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For anyone who wants to know, the Classic Car Club Manhattan is located on 250 Hudson Street in New York, NY. The area is known as Tribeca and is home to some of the most desirable property in the entire city. I used to work three blocks from that address and everyday I’d walk by their windows and peak inside to see what cars were on the floor. To some, this video may seem a bit on the irresponsible side, but to a native New Yorker like myself, it’s just how we drive.

Source: Youtube.com

A hacker attack recently shut down the ad service OnRamp completely. In an official statement posted on its forums a few weeks ago, OpenX, the parent company of OnRamp, questioned the security of open source technology.

Let me be clear about this: This isn’t an open source issue, and we shouldn’t level blame on open source users and producers (Full disclosure: my company Sonatype is an open source software development firm).  Economic and production efficiencies of open source have made it an almost compulsory component of any modern software application. We’ve all reaped tremendous benefits from open source – we develop fast, re-use proven components, and can focus more time on the functionality that’s truly valuable to our employers.

It’s not just that open source is good – it’s necessary. That’s why more than 70,000 organizations made nearly 8 billion requests for open source components from the Central Repository last year for use in all the major categories of applications, including the web, cloud, mobile and critical infrastructure.

The hard truth is that today more than 80 percent of a typical software application is assembled from existing components – and the vast majority of those are open source, coming from dozens, if not hundreds, of individual projects. All industry verticals, both regulated and unregulated, are using tremendous amounts of open source components in both internal and consumer-facing applications.

Open source is essential

Think of software development organizations today the same way you would think of car manufacturers. Developers assemble applications using existing components or parts rather than writing applications from scratch. But unlike manufacturing, the software industry lacks the tools to manage the intricacy and risk associated with a complex and distributed software supply chain.

Component-based development needs to be managed, for sure; security problems arise when oversight is incomplete. Simply put, a flawed software supply chain means flawed applications. Our research indicates that at least 71 percent of applications contain components with known security flaws that are classified as severe or critical.

According to one study, “The Leaking Vault 2011” by the Digital Forensics Association, more than $156 billion in direct losses can be attributed to data breaches in just a five-year period. The Application Risk Management in Business Survey by Forrester and Veracode found that 62 percent of surveyed organizations reported breaches in the past year due to flaws in their critical applications.

Mitigating inevitable risks

The question becomes then how to mitigate the risks associated with component consumption while realizing the benefits of open source. Certainly there are constant and sophisticated threats to open source software; this is true with proprietary software too. We know where danger lies: it comes from using outdated components with known vulnerabilities. It comes from not having an enforceable open source policy. And it comes from not managing component licenses or the licenses of dependencies.

It is important to understand that this is a supply chain problem: You need to manage components at each phase of the software development lifecycle — at consumption, in development, during integration and within production.

Decreasing security exposure

Decisive security measures at the component layer strengthen the entire software development lifecycle and increase the integrity of the overall software supply chain. Imagine the risk of a vulnerability in a popular open source component. Because the component is used in many applications, within and across various organizations, it becomes a rich target for exploitation. History has shown that an attacker only needs to gain a foothold in an organization and often attacks the weakest link, so the risk of component-based software development could not be greater.

Here are the keys to decreasing this type of exposure:

• Institute an open source policy if your organization doesn’t already have one. If you do have one, review it, and often.  Make sure it’s clear to both those on the development team and those responsible for managing the security process – whether it’s risk management, legal or Jim the senior developer – to get buy-in from everyone.
• Ensure your policy includes key guidelines for component security, licensing and quality attributes. Beyond the over-arching open source policy that outlines the organization’s standards and values, create additional guidelines to drive usage decisions (e.g. age of component at download, license-type, level of documentation.)
• Be sure your policies are enforceable. Without the ability to enforce, honestly, what’s the point?  Paper-based policies will be ignored, so look for ways to integrate enforcement into the software development process itself.
• Give developers the information they need to make good choices. Your developers are on the front lines so give them the ability to fight. Detecting flaws or non-compliance early on in the process saves time and money down the line.
• Before going to production, inventory components and their dependencies. Knowing the makeup of your application is half the battle in troubleshooting vulnerabilities that may be discovered later.
• Continuously monitor for newly discovered flaws. New vulnerabilities emerge all the time (just like in proprietary software). You need to know when a new flaw is surfaced, and where exactly the component is being used.
• Have a remediation plan. Know how you can fix problems regardless of where they occur in the lifecycle.  Fixing flaws isn’t always easy, and having a plan helps.

Open source or proprietary, free or paid, remember this: If we can safeguard the component layer by instituting good component practice it will pays dividends across the lifecycle.

Ryan Berg is Chief Security Officer of Sonatype and former Cloud security strategy lead at IBM

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There’s nothing quite like getting settling into the couch on Sunday afternoon (or morning on west coast), cracking open a beer and yelling at a football coach who gets paid millions of dollars a year to do his job. After all, the guy’s clearly an idiot. Who would run it up the middle on third down and eight? And why does the team still punt the ball all the time? You never punt in Madden NFL, and you win all the time.

You probably think I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. Statistically speaking, football teams should go for it more often, they shouldn’t run on third and long and they’re almost certainly better off going for two-point conversions. The guys behind Statwing laid it all out in a blog post on Monday. What’s more, they’ve uploaded an entire data set of NFL statistics to their service that users can play around with for free to analyze a huge number of occurrences and correlations.

It’s all about democratizing data

Statwing, you might recall, is one of the “data for dummies” tools I highlighted in a January post about advanced analytics tools so simple anyone can use them. Right now, it’s one of the simplest there is. Here’s how I described Statwing then — although it actually performs more types of analyses:

“You upload data, check the variables you’re concerned with, and it plots their relationship. (It also can describe the variables by highlighting the sample size, minimum, maximum, mean, median and standard deviation.) Graphs are accompanied by explanations as to how strong the correlation is based on various statistical metrics, as well as the results of a linear regression model.”

The ease of use is by design, says Statwing co-founder Greg Laughlin. “There’s a general zeitgeist that people should care about data now,” he told me during a recent call, but they don’t always know to get started or really even see how all the hype around data relates to them. Early on its existence, Statwing is trying to answer both of those concerns by building an easy-to-use service that also happens to teach users about statistics, and by offering up some interesting data sets for people to play around with.

The latter part is easy, but valuable. Data sets like the NFL data or one about the Titanic’s passengers let other people into the data game and get them thinking statistically. They get people saying, “‘Oh, I grok that. I see how this interesting, I see how this is useful,’” Laughlin explained.

Building a data-analysis service that’s actually usable by mere mortals is a bit tougher. At its core, Statwing relies on a rules engine that considers the type of data uploaded and the types of variables (a maximum of two right now) a user wants to relate to each other. It can handle between 10 and 15 different analyses right now depending on how one defines them, Laughlin said, but at any rate they’re the ones used most often.

He credits Cloudera co-founder and Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher (with whom, along with Greylock’s DJ Patil, I’ll be doing a fireside chat at Structure: Data on Thursday) with helping Statwing decide to make the rules engine the service’s core.

That has been a wise decision because it lets lay users get what they need out of the service without worrying about the underlying functions. Statwing has users that never click the “advanced” tab that shows the statistical breakdown, Laughlin said. They just use the service, essentially, as a faster way of making charts than using Microsoft Excel, and the headline stating whether or not there’s a statistically significant relationship is all the info they need.

“That’s really exciting for us,” Laughlin said. “… It’s giving them the power of stats without them having to think about it.”

 

Paying the bills with bigger users

Of course, a startup can’t survive on free and unsophisticated users alone, so Statwing is ramping up its money-making efforts. For example, it has “just turned on the paywall in a really light way” by “maybe” charging really heavy users, Laughlin said. In the future, though, Statwing wants to add support for more variables and larger data sets (there’s a 5MB limit right now), and perhaps build in some predictive analytics.

“That kind of analysis is really powerful, really extensible,” he noted.

As the service grows, Laughlin sees the ideal paying user being someone who currently has to use statistical-analysis software like SPSS or R, but who doesn’t really go beyond the basic functions. That type of user has real business need for the software, he explained, but they don’t need all the complexity and arcane statistics dressing that comes along with that that type of product.

Some people don’t want advanced analytics democratized, Laughlin added, because they think people can’t ask the right questions. On the contrary, Statwing’s theory is that most people just struggle with the logistics of cleaning and formatting data and then knowing the terminology associated with the business questions they want to ask.

Back to football …

But forget business users — when will football coaches start caring about statistics?! Maybe not any time soon. Laughlin said a friend of his who works on the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference sees a lot of interest in analytics from the higher levels in sports organizations, but noted that anecdotal evidence suggests most coaches aren’t too interested in letting data influence their decisions too heavily.

Think of a situation like fourth down and goal on the two-yard-line as akin to a CIO choosing between Oracle and some new whizbang database. Nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle, and nobody ever got fired for kicking a field goal.

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Ah, the HTC One. That amazing new device that’s going to spearhead HTC’s 2013 assault on Samsung. The device that supposedly will be getting nearly every major carrier on board with its launch to guarantee success. Well, every carrier except the biggest carrier in the US.

We’d heard some iffy rumors about Verizon receiving the HTC One a month after its launch on other US carriers, but according to a tweet directly from HTC’s twitter page, you should be looking at the Droid DNA instead. While the DNA is a fantastic phone, (and possibly even better than the One if you absolutely want a bigger screen) it’s a bit disappointing to see HTC fail to get Verizon on board with this. And while we know for certain there’s some kind of Droid DNA+ waiting to be unleashed on the world, you can’t help but think that having your flagship device unavailable on a carrier like Verizon is going to hurt HTC in the long run against phones like the S 4 or iPhone, which have identical phones available on all US carriers.

Maybe in the next few months we’ll see Verizon change their mind and offer the One. Better late than never, right? Any Verizon customers disappointed about this news, or are you happy with the 5-inch Droid DNA?

source: Twitter

Come comment on this article: HTC One is definitely not coming to Verizon

TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, a new playlist is available: TED for kids.

Not at all TED Talks are appropriate for elementary and middle schooers. But these 9 talks — filled with information presented in fun ways — is perfect for curious kids. David Gallo takes you into the world under water, Arthur Benjamin performs mathematical mental feats, LXD dancers bend in truly weird ways.

Watch the “TED for kids” playlist »

Yesterday at the Engadget Expand conference Microsoft’s Bob Heddle, the director of Kinect for Windows, announced a new software developer kit is coming very soon — tomorrow, in fact. Version 1.7 will be made available March 18, and Heddle promised it will be the “most significant update to the SDK since we released the first version a little over a year ago”.

Version 1.7 promises new interaction, including push-to-press buttons, grip-to-pan capabilities, and support for smart ways to accommodate multiple users and two-person interactions. Heddle explains that “we wanted to save businesses and developers hours of development time while making it easier for them to create gesture-based experiences that are highly consistent from application to application and utterly simple for end users”.

The company is also adding more features to Kinect Fusion — a service that create accurate, full, 3-D models. Fusion will now include OpenCV and MATLAB Samples to allow developers to build advanced Kinect-enabled applications while using industry standards.

The new SDK also marks a milestone of sorts. Microsoft will be making Kinect for Windows code samples available through CodePlex — marking the first time Kinect code has ever been available through an open-source resource.

Heddle promises that the new features will be “fully compatible with all previous commercial releases, so we encourage everyone to upgrade to the new version”. If you want to check out the on-stage demonstration from Heddle then there is a video available for you now.

Photo Credit: Microsoft

VMware, at last, comes clean about its AWS killer

Remember last July when our own Om Malik and Stacey Higginbotham reported on VMware’s plan to take on Amazon with a cloud of its own?  Remember VMware denying it?  Well, last Wednesday it all became official with the announcement of VMware Hybrid Cloud services — in which VMware will host its own public cloud that will be sold by existing VMware partners.

Gartner’s Chris Wolf has an interesting take on his blog here.

Now, there is some wiggle room for VMware here. Our original story showed the big cloud coming out of the then-unannounced spin-off of VMware and EMC That spinoff — the Pivotal Initiative — did happen, but it appears that it’s VMware, not Pivotal, that’s running the big cloud. Paul Maritz the former CEO of VMware and now the head of Pivotal, will be speaking this week at GigaOM’s Structure: Data in New York.

Amazon adds beefs up Virtual Private Cloud

It was an even more busy week than normal for Amazon itself which unveiled new Virtual Private Cloud capabilities for AWS users. Launched 4 years ago Amazon VPC lets users create “a virtual network of logically isolated EC2 instances and an optional VPN connection to your own data center,” according to the AWS blog. what’s new now is that soon, when a new customer launches EC2 instances, they will do so in the ”EC2-VPC” platform.

“You don’t need to create a VPC beforehand – simply launch EC2 instances or provision Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases, or ElastiCache clusters like you would in EC2-Classic and we’ll create a VPC for you at no extra charge.  We’ll launch your resources into that VPC and assign each EC2 instance a public IP address.”

At that point you can assign multiple IP addresses to a single instance, change security group membership on the fly, and add egress filters to those groups.

One of Amazon’s weak points when it comes to the enterprise accounts it wants to attract is the unwillingness of IT pros — especially in heavily regulated businesses — to put mission critical workloads on shared public cloud infrastructure. This new VPC capability might make them more amenable to using AWS at a time when more and more “private” cloud options — from competitors Rackspace, HP, and others are coming on line. GCN has more on VPC.

Also new his week: AWS tripled the amount of storage that can be associated with each RDB (Relational Database) instance.

“You can now create DB instances (MySQL or Oracle) with up to 3 TB of storage (the previous limit was 1 TB) and 30,000 IOPS (previously, 10,000). SQL Server DB Instances can be created with up to 1TB of storage and 10,000 IOPS.”

And, Amazon also launched a version of its mobile AWS console for iPhone so It types can see what’s going on with their Amazon cloud when they’re not at their desks. An Android version of the console debuted in January.

this public cloud war will only get more interesting if, as has been reported here and elsewhere, that IBM is in the market for SoftLayer and/or Rackspace.  If IBM ends up making either of those rather substantial purchase — Reuters put a $2 billion price tag on SoftLayer and Rackspace would be much more — it would only show how critical IBM sees this market that it would spend that kind of dough after already investing billions in its own cloud infrastructure.

Working with your Frenemy: Newvem debuts AWS heat map

Newvem is the energizer bunny of AWS watchers. Amazon keeps “totally copying” Newvem’s capabilities (in the words of Newvem CEO Zev Laderman) and Newvem just keeps on adding more capabilities.

Newvem, the Israeli company obsessed with showing you more about your Amazon Web Services use than you know, was at it again this week, unveiling its Cloud Utilization Heat map that shows AWS users their utilization over multiple regions by time, machine type and availability zone.

The sales pitch?A substantive portion (15 percent) of the clouds Newvem analyzes now are underutilized. That means “$30 million of $200 million EC2 spending tracked is wasted,” says Newvem spokesman Cameron Peron. Presumably if you know what resources are being wasted you can make moves to streamline operations and run things optimally. Sell off reserved instances you’re not using, for example.

Here’s my guess: Newvem has focused 100 percent on AWS to this point. But as Amazon keeps adding more of its own dashboard and monitoring alerts, I would bet Newvem, like other monitoring companies, will soon turn its eye to other clouds as well. After all, multi-cloud deployments are one tactic large companies are looking at to avoid locking into a single provider.

That Amazon competes with its own partners is certainly not new. It’s been going on for years as we’ve reported. The company, like Microsoft or IBM before it, treads a fine line between relying on smaller, nimbler partners to come up with innovative new services, and then adding more value-added services itself. Amazon launched a partner program last year to help navigate this terrain.

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While you were busy SXSWing last week, you may have missed out on some of our podcasts. What better time than now to catch up with a relaxing and informative weekend listen?

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March Madness is here: The 2013 NCAA Men’s Division tournament will start on March 17 with Selection Sunday, and then continue with a total of 67 action-packed games until April 8.

Unfortunately, quite a few of these games are once again going to unfold when many of us have to work at the office. Fortunately, you won’t have to miss a thing, thanks to live streams of each and every game — if you’re a cable subscriber, that is.

For the first time, March Madness is going to require authentication for any game that’s shown on cable. This means that you’ll have to log in with your cable TV subscription account if the game you want to watch is airing on TBS, TNT or truTV. Games that are available on CBS will still be available without logging in.

Confused? Can’t find your cable subscription details in time before the action starts? No worries: The NCAA’s website and apps are going to offer everyone a four hour grace period in which you can start watching without bothering about logging in.

Here’s where you can start watching on your PC, iPad, iPhone or Android mobile device:

• The NCAA’s website streams each and every game live, no matter whether it airs on cable or CBS.
• The NCAA’s iOS app, now available on iTunes, offers live streaming for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
• The NCAA also promises to have an Android app for devices with Android 4.0 and up available in time, but it wasn’t on Google Play at the time of writing. Check the NCAA’s website for the latest links for your device.

We will update this article with additional links and resources throughout the tournament, so make sure to check back regularly.

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If Audi set-up displays like this in their dealerships, they’d move triple the amount of R8′s they currently sell.

Simply outstanding…

Source: AudiChannel

March madness isn’t just for sports – as we saw this week, spring fever is roaring across the tech world, too. As soon as our writers returned from covering the five-day SXSW Interactive whirlwind in Austin, Samsung launched its highly-anticipated (and much-leaked) Galaxy S 4 at a splashy event in New York, and Google elicited howls of protest by announcing the impending sunset of Google Reader. Meanwhile, over on GigaOM Pro, our analysts are preparing for this week’s Structure:Data conference in New York City and writing research reports full of practical advice for startup founders, analysis of converging trends in the mobile, cloud, and big data markets, and more.

Note: GigaOM Pro is a subscription-based research service offering in-depth, timely analysis of developing trends and technologies. Visit pro.gigaom.com to learn more about it.

Cloud: Understanding the Symbiosis of Cloud Computing, Big Data, and Mobile
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Analyst Stowe Boyd pens a brief thought piece based on a 2010 TED talk by 37signals’ Jason Fried. Fried and Boyd both advocate for thinking outside the box – or in this case, outside the office. Boyd notes the counterproductive nature of the typical office – the so-called “death by a thousand interruptions in the typical workplace” – and instead argues in favor of the disengaged (or semi-disengaged) worker.

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In late 2011, the big story for those fascinated by the Internet’s disruption of traditional Hollywood was Louis CK’s direct-to-fan comedy special. 2013 is young yet, but an early contender for story of the year has to be once-canceled cult series Veronica Mars roaring back to life, thanks to Kickstarter. What have we learned about the project since its launch on Wednesday? And what implications does it have for Kickstarter as well as other canceled shows? Let’s find out.

Warner Bros. is super-into this

In a very illuminating interview with HitFix, Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas addressed a great number of the concerns that have been raised about the campaign.

The whole interview is worth reading, and one of the biggest takeaways is how engaged Warner Bros. is with the project.

Working with Warner Bros. was always going to be necessary for a Veronica Mars movie, as Mars is intellectual property belonging to the studio. But there are other benefits. S.T. VanAirsdale looked at the costs typically associated with a campaign like this — specifically in regards to basic things like manufacturing 40,000 T-shirts:

At the time, the number of backers entitled to Thomas’ limited-edition shirts was 34,000 and change. CustomInk gave me a rough quote for the exact number of shirts I sought: $3.90 each, for a total of $132,600. (“You saved $579,360.00 [81%] with Volume Discount,” the site reassured me.) BlueCotton was cheaper at $3.44 apiece, but it maxed out at 9,999 shirts, meaning some rough multiplication and rougher estimate of $116,960. That’s more than 4% of the total amount raised so far — ostensibly Thomas’ production budget, which also has to cover such actual necessities as crew, equipment, transportation and craft service — just to produce t-shirts.

While these concerns are huge for independent Kickstarter campaigns, one of the many advantages Thomas has is that a team at Warner Bros. is handling the logistics of the campaign as well as the film’s promotion and distribution. The money being raised on Kickstarter is purely for production — this is because, according to Thomas, Warner is treating Mars as an experiment:

I know, on the second part of the question, that Warner Bros. isn’t treating “Veronica Mars” like a one-off. I think they’re treating us like a guinea pig — in the best way. They want to see if this model works, and they made the calculated decision, and for a lot of the reasons you articulated in that story, that we were a good test case for this. We just happened to be the right show at the right time, got to be the first one out of the gate. I think Warner Bros., if it works, they could start doing more of these. And you know that if it works at one studio, that they’re not going to be the only studio in town that will be trying it.

Is Veronica Mars bad for Kickstarter?

The controversy that’s stirred up around Mars on Kickstarter seems to boil down to the following question: When you contribute to a Kickstarter campaign, what role do you play in it? Are you a consumer, paying a certain fee for a certain benefit, whether it be a T-shirt or tickets to a red carpet premiere? Are you a booster, selflessly donating your money to support a project you believe in? Or does your money give you a role akin to a producer of the project?

Many who find the Mars Kickstarter campaign troubling are coming at it from that latter perspective, such as paidContent commenter jrhmobile earlier this week:

So, do these investors get points in the movie sales? Or are they just throwing a couple of million bucks at a major studio with no return on their investment?

I’d like to think it’s more than “I funded a movie for Warner Brothers, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

The key word there, potentially, is “lousy.” Thomas explained to HitFix:

The nice thing is that we never wanted to be perceived as a charity. We always imagined that we’re putting up a Kickstarter page, and we’re selling real product at real prices to fans. It’s not like a pledge drive where you pledge 100 dollars and get a 4 dollar tote bag, where it’s done out of the goodness of your heart, and for charity. We wanted to created packages where people look at what they’re getting and think, ‘Wow, I got a script and a digital download and a t-shirt for $35. I would pay that!’ So all those people worrying that we’re aksing for this money to make our movie, we’re selling you a product. Think of us as a store, not a charity.

The other issue being raised is whether success stories like this overshadow independent projects. Kenyatta Cheese, a freelance consultant and co-creator of Know Your Meme, offered the following analysis on Tumblr:

The success of the Marshmallows does nothing for unknown, unconnected creators on Kickstarter unless Kickstarter can get the backers of its high profile projects to discover some of the lesser known but equally intriguing small projects. That sort of thing has to be planned and programmed. It doesn’t just happen through the implementation of a Discover page with a few carousels of local and staff pick recommendations. This happens through building a backer community that celebrates their continued involvement while fostering a culture of discovery. The good news is that if anybody has a head start on figuring this sort of thing out, it’s Kickstarter.

And Kickstarter has numbers which show that blockbusters like Mars help build the Kickstarter ecosystem — bringing in new donors who may go on to fund other projects.

The current largest contributor to the Mars campaign, a guy who pledged $10,000 for a speaking role, is an entrepreneur named Steven Dengler. When interviewed by Entertainment Weekly, Dengler referred to himself as a “small-f fan” of Mars — what he actually is is a fan of Kickstarter projects. He’s funded over 60 of them.

“Save [NAME OF YOUR FAVORITE CANCELED SHOW HERE]!

I enjoyed Firefly, don’t get me wrong. But having witnessed the show’s hardcore fanbase overreacting to even the possible hint of new space Western adventures over the past half-dozen years, I’d like to thank Joss Whedon for, within 24 hours of Mars hitting $2 million, telling Buzzfeed that Kickstarter won’t bring back the crew of the Serenity anytime soon:

I’ve said repeatedly that I would love to make another movie with these guys, and that remains the case. It also remains the case that I’m booked up by Marvel for the next three years, and that I haven’t even been able to get Dr. Horrible 2 off the ground because of that. So I don’t even entertain the notion of entertaining the notion of doing this, and won’t. Couple years from now, when Nathan [Fillion]‘s no longer [on] Castle and I’m no longer the Tom Hagen of the Marvel Universe and making a giant movie, we might look and see where the market is then. But right now, it’s a complete non-Kickstarter for me.

Hardcore Firefly fans are thus out of luck at present. But other creators are watching Mars with interest. Shawn Ryan, whose offbeat drama Terriers was canceled after one season on FX, Tweeted the below on Wednesday:

Very interested to see how this Veronica Mars kickstarter goes. Could be a model for a Terriers wrap up film.

— Shawn Ryan (@ShawnRyanTV) March 13, 2013

And as Thomas told HitFix:

I did get an email from Bryan Fuller earlier today saying, ‘Hey, can you jump on the phone with me at some point? I know you’re busy, but I would love to talk to you about how this thing works.’ And I know it was specifically for Pushing Daisies.

Fuller’s Daisies was canceled by ABC after two seasons — just one of many cult shows that never got the chance to wrap up its many storylines.

I used the word “cult” in this article more than once, but depending on what happens here, that term might become much more apt than before. Because, after all, aren’t cults financially supported by their followers?

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Well Galaxy S fans, the good news just never stops rolling in concerning Galaxy S 4 specs. Qualcomm has confirmed what we have previously reported, which is the GS 4 will be rolling out with its impressive Snapdragon 600 chip in select regions on April 26. The U.S. is most likely one of those select regions.

This is welcoming news considering some reports indicated the handsets might be shipping with the still impressive, but power hungry, S4 Pro. The 600 does a much better job at handling power consumption than its predecessor, which should make those of you worried about how long the 2,600mAh will last under the GS 4′s numerous software and hardware upgrades very happy. In fact, the 600 will reportedly provide about 40 percent better battery life.

As expected, the international version will get the Exynos 5 Octa, which is built on ARM’s “big LITTLE” architecture and consists of four powerful Cortex-A15 CPUs matched by four power efficient Cortex-A7 chips.

At least we can all take comfort in the fact that Samsung is working hard to ensure the best battery-to-usage ratio possible for its S 4 users. This will be welcomed news for users that were left very disappointed by the short battery life of their stock GSIIIs. Samsung is leading the way with its hardware and software innovations, and are backing it up by developing the integrated power to handle anything you can throw at it.

Source: Qualcomm

Come comment on this article: Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Confirmed for Galaxy S 4 in Select Regions

It all started, Mike Yang says, with a conversation he had with Facebook’s vice president of technical operations in 2007 or 2008. Rather than source servers through a traditional vendor like IBM for its  data centers, Facebook turned to Quanta.

Back then, Quanta didn’t sell servers directly to customers, it only built them for traditional server vendors who then put their name on them and sold them to customers. Fast forward a few years, and a majority of Quanta’s server revenue stems from direct deals — 65 percent in 2012, and a forecasted 85 percent this year. Now, it counts other large-scale server buyers such as Rackspace and Amazon among its customers.

Yang, the man in charge of Quanta’s cloud computing business unit, beamed during an interview on Thursday as he spoke about how the company can directly offer energy-efficient and high-performance products for webscale customers and smaller ones, too. If the Taiwan-based hardware maker’s 85 percent forecase proves out, it company could become a more recognized supplier for cloud computing venues, further threatening old-line server vendors like Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

The company, with U.S. headquarters in Fremont, Calif., didn’t show projections of server revenues in dollars or server shipments in total but said it shipped 1.2 million server motherboards in 2012 and plans to ship at least 10 percent more — 1.32 million motherboards — this year.

Quanta appears to be on a roll with Quanta-brand direct server sales growth. At the same time as it’s doing custom jobs for webscale customers, it’s also promoting direct sales of other gear, including off-the-shelf storage and network appliances, to smaller customers through a subsidiary Quanta established last year, Quanta QCT.

The company has a few strategies in mind for shifting from an original-design manufacturer to a name brand in its own right, at least in servers. It sees full racks of equipment, under the Rackgo name, as a major seller this year. The Rackgo offering, which includes compute, storage and network appliances, can appeal to customers because there’s simply one company to go to when problems arise, Yang said.

And then, of course, there’s the Open Compute Project — the Facebook-led open-source hardware initiative that kicked off Quanta’s evolution as a direct server vendor. Quanta will come out with multiple products based on Open Compute specifications later this year, although exact timelines weren’t immediately available.

Next month, the company will open an office in Seattle in order to be closer to customers. It counts Seattle-based Amazon as a customer, and Yang said Quanta has other customers in the area, although he declined to name them. Microsoft, which is building huge data center capacity for Windows Azure and its Live offerings, is a short drive from Seattle, in Redmond, Wash., and Seattle is much closer to Quincy, Wash., a hotbed of data centers, than is the Fremont office. Quanta will add more U.S. offices for sales and service this year, Yang said.

Quanta is also opening up to the press, rather than silently working behind the scenes. That campaign started last year.

The company’s business model has undergone a sea change. If the upward trajectory keeps up and the server-market dynamics keep shifting in its favor, Quanta could become one of the stalwart name brands of IT technology.

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There are plenty of tools around to check your PC for missing updates, but most have significant issues. Soft4Boost Update Checker is good at detecting updates, for instance, but it won’t download or install them – that’s left up to you.

OUTDATEfighter (from the makers of SPAMfighter) is a little more ambitious. Not only will it find updates, but it can also download and install them for you. There’s a Windows update checker as well. And the program is free, so there are no annoying omissions and you’re not forever being nagged to “upgrade”.

Getting started is simple enough: launch the program, click “Scan for Program Updates” and it’ll examine your installed applications, compare their installed versions against a central list, and produce a report listing available updates.

Installing all these updates is as easy as checking the Name box, and clicking “Update Selected Software”. OUTDATEfighter then downloads the various files and launches them for you. These won’t be silent installations — you’ll have to work through each setup program, just as normal – but overall you should still save plenty of time.

If you want more control over your updates, it’s also possible to select particular files from the list. And if OUTDATEfighter can’t download an installer itself, or you need to keep the file to use elsewhere, then the program also provides a direct link to the official download page (click the “Information” icon, and click “Link”).

Elsewhere, an Uninstall tab lists your installed applications and can launch their uninstaller with a click.

An “Update Windows” tab seems to be an equivalent to the regular Windows Update tool, listing “Important” and “Optional” updates and installing whatever you select.

And there are a few useful configuration options, including an “Ignore List” which tells OUTDATEfighter to ignore particular programs which you’d rather manage yourself.

In our tests, OUTDATEfighter detected only an average number of updates. And for some reason it couldn’t install a Chrome update; we tried repeatedly, but each time were told “Download failed: try again”. Maybe it was a temporary issue, or something related just to our setup, but there was no way to tell.

We had issues with the “Update Windows” module, too. The regular Windows Update tool said our test PC required only one “Important Update”, but OUTDATEfighter listed eight, most of which weren’t important at all (a fax tool for our all-in-one printer, for instance). Not only does this increase the chance that you’ll install files you wouldn’t otherwise have touched, but it also makes it harder to spot the worthwhile updates amongst the rest.

This isn’t necessarily a critical problem. The ability to batch download all your available updates is very convenient, and we’d certainly recommend giving OUTDATEfighter a try, just to see what the program can do for you.

We would also recommend you leave the Update Windows function alone, though. Or at least check what each update does before you agree to install it.

Photo Credit: ARENA Creative/Shutterstock

Two days ago, at the Unpacked event held in New York, with much fanfare, South Korean manufacturer Samsung unveiled the new Galaxy S4. As we have come to expect, the company mostly focused on the added software benefits rather than showcasing the hardware underneath, leaving folks puzzled as to what powers the new Android flagship.

Samsung revealed two processor choices for the Galaxy S4 — quad-core or octa-core solution depending on the market. Considering the scarcity of octa-core processors coming from high-end chip makers, the Exynos 5 Octa, which is scheduled for production in Q2 represents one-half of the equation. And, as Qualcomm has announced, the Snapdragon 600 represents the other half.

The Snapdragon 600, which Qualcomm announced during Consumer Electronics Show 2013, powers other Android flagships including the LG Optimus G Pro and HTC One. On Galaxy S IV, the Snapdragon 600 processor features a 1.9 GHz quad-core Krait CPU; Adreno 320 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit); 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM and support for LTE Category 3 connectivity, which delivers download speeds up to 100 Mbps and upload speeds up to 50 Mbps.

With the Galaxy S III, Samsung chose the Qualcomm-made processor for North America and other markets where 4G LTE adoption rates are high, while the Exynos-branded processor is (still) for the most part reserved for 3G networks. And, judging by its older brother’s path, the Galaxy S4 is unlikely to be any different.

Redbox, in partnership with Verizon, has been gearing up its Instant service and finally launched today in the US. For $8 per month, customers can get unlimited movie streaming and four one-night DVD rentals every month. Redbox and Verizon announced a joint venture to launch Instant back in February of 2012. Users will be able to stream content via iOS, Android, Xbox 360, Samsung connected TVs or Blu-ray players, and Mac or PC. Redbox Instant does have some catching up to do in terms of streaming titles. Major competitor Netflix currently has around 14,000 streamable titles available in the US while Redbox Instant only has around 4,600 titles. However, Instant’s four one-night DVD rentals included in the $8 monthly subscription, may be enough to attract people.

Source: Redbox Instant by Verizon

Come comment on this article: Netflix Rival Redbox Instant Launches In The US

It’s not a huge surprise that Google is dropping Google Reader, the blog reader it operated since 2005. After all, they’d let it go for some time now (not that I’m complaining – it was after all, a free service, a fine product, and a boon for the overall ecosystem of blogging, podcasts and RSS).

The reality, though, is that Google operates at vast scale, and a niche consumer product like Reader just doesn’t move the needle. As crazy as it may sound, today even a billion-dollar business is simply a distraction to Google (unless, of course, it’s well on the way to becoming a five-billion-dollar business).

So all those who are signing petitions to Google  (and even one to The White House!) are missing the bigger point: that this is a victim of the company’s DNA, one that’s accelerated under Larry Page’s management. Some companies specialize in keeping the status quo, others specialize in moving forward. Google is the latter. If the company maintained every niche product with N thousand fans, even paying ones, it’d become the very bungling bureaucracy we love to hate. For a company with Google’s ethos and standing, any such dead-end, non-revenue-producing product that’s retained is holding others back, and prevents the company from moving forward and making true innovations instead of incremental improvements.

Open standards just a means to an end

While Google is giving up on Reader, I believe the company will still embrace subscriptions in a big way, just without RSS (by which I mean RSS, Atom, PubSubHubbub, etc.) Sure, they may continue to lean on RSS as part of their technical infrastructure – e.g. Googlebot will still be crawling external RSS feeds to identify fresh content – but users won’t see those three letters or the shiny feed icon that accompanies them.

To understand why Google’s walking away from RSS, look at Google’s relationship with open standards over the past decade. Google has experimented with various open technologies and found it difficult to win over Google-scale audiences and developers. The list of casualties would include OpenSocial (present in Orkut but not Plus), Activity Streams (present in Buzz, but not Plus, though certainly an inspiration), Social Graph API (no longer available) and RSS (not just Reader, but Feedburner is fading out and podcast app Listen was killed months ago).

Furthermore, Android has been a stonking success for the company, and while it may be open source, with a relatively open store policy, it’s not particularly based on open standards in the way that ChromeOS, WebOS, and now Firefox OS are.

So overall, Google’s lesson has been to lead with a compelling user experience first and then build an API from there, an API which may be based on open standards, but only if it’s a means to an end. Developers are much more attracted to a big market than a glorious proclamation of Open. It’s this philosophy that explains why Google has been so cautious with the Google Plus API.

Doubling down on media

Google isn’t giving up on blogs and media. Far from it. They already have Google News, Google Currents, and Google Now. And on Plus, they have vibrant product pages and communities. The Economist, Time, and ESPN all have over 2 million followers, for example.

This comes at a time when Facebook has been facing a backlash from journalists, with people saying that unless you’re paying for sponsored posts, it doesn’t show up in streams. Facebook’s recent design aims to fix this with a separate Subscriptions area, but as discussed on this week’s TWIT, it’s looking more like they experimented with subscriptions, that it wasn’t core to their business of connecting individuals, and now it’s off to the side.

So Google has an opportunity to win over media brands right now, and I believe they’ll be placing an emphasis on this in their own apps like Currents, as well as on Google Plus proper. In many respects, Currents is exactly what you’d expect from Google in 2013. It’s pretty, mobile-native, and “just works” without anyone having to learn the details of RSS.

Looking further ahead, Google has a vision heavily influenced by machine learning. The company has long known that the best search is the one you didn’t have to make, and this always-on attitude is now coming to fruition with Google Now. Google Now anticipates what users might be interested in at any time, and that includes the kind of articles people might presently be discovering on Google Plus.

Reader’s demise is understandably a sad moment for many, but I believe in time, it will be a positive for the overall ecosystem. Google simply wasn’t innovating on Reader, and as people shift over to services like Feedly or Newsblur (and new ones are popping up as I write), those companies will have extra incentive to innovate and extra resources to do so. Meanwhile, Google will continue to work on what it does best: boiling oceans and shooting for the moon.

Michael Mahemoff previously worked at Google and is founder of cloud podcasting service player.fm. Follow him on Twitter @mahemoff.

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I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted the impact the original Volkswagen Beetle would have on the automotive world and pop-culture. It’s an icon that spans the globe and is loved by just about everyone. Like Harley-Davidson motorcycles, these little machines are customizable to no-end allowing their owners to personalize each and every inch of them. Recently the Second California Volks Brothers meeting took place and thankfully for us, they filmed it!

Source: chromjuwelen.com