“The people that are on our mainland and in our estate, if they are going to engage with adult content, are being asked to do that in the adult content area,” said Cyn Skyberg, vice president of customer relations at Linden Lab. “Private land owners will be asked to tag their searches for adult-related listings so that it goes into the adult filter.”

Virtual world Second Life has put in effect some new measures to keep adult content away from users who might not want to run into it. Or fly into it, as avatars might do.

Members will be asked to start flagging content as adults-only as part of a new content rating system, which will start to roll out in an update to the downloadable Second Life client that will be available next week.

Later this year, parent company Linden Lab will create a standalone “continent” for adult content, and members who don’t purchase private “land” will be asked to migrate there if they wish to partake in adult-related activities. Second Life is an 18+ environment already, but stricter age verification policies will be put in place. You’ll need a “verified” account, either through credit card information or through Linden Labs’ filtering system, to get into the adult “continent.”

“A portion of this will be perceived as definitely being more corporate- and educator-friendly because you’ll have more control over the things you’re experiencing,” Skyberg said.

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.–Rep. Howard Berman, who heads a congressional panel in charge of writing copyright legislation, lashed out at Internet pirates this week and defended his effort to add stiffer anticopying penalties to federal law.

* Wondered whether Internet service providers should be required to pull the plug on customers engaged in piratical activities: “To what extent do we ask ISPs to (undertake) some affirmative actions?” The Motion Picture Association of America has called on ISPs to do precisely that, without saying it should be mandated by law; its international counterparts have not been as reticent.

Berman dismissed the Justice Department’s criticism of Pro-IP–the agency believes the current arrangement for criminal enforcement works fine–as merely protecting political turf. “They don’t like Congress telling them how to organize their branch, but that’s our right,” Berman said. “They take the notion of executive privilege very seriously.”

Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have opposed the Pro-IP Act, saying it makes little sense to seize a family computer allegedly used to download music on a peer-to-peer network and that the legislation amounts to protecting the entertainment industry’s business model at the expense of technology.

He also:

Berman, a Democrat who represents the congressional district near Hollywood, said at a technology policy conference here that he was on track to enact the so-called Pro-IP Act by the end of 2008. The bill ratchets up civil penalties for copyright infringement and creates a new federal agency charged with bringing about a national and international copyright crackdown.

(Credit:
Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com)

“There are people who want to steal intellectual property,” Berman said in an apparent criticism of EFF and Public Knowledge. “Their lobby is distributed, diffuse, but unfortunately very popular.”

* Defended the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been the subject of protests from technologists for nearly a decade: “I know the DMCA is controversial–by and large I think it makes a lot of sense.”

* Joked that as the new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (after Rep. Tom Lantos’ death), he’d support using military force against countries that are piracy havens. Berman didn’t say who would be the next chairman of the House copyright subcommittee and refused to speculate on whether Rick Boucher or Jerry Nadler would get the spot.

Rep. Howard Berman, the Democrat who represents the area near Hollywood, Calif., slams ‘people who want to steal intellectual property’ and their ‘lobby.’

The technology consists of a number of standardized Web programming interfaces called APIs; with OpenSocial, a developer can more easily write a single application that runs on several different Web sites.

Programmers are working on building OpenSocial 0.8 support into Apache Shindig, an open-source project that can endow servers with OpenSocial support, Dan Peterson, a Google product manager, said in a blog posting. “Expect to see containers supporting it in the coming weeks and months,” he said.

Other changes beside the RESTful API are documented in the OpenSocial 0.8 release notes.

It’s still not up to 1.0, but Google on Wednesday announced completion of version 0.8 of OpenSocial, a standard for building social applications on the Web.

One notable difference with OpenSocial 0.8 is the addition of the RESTful API. This addition lets a wider variety of software beside just Web-based widgets running in JavaScript interact with the servers running social applications. For example, it would permit a program running on Windows or on a mobile phone, but not in a Web browser, tap into a social application.

OpenSocial began at Google, but the company won allies for it. Web heavyweights including MySpace.com and Yahoo joined Google to manage the technology through the OpenSocial Foundation. OpenSocial is one theme getting heavy emphasis at the first Google I/O conference in San Francisco on Wednesday and Thursday.

Like Conceptshare, a tool we’ve raved about in the past, ProofHQ is entirely Web-based, and designed to make collaborating on projects of all magnitudes something that happens outside of your e-mail in-box.

On Monday co-founder and CEO Mat Atkinson took me through the entire process of proofing something among multiple parties. What makes it a standout among some of the competition is its capability to integrate with other tools or workflows you might be used to. For instance, users of 37signals’ Basecamp can link it up with their account to help manage proofing jobs in that environment, simply using ProofHQ’s editing, revision, and commenting tools while maintaining some of the dialogue, deadlines, and assignment work in Basecamp.

Likewise you can embed items that need to be proofed into your blog or site and have others leave their feedback. Like Scribd your document lives inside an embedded file viewer that runs in Adobe Flash, but when it comes time to propose edits, users can kick over to the full editor. Atkinson said he’s already seen some great success with this in the private beta. It’s been designed to make crowd-sourcing edits and suggestions a simpler process.

By default users can upload files one at a time. There’s also a Java-based desktop applet you can simply drag files over to akin to Box.net’s mass uploader. The only thing missing from ProofHQ is some of the real-time collaboration found on some other tools, most notably Octopz. There’s no live video conferencing or text chat, although any changes get pushed out to all the other viewers as they’re made.

ProofHQ has four different plans, three of them requiring a monthly fee. Each plan includes a certain number of allotted proofs per month (kind of like minutes on your cell phone plan), along with additional amounts of storage for uploaded files. If you want to give it a spin, the free plan will cap you off at five proofs per month, though your colleagues can make infinite revisions.

Editing documents or photos in ProofHQ runs right in your browser with nothing special to download. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit:
CBS Interactive)

At least if the supplicant is the Net’s most prominent techie cartoonist and Google is in a position to fulfill the request.

In late September, I chuckled at Randall Munroe’s XKCD cartoon about living to regret YouTube comments. The cartoon suggested a virus that would read people’s YouTube comments back to them before they posted. The result was the mass realization that we’re all a bunch of morons, which, judging by the average YouTube comment I see, doesn’t seem too far off the mark.

Well, lo and behold, such a thing now exists, as Google Blogoscoped pointed out Thursday, though alas not with the mandatory listen-before-you-post requirement Munroe suggested. Google added a text-to-speech button that will play back your comments.

YouTube comments, now with a text-to-speech engine.

(Credit:
CNET News)

Is it a coincidence? Speak your mind in the comments below, and I’ll update if Google gets back to me with a response.

Though I could be persuaded otherwise. I suspect it’s evidence of Google being witty, mostly because I’m having trouble figuring out the utility of the feature besides to show off what I see as a generally pretty impressive text-to-speech engine. Perhaps they’re trying to see how well the engine can handle a little more load.

It would be more useful if there were some way to train the audio engine when it flubs, as it does with some foreign terms and proper nouns, or at least let it know its errors. I was impressed it could handle some awkward terms, though, including “CNET” and “syzygy.” It runs out of available syllables before the comments field runs out of room for words, though it seems well suited to the typically brief, if inane, YouTube comment.

Update 7:52 a.m. PDT: Matt Cutts, Google’s Web spam guru, believes the audio feature is indeed a hat-tip to XKCD. “I love that Google had the sense of humor to add this feature,” he said.

Also, Munroe himself remarks on his own blog about the audio feature, aptly pointing to one commenter’s post: “It’s the DUMBEST FEATURE I’ve seen thus far. There is no practical use for it. None. Zero. Nada. Sheesh. (The audio preview of my own post sounded moronic!)”

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Main Menu

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Controlling Programs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Go figure.

Rules

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.

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.

Kicking The Tires

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Final Thoughts

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The X300 is here! The X300 is here! The last few days at CNET Laptop HQ have been consumed with Lenovo’s latest ThinkPad, which first popped up last week. The verdict? It’s the sleekest ThinkPad yet, and quite possibly the perfect balance between portability and usability. Check out our full review on the ThinkPad X300 page and, if you missed it, the photo slide show here on Crave.

Though the ThinkPad X300 is totally my new BFF favorite ultraportable, it’s not the only alternative to the MacBook Air, as Dan Ackerman points out. Among his suggestions is the Asus U6S, which we reviewed this week.

If the only thing holding you back from buying an Air is its silver case, you’ll be glad to know that custom
Mac painter Colorware added the MacBook Air to its lineup this week.

Changing gears: Remember the Foleo, Palm’s mercilessly mocked laptop-thing? Well, turns out it was simply an idea before its time, according to CNET News.com’s Erica Ogg. Then again, CNET News.com’s Tom Krazit disagrees: “If the race to develop The Next Mobile Computer really centers around the Eee PC and its offspring, it won’t be because of the Foleo,” he writes. I say they settle this disagreement like adults, with a thumb wrestling match. But that’s just a suggestion.

Other tidbits this week: A company in the UK plans to launch a $195 laptop for students; Alienware and Gateway updated their models with Penryn; Dell expanded its line of Inspirons running Ubuntu Linux; and Apple filed a patent for a multitouch touch pad that recognizes complex gestures. Checking in with Cravers around the world, we learned that a colleague in Asia found a clever laptop station to keep his desk tidy, while colleagues in the UK rounded up some of their favorite tech for travel.

Have a great weekend!

However, It’s not all bad news. Following in the steps of the always excellent Criterion Collection, the Weinstein brothers’ Miriam Films line has been restoring and releasing such old-school epics as Anthony Mann’s El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire. David Lynch fans finally got his Lost Highway on DVD earlier this week. Still, it looks as if those us waiting to see North American DVD versions of Saul Bass’s Phase IV or the cheesy apocalyptic thriller Damnation Alley are going to have to dig in for the long term.

(Credit: Amazon)

To make matters worse, searching for some of these movies on Amazon or eBay will offer glimmers of hope, only to be dashed when reading the fine print. Many of the movies are available in overseas editions, but that means you’ll need a region-free DVD player–and, usually, a PAL-compatible video display–to watch them.

There are a variety of reasons for the no-shows. Sometimes there are squabbles over who controls home video rights; other times the company is taking its time to locate a good print of the movie, and investing time and money into restoring the image and soundtrack to optimal condition. Whatever the reasons, however, the net result is that some favorite flicks or TV shows remain unavailable on DVD. Some of these are bona fide classics–The Magnificent Ambersons and The African Queen remain AWOL on DVD. Others are less well-known, but still have recognizable stars or top directors: Night People (with Gregory Peck), Holiday Affair (Robert Mitchum), Otto Preminger’s Forever Amber, and Samuel Fuller’s China Gate–just to name a few that my parents have been searching for. Once you get to cult classic territory, the list seems endless. A good friend of mine has been holding on to his well-worn VHS copies of 84 Charlie MoPic and The Final Option for more than a decade. International cinema can also be tough: don’t look for DVD versions of Mediterraneo or Love Without Pity in North America.

I have no idea how many titles have been released on DVD, but the 90,000-title library available at Netflix gives a pretty good indication. That’s a much larger pool of titles than the infant Blu-ray format (still far fewer than 1,000 titles available), but it’s far from comprehensive. Despite such guilty pleasures as Gymkata and Strange Brew hitting the the silver disc in the past few years, there are still some high-profile movies (and TV shows) that have yet to be released on DVD.

Got a favorite movie or TV show that hasn’t yet been released on DVD? Share your thoughts below.

One of the AFI's top 100 American films:
still only available on VHS.

What do you want in a mobile computer?

Thakkar concedes that point, but notes that a more powerful CPU can handle popular software-based codecs like Flash or Javascript that don’t need an accelerator. Flash is hard to find on a mobile phone. The alternative is Adobe Systems’ Flash Lite technology, which isn’t bad but isn’t the same as the PC version of Flash.

This isn’t a one-size-fits-all market. Consider just how many types of mobile phones there are, from iPhones to Voyagers to BlackBerrys to Hiptops. Those phones all require a different balance between performance, power consumption, battery life, and software requirements. But for the most part, the laptop form factor isn’t all that much different between a Pavilion, an Inspiron, or a MacBook.

“We’ve made these jumps where we’ve taken order-of-magnitude leaps,” Thakkar said. For Intel to find the next big source of growth that has eluded its grasp this entire decade, it will need to do that again.

How much performance do you want to give up for longer battery life? Would you buy a clunky mobile computer that can run anything you throw at it? If you’re the envy of the digerati when you walk down the street with your new phone, but you can’t use it to make reservations at Nobu, are you still cool?

ARM and its partners enjoy almost complete control over the current smartphone market and are eyeing the evolution of the platform just as closely. This is the next growth engine for personal computers, something made extremely clear last year with the steps taken by outsiders such as Apple and Google to gain a foothold.

Intel hopes device makers will build sleek and powerful designs with its Moorestown chip

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The current model for smartphone chip design used by companies like Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Freescale Semiconductor is to minimize power consumption by relying on an ARM applications processor for many tasks, but spreading much of the work around smaller components called accelerators that are activated only when needed.

Why should you care? TI argues that its approach results in better battery life and can actually improve the responsiveness of the hardware, since the various accelerators band together to spread out the load.

Phone makers like Nokia, Motorola, and Apple will decide how this battle plays out. For smartphones to really evolve into mobile computers, they’ll need to ensure that software written for one operating system will run across many devices–which isn’t always the case now and is a large reason why Google is getting involved. But for Intel to find the elusive source of growth outside the PC market it so desperately needs, it’s going to have to deliver on the audacious goals it has set for power consumption.

“When you are using an architecture of multiple cores and multiple engines, and you offload the multimedia tasks to the coprocessors, the ARM (core) is more responsive because it’s not loaded,” TI’s Goren said. This approach also has power benefits that allow device builders to push the envelope of slim and stylish design.

This is the heart of Intel’s pitch to mobile device makers like Nokia and Apple: we’ll be able to support anything you currently enjoy on your PC, on your mobile phone. Not necessarily at the snappy performance levels you’re used to on a Core 2 Duo laptop, but Intel wants to deliver a PC-like experience on a mobile phone.

The basic idea is that most of the time, your phone or mobile computer isn’t doing a whole lot. But every now and then, you need a performance boost to fire up a video clip, download something from the Internet, or take a picture. In the ARM community, chip companies deliver this performance with a complicated concoction of multiple processing cores that only handle one specialized task, such as video encoding.

To get an iPhone-like combination of battery life and sleek design, ARM's partners use several specialized chips.

A smartphone is no PC
As advanced as smartphones have become, they’re not overtaking the PC on any benchmarking applications anytime soon. And as Intel’s manufacturing operation continues to crank out smaller transistors, and integrates more and more of them onto a processor, Thakkar thinks it’s going to be hard for other players to match Intel’s combination of software compatibility and performance.

Intel acknowledges the special role that hardware accelerators play in this market, because a modern general-purpose processor like the Core 2 Duo simply won’t fit into a handheld device. But it argues that the role of accelerators should be somewhat limited to maximize software compatibility, and that the processor, such as its low-power Silverthorne and Moorestown designs, should be able to take on a great deal of work.

But then again, is that what you want from a mobile phone, a little PC? “A laptop is not a cell phone. When I boot my laptop, I’ve trained myself to go get coffee. When I switch on a cell phone, I expect that I can make a call in seconds,” Goren said. Running PC software might be nice in theory, but TI and the mobile phone companies think that software written for the PC is too bloated for the phone environment.

Intel is used to integrating as many of those kinds of functions as possible into its PC chips and might have been expected to bring that same approach to this new battleground. But as it prepares to roll out Silverthorne, and later Moorestown, power consumption requirements are forcing Intel to acknowledge that it can’t do everything with a single chip.

Eye on power consumption
The mobile phone chip suppliers evolved their strategy by focusing first and foremost on power consumption, a luxury they were afforded by the relatively simple software run by most mobile phones up until fairly recently.

So which approach is best-suited for the next generation of mobile computers? Modern smartphones offer snappier performance and can run all day, but the increasingly sophisticated software that people want on these devices can overwhelm the system and cause compatibility issues. Running a wide variety of software won’t be a problem for devices based on Silverthorne and Moorestown, but Intel still has a ways to go to allow its customers to build devices that are design showpieces like the
iPhone.

“We don’t expect everything to be done by the general-purpose processor,” said Ticky Thakkar, director of Intel’s ultramobile group platform architecture and an Intel fellow. “(But) you need it for compatibility reasons; you need the same software that runs on a PC to run on a handheld device.”

One of Intel’s most important goals over the next five years is to establish itself as a silicon supplier to future manufacturers of ultramobile computers, whether those are smartphones, Mobile Internet Devices, UMPCs, or some other design that emerges from that soup. It’s already tried this once, attempting to break into the mobile phone market with an ARM-powered chip that was a model of integration, but a flop with customers.

As with many decisions in chipmaking, the question is one of engineering trade-offs. ARM, TI, and the other smartphone chip companies are trying to step up to build more powerful computing devices, while Intel is trying to cram a PC into a handheld. Their respective starting positions dictate the philosophies to a great degree.

“What happens is that each task runs on the specific engine that is much better optimized from a power generation standpoint,” said Avner Goren, worldwide director of cellular systems market for TI. “Offloading video from a central CPU to a video and imaging accelerator decreases the power generation.”

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)

Silverthorne, due out in the second quarter, isn’t quite the answer. Moorestown, which is expected to arrive around 2010 and consume 10 times less power than Silverthorne, could be. If Intel can pull that off, it would put Moorestown down on the milliwatt range currently occupied by ARM’s chips, with performance that should rival anything from TI, Samsung, and the like.

Microsoft, which typically does not comment on individual applications, did offer a bit of comment, in the form of a statement from Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice president of intellectual property and licensing.

Microsoft, which once was only a modest customer of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, has been one of its biggest customers in recent years.

In just the past two months, more than 500 applications from the Redmond, Wash., software maker have been published. (That’s actually a reflection of how active the company was in mid-2006, since patent applications aren’t generally published until 18 months after their filing).

However, I’m hearing that this patent is more aimed at building a more useful and relevant help system into software than it is at offering a snooping tool for bosses. Of course, you never can tell where a technology will lead, and the patent could cover either or both applications.

But it’s one particular filing that has been grabbing headlines in recent days. That patent covers a means by which a computer that can use factors such as a person’s heart rate, blood pressure, and facial expression to take action. The Times newspaper of London posted a story this week noting the “Big Brother” implications such a technology could have, such as notifying an employer if a worker appears stressed or is not being productive.

Trolling through filings can offer a glimpse of where a company is headed, but as with Apple’s closely watched patent filings, seeing something in a patent application is far from a guarantee of what will eventually ship.

A number of Microsoft’s recently published patent applications cover search and advertising, areas in which Microsoft is investing a lot as it tries to play catch-up with Google. There are so many of these, I’ll save them for a separate post, but recent filings cover things such as creating a spot market for video ads, and creating marketing that uses a combination of video and banner advertisements.

Microsoft’s patent push is stimulated by a number of factors. One is competition and trying to make sure that Microsoft’s rivals don’t get access to key innovations. However, the company also began a broad intellectual-property licensing push several years ago, under which it licenses technology to many companies big and small. The company has signed a slew of patent cross-licensing deals since then, the most recent being Tuesday’s deal with Japan’s JVC.

Another patent covers so-called managed copy, which takes something like a video file or DVD, and uses digital rights management (DRM) to enable people make a copy that can be used on their various digital devices but does not allow unlimited duplication.

“This particular patent application, in general, describes an innovation aimed at improving activity-monitoring systems and uses the monitoring of user heart rate as an example of the kind of physical state that could be monitored to detect when users need assistance with their activities, and to offer assistance by putting them in touch with other users who may be able to help,” Gutierrez said. “It is important to keep in mind that with most organizations in the business of innovation, some of our patent applications reflect inventions that are currently present in our products, and other applications represent innovations being developed for potential future use.”