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 another competitor weighed in.

"Oracle still has to prove their credibility in the large database space, which was traditionally Teradata and more recently companies like ours," said Scott Yara, founder and president of Greenplum, another data warehousing appliance vendor. "This was about them trying to achieve parity."

In a blog posting Wednesday, Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus called the products "a bold move into petabyte scale-out territory, an emerging, very-high-end niche in which one veteran vendor, Teradata, has been pre-eminent."

Kobielus also saw a challenge to Netezza.

"Like that vendor's appliance, the Oracle Database Machine offloads SQL query processing and large-table scans to an intelligent storage layer," he wrote. "Whereas Netezza uses a technique that involves field-programmable gate arrays, Oracle has leveraged its 11g technology to parallelize query/scan execution to a massively parallel pool of Exadata storage cells."

Oracle's storage layer is transparent to applications, meaning they don't need to be rewritten to see performance gains, he wrote. That said, Oracle is "just one of several [data warehouse] vendors that have petabyte-scale solutions. It's best not to get all whipped up in a lather by an artfully constructed event-based marketing tease."

More information about the Exadata Storage Server is available on HP's Web site .

(Computerworld's Eric Lai contributed to this report.)

Oracle may not deliver the first suite of its long-awaited Fusion Applications until 2010, according to Steve Miranda, senior vice president of Fusion application development.

"We're going to be with early customers at the end of next year, and we're going to be very, very cautious on the [general availability date]," Miranda said in an interview following a session Wednesday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. "We're going to make sure [the applications] are successful. Period."

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

On Sunday, another Oracle executive said in a panel discussion that early adopters would go live on the first suite in 2009, but did not indicate in what part of the year that would happen.

Fusion Applications are supposed to combine the best capabilities from Oracle's various product lines, which include E-Business Suite, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel.

To date, Oracle has shown only a handful of Fusion products, mostly centering on CRM (customer relationship management), and the project, first announced in 2005, has been dogged by concerns that it is behind schedule.

But Miranda demonstrated another Fusion application in the area of project management on Wednesday, and was scheduled to show modules for finance and human capital management later in the day.

His demonstration showed how Oracle is making BI (business intelligence) a hallmark of the Fusion project. The strategy makes sense given rival SAP's acquisition of Business Objects and its efforts to integrate some of that company's BI capabilities with SAP's software.

The embedded BI in Fusion Applications will be "truly pervasive," Miranda said. "In every transaction we have, we'll have some business intelligence information to help the business user make a decision. ... It's not after-the-fact reporting, it's in-line, in that transaction, what do you need to do."

For example, the system might be able to tell a user about to approve an invoice what the impact would be on the company's bottom line, Miranda said.

The project management module Miranda demonstrated also included a range of collaboration capabilities, from discussion forums to presence indicators for online chat.

More than 700 customers have been participating in three years of research around Fusion Applications, according to Miranda. Those companies include FedEx, Kodak, Sears, Target, Toshiba and Coca-Cola, according to a presentation slide he showed.

Floyd Teter of the Oracle Applications Users Group's Fusion Council -- which is trying to get the word out to members about how to prepare for Fusion Applications -- said Oracle might be taking longer than expected, but that it should result in better software.

"Most software projects are driven by schedule; in the applications software space, the market usually rewards the competitor who is first to release," Teter wrote in a recent blog post. "With Fusion Apps, however, product quality seems to be the driving factor and the highest priority that I continually hear about from the people building the apps ... even if achieving acceptable quality means some elements of the development effort take longer than originally planned."

"Those customers and users who have suffered through the pain of early software releases can appreciate this approach," he added.

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers.

The controversial plan sparked debate over whether Oracle was trying to kill off Red Hat by taking away Red Hat's revenue stream. Oracle and Red Hat representatives questioned during this week's Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco offered strikingly different perspectives on how well Oracle's plan has worked out.

Asked if there has been any measurable impact on Red Hat, Andrew Cathrow, Red Hat product marketing manager, responded, "To be quite honest, not at all."

"Customers may mention it as part of their renewals," Cathrow said. "We've actually seen that customers want the close relationship with us."

"The customers that we talk to, their concerns are [that] certifications don't follow through for hardware or for high speeds and can Oracle support the distribution they don't maintain," he added. A customer who wants a different support agreement than what Red Hat offers can go to IBM, Dell, or HP for third-party support, said Cathrow.

Oracle released a statement offering a much rosier outlook on Oracle's efforts.

"Put yourself in Red Hat's shoes. Oracle directly supports Red Hat Linux and provides free downloads of compatible binaries. The quality of Oracle support is superior -- our customer satisfaction is very high -- and our price is lower," Oracle said.

"In addition, we provide value-added components, such as an Oracle Enterprise Manager management pack, Clusterware, and a clustered file system all for free. So if you are Red Hat, refusing to admit that Oracle is making progress is one of your last lines of defense," the company said.

"Our Linux ecosystem, currently 700 partners, is growing rapidly, and we now have more than 2,500 customers. Our renewal rates are excellent, and many renewing customers are increasing their server counts and adding Oracle VM. Additionally, many of those customers are large enterprises," Oracle said.

Oracle directly supports Red Hat Linux and provides free downloads of compatible binaries, the company said. Red Hat "may not be happy with our progress, but we certainly are," said Oracle.

Red Hat said the Oracle Enterprise Linux product supported by Oracle is in fact not Red Hat Enterprise Linux but a derivative distribution. Oracle countered that Oracle Enterprise Linux is 100-percent based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux code base.?

Cost-wise, Red Hat support costs vary greatly, priced from $80 to $2,499 for an annual, single-unit subscription. Volume discounts are offered. By Tuesday afternoon, Oracle had yet to respond to a morning request for its support pricing.

Red Hat financial statements do not indicate that the company has suffered from Oracle's strategy. Net income for the fiscal year that ended February 29 was $76.7 million, compared with $59.9 million in the previous year. Revenues were $523 million in the year that ended this February compared to $400.6 million in the prior fiscal year.

The company on Wednesday reported revenues of nearly $164.4 million for the fiscal quarter that ended August 31, a 29 percent increase from the same quarter a year ago. Net income was $21.1 million compared to $18.2 million for the same quarter last year.

Microsoft confirmed today that it will hand out preview copies of Windows 7 to attendees at next month's Professional Developers Conference (PDC).

In a post to the PDC Web site, Microsoft said that developers would get a "pre-beta" release of Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista, on Oct. 28.

"Keynote attendees will be among the first to receive the pre-beta build of Windows 7," the company said.

Steven Sinofsky, who heads Windows development, will deliver a keynote address on Oct. 28, the second day of the conference, which opens the day before and runs through Oct. 30 in Los Angeles.

Mike Swanson, a Microsoft technology evangelist working on the PDC, said earlier this week that attendees will receive a 160GB external USB hard drive that will contain all the developer bits from the conference. The USB drive will presumably include the pre-beta version of Windows 7.

Last week, Mike Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said that he expected developers at either PDC, or the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), which is scheduled for Nov. 5-7, to receive Windows 7 code.

"When that many developers [come] together, you want them to go home with something that they can play with," Cherry said then. "Microsoft will want to do more than just tell developers about Windows 7."

Today, he was cautiously optimistic that the announcement meant Microsoft was on track with Windows 7. "If they didn't do this, you would have to wonder if they could make the schedule," Cherry said. But the fact that Microsoft's handing out an alpha doesn't necessarily mean the operating system will be done by 2009, the date most often circulated by analysts. "We now know they're making progress. They at least have something they're confident enough in to share," Cherry continued. "But the next question is, how far along is it? And we won't know that until people load it up."

Also today, Microsoft added more than a dozen Windows 7-specific sessions to the PDC agenda, including ones titled "New APIs to Find, Visualize and Organize," "Integrate with the Windows 7 Desktop Taskbar," and "Best Practices for Developing for Windows Standard User."

Sinofsky is also on the WinHEC agenda, where he's scheduled to deliver a keynote speech on Nov. 5. Microsoft, however, has not officially announced that it will deliver a Windows 7 alpha to attendees there.

Cherry fully expects the WinHEC attendees to get the same build as those at the PDC. "The people who really should be looking at the Windows 7 alpha at this point are those with the longest lead times, and that's the hardware developers," he said.

Previously, Microsoft had said that it would also seek beta testers for Windows 7. "Our current plans call for signing up for the beta to happen in the standard Microsoft manner on http://connect.microsoft.com," said Christina Storm, a Microsoft program manager, in an entry on the Engineering Windows 7 blog earlier this month.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Mozilla late Tuesday patched 11 vulnerabilities in Firefox 3.0, more than half of them labeled "critical," and fixed 14 flaws in the older Firefox 2.0.

Firefox 3.0.2 quashes six critical bugs, four marked "high," and one pegged as "low" in Mozilla's four-step threat ranking system. Among the most serious were four stability bugs in the browser's graphics rendering, layout and JavaScript engines that can crash the program and might be exploitable with malicious code.

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

"Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code," said Mozilla in the accompanying advisory.

Mozilla also updated the older Firefox to 2.0.0.17, patching all but one of the bugs fixed in 3.0.2, but also addressing several issues specific to the aging browser.

It's unclear how many more updates Mozilla will release for Firefox 2.0 -- it doesn't produce them on a set schedule -- because it has already announced it will drop the browser this December. Yesterday, Mozilla continued to urge users to upgrade to Firefox 3.0.

One of the bugs in both Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, although rated only low, was described by Mozilla as a variant of a "click-hijacking" vulnerability first reported in Microsoft's Internet Explorer by Liu Die Yu, a researcher noted for finding flaws in IE. Microsoft first patched the bug in 2003, then patched it again the following year.

A Mozilla developer, Paul Nickerson, was credited with uncovering the Firefox variant, which could be used to force a user to download a file.

Mozilla also addressed several other issues in Firefox with 3.0.2, including several stability problems and a bug that caused browsers with customized toolbars to delete the back and forward buttons.

Because the update was delayed to take into account some last-minute fixes, Mozilla also modified the licensing language in Linux versions to eliminate an end-user licensing agreement (EULA) that open-source advocates and users had objected to. Last week, Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corp., admitted that prompting Linux users to accept the EULA had been a "giant mistake."

Users can download the update for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux from the Mozilla site; call up their browser's built-in updater; or wait for the automatic update notification, which typically appears within 24 to 48 hours.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

IBM opened up cloud computing centers in four countries on Wednesday to let enterprises, universities, and governments test Web-based services and applications.

The new cloud computing centers are in Bangalore, India; Hanoi, Vietnam; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Seoul, South Korea. The company now has 13 cloud computing centers worldwide.

[ Learn more about what cloud computing really means and the new breed of utility computing and platform-as-a-service offerings. ]

Cloud computing is a relatively new technology, and issues such as usage models need to be studied, said Ponani Gopalakrishnan, vice president of IBM's India Software Lab.

The cloud computing model allows businesses and consumers to remotely access computers over the Internet to access services, IBM said. Using shared infrastructure like a cloud computing center allows businesses to manage and provision IT infrastructure dynamically depending on the requirements of business, Gopalakrishnan said.

The new center in India is positioned as an experimental platform for businesses and academic institutions to deploy and test applications, Gopalakrishnan said. While the platform would be offered free to academic institutions that IBM partners with, businesses will be charged, he added.

There are a number of production-scale applications using cloud computing available, Gopalakrishnan said. Academic institutions in India are expected to work on using cloud computing for e-government applications and researching deployment models for cloud computing, he added.

Cloud computing will help his organization provide IT services to its branches around the world without setting up additional infrastructure, said Deepak Bhosale, chief manager for IT at Asian Paints, an Indian vendor of paints.

The Society for the Promotion of Excellence in Brazilian Software (SOFTEX) and Vietnam Technology and Telecommunications (VNTT) are some of the early customers for the new cloud computing centers, IBM said.

Inadequate communications bandwidth in emerging economies like India will not be a bottleneck for the adoption of cloud computing, Gopalakrishnan said. There are a lot of mobile applications built around cloud computing, for example, that run on less than broadband-grade connectivity, he added.

Cisco this week rolled out a new collaboration product portfolio designed to help companies accelerate business processes and increase productivity, and further mine a $34 billion market for Cisco.

Additions to the Cisco collaboration portfolio include a new release of the company's Unified Communications software (compare unified communications products), a WebEx-enabled product for Web meetings with integrated presence and IM, and TelePresence customer service. The products are also intended to buttress Cisco's focus on the network as the nerve center for the collaboration experience.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Cisco contends that the network as a collaboration platform fosters integration between business applications, communications devices and Web-based tools, while allowing IT departments to maintain their mandates regarding security, policy and compliance. Microsoft comes at it from a software perspective (see a head-to-head comparison of Microsoft and Cisco UC products), while IBM touts systems, server, and software as the optimal collaboration platform.

"It's one of the first proof points Cisco's had around the concept of network-as-a-platform," says Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala on this week's collaboration rollout.

Deeper integration with desktops in those IBM and Microsoft environments is one of the features of Cisco's Unified Communications Release 7.0 software. Another is mobility, with additions that help extend collaboration features across workspaces.

Still another is Cisco Mobile Communicator support for devices running on Windows Mobile as well as Symbian and BlackBerry operating systems. Unified Communications 7.0 also scales Cisco Unified Presence to 30,000 users and Cisco Unity to 15,000 users on a single server, Cisco says.

The new WebEx product is called WebEx Connect. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application platform for collaborative business mashups that integrates presence, instant messaging, Web meetings, and team spaces with traditional and Web 2.0 business applications.

"It's the first time one of the major UC vendors decided to go to market with an online, SaaS-based offering," Kerravala says. "The whole idea behind WebEx Connect is to allow developers to be able to access a lot of the UC elements from the cloud. It's the cloud version of UC."

Cisco WebEx Connect includes a number of standard applications including enterprise instant messaging, team spaces, document management, calendaring, and discussions that can be combined with third-party widgets to enable companies to work from a single workspace. It allows administrators to control enterprise policy, security, and compliance for secure inter-company collaboration, Cisco says.

Cisco WebEx Connect also works with enterprise messaging systems to provide integrated communication capabilities within a collaborative mashup. But that's an area where the company can improve, according to one user.

"They need to have a way of having the [Unified Personal Communicator] client be able to talk to all IMs -- not just one -- all those different clients," says Mike DeDecker, voice network engineer at Activision. "So a user doesn't have to have four or five different clients working at his desktop just to communicate with the rest of the world."

DeDecker says Activision, though, can benefit from UC 7.0's standard local route groups feature, which he says reduces and the number and automates the establishment of dialing rules between two sites.

Kerravala expects WebEx Connect to compete with hosted versions of Microsoft's LiveMeeting and Avaya's OnDemand VoIP offering.

The TelePresence component is called Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand. It integrates Cisco TelePresence into the contact center for in-branch customer service and the ability to summon expertise directly from a Cisco TelePresence meeting

It enables customers to connect with subject-matter experts for in-person customer and point-of-sale service. Users can summon expert assistance directly in a Cisco TelePresence meeting or use a dedicated Cisco TelePresence endpoint and get face-to-face assistance.

For example, a retail bank could provide in-person services to bank customers in every location via Cisco TelePresence, giving organizations the ability to scale resources or expertise, irrespective of geographic location.

Cisco Unified Communications System Release 7.0 and Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand are available immediately. WebEx Connect is currently available as a desktop and Web-based client; support for mobile clients is scheduled to be available in early 2009.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

The U.S. Senate has approved an extension to an expired R&D (research and development) tax credit sought by many tech vendors.

The Senate, late Tuesday, passed the extension of the R&D tax credit after adding it to the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act, which the U.S. House of Representatives passed in May. The House will have to approve the Senate version of the bill before it can go to U.S. President George Bush for his approval.

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

The tax credit, expired since December, can cover up to 20 percent of qualified R&D spending. It has expired 13 times since 1981, despite calls by tech, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing groups to make the tax credit permanent.

Lawmakers have resisted making the tax break permanent largely because its price tag of about $7 billion a year. Some critics have called the tax credit a government subsidy for large businesses.

The Senate bill, which passed by a 93-2 vote, included clean energy tax incentives, a revamp of the alternative minimum tax paid by individual taxpayers, and other extensions of expiring tax cuts. The clean energy tax incentives earned praise from TechNet, a network of tech CEOs, which said that green energy represents a huge economic opportunity for the U.S.

"These tax measures represent real support for the American families, workers, and businesses that need a break now," Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement. "Businesses need provisions like the R&D tax credit to innovate and grow."

In recent weeks, tech trade groups have renewed their push for the tax credit to be extended, with Congress in session for only a few more weeks this year.

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a tech trade group, praised the Senate for passing the bill. "Given the historic economic uncertainty facing our nation, we should be doing all we can to encourage innovation and spark job growth in the U.S.," Ralph Hellmann, ITI's senior vice president for government relations, said in a statement. "It's time for the House to act and pass this legislation right away."

Earlier this month, R&D tax credit supporters sent a letter signed by more than 3,400 U.S. R&D workers from 123 companies to all members of Congress.

The lack of an R&D tax credit could mean that U.S. R&D jobs are sent overseas, the letter said. "Simply put, we are dismayed that Congress has allowed the R&D tax credit to expire," the letter said. "The signatures you see on this letter represent just some of the tens of thousands of real people who have benefited positively from the effects of the credit over the past 26 years. ... We are living proof that the vast majority of R&D credit dollars go directly to pay the wages of highly skilled American workers."

Without the tax credit, it's difficult for companies to plan their R&D budgets, said Sarah Barber, an engineer with Rockwell Collins, an aviation electronics vendor based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

R&D is an "essential part" of the success for companies like Rockwell Collins, said Barber, one of the workers who signed the letter to Congress. "It's very important to be able to differentiate yourself from your competitors," Barber said.

Without the tax credit, many U.S. companies will have to make tough choices, with some sending R&D work overseas, Barber added.

In addition to extending the R&D tax credit until the end of 2009, the Senate bill would increase the percentage of R&D spending covered from 12 percent to 14 percent under one way of claiming the credit.

Nearly 18,000 U.S. companies used the R&D tax credit in 2005, ITI said. About 70 percent of the tax credit is used for R&D employee wages, it said.

A federal grand jury investigation into the compromise of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo account has apparently concluded its first day of meetings without an indictment.

Local press has reported that University of Tennessee student David Kernell is being investigated as a suspect in the crime, which occurred last week. Late Tuesday, U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said that no charges had been filed in the case.

[ To learn more about the Palin incident, read "Lessons of the Sarah Palin e-mail hack." And find out how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that federal agents and three students had reported Tuesday morning to the courthouse, where a federal grand jury was investigating the case. The grand jury stopped for the day around lunch time without handing down an indictment, the newspaper said.

Sweeney declined to comment on the grand jury or on whether Kernell was a suspect in the matter. Grand jury proceedings are secret until an indictment is delivered to the court.

Although Kernell has not been officially named as a suspect, he was fingered by bloggers who linked him to the online name "rubico," used by the hacker who claimed to have accessed Palin's Yahoo account last week. Information from that hack, including personal messages to and from Palin, were published on the Wikileaks Web site.

Rubico claimed to have accessed the account by using Yahoo's password reset feature and answering security questions with publicly available information. He guessed correctly that Palin had met her husband at Wasilla High.

Kernell, 20, is the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis. David Kernell's Knoxville, Tenn., apartment was searched over the weekend by U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, according to a local report.

Sweeney confirmed that there had been "investigatory activity late Saturday and early Sunday morning in Knoxville related to the government's inquiry."

Last week, the McCain-Palin campaign called the hack "a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law." Palin is the governor of Alaska.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

Rob Kelly, Microsoft's corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing, sat down with IDG News Service to discuss the adoption rate of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft's plans for cloud-based services, and the recent declaration by Paul Maritz, an ex-Microsoft executive and current president and CEO of VMware, that the traditional server operating system "has all but disappeared."

[ Learn more about what cloud computing really means and the new breed of utility computing and platform-as-a-service offerings. ]

What follows is an edited transcript of that interview:

IDGNS: We haven't heard much from Microsoft about user adoption of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, can you give us an update on how things are going? For example, are you finding many customers switching from Oracle?

Rob Kelly: At the end of the day, our job is to build software that customers choose to run their businesses on. My job is not out there to beat Oracle, to take Oracle's business. I just want to do a better job of satisfying the customer and, ultimately, they'll choose me for that reason.

The products have been exceedingly well received. We've never had faster adoption of the OS as we've seen with Windows Server 2008, for lots of reasons: the quality of it, the workload focus that we have, some of the efficiencies that are built into it around things like power management, that sort of thing.

IDGNS: When you say this is the fastest adoption you've ever seen, can you quantify that for me?

Kelly: We're taking more share than we've ever taken of the x86 server world, whether you look at IDC or Gartner. We will probably make it to that magical million licenses per quarter run rate very quickly, and that's a phenomenal rate of adoption.

The other thing that's happening on Windows Server 2008 is our mix of premium SKUs (stock keeping unit), driven almost exclusively by virtualization and the rights around virtualization that we've put in those SKUs. Just think of it this way: We have three main SKUs for Windows Server 2008. If you want to run one virtual machine, you choose Standard. If you want to run four virtual machines or fewer, you run Enterprise Edition. If you want unlimited virtual machines you run Datacenter Edition.

Our premium SKU mix, on a global basis, has more than doubled over the last two years since we made the licensing change, and over the last six months it's been unbelievably fast.

IDGNS: Last week we saw Paul Maritz, the CEO of VMware and a guy who knows Microsoft pretty well, proclaim that the server operating system is obsolete and his company will build a virtual datacenter OS to manage applications. How should we interpret his comments? Is there substance to his claim?

Kelly: The death of Windows has been foretold many times. It's in their best interests to position it that way.

Secondly, as I told some internal folks the other day, I know Paul and he's a great guy. I don't envy him where he is right now, because he just entered into a hornet's nest. Not so much because of Microsoft; we treat virtualization as an enabler. It's a feature of the operating system, as it's always been in mainframes and as it is in Linux distributions. What he's just done is enter a space that's crowded by his partners, and I'll give you the one that's canonically challenging for him: Hewlett-Packard.

HP has spent, literally, billions of dollars buying companies that would allow them to be the governor of the data center. They bought Opsware, they bought EDS, they bought Neoware. They bought a whole bunch of interesting assets for themselves. VMware came out and said, "We want to displace them." That's a very tough spot to be in.

As they try to move out of what's quickly becoming a commoditized world, where all these very high margins go away, VMware has stomped into a space where all of their partners are scratching their heads. The buzz on the show floor last week was, "Oh, that's our stuff. That's what we do. Now they want to do this?" It's a fascinating thing, actually. I don't envy Paul.

IDGNS: The news coming out of Wall Street has been pretty grim lately. How does Microsoft view the economic situation? Do you see foresee a point where a worsening economy hurts user adoption of Windows Server 2008?

Kelly: At the core of what we're trying to do is help customers deliver a whole new set of experiences at the lowest cost possible. The first job is help them strip out cost, because that's what they live with every day. We also have to help them deliver new capabilities, because that's what drives their business. Everything is about helping customers move from a high cost, maintenance-focused IT environment to a much more dynamic, business-responsive IT architecture.

When times get tough, customers are constantly on the path to do more with less. Software really delivers the best bang for the buck. Customers tell us when their IT department is strapped, they start asking whether this next machine, this next application or maintenance check is the right way to spend their IT dollars. Or should they move to the economic platform, the one that's actually driven the innovation over the last 10 or 15 years and get on that wave now?

IDGNS: But is the investment required for companies to replace their existing systems with new ones going to be less than the marginal cost of maintaining those existing systems until the economic environment improves?

Kelly: It depends on the customer. A great advantage of Windows Server 2008 is our virtualization technology. It used to cost you $3,000 to buy the Enterprise Edition license and then you had to pay another $3,000 for each virtual server running on top of that, up to four. Now, because of the licensing rights change we allow you to run four virtual machines on top of that for no additional cost. Now, for $3,000, you can run five machines, the base plus four virtual machines.

If you're a Windows customer, for a very marginal outlay of price you can consolidate your physical environment into a virtual environment, which reduces your total footprint of servers. You get a huge power savings and your management costs go down.

IDGNS: Oracle and Amazon announced a deal that makes Oracle 11g and other products available as part of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service. Is Microsoft headed down the same path?

Kelly: We're telling everybody to hold their horses, wait until the PDC. At the Professional Developers Conference in late October we will be more concrete about what our plans are, what our offers are in the cloud. But you could probably guess to a large degree. We are a platform company and we are going to offer platform elements in the cloud.

From a developer's standpoint, it will be coherent across the on-premises experience and the cloud-based experience, so you can leverage the learning you already have. If you're a customer, it's a consumption model. I want to consume an application, but do I want to consume it on the premises or in the cloud? We'll make it coherent.

Without giving away a whole bunch of interesting secrets and all that stuff we're holding for PDC, there is nothing that is frightening to us about the cloud. It's just a different delivery vehicle. There's nothing frightening to us about other vendors getting into the space. We believe in the platform and we believe that because we have a platform that customers have chosen with their feet, and their dollars, in the on-premises world, we will be able to deliver that same value proposition in a cloud-based world.

To a lot of people, Ubuntu represents the most end-user-friendly non-geek-compatible Linux distribution. But there are other commercial distributions that work even harder to create a desktop experience that is, frankly, Windows-like. The two best-known of these are Xandros and Linspire (formerly Lindows). Since Xandros recently acquired Linspire, that leaves it pretty much in sole possession of that segment of the marketplace.

Xandros tries to set itself apart from the majority of popular distributions in two ways: first, by making the installation and administration procedure as simple as -- or simpler than -- the best free distributions; second, by integrating commercial software offerings into its package management system.

[ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog. ]

A no-choice installWhile distributions such as Ubuntu try to make the installation process easy for nontechnical users by offering reasonable defaults for the various setup options, Xandros takes it a step further -- by essentially offering no choices. The first thing that the installer asks is whether you want an express installation or a custom one.

If you select express, you have made your last decision -- the installer will take over the entire disk, install a standard set of packages, set your network port up for DHCP, and so on. About all you'll be asked for is the required security information for the system login. (As you'd expect, the custom install gives you a bit more control.)

The Xandros installation CD performed well during testing, installing nearly flawlessly on both VMware running on a Windows Vista quad Core 2 workstation and a trusty three-year-old Toshiba laptop. It correctly identified and configured the 802.11g wireless system in the laptop, something that not every distribution I've tested can boast. It did not, however, manage to configure the laptop's sound correctly -- it did not recognize the device, leaving me without audio.

One thing you won't find with Xandros is a LiveCD version. This means that your opportunities to "try before you buy" are limited to physically installing the trial version, and installing something else later if it turns out you don't like it.

After installation, you'll be asked a few more questions when you first log in, dealing with internationalization, time zones, and selecting a desktop look and feel. The default Xandros look is (probably intentionally) very reminiscent of Windows XP, with a Launch button in place of the Start button and little icons representing running programs on the bottom right. If you want, you can choose from several other themes, including a generic KDE interface.

The standard install doesn't include some things you might have expected, such as the OpenOffice suite or the Gimp image manipulation app (although both are available for install via the Xandros Network). You also won't find the Gnome desktop. Unlike many distributions, Gnome isn't available in the standard Xandros installation as a choice -- in fact, it isn't available at all, even through the package manager. Xandros has clearly decided that KDE is the app of choice, and the company is sticking with it.

Interestingly, the install does include some of the usual suspects, such as Firefox and Evolution, the integrated mail, address book, and calendaring app. You also get a copy of CrossOver Linux, an app that allows you to install Windows software on a Linux system, which makes one wonder if they expect most of their potential users would rather install Microsoft Office than use the open source alternatives.

Incidentally, Xandros does a good job of making a number of tasks friendlier than usual for Linux. For example, it has a printer driver installation wizard that walks you through the process, and seems to know about most common printers, such as the pair of networked Brother laser printers I used it with.

The Xandros NetworkThe Xandros Network is a very interesting component of the distribution. It combines a number of functions that most distributions keep separate: package management, updates, and news from Xandros. The package management component, where you install new applications, looks pretty much like that for any other distribution. However, the update section is another place where Xandros has gone for a Windows look and feel, with highly readable descriptions of the updates, divided up into security updates, normal updates, driver updates, and service packs (yes, Xandros has even borrowed the Service Pack nomenclature from Microsoft).

One thing that Xandros offers that most distributions don't is a store, integrated into the Network, that lets you purchase, download, and install commercial Linux software.

Unfortunately, there really aren't that many packages available -- the store mainly offers the pro version of CrossOver and the StarOffice productivity suite, along with Xandros' ant-ivirus software. For an additional $40, you can purchase a Xandros Network Pro membership, which lets you download a number of interesting games and tools.

The current Network may become irrelevant, however, due to the Linspire purchase. One of the major reasons that Xandros gave for acquiring Linspire was to integrate Linspire's Click and Run (CNR) technology into Xandros. CNR offers a much wider variety of commercial software as well as the usual open source fare, and is available on multiple distributions, including Fedora and Ubuntu. As of this writing, CNR is still not available for Xandros, despite an announced July 2008 date, but I would expect it to become available soon.

No free lunchXandros is an unabashedly commercial distribution. Unlike Linspire, which has a parallel Freespire project, Xandros has no free version. The trial version is just that -- it starts shutting down after a half-hour once you've reached the end of the 30-day trial.

If you decide to buy, you currently have only one option: You can purchase the Professional version for $99, which includes the distribution, the Xandros Network package and 90 days of support. (If you're a nonprofit, incidentally, the company allows unlimited installations for nonprofit use.)

And if you're looking for a single desktop edition? At the moment, you're out of luck; Xandros has discontinued its $40 Desktop Home Edition. However, according to a company rep, Xandros will release Freespire 5 in late October and a new Business Desktop version in November.

Xandros will no doubt offend Linux purists, both by the tight integration of commercial software into its business model and by the lack of features such as Gnome. On the other hand, for a Linux newbie who wants a Windows-like experience, it may make a reasonable choice.

James Turner is a freelance journalist specializing in technology. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Chuck Rozwat, Oracle's head of product development, largely deflected questions about hotly anticipated technologies such as Fusion Applications during a Q&A session with reporters at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, but did reveal more details of the vendor's plans around cloud computing.

Intel and Oracle announced Tuesday that they are collaborating to "accelerate enterprise readiness of cloud computing." The partnership will focus on three areas: software performance and power efficiency; improved virtual machine security; and the promotion of standards for porting virtual machine images and provisioning cloud services.

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

Oracle will likely seek a similar collaboration with Intel's rival, Advanced Micro Devices, Rozwat said.

"When we do announcements with one particular vendor, unless there's some big exclusive tag associated with it, it typically is something we might do with other vendors as well," Rozwat said.

That announcement followed Monday's news that Oracle will make its 11g database, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager products available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The Amazon deal is also by no means exclusive, Rozwat indicated: "We will be making subsequent announcements for other cloud computing environments."

But Rozwat was less forthcoming regarding other topics, particularly Fusion Applications, which have been dogged by questions of delays.

Oracle has unveiled a handful of Fusion Applications so far, centering on CRM (customer relationship management). Rozwat also classified a recently released enterprise performance management product as a Fusion application.

On Sunday, another company executive said during a panel discussion that Oracle hopes to get the initial Fusion Applications product suite into the hands of early adopters starting in 2009.

But Rozwat refused to reveal any other concrete information about Fusion Applications, and characterized his reticence as standard company practice.

"Across all our products, we talk about general directions but we try to avoid giving very specific features or specific dates," he said. "If you look at all our presentations this week, you really won't see anything too far into the future that starts giving feature lists or product names. ... We're treating Fusion applications no different than any other product in that regard."

Neither would the executive pull the curtain back on Oracle 11g R2, for which Oracle is recruiting beta testers this week. Oracle did deliver a patch set for 11g Release 1 this week, but is not "quite ready to talk about 11g R2 and exactly when that will be available," Rozwat said.

When it does ship, 11g R2 will make it easier to employ and manage grid computing and Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) database-clustering technology, and will include better diagnostic and monitoring tools, Rozwat said.

T-Mobile, Google, and High Tech Computer (HTC) unveiled the highly anticipated Android phone in New York on Tuesday, and I got a chance to try out the new handset at HTC's office in Taipei.

The applications on board are by far the coolest feature of the handset, especially Google Maps Street View, which on the handset, allows a person to view a snapshot of an entire street scene at any of several U.S. cities.

[ See  related story "Android to debut in T-Mobile's G1 smartphone." ]

I chose 42nd Street in New York City at the Avenue of the Americas from Google Maps, and once the information downloaded from Chunghwa Telecom's mobile network, I was able to view the street on the handset's screen. It's cool.

There are three ways to navigate a street scene with T-Mobile's G1, or the "Dream" as HTC calls it.

The funnest was to hit the "compass" function on the handset and move it around by hand. You pan the G1 up and view the screen as if it's the LCD viewfinder on a digital camera, and you're looking at building tops or into trees. Pan down and you can see if anyone dropped some coins on the street. Pan around for an entire 360-degree view of the street from where you are, including taxis, buildings, or a guy walking down the street eating a sandwich.

I can't think of any useful reasons to use Street View -- Google Maps is enough to get you where you want to go -- but it sure is fun.

The other two ways to navigate on Street View are by using the touchscreen to look around or the trackball at the bottom of the phone.

Google is still expanding the Street View database to include more cities.

The applications aspect of the G1 may make it one of the most expandable handsets around. You can already find fun and useful programs from Android, many of them free. And applications are easy to find and download.

An icon on the desktop of the handset sends you right to an Android apps page, where applications roll across a panel at the top of the screen. You can use your thumb on the touchscreen to make the panel move left or right for more choices and then tap an app's icon to choose it.

I picked ShopSavvy because the demonstration of it looked fun and I wanted to see it in actual use.

Bargain hunters will love this program.

ShopSavvy turns the G1's on-board 3-megapixel camera into a price tag scanner. It starts to scan immediately when ShopSavvy is on, no need to snap a photo or anything. Just run a red line in the middle of the viewfinder over a barcode and it scans the information.

It took me a few tries to scan the barcode of the book, "Execution" by Larry Bossidy, which was one of the few things at HTC's office with a barcode. But once I got it, it only took several seconds to navigate to a site with a book review and other information, as well as suggestions on where to buy. It costs $21 new at eCampus.com, or $2.50 used at Half.com, while the retail price listed inside the cover of the book itself was $27.50.

The ShopSavvy application only took about 40 seconds to download. I also downloaded Pac-Man, which took about 33 seconds.

The handset itself feels good, solidly built and with beautiful screen quality. Even when you flip up the screen to reveal the QWERTY keyboard below, it's quick and smooth in a way you can tell it won't break easily.

Flipping up the screen, by the way, is the only way to turn the view on the handset screen sideways. Unlike other handsets that turn the screen view sideways when the handset is held sideways, the G1 only turns the screen view sideways when the QWERTY keyboard is showing.

I can't say I was wild about the handset's overall design. It's a bit thick and industrial, especially compared to HTC's last major release, the Touch Diamond, which is beautifully crafted.

But unlike the Touch Diamond, which is made of a clear plastic that's a bit slippery, the G1 has more of a rubberized feel for easier handling.

The face of the G1, when the QWERTY keypad isn't showing, is mainly the touchscreen, which looks like it's about 3-inches, with five navigation controls at the bottom, including the trackball in the middle.

Navigation on the touchscreen was smooth and the software responded quickly to tap commands. The trackball, also worked well, but took a bit of getting used to.

The keypad was easy to use, even with my big thumbs, but I didn't have a chance to actually type out a message. I did make a phone call, which was easy to do and the voice quality was clear.

One warning to sound out to anyone interested in the G1 (Dream) handset is to take care on your choice of mobile phone service providers.

The only service provider today is T-Mobile and some fine print on their Web site betrays a stingy allowance on data services: "If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50Kbps or less."

For a handset designed for the Internet, with so much downloadable software applications from Android's Web site that are heavy on data usage, as well as music downloads from Amazon and online videos from YouTube, it seems likely users will need more than the 1GB allotment.

More likely than not, other service providers will launch a version of HTC's Dream as well. They may offer better terms.

T-Mobile's G1 will first be available in the U.S. on Oct. 22 for $179 with a two-year contract and subscription to a limited data plan for $25 a month or $35 for unlimited data access.

T-Mobile will release the G1 in the U.K. in early November and other European markets in the first quarter next year.

The G1 is currently only available in English, but translation into other languages is already underway, an HTC representative said. It will take six months for the handset to be made available in nearly all languages.

In the coming weeks, the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?

The fact is that despite government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, there is little visibility mandated by current regulations into the origination of loans and how they are broken up, resold, and resold again.

[ After-the-fact BI doesn't help identify problems early. Read how operational analytics could help flag issues so that you can act before they blow up. ]

To cite the classic example of how we got into this mess, consumers were given 100-percent-plus variable mortgages without any security. Not only could those mortgages be sold to other banks, but they could be divided into 5, 10, or 20 tranches -- financialese for slices -- and resold to between 5 and 10 different organizations, making it difficult to track who was involved and who ended up taking the risk.

Theoretically, the financial service providers were clear on the risks of each type of loan and had a way to gauge whether they had enough liquidity -- cash and other easily sold assets -- available if the riskier loans went south. But a New York Times report indicates that in fact many financial institutions gamed their analytics to favor positive scenarios over negative ones in order to justify keeping less money in reserves should the risky loan blow up. "A large number of buyers of these kinds of instruments really didn't care about the value. They just wanted to flip it. A lot of people just didn't want to know," says Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.

Analytics and CEP tools could have helped Had these financial services companies and banks established business intelligence metrics as to the ratios of what kind of debt they were holding versus the cash reserves they held, their analytics systems might have driven alerts earlier in the process, says Michael Corcoran, a product manager at the BI provider Information Builders. But as anyone in business already knows, consolidating that kind of data to get those answers more often than not is a slow process that typically ends up being done manually in an Excel spreadsheet well after the fact.

Jeff Wooton, vice president of product strategy at Aleri, a CEP (complex event processing) company, agrees that most data consolidation takes far too long to give a complete picture. "It relies on overnight data consolidation runs, overnight reports, and manual processes like spreadsheets."

That's where technologies such as CEP and operational BI come into play. They analyze huge volumes of transactions -- 100,000 messages per second with millisecond response time, triggering remedial actions by other systems. But they can also be slowed down and used by analysts as a decision support tool. Tools such as Aleri's Liquidity Management System already exist to help treasurers in global banks gauge their liquidity position in real time. Wooton says that over the last two weeks there has been considerably more interest in such products than in the past.

Wooton cautions that the various kinds of analytics tools available, such as business activity monitoring, decision support software, data integration, and alerts, could have offered a warning but not fixed the underlying problem of financial services firms misjudging -- and in some cases, misrepresenting -- the risks of their loans and securities.

But taking analytics, CEP, and data integration to the next level to give regulators a sense of what all the financial institutions were doing and what the liquidity risks actually were could have helped, and it could prevent a recurrence, Corcoran says. He says that the use of middleware could bring the data together and create a "common front end" that is shared by regulators and the services companies alike.

But that front end needs a common back end, especially around the data that should exist, says consultant Greenbaum. "The data model for doing the analysis doesn't exist," he says, so a company selling securities and packaged mortgages doesn't include the packaging history. "You can't do the classic drill-down," Greenbaum says, because no one knows what the relationships are because the metadata hasn't been preserved -- or at least not preserved in a way that is easy to find.

Integration is a double-edged sword While integration of data and the analytics around financial investments could help prevent future financial meltdowns, it's also true that the integration of business activities on a global scale helped get us into this crisis in the first place, says Suzanne Duncan, financial markets industry leader for the Institute for Business Value at IBM.

"Firm-to-firm and country-to-country integration is increasing. This improves efficiency because it lets capital flow to where it is needed, but at the same time these linkages cause larger shocks at a greater frequency," Duncan says.

The reason comes back to the lack of visibility into financial risks and liquidity both at the individual financial institution and globally. Because the information is too scattered throughout the firm and held in silos of information systems, many financial institutions did not even have a grasp on the loans they held, he says.

"Many of these bigger firms don't know what their counterparty exposures are. They don't know how much Lehman Brothers owes them," Wooton adds. (A counterparty is any organization with which your company has some kind of relationship with, be it as partner or as a client.) Duncan agrees: "No matter which part of the ecosystem you are talking about, companies don't know what their counterparty exposures are." IBM is in the midst of working with its Asian clients to root through what their exposures are.?

Retail algorithms may be reused for financial services Although much of the technology already exists that could have tracked and helped to at least warn companies of the dangers ahead, IBM is also looking at retooling some current technology that uses sophisticated algorithms to map processes to help increase the visibility into risks of financial instruments that are dispersed globally.

Up until now, technology in the financial services industry has been focused on capacity -- whether an application can handle high volume and volatility -- rather than on process. There is no process flow map that tells organizations who owns what pieces of what risk.

But in the retail industry, there are such flow-mapping technologies to track, for example, that consumer A buys a car and two years later sells that car to consumer B, who in turn sells his car to consumer C, while consumer A buys a new car; the software maps all of those processes for the sake of tracking buyer behavior. By scanning through the Web and physical public documents, a retailer puts together a point of view on a customer's buying behavior. "That kind of process mapping hasn't been unleashed to track the whole world of institutional behavior," Duncan says. But perhaps it could.

Of course, even with the right technology in place, Greenbaum cautions, it will do no good unless meaningful government oversight is put in place, so the financial services companies can't again -- through ignorance or deceit -- so wildly create and distribute toxic assets.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

The case for Solaris's demise Sun officials believe the 16-year-old Solaris platform remains a pivotal, innovative platform. But at the Linux Foundation, there is a no-conciliatory stance; the attitude there is to tell Solaris and Sun to move out of the way. "The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. "It is not Unix or Solaris."

[ Sun is moving into the virtualization space, riding on x86 Solaris. Read the InfoWorld's Test Center review of Sun's xVM VirtualBox. ]

Solaris, he said, has almost no new deployments and is a legacy operating environment offered by a company with financial difficulties. Original equipment manufacturers also do not see a bright future for Solaris, he claims.

By contrast, Linux is the overwhelming choice for new deployments on x86 systems, Zemlin says.? Sun has had its strength in applications such as ERP systems with a seven- to 20-year life cycle, he adds. "What's starting to happen is those life cycles are starting to be completed," and those customers are moving to Linux.

That move to Linux is accelerated by Linux's strength in Web applications, where developers today are focused, Zemlin adds. "You can't really talk to any Web-based application company these days that's not using Linux," he says.?

Linux also is less costly to run, Zemlin claims. Sun, he declared, should just move over to Linux. Zemlin also held out little hope for other IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix platforms. "It's certainly true that Unix is on the decline," he says.

"Customers are pretty aware that Unix is a more expensive legacy architecture. They continue to support it because they don't want to change their legacy apps over to a new platform because of the costs," Zemlin said. "But they know now they eventually need to do it because Unix just doesn't have the combined might of all the different organizations and individuals that are developing [for] Linux."

Thanks to its strong support of the x86 hardware architecture, "in terms of overall volume, Linux is just a much higher volume product than Solaris ever was," says Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. IDC data show that worldwide Linux shipments in 2006 were about 2.4 million in 2006 and nearly 2.7 million in 2007. By contrast, Solaris shipments totaled 376,000 in 2006 and 371,000 last year.

Solaris, Zemlin says, is losing market share because it does not have a good price performance or value proposition.

Zemlin also disputes Sun's notion that Solaris technology gives it an edge over Linux. "The only people I hear talk about DTrace [Solaris's technology for assessing program and OS behaviours] and ZFS [the Zettabyte File System] as competitive features [are] Sun Microsystems sales representatives. It's not something I believe is impacting the market in any way," he says.

With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features, Zemlin says. "That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground." And the Linux community is working on rival technology, Zemlin adds.

Given Sun's own Linux support on its Sparc and x86 servers, Zemlin suggests that it should make ZFS and DTrace available under a Linux-compatible license. Sun instead uses its Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is not compatible with the Linux GNU General Public License. (Sun says CDDL provides licensing support for a greater universe of systems than GPL does.)

One company that is moving from Solaris ?to Linux is Sesame Workshop, famous for TV shows such as Sesame Street. A key reason is that more people are available to support Linux than Solaris, says Noah Broadwater, vice president of information services at Sesame Workshop. "I honestly have one person who is certified on Solaris. I have four people who are certified on Linux," Broadwater said.

The other key issue with Solaris boils down to one word: cost. Sesame is saving about $20,000 a year in support costs by moving to Linux, Broadwater says.

One fear that Broadwater had in moving to Linux was degradation in performance, but he has been pleasantly surprised such degradation has not occurred. For example, the company's IBM Cognos BI application runs faster on x86 Linux boxes than it did on Sparc Solaris, he says.

The case for Solaris's existence Sun stands behind Solaris. "For customers who'd chosen Linux in the past, we're seeing some of those same customers come back to Solaris," says Charlie Boyle, director of Solaris product marketing at Sun.

Solaris boasts features such as ZFS for simplified storage management and Solaris containers for virtualization, Boyle says. He cites a recent partnership in which Dell will make Solaris available on its computers; Dell would not do this if there was not customer demand. Sun is seeing brand new customers for Solaris; "I think we've got a great future," Boyle says.

"I think Solaris is absolutely a great OS," says Neil Wilson, a former Sun employee who later left the OpenDS project. Solaris is "absolutely far superior to Linux for the cases where the hardware support is there," he adds.

Gracenote, which provides a media recognition and metadata service for MP3 users (the CDDB database familiar to iTunes users), agrees. "We found the threading model in Linux was problematic. You get to a certain number of concurrent threads and the OS just slows way down," says Matthew Leeds, vice president of operations at Gracenote.? Solaris "just works for us."

The debate over Solaris's open source future As part of its plans to give Solaris a longer life, Sun has developed an open source effort based on Solaris, called OpenSolaris, featuring a binary release of Solaris through Project Indiana.

The Linux Foundation's Zemlin, though, dismisses Sun's open-source Solaris as "too little, too late." His foundation has also charged that there is no real open source community around OpenSolaris, arguing that Sun still controls development. To back up its point, the foundation points to blogs detailing disputes over control of OpenSolaris and the Sun-driven OpenDS directory projects, from February 2008 and November 2007. Sun declined to comment on the specifics of these issues and noted they both happened several months ago. Zemlin claims Open Solaris is no more than an attempt to expand the Solaris user base to drive customers to commercial Sun technology.

Sun's Boyle acknowledges that Sun employees participate in OpenSolaris development, but says they do so along with individual and corporate contributors such as Intel. Community registrations in the OpenSolaris community exceed 160,000, far in excess of Sun's total employee account of 34,000 people, he notes.

"I'd say we've got a great community around OpenSolaris." Boyle said. "People are free to come and go as they want, and the community's been growing every month," he says. "To say that Sun is controlling all this, I don't think is a fair and accurate statement."

Oracle introduced a new application grid that employs technology acquired through its purchase of BEA Systems.

Application grids eschew the traditional approach that dedicates a piece of hardware to serving a particular application. Instead, the grid format creates a pool of resources that can be provisioned dynamically at runtime.

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

This can help IT shops respond to spikes in demand for a given application. For example, a bank may have certain hours of the day when its online banking application is heavily hit, and therefore needs more resources, whereas an account reconciliation program might need additional power at a different time of day, said Rick Schultz, vice president of product marketing, at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Oracle is talking about application grids now because of the recent BEA purchase, but also because many customers who have applied grid technology to their database tiers are thinking about implementing a similar model at the middleware level, according to Schultz.

Oracle WebLogic Application Grid components include Oracle Coherence, an in-memory data grid; JRockit Real-Time and JRockit Mission Control, the Java virtual machine and accompanying toolset Oracle gained from BEA; and Oracle WebLogic Operations Control, another BEA-developed product, for managing the service-level agreements of grid-enabled applications.

The stack is "application-server-agnostic," able to work with competing products such as WebSphere and JBoss as well as Oracle's own WebLogic Server, according to a FAQ sheet.

Speciality vendors like Gigaspaces and Appistry also sell application grid technology.

When Google announced the Open Handset Alliance (a group of wireless industry players looking to get their names associated with Google's Android open mobile platform project), true open-source smartphones were a great idea that seemed far from commercial realization. This will change on October 22, when the T-Mobile G1 ? the product of an exclusive partnership among T-Mobile, Google, and Asian handset manufacturer HTC -- becomes the first shipping mobile device based on the Android platform.

The Android platform is open source -- Google has committed to publishing the source code for the entire platform, not just an application-level SDK. In the words of one developer interviewed for the T-M