Better than expected results from a number of top technology names boosted stocks in the early going Friday, but sellers soon took over to send the market sharply lower. Despite extreme volatility, Wall Street managed to finish the week with small gains in the Dow and S%26amp;P and just a 0.6% loss in the Nasdaq, as the Federal Reserve's biggest emergency rate cut since 1982 saved stocks from much steeper losses. Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Juniper Networks and Broadcom were among the names posting better than expected results late Thursday. All opened sharply higher Friday morning but ended the day mixed, with Microsoft and Juniper lower and Sun and Broadcom posting small gains. The selling started as the S%26amp;P 500 neared the 1370 level, the bottom of a 15-month trading range the index broke down out of last week, as traders began lowering their expectations for more rate cuts when the Federal Reserve meets next week. Expectations are for a one-quarter to one-half point rate cut, less than this week's three-quarter point emergency rate cut. E*Trade was a big gainer, up 8% on a restructuring plan, and Microchip Technology and Compuware were higher on their results. InsWeb jumped 29% after finishing its first year of profitability. Motorola rallied 6% despite an S%26amp;P credit rating cut, as the company rebounded from an 18% drubbing earlier this week. Synaptics, PMC-Sierra and Integrated Devices fell on their results. The Nasdaq lost 34 to 2336, the S%26amp;P fell 21 to 1330, and the Dow tumbled 171 to 12,207. Volume declined to 4.92 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.65 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 19-14 margin on the NYSE, and 16-14 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 73% on the NYSE, and 72% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 21-84 on the NYSE, and 42-114 on the Nasdaq.

AT%26T on Thursday posted stronger-than-expected wireless growth for the fourth quarter and reiterated its 2008 outlook, easing investor concerns that U.S. economic weakness would hurt its subscriber growth. The largest U.S. phone company had warned earlier this month that it saw some softness in its consumer business, but it said on Thursday that it added 2.7 million net new wireless subscribers in the quarter, showing resilient growth. Five analysts contacted by Reuters had on average estimated AT%26T's new subscribers at 1.92 million for the fourth quarter. AT%26T also said its fourth-quarter profit was $3.1 billion, or 51 cents per share, compared with $1.9 billion, or 50 cents a share, a year earlier. Most of the year-ago quarter excludes earnings from BellSouth, which AT%26T bought at the end of 2006. Before merger-related costs and other special items, AT%26T's profit rose to 71 cents a share from 61 cents a year ago, matching Wall Street expectations. AT%26T said quarterly revenue grew 2.9 percent to $30.3 billion assuming it owned BellSouth for both full quarters. "It was a solid quarter certainly," said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris King. "It's certainly a positive, and they reiterated guidance for 2008," he added. "In this type of market, any reiteration of guidance has to be viewed positively." The exclusive U.S. carrier for Apple's iPhone, AT%26T results came after third-largest U.S. wireless service Sprint Nextel warned last week it had incurred steep losses of high-value customers last quarter. Verizon Communications is scheduled to report results on Jan 28. "We had an excellent fourth quarter, which affirms our outlook for 2008," AT%26T CEO Randall Stephenson said in a statement. He had reported earlier in January that AT%26T was seeing some softness in its consumer business, which represents about 20 percent of revenue. The CEO said at the time that this had less of an impact in wireless than on wired services. AT%26T last month forecast 2008 consolidated revenue growth in the mid-single-digit percentage range and adjusted earnings-per-share growth in the double-digit range. It also forecast wireless service revenue growth in the mid teens. The company also said on Thursday it had approved a buyback of 400 million shares, or 6.6 percent of its shares outstanding, and expects to complete the transactions by the end of 2009. AT%26T said it maintained double-digit growth in revenue and subscribers for its broadband Internet service and saw subscribers to its U-verse video service rise to 231,000 by the end of the quarter from 126,000 the previous quarter. Stephenson said AT%26T was on track to reach more than 1 million U-verse subscribers by the end of 2008. U-verse is a video and broadband service AT%26T is building to compete with cable rivals such as Comcast. King said AT%26T's addition of 12,000 U-verse customers a week in December was better than its goal of 10,000. AT%26T shares were up 12 cents at $36.65 in early trading.

Let the bidding begin! The long-awaited wireless spectrum auction began today, with the Federal Communications Commission accepting bids for slices of airspace in the coveted 700 MHz band. Verizon Wireless, Google, AT%26T, Cablevision and other heavy hitters representing a cross section of the communications industry will vie for the airwaves that the government is freeing up in advance of next year's conversion to digital television broadcasting. The auction is expected to generate as much as $15 billion in government revenue, according to Gartner analyst Tole Hart. "It's the last major spectrum auction for the foreseeable future, so there's some scarcity there," Hart told InternetNews.com. The FCC is selling the spectrum in five blocks: A and B, both 12 MHz, the 22 MHz C block, D block, linked with public safety networks, and the unpaired 6 MHz E block. The C block is the most sought after spectrum at the auction, and that is where Google is likely to come up against the major telcos Verizon and AT%26T, Hart said. Hart predicted that Verizon would likely outbid Google for the bulk of the C block spectrum, with AT%26T also making a strong push. Quite simply, Hart said, the C block spectrum plays into the telcos' "core competency" of improving the data transfer speeds of their networks, and they will likely be more willing to drop a greater share of their budgets on the auction. Hart said he expects that Verizon to be the top bidder for the C block because that spectrum would be pivotal in executing the company's Long-Term Evolution (LTE) plans for upgrading its network. The analyst firm Stifel, Nicolaus %26 Co. concurs, pegging Verizon as the likely high bidder for C block. After the first round of bidding today, the FCC saw one bid for the C block as a package; the other bids for regional licenses. Under the auction rules, the identities of the bidders are kept anonymous, so the public can only see the dollar amounts of each bid. The C block package drew a bid of slightly more than $1 billion. Small and midsized companies engaged in the most vigorous bidding, grappling mainly for licenses in the A and B blocks. The B block licenses in Los Angeles, New York/Newark and Phoenix each drew seven bids. One group put in a bid for the national D block public-safety/commercial license, though Stifel noted that it is too early to determine whether that is a serious bid or if the group made the move simply to retain eligibility for other parts of the auction. Analysts have been speculating on which groups would bid on the D block since Frontline dropped out of the auction earlier this month. With Verizon likely winning the C block, Stifel suggests that AT%26T might make a run at the D block, which could trigger Verizon to enter a bid just to drive up the price. There are 214 qualified bidders in the spectrum auction. After months of speculation, Google officially announced that it would participate in November. The FCC finalized the auction rules in July, pledging that it would devote nearly one-third of the spectrum to open-access networks, meaning that consumers could use any type of device or software. The FCC has said that it sees the spectrum auction as a healthy means of promoting competition in the wireless market. The FCC's nod to open access drew sharp protests from Verizon Wireless and other telcos, which have unsuccessfully challenged the legality of the rules. Though it remains unlikely that Google will win the C block, if it bids heavily enough, the auction could cross the threshold so the spectrum becomes open access. The auction is expected to last for several weeks.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates called on Thursday for a new "creative capitalism" to help the world's 1 billion poorest who live on less than $1 a day. Gates, one of the world's richest men, said he was not dumping the basic tenets of capitalism but argued market forces must be better used to address the needs of those left behind by advances in technology and health care. "We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well," he told the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. "I like to call this idea creative capitalism." The speech to top business leaders and politicians in Davos, Switzerland, reflects Gates' growing focus on philanthropy. Gates built Microsoft into a formidable and sometimes controversial money machine, which has been accused in the past of abusing its market position. But he will retire from full-time employment at Seattle-based Microsoft at the end of June to concentrate on his charitable organization, the Bill %26 Melinda Gates Foundation. The organization, founded in 2000, supports projects to improve health, reduce poverty and increase access to technology. Gates said the self-interest behind capitalism had driven multiple innovations but to harness it to the benefit of all required the system be refined. Greater focus on recognition for improving the lives of others could provide a spur for companies to focus more on making money out of providing valuable products at affordable prices to the world's poor. He urged multinationals to pledge the services of their top people to the work. "This kind of contribution is even more powerful than giving cash or offering employees time off to volunteer," Gates said. "It is a focused use of what your company does best," he said.

Sprint Nextel said on Thursday that Chief Financial Officer Paul Saleh and two other top executives would leave the company in a new management shake-up as the No. 3 U.S. mobile service grapples with subscriber declines. The announcement is the second major move in less than a week by Sprint's new Chief Executive Dan Hesse, who was appointed in December to stem the company's market share losses to bigger rivals AT%26T and Verizon Wireless. Sprint shares rose 1.7 percent in pre-market trading from its New York Stock Exchange close of $8.71. Saleh will leave the company on Friday, along with Chief Marketing Officer Tim Kelly and president of sales and distribution, Mark Angelino. Saleh had served as Sprint's acting CEO while it conducted a search for a permanent leader. Last week, the company reported deeper than expected subscriber losses and said it would cut about 4,000 jobs as it lost ground to bigger rivals. The news sent Sprint shares down nearly 25 percent and raised fears of a wider slowdown in the U.S. wireless industry. But AT%26T reported on Thursday better-than-expected wireless subscriber results for the fourth quarter, adding 2.7 million net wireless customers compared with an average forecast of 1.9 million, based on four analysts contacted by Reuters. Hesse said the company has no set time frame to fill the roles, but would name permanent replacements after a review of its overall strategy. Sprint controller William Arendt will serve as acting CFO in the interim. John Garcia, senior vice president of product development, will be acting chief marketing officer and Paget Alves, regional president for sales and distribution, will be acting president of the sales and distribution division.

In the film "Arlington Road," a college professor in a quiet Virginia town is disturbed to learn his neighbors may be terrorists. That film was released in 1999. In 2008, something similar happened, in a manner more fitting to the 21st century. A few days ago, Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at Secure Computing began tracking a software package called Mujahideen Secrets 2, an update to an encryption tool used by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to communicate on the Internet. Henry tracked it down to a password-protected Web site that belongs to an Islamic forum known as al-Ekhlaas. al-Ekhlaas's domain, Ek-ls.org, traces back to a hosting company, Noc4Hosts, which in turn is run by Hi Velocity, a hosting provider based in Tampa, Florida. Henry, who lives in Tampa, was upset when he found out. "I'm appalled that someone is willing to risk these types of actions just to make a few dollars," he told InternetNews.com. Hi Velocity did not answer a query as of press time, and calls to the phone number listed in its WHOIS registration entry did not go through, meaning the lines are disconnected or out of service. Its 800# customer service line has an option to report abuse, but on selecting that you are told all abuse must be reported via a feedback form on the company Website. Henry said that he contacted the FBI about the site and its contents last weekend, but as of Wednesday evening it's still up and running, as is Henry's blog posting on the subject. Because the site is password protected, Henry hasn't been able to download the new version of Mujahideen Secrets. Ironically, under U.S. law, he can't try to brute force his way in either. He's concerned because it looks like the bad guys are getting better at covering their tracks. "What concerns me personally is we've relied on their use of archaic technology to block them in the past and it looks like this might be the start of a tech refresh for the bad guys," he said. Last November, there was supposed to be a mass cyber assault called e-Jihad, but it never went down. Henry said the IP addresses with the command and control servers with the target lists were hard coded into the client applications. Law enforcement apparently got the information before the attack and were able to take down the servers before the attack could be launched. Now, Henry says terrorists have adopted the same methodology as the Storm worm, using something called a fast flux DNS, where the IP addresses of control servers change every 300 seconds, making it impossible to use IP address blocking. Unlike "Arlington Road," this incident isn't a movie, but a potential threat. And we don't know, yet, how it ends.

Dell is making up for lost time with its late entry into the blades market with an ambitious new design, both in the chassis and blades themselves. The first point Dell wants to make about the PowerEdge M1000e series, unveiled Monday, is that it comes ready to run out of the box. Rather than being shipped in pieces, it was designed for shipment with all blades installed. You can have it unboxed, plugged in and running in 15 minutes, said Rick Becker, vice president of solutions for Dell. "When we talk about making IT faster, we mean it by shipping the system preconfigured and ready to go out of the box," he said. Dell is claiming considerable power savings over similar blade solutions from HP's BladeSystem c-Class and IBM's BladeCenter. Dell plans to phase out its existing blade server line, the M1955, but the same OpenManage administrative tools to run the 1955 will also support the 1000e. The PowerEdge M1000e is a 10U-sized enclosure, supports 16 half height blade servers or a mix of full height blades, which Dell plans to ship some time in the near future. The chassis supports both the PowerEdge M600 and M605 blade servers, which contain two quad-core Xeon or two quad-core AMD Opteron processors, respectively. The back plane of the M1000e is also a mix and match of fans, power supplies that Dell claims are 91 percent efficient and various network ports, all of which are hot swappable. The various back plane blades include an upgradeable Ethernet blade switch with four 1Gb ports and optional, three Cisco Ethernet switch options, two Brocade 4Gb Fibre Channel options, and FC4 Host Bus Adaptors from QLogic and Emulex. The M1000e will not have backup blades, something found in competitive products from HP and IBM. "We think the chassis is best for deploying dense computing solutions," said Becker. "We have better solutions coming with dense storage and we think that that's a better solution than trying to do a half-job in the chassis." James Staten, analyst with Forrester Research, had nothing but praise for the new blade system. "Dell's made a lot of interesting moves with these products in terms of setup, management, remote administration. They are a definite step up from the last round of blades," he said. Staten said most customers who tend buy blades do so from their preferred server vendor. So if you are in HP's camp, you will buy from HP. Dell had no response, which sent its customers elsewhere. Despite coming late to the blades game, Staten said Dell closed the gap quickly with HP and IBM. The new M1000e blade enclosure will be available from Dell on Wednesday with a starting price of $5,999 for the chassis and blades starting at $1,849.

There are a lot of companies with point products for specific WAN optimization and application acceleration needs. Certainly Cisco is among those that play in the WAN optimization and application acceleration space though for Cisco it's about a lot more than just point products. With Cisco it's about building what it refer to as an Application Delivery Network. As part of its application delivery strategy, Cisco is now rolling out a series of products that tie together to handle application and WAN acceleration for both office and remote users. Among the offerings is the new entry level Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) 4710 Appliance; the Cisco ACE XML Gateway Release 5.2 and the Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Mobile. Cisco is also rolling out a Data Center Assurance Program for Applications (DCAP for Applications) that ensures that applications from leading vendors Microsoft, Oracle and SAP will benefit fully from Cisco's application delivery portfolio. "Our approach to building application delivery technology is network wide and tightly integrated with all components of the network," Mark Weiner, Director, Data Center Solutions, Cisco told InternetNews.com. "It's about application delivery networks and not about delivering point products." Weiner sees the current data optimization market as being at an inflexion point where it is moving away from its original basis in point solutions that stand on their own. He explained that the broader Cisco strategy is to put smarts into the foundation and tie it into purpose built application delivery products so you end up with an application delivery network. The various components are all tied together with common mechanisms that provide end to end visibility and reporting. A key part of Cisco's application delivery is found in its ACE (Application Control Engine)product line which was first released back in April of 2006. Originally ACE was just available as a module that fit into Cisco's Catalyst switching lineup. Now it's also available in a standalone appliance form factor. The new ACE 4710 is considered to be an entry level ACE appliance with support for up to 2Gbps of application traffic. Web applications in particular can benefit from the ACE 4710 with Cisco's FlashForward acceleration technology that aims to reduce network delays with Web technologies like JavaScript files. Indrajit Roy Sr. Manager, Product Management Application Delivery Products for Data Centers, at Cisco explained that the ACE 4710 uses asymmetric acceleration techniques. "The asymmetric acceleration means the ACE 4710 sits in front of application servers in a data center," Roy said. "This allows for optimization that makes the transactions up to 90 shorter in terms of latency. The impact is very tangible." The ACE 4710 also makes use of virtualization techniques to virtualize the application delivery pipeline as well, with the end result being better utilization and optimization overall. For those enterprises that are deploying SOA and XML types of applications, Cisco is releasing the new ACE XML Gateway (AXG) Release 5.2. Roy noted that the new AXG is capable of handling 30,000 transactions per seconds which he argued is superior to other XML acceleration solutions in the market today. XML acceleration appliance are now becoming increasingly popular. Among the many vendors now entering the space is Alcatel-Lucent with its OmniAccess 8550 WSG (Web Services Gateway). Remote acceleration for mobile Cisco is also rolling out a new Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Mobile release to extent the benefits of acceleration to remote users. "The WAAS mobile client has automatic agility," Roy explained. "So as it's running on a laptop when you walk into your branch it will automatically sense the local branch and put you through the local box giving you even better performance." Roy noted that Cisco has been using the new WAAS release internally itself for months with great success. While the new ACE, AXG and WAAS products are each unique offerings, Roy commented that the products are not isolated for one another. All the products can interoperate with each other and there is common management as part of Cisco's overall application delivery platform. With its broad offering affecting some very different aspects of the IT infrastructure, a key challenge for Cisco with its application delivery network strategy isn't so much about the technology it's about people. "The challenge is expanding inside the base of customers that we speak too," Weiner said. "The solutions are spread across a range of departments in IT, application owners, infrastructure people storage and servers and then the traditional network teams we've sold to for so many years. It's just sharing benefits and getting alignment across these teams and getting approval cycles done."

A surprise interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve may have rescued the stock market from a steep decline on Tuesday, but it was no help for Apple shareholders. Apple shares plunged in late trading Tuesday after the company issued a much weaker than expected outlook for the current quarter. Apple posted 35% December quarter sales growth to $9.6 billion, along with earnings of $1.58 billion, or $1.76 a share. Both numbers were much better than expected, and Mac and iPhone shipments were solid. But iPod sales of 22 million were below forecasts, and the company's current quarter outlook %26#151; $6.8 billion sales and 94-cent earnings %26#151; was well below estimates, sending shares skidding. For the rest of the market, the day turned out much better than it could have. Following a global sell-off on Monday, U.S. stock futures were headed sharply lower Tuesday morning when the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by three-quarters of a point. It was the first emergency Fed funds cut since September 17, 2001, and the Fed's largest rate cut since October 1984. The news did much to ease fears that the Fed was unresponsive to a market and economic freefall, but stocks still ended the day down more than 1%, adding to the market's worst-ever start to a year. Yahoo lost 4% on reports that it is considering cutting hundreds of jobs, while eBay fell 4% on reports that CEO Meg Whitman could retire. Motorola shed 7% ahead of its quarterly results, and Alcatel Lucent lost 12% on a Goldman Sachs downgrade. Oracle was another big decliner, down 6%, and Microsoft, Cisco, Dell and Sun were off more than 3% each. The Nasdaq lost 47 to 2292, the S%26amp;P fell 14 to 1310, and the Dow lost 128 to 11,971. Volume rose to 6.51 billion shares on the NYSE, and 3.16 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 19-13 margin on the NYSE, and 20-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 55% on the NYSE, and 79% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 32-1,098 on the NYSE, and 36-982 on the Nasdaq.

The PC chip industry continued seeing strong sales and held prices relatively flat over 2007, according to a new report from market researcher IDC. For the full year, total worldwide PC processor shipments grew 12.6 percent over 2006 while revenues were nearly flat, up only 1.7 to $30.55 billion. This reflects the price erosion that occurred for most of the year, where vendors were lucky to keep average selling prices (ASPs) flat instead of declining as they did in other sectors, like memory. During fourth quarter alone, microprocessor shipments grew 8.5 percent sequentially from third quarter. Revenue grew 9.6 percent sequentially to $8.7 billion, according to IDC. By and large, the two major competitors in the field -- Intel and AMD -- held their respective market shares. For the entire year, Intel held 77.4 percent of the market to AMD's 22.2 percent, with the rest going to VIA Technology, IBM, Freescale and Transmeta. This represents virtually no change from the 3Q07, but a slight decrease for AMD from the fourth quarter of 2006 -- before the company began suffering from a number of problems. In that quarter, AMD held 25.3 percent of the market to Intel's 74.5 percent. What a difference a quarter can make. Barcelona delays and other production problems hurt AMD terribly, and its market share plummeted to 18.6 percent in the first quarter of 2007, just one quarter later. Since then, AMD has clawed back to 23.1 percent market share in Q407. Shane Rau, director of Semiconductors: Personal Computing research at IDC, told InternetNews.com that despite the woes surrounding AMD, it wasn't a yearlong bloodbath. "There's some common wisdom to dispel that every quarter Intel is cleaning AMD's clock," he said. "It was the first quarter where AMD had its problem with supply chain and pricing. Since then it's been going toe to toe with Intel." What AMD needs now is to get high end products out the door because that's where the profits lie. "Until they get Barcelona and Phenom quad%26#91;-core%26#93; out in volume, that means they are not playing at the top of the stack where the best ASPs are," he said. "If you don't have products there, the rest of your products are still moving downward in price. If you don't have anything to replace them at the top end, your ASPs are sinking." Compared to other markets, PC server chips had the best quarter, growing 17.0 percent sequentially while laptop chips grew 10.3 percent and desktop processors were up 6.5 percent. In all three categories, IDC reported that sales in the middle and high end outpaced the low end. Rau attributed this primarily to Intel's Caneland platform, and a little to AMD's success in finally shipping Barcelona. For the year, desktop processors grew by 2 percent, servers were up 5.6 percent, and mobile processors grew a whopping 34.3 percent. IDC's PC researchers estimate that in 2010, laptop system sales will finally surpass desktop sales -- one year earlier than it had previously projected. Rau said he expects an even earlier transition for CPUs, with laptop chip sales surpassing desktop models in late 2009. IDC expects mobile sales to remain strong in 2008, but a weakening of the U.S. economy may impact the rest of the market. Both Intel and AMD noted in their recent quarterly announcements that they do about three-quarters of their business outside of the country, so impact of a U.S. slowdown might be mitigated. Rau agrees, to a point. "For an American-based company, having a lot of worldwide business does help them hedge their bets, especially as it goes along with a weak American dollar," he said. "That's an effective price cut for emerging markets that are very price-conscious. The danger is when the U.S. economy spills over into the worldwide economy."

For Zend Technologies, PHP is a lot more than just an open source programming language. Zend, the lead commercial backer behind PHP, is pushing its vision of PHP as a prominent platform for development and deployment of mission-critical applications with a pair of new products. Zend Studio for Eclipse is Zend's new PHP IDE(define), and Zend Platform 3.6 is the latest release of the company's enterprise-deployment platform for PHP. The new releases are part of the PHP vendor's strategy to move from point products to a complete suite for the application life cycle, as PHP continues to makes inroads against both Java and .NET. "When our customers build mission applications they take the whole Zend solution, since we deal with the whole life cycle from development to staging to production," Andi Gutmans, Zend's CTO, told InternetNews.com. "So they use Zend Core for their certified PHP, they use Zend Platform for getting performance, scalability and reliability for their production servers and then they use Zend Framework across the board to get the right methodology and best practices," Gutmans added. The Zend Platform got under way in 2005 with the last major release version 3.0 in February 2007. In the new version, 3.6, Zend has focused on further improving the performance of PHP deployments. "Performance management starts when a user clicks on a URL and until they get what they're looking for," Gutmans noted. "So we mapped that whole process and looked at where we could improve." One of the key improvements in Platform 3.6 is the ability to cache model view controller%26#150;based applications, which are increasingly popular in framework deployments. Gutmans explained that with the new MVC caching capabilities, instead of caching on a file basis Zend Platform can now cache on a URL basis. Additionally, Zend Platform allowed for high-performance sites to cache in shared memory, which further improves PHP delivery performance. While Zend Platform is available for both Linux and Windows Servers, Gutmans commented that the 3.6 release is geared toward Linux. "We're now working with Microsoft toward Windows Server 2008 and working on a road map for how to work with it," Gutmans said. Zend and Microsoft have a working partnership to make PHP run well on Windows platforms. On the development side, Zend's IDE version of Zend Studio has long been primarily used on Windows, and that's not expected to change with the new release of Zend Studio for Eclipse. The new Zend Studio for Eclipse is the first official release from Zend of its IDE based on the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PHT) project. Gutmans noted that Zend had more than 15,000 beta testers for Zend Studio for Eclipse, and the feedback received helped to make the final release a more stable product. Because the new Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, developers can now leverage the full Eclipse ecosystem of plug-ins to further expand the capabilities of the IDE. While Zend is pushing its new Eclipse-based IDE, it's not abandoning its non-Eclipse Zend Studio 5.5 customers. Zend has not officially set an end-of-life date yet for the non-Eclipse Zend Studio and has pledged to keep it current for minor fixes in a maintenance mode. "I think right now we have a very solid story for business-critical applications," Gutmans said. "What we're seeing today at Zend is that it's changing the way we work with customers," he added. According to Gutmans, the company set out on this path two years when it began working with Eclipse and Framework. "It's a strategy we've been seeing the benefit of," Gutmans noted. That's not to say there still isn't work for Zend to do to further improve PHP development and deployment. "I'm the CTO, so I always think there should be more that we should be doing," Gutmans said. "I want to do more around RIA (Rich internet applications), methodologies and more around business critical deployments. There is always a lot of work for Zend."

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- HP and Intel are promoting energy efficiency programs and new products that reflect those initiatives. At an event here Wednesday, HP announced new versions of two low-power desktops, one with a 16GB solid state drive (SSD), ie. flash memory drive. The new systems are the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC with SSD and the HP Compaq dc5800 Business PC will meet Energy Star efficiency and use all the latest techniques for power efficiency, such as a low wattage CPU and the power management from Intel vPro. The dc7800 can actually attach to the back of an LCD monitor for a small, albeit less than elegant footprint. Its SSD drive will consume just two watts of power instead of 10 to 12, according to Kirk Godkin, senior product manager for business PCs. Between the SSD drive, Intel's Core 2 processor and vPro management, HP claimed it can cost as little as $10 per year to operate, at least in terms of raw power. However, the SSD drive comes with just 16GB of capacity, making the dc7800 the computing equivalent of an iPod Touch. Godkin acknowledged that this system is not for everyone, or even many businesses, due to its low capacity. It's aimed at customers where the PC would be used in a single-use environment, like a kiosk. The 16GB drive runs around $300, vs. $120 for a 80GB standard hard disk. Godkin said in the future, as prices come down, there could be 32GB and 64GB versions as well. The HP Compaq dc7800 is available today in North America at a starting list price of $1,258, while the HP Compaq dc5800 is expected to be available on February 11, starting as low as $579. The PCs reflect the latest efforts of both companies to reduce harmful materials in computers and recycle as much as possible from old systems. Until recently, old PCs usually ended up in a landfill. Not any more. HP recycled 185 million pounds of PCs in 2006, according to Carl Eckersley, manager in the personal systems group supply chain operations at HP. That includes old servers, even from a competitor. "If you're buying HP stuff, we'll take %26#91;the old equipment%26#93;," he said. "We grind up the metal and plastics, recover the precious metals and reuse as much as we can." HP recently passed the one billion pounds recycled mark and hopes to recycle another billion pounds by 2010, he added. In addition to its low power push, Intel's contribution to the environment has been to make cleaner chips. The newly-launched Penryn line is free of lead and halogens, which will make them less polluting and easier to recycle. Intel is also working on recycling efforts, although it generally leaves system recycling to the OEMs, according to Todd Brady, corporate environmental manager for Intel. But Intel does have its own project to recycle its own waste in the works. "It's been a multi-year effort, both in the U.S. and overseas," he said. Intel manufactures chips in places like Costa Rica, Malaysia, Israel and Ireland. If the local pollution control standards aren't particularly strong, Intel still brings back the waste to properly dispose of it. This includes chemicals like acids and salts used to etch the silicon wafers and the metals in the wafers. "We recycle about 80 percent of the chemical waste and minimize the amount that ends up in a landfill. Last year, about six percent of our total waste ended up in a landfill. Our ultimate goal is to get that to zero."

The drive toward openness and interoperability in Web services is gathering steam. Yahoo today announced that it is supporting the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework, giving a ringing endorsement to the effort to build a universal login standard -- which has been dismissed by some skeptics as a dreamer's fantasy. The addition of Yahoo, which counts 248 million registered users globally, will triple the number of OpenID accounts on the Web to 368 million, the company reported. "Yahoo's commitment to an open Web is a significant validation of the OpenID movement," said Scott Kveton, chairman of the OpenID Foundation, in a statement. The OpenID Foundation formed in June 2007 to promote the standard. The brainchild of LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick, who is now with Google, OpenID is designed to provide Web users with a universal identifier so they can sign into social networks, blogs and other Web sites with a single login. When Yahoo launches its OpenID service in public beta form on Jan. 30, anyone with an OpenID identifier will be able to log into Yahoo's Web sites. On non-Yahoo sites, Yahoo users will be able to type "www.yahoo.com" into the login prompt of a site that uses OpenID. The company Yahoo said that it is also working with several OpenID partners to include a "Sign in with Your Yahoo ID" button on their sites to further streamline the process. Prior to Yahoo's announcement, AOL had been the biggest name behind OpenID. Other backers include Plaxo, the online address service, and blogging sites Technorati and WordPress.com. Still, OpenID has remained at the fringes of the Web, hindered by security concerns and a tepid embrace beyond its early adopters. It is also part of the larger push toward cross-platform interoperability that some Web properties have resisted. OpenID is one of the initiatives supported by the DataPortability Workgroup, a broad-based coalition devoted to creating open standards and protocols to level the barriers between Web sites. Last week, the group announced that representatives from Google and Facebook had joined the effort. Both companies, which each offer a third-party developer platform for applications to run across various social networks, were two of the last major holdouts to the coalition. In addition to OpenID, the DataPortability Workgroup supports data-integration standards such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) and others.

While "CSI" is well known in popular culture thanks to the "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" TV shows, the former head of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is pushing a different use of the acronym. Stuart Cohen's CSI is the Collaborative Software Initiative, an organization he started after the Linux Foundation absorbed the OSDL a year ago. "I wanted to focus on broadening the scope of the organization," Cohen told InternetNews.com. "They chose to focus on the operating system only." Cohen's CSI is all about applying the open source model to software development in general and not just Linux. It's an idea that originated with the OSDL Customer Advisory Council, whose members had been bombarded with various government regulations and were looking for a way to develop an open source project around compliance and regulatory issues. A year ago after the OSDL became part of The Linux Foundation, Cohen left and set up shop as CSI. The goal of CSI is to help companies and organizations develop software using open source. In return, the companies save time and money on their projects. The first project for CSI was an effort for the Financial Services Roundtable's BITS working group, whose members includes the largest financial services companies in the United States. Cohen explained that a U.S. government regulation requires banks to assess, score and certify that vendors they use for outsourcing and which have access to confidential information are secure. For the most part, he noted that the banks were using Excel spreadsheets for the initial part of the assessment. The spreadsheets could have thousands of cells in them to address all the questions the financial services firms need to answer. The inherent problem with a spreadsheet approach is that it is difficult to manage and offers limited multiuser capabilities. "So what we are working on with them is an open source project called RegQ, which stands for regulatory questionnaire," Cohen said. RegQ is an XML schema developed using an open source stack that provides the banks with a machine-readable substitute for tracking compliance using a spreadsheet. The RegQ project is only part of a larger equation, though, for financial institutions as well as other software developers. Cohen explained that RegQ fits into a bigger operational risk-management system that banks may be using. "Ours is just the front-end, data-gathering tool to get information into the databases," Cohen said. Cohen estimated that a typical operational risk-management system will cost $3 million to $4 million, including implementation. For the front end CSI is building, a software vendor could charge $800,000 or so to develop it. According to Cohen, because a group of companies are coming together to build and fund the application in an open source approach, the cost could be limited to $100,000 to $200,000. He said IBM, HP, Novell and Intel, all members of the CSI advisory council, are interested in working with the group on commodity or industry standardization. This collaboration could create a software platform for customization, he added. While CSI's first effort is in the financial services sector, Cohen sees a broad appeal for his approach. He said he expects CSI's second project, which will be announced in the coming weeks, to show just how broad the applicability of the approach can be. Cohen did not elaborate on the particulars of the second effort. "Compliance and regulatory issues are a real focus area, but it's truly a diagonal that goes across industries," he said.

By Gisela Telis
ScienceNOW Daily News
17 January 2008 A gigantic, suicidal palm tree has been discovered in Madagascar, researchers announced today. The palm represents a genus seen nowhere else in the world--and a unique conservation challenge for a nation with a poor environmental track record.

"This palm really is an amazing discovery," says palm biologist Scott Zona of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida. "It adds a completely new branch to the palm family tree, something that happens very rarely." It's a spectacular find, adds research botanist James Miller of the New York Botanical Garden in New York City. "It makes you wonder how much we've already lost."

Xavier Metz, the French manager of a cashew plantation in remote northwestern Madagascar, found the flowering palm while picnicking with his family 2 years ago. His photos of it eventually made their way to John Dransfield, a palm expert at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Richmond, U.K. Dransfield was astonished by the palm's appearance, but he was even more surprised by a study of its DNA: Lab tests showed that the palm was a previously unknown genus and species within a family of palms found primarily in Afghanistan, Thailand, and southern China.

The palm bears only a meager resemblance to other members of its family. It is more than 18 meters tall, has fanlike leaves 5 meters across, and, when in bloom, has hundreds of flowers towering above its crown. Its Chinese cousin, by comparison, is chest-high and shrubby. The palm's life cycle is also unusual. Based on an analysis of the trunk, the palm appears to grow for decades before exploding with nectar-rich blossoms that develop into fruit, deplete the plant's nutrients, and cause it to collapse. According to Dransfield, only a handful of palm species flower themselves to death. It's still unclear how long these palms live before their dramatic demise, or how the genus arrived on the island in the first place.

In a study published in the January 2008 issue of Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, Dransfield officially names the palm Tahina spectabilis. "Tahina," the name of one of Metz's daughters, is Malagasy for "blessed" or "to be protected"--an appropriate name, given the opportunity that preserving it presents. That's because Madagascar, long known as an "ecological hot spot," is a conservation disaster, according to some environmentalists. Illegal logging and slash-and-burn practices to clear land for farming--two major sources of income for impoverished Malagasy--have destroyed most of the country's native vegetation, including 90%26#37; of its original forests.

Since the discovery, researchers have found 91 other Tahina palms, along with 50 seedlings, all within a quarter-kilometer stretch of the island. That offers Malagasy villagers a chance to reclaim some of what's lost, Dransfield says. He, the Metzes, and local villagers have set up a committee to protect the palm and have plans to cultivate and sell seedlings to botanical gardens and growers worldwide. Proceeds from the sales would come back to the villagers and help fund rural development and education efforts--in hopes, says Dransfield, that the Malagasy people might finally reap some benefit from preserving the environmental resources that remain.

Related sites

The International Palm Society

More about Madagascar

By Adrian Cho and Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 January 2008 These have been trying times for Raymond Orbach, the undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)--and for the U.S. physical scientists who depend on funding from his department.

Two weeks ago, Congress slashed $400 million in proposed increases for the 2008 budget of DOE's Office of Science, the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States (ScienceNOW, 18 December 2007). The cuts wreaked havoc on DOE's programs in fusion and particle physics and took a big bite out of its efforts in "basic energy sciences" such as chemistry and materials sciences. Funding was zeroed for the U.S. contribution this year to the multibillion-dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) (ScienceNOW, 21 December 2007), and U.S. participation in the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC) particle physics experiment was also effectively stopped, jeopardizing the project's existence. The rollbacks are also forcing hundreds of layoffs at two of the Office of Science's national labs (Science, 11 January, p. 142) and have led to deep cuts in running time at x-ray sources and other user facilities at the other eight.

As DOE officials were sorting through the wreckage, Orbach sat down with Science's Adrian Cho and Eli Kintisch last week to discuss the state of U.S. physical science in the wake of the 2008 budget. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

ITER

Science: Let's begin with the question many people are asking: Will DOE meet the U.S.'s commitment to ITER in 2008?

R.O.: Obviously we can't. Look, can I give you a bigger picture rather than deal with one item at a time? The '08 budget is the '08 budget. ... And my position on it is that it's the will of Congress and the people, and the president has signed it. We're going to do the very best we can to follow congressional direction. Obviously, it's going to be very difficult for us. It represents a substantial departure from the president's request. It also took place 3 months into the fiscal year, ... so we were spending at the level of '07. Where you see a cut from '07 in the '08 budget, we've got a real problem, because we just don't have the money. Some of the actions that we've had to take, we would not have had to take had we had the budget on October 1. ?

What we're doing is following the will of the Congress while, at the same time, maintaining, from our perspective, U.S. leadership in science as best we can. Now, I can't tell you, obviously, the details of the president's budget for '09, but I can tell you that it will be a wonderful budget request. And because '08 has been difficult for us, the gap between '08 and '09 will be large.

Science: Some researchers have suggested that DOE might go to Congress and ask to reprogram money from outside the fusion energy science program. Will DOE be asking to reprogram some money for ITER?

R.O.: ... I honestly don't know the answer. We've looked around the Office of Science at where we might reprogram [money], and we're hurting in almost every area. And remember that a reprogramming requires approval from both the subcommittees on appropriations and the authorization committees. And I meant what I said when we started--namely, Congress has spoken. They've told us where they want us to spend the money, and it would be very difficult to have a reprogramming of any kind of magnitude at all to change the directions that Congress has given us. So I don't think reprogramming--one can put much hope in that.

Science: Then will DOE ask Congress for a supplemental budget?

R.O.: I don't know the answer to that, either. ... We're not the only program in the complexity of the federal budget that feels that it has problems, ... and my assumption is that the last thing that Congress or the president wants is a decorated supplemental. Because, you come in for the Office of Science, and there will be somebody else coming in, and before you know it, the thing will be enormous. ... My guess is that it would be very hard to single out a particular program for a supplemental.

Science: Assuming that things don't change and there is no U.S. funding for ITER this year, is the U.S. effectively pulling out of the project?

R.O.: No. And I can say that unequivocally. ... Our position will be that we will go into the arrears, but we will not drop our membership in ITER. ... What we're going to do is to keep the ITER project office [at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee] alive as best we can between now and the '09 appropriation and to do the best we can to maintain our position within the international organization. We will have problems because we have six other parties who are beginning to invest in ITER construction, and we will not have those funds. But we will be there at the table, and we will do the best we can under the circumstances.

Science: The U.S. has been in and out of ITER before and now faces a year where it's not going to be making its contribution. Given the uncertainties in the budget every year, can the U.S. participate meaningfully in these huge international collaborations?

R.O.: I believe so. In the middle of the ITER negotiations this was brought up and thrown in our faces a number of times. ... But you notice Congress did not say "Pull out of ITER." What they simply said was that we will not provide funding in FY '08, and that's why FY '09 is so important. My belief is that we are good partners. We're a little strange in the way we appropriate funds. But we will do our part. When you're in the arrears, you've got to pay the price. Our cost will go up because construction is delayed. But I hope our presence at the table and our keeping the project office alive will be evidence that we fully intend to meet our commitments.

Trouble in High-Energy Physics

Science: The ILC is effectively stalled because researchers have no money to spend the rest of the year. Is DOE still committed to trying to build the ILC in the U.S.?

R.O.: We are committed to high-energy physics. ... We have no intention of moving away from the basic R%26D in the ILC, but it will have to be delayed. ...

Science: In the fall, you went to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory [Fermilab] in Batavia, Illinois, and made a point of telling researchers that the ILC had not yet reached CD0 [the first of five "critical decision" reviews that any major DOE project must pass and the one that determines whether the project is necessary for DOE's mission]. Congress cited that fact when they cut ILC's funding for R%26D from $60 million to $15 million this year, and a number of physicists believe that it may have been one of the key factors that caused the British to pull out of the ILC (Science, 21 December 2007, p. 1851). What did you intend when you made the statement that the ILC had not reached CD0, and has it been misinterpreted?

R.O.: Well, I can't speak for those who interpreted it. I can tell you precisely what I said. And that was that we have to bring the ILC into [DOE Order] 413.3, which is the way we construct major projects within the Department of Energy. And that means that you have to have a CD0, [which shows] mission need, and then CD1, CD2, CD3, and so on. It's time to start thinking about bringing the ILC into this framework. ... There was never--never--a suggestion in my comments or my actions that we were somehow moving away from the ILC. In fact, just the opposite. I was trying to include it under the rubric that we [use for] all of our construction projects.

Science: Fermilab was looking at getting a bigger-than-inflation bump and ended up taking an absolute cut of about 17%26#37; from the '08 request and about 10%26#37; from the '07 budget. The lab is now preparing to lay off 200 of its 1900 employees. What would you say to the people who will lose their jobs about the effectiveness of the Office of Science in stewarding their lab?

R.O.: I'm not sure you can blame that entirely on the stewardship of the Office of Science. I think you can say to them, first of all, that we preserved the Tevatron [collider] run. And in order to do that, the B-factory [collider] had to be shut down early at SLAC [Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California]. That said something about planning for the future and our desire to use the Tevatron, in which we have made a very heavy investment, to hopefully discover new physics that will change the way we look at nature. ... In terms of the [zeroing of funds for the] NOvA [neutrino experiment] and the reduction in the ILC--that's what I meant by priorities.

I think now the high-energy physics community understands how Congress feels and has a job on its hands to explain why it should be supported at the level of the president's request. You don't have to convince me. You don't have to convince the president. It's there. Now we're talking about the American people. And so that's their job and my job, too. And we'll make every effort to do it. ?

Science: One leading particle physicist has said that Fermilab is in "deep, deep, deep" trouble. Do you agree with that?

R.O.: No. ... I think the high-energy physics community needs to help us in determining a set of priorities within reasonable budgetary limits. ... There will be a charge to HEPAP [High Energy Physics Advisory Panel] to and to P5 [Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel] to examine the priorities for high-energy physics [as a field] within different budget outlines. ... It will be up to the community to decide what the priorities are. In terms of Fermilab itself, there is no issue. Fermilab is the high-physics experimental laboratory for the United States. There's never been any move away from that, either by Congress or by us. ... What we need now is for the high-energy physics community to give us its recommendations. We'll make the decisions, but we need their recommendations for different budget projections as to what they would do and what they wouldn't do. ...

Overall funding for basic and applied research

Science: For two straight years now, the funding subcommittees have given you guys just what you've asked for, and more, for the basic research [which is supported by the Office of Science] and applied research [which is funded through other parts of DOE]. And in the end game, the Office of Science has not done as well as other areas of DOE. What confidence can the community have that this year is going to be any different?

R.O.: ... I believe that Congress represents the views of the American public. And I believe that the numbers that we received are telling us something. Therefore, if we are to actually achieve ... an appropriation of the magnitude of the president's request, we've got to make our case to the American public. So I will be attending each of the [six] advisory committee's meetings in the coming year and urging them to recognize that Congress has taken these actions, [that] they represent the public, ... and [that] it's up to the community to make its case as to why the science and long-term investment in basic research is of sufficient priority that the president's request be honored by Congress.

Science: Do you think the physics community got somewhat cocky or overconfident, given all the positive developments on the authorization side [such as the America COMPETES act passed in August, which calls for increased funding for the Office of Science (ScienceNOW, 3 August 2007)?

R.O.: I think that's a little unfair. I think if you looked at the trajectory, it looked like the Office of Science was just fine. That was true in '07 as well. I think people worked very hard, and I think what we have to do is work harder. ... I believe we have a very strong case. [The] Rising Above the Gathering Storm report [and] the America COMPETES bill [that] was signed by the president this past August indicated support for investment in long-term basic research. But in the end of a budget cycle, you have a number of competing forces, and it's a question of priorities. I would hope that the communities that are involved in science would make the case that would bring the priority of investment in basic research to a successful conclusion.

Science: Regarding making the case for investment in basic research to the American people, what efforts have you made personally to introduce the Office of Science to the new Democratic lawmakers who are now in control of the budget?

R.O.: Well, first of all, I have never regarded this as a partisan operation. I have talked to both sides of the House since the day I got here. And the Democratic leadership that is in control now is the same Democratic leadership that I've talked to for the last 5 1/2 years. ... So I don't think it's an issue of Democrat versus Republican.

Science: When you were named undersecretary for science a year and a half ago, you spoke of the importance of having crosscutting research and discussion [between the Office of Science and other parts of DOE.] Do we see the fruits of that?

R.O.: I was sworn in on 1 June [2006], and the [2008] budget was essentially final then. ... But now I have had a year. I can't tell you the details, because obviously it's part of the president's budget [request]. But you will see. ... I think the integration of basic and applied [research], with all of the difficulties of crosscutting of stovepiped programs, has actually happened. I have another year as undersecretary. I'm very much hoping to make that an integral part of the functions of the of department so that we are working very closely between basic and applied, each doing what we do well. ... I'm actually very, very pleased. I hope the community will be, too.

Related sites

DOE home page

ITER

ILC

Call it a photo finish. A split decision. Too close to call: The leading online tracking firms are split over which Web property garners the most traffic. According to comScore, Yahoo -- perennially ranked as the most visited destination on the Web -- held onto its lead in December, staving off surging Google for at least another month. Yahoo sites pulled in 136.6 million unique visitors in December, beating out Google, whose Web properties came up just shy of 133 million unique, comScore reported. But look at the figures from Nielsen Online, and it's a different story. Google tops Nielsen's lists of the top 10 Web sites both by parent company and by brand. Nielsen defines a parent company as the consolidation of Web sites owned by a single company. By this measure, Google's sites drew the most traffic in December, with 124.6 million unique visitors. Microsoft then followed with 123 million, wile Yahoo came in third with 114 million. By brand, which Nielsen defines as all Web properties bearing consistently branded content, Google was still the top destination, but Yahoo ranked second, followed by Microsoft. comScore's top 10 Web properties during December
(Includes home, work and university users)

1. Yahoo sites (136.6 million uniques)
2. Google sites (133 million)
3. Microsoft sites (120 million)
4. Time Warner Network (119.5 million)
5. Fox Interactive (82 million)
6. eBay (80 million)
7. Amazon sites (65 million)
8. Wikipedia sites (52 million)
9. Ask Network (49.5 million)
10. Apple Inc. (47.7 million)

The disparity likely resulted from Nielsen ranking Microsoft and MSN/Windows Live as separate entities in its list of branded sites. Nielsen Analyst Suzy Bausch told InternetNews.com that Google has topped the traffic rankings by brand since March 2007. Allowing for nuanced differences in methodologies, the two research firms are measuring the same thing. Their leaderboards might look a little different, and Nielsen's numbers trend a little lower than comScore's, but both firms' analyses highlight Google's success in expanding itself into a portal. Though industry commentators and analysts frequently take shots at Yahoo for falling behind Google in search, innovation, market capitalization and other barometers of the companies' vitality, Yahoo has always been able to counter that it's still the most popular site on the Web. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang certainly took that approach last week at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. During his keynote address, he trumpeted Yahoo's unmatched popularity as a portal while repeatedly articulating his vision for the company as the premier jump-off point for the Internet. Nielsen's top 10 Web properties during December, by parent
(Includes home and work users)

1. Google sites (117.7 million)
2. Microsoft sites (123 million)
3. Yahoo sites (114 million)
4. Time Warner (106 million)
5. News Corp. Online (76.3 million)
6. eBay (67.4 million)
7. Amazon (65.4 million)
8. InterActiveCorp (64 million)
9. Apple Computer (50.7 million)
10. Wikimedia Foundation (50.5 million)

But the recent batch of tracking data suggests that the distance separating Yahoo from Google is narrowing -- or widening, depending on whose numbers you're looking at. By comScore's numbers, which paint the more optimistic picture of Yahoo's market share as a portal, the gap between the two Web titans tightened considerably in the last year. In December 2006, comScore tracked 18.6 million more visitors to Yahoo sites than to Google's Web properties. Last month, Yahoo bested Google by just 3.7 million visitors. One is only left to wonder what story the numbers will tell a year from now.

Customer feedback over its inaugural storage device has spurred Data Robotics Inc. to craft a NAS-in-a-box that lets its Drobo users share files over a LAN and gain greater storage capabilities. DroboShare, which will retail for about $200, is nearly a maternal twin to Drobo and boasts some neat features, including self-monitoring and a clear visual status and alert panel, similar to its sibling. In a statement, the San Francisco startup says DroboShare "significantly increases the value and functionality that Drobo brings by providing home or business users with a simple way to share data without the complexity normally associated with NAS or RAID storage systems." "This is the perfect file sharing device for the small team, whether they%26#146;re a group team in a big organization or a small workgroup in a SMB environment," Jillian Mansolf, SVP of sales and marketing, told InternetNews.com. DroboShare%26#146;s back panel offers up two USB ports, which lets users connect two Drobos to the network%26#151;a combined storage tank of 8TB that can potentially scale to 32TB once larger drives are on the market. There%26#146;s also a gigabit Ethernet port, and, like the Drobo, the two-pound NAS works on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. New users are already spouting off about DroboShare and sharing user experiences at theDroboShare Community.

IBM and the Mayo Clinic on Wednesday announced the opening of a new collaborative research facility designed to speed the processing of compute-intensive algorithms used to deliver medical images from patients' MRI and CT scans. The Medical Imaging Informatics Innovation Center (MI3C) is the latest product of a four-year partnership between IBM and the Mayo Clinic, giving radiologists and physicians access to IBM's latest blade hardware and Cell microprocessor architecture %26#151; first used in Sony's PlayStation 3 %26#151; to render 3-D medical images that used to take hours in a matter of minutes. "There have been algorithms out there for years that can take two-dimensional images and process them into 3-D but they take a lot of processing power and can take hours to run," Bill Rapp, IBM distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for IBM%26#146;s Healthcare and Life Sciences team, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. "But radiologists often don't use them because they only have five to 10 minutes to do a reading. By putting all this computing power together, these images can be registered 50 times faster and improve the quality of radiology reading and productivity," he added. Rapp said IBM and the Mayo Clinic are sharing the costs of staffing the six-person MI3C staff while IBM provided "hundreds of thousands of dollars" worth of hardware. For this investment, IBM gets the opportunity to see what features and applications have the greatest commercial promise for future product releases and medical researchers get access to the technology and the ability to showcase to garner more federal research grants. In practice, the high-speed computations allow radiologists to fill in the imaging gaps and blurs created when patients breath or make slight movements during examinations. If multiple scans of a particular organ or limb are slightly different%26#151;say the head is tilted a bit to the right or the left in each scan%26#151;the algorithm adjusts to provide a consistent image. The MI3C is located on the Mayo Clinic's campus in Rochester, Minn. and is open to third-party researchers and medical professionals.

Apple added two powerful systems to its lineup Tuesday ahead of the Macworld Expo conference set for next week in San Francisco where new Apple hardware is typically unveiled. Rumors have circulated for weeks that Apple is planning to debut an ultraportable computer at the show, so perhaps Tuesday's news is meant to save the spotlight for that and other announcements. In any case, the new systems are significant additions to the Mac line. Fastest Mac Ever The Mac Pro got a major performance boost in its latest incarnation. Apple is billing the new Mac Pro as the fastest Mac it's ever made thanks to the inclusion of two Intel Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz. A standard 8-core configuration is priced starting at $2,799. Other standard features include an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256 MB of memory and a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot the company said delivers up to twice the bandwidth of its previous generation. Support is also included for the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA such as the GeForce 8800 with 512MB of video memory. With support for up to four graphic cards the Mac Pro can drive up to eight 30-inch displays at once. While the typical office user won't need all those displays, Apple mentioned advanced visualization and large display walls as potential applications. The Mac Pro comes with Leopard, the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system. The latest Mac Pro is also the most expandable one Apple's offered, with four internal hard drive bays with direct-attach, cable-free installation of up to four 1 Terabyte Serial ATA hard drives. Users have the option to connect external devices to the front or back of the system which includes five USB 2.0, two FireWire 400, two FireWire 800, optical and analog audio in and out and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as a headphone jack. Apple also offers a number of build-to-order options for more memory, storage and peripherals like the Apple wireless Aluminum keyboard. Serving up Quad Core The other new hardware is Apple's latest Xserve, which the company said can run as much as twice as fast as its predecessor. The 1U rack-optimized server has up to two Quad Core 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors for 8 core's of performance and includes an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server Leopard. Priced at $2,999, Xserve also sports faster front side buses, faster memory, up to 3 Terabytes of internal storage and two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots. Specifically, the server's new high-bandwidth architecture includes two 1600 MHz front side buses and up to 32GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory for up to a 64 percent increase in memory throughput. The standard configuration, starting at $2,999, includes a single 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon, with 12 MB of L2 cache and a 1600 front side bus. Apple marketing executive Philip Schiller said the Xserve's power, storage and server software "make it ideal for supporting Mac clients and mixed platform workgroups."