If you happen to have a Sony Vaio laptop, particularly if your graphics are playing up and you’re seeing distorted images and videos, duplicate images or even a blank screen, then you had better pay attention.

Sony has just said that some of their Vaio laptops have faulty Nvidia graphics chips installed in them and that it’s possible for these laptops to overheat and ultimately fail.

As a result of this, Sony is offering free repairs and an extended three year warranty on some of their Vaio models that contain Nvidia graphics chips but no refunds are being offered.

The problem appears to be connected to faulty die used in the chips and packaging material that is not up to scratch, a problem that Nvidia first reported last year.

This is not good news for Sony and certainly not for Nvidia who is feeling the pinch financially as they pay out on warranty charges and product replacement costs.

Several other computer makers have also had to suffer the embarrassment not to mention the hassle of having to deal with faulty Nvidia chips in their computers including the likes of HP, Dell and Apple all of who reported faults in 2008.

Ok so admittedly it’s only a small percentage of Sony Vaio laptops that are affected but that’s of no consolation if it’s yours.

In a statement issued by Sony last week the company says they have been “looking into any possible effect to Vaio notebooks with Nvidia graphic processors. Until recently we had not identified any Vaio models that were affected by this issue.”

The statement continues “after closely monitoring the situation, Sony has now determined that a very small percentage of Vaio computers with the Nvidia graphics chips may experience this issue.”

If you want to check if your laptop is one of those that could be affected then these are the Sony Vaio models that have the Nvidia graphics chips installed:

* VGN-AR1xx
* VGN-AR2xx
* VGN-AR3xx
* VGN-FZ1xx
* VGN-FZ2xx
* VGN-FZ3xx
* VGN-FZ4xx
* VGC-LT1xx
* VGC-LT2xx

.

And if yours has got problems than of course Sony will repair it and extend the warranty on the graphics chip.

Fair enough, but what I want to know is if all the other companies, including Nvidia, reported the fault last year, how come it is only coming to light with Sony now?

Lanyu from Shenzhen, China, has achieved a world’s first with the cheapest netbook across the planet. The eBook LY-EB01 has been price at 666 Yuan (what a devilish bargain at approximately $98 after conversion). Don’t expect an Intel Atom processor inside though, as this ARM-powered netbook comes with a paltry 266MHz AK7802Q216 processor instead, accompanied by a 7″ 800 × 480 TFT LCD display, WinCE 5.0 as the operating system of choice, Wi-Fi connectivity, 128M RAM and a 1800mAH Li-Ion battery. Guess this is good for casual web surfing and email checking only.

Permalink: Cheapest netbook in the world from Ubergizmo | Hot: Wii, PS3 and Natal Motion Sensing

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Cheapest netbook in the world

OCZ’s latest SSD would be the 2.5″ Solid 2 SATA II, where it will utilize MLC-based NAND flash memory to achieve a balance between performance and price. MLC memory might be a bit of a laggard compared to SLC memory, but they ain’t no slouch either, delivering 100MB/sec write (120GB model) and 125MB/sec read speeds and a seek time of less than 0.1ms. Features include a 64MB onboard cache and a 3-year warranty, boasting a mean time between failure rating of 1.5 million hours. You can choose from 60GB and 120GB capacities, where the latter is able to perform better in terms of write speed. RAID support and low power consumption are also other key points of picking up this from OCZ if you happen to be in the hunt for SSDs. More details to come concerning pricing and availability in due time.

Permalink: OCZ Solid 2 SATA II Solid State Drive from Ubergizmo | Hot: Wii, PS3 and Natal Motion Sensing

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OCZ Solid 2 SATA II Solid State Drive

The IBM PC, the machine that helped launch the original revolution in business computing, burst onto the scene 28 years ago today.

Though it was far from the first personal computer available for purchase, IBM’s original 5150 model quickly became the gold standard for business computing, and helped to transform our notions of communication and collaboration forever.

The year was 1981. While Apple and other companies had been selling to hobbyists and select geeks, there was by no means any guarantee that personal computers would be as influential as they are today.

But just a year later, Time had named the computer “Man of the Year,” and 80 percent of Americans predicted that home computers would be “as common as television sets or dishwashers.” The millions of IBM PCs sold and the army of clones it inspired are what jump-started that shift.

The IBM PC was a driving force behind getting people to see computing as a personalized activity at work and at home. By cementing the idea of computing as a personal activity in our culture, the IBM PC set the stage for the Web as we now know it, a phenomenon that would eventually circle back to influence the enterprise enormously.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia

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Happy Birthday Business Computing, You’re 28 Today

Intel Corporation has been taking a bit of heat from the government lately, both domestic and abroad.  In May, the European Union fined Intel $1.45 billion over anti-competitive practices.  And two months ago Intel received a letter last week that PCs in Cuba contain Celeron processors even though there is an embargo.

Dealing with the European Union
Interestingly ombudsman P. Nikiforos Diamandouros criticized the EU for not recording the case file in the decision against the chipmaker.  And a Dell executive cited AMD’s performance being poor as the reason why the PC manufacturing company chose Intel as their supplier.  This makes the verdict of the decision to penalize Intel seem a bit off.  More details to follow as discussions arise on this topic.

Dealing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
The SEC sent Intel a confidential letter on June 4th stating the following:
“We are aware of a May 2008 news report that PCs in Cuba contain your Celeron processors. Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria are identified by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism, and are subject to U.S. economic sanctions and export controls.”

In addition, the SEC wrote “We note that your Form 10-K does not include disclosure regarding contacts with Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. Please describe to us the nature and extent of any past, current, and anticipated contacts with the referenced countries, whether through distributors, resellers, licensees, or other direct or indirect arrangements.”

The Cubans have PCs that have Intel Celeron processors with 80GB hard drives and 512MB of RAM.  They also have the Windows XP operating system.  Intel responded with the following letter:

“Intel has no business contacts with the Subject Countries, either directly or indirectly through tacit agreement with its customers. Intel does not provide products or technology to the Subject Countries….”

To be honest, perhaps it is a good thing that all the Celerons are ending up in Cuba.  They should even take computers marked with “dual-core” processors.  And let’s give the Americans more Core 2 Duos!

Photos:

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SEC Tells Intel That The Cubans Have Celeron Processors

Maybe it’s better to host your own. That’s the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users who have published their content online only to see the tools they use become broken or less desirable.

The prospect of a distributed, interoperable, self-hosted network of publishing, reading and discussion tools is nothing new – but the idea is gaining a lot more support as more people react to recent news like FriendFeed’s sale to Facebook, Tr.im’s up and down and Twitter’s denial of service attacks. The tide may not be turning, but there’s sure to be some new waves of innovation that come out of this period of frustration.

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Isn’t This What Blogging Does For Us Already?

One of the analogies people are drawing is that we need a WordPress.org-type version of Twitter to put on our own servers as an alternative to the Twitter-hosted version that exists now like WordPress hosts blogs on WordPress.com.

Why do we need self-hosted lifestreaming, microblogging or social networks though when we’ve already got the ability to host our own blogs, own our own data there and set our own rules? Simply because these technologies fill different needs. Blogs are good for longer-form, author-centric communication. Quick, very social conversations around objects like links or media items can best be had in other settings. Thus the interest many people have in both writing a blog and sharing and discussing items on sites like Facebook (social networks), Twitter (microblogging) or FriendFeed (activity streams).

Twitter’s Down Time

Twitter went down again today, possibly for the second time in two weeks because of a Distributed Denial of Service attack. A swarm of zombified computers, distributed all around the world, is hitting Twitter’s centralized infrastructure over and over again until it can’t stay up.

If we all had a little piece of our microblogging network on our own servers and they spoke to each other, that couldn’t happen.

We’d also own our own data, our archives, our interface design and more. It would be like publishing little messages… like grown ups.

The two systems could co-exist, a hosted service has its advantages and many people wouldn’t use anything else. Realistically, no one is going to build something too much like Twitter if they could build a distributed version of something like FriendFeed or Facebook.

Facebook Eats FriendFeed

Social activity stream discussion network FriendFeed announced that it was selling itself to Facebook yesterday and many of its users were very upset. The acquisition is likely to change Facebook in interesting ways (FriendFeed’s creators were the inventors of GMail and Google Maps) but FriendFeed itself was important to its users.

The feeling of betrayal that comes from a transaction like this makes it hard to trust a hosted social networking company again.

Fortunately, there’s a long and growing list of ways to put all of your activity around the web in one place on your own website. When will those tools begin to include subscription to other peoples’ activity feeds and posting comments from your social lifestream viewing page that will appear back out on everyone else’s?

That’s a big part of the vision articulated by Anil Dash in his recent essay about what he calls The Push Button Web. It’s related as well to RSS pioneer Dave Winer’s recent promotion of a part of RSS called RSS Cloud. Developers are actively building on RSS Cloud and a similar protocol with the humorous name PubSubHubbub.

That’s also part of the vision of the Distributed Social Networking Project (DiSo). We haven’t heard much lately from this project, probably because its founders are busy building the technical standards that will allow the information to flow from one social network to another.

Tr.im Your Expectations

This weekend link shortening service Tr.im announced that it was shutting its doors. It was too expensive and hopeless to run the service without the funding, hype and official blessing from Twitter that competitor Bit.ly had won.

Big deal, right? It turns out that people freaked out. Tr.im’s biggest users were developers who were hip to the opportunities to do interesting things with the service. They had built on it and they felt a lot of frustration when they heard the news.

A dead URL shortener means dead links, broken content, lost data.

There are a number of different solutions being explored in response to this part of the problem. Developer Brian Hendrickson has already begun working on a service called rp.ly, a “community-owned URL shortener” based on cloning the Tr.im API.

There will, no doubt, be any number of other efforts that rise from the ashes of the trust that’s been burnt over the last week or more.

Are all of these circumstances and conversations going to push the social web over the edge, toward a more distributed and less centralized model? Probably not in a big way, immediately, but we’re pretty sure that some interesting innovation is going to come out of this. Dissatisfied engineers, working on a problem that a lot of people are interested in, can produce some fun and important work.

Some will hold out for Google Wave, the forthcoming open-source hyper communication head shift. We’re hearing that Wave may be too complicated, though, and we suspect that the most important innovations will come from coders building the kind of software that many, many people can hack on and help evolve.

In the future many of us may be microblogging, lifestreaming and social networking over technology that we control and can customize ourselves, instead of inside the owned networks of major companies like Facebook or Google. Those companies are seeking to branch out as well, trying to colonize the web (in the words of Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang) with tools like Facebook Connect.

But many of us may decide not to trust them anymore, and to use the tools that are becoming available to build and host our own systems of communication. People who control their own systems of communication can innovate on them outside the boundaries of the financial interests of big communication companies and we can all benefit from those innovations.

This summer is an important period in answering those questions.

Discuss

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Is a Perfect Storm Forming For Distributed Social Networking?

For those who’ve bemoaned the lack of cross-platform mobile support for Microsoft Office, a ray of hope is on the horizon. Microsoft is expected to announce tomorrow a partnership with Nokia to include Office support on its mobile devices.

Currently the only devices that have native versions of Microsoft Office are those running Windows Mobile. This deal could see that change for the first time. No confirmation of details has been provided, but it’s likely that this mobile version will be an accompaniment to Office 2010, along with the Web-based suite.

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Many enterprise users are still devoted to Microsoft in the office suite space, but SaaS competitors like Zoho and Google have begun to emerge as a serious threat. By adding flexibility and ease of access — including through cross-platform mobile support — these services have enticed users who can’t afford to be tied to the desktop.

But Office 2010 is showing more and more promise. The release is currently in a limited beta, but features such as the free Web-based version just might reassert Microsoft’s dominance.

Microsoft representatives are being tight-lipped until tomorrow’s press conference, but it’s clear from the invitation that a major alliance between the two companies is what’s in the works. Look for an update tomorrow morning after we hear more on the details.

Discuss

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Microsoft & Nokia to Announce Mobile Version of Office

Creative’s patent for a drag and drop user interface for touchscreen devices which was filed earlier in January last year under the 3DLabs brand will see any device utilizing it to have an “action” segment of the display, where said object (musitc title, video, album, etc) can be dragged straight onto the action tab with a finger. The copy/paste method has also seemed to be implemented in a similar manner, while another cool feature would be the tabbed web browsing that many of us take for granted on our computers these days. Tabbed browsing is processor intensive, but thankfully the ZMS-05 processor within ought to have more than enough muscle underneath to handle everything with aplomb.

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Creative patents drag and drop touchscreen devices

The DDoS attack that took down Twitter and slowed Facebook was apparently targeted at a single person.

According to Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly the target of the attacks was an anti-Russian blogger, operating under the username Cyxymu, on the anniversary of Georgian troops invading South Ossettia.

“It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard,” Kelly told CNet.

“We’re actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can.”

Spam or revenge?

Security expert and TechRadar columnist Graham Cluley of Sophos thinks that some suggestions that spam was the actual cause of the Twitter crash was wide of the mark, but does have an alternative theory.

“Some media reports have suggested that the surge in internet traffic that crippled Twitter wasn’t the result of a distributed denial-of-service attack, but caused by spam recipients clicking on the links to Cyxymu’s webpages,” said Cluley on his blog.

“I don’t think that’s likely. Most people wouldn’t have bothered clicking on the link.

“However, I think it is possible that the spam campaign was either run alongside the denial-of-service from compromised computers around the world, or that someone who wasn’t responsible for the Joe Job decided to wreak revenge on whoever they believed to have spammed them (and they might have imagined it was Cyxymu) by launching a DDoS from their botnet.”

Whatever the outcome, Twitter and Facebook will be spending the day and possibly the weekend getting to the bottom of exactly what happened.

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Twitter and Facebook DDoS attack ‘targeted one person’

From iPhones to PCs, Skype has clearly become the dominant VoIP application on a range of platforms since its arrival in 2003 but we’d have been hard pushed to guess the area where it appears to be coming up fast on the rails.

According to recent market research from Japan – and let’s not forget what a useful tech weather vane the Far East can be – the second most popular Skype platform is the PSP.

iPhone nowhere

Naturally, computers account for most Skype usage (97 per cent), but the Sony device’s hefty 6.6 per cent share is a real surprise.

Barely a year on from Skype hitting the littlest PlayStation, it has already beaten normal mobile phones and smartphones like the iPhone (4.2 per cent, combined) by some margin.

If the broadening of the Skype base continues to push it to platforms beyond just the desktop, then parent company eBay’s plans to IPO Skype as a separate firm next year could see quite the rush for shares.

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Skype on PSP puts iPhone in the shade