Microsoft blames computer makers for some of the problems users have encountered after updating to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), according to a company support document.

The document also showed that the "endless reboot" problem some users have reported after installing XP SP3 was neither unanticipated or new; Microsoft updated the document the same day it released the service pack, and indicated that the same thing happened nearly four years ago when it rolled out Windows XP SP2.

Knowledge Base document 888372, last updated May 6, spelled out an error message that stops a PC's boot process -- and, depending on the machine's settings, may make it repeatedly reboot -- after installing SP3. The fault, said the Microsoft document, is in the Windows XP image originally installed on the PC by the computer manufacturer, or OEM.

"The problem may occur if the original Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) Sysprep image is created on an Intel-processor-based computer and if the Sysprep image is then deployed on a non-Intel-processor-based computer," said Microsoft.

"Under this configuration, after the computer is upgraded to Windows XP SP2 or SP3, the Intel processor driver (Intelppm.sys) may try to load because an orphaned registry key remains from the original Sysprep image," the document continued. "This issue may also occur if the original Windows XP SP2 or Windows XP SP3 Sysprep image is created on an Intel-processor-based computer and if it is then deployed onto a non-Intel-processor-based computer. Again, the Intel processor driver (Intelppm.sys) may try to load because an orphaned registry key remains from the original Sysprep image."

A day after Microsoft added XP SP3 to Windows Update, users began reporting that their machines processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) were rebooting endlessly. Many of them said that the crippled systems were from Hewlett-Packard.

"I too have an HP Pavilion with an AMD Athelon [sic] processor," said a user identified as "jrednasnh" in a message posted Saturday to a Microsoft support forum. "I find it discouraging that HP may be partially at fault and did not attempt to notify us AMD customers, nor attempt to fix the issue."

Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft and currently an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional), worked with others to identify some of the reboot issues as involving PCs running AMD CPUs. Johansson, who said one of his HP PCs repeatedly rebooted after installing XP SP3, traded accounts with several other users on the newsgroup and summarized the results on his blog.

"The problem is that HP, and possibly other OEMs, deploy the same image to Intel-based desktops that they do to AMD-based desktops," Johansson said. "Microsoft points out in a Knowledge Base article that installing both drivers on the same computer is an unsupported configuration, putting the blame on the OEM that deploys the image. The article in question was written when the same problem occurred after installing Service Pack 2 for Windows XP." Microsoft unveiled XP SP2 in August 2004.

According to Johansson, only HP desktop models are affected. "It also appears that this is unique to their desktop image, and any HP AMD-based laptops are unaffected by the problem," he said.

As Johansson mentioned, Microsoft has dubbed the practice "unsupported" in KB888372. "We do not support using Sysprep to install an operating system from an image if the image was created by using a computer that has a different processor," said Microsoft. "For example, you cannot create a Sysprep image on a computer that has an Intel processor and deploy the image to a computer that has an AMD processor."

KB888372 instructed users how to modify the Windows registry to disable the errant Intel driver, assuming users could regain control of their PCs long enough to boot into Safe mode.

The company has also listed several other scenarios that OEMs should avoid in another support document.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard did not immediately respond to questions Sunday.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Hackers now have their own social network, backed by GnuCitizen, a high-profile "ethical hacking" group.

The network, called House of Hackers, has signed up more than 1,000 members since its launch earlier this week, according to the site.

GnuCitizen set up the network in order to promote collaboration among security researchers. The site's founders said they use "hacker" in the complementary sense.

The term "should all express admiration for the work of the most skilled, creative, clever, unique, provocative, intelligent, intense, intriguing and interesting people among the human society," said GnuCitizen in a message on the House of Hackers website.

"From our perspective, a hacker is a person people express admiration for his/her work, skills, creative edge, cleverness, uniqueness, intelligence, etc," said GnuCitizen founder Petko D. Petkov in a blog post.

"We do not promote criminal activities. The network is designed to enable its members to exchange ideas with each other, communicate, form groups, elite circles and tiger/red teams, conglomerate around projects and participate in a hacker recruitment market."

Petkov said the ability to create groups on the network could be useful for setting up ad-hoc penetration testing teams. He suggested organizers could use the site's events features to test the water for planned events.

GnuCitizen is encouraging businesses to use the site to seek out security researchers for jobs or particular projects.

The network is built on Ning, a site allowing the creation of ad-hoc social networks, and programmers can create customized add-ons using the Google-backed Open Social API, meaning the add-ons are reusable on other sites.

GnuCitizen was founded in 2005 and has been credited with some high-profile security research of late, including vulnerabilities involving SNMP and BT Home Hub Wi-Fi routers.

Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Sanjiv Ahuja left his role as CEO of Orange, the mobile phone and Internet access subsidiary of France Télécom, last year in order to seek a new challenge. With his new company Augere, he is now focused on rolling out broadband Internet access in parts of the world where penetration today is almost nonexistent -- and sees a need for desktop, not laptop, computers in developing countries.

"Our objective is very simple. I think there is a significant part of the world's population that is still not getting connected to the Internet. More than 90 percent of the world's countries have a broadband penetration of less than 2 percent," said Ahuja, who on Monday visited Cairo to speak at the ITU Telecom Africa 2008 conference.

In Egypt itself, only 1.5 percent of the population have broadband connections, while the figure is less than 2 percent in Russia, and only 0.3 percent in India, all countries that have moved up the development scale, according to Ahuja.

"As we go around world the penetration on a household level is still very, very low, so somebody needs to step up, and solve this on a global scale," said Ahuja.

He still doesn't want to talk in detail about what his new company Augere plans to do to change this, but believes that broadband access is directly linked to improving national prosperity, education, health and stability.

Going from a large operator to a small startup has its advantages.

"Not having a legacy of the business in your hands give you an extreme sense of freedom, agility, and focus in a small organization," he said.

Wireless is Ahuja's technology of choice for rolling out broadband.

"The advantages are speed and cost of rolling out your service. Rolling out using fixed technology is cost-prohibitive, or it would have already been done, and it hasn't," he said.

Broadband also has to be affordable for the masses.

"Ideally, you should be able to offer a basic desktop for under $300 that connects you to the Internet at a monthly rate of $10," said Ahuja.

That Ahuja favors desktop computers may come as a surprise: talk of computers for the developing world has been dominated by discussion of the One Laptop Per Child Project and its goal of building a $100 laptop. But Ahuja is convinced that users in the developing world aren't as mobile as many think, and don't want to carry an expensive product like a laptop with them all the time.

Reaching the goal needed for mass adoption may not be possible today, but he is confident for the future.

"I am very optimistic individual. The needs are very clear, and there is a latent demand," said Ahuja.

Database maker Vertica Systems is moving its technology to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure (EC2), hoping to score customers who want a hosted, pay-as-you-go model for data warehousing and BI (business intelligence), the company announced Monday.

Vertica's database organizes data by columns, as opposed to rows. The company and others that make columnar databases, such as Sybase and ParAccel, contend the approach is faster and better for BI-related queries because only the desired columns -- such as a customer's name or location -- can be read without having to parse through an entire table, saving bandwidth.

The company also sells the database for on-premises use and in appliance form.

It sees a market for the on-demand offering due to a number of scenarios. For example, a company might want to conduct a BI project that will only last a fixed period of time, such as revising its pricing based on competitive and market data, said Andy Ellicott, senior director of marketing.

Hedge funds, which test their trading algorithms against large sets of historical stock market data, are another potential use case, because while such entities manage vast amounts of money, they seek to maintain the lowest possible overhead, which a cloud-based approach can provide, he said.

It is also hoping to sell to SaaS (software as a service) companies that focus on analytics.

One such vendor, Sonian, has been beta-testing the on-demand version.

"Everything is working out really well," said Sonian's chief technology officer, Greg Arnette. "We don't want to be in the plumbing business any more, managing pipes and [storage area networks]. We don't have to become experts on the Vertica database," he added.

The Dedham, Mass., company started out as a hosted e-mail archiving provider, but is working on a service that will provide analysis of a company's stored content.

Sonian is still handling the task of loading data into Vertica, "but they're providing the expertise on configuring the database, optimizing it, that kind of stuff," he said.

Vertica's move is "very interesting" and positions it "as one of the front-runners in the race to bring data warehousing into the cloud," said Forrester analyst James Kobielus in an e-mail message on Friday.

Amazon's architecture also sets up Vertica "both for the midmarket (which generally doesn't use the most scalable premises-based [data warehousing] platforms) and for the surge requirements of the most demanding, high-end enterprise DW, predictive analytics and data mining jobs," Kobielus added.

Cloud-hosted database management systems (DMBS) hold "little value" to "the end-user type IT and department-level

organizations," Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg said via e-mail.

However, there is potential in the model for small third-party software companies, which could cheaply use the service to run proof-of-concept exercises, he noted.

"Another, although related to the software vendor, is when a BI app vendor puts their app on top of Vertica and sells to their clients as a package," Feinberg wrote. "They could now sell just to the end-user (bypassing IT and red tape) and install it fast with the correct resources for the end-users on EC2, assist the end-user loading data and the users are off and running."

"So it appears that Vertica may be on to something for the short term, until cloud DBMS (DaaS -- DBMS as a Service) catches on more broadly (maybe or at least two to five years out)," he added.

The on-demand offering is priced on a usage basis, beginning at $2,000 per month for managing 500 gigabytes of data. This compares to about $150,000 for a typical on-premises installation, according to the company.

Taiwanese hardware maker Micro-Star International's upcoming Wind laptop can be preordered starting from $560.

The Wind, which is expected to use Intel's upcoming 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, is just one of an expected flood of low-cost systems based on the new chip that will be on show at the Computex exhibition in Taipei during June.

While the Atom processor  has yet to be released by Intel, online retailer Expansys has begun accepting orders for the U.K. version of the Wind running either Windows XP Home for $604 or Linux for $560. The laptops are available in three colors: white, black and pink.

The same laptops are priced at £350 ($684) and £320, respectively, on Expansys' U.K. Web site.

The Wind systems available for preorder on Expansys have a 10-inch screen with a resolution of 1,024 pixels by 768 pixels and an LED (light-emitting diode) backlight, which helps lower power consumption. The system, which weighs roughly 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), also ships with 1GB of memory, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and an 80GB hard drive.

Expansys did not list pricing for a planned version of the Wind that has an 8.9-inch screen.