Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed technology that can fence off microprocessor bugs and keep them from seizing up a PC.

For the past two years they've been working on what they call a "semantic guardian." It's a tiny monitor that lives on the microprocessor, checking it to see if the chip is being asked to do something that its designers hadn't predicted in their quality assurance testing.

Companies such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices test their products rigorously, but in the real world, chips are often asked to do new things that could potentially cause a crash. The semantic guardian can identify these untested states and then slow down the processor by kicking it into a safe mode, where many of the chip's performance-enhancing bells and whistles are disabled.

This slows the computer down for a tiny fraction of a second, but it also makes it much less likely to crash, said Valeria Bertacco, an assistant professor with the university's computer science department.

Her team has built the semantic guardian into a software-based chip simulator and is now trying to get it up and running on a programmable microchip called a field-programmable gate array. In their current design, the monitor takes up about 3 percent of the chip's real estate, but they expect that it would be much smaller if ever developed commercially. "If any commercial company decides to do this it would be much less than 1 percent," Bertacco said.

Chipmakers often end up discovering hundreds of bugs, called errata by the industry, in their products after they ship. These bugs can be addressed in BIOS updates, but if a flaw is serious enough, it can derail a company's product plans. Last year, AMD's quad-core Opteron processor, code-named Barcelona, was delayed by nearly half a year when a serious flaw was discovered after the chip's official launch.

Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood is unconvinced that a semantic guardian would have helped AMD with its Barcelona problem. According to him, there are at least two big problems with this approach: First, it would be hard to keep track of all the tested states on a commercial processor. "There are a very large number of legitimate states, so I really question whether this is anything that could ever be made to be a practical solution," he said.

A second problem is that it would take a lot of design work to create a slimmed-down processor safe mode that really worked.

"My guess is it wouldn't really catch the kind of really subtle things that do show up and which are caught in the field," he said. "Color me skeptic."

But security concerns may soon cause chip makers to take a close look at the University of Michigan work. That's because some security experts think that microprocessor bugs may enable a new wave of hacking attacks.

Next month, for example, security researcher Kris Kaspersky plans to demonstrate ways of attacking Intel processors using malicious JavaScript code and network packets. "It's just a matter of time before we start seeing these ... attacks used in more devastating ways over the Internet," he wrote in a description of a talk he's set to give at the Hack in the Box conference in Kuala Lumpur.

Bertacco believes that security concerns could make her semantic guardian more attractive to chipmakers. "The general public is much more sensitive to security, " she said.

Starting on Wednesday, enterprises can sign up for Microsoft's new Select Plus licensing program, a plan that one analyst said seems to be designed more to help the software giant than its customers.

Select Plus is similar to Microsoft's Select volume licensing program in that it lets companies combine the purchasing power of different departments to qualify for bigger volume-based discounts. Select Plus  has a couple of differences but not much that will be particularly attractive to most companies, according to Paul DeGroot, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.

For example, unlike Select, Select Plus doesn't require customers to try to estimate their annual purchases in advance in order to calculate the volume discount they will receive. That could potentially ensure more revenue for Microsoft but likely won't save enterprises much money, DeGroot said. That's because with Select, if enterprises overestimate what they'll buy, they don't have to pay Microsoft back at the end of the year for the difference between the discount they got and the lower discount they actually qualified for.

"That really bothered Microsoft, the notion that someone would ever walk away with one of Microsoft's dollars," DeGroot said.

If an enterprise underestimates the amount of software they buy, Microsoft similarly doesn't offer a refund to make up for a greater volume discount that the customer qualified for.

"My advice to customers is never to forecast low," DeGroot said.

Select Plus applies volume licensing discounts as the year progresses based on how much software a company buys, he said. While that lets Microsoft apply discounts based on actual sales, it might have some unintended consequences for enterprises.

"If you are part of a global company, you don't want to be the first guy to purchase in a given year because you get the lowest discount," DeGroot noted.

In addition, some organizations might find it difficult to predict what they'll pay for software that they intend to buy in the future because they won't know what the discount will be in the future. "It creates this uncertainty, and right now might not be the best time to create uncertainty," DeGroot said, referring to the ongoing financial crisis in the United States.

Select Plus has a couple of other slight differences from Select. It eliminates the need for customers to sign up for the program every three years; once a customer qualifies for Select Plus, the agreement never expires.

Select Plus also gives customers the choice of buying Software Assurance, Microsoft's maintenance and upgrade program, but requires them to buy a full three-year term. Select customers can buy Software Assurance for a shorter term, but restrictions mean they could end up paying for more than they get.

Microsoft has been making changes to its licensing programs recently, but the addition of Select Plus might not be one that many customers are looking for. "For resellers, it's yet one more thing to explain to customers about Microsoft licensing which is already extraordinarily complex," said DeGroot. "I think there are some missed opportunities here, and I'm disappointed Microsoft didn't take some other chances with Select Plus."

A Microsoft spokesperson was not available to comment on Select Plus.

Operators, along with laptop and chip set manufacturers, are joining forces to push built-in support for mobile broadband, using a newly created mark that will signal that a laptop is ready to offer mobile Internet access.

Participating companies include 3, Asus, Dell, Ericsson, Lenovo, LG, Microsoft, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefónica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Toshiba, and Vodafone. The mark is also backed by a $1 billion marketing budget, to be spent in the next year. The mark, which looks like a stylized cloud or bird, will be on laptops in time for the holiday shopping season.

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"Together we are announcing the initiative to drive the adoption of mobile broadband notebooks," said Michael O'Hara, chief marketing officer at GSM Association (GSMA), which handles the initiative.

If a laptop bears the new mark it supports at least 3.6Mbps on paper and 1Mbps in real-world capacity. The technical specification states that 3.6Mbps is required, and that 7.2Mbps is recommended, but the mark will always look the same. Different marks for different capacities won't be clear to customers, according to Ton Brand, who leads the initiative at the GSMA.

Only members of the GSM family can get the mark, which today means HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), and in the future LTE (Long Term Evolution). WiMax hasn't got the coverage and mobility that operators and laptop manufacturers are looking for, according to the GSMA.

The goal is to make it easy for consumers to find computers with built-in support for mobile broadband, which is needed for mobile broadband in the mass market product, and today that isn't the case, according to Brand.

"Like Bluetooth, like Wi-Fi, everybody has a mark, and mobile broadband didn't," he said.

The organization isn't alone in thinking that the industry has made mobile broadband too complicated. "About a year ago, one of our customers talked at a telecom conference and one thing he highlighted was that the telecom industry does more or less everything it can to confuse its customers. We talk about 3G, Turbo 3G, HSPA and WCDMA, and that confuses the customers," said Eva Sparr, marketing director at Ericsson's mobile broadband modules unit.

The confusion needed to be addressed, and that is what the industry has done with its new mark, according to Sparr.

Currently, most mobile broadband users connect to the Internet using an external modem. Using an integrated module instead has several advantages. Besides ease of use, an integrated modem also offers better battery time, and you can't misplace or leave an integrated module at home. It's one less thing to remember, according to Sparr.

A second goal with the initiative is to offer an alternative to Wi-Fi-based hotspots, and on a national level mobile broadband offers better convenience and pricing than hotspots, but more than a mark is needed if mobile broadband is to compete with Wi-Fi hotspots on all levels.

"Cheaper international roaming is as important. If you price it out of the market it's never going to take off," said Christian Salbaing, managing director of 3 Group in Europe.

Salbaing thinks the E.U. suggested ¬1 ($1.46) per megabyte on a wholesale level, which is what operators pay each other, is still too expensive. "We think it should be ¬0.25, but it could be even lower, because the real cost is way under ¬0.25," he said.

Officials from companies such as HP and Joyent debated the merits and even the definition of cloud computing Monday during an event at eBay headquarters, emphasizing efforts underway and noting limitations to cloud computing on the software side.

Panelists and the audience pondered the issue of cloud computing during the eBay ResearchFest event in San Jose, Calif.

[ Read more about the emerging world of cloud computing in InfoWorld's special report ]

"[The] cloud computing juggernaut is coming. Embrace it," said panelist Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP Labs.

"Cloud computing, cloud services is computing and services that people can access over the Internet," Banerjee said, offering up his own definition. An audience member, meanwhile, defined cloud computing as "distributed computing trying to be a mainframe."

The question of what cloud computing is came to the forefront recently, with published reports quoting Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, pondering the subject.

Banerjee cited a variety of cloud computing projects at HP to improve the user experience, boost presence and in scaling computing. Among the projects are CloudPrint, to print from anywhere in the world, and Exascale, to build infrastructures for the cloud having millions of servers and petabytes of storage.

HP also is developing datacenter cooling technology, called dynamic smart cooling, that could be applied to cloud computing. "We are working on technology that will allow datacenters to reduce energy consumption by over 40 to 50 percent," Banerjee said.?

HP is partnering with companies such as Intel and Yahoo on Cirrus, which is intended to be an easily accessible, open cloud computing platform.

An official at cloud services infrastructure provider Joyent said software can be an impediment to scaling in the cloud. Twitter, said Joyent CEO David Young, used to be on Joyent, running 30 machine equivalents but unable to keep up with 40MBps of traffic. Another customer, meanwhile, used a single server doing 50MBps, Young said.

"Twitter had plenty of infrastructure, but their software was not ready to scale," Young said.

Also during the eBay event, another panel discussed trends in technology research. Jim Spohrer, director of service research at IBM, noted the company's efforts in computer-aided design systems to generate business models. The company already has an early-stage effort going called component business model, but a full-fledged technology will take 5 to 10 years to develop, he said.

Panelist Mark Bernstein, president and center director at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), formerly Xerox PARC, said personalization of information services would be a trend the next 20 years. And Google's Peter Norvig said while other organizations have had research personnel separated from other parts of the company, Google does not. "In Google, we don't do that. Everything is mixed together," he said. Some engineers and researchers are even in the same office, Norvig said.

Panelists also discussed the impact of patents.

"From my perspective, patents are a fundamental asset to creating business value to the research you do," Bernstein said. "Now all that's changing."

Decisions have been made pushing the pendulum in the direction of open innovation and away from what patent trolls have wrought, he said. "I think patents for their purpose are a very good thing. I think that the use of them in society is less than optimal at the present."

eBay said on Monday that it has been awarded the 2007 Medal of Technology and Innovation and that it was the first Internet company to receive the award. The award was conferred by President George W. Bush at the White House, who cited the company's efforts in online trading, eBay said.

Also at Monday's ResearchFest, eBay touted research projects such as Hyades, offering guided e-commerce search by clustering.

After shelving plans to detail a browser clickjacking vulnerability that is indirectly related to Adobe Systems' products at the company's request earlier this month, a security researcher plans to detail the flaw next month.

Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology at White Hat Security, will discuss the vulnerability at the Hack In The Box (HITB) conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. "We have no ETA on Adobe fixes, but we're hopeful that it'll be weeks and not months. Whether or not they 'patch,' it will not change the content of my keynote speech," he wrote in an e-mail.

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Grossman was scheduled to detail the clickjacking flaw with Robert Hansen, CEO of SecTheory, at the Open Web Application Security Project conference in New York, but they pulled the presentation at Adobe's request. The hackers said no pressure was put on them, but Adobe wanted time to study and address the vulnerability before it was made public. "This is not an evil 'the man is trying to keep us hackers down' situation," Hansen wrote on his blog at the time.

Clickjacking is an attack where a user clicks on a button in a browser, thinking the button will perform a specific function, such submitting a news story to Digg, but instead an attacker hijacks the button to use it for another purpose. The vulnerability is "obviously scary enough for Adobe to call it a critical issue and ask for more time, even though they were only indirectly affected," Grossman wrote in an e-mail.

Over the weekend, Grossman and Hansen planned to inform Adobe of their intent to proceed with the presentation and make the proof-of-concept code they developed available.

"We gave Adobe time out of courtesy because they asked and we have a good working relationship with them. They are using the time productively, but we could not agree to another delay," Grossman wrote. "Our belief is clickjacking as an issue is not a problem in their software, but with browsers in general. It would not be fair to the others that it does impact to be without the information they need."

HITB will be held in Kuala Lumpur from Oct. 27-30.

Worries about consumer spending, advertising and the ability of IT companies to raise money appear to have hit many tech stocks harder even than the overall market on Monday, one of the worst days on Wall Street since 1929.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 777 points, or 6.98 percent, to 10,365.45 as the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a plan to bail out financial markets. But the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 9.14 percent, falling 199.61 to 1983.73, and shares in some of the biggest names in technology fell even more steeply: Apple (AAPL) nearly 18 percent, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) almost 17 percent, and Intel (INTC) more than 10 percent. Google (GOOG), which has flown higher than most, went down $50.04 to $381 a share, losing 11.61 percent of its value in one day.

[ Learn how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]

Fear that nervous consumers are losing their appetite for discretionary spending was one factor that slammed Apple. In a report released Monday, RBC Capital Markets lowered its rating of Apple from "Outperform" to "Sector Perform," in part because of research that said fewer consumers intend to buy Macs in the next 90 days. In addition, 40 percent of consumers plan on spending less money on electronics overall in the next 90 days, the weakest outlook ever seen, according to RBC.

"Apple's business is driven by the consumer, and the consumer is getting hurt because of higher oil prices" that leave less money for cool gadgets, said Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research in San Francisco. Large enterprises, such as airlines and shipping-dependent retailers, also have less money to invest in IT, he added.

As consumers go, so goes advertising, according to Albert Lin, an analyst at investment firm Sooner Cap. When companies grow less confident that consumers will buy their products, they don't want to spend as much on advertising. That can affect companies such as Google, which depends heavily on how much it can charge companies for search advertising, he said.

But tech's woes are broader than that, according to Lin. Compared with businesses in general, IT companies both need more cash and have less of it on hand, he said. Giants such as Apple and Google, with their large cash hordes, are exceptions to the rule, he said. Most operate close to the bone, investing most of what they bring in just to keep up with technology, and often need to borrow capital.

"Now, the access to capital is much harder," Lin said.

Lacking solid collateral and a good cash-flow history, tech companies usually can't turn to conventional lenders such as banks when they need to borrow, Lin said. So they typically turn to investors and recapitalize, selling more stock, Lin said. Bad news, such as the rejection of the bailout plan, makes those potential investors skittish.

"When all those unknowns are thrown into the market, people conclude the stocks have become more risky," Lin said.

Nokia will stop developing its enterprise mobile e-mail platform Intellisync: its future enterprise e-mail systems will be based on platforms from Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM, among others.

"It doesn't make too much sense for us to create our own when we can partner with the best solutions in the market," said Dinesh Subramanian, spokesman at Nokia.

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Existing enterprise e-mail customers will now be given the option to move to a new solution, from one of the partners or its own upcoming consumer e-mail platform, or other Internet platforms, according to Subramanian.

Internal resources previously devoted to Intellisync will instead be reallocated to Nokia's consumer service push, but the underlying technology will still have a place. "The technology from Intellisync will very much come in handy when we go forward with our consumer e-mail strategy," said Subramanian.

The company is currently beta testing the Nokia Email Service, which can aggregate messages from for example Gmail, Yahoo, and ISP accounts directly in the mobile phone. The service will launch "when it makes sense", according to Subramanian.

Nokia is also in the process of selling its security-appliances business, products which come with support for intrusion protection and VPN (virtual private network).

The increased focus on the consumer market doesn't come as much of a surprise to analysts.

No matter how hard it would have tried Nokia wouldn't have been able to overcome the likes of Research In Motion and Microsoft, and Nokia has always been more of a consumer company, according to Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.

"It also underlines what a massive undertaking Nokia has on its hands in the consumer space," said Blaber.

September 2008 will certainly go down as one of the blackest months in Wall Street history. Venerable financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG abruptly vanished or were radically overhauled. Investors lost loads of money -- in some cases, fortunes -- and ordinary taxpayers are now finding themselves funding an industry bailout that could cost a staggering $700 billion, perhaps even more.

Also hit hard by the financial services industry meltdown are the tech vendors that depended on high-flying investment banks, brokerages, insurance companies, and related firms for revenue -- as well as to popularize and mainstream a variety of cutting-edge products and services to IT organizations across industries.

[ Learnhow the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]

Now that most of the major investment banks and sundry financial services firms have either evaporated, transformed, or been absorbed by other companies, an untold number of vendors in fields ranging from business intelligence to cloud computing are sadly waving good-bye to many of their prime customers. "For some vendors it's undoubtedly going to be very painful," concludes Andrew Bartels, a research analyst at Forrester Research.

As October dawns, vendors that once served a seemingly reliable and stable market are now awakening to a starkly altered reality. "It may not be a new world, but it's certainly going to be a different one," says Jeanne Capachin, research vice president at Financial Insights, a research firm that serves the financial services industry.

With many vendors reliant on financial industry sales now struggling to navigate a radically transformed business landscape, customers in fields far removed from Wall Street will begin noticing market changes, primarily in the amount and types of available products and services, but perhaps also in the number of vendors they can turn to for solutions. "Given the important role the financial services industry played in the tech market, changes are bound to happen," Bartels says.

"This will mean, for many vendors, a need to refocus on customers in fields outside of financial services," says Vivek Mehra, head of the financial services practice at IT services company Keane.

Which technologies -- and providers -- are at risk? The most obvious technology at risk from the financial services firms' meltdown is analytics, including business intelligence. Fewer customers with cutting-edge needs, combined with slowing revenue, may have the long-term effect of stifling innovation. "It's the chicken-and-egg scenario," Mehra says. "Without the financial services vendors around to drive advancements, innovation could suffer."

But a silver lining to this cloud may be that analytics developers will refocus on mainstream market needs while downplaying exotic and esoteric offerings, Mehra suggests.

And even BI and analytics vendors may be able to mount a near-term strategic comeback, Bartels says. However, to do so, they will have to work hard to make their offerings relevant to surviving financial services firms as well as to enterprises at large. Vendors will have to focus "on providing software that's seen as a 'must have' as opposed to a 'nice to have.'" Over the long run, such a trend could lead to BI and analytics software geared more toward real-world needs than the arcane requirements of investment traders. "For many vendors, it will mark a return to the real world," he says.

Beyond BI and risk analytics, vendors active in such diverse fields as SOA, SANs, and cloud computing can also expect to feel at least some of the effects of a collapsed financial services industry.

SOA infrastructure, for instance, is widely used by financial services firms for transaction integrity and scalability. Therefore, SOA vendors who targeted financial services firms can expect to experience many of the same customer pullback and revenue issues as their BI and risk analytic counterparts. On the other hand, since financial services firms didn't play as big a role in driving SOA innovation as they did in the BI and analytics markets, enterprise customers shouldn't see any serious impact on long-term product development.

The same calculation generally holds true for the SAN market, says Mehra, where vendors over the years sold financial services firms an impressive number of systems for managing and protecting vast data repositories. But, as is the case with SOA vendors, SAN innovation isn't heavily dependent on financial services firms, so the damage shouldn't significantly extend beyond vendors' bottom lines, he notes.

For cloud computing vendors, however, the outlook appears somewhat darker. In fact, next to BI and risk analytics, cloud computing vendors may stand to lose the most from an eroded financial services market. Forrester's Bartels notes that some financial services firms led the way in using cloud computing's vast resources to test novel investment strategies and alternative model scenarios. "Not much of that is going to be happening for financial institutions in the near future," he says. The good news is that cloud computing is a nascent market with relatively few enterprise adopters heavily involved in the technology. As a result, any negative impact should be muted and limited mostly to the vendors' revenue streams.

Small vendors are the most at risk Financial Insights' Capachin says that across all categories the biggest vendor losers will be the small, innovative firms that have "sold well into the capital markets industry." For at least some of these firms, the loss of one or more key customers could mark the end of the road as a viable business. "If it were me, I'd check with my vendors to see their exposure to the financial industry," she says.

"I just think it's going to be a tough market anyways for tech spending, but in particular if you're not a well-capitalized, well-known firm," she says. For survival, many smaller vendors will likely find themselves driven into partnerships with bigger players, Capachin says.

Conversely, while some small innovators with specialized products and a narrow market focus may be devastated by the meltdown, diversification and economies of scale should help larger vendors like IBM and Sun Microsystems withstand the collapse with only minimal damage. "IBM, for example, says that 29 percent of its revenue comes from financial services -- but only 6 percent of that comes out of the U.S.," Bartels says. Sales in Europe -- whose financial firms have also been hit by the financial crisis -- adds another 5 percent. "So they're going to feel some pain, but it's only a small part of their overall business."

Life after death: Integration, compliance opportunities abound Given the severity of the current crisis, it's comforting to know that there may actually be a faint silver lining on the horizon. As the financial services industry enters a new and -- in all likelihood -- very much downsized era, several fresh opportunities could arrive to benefit at least some vendors and their enterprise customers.

As banks and other institutions swallow each other up, industry consolidation may itself open new doors. "The need for integration software will be very high, because a lot of these [financial services] companies will want to change their business models," Keane's Mehra says. This trend could help spur the development of better integration software, leading to products and services designed to help merging businesses in industries beyond financial services.

Vendors with productivity-enhancing and cost-cutting technologies may also prosper. In the foreseeable future, sellers in a wide array of tech sectors -- everything from call center automation to virtual meetings to environmental controls -- should be able to take advantage of a financial services industry driven by a need to ruthlessly slash expenses. "A vendor that sells software to help cut or reduce IT cost may still be in a good position," Bartels says. Furthermore, many of these solutions will likely appeal to a broad spectrum of enterprise customers.

Mehra expects that increased government oversight will power a growing market for compliance applications in the financial services industry, just as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act did several years ago for a variety of enterprises affected by the corporate corruption scandals. "I think business intelligence will start to benefit right away because, from a regulatory standpoint, [there will be a need for] more transparency of information," he says. As a result, better and easier-to-use compliance tools could eventually become available to all enterprises.

G.ho.st, a startup that offers a hosted operating system, has accused Microsoft of violating a company trademark with its prominent use of the phrase "no walls" in its recently unveiled $300 million Windows marketing and advertising campaign.

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A letter from G.ho.st CEO Zvi Schreiber sent to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last Tuesday asked the company to stop using the phrases "life without walls," "imagine without walls," and "imagine no walls" on its products, Web site, marketing materials, advertising, and other promotions and agree in writing to stop using these phrases by the close of business last Thursday.

As of Monday, Microsoft was still using the phrases in its campaign. Microsoft spokesman Michael Marinello said via e-mail Monday that the company acknowledged it had received Schreiber's letter but "the allegation is without merit."

Schreiber said G.ho.st has been using the phrase "no walls" to describe its G.ho.st Virtual Computer product, which is a hosted OS that runs in a virtual environment and is what he calls a "conceptual alternative to Windows," since April 2007.

Microsoft's use of "life without walls," "imagine without walls," and "imagine no walls" and their prominence on the marketing campaign "are virtually identical ... to our trademark," he wrote.

However, according to a record with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, G.ho.st has not yet officially trademarked the phrase and only filed an application to do so last Tuesday, the day it sent Microsoft the letter.

Schreiber also suggested in the letter that Microsoft's use of the phrase "is designed to scare off potential investors in G.ho.st or partners of G.ho.st and prevent us from giving our innovative Virtual Computer solution a fair chance in the market place."

In addition to no longer using the phrase, G.ho.st also has requested that Microsoft publish "in the same media where these marks were displayed or advertised" clarification that it has not licensed G.ho.st's technology or trademark and that it doesn't offer the same "features or benefits of the G.ho.st Virtual Computer. "

Additionally, G.ho.st is asking Microsoft negotiate a "good faith" license for the past use of what the company believes is its trademark.

G.ho.st did not respond to a request for comment Monday about whether it would take legal action against Microsoft to resolve the matter. The company was founded in 2006 and has about 40 employees in Israel and the West Bank.

Oracle's powerful new HP Oracle Database Machine comes with 168TB of storage, a new method of retrieving data more quickly and intelligently, and -- wait for it -- a $2.33 million price tag.

It's the turbocharged option for the database administrator with money to burn and a need for speed.

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But most DBAs don't get to drive in the fast lane -- especially not with IT budgets the way they are. So as a less lavish option for enterprise users, Oracle is touting another approach.

That one involves data compression, which has long been a popular way to save storage space and money. Traditionally, though, the trade-off has been high: Gobs of memory and processing power typically are needed to compress data and write it to disks. Even more is needed when the information is later extracted.

Now Oracle claims to have solved this thorny problem with a feature it first introduced in its Oracle 11g database, which was released last year.

By using the Advanced Compression option in 11g, Oracle says, DBAs can shrink database sizes by as much as three-fourths and boost read/write speeds by three to four times, no matter whether they're running a data warehouse or a transaction-processing database -- all while incurring little in the way of processor utilization penalties.

Oracle claims the storage and speed gains are so dramatic that companies using Advanced Compression will no longer need to move old, seldom, or non-used data to archives. Instead, they can keep it all in the same production database, even as the amount of data stored there grows into the hundreds of terabytes or even the petabyte range.

"This works completely transparently to your applications," Juan Loaiza, Oracle's senior vice president of systems technologies, said during a session at the company's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco last week. "It increases CPU usage by just 5 percent, while cutting your [database] table sizes by half."

Oracle says it's responding to the demands of enterprise customers with fast-growing databases (download PDF). "The envelope is always being pushed," Loaiza said. "Unstructured data is growing very quickly. We expect someone to be running a one-petabyte, 1,000-CPU-core database by 2010."

It's also responding to the fact that storage technology, one of the keys to database performance, has made little progress from a speed standpoint, according to Loaiza. "Disks are getting bigger, but they're not getting a whole lot faster," he said.

Taking data compression down to the block levelOracle has offered simple index-level compression since the 8i version of its database was introduced in 1999. That improved several years later with the introduction of table-level compression in Oracle 9i Release 2, which helped data warehousing users compress data for faster bulk loads, according to Sushil Kumar, senior director of product management for database manageability, high availability and performance at Oracle.

Advanced Compression provides even finer capabilities, letting the database compress data down to the disk-block level (download PDF). The algorithm used in the new feature compresses data while keeping track of exactly where information is stored, Kumar said. The result, he claimed, is that when data is extracted by users, the database can focus in like a laser on the exact block on the disk where the information is located, instead of pulling whole tables and sifting through unwanted data.

Other compression schemes "have no idea what's on the disk," Kumar contended. "They can't read part of a document without opening up the entire one."

According to Oracle officials, Advanced Compression is also smart enough not to compress data with every single change to a database, but to instead let the changes accumulate and then run them in batches. That is efficient enough to enable Advanced Compression to work with OLTP databases, which tend to have heavy read/write volumes, said Vineet Marwah, a principal member of the Oracle database staff.

Another component of Advanced Compression, called SecureFiles, can automatically detect, index and compress non-relational data such as Word documents, PDFs or XML files, Marwah said. Oracle also has enhanced its backup compression performance so that it is 40 percent faster in 11g than in the previous version of the database, while not degrading the performance of other database functions, he said.

And because a compressed database is generally much smaller, it shrinks the flow of data between the storage server and database, where bottlenecks tend to occur, Kumar said. The gains are so dramatic that DBAs can dump their complicated partitioning and archiving schemes, he claimed. "A lot of people archive data because they have to, not because they want to," he said. "So if you see a business value in keeping data around, compression is a useful way to not let resource constraints dictate your architecture."

Advanced Compression: not a cure-allOracle acknowledges that Advanced Compression isn't a cure-all. For instance, while large table scans "are a whole lot faster, compression doesn't make random-access reads that much faster," Loaiza said. Also, data that has already been compressed, such as a JPEG image, can't be compressed further, according to Kumar.

Oracle's claim of 4:1 compression also isn't the highest level in the database industry. Database analyst Curt Monash pointed out in an online post this week that analytic database start-up Vertica Inc. claims compression ratios from 5:1 to as much as 60:1, depending on the type of data.

Kumar declined to comment about Vertica. But during his OpenWorld presentation, he claimed that Oracle's variable-length, block-level compression is more efficient than what is offered in IBM 's rival DB2 9 database, not to mention faster. "Because DB2 is so inefficient to begin with, Oracle is the winner any day," Kumar said. He also called the compression offered by data warehousing database vendor Teradata Corp. "very primitive."

But users haven't flocked to Advanced Compression yet. One reason is that it's a paid add-on. A license costs $11,500 per processor, with updates and support adding an additional $2,530 per CPU. Also, it's available only to users of 11g Enterprise Edition, and Oracle hasn't seen much adoption of 11g thus far. According to Andrew Mendelsohn , Oracle's senior vice president of server technologies, 75 percent of its customers are running 10g, and another 20 percent are still running 9i.

Take what is likely Oracle's biggest customer, LGR Telecommunications, which develops data warehousing systems for telecommunications companies. LGR has built two 300TB data warehouses for AT&T for use in storing and managing the carrier's caller data records, according to Paul Hartley, general manager of LGR's North American operations in Atlanta. The databases, which run concurrently with one another, can scale up to a total of 1.2PB, Hartley said during a presentation at OpenWorld.

But the two data warehouses are based on Oracle 10g, so they can't take advantage of Advanced Compression. LGR does "use compression to some extent today, but we plan to use it extensively in the future," Hannes van Rooven, a manager at LGR, said during the same presentation.

Another Oracle customer, Intermap Technologies Corp., is using the spatial-data version of 11g for its 11TB database of digital mapping and imagery data, which is expected to grow to 40TB by the first quarter of 2010, according to Sue Merrigan, senior director of information management at the Englewood, Colo., company. Intermap isn't in the compression camp now. "We don't compress the data because we are concerned it would lose its accuracy," Merrigan said.

That isn't true, responded Kumar, who said that Advanced Compression is a so-called lossless compression scheme.

Rivals such as John Bantleman, CEO of archiving software vendor Clearpace Software Ltd., argue that sending old data to archives will continue to boost database performance more than compressing information. Moreover, it isn't much more complicated to do so, Bantleman claims. And using tools such as Clearpace, users can search and extract data archived outside of the database as quickly and conveniently as if the information was stored in it, according to Bantleman.

"A telco might need to maintain its caller data records for years," Bantleman said. "But does it really make sense to keep all of that in your database if regulations only require you to keep access to it for 90 days?" He added that it might seem better "emotionally" to maintain a single data storage environment. "But I think you want to segment the live part of your data for OLTP performance from your highly compressed historical data. These two schemas don't meld well in the same box."

Managed hosting provider Savvis has rolled out a service that allows ISVs to offer their applications in a SaaS (software as a service) model.

The service allows ISVs to take a single-tenant application and offer it as a hosted service to multiple clients through Savvis' 29 datacenters around the world, said Chief Technology Officer Bryan Doerr. It is available first in the U.S. and the U.K. and will be offered worldwide by the end of the year, he said.

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

Savvis partnered with Parallels to use its Virtuozzo Containers virtualization software to offer the service. The product divides a server OS into individual containers, each of which is assigned to an ISV customer and hosts multiple instances of its application. Customers also use Parallels' Automation software for provisioning accounts, billing, and linking to payment systems.

More and more end customers are turning to SaaS to reduce costs, putting pressure on ISVs to offer their applications as services. CRM has seen the widest uptake, with 15 percent of software revenue in 2007 coming from SaaS applications, according to Gartner. The fastest-growing segments are for office suites and digital content creation tools, where SaaS revenue will roughly double on average each year from 2007 to 2011, Gartner said.

Some ISVs have developed multitenant versions of their applications, which allows multiple end-users to access a single instance of their software. Savvis hosts applications for some of those vendors, but the new service is for ISVs that have yet to develop multitenant products. They don't need to rewrite applications to use the service, according to Doerr, and need only to bring it in and test it in the SaaS environment.

"We think of this as a transition period. We think ISVs will use this [service] as a quick go-to-market and eventually rewrite their application to be natively multitenant," Doerr said.

The infrastructure services, which also include application firewalling, are the first in a series of SaaS offerings that Savvis will roll out in the coming months. It also plans "lifecycle services" such as virtual labs hosting, where clients can develop and test applications, and application performance monitoring.

Longer term it will offer "marketplace" services that encourage ISVs to link their applications with those of other Savvis hosting customers. One ISV might offer a load testing service that other ISVs can use, for example, or a CRM provider might integrate its service with another ISV's human resources application.

Savvis wouldn't provide any pricing for the services; it said they will vary depending on the scale and type of application. Customers will pay separate bills for the Parallels software and for Savvis' hosting services. Savvis will be the support contact and will contact and work with Parallels on issues when necessary, Doerr said.

Savvis competes with other managed hosting providers such as AT&T and Terremark, SaaS hosting specialists such as OpSource, and platform providers such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Sunday passed a bill that would significantly increase penalties for copyright infringement and create a new office of intellectual-property enforcement coordinator in the White House.

The bill, which passed the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent on Friday, was stripped of one of its most controversial provisions, which would allow the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute civil lawsuits on behalf of copyright owners. The DOJ, in a letter to lawmakers last week, objected to that provision, saying it "could result in Department of Justice prosecutors serving as pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources."

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The legislation, called the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act, now goes to President George Bush for his signature. But digital rights advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have opposed the bill, saying it shifts the balance of copyright law away from consumer rights and toward protections for large copyright holders such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

"The bill only adds more imbalance to a copyright law that favors large media companies," Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge's president, said in an e-mail. "At a time when the entire digital world is going to less restrictive distribution models, and when the courts are aghast at the outlandish damages being inflicted on consumers in copyright cases, this bill goes entirely in the wrong direction."

Public Knowledge has called the October 2007 jury verdict against Minnesota resident Jammie Thomas, awarding the RIAA $222,000, an excessive award. Thomas was accused of sharing 24 songs on a p-to-p (peer-to-peer) network. Last week, a U.S. judge awarded Thomas a new trial, saying the award was "wholly disproportionate" to the damages the RIAA incurred.

If Bush signs the PRO-IP Act, the law would increase the forfeiture penalties for copyright offenses. It would allow courts, in civil cases, to seize "any property used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part" for copyright offenses.

That provision could mean that a wide range of devices and equipment will be seized, said Sherwin Siy, staff attorney at Public Knowledge. Earlier versions of the bill required that equipment be substantially connected to copyright infringement, but the bill that passed in recent days does not, he wrote on the Public Knowledge blog.

"Any number of multipurpose devices -- even those not owned by the infringer -- could get caught up in the net of forfeiture penalties," Siy wrote.

The bill allows courts to impound business records associated with an alleged infringement, pending trial. It would also increase funding for local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to help with intellectual property investigations, as well as creating the new intellectual-property coordinator position at the White House.

Sohn called for Congress to look in a holistic way at copyright law "and write legislation that recognizes the reality of the situation and the reality that consumers have rights also." She said she was pleased that the bill was stripped of its provision to allow the DOJ to file civil lawsuits on behalf of copyright holders.

"This provision was a total waste of the taxpayers' money," Sohn said.

The RIAA and the Business Software Alliance, a trade group representing large software vendors, praised the passage of the bill.

"This bill truly is music to the ears of all those who care about strengthening American creativity and jobs," Mitch Bainwol, RIAA's chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "At a critical economic juncture, this bipartisan legislation provides enhanced protection for an important asset that helps lead our global competitiveness."

Microsoft plans to incorporate the jQuery JavaScript library into its Visual Studio platform, according to several blogs published on Sunday.

JQuery, the jQuery Web site states, is "a fast and concise JavaScript library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and AJAX interactions for rapid Web development." The technology also was described as lightweight and cross-browser.

"JQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript," according to the site.

Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in the company's developer division, noted Microsoft's intentions to support the open source technology.

"I'm excited today to announce that Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward," Guthrie said.?"We will distribute the jQuery JavaScript library as is, and will not be forking or changing the source from the main jQuery branch.? The files will continue to use and ship under the existing jQuery MIT license."

Microsoft also will distribute intellisense-annotated versions that provide "great" Visual Studio intellisense and help-integration at design time, Guthrie said.

"A big part of the appeal of jQuery is that it allows you to elegantly (and efficiently) find and manipulate HTML elements with minimum lines of code," said Guthrie.

"JQuery is a fantastic library, and something we think can really benefit ASP.Net and ASP.Net AJAX developers.? We are looking forward to having it work great with Visual Studio and ASP.Net, and to help bring it to an even larger set of developers," Guthrie said.

The jQuery intellisense annotation support will be offered as a free Web download in a few weeks and will work with Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and the Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Service Pack 1. A new ASP.Net MVC download will distribute it as well and add the jQuery library by default to new projects, Guthrie said.

Microsoft product support will be extended to jQuery later this year, enabling developers and enterprises to call and open jQuery support cases.

John Resig, of the jQuery development team, said Nokia also was taking steps to adopt jQuery as part of its official application platform.

As wireless devices become more numerous within businesses, their convenience will be counterbalanced by an increasing potential for security problems, according to a Gartner analyst.

New trends in the wireless industry are making it easier for hacking attacks, said John Girard, a Gartner vice president, who spoke at the IT Security Summit in London on Monday.

[ For a look at enterprise-worthy smartphones on the market, check out "Supersmart phones for extreme mobility." And learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

A few years ago, there was not a lot of standardization across wireless devices. Differing operating systems, differing implementations of mobile Java, and even varying configurations among devices with the same operating system made it hard to write malicious code that ran on a wide array of devices, Girard said.

But that's changing as the quality control gets better on widely used platforms such as Microsoft's Windows Mobile and the Symbian operating system, he said. That standardization makes it easier for attackers to write code that will run on many devices.

"The more your phone gets like a PC, the more it can host malicious code," Girard said. "People are getting used to sending out executable code."

Many of the attacks that have been traditionally plaguing desktop machines, such as phishing, will increasingly move to the mobile platform, Girard said. Also, users may be more tolerant of glitches on their mobile phones, which may be clues that a device has been infected or hacked.

That's problematic when enterprises begin installing business applications on mobile phones and carry data that is potentially valuable to attackers, Girard said.

"We're very quickly moving to the point where people really can do business on smartphones," Girard said.

Gartner is predicting that wireless ID theft and phishing attempts targeting mobile devices will become more and more prevalent throughout next year, Girard said.

Companies need to be sure before buying a fleet of mobile devices that those devices meet a minimum security specification. The security specification can be formulated by figuring out what kind of data the device will handle and what regulations a company is bound by under data protection law, Girard said.

If the hardware and software is secure when the device arrives, it makes it a lot easier to manage than trying to fix a device after it's in the field, Girard said.

Girard laid out a few key security points: Data on devices should be encrypted, proper identity and access controls should be implemented and intrusion prevention systems should used to ensure that rogue devices don't access sensitive information, he said.

Sprint Nextel launched its mobile WiMax broadband network in the city of Baltimore on Monday.

Xohm (pronounced "zome") will offer download speeds of between 2Mbps and 4Mbps, with prices starting at $30 a month for mobile users, the company said.

[ For a better understanding of the WiMax technology read InfoWorld's "Road test: Does WiMax work in the real world?" ]

Other plans include a one-day pass at $10, a home Internet option at $25 a month, and a "Pick 2 for Life" introductory offer that allows two devices to access the network for $50 a month. Customers won't have to sign a long-term contract.

Sprint will sell the necessary WiMax modems through the Xohm Web site and local independent retail stores. The Samsung Express costs $59.99 and the Zyxel model $79.99.

The company plans to introduce another modem from Chinese manufacturer ZTE later this year, and expects to see notebook PCs and a wireless Internet tablet from Nokia with WiMax modems built in. Sprint also plans to sell a dual-mode wireless modem capable of connecting to the WiMax network and to its existing 3G mobile phone network.

Following the Baltimore launch, Sprint plans commercial service in nearby Washington, D.C., and in Chicago before the end of the year. The carrier also is building networks in Philadelphia, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth. Its WiMax business will be combined with wireless startup Clearwire, to form a company that will carry Clearwire's name, in a deal expected to close by the end of this year. Clearwire plans a commercial launch in Portland, Ore., in this quarter and may also go live in Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Grand Rapids, Mich., by year's end.

Sprint's network has been delayed several times, partly by turmoil within the company. Sprint and Clearwire said in July 2007 they had reached a 20-year agreement to jointly build a national WiMax network that would launch in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington market in 2007 and reach 100 million U.S. residents by the end of 2008. But that deal fell through after Sprint chairman, president, and CEO Gary Forsee was fired last November. It wasn't until May 2008 that Sprint and Clearwire got back together, this time with big-name partners including Intel, Google, and Comcast and other cable operators.

Sprint's project represents not only the world's biggest network using the emerging 4G technology, but also a desperate effort to regain competitive momentum in the U.S. mobile market. The nation's third-largest carrier lags badly behind leaders AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, and it has been losing subscribers. A poor reputation for customer service has dogged the company, and it has not been able to capitalize on its 2005 acquisition of Nextel.

The multipartner deal in May addressed a major hurdle for the ailing Sprint, that of financing the WiMax rollout. Together, the partners agreed to finance the Clearwire joint venture to the tune of $14.5 billion. Still, the business represents several gambles. Sprint, Intel, and consumer electronics makers are betting that subscribers will want to buy unsubsidized devices in high volume, eventually driving down manufacturing costs, for a service that will only reach a handful of markets at first. And although the WiMax joint venture will have a head start over AT&T and Verizon's 4G networks, which are not expected go have significant rollouts until 2010 or later, those carriers continue to roll out faster 3G systems.

Under the banner of "democratizing" application life-cycle management (ALM), Microsoft is unveiling today the next major release of its Visual Studio Team System platform. Visual Studio Team System 2010, which has been code-named "Rosario," focuses on collaboration between the different persons involved in the software development process. The company also is revealing "pillars" of Visual Studio 2010, which is the next version of the company?s development environment, and the accompanying .Net Framework 4.0 programming model. Visual Studio 2010 recently had been referred to as Visual Studio 10.

[ InfoWorld's Strategic Developer blog: A sneak peek at Visual Studio 2010 ]

In ALM, integration of roles is key for the 2010 release. Microsoft's goal in the planned release is to "enable a collaboration between those roles," which include lead developer, architect, a combined architect/lead developer role, general purpose developer, database developer, and tester, said Dave Mendlen, director of developer marketing at Microsoft.

Previous versions of the Visual Studio Team System has featured role-based products for testers, architects, developers, and database developers. With the 2010 edition, Microsoft is recognizing a blurring of roles between developer and database developer and thus is eliminating the database-specific product, which has been called Team System 2008 Database Edition. Capabilities for both general-purpose and database developers will be featured.

To boost the lead developer or architect, Visual Studio Team System 2010 will feature simplified installation and configuration in the TFS (Team Foundation Server) collaboration and source code control tool, Microsoft claimed. Also, the new versions of Team System and TFS promise to bolster continuous build processes to ensure that an application's architecture is maintained. When code is checked into the TFS, the software makes sure the code will not invalidate the architecture. "In the past, we were checking for bad code. Now, we're checking for bad architecture," Mendlen said. Workflow to catch errors also is incorporated in TFS.

Additionally, Visual Studio Team System 2010 will offer functionality to accommodate teams using agile programming methods, including enablement of preconfigured Excel workbooks for use by agile development teams.

For architects and developers, the Architecture tool in Visual Studio Team System 2010 will enable representations of what is going on with code through a feature called Architect Explorer. "The tool will integrate your source code and build a graphical model of that code," providing details on relationships and dependencies between different pieces of code, Mendlen said.

For testers, Microsoft plans to help developers and testers work better together via a new video capability in the Test product. "What we're doing with this release is we've been able to record a video of the tester while they?re testing the application so that when a crash occurs, the video is sent to the developer," said Mendlen. Screen activities are captured to assist the developer, who can see whether or not there is a bug.

For debugging, the tester tool offers a feature referred to as "TiVo for debugging." With this capability, a tester can record all PC activities and hand that off to a developer. Source code is examined and the state of the machine determined for developers inside of Visual Studio. The tester tool also offers an integrated manual testing.

Chris Menegay of Notion Solutions, a user of Visual Studio Team System 2008, looked forward to the 2010 platform. "We use Visual Studio Team System 2008 extensively today for managing our work processes, doing testing and handling our builds and releases. It's been incredibly valuable for streamlining both our process and those of the companies we work with," he said. "One of the main shortcomings we?ve been struggling with today is that the testing tools are sub-par. We've been looking at what's coming in the 2010 release, and it appears to fill all the key gaps that we've identified, which is phenomenal."

Microsoft's efforts in UML (Unified Modeling Language) as part of Visual Studio Team System 2010 were noted by Jeffrey Hammond, senior analyst for application development at Forrester Research: "They are putting in a lot of capability to round out the tools. For architects, the UML tooling will be a real improvement and go a long way toward finally putting the UML vs. DSL [domain specific language] debate to rest. There are also some really nice testing features that I think will compete favorably with anything else in the market today for unit and regression testing."

Microsoft has seen Visual Studio Team System used in applications ranging from line-of-business systems to departmental, aerospace, and Web applications. "Visual Studio Team System is a general-purpose software development tool, so we see all kinds of things," built using it, Mendlen said.

Microsoft views its competition in ALM as Rational and says that capabilities like Architectural Explorer and TiVo for debugging will make Visual Studio Team System 2010 stand out.

While there is no set ship date yet for the 2010 version of Visual Studio Team System, Microsoft has been on roughly two-year release cycles for upgrades to its Visual Studio platform. The last version, Visual Studio 2008, shipped in November 2007.

The Architecture product in Visual Studio Team System 2010 will work with the planned Oslo software modeling platform by enabling storage of models in the Oslo repository, according to Microsoft.

Mendlen says the pillars of the Visual Studio 2010 development environment, meanwhile, include "delighting" developers and riding the next platform wave, which involves .Net Framework 4.0 and the importance of Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. Other pillars include powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends like cloud computing, and "democratizing" ALM.

Microsoft plans to shed more light on .Net Framework 4.0 within a few weeks.

Enterprises continue to pay too much for security software -- while the software vendors aren't doing enough research to keep up with fast-changing threats on the Internet, a Gartner analyst said Monday.

Security vendors are maintaining high profit margins on firewalls and anti-virus software, products that are commodities these days, said Neil MacDonald, a research vice president at Gartner, during a presentation at the company's IT Security Summit in London.

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

Buyers should take advantage of the competitive environment in the anti-virus software industry to negotiate better prices for such products, he said.

"I know it's hard to switch, but you have to seriously enter the negotiations," he said. "Let the vendors know that you are not afraid to switch."

Security vendors have maintained a pricing scheme that contradicts the rest of the IT industry, MacDonald said. Typically with software or hardware, prices go down year after year with the introduction of new and better products. In some cases, however, security software often loses its effectiveness as new threats emerge, while prices stay high.

"Why in anti-virus year after year do we pay more for something that gives us less?" MacDonald asked. "It's insanity. Why is information security immune from the trends of the IT industry?"

For the last 18 months, MacDonald has been researching adaptive security, a concept that envisions having different security products communicate with one another and evaluate threats in a more contextual way. MacDonald argued that security products should work together like the human body's immune system, where different defensive mechanisms work in concert with each other.

These days, a security product is often designed to address a single security aspect, such as fortifying Web applications, protecting end-point devices, or preventing network intrusions. Vendors have taken advantage of how organizations deal with a security problem by offering single products, a model that makes security overly complex, MacDonald said.

Vendors need to create security technology that is less rigid and can change when businesses modify their processes. Ideally, those products would able to apply certain security policies in certain situations, a concept MacDonald labeled as adaptive.

"Vendors are holding us back from enabling this vision," MacDonald said. "The vendors are delivering us too many unconnected point products with too much complexity."

Developers working on WebKit announced late last week that the newest build of the browser engine, which powers both Apple 's Safari and Google 's Chrome, has aced all of the requirements of an important Web standards test.

"WebKit is the first browser engine to fully pass Acid3," said developer Maciej Stachowiak in a post to the WebKit blog.

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

The claim was a follow-up to last March's boast by WebKit developers that the browsing engine had scored 100 out of a possible 100 in the Acid3 test. The test, which was approved last March by the Web Standards Project, is designed to check how closely a browser follows certain standards, particularly specifications for Web 2.0 applications, as well as standards related to the DOM (Document Object Model), CSS2 (Cascading Style Sheets), and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).

Last Thursday, however, Stachowiak said that the newest builds also met Acid3's "smooth animation" requirement, something it had failed to do in March, by completing each test in under .033 milliseconds. When a browser finishes each test in that time or less, Acid3 shows the message "No JS [JavaScript] errors and no timing issues" in a pop-up window.

WebKit provides the core engine for not only Safari, but since early this month, also Google's Chrome . Google's browser, however, relies on a version of WebKit older than the one touted by Stachowiak.

Computerworld tested the newest WebKit, build r36882, in a virtual machine running Windows XP SP3 on an iMac powered by an Intel 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor. Although WebKit scored a perfect 100, it could not complete all tests in the required time in the virtual machine; one test repeatedly failed to meet the 0.33 millisecond cut-off.

However, when the most recent Mac OS X WebKit, build r37012, was tested on the same machine, it scored 100 and finished each test under the 0.33ms mark, confirming Stachowiak's claim.

Computerworld 's tests also confirmed his statement that no other major browser could match WebKit's Acid3 score. In the Windows XP SP3 virtual machine, all production and preview versions -- the latter indicated by build numbers or status in parenthesis -- scored less than 90 on the test.

Those results were:

WebKit, (r36882) -- 100

Firefox 3.1, (nightly) -- 89

Opera 9.6, (RC1) -- 85

Opera 9.52 -- 84

Chrome, (0.2.153.1) -- 79

Safari 3.1.2 -- 75

Firefox 3.0.3 -- 71

IE8 (Beta 2) -- 21

IE7 -- 12

The only other browser maker to stake a claim on Acid3 has been Opera, which said six months ago that a development build of its flagship application had also scored 100 .

In related news, Stachowiak also recently revealed that a major revamp in WebKit's JavaScript engine, dubbed "SquirrelFish Extreme," was more than twice as fast as its predecessor, and over three times faster than the engine included in the current production edition of Safari.

Stachowiak's comments followed similar claims by Mozilla Corp. last month, when the company spelled out massive speed gains from its TraceMonkey project . Mozilla plans to add TraceMonkey to the next edition, Firefox 3.1, due to ship sometime later this year or in early 2009.

According to reports, Apple will integrate new builds of WebKit into its Safari 4, which has been seeded to some developers for testing and is expected to publicly launch with Mac OS X 10.6, aka "Snow Leopard," the next version of the company's operating system. Snow Leopard, which Apple has said will ship sometime next year , will focus on stability and performance improvements, rather than on adding more features to the operating system.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Faced with a massive PC refresh at a price tag of $1.8 million, Jack Wilson instead rolled the dice on virtual desktops three years ago. The enterprise architect at Amerisure Insurance didn't just dabble in the nascent technology, he enacted a sweeping change, replacing all 800 PCs with Wyse thin clients and a server infrastructure that hosts 800 Windows workspaces -- a feat that took eight months and, critically, struck at the heart of worker productivity in a services-dependent industry.

Wilson had to rethink his entire infrastructure, from servers and storage to the network and its points of potential failure. He had to convince employees to give up their powerful PCs and embrace thin clients. And he had to deliver a solid return on investment to his bosses. Essentially, Wilson gambled that desktop virtualization wasn't just a fad but the future.

[ Read InfoWorld Test Center's review of Citrix XenDesktop 2.0, which leverages streaming applications, server virtualization, and swift admin tools for a scalable and manageable virtual desktop infrastructure. ]?

Today, Wilson basks in the limelight of success. "I've been in IT for 30-plus years and had a lot of really great ideas, but none of them actually worked out as well as I had thought," Wilson says. Desktop virtualization "is the only thing I've done that has exceeded my expectations."

Bold companies such as Amerisure have embarked on the desktop virtualization journey, navigating uncharted waters and steamrolling toward a fuzzy future. Yet most are reaping the cool benefits of the technology today. Amerisure, for instance, expects to save a few million by avoiding next year's traditional PC refresh cycle as well as one in 2012.

The virtualization buzz The term "desktop virtualization" generally refers to centralizing desktop applications inside a datacenter. These applications can be hosted on a traditional server farm and delivered to remote users via Citrix or Windows terminal services, or in the case of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), they can be run in Windows virtual machines on a VMware server. End-users simply launch a browser on a thin client -- or any PC, for that matter -- and access their desktops over the network. Regardless of how you centralize the desktops, the essential benefits remain the same: Virtual desktops are easier to manage, provision, and secure than PCs.

On the dollar-savings front, Forrester Research estimates that desktop virtualization costs around $860 per user (plus any required network upgrades) to deploy, which is less than the cost of a PC. Amerisure reaped not only these PC savings but additional benefits as well. Help-desk calls, for instance, have decreased by 80 percent because thin clients rarely run into trouble. The cost of rolling out a new desktop operating system, such as Vista, is cheap with virtual desktops but a major hit on the balance sheet with PCs.

Another bonus: Wilson no longer frets about virus-laden PCs infecting his network or hackers stealing data from PCs. "I'm not worried about catching something off a laptop because I'm just borrowing the laptop's screen and keyboard," he explains. "In a traditional VPN model, it would be a problem because you would be connected to my network."

Companies are drawn to desktop virtualization for a variety reasons. Lifetime Products, a manufacturer of polyurethane tables, sheds, and basketball hoops, chose desktop virtualization for its inherent data protection aspects. Desktop virtualization ensures that all of Lifetime's product-design data and other intellectual property remain safely locked inside its datacenter in Utah, even though engineers scattered here and abroad work daily on new designs.

Last year, Natixis Capital Markets virtualized workstations for 30 employees (out of 400) to give them server-level reliability and horsepower. Natixis deploys virtual instances of desktops on servers inside its datacenter for its army of traders. "If some traders ran apps locally on their workstations, then they wouldn't be able to do anything else on them," says Drew Hiltz, CTO of Natixis in the United States.

Slow from the starting gate Despite all the buzz around desktop virtualization, there are signs of tepid adoption. In a recent survey conducted by sister publication CIO, only one out of four respondents was using desktop virtualization; one in five said it would be a year to three years before they'd deploy the technology; and 37 percent said they weren't interested at all.

Why all the hand-wringing? The fact is, desktop virtualization has a few technical blind spots that it still needs to cover. Graphics and streaming video don't work well on a virtual desktop without significant (and costly) network upgrades. "If you have high-graphic apps, this is going to be a kludgy environment to work in," Wilson says.

Certain applications also don't run smoothly on a virtual desktop, while some software licensing even forbids their use. "There are vendors selling applications who still want to resist," says Hiltz. "Vendors play with licensing models to squeeze more dollars out of you. I can't run Bloomberg on a virtual desktop based on the language of the licensing, even though technically I could."

Both Hiltz and Wilson worry that virtual desktop users will drain datacenter resources. Part of the problem is that users feel resources are unlimited in the virtual desktop model. Another issue is that management tools are not yet up to par, in terms of controlling CPU and memory usage for every employee. "I'd like to be able to throttle a user down," says Wilson. "While vendors say they have this ability, that's not really true yet."

Desktop virtualization adopters say these concerns aren't even the toughest hurdles when deploying the technology. They point to the need for massive infrastructure upgrades that wreak havoc on ROI, resistance from managers who are wary of hitching workers' productivity to a live Internet connection, and pushback from end-users who don't want to lose control of their workspaces.

Sweeping inftrastructure upgrades Wilson's infrastructure upgrades included a retooling of his network's points of failure. He used to have two T1 lines at every location, yet twice a year, AT&T would go dark and take out both of them. This wouldn't work in a virtual desktop environment, where "our base assumption is that you will always be connected," Wilson says. "Generally speaking, if you aren't connected, there's very little you can do anyway. Maybe you can write a Word document or work on an Excel spreadsheet, but even then you'll likely need to connect to a file server."

And so Wilson replaced a dedicated T1 line with cable or DSL (depending on the location) and added a Cisco router. Now he says he has three levels of redundancy on different technologies. Also, Wilson added 10 quad-core Dell servers running Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server).

Lifetime installed a powerful MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) mesh network to accommodate the fast transfer of images its engineers needed to work on over thin clients. "Since virtual desktops are mostly used for WAN applications, make sure that your bandwidth and, more importantly, your latency are as low as possible," advises John Bowden, CIO at Lifetime.

Fast storage is another important factor for reducing latency. Fortunately for Natixis, the company had just bought high-end storage from EMC for its SAN. "Reliable, fast storage is key," says Florent Soland, manager of Windows services and virtualization at Natixis. "If you don't have it, it's going to take a lot more time to provision a workstation, and the end-user performance will be very bad."

Infrastructure upgrades throw a monkey wrench into the ROI that desktop virtualization was sold on. Add up the expense of new SAN storage, servers, virtualization software, a connection broker, and thin clients, among other costs, says Soland, "and it's more expensive to roll out 100 workstations in a virtual desktop infrastructure than 100 desktop workstations today -- we're still not there yet."

Au contraire, says Wilson. The reason ROI suffers, he says, is that most companies transition only a part of their workforce to virtual desktops. Indeed, Natixis plans to move 80 percent of its workforce to virtual desktops over the next couple of years. Lifetime's target is only 20 percent. This means they must support two computing models, contends Wilson.

"If you do this piecemeal, then you're only adding another layer and making the stack deeper and more complex," Wilson says. "The key is to deploy this strategically across the board." (To be fair, Natixis cites desktop virtualization concerns, such as licensing and apps that don't work well on virtual desktops, as barriers to a wholesale transition.)

My workspace, your server Everyone agrees, though, that getting end-users to embrace virtual desktops is the greatest hurdle fronting the technology -- that is, removing the "personal" out of the PC in the employee mindset. In fact, when Soland first brought the concept of desktop virtualization to his boss, Hiltz's initial fear was that users would balk. After all, angry employees and productivity loss are death knells for any technology.

Soland solved this problem by making Hiltz a beta user. Soon Hiltz realized that a virtual desktop looked and acted the same as his old PC, except that he couldn't put a picture of his children on the screen's background. Natixis traders also liked the virtual desktops because they suddenly had more processing power. Moreover, Natixis didn't replace their powerful workstations with thin clients -- traders could still work offline using applications running locally. "We didn't use thin clients," says Hiltz. "A thin client without a network connection is a boat anchor."

It's important that end-users feel like they are getting something out of the deal, says Wilson. That's why he gave employees 19-inch monitors, the largest screens available at the time. And he touted desktop virtualization's biggest end-user benefit: the ability to work anywhere. Now Amerisure employees can work from home a couple of days a week.

Still, many people view laptops as a tether to their personal lives -- not just for work -- and shun the locked-down, thin-client world order. But Wilson sees desktop virtualization as an enabler for them. "I can see a day within the next three to five years when I will hire someone, and he'll say, 'I don't want you to supply me with anything; I just want to connect my MacBook to your environment,'" Wilson says. "Our environment will totally do that, and it'll lower my costs even further because I won't have to provide him with a thin client."

Road bump ahead? Infrastructure upgrades and cultural acceptance are two game-killing guns leveled at desktop virtualization. But there are other technical wrinkles that still need to be ironed out, says Doug Dineley, InfoWorld Test Center executive editor. There's no question that the environment serves up a host of benefits, such as better security, he says, but the jury is out when it comes to potentially hampering worker productivity.

Dineley feels that end-users will need a way to work offline on a virtual desktop -- a way to check out a virtual machine and work on files without a network connection, a la Google Gears. "As we get further along, I suspect we'll start hearing some horror stories," Dineley says, "like unintentional denials of service that bring the blood of users to a boil."

Google entered the mobile phone market this week when T-Mobile rolled out the first handset running the search engine's Android mobile operating system. Oracle also ventured into new territory by announcing that it will sell a hardware product -- a database server the company developed with Hewlett-Packard. IBM threatened to leave the standards bodies that determine software interoperability regulations over concerns that the standardization process is unfair. And Microsoft is still searching for a search strategy to compete with Google.

1. T-Mobile, Google and HTC introduce first Android phone The first cell phone running Android, Google's mobile operating system, debuted Tuesday. U.S. customers can purchase the G1 from T-Mobile on Oct. 22 for $179. The handset, which HTC manufactures and calls the Dream, will appear in the U.K. in November and other T-Mobile European markets in the first quarter. The G1 comes with a touchscreen display, as well as a slideout keyboard. Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and GTalk are all featured applications on the phone. Users can purchase music from the Amazon MP3 store and applications from the Android store. The phone can read Word, PDF and Excel documents but cannot synch with Microsoft's Exchange e-mail program. Google spun this as a perfect chance for developers to take advantage of Android's open-source model and create an application for the task.

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

2. Oracle pushing new application grid , Ellison pitches high-speed data warehouse server , Oracle puts its 11g database in Amazon's cloud and Oracle aims to get Fusion to some by next year Oracle used its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco to announce assorted news. The biggest headlines came on Wednesday when CEO Larry Ellison announced two high-speed servers that the company developed with HP. This marks Oracle's first entry into the hardware market. Information on the debut of Fusion Applications, long-awaited software that combines the best features from Oracle's many acquired product lines, proved limited. One executive said the suite may not arrive until 2010, while another deflected questions on the product. Yet another person said that early adopters will start testing the apps in 2009. Oracle provided more details on its cloud computing strategy, announcing that it will offer the 11g database through Amazon's cloud computing service. Oracle also said that it is partnering with Intel and eventually AMD to ready businesses for computing in the cloud.

[ Special report: Oracle OpenWorld 2008 ]

3. How IT could have prevented the financial meltdown The U.S.'s financial crisis has extended to virtually all industries, and IT could suffer severe setbacks, particularly in the area of R&D. Ironically enough, IT could have played a major role in heading off this crisis before it happened. IT offers plenty of tools to help detect problem areas, but they need more visibility for bankers and regulators in order to make a difference.

[ The financial meltdown may not slow IT innovation, as InfoWorld blogger Bill Snyder explains. | 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. ]

4. IBM threatens to leave standards bodies IBM threatened to leave the standards bodies that determine software interoperability regulations over concerns that the standardization process is unfair. IBM released guidelines it plans to follow, including a provision that standards bodies draft rules that protect decisions from "undue influence." IBM said that leaving a standards group is a last resort and that the company wants loopholes that allow a company to abuse the standardization process closed. IBM's stance stems from its opposition to a document format that Microsoft submitted for expedite approval as a standard. Office Open XML became a standard earlier this year, despite concerns that the process was too rushed and that Microsoft pressured countries to vote for its format.

5. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer talks search, virtualization: Microsoft possesses the money and commitment to challenge Google in the online search business. The company just needs to figure out how to contend, CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday. Competing with Google requires reinventing the search business model, a task that could take five years and cost Microsoft five percent to 10 percent of its operating income for several years, he said. Microsoft attempted to acquire Yahoo this year to better compete against Google, a contentious courtship that failed to yield a merger. Microsoft has work to do: Search data for August showed that Google was used to conduct 63 percent of U.S. searches compared to Microsoft's 8 percent.

6. Will the iPhone NDA mean Never Develop Apps?  Apple has deemed all developer communication as being covered by its NDA (non-disclosure agreement) -- a policy that even extends to App Store rejection notices. While the policy will not have much effect on larger businesses that are developing iPhone apps, it could serve to alienate the independent developers who have helped push the iPhone's popularity by designing sought-after apps.

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

7. Politicians push for net neutrality, broadband policy In other Internet news, two U.S. politicians called for a comprehensive broadband access policy and net neutrality at a conference on Monday. A U.S. representative claimed that broadband service wasn't available in her suburban Washington, D.C., town. She also said that students in her neighborhood school suffer a competitive disadvantage because of limited Internet access. A member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said a lack of net-neutrality laws could hinder political debates if carriers select what content their networks carry. Some studies have claimed that the U.S. is falling behind in broadband deployment and capacity. Government reports counter and state that 99 percent of the country's ZIP codes have broadband access.

8. Senate approves extension to expired R&D tax credit The U.S. Senate approved an extension to an R&D (research and development) tax credit that many IT businesses support. The credit, which expired in December, was tacked on to a bill that the U.S. House of Representatives approved. The House now must pass the Senate version before U.S. President George Bush signs the bill. The credit covers up to 20 percent of R&D spending and has expired 13 times since 1981. The $7 billion that the tax credit costs makes Congress reluctant to enact a permanent version. Tax credit supporters called the measure essential to keeping R&D jobs in the country and maintaining U.S. innovation in a time of increased global competition. The Senate's version of the bill extends the credit until the end of 2009. Most of the 18,000 companies that use the credit apply it to employee wages, an IT trade group said.

9. No charges as grand jury investigates Palin hack A federal grand jury investigating the hacking of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's personal e-mail account did not deliver an indictment after its first week of reviewing evidence. Bloggers named David Kernell, a University of Tennessee student, a suspect after they linked him to the online name "rubico," the moniker used by the hacker who alleged to have accessed Palin's Yahoo account last week by resetting the password. Local press claimed that U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents searched Kernell's apartment last weekend. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on if Kernell is a suspect and on the grand jury proceedings, which are secret until an indictment is reached.

10. McAfee to buy Secure Computing McAfee purchased its second IT security vendor this year by acquiring Secure Computing for approximately US$465 million. The purchase is the latest in a string of buys for the company, which acquired a risk management tool company in August and bo