Computer Care - Past News

HP to reorganize printer business

NEW YORK--Hewlett-Packard will reorganize its printer operations, trimming its five business units to three in a bid to become more efficient, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The announcement was made in a Webcast to employees on Wednesday by print division chief Vyomesh Joshi, the newspaper reported in its online edition.

The changes will consolidate HP's laser-jet and commercial-printer units into one, change the head of the graphics unit and combine the ink-jet and consumer-supplies units.

The printing division has already eliminated hundreds of jobs in its offices in Idaho, Oregon and Washington State, but the company said the new move would not result in large-scale lay-offs.

The printer business has long been one of the company's largest profit centers, but consumers and businesses have become less reliant on printing in recent years.

The printer unit earned $2.38 billion over the first two fiscal quarters.

Posted on ZDNet News June 19th, 2008

Gates rules out returning to Microsoft

Wall Street Journal is running an article on how Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer spent the past eight years learning how to pass the leadership baton from Gates to Ballmer.

The most interesting part of the article — and perhaps the main reason Microsoft provided the Journal with access to top-level company officials on the topic of Gates’ and Ballmers’ interpersonal relationship — is at the very end.

“The question remains if Mr. Gates can resist the temptation to dive back in if Microsoft hits a crisis point. Over the past decade, several high-profile founders jumped back in when their companies were under siege, including Steve Jobs, who remade Apple Inc., and Michael Dell of Dell Inc. and Howard Schultz of Starbucks Corp. ‘There is a savior complex that says, ‘I’m the only one who can restore it to its glory,” says David A. Nadler, senior partner at consulting firm Oliver Wyman Group.

“Mr. Gates says he’s happy to help on some long-term projects, but won’t return full-time. ‘I am done with that,’ he said.

There’s been much speculation, both public and private, regarding whether Gates might “un-retire” if he saw Microsoft going downhill. Some readers of this blog have even gone so far as to bet that Gates might not actually leave Microsoft at all, given the ongoing image problems plaguing Vista, the unfinished status of Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo and the fact that the company is at a cross-roads, in terms of its implementation of new business models.

But via the Journal, Microsoft is attempting to squash any such theories. June 30 will be Gates’ “last day” at Microsoft; he will remain as Chairman but no longer be involved in day-to-day decisions as of that date. And he won’t be back, Gates himself is on record now as saying.

Posted by Mary Jo Foley

June 5th, 2008

ZDNet

Windows XP comes to the OLPC

After years of dispute and half-hearted discussions, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) organization have come full circle and will be putting Microsoft’s Windows operating system onto its XO laptop. Limited trials will begin next month, with a general release expected as early as September this year.

Founder of OLPC, Nicholas Negroponte said: “The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases. And those people are much more comfortable with Windows.”

It should be noted that Microsoft was originally antagonistic to the idea of Windows XP running on a laptop championing its rival - the XO laptop was originally designed to run the open-sourced Linux operating system.

Excerpt from the New York Times:

Last year, Mr. Negroponte said, he contacted Mr. Gates again, and this time the Microsoft chairman was receptive. He instructed Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, to work out a deal with Mr. Negroponte. Those talks began in January in private meetings, when both men were attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Microsoft apparently also experienced a change of heart:

“Customers have come to us and said they really like the XO laptop and they would like to see Windows on it,” said James Utzschneider, manager of Microsoft’s developing markets unit.

The Linux version of the XO laptop will still be available. On the OLPC’s end, they are now calling for external software developers to create a version of Sugar - the education software running on the XO, for Windows.

It is clear that Mr. Negroponte is driven more by practicalities than dogmatism to a particular concept or operating system.

- TechRepublic 5/16/08

10 Ways the Internet (As We Know It) Will Die

We often think of the Internet as a platform for unfettered global communication, where information flows freely, innovators can launch new applications at will, and everyone can have a voice. But it’s unlikely that our children’s Internet will look anything like what we have now. How might the Internet as we know it die? Here are 10 possibilities.

1. Someone subverts the Domain Name Service. The Internet relies on DNS. But if someone broke — or worse, subverted — the fundamental way in which we find web sites, we wouldn’t trust URLs any more. Phishing would be easy. Own the DNS and you own the Internet.

2. Zombie networks attack! Untold numbers of enslaved PCs are waiting to do the bidding of shadowy hackers. Matt Sergeant of MessageLabs puts the size of the Storm botnet at between five and 10 million machines (though others peg the size of the network at much less.) Today, bots fill our inboxes with spam. But in the past, they’ve been used to take out companies and countries and to blackmail sites. In the end, it’s an arms race in which only one side has to play by the rules.

3. Massive physical infrastructure failure. If an accident involving a couple of cables in the Mediterranean can make the Internet unusable for hundreds of millions, imagine what an intentional attack could do.

4. Death by a thousand fragments: Ever since Usenet, people have been grouping together with those who think like them. In his book “The Big Switch,” Nicholas Carr cites one study that claimed more than 90 percent of the links originating within either the conservative or liberal community stay within that community. Some link referral tools can even be configured to keep visitors on sites with the same world view. The end result? Islands of like-minded people, increasingly sure there is only one right answer and that they’re in sole possession of it. And an end to the dreams of a global community envisioned by the Internet’s creators.

5. A really good virus breaks the routers. The Internet’s self-healing mechanisms rely on the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. But what if someone gets inside the routers? In a 2006 NANOG presentation, Cisco looked at claims of vulnerability and concluded that “the most damaging attacks are caused by the deliberate misconfiguration of a trusted router.” Corrupt BGP, and you not only stop the Internet from forwarding traffic, you interfere with our ability to get to the routers and fix them.

6. Updates break how updates work. Most software these days is designed to patch itself and remain current. But sometimes the process of automated upgrades triggers its own problems. On Aug. 16, 2007, Skype went down in what the company claimed was a side effect of a massive automatic update to Windows. It’s only a matter of time before an update makes a fundamental piece of software, like a networking stack, unable to update itself, cutting off millions and requiring manual intervention.

7. The Net stops being neutral. If the carriers start to charge us for access to sites the way cable companies charge for premium television, pretty soon you’ll have a “Google fee” on your monthly bill. This already happens with many mobile phones that feature the services of Facebook and YouTube. It’s perhaps the most insidious death, because it would signal the end of innovation — no one would be able to launch the next Skype, Twitter or YouTube without the tacit approval of carriers.

8. The lawyers get involved. The Internet has been an experiment in free speech. That may be coming to an end. Unable to go after the sites themselves, lawyers go after the hosters and registrars. That’s how Swiss banking group Julius Baer took whistleblower Wikileaks off the air. And once there’s precedent, others are sure to follow. The recording industry is already wondering if it can go after carriers for enabling copyright infringement. This is the irony of Net Neutrality: When telcos start treating different bytes differently, they aren’t “common carriers” and may be liable for what they transmit, including illegal content. So they’ll comply.

9. Walled gardens: Many countries already restrict how the Internet is used. China’s firewall — which includes 30,000 people tasked with finding improper users — is a good example. But the Internet is a tool for social change and revolution that could threaten any government. Imagine, for example, a U.S. Congress that outlaws online pornography and blocks known adult sites (which accounted for 18.8 percent of all web visits in 2004, according to Hitwise, although the U.S. government says that figure is actually a mere 1 percent.) Instead of a global Internet, we’d have a return to localized standards of decency imposed by legislators. It’d be like “Dirty Dancing” all over again.

10. Humans take themselves out: As Discover Magazine pointed out years ago, we’ve got plenty of ways to do ourselves in, from nukes to plagues to sucking ourselves into a black hole of our own making. And what’s an Internet without users?

Giga Omni Media, Inc. – April 2008