plans-interactifs.net

The report quotes Samsung SDI’s VP of mobile display marketing, Woo-Jong Lee, who says that Samsung SDI will be able to produce 3 million panels in 2009, which is double what they can crank out now. Lee said the company anticipates doubling its capacity again by the close of 2010.

(Credit:
Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)

The liquid crystal display (LCD) industry probably doesn’t have much to worry about yet. OLED panels are incredibly expensive to produce right now, and, yes, they’re awfully pretty. (Sony’s 11-inch display achieves a 1 million-to-1 contrast ratio, which is by far the best available for a TV.) But even as production increases from one manufacturer, it doesn’t necessarily mean the prices will drop down to where flat panels have sunk. The 11-inch OLED TV from Sony costs $2,500. For that price you could also get a 50-inch Pioneer Kuro, generally regarded as the best plasma TV on the market.

Though Samsung has previously discussed making OLED TVs, the company still has yet to release one. A year ago Toshiba also said it’s planning on investing in OLED panels. Sony is betting on OLED’s eventual domination of the display market, but it’s also heavily invested in LCD.

Sony’s teased us for a bit with its impossibly thin, 11-inch organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV, and finally brought it to the U.S. this year. Now it looks like there will be more to choose from in OLED TVs next year. Samsung SDI says that by 2009, not only will it have OLED panels for larger TVs, but also for monitors and notebook displays, according to a report in Digitimes.

However, Panasonic, which owns the plasma TV market, doesn’t anticipate LCD or plasma TVs fading out anytime soon.

OLED TVs on display at CES

“On April 20 a Russian Mig-29 fighter jet shot down an unarmed, unmanned air vehicle which was performing basic reconnaissance over Georgian territory,” Georgian air force Colonel David Nairashvili told Reuters. “It’s absolutely illegal for a Russian Mig-29 to be there.”

UAVs may have been stealing the publicity limelight of late from traditional war birds, but there’s little doubt of who comes out on top in a dogfight as seen in this video of a purported Russian MIG-29 drilling a Georgian drone.

Georgia’s air force provided Reuters with video footage it said was recorded and transmitted by the UAV’s on-board camera before it was shot down.

Russia has denied involvement.

The video opens on a lovely spring day over what could be the Black Sea, then focuses in on a swooping jet aircraft. The jet, with no visible identification markings, fires a missile that comes up on the drone in a languid uppercut, before the screen goes to static.

Oracle raised the prices for a number of its products this week, by as much as twenty percent in many cases. While on the surface this seems silly in a down economy the truth is that it’s actually a very smart move.

Do I think this is good for Oracle customers? No. But, once again I have to marvel at the economic prowess that Oracle continues to display. Meanwhile, just go get some MySQL.

First of all, Oracle sets the pricing for the database market (and now possibly the app server market too) and therefore should always be looking for ways to increase their prices. The other important aspect is the fact that Oracle discounts heavily off list price. With a large increase (say 20%) they stand to even their loss on the list vs. actual price. It’s deviously ingenious.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Fluther, my favorite Q&A site has launched a new feature Wednesday called “Your Fluther.” It lets you follow other people’s activity on the site in one centralized, easy to parse feed. It’s a companion to the built-in recommendation engine “just for you” that will feed you with questions based on topics listed in your profile and tracked site usage. More importantly, it’s an easy way to create a private group of users who you’d rather keep an eye on than the growing public feed.

If you see a user your like you can their question asking abilities with this new feed. Missing however is a way to track their responses.

One thing I’d like to see added to that feed is users’ responses to other people’s questions as many of the site’s best users seem to do more answering than asking. It would also be another good way to discover new worthwhile questions besides the centralized feed.

Fluther co-founder and CEO Ben Finkel tells me the site has been doubling in users every three months, which has been helped with a successful iPhone Web app and an overall increase in traffic from search engines. While Fluther has less users than more established services like wiki.answers.com and Yahoo Answers, I think it’s got a far more advanced offering with things like live tracking of written answers and a count of how many people are watching. There’s honestly nothing as cool as asking a question and seeing who is in the middle of responding before their post goes live.

To date, the proprietary license models surrounding such software have meant that this all-important access has been limited or even non-existent for many smaller developers and content providers. And, without ubiquitous access, the growth of the mobile internet industry as a whole has been held back. In the traditional internet environment, access has been provided through open source software models. So why couldn’t the same principle be applied to mobile?

Suddenly, open source provides an answer. As vendors like Nokia look to open source to build the mobile Web, we may finally get the open, thriving mobile Web we’ve been pontificating about for far too long.

commentary

My friend and one-time colleague, Mark Watson, CEO of mobile open-source company Volantis, pens a cogent analysis of the mobile content industry, and what prevents it from becoming the gargantuan market it has long been predicted to become. Watson suggests that “fragmentation may be the very thing that is inhibiting the ability to meet market expectations for growth and proliferation of mobile content and services,” and suggests that open source may offer a remedy for this problem:

Disclosure: I am an advisor to Volantis.

This is a perspective I hadn’t considered before, but it strikes me as true. The Web has flourished in large part because it is an exceptionally open platform, one built upon open source and open standards. The mobile Web? It is precisely the opposite: walled garden, closed standards, and closed source.

…[I]t’s not possible for content providers to just put a mobile web application “out there” and see the immediate uptake that they’d expect on the wider internet. Instead, they need access to the right enabling technology to reach the mass market — development tools and runtime software that can automatically overcome fragmentation issues, without passing the burden of device knowledge to the developer.

Surely a high point in Superbowl advertising history: GoDaddy's 2005 commercial.

Hulu is still in private beta but there are 2,000 new Hulu invites waiting for Webware readers. The Superbowl archive won’t go live until after the game, but you can nab your invite now.

I like Hulu. When I travel, I tune in to it on my laptop instead of a hotel’s TV. The service always has something dumb to watch, thanks to its relationships with network TV providers.

I am man enough to admit that I am not a big football fan. Superbowl? Sure, I Tivo it. For the ads. This year, I’ll be checking out Hulu’s Superbowl site after the game. The site promises that all the ads will be up right after the game ends, in high-quality streams.

I think that means I can’t even afford one pixel of its logo. That’s one heck of a brand.

Which are the other top-10 brands? General Electric, Microsoft (but going down according to other research), Coca-Cola, China Mobile, IBM, Apple, McDonald’s, Nokia, and Marlboro. It’s fascinating to see how technology brands dominate. Maybe we really do rule the world?

$86 billion.

In WPP-owned research company Millward Brown’s annual study of the world’s top-100 brands, Google came out on top for the second straight year, registering a 30 percent increase in the value of its brand to maintain the ranking. Google’s market capitalization is $169 billion as a I write this, but the value of its brand?

commentary

And consequently, the vast majority of the stories were about the nitty-gritty details of the site, the sort of thing that would be of importance to a daily Digg user but which would be inconsequential at best (and potentially nonsensical) to an outsider. I’m not a top Digger, but I’m more than familiar with the site. Digg’s users, for better or for worse, also happen to be a tech-savvy bunch. That means a tougher job for Adelson, Rose, and the rest, as the users will be more likely to demand upgrades to the service, insist on a better user experience, and the like. That’s good; I’m tired of seeing Web 2.0 sites thinking that they can get away with perpetual beta phases and poor performance.

But on the other hand, Digg can’t simply look inward because legitimate competitors have begun to surface. One of them, Mixx, just raised several million dollars in venture funding. None of the questions addressed on Monday night dealt with Digg’s opinion of its competitors, plan for moving forward in a tough economic climate, or where Rose and Adelson see the site in five years. Granted, that’s not their fault; the questions about “super-users” and comment system upgrades were, after all, what the users Dugg. But I sat through question after question about minute upgrades to the Digg comment system when I really wanted to hear about Adelson and Rose’s collective vision for the site going forward.

All in all, the session highlighted quite a few of Digg’s strengths as well as troubles going forward–and additionally reflected a few common criticisms about the site as a whole. But in the process, the questions were inward-focused, dealing with the demands of an active but demanding user base. Very few dealt with Digg’s place in the Web’s landscape or new media industry as a whole.

Digg does have a great model for social news that, in my opinion, hasn’t yet been paralleled by any other site. But it’s in a bit of a Catch-22: ignore or deceive its community, and it faces mass backlash; but pander to its community too much, and it hinders its opportunities for growth as it focuses too far inward. I wanted to hear vision. I wanted to hear partnerships and developments and possibilities. What I heard instead was the gradual upgrading of the search algorithm. Maybe, because I’m not a hardcore Digger, I just don’t get it.

Watching the town hall, those complaints seemed pretty grounded. Right off the bat, the 20 questions selected were chosen because of the numbers of Diggs each question amassed in a thread about the town hall. True, that’s keeping it in the community, and Digg is all about the community. But it’s also a bit incestuous, and the questions could have fallen prey to Digg’s alleged insideriness–voting up a comment or story simply because of who posted it or submitted it, not because of the content of the stories.

But I appreciate that Kevin Rose is a fan of Chimay Red ale.

On Monday night, social-news site Digg took a new approach to its famously clamorous users: CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose sat down in front of a Ustream-connected camera with their MacBook Pros and a couple of beers and answered questions that had been submitted by Diggers.

Digg, like a handful of other social-media sites (Yelp and Vimeo come to mind), has become famous for a notoriously tight-knit community. On one hand, that’s a sign of success. It’s got a really dedicated user base. On the other hand, it invokes claims of cliquishness and complaints that it’s hard for an outsider to break in.

As a relative outsider to Digg culture, I was fairly dissatisfied.

One question did touch upon the constant gossip that Digg will get acquired. For obvious reasons, Adelson and Rose declined to comment. “We get asked this every day,” was Adelson’s response. “We are laser focused on the features that users want us to do, and frankly that is what we’re focused on as a business right now.”

And, I don’t know that it’s a good fit for non-techies. Not only is it more ambitious than just being a firewall, the paid version is a very ambitious firewall. The list of features is huge. The free version of ZoneAlarm is skimpy on features, but sometimes less is more.

A nice feature of Online Armor is that it shows you other computers on your LAN, something that ZoneAlarm does not. But, every time I’ve looked at it, the status of the other computers is “unknown”, it continued to show computers that had been turned off hours ago and there is a yellow light bulb icon whose meaning is a mystery.

The fact that Online Armor is not just a firewall may be what leads to my biggest gripe with the product - it’s confusing. Compared to the simplistic, free edition of ZoneAlarm, the Online Armor configuration options seem strangely spread out. For example, some Firewall options are in the Firewall section, others are in the Options section and the main on/off switch for the Firewall is in the “General” section.

Kicking The Tires

Rules

After installing Online Armor I was getting, what I felt were excessive warnings. Granted, “excessive” is subjective, but I was getting warnings that had nothing to do with networking.

The heart of a firewall are the rules governing the networking that programs are allowed to engage in. Online Armor controls this in three different places.

Speaking of notifications, below is the standard alert from Online Armor, one that was generated by installing Java. It leads with “A program wants to use the Internet”. It doesn’t say if it wants to make an outbound connection or if wants to accept an incoming connection, something ZoneAlarm makes very clear. The last option has to do with sessions, what a session is to Online Armor, I don’t know.

The most important thing a firewall does is keep the bad guys out. That is, it prevents unrequested connection attempts from the outside world. Even the basic firewall in Windows XP does this (that’s all it does). ZoneAlarm excelled at two things in this regard, it logged these blocked intrusion attempts and it had an option to issue an alert when it blocked something. After reviewing all the options in Online Armor, it doesn’t seem able to do either. This, to me, this is a big omission. Not only did I like to audit my firewall by occasionally reviewing the log of unsolicited incoming connections, I also found it educational. There is no better way to drive home the danger that is the Internet, than to see how often bad guys come knocking at your door.

I was disappointed by the history, which doesn’t show the outbound endpoint. For example, it showed that Thunderbird, my email program, made an outbound connection on port 443, but to where? Of the millions of computers on the Internet, which one did my email program connect to? Online Armor doesn’t log this, ZoneAlarm does.

That said, two features of Online Armor sound very interesting. The “Run safer” feature is much like DropMyRights, which I wrote about last year. The “banking mode” (only available in the paid version) is also intriguing. I may research these a bit more.

The install process for Online Armor was uneventful, but then things went downhill. After installing, you have to reboot, no surprise there, I would expect this with any firewall. But, on the first computer I installed it on, the reboot looked like it wouldn’t happen. For what seemed like an eternity, I was staring at the Windows desktop image with no icons. Perhaps a watched pot never boils, but I was sure glad that I had made a disk image backup beforehand.

There is a “Hide Trusted” checkbox as part of this display. Yet, even with it checked, you still see programs that are “allowed”. So, there is a difference between “allowed” and “trusted” that I’m not getting. You also see this in the Firewall section of the Options tab, which has a checkbox for “Automatically allow trusted programs to access the Internet”. What about a program is trusted, if not Internet access? This is, after all, a firewall.

This was bad documentation. Online Armor doesn’t tell new users that special processing takes place during the first boot after the product is installed. There is a warning on their website, but there is no warning where it needs to be, alongside the message that says the installation worked and you have to restart Windows. After Windows finally restarted, Online Armour said something about completing an initial “learning process”.

Windows Messenger is an IE7 browser extension that I always disable, since I don’t use the product. Online Armor trusted it, so for good luck I tried to block it. This produced the warning below saying it will be uninstalled rather than blocked. The warning is wrong - if you say yes, the Windows Messenger extension is blocked rather than removed. After unblocking the Windows Messenger extension, I deleted it and that seemed to work, it no longer appeared in IE7.

*Online Armor supports Windows XP and 2000, a Vista version is in the works.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

Online Armor is a step up from ZoneAlarm in that it includes a database of known trusted programs. So, for example, the first time I run the Ping command it allows it and pops up an alert. The free ZoneAlarm knows nothing, so it objected to Pings. In the Online Armor history, there are two entries for that first ping. Neither shows the website that I pinged and one says it was a user decision, which is was not.

In Internet Explorer 7, you can see the installed Add-ons with: Tools -> Manage Add-ons -> Enable or Disable Add-ons. On both machines, when I selected “Add-ons that have been used by Internet Explorer” the list was much longer than the list in Online Armor. On one machine, IE7 displayed 20 Add-ons and Online Armor listed 7. I’m not sure what to make of this.

Judging by the General tab, shown below, there are four main sections/features to Online Armor, two of which are included in the free edition - Program Guard and the Firewall.

One problem ZoneAlarm had was that it created an always-growing log file. I had to put a reminder in my PIM to delete this file every couple months. With this in mind, I looked to see how Online Armor dealt with logging. It seems to have both a log file and a history, the difference between them isn’t clear. Even with logging disabled (there is a checkbox in the Firewall section of the Options tab), the history is still created. Neither one seems to have an option to limit the total size of the output.

In the interest of brevity (this is already my longest posting), I won’t go into some other quirks in the user interface but suffice it to say, there is room for improvement.

Go figure.

Online Armor also deals with Internet Explorer extensions, which ZoneAlarm does not. On both machines, it trusted the few extensions it found, which isn’t a surprise, as I hardly use IE.

Controlling Programs

As I mentioned previously, based on a recommendation from Scot Finnie, I installed the Online Armor firewall on a couple Windows XP machines.* Scot recommended the paid version, I opted to get my feet wet with the free edition (v2.1.0.131). These are my first impressions, not a review. I don’t think anyone can base a firewall review on merely a couple days experience, it’s the sort of software you have to live with for a while.

My previous firewall was ZoneAlarm, whose best feature was its ease of use. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, I no longer think that’s sufficient. For example, ZoneAlarm seems bloated. The download for Online Armor is 9.9MB, ZoneAlarm is over four times larger.

One of the first things I noticed was that Online Armor has two icons in the system tray (the leftmost two in the screen shot above). To me, one is enough. Other software makes do with a single icon (Avast antivirus defaults to two but there is an option to combine them). Someone else pointed out that both icons have the same right click menus. One icon (leftmost one above) looks like a shield and doesn’t seem to change. The other icon looks very much like the Task manager icon which, at first, I thought it was (judge for yourself - the two are next to each other in the picture above). This icon does change, it’s a vertical bar graph showing inbound and outbound traffic.

The product help is not part of the installed software, rather, it’s on the web, so if you’re off-line it doesn’t exist. And, the Help button is not context sensitive. That is, it always goes to the same introductory web page rather than going directly to the page with help for the feature you are looking at. In this case, I want to read about the Rules tab, within the Firewall tab. Because there is more than one Firewall tab, finding the right section in the help takes time. The page for the Rules tab doesn’t explain these columns but the page for editing rules does. This is harder than it needs to be.

The other computer with Online Armor had a normally installed copy of Firefox 2, a portable copy of Firefox 3 and a portable copy of Firefox 2. I ran them all at least once. The Programs tab only knows about the normally installed copy of Firefox 2. The Program Access section of the Firewall tab shows all three but the Rules section of the Firewall tab has one entry for the portable copy of Firefox 2, no entries for the portable copy of Firefox 3 and two entries for the normally installed copy of Firefox.

First, there is a Programs tab where you can allow or block programs. Allow them to do what? It doesn’t say. I turned off Program Guard, yet this window seems fully functional. Only by clicking the Block button, does it become obvious this is blocking programs from running so it must be part of Program Guard rather than the firewall. There should be some indication here that Program Guard is disabled because a user can easily make changes here and expect them to take effect, when they are, in fact, being ignored.

On one computer running Online Armor there is a normally installed copy of Firefox 2, a portable copy of Firefox 3 and two portable copies of Firefox 2. The Program Access section of the Firewall tab shows all four, but calls each one “Firefox”. By accident, I discovered that if you hover the mouse over the program name, a tooltip displays the path to the program. The rules section shows only two copies of Firefox and, likewise, the Programs tab shows only two of them.

When a program was approved with ZoneAlarm, you never heard another thing about it. That said, ZoneAlarm doesn’t offer the level of control that Online Armor does. Specifically, ZoneAlarm can’t restrict the ports a program uses. And, if you really care about network security, you would want to be notified if a program used an unexpected port. Still, I would have liked some way to not be notified every time my FTP program used a new port.

Like ZoneAlarm, Online Armor can protect the hosts file, something I think any firewall should do. I found that it let me modify the comments in the hosts file without objecting, but as soon as I changed something that really mattered, it caught me and issued the alert below. In other words, it works great. If you want to test this yourself, the hosts file in Windows XP is in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc.

In all this configuration, I miss what ZoneAlarm calls “server rights’, the ability to accept incoming connections. The Online Armor equivalent is a rule with a “Dir” of “in” (”Dir” means “direction”). Online Armor commits a cardinal sin here, it uses abbreviations without explanations. This same window has an “Adv” column whose meaning I couldn’t even guess at initially.

I poked around and found an option to suppress the bar graph traffic icon and another option to suppress both icons. What I wanted to do, see just the bar graph icon, doesn’t seem possible.

Before Scot Finnie recommends a firewall, he runs it through a battery of tests. Online Armor got an excellent score, so I don’t doubt it’s protecting my computer. Still, it will be a while before I feel comfortable with it.

To try and understand things, I looked into how each of these three configuration areas dealt with
Firefox.

For example, below is a warning from Online Armor that IrfanView wants to run. IrfanView is a picture viewer and editor. It has nothing to do with networking and therefore it’s not something a firewall needs to worry about. Disabling Program Guard (you can see the checkbox is off in the screen shot above) was one of the first things I did. Program Guard may be a good thing, but all firewalls are chatty at first, that’s the nature of the beast. Adding warnings about safe, non-networked programs such as IrfanView just makes things worse.

Update July 17 2008: Revised the topic on incoming connections and added mention of the status display.

Main Menu

The first hint that Online Armor is not just a firewall comes from this introduction to the product on the Tall Emu website which refers to Online Armor as an antivirus program. The page also refers to trusted programs and programs allowed to access the internet as two different things. As a former ZoneAlarm user these are, to me, the same thing.

Final Thoughts

Programs are also controlled in the “Program Access” section in the Firewall tab, which seems to do the same thing. That is, it too has a list of programs that you can Allow or Block. Allow to do what what was not immediately clear here either. Finally, there is a rules section in the Firewall tab (shown below) which also controls programs.

I maintain a number of websites using an FTP program. One type of FTP chooses port numbers randomly which meant that every time I used the program, it generated a pop-up notice that the new port was auto-approved. The pop-up doesn’t say that explicitly (see below) but that’s what it means. When an already approved program uses a new port for the first time, you get this pop-up and it wasn’t obvious how to turn this off.

The second thing of note is the cool looking status display shown below. I haven’t yet found the graphs at the top to be very useful, but the Active Connections section at the bottom offers very interesting information, data that ZoneAlarm did not provide.

(Via Gearfuse.)

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.

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 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.

Seitz's 160-megapixel 6×17 Digital camera

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.

(Credit:
Seitz)