rc800.com

Windows users can check for software that is missing bug fixes using the online Secunia Software Inspector .

The confusion included Secunia recommending version 1.6.0_04, while Sun recommended version 1.6.0_03. Since writing about this on the 8th, I’ve been in contact with Sun. I’ll have more to say on this later, but suffice it to say that version 1.6.0_04 contains many updates but only one that might be considered a security update. Sun’s position is that version 1.6.0_03 is secure for normal consumer usage.

Recent Bug Fixes

Before updating Java, I suggest removing older versions. Windows users can do this with the usual Add/Remove programs thingy in the Control Panel (I say “thingy” because when discussing Java, the normal term, “applet”, has a specific non-Windows meaning).

Update. February 13, 2008: Sun provides recent copies of Java for Windows, Linux and Solaris here but not for Macs. At this Java.com download page, Sun links to Apple’s web site, where the available versions of Java are very old. Specifically, this page offers downloads of Java version 1.5.0_08 and 1.4.2_12. More recent was the December 13, 2007 release by Apple of Java for Mac OS X 10.4 which offers up versions 1.5.0_13 and 1.4.2_16. Despite the title, it seems as if these versions of Java are supported on Leopard (10.5). I am not a Mac user so I can’t test this myself. If and when Apple will release a version of Java in the 1.6.x family is anyone’s guess. For more see developer.apple.com/java/.

The latest version of Adobe Flash player was released in mid-December. I mention it here because it fixed a number of critical security bugs, everybody has a copy and didn’t get a lot of publicity.

Java was updated a few weeks ago, but there was confusion about the need for the latest version, 1.6.0_04. I wrote about this on February 8th, see Sun’s Java sloppiness.

The Adobe Acrobat Reader was updated on February 6th to fix security problems on Windows and Macs. Interestingly, Adobe says they support
Mac OS X Leopard up through version 10.5.1. That was as of February 7th, but Apple updated Leopard to version 10.5.2 just four days later (see below for more on updates to OS X). Adobe hasn’t yet said if this latest update to the Reader works on the latest version of Leopard.

Apple’s QuickTime was updated on February 6th to fix a security problem. The latest version is 7.4.1. The update affects Mac OS X v10.3.9, v10.4.9, v10.5,
Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2. You can download it here and see the Secunia advisory . Apple has a software update service for both Macs and Windows, but I’m not familiar with it.

To see which version of Java is installed on your computer, you can use my javatester.org web site. Be sure to check in every web browser that you use.

Firefox released version 2.0.0.12 on February 7th to fix ten bugs, three of which are considered critical.
Firefox runs on Windows, Macs, Linux and more. Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, doesn’t say if any of the bugs are specific to an operating system, so all Firefox users should upgrade.

The latest soft word in the bug field seems to be “bulletin”. I missed the memo. What’s a bulletin? Is it a bug? A bug fix? A description of the bug? How can the February bulletin include eleven bulletins?

Updates to Mac OS X were released yesterday (February 11th). The latest Leopard is now 10.5.2. For more, see this from Apple docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307109 and Apple updates Leopard, Tiger with security updates from fellow CNET blogger Robert Vamosi. I couldn’t find any references to recent Tiger (10.4) bug fixes at Apple’s web site.

Update: February 13, 2008: The title says it all: Rush Limbaugh begs Steve Jobs for bug fixes.

The latest version of the Flash player is available at www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer.

According to Adobe, bug fixes are also needed if you are running “Adobe Acrobat Professional, 3D and Standard 8.1.1 and earlier versions”. For more see Security update available for Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8 and the Secunia advisory.

The usual Help -> About displays the currently installed version. You can force Firefox to check for updates with Help -> Check for Updates.

But getting back to software, below I go over a slew of important bug fixes released in the last few days. I also describe the latest updates to Java and the Flash player even though they weren’t released this week. As more and more Windows users get their Windows fixes automatically, the bad guys are naturally going to attack other software on your computer. Thus, it’s important to install the fixes described below. This is a Defensive Computing blog after all.

Firefox normally checks for updates often enough that you don’t need to be concerned. From what I’ve seen, looking at website usage statistics, the vast majority of Firefox users are using the latest version. That means most Firefox users have it configured to automatically check for updates. To see how your copy of Firefox is configured, do Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Updates tab. When updates are found, Firefox can either apply them automatically or to ask you before applying them. All in all, the self-updating of Firefox works great.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

In both versions 7 and 8, the usual Help -> About displays the current version and you can check for updates with Help -> Check for updates. Most likely you will find available updates. Version 7 dealt with this well, displaying the all the available updates and letting you pick and chose those to install. Version 8 has, by default, done away with displaying information about each available update. I mention this because there are updates that version 8 users may not want or need.

The latest and greatest Acrobat Reader is version 8.1.2. If you are running version 7, the latest edition, 7.0.9, has known bugs but Adobe has not yet issued fixes for. They intend to. According to Adobe Reader 8.1.2 Release Notes the latest version of the Adobe Reader is available on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 2003 Server, as well as Macs, Linux and Solaris.

Not So Recent Bug Fixes

Bug is a dirty word in the software world. After all, it means “mistake” and no one wants to admit they made a mistake. Instead of calling the fix for a mistake by its rightful name, a bug fix, software companies refer to “patches” or “updates”. Soft words. Happy words.

I wrote about updating the Flash player on January 28th, see A heads-up on the Adobe Flash player. For safety, old version(s) should be manually un-installed before installing a new version. Unfortunately, removing the Flash player can be problematical. My blog posting has more on this, but after removing the Flash player, check with the above web page, that each browser on your machine is, in fact, not able to access Flash. Adobe has a dedicated Flash Player un-installer, if need be.

If you are using version 8, then after checking for updates, click on the “Show details” link before downloading anything. You may also want to click on the “preferences” link to configure self-updates. In terms of security, you don’t need the update that installs dictionaries for spell checking for multiple languages. You also don’t need the Photoshop Album Starter Edition.

All users of Mac OS X should read Mac OS X: Updating your software from Apple.

For the gory details see Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for February 2008 from Microsoft and Microsoft fixes 17 flaws in 11 patches; 6 are critical by CNET blogger Robert Vamosi.

Both Windows and the Mac OS X were also just updated.

The bug itself is called a “hole” or a “vulnerability”. Initially, bugs were called “issues” but eventually people caught on. Did you happen to notice that Mitt Romney recently “suspended” his campaign (a soft word), as if he was taking the weekend off, rather than actually stopping (a harsh word).

Depending on how your copy of the Adobe Reader is configured, it may notify you of the need to update itself as soon as the program starts up.

Skype was updated on February 5th to fix a security problem that only affects Windows users. The new version of Skype for Windows is 3.6.0.248. You can download the latest Skype software here. For more, see the Secunia advisory or read about the problem from Skype.

If you are running version 1.6.0_03, it may not be worth the trouble to update to the latest version. If you have an earlier version of the 1.6 family however, then you should update and, if you’re going to update, you might as well go for 1.6.0_04. The last version of the previous 1.5 family is 1.5.0_14. According to Secunia, this version is secure, but earlier versions of 1.5.x are not.

Operating Systems Too

To see which version of the Flash player is installed on your computer, go to www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/. The latest is version 9,0,115,0. As with Java, you need to check this in all web browsers on your computer as different browsers can be using different versions.

I need your help here. The latter article starts with “Microsoft on Tuesday released its February 2008 security bulletin, which includes eleven bulletins, six of which are deemed Critical by Microsoft, while five are deemed Important.”

The latest Microsoft bug fixes roll out today, February 12th, otherwise known as “Patch Tuesday”. Some fixes are for Windows, some are for Microsoft Office. Specifically, there are bug fixes for Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Server 2003 as well as Office 2000 and 2003 and Office for the Mac 2004.

Unfortunately the timing isn’t great in regard to the U.S. economy. In the earnings announcement, Dell acknowledged “conservatism in IT spending in the U.S. particularly with its global and large customers as well as public, small, and medium business accounts.” The company said it expects the conservative spending trend to continue on through summer.

And it’s clear there’s still more change to come. Michael Dell said the company is still planning to introduce many more new notebook models by the end of this year. He specifically mentioned an “active back-to-school” season. Besides the already announced Latitude E series, it will be interesting to see if this is when Dell decides to introduce the mini-notebook Michael Dell was seen carrying around with him at the D6 conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Wednesday.

Cost reduction was one of the company’s main goals in the past year. Dell reduced its headcount by 3,700 people during the quarter, many in its consumer products divisions and in international sales, for a total of 7,000 in the past year, according to Carty. The company said in the same quarter a year ago it planned on removing 8,800 positions. Dell also said it has added about 2,700 employees through acquisitions, bringing the net employee reduction to 5 percent, and Carty emphasized that more thinning of company ranks is coming.

The Round Rock, Texas, PC maker reported its first-quarter earnings Thursday, with revenue of $16 billion, a 9 percent improvement from a year ago, and earnings of 38 cents per share, a 12 percent increase.

It was also a year ago that after telling his employees the company’s hallowed direct model was no longer “a religion,” Dell products first began showing up in Wal-Mart stores. Now Dell PCs and printers are available at many of the major electronics retail outlets worldwide.

Analysts were expecting earnings of 34 cents per share and revenue of $15.4 billion to $16.2 billion. In after-hours trading Thursday, shares of Dell were up 7.5 percent.

It’s been over a year since Michael Dell hit the reset button, promising to revitalize his company that had fallen behind its main competitor, Hewlett-Packard. Dell admitted publicly at D6 Wednesday that his company had indeed missed a few very big trends, including retail and a focus on consumer products.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg interviews Michael Dell at the D6 conference this week.

However, the company is making huge gains internationally. For the first time in the company’s history, sales outside of the U.S. reached 50 percent. Dell particularly has its eye on the booming Chinese market.

Following a turbulent 2007, Thursday’s results were a more encouraging beginning for this year. “We’re beginning to see positive results in our performance,” founder and CEO Michael Dell said during a conference call with company investors Thursday afternoon. He pointed to growth in all business segments in all regions as the impetus. He said that while the industry grew 14 percent in unit shipments, Dell was able to grow 22 percent.

“In China you can blast out a run of 1 million notebooks, call them Dell ‘X,’ sell to distributors, and do pretty well,” said Spooner. It’s a great way for the company to test out products and market strategies before bringing them to their more established markets.

“Are they getting a pop because they’ve just entered retail?,” asked John Spooner, analyst with Technology Business Research. “Retail didn’t get it fully in place until this January, so I wouldn’t pass judgment until Q4 this year.”

“We believe China is going to become the largest retail market in the world for PCs,” Michael Dell said. Dell’s unit sales increased 140 percent in China over the last year, and the company plans to reach 3,500 retail locations in China alone by the end of the next quarter.

China, as well as India, are becoming the place for Dell to experiment, not only with products, but with different business models and with customers with no previously established sense of what to expect from Dell.

Carty specifically pointed to retail initiatives as one of the driver’s of the better-than-expected quarterly performance. Dell added 2,000 more retail locations worldwide in the past quarter, including Costco in the U.S., Best Buy in Canada, and several large Chinese outlets, to bring the total to 13,000 locations around the world.

It’s not a blow-out quarter, but Dell investors will likely be pleasantly surprised.

But it’s still too early to tell if the company’s momentum in retail can be sustained.

“I think our results demonstrate we made some progress, but still a lot more to be done,” said outgoing Chief Financial Officer Donald Carty, who is to be replaced by Brian Gladden on June 13.

This blog has been updated with Dell executive and analyst comments.

But is this the comeback that Dell has been promising, and investors have been waiting for? Not quite. However, it appears the company is at least on the right track. Though the No. 2 PC vendor in the world has fallen behind both HP and Acer in notebook sales, Dell showed improvement in the past year. Notebook revenue was up 22 percent over the past year, but just 2 percent from the previous quarter.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com )

The optional feature–along with a notification on blog owners’ “dashboards” of how many people have subscribed to their blogs through Blogger–will be rolled out in the next few weeks. A new tab on the dashboard, called “Blogs I’m Following,” lets Blogger users keep track of updates to the blogs on their subscription list.

Follow that blog!

With blog platforms Movable Type and WordPress adding social-networking features to their software, it was only a matter of time before Google’s Blogger did the same.

(Credit:
Google)

The problem with these sorts of features is that they’re inherently limited to readers whose “following” is directly tied to the Blogger software and its members, so it will reflect only a slice of readers. A follower widget (or gadget, as Google calls them) claiming 21 followers only refers to Blogger members, not to the overall number of people reading the blog, which could make the owners of smaller blogs get a bit image-conscious.

But with its Google ownership, Blogger is tying the new following feature into some of its other properties, like Google Reader and the forthcoming Google Friend Connect. The “Blogs I’m Following” tab, for example, can be imported into Google Reader.

A post on the official Blogger blog earlier this week announced that users would soon be able to display their “followers”–other Blogger members who have subscribed to them.

Even more curious: Facebook pulled the feature within hours of the Gawker post going up.

A post on Gawker yielded a moderate wave of panic across the Web when it asserted that by typing the “down” arrow into Facebook’s search box, you could see a list of the five people who view your profile the most: Not quite. It was more likely a list of five people whose profiles a user visits frequently, or at least something along those lines. Some users promptly nicknamed it the “stalker list.”

“Facebook tries to surface the people we think are most important to users to make it easier and faster for them to navigate the site and find what they are looking for,” a statement from Facebook issued on Tuesday read. “The search drop down is not a list of those that have searched for the user. It is also not a list of people whose profile the user has viewed the most or who have viewed the user’s profile the most. To avoid any confusion, this will no longer appear.”

Whatever the algorithm behind it, the tool was pretty accurate. My “stalker list” consisted of two close friends, two people I’d dated relatively recently, and my younger brother, whose profile I occasionally check up on to make sure he’s staying out of trouble–I know, I know, I’m such a good sister.

According to Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook, I was one of the people he “stalked.” I’m, uh…flattered?

Or they use terms like “SMB” (small and medium business) or “SME” (small and medium enterprise)–categories that aren’t really the same thing but nonetheless often get used more or less interchangeably to denote companies with about 100 to 1,000 employees.

commentary

Expanding market reach in this way is all well and good. Certainly, many small and midsized businesses continue to run their IT departments in much the same way as in the past on in-house systems running a combination of packaged and custom applications.

The challenge they face is that IT at midmarket companies bears, at best, a passing resemblance to that of enterprises. Development and operations staffs are small and are far more likely to be made up of generalists than specialists. Furthermore, most selling to midmarket companies takes place through regional or vertical market partners of some sort. Thus, the vendor seeking to increase midmarket footprint typically has to put together different types of product packaging, if not entirely different products, and craft go-to-market (GTM) approaches that differ in substantial ways from those supporting large enterprise sales.

Or, to put it more bluntly, enterprises may find running their own IT infrastructures costly, but for many midmarket companies, it’s genuinely hard and even harder to bring new applications and the like online.

Lots of large system and software vendors, even (or perhaps especially) those who have traditionally focused largely on enterprise sales, talk loudly and often about the midmarket these days.

The reason for the interest is pretty simple. There are far more smaller businesses than there are larger ones–especially in developing economies. Midmarket IT spending is also growing quickly in many categories. As a result, it’s not especially surprising that even those vendors most accustomed to selling to enterprises are itching to boost their midmarket share as well.

However, we’re also struck by how tenuous the connections are between many vendors’ midmarket planning and any sort of software-as-a-service (SaaS) or broader cloud computing initiatives.

It’s also hard to argue with a contention that, again as a general rule, SaaS should have more near-term appeal in the midmarket than in the larger enterprise. The list of reasons why is substantial: midmarket companies have smaller IT staffs; they tend to use more pre-packaged and less complex applications; their IT infrastructures tend to have fewer “moving parts” (and therefore better lend themselves to carving out pieces to run over the network); and existing relationships with midmarket ISVs and VARs could make the transition to SaaS applications from those partners fairly natural.

Given these complexities, it’s natural that historically enterprise-y vendors have taken awhile to craft successful midmarket plans. Even IBM, which has long had a strong midmarket presence with System i (and the AS/400 that preceded it), has gone through numerous GTM and organizational iterations to improve its ability to tap the midmarket with other product lines. However, most large vendors have made progress. The best are doing quite well (as we’ve noted in the case of Hewlett-Packard for example). Others, such as Sun Microsystems, have at least made improvements to their partner programs even if their overall grade remains middling.

Therefore, the disconnect at many vendors between forward-looking SaaS and cloud computing strategies and their more tactical midmarket plays is, at the very least, a strategic oversight.

Computing isn’t going to jump from the data center to the network overnight; if nothing else, the rate and specifics of such a shift are matters for spirited debate. But as a general direction for computing, it’s hard to make much of an argument.

While it would seem like Apple could use the ready-made iPhone operating system for a tablet instead of a touch-friendly version of Mac OS X users, that could limit the device. Most users expect the freedom of having a Finder and the ability to download directly from the Web and not through the App Store only, as with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

These are just a few of the feature upgrades of OS X 10.6 that seem it indicate a trend toward touch capabilities.

Stacks now has a scrolling option and resizable thumbnails.

Expose in Dock Starting with the Finder, the addition of Expose to the dock is a great example. Expose is a feature that is used for organizing all your open windows at once, or just the windows from a particular application you were running. Putting Expose directly into the dock now cuts out the need to first switch to the specific application you want before activating Expose. It also cuts out the need to use a keyboard, or use a trackpad gesture to call it up. Clicking and holding an app’s icon will bring all windows open that are associated with that program to the front. Being able to tap and hold on a touchscreen would make it that much easier.

After a closer look, however, the unifying theme of several of the new features of Snow Leopard is that they’re now extremely easy to navigate without a keyboard, or without a lot of mouse clicking. That also happens to be one of the keys to a successful mobile interface: keeping steps to opening applications and performing tasks to a minimum.

(Credit:
Apple)

Freehand drawing And then there’s the addition of freehanding via the touchpad. Apple said Snow Leopard will allow users to draw Chinese characters freehand onto a Mac notebook track pad, and the OS will predict characters for faster writing. This feature could clearly transfer from trackpad input to direct onscreen input if Apple engineers wanted. They already have a similar feature in the iPhone for Chinese characters based on the technology from Hanwang.

Of course, the Apple tablet has become the Apple press corps’ version of a Bigfoot hunt. Some believe the evidence is overwhelming. Others are, well, underwhelmed. And Apple doesn’t discuss products before it’s ready to.

At the developer event, a list of new features of OS X 10.6 was rattled off by Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet. But most of the upgrades to the operating system from the previous build, OS X 10.5, known as Leopard, are gentle tweaks aimed at easier usability and faster processing, things the average user may or may not notice.

However, based on the features demonstrated at the developer conference last week, the newest version of the Mac operating system, OS X 10.6, dubbed
Snow Leopard, could turn out to be the most touchscreen-friendly Mac OS the company has ever built. Snow Leopard won’t be available until September, and so far, Apple does not sell a touchscreen notebook or tablet. But some of the features in the upcoming OS at least show a path on which Apple could be headed toward offering a larger touchscreen device.

If Apple does end up making a tablet that were to run Snow Leopard or some version of it, that means it probably wouldn’t be announced until after Snow Leopard’s official release in September. Others have speculated that it won’t be ready until at least early 2010.

CNET’s Josh Lowensohn contributed to this story.

Safari 4 updates New
Safari 4 features would also accommodate easier navigation by touch. The new Coverflow option to browse through past sites visited as well as sites you visit most often would be easy with the drag of a finger. And on a screen larger than an iPhone, the effect would work marvelously.

Quicktime X The new version of Apple’s video application QuickTime is also more touch-friendly. The player controls (play, pause, forward, backward) are now quite similar to what’s found on the
iPhone. Also, in order to edit videos, there’s a ribbon timeline of scenes from the video that appears under the player. The ribbon can be moved forward and backward in time for editing just by dragging. The same interface is what users of the new iPhone 3G S will be using when they want to trim video clips they’ve captured on the device. Prior to this, you had to set the beginning and end points with little arrows that provided no indication of what segment of the clip you were editing besides the time.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)

True, Steve Jobs said at an Apple event last fall that putting touchscreens on traditional laptops “hasn’t made a lot of sense” to Apple. His point is a good one: even companies that embrace touchscreen laptops admit that it’s an awkward posture to sit and point at a laptop screen. HP’s CTO of its PC group, Phil McKinney, has indicated that’s why the company’s Windows touchscreen laptops are convertible to tablet PCs. But Jobs’ comment doesn’t rule out a different form factor with a touchscreen, like a tablet.

Though Apple isn’t saying whether it’s working on a touchscreen tablet, the company may have shown its hand at its Worldwide Developers Conference last week.

Snow Leopard allows Chinese characters to be drawn freehand on the trackpad.

(Credit:
Apple)

Bertrand Serlet demoes new features of Safari 4 at WWDC 2009.

Stacks There’s also Stacks, a feature that keeps shortcuts to chosen files in the dock, which has been updated to be more useful without forcing users to enter the Finder. In Leopard, the amount of thumbnail previews of files shown in a stack was limited, and to see the all files, you had to go into the Finder. Now in Snow Leopard, all items in Stacks can be viewed simply by dragging the scroll bar, precluding the need to open the Finder. That might seem like a small change, but it’s important if you’re browsing with just a finger on a touch-sensitive surface.

The difference is that while anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, which can lead to pages and pages of edits and contradictory revisions and accusations of bias, knols have an author’s name attached. A knol author is responsible for the content and can choose to allow others to edit it, or filter suggested edits or even block public editing entirely.

I felt an odd sense of power, and responsibility, creating my knol. It gives me the ability to publish anything I want, without having to run it past an editor like I do at CNET News. And once it is published, it is a permanent record and has an air of legitimacy that editorializing and gossipy blogs don’t have. It’s a Google knol–”a unit of knowledge” as the Web site describes it, lending it at least the illusion of propriety.

In an interview on Wednesday, Knol Product Manager Cedric Dupont said Google won’t be determining the legitimacy of knols or verifying the authority of their creators. “We are not editors in any way,” he said.

A Google spokeswoman said it takes time for the company to index new knols, but didn’t say how long.

I’m an expert on pit bulls! Really.

“We think we make it very easy for the user to determine the trustworthiness of the content.”

The hardest part was the research. But given that I do that every day for my job, it wasn’t all that tough. I wrote the item in Microsoft Word and then cut and pasted it into the Knol page. It was easy to use the editing tools and add images. However, I think the page looks rather simple and dull. The system lacks the ability to add background colors and other stylistic flourishes that give blogs that individualistic panache.

I asked the Google spokeswoman about this situation and her response was: “Knol will be subject to our general content policies and terms of service, and knol content will be treated under those policies like any other user-generated content for which we provide a distribution platform. In particular, we will provide community flagging tools and the usual legal notification processes, so that we can comply with applicable laws and regulations. In addition, because knols are attached to verified author names, we think that the structure of Knol will actually provide something of a disincentive to defamatory or other harmful content.”

It will be interesting to see how the Marsden-Wales fracas plays out on Knol. Google’s response didn’t give me any confidence that the system won’t be widely abused. And it’s likely that people who disagree with my knol will create one of their own with contradictory conclusions.

I just wrote a knol, a Web article akin to an encyclopedia entry, using Google’s new Knol publishing platform launched publicly on Wednesday.

I decided to try Knol out. First I had to figure out a subject I felt I knew enough about. I walk dogs as a volunteer at the local animal shelter where there happen to be a lot of pit bulls. I’ve learned a lot about the dogs and have become disturbed by the amount of misinformation that circulates about them. So I did some research and wrote a knol titled “The pitfalls of stereotyping pit bulls.”

Her knol is titled “Jimmy Wales (Jimbo Wales)” and the summary describes Wikipedia as an “online libel board,” that “any loser can use to smear people who are more successful than them.”

Once I published the knol using the default “moderated collaboration mode,” a colleague logged into his Google account and suggested an edit to my knol. I, in turn, rejected that edit (it’s irrelevant that ex-Atlanta Falcons player Michael Vick, who I mention in the knol in reference to his dog fighting charges, wasn’t that great of a quarterback). The system didn’t notify my colleague that I snubbed his edit; he had to go to the page and keep checking the site for himself. It would be nice if the system were to notify people of the status of their suggested edits. Later, I found out that when an edit is accepted, the person who suggested it will be listed as a contributor in the contributor’s list on the page.

Google is dismissing the notion that Knol is its Wikipedia killer, but both operate under the premise that Web users can collectively create a knowledge base that can be searchable and vast.

I’ve deemed myself an expert on pit bulls by writing the knol. We’ll see if the reader reviews and ratings suggest otherwise.

Adding a New Yorker cartoon was simple. I was directed to the online New Yorker Store where I searched for cartoons dealing with pit bulls and found one. But when I added it into the blog it automatically inserted it at the top of the text and above the other image I had chosen. It didn’t look right, so I removed it. If I had had the ability to determine where on the page the cartoon should go, I would have used it closer to the bottom of the page.

This New Yorker cartoon, while it was appropriate to the subject matter, was removed when I learned I couldn't control where it appeared on the page.

It also took a few hours for the system to index my knol so it could be searched via the main Knol page and even then, it only initially showed up when I searched by subject (pit bulls) but not by author name. By the next morning, I could search also by author name. The knol has yet to show up on the Google search page using both subject and author.

With Knol, Google is encouraging people to create more authoritative content that can be indexed by its search engine and monetized with ads. Unlike blogs, which tend to be casual and opinionated in tone, knols are supposed to be fact-based, informative, and well-sourced articles on a specific subject.

After some digging around I figured out how to add advertisements through Google’s AdSense program, but I won’t see any on the page for awhile (it can take up to two weeks, the system said).

(Credit:
The New Yorker)

The author's knol on pit bulls.

But what if I wanted to write something inaccurate or defamatory? Already that question has been put to the test with a knol written by Rachel Marsden, the ex-girlfriend of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

My colleague, Tom Krazit, suggested an edit to my knol, which I subsequently rejected.

The deal is expected to close toward the end of the fourth quarter, McAfee said.

Security specialist McAfee on Monday announced that it has a deal in place to acquire Secure Computing.

San Jose, Calif.-based Secure Computing would bring to McAfee a set of products and services designed to help customers protect Web, e-mail, and network assets. With the acquisition, McAfee says it would be able to offer a complete, single-source network security portfolio to a wide range of businesses, from small to global.

Clarification, Sept. 23, 4:42 a.m. PDT:
This story originally omitted mention that the $465 million total includes consideration of cash held by Secure Computing.

The merger offer is pegged at $5.75 per common share in cash, which McAfee says represents a total equity value of about $413 million. The deal also includes a cash offer for outstanding shares of Secure Computing preferred stock, valued at about $84 million. Those components, less cash held by Secure Computing, bring the total value of the proposed acquisition to $465 million, McAfee said.

The most disturbing part about these new liquidity figures is that we’ve already reached the lows seen after the dot-com bust and we may not be at the bottom yet.

During the first quarter, $3.2 billion in liquidity was generated–a sharp contrast with $9.1 billion from a year ago and around the level seen in 2003. Because no initial public offerings took place in the first quarter, all of the $3.2 billion was generated from venture-backed companies selling themselves to the highest bidder.

Jessica Canning, VentureSource’s global research director, said in a statement:

With venture-backed companies failing to launch IPOs and with mergers and acquisitions lagging, liquidity for venture capitalists fell 65 percent in the first quarter, according to a report released Wednesday by Dow Jones VentureSource.

The median price paid for a venture-backed company was $22.1 million in the first quarter, compared with $60 million a year ago, according to VentureSource. That’s a steep 63 percent decline.

The IPO market is totally closed and there’s just no clear indication right now that it will revive any time in the next quarter or two, even with 43 companies currently in (IPO) registration. It’s a tough time to be a venture capitalist - and likely even tougher to be an investor in a venture fund.

Those two types of transactions are how VCs and investors in VC funds make their money back, after nursing those companies along with funding. The fewer of those types of transactions, the less money that VCs and their investors make.

With no venture-backed companies launching IPOs in the first quarter, all the activity fell to mergers and acquisitions. During the quarter, 68 mergers and acquisitions took place, substantially down from the 104 completed a year ago.

In the first quarter, the median amount of time it took for portfolio companies to provide money back to their VCs was 4.7 years, compared with 6.8 years as was the case a year ago, according to VentureSource.

While the amount of money companies raise through a sale or IPO is down, venture capitalists may find comfort in that the time it takes for their portfolio companies to provide liquidity is shrinking.

“This is due to the fact that many public technology companies are focused on conserving capital and the few that are buying venture-backed companies are doing so for lower prices,” Canning said of the plunge.

The 6×17 Digital employs a digital scanning back made by Dalsa. Scanning cameras employ a linear light sensor detector similar to that used in flatbed scanners; it moves across the field of view to take the photo rather than using a two-dimensional sensor that captures the entire scene simultaneously. It’s a good way to get high resolution, but it comes at a cost: it takes a single second to take a full-resolution 7,500×21,500-pixel image.

It can be purchased with a tablet PC to operate it, too. That’s doubtless handy, because a single high-resolution file is 307MB in raw format, the company said.

Got $45,600 burning a hole in your pocket? Try out Seitz Phototechnik’s 160-megapixel 6×17 Digital camera. And save a bit more of your allowance for a lens, too.

The mammoth device is able to take an image measuring 60×170mm, a big notch up from high-end SLRs with a 24×36mm frame. It’s got huge handgrips on either side that cry out to be grasped, but it’s 18 inches wide and weighs 10 pounds, so it looks either like a great workout or tripod material to me.

(Credit:
Seitz)

(Via Gearfuse.)

Seitz's 160-megapixel 6×17 Digital camera