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A Microsoft add-on for Firefox lets the browser show suggested completions of a search when someone starts typing it into the search box.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

If you had any doubts Microsoft didn’t appreciate the advantages of
Firefox’s ability to accommodate add-ons, you can dispel them now. The company just released one that makes Microsoft’s search service work better with the open-source Web browser.

According to Alessandro Catorcini, lead program manager for Live Search API (application programming interface), the add-on uses Microsoft’s Live Search API 2.0. That’s part of a project called Silk Road.

Microsoft is vying with Yahoo and Google to claim a greater share of the search market. Those rivals are more successful at the search advertising business, which places text ads next to search results.

“We’re happy to report that we’ve officially integrated Live Search into Firefox by popular demand,” said Live Search Program Manager Beatrice Oltean and Senior Product Manager Debapriya Ray in a blog post Thursday.

Like Yahoo’s Inquisitor, the Microsoft search add-on connects to Microsoft’s search site to suggest completions of searches as people start typing them into the browser’s search box.

The new Onkyo TX-SR606 looks a lot like the old TX-SR605, at least cosmetically.

There’s a lot to like about the TX-SR606, but we’re tempering our enthusiasm, at least for now. For starters, there’s the price: The $580 list price actually translates to a more affordable $500 street price (at least according to Circuit City, where the product is already listed for preorder). But last year’s TX-SR605 is still widely available for around $400. Secondly, the playing field has leveled quite a bit from 2007. Sony’s upcoming STR-DG920 has a list price of $600, has four HDMI inputs, upscales to 1080p, and will feature an icon-driven menu system, probably similar to what we’ve seen on the STR-DA5300ES. Lastly, in most cases, analog video upconversion past simple 480p (480i deinterlacing) just isn’t that important to us in an AV receiver, since most quality HDTVs already do a solid job converting 480p signals to the set’s native resolution (see this column for more info). And we’ve seen enough issues with AV receiver video processing that we’re at least a little skeptical that it will do a better job than your existing HDTV.

Last year, Onkyo pretty much dominated the budget AV receiver market with the TX-SR605, which offered up cutting-edge features like onboard high-resolution audio decoding at a bargain price–and it earned our Editors’ Choice award. Today Onkyo has announced its successor, the TX-SR606, which adds some significant features, such as four total HDMI inputs and 1080i upscaling. Here are the details:

7.1 channels, 90 watts per channel
Four HDMI 1.3 inputs
Onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio
1080i upconversion for analog signals
New “music optimizer” software that claims to improve the sound quality of MP3 sources
Powered second zone
Available in April with a list price of $580

The following products are available:

On Sale Now: $450.00
View the latest prices for Onkyo TX-SR606 (silver)

On Sale Now: $319.97 - $799.99
View the latest prices for Onkyo TX-SR606 (black)

The Onkyo TX-SR606

That doesn’t mean the TX-SR606 won’t be a good option–it’s definitely the best price-to-performance model in Onkyo’s line, as the step-down TX-SR576 doesn’t offer any kind of analog upconversion at its $480 price point. As always, though, we’re reserving judgment until we get to do a thorough hands-on evaluation of the TX-SR606. Onkyo’s PR agency has indicated that we’ll be getting a review sample in “two to three weeks,” so–if they stick to that schedule–look for a full review of the TX-SR606 by CNET sometime in May.

Key features of the Onkyo TX-SR606:

The Intel blogger, Craig Raymond, senior technical marketing engineer for Corporate Demonstrations at Intel, is–not surprisingly–ebullient about the “new mobile powerhouse”–An Asus M51VA with a Penryn P8600 2.4GHz processor. The P8600 is part of the upcoming Centrino 2 processor refresh.

(Credit:
Intel)

As a Computex preview, Intel is showing off its “delayed” Centrino 2 platform via an Asus notebook.

“Online gaming over a live carrier network has long been my holy grail around WiMax. Here from my outside park bench, after downloading my Warcraft client, I’m able log into the game world to slay all manner of goblins and over sized gerbils,” he gushed. (More here).

“That’s right. You heard me correctly. Montevina, WiMax; live in Taipei. Kind of strange to say it all in one mouthful, but it’s finally here.”

He cites one of the best features as testing “World of Warcraft over the live Fitel WiMax here in Taipei.”

But he quickly qualifies the euphoria with: “Oh Montevina…You broke our hearts with the launch delay.”

This statement has to be qualified too since WiMax won’t ship with Centrino 2 until later this year. “When WiMax ships with Centrino 2 later this year, no add on card required, the Echo Peak mini-card hidden under the hood (like the one inside this Asus) promises the ‘always on’ connection we’ve been lusting for.”

Asus M51VA with a 2.4GHz P8600 processor

A chunk of the Centrino 2 roll-out has been delayed until August 5–and WiMax even beyond that. Intel, however, is slated to do a Centrino 2 processor refresh on July 14.

“Today I’ve got my privileged hands on a brand spanking new Asus Centrino 2 (”Montevina” for us nerds) system,” according to a pre-Computex Intel blog.

Intel, not surprisingly, is trying to build enthusiasm for Centrino 2 and WiMax. But, with chipset and WiMax delays, all this euphoria comes with qualifiers.

(Credit:
Netflix)

I give Netflix’s boss credit for trying to refocus the debate. Of course, no technology firms have lined up at the trough to receive public funds. So at this stage, at least, the idea remains theoretical–that is, barring the (unlikely) economic collapse of the tech industry as well.

Don’t get me wrong. Many of these folks take home enormous compensation packages. But we’re talking about real bonuses in return for real performance. I think that Obama’s jumping mad because the financial fat cats were taking home real bonuses for fictional profits. There’s a big difference.

All this takes place against the backdrop of the president’s proposal this week to put a $500,000 compensation limit on executives of companies seeking a bailout.

Hastings’ proposal seeks to satisfy both sides of the debate over pay scales for executives overseeing companies that are bailout recipients. Writing about the compensation cap proposed by Obama, he had this to say:

President Obama should celebrate our success, rather than trying to shame us or cap our pay. But he should also take half of our huge earnings in taxes, instead of the current one-third.

Reed Hastings, chief executive of video rental site Netflix, floated a ballsy proposal in Friday’s New York Times, volunteering the idea that he and other highly paid wage earners ought to pay more in taxes.

Silicon Valley marches to a different beat. You’ll find the occasional carpetbaggers–during the dot-com bubble, they were all over the place–but most hung out a shingle in order to create something new and exciting.

Perhaps a starting place for “tax, not shame” would be creating a top federal marginal tax rate of 50 percent on all income above $1 million per year. Some will tell you that would reduce the incentive to earn, but I don’t see that as likely. Besides, half of a giant compensation package is still pretty huge, and most of our motivation is the sheer challenge of the job, anyway.

Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO

It’s a terrible idea. We all want the taxpayers’ money returned, and capping compensation (for) bailout recipients will just make it that much harder for those boards to hire and hold on to the executives who can lead their companies to compete and thrive.

I’m the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I’m very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I’d like to offer a suggestion:

Then, the next time a chief executive earns an eye-popping amount of money, we can cheer that half of it is going to pay for our soldiers, schools, and security. Higher taxes on huge pay days can finance opportunity for the next generation of Americans.

That last clause is beyond contestation. The thrill of being the boss is a huge motivation. The gluttons being outed on Wall Street are a class unto themselves.

Even if it’s got a snowball’s chance of going anywhere for now, the idea still merits consideration.

Yahoo supplied a video to show off the new home page since it is still in “bucket” testing, meaning that only random users will see the page, which was first unveiled in September. I am still waiting to be found by the randomizer.

Yahoo is continuing to dribble out its open platform.

The company on Thursday added an eBay Anywhere application to the dashboard area of the new home page in testing. The eBay application allows users to monitor their buying and selling activities from the Yahoo home page. Other applications blessed by Yahoo include checking various e-mail in-boxes from the Yahoo home page, and down the road activity updates from social networks. The functionality isn’t much different from what users can do with external applications built for Facebook or OpenSocial containers.

The security flaws affect QuickTime 7 versions running on the
Mac OS X and Windows. Users are advised to update to QuickTime 7.4.5, according to an Apple advisory issued Wednesday.

Apple issued 11 security updates designed to prevent malicious attackers from disclosing users’ sensitive information, executing arbitrary code, or causing an application to suddenly crash.

Lovely, eh?

For those who want to delve deeper into the nitty gritty details of the vulnerabilities check out TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative, which discovered some of these flaws, as well as security researcher Secunia, which lists all 11 updates.

Users can be hit with such evil dealings when visiting a Web site rigged with malicious Java applets, view a tampered movie file or open a malicious PICT image file, according to the advisory.

Apple has released a QuickTime security update to address “highly critical” security flaws in its media player that could allow malicious attackers to take control of a user’s system.

Of course, some may scoff at those for whom not being able to use sites like Facebook for a short time is a big deal. But while it’s true that the world goes on even when Facebook, Twitter or MySpace are down, such maintenance work–especially when down in the middle of a weekday–can indeed be an inconvenience for people whose professional and/or social lives depend on them.

For its part, Facebook said later Monday that’s not the case.

(Credit:
Facebook)

Some are speculating that the outage may be due to Facebook’s recent redesign.

Update (1:18 p.m.): This story has been modified to include comment from Facebook.

“Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance,” a message received by some users when they tried to log in said. “It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

On Monday morning, many Facebook users received this message when they tried to access the site.

For some of the legions of Facebook users eager to get on the site to see what their friends have been up to, play Scrabble or look at photos, Monday morning has not been the best of times.

“That is the error message that occurs when someone’s database is inaccessible,” Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt told CNET News by email Monday afternoon, after the problems had seemingly been resolved. “This can happen for a number of reasons. Most of them are related to hardware issues. Usually it is a per-user problem (not everyone will see that at the same time, maybe just a small handful of people) and has nothing to do with the redesign.”

That’s because some users of the popular social-networking site–though not all–have found themselves locked out due to some sort of Facebook-initiated downtime.

On the other hand, for such people, these outages put the focus on just how fragile our personal networks are and how much dependence many have on systems that can go down at any time.

[via RefreshingApps]

(Credit: Daniel Dura)

If you’re keen on moderating blog comments in near real time and would prefer to do so without a browser window open, you should check out Moderator. It’s a hybrid tool that uses both a WordPress plug-in and an Adobe AIR desktop application to keep you up to speed with the latest user chatter on your blog.

The tool, which was released earlier this week, is just an early version. Planned features for future releases include the option to reply right from the application, manage comments on multiple blogs, and get near real-time notifications when new comments come in.

Once installed, you simply leave it running and it will update itself throughout the day, letting you approve or deny comments to go live. Because it sits on your desktop you can keep your blog comments lean and clean without ever having to visit the moderation page on your WordPress install, although creator Daniel Dura says you might run into some slowdown if you’ve got more than a few hundred comments awaiting moderation.

No, Oracle has single-handedly assured its long-term appeal by consolidating the market around its database technology with that same $30 billion in acquisitions. It’s not necessarily good for customers that are locked into Oracle to an increasing degree, so much so that they can offer but token resistance to Oracle’s pricing power, but it’s good for Oracle’s profitability.

No wonder he sounds ticked–you would be too if you just spent more than $30B…on a bunch of wasting assets that are going to be shafted by the Cloud/SaaS shift just as Siebel’s market share was eviscerated by Salesforce.

I really like this post by WaveMaker CEO Christopher Keene, deconstructing Larry Ellison’s aversion to cloud computing.

Larry’s rant is an extraordinary example of whistling past the graveyard. Oracle’s huge transformation over the last 10 years has been from an infrastructure company (databases & middleware) to an applications company (ERP, CRM, SFA, etc.). Now, just as this transformation is completed, along comes an infrastructure that will obsolete all the applications Oracle just got done rolling up….

Larry Ellison is a smart guy, and Oracle is a hyperaggressive company capable of beating most companies on the market. While Keene’s macro view is probably spot-on, I suspect that Oracle isn’t going to turn into Computer Associates overnight and start an inevitable decline.

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Still, I think there’s something to software as a service. Will it change the world overnight? No, it has already failed to do that. But it’s a long-term threat to an old-school way of delivering software, one enabled by the Web and ever-improving bandwidth. Ellison is safe today, but tomorrow? That’s another chapter.

Given that Harris is apparently not trying to make a living directly from KDE, his view is understandable. It is true that open-source projects flourish when people contribute code, rather than passively digest others’ code.

Occasionally, intelligent conversation erupts online–this time as the KDE open-source community tries to figure out whether it needs users or simply contributors. Jason Harris suggests:

With that in mind, it’s important to remember what will make an open-source project relevant to contributors. The answer? Users. Also, who is going to indicate to the contributors/developers which features are important to satisfy their needs and encourage more users? Users. It’s a virtuous cycle. The more users, the more contributors (salaried and otherwise), and the better informed those contributors are.

But for anyone hoping to build a business around an open-source project, users are critical (even if one of Harris’ KDE compatriots may not think so). Who else is going to buy support/add-ons/etc.?

KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn’t really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not. What we need are contributors: that’s the life-blood of our community, what keeps KDE growing and evolving. To the extent that users can and do become contributors, I will grant that we need a userbase as a pool of potential future contributors. But I am simply baffled by any argument that we “need” to have a large number of people that never do more than use KDE.

In sum, I think Harris has missed the forest (users) for the trees (contributors), and KDE suffers as a result.

The real challenge in my view is in figuring out how to turn a significant percentage of users into customers, but then again I’m coming at the question from the exact opposite perspective of Harris. With enough (paid) users, contributors can also be paid/encouraged to participate. Just look at what IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and others have done for Linux.

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