sr4hrh.org

“As of ~4 p.m. PST today, Google Chrome 1.0+ on Windows is an officially supported browser,” a Google employee said on a Google Earth mailing list on Thursday. “That means Chrome users will no longer get the unsupported browser message, and the plugin and API should work just as they would in other supported browsers.”

Google Earth is generally used as standalone software, but the plug-in version can be mashed up with Web pages such as James Stafford’s Mini Flight Sim and Thatcher Ulrich’s Monster Milk Truck.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

This Google Earth flight simulator works in Chrome now.

Google has fixed a disconnect between two of its software products, its Chrome browser and the plug-in version of Google Earth.

(Via the unofficial Google Earth Blog.)

In other Google geography news, the company also announced a new batch of public transit map updates Thursday. Houston, Calgary in Canada, and 21 agencies in Virginia include maps and schedules, while Atlanta, Bonn in Germany, and Sacramento, Calif., among others, got maps visible through Google Transit.

The update is also noted on the Google Earth API page from which the plug-in can be downloaded.

Ultimately, Google believes Google Maps and Google Earth will converge into a single product; the plug-in is one step in that direction.

Future Mac OS X desktops could be presented in three dimensions.

(Credit: U.S. PTO via MacRumors)

Apple is working on such a project, according to patent filings unearthed by MacRumors this week. The “multidimensional desktop” applications suggest that Apple wants to take familiar parts of the
Mac OS X desktop–such as the dock–and add depth, allowing you to stack documents or folders behind application icons on the “floor” of your desktop.

The idea of a 3D desktop is not new, but neither is it something that people are using in large numbers. When it comes to patent applications there’s always a distinct chance that the technology never actually makes it into a product; still, it’s always interesting to see what companies are working up in the labs.

Are you ready for a 3D desktop?

The former head of Microsoft’s search unit may have left Redmond, but he is still very much in the search game.

(Credit:
CrowdEye)

“Right now it is still the two of us for now, but we hope to expand that soon,” Moss said.

Moss said he looks forward to listening to feedback once the product goes public and already has a long to-do list of things he would like to add, things such as adding more real-time sources beyond twitter.

“I think there’s a very long list of exciting improvements that will take us a long while,” he said.

Of course, Moss is not alone in this thinking. Twitter has its own search engine, while others such as Topsy and OneRiot, are also mining the twitterverse.

“I think that real-time search is the next big thing in search,” Moss said in a telephone interview. “It’s an area that has been underexploited to date.”

The service, which is going into public beta on Thursday, offers up not only the latest tweets on a topic, but also a list of the most popular links on a topic and a tag cloud of associated terms.

Created by former Microsoft search head Ken Moss, CrowdEye gives several views of a topic based on the conversations taking place on Twitter.

Moss

Moss has been working on CrowdEye for about nine months. For now, his only other co-worker is his wife, Becca Moss, also a former ’softie.

Ken Moss, who led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years, has spent the last months building CrowdEye, a real-time search engine that aims to allow users to better mine Twitter to get a pulse on hot topics.

Among its features, CrowdEye has a historical view that allows one to see how the discussion on a topic has evolved. Although, for now, that historical period is only three days.

The plan to launch CrowdEye was noted earlier by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley and on Seattle-area news site TechFlash.

(Credit:
CNET)

Searching Twitter is good for news, he said, but also for things such as finding the latest viral video or a solution to a new software bug.

“Right now that’s all we support, but its definitely something I’d anticipate growing over time,” Moss said.

Standards matter. Containers have been around in various forms since at least the 1800s, beginning with the railroads. In the U.S., the container shipping industry’s genesis is usually dated to Malcom McLean in 1956. However, for about the next twenty years, many shipping companies used incompatible container sizes and corner fittings. This in turn required different equipment to load and unload and otherwise made it hard for a complete logistics system to develop. This changed around 1970 when standard size and fittings and reinforcement norms were developed (with all the political jostling between the incumbents that you’d expect).

Cloud computing is one area where the story of the shipping container has particular relevance. Like the container, the basic concepts aren’t new but they are being made more relevant to a wider audience by things like network infrastructure.

However, a discussion with HP in the context of their ProLiant SL launch got me to thinking: Literal shipping containers aside, the evolution of containerization has a lot of interesting lessons for how technologies evolve more broadly.

Process matters. At least as important as standards was changes to the labor agreements at major ports. When containers were first introduced, existing labor contracts negated much of their economic benefit by requiring excess dockworkers or otherwise requiring processes that involved more handling than was actually necessary. (For reason of both labor negotiations and infrastructure, containerization allowed the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal to largely eclipse the New York and Brooklyn commercial port.)

Marc Levinson’s “The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger” has lots of detail on the labor and other aspects of shipping containers. 

Existing infrastructure matters. The size of container ships is largely constrained by the width and depth of the Panama and Suez Canals. A “Panamax” container ship is the maximum size that can go through the Panama Canal; a “Suezmax” the largest that can go through the Suez Canal. “Malaccamax” ships have the maximum draught that can traverse the Strait of Malacca. (Currently, there are bulk carriers and supertankers this large but not container ships.) In a totally different context, there’s a good argument that the Segway failed, not so much because of price or poor design, but because it wasn’t a good fit with either existing sidewalks or roads.

And the business processes are, as always, highly relevant to the computing resources that are ultimately there simply to support them. Processes that are rooted in manual approaches that have lots of human back and forth won’t see much benefit from new technology no matter how virtualized, service-oriented, or self-service.

Thus, in this storyline, the shipping container represents the new increment for large-scale computing infrastructures.

At one level, this shouldn’t be taken too literally. Even if an increasing number of high performance computing and high-scale Web sites add servers in this kind of quantity, most aren’t buying them actually installed in shipping containers; they’re putting them in data centers a rack at a time. And vendors are designing new server form factors to reflect this shift.

As human beings we like analogies. Admittedly, we sometimes overextend them and end up obfuscating rather than clarifying. Such is arguably the case with cloud computing and the electric grid. However, a good analogy can not only make the new and unfamiliar more comprehensible but can even bring fresh insights based on history and past patterns.

(Credit: photohome_uk CC flickr)

Shipping containers in Clyde.

Many of you are probably familiar with the computing-in-shipping-containers theme that Sun most popularized but that a variety of vendors has picked up on in various forms. The idea is that a shipping container is the largest thing that can be easily transported around the world and therefore it’s the largest unit of computing that can be practically prebuilt at the factory.

Standards will matter–at least to get to the point of interoperable clouds (which admittedly may not be as pressing a need as in the case of the electrical grid and the world’s logistics system).

More information on that issue and the others addressed with this month’s patches is available in a bulletin on Microsoft’s Web site.

In any case, McAfee and Lumension both noted that it continues to be a long, hard summer for IT professionals who have had to deal with a large number of regular patches and some unscheduled ones as well from Microsoft and others.

Microsoft on Tuesday released nine patches, five of them critical, to plug holes in Windows and other software products.

“There’s no break from patching this summer,” McAfee Avert Labs’ Dave Marcus said in a statement. “Microsoft is playing catchup with these patches as cybercriminals have already used some of the serious vulnerabilities to commandeer vulnerable Windows computers.”

Lumension analyst Paul Henry said there had been some fear that the patches would go further, addressing some kernel-level issues. But even still, he said the latest crop of patches will bring their fair share of headaches.

Among the issues addressed is one that Microsoft warned about last month–a vulnerability related to the Office Web Components that help users put spreadsheets, charts, and other documents onto the Web. At the time, Microsoft said it was already seeing attacks based on the flaw, which affects Office XP, Office 2003, Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004 and 2006, as well as Office Small Business Accounting 2006.

“All of the ActiveX issues patched this month could be easily exploited and can impact even the average computer user,” Greenbaum said in an e-mail. “For example, any user who has Microsoft Office on their machine could be vulnerable to the Microsoft Office Web Components vulnerabilities. Similarly, every user with Windows XP SP3 or Vista could also be susceptible to one of the Remote Desktop Connection issues.”

Symantec senior research manager Ben Greenbaum noted that many of the vulnerabilites this month related to so-called ActiveX controls and added that many of the holes could be exploited just by getting a user to visit a Web page that has malicious code.

The nine patches actually relate to 19 separate vulnerabilities in Windows, the .Net Framework,
Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft ISA Server, Microsoft BizTalk Server, and Remote Desktop Client for Mac.

As is its practice, Microsoft said last week that the patches were coming.

Actually, not all versions of Office are affected, as the Web components issue does not affect the latest version–Office 2007. For a list of Office programs affected, see this security bulletin.

“After a summer of heavier-than-normal Patch Tuesdays, the last thing IT workers need is yet another large batch of patches from Microsoft,” Henry said in a statement. “Unfortunately, that is exactly what we got today as Microsoft released a total of nine security updates, five of which are critical and seven of which require disruptive restarts.”

Google’s admission that Gmail users were affected by the phishing scheme comes on the heels of Microsoft acknowledging that over 10,000 Live Hotmail accounts were compromised by the scam. The passwords apparently first hit the Internet on October 1.

Hotmail users aren’t the only ones who’ve been hit by a phishing scheme over the past week. Google told BBC News on Tuesday that Gmail users have also been affected by the hackers who posted passwords online.

The representative said that Google immediately “forced passwords resets on the affected accounts.”

Like Microsoft, Google was quick to point out to the BBC that the phishing scheme was a “scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers” and not an internal security issue. It didn’t say how users fell victim to the scheme.

“We recently became aware of an industrywide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for Web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts,” a Google representative told me in an e-mail.

Google described the issue as an “industrywide phishing scheme.” BBC News said it has seen two lists posted online with “more than 30,000 names and passwords” from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail, and other service providers.

In an e-mail to CNET, a Google representative said that the company had to reset the passwords on fewer than 500 Gmail accounts so far. However, that figure could change.

Updated at 9:10 a.m. PDT
to include Google’s comments.

The problem is far more widespread than was disclosed on Monday, possibly affecting Yahoo and AOL e-mail accounts as well, according to BBC News.

Despite Google’s and Microsoft’s awareness of the problem, it doesn’t seem that users are out of the woods just yet. Google’s representative told CNET that it will continue to force password resets on any newly affected user accounts.

Next time: Talk about tablets. Guests TBD!

Secrets from Steve Jobs launches that work for everyone?

What about the alternative: Launching solo?

Got questions? E-mail rafe@cnet.com. Feedback on show format too.

WRAP

As usual, watch or listen to the podcast for the content. The notes below are for those keeping score at home.

Today, we’re talking about product launches. The reason we’re doing this show now is that the Demo conference just ended, a week after the TechCrunch50 conference. One hundred and twenty products were launched at these shows. Is that smart? Is this how products should be launched? Is there a better way? To talk about this issue in some depth, I have two great guests….

Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Thanks Jeremy and Jim, Thanks Lynn Fu, producer

The velvet rope… does it work?

TALKING POINTS

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Should you launch your product at a trade show like Demo or CES, or should you try to drum up interest on your own? This week on the Roundtable, Revision 3 CEO Jim Louderback and Stage Two Consulting’s Jeremy Toeman discuss successful and doomed strategies for introducing new products to the market.

Do they still make sense? Arguments for/against.

And in this corner, Jeremy Toeman, the founder of Stage Two Consulting, a marketing and media relations firm. Now, there are a ton of consultancies out there that help companies launch products, and I wanted someone from one of them on this show. The reason I asked Jeremy to join is because he helped launch Sling Media and Boxee, two very interesting new media plays, as well as Bug Labs, a product for ultrageeks. Jeremy also has his own projects, like Legacy Locker, a site for archiving the keys to your digital assets. He’s one of the most thoughtful communication strategists I know, and that’s why I invited him to be on this episode.

Reporters Roundtable # 4: launching stuff

Let’s talk a bit about what happens at shows like Demo, TechCrunch, and some others that we know, like Under the Radar, the GDGT parties, etc…

First guest: Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision 3, the other computer video network. Jim has been in tech media for 16 years. He was the editor-in-chief of PC Magazine for a while, and I believe we first met when we both worked at Ziff Davis, years ago. Jim, welcome.

Greatest launch ever? (My pick: Moobella at Demo. Too bad the product never shipped).

Thanks for listening to Reporters Roundtable. We’re on live each Friday at 1 p.m. Pacific time at live.cnet.com.

How to follow up on a launch.

What about CES and other big shows — what are they good for?

How to get buzz today with a new product

Obligatory pimping: Be sure to visit Jeremy’s blog, livedigitally.com, and of course watch the great shows over at Revision 3.

When’s a good time / bad time to launch?

Great launch disasters in history (Cuil… others?)

• Blu-ray won’t be around forever, but it is the best option for watching high-quality video for now. “Eventually people will download (movies), but broadband installation isn’t there yet,” Glasgow acknowledged.

• While Netflix streaming has already been announced for Sony’s networked TVs, Blu-ray players are next. Connecting Netflix accounts with Blu-ray players is on Sony’s road map, which would put them in the same company as Samsung and LG. “Whatever it is people want–Netflix, Amazon–we’re going to make it available,” said Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow.

Fasulo’s remarks came on a day filled with announcements from Sony, both on the electronics side, and the video game division, Sony Computer Entertainment America. Although it’s only August, the company, like many in its industry, is already gearing up to introduce the products it hopes shoppers will snap up before they head back to school, as well as for holiday gifts.

Glasgow said he expects X-Series Walkman to grab some market share in the portable audio market, despite the iPod’s dominance and mounting curiosity for the new
Zune HD from Microsoft.

“I’m cautiously optimistic about (holiday retail sales). Though I’m cautious about saying I’m cautiously optimistic,” he said. Among retailers that sell Sony products, there’s also “some notion this will be a better holiday than the previous year.”

Sony Electronics introduced a new line of home audio equipment Tuesday, called Altus, that it developed in partnership with Best Buy, though other retailers will eventually offer it too. Altus receivers, speakers, and
iPod docks are aimed at a less tech-savvy audience, with minimal setup required.

But the announcements that got the most attention are the new PlayStation 3 Slim and its new, cheaper $299 price tag, and a new game format for the
PlayStation Portable.

Despite ongoing problems in the company as a whole, Sony’s electronics division is looking on the bright side when it comes to the all-important winter retail season.

• Sony thinks of Apple’s iPod as “another format” it wants to support, which is why it’s focused on iPod/iPhone connectivity with the new Altus audio products. “We recognize Apple has significant market share in this country,” Glasgow said. “They don’t have that same market share around the world, though.”

Sales of consumer electronics sunk 26 percent in the 2008 holiday season, according to one survey.

The natural question is whether Tuesday’s $100 price cut for the PS3, which has a Blu-ray player, would in turn put pressure on Sony’s standalone Blu-ray players, whose prices range from $250 to more than $700. But Sony executives declined to comment, other than to say that PS3 and Blu-ray are “different products.”

Looking ahead to the holidays, Sony Electronics’ Executive Vice President Mike Fasulo said Tuesday at a small media gathering in San Francisco that the gadget maker is hopeful about better sales this year than last.

Other interesting tidbits revealed during the meeting:

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET)

This story was corrected Thursday, August 20 to reflect that the X-Series Walkman is currently on sale.

Sony has high hopes for its touch-screen Walkman.

The presence of businesses in virtual worlds like Second Life is nothing new–and has been much derided in recent years. But according to Gartner, it’s still on the rise, particularly when it comes to training and virtual meetings. “Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behavior, and computing platform requirements,” the release explained. Gartner estimates that 70 percent of enterprises will be regulating the avatars of employees who use virtual worlds for business.

Two years ago, Gartner put out a study detailing the risks and pratfalls of doing business in virtual worlds, among them the difficulty of brand and reputation management. Now it’s getting more specific: Gartner now says that employees ought to know how to operate their avatars properly, use the same degrees of discretion and professionalism that they do on social-networking sites, and even keep separate avatars for personal and professional use.

That means your avatar might want to lose the sparkly pink torpedo bra, metallic leggings, and giant bat wings. When it’s representing your company, that is.

If you’re running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner thinks you might want to make sure your employees’ avatars aren’t dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

“Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments,” a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report “Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success” explained. “However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies also cover dress codes.”

My own mother had three sets of twins (I’m the younger sister in the first set; my twin brother is 12 minutes older), though her third set resulted in miscarriage. None of us are identical twins, so it is entirely possible, if unlikely, that my mother was ovulating more than once a month as well (not to mention having sex more than once a month; go Mom!).

Here’s how it happens–egg and sperm implant. Of course, that’s your first pregnancy. But if you ovulate more than one time a month–and women do–and a sperm happens to meet that egg, and they, too, implant, guess what? You get a second fetus.

Some women appear to be able to ovulate more than once a month. This can result in a condition called superfetation, which means conceiving while already pregnant.

What technically constitutes “twins” may need to be further defined, as twins are thought to be two children produced in the same pregnancy and born during the same birth process. So if Grovenburg has these two children at the same time, by the traditional definition they would be considered twins. (Fraternal twins, the result of two sperm and two eggs, are not technically created at the same instant, unlike identical, or monozygotic twins, when one egg fertilized by one sperm splits.)

So who knows? Maybe there are not only more twins than we realize, but also more parallel pregnancies of two kids we assume are twins but who are technically not.

In fact, my little sisters were born a full 37 minutes apart, which is a long time for twins. The doctor told my mother that the younger girl, Anne, didn’t want to come out, but the doctor insisted it was safer to have one labor, not two.

This is precisely what doctors think happened to Arkansas couple Todd and Julia Grovenburg. An ultrasound revealed that a male fetus appears to have formed a full 2.5 weeks after the female fetus was formed, according to Arkansas TV station KFSM-TV.

According to NBC’s Nancy Snyderman:

In a report on MSNBC, Dr. Snyderman calls superfetation a rare condition, but writing strictly anecdotally, I wonder if it may happen more than we realize.