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I was on the show with (obviously) Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Molly Wood and Jason Calacanis.

Had a great time on TWiT once again this week. Check it out here.

This was a click and run.

I know that people make jokes about Google being the quintessential engineering company. And that is something this blog will never stoop to (being an engineering company, that is).

Speaking of his dead friend, Bill said: “‘I know what he would have done if I left –he would have partied, too. That’s what I would’ve wanted him to do, so that’s what I did with some friends.”

Who was the anti-Samaritan driving that Google camera car? Are his parents made of metal? What sort of instructions did he have? Why didn’t he get out to help? And why didn’t anyone at Google Australia notice that there was, well, a body lying in the street? (Google only removed the image after Bill’s story came to light)

A cab dropped him off back at his house. But he collapsed before he could get to his front door.

So along came a friendly Google StreetView camera
car. The Australian version of the service was to be launched August 4. So the Googler had a lot of filming to do.

However, he added: “I wasn’t really thinking there would be someone driving by with a video camera on the roof filming me, either.”

Bill (he doesn’t want his last name plastered all over the place as well as his drunken pose) was as sanguine as the Australian Prime Minister, who, when he was seen getting drunk in an New York strip club, remarked: “I think any bloke who’s honest about their lives can point to times in their lives when they’ve got it wrong.”

But I hope you, too, would like to know how the company reacted to one of its drivers leaving a man lying in the street while he filmed him.

Bill’s friend, the one with whom he was going on a motorbike holiday in Tasmania, suddenly died. Bill, being upset and Australian, went out and got drunk.

(Credit: CC re-ality)

Or could it be that this driver was, in fact, yet another robot with vision problems?

Did his shot of the beFostered Bill make the first edition of Google StreetView Australia? Too right, mate.

The driver didn’t stop to see whether Bill was all right. He didn’t even get out of his camera car to move Bill’s feet away from the curb. Like a TMZ.com paparazzo, his deadline seemed to be more important than something that could have been a dead body.

He shot the prostrate Bill who was lying on his back, his feet sticking out into the road.

But the cadre of professionals needs to also include psychologists, physicians, counselors, social workers, youth workers, clergy, tech educators and others involved in the lives of young people. And young people themselves need to be part of the discussion, not just to listen and parrot what adults tell them to say, but to help think through the issues, help adults understand the difference between real and imagined dangers and come up with messages that will resonate with other youth.

To be effective, the Internet safety community has to find ways tailor its messages based on particular risk factors. Not to do so would be like inoculating an entire population for a disease that affects only a small number of people while not inoculating the very people of are most at risk. I’ve often worried that most of the teens and parents who are consumers of safety messages are the very people who least need to hear them.

Internet safety and the “sexually toxic culture”
We must also look at behavior in light of the culture in which youth are being raised. I would never suggest that society should be prudish or suppress sexuality, but I am concerned by the extent to which overt sexuality–starting at a very young age–is being promoted by the media, fashion industry, music, TV, movies, everywhere. Young people are growing up in what sexual abuse prevention specialist Cordelia Anderson has referred to as a “sexually toxic culture.”

Overcoming this larger cultural issue is not going to happen overnight nor will all stakeholders agree with Anderson and other members of the Coalition that it’s a contributing factor to teen risk. But there are plenty of studies to show that risky teen behavior is influenced by the media, social, and cultural environment around them.

The one thing I am sure about is that kids’ use of the Internet doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Technology doesn’t put kids in danger nor will it prevent them from danger.

Disclosure: I serve on the National Coalition to Prevent Child Exploitation representing the non-profit group, ConnectSafely.org.

Broader expertise needed
In addition to redefining online safety, we also need to expand the discussion. When online safety advocates gather at conferences, the room is typically filled with public policy professionals, technology experts, lawyers and sometimes representative of law enforcement.

Anderson chairs the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Exploitation that has drawn a connection between commercial and individual sexual exploitation with youth risk and even child sexual abuse. Kids posting or sending sexually provocative photos (sexting) according to Anderson, “is behaviorally consistent with what kids see all around them.”

One problem with most of today’s Internet safety messaging campaigns is that there is only one set of messages for the entire population of youth and parents. But, an extensive literature review conducted by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force Research Advisory Board found that “not all youth are equally at risk” and that “those experiencing difficulties offline, such as physical and sexual abuse, and those with other psychosocial problems are most at risk online.”

Activity Streams works with 75 services now, and MT’s creators said they have plans to add more services. MT users need to be running version 4.1, and have the plugin installed. There are already a handful of examples of Activity Streams in action on MT blogs, ranging from an entire page to a blog’s sidebar. You can check out the examples here, here, and here.

If you do want to share, the service is designed to work with other MT users contributing to the same blog. It’ll break up each action by user, and by each set of actions by day. You can see an example of it in action over on Movable Type’s team blog.

Add a news feed to your blog, now a standard feature on Movable Type.

Six Apart is releasing a new plugin for Movable Type this morning called Activity Streams that let MT users create a news feed and add it to their blog. Similar to the FriendFeed, which I checked out back in October, MT users can plugin their various affiliations with other social services and present all the information in one place where they are already publishing content–their blog.

MT’s creators said the plugin is different from services, such as Plaxo Pulse, because you host it, not a third party company. Hosting it yourself keeps your login information in your hands. MT also added privacy options, similar to Facebook’s news feed, letting you hide stories you don’t want to share entirely, or on an ad hoc basis.

(Credit:
CNET Networks / davidrecordon.com)

Feature of Firefox 3: Will look like a native app on each platform: Windows,
Mac, Linux. Less of the “Firefox look,” more native. Of couse, will support skins so you can pick your favorite look. Most everything is in the same place, but the back button is about twice as big.

Mozilla claims better memory management in Firefox 3.

“Better, faster, safer” is a focus. Firefox 3 will scan for malware (Firefox 2 already checks for phishing). Actively checks sites. Updates internal pattern database every 30 minutes. Compare to IE, which uploads site URLs to Microsoft to check. Mozilla says its version offers more privacy, but at Mozilla’s expense to push the pattern database over the Net. In early beta, this technology found that the site supporting a popular extension (Firebug) had been compromised.

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla VP of engineering

That’s it for the demo.

Update: Meeting swag.

For another CNET perspective on this meeting, see a post from News.com’s Charles Cooper: With Firefox 3, Microsoft has reason to worry.

New password manager: doesn’t pop up and interrupt, but does give you the opportunity to save the password after you see if you’ve successfully logged in. Won’t sync passwords across systems yet, but a new Mozilla project, Weave, will make this possible in the future.

Address bar also checks for phishing exploits, lets users pull info from certification authorities.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman / CNET)

Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering: Next beta of
Firefox 3 will be beta 5. It comes out next week. Will be the last beta before release candidate 1, which is due for May. Firefox 3 should ship for real in June (or before, if possible).

I’m at a Mozilla “open house” sitting around a table with about 10 other bloggers. Lots of history is being discussed here; the 10th anniversary of Mozilla will be celebrated on Monday (Firefox 1 came out two years after Mozilla started). Check back on this post for practical tidbits from this meeting.

Faster is good.

The “awesome bar:” This is what they call the new address entry field. It has very useful autofill and search, since “people are moving to search as a modality” of how they use the browser. It combines search with your history, and it’s adaptive, based on what you historically click on. Tries to divine what you want even if the search term is ambiguous.

After the roundtable discussion, I had a good talk with Chris Beard, Mozilla’s director of labs. A post on that is forthcoming.

On offline access: Firefox will support HTML 5, which has a spec for offline access. This will make Google Gears obsolete.

New history/bookmark technology: Stored in a local relational database, replacing the old-school tech from previous version. New tech is more reliable and higher performance. What it means to users: more browser history is stored by default (instead of just 14 days), and will be instantly accessible and searchable.

Regarding Microsoft: The company’s stated support for open standards (like CSS 2.1) is “a huge win for the Web.” But “I wouldn’t call it ‘vigorously embrace,’” Schroepfer says. Still lots of old standards not used.

Question from my Twitter followers: What about Firefox on the iPhone? Response: “Apple has not written a license that allows it to happen. We’ve got other places we’re paying attention to, but that’s not one of them.” We note that Schroepfer, as well as Mozilla CEO John Lilly, both have iPhones sitting on the table in front of them. Still, they say, both iPhone and Android are closed platforms. What they are interested in is a truly open platform, they maintain. “That’s coming,” they say. Look at the Nokia N810.

Performance/memory improvements: Hundreds of fixes, reflected in benchmarks. Maybe three times faster than Firefox 2. Testing on Gmail: it’s two to four times faster than Firefox 2. Much faster on SSL sites (like banking), too.

Regarding the complaint, “You’re eating all the RAM in my machine:” They say they’ve made it better, “better than anything out there.” Firefox 3 uses less memory than other browsers, and more importantly, releases that memory when tabs close. Also, during an extended browser session test, Firefox 3 is much better behaved and doesn’t chew up memory and slow down. Schroepfer says
IE 8 can’t pass the test they’ve written, and neither can Safari 3.1. They both crash.

Even then, three generations of process technology ago, the “x86 penalty” was down to a couple square millimeters of silicon. Today, the comparable figure is about 0.25 square millimeters. Not zero, certainly, but not a significant concern for chips that are a hundred times larger.

On Thursday, a GigaOM staffer wrote a piece titled “Can Intel Thrive in a Post x86 World?”

What else is the App Store but the visible manifestation of the iPhone’s programmability?

Yes, there are companies like Freescale (the subject of the January post on GigaOM) and Nvidia that are looking to push the ARM architecture into the Netbook space. But that idea never made much sense, and now that Intel and TSMC are working together to get Intel’s Atom x86 core into lower-cost SoC (system on chip) products, the ARM architecture will eventually have to retreat into the shrinking niche for supersmall, supercheap phones and consumer electronics gizmos for which x86 compatibility is of negligible value.

I honestly don’t know whether Om Malik’s blog site, GigaOM, is intended to be informative or merely entertaining. I pointed out a previous example of the overwrought rhetoric that permeates that site last September (in the context of Comcast’s then-new usage cap policy), but generally, I try to ignore the nonsense there for the same reasons that I ignore talk radio.

A slide from Fred Weber’s keynote presentation at Microprocessor Forum 2003 showing how x86 will evolve into systems from big servers down to handheld consumer devices.

But like it or not, GigaOM is widely read, and sometimes when a post there bears directly on a market that’s important to me, I can’t bear to let it go. This is one of those times.

The rest of Thursday’s GigaOM post is a hopelessly self-contradictory muddle that fails to reach any clear conclusions. I’ll just quote one more line near the end: “But the PC will be just one small (and shrinking) battleground to keep x86 relevant, amid a more mobile, visual, and power-sensitive world.”

So not only are x86 chips selling into a growing PC market, they’ll eventually start eating into ARM’s own strongholds. That can’t be bad for Intel.

(Credit:
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.)

See, we learned a long time ago–those of us who cover this industry professionally, not just as a random assignment for some random blog–that the instruction set architecture (ISA), per se, doesn’t matter any more.

Now, ARM isn’t dead yet. The iPhone uses an ARM processor because there’s no x86 processor that would work as well in that system. ARM processors will probably see at least two more generations in cell phones just because there’s so much ARM-based software out there (including all the software on the App Store).

The headline is preposterous from beginning to end. It has two implications just in the eight words of the title: that Intel’s ability to “thrive” faces any imminent threats, and that the importance of the x86 architecture is declining.

But somewhere around 2012, we’re going to see x86 chips poking into that space. The value of instruction set compatibility with the PC market will persuade developers of new cell phone platforms to go with x86 chips, and eventually even established systems like the iPhone will switch over.

And that’s why the GigaOM piece was preposterous.

And seriously, is anyone really not clear on the fact that the
Apple iPhone is a computer? It isn’t an embedded system. An embedded system is one in which the presence of a microprocessor is functionally irrelevant to the user. When a gizmo exposes its programmability to the user, it’s a computer.

But by the turn of the century, ISA complexity was almost a dead issue, and that coffin’s final nail was pounded in by the keynote speech of then-Advanced Micro Devices CTO Fred Weber at Microprocessor Forum 2003, an event I had the honor of hosting.

Well, as I pointed out just a few weeks later (in “The Netbook is dead. Long live the notebook!”), when the Netbook phenomenon ran up against the dominance of Intel and Microsoft in the PC market, it was the Netbook that died instead. Even at a $300 price point, people still want full PC compatibility.

The choice of ISA was a big deal in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the extra complexity of an x86 instruction decoder was a large fraction of the total complexity of a microprocessor. That’s where the conflict between RISC and CISC came from.

In his talk, “Towards Instruction Set Consolidation,” Weber made a simple point: “Technology has passed the point where instruction set costs are at all relevant.”

In short, ARM chips aren’t cheaper or more power-efficient because of their instruction sets; they’re like that because they’re designed to be. And anything that an ARM chip can do to save cost or power can also be done by an x86 chip.

So there can’t ever be a time when the world moves beyond x86. That’s 1980s thinking, just plain ignorance of what may be the most important trend in the microprocessor industry.

Current economic woes aside, the PC market is hardly shrinking. You know what’s shrinking? The PC! As the PC shrinks, the PC market will grow. The MID (mobile Internet device) market isn’t much to speak of right now, for example, but once MID makers figure out what to build, MIDs will become more popular.

In January, the same staffer wrote a piece titled “Netbooks and the Death of x86 Computing” which reached the fantastic conclusion that Netbooks would “destroy the hegemony of x86 machines for personal computing.”

Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday that they’ve teamed up to create a “test bed” project for research in cloud computing, the umbrella term for outsourcing hardware and software capabilities rather than handling them locally.

Using largely HP hardware and Intel processors, six initial data centers will be built at those locations, each with 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores (that’s probably about 125 to 500 servers). Though research has already begun “in bits and pieces,” all the centers are expected to become fully functional later this year. Researchers from all three companies as well as the host institutions will have access to the project.

The three founding companies said they were “open” to adding additional partners in the future and stressed the open-source element of the project, saying that HP, Yahoo, and Intel were each committed to using information gleaned from the test beds and contributing it to open-source projects both commercially and for further research.

This post was updated at 10 a.m. PDT to include further comments from the companies.

When HP Labs underwent a major reorganization in March, it named large-scale cloud services as a key focus. Labs Director and company Senior Vice President Prith Banerjee said Tuesday on a conference call with reporters that the project is important to HP because “we believe we are entering a new era called ‘Everything as a Service,’” where devices and services will “interact seamlessly through the cloud. To realize the full potential, the tech industry must think of the cloud as a platform.”

The three companies declined to state how much each had contributed financially, but did say that each was responsible for committing hardware and people to do the research.

Yahoo’s commitment to cloud computing stems from its involvement in the Apache Hadoop project, an open-source project for large-scale data processing, similar to Google’s proprietary MapReduce software. Yahoo formed a cloud computing group as part of a major reorganization in June, and earlier this year partnered with a research facility in India to make one of the world’s fastest supercomputers available for cloud computing research.

CNET News’ Erica Ogg and Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

With the rather dry name of The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, the open-source project will consist of data centers around the globe “to promote open collaboration among industry, academia, and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing.” They’ve partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as the National Science Foundation.

So Microsoft does keep an eye out for Apple. And perhaps even an ear out for Apple’s lawyers.

In the original version of the ad, Lauren, who wants to spend a maximum of $1,700 on her computing dreams, offered this competing statement: “This Mac is $2,000, and that’s before adding anything.”

However, according to AdAge Microsoft has actually made changes to one of the Laptop Hunter ads.

It’s the one featuring Lauren, the aspiring law student, and her mom, who claimed that Lauren usually gets what she wants.

Recently, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner claimed that Apple’s legal vultures had called Redmond, aggrieved at alleged inaccuracies in Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters campaign.

In a week in which Microsoft admitted that sales of PCs are sluggish, might it be possible that Apple’s lawyers will be taking advantage of happy hour on Friday night?

Her mom, Sue, asks her why she would pay twice the price. To which Lauren gives her the steely look of a future prosecutor and says: “I wouldn’t.”

A Microsoft representative told AdAge: “We slightly adjusted the ads to reflect the updated pricing of the Mac laptop shown in the TV advertisement. This does not change the focus of the campaign, which is to showcase the value and choice of the PC.”

With a sip of the finest chardonnay, of course.

He described the call as being better than an evening with Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston. Well, perhaps not quite. But he certainly used phrases like “greatest single phone call,” as if only multiple phone calls from Cupertino would have made him more excited.

This loving familial exchange has now been edited out. The old version has been removed from YouTube and replaced with a new version, in which Lauren merely says: “It seems like you’re paying a lot for the brand.”

The included mouse foot storage box also facilitates USB charging.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

The new 4,000 dpi SideWinder X8 with BlueTrack sensor.

As we reported Tuesday, the new BlueTrack sensor is a Microsoft-developed optical-tracking technology that purports to give mice greater accuracy over a wider variety of surfaces than laser or IR optical mice.

Microsoft claims scalable dpi settings from 250 to 4,000 dpi for the SideWinder X8, which should please gamers. Thankfully, this new mouse also brings back the macro-record button for on-the-fly command recording, introduced by last year’s SideWinder, but missing from the more recent X5 model.

Distinguishing the SideWinder X8 from the Explorer Mouse announced Tuesday are the extra programmable buttons on the SideWinder, as well as a unique combination of wired and wireless usage modes. In its wireless mode, the X8 connects to your PC via a 2.4GHz wireless connection, and Microsoft claims 30 hours of play time.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

But the mouse also comes with a disc-shaped box that hides both extra mouse feet (for customizing the feel of the glide, depending on the surface) and a USB cable. Connect the mouse to your PC via the cable and you can play and recharge. We’ve seen laptop mice that use this kind of design, but to our knowledge this is Microsoft’s first attempt at a wireless gaming mouse, let alone one with this kind of charging mechanism. That feature may be a bigger draw than the updated sensor.

Following Tuesday’s official Microsoft announcement of its first BlueTrack mice, Wednesday we get word of the unsurprising extension of the new sensor technology to Microsoft’s SideWinder gaming mice. The SideWinder X8 will go for $100 when it ships in February (although Amazon.com is apparently already taking orders).

Now, we’re just wondering how Steve Jobs feels about the magazine’s “Calvin and Jobs” comic strip.

I spotted the article about Circuit City and MAD Magazine on your site.
fyi, I became aware of this “situation” only this morning, and I have sent a note today to the Editors of MAD Magazine.

Speaking as “an embarrassed corporate PR Guy,” I apologized for the fact that some overly-sensitive souls at our corporate headquarters ordered the removal of the August issue of MAD Magazine from our stores. Please keep in mind that only 40 of our 700 stores sell magazines at all.

We apologize for the knee-jerk reaction, and have issued a retraction order; the affected stores are being directed to put the magazines back on sale.

Hi, Ben,

The parody of our newspaper ad in the August MAD was very clever. Most of us at Circuit City share a rich sense of humor and irony…but there are occasional temporary lapses.

MAD Magazine is getting the last laugh now that Circuit City has issued a mea culpa for telling employees to destroy issues of MAD that contain a parody of the retailer’s advertising.

The good news is that at least one member of Circuit City’s PR team appears to appreciate the value of a good ribbing–or at least appreciate the value of pretending to have a sense of humor. This is the letter:

The Consumerist pointed us to a copy of a letter of it received from a Circuit City corporate communicator after the site wrote about the alleged search-and-destroy mission. In the letter, Circuit City apologizes for its “knee-jerk reaction,” and says its has issued a retraction order and directed affected stores to put the magazines back on sale.

(Credit:
MAD Magazine)

The magazine’s August issue contains a (pretty darn amusing) four-page “Sucker City” circular with announcements like: “Believe it or not, $3,599.99 is the sale price,” and “Wii Gaming System Guaranteed In Stock…if you’re friends with an employee who hid it in the back for you. Otherwise, oh, sorry, all sold out.” Sucker City also sells products including a self-editing Web cam that “stops embarrassing YouTube videos before they’re made.”

As a gesture of our apology and deep respect for the folks at MAD Magazine, we are creating a cross-departmental task force to study the importance of humor in the corporate workplace and expect the resulting Powerpoint presentation to top out at least 300 pages, chock full of charts, graphs and company action plans. In addition I have offered to send the MAD Magazine Editor a $20.00 Circuit City Gift Card, toward the purchase of a
Nintendo Wii….if he can find one!

All the best,
Jim Babb
Corporate Communications
Circuit City Stores, Inc.
Richmond, VA