You know a report is controversial when fierce rivals line up on the same side. Research firm Avian Securities claimed in a report earlier this week that Dell may be seeing a 20 to 30 percent return rate on its systems with a Solid State Drives (SSD), ie., the drives based on flash memory.

That seems rather remarkable, as one of the claims from SSD proponents is that they have a longer lifespan since there is no spinning hardware and a lot less heat is generated. It prompted Dell's Chief Blogger (they have such a person??) Lionel Menchaca to post a vehement denial, which said in part:

Our global reliability data shows that SSD drives are equal to or better than traditional hard disk drives we've shipped. Beyond that, return rates for SSDs are in line with our expectations for new technology and an order of magnitude better than rates reported in the press.

SSD drives are still relatively new to the market so there isn't a lot of data available yet, which doesn't help make Menchaca's argument. However, you know it must be a serious issue when a major competitor takes your side. Matt Kohut, worldwide competitive analyst for Lenovo issued his own blog comment.

I'm not one to defend a competitor here, but I highly doubt that any Tier One vendor is seeing SSD hard disk drives being returned at a 10 percent rate. The article circling the Internet is fear mongering meant to drive readership. On the other hand I do doubt that return rates are as low as traditional hard disk drives though.

A Dell spokesperson told me that Dell sales haven't been hut by the comments but they wanted to get a response out as soon as possible. Avian never contacted Dell in regard to its note, but Dell added "There's just no way those numbers could ever be accurate."

Avian was unavailable for comment at press time and the mailbox was full, perhaps it had closed early due to Good Friday.

Microsoft has issued a patch of a patch from last Patch Tuesday for Excel, since the fix added some math errors. The fix issued a critical error that would allow for remote code execution and affected all versions of Office from 2000 and up.

In this case, the fix is solid. The problem, as Microsoft spokesman Tim Rains said in a blog posting, is that a calculation error was introduced into Excel 2003 "when a Real Time Data source was used in a user-created Visual Basic for Applications solution (in other words a custom-built VBA function)."

On installing the update, users encountered a 'Real Time Data' error when attempting to use the component with Office's Visual Basic for Applications software.

The patch of the patch is available through Microsoft's Automatic Update.

Apple has issued a major security update for Mac OS X and Safari, plugging 86 holes and vulnerabilities in 30 different applications for Mac OS, both the "Tiger" and "Leopard" versions. The Safari browser got a separate set of fixes, covering 13 issues, including a remote code execution vulnerability.

The patches cover the full array of Apple's products; both the client and server software and both the Intel and PowerPC versions of the OS all had their share of fixes.

For example, the open-source ClamAV antivirus scanner included in Apple's server operating system received nine fixes. There were also fixes in Leopard's firewall and the Apache server.

Mac users can download the fixes either through Apple's Software Update tool or manually from the Apple Downloads site.

Say hello to your little jail cell. Last Friday, Robert Soloway, 28, of Seattle, Washington, pleaded guilty to a variety of fraud charges and failure to file a tax return in 2005. The one-time "king of spam" was listed as the eighth-largest spammer in the world, according to Spamhaus, which tracks these offenders.

Soloway has been on the losing end for quite a while now. Microsoft sued him in December 2003, for using a Hotmail address for a number of spam-related offenses, including advertisements for spamming software, as well as a global defamation campaign targeting Microsoft. Microsoft won a $7.8 million judgment in 2005.

Then in 2005, an Oklahoma ISP sued him for violating federal CAN-SPAM laws. Soloway fired his lawyer and eventually stopped showing up in court, resulting in a $10 million summary judgment for the ISP.

Not that anyone will collect. His lawyer tells the Seattle Times he's "essentially broke." With a maximum sentence of 26 years hanging over his head, he won't be working off his debts any time soon, either.

A while back I'd written about my frustrations with Vista (I know, take a number) but there was no going back because the XP install discs were too old and failed to install. Well, a friend at an enthusiast pub saved the day.

The problem was this: my Windows XP CD was stamped in 2001. My Intel motherboard, a 975XBX2, was built in 2006 and was so different from 2001 or earlier that the install process would fail. We're talking the time before SATA drives. The original XP install discs would not recognize a hard drive larger than 170GB.

What I needed was the newer XP discs that were updated for Service Pack 2. Turns out, you can make one. If you Google "Windows XP Slipstreaming" you will find plenty of tutorials on the process. Here is the Cliff Notes version: you copy the original XP CD to a folder on the hard disk, extract the Service Pack 2 files into that folder as well as the boot image file, and build a new CD. The SP2 extraction updates all of the installation files. Burn the disc, and you have a Windows XP with Service Pack 2 install disc.

So instead of XP crashing when it loaded pci.sys, the install came right up, recognized the 300GB, 500GB and 750GB drives instantly, and installed without a hit. I still had to download more than 100 critical fixes plus another 30 optional fixes, but the fact is, I am out from under that mess.

Nice bit of foresight on Microsoft's part to enable such updating. The company first introduced this for Windows NT 4 and refined it with 2000 and XP. It was intended for enterprise customers so they could keep their install discs current without having to go through 50 Windows Update updates (like I did), but it's perfectly legal for an end user to do it; the EULA does not forbid making a copy for yourself, which is what I did.

AMD has begun volume shipments of its triple-core Phenom processor to OEMs and product will be in stores by the end of the month. Just as it promised.

Now that's a good habit to form.

A company spokesman confirmed today that product is indeed shipping to OEMs this quarter, just as promised. The triple-core line will be sold under the brand name of Phenom 8000, in contrast with the quad-core Phenom 9000 that is already shipping.

AMD declined to say what we can expect for clock speeds, which OEMs are shipping them or what the prices of the machines will be, however. That's all planned for the formal launch later this month. Given that the triple-core is being positioned as a more affordable choice than quad-core, expect it to be a little slower, perhaps in the 2.1 to 2.2GHz range.

HP has 2.2GHz Phenom 9500 desktops in the $850-$950 range, while Gateway has 2.3GHz Phenom 9600 machines for around $1,000, so the Phenom 8000s will likely sell for less than that. AMD's dual core processors retain the Athlon name, which AMD had originally planned to retire with this new generation of processors but later decided to give it a stay of execution.

It's amazing what happens when companies decide to work together instead of tear each other apart.The Sun Microsystems and Microsoft detente continues to bear surprising fruits, this time in the form of the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center on Microsoft's Redmond campus. It's actually an expansion of Sun's current presence in the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center where testing Microsoft software on Sun hardware is performed.

The center is designed to allow the two firms to work on optimizing Microsoft applications on Sun Fire x64 server systems and storage and the availability of the Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 (more details here).

Among the objectives of the Interoperability Center are optimization of Microsoft applications on Sun x64 systems and storage and promotion of full interoperability in application areas such as virtualization, Java technology, systems management, and identity.

Additionally, the Center will collaborate with authorized Sun Solution Centers to support customers running their own deployments. They can bring their own scenarios to the center for testing by Sun and Microsoft engineers.

The companies are even working on tighter interoperability between Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Communication Foundation in Sun's Web services interoperability technologies.

Microsoft may be the butt of all the Borg jokes, but it looks like the real assimilator is Apple. iTunes now has th final big prize, it scored the entire back catalog for Beatles. The London Daily Mail reports Paul McCartney has reached an agreement to the tidy sum of $400 million.

McCartney will share the money with former bandmate Ringo Starr as well as the estates of his late bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison. Some of the money also goes to Michael Jackson, since he owns a good chunk of the Beatles publishing rights, and he could sure use the cash right about now.

Wouldn't you know it, but this might mess up his interminable divorce. The Daily Mail said any attempt at finalizing his divorce from gold digg-, er, parasit-, er, ex-wife Heather Mills might get thrown out as she makes a grab at an even bigger settlement demand.

Trent Reznor, the one-man band that is Nine Inch Nails, may have found a formula that works for online music sales. Last year he split from his record label Universal/Interscope and decided to go independent. In his first effort, Reznor has released a 36-track "album" (that term seems so anachronistic now) called "Ghosts I-IV" and is selling it online. 

"Ghosts I-IV" comes with five pricing options:

• Free downloads of the first nine tracks, DRM-free, plus a 40-page PDF documenting the album.
• $5: All 36 tracks in a variety of digital formats, no DRM, a 40-page PDF.
• $10: The full download plus a double-disc set, packaged in a Digipak with a 16-page booklet, to be shipped on April 8.
• $75: Deluxe Edition with all 36 tracks for download plus Ghosts I-IV in a hardcover fabric slipcase containing two audio CDs and a Blu-Ray disc of Ghosts I-IV with all tracks in multi-track 96 kHz 24-bit stereo and accompanying slideshow. Ships May 1.
• $300 Ultra-deluxe limited edition package: The Deluxe edition plus a four-LP set on 180-gram vinyl, which is packaged in a fabric slipcase. Two limited-edition Giclee prints are included; package is numbered and signed by Trent Reznor. Limited to a run of 2,500, and one piece per customer.

So far it seems to be working, as the $300 ultra-super-duper set is sold out, meaning $750,000 in sales for just the top end product alone, and it all goes to Reznor. The average CD royalty is in the range of $1 to $1.60, so for Reznor to make the same amount, he'd have to sell 468,000 to 750,000 CDs minimum, which he usually did until the primary means of music acquisition became theft.

It's nice to see an artist bypassing the incompetent labels. But there's a little problem. It's called the first step. Nine Inch Nails is an established band. Heck, its first album came out when I was in college (way to make yourself feel old, Andy). An established artist like NIN or Radiohead can do this, but what about the newbies? 

Reznor's old label Universal in 2002 signed a young band from Utah called Acroma. They produced one promising, little-heard album, called "Orbitals," but never made it on the road due to chaos at the label. They gave up in frustration and disbanded, with the rhythm section quitting music entirely.

So we have a little problem: how does a band get to NIN's status so they can release a "Ghosts I-IV" in the first place?

Denver International Airport is a monstrous place, one of the few airports I have not passed through in my career. Like many airports, it offers free Wi-Fi for travelers, but it also decides which sites are suitable for you to read. 

Want to browse the sites for Vanity Fair, Victoria's Secret or Perez Hilton? Gonna have to wait until you land somewhere else or leave the airport because DIA has deemed them "provocative," and thus, double-plus ungood.

I've got a few adjectives to describe Hilton but "provocative" is not one of them.

It first came up when David Byrne, founder of the band Talking Heads, found himself blocked from accessing Boing Boing, one of the earliest blog and aggregator sites on the Web where he is a contributing blogger. boingboing.net editor Xeni Jardin noted that DIA uses SmartFilter, the same kinds of software filters employed by the less-than-democratic regimes of the Sudan and Kuwait.

An airport spokesman told the Denver Post that the service went gratis last November and sees about 4,000 connections a day, with less than one percent of 1.7 million Web page requests a day. Airport officials added they rather deal with complaints about blocked sites than an angry parent whose child accidentally saw porn.

So, where's Free Press and the rest of the Comcast harassment squad?

Lenovo, the artists formerly known as IBM's PC business, today announced a new "eco-friendly" PC, the ThinkCentre M57/M57p. This is the first desktop PC from any manufacturer to receive GREENGUARD certification as a low-emissions device, along with being EPEAT Gold rated, Energy Star 4.0 rated, and the first ThinkCentre made from recycled material from consumer plastics.

GREENGUARD certification means that the ThinkCentre M57/M57p was tested for up to 2,000 different chemical emissions. It is certified to emit very low quantities of chemicals like benzene and ozone indoors.

The M57/M57p features an ultra small form factor mini-tower case with either Celeron or Core 2 Duo processors, and come with Intel's vPro technology as well as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) security chip, which uses hardware to encrypt keys, passwords and digital certificates. For added security, users can enable or disable USB ports through the BIOS.

The ThinkCentre M57 starts at $699. Monitors are sold separately.

With the dust settling on the high definition format war, I wanted to add my voice to the ever-growing chorus of opinions on what the future holds.

It's not really surprising that HD DVD sales are spiking. Look at the price blowouts. Amazon recently dumped the Toshiba HD-A35 for $169, with free shipping. Even I couldn't resist that, since it's a superb upscaling DVD player for standard definition DVDs. I could see it in many of my standard def movies on the first night, and that was without calibrating it.

The A35 special, done through TigerDirect, is already over. Once word got out that a $600 player was selling for around one-quarter the price, it sold fast. Last night at Best Buy, I saw a stack of open players selling ridiculously cheap as well. The Microsoft XBox 360 add-on drive is now $49 (it used to be $179).

Likewise, software is going fast. Amazon is selling off HD DVD titles starting at $11.49. The Hollywood Video chain is dumping its rental discs for just $7.95. I spent one day this past weekend roaming the San Francisco peninsula, searching out one Hollywood Video after another with the GPS (thank you, Garmin) but word travels fast on the Internet, and the pickings were very meager.

So there will be one final burst of HD DVD sales as the format dies. The players are perfectly fine DVD players and an HD DVD movie looks every bit as good as Blu-ray. This format war was never about whose movies looked and sounded better. It wasn't like VHS vs. Beta, where there was a clear technological gap in quality. Both Blu-ray and HD DVD are 1080p with Dolby Digital, DTS or high definition audio. So if you stock up on HD discs, they will look exactly like their inevitable Blu-ray counterpart.

What Lies Ahead

Now everyone is looking to the future and the prognosticators are wondering aloud if it was a pointless victory for Sony as we will do everything on-demand. Having spent two years running a DVD review site and corresponding with hundreds of readers, I can tell you that it's not the format makers who have something to fear from on-demand.

You see, DVD created a culture of collection that was pretty much unheard of in the VHS days. Very few people built libraries of VHS tapes, since the things degraded, weren't easy to navigate, etc. DVD didn't degrade with use and you could jump to your favorite scene.

The result is people building libraries of movies and buying them on the day of release, something unheard of in the days of VHS. Until DVD came along, no one bought a movie the day it came out, you rented it, period. The collections on DVD Aficionado are nothing short of impressive, and I'm sure warm the hearts of studios.

I think people will always want to own their favorite materials so they can watch them or show them off whenever they want. So I think a market will remain for hard copy media.

On-demand is a problem for video stores, not for DVD sales. I believe the ownership culture is fairly engrained and the analogy to music doesn't work. We're not talking a four-minute song, we're talking two hour films.

Hollywood Video's parent company is in Chapter 11. Blockbuster is ailing. Mom and pop video stores are dying as well. The staple that kept independent stores going, adult video, has gone almost entirely to the Web.

The price needs to come down, though. Movies on demand from Comcast run $5.99. Blockbuster is at least $1 to $1.50 cheaper. That can add up quick. Netflix is even cheaper if you can watch and return them and get more in quickly in the course of a month.

Its Worst Enemy Will Be...

Really, I think high definition may be a victim of its own success, in that it shows too much. Never mind the vain actors and news/TV hosts kvetching about how it reveals their flaws. Watching movies in high definition really kills suspension of disbelief because it so glaringly exposes special effects and make up.

Nowhere was this more obvious than while watching a Blu-ray demo at Best Buy on a Sony Bravia TV (want want want, as they say on Fark). It was the first "Fantastic Four" movie, during a crash sequence on a bridge where a fire engine ladder truck loses control and ends up dangling over the edge of the bridge, a fireman hanging on for dear life hundreds of feet up.

Except he wasn't. The "water" under him was so patently fake as to be a joke. I've seen more realistic water in PlayStation 2 games. The effect was to immediately kill my suspension of disbelief. Since then, I have seen a number of movies where the effects were glaringly bad. The Neo vs. 100 Agent Smiths fight in "The Matrix Reloaded," for example, is jarringly fake. Some shots in "The House of Flying Daggers" were downright cartoony, although that is also one of the worst-looking DVDs out there.

In the end, I can't help but wonder if HDTV/high definition DVD will do itself more harm than good, exposing the man behind the curtain and ruining the magic of the movie. Planet Earth is stunning in Blu-ray, probably the best demo disc for the format. But effects movies may have their cover blown by showing us too much.

Virus vendors are frequently accused of creating the viruses so they can sell you the fix. Just last week, ESET Software came by to discuss their 2007 Malware report and it was a joke among us that they were writing the viruses so they could detect them.

Well, now we're seeing a piece of malware that does just that. Kaspersky Labs has found a virus called MonaRonaDona that is exactly the opposite of most malicious software. Instead of hiding, it makes its presence known with a threat to the user.

The hope on the part of the authors is that the user will do a Google search on this new threat. When you search for solutions for MonaRonaDona, you will find a site called Unigray Antivirus, which claims to be a legitimate antivirus company and able to remove MonaDonaRona. 

However, Kaspersky did a little digging, which means they did a WHOIS search. Unigray's Website was registered on February 20, 2008, which is always a red flag for trouble. When you run a scan of your computer using Unigray's technology, it pops up completely random infections, calling them all a form of the MonaRonaDona malware. 

Kaspersky quickly realized that Unigray is only capable of removing one piece of malware from a user's system -- you guessed it, the MonaRonaDona malware, for a fee of $39.  

Fortunately, the Google search results list is not static. A search of MonaRonaDona no longer brings up Unigray in search results or advertising, just a lot of people talking about this new virus.

Give your antivirus vendor of choice a day or so, they should have definitions to detect this shortly.

Bachelor auctions have been popular gimmicks for raising money, but how often does a celebrated actress get involved? On eBay there is a bid to win a date with Scarlett Johansson, the curvy star of films like "Lost in Translation," "The Island" and the recent period piece "The Other Boleyn Girl."

Like many in Hollywood, Johansson has her pet causes and proceeds from the date will go to Oxfam America, an international development and emergency relief agency.

The winner will receive two tickets to the world premiere of the film "He's Just Not That Into You," starring Johansson, Drew Barrymore and Ben Affleck, chauffeured car service to the premiere, hair and makeup for one by Prive and a chance to meet Johansson at the premiere. The location has not been determined yet but will be in either Los Angeles or New York this July.

Airfare and the hotel, however, are not included. Bidding is up to $300 as of this writing. The auction will last until March 12th, so save your pennies.

Sun is continuing its acquisitions strategy, not of companies but prominent open source programmers.

James Gosling today announced during his keynote at Sun Tech Days in Sydney Australia that Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki will be joining Sun to work on all of the company's Python projects. 

Leung is an author, a member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and a long-time Python developer at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). Wierzbicki is the lead implementer of the Jython project (Python on the Java VM). The two join Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock, JRuby creators Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo and Nick Kew, a leading developer on the ASF platform, who have recently joined Sun to pursue open source projects.

The Python language is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that is used for a variety of applications, from desktop to Web applications. Sun is a platinum sponsor in the upcoming PyCon 2008 conference in Chicago this month. 

Sun's strategy as of late has been to broaden its virtual machine to support a number of dynamic languages, not just Java. CEO Jonathan Schwartz told attendees of the SugarCRM Customer and Developer conference last month that Sun wants to "take the J of the JVM and just make it a VM."

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is being adopted for a wider range of uses, and not all of them are for the good. On the plus side, OpSource, a SaaS hosting company, late last week announced OpSource Connect, a new feature that will allow companies to consume and publish multiple Web services across their SaaS applications and connect those services with legacy apps.

SaaS applications, including those of Salesforce.com and NetSuite, can be integrated with legacy enterprise applications behind the corporate firewall to protect data integrity. These legacy connections are enabled via a service called OpSource Sockets.

On the unfortunate side, security vendor Finjan has discovered a SaaS-like toolkit that is stealing account information for FTP sites, including some of the top 100 domains as rated by Alexa.com.

The crimeware, which originated in Russia, allowed multiple users to attack a target, trying to find the credentials that would allow for access to the server's file system. The ill-gotten account information would then be validated and sold to other cybercriminals, all through an automated service.

The standard-bearer for SaaS, Salesforce.com, reported its year-end numbers last week. The company posted net income for the year of $18.3 million, or 16 cents per share, on revenues of $556.8 million, a 45 percent improvement over the $381.8 million in fiscal year 2007. Net income in fiscal 2008 was $481,000.

Salesforce.com is taking the show on the road. Dreamforce Europe, the first international customer show, will take place in London on May 7 and 8, with an interesting mix of speakers that includes Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and musician Peter Gabriel.