Deep Tech

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems' chief executive until January, has accelerated the pace of his public communications from blogging to the even faster-twitch Twitter medium. But he's also considering slowing it down by writing a book.

"I'm thinking of writing a book about my experiences as Sun's CEO (will not be in haiku). What would you like to read about?" Schwartz asked in a tweet on Monday.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The haiku comment refers to Schwartz's parting tweet as Sun CEO, in which he blamed the economy for the fact that Sun was acquired by Oracle rather than remaining independent: "Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."

A number of suggestions for subject matter have arrived:

• "the decision and discussion and hand-wringing behind the Great Open Sourcing efforts (Java, Solaris, etc.)," from pholdings.

• "Would like to hear about boardroom discussions about research directions: any disagreements? & Thoughts on A.I.," from FriskyBoy.

• "how to balance community rules & philosophy with company duties & profitability," from danieledemauro.

• "I'd love to know 'all' about the transitional period between between Scott 'stepping' down and you taking over," from rudids.

As Sarah Palin and countless other authors have found, autobiographies are a great opportunity to present personal history in a flattering light--and Schwartz has demonstrated skills in framing debates to his advantage. If a book comes to pass, let's hope that there's a healthy dose of reality in there, too.

Mozilla wants its Firefox browser to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4--the operating system also known as Tiger that was released in 2005--but the plan is running into some resistance.

If support is indeed removed, then Firefox 3.6--the current version of the browser--would be the last one to support Mac OS X 10.4, although Mozilla would still issue updates for several months after the succeeding version of Firefox is released.

"We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X, and 10.4 support has been a hindrance," Josh Aas, one of Mozilla's Mac experts, said in a mailing list post. "We are planning to make the decision to remove 10.4 support final and remove the code from the tree. If you have any strong objections please let us know now."

There are objections, of course.

"I still have two PowerPC machine that use OS X 10.4.11...As it stands now it impractical for me update either machine due to lack of funds...So if support for 4.11 is removed then that means I will have to go to something else such a iCab, Opera, or OmniWeb rather than Firefox and you don't need to lose users," Phillip Jones said in a response, suggesting a two-track approach. "You can create one with all the fancy new stuff. Then one for us poor people that [can't] drop ($3,000) at the drop of the hat and have to hang onto older equipment out of necessity."

But his objection and some from others have not moved Mozilla members to change course thus far.

"Does this suggestion come with a donation for doubling of full-time development resources, QA [quality assurance] and testing, build and release infrastructure, and user support for this second track that would cover a shrinking minority of Firefox on Mac users?" Mozilla's Asa Dotzler asked in a post. "There are currently approximately 1.5 million people using Firefox on 10.4 and we're fully aware of that...In one year, I expect 10.4 to account for less than 5 percent of Mac OS X users and at that point it will have less prominence than Windows 98."

Supporting Mac OS X 10.4 also comes with a penalty for those who are using 10.5 and 10.6, added Mozilla programmer Boris Zbarsky. "We can significantly improve the user experience on 10.5 and especially 10.6 if we drop support for 10.4 (we're talking something like 30 percent performance improvement on 10.6, for example if I recall the numbers correctly, between the newer compiler and doing 64-bit builds," he noted.

Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, added that the decision wouldn't immediately cut off those with Tiger.

"10.4 users would still have a supported release until Firefox 3.6 was end-of-lifed, which I would expect to be at least 6 months after the trunk release of which Boris speaks," Shaver said. "They wouldn't be able to upgrade to the latest and greatest, but they would still get stability and security updates."

The sometimes-emotional debate recapitulated elements of a 2009 discussion about dropping Mac OS X 10.4 support.

Adobe Systems, evidently stung by recent criticisms of its widely used Flash Player browser plug-in, has promised better performance on Mac systems.

"Given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system," said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch in a follow-up comment to his own blog post. But Adobe and Apple have been cooperating to make things better, he said. "In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and, we believe, will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering."

Things should get better with video, too, one of the primary reasons Flash has thrived on the Web. "Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on--for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34 percent of CPU on Mac versus 16 percent on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video."

The words reflect an Adobe effort to explain itself while under competitive threat. HTML is gradually encroaching on the turf Flash has had largely to itself, and some are taking advantage of the opportunity to bash Flash.

Adobe also is taking on the matter of bugs.

In particular, it's answering a security problem Matthew Dempsky reported in September 2008, shortly before Flash Player 10 was issued. Dempsky took Lynch to task for his statement in the comment that "we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today."

Flash Player manager Emmy Huang apologized for the issue in a separate blog post.

"We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it. Remember that Flash Player 10 shipped in October 2008, so when this bug was reported we were pretty much locked and loaded for launch. The mistake we made was marking this bug for 'next' release, which is the soon to be released Flash Player 10.1, instead of marking it for the next Flash Player 10 security dot release. We should have kept in contact with the submitter and to let him know the progress, sorry we did not do that," Huang said. "It slipped through the cracks, and it is not something we take lightly."

And for those who are interested in helping Adobe track down problems, Adobe's Ted Patrick called on people to try the Flash Player 10.1 beta.

It's still not clear how well Google will surmount challenges selling its Nexus One to ordinary folks, but when it comes to endorsement from the tech-savvy realm, it doesn't get much better than this.

Google's Nexus One

(Credit: Google)

Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel programming project, said Saturday not only that he likes the Google phone, but that it was good enough to convert him into a mobile phone believer.

"I generally hate phones--they are irritating and disturb you as you work or read or whatever--and a cell phone to me is just an opportunity to be irritated wherever you are," Torvalds said in a blog post. "But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner."

The whole idea of talking on the phone still isn't that exciting to Torvalds, though. Instead, it was other features that won him over.

"I've wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that Google navigation might finally make a phone useful," Torvalds said. "And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I'm dragging a phone with me 'just in case' I would need to get in touch with somebody--now I'm having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone, too, is kind of secondary."

Google's Android operating system used in the Nexus One is built atop a Linux foundation, but the applications typically don't run on the Linux. Instead, they run atop Linux on a Java-like layer, Google's Dalvik virtual machine and accompanying software libraries.

More recently, though, Google issued a Native Development Kit for software that runs directly on the phone's Linux operating system. Through that technology, Mozilla is working on a version of Firefox for Android.

"Android has been pretty great to work with so far; it's a bit unusual platform for us due to its Java core, but with the NDK we're able to bridge things together without many problems," said Mozilla Vladimir Vukicevic, who's working on the software, on Thursday. "We're still a ways to go before any kind of usable alpha release, but we're certainly one step closer. We'll also be able to accelerate our progress now that we have some of the basic scaffolding in place."

Google has made YouTube available over IPv6 in an effort to encourage more use of the next-generation and more capacious Internet addressing system.

The transition from the current Internet Protocol version 4 has been slow and difficult for the computing industry. But Google has been gradually making its services available over IPv6, including search in March 2008, to those with sufficiently reliable connections.

The number of IPv4 Internet addresses still unused is steadily dropping toward zero, according to Comcast.

(Credit: Comcast)

"The service most requested to have IPv6 support has unquestionably been YouTube," said Lorenzo Colitti and Steinar H. Gunderson, Google IPv6 network experts, in a blog post Friday. "Given all of this, we're proud to make YouTube available over IPv6 and to begin streaming videos from a select number of sites worldwide to our Google over IPv6 partners."

Because IPv6 hasn't been backward compatible with IPv4, its adoption has been a classic chicken-and-egg problem in the industry. With no services available, there was little incentive to built out the new IPv6 network to attach to them, and with no network, there was little incentive for services.

That's gradually changing, though, as the number of unused IPv4 addresses dwindles away. Google, among others, has been trying to nudge the world toward IPv6.

One big gating factor to IPv6 adoption is support by Internet service providers. Comcast is testing the IPv6 waters, though, with a trial program this year for its customers.

"In 2010, we will be conducting several IPv6 technical trials in our production network, with customers, in order to prepare for the IPv6 transition," Comcast said on its form for volunteering for IPv6 trial. "We will consider all volunteers."

The big advantage IPv6 has over IPv4 is the number of unique addresses it can accommodate--4.3 billion for IPv4 compared to about 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for IPv6. Although 4.3 billion may sound like a lot, addresses are often allocated in large blocks that mean many aren't generally available, and some experts forecast an end to new IPv4 addresses in 2011.

Google has filed at least four patent applications for technology it's building into its Chrome browser to try to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications.

Three patent applications concern Google's Native Client, a technology for letting downloaded software modules run directly on a processor rather than more slowly through on-the-fly decoding as with the commonly used JavaScript. And one patent application involves O3D, a technology to let browser applications take advantage of 3D acceleration of graphics hardware.

Brad Chen

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Patents can serve a variety of purposes. They can be used to keep competitors away from new technology until the patent expires. They can be licensed to others for their use or used as bargaining chips when negotiating patent cross-license agreements that let companies use each other's patents. They can be hoarded for defensive purposes, ready for deployment in a patent infringement countersuit if one company is sued by another. They can be used to gain more favorable terms in the creation of industry standards that relate to the patents. And of course they can bolster corporate chest-thumping when it comes time to boast about levels of innovation.

Thus far, Google hasn't proven to be a litigious company, but its presence is looming ever larger over the computing industry. The new patents are in a particularly fast-moving area, the development of Web browsers and associated technology for making cloud computing a more powerful foundation for applications.

A few weeks after releasing Thunderbird 3.0, an overhaul of its open-source e-mail software, Mozilla has issued an early test version of a successor that smooths rough edges and fixes some bugs.

A principal change coming with the first alpha version of Thunderbird 3.1, code-named Lanikai, is the inclusion of the Gecko 1.9.2 browser engine, which is the version used in the present Firefox 3.6. The browser engine can be used in Thunderbird for extensions that do things like show Google Calendar or let people take actions in e-mail that require a Web page.

Rafael Ebron announced the new version on a Mozilla mailing list Thursday night. According to the release notes, there are a number of changes:

• Several improvements to IMAP.

• Several fixes for Smart Folders, message filters, and attachment handling.

• Several design improvements and corrections to the interface.

• Download Manager is now accessible as a menu item (Tools > Saved Files).

• Stability and memory improvements.

The full list includes 147 changes in Thunderbird 3.1a1 so far. Obviously, though, expect more as the alpha matures to beta and eventually final release.

Trying to emulate its Firefox brethren, the Mozilla Messaging group that develops Thunderbird is trying to accelerate the release schedule for the software.

MIT has demonstrated a laser that's built from germanium and that works at room temperature, a move the university said could be useful for high-speed optical data pathways within computers.

Lasers today are widely used to transmit large amounts of data over long distances, but the technology isn't economical for short-haul trips. However, many researchers are investigating ways to integrate lasers directly with conventional computer chips in an effort to reduce those costs and make high-speed communications more widespread.

Today's lasers typically are made from gallium arsenide and other expensive materials that have to be attached to computing chips after each component has been separately manufactured. In a paper to be published in Optics Letters, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers said Thursday they made the germanium lasers work using a technology called indirect-band-gap semiconductors that other researchers thought wouldn't work. And the germanium technology is more easily integrated during manufacturing with today's chips.

LensVector, a start-up in Mountain View, Calif., that hopes its optical components using solid-state electronics will replace moving parts in consumer camera technology, said Thursday that it's raised $30 million in a third round of funding.

Institutional Venture Partners led the funding round, joining existing investors Menlo Ventures, Samsung, Silicon Valley Bank, Mitsui, and Kodak. IVP general partner Norm Fogelsong has joined the LensVector board, the company said.

"This financing will allow us to scale our manufacturing capacity and better serve this growing demand from our customers," Chief Executive Derek Proudian said in a statement. LensVector now has raised a total of more than $50 million.

The company's optical technology can steer and focus light without mechanical moving parts common in today's optical lenses for tasks such as autofocus. LensVector promises simplicity and durability with its technology. It's aiming for a place inside cameras in devices including mobile phones, laptops, small video cameras, and bar code scanners.

Specifically, LensVector's approach uses varying voltage across a transparent element to shift the refractive index by differing amounts across the element. That in turn changes the path the light takes as it travels through the element.

The technology can focus light from a range spanning 10cm to infinity, the company said.