With Mac sales growing 52 percent in Australia in Q2 2008, Australia is officially the world’s fastest-growing Mac population.
In the US,
Mac sales are growing three times as fast as PC sales. The Australians, however, are putting us to shame. In the land “Down Under” made famous by Men at Work, Olivia Newton John, and Crocodile Dundee, Mac sales are growing at six times the industry average.
Oy, mate! Throw a little of that Mac on the barby!
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Google has developed a way to help companies move onto Google Apps–and away from Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail software–without forcing a migration to the Gmail user interface.
Google’s eye is squarely on Microsoft’s cozy position in the enterprise when it comes to products such as Google Apps. Around 1.75 million businesses are using Google Apps, Girouard said, although he declined to clarify how many of those businesses are Premier Edition customers.
(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News)
“At most businesses, IT is not core. I’m not in the IT business to make money, I’m here to enable (my company) to win,” said Bob Rudy, vice president and CIO for semiconductor designer Avago Technologies in San Jose.
However, there apparently is a sizable enough number of workers that refuse to move off Outlook, meaning that IT directors who want to sign up with Google were forced to maintain a Microsoft Exchange server to placate those folks while moving everybody else to Gmail. An alternative where Outlook users are connected to Gmail through IMAP got the job done, but at the expense of a severe performance hit, said Chris Vander Mey, a senior product manager with Google.
Google is trying to expand its presence inside the world’s corporate IT departments with products like Google Apps, which the company says offers a cheaper and more reliable alternative to traditional IT software companies. Quoting data from Forrester, Google’s David Girouard, president of Enterprise products, said companies who chose to use Google’s hosted Gmail service save about $17 per user per month as compared to companies that build and host their own e-mail servers.
CIOs invited by Google to a press event in San Francisco were naturally bullish on Google’s version of cloud computing, and downplayed any concerns about security, reliability or the loss of a competitive advantage when it comes to giving up control of their IT.
Now, they can let those people continue to use Outlook but allow IT managers to move completely away from Exchange servers. “We’ve made it pretty easy to exchange your Exchange server for Google,” Girouard said.
Microsoft’s Outlook has been the dominant e-mail client within the business world for years, and Google’s new Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in acknowledges that some business workers just aren’t ready to give up that familiar interface, even if their CIOs are anxious to get everybody onto Google’s version of the cloud. Businesses who have already signed up for Google Apps Premier Edition–as well as Education Edition customers–will be able to roll out this plug-in across their networks and allow Outlook messages, contacts, and calendar appointments to sync with Google Apps.
Google's Dave Girouard discusses how Google is making a play for more and more business customers for Google Apps.
The plug-in only works for Outlook users on Windows;
Mac users on Entourage will have to wait.
Properties of a Process
Properties of a Process - Threads Tab
To see more information about a thread highlight it and click on the Module button just below the list of threads. This displays the properties of the file underlying the thread (see below). The properties window opens in the General tab, go to the Version tab. This isn’t foolproof, but you may get lucky, as in the example below, where the file/module is obviously the DNS Caching Resolver Service.
Next Up…
Changing Priority
Next time, installing and configuring Process Explorer.
*A service is a special type of Windows program. Most services are part of Windows, the previous posting discussed the Automatic Updates service and the Task Scheduler service. Applications can also install their own services. In Windows XP services are managed from the Administrative Tools applet in the Control Panel.
Note: This posting is based on Process Explorer version 11.04, which was current at the time this posting was written. The screen shots were taken on a machine running Windows XP.
The columns in the middle are what first attracted me to Process Explorer - the description of the process, the name of the company that created the process and, most importantly, the executable file running in the process. Just knowing the directory that a program is running out of has been useful in and of itself. The CPU History column is also vital, with spikes of green showing processes consuming large amounts of the processor over the last few minutes.
As computers go, the one in the picture is pretty boring, it’s a Windows XP virtual machine with next to nothing installed. Chances are, a similar display on your computer will reveal two or three times as many processes.
Process Explorer - The Main Window
Setting Priorities
Version Property of a Module/File
The Process Explorer window is extremely configurable, the next posting will cover installing and configuring the program. The screen shot shows eight data fields, those I find the most useful. I also like to include I/O counts but left them out here for space reasons. This is one application that really benefits from a wide screen display.
See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.
Below is the main Process Explorer window. There’s a lot going on here, you may want to, click here for a larger version of the image.
Freezing a process is something Task manager can not do. In Process Explorer click on “Suspend” after right clicking on the process name. By default, Process Explorer displays suspended processes as dark gray. If a suspended processes was running a visible application, the application window can’t be minimized, resized or even re-painted when another window covers it up. To resume the application, right click on the process name again and select “Resume”.
There is one caveat however, some processes do not allow their priority to be changed. I don’t know a way around that.
To get information on a running process in Process Explorer, double click on the process name. This opens a properties window (see below) with nine tabs.
Earlier I noted the difficulty in pinpointing a performance problem to a Windows service*
running inside an instance of the svchost.exe process.
This is because Process Explorer breaks down processes by thread rather than by service. Even when a process hosts a single service, there can can be multiple threads. But all is not lost.
Slowing down a running program/process is something Task Manager can also do. In both Task Manager (from the Processes tab) and Process Explorer, right click on the name of the process and select “Set priority” from the pop-up menu (see below). The default priority is “Normal”, changing it to “Below Normal” lowers the priority one notch. Changing it or “Low” (in Task Manager) or “Idle” (in Process Explorer) lowers it two notches, and should let you get your work done with a minimum of interference.
This is a continuation of my previous posting (Using Process Explorer to tame svchost.exe - Advanced topics) which introduced the excellent Process Explorer program, a souped up version of Task Manager. According to the author, “Process Explorer works on Windows 9x/Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Server 2003, and 64-bit versions of Windows for x64 and IA64 processors, and
Windows Vista.” And, it’s free.
Sometimes a necessary program on your computer can get in the way. If, for example, you’re facing a deadline and the computer is running a full hard disk scan, it may become so slow as to interfere with your work. Such was the problem Peter Butler faced. While your knee jerk reaction may be to cancel the interfering software, on a corporate computer this can be problematic. Process Explorer offers a couple less intrusive options - it can slow down or freeze a program in its tracks.
Go to the Threads tab, expand the CPU column and click on the column heading to sort the list of threads by their current CPU usage.
Another useful tab is Services, which, as you can see below, provides information on the services, if any, running inside the target process.
When a computer is running slow, people sometimes guess at the underlying problem. An experienced Process Explorer user doesn’t have to guess.
Properties of a Process - Services Tab
What I really want, though, is a geo-enabled Yelp, both on my desktop browser and in my mobile phone. Yelp has all the location data I could possibly want; it just doesn’t have a very good location-focused interface, or the capability to auto-locate me when I am on my mobile phone.
It’s when the
iPhone app store opens up next month that we’re really going to see geo-focused reviews sites and networks take off. Despite its lack of GPS (so far), a core component of the iPhone is location reporting (using a combination of Wi-Fi router mapping and cell tower triangulation). All of the Web 2.0 geo execs I’ve talked to are working on iPhone apps; many will be available on day one of the app store opening.
Everyblock gathers hyper-local news and info.
Platial's new UI is great for browsing local info, but it needs a richer reviews database.
At least one geo site has a CEO who’s aware that you can grow your audience more by giving users a lot before you ask them to give anything to the site. Platial’s CEO, Diann Eisnor, recently relaunched her site with a new reader-focused interface, replacing a previous design that appeared to be made more for contributors. Platial, unfortunately, doesn’t have the rich data set of reviews that Yelp does, but it does a better job of displaying Yelp-like content. We can hope for a partnership.
Being lazy, I favor the geo-focused sites that don’t require that I do any work. Everyblock (review) wins the lazy-geo award from me: It scans local news sources and public records and shows me what’s happening in my ‘hood. My participation with the site consists solely of entering my address. Outside.in (news) has a similar function, but its user interface is less clear.
The personal location-reporting sites (Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, etc.) require a change in behavior: I have to tell these apps who my friends are and where I am to get them to work right. Integration with existing social nets should help these products take off, but until people start hooking these apps into their network profiles, they are going to languish.
It’s entertaining to see all these new geo-focused sites trying to build out their social networks and their databases of local content. There’s still a huge disconnect between the sites that make data entry easy and the ones that do a good job of helping you find what and who you are looking for.
(Credit:
Pingdom)
The result is an artful scattering of 36 pushpins, one for each known data center. Yes, that’s a lot of data centers, and Data Center Knowledge has some details on Google renting further capacity, too.
And there are likely more tucked away here and there. “Since Google tends to be quite secretive about their data centers in general, the information we have presented here most likely isn’t 100 percent complete,” Pingdom said.
Ever wonder where Google’s data centers are? Now you can use Google Maps to get a good overview.
Pingdom put together a Google map via Wayfaring based on data center location information from Data Center Knowledge. The map shows general areas, so don’t expect to zoom in on a satellite photo.
A map view of Google's European data centers.
Microsoft will have to put up with another two years of court antitrust oversight, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
Kollar-Kotelly also said that the decision to extend the ruling for only two years does not mean the decree could not be again extended.
In her ruling, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly cited the length of time it has taken Microsoft to get its protocol licensing program up and running as the primary reason she is extending the consent decree, which was due to expire at the end of last year.
She did say that she did not intend her ruling as a rebuke of the software maker.
“We will continue to comply fully with the consent decree,” Smith said, going on to find comfort in some of the judge’s words. “We are gratified that the court recognized our extensive efforts to work cooperatively with the large number of government agencies involved. We built
Windows Vista in compliance with these rules, and we will continue to adhere to the decree’s requirements.”
In a statement, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said the company would accept the ruling.
“The court’s extension should not be viewed as a sanction against Microsoft, but rather as a means to allow the respective provisions of the final judgments the opportunity to operate together towards maximizing (their) procompetitive potential,” she said in the ruling.
“Ultimately, the court’s decision not to extend the final judgments beyond November 12, 2009 now does not foreclose the possibility of doing so in the future,” she said, adding that mechanisms are in place to allow the consent decree to be extended if the protocol licensing program does not achieve its stated aims.
“The court’s decision in this matter is based upon the extreme and unforeseen delay in the availability of complete, accurate, and useable technical documentation relating to the communications protocols,” Kollar-Kotelly said. “The court concludes that the moving states have met their burden of establishing that this delay constitutes changed circumstances, which have prevented the final judgments from achieving their principal objectives.”
Also participating in the funding is Time Warner Investments, and KTB Ventures. Time Warner Investments is a strategic investing arm for Time Warner; this investment will give Meebo hooks into major media properties. KTB’s portfolio has a Far East bias, with more than half of its portfolio companies based in China and Korea.
Meebo’s previous investors, Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, also participated in this round.
Meebo, which continues to release new Web-based instant message and chat applications, is announcing tonight that it has closed a $25 million funding round led by Jafco Ventures. Jafco’s investment portfolio includes other online communications plays, such as classifieds utility Oodle, Exchange competitor PostPath, and Web content tracker Attributor. It looks like a good club for Meebo to join.
Meebo has a competitor nipping at its heels: Soashable (review) has the mission of creating an “open-source Meebo clone;”
it offers about the same core features as Meebo did when it launched in 2005. Trillian, which also makes a multinetwork IM client, has not kept up with Meebo on the Web front.
For me, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is the greatest opportunity ever,’ because I knew working with those two organizations meant it would be huge, and that they were committed to making it truly global. That this would be the chance to make ARGs what they want to be. We talk about making them global, but so far, they’re not really. But you have the Olympics everywhere, and McDonald’s is everywhere. I just knew this would be the one that would just blow up the scale and possibility of ARGs. And obviously, with the Olympics theme, you couldn’t ask for a richer, more historical theme to design for.
McGonigal: We talk about collective intelligence, but you need a diversity of participants to really make it work. It’s not just intellectual diversity, but also gender diversity and age diversity. One of the things this game can do is show what the truly geographically collective intelligence really looks like. I don’t know that we’ve really seen one. The Wikipedia articles, maybe. In this game, everyone’s writing the same article, to use that metaphor. So we just sit around thinking about how lucky we feel to be doing this.
McGonigal: Last weekend, after one week, we had 1,000 players. That’s not a lot. We want millions of players. So we’re putting the trailers online, and we’re hoping tens of thousands of people watch those and that it grows from there. By Beijing, we hope there will be millions. That has to happen.
‘The Lost Ring’ is a new alternate-reality game that is tied to the Olympic Games and which tasks players with discovering a 2,000-year-old sport lost to history.
How can this game impact someone in China or India?
(Credit:
The Lost Ring)
How much control did you have?
Q: Talk about how The Lost Ring came about.
How many people are involved?
This seems like a pretty good example of collective intelligence at work.
Players of The Lost Ring, then, are similarly tasked with helping these five people figure out their identities, and in the process, rediscovering this lost Olympic sport.
McGonigal: They’re going to learn about their own strengths. We’re going to help them learn what they’re good at and then give them missions that are totally customizable to their personal strengths. That’s the part of the game I’m most proud of, that innovation. In the ARG world, you don’t always know what you’re supposed to do. You spend a lot of time waiting and waiting. So we wanted it to be so that for everybody, every time you come to one of the game sites, you know exactly what you’re supposed to do, and that we need you because this is what you said you were good at. But that part hasn’t started yet.
See more stories in CNET News.com’s coverage of SXSWi (click here).
AUSTIN, Texas–To players of alternate reality games (ARGs) like I Love Bees, Tombstone Hold ‘em, A World without Oil and others, Jane McGonigal is a household name.
McGonigal: It was an intense collaboration process. They didn’t have design ideas, but every time we had an idea, we were like, ‘Is this cool?’ And, ‘Is this exciting?’ But to some extent, one of my colleagues at AKQA said there’s only one person who knows where this is all going. I have a lot of this stored in my brain exclusively. And I think McDonald’s and the IOC feel like they’re going on a ride. We can’t wait to find out what happens.
McGonigal: Yeah, one of the things I learned about I Love Bees is how important it is to respect the ARG community and give them the opportunity to play with something first, and kind of get things organized, and set up for when someone who’s never played before shows up. So we sent out The Lost Ring rabbit holes–a box of clues to the game–to about 50 all-star players to get them going. It’s not we were advertising on TV. So by time other players show up, they won’t get lost. We’re thinking about how to make this huge narrative experience not be overwhelming.
If the people at the International Olympics Committee, McDonald’s, and worldwide brand experience firm AKQA have anything to say about it, the list of people who know McGonigal and her work will soon expand geometrically.
McGonigal: We’re taking everything we’ve seen work in ARGs and amplifying it so more people can have the experience. We’ve seen ARGs in five cities, but now it’s going to be on five continents. We’ve seen puzzles in other languages, but this whole game is in eight languages. Every piece of content will be translated into eight languages. And localization has been a huge part of the development process, and it’s very challenging, but so rewarding. The first week of game, a whole faction of players from Argentina who have never been participants in ARG forums (became very active) on Unfiction….And people wrote in and said, ‘This is amazing, this game is showing us how small our world really is.’
The game is built around the fictional concept that more than 2,000 years ago an Olympic sport was lost to history and that now, five Olympic-caliber athletes have turned up in corn fields around the world, amnesiac but sure they’ve been tasked with some great mission.
What can people learn from the game?
That’s because she’s the lead designer on The Lost Ring, a new ARG that launched earlier this month that is tied to this summer’s Beijing Olympics and which McDonald’s, AKQA and the IOC are partnering on with McGonigal.
McGonigal: I started working on it last June, right at end of World Without Oil. I was very happy that AKQA, McDonald’s, and the IOC approached me on the heels of World Without Oil because it meant they wanted to make a project for good.
Because the game is still in its infancy, however, she didn’t want to talk much about the process of its creation or about working with corporate partners like the IOC and McDonald’s. Instead, she preferred to focus on how the game is innovative and what players can expect to learn from it.
(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)
But it’s a slow ramp up?
McGonigal: Yes. I’m so excited about the historian podcasts. If someone did nothing but listen to the historian podcasts, which blend history with our alternate reality, if they did nothing but listen and then take the quiz, take the poll, if that were all that you did, you would have such a great experience of the summer Olympics. Your head would be full. You’d be like, I know the secret reality. I definitely hope that when people put the Olympics on the TV, they’ll feel they’re not vicariously experiencing it, but feel, ‘I’m in it, it’s not something I’m experiencing remotely, I’m having my own true, real Olympics experience.’
On Tuesday, McGonigal was the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival here and talked at length about the philosophies she uses to guide her game design approach, as well as to talk a little bit about her new project.
Jane McGonigal giving the keynote address on Tuesday at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference.
Afterward, she sat down with CNET News.com for an interview about The Lost Ring, in which she talked about how she hopes the game will change the perspective of people around the world and how she expects this game to be by far the largest game of its kind in history.
You’ve told me that you think this game will be orders of magnitude bigger than any previous ARG. How so?
McGonigal: The answer to how any ordinary person will experience this game lies in the Lost Sport podcast. It will be the first alternate reality podcast. It appears that this ancient sport has been lost for 2,000 years, and if people can figure out how to play it, this new sport will be something anyone in any country can play. And the experience of playing it is going to be a very big part of the mainstream experience.
So the game is for people at any level?
McGonigal: AKQA has developed ARGs in past, on smaller scale. They really believed that this was the new genre to invest in, and to take seriously as a creative form. So they decided to talk to the different partner organizations to see who else might get this idea. McDonald’s and the IOC said, ‘We don’t understand it, but we love it. It sounds risky but if anything is going to be the next big art form, this is it.’ That all happened before I got involved. They decided to make the biggest most global ARG ever. It made sense for these gigantic global organizations, this idea to bring the world together through play…and with collective intelligence. And the Olympics brings the world together, but through sports.
Where the idea for the game come from?
When did it begin?
Jane McGonigal: I should say, we’re not talking a lot about the process, because we want to keep the focus on the game itself, we don’t want to get meta on process yet. I definitely want people to be thinking about the experience, and to have the experience before we get deconstructive.
In the interest of sharing, here’s what I learned:
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You must own something. Lineo’s business model was to provide developer tools to facilitate the development of software stacks for mobile/embedded devices. The tools business is a very difficult business and so the company sought to expand on this to create software stacks to power things like mobile phones and PDAs. The Sharp Zaurus was an example of the company’s success with this model, but also its failure.
Lineo didn’t own the stack that it sold to Sharp. It was an aggregator of other’s IP/open source (Trolltech’s Qtopia, for example). Our model was to sell the stack on a royalty basis for something like $5 per unit, of which we’d take $1 or so. However, because we didn’t actually own anything we were always in a dependent position to those who comprised the stack. Trolltech or Esmertec, for example, both had more control of the stack than we did because they owned IP within that stack. We had our distribution of Linux but it wasn’t a solid differentiator, not with MontaVista and others creating essentially the same thing.
In open source it doesn’t matter if you license your IP freely. This, to my mind, is a positive thing. But you must own something. You must have control of something that you sell in order to convince customers to pay. Red Hat is responsible for 14 percent or more of the Linux kernel, which gives it soft control of the Linux kernel, but it’s real value differentiator is in its Red Hat Network and other ancillary services.
A business that appeals only to developers is likely a good project, but probably not a good business. Lineo, as I noted above, made developer tools. In the open-source world developers are a gateway to those with money, but they ultimately don’t control much money themselves. They are a hugely important constituency to woo, but they are not the group to which you want to sell products. Why? Because they can probably build your product better than you can, and so will have a disincentive to pay for it. They are your influencers. They’re not the ones to put your children through college.
Grow slowly, profit quickly. I mentioned that Lineo went from 40 employees to more than 400 in one day. The company spent the next two years trying to recover from that too-rapid growth. There were many compelling reasons for this growth–the primary one being, I believe, the bankers belief that without revenue the best way for Lineo to justify a strong IPO was with headcount (which seems ludicrous in the extreme in retrospect but those were ludicrous days). But they all led to an over-investment in sales and marketing on the back of a product that couldn’t support them.
Open-source companies are first and foremost engineering companies. If the product stinks, the community will stink, the company will stink, the investors will stink, and so on. An open-source company must religiously focus on product excellence. Marketing and sales are important, but they come later and extend naturally from the excellence of the product. In a proprietary company, good marketing can make up for weak products (Witness some of Microsoft’s success). In an open-source company, marketing that is better than the product deserves leads to corporate suicide. Eventually, customers look at the code and realize they were fed rubbish.
Lineo (later renamed Embedix) was an embedded Linux vendor that rose to prominence in 1999 to 2000, and then cratered into obsolescence in 2002. I joined in 2000, the day that the acquisition of six (yes, six) different companies was announced. My first day of work was the approximately 400-person company get-together designed to build a team out of a mass of new bodies. Up until that day the total employee base was approximately 40 people.
I learned a tremendous amount about business and open source and the intersection of the two during my two years with Lineo. These lessons heavily influence how I see open-source opportunities today.
There are more lessons to be learned from Lineo (like how not to manage outsourced professional services resources, how to manage distributed development, etc.), but these three are enough. If today’s open-source companies would pay heed to just these three things, we’d be a much stronger force in the market than we already are.
Broadcom’s tag line is “Connecting Everything.”
Could it be that, in his enthusiasm to embody his company’s promise, to connect everything, Mr. Nicholas simply became disconnected from himself by the monstrous impossibility of his task?
Pope John was smoked into the Papacy when he was 18 and appeared to decide that the Organization needed to be an expression of his own youthful exuberance.
It all seemed to go a little far.
But no one considered that, in an attempt to counteract deleterious forces, he might have been merely researching the seven deadly sins so as to know how to better combat them for the benefit of his organization.
Business is a peculiarly seductive activity and who knows just how deeply Mr. Nicholas might have been gripped by the need to deliver on his corporate vision?
It’s hard to know what drives most people. The cranial machinations of Jennifer Aniston and Bill Belichick, for example, have always perplexed me.
Supposedly, he showered clients with chemical and human pleasure providers to close deals.
Anyone who was privileged enough to watch Fox’s seminal drama series “the OC”, or, indeed, Bravo’s “the Housewives of Orange County”, knows just how difficult connectivity is to achieve in that especially cold-hearted and forbidding part of America.
It is easy to mount one’s 18-hands stallion and scoff at his methods.
(Credit:
Tom Purves)
While so many pundits and otherwise wise people have expounded at great and critical length on the allegations of drug-fueled friendsy leveled at Broadcom founder, Henry Nicholas, has anyone stopped to consider just what a dedicated CEO he might have been?
Is it possible that Mr. Nicholas, in his determined quest to connect humans to his chips, humans to other humans and humans to their inner other humans (hence the pilot episode), simply got carried away by an enthusiasm for his organization not seen since Dave Thomas of Wendy’s burger chain (who appeared in over 800 commercials for his company) or perhaps even Pope John XII?
He clearly had circumstances stacked against him. His company was based in Orange County.
He received a letter from the German Emperor Otto I: “Everyone, clergy as well as laity, accuses you, Holiness, of homicide, perjury, sacrilege, incest with your relatives, including your sisters.”
But suppose for a moment that, despite looking a little like Tom Selleck after cut-price surgery, Mr. Nicholas was determined to be the ultimate embodiment of everything Broadcom stood for.
When I advise clients about marketing and creativity, I always talk to them about deciding what their company stands for, how their company wants to be seen and trying to protect and embody that vision as much as possible.
Some say he openly authorized cash to be paid to drug couriers as well as pizza delivery boys.
And, most bizarrely, he is accused of smoking so much marijuana on a plane that the pilot had to don an oxygen mask in order to resist dopiness at the controls.