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I can’t imagine that the deal would be overturned just because of a few complaints to the military, but Apple might be forced to figure out a way to transfer that portion of PA Semi’s assets to another chipmaker that could satisfy Uncle Sam’s need for the chips.

EETimes is reporting that PA Semi started telling its customers in the military hardware industry that it was about to be acquired by a company that wanted only its intellectual property and employees.

PA Semi, acquired by Apple earlier this week, has been telling its former customers that Apple has no interest in its products, according to a report.

The PWRficient processors are used in military systems built by defense contractors such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, companies reportedly annoyed by the possibility that the PWRficient processor might be coming to a quick end. According to EETimes, PA Semi told those contractors that after the acquisition, supply of the chips could not be guaranteed.

On Tuesday night, we learned that Apple was that company via a Forbes report that said the
Mac maker wanted to put PA Semi’s PWRficient processors in its
iPhone.

And that, apparently, could cause problems for Apple. The report says those contractors are going to complain about the acquisition to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Sony already has an 11-inch OLED model that sells for $2,500, but Stringer showed an even thinner model due out within the next 12 months. It’s thinner than a credit card, just 0.3mm thick.

Among those who went onstage to see it was decor guru Martha Stewart, who gave it the all-important thumbs up. “I like it,” Stewart told me, adding that she already has several Sony VAIO displays.

CARLSBAD, Calif.–A steady stream of folks rushed the stage Wednesday after Howard Stringer’s speech, but they weren’t looking to corner the Sony CEO. Rather, they wanted to see his superthin television.

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

The newest version of Mac OS X Leopard, 10.5.3, is ready for Mac owners.

Apple has released the latest version of Mac OS X Leopard, just weeks before its annual developers’ conference.

(Credit:
Apple)

Apple is getting set to host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco the week of June 9, where we might learn more about the yet-unnamed Mac OS X 10.6, assuming they aren’t skipping ahead to Mac OS XI, or Mac OS 11, or whatever naming convention gets chosen.

Mac OS X 10.5.3 is now available for downloading from Apple’s site or through the Software Update process. Dozens of bugs are fixed with the new release for products like iCal, Mail, Time Machine, and others.

Itanium is an Intel 64-bit architecture for high-end servers. It differs from the x86 architecture, widely used in PCs. One principal difference is the way the compiler is used. Because the compiler makes decisions about the parallel execution of instructions, the processor can execute up to six instructions per clock cycle.

NEC’s Mitsch said Itanium also supports extremely robust error detecting and error correcting memory. “We’re in the process of qualifying up to two terabytes of logical (memory),” he said.

The quad-core version of the Itanium, code-named Tukwila, will come out in early 2009 and be one of the first “monolithic” quad-core designs from Intel, said Rob Shiveley, worldwide marketing manager of the Mission Critical Server Platform Group at Intel. A monolithic design puts all four cores on one piece of silicon (called a die). To date, Intel has built its quad-core processors by combining two dual-core processor dies. AMD’s “Barcelona” Opteron quad-core design puts all four processors on one die.

This will give system vendors the ability to deliver eight-socket systems with up to 32 cores (4 cores per socket), said Mike Mitsch, General Manager, Enterprise Servers, IT Platform Group, NEC Corporation of America.

On another front, the Itanium Solutions Alliance announced that worldwide annual Itanium-based factory system revenue and system volume continued to grow in 2007, with a year-over-year increase of 30.8 and 36.3 percent, respectively. The Asia-Pacific region led the way, with year-over-year growth in factory system revenue and system volume of 61 percent and 45 percent, respectively. In Japan, Itanium-based revenue exceeds all other non x86 server platforms, the alliance said.

The alliance also said it is collaborating with Microsoft to deliver new programs and tools to help businesses migrate from “costly legacy RISC systems and mainframes” to Itanium-based platforms. Currently, a fourth of the more than 13,000 Itanium-based applications are Windows Server-based, the alliance said.

Tukwila will also have an integrated memory controller and QuickPath Interconnect technology, Shiveley said. This will increase the data transfer rate within the processor. Intel’s “Nehalem” processor–due in the fourth quarter of this year–will also be a monolithic design with an integrated memory controller and QuickPath Interconnect technology.

UPDATE An alliance to promote the use of Intel’s Itanium processor said a quad-core version of the chip will come out in early 2009. The alliance also disclosed more than a 30 percent jump in volume growth year to year and an update to its partnership with Microsoft, among other announcements.

On-chip cache memory for Tukwila will also be increased from 24MB to 30MB. “It is focused on database performance”–that’s what the large 30MB cache is for, Shiveley said. Windows Itanium platforms are used, for example, to consolidate a larger number of SQL database servers.

Using two billion transistors (the bulk of the transistors are allocated to the large cache memory), Tukwila will be based on Intel’s 65nm process technology and will initially have a clock speed of up to 2GHz at both 170 watts and 130 watts.

Other recent developments include: an NEC enterprise server with dynamic hardware partitioning functionality for Microsoft Windows Server 2008–the NEC Express5800/1320Xf. Sun Microsystems previewed Itanium-optimized Java SE 6 running on an Itanium-based server in several different SOA (service-oriented architecture) scenarios.

(Credit:
Itanium Solutions Alliance)

He used instant messaging as an example. He said that unlike email, which allows people to send and receive messages from different e-mail providers, IM is still closed. (Microsoft’s Live Messenger does interoperate with Yahoo Messenger, but it doesn’t use an open protocol, such as Jabber.

“We think that’s stupid,” he said. “It doesn’t foster competition. If you want good products you need some degree of openness.”

Google and Yahoo have been discussing and testing an advertising partnership. As part of this deal, Google would supply some text ads alongside Yahoo search results. The companies both seem satisfied with results from a two-week test. However, a partnership between the two companies has stalled due to antitrust concerns.

(Credit:
Google)

“Yahoo wants to remain independent,” he said. “We support that. On the other hand, they’re in a difficult situation.”

Speaking at an event Thursday in Washington, D.C., Page said a deal could be structured to help Yahoo maintain its independence without violating antitrust laws. Page acknowledged that Google has a significant share of the advertising market, but he said “there are ways in which to structure a deal with Yahoo that would be reasonable.” He added, that Yahoo’s alternatives aren’t great either.

Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of products.

Google has been opposed to Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo from the start. Page said that a combined Microsoft and Yahoo would control too much of the market, and as a result would stifle innovation and slow development of new products and services.

Meanwhile Yahoo has also just fended off a takeover bid from competitor Microsoft. Now the software giant is looking at ways to get a smaller stake in Yahoo. At the same time, Yahoo is dealing with pressure from activist Carl Icahn, who believes the company should have taken the Microsoft bid.

Google’s co-founder Larry Page respects Yahoo’s struggle to remain independent, and he says there’s still a chance an advertising deal between the two companies can work.

“You can’t have one company control 90 percent of the market, especially one that has a history of doing bad stuff,” he said.

MySpace’s political initiatives didn’t end with the primaries: the News Corp.-owned social network has unveiled a contest in conjunction with NBC News and MSNBC.com in anticipation of the major parties’ campaign conventions.

Convention reports, both text and video, from the two winning “journalists,” will then be featured in MySpace and MSNBC’s campaign coverage.

Entrants, who must be MySpace members who are 18 years or older, must answer one of the following questions via a video submission: “Why do you vote?” “Why are you the best person for this job?” and “How will you stand out in the crowd and get the scoop no one else can?” Entries open at noon Pacific time on Thursday, and close on July 16.

Part of the Decision ‘08 initiative between MySpace and NBC News, it’s a competition to choose MySpace’s “citizen journalist” correspondents at the major parties’ national conventions later this summer.

Contest judges will be MSNBC personalities Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, as well as MySpace president Tom Anderson (yes, that Tom) and Lee Brenner, director of the site’s “Impact” political activism section. They’ll choose five finalists, from whom two winners will be chosen by members of MySpace.

An analyst rekindled speculation Monday that the world’s largest graphics chip supplier would sell off its chipset business, while rumors persist that the company would play a larger role in an expected refresh of the Apple MacBook.

Nvidia shares fell Monday after a Pacific Crest analyst issued a negative report on the company’s prospects. In the report, the analyst said “our checks confirm” that Nvidia will exit the chipset business next year.

Some are even pointing to a graphic on the Nvidia notebook home page of a slim notebook design as a possible MacBook design–though a more plausible explanation is that it’s simply generic artwork.

But not all is lost. On the upside, rumors persist that Nvidia will play a large role in an expected MacBook refresh this month. The latest rumor holds that Nvidia is showing off prototypes internally of upcoming MacBooks with new Nvidia silicon.

Nvidia would not comment on the rumors.

Nvidia graphic on its notebook home page

Nvidia has become a Silicon Valley hot spot for rumors. One is tied to an analyst downgrade Monday, the other to the rumored Apple MacBook refresh.

Apple uses Nvidia graphics chips in its high-end MacBook Pros, but the MacBook and MacBook Air use Intel integrated graphics silicon. One of the latter two could be recipients of new Nvidia graphics chips.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

Nvidia chipsets–sometimes referred to as MCPs–serve as supporting silicon for the company’s graphics processors. In the past, Nvidia has denied that it will exit the chipset business.

If that wasn’t enough, Pacific Crest said Nvidia may see share loss in the notebook market next year as a result of a future refresh of “Montevina” graphics silicon from Intel.

The analyst also speculated that Nvidia will pre-announce negative results for the third quarter (ended October). Nvidia has been dogged by negative press and analyst reports after it disclosed issues with its processors and chipsets back in July.

Computing practices tend to gravitate toward one of two poles. One is tight control, higher prices, and high reliability. The other is openness, lower cost, but some degree of flakiness. High-end mainframes and Unix servers can handle transaction loads that would crush most machines using Intel or AMD x86 processors, but they cost more and are less adaptable. Most of the cutting-edge, large-scale action in the Internet–including various cloud computing efforts–is happening with the more free-wheeling technology.

• Second, you can expect reliability to increase as the companies providing cloud infrastructure and services figure out explore the terra igcognita.

Afterward, Om Malik called cloud computing frail: “The S3 outage points to a bigger (and a larger) issue: the cloud has many points of failure–routers crashing, cable getting accidentally cut, load balancers getting misconfigured, or simply bad code. And he’s right, to a degree, but there are three things that shouldn’t be overlooked before writing cloud computing off as a failure.

But a little silver lining to this particular cloud problem is that Amazon is setting expectations at the right level: They said in a statement, “Any downtime is unacceptable, and we won’t be satisfied until it is perfect.”

Some Amazon Web Services were down for hours on July 20.

Essentially, Amazon had to reboot S3. Here’s how the company described its S3 problem in a statement:

“As a distributed system, the different components of S3 need to be aware of the state of each other. For example, this awareness makes it possible for the system to decide which redundant physical storage server to route a request to. We experienced a problem with those internal system communications, leaving the components unable to interact properly, and customers unable to successfully process requests. After exploring several alternatives, the team determined it had to take the service offline to restore proper communication and then bring service online again. These are sophisticated systems and it generally takes a while to get to root cause in such a situation,” Amazon said. “We will be providing our customers with more information when we’ve fully investigated the incident.”

• Third, don’t confuse Web 2.0 with the foundational elements of cloud computing. A Web site that uses an online application at another site to mash up data from some other sites then present it using a service from yet another site is indeed susceptible to numerous points of failure. But a single-purpose infrastructure such as Amazon S3 is at least in theory a more tightly controlled, single-purpose utility that can offer higher reliability.

(Credit:
Amazon)

That’s not to excuse Amazon’s outage or gloss over the effect it had on business partners reliant on it. After all, S3 is the sole part of Amazon Web Services that comes with a service level agreement to promise customers reliability.

One company operating at colossal scale, Google, has concluded it’s better to buy cheap x86 servers and write software that automatically paves over hardware failures. The bigger problem comes when a large system composed of many interacting components loses track of its self-conception, and rebooting a single system or swapping out a hard drive isn’t sufficient.

Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service, S3, spent a few hours Sunday in a big pothole on the road to the glorious cloud computing future, with an outage taking the storage system offline for several hours Sunday. Should we be surprised?

No. In short, the computing industry is making up what’s called cloud computing as it goes along, often with a server and networking architecture that’s one part improvisation to two parts proven best practice. Frankly, it’s notable to me that some services are as reliable as they are.

• First, you should compare the problems of cloud computing to the alternatives, including running computing services in-house. Last I checked, corporate data centers also have crashing routers, bad code, and misconfigured load balancers.

Update: I incorrectly referred to Nullriver as Nullsoft–makers of WinAmp. That has since been fixed.

What it comes down to this time around is readiness. A cheaper price point means more people are likely to want and actually afford the device. The new architecture also means those same hordes of people will be open to having non-Apple applications on their phone. While I have no doubt Apple will easily pull in huge numbers from paid apps in the coming months, Installer.app might have a few surprises up its sleeves.

The obvious guess here is that the Installer.app will simply go the way of the dinosaurs because of Apple’s own first party creation, but I think the groundbreaking tool has life left in it yet. Nothing besides the apps store says people will no longer want to jailbreak their phones. The new marketplace sure looks nice, but it’s not going to have everything people want. There will be all manner of apps that don’t make the cut and the developers that built them will want to hawk them somewhere else.

When Apple announced the iPhone apps store several months ago, it appeared to signal the end for the popular homebrew Installer.app by Nullriver. While the application has a few developer creations that cost money to use, most of the library is completely free, letting people load up on useful applications without spending a dime. The application became so popular it started coming with popular unlock and jailbreak utilities, including ZiPhone, which has had more than 3 million downloads of its latest version.

Another thing to take into account is one of the important things not included in Apple’s latest software–customization.

There’s still a huge market for these things, whether Apple is willing to allow it or not. I’m not surprised the company has passed on the potential cash cow. Nokia practically built an empire in the 1990s by selling phones with interchangable faceplates, but ultimately the ratio of quality to crap from third-party creators was off the charts. That stigma still exists for some users, which is why it’s likely Apple passed on adding a user replaceable battery if only to limit the offshoot of companies that would likely create glitter, and clear plastic replacements.

Apple’s new system is a different story. It doesn’t cost anything, but developers must go through the company’s QA for approval and inclusion. Developers can also charge users to use their applications at the point or purchase instead of relying on time or feature restrictions post-download. There’s also the SDK, which makes it viable for companies to spin out entirely new development teams to port over versions of their Web apps or software that are specially tuned for the device.

One of the early killer apps for the
iPhone was Summerboard, a simple tool that would completely re-skin the look and feel of your phone. No such application is likely to make its way to the app store, since no app made through the SDK can have that level of control. The same goes for potential VoIP apps that can be integrated at a very deep level into the device’s calling software.

“It’s integrated with the Internet. It’s not an alternate destination,” said Niniane Wang, Google’s engineering manager for the project. “Our intention is to add to your existing life.”

Don’t get me wrong. I remain a believer, overall, in this form of online interaction, however socially stunted it may feel compared with, say, a singles bar. I just think the technology has a ways to go. I found Second Life more immersive, but even so, even the relatively crude communications enabled by e-mail and instant messaging did more to revolutionize my online social interactions.

With Lively, you can set up you own online spaces–rooms, grassy meadows, desert islands, or, in the demo version I tried, simulated Silicon Valley office parks. You can change the clothing or form of your avatar (that’s your online incarnation, for those of you who missed the Second Life hype). And of course you can chat, do backflips, shake hands, and give high-fives.

After that, the novelty wore off even more rapidly than with Second Life. I’m sure it would have been more exciting with somebody else to talk to than a mock-up of Google’s T. Rex skeleton, and perhaps if it were a room that I designed myself.

The idea is to bring a better social dimension to online interaction, Wang said–something more sophisticated for expressing oneself than an emoticon on an instant-messenger status line.

“We think there is a desire to socialize in this way,” Wang said, suggesting that’s why Second Life got so much attention when it blossomed in popularity a couple years ago. “We hope this product will help them do that.”

Update 8:17 p.m. PDT: Google amended one Lively detail: the application for MySpace is under development but not yet ready. Also, I corrected a name misspelling.

Google's Lively is a Web-based project similar to Second Life. This shows a re-creation of Google headquarters, complete with the T. Rex skeleton.

A few other differences from Second Life: Lively doesn’t have money. It’s designed to be easier to use, with a drag-and-drop interface. And it’s not programmable, at least yet, so you can only select furniture, clothes, hairstyles, and such from the prefabricated catalog Google supplies.

Money and programmability are both items the company is seriously considering, though, Wang said. A
Mac OS X client also is a high priority, she added.

Integration with the Internet is indeed a significant departure from the Internet, but much of the Lively sales pitch will sound–how to put this politely–familiar to those who’ve already read virtual worlds press releases from years past.

Integration with the ordinary Internet takes several forms. For one thing, you can pipe in content hosted elsewhere on the Internet, including photos or videos. For another, you can embed your Lively area into your blog or, using widgets Google has written, on Facebook Web pages now and MySpace pages later. And you can e-mail your friends a normal Web address to get them to join.

Second Life requires users to download and install a separate “client” software package that taps into the online world. Lively also requires a download and installation–Windows only for now–but then people can use Internet Explorer or
Firefox to enter the virtual world.

Google on Tuesday plans to unveil an online 3D social arena called Lively, the Internet giant’s take on Second Life. But Google wants it to be part of your first life.

I had a number of burps and hiccups using Lively in my demo on a somewhat elderly but by no means ancient laptop, problems Wang said weren’t widespread. When it’s working correctly, it took a little while to master the controls for moving the perspective and my avatar around.