefs about the H-1B program held by backers like Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve.
In a recent column in the Financial Times, Greenspan argued that restrictions on the H-1B program protect "many high earners from skilled migrant competitors." He called the H-1B program "a subsidy for the wealthy," meaning well-paid IT workers.
Greenspan has previously called for raising the visa cap. Read more...
Presidential candidates’ mobile websites still works in progress
Despite pronouncements that they are pro-technology, all of the U.S. presidential candidates have made fairly feeble attempts at building mobile campaign websites.
"It's appalling how poorly their mobile websites work," said Joshua Bixby, who has analyzed desktop and mobile websites of the Republican frontrunners and President Obama. Bixby is president of Strangeloop, a Canadian Web software company that has no connection to any of the campaigns.
In a blog post in which he shared his most recent findings about candidates' websites, Bixby said he encountered slow site load times -- some took several minutes on smartphones -- and basic functionality problems. Computerworld performed several of the same informal tests as Bixby did, and in some cases found even poorer performance than he did.
The findings suggest that politicians may not be doing a very good job of reaching out to voters who are using smartphones and tablets in far greater numbers than they were during the 2008 presidential campaign, Bixby said. He joined other election observers in predicting a big upsurge in campaigns focused on mobile device users.
"None of the candidates' sites rose to the challenge of designing for mobile devices," Bixby wrote in his blog. One key ingredient of a good mobile website is that it should offer the ability to link to the full desktop site, not just provide a view of a stripped-down mobile version, Bixby added in an interview. He said surveys have shown that at least one-third of mobile users strongly favor access to a full site from a mobile device. Read more...
AMD puts the brakes on adding more cores to server chips
AMD has put the brakes on adding more cores to its server chips, stopping at 16, the company said Thursday during a financial analyst day.
AMD's new server chips code-named Abu Dhabi and due out in 2013 will have 16 cores, the same number as the existing Opteron 6200 chips code-named Interlagos that shipped last year. Servers are being redesigned to match specialty workloads and adding more cores to the Abu Dhabi chip wasn't the way to boost performance, said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of Global Business Units at AMD, during a speech.
"At the end of the day, that wasn't the right answer for the customers," Su said. Read more...
RIM offers free PlayBook to attract Android developers
Research in Motion is trying to woo developers by giving a free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to coders who port their Android application for its BlackBerry Tablet OS.
The promotion, announced on Twitter by Alec Saunders, RIM's vice president for developer relations, comes as RIM struggles to generate interest in the PlayBook in the face of sluggish sales.
In the U.S., the company put the tablet on sale again this week, slashing the price of its 16 GB PlayBook to $199, down from an original retail price of $499. The 32 GB model is now $249, down from $599, and the 64GB model now retails for $299, according to the company's website. Read more...
Could Facebook IPO help it dominate Google?
With the Facebook initial public offering (IPO) now official, industry and financial analysts say that a huge influx of cash could enable the social networking company to topple Google from its dominant position in the online world.
Facebook had been expected to file its IPO papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week, and it did just that late yesterday afternoon. Analysts and potential investors were eagerly awaiting what is one of the largest IPOs in recent years.
With an expected valuation of $100 billion, financial analysts say the IPO is worth about $5 billion. That's a big potential war chest for a company that has been fighting for social networking users and advertising dollars with the largest Internet company on Earth - Google. Read more...
Google’s punishment of Chrome drops browser’s share, says metrics firm
The browser world turned upside down last month as Internet Explorer's share jumped by its largest-ever increase and Chrome posted its biggest one-month loss, a Web metrics company said today.
Net Applications, which measures browser usage by collating data from some 40,000 sites, attributed the turnabout to Google's self-imposed punishment last month when it downgraded Chrome's search ranking.
Google demoted the PageRank -- the rating Google assigns based on how many other sites link to a URL -- for Chrome's download site after it admitted a marketing campaign had violated the company's own rules against paid links. Read more...
Apple updates Lion, patches 51 bugs in Mac OS X
Apple on Tuesday patched 51 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, most of them critical, in 2012's first security update.
Both Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, and 10.6, better known as Snow Leopard, were updated with fixes. The two operating systems were last updated in mid-October 2011.
Some Lion users reported post-update catastrophes. In a quickly-growing thread on the Apple support forum, users said that after updating, every application crashed when launched.
Among the patches were a pair that addressed a vulnerability in SSL (secure socket layer) 3.0 and TLS (transport layer security) 1.0 that was demonstrated last September by researchers who crafted a hacking tool dubbed BEAST, for "Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS." Read more...
More than 50 percent of Facebook’s monthly active users are on mobile apps
We already knew Facebook’s various mobile apps were popular, be they on Apple’s iPhone or iPad, on devices running Google’s Android operating system, or even on BlackBerry devices and feature phones.
But the company hadn’t released the exact numbers on its mobile “monthly active users” (MAUs) since September, as TechCrunch reports, when it revealed that it had about 350 million mobile MAUs. But with the filing of Facebook’s initial public offering this week, the company also revealed that in December it reached 425 million mobile MAUs, out of 845 million monthly active users across all platforms. Read more...