Intel adds WiMax, 3G support to Linux device plans
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(InfoWorld) - Laptops aren’t the only computers slated to get support for WiMax next year.
On Wednesday, Intel is expected to announce plans to add the wide-area networking technology and support for 3G mobile technology as options for ultramobile PCs running Windows or Linux. The company also plans to add WiMax as an option to its Centrino notebook package next year.
The ultramobile PCs will be based on Intel’s Menlow chip package, which includes the upcoming Silverthorne processor and single-chip Poulsbo chipset. Expected to be released in early 2008, the package is designed for ultramobile PCs running Windows or the Linux operating system.
Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, is expected to announce that WiMax, 3G, and Wi-Fi will be available as options with Menlow for ultramobile PCs during a scheduled keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
Chandrasekher is scheduled to be joined on stage during his speech by Mark Shuttleworth, the founder and CEO of Canonical, which distributes the Ubuntu version of Linux. Shuttleworth plans to use the opportunity to unveil an alpha version of Ubuntu designed for small, portable computers.
If Intel’s aim to popularize ultraportable PCs based on Linux takes off with end-users, this will have far-reaching implications by expanding the number of people that use Linux beyond technology enthusiasts to the mainstream, and treading into territory coveted by Microsoft.
Report: VA’s IT security still needs work
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has made some progress since a May 2006 data breach, but it has not completed 20 of 22 recommendations from an internal auditor, according to a report released Wednesday.
As of May, the VA had not yet addressed several “critical success factors” for transforming its IT management, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said in its report. The VA had only completed two of 22 recommendations from its inspector general following the breach, in which a laptop and hard drive containing personal records of 26.5 million veterans and family members were stolen from a VA employee’s home.
The VA also needs to improve its IT asset control, the GAO said, referencing a July report showing about 2,400 missing IT devices at four VA locations in 2005 and 2006. While the VA has “many significant initiatives under way,” problems persist even in the programs meant to fix past problems, the GAO report said.
“We continue to see management weaknesses in these programs and initiatives, which are the very weaknesses that VA aims to alleviate,” the GAO report said.
The VA has not completed a comprehensive security management program recommended by the GAO, and it has not strengthened its critical infrastructure planning process, which was recommended by its inspector general, the GAO said.
In addition, the VA has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense for 10 years to share electronic medical records, but the two agencies are “far” from completing that work, the GAO said.
Robert Howard, the VA’s assistant secretary for information and technology since last September, largely agreed with the GAO report while testifying before the U.S. Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Wednesday.
“Since the May 2006 data breach, the VA staff is now more aware of the importance of protecting our veterans’ and employees’ information and identities,” Howard said. “While we do have a way to go here, I have definitely seen improvement.”
The VA has encrypted more than 18,000 laptops since the breach, and it is rolling out software that blocks unauthorized data storage devices, such as thumb drives, from connecting to the VA’s network, he said. The agency has also installed software that blocks VA employees from sending e-mail containing Social Security numbers, he said.
As the VA was rolling out the e-mail filtering software, the software caught about 7,000 e-mails containing Social Security numbers in just one month, Howard said.
The VA is also in the process of centralizing its long-criticized location-based IT structure, and the agency’s goal is to compete the realignment by July, Howard said.
Senator Daniel Akaka, a Hawaii Democrat and committee chairman, noted that VA Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson promised the agency would become a “gold standard” for cybersecurity following the 2006 breach. “How close is VA to becoming the government leader in information security?” Akaka said.
Howard recounted some of the agency’s progress, but said there’s still work to do.
“I don’t know, to be honest with you,” he said. “We hope to be very close by the end of this fiscal year.”
Howard also talked about seven major priorities, including a “well-led, high-performing IT organization.” Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, asked Howard to rate each priority on a scale from one to 10, with 10 meaning fully completed.
Howard’s progress ratings on some of the priorities:
* Standardizing its IT infrastructure and business processes: 3
* Establishing programs to make the agency’s IT system more : 2 or 3
* Remedying the agency’s “long-standing IT material weaknesses” relating to a lack of security controls: 5
“All this will take some time to put in place,” he said.
Laptop vendors to offer Centrino with WiMax next year
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(InfoWorld) - Several laptop vendors plan to announce support for an upcoming version of Intel’s Centrino platform that uses WiMax wide-area networking technology — but Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Apple are not expected to be among them.
Asustek Computer Inc., Acer Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., which sells laptops under the Panasonic brand, all plan to use the coming version of Centrino, called Montevina, that supports WiMax, Intel said in a statement. Centrino Duo laptops with WiMax will be available from these vendors in 2008, it said.
The vendors are expected to announce their support on Wednesday during a scheduled keynote speech by Dadi Perlmutter, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobility Group, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
HP and Dell, the world’s top two laptop vendors, are not among the companies that plan to voice support for Centrino for WiMax. But the expected absence of these companies doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t plan to sell Centrino laptops with WiMax. For example, it could simply mean they have not yet reached an agreement with Intel to make the technology available in their products.
Also absent from Wednesday’s planned announcement is Apple, which typically holds its future product plans close to its chest, rarely offering a look at its long-range plans.
Montevina is set for release during the middle of 2008 and will replace the current version of Centrino, called Santa Rosa, in Intel’s product lineup. Montevina will include a dual-core mobile Penryn processor made using a 45-nanometer process, a chipset, and the option of using Echo Peak, the code name of a wireless module that includes support for both Wi-Fi and WiMax.
The chip package will also be available in a version without Echo Peak, offering support for only Wi-Fi.
Montevina will also include hardware support for HD-DVD and Blu-ray high-definition disc formats, compatibility with faster DDR3 (Double Data Rate 3) memory, as well as new management and security features designed for corporate users, Intel said.
The package will be available for a range of laptop designs, including subnotebooks to high-end laptops, Intel said.
Intel will release updated Centrino in January
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(InfoWorld) - Intel will update its Centrino laptop package in January with a new processor and better graphics.
The update, called Santa Rosa Refresh, will replace Centrino’s current processors with chips made using a 45-nanometer production process – part of Intel’s Penryn chip family – instead of the 65-nm process now in use. The number refers to the average feature size that can be created on a chip and smaller is generally better.
The planned release of Santa Rosa Refresh is set to be announced Wednesday by Dadi Perlmutter, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobility Group, during a scheduled speech at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
Moving to a more advanced manufacturing process typically results in faster chips that consume less power. It also allows chip makers to reduce the size of the chip, either cutting unit production costs since more chips can be made on a silicon wafer or allowing new capabilities, such as a larger memory cache, to be added to the chip.
The Santa Rosa Refresh will also include the 965 Express chipset and support for Microsoft’s Direct X10 technology.
This updated version of Centrino will itself be replaced in the middle of 2008 with a new version, called Montevina. This version of Centrino will also use a 45-nm processor but includes a new chipset that offers support for faster DDR3 (double data rate 3) memory.
Montevina will also WiMax as an option in addition to Centrino’s customary Wi-Fi support.
Apple admits flaw in Danish iBook laptops
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(InfoWorld) - Apple has admitted that a manufacturing defect caused power failures in an iBook G4 laptop sold in Denmark and refunded the customer’s money, said the country’s Consumer Complaints Board.
The case is just one of many concerning the iBook G4 that the board has heard about, Frederik Navne Boesgaard, the complaints board’s legal adviser, said Wednesday.
Apple also faces a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California concerning a similar problem with the iBook G4. In a complaint filed on Nov. 7, plaintiff Alan Vitt said the computers’ motherboards fail at an abnormally high rate. Apple is seeking to have the complaint dismissed — its filing on that motion is due Thursday — with the next hearing in the case set for Oct. 4.
The Danish complaints board, part of the government-funded National Consumer Agency, published a technical report on faulty iBooks in May. The study found solder joints around a voltage regulator were flawed in such a way as to deteriorate each time the computers were turned on or off, until they would no longer start up. However, using a clamp to apply pressure to the computers’ casing, next to the trackpad, closed up the broken joints and allowed the computer to start — a clear sign of an original design flaw, the study concluded.
In response, Apple submitted its own technical report saying that the flaw was not due to cycling the power on and off, but this was not enough to sway the board’s decision.
Two weeks ago, the board challenged Apple to concede the point and refund the customer’s money, or take their customer to court. Apple paid up, said Navne Boesgaard.
The complaints board is handling four such cases, and owners of faulty iBook G4s continue to come forward: 15 more have called him in recent days, he said.
The faulty iBooks were among the first notebooks using the G4 processor that Apple produced, and had an opaque white casing like their G3 predecessors. The machines examined, the 800MHz Model 9164LL/A and the 1GHz Model 9426LL/A, were introduced in April 2004 and discontinued in October of that year. The board received the complaints between April and November 2006.
A spokeswoman for Apple in the U.K. said she believed the case had been settled, but was unable to comment further.
Intel details Moorestown platform for ultramobile PCs
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(InfoWorld) - Intel will detail its future Moorestown platform for ultramobile PCs on Wednesday, even though the chips won’t be available until 2009.
Moorestown is scheduled to replace Menlow, a package of chips set to debut early next year. Menlow is designed for ultramobile PCs and includes the dual-core Silverthorne processor and Poulsbo single-chip chipset. These chips can be paired with modules for WiMax, Wi-Fi, or 3G mobile services for hardware makers that want to add wireless support to their devices.
Moorestown’s biggest advantages will be smaller size and lower power consumption. An ultramobile PC based on Moorestown will consume one-tenth of the power that a Menlow-based device requires when idling, Intel said.
Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, is scheduled to discuss some details of Moorestown in a speech at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
Moorestown will consist of an SOC (system-on-chip) design that packs a CPU, graphics processor, video, and a memory controller into a single chip. Previously, many of these capabilities were handled by a separate chipset. Combining them with the CPU allows Intel to reduce the space required by the chips and save power.
In addition to the SOC, Moorestown will include a communications chip, which will handle input/output for storage and wireless connections.
SAP christens its hosted ERP suite Business ByDesign
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(InfoWorld) - SAP has christened its suite of hosted ERP software for the midmarket SAP Business ByDesign and said it will be available initially in the U.S. and Germany, with the U.K., France and China to follow soon after.
Pricing for the service in the U.S. starts at $149 per user per month for a minimum of 25 users, including services and support, SAP said. Customers also pay $54 per month for each group of five “efficiency users,” or casual users who access the software only to fill out expense reports and purchase confirmations, for example.
SAP CEO Henning Kagermann presented the first demonstration of the product, formerly known by its code name A1S, at an event in New York Wednesday morning, calling it “the most important announcement I have made in my career.”
SAP has said it will invest ?300 million to ?400 million (about $400 million to $550 million) by the end of 2008 to support the introduction of the service, including a consumer marketing campaign on the Web to alter the perception of SAP as a provider of software for big businesses.
SAP Business ByDesign aims to offer the gamut of ERP (enterprise resource planning) capabilities in a service affordable and simple enough for use by businesses with 100 employees to 500 employees, Kagermann said. The capabilities include manufacturing, purchasing, accounting, sales and marketing and human resources.
The software is live today at 20 customers in Germany and the U.S., including a small aircraft manufacturer, a manufacturer of air fresheners, a technology consulting company and a company that offers packaging and distribution services to pharmaceutical companies.
It still wasn’t entirely clear from SAP’s statement when the average business will be able to sign up for the service, but a safe bet for most countries appears to be 2008.
SAP is “currently engaging with pilot customers” in the U.S. and Germany and “validating” the product with customers in the U.K., France and China, it said in a statement. Next year it will offer the service in additional markets including Australia and India in the Asia-Pacific; Italy, the Netherlands, the Nordic region and Spain in Europe; Canada and Mexico in the Americas; and South Africa. Other countries will follow in 2009.
The company has said it hopes to open a new market for ERP among companies that rely today on spreadsheets and other individual programs to run their businesses, and were put off ERP in the past by its price and complexity. Analysts say the challenge will be to offer a product that’s easy for companies to configure but which meets the needs of their individual business.
Security gurus look for better ways to classify malware
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(InfoWorld) - Two senior security veterans from Trend Micro are trying to get the industry to change how it classifies malicious software.
They argue that today’s classification system, which tends to focus on the technical way the software works, neglects a far more important metric that matters more to users: how it tries to steal your money.
“This is my pet bug-a-boo — the unclear language,” said David Perry, global director for education at Trend. “I come from 26 years of technical support, and it irks me that we protect people against things and they don’t know what we’re protecting them against.”
Perry and Anthony Arrott will present their paper, “New approaches to categorizing economically motivated digital threats,” on Friday at a security conference in Vienna.
Take the term “virus.” The proper definition of virus is a piece of software that replicates or makes copies of itself and attaches itself to other pieces of software.
But for nonsecurity professionals, it’s “taken to mean the universal indication that there is something wrong with their computer, no matter what the cause,” Perry said. Toss in relatively newer terms such as “Trojan horse,” “dialer,” and “adware” and the situation becomes a mix of confusing vocabulary.
Perry and Arrott stop short of proposing a new taxonomy. However, they do detail some parameters that should be considered when building a new framework to categorize Web threats.
Although malware categorization systems exist, a new one is necessary because of the focus on economic crime. The “business” models behind the malware are far easier to define than the infinite technical variations that the malware can take, they write.
Malware can then be classified into fewer, overlapping categories would help deflect “the endless efforts to determine the exact definitions of the boundaries between categories,” Perry said.
The new groupings would ideally take into account how a threat is installed, its economic purpose, how it exploits a host computer as well as how it hides itself from detection, the paper said.
Another new metric that could be considered is the persistence of threats, since it may more accurately frame the scope of an ongoing fraud. The antivirus industry has tended to focus on “top 10″ lists, which indicate the most frequent recent threats but not the most successful attacks over time, the paper said.
Trend Micro researched over time fraudulent antispyware programs that were most persistent on computers. This research indicated the diversity and depth of fraudulent programs such as Winfixer or the Zlob Trojan, which purport to fix security problems but install advertising software instead.
“Rogue antispyware is just on example of economically motivated threats where chronic persistence is more significant than acute outbreaks,” the authors wrote.
Perry is hoping for fruitful discussions on taxonomy, although he said the security industry is notoriously fractured and not exactly known for working well together. “There are no grown-ups in this industry,” he said.
Ultimately, Perry believes the proposal is “a bid toward accuracy and to deconflict the issues that face us as an industry.”
EC backs $4.7 billion in funding to salvage Galileo GPS project
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(InfoWorld) - Satellite navigation boxes using the GPS (global positioning system) are no longer the preserve of luxury car owners in Europe. Now you see them in the humblest vehicles on the Continent’s highways.
That’s part of the reason why the European Commission Wednesday proposed taking on the entire ?3.4 billion ($4.7 billion) cost of creating Galileo, Europe’s answer to GPS, which is based in the U.S.
“Do consumers really want this product? To answer that you must ask why consumers like GPS so much,” said transport commissioner Jacques Barrot at a press conference Wednesday.
“Consumers are answering the question by buying more and more GPSes,” he said. “Galileo will make money, and with the E.U. as its owner, it will generate income for the E.U. budget.”
Barrot’s confidence wasn’t shared earlier this year by the companies picked to share the cost and benefits of building the 30-strong constellation of satellites.
Unsure of the costs and unconvinced of Galileo’s eventual commercial potential, the companies dragged their feet to a point in June where the Commission abandoned the partnership with the private sector.
Under the original plan, public money was supposed to pay for the first four satellites and then the private consortium of companies building the satellites were to pay for two-thirds of the 26 remaining satellites.
This amounted to a private sector cost of ?2.4 billion. The companies — AENA, Alcatel-Lucent, EADS, Finmeccanica, Hispasat, Inmarsat, TeleOp, and Thales — were to recoup their investment costs by then operating the satellites and collecting fees once they were in operation.
Barrot said Wednesday that the Commission wants the ?2.4 billion to be paid for out of European Union funds. The E.U. has already committed ?1 billion to the project.
He said that he initially wanted the 27 member states of the E.U. to fill the funding gap through payments directly to the European Space Agency (ESA). But as 10 countries in the E.U. aren’t members of the ESA this was dismissed, leaving the E.U. budget as the only possibility for ensuring that the project is financed.
With the E.U. as the sole owner of Galileo, it will still need companies from a variety of industries to build the system’s infrastructure, Barrot said.
Astrium (EADS group) and Thales Alenia Space (Thales and Finmeccanica groups) approached the ESA for some of this work recently, the commissioner said.
“Galileo is extremely important for the strategic autonomy of Europe. We can’t let this opportunity to manage the know-how in this advanced technology pass,” Barrot said.
Transportation ministers of the E.U. member states will meet in Luxembourg on Oct. 2 to debate the Commission’s proposal. Countries with most to gain from the project include France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. They are believed to support the Commission. However, others including the U.K. and the Netherlands, remain to be convinced that there is a real need for a European GPS.
Separately, U.S. president George W. Bush said in a statement issued by the U.S. mission to the E.U. Wednesday, that he will stop the GPS signal from being interrupted or degraded by military purposes.
One of the main justifications for launching Galileo was that GPS is ultimately at the mercy of the U.S. Department of Defense, and could be jammed for strategic reasons, potentially endangering private users’ lives. Galileo is intended to be purely for civilian use.
However, the U.S. recently has taken steps to assure GPS users that they can count on the system.
“President George W. Bush has accepted a recommendation to end procurement of Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites that have the capability to intentionally degrade the accuracy of civil signals,” the White House press secretary said in a statement Tuesday.
Although the U.S. stopped the intentional degradation of GPS satellite signals in May 2000, this new action will result in the removal of “Selective Availability” capabilities, thereby eliminating a source of uncertainty in GPS performance that has been of concern to civil GPS users worldwide. This decision reflects the nation’s commitment to GPS users that this free global utility can be counted on to support peaceful civil activities around the world, the statement said.
SAP charts new waters with hosted ERP
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(InfoWorld) - SAP is stepping into uncharted waters with the launch of its hosted business applications service, codenamed A1S, on Wednesday. The move will give it a head start over Microsoft and other rivals, but could also mean SAP learns the hard way that offering hosted ERP on a wide scale is difficult to do.
Offering business applications on demand, also called software as a service (SaaS), is not new. But most services, including those from trailblazer Salesforce.com, have focused on customer relationship management or human resources management, only a part of ERP (enterprise resource planning).
Those functions are easier to offer as a hosted service, since managing sales and payroll tends to be fairly standard across industries and countries. ERP as a whole is more complex, involving tasks like supply chain management, procurement and accounting, for which requirements and regulations can vary greatly.
“It’s less standard across industries, but even more importantly across geographies. The regulatory differences are profound even between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg,” said Bo Lykkegaard, a research manager with IDC in Denmark.
Even the existing leader in hosted ERP, NetSuite, has found it difficult to offer the services widely outside the U.S., according to Lykkegaard. “They’ve been selling mostly CRM internationally, which is easier to localize because it’s mostly a question of currency and sales tax.”
“Hosted ERP is still nascent, and that’s what A1S is largely about. That’s what makes the A1S launch today so interesting,” he said.
SAP executives are giving the first public demonstration of A1S, aimed at midmarket companies with up to about 2,000 employees, in New York on Wednesday. They are also expected to unveil the name for the service and possibly pricing. The software is being tested by a handful of customers now and is likely to be rolled out gradually next year starting in the U.S. and parts of Europe.
The complexity of hosting ERP software has prevented Microsoft from announcing plans to offer its Dynamics ERP applications as a service, although its hosted Live CRM software is being released this quarter.
“Software as a service makes a lot of sense for CRM, because the offering typically goes in with very little customization — a sales process is a sales process,” Klaus Helge Andersen, corporate vice president for Microsoft Business Solutions, said in a recent interview. “ERP has more deep vertical content, and all the multitenant platforms I know about don’t have a customization model that works well for individual customers.”
SAP is expected to show in New York Wednesday how it gets around this problem. It has touted the benefits of A1S at some length but hasn’t shown publicly yet how it works. It has said it will be quick and easy for businesses to set up, with interfaces tailored for industries and users. And it promises to open a new market for ERP for smaller companies wary of its complexity, much as Salesforce.com opened doors for CRM.
Lykkegaard has seen A1S and said it is built from the ground up as a hosted service, and that SAP has done much to make it easy to use.
Customers can look at the software on the Web and try configuring it before they purchase it, “so what used to be a presales exercise the customer can do for themselves,” he said. “Then when you configure a business process it’s all model-based, so you choose a business process and the user interface will change correspondingly. It’s procedure driven.”
“They truth will be in the details, and we’ll see that when some of these midsize companies start to work with the software,” he said.
Besides NetSuite, SAP will face competition from many small companies offering hosted ERP in local markets. In addition, Deloitte & Touche has been offering hosted ERP using Microsoft’s Dynamics software in some European countries, Lykkegaard said, although Deloitte declined a request to discuss it.
The rewards are potentially big. IDC projects revenue from on-demand applications to increase almost 60 percent in 2007, and grow at a compound annual rate of 32 percent over the next five years. In 2006, hosted applications accounted for about 3 percent of all software applications revenue. That will increase to 10 percent by 2011, Lykkegaard said.
“Keep in mind that’s revenue from licenses and maintenance, not just new software licenses, so it’s a very profound impact,” he said.