Samsung DVD Claims 22X Recording

Samsung India launched a DVD writer, which is claimed to be the industry’s fastest writer with 22X recording capability. The new Super-WriteMaster SH-S223 is available in the Indian market.

With over-speed recording, users can write at 22X speeds on 16X media and 12X speeds on 8X media. As lower speed media is more cost-effective, users can save money while burning discs at faster speeds.

The SH-S223 drive provides blazing recording speeds across a gamut of different data media types including: 22X DVD±R recording, 12X DVD-RAM recording, 16X DVD+R Dual Layer recording, 12X DVD-R Dual Layer recording, 8X DVD+RW recording and 6X DVD-RW recording.

It enables consumers to burn 4.7GB on a DVD±R disc in approximately 4 minutes and 26 seconds, a 6 percent increase in speed compared to a 20X DVD writer. It also takes less than 12 minutes to burn 4.7GB in DVD-RAM format, which is a 30 percent increase in speed over a 20X DVD drive. The SH-S223 drive supports SATA interface, the dominant interface for PCs.

It includes free software, enabling users to easily create music, video, photo and data discs. The drive also includes Samsung’s live firmware update program that enables users to download new firmware upgrades for free and keep their drives updated.

It features technologies including SAT (Speed Adjustment Technology), TAC (Tilt Actuator Compensation) and Double OPC (Optimum Power Control). Buffer Under Run Free Technology supports stable writing under high speed, and Magic Speed and ABS (Automatic Ball Balancing System) technologies reduce vibration and noise.

The SH-S223 is designed to be eco-friendly and is RoHS compliant. It is available at the price of Rs. 1700 (US$41).

Social Networks Go Corporate

The market for social networking software nearly tripled last year, and an IDC analyst says when implemented properly, these tools can improve internal communication.

Framingham, Mass.-based IDC released a study this week, which found it underestimated the popularity of social networking. Last year, the firm predicted the market in the U.S. would increase by 120 percent in 2007, but the actual revenue growth was 191 percent, said Rachel Happe, IDC’s research manager for digital business economy.

The study, dubbed U.S. social networking applications 2008-2012 Forecast: Enterprise Social Networking takes Hold, used revenue figures from American vendors. No figures were released for Canada. The study, which predicts the market could reach $2 billion by 2012, includes any software often deployed as a service paid for by enterprises to enable communities, either internal or external, such as KickApps, Passenger and hi5.

The technology is popular because companies are discovering the use of applications spawned by the popularity of Facebook and Myspace have business benefits, Happe said.

More in CIO Canada Concerns over social networks

“These communities are extremely good at prioritizing information,” Happe said. “It’s like flash mob. If a community sees an idea and thinks it’s really exciting and everybody starts participating in it, the company can recognize that this is something that maybe they should spend a few resources investigating.”

A case in point, she said, is Dell Inc.’s Idea Storm site. Last year, customers surveyed by Dell said they wanted Linux as an option for their PCs, so the PC manufacturer decided to offer hardware with the open source operating system.

Happe said social networking lets workers exchange information without bombarding each other with e-mail.

“As a participant who may see an interesting conversation, I don’t necessarily have to get that flowing in e-mail and constantly get pinged,” she said. “I can kind of drop into the social network when I have time, see what conversations are happening and engage when I have the time to, rather than having things directed at me.”

Human resource departments in particular are taking advantage of social networking, especially in companies that have gone through several mergers and have different employees who are accustomed to different processes. “I’m seeing it all over the place,” she said. “Engineering teams are a good example. With so much outsourcing and distributed teams where you have 24 by 7 development going on around the globe, it’s really good to keep track of conversations and updates that are happening.”

Businesses planning to implement social networking need to bear in mind the major implementation issues are not technical issues, Happe warned.

“It’s community development effort, making sure people know about it, bringing them in and getting them used to the social construct of this,” she said, adding: “you can’t force people to communicate so if you don’t have an impassioned group of people it’s going to fall flat.”

Facebook to let users carry profiles with them

SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook Inc. is loosening its grip on millions of personal profiles to allow inhabitants of its popular Internet hangout to transplant the information and applications to other Web sites.

With the changes announced Friday, Facebook joins a growing movement to make it easier for people to share their favorite pictures, information and applications with family and friends anywhere on the Internet.

Facebook, which has about 70 million users worldwide, unveiled its plans the day after its bigger rival, News Corp.’s MySpace, made a similar commitment.

Unlike MySpace, which has about 200 million users worldwide, Palo Alto-based Facebook plans to allow users to take their personal profiles to any Web site that wants to host them. For starters, MySpace is opening user profiles only to a select group of sites, including leading destinations owned by Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc.

Both Facebook and MySpace say several weeks remain before their users’ data becomes portable.

The transition poses a risk for Facebook and MySpace because they are effectively tearing down the barriers that sequestered the personal profiles on their sites. This so-called “walled-garden” approach kept people coming back to the sites and sticking around, creating a magnetism that appeals to advertisers.

But pressure to offer portable profiles has been building as people have embraced the Internet as a convenient way to swap personal information and interests.

Internet search leader Google Inc. waded into the fray last year by creating a network that’s supposed to make it easier to share music, pictures, video and other personal interests on a range of online hangouts.

MySpace joined the Google system, known as OpenSocial, but Facebook hasn’t.

If freeing up the personal profiles on its site turns Facebook into the command center for shaping and steering social interactions across the Web, that could make Facebook even more powerful than it already was becoming.

Facebook’s Web site could also become an even more attractive platform for hosting a wide range of mini-applications, known as “widgets,” now that its users will be able to take the same bundle of programs to other Web sites. Drawn by a potentially larger audience, developers may see greater reason to create applications for Facebook.

The portability of personal profiles also may help other top Web sites, like Yahoo, that have struggled to create their own social networks. Yahoo is hoping to drum up more advertising by featuring more social applications from outside sources. Yahoo is under intense pressure to boost its profits after its board refused last weekend to sell to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion.

Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook in October, valuing the 4-year-old startup at $15 billion. That deal came a little more than a year after Facebook rejected a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo.

Facebook’s recent efforts to interact with other sites haven’t gone smoothly. Last year, users rebelled when Facebook introduced a marketing tool that tracked and broadcast information about their activities on dozens of other Web sites. The backlash prompted Facebook to empower users to turn off the feature permanently.

XP SP3 Demands IE7, Microsoft Warns

Microsoft has warned users updating to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) that they won’t be able to downgrade from Internet Explorer 7 to the older IE6 without uninstalling the service pack.

The warning first appeared in a post Monday to a company blog written by the Internet Explorer (IE) development team. Microsoft released Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update as an optional download Tuesday.

“If you choose to install XP SP3, Internet Explorer 7 will remain on your system after the install is complete,” said Jane Maliouta, an IE program manager , in the blog entry. “Your preferences will be retained. However, you will no longer be able to uninstall IE7. If you go to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, the Remove option will be grayed out.”

The inability to downgrade to IE6 after installing XP SP3 was by design, said Maliouta, because the service pack includes newer versions of the old browser’s files. If Microsoft had allowed users to revert back to the pre-SP3 version of IE6 — the one saved on users’ PCs when they upgraded to IE7, and until now what was used to back out of the newer browser — Windows would have ended up in a “mixed file state,” Maliouta said.

“This state is not supported and is very bug prone. To ensure a reliable user experience, we prevent this broken state by disabling the ability to uninstall Internet Explorer 7,” she said.

Users who want to retain the ability to downgrade from IE7 to IE6 should uninstall the former before upgrading to XP SP3. Once Windows XP has been updated to SP3, users can then install IE7. That process allows for reverting to IE6 in the future.

“The restriction on uninstalling only applies to when you install a Windows Service Pack release on top of a standalone IE release,” Maliouta said.

If Windows XP SP3 has already been installed, the only way to return to IE6 is to first uninstalled the service pack. At that point, IE6 can be restored on a PC that’s been updated to IE7.

Microsoft released IE7 in October 2006; it was the first major update to Internet Explorer since August 2001, when IE6 went final.

The newer browser has not been able to usurp IE6, particularly in businesses, where it remains Microsoft’s most popular browser. According to a survey released in late March by Forrester Research , only 30% of corporate Internet Explorer users had switched to IE7 by the end of 2007. IE6 accounted for nearly all the remaining 70%.

Maliouta also outlined how Windows XP SP3 upgrades affect in-place copies of IE6 and IE7; in both cases, she said, the currently installed browser remains undisturbed by the update.

However, users who have installed IE8 Beta 1 — a preview of its newest browser that hit the streets two months ago — will not be offered Windows XP SP3, according to Maliouta, again because of possible instability problems.

“We strongly recommend uninstalling IE8 Beta 1 prior to upgrading to Windows XP SP3 to eliminate any deployment issues,” she said, “and install IE8 Beta 1 after XP SP3 is on your machine.”

Xbox 360 May Get New Graphics Card

Xbox 360 Red Ring still got you down? A report released last week suggests that Microsoft is working on a second internal optimization to reduce overheating and mitigate the abnormal number of system failures once and for all.

The new graphics processor, code-named Jasper, is said to run cooler and reduce overheating, which is commonly blamed for the high number of Xbox 360 system failures. The GPU is expected in retail units by late summer, according to Daily Tech.

It wouldn’t be the first time Microsoft has modified the innards of its popular console to reduce failures. In 2007, the company introduced a cooler-running CPU, dubbed Falcon, which seemingly reduced the number of Red Ring of Death occurrences, though reports of widespread failures remain.

In July 2007, Microsoft apologized for “an unacceptable number of repairs,” after it was estimated that nearly 33 percent of all Xbox 360 units fail. The company increased the Xbox 360 warranty to three years as a result.

Sun Offers Peak at Internet Apps Plan

Sun Microsystems Inc. is taking a different approach, compared to its rivals, toward offering a rich Internet applications platform geared for the designer.

Web designers can currently use tools like Microsoft Expression and Adobe Creative Suite, but Sun said it will also offer a designer tool, albeit in an approach that’s phased and reflects a “different strength”, said Param Singh, senior director of JavaFX at Sun. “

Sun’s approach, said Singh, is to first start with delivering tools so the developer can continue building in a familiar environment, like an Integrated Developer Environment (IDE), and yet be able to integrate content from the designer counterpart. “We want to empower our current audience today, extend that, and then continue to work towards that,” Singh said at a media roundtable at the JavaOne conference.

However, when pressed for a timeline, Singh said the road map will come later and that “we are just saying we understand the requirements of the designer.”

Sun is coming “from a different point in the spectrum” compared to Microsoft and Adobe with its incremental approach and strong developer focus, he said, adding that “different vendors have different strengths in different areas.”

Singh noted that while its RIA rivals have strengths on the design side, “what their problem is, is really getting it to work with developers.”

In fact, he doesn’t believe there is a client platform that covers the full spectrum from graphic designer to rich content creator to scripter to developer. “Whoever delivers that overall experience will be a platform that people will adopt. So that’s our vision.”

Singh isn’t concerned that designers might have their own set of familiar and comfortable tools and environments at the potential expense of the adoption of the JavaFX platform. The market trend, he explained, is such that traditionally-segregated sides want to collaborate and “Java developers want to work with designers and designers want the backend services accessible to them.”

Calgary, Alta-based ICEsoft Technologies Inc., a provider of Java-based Web development software for enterprises, was an exhibitor at the conference pavilion. The company’s senior software architect, Ted Goddard, said Sun’s vision of an end-to-end platform for all aspects of RIA development sounds like a good thing, but he does caution that developers and designers tend to work on very different things.

“In one case, the developers are mostly concerned with the logic of the application and designers are concerned with how it looks. And conceptually, those are really different,” said Goddard.

The important thing, he added, is to create an environment where all parties can work on their respective areas “without stepping on each others toes and being stretched out of their comfort region.”

Sun’s Philosophy

Goddard said that the Java platform already does offer technologies that provide a clean separation between developer and designer tasks. JavaServer Faces, for instance, lets the developer work on the model in JavaBeans and the designer work on the markup with a tool like Adobe Dreamweaver. And although Dreamweaver is an Adobe tool, he said the setup nonetheless let’s people use familiar platforms and “everyone is ultimately working on a Java application making it an even more powerful team.”

Designers perhaps need to be better aware of capabilities within the Java community system, said Goddard, adding that many of them are probably focused on the PHP scripting language, for instance, because it’s “similar to what they’ve already been doing and they know other designers who are using PHP.”

On the fact that Singh had no roadmap to share, Goddard said he thinks Sun will lend an ear to users and eventually develop tools that are useful for them.

In fact, he thinks the Java language is much better for building RIAs given the solid base. All that’s really required for better collaboration, he said, is to incorporate the multimedia capabilities that already exist with certain Java tools. “It’s really a matter of integrating those existing multimedia technologies on top of this really strong Java base.”