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Earlier Monday, Intel acknowledged that a supporting chipset for the next-generation Core processors contained a flaw in the Serial-ATA (SATA) controller. The bug can cause poor hard drive performance or even make the drive invisible to the system.
Intel said it has stopped shipments of the flawed chipsets and retooled the chipset. It will begin shipping the fixed version late next month, and said that it "expects full volume recovery in April."
The design gaffe could effect Apple's next MacBook Pro refresh if the notebook line is to get new processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, as many speculated last month.
According to Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst with the Linley Group -- the publishers of Microprocessor Report -- the mobile version of the supporting chipset may have been flawed.
In an e-mail reply to questions, Krewell pointed out a pair of Intel documents that note the mobile versions of the chipset use the same 6Gbps and 3Gbps ports as those used in the desktop versions.
Andantech.com, meanwhile, said today that the flaw affects only the 3Gbps ports -- the chipsets' SATA controller also offers faster-speed 6Gbps ports -- making the likelihood of an impact on notebook makers even higher.
While the signs point to a problem for Apple, analysts split today on whether a MacBook Pro refresh would be delayed.
"It could mean a delay of two to three weeks," said Martin Reynolds, a vice president with Gartner, assuming Apple intended to launch new MacBook Pros in March or even April.
Dan Olds, a senior analyst with Portland, Ore.-based Gabriel Consulting Group, disagreed.
"I don't think Intel has shipped any [Sandy Bridge] chipsets for mobile yet," Olds said. "I haven't heard any chatter from the major players [about upcoming notebooks that use the chipsets], like Dell, for example."
The unknown, of course, is when Apple was planning to launch revamped MacBook Pro models that rely on the Sandy Bridge architecture, and thus, the flawed chipsets.
Most close Apple watchers have been expecting an imminent refresh. Although Apple doesn't hew to a set schedule for upgrades, the last time it boosted the MacBook Pro was in April 2010, nearly 300 days ago.
MacRumors, which monitors Apple product timelines, said today that the average time between MacBook Pro refreshes is just 208 days, and currently recommends that buyers delay purchases because a refresh is likely.
"If you're Apple, this is actually good news," said Olds. "You'd rather have it happen now than in April, May, June or July when systems have been shipped."
Reynolds echoed that. "Intel is lucky they caught this now, that the ports failed as soon as they did," he said, noting that the flaw escaped Intel's usual pre-shipping tests, probably because the symptom -- a hard drive issue -- could have been blamed on the drive not the SATA controller.
To Olds, the problem was a big deal no matter how you looked at it.
"This affects everyone involved, Intel and OEMs," he said. "When this happens, you simply don't see your drive anymore. It turns the computer into a brick."
But Olds was confident Intel would quickly get new, fixed chipsets to computer makers. "You have to assume that Intel will be rolling with all due speed on this," Olds said. "Ever since they had that Pentium math error years ago, they've attacked problems pretty aggressively."
The Pentium problem Olds mentioned came to light in 1994, when a Virginia math professor discovered a bug in the processor's calculations.
Read more about Processors in Computerworld's Processors Topic Center.
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While large enterprises have full-time staffers to operate monster machines that digest the contents of reams of paper and place it on company networks, many companies rely on department multifunction printers (MFP) that handle copying and printing tasks for networked users. About the size of a Smart car, these powerhouses can scan pages so that their contents can be saved as electronic data. To take full advantage of this capability, however, you need dedicated software that can simplify and automate the operations. And that's where eCopy ShareScan Suite v5 comes into play.
eCopy ShareScan lets you track all scanning activities by user or by device, either for security or cost-recovery reasons. This is the first version of this powerful scanning software package to be released since Nuance Communications acquired eCopy just over a year ago. Nuance (formerly ScanSoft, formerly Visioneer) has grown to be a dominant power in optical character recognition (OCR) through a long history of mergers and acquisitions. It also picked up the Dragon speech-recognition software when it acquired Lernout & Hauspie. (As it turns out, the algorithms required for speech recognition are also very helpful in OCR processing.)
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Computerworld - Despite e-mail and access to shared databases, the daily tidal waves of paper that businesses have to deal with have not subsided. From purchase orders to contracts, correspondence to catalogs, the average office has stacks of paper full of information to manage and maintain.While large enterprises have full-time staffers to operate monster machines that digest the contents of reams of paper and place it on company networks, many companies rely on department multifunction printers (MFP) that handle copying and printing tasks for networked users. About the size of a Smart car, these powerhouses can scan pages so that their contents can be saved as electronic data. To take full advantage of this capability, however, you need dedicated software that can simplify and automate the operations. And that's where eCopy ShareScan Suite v5 comes into play.
eCopy ShareScan lets you track all scanning activities by user or by device, either for security or cost-recovery reasons. This is the first version of this powerful scanning software package to be released since Nuance Communications acquired eCopy just over a year ago. Nuance (formerly ScanSoft, formerly Visioneer) has grown to be a dominant power in optical character recognition (OCR) through a long history of mergers and acquisitions. It also picked up the Dragon speech-recognition software when it acquired Lernout & Hauspie. (As it turns out, the algorithms required for speech recognition are also very helpful in OCR processing.)
The addition of eCopy gave the company a departmental solution, and one that works with all major networked MFPs, including those from Canon, Konica Minolta, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox and Ricoh. ShareScan has embedded software available for all of these (except HP), which means that the software can be controlled right from the user panel on the MFP.
I had the opportunity to spend a day putting ShareScan through its paces. Nuance provided help in the form of two company experts. We met at the Canon Business Solutions center in Jamesburg, N.J., where I was given free run of the demonstration systems, including departmental MFPs and a complete network.
ECopy ShareScan v5 comes in three different versions. ECopy ShareScan Elements has a list price of $795, and handles capture and send tasks. ECopy ShareScan Office lists for $1,495, and adds the ability to connect the MFP to basic office applications. ECopy ShareScan Suite lists for $2,995 and has the features required for advanced automation of workflows. Each license is good for one networked MFP device; annual maintenance and support fees are extra.
I tested the Suite version so that I could see all the available features.
(For companies whose employees may have MFPs and desktop scanners that do not support the ShareScan software, Nuance offers the eCopy ScanStation, a kiosk-style device that holds an MFP or scanner, provides network access and supports all the features of ShareScan.)
The key to efficient paperwork management is to handle each sheet as little as possible. ShareScan has remarkable versatility to help make that happen through the use of "connectors," which integrate with business applications, and "extenders," which perform various processing tasks on the scanned data. Both can be created for business customers by Nuance for additional fees, or by third-party developers; there are also SDKs so that customers can create their own.
Some connectors are straightforward; for example, you could use connectors to automatically take a scanned image, place it in a target folder on a networked storage location and notify someone that the document is now available. You could develop this workflow to send a PDF version of the file, or use eCopy's OCR functions (based on the OmniPage engine) to create a Microsoft Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Or you could define a workflow that would create the file and then send it as an attachment via e-mail to someone.
ShareScan v5 has native integration with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, so you can use your familiar e-mail system. And since ShareScan works off the same network authentication as the office programs, you have access to all your address lists, right at the MFP console. It even uses a "type-ahead" interface to make it easier to select recipients.
Connectors are available that interface directly with other major software systems, including Microsoft SharePoint, EMC Documentum and Xerox DocuShare. And if you're looking for, say, automatic Bates numbering of scanned documents, it can do it. It can also recognize and read 15 different types of bar codes, including 2D formats, so that individual documents can be identified automatically and routed accordingly.
The rule states that when only five large blocks of IP addresses remain, one will be handed out to each of the world's five regional Internet registries. With the latest allocation to APNIC, the number of remaining IP address blocks is down to five.
IANA is expected to assign the remaining blocks within a matter of days or less. After that, the regional bodies will have no higher source of addresses to turn to when they have assigned the addresses they hold.
IPv4's address space allows for only about 4.3 billion unique Internet addresses, which client and server computers use to connect with the Internet. The remaining IPv4 addresses have been dwindling over the past few years. The latest version of Internet Protocol, IPv6, has a nearly unlimited number of addresses but is not yet widely used.
As expected, APNIC, the regional Internet registry for Asia, has requested and been assigned two "/8" -- or "slash-8" -- address blocks, each of which contains about 16 million IP addresses. The newly assigned blocks are 39/8 and 106/8, which as recently as last week were unallocated. Now only 102/8, 103/8, 179/8 and 185/8 remain unallocated. Some other /8 blocks are reserved for special purposes such as multicasting.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com
Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2010 International Data Group. All rights reserved.At the low end of the spectrum, Windows Phone 7 (WP7) didn't even gain more share than its predecessor Windows Mobile in the fourth quarter, according to a report from The NPD Group. Windows Mobile phones are still sold by all the four major U.S. Carriers.
The WP7 rankings came out amid online speculation that the mobile OS will get an update next Monday to bring copy-and-paste functionality and other improvements to the phones.
Android became the bestselling smartphone OS with 32.9 % of the global market and 33.3 million phones shipped, Canalys reported. That was ahead of Nokia's Symbian with 30.6% of the market, or 31 million phones shipped, and double Apple's 16% market share (with 16.2 million phones shipped). Research in Motion had 14.4% of the market and shipped 14.6 million phones, and Microsoft had 3.1%, shipping 3.1 million phones.
In total, Canalys said 101.2 million smartphones shipped in the fourth quarter of 2010.
Meanwhile, NPD said that in the U.S., Android took 53% of the sales in the fourth quarter. The Apple iPhone had 19% of sales -- the same as RIM -- Windows Mobile had 4% and WP7, which debuted mid-way in the fourth quarter, had 2%. Palm WebOS phones also had 2%, NPD said.
The Android impact in tablets came at the expense of the iPad, according to U.K.-based Strategy Analytics. It found that 9.7 million tablets shipped in the fourth quarter globally, with the iPad accounting for 75% of those sales and Android grabbing 22%. The Samsung Galaxy Tab, running Android, was a big factor in Android's growth, appearing in the fourth quarter in many countries.
Samsung said it sold 2 million in the quarter.
WP7 hit the market in devices at the "epicenter of competition between iOS and Android at AT&T," said Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD. WP7 is also sold by T-Mobile USA.
Even though Android phones in aggregate outdid the iPhone, the iPhone 4 was the top-seller in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, NPD said. That put it ahead of the Motorola Droid X and the HTC Evo 4G, both of which run Android. The Apple iPhone 3GS came in fourth, followed by Motorola Droid 2, NPD said.
Rubin said WP7 needs to offer exclusive capabilities and "must close the feature gap" with other devices. A Feb. 7 update for Wp7 update seems logical, coming a week before Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is set to speak at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Some sites have estimated that about two million WP7's have shipped, although they might not yet have been sold. But that figure would likely be a high estimate if Windows Mobile devices have outsold WP7, as NPD claims for the U.S., and if three million Windows Mobile and WP7 phones were sold in the fourth quarter, as Canalys claims.
Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at 
@matthamblen or subscribe to 
Matt's RSS feed. His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.
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Google, which purchased SayNow just last week, has hacked together a "speak-to-tweet service" for Egyptians who still have working telephones but who can't connect with Twitter because ISPs in the country were ordered to disconnect from the Internet.
The last remaining major ISP (Internet service provider), Noor Group, abruptly disconnected its service on Monday.
"[A]nyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers ... and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt," Google said in a blog posting. "No Internet connection is required."
The speak-to-tweet service automatically puts the voicemail on a Web page that is then linked in a Twitter message posted to Google's Speak2tweet Twitter account.
By Monday afternoon Pacific Time, the service was posting new Twitter messages every few minutes -- many of them in Arabic -- including commentary and reports from Egypt.
It's one of several alternative techniques that have been set up to keep Egyptians connected as people take to the streets to call for democratic reforms to the unpopular government of President Hosni Mubarak.
Other service providers have set up free international Internet dial-up numbers, and even harnessed ham radio communications systems for Egyptians.
Robert McMillan covers computer security and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Robert on Twitter at @bobmcmillan. Robert's e-mail address is robert_mcmillan@idg.com
Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2010 International Data Group. All rights reserved.Motorola Mobility has updated that freedom theme in a new one-minute ad to air during this year's Super Bowl. Motorola contrasts its upcoming Xoom tablet with the Apple ipad by referencing 1984, the year.
In the 1984 ad, Apple itself was attacking a Big Brother image, explained by CEO Steve Jobs as IBM -- "IBM wants it all," he said at the time. But many viewers saw the ad as a shot at Microsoft, which made software running on IBM PCs. (This video shows Jobs introducing the 1984 ad and the ad itself. )
Today, the iPad dominates the tablet market.
Motorola is clearly challenging that iPad domination in the Xoom ad, but with a bit of humor: It opens with an image of a spinning Earth wearing recognizable white Apple earbuds.
No images of either tablet actually appear in the commercial, but the comparisons between the Android Honeycomb-enabled Xoom and the iPad are there.
The text in the ads notes, "2011 looks a lot like 1984...One authority...One design...One way to work...It's time for more choices."
Against a heavy drumbeat of music, the Xoom is further described in text as offering more speed with a dual-core 1GHz processor and 1080p video playback, while starting at 3G speeds that are upgradable to 4G. Further, the ad says it will have "more flexibility" with Honeycomb (Android 3.0), the Adobe Flash multimedia player, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera.
It concludes: "More Freedom.... It's time to explore.... It's time to live a free life." The ad signs off with Motorola's latest slogan: "Life M-powered" which uses the Motorola M logo and references to Xoom and Super Bowl 45.
With all those contrasts, the ad omits that the Xoom has 10.1-in. screen, slightly bigger than the iPad's 9.7-in. screen.
Xoom is scheduled to appear Feb. 17, according to leaked documents, and could be priced starting at $700. Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha told investors last week that he anticipated a launch in February.
Motorola's Super Bowl 2011 ad for the Xoom tablet harkens back to Apple's own 1984 Super Bowl commercial, each casting themselves as the underdog.Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed. His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.
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