sous-slo.org

The next test, essentially a “release candidate” version will come in the first quarter of 2009. That means the final release won’t hit Microsoft’s initial goal of finishing the browser this year.

Hachamovitch also called on technical users to download the current beta 2 version and let Microsoft know how that goes.

The first beta version was released in March, with a second beta arriving over the summer.

“Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period,” general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting. “We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in Web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done.”

Microsoft plans to offer one more public test version of
Internet Explorer 8 before releasing the final version of the updated browser, the company said late Wednesday.

Hachamovitch said that Web site developers should test their sites and report “any critical issues” to Microsoft.

“We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release,” he wrote. “We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release.”

Microsoft first demonstrated the browser at the Mix conference in March. Among its improvements are malware protection, better standards support, and the ability to carve off a piece of a Web page, known as a Web slice. It also supports having private sessions that don’t get logged in a browser’s history.

This looks to be the beginning of the company’s promised push into two of the fastest-growing PC markets in the world. After establishing a retail presence in both China and India in the last year, Michael Dell said in March that while growth in the U.S. market for PCs would be “OK,” Asian markets would grow more.

Dell says there will be more Vostro products for these markets released in the next few months.

New Vostro notebooks from Dell made for emerging markets.

As promised, Dell unveiled several new computers Wednesday made specifically for emerging PC markets like China and India.

We’ll see Thursday how effective the retail push into Asia has been for Dell, when it’s due to report its second-quarter earnings.

The notebooks are available in 14.1-inch and 15.6-inch sizes, and come with Intel Celeron or Core2Duo processors, and Ubuntu Linux or
Windows Vista. The desktops come with Intel Atom, Celeron, or Pentium processors, and Ubuntu or Vista.

Dell has traditionally derived the majority of its business here in the U.S., but for the first time ever its international business ticked above 50 percent of the company’s total last quarter.

There are four new models in all under the Vostro line–two laptops and two desktops. The notebooks will start at $475, and the desktops at $440, and will be available in more than 20 countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.

(Credit:
Dell)

But looking abroad for a boost is a strategy that Dell’s not alone in pursuing. Chief rival Hewlett-Packard has been doing a bang-up business for a while now in China, which is the home turf of another PC heavyweight, Lenovo.

Update (3:52 pm): This story got the name of the R.E.M. video wrong. It’s fixed in the text below. Additionally, there’s new comments from Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd below.

An R.E.M. video posted to YouTube was an obvious take-off of the ‘Frozen Grand Central’ video from culture-jamming group Improv Everywhere and originally didn’t give proper credit. The band has taken the video down and told Improv Everywhere it is re-editing it.

(Credit:
YouTube)

In a posting on the Improv Everywhere site, Todd wrote, “It’s sort of shocking to see this video which gives absolutely no credit to us and presents the concept of ‘getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area’ as their own original idea.”

The note also said that the video would be re-edited to give Improv Everywhere credit.

To Todd, that’s not necessarily the point.

But all seems well now. And it’s nice to see a band like R.E.M., or its publicity people, be so reactive and responsive to this kind of calling out.

The video, R.E.M.’s “The Big Still,” was an obvious take-off on Improv Everywhere’s now-famous Grand Central Station freeze event, in which hundreds of participants showed up in the Manhattan train station and suddenly froze in place for five minutes. Improv Everywhere’s YouTube video of the event has been seen nearly 9.9 million times.

Of course, one issue seems to be the question of what’s original. As a commenter on this story posted earlier today, a TV sketch comedy show had done a bit with freezes years before Improv Everywhere came along.

After reading Tuesday night on Laughing Squid that a new R.E.M. video had been posted by the band’s publicity firm on YouTube that seemed to blatantly rip off Improv Everywhere’s now-famous “freezes,” I wrote to the culture jamming collective’s founder to get his take.

“I did not know they were making this video and was not involved in any way,” Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere’s founder, told me by e-mail late last night. “They edited the YouTube description to give us credit, which is enough to satisfy me.”

“We never claimed to invent the idea of freezing in place,” Todd wrote to me in an email Wednesday. “I’m sure a caveman froze in place as a gag. What I said in the post (on Improv Everywhere’s site) was that we started the current worldwide phenomenon of ‘getting a mob of people to freeze in place in a public area.’ It’s happened in over 27 countries and it’s all been inspired by our Frozen Grand Central video which has almost 10 million views on YouTube. So sure, Just For Laughs had 1 to 3 people freeze in place at a time in a grocery store many years ago for their television show, but I don’t really think that’s relevant to what happened here with R.E.M.”

In fact, the publicity firm later removed the video from the YouTube remhq channel, and wrote Todd a note saying, “Sincere apologies and do note us on team R.E.M. love the stuff you guys do.”

Isn’t that where something like Friendfeed comes in, to aggregate all the different services into one place?

Prodromou: Friendfeed is a great way to listen to multiple places, but to me, that’s a stop-gap solution where we’ve got lots of silos, so you can listen to lots of silos. I want one microblogging place, where if I’m on one and you’re on another, we can still communicate and still be friends. That’s the long-term solution to the problem. It should be up to the services to talk to each other. That’s really the difference with Identica. I made the software open source, so you can take the software that runs Identica and install it on your own server. Maybe you’re involved with a Web community or you have a group of friends that like to talk or maybe you’re in business and you want people in your business talking to each other in the enterprise. You can install the software and tailor it just for your group. I built a protocol called OpenMicroBlogging, so if you take the software and install it on your server, people on your server can still subscribe to other people on Identica and vice versa, so we’re no longer having these little silos that are fractured and different from each other.

What’s your business model?

Prodromou: I have four possible revenue streams. The first is a premium services model. Some things cost us money, like file sharing, or heavy SMS use, so we have to limit that. But we may let people buy their way out of those limits. The second is enterprise deployment. A lot of companies are interested in microblogging but they’re concerned about putting their company data out on third-party Web services. But if they install Laconica inside their firewall, they can have more control of access to the data. The third business is the WordPress.com model, where we provide hosting for online communities using this open-source software, like if, say Boing Boing wanted to provide microblogging services for its community. And the fourth one, which is probably not as attractive to me right now is advertising. One other thing that I think could be very good, is helping companies or brands have a presence on the open microblogging network. So if Levi’s wanted a new campaign, we could help them set up micro.levis.com and they could have people subscribe to their messages.

Now, Twitter has regained much of its footing, and it has a huge name recognition advantage over any of its competitors, but Prodromou thinks his model could eventually take the microblogging genre to its natural next evolutionary step.

Explain what Laconica is?

Prodromou: Identica is the name of the service and, it’s open source. I’m very interested in ways that service providers can give their users the same kind of autonomy as people have using open source software. So, one thing I did when I started Identica was made the software open source. It’s called Laconica. The software is available for download from Identica and it’s pretty easy to set up. It runs on PHP and MySQL, which you can get on pretty much on any hosting service. So my goal is to make it very easy to install and have lots of people installing their own systems and using it. I believe that if that becomes the case, as the network grows and gets stronger and it’s advantageous to everyone.

So you founded Identica by yourself?

Prodromou: Yes. My background is in creating open content. I started a Web site a few years ago called Wikitravel, which is the Wikipedia of travel sites. I’ve also been involved with conversations about open network services and running free software on Web services. I wondered what I could do with this, and at the time, the most popular Web service with the digerati was Twitter. So I decided to try writing an open-source Twitter. I really did it in my spare time and invited about 150 people to check it out. But one morning Twitter was down and so the time was right to have the users start blogging about it, and TechCrunch and Mashable and ReadWriteWeb and CNET did, and we had a big explosion right at the time when Twitter was having a hard time. We’re about two months in right now and it’s looking like we’re just about feature complete compared to Twitter. We’ve got a really good group of 50 people on our developers mailing list and we’ve got an IRC channel that usually has about 50 or 100 people in it all the time.

Which of these models are you going to follow?

Prodromou: I’m actively pursuing all of them, except for the advertising one. I’ve already started approaching people for doing white label hosting. I’m already talking to people about doing pilot enterprise deployment and we’re at a point where we’re going to be doing some multimedia file sharing later this month so I should be pushing it out. I hope to push it out for trial on Identica soon. So that will be a point at which we would start talking about premium services.

For countless users, this was extremely frustrating, as Twitter had become the live conversation medium of choice for many early-adopters. And into this vacuum jumped a series of other microblogging services, each trying to pick up where Twitter seemed to be leaving off and hoping that large numbers of users would migrate to these new choices.

But as Twitter solidifies itself, why won’t people just say, Okay, Twitter is working, I’m just going to stick with that because most of my friends are there? How do you fit into that dynamic?

Prodromou: I’m a big openness advocate and I want to make sure that we follow the winning solutions. With social-networking sites, in around 2003 or 2004, Friendster was probably the only one worth caring about. But they had big scalability problems. That gave openings to alternatives like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and so on, all the ones that have become very big since then. Twitter’s gotten back on its feet, but there are other players now, and some Twitter users got accounts on Identica and others went to Plurk. A lot have gone back to Twitter, but as we saw with social networking, the growth wasn’t in those early adopters, the early, say 2 million, that are using Twitter. There are a billion people online, and there is a lot of room for growth in that billion people. You can’t just have a bunch of players fighting over the same small pie of early adopters. Eventually the market grows, and the MySpaces and Facebooks grow beyond the early adopter market, and I think that’s what’s going to happen with microblogging.

Earlier this summer, just as Twitter started to really pick up steam, the microblogging service began to have major stability problems.

Q: What is Identica?

Prodromou: Identica is a microblogging service, a way for people to publish small messages about themselves. The messages are limited to 140 characters or less, so one to two sentences, maybe three sentences about what you’re doing, what you are interested in right now, and you can broadcast it to your social network. I launched Identica in July, and of course, microblogging has been around for probably about two to three years right now with some leading services like Twitter, Jaiku, and more recently Pownce and Plurk.

So will Indentica users be able to communicate with Twitter users?
Prodromou: That’s my goal. If we get enough people using these open standards and open systems, perhaps Twitter sees it as a business advantage to join this kind of open network. We’ve seen that before on the Internet. In the early 1990s, there were lot of silos around e-mail and if you had an AOL e-mail address and I had a CompuServe e-mail address, we couldn’t send e-mail to each other. But e-mail became so ubiquitous that even the companies with the biggest groups and users had to allow their users to send and receive Internet e-mail and I think that that’s going to happen with microblogging, too. But it means that we have to grow the rest of the system.

One such service that seemed to come out of nowhere and get instant buy-in from influential digerati around the Web was Identica, an open-source microblogging alternative from Montreal resident Evan Prodromou, who in 2003 had co-founded Wikitravel, a wiki-based travel service that gained a widespread following and that has since expanded into printed guidebooks.

Evan Prodromou

The more users who signed up, the more the site seemed to be down, and it became nearly as commonplace to see the so-called “fail whale”–signifying that a desired operation wouldn’t go through–as it was to have the service work properly.

Do you have investors?

Prodromou: I’m definitely seeking investment right now, I’ve got some very strong leads, I haven’t finalized anything yet. So my hope is that I’m going to have an announcement to make probably in less than a month.

For Prodromou, Identica began as a side project that leveraged his experience with open-source software and free software projects and quickly became a popular place for people looking for a stable microblogging service to go.

It seems you had the good fortune of launching Identica last summer right when Twitter was having major stability and scalability problems.

Prodromou: Yeah.

(Credit:
Evan Prodromou/Indentica)

How do you differentiate yourselves from Twitter and the others?

Prodromou: Recent numbers show there are already around 110 microblogging services, and with others that have been announced, there are probably 200 different services right now. What we’ve seen with other kinds of social software is this kind of fragmentation and we are seeing that now with microblogging where you are on Twitter, and I am Jaiku, and we can’t be friends and we can’t send each other messages. That’s not the way the Internet is supposed to work. We are seeing these information silos happen around microblogging just like we’re seeing them in other social media and my goal is to see that not happen with microblogging because I think it’s a very valuable kind of communication.

Updated at 5:54 p.m. PDT to clarify that the “Commodore” in the Commodore UMMD 8010/F is most likely only an homage to the company of yore.

The Netbook joins the fast-growing new category of small, cheap laptops exemplifed by Asus’ Eee PC.

If you have any insights on the new Commodore devices and the company behind the name today, let us know in the comments section below the story.

The Commodore UMMD 8010/F, announced at the IFA consumer show in Berlin, will sport a 1.6GHz Via C7-M processor and will have an 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and optional Bluetooth. The machine will have 10-inch display and a 1.3-megapixel camera. Prices are expected to start at $610.

With low-power processors, and tiny screens and keyboards, most Netbooks available today aren’t good for much more than surfing the Web, checking e-mail, working on office documents, and maybe a little minor multimedia fun–though those tasks do comprise a bulk of what most people do on their laptops.

And before you go shopping for any Netbook, you might want to take a look at CNET editor Dan Ackerman’s tips for finding the perfect Netbook.

No doubt some consumers will be drawn to the Commodore UMMD 8010/F for its nostalgic appeal. The Commodore name is indelibly linked to iconic computers of the ’80s such as the C64 and the Amiga. But times change, and old companies often fade away–several years back, Dutch company Yeahronimo Media Ventures bought the rights to the Commodore name, with the express goal of selling gadgets and trading on “not only the brand name but also the heritage of Commodore.”

Gadget watchers on the tubes are atwitter with news that the Commodore name is having a decidedly 2008 moment in connection with the nascent but red-hot Netbook market.

(Credit: Liliputing)

Because of this more sophisticated design, Isaiah may deliver higher performance than Atom under certain processing loads. But Isaiah may also compete with Intel’s higher end Core 2 solo (single processor) and Celeron lines. In this case, it may not have a performance advantage.

Isaiah is Via’s first high-performance x86 chip and is targeted at the mainstream PC market–another first for the Taipei-based chip supplier. Via processors have historically appeared in ultra-small mobile devices (such as the OQO), embedded computers, or thin-client computers.

“We are participating in the launch. We wish to work with them in demonstrating any number of different visual computing applications,” Henry added.

Nvidia will take part in the launch of Via’s Isaiah processor slated for next week, just prior to Computex in Taipei, Taiwan.

“Their solution is better than (Intel’s) Atom solution because (Isaiah) is a newer technology,” Henry said.

One of the main differences between Isaiah and Atom is that Intel’s chip uses a more simple “in-order execution” design, compared with Isaiah’s Superscalar, out-of-order design.

Via will provide the central processing unit and motherboard, plus the core logic (chipset) solution, while Nvidia will provide the graphics processing unit, said Drew Henry, general manager of Nvidia’s platform products division.

Nvidia will offer standalone “discrete” graphics for both notebook and desktop platforms using the Isaiah chip, Henry said.

With its multibillion-dollar Yahoo merger bid yanked from the table, the Microsoft chairman said in a Tokyo press conference on Wednesday that the software giant has no immediate plans to jump on another deal, according to an Associated Press report.

Some of those partnerships could include Facebook, in which Microsoft is already a minority investor, and MySpace.com.

The more Microsoft distances itself from the Yahoo negotiating table, the more the Internet search pioneer’s stock will likely feel the effects.

“At this point, Microsoft is focused on its independent strategy,” Gates said during the press conference.

The Microsoft founder recounted how the Redmond giant had spent a lot of energy on trying to wrap up a deal with Yahoo, but it ultimately decided that it was better to leave it behind.

Bill Gates to dealmakers: cool your heels.

Gates is the latest Microsoft executive to chime in on the software giant’s future plans. Microsoft’s Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall covered such ground Tuesday at the Merrill Lynch Technology Conference, where he addressed investors.

Gates reiterated Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s plan: pursue an independent path to grow the company’s search advertising and online-services business.

That Plan B, as outlined by CNET News.com’s Ina Fried, could include such things as beefing up its engineering ranks and looking at other business partnerships.

Shares of Yahoo were down 1.87 percent, to $25.25, in early-morning trading Wednesday.

commentary

It’s good to have Rex back with Novell’s Suse Linux business. This is positive news for the company and for Suse Linux.

Markus Rex, formerly the chief technology officer of Suse and currently on leave from Novell, is back in the saddle as acting general manager and senior vice president of Novell’s Open Platform Solutions business unit, reporting to Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe, as Novell announced Monday.

Rex had been on loan to the Linux Foundation as its CTO for the past year. He’s a fervid community believer, someone who will help balance Novell’s interest in driving Linux-based revenue with the need to rebuild its relations with the Linux community that soured on Novell in the wake of its patent deal with Microsoft.