Imagine asking mobile operators to compete in an auction for the chance to offer you service and then switching from one operator to the next multiple times a day to get the best rate or more bandwidth.

Picture doing this without any of the hassles associated today with switching carriers -- no early-termination fees, phone number transfers, or new-handset purchases.

[ Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

Google has sketched a plan for such a system in a patent application. Initially filed in March 2007, the application, which is not available on Google's Patent Search site, was posted on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office site on Thursday.

The system would require end-users to have mobile devices that can operate on different types of networks, including Wi-Fi and the various incompatible cellular technologies, as well as multiple operator networks.

In one scenario described in the application, a user might have a device that is configured to use the least expensive option for connectivity at all times. When at home, the device would attach to the user's Wi-Fi network. Outside, it would switch to the cellular network.

But once outside, the device could periodically search for other available service providers, asking the service providers to bid for the chance to offer service to the customer. The device could automatically switch to the network that has the best price without interrupting a user's voice call or data connection.

On the back end, a program on the phone could contact each of the available networks individually, or the phone could instead communicate with a central server that handles the negotiations with each service provider.

A user could also set different parameters, not just based on price. "In addition to cost as a factor in selecting appropriate telecommunications providers, users may opt for alternative auction models based on maximal bandwidth offered, best coverage/reliability, or some combination of options," the application reads.

Portions of Google's proposal are already available from other providers on the market, but the search giant could have difficulty implementing the broad vision because mobile operators might not see an incentive for joining the program.

T-Mobile currently offers a phone that automatically uses a customer's home Wi-Fi network to carry calls when the user is at home, seamlessly switching calls to the wide area cellular network if the user leaves home while on a call.

But Google argues those kinds of offerings have limitations. "Generally, however, such a system is limited in the services it may provide and the way in which it can provide them. For example, a user may be restricted to a particular plan or particular provider of telecommunication access.... The user may instead be more interested in having access to numerous and superior applications, and may desire the freedom to use a variety of communication modes," the application reads.

If Google were to try to implement such a system, mobile operators might not be interested in joining it. Operators typically try to lock customers into using only their networks, as a way to receive guaranteed regular revenue from customers. Google's plan would make it easy for end-users to transfer their calls and revenue stream to other operators that might be able to offer them a better price or service.

Google did not reply to a question about whether it has discussed the idea with mobile operators. It also did not directly answer a question about whether it intends to try to implement such a system. "We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don't. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications," the company said in a statement.

Google has increasingly been looking for ways to better participate in the mobile market. Only this week it launched, along with T-Mobile, the first mobile phone running its Android software. Over the last couple of years, the search giant has often complained about the closed environment of the mobile-phone market, where operators dictate which phones users can connect to their networks and which applications can run on the phones. Its patent application would enable an environment where end-users have more control, switching from operator to operator at whim depending on a variety of factors.

The system would encourage greater openness in the market, Google argues. "Because the user controls the device, the user receives greater flexibility in deciding what applications they need or want. In addition, such generalizing of the communication channel permits more open development of devices and applications to be run on devices, because the transmissions are standardized, and any device that can format communications according to the standard will work. Thus, for example, such an approach permits more readily for the development of an open-source telephone or other communication device," according to the application.

Google's idea applies the similar auction concept it uses in its ad buying system, AdWords. This is not the first time the company has proposed extending the model to new areas. Last year, the company submitted a filing to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission proposing a plan that would let mobile service providers bid real time in an auction for the right to use a piece of spectrum for a given period of time in order to deliver services to phones. The idea would effectively open up a secondary market for spectrum.

Microsoft has given small- and mid-sized business customers more ways to earn cash to buy its software through partners by adding new products and product groups to its Big Easy program.

This week, Microsoft unveiled Big Easy 2.0, an update to a program originally launched in February. Through the program, small businesses purchasing certain products through authorized specialist partners get between 10 to 22 percent of money back that they can use to buy other services from those partners. Microsoft to date has invested about $13 million in the program.

[ Take a sneak peek at Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 in Test Center's preview. ]

In Big Easy 2.0, small-business customers now can purchase licenses for Microsoft's SQL Server database without having to also buy the company's Enterprise Assurance (EA) maintenance program that includes free updates to software. Customers have complained about EA in the past because if there are not significant updates to products they use over the three-year time period of the contract, they don't feel EA is worth the investment.

Microsoft also has broken out its Forefront security products into their own group in the program update. Customers receive more subsidies if they buy products from more groups through the program's four-level tiering system, said Michael Moore, a senior channel marketing manager at Microsoft. By breaking out the Forefront products instead of including it under the Exchange product group -- as it was in Big Easy 1.0 -- it gives customers the opportunity to get more money back from Microsoft, he said.

On the other hand, Microsoft merged what previously were two product groups -- Windows System Center Essentials and System Center Configuration Manager -- in Big Easy 2.0, he said. However, this was at the request of partners who wanted more clarity about Microsoft's systems-management offerings, Moore said.

Microsoft also has added products to the list of those for which subsidies are available. In addition to the current list, Windows Essential Business Server and Windows Server Data Center Edition are now covered under the program. However, Essential Business Server won't be available until November, Moore said.

A comprehensive list of products covered in the program and a calculator to estimate the amount of subsidies a small business can receive is available on Microsoft's Big Easy Web site.

The calculator is particularly helpful because while Microsoft tried to keep the program simple, Microsoft's volume-licensing -- on which the program is based -- is complicated and therefore subsidies can be difficult to calculate, Moore acknowledged.

Dean Edouarde, president of Microsoft consulting partner Apex Data in Los Angeles, said he was skeptical that the Big Easy program would be better than any other customer-incentive program vendors offer partners when he first heard about it. "I was like, 'Oh yeah, great, another incentive program,'" he said.

However, he said the simplicity of the program -- which requires only that customers sign up on a Web site without even purchasing anything to join -- has made the program "the best incentive program" he's used.

"All you do is tell customers to go to the Big Easy site and sign up, and every time you sell software, it will build up an incentive," Edouarde said. Eventually, Microsoft "will send a check to that customer from you" that can be used to buy more products and services from the partner, he said.

Edouarde added that among his company's 40 small and mid-sized customers, all but one are using the program. He said that customers have even called him to buy new products so that they could get more incentives through the program before Microsoft's most recent fiscal period ended on June 30. Customers calling the company to buy products instead of the company calling on them is unusual behavior, Edouarde noted.

Accused of being home to online scammers, the San Francisco-based ISP Intercage has been unplugged from the Internet -- for the second time this week.

Intercage, which has also done business under the name Atrivo, was first knocked offline on Saturday when its last upstream partner, Pacific Internet Exchange, terminated service. A few days later, another service provider called UnitedLayer agreed to provide it with service, giving it a lifeline to the Internet.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Intercage has been heavily criticized by the Internet community for tolerating online scammers. Last month, security researchers published a damning white paper [PDF] on the ISP, describing it as a "major hub of cyber crime." The researchers found that 78 percent of the domains and mail servers on Intercage's network were hostile.

Complaints about malicious Web sites and spam servers on Intercage's network went unacknowledged for years, researchers say.

In recent weeks, Intercage executives had argued that they were making a good-faith effort to cut down on cybercrime, but it all may have come too late.

After being notified of more problems on the network this week, UnitedLayer pulled the plug on Intercage late Thursday afternoon, said UnitedLayer chief operating officer Richard Donaldson. "We decided that, given the stuff that was going on and with a couple of infractions that we were made aware of, that they needed to purge themselves of any [malicious] stuff that remained," he said.

Even though UnitedLayer had been peering with Intercage and providing it with Internet connectivity since Monday, computers on the Intercage network were largely out of reach to most Internet users. That's because UnitedLayer's own upstream provider, Global Crossing, had been blocking traffic from Intercage's address space, Donaldson said.

Intercage president Emil Kacperski could not be reached for comment Friday.

But according to Donaldson, Kacperski is evaluating whether his company can continue as a business. "I honestly don't know if they're going to be around for much longer," he said.

The software development department might envision a marvelous solution to the company's IT or business need, but the technology goal can't be achieved unless the Big Boss commits to the new strategy. How do you get there -- and ensure that the user need really is filled? The key, say three former CIOs, is accurate business process requirements, a common language for the business and IT to communicate, and executive steering.

"It's what happens before a project gets to IT that often creates the challenges," says Brian Kilcourse, former CIO of Longs Drug Stores, and now a managing partner at Retail Systems Research.

While conflicting demands for IT resources and the propensity for a short-term view are significant challenges, he says, the most basic quality issue that IT efforts face is a lack of business involvement. "Businesses tend to think of IT efforts as separate from their overall strategic agenda, in spite of the fact that to a large extent it is a company's ability to use its digital assets effectively that distinguish winners from losers," he says.

Bob Doyle, former CIO of Alliant Foodservice (formerly Kraft Foodservice), agrees. "My major challenge -- the reason I was brought in to five different companies in four distinct industries -- was to enable major business change by implementing integrated IT application solutions that fundamentally changed the way the business operated. And do it as quickly as possible," says Doyle, who now runs a consulting firm. Management staff usually did not fully understand their role or responsibility in the development process, he says, so they felt no accountability. Plus, says Doyle, who has more than 30 years experience with Fortune 100 and smaller companies, company management had no process to involve, manage and set expectations.

For an IT strategy to succeed-or simply to sell the business on a major development project-you need full executive buy-in and support. Reports Kilcourse, a CIO friend of his said it simply: The most important word a CIO must learn is "No," and his most important skill is to say it when the business isn't ready to commit. "Top level guidance and visibility is an absolute must," Kilcourse adds.

Given the challenge, how does one address it?

Winning the boss's trustTo win over the business side, Doyle suggests three overall solutions:

* Educate at all management levels: explain and engage.* Establish Executive IT strategy committees to create a formal executive and management reporting and feedback process.* Win their confidence and trust by demonstrating successful implementations.

A successful CIO of a $60 billion company once told Kilcourse that the perfect IT budget was one that was 100 percent allocatable to business initiatives. "That might be a little bit of hyperbole," he says, "But it's a stretch goal that companies should try to reach."

Doyle says, "The business exec is concerned with, 'Will I get the system when I need it for the price I agreed to, and will it perform as requested (meet expectations)?' Whereas the CIO is also looking across all projects to determine manpower requirements and effective resource allocation."

That makes it even more important to gauge the progress of a project. Unfortunately, says Doyle, most development departments are very weak in collecting and reporting meaningful metrics. Disparate processes and lack of tools can make it very difficult to accurately report a development team's efforts to both IT management and business partners. Most data is collected and reported manually, which is labor intensive, not timely and prone to error, he says. "Often, you had to rely on 'gut' experience and judgment when explaining the 'health' of a project," says Doyle.

Doyle suggests that IT managers explore recently available tools, such as CIO dashboards, which are integrated into the software development process. Doing so, he says, can facilitate the collection and reporting of development activities -- and improve communication with the business people.

A common language for the business and ITVisibility into IT processes and services is a must, says Kilcourse. "The biggest part of that is getting agreement on what will be measured, and then measuring it," he says. He urges IT managers to develop a common language that both IT and the business can use to communicate about both a problem's business description and its technical description. "[That language] needs to map its processes and their output (always, digital assets) to the business, and not leave it to the business to figure it out. Inevitably, that leads to development methodologies and portfolio management techniques."

Sponsoring business leaders lose the thread of IT driven change initiatives pretty early in the process, Kilcourse says, usually between requirements definition and system specification phases. That happens when they can't understand the correlations between the requirements and the use cases that define how the requirement will be met.

The fault here may not be all on the business side, though. IT might think it got the use cases right , only to discover-usually much later-that the scope is wrong. "This, more than any other reason that I can think of, is why projects fail," says Kilcourse.

Part of a CIO's job, says Kilcourse, is to create and maintain the "bubble" wherein software engineers can stay focused and do what they're paid to do. But that is very hard to do in an "open" environment where there is free interplay between IT'ers and their business cohorts. Creating that bubble really boils down to getting the "contract" right at the outset: what will be built, what it will do, what it won't do, and (most important) how it will set a foundation for future value generation, says Kilcourse.

That means you need to put extra emphasis on finding out what users and the business executives truly want and to communicate it effectively. " User requirements, no matter what the development style, must be rigorously developed, detailed and documented," says Frank J. Fanzilli Jr., the former managing director and Global CIO of Credit Suisse First Boston, from which he retired in 2002 after 18 years of service. Rigorous change control processes need to be mutually agreed upon and adhered to, he says.

Kilcourse agrees. "The most important thing to get down is the process, and then the rules and data that the process need. As they say, 'A picture is worth a thousand words,' and there are good tools today that define or describe business processes-often in easy to understand graphic form. Having business operatives and IT'ers working on these together is crucial."

Even a great staff who understands the business functions they support very well is, at the end of the day, just IT folks with a somewhat idealized view of reality, he points out. "Any coder will tell you that it's the exception logic that complicates a program-and the same is true for business processes. So you need the operations professionals to help define what is and what will be. Then IT can start talking about the digital assets needed to get the agreed-upon process to flow."

To get others to buy into your solution, you need to understand them-and there is no substitute for getting to know your users as well as you can, adds Fanzilli. "Developers are very cognizant of the impact that user involvement has on them. Requirements definition, change control, education and the like have a significant impact upon their lives, and they know that by experience. He says, "One problem is that they may not see it as their role to help manage those processes."

It's a pressing problem; how can datacenters be made more energy efficient when managers often have little idea as to the true environmental cost of running their datacenters.

A British company claims to have the answer. Consultancy Migration Solutions has introduced an audit that can assess all the energy consumed within a datacenter. According to Alex Rabbetts, managing director of Migration Solutions, businesses should look beyond industry benchmarks, such as PUE and DCiE. "We already have a bunch of industry metrics, but they provide only a small part of the answer. For example, if you took readings in summer and winter, you'd get two different sets of figures; all you're getting with them is a snapshot at a particular time."

He said that the Migration Solutions' ERA (Environmental Report and Audit) took into account a wide variety of other factors. "It's not just about power, you have to take a holistic approach to measuring IT efficiency. We look at factors such building construction, windows, cooling for example as well as power."

While much of the debate on data center optimization has focused on factors such as virtualization, Rabbetts said that this wasn't enough. "You can't run virtualization on x88 servers, but if you take the old servers away, the energy efficiencies in disposing of them might well outweigh the advantages of upgrading the servers."

But he added that there were other factors to consider that the cruder metrics just wouldn't look at. "If you have a switch you need to look at whether it draws air up and down or from side to side, that has an effect on the way that you build a data center.

The Migration Solutions' audit costs around £2.500 and considers about 150 variables. Rabbetts said that it was difficult to say what sort of savings an audited firm could expect to make. "One thing that I would guarantee is that we would make some sort of power saving but it's hard to put a figure on it. It's fair to say that most of our customers are interested in saving money rather than looking to save energy - although that's a by-product. "

When pressed to give a figure, Rabbetts said that a company could save something between 5 and 20 percent on power costs.

The company has just launched the audit to customers but has already signed up a number of trial lists, drawn, said Rabbetts, from a wide variety of industries.

Although the company is marketing the audit as an industry standard, there is no standard that the audit conforms to. "It's an interesting point," admitted Rabbetts, " tell me which body would ratify it."

A Florida man was sentenced to three years probation Thursday for helping run a server used for illegally sharing computer programs and files under copyright.

Steven Fiatarone, 55, was also fined US$2,000 in U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Fiatarone's server, nicknamed the "Nite Ranger Hideout," was located in a school in Emporia, Virginia.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

The server was part of the "warez" scene, a group of file traders known as "crackers" who break copyright protections on movies and computer software and put the files on password-protected servers for others.

Fiatarone, who went by the nickname "kidzap," uploaded 23,572 files to the server and downloaded 40,487 files between November 2002 and April 2003, according to the indictment. He could have faced a prison sentence, but chose to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement in exchange for a lesser sentence.

Among the programs Fiatarone uploaded was Pro/Concept, a product design engineering program, and ColdFusion MX version 6.0.1, an Internet application development program from Adobe Systems.

Federal prosecutors charged five men in the same indictment for their warez activities. Robert Hardick of Gretzville, New York, was sentenced in August to three years probation

Still pending are the cases of Michael Uszakow of Oakdale, Minnesota; William Parrott of Roanoke Rapids, South Carolina and Dominic Tymorek of Woodstock, Georgia.

Alcatel-Lucent lost another round against Microsoft on Thursday in a continuing court battle over patents for the MP3 digital music format.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., upheld a ruling denying Alcatel-Lucent a US$1.5 billion award from Microsoft. The amount would have been one of the largest-ever awards for patent infringement.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

In February 2007, a jury ordered Microsoft to pay Alcatel-Lucent the money for infringing on two patents covering MP3 encoding and decoding technology.

But the decision was reversed in August 2007 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in San Diego after a judge found Microsoft was guilty of infringing on one patent.

The judge also ruled the court had no jurisdiction over the other patent since its co-owner, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft -- a German research organization -- did not join the suit with Alcatel-Lucent. That decision was upheld Thursday.

Microsoft maintained it properly licensed the technology, which is used to reduce the size of music files but preserve audio integrity, from Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft for $16 million.

Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman Mary Ward said Friday the company was "disappointed" but had not decided whether to appeal.

Customers using unified threat management devices say the appliances represent a more streamlined way to provide multiple security functions and to track down security data, but don't necessarily meet all gateway security needs adequately.

This category of equipment is about 4 years old and has really caught on -- IDC projects more than $3 billion in sales in 2011 -- with most firewall appliances supporting options that make them UTMs and offering a way to simplify networks by eliminating boxes.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

For instance, the Columbia Association, a nonprofit government agency that oversees the planned city of Columbia, Md., switched this year to using Cisco ASA routers with UTM functionality that enabled the association to drop a VPN concentrator, firewall, and intrusion-detection system -- all Cisco gear -- and the Cisco Security Agent software deployed on the association's servers.

Instead, the ASA performs all those functions, says Columbia Association's IT director Nagaraj Reddi. Adopting the ASA to pick up the functionality of the individual products gave Reddi a way to quickly assess what otherwise would have been spread across four other platforms. "We had nothing to put these logs together," Reddi says. "Now we can monitor them all in one place."

This kind of unified reporting from UTMs can give a broad view of overall network health and activity, says Grant Nickle, the IT director for Underwriters Safety and Claims in Louisville, Ken., which uses an Astaro Security Gateway UTM. It replaces two devices -- a Cisco PIX firewall and a Novell Border Manager proxy -- and provides functionality the company lacked before, namely intrusion protection, gateway antivirus and SSL VPN.

Initially, Nickle was skeptical that the device could perform all of its functions well, but he says it does and generates an executive report daily that he finds valuable for its snapshot of the previous day's activity application by application. It reports concurrent traffic, CPU and memory use, the number of packets filtered and top users.

"It answers 95 percent of the questions I might have about the network," he says. For greater detail, he can drill down to the activity of a particular IP address or the top categories of blocked URLs. Before, he had to dump logs from Border Manager and sort them. The Astaro reporting makes it easier to find data he needs to voluntarily comply with Statement on Auditing Standards 70 requirements, which demonstrate to outside parties that companies follow accepted auditing procedures.

While consolidating functions on a single device has its upside, not all UTM users are satisfied that they provide the best protection. Cedarville University, a 3,000-student school in Cedarville, Ohio, uses paired SonicWall E7500 UTMs, and other gear that duplicates some of its functions is still desirable, says Nathan Hay, Cedarville's network engineer.

In addition to firewalling the network, the UTM gear performs intrusion prevention, gateway, antispyware screening and URL filtering, Hay says.

He chooses to double up the URL filtering with a St. Bernard Software iPrism Web-filtering appliance that offers more than the Web filtering on the UTM, he says, such as logging and built-in reports. "I get more complete features with the purpose-built Web filter," he says.

But because the URL filtering is available on the UTM and doesn't overtax the machine, he uses it with the theory that one filter might catch something the other misses.

Hay recommends making sure the UTM is the right size. Initially the school had a smaller SonicWall PRO 5060 that bogged down so it turned off URL filtering and the intrusion-prevention system (IPS), he says. With the larger device processing the IPS and antivirus screening, it runs at 30 percent of capacity or less. "The 7500 has lots of horsepower and we wanted it to grow with us," he says.

Tift Medical Center in Tifton, Ga., uses a Watchguard UTM for its firewall capabilities and gateway antivirus screening, but would like to use more features such as antispam and e-mail filtering. By focusing on a single device, this would help simplify troubleshooting problems and finding threats, says Alan Lewis, network administrator at the medical center.

"For the most part we are using other things. I'm trying to move more and more to the UTM to simplify and consolidate my network," Lewis says.

But he also doubles up some protection. For instance, he uses both gateway and desktop antivirus because he doesn't believe the gateway can stop all threats. "Not in a large environment like ours. There's too many ways to get in," Lewis says.

He uses a McAfee e-mail filtering appliance in addition to e-mail protection on the UTM as well, relying more on the appliance.

"I'm not using [the UTM] to the fullest. It's on a low-level setting to catch the obvious things," he says, and the specialized device is used to do deeper inspection.

Lewis says ultimately he would like to use the Watchguard gear for antispam, antivirus and e-mail filtering to reduce complexity. He has separate security event management tools, firewalls and Zix e-mail encryption service for medical businesses. "I've got lots of places to look," when something goes wrong, he says.

Columbia Association's Raddi says switching from multiple Cisco devices to the ASA saves him on licensing and maintenance fees. Plus the single chassis reduces energy consumption so the UTM is green as well, he says.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Thursday evening emphasized the company's ambitions in search and virtualization while offering his perspective on the current nervous U.S. economic situation.

Speaking at a Churchill Club event in Santa Clara, Calif., Ballmer also dished out his perspectives on rival Apple Computer and acknowledged -- but did not detail -- a cloud computing effort dubbed Project Red Dog.

In the search space, Microsoft remains a small player but is a much larger player in software-based advertising market, Ballmer said.

"In search, we [have] got about a 9 percent share in the U.S." he said. It will take a while for the company to be a larger player, he said. Microsoft offers search via its Live Search site and is competing with search giant Google.

"While we have made a lot of progress, we still have a lot of work we need to do to try to fundamentally reinvent the search experience, the search business model," Ballmer said. The company has improved the core relevance of its search results and differentiated in areas such as image and news search. Microsoft, said Ballmer, may be unique in its ability to compete with Google in search and search-based advertising.

With properties such as MSN and Hotmail, the company is No. 3 in advertising-based software. "We sell over $3 billion a year of advertising," Ballmer said.

Asked if Microsoft's five-year plan in search once included acquiring Yahoo, Ballmer acknowledged that this proposed acquisition, which did not come to fruition earlier this year, was likely part of the plan when he last spoke at the Churchill Club two years ago.

Ballmer also cited the newness of the virtualization market and how Microsoft sees an opportunity to democratize this space. "Numerically, virtualization is in a very early stage," with fewer than 5 percent of servers virtualized, said Ballmer.

Microsoft, he said, has had a tremendous reception to its work on the Hyper-V virtualization technology and the company's systems management platform. "I see real opportunity to bring virtualization to a much higher percentage," of the world's servers, Ballmer said.

Desktop virtualization also is possible in a number of ways to improve the desktop, he said. There could be application-level virtualization streamed to the client or virtualization at the presentation layer, for example, said Ballmer. Also, hypervisors present a technique to boost the desktop experience, he said.

Commenting on the health of the IT economy, Ballmer said the United States is harder hit than other parts of the world and the business side more impacted than the consumer market.

"Our industry is not immune to what goes on in the global economy," Ballmer said. But "people still see a certain buoyancy in the market," he said.

Nobody is quite sure how bad the fallout will be from either the credit crisis or bailouts, said Ballmer. He added that at least for now, people he talks to are feeling better than if all they did was watch CNBC.

Ballmer also noted the migration of users to the cloud. "We have an incredible pipeline of customers moving to cloud-based solutions," he said. In the SaaS space, most enterprises will use SaaS via a subscription model, while for consumers they will have a mix of advertising- and subscription-driven services, he said.

Project Red Dog, meanwhile, will be discussed at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles at the end of October, according to Ballmer and a Microsoft representative.

Ballmer cited two opportunities for improvement with certain application development spaces: scientific computing and Web workflow. Forty percent of Web servers run on Windows and 60 percent run on Linux, which means Microsoft has some work to do, said Ballmer.

He also raised questions about how well Apple could do in the enterprise. "Because Apple believes in putting hardware and software together, it doesn't believe in allowing a lot of people to make it," he said. Apple also does not invest in infrastructure to support enterprise scenarios, said Ballmer.? If Microsoft does its job right, there is no real reason why Apple should get any real footprint in the enterprise, Ballmer said.

?Ballmer also reflected on Microsoft's mission statement that the company had wanted to see a computer on every desktop and in every home." It's still my favorite mission of all time," he said. Now, there many mission statements, such as enabling businesses to realize their full potential, Ballmer said.

He also listed three important decisions Microsoft executives made over the years: co-founder Bill Gates' decision that microprocessors were a new opportunity and that software and hardware were different businesses; co-found Paul Allen's decision to get Microsoft in the applications business; and Gates', Ballmer's, and Microsoft Technical Fellow Dave Cutler's decision to have Microsoft enter the enterprise business.

Microsoft has built a strategy around the planned early-November release of its high-performance computing server that it hopes will be the catalyst to deliver massive computing power for future applications.

The strategy encompasses Microsoft applying its typical mantra of "simplifying computing" to the costly and often complex high-performance computing world in the form of its Windows HPC Server 2008 surrounded by Microsoft's collection of applications, management wares, development tools, and independent software vendor community.

[ Read the related story about Microsoft's rollout of HPC Server 2008 on Wall Street. ]

"We are not talking about a lot of unique product development here; it is mostly about packaging and coming up with appropriate licensing," says Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata. "But as HPC becomes more and more mainstream and used for all kinds of commercial roles, whether it is product design or business analytics, Windows is not such an unnatural fit as it might have been in the past."

Microsoft last week said it would release on Nov. 1 HPC Server 2008, the company's most competent move to date to offer parallel computing horsepower to corporations doing more real-time simulations, designs, and number crunching.

But the road is decidedly uphill.

Microsoft currently lays claim to less than 5 percent of HPC server market revenue, according to IDC. Those numbers compare with 74 percent for Linux and just more than 21 percent for Unix variants.

In addition, competitors such as Red Hat have been offering its Enterprise Linux for HPC Compute Nodes since last year. And Sun late last year reentered the HPC fray with its Constellation System.

Those sorts of challenges, however, have not deterred Microsoft in the past.

The company is betting users such as engineers will combine workflows running on their Windows workstations with Windows-based back-end HPC clusters, or move those workloads off the desktop and into an HPC infrastructure.

Microsoft also envisions such desktop /back-end combinations as Excel users performing a function call from their desktop, which in the background executes an agent that runs some computational algorithms on a networked HPC cluster and returns an answer. The user would have no concept of the back-end tied to Excel, which is widely used in financial services.

Since the 2006 release of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, Microsoft has been working with partners such as HP and Intel to create mass market appeal for HPC and the message may finally be striking a chord as prices drop and performance rises on technical computing platforms.

But Microsoft, experts say, isn't likely to climb the ladder and replace high-end HPC environments built on Linux and Unix.

The real opportunity is appealing to new buyers with a Windows desktop infrastructure looking anew at HPC for workgroups or departments.

IDC says HPC hardware revenue 2007 alone generated by workgroup and departmental platforms was nearly $5.5 billion, just more than half of the $10 billion total. The prices on platforms in those segments range from $100,000 and below (workgroup) to $100,000 to $250,000 (departmental).

Microsoft's recent hardware-software partnership with Cray on the CX1 "personal" supercomputer aimed at financial services, aerospace, automotive, academia, and life sciences and priced at $25,000 is testament to Microsoft's plan -- as is the $475 per node price of HPC Server 2008.

That's not to say Microsoft won't make a run for the top. Earlier this year, a Windows Server 2008 HPC cluster built by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications garnered a No. 23 ranking on the list of the world's top 500 largest supercomputers, achieving 68.5 teraflops and 77.7 percent efficiency on 9,472 cores.

But experts say Microsoft's sweet spot will be much lower down the list.

"The Microsoft strategy is aiming hardest at verticals where Windows is strong on the desktop and then extending that Windows environment upward," says Steve Conway, research vice president for technical computing at IDC. "It includes applications such as Excel and tools like Visual Studio so people can unify their desktop and server workflow."

Microsoft also plans to integrate HPC Server with its System Center tools for application-level monitoring and rapid provisioning by releasing an HPC Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager by year-end, according to Ryan Waite, product unit manager for HPC Server 2008.

The company is aligning HPC Server 2008 with Visual Studio Team Services, and F#, a development language, designed to help write new applications and rewrite old ones for parallel computing environments.

"We are looking at the holistic system," says Vince Mendillo, director of HPC in the server and tools division at Microsoft.

Familiarity is the big theme. Windows HPC Server 2008 is built on the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008.

The platform combines into a single package the operating system with a message passing interface and a job scheduler built by Microsoft.

The server software, built to scale to thousands of cores, also includes a high-speed NetworkDirect RDMA, Microsoft's new remote direct memory access interface, and cluster interoperability through standards such as the High Performance Computing Basic Profile specification produced by the Open Grid Forum. The server features high-speed networking, cluster management tools, advanced failover capabilities and support for third-party clustered file systems.

"HPC is no longer a niche either in terms of hardware platform or in terms of pervasiveness," Illuminata's Haff says. "For the most part, it is using volume hardware and is being applied to all kinds of problems in all kinds of companies and organizations."

It is that trend that Microsoft is betting on.

"We can take people's apps on Windows workstations and automatically scale those apps with supercomputer capabilities on the back end," Microsoft's Waite says. "When you pull all those pieces together in an integrated fashion, HPC becomes easier to use."

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate

Apple patched nearly 30 Java vulnerabilities in Mac OS X Wednesday, months after Sun Microsystems , Java's developer, fixed most of the same flaws for other operating systems.

The separate updates for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) patched 27 and 23 bugs, respectively. Two of the vulnerabilities in Leopard, only one of which was also present in Tiger, are specific to the Mac OS, and could be used by attackers to execute malicious code. Both of these critical bugs could be triggered by specially-crafted Java applets if the user was tricked into visiting a malicious Web site, Apple noted.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

The bulk of the vulnerabilities, however, were not Mac-specific, and had been patched by Sun for Windows, Linux and Solaris as far back as March 2008. Unlike its OS rivals, Apple maintains its own version of Java and so is responsible for handling updates for machines running OS X.

Apple has been criticized for its sluggish patching of third-party components, particularly open-source code, that it bundles with Mac OS. More than a year ago, Charles Miller, a researcher with Independent Security Evaluators, called Apple's inability to keep up with open-source fixes "negligent."

Wednesday's update brings Java SE 6 to version 1.6.0_07, J2SE 5.0 to version 1.5.0_16, and J2SE 1.4.2 to 1.4.2_18. All are the most current versions available from Sun, which last patched Java for Windows, Linux and Solaris in July.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Apple is selling the iPhone 3G on its Apple Store Web site in Hong Kong, promising the phones "can be activated with any wireless carrier."

The Apple Store in Hong Kong is selling the 8GB and 16GB iPhone 3G models for HK$5,400 (US$695) and HK$6,200, respectively, with free shipping. The store advertises the compatibility of the phones with any carrier, saying, "Simply insert the SIM [subscriber identity module] from your current phone into iPhone 3G and connect to iTunes 8 to complete activation."

[ For the big picture on the iPhone 3G, see InfoWorld's special report, and for more on bringing the iPhone into the office, read How to make the new iPhone work at work. Also get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

On the Apple Store's main page for Hong Kong, the site says, "Buy directly from Apple. And choose your carrier."

"Customer response to the iPhone 3G has been off the charts, and we are thrilled to offer our customers in Hong Kong another way to get their hands on this revolutionary device," an Apple spokeswoman said in an e-mail response to questions.

The company did not comment on whether online iPhone 3G sales and activation will be extended to other markets.

The iPhone 3G has been available in Hong Kong since July 11 through Hutchison Telecommunications. The cheapest monthly plan offered by the operator charges HK$2,938 for the 8GB version and HK$3,738 for the 16GB one, along with a two-year contract that costs HK$188 per month.

Checks of the Apple Store in the U.S. , the U.K. , and Singapore , show the iPhone 3G is not available for sale online. Instead, the sites offer a link to a list of stores where the phone is on sale.

Cisco has released a bunch of products to tap into the growing remote workers market. The company, which earlier this month launched Virtual Office for home workers, is set to release more offerings to tap into the demand for flexible working.

The new releases are in three complementary areas: unified comms, Telepresence videoconferencing system, and the WebEx collaboration platform.

[ Keep up on the latest networking news with our Networking Report newsletter. And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

"We're addressing some key trends towards flexible working", said Tim Stone, Cisco's head of collaboration solutions for Europe. "We at Cisco have already embraced collaborative working and have changed the way that we work on projects. He said that there was a growing demand for flexible working among organizations and that the new Cisco products were well set to meet this demand.

Stone said that the enhancements to Unified Communications would offer users a greater deal of interoperability with other business applications. "We'll be offering integration with Microsoft's OCS and with Sametime from IBM. In addition, we'll be supporting devices from various mobile providers including Nokia, RIM and Microsoft Mobile"

He said that some of the new features were bring IM-type functionality to mobile phones. "For example," he said."Users will be able to set their status to indicate to the friends whether they are available to talk or not.

Stone said that Telepresence Expert on Demand was aimed at organizations such as banks who had branches in rural areas where there wasn't enough demand for a mortgage broker or a shares advisor to be permanently stationed on the premises. Using Telepresence, potential customers would be able to talk to such an expert remotely. Stone added that the company had also had queries from educational establishments as a potential teaching tool.

The third strand of the launch WebEx Connect is a new software-as-a-service platform that combines, instant messaging, web meetings with web 2.0 business applications. Stone explained that this would provide plenty of opportunity for collaboration, through IM or VoIP. He said that Cisco's recent purchase Jabber would be integrated with the WebEx in the future and last month's purchase of PostPath would bring calendaring and email functionality to the product.

Stone said that he had not seen the research that pointed out the organizational problems that teleworking could bring. He said that it was important that make the relevant cultural changes with an enterprise to benefit from the technology. "It's important to build up a feeling of inclusion, building up trust within a team. You start with working face-to-face and then start moving to forms of collaborative working," he said.

T-Mobile dropped a data usage limit of 1GB a month over 3G networks used with the coming Android G1 phone, but said Thursday it still reserves the right to set restrictions and is working on the terms.

The turnabout might please some potential G1 customers for now, but the issue raises bigger questions over whether T-Mobile and other wireless carriers will have the capacity on their 3G networks to handle the demand from feature-rich cell phones that stream video, music and other data.

[ InfoWorld's Tom Yager got the nitty-gritty on the G1 Android smartphone | Yager also got a hands-on first look at the G1 |  Special report: All about Google's Android ]

"The wireless carriers want everybody on their networks, and they want the data junkies, but they also seem to be saying [with their caps] that 'We know you're hooked on data but you are using too much, so screw you,'" said Kevin Burden, an analyst at ABI Research Inc. in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

In T-Mobile's case, the network for 3G over HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) is in the early stages of buildout, with 16 cities on HSPA service today and a total of 22 cities expected to be ready by the time of the G1's U.S. launch on Oct. 22 . A total of 27 markets will have 3G HSPA service in mid-November, representing 80 percent of T-Mobile USA's 31 million customers.

In addition to creating a "PR nightmare" for itself, Burden said T-Mobile's earlier 1GB cap on data usage and its broader language saying it will set new terms eventually, "show that T-Mobile doesn't have confidence in its young network -- yet."

The 1GB cap on T-Mobile's Web site was noticed by an Engadget Mobile reporter, but was pulled back by T-Mobile after Engadget and at least one other blog mentioned the restriction, generating angry reader comments.

In the earlier T-Mobile language, the penalty for users exceeding the 1GB cap could potentially have meant facing network speeds reduced to 50 Kbps, significantly lower than the 3 Mbps of theoretical throughput on many early-stage HSPA networks.

The mention of the 1GB cap was removed on the T-Mobile Web site late Wednesday and replaced with language stating: "We may temporarily reduce data throughput for a small fraction of customers who use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth. Your data session, plan, or service may be suspended, terminated, or restricted for significant roaming or if you use your service in a way that interferes with our network or ability to provide quality service to other users."

In an e-mail to Computerworld, a T-Mobile spokesperson said the carrier "removed the 1GB soft limit from our policy statement, and we are confident that T-Mobile G1 customers will enjoy the high speed of data access over our 3G network. The specific terms for our new data plans are still being reviewed and once they are final we will be certain to share this broadly with all customers."

The statement also said "we reserve the right to temporarily reduce data throughput for a small fraction of our customers who have excessive or disproportionate usage that interferes with our network performance or our ability to provide quality service to all of our customers."

Burden and other analysts said T-Mobile and all the major carriers are wrestling with how to charge for usage of fast 3G networks for feature-rich devices, such as the G1, the iPhone from AT&T and the HTC Touch Diamond from Sprint Nextel.

"The problem of dealing with capping usage will only get worse with the release of more feature-rich phones," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates in Northboro, Mass.

Burden said he has been told by carriers that if too many customers started downloading video or other rich content over a 3G network at the same time it would de-grade service and result in customer complaints. But they have not shared data on how serious the problem could be, he said.

"I'd guess that if 50 college kids converged on the Boston Common and started streaming YouTube to their new smart phones at once, it would cause problems," said Gold, noting that it's not clear how many users would be needed to cause a disruption because every area served by a single cell tower is unique. If video slows, it is hard to watch, and the 3G experience is lost, he noted.

Newer 3G networks are no different than other wireless networks, which share service among all the users in a cell, the geographics area served by a cell tower. So, the farther away a user is from a cell tower, the weaker the signal and the greater chance for disruption if many people are using it. The most dramatic evidence of this problem is how even robust cell coverage has failed in disasters when many victims try to call 911 at once and find they have no service, the analysts said.

Phillip Redman, an analyst at Gartner, said all the wireless carriers are managing the adoption of new devices using 3G networks through pricing. "They could drop the pricing down to$10 per month [for unlimited data], but then they couldn't handle the traffic," he said. "Higher pricing keeps the traffic down with fewer people willing to spend on it."

Noteworthy in T-Mobile's announcement of the G1 was a $35 monthly fee for unlimited e-mail and Web browsing capabilities, Burden said.

One of the realities of wireless networks is that they were principally designed for convenient mobile access, not as a primary means of access to data, Redman said. "Wireless networks were never designed to be a primary data access service," he said. "If people use it as a primary access service because the new 'broadband networks' are positioned that way, the service will become unusable. I hope the operators learn the lesson early enough to promote mobility more, and not speed."

Redman said the typical definition by carriers of unlimited data is within 5GB per month, although enforcement varies by carrier.

The T-Mobile position on data limits should serve as a warning to smart phone users and IT managers who work with employees using them to be careful about the terms within a service contract, analysts said. If a salesperson says one thing, it is worth checking the language in the phone service contract.

Even with a contract containing language about how a carrier might penalize a customer for excessive data usage, the carriers are not generally bound by any guarantees for service levels, meaning they could drop the speed over a network without having to pay a refund or offer a credit, analysts noted. Service level agreements are commonplace within wired network service agreements offered by carriers to large customers, but are generally not part of agreements with consumers on wireless plans, they said.

Apple has closed a loophole that had let a rejected iPhone developer sell his application using a distribution channel meant for beta testing and enterprises.

Alex Sokirynsky, creator of an iPhone and iPod Touch application called Podcaster, confirmed that he has been blocked from selling any additional copies of his program. "Basically, Apple denied me from provisioning new devices," Sokirynsky acknowledged in an e-mail.

Apple had said it rejected the tool two weeks ago because it duplicated features in the company's own iTunes software. "Since Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes," Apple told Sokirynsky.

After Apple rejected Podcaster, Sokirynsky had sold the software using the "Ad Hoc" mechanism, Apple's name for the distribution channel it set up earlier this year to help developers beta-test their iPhone applications. The mechanism is also used by enterprise developers to offer custom iPhone apps to corporate users for business use.

Ad Hoc allows up to 100 iPhones or iPod Touch devices to download and install a specific build of an application. To enable downloads, a developer must obtain each iPhone's UDID (unique device identifier) code. Sokirynsky created a Web site to sell Podcaster directly to customers for $9.99; during the process, buyers had to submit their iPhone's UDID, then download and install the application to their computer.

Apple has effectively shuttered that sales channel by shutting down Sokirynsky's account.

On Monday, he posted an entry to his blog blasting Apple's move. "All I wanted was for someone from Apple to contact me and tell me how we can work it out so that I get into the App Store," Sokirynsky said on the blog. "Instead, Apple took the coward's way out by simply disabling features in my developers portal. This seems like a childish move for a company that has been proving [sic] such high quality service and products in the past."

Sokirynsky deleted the post shortly after it went live. On Tuesday, in response to questions, he said he regretted writing the blog. "That was written very late at night. I really didn't mean to write and so I took it down. I should have waited a few days to cool off before writing the post."

Others, however, have linked Sokirynsky's move to reports that Apple has told iPhone developers that the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that they signed covers all correspondence between the company and its developers, including rejection notices.

Sokirynsky did not immediately reply on Thursday to further questions about a link between pulling his post and Apple's NDA.

"Apple just closed a loophole in their system and you can't blame them for that," he said on Tuesday via e-mail.

He's not ditching Podcaster, however. In the since-vanished Monday blog, Sokirynsky said he would port Podcaster to Android, the Google-backed open source mobile operating system that will debut on T-Mobile Inc.'s G1 handset next month. "At least there, I will be welcomed instead of being walked all over," he said in the entry.

Another option, he said, was to tweak the program so it could be installed on iPhones that had been hacked to accommodate unauthorized applications. "I am going to compile the application to install using Cydia," he said Tuesday, referring to an open source iPhone application installer.

Existing copies of Podcaster continue to work, Sokirynsky said, and customers who paid for the program prior to Monday can still install it. The Web site he used to sell Podcaster via Ad Hoc was still live on Thursday, but it had been modified to include a short message telling potential buyers that Apple had blocked additional sales.

Apple has not responded to questions asked last week about Apple's rejection policy and whether it would allow Sokirynsky to continue to use the Ad Hoc channel.

T-Mobile is backpedaling on the limit it placed on the so-called unlimited data plan that will accompany its Android phone, but the operator isn't saying exactly what the new terms will be.

When T-Mobile introduced the G1, the first phone based on Google's Android mobile platform, on Tuesday, it said that subscribers would be able to sign up for a $35-per-month unlimited data plan. But the fine print on the Web site for the phone said that users would actually be limited to 1GB of data usage per month, after which their connection would slow to a 50Kbps or less rate.

[ InfoWorld's Tom Yager got the nitty-gritty on the G1 Android smartphone | Yager also got a hands-on first look at the G1 |  Special report: All about Google's Android ]

The operator quickly came under fire for the limit, which is relatively low for people who hope to use the phone regularly to view maps, check e-mail, watch YouTube videos and browse the Internet.

On Thursday, T-Mobile said it removed the 1GB limit from its policy statement. But it didn't say that users would have true unlimited download capability. "The specific terms for our new data plans are still being reviewed and once they are final we will be certain to share this broadly with all customers," the company said in a statement.

The Web site now has a more generic statement about possible repercussions for people who use what T-Mobile calls a "disproportionate" amount of bandwidth. "To provide the best network experience for all of our customers we may temporarily reduce data throughput for a small fraction of customers who use a disproportionate amount of bandwidth," the fine print reads.

Mobile operators routinely cap the amount of data that users can download, even in their so-called unlimited plans. They say that the cap ensures that a few heavy users don't hog the limited available bandwidth to the detriment of other users.

T-Mobile, however, might be at a particular disadvantage compared to its competitors. The operator is only just now launching its 3G data network, currently available in 16 markets, with a total of 27 expected to be live by the middle of November. Some operators face challenges when first launching new networks, as they try to predict the demand for services and plan their capacity accordingly.

Databases are fast becoming the next target for cybercriminals, says analyst firm IDC.

According to IDC research director Charles Kolodgy, databases are becoming the next major target for cybercriminals due to the sensitive and valuable information they hold.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Kolodgy said there is an increasing need for powerful tools that can detect and help guard against data breaches.

He said this was especially critical for vertical industries such as retail, which require compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), to protect customers' personal and credit card information.

In order to meet the need, unified threat management (UTM) solutions firm Fortinet has launched a family of security appliances dedicated to database vulnerability assessment (VA).

Hardening databasesFortinet vice president of products, Anthony James, explained that the FortiDB-1000B appliance was a mid-enterprise product designed to 'harden' databases by detecting weaknesses in passwords, access privileges and configuration settings.

The FortiDB-1000B VA appliance provides an automated, cost-effective and centralized solution for database application security, explained James, with evaluation and remediation advice for common compliance requirements built in.

He said that by identifying weaknesses in databases, the FortiDB appliance helps to prevent the theft of proprietary and personal data by what might appear to be legitimate users. FortiDB works by identifying the weakness, alerting system administrators of potential threats, and offering remediation advice.

The FortiDB-1000B appliance supports heterogeneous environments including Oracle, DB2, Sybase and SQL Server, with each appliance supporting up to 30 concurrent databases.

Deeper layers of security"Fortinet's introduction of the FortiDB appliance family is a key step in fulfilling our long-term growth strategy to broaden and deepen our portfolio of enterprise network and application security products," said Fortinet's James.

"The FortiDB product line enables Fortinet to help secure deeper layers of the network -- up to and including the application layer -- and brings a much-needed product to market to help address one of the most critical security issues today: protection of consumer and corporate data."

"Much of the world's personal and proprietary electronic data is held in the databases of corporations and businesses, with most of it having an intrinsic monetary value in the criminal underworld," said IDC's Kolodgy. "So, database security tools, like Fortinet's FortiDB-1000B appliance, are no longer optional. Instead, they are a necessary component to help protect personal information that organizations are obligated to secure."

MIS Asia is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google has released a free Web-based service called Moderator that organizations can use to improve question-and-answer sessions during heavily attended meetings.

Moderator lets event participants both submit questions to meeting leaders and vote in favor or against the questions they like or dislike.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

In theory, meeting leaders will be able to ask speakers the questions that the group democratically chose as the best ones.

The goal is to improve on the random, ad-hoc selection via the raised-hands method and thus make better use of the often limited question-and-answer periods.

Moderator also makes it possible for remote attendees to have as much of a say as in-person participants in the process of selecting questions.

Platform Engineer Taliver Heath developed the service for internal Google use as part of the 20 percent work time Google gives employees to work on projects of their own yet relevant to the company.

The idea came to him after attending the frequent "tech talks" Google holds and realizing that as the number of attendees has grown, many participants' questions went unasked due to time constraints, while not all questions that were asked seemed good ones.

"To help with this, I designed a tool in my 20 percent time that would allow anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question, and then give other participants a way to vote on whether or not that question should be asked. This way, the most popular and relevant questions would rise to the top so that the presenter or the moderator of an event could run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner," Heath wrote on an official Google blog on Wednesday.

At Google, Moderator is known as Dory, like the character in the Disney/Pixar film "Finding Nemo" whose short-term memory loss forces her to constantly ask questions.

Moderator runs on Google's App Engine, a service for developers to build and host their Web-based applications using Google's computing infrastructure.

AccuRev this week introduced its AccuRev 4.7 software change and configuration management software, featuring enhancements for scalability and personalized process visualization.

With these capabilities, enterprises can scale to accommodating growing development teams, AccuRev said. "The major functionality in this release that we're introducing is the ability to support multiserver solutions," in which servers can be added to an AccuRev deployment locally and remotely, said Cliff Utstein, vice president of marketing at AccuRev. Teams can be supported on their own distributed, commodity servers; user sites do not need to invest in high-end server clusters to run AccuRev, Utstein said.

Previously, AccuRev offered a centralized model with replica servers for remote locations. "Before, you tied everybody into the central server," he said. Now, projects and users can have their own servers for greater scalability, said Utstein.

Only the central server needs dedicated administration. "All the other servers are administered from the central server automatically, Utstein said.

Other improvements in version 4.7 include the following:

* Boosted support for large workspaces, in which AccuRev 4.7 can manage hundreds of thousands of files in a single workspace.

* Personalized visual filtering for departments, teams, and individuals, in which development teams can filter large, concurrent process structures that may contain thousands of unique projects, teams, and developers. Managers can see development activity related to work being done by their team or work in active development.

Prices vary depending on configuration. A single-user, perpetual license is $1,495.

Mobile hardware is outpacing software capabilities and the mobile user experience, according to a group of mobile phone technologists speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Among those speaking was Rich Miner , group manager of mobile platforms at Google , who said open operating systems -- like the one launched on Google's the long-awaited G1 Android phone -- will drive future innovation, but much of it may be lost on the user in the short term.

"The easiest way to see this is ... about 80 percent of mobile phones have cameras in them today, yet if you were to ask how many people actually use those cameras -- know how to get photos off of the phone -- it's probably literally 10 percent to 15 percent," Miner said during a panel discussion on the future of mobile communications at Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference here.

[ For more on the latest mobile platforms, read Neil McAllister's related blog "SDK shoot-out: Android vs. iPhone." ]

Miner spoke only a day after the debut of the G1 Android phone , a combination of technology from T-Mobile, Google, and HTC. Much like Apple's iPhone , with a touch-pad screen and GPS, the G1 Android adds a physical keyboard.

These phones "have the capabilities in terms of hardware and processing power and network connectivity that desktop computers had a few years ago. These devices clearly have desktop mobile computing capabilities but yet we're not using them this way," Miner said.

Elizabeth Altman, vice president of strategy and business development at Motorola Mobile Devices, said having more open OSes on phones and lower prices for those phones will enable greater use of more sophisticated applications and make it more interesting for developers to create more Android -style OSes for mid-tier cellular phones, but she added, "for good chunks of the world, in 3 to 5 years, Android probably won't be the operating system of choice because it just doesn't make sense economically."

Among the issues dissuading users from employing all the capabilities of their mobile devices is the complexity involved in operating them. Another obstacle is the traditional programming environments for mobile phones, which have been controlled by resellers and mobile phone carriers, and "neither of those groups are known for building brilliant software," Miner said.

But with the entrance of companies such as Microsoft and Google into the mobile platform market, a shift is coming -- one so dramatic that in a few years, a large contingent of consumers may not even use a PC, but instead perform all their Internet and communications applications on mobile devices, according to panelist Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer of the Experience and Technology Group at Adobe Systems.

Lynch said many developers are also betting on Webkit , an open source application framework, as the method for creating a foundation on which web services can be delivered across platforms, be it Windows, Linux or Mac. Miner also said larger and faster touch screens, better designed keyboards along with the use of conventional wireless networks and high speed networks with contemporary web browsers will give users an experience very much like that of a desktop PC, Miner said. "Not that that experience is the exact same one as you'd have on your desktop, but the browsers are becoming every bit as capable on mobile phones as the ones on your desktops," he said.

"All of these things are going to be important factors in realizing the mobile Internet which has eluded us," he added.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Back when the National Security Agency still had a low profile, before it became the villainous adversary of action movies or the subject of congressional inquiries, there was a quip among the agency's employees that the abbreviation NSA stood for "Never Say Anything." But shift just one letter in that abbreviation and you'll get "NDA," the document that's beginning to make Apple look more and more like the über-secretive government agency.

According to reports from developers, the latest close-mouthed move from Cupertino is that Apple has started branding its communication to developers -- including App Store rejection messages -- with all-caps notices that the messages are themselves covered by Apple's non-disclosure agreement.

[ Which platform is more developer-friendly, iPhone or Android? Read Neil McAllister's related blog "SDK shoot-out." ]

It's not clear whether those messages are just reminders that such communication has always been covered by the NDA, or whether this is Apple actively extending the reach of the NDA -- the terms of the agreement being themselves confidential -- but it's worth observing that the change comes not long after a handful of app rejections became high-profile news.

Regardless of whether those communications have always been covered by Apple's confidentiality agreement, reinforcing that fact now is a tactical blunder on Apple's part. Because the last thing you want to do when people take issue with your lack of transparency is to institute more opacity. Apple's relationship with iPhone developers is quickly turning into a parody of security through obscurity -- after all, if developers can't say anything, then how could anything possibly be wrong?

Look, not communicating with developers is A Bad Thing. Not letting developers communicate with each other is A Very Bad Thing. Unlike with development on its platforms, like the Mac, Apple hasn't even provided a way for developers to talk to each other. No Web forums, no mailing lists, nothing. In fact, with the NDA Apple's gone in the other direction entirely, prohibiting discussion of iPhone development, even among people who are all bound by the NDA.

Apple's well known for holding onto its uncompromising vision of what technology should be, but the key word there is quickly shifting from "vision" to "uncompromising." The cone of silence that's long covered Apple's product announcements and road maps has become standard operating procedure in all facets of its business, from communicating with developers to communicating with customers. But here's the thing: While it's a great idea to keep your troop movements and communications hidden from enemies' prying eyes, it's a little ridiculous to keep them hidden from the people on your own side.

Look, if Apple were a kindergarten student, its report card right now would read "does not play well with others." As the only game in iPhone app town (population: 6,325 flashlight applications and counting), Apple holds all the cards. Which means that yes, it can deny whomever it wants and it can control the flow of information however it wants -- like a five-year-old, Apple can take its toys and go home. But it's never been a question of what Apple can do; it's a question of what it should do. And I'm not talking some high-falutin' moral sense of "should" either, I'm talking business -- cold, hard cash.

Sure, the NDA probably isn't going to harm Apple's relationship with huge software companies like EA or even the guy who's making a quarter million dollars off his iPhone game, but it is going to hurt its ties with independent developers. Now, I can't make you care about independent developers, but I can tell you that you'll miss them when they're gone. Because the independent developers are the guys who innovate, the guys who push the platform to its limits. And if you want to scoff and ask what difference two guys in a garage could possibly make, well, asked and answered.

So instead of clamping down on communication, Apple needs to institute a campaign of glasnost. The NDA is a Berlin Wall, keeping the oppressed citizens of iPhone town hemmed in. And the more that communication and freedom are stifled by that wall, the more people are going to be lining up to slip through the cracks to what they perceive as a land of freedom.

There may very well be a good reason for the NDA to remain in place--but that shouldn't prohibit Apple from explaining that reason to its developers. All it takes is for Apple to be a little more forthcoming to begin to undo the damage that's been done. It's time for Apple to diverge from the path of "Never Say Anything" before developers take NDA to mean "Never Develop Apps" for Apple.

Macworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Yahoo rolled out part of a new advertising platform on Wednesday that's intended to streamline how digital ads are bought and placed across the Web.

The platform, APT, has been under development for at least two years. APT has been one of Yahoo's big projects undertaken to improve its mediocre financial performance and grab a larger slice of rising Internet advertising revenue.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

Yahoo hastily previewed APT, then known as AMP, in April, as the company was under intense pressure caused by Microsoft's acquisition attempt.

The APT Web site is short on details, but the company outlines its features.

APT aims to link Web site owners, advertisers, and the agencies between them who sell ads. It's an automated platform that gives advertisers a range of tools to control where ads should appear, what kind of Web surfers the ads should be shown to, and how much they are willing to pay.

Yahoo's strength has been in display advertising area, while Google has built its robust business on text-based ads that can be incorporated into Web sites with similar content. Google, however, is also diversifying its platform for display ads and Microsoft also remains a key player.

Two newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, will use APT, Yahoo said. The publications are part of a Newspaper Consortium established in 2006, in which the papers share ad revenue with Yahoo in exchange for technical assistance.

Yahoo said more of the consortium's 784 newspapers will adopt APT through next year.

APT can serve ads, meaning it places an ad in the right spot at the right time on a publisher's site. It also is its own ad network, which links advertisers and publishers, and an ad exchange, where ads can be bought and sold. Ad exchanges help publishers find ads to show when they have unsold spaces.

Yahoo says APT can deliver ads based on where a person is browsing the Internet from and based on their online behavior. Those targeting capabilities are increasingly being demanded by advertisers, who don't want to spend money showing ads to people who are likely not interested in their product.

APT also has other tools for publishers, such as managing the schedule of when ads will be shown and tools that help ensure all available ad space is sold.

Cisco has issued a set of security patches for the Internet Operating System (IOS) software, used to power its routers and switches.

The patches were published Wednesday, the date Cisco had previously set aside as the latest release date for its twice-yearly IOS patches. Cisco also published 12 security advisories describing the bugs, noting that many of these vulnerabilities could be exploited by attackers to crash an IOS device.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

One of the bugs, a flaw in the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) could be exploited by an attacker to seize control of the router. However, only specially configured Cisco uBR10012 series devices, used by telecommunications companies to connect broadband customers to the Internet are affected by the flaw, Cisco said.

Symantec rates this flaw critical and on Wednesday advised users of these devices who have configured their routers for linecard redundancy apply the patches as soon as possible.

Cisco is not aware of any attacks or previous public disclosures that were based on this flaw.

Other bugs that were patched affect Cisco's multicast, SSL processing, and Session Initiation Protocol software. A complete list of Wednesday's security bulletins can be found here.

Oracle saved the biggest news for last at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. CEO Larry Ellison took the stage Wednesday afternoon to announce two hardware products developed with Hewlett-Packard that are designed to provide very high performance for data warehousing applications.

Calling them "Oracle's first hardware products," Ellison introduced the HP Oracle Database Machine and the HP Oracle Exadata Storage Server, which are preconfigured server racks including Oracle software and HP ProLiant servers.

[ For more news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

The Exadata Storage Server includes a dozen disk drives and two quad-core Intel processors that are used to perform database query operations on the storage equipment itself, reducing the amount of data that has to be shuttled back to the database server. This gives a 10-fold performance boost compared to Oracle's current data warehouse products, according to Ellison.

"The storage system itself runs the Oracle database's fast parallel query software, so we took the capability you normally find in the database servers and moved it into the storage server next to each and every disk drive," Ellison said.

"We're taking a tremendous load off the interconnect between the server and the storage grid, returning just the query results instead of whole data blocks. It makes a huge difference," he added.

The storage servers can be ordered separately for use with an existing Oracle data warehouse, or as part of the HP Oracle Database Machine, which includes eight Oracle database servers and 14 Exadata Storage Servers in one rack. The database servers include 64 Intel processor cores, Oracle's business intelligence software and its Real Application Clusters technology.

Each storage server is connected to the database server with two InfiniBand pipes. Each can carry data at 20Gbps, but the speed of the system is limited to the speed of the disk drives, which limit the throughput speed to 1Gbps, Ellison said. The Storage Servers include up to 168TB of storage, he said.

Ever the showman, Ellison chuckled with delight as he stood next to one of the hulking Database Machines on stage. Joking about the storage capacity, he quipped, "This is 1,400 times larger than Apple's largest iPod."

The Linux version of the Database Machine is available immediately, he said, with support for other operating systems to follow. He said the Exadata Storage Server will work with "any Oracle database server," suggesting customers won't have to be using the current 11g version for their data warehouse.

The Database Machine is priced at $4,000 per terabyte of storage, plus the database license costs, Oracle said. The systems can be ordered from Oracle, and Oracle will be responsible for sales and support, while HP will handle the delivery and servicing of the hardware.

As Oracle enters the hardware game, data in the enterprise "is proliferating at astonishingly high rates," Ellison said.

"That creates a fundamental problem. The disk storage systems that are available today ... can store 10, 100TB of data, but they can't move that data off the disks and into the database servers very fast," he said.

There are two ways to solve the data bandwidth problem, he said: reduce the amount of data going through the pipes or make the pipes wider. Oracle did both, he said. He claimed the resulting product is much faster than competing data warehousing systems like those sold by Teradata and Netezza.

"Teradata has no intelligence in their storage server whatsoever. None," Ellison said, while allowing that Teradata's database is "pretty sophisticated."

"Netezza does very fast table scans," he said, "but their overall database capability is really primitive.".

Netezza's president, Jim Baum, shot back quickly in a statement. He dismissed the Oracle-HP products, saying data warehouses need to be designed "from the ground up" by engineers in the same company, not patched together "with glue and spit."

A Teradata spokesman was more diplomatic.

"On a high level, it's very difficult for us to comment on the performance claims of Oracle. ... We respect all of our competitors and look forward to competing against Oracle with this new offering," said Randy Lea, Teradata vice president of product and services marketing.

"We're still trying understand it a little bit more, and get more detail," Lea said. "We're not exactly sure what type of smart storage they're using and what advantages and limitations there are at this point in time."

Still anoth