GoodBadUgly's blog

GOOD: Back in the money

Fueled by investments in software, biotechnology and the Internet, U.S. venture capitalists spent $29.4 billion in 2007, beating their totals from each of the previous five years, according to the quarterly MoneyTree Report . "Software-as-a-service is a big trend. Open source companies are doing very well," said investor Deepak Kamra of Canaan Partners in a conference call announcing the results. "We think those two sectors will continue to do well."

BAD: Adding up software piracy's toll

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GOOD: IBM remains patent king

IBM secured 3,148 patents in 2007, besting all other competitors for the 15th consecutive year, but Big Blue's lead is getting slimmer and Microsoft charged into the top 10 with 1,637 patents, according to an analysis by IFI Patent Intelligence.

BAD: Nightmare for DreamHost customers

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GOOD: OLPC: No hard feelings
The One Laptop Per Child Project would welcome Intel back if the chip maker returned to the group, the head of OLPC says. The statement came just days after Intel quit the group's board over what it said was OLPC's insistence that it abandon a rival low-cost laptop, the Classmate PC. OLPC has said it asked no such thing of Intel.

BAD: Bidding adieu instead of on spectrum

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GOOD: Nortel, Vonage make up

Vonage Holdings and Nortel Networks have preliminarily agreed to cross-license several patents, ending a dispute between the companies without any monetary payments. Nortel had alleged that Vonage infringed on 12 of its patents, which broadly deal with click-to-call systems, with the management or architecture of VoIP system resources, and with call-tracing methods in packet-switched networks.

BAD: CLECs stay on decline

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GOOD: Cisco's Chambers: There's hope for 40-year-olds

John Chambers demonstrated at an analyst conference some business collaboration and social networking tools that he said are for more than just 20-somethings. "The 40-year-olds will out-execute the 20-year-olds. You bring process to this," Chambers said.

BAD: FTC cracks down

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GOOD: Networking's the place to be

Research from IT staffing and consulting company Robert Half Technology shows that nearly one-fifth of 1,400 CIOs polled by an independent research firm cited networking as the single job area in which they expect to see the most growth. Seventy percent of CIOs also ranked network administration as the second-most in-demand skill, behind Windows administration, which topped the list with 74% of CIOs seeking such skills.

BAD: No more price war?

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GOOD: Better late than...

Microsoft says it is working on a fix for an eight-year-old flaw in Windows that lets hackers exploit a Web proxy autoconfiguration protocol and take over groups of machines via a single attack.

BAD: Questioning Google's magic touch

Not everyone is drinking the Google Kool-Aid. Tony Rizzo, a wireless market watcher for The 451 Group, said during a presentation this week that regarding Google becoming a big telecom player: "My prediction is that Google winds up biting off more than it can chew here and we're not going to see the Google magic that we've seen in the past."

UGLY: OLTP gets sued

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GOOD: Happy 50th IEEE conference

The IEEE Communications Society marked the 50th anniversary of its annual IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference in Washington, D.C., this week, with a roster of speakers including Internet pioneer Leonard Kleinrock of UCLA, ex-IETF chair Fred Baker and a slew of top telecom industry execs.

BAD: More muni Wi-Fi woes

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GOOD: Pushing copper's limits

Penn State engineers are trying to push Category-7 copper cables of up to about 330 feet to support digital data speeds up to 100Gbps. The idea would be to enable copper cables within a room or building, perhaps being used to interconnect servers, to handle data rates typically reserved for fiber-optic links. The trick has been coming up with a transmitter/receiver that uses error correcting and equalizing methods to cancel interference better than traditional systems.

BAD: Dreading 2008

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GOOD: Hyping HyperSpace

It's four years since Phoenix Technologies last tried to boot up the market for instant-on notebook PCs, and now it's trying again with a new software platform called HyperSpace. Notebooks designed to run the software could offer instant-on functions including multimedia playback, e-mail, instant messaging, Web browsing or remote system maintenance, all without the need to boot into an operating system such as Windows.

BAD: Just another Linux platform

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GOOD: Dell might want you

Dell CEO Michael Dell hinted that his company could be shopping for more acquisition targets, and that they could be larger than the companies it has acquired to date. "In the last two years Dell has acquired five companies, two related to the consumer business, one related to software and two related to services. These have all been relatively small companies but I would not be surprised if the nature and pace of acquisitions increases somewhat," Dell said.

BAD: Enough with the outsourcing

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GOOD: Rockies sell out

After its effort to sell tickets to the three potential World Series games at Coors Field last Monday resulted in embarrassment when the ticketing system got overloaded by an external malicious attack, the Colorado Rockies baseball team gave it another go on Tuesday and sold out all the games.

BAD: The problem with SOA

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GOOD EBay, PayPal catch a break

EBay and PayPal, once the primary lures used by phishers to trick e-mail users into giving up personal information, aren’t as popular as they used to be. According to security vendor Sophos, which monitors spam and phishing e-mails to catch new blasts and determine trends, the number of messages pretending to be from eBay or its payment subsidiary PayPal has dropped from 85% of all phishing e-mails a year ago to 21% in September.

BAD: AOL cuts back

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GOOD: The brains behind iPods

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two researchers for their discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR), a sort of nanotechnology that enables more compact disks to be squeezed into laptops, iPods and other such devices.

BAD: The weak dollar and offshoring

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GOOD: New life for Windows XP

Microsoft, clearly getting an earful from corporate users over the rapid demise of XP to make way for Vista, has responded by committing to extend the availability of XP for another five months. The company said Windows XP SP2, first released in September 2004, will now be available until June 30, 2008, on an OEM basis and from retail channels.

BAD: Ex-NetApp exec charged with embezzlement

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GOOD: Go Phish

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an online game designed to teach Internet users about the dangers of phishing. Officials with CMU's Privacy and Security Lab say users who spent 15 minutes playing the online game -- which features a cartoon fish named Phil -- were better able to discern fraudulent Web sites than those who simply read tutorials about the threat.

BAD: Apple is warning you

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GOOD: Happy birthday, Smiley

The smiley face emoticon (:-)) turned 25 years old this week. Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott Fahlman claims to be the first to have used the smiley face in a message. This marks the first time we've typed it into GBU.

BAD: Microsoft not only loser in this case?

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GOOD: The perfect storm predictor?

The prediction of thunderstorms has never been an exact science. But a research team from the University of Oklahoma and the federal government is poised to dramatically improve weather forecasting with supercomputer analyses of the individual cells that make up severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. The Oklahoma team has joined with the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration to run analyses of 2-kilometer areas throughout two-thirds of the United States, with a Cray supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.

BAD : A little help here?

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GOOD: iPhone gets (relatively) cheaper

Apple and AT&T swear the iPhone has been selling well since its debut in June but announced this week a plan to spur even stronger sales by slashing the price from roughly $600 to $400. Current owners can get a $100 refund.

BAD: Pfizer's Viagra zombies

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GOOD: Goodbye clutter

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have come up with a way to measure visual clutter, a breakthrough that could help everyone from fighter pilots to Web site designers. The impetus for the work was that “we lack a clear understanding of what clutter is, what features, attributes and factors are relevant, why it presents a problem and how to identify it,” says Ruth Rosenholtz, principal research scientist at MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

BAD: Spoofing YouTube

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GOOD: Servers are back
The server market is taking off again after three years of slowing growth, says research firm IDC. According to IDC's quarterly report, the server market grew 6.3% year-over-year to $13.1 billion for the second quarter of 2007. The firm attributes this growth to users refreshing the servers used in their data centers and to expanded distributed-workload deployments.

BAD: Monster data theft

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