The worm is spreading through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without current security updates.

The malicious program – also known as Downadup or Kido – was first discovered in October 2008.

Although the spread of the worm appears to be levelling off, there are fears someone could easily take control of any and all of the 9.5m infected PCs.

Speaking to the BBC, F-Secure’s chief research officer, Mikko Hypponen, said there was still a real risk to users.

“Total infections appear to be peaking. That said, a full count is hard, because we also don’t know how many machines are being cleaned. But we estimate there are still more than 9m infected PCs world wide.

“It is scary thinking about how much control they [a hacker] could have over all these computers. They would have access to millions of machines with full administrator rights.

“But they haven’t done that yet, maybe they’re scared. That’s good news. But there is also the scenario that someone else figures out how to activate this worm. That is a worrying prospect.”

Experts say users should have up-to-date anti-virus software and install Microsoft’s MS08-067 patch. The patch is known as KB958644.

Speaking to the BBC, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with anti-virus firm Sophos, said the outbreak was of a scale they had not seen for some time.

“Microsoft did a good job of updating people’s home computers, but the virus continues to infect business who have ignored the patch update.

“A shortage of IT staff during the holiday break didn’t help and rolling out a patch over a large number of computers isn’t easy.

“What’s more, if your users are using weak passwords – 12345, QWERTY, etc – then the virus can crack them in short order,” he added.

“But as the virus can be spread with USB memory sticks, even having the Windows patch won’t keep you safe. You need anti-virus software for that.”

Method
According to Microsoft, the worm works by searching for a Windows executable file called “services.exe” and then becomes part of that code.

It then copies itself into the Windows system folder as a random file of a type known as a “dll”. It gives itself a 5-8 character name, such as piftoc.dll, and then modifies the Registry, which lists key Windows settings, to run the infected dll file as a service.

Once the worm is up and running, it creates an HTTP server, resets a machine’s System Restore point (making it far harder to recover the infected system) and then downloads files from the hacker’s web site.

Most malware uses one of a handful of sites to download files from, making them fairly easy to locate, target, and shut down.

But Conficker does things differently.

Anti-virus firm F-Secure says that the worm uses a complicated algorithm to generate hundreds of different domain names every day, such as mphtfrxs.net, imctaef.cc, and hcweu.org. Only one of these will actually be the site used to download the hackers’ files. On the face of it, tracing this one site is almost impossible.

Variant
Speaking to the BBC, Kaspersky Lab’s security analyst Eddy Willems said that a new strain of the worm was complicating matters.

“There was a new variant released less than two weeks ago and that’s the one causing most of the problems,” said Mr Willems

“The replication methods are quite good. It’s using multiple mechanisms, including USB sticks, so if someone got an infection from one company and then takes his USB stick to another firm, it could infect that network too. It also downloads lots of content and creating new variants though this mechanism.

“Of course, the real problem is that people haven’t patched their software,” he added.

Microsoft says that the malware has infected computers in many different parts of the world, with machines in China, Brazil, Russia, and India having the highest number of victims.

Original URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7832652.stm
Image: Sci-Tech Today

The full list is below.

1. Nintendo Wii: 2,056,866 related items sold
2. Microsoft Xbox360: 1,297,903 related items sold
3. Sony PSP: 350,591 related items sold
4. iPod Touch: 281,361 related items sold
5. Nintendo Wii Fit: 266,584 related items sold
6. Apple iPhone 3G: 212,837 related items sold
7. BlackBerry Pearl: 207,688 related items sold
8. BlackBerry Curve: 193,788 related items sold
9. Sony Playstation 3: 103,333 related items sold
10. Guitar Hero III: 98,159 related items sold
11. Halo 3: 91,067 related items sold
12. Grand Theft Auto IV: 43,005 related items sold
13. MacBook Air: 12,423 related items sold
14. Guitar Hero Aerosmith: 3,749 related items sold
15. Rock Band 2’s: 1,650 related items sold

Original URL: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/08/wii-reigns-supreme-on-ebay-2008-top-gadget-list/

But, on Friday, Verizon Wireless and Research in Motion, the BlackBerry’s maker, will do the unthinkable: They will introduce a BlackBerry model without a physical keyboard, one where typing and navigating require tapping on glass, just as users do on the iPhone. This new model is called the BlackBerry Storm, and will sell for $250 with a two-year contract, though a $50 mail-in rebate can bring the price down close to the $199 that Apple charges for the base model of the iPhone.

Despite its lack of a keyboard, the Storm is a real BlackBerry in every other respect, with push email, corporate features and the familiar BlackBerry menus. In many respects, the Storm is a touch-based, large-screen version of the recently released BlackBerry Bold, which is the most polished version of a traditional BlackBerry. It is also the latest member of the new class of hand-held computers, the super-smart phone category kicked off by the iPhone last year and joined by the Google G1 earlier this year.

The Storm sports a large, high-resolution touch screen that fills most of its surface and automatically switches from portrait to landscape mode when the phone is turned. There’s also a forthcoming souped-up download store for third-party software, meant to be similar to the ones on the iPhone and the Google phone. And the Storm can even be used in European and other countries where most Verizon phones don’t work.

However, the biggest innovation in the Storm is a clever feature RIM hopes will give it a big advantage over the iPhone. When you strike a key or icon on the Storm’s screen, you feel a physical sensation, as if you were pressing down on a real key or button. That’s because you are, in fact, pressing a real button. The entire glass display is one large button, mounted on a mechanical substructure that allows it to be depressed when pressure is applied.

The idea behind this feature is to make typing on glass feel much more like typing on a real keyboard, and thus to make the virtual keyboard, and the touch interface, more acceptable to people used to physical keyboards and buttons. This push-down screen also replaces the side-mounted scroll wheel or track ball on other BlackBerrys for activating menu choices and icons.

But, in my tests, this physical feedback feature, which RIM calls SurePress, didn’t magically turn the Storm’s touch interface and virtual keyboard into their physical counterparts. The feature does provide a more reassuring confirmation that a key has been struck or an icon has been clicked than the mere visual feedback one receives from the iPhone. But neither I, nor any of the several BlackBerry addicts I asked to try it out, considered typing on the Storm’s keyboard to be very similar to using the keyboard of a traditional full-sized BlackBerry.

In my opinion, using the Storm’s keyboard is much more like using the iPhone’s keyboard than a traditional BlackBerry’s. I found that I could type quite well on the Storm after awhile, but that a greater adjustment, and more practice, were required than with a physical keyboard.

The Storm also has a keyboard oddity that I found annoying, and that may put off others. It presents you with a full virtual keyboard only when you are holding it horizontally. When you hold the Storm vertically, you get a mashed-up keyboard, like the one on the narrower BlackBerry Pearl, which has multiple letters on each key. This keyboard design relies on software to guess which letter you meant to press. You can also switch to a virtual cellphone-style keypad that requires you to hit each key multiple times.

This is a curious design decision. Once a company ditches a physical keyboard for a virtual one, it can create all kinds of keyboard variations. RIM could have offered a full, vertically oriented keyboard, even if it would have had smaller, more closely spaced keys.

RIM also failed to customize the Storm’s virtual keyboard for some common, specific tasks. For instance, on the iPhone, when you are typing in a Web address in the browser, the keyboard morphs to offer a convenient key that automatically enters “.com”. Not so on the Storm.

There’s another glaring deficit in the Storm: It lacks Wi-Fi capability. This means that, unlike on the Bold, the iPhone or the Google G1, if high-speed cellphone data service is absent or pokey, you can’t fall back on speedy Wi-Fi connections in public places. And, at home or in the office, you can’t take advantage of Wi-Fi connections that are often much faster than cellphone data networks.

The Storm has some important advantages over the iPhone. Its screen, while 7% smaller physically, offers about 13% higher resolution. Photos and videos look beautiful on it. It has much better battery life for phone calls than either the iPhone or the Google G1. While the latter two phones deliver just under their claimed five hours of talk time, in my tests, the Storm lasted a bit over six hours, which is actually half an hour more than its claimed 5.5 hours of talk time. And the Storm has a removable battery, unlike its Apple rival.

This new BlackBerry comes with more memory than the similarly priced base model of the iPhone — nine gigabytes versus eight gigabytes. And, unlike the iPhone’s memory, the Storm’s is expandable, via larger flash cards.

The Storm’s camera is much better than the iPhone’s, at 3.2 megapixels, versus just 2 megapixels for the Apple device. It also has zoom and flash, features the iPhone’s camera lacks. And, unlike the iPhone or the Google G1, the Storm can record videos. In my tests, all of these camera features worked well.

Also, the Storm has copy and paste functionality; MMS (a service for sending photos directly to other phones without using email); voice dialing; and the ability to act as a modem for your laptop. It also allows you to edit, and not just to view, Microsoft Office documents. All of these features are missing from the iPhone out of the box.

The Storm also has a better speaker than the iPhone, and a noise-canceling microphone system. Phone calls, even on speaker phone, were crisp, clear and plenty loud. Physically, the Storm is attractive but hardly svelte. While it’s about the same length and width as the iPhone, it is 15% thicker and 17% heavier — almost as heavy as the chunky G1.

The Verizon high-speed network on which the Storm runs is older and better-established than either the T-Mobile high-speed system the G1 uses or the AT&T 3G network used by the current iPhone. Where Verizon’s high-speed data coverage is strong, the Storm flies.

But, because it lacks Wi-Fi, the Storm can be much slower at Web access than its main competitors. I tested these Web speeds in two hotels in Silicon Valley. In the first, where Verizon reception was strong, the Storm trounced the iPhone on cellphone data speeds, averaging over 800 kilobits per second to the iPhone’s 621 kbps over AT&T. But, when I switched the iPhone to use the hotel’s Wi-Fi network, it beat the Storm by 100 kbps or so.

At the second hotel, barely a mile away, the Storm’s lack of Wi-Fi hurt much more. There, Verizon’s signal was poor, and data speeds on the Storm averaged a horrible 96 kbps. But the iPhone on AT&T averaged 459 kbps, and on Wi-Fi the iPhone averaged 785 kbps.

My test Storm, which was a near-final model missing only a few minor software tweaks, was also sluggish at some tasks. It took noticeably longer than the iPhone to flip the first photo from landscape to portrait orientation, or to start the process of flipping through a series of photos by swiping them with a finger. And some other tasks were also slow. It’s possible that production models will be quicker.

BlackBerry Storm’s touch screen switches from portrait to landscape mode when turned, and aims to make typing on glass feel more like typing on a real keyboard.

Rim has tweaked the familiar BlackBerry user interface for the touch screen, and in general these changes worked well. You select the menu item or icon you want with a light touch, then press down on the screen to activate or confirm your choice. There are even a couple of cool new touch features. For instance, in a list of emails, if you lightly touch and hold one entry, the Storm shows you all messages in that thread.

But this combination of a light touch followed by a hard press on the large screen took some practice, just like typing did. It befuddled several BlackBerry veterans at first.

And some common tasks took more steps than on the iPhone. For instance, emailing a link from a Web page required four steps on the Storm, versus two on the Apple device. The Storm’s email system will be familiar to every BlackBerry user. It has the same corporate email features as other BlackBerrys, and I was easily able as well to use a BlackBerry Internet email account and to set up several personal email accounts, including Gmail.

The Web browser is much improved over the one in older BlackBerry models, and offers multiple ways to view and navigate pages, including one in which a finger moves a cursor, just as on a PC. But I found that panning and zooming in the browser was a bit slower and more awkward than on the iPhone. And, to make some Web sites work properly, I had to dig through menus to change options.

Using the BlackBerry desktop software, I was easily able to synchronize my calendar and contact data over a cable from a Windows PC. (There’s also Mac software for the same task.) But, unlike the iPhone or the G1, the Storm doesn’t offer wireless synchronization from consumer services, only from corporate servers.

The Storm’s multimedia software isn’t as fancy as the iPhone’s, but it’s better than the G1’s, and worked very well in my tests.

Overall, the Storm is a very capable handheld computer that will appeal to BlackBerry users who have been pining for a touch-controlled device with a larger screen. And it offers yet another good option for anyone who is looking to buy one of the new, more powerful, pocket computers.

Original URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122714533895043229.html

The New Hosted Apps Service
At this time, there are only three applications available in the new hosted format:

• LimeSurvey
• MediaWiki
• phpBB

However, any existing application can now be enabled as a hosted app, too. This can be done from the new “Hosted Apps” Project Admin page, a link to which can be found under the “Admin” project navigation menu.

According to Ross Turk, director of community at SourceForge, “developers can be much more productive when they don’t have to worry about maintaining their infrastructure, and this new offering allows them to use the tools they know and like without the burden of maintaining them.”

Benefits Of Hosted Apps
This service was actually launched quietly a few weeks ago, as SourceForge insiders may already know. The announcement was then made via a forum posting which clued in members to the new service. But since the news only hit the mainstream channels today, we imagine this means that they’re now ready for primetime.

That earlier announcement touted several benefits to using Hosted Apps, including the following:

• Eliminates the overhead of deploying supported applications; simply opt-in and begin using the application right away. No need to deal with config files and install procedures.
• Served from a dedicated database and web server pool, separate from the project web servers — so you don’t need to cope with the security limitations of project web’s shared hosting environment, or project web’s outbound mail and connectivity restrictions.
• They maintain the application code for Hosted Apps and will deploy updates as they become available from the vendor. This should reduce the risk from vulnerabilities found in the Hosted Apps and eliminate a major administrative burden (installing updates) to projects.
• They perform regular backups of the Hosted Apps data, but also provide you the ability to easily make application backups on-demand.
• They perform application testing, tuning and monitoring to ensure Hosted Apps operate properly. If service faults occur, they respond and fix the issues. If defects are found in the application (either through our own testing or through end-user report), they will repair the defects or raise the defect to the vendor for repair.
• All Hosted Apps make use of our centralized authentication infrastructure (users login with their SourceForge.net usernames and passwords) but retain the permissions (authorization) of the application (so, for example, existing users of MediaWiki will find permissions handling exactly as they expect).
• Since this offering is centrally managed, any improvements they make either to the infrastructure or to the Hosted Apps themselves will immediately become available to all projects. The Hosted Apps offering reduces their overhead for adding major new functionality to their offering, since all applications share common integration points and common infrastructure.
• Since Hosted Apps are available under an Open Source license, this centralized service has the potential to rapidly increase the user base of Open Source applications and drive high quality feedback for the further improvement of those applications.

Original URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sourceforge_announces_hosted_apps.php

Ubuntu has achieved an unprecedented level of success in the desktop Linux market, but the distribution has been slow to gain acceptance on servers. Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu could help increase the distribution’s visibility in the Linux server market and demonstrate its viability in large-scale deployments.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that is primarily funded by donations, the organization’s technical requirements are significant. Wikimedia CTO Brion Vibber published some statistics in the slides (PDF) from his presentation at the Wikimania conference which took place in July at the new Library of Alexandria.

Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers.

In an interview with Computerworld, Vibber provided some insight into some of Wikimedia’s technical challenges and discussed the benefit of migrating the entire set of servers to a single distribution.

He says that the original Wikipedia site grew from 15 servers to 200 servers within the first 18 months. Replacing their previous mix of distributions with a consistent and uniform Ubuntu solution has simplified administration considerably for the organization. “We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing,” Vibber told Computerworld. “Everything is a million times easier.”

Canonical initially announced the availability of Ubuntu for servers in 2005 and has taken several major steps since then to boost its popularity, including a partnership with Sun and several certification initiatives for major enterprise software packages. At the Ubuntu Live conference last year, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that the company will increasingly fund server improvements and also announced Landscape, a server management tool.

Despite these efforts to push Ubuntu in the server market, Canonical has had difficulty competing with Red Hat and Novell for enterprise server marketshare. Some changing trends could, however, soon give Ubuntu an advantage. Organizations are increasingly turning toward free, community-driven Linux distributions as in-house Linux expertise becomes more accessible. During a presentation at the LinuxWorld conference earlier this year, 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman said that Ubuntu and CentOS will both gain enterprise acceptance as a result of this trend.

Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu is a reflection of the distribution’s growing strength and popularity as a server solution, but it doesn’t appear that it will translate into revenue for Canonical because Wikimedia will be maintaining its systems largely without commercial support. Now that Ubuntu is gaining traction with large-scale free deployments, the next challenge for Canonical will be getting some mindshare with enterprise adopters who are willing to sign up for support contracts.

Original URL: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081009-wikipedia-adopts-ubuntu-for-its-server-infrastructure.html

Current computers have to be fully on to receive a call, making them impractical and energy-wasters as replacements for the telephone.

The new component Intel is announcing Thursday will let computers automatically return to a normal, full-powered state when a call comes in. The computer can activate its microphone and loudspeaker to alert the user, then connect the call.

“This certainly helps the PC become a much better center of communications in the home,” said Trevor Healy, chief executive of Jajah, which will be the first Internet telephone company to utilize the feature.

The first Intel motherboards with the Remote Wake capability will be shipping in the next month, said Joe Van De Water, director of consumer product marketing for Intel.

These components, which are at the heart of every computer, will most likely be used by smaller computer manufacturers. Bigger names like Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. use their own motherboard solutions, but Intel is working to supply them with the technology as well.

The four initial Remote Wake motherboards will be for desktop computers and will need an Internet connection via Ethernet cable, as Wi-Fi doesn’t work in sleep mode.

Van De Water said the computer will know to wake up only for calls from services to which the user has subscribed, so computer-waking prank calls should be impossible.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Jajah is setting itself up as a link between Web companies and the phone system. In April, it signed a deal to become the phone service provider for Yahoo Inc.’s Messenger. Jajah intends to offer the ability to wake up computers to other instant-messaging and Internet voice services, like Google Inc.’s Talk and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Live Messenger, Healy said. It will be able to wake up subscriber computers both for calls dialed with a number and for those that are directed at a user name.

A fully on desktop PC usually consumes more than 60 watts of power, with many models ranging into the hundreds of watts. In the so-called S3 sleep state, they consume around 10 watts.

Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080814/ap_on_hi_te/tec_pc_phone_calls

Nintendo’s global president Satoru Iwata is humble enough to admit that even he had been surprised by the epidemic-like success of the Wii console.

He told BBC News: “It was so fast. We knew the Wii was the right direction for the company. But the question was always how many years it would take to find success.”

The answer was two years. In that brief time Nintendo has dramatically altered its fortunes in the home console business, while at the same time maintaining, and even improving, its dominance in the handheld gaming space with the DS.

Play time
The change of fortunes began when Mr Iwata took over as president of Nintendo in 2002, only the fourth man to hold the position since the company was founded 109 years ago.

Speaking to BBC News at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) In Los Angeles, he said: “Five years ago when I was appointed I thought that if we didn’t do anything but took the same route there would be no bright future for the entire industry.

“So we decided we needed to increase the number of people gaming.

“We started thinking about people who weren’t playing games and asked ourselves why they were not interested. And why had some people stopped playing despite playing in their youth?”

The solution was not a rush towards a high definition games platform targeted at the hard core gamer but remembering the simple pleasures of playing with family and friends.

The Wii console introduced a mass market of gamers to motion-sensitive play, replacing the button-laden controller with a wand that could direct action with the flick of a wrist.

Within weeks of the Wii’s launch people were taking their new console around to the homes of friends and family, and word of mouth quickly spread.

“It was so fast because those who appreciated the new attractions of Wii must have been those who used to play video games. And these people were telling friends and family about the console.

“People who first started playing with the Wii were so excited that they had to spread the news.”

History lesson
The success came after the perceived disappointment of the GameCube, which finished its lifespan behind the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in terms of global sales, selling 22 million units over seven years.

Nintendo had tried to compete directly with Microsoft and Sony and failed.
Its resulting and ultimately successful move was to realise that the market of people who could play games but were not was much bigger than the market of those already playing games on a regular basis.

“It was somewhat out of the boundaries of common sense for the time,” said Mr Iwata.

“From the perspective of people from outside the industry it might have looked like a gamble. But I do not think it was a gamble at all.”

One of the original criticisms of the Wii at launch was that the underpowered machine would increasingly suffer in comparison to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as the machines went through their lifecycle.

But Mr Iwata dismissed talk of a console lifespan as nonsense and somewhat irrelevant.

“After all, the primary concern is not to let consumers purchase hardware but to enjoy software,” he said.

Future fun
But that did not mean Nintendo was not already thinking about life beyond the Wii.

“However hard our software developers try to create new and unprecedented titles with great ideas eventually there will be a day when devs will say they have no more means with that hardware.

“That’s exactly the time we need to introduce people to new hardware. We do want to be flexible about this,” he said.

“We just don’t want to decide upon a fixed lifecycle of any platform.”

Addressing another criticism of the Wii, Mr Iwata said it was a “misunderstanding and misconception” to say that the console was struggling to attract support from developers outside of Nintendo.

“The number of third-party titles for Wii is actually more than what is available for other platforms.

“And in the initial launch platform period for any platform, the third-party software titles for Wii are outselling any of the third-party titles for other platforms.”

Nintendo remains the home for some of gaming’s most enduring franchises and icons, from Mario to Zelda and the success of the Wii has ensured they will remain part of the landscape for some time to come.

But there were no details of any new Mario or Zelda titles given at the recent press conference held by Nintendo to highlight its plans for the months ahead.

“At this E3 we had to focus on software for the mass audience and software that will be sold in this year or next.

“This one of the rare opportunities to reach out to mass audiences around the world.

“In order for us to create a new Super Mario game or Legend of Zelda game that can cater to the strong demands of core gamers around the world it takes two to three years.”

While its competitors battle to become the multimedia hub for the digital living room Nintendo is determined to continue on its course of “putting smiles on people’s faces”.

He said: “All we have got to do is carry on. People are going to get tired of new proposals. We have to offer them new proposals before they do.

“We really want to keep surprising people,” he said, then added: “It’s not easy at all.”

Original URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/7511215.stm

Hitachi says the new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent compared with last year’s model. Fewer platters should also mean improved reliability, acoustics, and seek times. The Deskstar 7K1000.B also matches Samsung’s Spinpoint F1, which was the first three-disk drive to offer 1TB of capacity.

While desktops go missing at a much slower rate than laptops, that didn’t deter Hitachi from offering Bulk Data Encryption on the Deskstar 7K1000.B. This feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and decrypts when it’s retrieved. This hard drive-level security is superior to software or system-level security measures, and it has no impact on system performance.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B will sell for $239 when it starts shipping later this month. Hitachi will also ship the Deskstar E7K1000 this month for $279, an enterprise version of the drive designed for low-duty-cycle, 24×7 applications.

Original URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9986194-7.html

Nokia’s service, which will officially launch in the second half of this year, is called Comes With Music. It will be built into certain Nokia handsets and will allow customers to download unlimited amounts of music from participating labels. The downloaded music can be kept on a PC or mobile-phone forever. In theory, a consumer could download every single song from the labels’ catalogs; they’d simply need a very big hard drive on which to store the files. Nokia and its partners have not disclosed pricing for the service, but they believe it has plenty of potential. “We believe this will be a significant contributor of revenue over a long-term basis for Nokia,” says Liz Schimel, global head of music for Nokia.

(Almost) All Aboard
The record labels seem to be buying that argument. Universal Music Group in December signed up with Nokia, and Sony BMG Music Entertainment partnered with the service in April. A spokesperson for EMI Group, the sole major label yet to join, says the company is talking with Nokia, although no deal has been reached. Nokia says it is in talks with independent labels as well.

For the music industry, the Nokia venture represents a departure from the old ways of doing business. Susan Kevorkian, program director of consumer markets at research firm IDC, says there is “broader experimentation” as CD sales decline and music revenues slide overall. For record companies, it may make sense to look for new ways to sell the work of their artists. Ringtones, for example, have become a multibillion-dollar business in only a few years. “We have a long-term sustainable business for Nokia, the music industry, and the artists,” says Schimel.

It’s hard to evaluate the service before pricing and other specifics are known. Nokia remained tight-lipped about the details of Comes With Music as it unveiled the Warner Music partnership. But Apple has said that it makes little money on music sales through its iTunes store, instead generating profits from sales of iPods and other hardware. Will the music business for Nokia and its partners also be of marginal financial benefit? Schimel says such comparisons are off-base. “We feel it is apples and oranges,” she says. “We are offering a structure that will attract new customers and new revenues.”

Will It Pay?
Some analysts are skeptical that Comes With Music will help Nokia attract new customers for its mobile phones. James McQuivey, a principle analyst at Forrester Research says, “There won’t be the same rush to buy Nokia phones” as there is for iPhones. Apple is expected to sell 10 million iPhones by yearend. McQuivey guesses that at most Nokia could sell between 2 million and 4 million handsets in the year following Comes With Music’s launch. The amount of revenue the company earns from downloads will depend on how much Nokia intends to charge consumers. But it is sure to be insignificant at a company that made $10.6 billion last year on sales of $75 billion.

IDC’s Kevorkian sees this as part of a bigger move by Nokia and the music industry. “It is a slim revenue margin, but it makes sense as part of a volume play for Nokia, who is in the midst of transition,” she says. Kevorkian sees Comes With Music as fitting into Nokia’s Ovi service, a broad effort to sell services to mobile-phone users.

Still, McQuivey thinks Nokia and its partners may find few takers for the new music service. He argues that music enthusiasts won’t be satisfied with a phone that’s merely adequate for listening to tunes, while other people won’t be willing to pay money for such music services. He says it’s a lot like digital cameras. Some people use their phone as a digital camera, but people taking lots of photos will generally purchase a separate, higher-quality digital camera. “It’s a mismatch in market opportunity,” says McQuivey.

Original URL: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2008/tc2008071_969873.htm

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines.”

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/technology/09petaflops.html