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Alas, Oracle’s consolidation play suggests that the big enterprise software vendors struggle to see the market in terms other than zero sum. IBM is looking abroad to developing economies for growth, and surely Oracle and SAP are doing the same. But what about here in the US? Or Western Europe? Surely there are new markets to be created here, too?

This is fine, but I’d prefer to see press releases that announce that 100 net new customers were created through a differentiated product and licensing strategy. You know - the sort of thing that open source does.

Or would Oracle et al prefer that open-source vendors clean up on these emerging markets?

It’s a bit pathetic to watch proprietary behemoths slug it out over saturated markets. SAP just went on the offensive in one such skirmish, announcing that 100 of Oracle’s Hyperion customers are buying SAP for performance management with the intention to replace Oracle. (As Josh Greenbaum notes, the real story here may not be the customer defections, but rather the fact that conservative SAP is taking the gloves off at all to smack Oracle around.)

Research chief Rick Rashid didn’t mention Google by name, but did say that investing in basic research can help a company when technology shifts and as new rivals emerge.

Other projects include the well-publicized WorldWide Telescope and LucidTouch, a new touch-based interface for mobile devices.

REDMOND, Wash.–Microsoft kicked off its annual TechFest internal science fair on Tuesday, touting a wide range of projects that span from new views of outer space to efforts much closer to home.

Although he is now one of the event’s biggest champions, Rashid conceded that he thought the whole concept was a bad one when first approached about doing TechFest.

On Wednesday and Thursday, about 7,000 Microsoft employees are expected to tour a collection of 150 research projects to see which of the efforts might fit with work they are doing in their product groups. About a quarter of the projects are on display for the non-Microsoft folks assembled today.

Among the projects being shown are several efforts in the area of search, where Microsoft has been counting on its research team to help the company better compete against Google.

“You don’t know what’s coming around the corner,” Rashid said. “Research creates a reservoir of technology, of ideas, of people, that can be brought to bare when things get bad. It gives you agility.”

Amid continued pressure, Rashid eventually conceded to try it several years back as an experiment. The company has been doing it ever since.

“I didn’t ever really want to do this,” Rashid said. “I kept saying, ‘Gosh, you know that would be such a bad idea. It would be kind of a waste of time. I don’t know if anybody will show up.”

Intel likes to mention that it’s the world’s leading supplier of graphics technology. The only reason it can claim that mantle, however, is because people like bargains, and the way they get those bargains is through the use of integrated graphics chipsets.

It needs to somehow get up to speed with Nvidia and the former ATI when it comes to graphics knowledge while keeping an eye on the rest of its business. Intel has found it difficult in recent years to break into new areas, such as flat-screen TVs or cell phones, that have very different processing requirements and architectures than the CPU.

This is Intel’s next great challenge, now that it has thankfully derailed the March of Itanium and soothed the burns from the Netburst architecture.

Intel has put the 915 and 945 chipsets behind it, but challenges remain. It still encountered problems with the release of the 965 chipset, and the G30 series has yet to make it into notebook PCs. This area represents arguably Intel’s most glaring weakness at present.

But those other bets were just that, bets. This time, Intel has no choice. Intel can’t afford to fall behind as the PC industry changes; it’s one thing to swing and miss when trying something new, it’s quite another to miss the mark on your home turf.

The integrated graphics chips, usually thought of as “good-enough graphics,” really aren’t that good. Intel has had loads of problems with its graphics chipsets and their support for PC games or other intense graphical programs. Most of that software will run, but not in an ideal fashion, and lots of people expect that shiny new PC to be able to run PC games without fits and starts or jerky gameplay.

Nvidia and AMD are way ahead when it comes to understanding how to build graphics chips. Nvidia has been doing this for years, and AMD recognized the growing importance of graphics when it acquired (for far more than it should have paid, however) ATI Technologies in 2006.

In February 2007, just after Vista launched, Microsoft’s Steve Sinofsky told CEO Steve Ballmer that the 945 chipset, required for the “Vista Premium Ready” logo, could barely run Vista. And everyone (inside the PC industry, at least) knew the widely used 915 chipset that was awarded the “Vista Capable” logo couldn’t even think about running the advanced display driver model used to deliver the fancy Aero interface, considered one of the major selling points of Vista.

Graphics chips and CPUs like the Core 2 Duo are two very different beasts, but the wholesale embrace of multicore processor designs means that at some point, graphics technology becomes just a core on the main chip. AMD is well underway with planning for its Fusion processor and Nvidia seems to be eyeing broader uses for its high-powered graphics chips.

When a high-ranking executive at your strongest partner openly thinks your technology “barely works,” perhaps it’s time to make that a higher priority.

Juicy stuff, for sure, but it’s old news that Intel and Microsoft have been in engaged in “coopetition” for years. The real lesson is just how badly even Microsoft thinks of the current state of integrated graphics.

The company has shown it’s getting more serious about graphics, hiring more engineers and focusing some of its design prowess on projects like Larrabee. And it tried to take a big step forward in the performance of its 965-series integrated graphics chipsets by adding support for functions like transform and lighting. It had lots of problems delivering drivers for that chipset, however, and when those drivers arrived, they didn’t deliver a uniform boost in performance.

Around 75 percent of the notebooks, and around 60 percent of the desktops, sold last year used integrated graphics chips. The rest use discrete graphics chips made by Nvidia and AMD that offer far more powerful performance for games and video.

By the time Windows 7 rolls around, Intel will need to do better than “barely works.”

A series of internal Microsoft e-mails discussing Intel’s 915 and 945 integrated graphics chipsets in unfavorable terms made its salacious way around the Internet this week. Microsoft is currently being sued over its Windows Vista upgrade programs, which were designed with pressure from Intel, but over the objections of the PC industry, to include support for a graphics chipset that couldn’t run Vista’s Aero interface.

IBM and Saudi Arabia’s national research and development organization have created a joint nanotechnology lab to develop new technologies in solar power, seawater desalination, and recyclable materials.

An agreement to create the Nanotechnology Centre of Excellence, established by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and IBM Research, was signed last week in a ceremony in Riyadh.

The lab is one of several indicators that oil-rich Middle East nations are moving rapidly into clean tech.

The oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Ali al-Nuaimi, told the French oil newsletter Petrostrategies that “one of the most important sources of energy to look at and to develop is solar energy,” according to an AFP report.

Last November, OPEC members created a $750 million fund to do research on carbon capture and storage.

And the head of the Masdar Clean Tech Fund, based in Abu Dhabi, last month was named “Cleantech leader of the year,” at last week’s Cleantech Forum. The fund is behind Masdar City, which is being called the first sustainable city.

For IBM, the joint nanotechnology lab is part of the company’s Big Green Innovations initiative to develop environmental technology.

Dino-Light Digital USB Microscope AM413M

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

At this year’s CES, adrift between meetings, I stumbled into a few digital microscope booths and spent a little time at the other end of the image-capture spectrum; in cameraville, we tend to concentrate on the telephoto megazooms, which make big things look small, as opposed to the telemacro end, making small things look big. Over the past couple of weeks, I had the opportunity to put the BigC Dino-Lite Digital Microscope AM413M under the, um, microscope.

Although I expected to find the Dino-Lite intriguing, I didn’t expect to become quite so absorbed by it. Another way to put that: it’s an addictive abyss of a gadget. I found–and still find–myself grabbing everything in sight to put it under the ’scope. (Click the slide show to see some of the things I did examine.)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Dino-Light AM413M handheld

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The Dino-Lites come in a variety of models ranging from a plastic-bodied, VGA-resolution version with 4 LED lights (AM211) to the 1.3-megapixel, aluminum-alloy-bodied AM411/AM413 models. (Here’s a handy comparison chart of the different models, though it doesn’t include pricing.)

The device itself is pretty simple: a metal tube with a ring for setting magnification/focus on the barrel and a snap-on clear plastic cover to enclose small objects. A USB cable comes out the top. One of the most fun things about the Dino-Lite is that you can hold it in your hand–you can see what detritus has accumulated between the keys of your keyboard, for example–but when you zoom in that much what really gets magnified is hand shake. There are two optional stands available: a $39 plastic base with gooseneck arm and plastic mount and a $95 high-tech metal base with a more high-precision mount for finer scope placement (not shown). The latter took a little longer to assemble–this isn’t the most well-documented product I’ve reviewed. There are quite a few helpful videos about it on YouTube, however.

The software that accompanies the Dino-Lite is fairly basic but easy to use.

The image under the scope appears in a window of the accompanying software application. The software lets you view and capture stills and video (up to 30fps or time-lapse) and provides some measurement and annotation tools for analyzing images. Though there are quite a few options–measure by diameter, radius, line segment, continuous line–the measurement tools aren’t quite as useful as they could be. For instance, the scope can’t tell the software what the current magnification level is. You’ve got to enter it manually. And you can’t seem to save or export the measurement data, just use it as labels.

Most of the Dino-Lites have magnifications the company specs as “approximately 10x to 50x, 200x”. The actual available magnifications vary, and are kind of difficult to peg. With the scope sitting directly on an object, it generally focuses at 50x to 60x and then again at 200x to 210x. You can achieve other magnifications by adjusting the distance between the scope and the subject. For small objects, which can be jiggered to fit underneath the clear plastic endcap, you should be able to achieve continuous magnification across the entire range. Larger objects won’t be able to get close enough to the lens, however, so there will be gaps in the magnification range for those. And the LED lights can’t illuminate more than about 3 inches away.

At about $500 (you can buy it at the charmingly named SunriseDino.com, and ThinkGeek.com carries some of their models), it’s a bit pricey as a toy–unless it’s a gift for your brainiac teen or the executive who has everything–but I don’t think it’s appropriate for analyzing cancerous tissue, either. Though the images and video are surprisingly good, the white balance is very sensitive to ambient light and white balance and exposure aren’t sufficiently uniform across the field of view for color-critical analysis. But there’s a lot of gray area–and potential uses–that fall between toy and scientific instrumentation.

I’m going to hit the floor of my office now, to get the Dino-Lite up close and personal with my carpet.

Sling Media has plans to connect your Slingbox to Apple’s 3G iPhone. But don’t get too excited; there’s no release date set yet.

Sling showed us a brief demonstration of what the company’s mobile application, SlingPlayer, looks like on a jailbroken first-generation
iPhone. It’s merely a proof of concept, the company says, to demonstrate how superduperexcited it is to get started on an actual product.

This is, of course, all assuming that Steve Jobs announces the 3G iPhone Monday at the opening of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which is all but assured at this point.

A glimpse of what the SlingPlayer UI will look like on the next-gen iPhone.

(Credit:
Sling Media)

SlingPlayer is an application that allows users to stream video directly from a Slingbox to a mobile device. The bandwidth to show a high-quality video stream necessitates a device on a 3G wireless service, which is why the company has had to wait for the next-gen version of the iPhone. Sling already makes the SlingPlayer Mobile available on Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and Symbian phones, with RIM’s BlackBerry on the way.

Sling’s product manager for hardware, Ted Malone, says the company didn’t consider making a Web application version of the SlingPlayer like Apple has encouraged other developers to do. Malone says SlingPlayer Mobile has to be a native application to meet Sling’s standards of quality.

There’s no date set, but Sling says it could be available by the end of this year. It’s more likely to debut in early 2009.

A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act.

The team of two graduate students and three professors neither sought legal review of the project, nor ran it past the Human Subjects Committee at their university, putting them in a particularly dangerous position.

The academic paper, “Shining Light in Dark Places: Understanding the Tor Network” (pdf) was presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium yesterday, in Leuven, Belgium. The authors are listed as: Damon McCoy, Kevin Bauer, Dr. Dirk Grunwald, Dr. Tadayoshi Kohno and Dr. Douglas Sicker.

The goal of the project was to learn what kind of traffic was flowing over Tor — a free network providing anonymous web and other Internet services to hundreds of thousands of users world-wide. Some of Tor’s users include pro-democracy dissidents, journalists and bloggers in countries like China, Egypt and Burma who would otherwise face arrest and torture for their work.

Tor relies on volunteers who donate computing power and bandwidth to run approximately 2500 publicly accessible proxy servers, which are then used by hundreds of thousands of people to hide their Internet traffic.

In order to study Tor, the researchers setup their own ‘exit node’ server on the University of Colorado’s high-speed network. For 4 days in December 2007, they logged and stored the first 150 bytes of each network packet that crossed their network, thus revealing what kind of traffic was crossing the network, and the remote websites that Tor users were visiting. While the authors do not state how many sessions they snooped on, they do state that their server carried over 700GB of data.

In a second part of the study, the researchers ran an ‘entry node’ to the network for 15 days, which allowed them to determine the source IP address of a large number of Tor users. They used this to learn which countries use Tor more heavily than others. Note that in this second part of the study, the researchers did not have access to the destination site information, nor were they able to observe the kinds of traffic going through their server.

The researchers found that HTTP (web traffic) was responsible for 58% of their servers’ bandwidth. They also found that the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, while accounting for only 3% of the number of connections, was responsible for over 40% of the overall bandwidth. They also observed that German users were responsible for over 30% of the requests through their server.

No Legal Review Sought

In his presentation of the work at the PET Symposium yesterday, Kevin Bauer, one of the graduate students who wrote the paper shed some light on the limited amount of legal analysis performed on the project.

Bauer said that the researchers “spoke informally with one lawyer, who told us that that area of the law is ill defined” based on this, the researchers felt that it was “unnecessary to follow up with other lawyers.”

The lawyer they spoke to was Professor Paul Ohm, who teaches at the University of Colorado Law School. Ohm has previously collaborated with two of the researchers on an earlier publication, which discussed the legal risks faced by academics engaged network monitoring research. Ohm, a former federal computer crimes prosecutor, has also been the subject of some media attention in recent months, after he publicly stated that ISP-level advertising and traffic-shaping systems may violate US wiretap laws .

In a response to questions by this blogger, Professor Ohm seemed to attempt to distance himself from the researchers, writing by email:

I met with the research team once before they had finished their research, although I don’t know how far along they were at that point. At the meeting, I gave them a very brief sketch about federal Wiretap law and they gave me a very brief sketch of their research. They seemed to have put in place a number of controls to try to minimize the risk of liability. I haven’t seen the final paper (as far as I can recall).

I’m not their lawyer, and I’ve never been their lawyer, and I haven’t produced any official or unofficial legal advice about their research, but because I spoke with them about this, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to give you any opinions about the research other than this brief statement.

Legal Risks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which wrote a legal guide for operators of Tor servers, strongly advises server administrators against snooping on their users. A section in the legal guide makes this clear:

Should I snoop on the plaintext that exits through my Tor relay?

No. You may be technically capable of modifying the Tor source code or installing additional software to monitor or log plaintext that exits your node. However, Tor relay operators in the U.S. can create legal and possibly even criminal liability for themselves under state or federal wiretap laws if they affirmatively monitor, log, or disclose Tor users’ communications …. Do not examine the contents of anyone’s communications without first talking to a lawyer.

While state laws vary, one immediate concern would be the Wiretap Act, a federal law that broadly prohibits snooping by network operators and others. The core prohibition of the Wiretap Act is found at section 2511(1)(a), which prohibits any person from intentionally intercepting, or attempting to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication.” A violation of these rules is is a Class D felony, and can result in fines up to $250,000 and up to 5 years in jail.

It is this same law that groups such as the ACLU and EFF sued AT&T and other telecom companies for violating, when they shared customer communication with the US National Security Agency. AT&T was able to obtain retroactive immunity from the US Congress, but only after spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists.

In order to learn more about the legal issues at play, I spoke with Kevin Bankston, the EFF lawyer who wrote the Legal guide for Tor server operators, and who also lead the EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T. Bankston told me that:

“I agree that their logging the content exiting their nodes would appear to constitute interceptions of those electronic (not wire) communications under the Wiretap Act, and I don’t think they qualify for the narrow provider exceptions [18 USC 2511, 2 (a) I], so I still see the same potential civil and criminal liability that was noted in our FAQ.”

No Human Subjects Committee Review

In addition to possible legal issues, the project also raises serious ethical concerns related to the study of users’ communications without their consent.

During his presentation, Bauer revealed that the researchers did not seek the approval of their university’s Institutional Review Board — a body that reviews research projects that involve human subjects. He said that, “we were advised that it wasn’t necessary,” adding that the IRB review process is used “used more in medical and psychology research at our university,” and was not generally consulted in computer science projects

Information listed on the website of the University of Colorado’s Human Research Committee states that: “All research involving human participants that is conducted by UCB faculty, staff or students must receive some level of review by the Human Research Committee.”

Of particular concern to all Institutional Review Boards is any research that involves the study of participants under the age off 18, and other at risk or vulnerable persons. Given that the users of the Tor network have gone out of their way to seek anonymity, and that in some cases, their discovery could lead to arrest or torture, it would seem that these users would almost certainly be considered to be vulnerable. Furthermore, it is quite likely that the snooped communications include at least a few users under the age of 18 — something that the researchers did not address in their paper.

In a paper published earlier this year, Dr. Simson Garfinkel explored some of the common myths and pitfalls for computer security researchers that study real users and their behavior, and the need to submit their projects to an IRB review.

Dr Garfinkel specifically deals with one of the researcher’s claims:

Myth: Because the Common Rule exempts research involving subjects that cannot be identified, IRB approval is not required when using anonymized data

Although this would certainly be convenient, most institutions only allow a determination of exemption to be made by the IRB itself.

A request for clarification on these issues left with the director of the University of Colorado Human Research Committee had not been returned by press time.

Other concerns

In addition to the issues surrounding US legal liability, and ethical concerns over human subject testing — there is one other problem: International law.

While the researchers are Americans, and conducted their study on a server based in the US, there is certainly an international angle to their study. Users from around the world sent traffic through the researchers’ server, and as such more strict Canadian and European intercept and data privacy laws may apply.

Furthermore, one of the strongest privacy protections inherent in the Tor system is the complete lack of logging. That is, if law enforcement agencies approach a Tor server administrator seeking information on a user of the system, the admin can truthfully reply that they have no logs, and thus have nothing that they can be compelled to produce.

Taking questions before their presentation, two of the authors told me that they still have a copy of the data that they collected, and admitted that it was not currently stored on an encrypted disk. They did stress that it was, however, being kept in a “secure” location.

What this means of course, is that law enforcement agencies could easily subpoena this data, thus legally compelling the researchers into handing over the data. This places the users of the Tor network at a significant risk, one that certainly violates the expected social norms of the system.

During the question and answer session after his presentation, Bauer stated that the researchers were still not sure what they were going to do with the data set, and were exploring possibilities for releasing it to researchers in an anonymized and non-personally identifiable way. This statement was met with boos from the audience, which was mainly made up of privacy researchers and activists, a number of whom run their own legitimate Tor servers.

Caveat Emptor

While the US government did not send officials to this annual meeting of privacy researchers, the Canadian government did. A representative for Dr. Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario was in the audience during the presentation.

When asked for comment on the research project, and any potential impact for Canadian citizens who may have used the snooping Tor server, Cavoukian issued the following statement:

“Whether you run an ISP, a search engine, a Tor server node, or a research project, the principle of Data Minimization should rule. Universal privacy practices require that strong limits be placed on the processing and storage of personal data. In today’s online world of constant data availability, privacy requires data minimization at every stage of the information life-cycle: If you don’t need the data, don’t collect it in the first place; if you don’t need it any more, then destroy it securely — don’t keep it any longer than you need to. Full stop.”

Wise words indeed.

Earlier this year, Radiohead singer Thom Yorke explained to the AP that the band was going to take concrete steps to minimize its contribution to global warming, including traveling by airplane only when necessary and using solar-powered generators. But the biggest contributor, by far, to the band’s global carbon footprint are its fans, who drive by the millions to its shows every time Radiohead tours. Hence, Yorke said that the band would play only “in places that have municipal transport systems in place or that we can persuade promoters to put on transport.”

Radiohead is playing a venue (3) located halfway between Seattle (1) and Mt. Rainier National Park (2).

(Credit: Screenshot (Live Search Maps))

Apparently this dictate doesn’t apply in Seattle. Most touring acts of Radiohead’s popularity play in Key Arena, the basketball stadium (at least for another year, until the Sonics move to Oklahoma), which holds about 17,000 people. It’s owned by the city, located in the middle of Seattle, and is easily accessible via the city’s Metro bus system. But according to stories in today’s Billboard and elsewhere, Radiohead will play the same venue they played last time, the White River Amphitheatre, a Live Nation venue located on the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation 35 miles southeast of town. (See a map with both venues here.)

White River’s about five years old. It’s a fairly small (maybe 12,000 capacity) outdoor venue in a pleasant setting, but it’s plagued by a complete disregard for traffic planning. If every
car disappeared from the road, it would take about 40 minutes to drive there from downtown Seattle. But because the last five miles leading to the arena are on a two-lane rural road, and because it is in a particularly sprawling exurban part of of King County where growth has gone more or less unmanaged for the last 15 years, it actually takes much longer–the one time I drove there, after work on a weekday, it took me a little more than two hours. Most of the time I was standing still, emitting great gouts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The venue is aware of the problem, and has put up a Web site with driving directions and instituted a free shuttle from the relatively nearby Auburn Supermall. But for the 550,000+ folks who live in Seattle, they’d have to drive 30 minutes to Auburn, park, then take the shuttle, which (according to people I know who’ve taken it) still takes about 30 minutes to creep the last few miles to the venue.

Draw your own conclusions. I’m prone to think that Yorke and the band are trying to do the right thing, but are too busy to worry about the details of every venue on the tour, and one of their promoters or assistants saw the note about the free shuttle and thought “sounds like public transit to me.”

The Macalope knows the MacBook Air isn’t perfect, but the amount of silly punditry it’s attracting is seriously out of control.

First, did you know that the MacBook Air Lacks Features, Analysts Say (tip o’ the antlers to the Rat Boy)?

It’s true! And, according to squirrels, it lacks delicious nuts!

Well, pardon the Macalope for saying so, but dur-hey. He’d have to scroll through keynote again, but he’s pretty sure that you don’t need analysts to tell you that it “lacks features” because Steve Jobs actually said so. That “lack of features” is actually a feature.

The point is that because music, video and software are mostly being received wirelessly from the Internet in the digital wonderland in which we live, you really don’t need them. The last time the Macalope used his optical drive was to install Leopard. Yes, you either need a USB optical drive or another
Mac, but let’s face it, at the MacBook Air’s price, another $99 isn’t going to bother you.

But PC World isn’t the only place where you can chew the FUD.

Direct from the Canadian Ministry of Silly Punditry we learn that the MacBook Air may increase risk of laptop loss (tip o’ the antlers to Colin Morton).

Indeed. The only way to ensure your laptop won’t get stolen is to buy big fat honkin’ ugly ones.

But, clearly, neither of those beats this gem from PC World’s Mike Barton:

MacBook Air Amiss: Time to License Mac OS X?

Good question! Like “I Have Stubbed My Toe And Find It Painful: Time to Commit Suicide?”

With its focus on form over function…

Mike, if you knew the slightest thing about Apple or Steve Jobs, you’d know that form and function are inseparable.

But, please, continue.

… it is destined for the niche of early Apple adopters, sure to get burned on price and features when Apple upgrades to at least include a bigger hard drive than 80GB, ethernet, Firewire and a user-replaceable battery.

Predicting a laptop will one day have a bigger hard drive is like predicting death and taxes. But, with the possible exception of Firewire, Barton is wrong about the other three because they affect the size and weight and violate Steve Jobs’ vision for shiny gadgets of the future.

Let’s face it: Apple’s done letting you get a new battery when the stock one won’t hold a charge anymore and having you milk your device. Their philosophy is that you should be turning these suckers over every two years or so, partially because that’s the rate of significant advancement for components. In two years, it’s going to be out of date. You may not like that philosophy, but the Macalope’s found it fits his personal buying pattern anyway so no big whoop.

The MacBook Air is not going to burn early adopters on features, but it might burn them on price. The Air is akin to the
iPhone, in that it’s “crippled” by lacking certain features you might have come to expect, but comes in a form factor not available in any competing product and it’s priced at a premium.

The problem is, it’s different from the iPhone because while Apple doesn’t sell another phone, it does sell other laptops. If you go into an Apple Store to look at the Air, you’re going to wonder if it’s worth the premium over the MacBook, when the MacBook is faster.

That’s why it also reminds the Macalope of another Apple product. What was that? If only he could put his hoof on it.

All that said, if you’d had the chance to lay your hooves on one of these as the Macalope has, you’d know that the MacBook Air is sexier than the cover of Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”.

Oh, who is the Macalope kidding? There’s nothing sexier than the cover of Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”. But still, the MacBook Air is pretty damned sexy.

If you’re a Mac user who travels a lot and/or is driven by style, do not need a lot of power and aren’t terribly price sensitive, the Air is probably already singing its siren’s song.

Clearly, as Macworld’s Dan Frakes said, Apple has set its phasers to “niche”.

But there’s nothing wrong with that and it certainly doesn’t excuse Barton’s world-class jackassery.

I say let early adopters get burned. This product begs a bigger question of Apple: When will you stop holding back the Mac OS and start licensing the OS?

Uh, well, let’s see. Wednesday’s no good because Apple has meetings all day. Thursday it has to take its
car in and nothing ever gets done on Friday, so…

How’s never?

I like the Mac OS (which is more advanced than Windows)…

What’s that even supposed to mean? That’s like saying “I like butter (which is more advanced than motor oil)”.

Well, no, it’s not. While both can provide lubrication, one tastes better and the other works better in engines.

… and I love the idea of being able to have a dual boot Windows machine. I am not in the market for an ultraportable, but Apple doesn’t offer one laptop I would buy.

Really? Not one of them? Why?

While the price parity issue has waned, the fact remains: Apple doesn’t make a laptop under $1000.

Ohhh. You’re cheap! Now the Macalope gets it!

I just bought a new ThinkPad R61i that cost me $600 delivered (just to show you the model I bought).

Aaaaiiii! It’s horrible! Put it away! Put it away!

Ha-ha!

Seriously, though, that is one butt-ugly computer you got there. The Macalope is sure you two will be happy together.

But what about the future of personal computing — will we always be subject to Apple’s product whims?

Surely the company’s entire product lineup was based on a series of whims.

Apple is missing so much opportunity to grow market share with the Mac OS.

Maybe it’s not all that concerned with market share. Maybe it’s concerned with profitability.

Nah, that would just be wacky.

Without it, Macs will struggle to warrant developers’ time unfairly and remain a niche platform.

Mike Barton, providing the latest analysis from 1995.

Really, is there anyone out there using a Mac who’s pining away for some Windows-only app, crying themselves to sleep at night because some vertical market sales force integration module for the dental field isn’t on OS X? Doubtful.

And if Apple does not act soon to license the OS, the hacking community will gain critical mass…

Right. Because everyone wants a completely unsupported OS running on their laptops. That’s certainly going to be a big hit in the home and in the enterprise.

With Apple on Intel and the genie out of the bottle with “hackintoshes” sprouting up, why doesn’t Apple at least offer the Mac OS to business-focused companies…

“Business-focused companies”? As opposed to all those companies focused on what? Badminton?

… especially if it is going to continue to develop niche products like the MacBook Air when there are big holes in its lineup?

Yes, Apple will never have all the various kinds of products that Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, etc. can offer. Want to know why? Because they get great margins on hardware. Who wants to give that up? And the Macalope hates to tell his good friends Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann this when they were just pining anew on Thursday afternoon, but the wait for a 12-inch MacBook is going to be awfully long. Like cosmically long. Like forever.

The good news is you’re going to love the tablet.

This post was updated at 10:11 AM on Friday with comment from Chi.mp’s Myles Weissleder.

SAN FRANCISCO–Wednesday night was a wild one.

As part of this week’s Web 2.0 Expo, the ubiquitous digital-media blog Mashable enlisted a brand-new social-media site called Chi.mp to sponsor its all-night bash at a cavernous nightclub called Mighty. The open bar was flowing, the dance floor was seeing plenty of attention (a rarity at a tech industry party), and young women left and right were posing for photos with snappily-dressed Mashable overlord Pete Cashmore and numerous Chi.mp-branded trucker hats.

Amid the drunken revelry and pulsing electronic music, one prominent tech-industry veteran at the party was asked exactly what Chi.mp is. “I’ll tell you what Chi.mp is. It’s venture money getting set on fire,” the jaded observer replied. Surveying the buoyant crowd, he added, “This feels a little like 1999.”

The atmosphere was radically different during the day at Web 2.0 Expo, as talk of economic recession was unavoidable. TechWeb’s Jennifer Pahlka, one of the expo’s organizers, told attendees in a welcome address on Tuesday that she thanked them all for coming to the conference “in this time of budgets that are being scrutinized, and some bad headlines.” Veteran entrepreneur Marc Andreessen was grilled in a keynote interview on his use of the term “nuclear winter” as a justification for his start-up Ning’s new round of venture funding.

With investment banks going down and food prices going up, the gloomy economic forecasts have cast a dark cloud over cloud computing (and everything else getting talked about at Web 2.0). Yet tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon are posting healthy earnings, and despite talk of an advertising downturn, new digital-ad networks seem to be debuting by the day.

The economic attitude of the Web 2.0 Expo hangs in an awkward limbo: The tech industry relies on innovation, but no one can deny that these economic times demand caution. What’s a geek to do?

Conference czar Tim O’Reilly preached a keep-on-trucking sermon in his keynote address Wednesday, admitting, “We’ve been kind of whipsawed lately.” He also railed upon the statistics detailed in reports like one by Dow Jones VentureSource last week, which are finding that venture dollars for start-up companies are growing scarcer. Urging conference attendees to focus on innovation, he said, “If you’re following the headlines you might as well stay home, because you’ll be very terminally confused,” he said. “You have to think about what really matters.”

It’s O’Reilly’s job to be bullish, though it seemed a little hyperbolic when he said the times are just too crucial to be cautious. “We’re at a turning point akin to literacy or the formation of cities,” O’Reilly said. “This is a huge change in the way the world works.”

“We’re at a turning point akin to literacy or the formation of cities. This is a huge change in the way the world works.”

–Web 2.0 Expo organizer Tim O’Reilly

Changing the world, sure. But it still helps to be realistic. “The recession will touch the Internet,” Slide founder Max Levchin, a Web 2.0 Expo keynote speaker, told CNET News.com in an interview. “There’s no question about it.”

Like Andreessen’s Ning, Slide just went through a massive venture funding round, and Levchin insisted the best thing a company can do is just be smart. Slide, he told News.com, is looking at other revenue streams besides advertising. “Trying to shift away from advertising partially and going direct to consumers is a really good idea, because it cuts out one more party from the equation,” he explained. “During a recession time you don’t have to worry so much about building an enormous scale, you just have to build up a loyal base of fans that pay you a little bit.” He might want to tell that to Twitter, whose execs banter about scaling and growth nonstop but haven’t made significant revenue, because their investors can still keep them in business for the time being.

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the recession. It might take five years,” Levchin said. “It has proven to be clever of us to raise money just before the signs of the recession started. It really is a war chest, both for acquisition and for survival.”

Someone with Levchin’s star power can fill that war chest, no problem. If you didn’t co-found PayPal, you might be out of luck. “The VCs are definitely holding their cards a bit closer to their chests,” a young dot-com entrepreneur observed at the conference, but then added that his own social-media company hadn’t seen trouble pulling in investors.

Because tech bellwethers and indicators for the broader economy just aren’t agreeing, no one is sure how things will play out. But if there’s any precautionary measure that a concerned start-up can put in place, it’s to be prepared and spend your money wisely. Some companies filling the after-hours agendas at Web 2.0 Expo opted to skip the open bars, holding “meet-ups” with cash bars instead of free-for-all affairs like Chi.mp and Mashable.

Chi.mp exec Myles Weissleder said the choice to throw a party was a “strategic decision,” and a better way to spread buzz about his new company than sponsoring a booth at the Web 2.0 Expo show floor. “Nobody knew about Chi.mp last week, and I think everybody’s talking about it this week,” Weissleder said in a phone interview Friday. Chi.mp, he added, is backed by private investors rather than institutional venture capital, with seed funding “in the millions.”

The divide between “strategic decision” and goofy attention-grabber remains: “I walked out of Zivity.com’s offices with a lightsaber and 10 shirts,” conference attendee Dan Tentler told me while socializing after hours on Thursday. “I walked out with 10 pounds of gear.”

True, the racy adult site Zivity depends on subscriptions, not ad revenue. But did they really need to spend that venture cash on lightsabers?