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Yes, but Larry Dignan pokes holes in whether that price/user experience equation will be enough to push Sun’s business forward. I want to believe that it can, but it’s true that Sun has a massive mountain to climb to make free software pay dividends.

commentary

Engadget has an interesting interview with Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz. Schwartz spends a lot of time talking about mobile, but also has this commentary on the importance of open-source software for network access…and Sun:

Unlike Microsoft and others, we actually view the success of the free software as a good thing, we are enormously pro-GPL, enormously pro free software, enormously pro the Mozilla license, the BSD license. Our view, is that we want to be known as the world’s largest contributor and commercial supporter of free and open source software…because it enables the democratization of the network — that creates more opportunity for us….I think its going to be an intersection of price and user experience that defines success.

Sun is almost unarguably the world’s largest contributor to open-source software. Now it’s time to see if that investment can be made to pay.

AMD will work with game giant Havok to tailor Havok’s game technology to AMD processors, the companies said Thursday.

Physics code has traditionally run on a CPU such as an AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processor. As part of the collaboration, Havok and AMD plan to further optimize Havok physics on AMD CPUs. Right now about 300 titles are optimized for Havok physics on the CPU, said Matt Skynner, vice president of marketing at AMD’s Graphics Products Group.

“The feedback that we consistently receive from leading game developers is that core game play simulation should be performed on CPU cores,” said David O’Meara, managing director of Havok in a statement. “Beyond core simulation, however, the capabilities of massively parallel (GPU) products offer technical possibilities for computing certain types of simulation,” he said.

And Nvidia has said that the conversion of Ageia’s physics application interface to Nvidia’s CUDA C language environment is under way. This means users will be able to get the benefits of a physics accelerator via a software download, Nvidia said.

AMD wants to take this CPU-centric approach a step further, however, and optimize certain components on the GPU, as well. “The plan is to work with them to leverage the right pieces of the physics (technology) that can be accelerated on the GPU,” Skynner said.

Havok, which Intel acquired in September of last year, provides development tools and services used by digital-media creators. Havok’s technology has been used in game titles such as BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, and has been used to create special effects in movies such as The Matrix and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Game physics brings the laws of physics–or physical-world simulation–to a game. For example, explosions may be modeled differently depending on the terrain.

The plans call for optimizing game-physics effects utilizing AMD’s multicore processors and graphics processing units, or GPUs.

AMD is chasing Nvidia, which acquired Ageia Technologies in February. Ageia’s PhysX software is widely used, with more than 140 PhysX-based games shipping or in development on Sony Playstation3, Microsoft
XBOX 360,
Nintendo Wii and gaming PCs, according to Nvidia.

“This is another step in the public negotiation between these two companies,” Clay Moran of Stanford Group Company wrote in a research note. “We believe this deal is turning friendly. But, Yahoo’s alternatives are dwindling.”

Under Regulation Fair Disclosure, Yahoo is required to disclose material information to all investors at the same time, so it filed the information with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to make it public.

Yahoo representatives declined to comment.

To Wall Street, the motivation was clearly to send a message to Microsoft.

“The company is clearly laying out a very optimistic scenario,” Ross Sandler, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a research note. “Judging by recent history, we remain skeptical of Yahoo’s ability to execute smoothly against this plan. If the overall economy and the online advertising space were in a healthier place right now, we would have more confidence. At the very least, this is a smart last-ditch effort by Yahoo management to squeeze a few more dollars out of Microsoft.”

That could all be a leap of faith, particularly in light of predictions for slower online ad sales growth because of softness in the overall economy.

Updated 5:20 p.m. PST with Alibaba looking to purchase Yahoo’s stake.

The growth estimates assume that Yahoo will see significant revenue increase from search, market share gains in display, and acceleration of international growth, he adds.

The strategy is likely to work, Sandler predicted. “We believe that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal ultimately goes through, and that today’s argument could push Microsoft to sweeten its bid to avoid a hostile takeover which may alienate Yahoo employees,” he wrote.

A snag in the Microsoft-Yahoo negotiations could be coming in Asia–The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Alibaba Group, the Chinese Internet company that Yahoo owns nearly 40 percent of, is talking to investors about buying Yahoo’s stake so it could stay independent if Microsoft acquires Yahoo. “For Microsoft, gaining Yahoo’s Asia stakes was a key attraction when it made the bid Jan. 31, an offer now valued at about $42 billion,” the report says.

Yahoo executives began a series of meetings on Tuesday with the company’s largest institutional investors and showed them a presentation detailing the company’s three-year financial projections that illustrates “the broader picture of all the assets,” says a source familiar with the matter.

Yahoo is using rosy financial projections to bolster its case with shareholders in a “last-ditch attempt” to get Microsoft to up the ante in its bid for the company, analysts say.

Mark Mahaney of Citi Investment Research also predicted that Microsoft will boost its offer. “Buying Yahoo may be Microsoft’s ONLY game-changing option in (the) Internet sector,” he wrote.

In the presentation, Yahoo reaffirms its first-quarter and full-year guidance of $1.28 billion to $1.38 billion and $5.35 billion to $5.95 billion, respectively. The company also expects to double operating cash over the next three years and projects 24 percent growth in search ads and 19 percent in display ads each year, Sandler notes.

“At the very least, this is a smart last-ditch effort by Yahoo management to squeeze a few more dollars out of Microsoft.” –Ross Sandler, analyst, RBC Capital Markets

A Colombian boy plays in a heavy rain at Juanes de la Paz park in Medellin. The downpour lasted just five minutes.

In Corinto, I saw students thrilled by the opportunity to use decade-old technology and a mayor and principal pleading for the more modern computers that could make an even greater impact. I was also struck by the teacher who helped the students with the computers–a zoologist who moved back to Corinto to help improve the education in the town where she grew up.

The military escort was not just a sign of the esteem that Ayala is held in–though the Colombian native is something of a favorite son here–but rather an indicator of the danger that remains in the area in an around Corinto. Though its just 30-some miles from Cali, the area is not far from rebel strongholds.

Though the trip into the countryside had some risk, it feels important to write about people that are trying to move forward, even as the conflict remains close to their homes. The visit was particularly powerful for me, having known someone in high school, Terry Freitas, who was later kidnapped and killed near the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

I also doubt I will forget the torrential rain that came out of nowhere as we visited the peace park in Medellin, started by well-known Latin singer Juanes, who is also from Colombia. The rain was probably the hardest I have seen in my life, but lasted just five minutes or so. A few minutes later, the kids taking tennis lessons at the park were back outside playing around.

At one point on our way there, the road was blocked by a herd of rather skinny cattle. Though on its face amusing (and definitely a Kodak moment), their presence was unsettling to even some of the Colombians in the van. Such incidents can be a diversion to initiate a kidnapping. Thankfully the cows were just cows.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

However, that painstaking process is costly, and the program often has to supplement donated computers with new parts. As a result, some say the $160 it costs to refurbish a computer may not be the best use of funds, when new machines, capable of running the latest software, can be had for around $280. It’s a fascinating debate, and I plan to describe the program and its challenges more in a post that will go up in the next day or so.

Click here to read all of the stories in The Borders of Computing series.

Even if they didn’t see the van carrying myself and Microsoft executive Orlando Ayala, it was hard to miss the 20 or so soldiers that accompanied us in a convoy.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

I also had a chance to tour the factory where workers painstakingly refurbish the computers that end up in places like Corinto. The program, Computadores para Educar (Computers for Education) refurbishes more than 20,000 computers a year. Although the machines are typically a few years old (the minimum specs are machines with Pentium II processors and 128MB of memory), a government study found that the computers the program refurbishes have roughly the same time before failing as new PCs, in part because of its rigorous process of cleaning and testing.

A herd of cattle blocks the road toward the rural village of Corinto.

CORINTO, Colombia–It was easy for the kids at the rural school to see I had arrived.

Hello to the Hero.

(Credit:
HTC)

August may be a slow month for news, but it’s not a slow period for new cell phones at the Federal Communications Commission. This week we saw a CDMA HTC Hero (Sprint, anyone?) and Whitestone, the LG GD900 Crystal, the Samsung Jalou, and the return of the Sony Ericsson Satio.

Because the FCC has to certify every phone sold in the United States, not to mention test its SAR rating, the agency’s online database offers a lot of sneak peeks to those who dig. And to save you the trouble, Crave has combed through the database for you. Here are a selection of filings from the past week on new and upcoming cell phones. Click through to read the full report.

HTC Hero

HTC Whitestone

Huawei G6610

LG BL20

LG GD900 Crystal

Motorola

Nokia N97 Mini

Nokia 7020

Samsung GT-i8320

Samsung GT-3650C

Samsung GT-S5510

Samsung SPH-i350

Sony Ericsson Jalou

Sony Ericsson J105a

Sony Ericsson J105i

Sony Ericsson Satio

On this week’s EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan and I debate whether Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader is the next iPhone.

That is a big stretch, especially given the way the
iPhone has turned the smartphone business on its head, at least from a product design standpoint. The Kindle is a nice product, and Amazon could bring music, video, and other kinds of content to the device, but it’s doesn’t have the Steve Jobs touch.

In addition, all the talk about Kindle’s skyrocketing sales doesn’t ring true. If the Kindle were on such a hot streak, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos would be talking up the sales numbers. All I know is that I keep getting huge Kindle ads in my face every time I go to Amazon.

After a few hundred times, Amazon should figure out that I am not interested in the Kindle and should show me something that I might actually buy based on my history and the recommendation engine. That would certainly be a more lucrative way to use the front door advertising space.

In the podcast, we also discuss Best Buy becoming an iPhone distributor (good for both companies and not for Wal-Mart) and Gartner’s endorsement of the iPhone as enterprise-ready. In addition, we note Dell’s latest refresh of its Latitude laptops, including a quick-start feature and a battery that can give up to 19 hours of juice.

Dear Amazon: Please stop spamming me with this advertisement when I visit your site. Show me something you know I might be interested in buying.

Will the DMP-BD50 be replaced at Cedia?

Cedia is still a couple of weeks away, but a few rumors are starting to trickle out about what will be announced at the show.

According to Blu-ray.com (which is not the official Blu-ray site), both Yamaha and Panasonic will be announcing new Blu-ray players. Yamaha will reportedly be rolling out the S2900, which will be a Profile 1.1 player and looks to only support Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio in bitstream format. There’s no price yet, but we have to imagine it will be relatively affordable given the spec sheet.

For Panasonic, the rumor is that the company will be releasing two new Blu-ray players, the DMP-BD35 and the DMP-BD55. Both of these players will be Profile 2.0-compatible, and the DMP-BD55 is adding 7.1 analog outputs and vibration-reducing isolation feet to its feature set. With that information, we imagine Panasonic will position the DMP-BD35 as the “everyman’s Blu-ray player,” while the DMP-BD55 will be targeted to home theater enthusiasts willing to pay extra for some additional bells and whistles.

While we’re not surprised that Yamaha is looking to get into the Blu-ray game, it is surprising that Panasonic would be rolling out two new players shortly after the release of the Panasonic DMP-BD50. The DMP-BD50 always seems to be in short supply at online retailers, so perhaps these new models will have expanded distribution to ramp up for the holiday season.

If the sudden rush into subnotebooks by major PC vendors is any indication, it’s worth considering whether Palm’s Foleo wasn’t such a lame idea.

Photos of a subnotebook from Hewlett-Packard, reportedly called the HP Compaq 2133, showed up on the Web recently. And another major PC vendor, Acer, is also rumored to be entering the subnotebook fray sometime soon. Neither company will confirm anything, but in the case of the HP Compaq device, an industry insider tells us the product is for real and that the company began seriously looking into the category in November 2007. When the device will come to market, however, is still a question mark.

Palm founder Jeff Hawkins (right) shows The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg the Foleo.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

But there’s likely to be even more news on this front in the next few months. So what’s the genesis of the sudden interest in this category? It’s easy to point to the Eee PC from Asus and its surprising and instant popularity. But the Eee wasn’t the first to employ the broader concept of a mobile Web device that looked like a notebook PC, but was meant to function more as a secondary device. That was the idea brought to us by Palm founder Jeff Hawkins with the Foleo.

Hawkins, who invented the Palm Pilot and the Treo, insisted the Foleo was “the best idea he’d ever had.” The product was roundly panned by critics and eventually dumped before it even came to market late last summer.

The idea of a small form factor computer that is tinier than a notebook with solid-state memory, running a light operating system, Web access for e-mail is being tweaked and advanced by some of the biggest names in computing.

It’s happening despite the fact that it’s still a vastly unproven category of computing, and previous attempts to define such a middling type of device (see: UMPC, MID) have largely failed. So what’s different?

The attraction to devices like the Eee PC, and the XO from OLPC, is partly form factor, but mostly price. At $399 for the Eee and $400 for the XO (that gets one for you and one for a kid in a developing country), they’re not necessarily functional as fully loaded primary PCs, but at those prices, you’re not going to expect it to be. More importantly though, at that price it severely undercuts notebook PC leaders HP, Acer, Dell, and Lenovo.

Not coincidentally, the impetus for HP’s experimentation in this category was its concern over the very low price tag Asus was able to stick on the Eee PC. Selling the mini-notebook at $399, even if it’s a secondary PC and runs Linux, gives it a serious chance to further chip away at the already-declining average selling prices for notebook PCs. (The 2133 from HP will have an entry level model priced at $499, and will have a Via processor, we’re told.)

But that kind of pricing also could represent a good opportunity for the HPs and Acers of the world. This type of subnotebook is aimed at a very narrow group of users, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, according to Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for The NPD Group.

The pricing shows “it’s not focused on being people’s primary computer,” he said. “Like the MacBook Air, like the Eee, like the Foleo was going to be. We tend to think of them in the context of other notebooks or portable devices, but they’re really not designed to be a primary portable device. It’s designed to be a niche product that focuses on a very specific usage model.”

But what is that usage model? There’s not even an agreed upon term for this category. Subnotebook? UMPC? Super mobile Internet device? Or as Intel is apparently ready to call it, Netbook? That definition is important to the consumer. The lack of clarity as to the purpose of the Foleo was a major reason it didn’t strike a chord with a lot of consumers.

“The tough part is, this type of product is trying to navigate narrow space between a notebook and a smartphone. It can’t compete with a smartphone in terms of price and portability, but it can outperform a smartphone,” said IDC analyst Richard Shim. “But at the opposite end of the spectrum, these OEMs don’t want to compete with notebooks directly because they don’t want to disrupt the growth engine and significantly (hasten) the decline in ASPs.”

So was the Foleo as silly as Hawkins’ harshest critics said? Maybe the execution and timing was off. Or more likely, he was on to something, but wasn’t quite able to take the idea to the next logical conclusion. In fairness to him, he did recognize at the time that the Foleo’s utility may not have been as obvious to the mass consumer as he’d hoped.

“The further out you are, the more people have trouble understanding. It’s hard to go back in time, but when we did the Pilot, there were a lot of people that thought that was a stupid idea. I mean a lot,” he told CNET News.com last year.

Maybe he’ll be vindicated–at least partially–on this one too.

Our Open Season podcast series continued with Episode 19 last week as we wallowed in my general inabilities and the fact that open source realities are starting to kick in for many people.

We were also joined briefly by RMS, Bill Gates, Nick Carr and others. It was an all-star event.

Topics:
-Apache licensing and the inability to make money
-Bill Gates’ departure
-Contest: Bill Gates or Kermit the Frog

(Credit:
Acoustic Research)

The AWD209 Wireless Headphone System complements the AWD510 that we recently reviewed, except the 209s do not offer true 5.1 surround. Instead, these headphones have two speakers in each ear cup, one of which is completely dedicated to bass output. Acoustic Research claims the phones will work up to 100 feet via the 2.4GHz transmitter and will provide uncompressed sound for up to eight hours. The AWD209 will be available in October for $150.

The ARW200 5.1 Dolby Digital headphones connect to any PC or
Mac via an open USB port and provide you with three separate speakers in each ear. The headphones also fold up in an included travel bag for 5.1 on the go. Also included is optional software should you want to save your personal treble and bass settings. Retailing for $100, the ARW200 are available now. We recently took a look at the Turtle Beach Ear Force AK-R8 and will put these two head-to-head for our review.

Look for reviews of both these headphones in coming weeks.

Acoustic Research announced two new specialty headphones models on Friday: a 5.1 USB solution and wireless headphones that offer uncompressed sound quality up to 100 feet.