After anonymously bashing PayPal in Australia, it’s not a huge surprise that Google was caught intentionally blocking AppEngine users from using PayPal too. Could it have been a innocent mistake? Sure, but the circumstance and timing are extremely suspicious.
First, Google was outed after sending an anonymous letter to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission explaining why PayPal isn’t playing fair. Now, developers are complaining that they can’t get PayPal to work with their applications hosted on Google’s App Engine. Even after a clever work-around was posted, that stopped working too. It certainly seems like someone was making sure PayPal wasn’t going to work on App Engine.
A Google employee in the discussion group commented on the situation calling it a “bug” that stems from PayPal being accidentally listed as a phishing site. This is also strange since Google’s own anti-phishing tool gives PayPal the thumbs up. The “bug” is now apparently fixed, and developers should be able to use PayPal once again.
If I was Google, and wanted to play fair, I would simply put in my terms of service something that says the following:
Payment Services not permitted on Google App Engine: PayPal, AlertPay.com, anypay.com…
Does that look familiar? Well, it should. Check out eBay’s official policy on accepted payment methods. They explicitly state that sellers cannot choose to accept payment using Google Checkout — likely the root of the escalating tension between these two companies.
What do you think? Was Google intentionally blocking PayPal from their App Engine? Should they put a clause in their terms of service to prohibit PayPal from being used?
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Google intentionally blocking PayPal from App Engine?
Intel Waiting for a Hit Product to Get MID Market Rolling
Intel is counting on the emergence of a hit product to kick-start demand for mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and spur sales of its Centrino Atom chip platform.
"By the end of this year, you will have seen a whole bunch of new MIDs coming out and we'll see which ones are hits," said Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Sales and Marketing Group. "You only need one hit."
Centrino Atom is based on the Silverthorne version of the Atom processor and includes Intel's System Controller Hub, a single-chip chipset that functions as the device's central nervous system. The chips were designed to be used in handheld computers that can be used to access the Internet and play multimedia files.
So far, very few devices based on Centrino Atom have been announced and given a release date; the few devices that have been announced are priced far above the US$500 target price that Intel set for these devices. The rarity of these devices means Centrino Atom shipments are also low.
The sluggish pace of the MID market stands in sharp contrast to low-cost laptops and desktops based on the Diamondville version of Atom, which uses a traditional two-chip chipset. At the Computex exhibition in Taipei last week, hardware makers were falling over themselves to showcase their latest laptops and desktops based on Atom -- and complaining they can't get enough of the chips from Intel.
There wasn't the same level of activity in the MID segment, although several prototype devices were on display. Despite that slower pace, Maloney said the MID category will get traction in the market eventually.
"As yet, we don't have any hit devices.The product's only just come out and there are a bunch of people announcing products, but the smaller a device gets the more it becomes a fashion item," Maloney said, alluding to the challenge hardware makers face when trying to gauge consumer tastes.
"It's very difficult for a CPU company to pick winners there. It's not really so much in our gene pool," he said.
Laptops and desktops based on Atom -- which Intel calls netbooks and nettops, respectively -- are a different matter. Hardware makers and Intel can draw on years of experience with these products, including the first version of Asustek Computers' Eee PC, to create devices that appeal to users.
"The netbook is more predictable, it's really like a notebook. With a MID, there's much more experimental design in it," Maloney said.
HP Launches Broad Array of Redesigned Notebooks, Displays
In one of its largest product releases, HP unveiled a bevy of PCs and displays, zeroing in on key trends such as touch-screen technology and compact laptops for business and consumer users.
HP made the announcements during its "Connecting Your World" conference in Berlin on Tuesday.
HP brought out 16 laptops, including fresh models for its Compaq "b" and "s" series for business users as well as the Compaq Presario and Pavilion line. The company also introduced a new series, EliteBook.
EliteBook models have a brushed anodized aluminum casing with a magnesium alloy chassis, which HP says complies with military-standard durability. The hard drive is shock-resistant, and the keyboard is spill-resistant. One version of the EliteBook, the 6930p, has up to 15 hours of battery life with an optional ultracapacity battery, HP said.
Some of HP's new laptops have the latest chips from Advanced Micro Devices, such as that company's Turion 64x2 ultra dual-core mobile processor. Other models have Intel's Centrino 2 and Centrino 2 with vPro, HP said.
HP said it has put some features previously only in business-class notebooks into consumer models. One is HP's ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection, which can stop a hard drive from spinning if the computer senses the laptop is falling. That feature has been incorporated in the consumer-focused Pavilion line.
HP also rolled out the Voodoo Omen desktop and the Voodoo Envy 133 laptop, which are aimed at gamers and other demanding consumers.
The Voodoo Omen can support up to four graphics processors. Omen also has copper cooling pipes, and since it is liquid cooled, HP said it runs quietly even when pushed hard. Omen starts at $7,000 and will only initially be available to those who bought a Voodoo PC before, HP said, although it will be more broadly available in around three months.
The Voodoo Envy laptop, which costs $2,099, has a carbon-fiber casing, a backlight keyboard and a "multigesture" touchpad, supporting pinch-like movements.
On the desktop, HP has launched a line that features touch-screen interfaces. Users can tap or drag a finger across the screen of the TouchSmart series of PCs to access basic features such as playing music or manipulating audio or video files.
TouchSmart PCs have a 22-inch diagonal wide-screen display, built-in DVD burner, wireless keyboard and sport an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
HP said its new DreamColor display -- an LCD (liquid-crystal display) that supports 1 billion colors -- costs just a quarter of competing displays. DreamColor will sell for US$3,499.
The company said DreamColor will accurately display colors for people where color matching has been a tricky task, such as the animation, game development and graphics arts industries. DreamColor, HP claims, cuts down on the need for multiple proofs, redesigns and color checks.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Microsoft apologize regarding opensource violation inside CodePlex project
After protest from various constituencies in the last few days, Microsoft has pulled from its site CodePlex Sandcastle project for non-compliance with the terms and conditions necessary to qualify as a good-fide open source.Sandcastle is documentation compiler for managed class libraries, which is labeled available within Microsoft permission license, one of the two Initiative approved open source licenses under which Microsoft provides access to its source code.Sam Ramji, head of Microsoft's open source and Linux team published one vazhvalyavaneto on behalf of Microsoft for OSI of Microsoft Port 25 blog on 6 June. He said on his instructions, Sandcastle was terminated, effective immediately, from Microsoft's CodePlex code-repository site. If and when you SandCastle team agreed to publish the source code, the project may be reposted in the future, said Ramji.Below is the text grabbed from Ramji’s blog:
“A number of people have alerted me in the last 24 hours that a MicrosoftIn the first hearing rumblings over Sandcastle licensing earlier this week, I was suspected Microsoft was willing to risk to the anger of OSI for documentation compiler. It's good to see Ramji & Co. do the right thing here.
project called Sandcastle, located on Codeplex, used the Ms-PL and called itself
‘open source’ yet never posted the source code.“This is unacceptable and
represents a violation of Microsoft’s Open Source policy. I take it extremely
seriously….“I apologize to the OSI on behalf of Microsoft for this mistake.”
Amazon Site Stumbles Again Monday
Online shoppers struggled to enter Amazon.com's main e-commerce site on Monday, after it had experienced similar problems on Friday.
Between 10:03 a.m. and 10:23 a.m. U.S. Pacific Time, only about 30 percent of visitors managed to enter Amazon.com, according to mobile and Internet management firm Keynote Systems, which tracks Web site performance.
After stabilizing, Amazon.com again wobbled, and its availability dropped to about 68 percent between 10:56 a.m. and 11:09 a.m., said Shawn White, Keynote's director of external operations.
After that, the site went back to normal and remains that way at press time.
However, the technical gremlins also hit the company's U.K. storefront on Monday, and the problems there are ongoing.
The U.K. site first experienced problems at 10:06 a.m. PT, and its availability dropped as low as 38 percent -- meaning that about six of 10 people couldn't enter -- but by 12:11 p.m. the availability had climbed back to about 96 percent, White said.
Asked for comment, Amazon provided this statement via e-mail: "Some customers reported intermittent problems accessing Amazon retail Web sites on Monday morning. However, we are working to resolve the issues, and Amazon's web services are not affected."
Even people who managed to enter and browse the sites faced slow performance: While Amazon.com pages typically load in six seconds or less, that average climbed to about 15 seconds during the affected periods, White said.
Gomez, another Web site monitoring firm, puts Amazon's normal average response times between 3 seconds and 8.5 seconds, but that average rose to 14 seconds on Friday and stood in a range of between 2.5 seconds and 14 seconds on Monday.
On Friday, when the availability problems lasted about 3 hours, as well as on Monday, most shoppers having access problems were getting a cryptic error message saying "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable," which means nothing to nontechnical people.
This indicates to White that whatever caused the problem proved hard to isolate, making it impossible for the company to configure its system to trigger a more intelligible alert acknowledging the problem in plain English.
White's guess is that a misconfiguration somewhere in Amazon's complex e-commerce system discombobulated unrelated pieces in its vast network of databases, data centers and application and Web servers.
If this is indeed the cause of the problems, the lesson for Amazon and anyone else is to perform rigorous testing before making any alterations, especially when the change will have an effect on many moving parts in the system, White said.
"The more complex a system is, the more challenging it is to maintain, and a configuration problem here can cause problems somewhere else," he said.
White confirmed Amazon's statement that the company's Amazon Web Services hosted technology services weren't affected by the problems on Friday and Monday.
Thirteen new Gmail features
Introducing Gmail Labs — a giant list of mostly useless Gmail extensions. Even though I’m underwhelmed by the current offering, it’s encouraging to see that Google may make Gmail more of a platform than a simple one size fits all webmail application.
It’s too bad they never added a task list feature — I wonder if they are even working on it?
The current list of items in “Labs” includes the following:
*Quick Links - A simple box of links that you can customize.
*Superstars - Additional star icons that you can use.
*Pictures in chat - You can see your friends’ profile pictures when you are chatting with them.
*Fixed width font - View messages with a fixed width font.
*Custom keyboard shortcuts - Customize Gmail shortcuts so they are easier to remember for you.
*Mouse gestures - Handy app that adds mouse gestures to Gmail. (this one is probably the best of the whole list)
*Signature tweaks - Moves the signature to before the quoted text.
*Random signature - Generates a random signature.
*Custom date formats - Probably also one of the more useful labs extensions.
*Muzzle - Hides your friends’ status message in the chat box.
*Old Snakey - Play the classic “snake” game in Gmail.
*Email Addict - Forces you to take a 15 minute break from Gmail.
*Hide Unread Counts - Removes the number of unread messages for “inbox”, “labels” etc.
Google tells us that if one of these projects breaks your Gmail, and you can’t get in, you can use the “escape hatch”
If (when) a Labs feature breaks, and you’re having trouble getting into your account, there’s an escape hatch — just go to http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0 and Labs will be temporarily disabled.
To enable any of these features, click the “settings” link at the top of your Gmail interface, then click “Labs”. You can enable and disable these addons by selecting the appropriate radio button beside your favorite features, then at the bottom, click “save”.
Which ones do you like? What do you wish they would add?
Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Released
There a bunch of new Beta 2 samples to check out. I’m a fan of the Airline demo.
