For the past few years, company’s have been investing heavily outsourcing their departments to India.  The top departments outsourced are usually customer service and IT related call centers.  It looks like this outsourcing business strategy may become a thing of the past, at least for India.  The Inquirer reports that the slow US economy is having a big impact on outsourced company’s in India.  Additionally, the Indian government’s fiscal policies no longer makes India an attractive outsource hotspot like it once did before.  Could this be the end of India call centers?  Or perhaps will we move them to other countries?  Time will tell.

–Update– The case was dropped for obvious reasons.

The greedy wallet mongers at the RIAA are at it again.  Instead of suing a low income working mom with two kids or a college student, this time they fire their law-guns at a homeless man.  At the time he was “served” his summons and complaint, he was living at a homeless shelter on April 9th, 2007.  Since then it was a charade between the lawyers and the court trying to find the guy to sue him.  As I said two posts ago, the RIAA and its practices are WRONG.  Their fascism business strategy needs to be significantly altered or they need to be put out of business.  They are attacking everyone and their grandmother that does not abide by their rules.  It’s not right that they want to charge a lot more for CD’s and only pay artists 9% of the money they generate for them. 

Farecast.com has been acquired by Microsoft for $115 Million. Farecast is an airfare prediction website that uses it’s own algorithm’s to help predict the best time to purchase airline tickets. The company was founded in 2003 by Oren Etzioni, which is also the founder of MetaCrawler and is a professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. According to Wikipedia, the site has collected over 175 billion airfare observations to date.  Microsoft will most likely integrate Farecast’s services into its own barrage of networks and online content.  For example they may utilize Windows Spaces or Windows Live to help advertise the service.

Despite the announcements that the MPAA has successfully taken down the big BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, the numbers are working against their favor.  According to Arstechnica.com, BitTorrent usage has climbed 24% since November of 2007.  This pretty much sums up the uselessness of their business tactics.  When you take down one site ten more pop up.  Why not collaborate with the BitTorrent community to help increase sales instead of generating consistent back lashing?  Oh duh that’s right, it’s the MPAA! 

The RIAA is even worse by targeting individual Peer2Peer users.  College students, single working moms, white collars, blue collars, you name it, they go after them and for hefty fee’s.  The RIAA or Really Inconsiderate Asshole Association, is not only leaving a bad taste in the consumers mouth but also in the artists.  Unless you missed the whole fiasco in Feb. about them wanting to cut artist royalties to 9%, you can read it here.  Tell me something, does that deal at least come with a free KY Jelly lube sampling or at least a reach around?  Because the war is just going to get worse for you guys.  Sure you might be winning a few battles here and there with lawsuits but at this rate you’ll collectively lose the war.  Keep pissing off more consumers and you’ll see what I’m talking about(just read the comments).

According to this article over at The Inquirerit’s do or die time for AMD.  The Opteron processors are a huge revenue stream for AMD and the fiasco that’s been going on these past two or three quarters has put them in a tight position.  They have been missing product release deadlines, earnings are falling, and have commenced job cuts for the next quarter.  Can their new chip architecture Barcelona save them? 

Initially it was released last fall but since it was so buggy they had to pull it off the shelves.  Now they have re-released the chips and seem to be doing much better.  But the performance is still lacking compared to Intel’s counter parts.  Intel is already in the 45nm processor market, AMD is still a couple of quarters away from releasing this technology to the public.  It’s a cut-throat business and this blood bath is far from over.  This summer and fall will be the true test of time for AMD.  Intel’s products are kicking ass and taking names in terms of power efficiently and performance.  For the consumers sake, AMD needs to stay in business and offer competitive products to give Intel a run for its money.  If AMD disappears who knows what Intel will be charging for new processors.

LOL!  I am still laughing after reading this one.  Apparently Philippine medical staff from the Vincente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu City are in deep shit after posting a surgical video on YouTube.  The surgery is for the removal of a perfume bottle that was shoved up the guys ass from a male prostitute.  Now I have nothing against Gay’s what so ever but come on now.  If you HIRED a male prostitute can’t you do more pleasurable things than let him shove inanimate objects up your ass?  Wait a minute, don’t answer that.

Furthermore, the staff not only video taped it but also were shown laughing at the guy in the video.  The video was pulled off YouTube(DAMN!) for privacy issues.  Okay I need to post this because my ribs hurt from laughing so hard.  I feel sorry for the guy but come on we’re all human here!

I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit at the opening excerpt of this article over at The Inquirer.  Although I’m not one for bashing Apple users, especially for my recent respect of the company and its products, but I thought it was humorous:
“Wi-Fi positioning accurate to within one or two continents.  THAT APPLE users are pretty much helpless basket cases is a given. But to discover that the pastel-hued gadgets on which they base their designer lifestyles are about as much use as a chocolate teapot is more amusing than a duck shooting Dick Cheney by mistake.”

Although this technology(dubbed “feature”) would be nice if it actually works correctly.  I think there might be a future security concern here.  This feature is supposed to triangulate the position of the iPhone user with WiFi access points within your area(for um “tracking” purposes so you know where you are).  The article complains that this feature currently is pretty useless but IF they did get it working what happens if you could reverse the technology?  What if you could triangulate the users position just by using the same technology but look up their positions from the access points instead?  This means you could find that person as long as they’re within range of your access point.  I’m sure this technology has safeguards against such a practice but as with everything in this industry, NOTHING is secure.

When Viruses, Trojans, Malware, and Spam isn’t enough researchers have found a more brutal way to hack your computer.  For years, hacking software has been the norm to gain access to someone else’s computer or network.  Now, Samuel King from the University of Illinois says hacking the hardware or the chips is the next level.  A snibbit from the article:

“New research has shown that it is in fact possible to alter chips in such a way as to leave computers helpless to back-door attacks, which would be almost impossible to detect.

To prove their point, researchers set up a demo of such an attack yesterday, in San Francisco, at a security conference called the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats. The alarming demo showed how a processor running a Linux operating system was left totally vulnerable after a malicious firmware laden chip was given instructions to allow an attacker to log on to the computer without any trouble at all.

Needless to say, this will just hype up the paranoia at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) , who already issued a warning back in 2005 about how offshore integrated circuit manufacturing could give rise to dangerous security breaches. After all, if you let pesky foreigners handle your chips, who knows what they might do to them.”

Finally!  Microsoft has announced the previous release dates are correct for the release of XP Service Pack 3.  Until now, these release dates were just rumors, now they have been confirmed.

As I reported yesterday, “The much anticipated release of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 is to be released to Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEMs) on April 21st.  XP SP3 will then be available for download from Microsoft Update, Windows Update site, and the Microsoft Download Center on April 29th.  June 10th, XP SP3 will be available via automatic updates.”

You know those annoying squiggly numbers and letters that you’re forced to type in whenever you open a new account on a website?  These things are called Captchasand are used to help deter from automated bots to create fake accounts.  Computers have been unable to read the text in these images and humans were the only ones that could read/translate them.  Now it has been announced that this process has been cracked and can be read by a computer in under 60 seconds.  This means that spammers can use these automated bots and auto create hotmail, gmail, or any other web based email service to send out spam.  Just when you thought there’s enough spam in the world here comes a lot more.  Source: The Inquirer

The much anticipated release of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 is to be released to Original Equipment Manufacturers(OEMs) on April 21st.  XP SP3 will then be available for download from Microsoft Update, Windows Update site, and the Microsoft Download Center on April 29th.  June 10th, XP SP3 will be available via automatic updates.  Sources: Neowin.net Arstechnica.com Technewsworld.com

Service Pack 3 has been reported to include a total of 1,073 fixes according to Wikipedia.  The update also allows XP to be installed without a product key and run until the end of the 30-day activation period without a product key.

These dates have NOT been confirmed from Microsoft as of the writing of this article.  So there’s a chance that these dates could be off.  This will be the last Service Pack for the Windows XP operating system from Microsoft as reported.  June 30th, 2008 was announced as the last day XP can be purchased for new PC’s.  After this date it will only be sold to OEMs installing on subnotebooks or UMPC’s until June 30th, 2010.

According to this blog post over at sphere.com AOL had quietly started using “Sphere it” icon’s in their News, Sports, and Entertainment articles on 04/01/08.  Well today Time Warner Inc. has announced AOL’s acquisition of Sphere Source Inc.  According to the press release Sphere was founded in 2005, although Tech Crunch says their site didn’t launch until May 2006(with $3.75 million venture financing).  This pretty much says that AOL is not sitting around twiddling their thumbs while Yahoo contemplates merging with them.  Sphere.com on the other hand had a nice run up starting with $3.75M initial investments and selling for $25M not even 2 years after launch.  What a nice ROI!

London, England could lose 20,000 jobs within the next two years as a result of the credit crunch and the bad economy.  Apparently the US isn’t the only one feeling the bind.  The Register reports that most of these jobs will be centered around IT departments as company’s cut back on expenses.  This may actually make Virtualization related technologies flourish in anticipation of reducing IT related hardware purchases.  Why buy 10 servers when you can buy 2-4 and run a few virtual servers on each of them.  This round of job cuts has been slated to be worse than the 15,300 job cuts during the dotcom crash in 2001.

The SSD arena seems to be on par if not outperforming Moore’s Law.  Moore’s law states that the power of microprocessor technology doubles every 18 months while the cost to produce it is cut in half.  Lately in terms of processing power this seems to hold true, not every 18 months but around every 12 months.(See Intel, AMD, & IBM processors).

Technewsworld.com has an article explaining the history, current status, and future of these technologies.  SSD NAND drives have matured from tiny 256MB drives in 2002 to 16-32GB units in 2007.  Additionally, the prices of these units have dropped dramatically but are still not affordable to the everyday consumer in comparison to regular hard drives.  At the time of this writing, Newegg has the Super Talent FSD32GM25M 2.5″ 32GB SATA SSD drive for $569 while a Western Digital Scorpio 160GB 2.5″ SATA drive runs for $79.99.

Performance is another very important factor when it comes to Solid State Storage.  Anandtech has a good review of the Super Talent 16GB drive.  If you take a look at their performance charts, you’ll notice that these drives are not too shabby in regards to loading times such as operating system boot-up or opening a game.  But when it comes to other intensive tasks such as file compression, encoding, or just copying a file they are terrible performers.  Almost 300% slower than normal hard drives in some cases.  There’s much needed improvements in this sector if these drives are to someday replace standard hard drives.

To help transition to the wonderful domain of Solid State Storage, some hard drive manufacturers have introduced hybrid hard drives.  These drives combine the regular hard drives we’re used to with onboard SSD capacity to serve as a buffer for most commonly accessed files.  This will help pickup the performance of regular hard drives while decreasing power consumption because the drive doesn’t have to seek for data as much.  Samsung has a few of these drives already listed on their website with specifications.  Unfortunately they don’t seem to be available at any retailers yet.

Finally, another big concern for these drives are their reliability.  SSD devices have limited write-cycles before certain memory addresses are no longer operable.  Average flash storage will wear out after 300,000-500,000 write cycles but “higher endurance” devices have been marketed with 1-5 million write cycles.  Most of the newer SSD devices come with a 5-year warranty so this issue doesn’t seem to plague the newer drives as it did with older devices.  As time goes on this technology becomes more reliable and is approaching the reliability of standard hard drives.

SSD/NAND technology looks promising and the market for them is definitely gaining grounds.  More so in the portable devices arena than desktop or server because of their extremely low power consumption.  As the market demands more of these units, the more research and development manufacturers will put into reducing the cost of this technology while increasing capacity and performance.  Let’s all hope this happens sooner rather than later.

I keep seeing more articles and blogs about the failure of Windows Vista.  I can’t help but think about what is going on behind the scenes right now at Microsoft.  What are the collaboration idea’s flying around the conference tables.  How far into Windows 7 are they really in terms of the source code and do they still have possible alternatives on the table to change or scrap it.  Is it really going to come out in 2010 or are they just blowing smoke up every one’s asses to try and retain market share.

For the longest time, the PC markets have been divided.  You either owned a Mac or a PC and the software was not interoperable between them.  Recently, Apple has an operating system that not only handles their own apps but also has the ability to run Windows and Windows related applications via virtualization software(you could also dual boot).

Here’s what I think:

Microsoft should create their own Linux distribution.  Yes!  It’s a crazy idea, not new, but it can work and I’ll tell you why.

• Almost every other operating system besides Windows is based on some sort of Unix or Linux flavor.  If Microsoft’s operating system was also on this same infrastructure they would have a lot more alliances.  The open source community will be able to find, fix, and patch security holes to help collaborate with Microsoft’s support team.  Of course all these new patches would have to be verified and released by them “officially”.  Software would be interoperable across all platforms, Linux flavors and Mac’s alike. 
• Hardware manufacturers are still having driver issues with their hardware working properly in Vista.  See the Creative Labs and Nvidia forums.  ATI’s hardware seems to have less headaches judging by the amount of complaints.  But then again, Nvidia also has more market share so take that for what it’s worth.  This will also give the driver teams less overhead as they only need to make Linux based drivers, not to mention they’ll have the open source community behind them.
• Software publishers, same thing.  Even with the release of Vista Service Pack 1, it broke a few software packages.  Granted, no where near as many XP Service Pack 2 during its release but still notable.  Again, they will have the open source community behind them to find/solve issues and work ’s.  They can still charge for licencing and deter pirating with some sort of activation like Microsoft/Adobe.(the activation system is a bit buggy too but that’s for another article).  Windows/Critical updates will be similar to the update system in Ubuntu.  Simple and streamlined.
• Microsoft has released the virtualization Hypervisor feature in Windows Server 2008.  Modify and port this feature over to their Linux distribution as a virtualization layer similar to Wine.  It should have the ability to run not only Windows operating systems but also Windows based applications on the fly.  No need to run it within a virtualization program as the Hypervisor layer will be integrated into the operating system and you can open the programs as if you’re in Windows.
• Microsoft’s Enterprise sector will have to slowly be revamped to work under this new infrastructure.  Windows Server and it’s features will have to ported over but once it’s done once then everything can be modular like Mac’s Leopard and server counter parts.  SQL Server and Exchange, same thing.  But all of this, including Windows Server versions, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. SHOULD all work under the Hypervisor feature just like it does now in the Windows Server 2008 version.  This will help smooth out the transition over to the new operating system structure.
• I’m sure there’s a lot of other things I can’t think of or I’m missing but would like further input on this from the Open Source community.  How would this community feel about Microsoft converging into them?

Yes, it’s an enormous change for Microsoft.  But, they themselves said they wanted to be more interoperable.  It doesn’t get much more interoperable than this.  Microsoft Linux 2012 or Winux has my vote.