thescenery.org

Balducci also points out that about one-third of products that break and that are under extended warranties don’t get the coverage they deserve since the consumer has lost the paperwork or forgotten that a product is covered. With GreenUmbrella, the single plan should increase the redemption rate–and hopefully improve customer satisfaction.

To get a new purchase into the system, all you have to do is go online and enter the info about it. You don’t need your receipts to register a product, but you will when you file a claim.

In the service’s favor–and this is a big deal–GreenUmbrella is a predictable and reasonable service if you ever expect any of your devices to break down during their first years. The plan, at $120 a year, could easily pay for itself if a major appliance like a refrigerator or laptop fails during its term.

Repairs are handled by The Warranty Group,Cubic Zirconia jewelry, which maintains a network of certified repair shops for consumer goods. When you call in with a claim, ultimately you’ll be routed to one of their providers for the repair or replacement of your item.

But for the most part, the GreenUmbrella plan only covers products during their most healthy period–the two-plus years that fall between the product’s in-warranty infancy (when it is most likely to fail), and its slip into creaky senescence when it’s more likely to suffer wear-related problems or become obsolete. It’s when you are most likely to need the plan that your products will not be eligible for its services.

The cool thing with GreenUmbrella is that if you are on the plan, you can just say, “No, thanks” when the drone at Best Buy tries to push the extended warranty on you. The GreenUmbrella program covers repairs to your computers, game consoles, cameras, refrigerators, TVs, air conditioners, etc. Anything less than $5,000 is eligible, and is covered for three years from purchase date.

GreenUmbrella GM Mike Balducci admits that “you do have a stigma associated with the extended warranty,” although he believes it’s due to the typical, pushy retail sales process. He has a point. Consumers are vulnerable during the extended warranty “sales minute” that comes during checkout, and they resent the hard sell, even if they later end up saving a bundle because they have a plan. It is precisely these sales minutes, though, that GreenUmbrella will be battling. Expect retailers to come up with reasons for consumers to buy their extended warranties anyway.

(Credit:
GreenUmbrella)

There are limitations, however. The service does not cover accidental breakage, doesn’t cover your mobile phone, and doesn’t cover products more than 3 years old. Also, keep in mind that all new products come with their own warranties. If you have a device that fails during the period of the warranty that comes with the product, GreenUmbrella might help a bit by offering a smoother experience through its service bureau, or by covering,Pearl Jewelry, perhaps, consumable parts (like a projector bulb) on a repair for a product whose native warranty only covers malfunctions.

You can put a product on your warranty plan after you’ve purchased it.

There’s a new self-serve extended warranty program for consumer goods launching Saturday night: GreenUmbrella. Unlike the typical extended warranties you may get when you buy products, this is an umbrella plan: $9.95 a month covers nearly everything you own. It’s a good deal when compared with other extended warranties, although that’s not saying much.

Clearly, extended warranties are a gamble, and the odds are on the provider’s side, not yours. That’s why they’re pushed so hard at retail (though not, we should note,OMEGA Watches, at Costco): they’re nearly pure profit for the seller. But if you spend a few thousand a year on electronics or appliances, this plan will provide peace of mind for a reasonable, and for a very small premium over your cash outlay.

And here the Macalope thought the only unwashed masses on the Internet who stoop to foul language and loutish comments were those cultish Mac zealots.

Not only is Vista crap but so is the company.

Oh, wait. Those are XP users.

Vista is bloated, expensive and buggy as hell.

vista is sh*t.

Vista is a pointless waste of processing power and space.

Boy, those
Mac users sure are shrill with their knee-jerk vitriolic hate of Vista, aren’t they?

Really MS needs to can that sh*t.

“Twitter’s not going to change the world. Twitter’s never, ever going to change the world,” says Loren Feldman in a recent video post.

Back to Loren’s main point, anyone who has followed the incessant bleating about Twitter’s supposedly existential meaning to our lives–let alone the silly debate over Twitter versus FriendFeed–has to wonder whether tech’s chattering class has lost its sense of perspective. Are we guilty of navel gazing to the point of silliness? (David Risley has a different take on the topic.)

For that matter, Loren could have extended his critique to the equally inane holy wars that periodically erupt between a familiar cast of bloggers. The squabbles would bore the other 99.9 percent of humanity to tears–that is, if they ever bothered to tune in. Happily, they’ve got lives to live.

Amen, bro.

(Credit:
1938 media)

I think Tech’s Last Angry Man–actually, he’s a very nice guy in person–is on to something important. Of course, Feldman’s cri de coeur is less about Twitter, per se, than about the increasingly banal state of tech “conversation,” circa summer 2008.

Loren says that he’s become bored by most of the debate churned out in the echo chamber. Chalk up part of this to the inevitable warp and woof of techdom. Great breakthroughs occur at irregular intervals, and you run across inevitable intellectual dry patches. (You don’t invent something like the World Wide Web each year.) But I part company with Loren here. Actually, I think we’re living through one of the more interesting times in recent years, what with the advent of cloud computing and the move, in fits and starts, toward a more intelligent Web. But that’s debate for another time.

Loren Feldman: Not buying the BS

Compared with the fastest industry benchmarked hard disk drive system, Quicksilver not only improved performance by 250 percent but did this in less than one-twentieth of the response time, one-fifth of the floor space, and with 55 percent of the power and cooling requirements, IBM said.

“Performance improvements of this magnitude can have profound implications for business, allowing two to three times the work to complete in a given time frame for classic workloads,” the company said in a statement.

IBM’s said its first implementation of solid-state drives was for select IBM BladeCenter servers in June of last year.

“It’s feasible that we could get it commercialized within 12 months,” said Charlie Andrews, director of product marketing for IBM systems storage. “Right now we have a screaming (fast) system, but there’s more work to be done in terms of long-term reliability and integration with systems applications. We don’t want to get distracted with ‘push the hardware.’ We want to focus on the solution piece first,” he said.

High-performance enterprise storage is where IBM comes in. Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden Research Center in California have demonstrated performance results that outperform the world’s fastest disk storage solution by more than 250 percent, according to IBM.

First it was Intel. Now, Big Blue is keen on solid-state drives.

Under the rubric Project Quicksilver, IBM coupled solid-state drives with its storage virtualization technology to achieve a sustained data transfer rate of more than 1 million input/output per second (IOPS), with a response time of less than one millisecond in a 4.1-terabyte rack of SSD storage. SSDs are being supplied by Fusion-io.

For years, flash memory cards–the first mass-market SSDs–have been limited to digital cameras and music players like the
iPod. But SSDs are now poised to hit technological critical mass in terms of storage capacity, speed, and availability as they find their way into everything ranging from tiny netbooks to massive enterprise storage arrays.

IOPS is a crucial benchmark for large customers that process credit card information or run reservation systems, for example.

By comparison, Intel is commercially shipping SSDs (X25-E Extreme) that individually achieve random data reads of 35,000 IOPS and random writes of 3,300 IOPS. In a 3.8-terabyte storage array using 120 SSDs, Intel claims 4.2 million IOPS.

IBM said Thursday it is testing a 4-terabyte, high-speed solid-state drive array targeted at the enterprise, as the technology giant gives its imprimatur to flash-memory-based storage.

The challenge is that a whole lot of computer software has been designed to take advantage of ever-faster brains, not a computer packed full of them. It’s a particular challenge for desktop and mobile computers. On the server and supercomputing side, the notion of parallel computing has been around for some time.

“To optimize the designs and interactions of multicore processors and software, we need to start from parallel programming,” Barcelona Supercomputing Center director Mateo Valero said in a statement. “The way to deal with this multicore architecture challenge is to bring together computer architects and programming language experts.”

In the PC world, software makers have been scrambling to find new ways of thinking as Moore’s law is quickly taking the chip world into a realm where there may be dozens or hundreds of processing units, or cores, on a single chip. In its latest attempt to figure out what to do with all those cores, Microsoft said Friday it is setting up a joint research center in Barcelona with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

From a marketing perspective, multicore processors are an easy sell. Two brains are better than one. Four brains are better than two. You get the idea.

The BSC-Microsoft research center “will focus on the way microprocessors and software for the mobile and desktop market segments will be designed and interact over the next 10 years and beyond,” Microsoft said in a statement. “The advent of many- and multi-core processor computing architectures will make it possible to deliver enormous computational power on a single chip, with profound implications for the way software is developed.”

The center will look at new approaches to software design.

Brutal Legend stars Jack Black as a rock ‘n’ roll roadie who must battle demons in hell. Also lending their voices to the project are Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy Kilmeister. Brutal Legend is set to melt faces on October 13 for
Xbox 360 and
PS3.

Say what you will about Steve Jobs, but when he pulled Apple’s latest laptop out of a standard inter-office envelope I stood in awe–of both his showmanship and of the laptop’s remarkably slim design. Though the MacBook Air is not quite the thinnest laptop ever, it is among the thinnest we’ve seen (the Fujistu LifeBook Q2010 and Toshiba Portege R500 both measure 0.8 inch thick, but neither tapers to 0.16 inch like the Air).

You can get the full hands-on experience by watching my First Look video of the MacBook Air at CNET TV.

The multitouch trackpad uses gestures similar to the iPhone.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

These data can’t really convey the MacBook Air’s wow factor–thus the envelope trick. Yet even with that visual I wasn’t quite prepared for how very slender this laptop would be. When I picked it up, my mind took a few seconds to get past the incongruity of such a broad, bright 13.3-inch display in a package the weight and thickness of a Dr. Seuss hardcover.

Once I put it down and started working, I was extremely pleased with the new multitouch trackpad, which incorporates a range of gesture controls that will be familiar to
iPhone users. It’s a smart move on Apple’s part; not only are the gestures easy to learn, but they’re difficult to forget, making it far more likely that users will stick with Apple products once they’ve become used to the interface. Writers and students will be pleased as well with the MacBook Air’s keyboard, which is full size and similar to that of the standard MacBook. (It actually feels the same as the keyboard found on regular MacBooks, but I couldn’t quite be sure without a direct side-by-side comparison.) In terms of interaction, the MacBook Air is probably the first 3-pound notebook that hasn’t asked users to make some kind of compromise.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

MacBook Air: I've eaten thicker slices of pizza.

That’s not to say users won’t have to compromise at all. Everyone around me seems to have a different take on the MacBook Air’s missing features. For example, I don’t care about the optical drive but bemoan the lack of Ethernet and cellular connections, while my video team is shocked that the laptop lacks FireWire and my business-minded friends can’t believe there’s no expansion slot. But in my mind the MacBook Air is hard to beat if you’re primarily looking for an eye-catching, extremely portable laptop that’s (relatively) competitively priced.

Information about the speakers is available at thelasthope.org/speakers.php. An interactive schedule is available at thelasthope.org/matrix.

Anyone interested in security in the real world has a lot to choose from, including:

Crippling Crypto: The Debian OpenSSL Debacle
A fundamental flaw in virtualization
Malicious User Interface techniques
Intrusion Detection and Honeypots for the Home User
Hacking with Microcontrollers
Hacking the Business Traveler
Identification Card Security
Reverse Engineering Proprietary Algorithms
Hacking the TI MSP430
IPv6, the Next Generation
Penetration Testing with
Firefox
Penetration Testing Using LiveCDs
PGP vs. PKI
RFID (a talk and a large demo)
Malware with Adobe’s Flash
VoIP (in)security
VLAN Layer 2 Attacks
XSS Vectored Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

(Credit:
2600)

Think of it as the summer semester at hacking school.

The list of talks is now firm for the upcoming hacker conference, known as The Last HOPE. Organized by 2600, who you may know from their weekly radio show, Off The Hook, on WBAI-FM or their quarterly magazine, the conference will be held July 18th through the 20th at the Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown Manhattan.

Biohacking - An Overview (about modifying DNA)
Brain Hacking
Consumer Electronics Hacking
Hacking the Media
Hacking Sex
Hacking the Price of Food
Food Hacking
Hacking the Post Office

New Yorkers may be interested in “The Art of Do-Foo” talk which aims to use statistics to “quantify successes and failures with the New York City community” and “isolate the key factors that have both positively and negatively influenced the culture in our region”. There is also a talk on Privacy vs. Utility in the New York City Taxi System.

Escaping High Security Handcuffs
Design Defects in High Security Locks
Methods of Copying High Security Keys Maintaining a Locksporting Organization Safecracking Ask a Spy a Question
Strengths and Weaknesses of Physical Access Control Systems
Bug Detection (not programming errors, surveillance bugs)

Among the featured presenters are Steven Levy author of “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”
published in 1984. The book was a defining work about the hacker culture. Kevin Mitnick, arguably the most famous hacker of all, will also be a featured speaker, as will Steven Rambam, an expert on privacy, who was arrested by the FBI prior to his talk at the previous HOPE conference.

The non-computer hacking topics include:

Anyone who flies on commercial airlines may be interested in the “Bagcam” presentation by someone who put a small camera in their checked luggage to learn “exactly how TSA or the airlines managed to destroy your luggage”. Also covered, “what security measures are actually in place once your checked luggage disappears from view?” Travelers may also be interested in “Warrantless Laptop Searches at U.S. Borders”.

If getting to New York City is impractical, 2600 is planning a hacker radio station during the conference to “give additional talk and interview time to the conference’s speakers, broadcast the keynotes and other popular seminars, and offer attendees who don’t speak at the podium a chance to share their ideas.”

Voters would be interested in “Building a Better Ballot Box” and “Hacking Democracy: An In Depth Analysis of the
ES&S Voting Systems”.

If you are interested in computer hacking but don’t have a techie background, try
the presentations on “No-Tech Hacking” and “Social Engineering.”

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

The 100 scheduled talks cover not only the expected computer hacking, but many other types of hacking too.
Among the topics for computer techies are:

More cell phone operators and financial companies are jumping on the mobile financial-service bandwagon, but it remains to be seen if U.S. cell phone subscribers are even interested.

Initiatives to make bill payments and other banking tasks phone-friendly have been hyped over the past couple of years. Mobile banking is one of several new mobile services, such as music downloading and TV viewing, that have been enabled by faster 3G wireless networks.

Fertile soil in foreign lands
That said, experts see mobile banking and other mobile financial services taking off outside the United States, where access to communications infrastructure and banks is limited.

But that’s not to say that there aren’t some situations in which mobile banking would be useful. The service could be helpful for people who are traveling. Users also may appreciate getting text alerts that certain bills are due or that the overdraft protection has been accessed.

Besides the convenience factor, another reason mobile banking hasn’t take off is that there are few compelling reasons to access bank or bill-paying information on a mobile phone when most people in the U.S. have easy access to a computer. With overdraft protection, automatic bill paying, and convenient and easy access to ATM cash machines, most people don’t need up-to-the minute check balance information, nor do they need to be able to pay bills while walking around town.

“Banking has been a compelling application for consumers on the PC,” Golvin said. “But like any other Web application, it needs to find its own value proposition in the mobile world. Not everything that is popular on PCs will make it to cell phones.”

Sprint has initially partnered with four banks, BB&T, Citibank, IBC Bank, and PNC Bank, to provide the application. It plans to add other banks at a future date. And it will eventually bundle the application into some of its handsets.

Some services have already seen big success. For example, Globe Telecom in the Philippines offers Gcash, a service that enables people to use their phones to pay for things and transfer funds. Mobile operator Safaricom has been offering its M-Pesa service to subscribers in Kenya to provide money transfers. And MTN, a mobile carrier in South Africa, has also been offering a mobile-banking solution.

Other than owners of the
Apple iPhone, most mobile-phone users do not like downloading applications, Golvin said. But even if an application is preloaded on a phone, there is no guarantee that it will be used. And for carrier-specific applications, mobile operators have to strike deals with individual banking institutions.

“My prediction is that mobile banking will steadily grow in the U.S. and become just another channel that banks will offer,” said Red Gillen, a senior analyst at Celent. “But outside the U.S., especially in emerging markets, mobile payments and mobile banking make a lot of sense. And that is where I see it being most useful.”

AT&T launched a mobile-payment application made available through Firethorn, which has since been acquired by Qualcomm, in March 2007. The telecommunications giant has also been running trials with Nokia to turn cell phones into debit cards, allowing people to make purchases with their cell phones. And Verizon Wireless, which also uses Firethorn, launched its mobile-banking application in January 2008.

Not a huge shock
So it’s not a huge shock that so few mobile subscribers are banking from their phones. One of the major hurdles for mobile banking has been that most of the services have either required users to download an application onto their phones or to use a
mobile browser to navigate to a Web site formatted for a cell phone screen.

Credit card giant Visa also announced several mobile initiatives Thursday. Specifically, it plans to enable its customers to transfer money, make payments, and receive real-time account notification alerts on their Nokia phones, as well as cell phones using the
Google Android operating system. Visa also struck a mobile deal with U.S. Bank that will enable individuals to make money transfers from one Visa cardholder’s account to another.

And for the past couple of years, financial institutions and cell phone operators have been rolling out new services and applications.

Most banks participating
Most of the major U.S. banks already offer some kind of mobile-banking technology, according to market research firm Celent. And the two largest mobile operators in the States have also introduced mobile-payment and banking options.

There is a lot of opportunity for mobile financial services in the developing world, where more people are likely to have access to cell phones than they are to computers. What’s more, people in the developing world have less access to banks and money machines. And many of the vendors in other countries don’t accept credit cards or debit cards. Cell phones could end up being an important way to expand financial services for people in these regions of the world.

But despite the fact that there are many options and opportunities for cell phone subscribers to access their banking information and pay their bills on their mobile phones, the uptake for these applications and services has been pretty weak. According to Forrester Research, only about 3 percent of mobile subscribers in North America check financial accounts on their mobile phone at least once a month. This rate of adoption is lower than that of services like music downloading, which 5 percent of mobile users say they do at least once monthly.

With more than 85 percent of the U.S. population owning a cell phone and more than 47 million people banking online, it would seem like a natural fit for Americans to migrate to mobile banking. But the reality is that getting people to use their handsets for doing more than making phone calls hasn’t been easy.

“Mobile banking and bill payment has been available for a while now,” said Charles Golvin, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “But it has yet to set the world on fire.”

Sprint Nextel announced on Thursday that it will be the latest U.S. wireless carrier to offer its mobile-phone customers the ability to bank from their mobile handsets. The new MyMoneyManager service is a free downloadable application that enables cell phone subscribers to check bank balances, pay bills, and find nearby branches or ATMs from their handsets.

“Nobody is going to switch their cell phone provider because that provider has a mobile-banking deal with their bank,” Golvin said. “And vice versa, no one is going to switch their bank because their cell phone provider offers mobile banking. It’s just not a top priority.”

Even though mobile operators have seen revenue for data services go up recently, only 11 percent of cell phone users access the mobile Web at least once a month, according to Forrester Research. Only 5 percent of mobile users download music onto their cell phone at least once a month, and only 3 percent watch mobile videos on their phone.

The company said it will continue to allow Windows XP Home edition to be sold for a class of computers it calls “ultra-low-cost PCs.”

In response to a question about Windows Vista, Gates, speaking before the Inter-American Development Bank here, said: “Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version.” Referring to Windows 7, the code name for the next full release of Windows client software, Gates said: “I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways.”

Less than 24 hours ago, a Microsoft representative told CNET News.com that the company expects to ship the successor to Vista roughly three years from Vista’s January 2007 debut.

Vista, the current version of Windows, has sold well, according to Microsoft. But the operating system’s debut was marred by repeated delays and shifting feature lists. Last week, Microsoft stepped up efforts to drive adoption of Vista by businesses.

Windows 7 and its intended feature list have been the topic of speculation since Microsoft discussed some details of the new software last summer.

Unclear is whether Gates was referring to early testing of Windows 7 coming within the year, as opposed to a widespread release or debut. An early test geared toward developers would be conceivable. The company has repeatedly said that it will accelerate the development of new Windows versions, largely as a response to Vista’s roughly five year gestation period.

Microsoft on Thursday declined to extend a lifeline for Windows XP, saying that only a limited number of specialized machines will be sold with the operating system after June.

CNET News.com’s Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.

At that time, Microsoft said little except that Windows 7 will ship in consumer and business versions, and in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The company also confirmed that it is considering a subscription model to complement Windows, but did not provide specifics or a time frame.

MIAMI–Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday indicated that
Windows 7, the next major version of Windows, could come within the next year, far ahead of the development schedule previously indicated by the software maker.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Most of Gates’ speech was devoted to topics closer to home for the crowd, such as how Latin America can be more competitive.

For its part, Microsoft on Wednesday said it had reached the 10 million mark for total Xbox 360s sold in the U.S., making the Xbox 360 the first next-gen console to reach that number. Microsoft argued that that’s a milestone that historically has been met by the eventual winner of each console generation.

In its own release, Nintendo touted its success with its own games during April, according to the NPD numbers.

While it’s true that the game was only out for two days last month, it seemed as though it had driven significant sales of both the Xbox and the PS3.

NPD said that Microsoft sold 188,000 Xbox 360s in April, while Sony moved 187,100 PlayStation 3s.

According to NPD, the Wii outsold Microsoft’s
Xbox 360 and Sony’s
PlayStation 3 in April. The Wii sold 714,000 Wiis during the month, bringing its total sales in the United States since the Wii’s launch in late 2006 to 9.5 million units.

Overall, NPD’s research indicates that the video game industry is doing well. It said that there was a total of $1.23 billion in game sales in April, a 47 percent increase over the $839 million sold a year earlier. Similarly, hardware sales were up 26 percent, from $339 million in April 2007 to $426 million in April 2008.

Still, NPD said that GTA IV took two of the three top slots for software sales, with the Xbox version moving 1.85 million copies, and the PS3 version selling 1 million units.

Its Mario Kart Wii was the second best-selling game of all during the month, with 1.12 million copies sold. Overall, 6 of the top 10 best-selling games during April were Wii games.

Nintendo had earlier put out its own release citing NPD’s numbers.

Update at 3:30 p.m. PDT: This post has been modified to reflect the public release by NPD of its April video game industry sales figures.

Note: On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I’ll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South’s most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I’m doing on Twitter.

The fact that the Wii came out on top in April is notable given that the industry’s biggest event last month was the April 29 launch of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

NPD also pointed out that both the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP outsold the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The DS sold 414,800 units, and the PSP sold 192,700.

Nintendo’s
Wii was the best-selling next-generation video game console in April, research firm NPD Group said Thursday afternoon.