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As the Qplayer plays this Sigur Ros video from YouTube, I can conduct a search for a friend's band, and add songs from their MySpace to my playlist. The only drawback: search results appear in a separate window.

A quick recap: the Qbox Web site lets you conduct searches for artists across MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube simultaneously. When results appear, you click a small play button on the Web page and the Qplayer launches and begins playing the song or video. You can conduct other searches and add them to your currently playing list, mixing audio and video in whatever order you like. The service is interesting because–like many younger music listeners–it makes no distinction between multiplatinum artists and your best friend’s garage band. As long as they’re on MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube, they’re easily available from Qbox.

Qbox has the concept right, but the overall experience is a little more awkward than it could be–you can conduct searches from the player, but the results appear in a separate Web browser window. Then, when you select an option like “play” or “add to player” from the Web page in the browser, it adds the song back to the Qplayer playlist. I’m not sure why this back-and-forth has to exist, given that Qplayer is basically a modified Web browser–why not just display the search results window in a separate tab within the player? It also has an annoying habit of asking you if you’re sure you want to close the player every time you try to shut it down–unnecessary dialog boxes are a pet peeve of mine. But I trust this is just a first iteration, and I’ll be keeping track as they improve the service and the software.

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Screenshot)

A follow-up to my previous post on Qbox: they fixed whatever was preventing the player from playing songs embedded in MySpace pages, and I can now happily recommend it anybody who frequently listens to music on MySpace, Bebo, or YouTube.

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Jabber)

Indeed, the real news centers around Cisco’s growing battle with Microsoft over collaboration, as Larry Dignan points out over at ZDNet. Open source? That’s just necessary plumbing, apparently. Indeed, even Jabber hardly mentions open source throughout its Web site, preferring instead to focus on “open standards.”

This is appropriate, since Jabber has never been about 100 percent open-source solutions. The company uses open Jabber technologies, but its products are not necessarily open-source.

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In a sign that open source has truly gone mainstream, Cisco Systems forgot to mention that Jabber is an open-source messaging company when it announced the acquisition of Jabber on Friday.

The terms of the deal were undisclosed, but I suspect that this was a very small acquisition for Cisco. Jabber makes great technology, but I’ve never heard of it making a great business from it. The only customer it appears to have announced in 2008 is the U.S. Marines.

Enough proof that server virtualization is starting to change everything (or at least an awful lot) about the data center?

More memory in servers is all the rage. That’s because there’s a fairly strong correlation between how much work a processor is doing and how much memory it needs to store the associated data and instructions. Memory requirements have been going up forever, of course, but server virtualization has accelerated the process. 10Gb Ethernet may not yet be needed for many single workloads–especially in the volume server world. But as a pipe for an aggregated group of virtual machines? It’s not mainstream yet, but it’s clearly an early use case for high-bandwidth networking on x86. Finally, observe that even performance claims are couched in virtualization terms. Sure, this is partly about using virtualization to lend a little dazzle to what might otherwise be taken as a just-another-server announcement. But the fact remains that system performance running a mix of workloads is increasingly a more important metric than how fast a system runs a single database application.

I’ll just note a few things here:

Virtualization doesn’t actually make the processor faster. But it does tend to make the processor do more work and thereby makes the other system components do more work as well. In practice this means that virtualized servers need correspondingly more memory and more network connections. And that’s exactly the sort of thing that we’re seeing.

We’re seeing this happening with server virtualization. IT shops have started to rethink the processes that they use to allocate new computing resources to users. Some at the forefront have even made virtual servers, rather than physical ones, their default unit of computing.

We’re also seeing changes in the way that servers are designed and built. Fundamentally, the issue is this. Server virtualization’s first big win was in providing a path to consolidate x86 servers that were otherwise very lightly utilized–5 percent or below in many cases. Virtualization can up that figure closer to 50 percent.

To pick just one recent announcement, consider this September 10 press release from Dell:

The PowerEdge M905 delivers the ultimate four-socket blade-based virtualization performance and is the first blade server to support 11 tiles and 66 Virtual Machines (VM) in VMmark testing. The PowerEdge M805 delivers the same number of DIMM slots in a two-socket blade that requires a four-socket blade from either HP or IBM. With a choice of hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, VMware, and now Microsoft Hyper-V, PowerEdge servers can deliver the optimal platform for virtualized environments. The Dell PowerEdge M805 and M905 servers are now available worldwide with a starting price of $1,699 and $4,999 USD respectively…In addition to the new servers, Dell announced full, high-speed 10Gb Ethernet and 8Gb Fibre Channel switches and mezzanine cards designed to provide customers increased bandwidth and performance.

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So how does this change server design? Servers are designed and configured to be “balanced.” This means that processing speed, memory performance and capacity, and I/O ideally don’t limit each other. (In practice, fundamental technology limits dictate certain inequalities, but the system designer’s job is to work around these as much as possible.) Consider if you put the latest quad-core screamer in a PC configured with only 256MB of memory and a slow serial port coming out the back. It wouldn’t run most applications well–however speedy the processor.

We’re also seeing changes in the way that servers are designed and built. In the x86 processor world, Intel VT and AMD-V attacked some of the most fundamental difficulties of virtualizing x86 hardware. Both companies are continuing to introduce hardware virtualization enablers to address things like I/O performance, virtualization’s handling of memory, and compatibility of virtual machines across multiple generations of hardware.

One of the sure signs that a new technology is having some real impact on the industry, as a whole, is when it starts changing other technologies, products, and processes that touch it. In part, this is a simple reflection that a vendor or a small group of vendors aren’t the only ones who care about their new shiny-ness. Press releases, consortia, and partnerships are all well and good. But the real proof of acceptance is when other companies and customers start spending real money and changing their own plans and products.

“Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites,” a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.

After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That’s the company’s latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.

Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best “custom Reddit” from scratch (i.e., fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1,500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!

Reddit Bacon.

Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast’s Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit’s open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.

The site’s humor-inclined team referred to the site update as “somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it.” More likely, it’ll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn’t otherwise have it; Reddit’s team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.

The move follows the largest one-day point decline ever for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a drop of 777.68 points or almost 7 percent. Microsoft shares, which had held to a less-than-5-percent drop for much of the day Monday, closed at $25.01, down $2.39 or more than 8.7 percent.

Congressional leaders of both parties proceeded to blame one another for the bill’s failure on Monday, with minority leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) blaming a partisan speech from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while Pelosi (D-Calif.) insisted that Democrats held up their end of the deal.

News.com Poll Bailout bombshell
Was the House right to vote down the $700 billion bailout plan?

“Microsoft strongly urges members of the U.S. House of Representatives to reconsider and to support legislation that will re-instill confidence and stability in the financial markets,” general counsel Brad Smith said in a statement. “This legislation is vitally important to the health and preservation of jobs in all sectors of the economy of Washington State and the nation, and we urge Congress to act swiftly.”

The House voted down the $700 billion bailout plan by a vote of 228 to 205, with 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats casting “no” votes.

Yes
No

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Following the massive Wall Street sell-off, Microsoft on Monday called on Congress to revisit its bailout decision, saying government action is “vitally important.”

Parent company Dell vowed on Tuesday to pour more resources into the game PC unit and invest in “product development, design, and engineering.”

New DDR3 memory is also becoming more of a factor. DDR3 memory is offered in two Alienware platforms. “It is the highest-performing memory now on the market. But I’m not so sure it’s quite there yet. The cost is very high,” he said. “Six months from now it will start making a lot more sense (economically) than it does right now.” Because of this, DDR2 memory is still widely used.

DDR3 memory modules use less power and double the data prefetch buffer
to 8 bits from 4 bits per cycle. DDR3 also operates at higher clock rates (1600 MHz), among other improvements.

“I think that would make sense now,” Diana said emphatically.

Alienware Area-51 m9750 notebook

The most obvious limitation of 32-bit operating systems and applications is a cap–4GB–on how much memory an operating system can use. And some applications can’t even use the entire 4GB. “Who cares about DDR3 memory? What about giving me 4GB?” Diana asked.

“So many people are caught up in this hardware race. Dual-core, quad-core this and that,” said Diana, who is Alienware’s product marketing manager for desktops. “If these companies–Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, ATI, and AMD–if they’d just sit down and realize the performance benefit of optimizing their drivers and software for 64-bit.”

Much of the software in the PC world is still 32-bit, including most copies of Windows XP and Vista. In fact, Diana said Alienware doesn’t offer 64-bit operating systems because “we don’t feel comfortable shipping a system to a customer with the 64-bit driver support that’s out there in the industry.”

Fast silicon is hitting a wall in game PCs, according to Alienware, which is looking for ways to boost game PC performance.

He also talked about other factors–beyond faster processors and graphics chips–that affect system performance, particularly for consumers who have limited budgets. “If I was looking to invest in one component over another,” Diana said, “I would probably invest in a really good motherboard,” and after that, a dual-core processor and a midrange graphics card such as Nvidia’s 8800GT or ATI’s X2 card.

Alienware’s Marc Diana believes optimizing systems for the 64-bit world would allow game PCs to make big strides in performance. In effect, today’s 32-bit environments are putting a crimp on PC-based gaming.

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Alienware)

“They’re building (software) for something that is inherently very old technology,” he said. “We (need) drivers that are very healthy in the 64-bit space. I’m not saying that 64-bit drivers don’t exist. I’m just saying there’s not enough software development and support on that end to warrant companies like us to move to 64-bit operating systems.”

“We are reorganizing the protest, sending text messages with minute-by-minute updates on where the torches are,” said a member of protest organizer SF Team Tibet. “People are using their cell phones, BlackBerrys, and PDAs. We are also updating media though our phones, sending pictures.”

Chasing the torch through S.F.:
Click above image to watch video.

(Credit:
Hanna Sistek/CNET News.com)

A screenshot of a Twitter sent by SF Team Tibet.

A Tibetan demonstrator passes a supporter of the China Olympics at the planned starting point of the torch relay in San Francisco Wednesday.

As crowds of spectators and protesters awaited the torch along the city’s Embarcadero and at the foot of the Market Street thoroughfare, the relay took off by bus in the opposite direction to Van Ness Avenue and then into the Marina District in the north part of the city, according to news reports. That set off a storm of Twitters–some of which were pasted onto this page at SFist–and a constant stream of text messages as people tried to figure out what was happening and which direction to head.

The SF Team Tibet member added: “It would be really, really hard if we didn’t have this. Can you imagine if the protesters in Lhasa had this technology? Witnesses could just send things in.”

The relay had been highly anticipated, largely because of security concerns related to protesters who–fueled by Web campaigns–came out in droves to oppose the Chinese government’s plans to carry the torch through Tibet, or more generally, the government’s overall human rights record.

CNET News.com’s Hanna Sistek contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO–In a switcheroo that threw off hundreds of protesters and put Twitter and text-message alert systems to the test, city officials here decided to take the Olympic torch relay on a far different route Wednesday than had been previously announced.

Of course, such forms of instant communication are only so reliable–I’m on an sms feed from SF Team Tibet and am still trying to sort out what’s accurate and what’s just rumor. It seems the planned closing ceremony was canceled and the torch is now enroute to the airport. (Followers are encouraged.)

But a new feature, being introduced today, takes Oosah to a whole different place: It lets you drag images between your PC and online accounts, such as Flickr and Facebook, or even directly between your online accounts, avoiding your PC and your Oosah storage allotment. That’s not just new and cool, it’s very useful. I plan to use this feature to drag images between my private Picasa Web and public Flickr profiles when needed, and ignore the whole cutesy slide show feature.

See also: Joggle.

Oosah’s 2GB accounts are free. There are no premium plans yet with more storage. But files you manage on other services do not count toward your total, so it doesn’t really matter. Try this one while you can, since the company’s revenue plan–”Right now, we’re not focused on making money”–doesn’t bode well for its future, no matter how cool it is.

Oosah is not a PC-to-Web synchronization tool. It can’t monitor your local picture folders and automatically upload new images to the Web. (See SugarSync; BlueString)

Oosah lets you transfer media and entire folders between your online accounts.

The first services supported by this feature will be Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook. MySpace is coming soon, Michael Duggan, Oosah’s chief operating officer, told me. The service will also let you drag videos to YouTube. I strongly doubt you’ll be able to drag videos off YouTube to other services.

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Oosah)

Oosah is a solid Flash-based media manager that lets you create little slide shows and share pictures with your friends. It competes with some pretty good applications, such as Flektor, Slide, and Splashcast, though, and isn’t likely to rocket to superstardom as just another media destination site.

You can also import images from a Web page just by providing the URL. The service then gathers up the images for you.

If you tag images in any of the services, the tags go with the media when they’re dragged to other services. User comments, however, don’t make the transition.

Perhaps most surprising among the data was the assumption of audio or visual feedback among all three groups. McDiarmid said that the use of contact-less credit cards is impersonal; often there is no confirmation of a transaction, such as you had when a clerk handed your card back at the end of the purchase. “Customers want feedback,” he said.

In a paper released at the conference, McDiarmid and King expressed concern over how the government and commercial interests are assisting the typical end user with the new technology.

In a talk Monday at USENIX Usability, Psyschology and Security Conference (UPSEC) 2008 in San Francisco, Andrew McDiarmid of the University of California, Berkeley, shed light on how ordinary people perceive RFID-enabled cards in their day to day life. He said while novices and intermediates were familiar with times when RFID-enabled smart cards such as work access cards or transit cards didn’t work, they couldn’t explain it. On the other hand, advanced users knew enough to keep their RFID-enhanced credit cards sheathed in a mini “Faraday cage” so the cards could not be read by others.

Speaking before a room of about 45 fellow researchers, McDiarmid reported on exploratory research conducted in 2007 with Jennifer King, also at U.C. Berkeley. Based on feedback from this initial sample group, the two hope to open the survey to a much larger audience of novice, intermediate, and advanced users during 2008. They will also narrow the focus to two specific RFID-enhanced items: e-passports and contact-less credit cards.

When asked how RFID worked, a group of novices responded to a recent academic survey with “witchcraft” and “magic.”

McDiarmid said on Monday that although the State Department provides a brochure describing the features of the ePassport, and companies like Visa offer videos describing the features of its PayWave contact-less credit cards, the general public still doesn’t understand the basic concepts behind RFID, and therefore do not understand the inherent risks.

Another misconception revealed by the survey is that cards can only be read by specific readers. That is not true, said McDiarmid. Thus, he wasn’t too surprised that only two individuals in his survey group knew to sheath their contact-less credit cards.

“We are disappointed that the Administration has been resistant to this effort and has opposed additional enforcement authority, such as civil enforcement in copyright cases where the violation rises to the level of criminal activity,” the letter says.

“Regarding the potential breadth of ACTA, we strongly urge you not to permit the agreement to address issues of liability for service providers or technological protection measures,” it said. “The contours of the law and liability exposure in these areas continue to be debated in the courts.”

Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) sent a letter on Thursday to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab saying that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement currently under negotiation “could limit Congress’s ability to make appropriate refinements to intellectual property law in the future.”

The speed of the negotiations and their lack of transparency compound the risk that the treaty will unnecessarily constrain Congress, the letter says.

Leahy and Specter authored the recently passed Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act. Before the legislation was approved by Congress, it was stripped of a controversial provision opposed by the Bush administration that would have given the Justice Department authority to pursue civil copyright infringement cases.

As chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the two senators also support funding to assist foreign countries in combating U.S. intellectual property infringement.

However, many at the forum still expressed their misgivings over the agreement. A representative from Google said the treaty should not include any provisions regarding Internet policy, since U.S. Internet policy is still in its nascent stages. The senators’ letter mirrored those sentiments.

The USTR tried to allay concerns over the treaty at a public forum last month that gave some indication of what would be included in the agreement. Representatives of the USTR emphasized that the treaty would focus on the enforcement of policies already in place, rather than creating new, substantive policy agreements with other countries.

Two senators known for their support of stringent intellectual property enforcement expressed concern on Thursday that an anti-counterfeiting treaty currently being drafted may be too far-reaching.

Even though they applaud the USTR’s efforts to bolster intellectual property protection, the senators said, they were concerned “about the breadth of the issues” the trade agreement could cover “and the specificity with which it could be written.”