Ever dream of designing a toaster that sears a design of your own making on a piece of bread? If that's the kind of project you might like to tackle in your spare time, Microsoft has a new program that could help.

At the Embedded Systems Conference this week in San Jose, Calif., Microsoft is set to introduce a low-cost hardware and software bundle designed for hobbyist developers of small devices. "There are tons of people out there that love to tinker with the OS and hardware," said Mike Hall, software architect for Windows Embedded at Microsoft.

For $200 to $400, a hobbyist or academic researcher can buy a package that includes Windows CE 6, developer tools, Visual Studio, and a hardware reference board from one of five hardware vendors. Windows CE is Microsoft's operating system that typically powers small portable devices such as car navigation systems, music players like the Zune, medical devices, and robotics.

Vendors participating in the program include Via Technologies and AdvanTech.

In addition to a toaster that imprints an image on a piece of toast, Hall has seen hobbyists use Windows CE to build home automation and security products and robots.

Microsoft is also trying to make it easier for commercial developers to create products based on its embedded software. Often, developers have an expertise in a specific area like user interface or multimedia, but they may lack the core skills required to port the operating system to new hardware, Hall said. As a result, Microsoft has built a Windows CE certification program "so that new customers working with CE can find certified developers to work on their custom applications and designs," he said.

Microsoft also plans to introduce packages of software designed for specific markets. The first such package will be called POSReady, which will include the operating system and other technologies often used in machines like cash registers and information kiosks. Microsoft already offers such a POS (point of service) bundle, but a new one will come out next year as part of the effort to make similar packages for different device categories. "We're leaving it open for additional 'Ready' offerings as we move forward," Hall said.

Microsoft is also changing the names of some of its embedded products. Windows Embedded CE will be called Windows Embedded Compact, and the next version is forecast for release next year. Windows XP Embedded, the operating system that runs PC-based products like ATMs and industrial control systems, will be called Windows Embedded Standard. The next version of that software should come out this year.

Apple and Sony have agreed to pay 1.3 million yen ($12,000) to settle a lawsuit filed by a Japanese couple whose Mac caught fire when its Sony-made battery went up in smoke.

The couple had wanted damages, arguing that the husband had suffered burns during the incident, which took place in their Osaka home.

The fire burnt part of the couple's floor and carpet, with the husband burning his fingers as he tried to get the flaming Mac out of his house. The couple claimed the wife's health was affected "due to the shock of the incident."

[ For more on Sony's laptop battery woes, see InfoWorld's special report. ]

Apple Japan accepted liability in court but said the level of compensation the couple required was too high. Sony countered that the link between the fire and the battery hasn't been determined.

It's the latest chapter in Sony's battery nightmare, which began in 2006 when the company and computer manufacturers including Apple were forced to recall 9.6 million lithium-ion batteries following multiple reports these had caught fire.

Macworld UK is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Apple is investigating graphics glitches affecting its latest laptops, reports claim. MacBook and MacBook Pro owners have been complaining of unacceptable graphics performance on their machines on Apple's own discussion forums.

They have been enduring unusual visual corruption, in which text appears to have been duplicated, documents fail to scroll or videos appear to flicker.

Some reports claim the problems are resolved in the latest Mac OS X 10.5.3 software, but that is only currently being circulated among developers for testing.

Apple has begun contacting users who have complained of the problem, sending an email which is alleged to state: "Apple has received reports similar to the behavior you are describing and we are investigating those reports. Further information will come in the form of a Knowledge Base article, Software Update, or Software Release."

Multiple reports suggest the problem is software rather than hardware based, with pressure mounting on the manufacturer to expedite a fix for the problems.

Macworld UK is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Curl plans to unveil next week a beta version of a runtime tool that it said will help large organizations extend RIAs (rich Internet applications) to run on the desktop.

The new runtime software, called "Nitro," provides the high performance, rich graphics, and enterprise security constraints that enterprises need to run RIAs on the desktop, according to Curl. The company claims that 300 mostly Japanese large organizations -- products enterprise customers? -- use its year-old Curl RIA development platform.

Curl is the latest vendor looking to garner part of the expanding offline RIA business, where users extend the rich User Interface and fast loading times of RIAs onto the desktop. Other offerings include Google's Google Gears technology, Mozilla's Prism software, and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) from Adobe.

Curl executives claim that Adobe's AIR, which shipped in February, is better suited for business-to-consumer applications, while Nitro is fitted for the enterprise because it can handle very large data sets and strictly cordons off non-certified desktop RIAs from corporate networks.

"Curl Nitro has a strong security model," noted Richard Monson-Haefel vice president of developer relations at Curl. "Nitro is constrained to a sandbox, but yet it can still have local storage."

In addition, Monson-Haefel said that because Nitro runs native applications written in the Curl programming language, it offers stronger performance than AIR. Nitro has successfully run data sets up to 100,000 records in tests, a performance level that would allow organizations to perform more complex data visualization. The Curl language is 10 years old and was developed at MIT specifically for RIA development.

Richard Treadway, Curl's vice president of product strategy, added that the default security model in Curl allows browser applets and desktop applets to run only in a secure sandbox area. Applications require approval by a valid certificate authority, which takes the process of granting privileges out of the hands of users, he added.

"The end-user doesn't have to make a decision about granting an application full privileges on the desktop, which could lead to bad things the user hasn't even thought of," Treadway said. "We require that they be signed by a valid certificate authority, and that gives them some legitimacy. It doesn't ensure that the code isn't malicious, but it makes sure you know exactly who the code came from."

Administrators can override the certification process, he added.

Nitro also uses the open source SQLite SQL engine so that enterprises can build applications with local SQL databases. The Web-enabled Nitro applications that run stand-alone on the desktop can run offline and update when they are connected again.

Cisco is opening up two pieces of its branch office gear to application developers in an effort to reduce the amount of equipment businesses have to place and manage in small business locations.

The company is making it possible for its ISR branch-office routers and a new version of its WAE (wide-area application engine) appliances to host business applications on the same chassis.

The ISRs already sport blades for intrusion prevention, voice and NAC, and now independent software developers as well as business customers can create applications to run on the devices. (Compare access routers)

The idea is to reduce the number of devices needed to support branch offices by including application servers in the same chassis as the router, which can also support VoIP.

To write for the platform, developers need a software developer's kit with APIs into Cisco's IOS router software as well as an AXP (application extension platform) blade for the software to run on. The ISR 1841, 2800 and 3800 devices support the AXP blade and SDK.

Business customers or ISVs can develop the applications and try to sell them themselves or with Cisco help. The company offers two levels of assistance, one in sales and marketing with certification of the software's compatibility and the other with Cisco formally reselling the software.

The company expects developers to write ISR applications for such industries as health care, financial services, retail, and energy, which have widespread branch deployments and unique applications.

Cisco is also introducing two new ISR series, the Cisco 860 and Cisco 880, that will be available in June. Pricing starts at $450. Variations of the new models include wireless access points and support for 3G wireless WAN options as well as redundant WAN connections.

In its wide area acceleration line, Cisco is bundling Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 software in with its WAE 674. The Microsoft software will run on virtual blades within the appliance. The equipment will be able to reduce transaction times between corporate sites by optimizing traffic over WAN connections and also improve performance of Windows applications by hosting them locally. (Compare application acceleration and WAN traffic optimization products) 

Pricing for the new device starts at $22,000 for the chassis with an enterprise license. The WAE 674 appliance is available now and it will be available with the Microsoft Server package during the summer.

If you're running Windows Vista, you're familiar with UAC (User Access Control). It's the security subsystem that pops up those irritating dialog boxes asking whether you really want to install software, modify system files, or write to the Registry.

UAC may be Vista's most-hated feature, but as it turns out, it may also be its best-designed. As reported by Ars Technica, UAC was created with a very specific purpose in mind: to annoy you.

Ars picked up this tidbit at the recent RSA 2008 security conference in San Francisco, where David Cross, Microsoft's product unit manager for Windows security, discussed the company's security directions post-Vista. "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious," Cross is quoted as saying.

More cynical observers will note that this is a longstanding Microsoft business strategy. But in this case, believe it or not, it actually makes some sense.

Before Vista, most Windows users did their day-to-day computing with full Administrator access to their PCs. This gave them -- and by extension, the software they used -- total control over the system, including the ability to modify critical system files.

That degree of freedom grants a lot of power, but it leads to unpleasant side effects. Most importantly, when you're logged in as an Administrator, any Trojan horses, viruses, or other malware you unwittingly download will have free reign to attack your system with impunity.

Vista attempts to correct this legacy of bad behavior by only granting Administrator privileges to applications in situations where it's absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, developers have been spoiled by the old-style security model. Too often, they write their software in such a way that it actually requires Administrator privileges, even if there might be another (albeit more complicated) way to do the same work.

That's where UAC comes in. When a program tries to gain Administrator privilege, UAC pops up a dialog box, forcing the user to click a button. As Cross pointed out, that's annoying, and intentionally so. The idea is that users will shy away from programs that cause too many UAC dialogs to pop up, out of sheer irritation. If developers don't want to scare users away from their software, they're forced to rewrite it so that it plays nice under the new security rules.

Microsoft is onto a whole new paradigm here: modifying user behavior via reverse psychology. By making users click "OK" in a bunch of security dialogs, Microsoft is actually discouraging them from continuing.

Of course, so far this strategy has only met with limited success. Many users have preferred to disable UAC rather than participate in Microsoft's social-engineering experiment. But isn't it nice to know that the good folks in Redmond are thinking outside the box?

IBM demonstrated technology on Monday that improves performance and reduces power consumption on chips used in devices from mobile phones to high-performance servers.

The technology, called high-k/metal gate, boosts performance by up to 30 percent and reduces power consumption by up to 50 percent on chips manufactured using the 32-nanometer process, IBM said. This compares to chips manufactured using the 45-nanometer process operating at the similar voltage, according to IBM's benchmarks.

For example, when a 45-nm process chip operating at 1.1 volts is scaled to the 32-nm process with high-k metal gate technology, it will have a 24 percent increase in speed and a 40 percent reduction in power consumption, said Mukesh Khare, senior manager at IBM's microelectronics division. If the voltage is dropped to 0.95 volt, the chip has an 18 percent increase in speed and a 45 percent reduction in power consumption.

A nanometer equals about one billionth of a meter. In chip manufacturing, the figure refers to the smallest features etched on chip surfaces. The measurement was done on circuits and components generally used to benchmark the speed and performance of a chip, Khare said.

The company is shipping an evaluation kit that includes chip models and shows customers how to design chips using the high-k/metal gate technology, Khare said. High-k/metal gate technology uses material to reduce electricity leaks on chips. IBM said it may incorporate the technology when it starts volume production of chips using the 32-nm process. IBM has said it plans to start volume production of chips using the 32-nm process in late 2009.

For computing devices to deliver power savings and performance gains, chip manufacturers are consistently upgrading manufacturing technologies. Intel last year started incorporating high-k/metal gate technology when it began manufacturing chips using the 45-nm process. Intel's chip rival, Advanced Micro Devices, does not use high-k metal gate technology in chips.

Monday's announcement was one more step in IBM's efforts to advance semiconductor technology. The company last month announced an alliance with Hitachi to jointly research the miniaturization of chip circuitry from 32-nanometer and 22-nm semiconductor. It is also developing silicon nanophotonics technology, which could replace some of the wires on a chip with pulses of light on tiny optical fibers for quicker and more power-efficient data transfers between cores on a chip. It is also working with U.S. universities to develop carbon nanotubes, smaller transistors that could deliver better performance than current transistors.

IBM made Monday's announcement with its partners: Chartered Semiconductor, Freescale Semiconductor, Infineon Technologies, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, and Toshiba. IBM has a manufacturing partnership with AMD, and although AMD wasn't part of the official announcement, it will have access to the new technology, Khare said.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission needs to prohibit mobile phone carriers from blocking text messages from competitors, a group of advocacy groups said Monday.

Mobile carriers continue to block text messages sent by competitors and there's nothing stopping them from blocking political messages, said officials with Public Knowledge, Free Press, and other groups. The groups first raised concerns about text-message blocking last September, when Verizon Wireless blocked Naral Pro-Choice America from sending messages to people who opted into a text-message campaign.

Even though Verizon Wireless quickly reversed its decision after media reports on its blocking of Naral's messages, the FCC needs to put rules in place, said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge. "If wireless carriers are allowed to decide who can speak to whom, it has huge implications for free speech, civic discourse, accessibility for the disabled ... and for competition," Sohn said.

Public Knowledge and other groups filed comments Monday in the FCC's inquiry into text-message blocking. Free Press, Public Knowledge, and other groups filed a complaint with the FCC in December.

"There is a real and ongoing problem in the U.S. communications network today," the groups said in their new filing. "Those who control the entry points into the communications system want to be able to control who can speak to the public and what can be spoken about through the rapidly growing medium of text messaging. Wireless carriers are currently openly engaging in discrimination against potential competitors, and claim the right to exercise editorial control over what their customers read and who they can communicate with."

In addition to the free speech issues, people with hearing disabilities are increasingly turning to text-messaging to communicate using phones, added Karen Peltz Strauss, legal counsel for Communication Service for the Deaf. People who depend on text-messaging need FCC guarantees that text-messaging will not be interfered with, she said.

Verizon and other mobile carriers have argued that an FCC rule is not necessary and could hurt consumers. Mobile-phone users could be inundated with spam messages if carriers are not allowed to block some messages, several carriers have argued.

Public Knowledge and other groups calling for FCC action failed to "present any facts that could justify regulation," Verizon Wireless said in March 14 comments to the FCC. Verizon Wireless has approved more than 3,200 requests for groups to send text messages, the company said.

But Verizon also screens advertisers and doesn't allow text campaigns for some products, the company said. If the FCC stops carriers from blocking some messages, "wireless operators would be prohibited from preventing ads promoting drugs, pornographic content, harassing messaging campaigns, or unsolicited messages, from barraging their customers," Verizon said in its filing.

The carriers' concern about messaging spam is misguided, said Jed Alpert, CEO of Mobile Commons, a text-messaging marketing vendor. The petition before the FCC is asking the agency to prohibit mobile carriers from blocking messages that their customers have asked to receive, not unwanted spam messages, he said.

"Nothing that's being asked for here, in any way at all, increases the likelihood that anyone would get spam on their mobile phone," Alpert said. "These are all [messaging] programs that require the user opt in, in some cases, multiple times."

Microsoft plans to launch its Live Mesh offering next week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco but so far is not revealing details of the service.

On Friday night, Microsoft sent out e-mail invitations to a "Mesh it up" event on April 24 featuring demos by Microsoft "experts." The invitation includes a reference to the mesh.com Web site, which currently requires visitors to sign in with a Windows Live ID and then displays an error message.

Microsoft declined to offer any more details about Live Mesh except to say that it will launch next week and further information will become available on Tuesday evening, April 22.

Earlier this year at Mix 08, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie vaguely referred to the Mesh concept as a way to use the Web through Microsoft products to connect devices, entertainment, businesses, and development.

The Web 2.0 Expo Web site includes a listing for a presentation by Microsoft executive Amit Mital, general manager of Live Mesh, entitled Get Mesh. Mital was previously a general manager of Live Meeting and BizTalk Server, according to the listing.

As it faces competition from online services, Microsoft has been slowly rolling out services that fall under its software-as-a-service strategy. In addition to Office Live Workspace and SkyDrive, Microsoft also has begun offering hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint.

Symantec chairman and CEO John Thompson last week delivered a keynote speech to thousands of security professionals at the RSA Conference 2008 in San Francisco. Network World senior editor Ellen Messmer caught up with Thompson at the RSA event, where he expanded on a range of topics, including vendor alliances, Symantec's competition, and the importance of data-loss prevention technology.

Network World: Cisco just announced a partnership with EMC's RSA division to make use of the data-loss prevention technology based on Tablus, a company RSA acquired last year. Any comment on that?

John Thompson: It's a little bit ironic. Cisco had a wonderful and profitable relationship with [data-loss prevention vendor] Vontu  before we bought them. Cisco was a Vontu reseller. It shows Cisco would rather work with anyone other than Symantec. Cisco has a philosophical point of view that if you compete with me, you can't partner with me.

NW: What's Symantec doing with Vontu, which it acquired last December?

JT: The DLP technology Vontu brings to a company specifically makes policy-based decisions about information flowing over a network, an area important to highly regulated financial services, health care providers, or the merger and acquisition transactions at a company. The Vontu acquisition was important for us since we will now integrate that policy engine into the storage and network tier in what Symantec researchers internally are calling Project Huggie.

NW: How does the Veritas merger of three years ago look to you today?

JT: We put together our $2.6 billion company with $2 billion Veritas and spent two years fully integrating the two companies. This was not an easy task. We made some mistakes. But the market has proven that our vision was correct.

NW: Why doesn't Symantec acquire an encryption-technology company?

JT: We license encryption technology for implementation in our products. We don't need to own the technology. My view is the real opportunity about encryption is managing the keys that unlock the data.

NW: Any take on virtualization?

JT: The virtual-machine phenomenon is here to stay. At the server level, it's optimizing the hardware resources a lot better. Most are underutilized. You can run more applications on a server. Given that you will virtualize the infrastructure, you'll also virtualize the backup and management. The complexity of the virtual environment goes up quite a bit due to the nature of the applications. The opportunity is around application isolation. You want trusted applications, so if something were to occur in one virtual instance, it wouldn't contaminate what was running in another. Everyone in this industry wants to wrap themselves in a "virtual cloak" as it were.

NW: What do you think of McAfee, often viewed as your rival?

JT: It's a nice little company and they do a nice job. The industry needs competition. But we don't see their portfolio as competing directly with ours. We help customers manage their infrastructures better.

NW: What about Microsoft's entry into anti-virus about two years ago?

JT: It's been much ado about nothing. Their results have been fairly abysmal, although Microsoft has done a lot to make Vista a secure operating system. Customers like the concept of diversity. Products like McAfee, Sophos, Panda, and more serve as part of the ecosystem.

NW: In past election seasons, you publicly voiced a preference for a particular presidential candidate. Are you doing that for this November's presidential election?

JT: I'm just going to run Symantec. I'd just say a new administration, whatever it is, hopefully realizes the importance of technology for everyone on the planet.