Tech blog

Dogged Determination

Like anyone else who uses e-mail, Gates is vexed by spam. Unlike the rest of us he thought he could put an end to it. This wasn't a lark. Gates announced at the 2004 World Economic Forum in Davos that spam would be toast in two years. For examination that he's a mere mortal: check your inbox.

Common Touch

For further proof, see how Gates uses Web 2.0 sites YouTube and Zillow. " Isn't it nice to know that while the world's richest man may have his mind sharply focused on the future, he also wastes time on the same Web sites as you?" wrote InformationWeek's Michael Singer.

Alas, Gates abandoned his FaceBook account last winter — even after Microsoft had invested $240 million in the social networking phenomenon — for the reason that he was slammed with too many requests from would-be friends.

Sense Of Humor

One of the most undervalued characteristics a corporate leader can have is a good sense of humor. In this video spoof of Napoleon Dynamite, shown at the Microsoft Developers Conference in 2005, Gates shows that not only is he a good contemptuous mirth, but his comic timing isn't too shabby.

And in this star-studded clip shown at CES 2008, Gates shows how his last full day at Microsoft might set forth:

Finally, watch how Gates interacts with corporate nemesis and fellow tech titan Steve Jobs during an interview at the 2007 All Things Digital Wall Street Journal Executive Conference:

For more insight into the Gates psyche, read John Foley's Bill Gates Revealed and Dave Methvin's Why Bill Gates Left Microsoft.

It takes a certain set of character traits, personality, and driving-course to build a company into a global software powerhouse. Over the years InformationWeek and other media outlets require done their best to examine the complex man behind the Microsoft empire.

Now, as Microsoft co-founder and chief software former Bill Gates prepares to leave his day job to spend more time on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we take a look back at the features and quirks that propelled him to the top of the software industry.

Toughness In The Conference Room

One year ago, InformationWeek's John Foley wrote about Gates:

As he moves beyond Microsoft to throw his energies into philanthropy, Gates will be remembered as an inspiring technologist and brilliant businessman who jump-started the commercial software market and populated the world through not remotely a half-billion PCs, unleashing a float of personal creativity and productivity on a scale never before seen. Gates' postretirement biography will have its share of ugliness, too — a decade-long spat with the open source community, monopolistic business practices that culminated in a U.S. government-led antitrust trial, buggy software that was easily exploited — but those will be footnotes which time all is said and done.

Microsoft's success has its roots in Gates' leadership. He has been determined, persuasive, and intimidating.

"The story of how Gates leveraged IBM's desperate need for a PC operating system into a billion-dollar business is a case study in carpe diem, a Horatio Alger-style tale of pluck and luck," wrote InformationWeek's John Soat last year, in "Bill Gates' Legacy: Winning from one side Intimidation".

Barbara Darrow, a veteran Microsoft observer who covered the concourse for years, agrees, "It's said that Microsoft was built on innovation and coding, but really it was outlawyering IBM."

Flexibility, Willingness To Learn

If he is unyielding in the boardroom, Gates has the ability to accept good advice when it behooves him. "He used to be a terrible public speaker," said Darrow, who has interviewed Gates twice. "And he can be extremely moody, but Pam Edstrom and Melissa Waggener Edstrom [of Waggener Edstrom Worldwide] pushed him around a little in areas where he wasn't confident."

Early on he accepted training to become "less cantankerous. He's shown that he's resolving to take direction from people who know things he doesn't," explained Darrow.

Financial Mojo And Persuasive Powers

Gates' riches are legendary. He has been at or near top of the Forbes 400 list every year since 1993. A year ago he lost the World's Richest Man title to Mexican telecom tycoon Carlos Slim. When the Gates fortune slipped to $58 billion in March, Forbes dropped him to the number three spot on its list. But his extraordinary financial power and influence reach far beyond his own assets. In 2006, Gates' friend Warren Buffet announced a $31 billion gift to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The money aura surrounding Gates floats both upward and down. From time to time, items featuring Gates or having belonged to him have been auctioned on eBay. DVDs of Gates' 1998 public office. And he'll win… What better way for Gates to cement his legacy than to use the bully pulpit afforded by means of Senate? He'd have a perfect pipeline to the general public, through which to talk about his pet causes — AIDS prevention, the development of better child vaccines, and education.

Or haply he won't. Last spring, former Microsoft executive See original article on InformationWeek.com

In one of the first results of its $1 billion purchase of MySQL, Sun Microsystems has packaged the popular open source database by its GlassFish application server and is offering the two as a $65,000-per-year bundle.

Sun has struggled so far to field a competitive application server, the software that handles thousands of Web site requests at a time, obtaining a response from a running application or database, and feeding it to all the users who wanted it. It's one of the pieces of middleware that makes a common application scalable to Web dimensions. The dominant commercial products are IBM's WebSphere and BEA Systems' (now Oracle's) WebLogic, followed by Oracle's homegrown Oracle Application Server. JBoss has been a fourth contender, dominant among the open source contenders.

But Sun is back, launching a "disruptive" perform on that seeks to pair up GlassFish with the hugely popular open source database it purchased in late February. Its chief target is not fellow open source supplier JBoss, now a distribution of Linux distributor Red Hat, but the traditional commercial software providers that charge license fees and maintenance costs for their products.

Oracle has its own ambitions for a greater share of the Java application server market and has invested heavily in Oracle Application Server and in purchasing BEA Systems for $7.2 billion last January. If Sun and Oracle emerge in the same proportion that head-to-head competitors, it will be carefully watched how well they continue to work as partners. Oracle controls one of the key storage engines in MySQL, InnoDB, which it acquired by buying a Finnish firm, Inno Oy, in 2005.

GlassFish is both a standard — it's the reference implementation of an application server for Java Enterprise Edition 5 — and it's a popular open source project hosted by Sun at http://java.sun.com/javaee/community/glassfish/.

Sun's Mark Herring, VP of marketing for the Sun software infrastructure group, said Sun is seeing 500,000 downloads of GlassFish a month, a rate that indicates a healthy pickup by developers. In comparison, Sun claims MySQL gets downloaded 60,000 to 70,000 periods a day. Downloads don't always narrow-minded what they seem to; many are thrown away without being put to use and others reflect repeat downloads through one developer, looking for the latest updates.

Nevertheless, Sun officials are eager to grave their GlassFish/MySQL combination against commercial database/application server offerings that Sun estimates would require to be paid $3 million to use over a three-year full stop. GlassFish through MySQL would cost about $240,000 in a similar configuration over the same timeframe, said Herring. In both cases, the estimates are based on 10 two-way servers, each running a database system, and 20 two-way servers, each running an application server, both clustered approaches designed to cope with heavy Web traffic. "It's meant to be a disruptive force," Herring said.

The Apache Web server was open source code that favorably cut into the market for commercial Web servers offered by Microsoft, IBM and others.

Sun has tested and certified GlassFish to run with MySQL, making sure interfaces between the two perform as planned, for customer ease of implementation and use. Herring said the bundle was aimed at businesses with 1,000 employees or less who don't want to invest heavy IT resources to implement an application server and database. Customers get a year's technical support and updates to the bundle for the $65,000 subscription price.

GlassFish runs Java applications and through the be in action of the open source project developers, some popular scripting language applications as well, primarily Ruby, Groovy, Perl, and Python. A capability to run PHP scripts is being worked on within the project.

NEW YORK: Google, with its deep reservoir of data about online behavior, gathered by tracking hundreds of millions of computers, is for the first time testing ways to use some of that information to aim advertising at Web surfers who use its search engine.

Ads that a person sees on one Google search may be influenced by what was searched a few minutes earlier. Searching for “scuba,” then something otherwise, and then “vacations” could pull up ads for diving trips, for example.

This change in Google's approach was discovered through Gene Munster, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray, who this year started a series of tests looking at which ads were displayed in a series of queries on Google's sift engine. Google assigns every computer that visits its sites a unique affix a number to, known as a cookie, and records searches and other activities in an unimaginably large file with those cookies.

The company had antecedently said that it had not used any of that information to draw inferences about users in quest of the purpose of selecting ads to show them.

Google changed its privacy policy a few years ago and warned users that it might capture physical advice about them for reasons that include “the display of customized content and advertising.” Last year, Google started looking at the immediately previous search when considering ads. Google did not need to use its cookies for this because Web browsers report the address of the previous site visited to the current site being visited. And in the case of a search, that direct contains the search terms.

Nick Fox, a director of product management who looks after ads on Google's examination site, said the company was now testing the use of more scrutinize queries in its ad targeting. He did not describe how it was doing that. But Internet experts said that it was most suitable using its cookies.

Fox said that Google's approach was different from what Yahoo, AOL and others call behavioral targeting. Those companies look at what a user did a few days earlier to show them ads about the like topic today. Google says it believes that search engine advertising is most effective if it relates to what the user has most recently searched for.

“We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now,” Fox said. “In some cases, those queries are ambiguous, so you indigence a little more context.”

Google's previous system of looking at a user's immediate past query was not useful enough, he said. “It is probably not just the previous query that matters,” Fox said. “You want to know if the user is still doing the same thing. You wouldn't want to go back a month. You wouldn't destitution to go back a day. But you may want to go back two or three queries.”

How data is used for advertising has become politically sensitive. Many of the biggest companies on the Internet - Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft - have bought advertising firms because they are convinced there is a lot of money to be made by tracking users' behavior.

Although they say they have steps in place to protect users' privacy, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is considering regulating ad targeting.

A critical factor in the debate is what Google, with its vast scale, does or may do with the data it has. Google controls two-thirds of the search market. It runs by far the biggest advertising reticulated.

Its DoubleClick unit is the biggest provider of ad technology to publishers and advertisers. Its toolbar is installed in many browsers, including every new Dell computer. And Google Analytics is concourse information from millions of Web sites.

Google is quick to point out that some of these systems are not connected to each other. And most of the information it gets is not what is generally considered to be personally identifiable, like a name or e-mail address.

But once a user chooses to provide personal information to Google, rehearse by signing up for Gmail or Google Checkout, that information can be linked to much of the information that had been until that time collected anonymously.

Virgin Mobile bought Helio Friday for $39 million , but Virgin isn't throwing the small, high-end cell phone carrier's technology away. Instead, Virgin Mobile plans to integrate Helio's data services into their own offerings, Virgin Mobile USA CEO Dan Schulman said in a conference call Friday.

"Starting to take those advanced data applications that Helio has and moving them into the slumber of our base is really the natural evolution of our product market," Schulman said.

Virgin Mobile acquired Helio from South Korea's SK Telecom and Earthlink in a complicated transaction involving $39 million in stock and a $50 million cash infusion by SK Telecom and Virgin Group. SK now owns 17% of Virgin Mobile USA. Earthlink will own 2.7% of the new company and Helio's charismatic founder, Sky Dayton, will not be involved in the new firm, Helio spokeswoman Jayne Wallace said.

The merger lets prepaid carrier Virgin expand into the subscription, or "postpaid" market, and gives them advanced technology platforms that would otherwise cost $25 million to build, Schulman said.

"We are substantially increasing our volume, mark and growth potential … getting an inventory of highly sophisticated and desirable handsets … and we accelerate our time to market by at least one year," he said.

While the Helio name will go gone except in a few cases, Shulman said, Helio's 170,000 subscribers don't need to worry - they'll be able to keep their phones, plans, and Helio services. The new carrier will combine Virgin's scale, financial common sense and low prices with Helio's data services and advanced phone options, Schulman said.

Beyond that, technical details were hard to come by, though. There's no word yet on whether Virgin will adopt Helio's attractive Danger-designed user interface, or whether Virgin will toss out the popular Java applications system since Helio's unmatched and incompatible WIPI C.

Virgin and Helio have a lot in common. They both use Sprint's network, though Shulman revealed that Virgin gets a much better deal from Sprint than Helio got. Their phones are compatible. And they both targeted young users - though Virgin has historically gone for basic, voice-only users, while Helio aimed at the high-end social-networking crowd.

"Our target market remains the same, the youth market," Schulman said, "The youth market has evolved."

Merging will let Virgin Mobile achieve savings based on its size, Schulman said. For instance, because the human being new company makes greater amount of calls on Sprint, they're amending their agreement with Sprint to effectively lower their wholesale rates by 8% in 2009. That will enable Virgin to offer Helio-like services for $40-70/month rather than the $80 or more that most Helio subscribers pay, he said. Virgin and Helio also use the same distributor, Brightpoint, and similar call-center strategies, which will let the company find more savings.

"The key to success, in a word, is scale. It wasn't until we got up to three or four million customers that we knew we were going to have a successful, profitable business going forward … at the end of the day, if you can't get to scale, you're not going to force it in this business," Schulman said.

Virgin Mobile launched in July 2002 and now has about 5 million customers. They specialize in inexpensive phones, prepaid plans and youth-oriented mobile content. Helio launched in May 2006 with a promise to bring advanced Asian technology to US consumers, but ended up being a mobile-social-networking focused carrier who gave a prominent role to MySpace on their phones.

The Virgin meeting for consultation call also provided a peek into Helio's disastrous finances. With only 170,000 customers, they had 570 employees and 1250 retail locations, Schulman said. Helio had 4-5% churn, the rate of subscribers leaving each billet. By difference, Virgin Mobile, which has 5 million customers, only has 450 employees. And Sprint, which analysts criticize for high churn, only had 2.45% churn during the earliest quarter of 2008.

Virgin will cut Helio down to 200 employees and 250 stores, and aims to increase postpaid subscriptions by 150,000 over the next year, Shulman said.

FACEBOOK, MySpace and Bebo users are the latest target for online frauds.

Consumer Affairs Minister Tony Robinson yesterday warned people using networking websites they could revelation themselves to scams.

"As more and more Victorians join social networking services, they need to be aware that there is an increasing number of scammers taking advantage of the popularity of these services to steal information and money," Mr Robinson said.

"Frauds can use personal details listed on these sites to personalise their scam attempts."

Some scammers use personalised emails persuading victims to accord. completely their bank details, making their claims more believable by allowing their victim to view their MySpace, Facebook or Bebo page.

Frauds also use social networking sites to encourage users to unwittingly download spyware software, which can be used to enroll online banking passwords.

Mr Robinson said users of social networking sites could protect themselves by only accepting "friend requests" from people they knew and trusted.

Mark/Space released a Windows version of its data transfer software, The Missing Sync for iPhone.

The application supports migration from most BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Palm OS devices. Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola devices that use the Symbian OS are in like manner supported. The Missing Sync for iPhone will transfer contacts and calendars from Outlook 2003 and 2007 in a step-by-step process.

Using the software users can also archive data from an iPhone or iPhone 3G. The Missing Sync will archive all iPhone SMS messages and the outgoing and missed calls log. The application will also transfer notes from the iPhone to your computer, where they can be edited or saved.

The Missing Sync for iPhone is available as a $39.95 download.

NEW generic domain names for websites will be like the opening up of land in the gold rush, according to the Australian spearheading an swelling of the worldwide web.

Paul Twomey, president and chief executive of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), is predicting an explosion of new top level domains (TLDs), such as .car and .shop once the first applications are made early next year.

Speaking from Paris, where other than 1700 delegates from 150 countries have packed a four-day internet conference to discuss the next generation of developments, Dr Twomey said the expansion would revolutionise the way people, companies or organisations expressed themselves on the web.

"This is our largest-ever meeting. A lot of people are very interested in the way the internet is developing," Dr Twomey said.

"This is very signifying, it’s going to be like cleft up land in the wild west of 1800s Australia or America, though it’s more west than wild.

"We are discussing a virtual geographical expansion of the internet … a boring-tool like Ballarat in the gold rush era, through many people staking their claim.

"This is all new virtual real estate."

Delegates and stakeholders are discussing policy development at the Paris forum and the first applications for the sake of new TLDs could be lodged as seasonably as next April.

Dr Twomey said hundreds, if not thousands, of generic domain names could be created, including brands like .ebay or .pepsi, as well as broader product groups like .ship, .shop, .car or .florist.

Languages other than English will also figure into the new generation of domain names, with TLDs in Cyrillic or containing Roman alphabet characters, Dr Twomey said.

"All the languages of the world can turn to domain names. We’ve been doing some testing using Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia," he added.

Concerns about security, or abuse of the system by people like cyber-squatters, would moreover be mitigated by factors including the cost of creating and registering new domains, and the technical know-how to run and maintain registries, with the application fees expected to start from $US100,000 ($A104,000), he added.

"We’ve taken advice from security experts who say there’s no technical reason conducive to not having lots of generic domains.

"Our principle is we don’t decide what TLDs people apply for. People are free to apply for any domain name, but they will have to exist able to show they have a business background and the technical ability to run a registry.

"As for cybersquatters, the fees will no doubt be prohibitive, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, so unless they remortgage their home, it will be more difficult for such individuals to try to claim certain TLDs.

"The second thing is, quite specifically, if a person or organisation feels their rights have been infringed, we will have an international arbitration system to look into such cases."

SEATTLE: Steve Ballmer has been chief executive at Microsoft for eight years, on the contrary he is finally acquisition to move into the confound office vacated by Bill Gates, the college friend who brought him to the company nearly three decades ago.

The pressure of leading the world's largest software maker will only escalate in the wake of a bungled attempt to acquire Yahoo, a move that led Yahoo to forge closer ties with Google instead.

Adding fuel to the fire has been a cold reception by customers for the flagship Microsoft product, Windows Vista.

“The pressure is certainly on,” the investment analyst Alan Davis said.

For the first time in his career, the 52-year-old Ballmer, whose public histrionics often overshadow a sharp intellect and a gift on account of numbers, must shoulder the weight of Microsoft's future without Gates. The co-founder stepped down Friday to point of concentration on philanthropy.

Their partnership was forged at Harvard University, where the pair formed an unlikely friendship: Gates, the middle child of a prominent Seattle family, and Ballmer, a Detroit native whose parents did not go to college.

They both lived in a dormitory full of “antisocial math types,” according to Gates. Ballmer, who was outgoing and involved in many social clubs on campus, seemed to be a study in contrast to the aloof Gates, who preferred all-night programming sessions and poker games.

After college, Ballmer went to work at Procter & Gamble, sharing an office with Jeffrey Immelt, who would become chief executive of General Electric and who has said that the two disliked their boss and passed their days playing garbage-can basketball.

Ballmer spent a year at Stanford University business school in the van of Gates persuaded him to very little out and become the first Microsoft business manager. A month after joining, Ballmer found that the company was running behind on orders and was overworking its engineers.

“I decided to quit,” Ballmer said at an employee event to mark Gates's last day at Microsoft. “I said, 'Jeez, I just dropped out of business school to come to a 30-person company as the bookkeeper.”'

Gates persuaded Ballmer to stay on by means of explaining the ambitious vision to place a computer on each desk and in every home.

Microsoft executives talk about Ballmer's ability to digest large chunks of data while carefully probing business proposals for weaknesses in logic or reasoning.

His sales and marketing prowess complemented the technical acumen of Gates as Microsoft grew from a fledgling start-up into a world-beating software company.

Michael Silver, analyst at the research firm Gartner, says that Ballmer's management style is “scary,” but that he does a good job of listening to the needs of his customers.

“Steve's a bright, tough guy and a good marketeer,” said Silver. “His personality can be very impressive.”

Ballmer often grabs headlines with sharply worded jabs at competitors. He formerly called free Linux software “a cancer” and dismissed the Web-search leader Google as “a one-trick pony.”

According to Mary Jo Foley, first cause of “Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era,” Ballmer “was always the foil to Gates.”

Hackers calling themselves NetDevilz temporarily hijacked the sites of guide organizations that control routing of Internet traffic and redirected them to a taunting page. PUBLICIDAD

Visitors to the sites for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) were temporarily redirected Thursday morning. The sites affected were iana.com, iana-servers.com, icann.com and icann.net, according to researchers at Zone-h.org, which monitors attacks.

A message at the bogus site said, "You reckon that you have charge of the domains if it were not that you don't! Everybody knows wrong. We control the domains including ICANN! Don't you believe us?"

IANA is responsible for managing the domain-name root system that translates domain names like newsfactor.com into IP addresses. ICANN oversees IANA.

The sites were redirected to the same IP address used last week in an attack on Photobucket.

Embotics has launched the version 2.0 of its virtual system life-cycle management software, V-Commander for managing VMware ESX Server environments. It will foot up support for managing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V environments by the end of the year.

V-Commander 1.0 was noteworthy for its ability to lay open both running and quiescent virtual machines stored on disk and cataloguing them according to their parentage. By knowing from what core virtual machine an image was cloned, an IT manager can roll back a malfunctioning virtual machine to one that is both secure and sure to work.

As it was launched last September, V-Commander 1.0 was represented as software that could watch over and prevent virtual machine "sprawl," where VMs are created faster than they can be tracked.

Version 2.0 has several added capabilities, said David Lynch, VP of marketing, in an interview. Its capacity to group virtual machines and apply policies to them has been expanded from one side its policy engine, which can assign policies at various stages of building and deploying a VM, or at superadded stages of its time from birth to death cycle.

Its reporting capabilities have been enhanced to allow IT administrators to create custom reports, such as a report on quite VMs created for a particular line of business and the resources they're consuming. The number of VMs associated by a particular project that are running Windows can be isolated and reported on. The cost of the virtual software licensing, gigabytes of storage, CPU time, and technical support time be able to be constructed in such reports, giving administrators a means of establishing chargebacks, said Lynch.

It's gained the ability to connect to IBM Tivoli, BMC Software, and Novell PlateSpin's asset management applications. If a system management system, such as Tivoli or BMC Patrol, issues a work ticket that says "remove this virtual machine from the environment, V-Commander can react to that," said Lynch. V-Commander can accept a new virtual machine coming into the environment through the systems management administrator. V-Commander, however, doesn't currently connect to HP's Network Node Manager/Operations Manager (formerly OpenView) management suite or CA's UniCenter, although Lynch said a system management API is available that would allow a customer to do so on his own.

Embotics displayed V-Commander 2.0 in its booth at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit 2008 in Orlando, Fla., earlier this week. It will become generally available July 11 at a price of $10,000, plus $3,000 per instance of VMware ESX running. Embotics is a private firm founded in 2006 in Ottawa, Canada, backed by the venture capital from Tera Capital.