Comcast lately has been running ads for a new service called Blast, which offers a considerable improvement in both upload and download speeds. After checking with them, I confirmed that I had the 6 megabit down/384kbit up package, and could get blast, 16 megabits down and 2 megabits up, for $10 more. So I gave it a try.

Well, it is definitely all that and a bag of chips. Look at my benchmarks against both a San Francisco and New York targets, using dslreports.com to benchmark it.

Web pages don't load in pieces like they used to, they pop up on a full screen as though I had loaded an application. Even a Flash-heavy monster like IGN.com pops up fully rendered.

The upload speed is respectable as well, although I doubt that will put an end to these foolish class action suits by spoiled net users who think they have a constitutional right to steal and Comcast must provide it. Unless these clowns have been uploading Linux ISOs and Grateful Dead concert recordings, they are probably downloading something they shouldn't via BitTorrent, and I hope Comcast enters everything they downloaded into evidence during discovery.

But I suppose with laughable defenses like this, I'm swimming upstream. Right, sending out BitTorrents makes you a virus. No, it makes you a bandwidth pig. I'm no great fan of Comcast. It has done more than a few things wrong in this whole incident, but it seems the other side will continue to categorically ignore the issue of upload speeds, network congestion and shared bandwidth, to say nothing of what exactly they are sharing, so I find myself defending the company if only for the sake of intellectual honesty.

AMD and IBM this week announced they had produced a working test chip utilizing Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to produce the first layer of metal connections across the entire chip.

This may sound like something only an electrical engineer could care about, but like Intel’s high-k metal gate breakthrough a year ago, this has a major practical value for customers.

Lithography is the process for building these dime-sized chips with hundreds of millions of transistors. The more transistors that are added, the denser things get and tighter everything gets packed. Each transistor has to be connected with microscopic metal lines, and with smaller manufacturing processes, there is less room for the lines.

The lines between transistors are based directly on the wavelength used to make them. EUV allows for using a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers much shorter than today’s 193nm lithography techniques. So it means IBM and AMD will be able to continue to pack more transistors on a chip while making them smaller at the same time.

It will be a while before EUV makes its debut. AMD expects EUV lithography will be fully qualified for production by 2016, when it makes the move to 22nm manufacturing.

Remember that '80s comedy about two losers trying to pretend their dead boss was alive so they could enjoy the good life? They don't make them like that any more. I was able to tolerate maybe 20 minutes of "Knocked Up" before being utterly disgusted.

Anyway, I had a weekend at Bernie's of my own, except it was my technology that was dead. Almost all of it. Events like this past weekend convinces me SkyNet could never happen because this stuff breaks too easily. First up, XBox 360 #2.

 

I had been making good progress in Rock Band, finally getting some decent songs instead of the slow, boring dirges that make up the early parts of the tour when I started seeing a red checkerboard pattern flash across the TV and the console would freeze up.

Restarting was no good, it froze on the boot up. I left it off for a day, placed my Antec notebook cooler under it, and it worked for a while, then it died for good. Wouldn't even boot. "Call Microsoft, get another return coffin," was how one person put it on the IGN XBox boards. So I did. A return box with prepaid postage will be arriving this week, which means about two to three months of down time.

This is the second XBox 360 to die on me in a year. Meanwhile, my PlayStation 3 does nothing but run Folding@Home and play Blu-ray movies. It may be time to reconsider my choice of console.

Second item to go to the morgue was my work laptop.
 

 

Like pretty much every tech reporter in the Silicon Valley, I work on a laptop that has traveled many miles with me between San Francisco and San Jose and points in between for industry events. It was inevitable that something would go, but the screen wasn't the first thing on my mind. However, it would become unreadable. The computer still worked, it's just that output was completely hazy.

I'm able to type this because the problem is isolated to the laptop screen. With the notebook in the docking station, video output works just fine. So our MIS department is working on getting me a new notebook. I suppose two years is a pretty good lifespan, considering how much I schlep this thing around.

Number three isn't dead but should be. Windows Vista.

I made the switch because a) Vista was on sale very cheap at a closing CompUSA and b) XP is so old and my PC so new I could not reinstall it any more. Now I wish I'd taken my chances on XP lasting. While I have gotten some things working and Aero is kinda cool, the file and disk access is pitiful.

I get timeout and Not Responding errors for the least disk I/O effort. Writing a Word document to disk can take 30 seconds. Also, I've yet to get my computers interoperating like they did under XP. All those computers were networked, saw each other, and could exchange files easily. I have yet to dig into Vista fully, and expect that option to be there, but so far it is not obvious.

There is one real positive to Vista: sound. After installing the Vista drivers for my Soundblaster, the improvement in music quality was stunning. My current favorite, Nightwish, made for an excellent test band due to their heavy use of strings and brass to accompany the base rock band, and the clarity and separation and brightness was just remarkable.

I'm tempted to say at least my car still runs, but don't want to jinx it.

Microsoft has posted a listing of applications known to break under Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. It's hardly a stop-the-presses list. Most of the affected software is, not surprisingly, security-related software. Considering how much Microsoft retooled Vista to improve its security, I'm surprised it didn't break more apps than it did.

The one true application, not a system utility, that's broken is the New York Times Reader, the custom viewer released by the Times publisher that displays news from the paper in its print format on your computer screen.

This affects version 1 and Microsoft reports that later versions will work with SP1. The Times Reader is currently at version 1.1.3.0.

Probably the most widely-used of the apps on the list is Trend Micro Internet Security 2008. Microsoft said the newest version, 16.1, will be compatible with SP1, so users should upgrade.

No, not Britney's career. No need to ask that. I was referring to HD DVD. Ever since the Warner Bros announcement right before CES that it would go Blu-ray only, nothing seems to have gone the format's way. Last week, Netflix and Best Buy abandoned the format. The Netflix defection left HD DVD without a rental outlet, basically, since Blockbuster went Blu-ray only last year.

Now really is the last straw. Wal-Mart is dropping HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray. Target abandoned HD DVD last July and Best Buy has all but kicked it to the curb. In a statement today, Wal-Mart Senior Vice President of Home Entertainment Gary Severson said "We've listened to our customers, who are showing a clear preference toward Blu-ray products and movies with their purchases." Wal-Mart will sell out its remaining HD DVD product and go Blu, like pretty much everyone else.

At this point, you have to figure Toshiba is looking for as dignified an exit as possible. While some people I know will undoubtedly rub the HD DVD camp's nose in it (*cough* Bill Hunt *cough*), no one has a right to gloat here. This was a monumental waste of a sickening amount of money. Only rich consumer electronics companies could have pulled this stunt. No start-up or venture funded companies would ever have done something so wasteful as the HD and Blu-ray format war. If DVD was splintered like this in 1997, it would never have succeeded. As it was, that almost happened with Circuit City's white elephant, Divx, but people just plain recoiled from Divx. You couldn't make that argument between HD and Blu-ray. Business schools will study this foolish format war for years to come, I'm sure.

For those bargain hunters, keep your eyes peeled. All of the Toshiba HD DVD players are decent standard definition players that offer upscaling, the ability to make a standard definition DVD look sharper than it actually is. And the HD-A35 in particular is a sweet piece of electronics, with its Silicon Optix chipset usually found in players that sell for $500 or more. By and large, the A35 is very well reviewed, and with the price plummeting to the $200 range, it would make a great standard definition DVD player. There are certainly no Blu-ray players in this price range. Worth a look.

UPDATED: A consumer group has found that the XBox 360 has five times the normal use failure rate as its competitors in the home videogame market. SquareTrade, an independent warranty provider, ran a test of more than 1,000 units and found a failure rate of 16.4 percent. By contrast, the PlayStation 3 is at around the three percent range.

The 360 has been plagued with a lot of problems, the most widely reported being the "Red Ring of Death" or "Three Red Lights" error. If three of the four lights surrounding the power button turned red, it was game over, literally. SquareTrade said the three flashing red lights represented 60 percent of all service calls.

"This further confirms what many long suspected, giving tangible evidence to the Xbox 360 reliability issues. The "red ring of death" failure rates we are seeing are also significantly greater than what Microsoft reported (3-5%) last year," said SquareTrade CEO Steve Abernethy in a statement to InternetNews.com.

Microsoft last year allocated up to $1 billion for XBox 360 replacements and extended all warrantees from the traditional 90 days to three years.

The other 40 percent of errors included disk read errors, about half of all non-red light claims, fried video cards, hardware freezes, on/off failures and, disc tray malfunctions that also caused damage to game discs.

The XBox 360 was introduced in 2005 and has been plagued with hardware problems almost from the start. One of the theories was that there was inadequate cooling of the internals and that the solder used on the GPU fan was coming loose. AnandTech dug around inside one and found the cooling was indeed lacking. Abernathy found that almost all failures involved systems with the original motherboards.

The company has since redesigned the internals, using a 65nm CPU instead of a 90nm and added a second fan. Reportedly the latest generation runs cooler and quieter, which would be a relief. Older ones are as loud as a blade server.

Here's a little anecdote for you: my 360 died last year, and after a brief chat with Microsoft, they sent me the shipping box to send it in for repair. It came with a prepaid, prestamped UPS label. While coming into work one morning I stopped at the local UPS Store and left it on the counter, saying not to worry, it was prepaid and pre-stamped.

Without even looking at the box, the counter worker said 'Sorry about your XBox.' How'd you know, I asked. He informed me he sees five to ten daily, with the same box and prepaid label, and that was a relatively small store. I can't imagine what a busy UPS store was getting.

(Update clarifies that the failure rate was among first-generation motherboards.)

I'm about to break dance in a minefield, but at this point, keeping quiet would bother me more.

I'm also going to come right to the point. A lot of people in the press owe AMD an apology for their sloppiness in a desire to be first. Numerous stories on a variety of sites, tech and general news sites alike, rushed out stories last Friday that gave the impression, overtly or slyly, that Dell was dumping AMD product.

It all stemmed from when people searched for some Dell consumer products with AMD chips and were told "Shop for Dell computers with AMD processors in retail stores. See our retail partners for details. Computers with AMD processors are not available online."

That statement in and of itself was incorrect, as Dell's consumer AMD products were being taken off Dell.com and moving to retail. But if you want a business computer, like a Vostro for a small business or a PowerEdge server, you could definitely get them with AMD processors.

And so, off that one item on Dell.com, whole stories were written and posted on news sites all over the Internet, not based on comment or statements from the two companies but on speculation and backfill. The writers would state the text from Dell.com and then rehash AMD's recent problems and speculate on what a bad blow it would be.

And they were all wrong. I read four or five stories, all of a similar vein, in between my calls to Dell and a market analyst for some perspective. Finally I gave up when I realized none of these people had bothered to do Journalism 101 and call Dell for a comment (many of these sites have since updated their stories to erase their original reports). One of the stories ran an update at the bottom of their speculation and doom and gloom, so after you read all that negativity you got the truth.

Now, I will make no claim to journalistic perfection, but I can't sit by quietly, either. This is the latest incident involving news outlets more interested in being first than being right. The move from print to Internet publishing in the past decade has me and many of my colleagues feeling like we're never off the job, but is this what we've become?

Some may dismiss me as overblowing the issue, but it goes to two issues: credibility and public perception. The mainstream press has all but blown its credibility, mostly due to political bias as opposed to rushing a story out before engaging in a basic fact check.

In 1997, the American Society of Newspaper Editors commissioned the multi-year Journalism Credibility Project, where they interviewed 3,000 Americans of varying backgrounds. The results were published in 1999 in a report called "Examining Our Credibility: Perspectives of the Public and the Press," and they were not pretty.

It found 78 percent of U.S. adults felt there is bias in the news media and 77 percent believe newspapers pay lots more attention to stories that support their own point of view. At 77-78 percent, that's not just conservatives saying the press is biased like they always seem to do, that's pretty much across the board.

The point is the press's credibility is shot with a lot of people, which is in part why ratings and circulations are flatlining. I readily acknowledge that there's also a media shift going on as well that's playing a part in that decline, too. Where is the shift going? Toward the Internet, and it was Internet publications that blew it.

It leads to issue two, misleading the public. When the Dell/AMD story was submitted to FARK, my favorite news aggregator, this was the headline: "That whooshing sound? It's the soon-to-be-heard sound of the breeze blowing through empty AMD factories after Dell slips a knife into the back of their business plan."

Smarter FARKers took the submitter to task in the story's reaction/response section, showing that a good number of people knew the submission line was totally wrong, but it shows what happens when a misperception is put out there. How many people incorrectly thought the exact same thing when they read reports that Dell was dumping AMD? At what point does it become self-fulfilling prophecy, like the recession warnings John Chambers talked about recently?

To be sure, Dell is a little frustrated with AMD, said In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor. "Dell signed on to AMD when it was the shining star and we haven't seen innovative new products since then, so it leaves Dell wondering," he told me.

Moving AMD product to retail is hardly a bad thing, McGregor noted, as did John Spooner of Technology Business Research in my story. "Where AMD is having their success is in the retail channel and where Intel has its success is the corporate channel. Is that really a mismatch here? You put your products where you have your best fit," said Mcgregor.

AMD has more than enough problems right now. It does not need the gross disservice of impatient journalists rushing out incorrect stories without bothering to do basic digging first. I'm calling some of my peers on the carpet with great reluctance, but am doing so none the less because I don't want to see AMD wronged, Dell wronged, or our sector of journalism suffer the same loss of credibility as other segments of the media.

 

Even though Microsoft unleashed a flood of patches yesterday, there was one biggie missing. Last month, Microsoft warned of a zero-day vulnerability in older versions of Excel (pre-Excel 2007). Microsoft rarely issues alerts in between monthly patches, so when it issues one, there's a good reason for it. The company did say that the vulnerability was being used in targeted attacks but, as always, was not specific. You don't want to give away specifics involving an exploit/vulnerability because then other people might use it as well, after all.

So why wasn't there a fix among yesterday's haul, which featured three Office-related fixes? Microsoft declined to get specific when asked, simply me the standard we-have-to-test-it-carefully answer in response to any query on a patch.

Don Leatham, director of solutions and strategy for Lumension (formerly PatchLink) also wondered what happened, but said Microsoft only had a few weeks to write and thoroughly test a patch, which is simply not enough time. "It may seem like a month but they gotta write the fix, test it against all platforms, and when you add on all the patches released yesterday, I think we had some busy people over at Microsoft over the last few weeks," he said.

Plus, there hasn't been a huge number of reports that this exploit is being propagated by a botnet. These days, Storm is rearing its ugly head again, sending out countless Valentine's Day spam message. I must get a half dozen a day.

Leatham said the Internet Explorer fixes in yesterday's patches were farm more serious. "I'm glad that was in the release. HTML rendering is the core of what IE does and it was remote code execution over IE 6 and 7, so it was a necessary fix."

The clock is ticking on HD DVD. Ticking down. Netflix today announced it would no longer carry HD DVD titles, only Blu-ray. This comes almost a year after Blockbuster made the same decision. So if you want a high definition movie, it has to be Blu-ray.

I had long figured this would happen as more titles are released. There's no such thing as unlimited shelf space, even in Netflix's massive warehouses, and sooner or later companies are going to rebel against having to stock two or three versions of the same movie. With Blu-ray looking like the clear winner and shelf space limited, you have to figure this is going to continue to happen. No one will want to invest in a perceived loser and the momentum will build.

UPDATE: Looks like I spoke too soon. Best Buy is indeed taking sides. It has said Blu-ray will be its choice for a digital format to showcase in its stores. The chain added that it will continue to sell HD DVD, but Blu-ray is going to get the prominent positioning and treatment. I'll have a full story shortly.

From the Let's-See-How-Long-This-Lasts Department: The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) at the University of Wisconsin sued Intel last Wednesday for patent infringement, claiming a technology that Intel used a technology in the Core 2 processor that UW researchers first created in 1998.

The technology is for code prediction technology, allowing instructions to be broken into separate strands for more efficient processing. In particular, it allows instructions to be processed without having to wait for data on which it is dependent.

So task B can begin processing even though it doesn't have the results of task A because the processor takes what can best be described as an educated guess to get the task of processing code started.

WARF said in a statement that it had been trying to sell the technology to Intel since as far back as 2001 but Intel wasn't interested. WARF stepped things up when it noticed Intel was heavily promoting the Core 2 and its Wide Dynamic Execution, which uses predictive technology.

Chuck Mulloy, Intel's legal spearcatcher, tells me Intel has been served with the complaint and is evaluating the complaint, and that Intel has been in communication with WARF on this matter "for more than a year."

Intel's defense, one analyst tells me, can be that the patent is invalid because of prior art, the patent is invalid because it’s obvious, and the claims in the patent are overly broad. And if that fails, then Intel will threaten to terminate any and all research grants with U of Wisc. That will likely work.

(Yes that was a Ratatoullie reference.)

Every six months, an independent group in Germany operating under the banner of AV-Test (not to be confused with AV Comparatives) does extensive testing of antivirus products to see who does best.What I've always found amazing is that the detection rates and thus placements seem to change with each test. Sure, there are consistent players at the top and bottom of the list, but a company can go from number one to number four to number two over time, and its accuracy rate can remain near constant. That's how volatile the AV detection market is.

In its January 08 tests, AV-Test found AVK 2008 from G DATA, a German company, to be the most accurate at virus detection, catching 1,022,418 out of 1,024,381 samples for 99.8 percent accuracy. Right behind it was AntiVir from Avira, another German company, with 99.6 percent accuracy. Number three was Avast! from ALWIL Software in the Czech Republic with 99.4 percent accuracy.

(perhaps the Ratatoullie reference is a mistake...)

Leading off the American firms is Trend Micro with 98.6 percent accuracy, followed by Symantec with 98.3 percent. Microsoft, which performed so poorly last year in an AV Comparatives test, is doing much better with 96.9 percent accuracy.

The biggest letdowns? McAfee with 93.7 percent and Nod32 with 93.1 percent, putting them near the bottom of the major name firms.

In a test to detect 12 different rootkits, F-Secure, Panda, Symantec, and Trend Micro were the only products to catch all 12. AntiVir, Avast, AVG, Kaspersky, McAfee, Nod32, and Sophos caught 11 of the 12 and Microsoft caught 10 of the 12 rootkits.

So at this point, Symantec and Trend are the tops among retail products.

Some press releases just make me chuckle, like this one from IBM. They won a deal with the National Security Agency, an organization that for decades the government denied even existed. Notice there is no boilerplate at the end like you usually get with a corporate release.

So what's next? How about Steve Wynn opens an alien-themed casino at Area 51, complete with zero gravity beds and slots that spin at the speed of light?

IBM Awarded National Security Agency High Assurance
Platform (HAP) Contract to Improve Secure Information Sharing

The U.S. National Security Agency has awarded IBM a technology and services contract for the High Assurance Platform (HAP) program. NSA and IBM will work together to design and develop the next generation of high assurance workstations, servers and pervasive computing technology. The contract, awarded in the fourth quarter, has an estimated contract value of $9.4 million over 15 months.

The goal of the HAP program is assist the IT industry with an approach that can be used by government and private sector organizations to support secure virtualization, compliance checking, cross-domain collaboration, and enterprise management. The use of secure virtualization technologies will also help eliminate the need for multiple classified workstations and servers; as well as enable agencies to achieve their 'green' data center consolidation goals.

"The NSA’s strategic approach to technology recognizes that a secure COTS environment is fundamental to the mission of both government agencies and private sector, offering assured information sharing that is cost effective," said Todd S. Ramsey, Managing Director for IBM U.S. Federal. "IBM is pleased to continue its support of the NSA for this mission critical program."

The NSA will offer the new capabilities to government agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the broader intelligence community. IBM will use COTS (commercial off the shelf) software and hardware in order for both public and private sector organizations to take advantage of the investment in these advanced security improvements.

IBM will leverage its work in secure virtualization, trusted computing, and advanced software technologies to improve the cross-domain access and secure distribution of classified data across agencies. It will be responsible for providing research and design, engineering development, fabrication, and testing and security certification. The IBM team will collaborate with General Dynamics C4 Systems, a business unit of General Dynamics and an existing contractor for the HAP program. IBM’s subcontracting business partners include Trusted Computer Solutions, Harris Corporation, and Innovative Security Systems/Argus Systems Group.

For more information on IBM visit www.ibm.com.

PlayStation 3 owners have basically had three uses for their expensive console while waiting for some native games: playing old PS2 games that are compatible, watching Blu-ray movies, and running Folding@Home. It looks like a lot of those PS3 owners are doing the latter. Stanford University, which runs the Folding@Home program, announced it has surpassed the 1 million user mark.

Folding@Home aims to simulate how proteins fold and misfold. Misfolded proteins cause diseases like Alzheimer's , Parkinson's and cancer. However, simulating protein folding is extremely tough due to the speed at which they fold or misfold.

Stanford said that the Cell processor in the PS3 has 10 times the compute power of a PC and the PS3 community is now 74 percent of the total Folding@Home network. With more than 1 million PS3 cranking away, Stanford can now lay claim to a petaflop supercomputer, even if it is distributed all over the planet. The fastest supercomputer, as recognized by the Top 500 list, is the 530 teraflop Blue Gene/L, an IBM design run by the Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

While the Folding@Home network isn't recognized by the Top 500 list, the Guiness Book of World Records has recognized the Folding@Home network as the most powerful distributed network.