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Microsoft and Novell on Thursday said they are going to try to make things a little easier. The pair announced that they will jointly support a virtualization scenario in which Suse Linux is running as a guest operating system under Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization.

The companies said partners such as Dell will test the setup at the joint lab the two companies have in Cambridge, Mass. It’s the latest fruit of a nearly 2-year-old alliance between the two companies.

One of the nice advantages of server virtualization is the ability to run Linux and Windows on the same server. One of the headaches, though, is getting help when something goes wrong.

“The collaboration between Microsoft and Novell has been built by our desire to meet our customers’ and partners’ IT needs, and to deliver solutions that support customers’ mixed-source environments,” Microsoft Vice President Bob Kelly said in a statement. “For customers standardizing on Microsoft’s hypervisor who also have a mixed-source IT environment, this virtualization solution gives that choice. For channel partners who need a cross-platform hypervisor offering, our work with Novell gives them an easy starting point.”

I’m now sitting in the opening keynote of the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) here in Beijing, adjacent to the newly opened Olympic Stadium.

So far, he’s been outlining what cloud computing is, something that he admits is not news to anyone in this room full of industry and academic researchers, and highlighting all of Google’s already deployed cloud components — Gmail, Google Documents, Picasa, etc.

Now he’s talking about the power of distributed computing for operations such as search that, as he said “are very hard to do with one computer, or even a very powerful computer.” He added, “A cloud computer should have at its disposal a virtually infinite amount of disk, an infinite amount of processing power.”

More to come… Follow me on Twitter at gwbstr. E-mail sinobyte@gwbstr.com if you’re here and would like to get in touch!

The first presentation is by Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China. He’s talking about “cloud computing,” the general term for developing ways to turn our computer lives into something not tied to any single device.

Postgres Plus is an open source distribution of the PostgreSQL database and includes significant performance benefits and important ease-of-use capabilities for developers and DBAs. Bundled into a one-click, cross-platform installer, Postgres Plus is targeted at developers of next-generation applications and sets a new standard for commercial distributions of open source databases.

That just changed.

This, however, has not been EnterpriseDB’s primary problem. It’s not cash that it has lacked, but open-source cachet. Its story of “Oracle performance and interoperability at a fraction of the cost” is a winner, but it was muted by its lack of a compelling open-source story.

In other words, EnterpriseDB deploys the same hybrid model as Zimbra, SugarCRM, Funambol, and others. While I’m not a big fan of hybrid models, the reality is that it’s an accepted, successful model within commercial open source. If it means that EnterpriseDB and these others also contribute ever growing mountains of open-source code, which it does, then I can accept that.

This is a good day for EnterpriseDB. PostgreSQL, with EnterpriseDB firmly behind it, now has a chance to make some noise. And with IBM backing EnterpriseDB (and, by extension, PostgreSQL), things look set to become very, very interesting in the open-source database market.

Today EnterpriseDB announced that it is open sourcing its GridSQL business intelligence and data warehousing engine under the GNU General Public License Version 2. Previously proprietary, this move demonstrates a stronger commitment to open source.

Postgres Plus Advanced Server is a commercially licensed product that adds advanced capabilities to Postgres Plus, including robust Oracle compatibility, dynamic performance tuning, and sophisticated management and monitoring. The company also announced the availability of free tools, tutorials, and Web-based services for developers.

Good things come in threes, as EnterpriseDB confirmed today. The company today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series C round, including backing from IBM. With $37.5 million in funding to date, EnterpriseDB isn’t hurting for cash.

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Additionally, the company has reintroduced its software under the Postgres Plus brand. This isn’t a big change, but it does highlight just how big of a role open source plays in EnterpriseDB’s plans:

Fortunately, IntelligentPeople.com says it has made its IQ test “culture fair,” one of the most bland, awkward terms I’ve come across in some time.

The site also says you can only take the test twice. What this doesn’t address is that people can study for IQ tests, and I daresay, could probably cheat on them, as well. I wanted to check out this IQ test to see if you could, in fact, cheat, but I realized I didn’t even want my name going in their database.

Of course, as anyone who’s ever dated a smart person knows, intelligence isn’t any kind of guarantee of a good date. Sure, smart people generally prefer to date other smart people because it probably makes for better conversation, and the potential earning power is greater.

IntelligentPeople.com purports to be a dating site only for people smart enough to pass an IQ test.

(Credit:
IntelligentPeople.com)

I suppose it’s no surprise. After all, there are plenty of affinity networks out there already, social networks for people who went to this college, or who play that game or who like to dress up as giraffes. So why not throw dating and high IQs into the exclusivity mix?

That means the test “will test intelligence while minimizing cultural or educational biases.”

Besides, maybe figuring out how to cheat on their IQ test is a sign of intelligence.

So, to those that do join this service, have fun. But make sure, when you go on dates with your fellow smart people, that you don’t say anything too dumb.

Now, my first instinct was to look at the calendar. It’s not April Fools’ Day, right? No, I think that happened already. Maybe the people behind this site weren’t smart enough to notice that it’s way past April 1.

Well, that’s good, at least. This ensures the site will welcome a multicultural party of IQ test snobs.

I’m sitting here, reading my morning e-mail and what pops up but a press release for a new dating site that purports to be “exclusively for intelligent people.”

Called, wonder of wonders, IntelligentPeople.com, the site says that to sign up you must first “pass the IQ test required for admission.”

Well, snark aside, this is an interesting notion, this dating site for smarties.

On the other hand, would you really want to date someone who would be inclined to limit their partner trolling to a site that restricts anyone who doesn’t pass an IQ test? Perhaps this was actually someone’s clever notion of how to wall off a really annoying demographic from the rest of the dating pool.

In one experiment, the groups were shown sets of two red rectangles. One showed the two rectangles alone, the other showed the two red rectangles surrounded by two, four, or six blue rectangles. Each configuration was flashed twice, and the participants had to determine whether the two red rectangles in the second frame were in a different position than those in the first frame.

Anyhow, the researchers are still trying to find out whether chronic media multitaskers are born with an inability to concentrate or pick up the habits and damage their cognitive control along the way. They are, however, convinced that the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could.

Who doesn’t multitask these days?
Now these findings are very perplexing to me. How could the researchers find that many people to put in the group of nonmultitaskers? Aren’t all students these days busy with Facebook and text messaging and equipped with cell phones and iPods?

This is one of my most (and by that I mean least) productive multitasking co-workers.

At any given time, we’re bombarded with e-mails, text messages, instant messages, and phone calls. That’s not to mention Facebook and Twitter feeds. And I want our boss to believe that all that communicating makes us a more productive bunch. Turns out that could be all wrong.

They were told to ignore the blue rectangles, and the low multitaskers had no problem doing that. The high multitaskers, on the other hand, were constantly distracted by the irrelevant blue images.

According to a new study released by a group of Stanford University researchers Tuesday, people who regularly deal with several streams of electronic information simultaneously do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another any better than those who prefer to complete one task at a time. Actually, they fare worse.

(Credit:
Dong Ngo/CNET)

(Credit:
Jack Hubbard/Stanford)

As multitaskers don’t seem to ignore extra stimuli, researchers thought they would have good memories, which led to the second test involving remembering sequences of alphabetical letters. The result? The high multitaskers did a lousy job of remembering when a letter was making a repeat appearance.

So maybe it’s time I stopped checking e-mail or uploading mobile photos to Facebook while I’m at a bar watching football with my friends or quit watching movie trailers on the computer screen while having lunch. Most importantly, I should probably tell my boss that I should cut down on my workload as it’s now a scientific fact that you can be more productive by doing less.

Once again, the more the study subjects multitasked, the worse they did in this test, the study found. In conclusion, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price for their habits since everything appears to distract them.

If you can’t read through this article in one sitting, you may be in serious trouble. The good news is you wouldn’t discover what your problem is. Are you still reading?

The last test was aimed at determining if multitaskers are good at switching from one task to another, which forms the basis of multitasking. Participants were shown images of letters and numbers at the same time and instructed what to focus on. When they were told to pay attention to numbers, they had to determine if the digits were even or odd. When told to concentrate on letters, they had to say whether they were vowels or consonants.

Study author Eyal Ophir, a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, explains the findings to a student.

The study, whose findings are published in the August 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved about 100 students being put through three tests. In each, the researchers split participants into two groups: those who regularly do a lot of media multitasking and those who don’t.

It has been my presumption that multitaskers are generally more productive than people who prefer to do one thing at a time. Typical examples of those with what I call “occupational short attention span” tend to be workers in high-tech environments, including me and most of my CNET co-workers.

This is a good point–go to where the users are going. A larger potential audience means larger potential dollars.

One product that I use daily is SpanningSync, a simple sync utility that connects iCal and Google calendar. One of the guys there (Charlie is his name, but I couldn’t find his title or role) has a very logical and eye-opening take on why they went the way they did.

When you are contemplating starting a new software company you want to look at where money gets spent now and where it’s going to be spent in the future. That’s why startups these days are building their applications on utilities like Amazon S3 (which despite last week’s outage, I still believe in) and attempting to monetize Facebook (I am not a big believer in this one though I get the idea.) And while neither of these things may be right, they are better bets than building your infrastructure on dying platforms or betting on outdated technologies.

Via Cote.

The other platform I used on a daily basis–Mac OS X–had roughly 25 million users with growth that CNET called “nothing short of spectacular”. So I put the Salesforce sync project on hold (and later passed it off to a consulting firm) and shifted my focus to syncing Apple iCal and Google Calendar. That turned out to be a good decision.

I didn’t know how many users Google Calendar had, but I knew it was a large and growing number. But at some point it occurred to me that Salesforce had fewer than a million users (and perversely, only a fraction of them are even allowed access to the Salesforce API), and while their growth was impressive, that absolute number of users was still relatively low.

According to the site, you’ll be able to access the following features via the XMB during gameplay. But be warned: some games may not support this feature.

But now, CVG claims to have the final list of features that make up the much-anticipated upgrade. In addition to the XMB, version 2.40 will feature a trophy system that will let compatible games track your progress, similar to the
Xbox 360 Achievements. Instead of a score, you earn different level trophies as you progress.

Last week we told you about the recent firmware upgrade the
PS3 was getting and touched on the arrival of milestone version 2.40. While Sony has confirmed the inclusion of an in-game XMB (cross media bar), the rest of the 2.40 update was a bit cloudy.

Friend category
View, send, receive messages
Manage downloads
Set the vibration feature of the controller
Sign in to PlayStation Network
Register friends
Manage Bluetooth devices
Terminate the game
Music category
Use the system BGM
Work the system BGM operation panel
Settings category
Assign controllers
View profiles
Game category
Set audio devices
Use the voice changer

Virgin America also offers Ethernet and USB jacks at each seat, but these are currently useless. When I hooked up to the Ethernet jack, my laptop detected the connection, but didn’t receive an IP address, so there was no way to communicate over it. I can imagine this feature could be useful for business travelers who need to collaborate on some project during the flight, but until a DHCP server is provided, even peer-to-peer networking will likely not work.

One of the most valuable features on board– to me, at least– was the provision of two 110V outlets for each set of three seats in the main cabin. (Presumably the folks in first class get one each.) Finally, there’s a legal way to power and recharge my laptop in flight. The DC outlets found on some airlines won’t charge a MacBook Pro, although they do let the machine operate without running down the battery further. Virgin’s AC outlets are oriented horizontally, rather than the usual vertical arrangement in most wall outlets, which made for a fragile connection to the MacBook Pro’s power adapter, which frequently fell out.

I had to pay $21 in fees for the flight, and I chose to pay $25 extra for an exit-row seat, but the discount still amounted to $277.20. Normally I’d say such a meager amount wouldn’t influence my posts here, but it’s probably the case that I wouldn’t be writing about Virgin America otherwise…

I was able to get an exit-row seat on the return flight, but not on the flight out. The seat pitch in the main cabin is adequate for moderately tall people such as myself, but only barely. It’s about like American Airlines, which is the airline I usually fly on.

When watching the pre-recorded content, there are pause, rewind, and fast-forward controls. These functions aren’t available for the live broadcasts– no in-air DVR yet, sorry.

The system can also be used to order food, which seems like a great idea, assuming it doesn’t run the cabin crew ragged. Some of the things you can order are free, like sodas, but most items are sold to generate additional revenue. Accordingly, “Eat” buttons are easy to find on the wired remote control and the on-screen menus.

In a way, this story is left over from CES 2008, where I attended a blogger party hosted by the Parnassus Group and sponsored by, among other companies, Virgin America, the US domestic airline counterpart to Virgin Atlantic.

The party was a lot of fun, and all the sponsors did extensive giveaways. I got a flight suit from Intel and Zero G, a private company that offers “weightless” (parabolic trajectory) flights. Alas, I didn’t win a Zero G flight, but I did win a free flight on Virgin America. In fact, I think pretty much everyone at the party won one of these prizes– apparently they gave away 80 flights.

A Virgin America A320 Airbus aircraft

Entrees– salad and sandwich type stuff, no hot food– were around $9; snacks were $1 to $2. These prices were competitive with those of airport shops, and it’s certainly more convenient to get the food onboard– but most airports offer more variety. A turkey-bacon wrap sandwich I ordered came without the expected accessories (napkin, mustard, etc.).

The Dish Network channels are standard definition, not HD, but are stretched to fill the widescreen LCDs, which I find annoying. The broadcasts didn’t come through reliably; on both flights, there were long periods when some of the channels were experiencing trouble, even in level flight at our cruising altitude under a clear sky. Sharp turns caused the satellite receiver to fail entirely, but I suspect there’s no good way to solve that problem. On the return flight, four of the channels (ESPN, ESPN Classic, BET, and BBC America) were carrying Dish informational programming instead of the intended content.

Buying the ticket on the Virgin America website was pretty easy once I figured out that the site requires customers to apply discount codes in advance rather than also accepting discount codes when paying for a flight.

The USB jack, allegedly provided to allow customers to recharge cellphones, iPods, and other USB devices (and, according to the on-board Welcome guide, to hook up a full-size keyboard for the in-flight entertainment system, an amusing notion), didn’t even provide power.

Coming up next, a few museum reviews! I spent most of my time in DC doing the usual touristy stuff, and I ran across a chunk of ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose digital computer, in an unexpected place…

The free flight coupon, which was good for one round trip in the main cabin (that is, coach class) anywhere Virgin flies in the US, was valid through the end of May, so when Montalvo Systems shut down in early April I was able to spend some time planning a trip.

I also appreciated the live flight map based on data from Google Maps, although it doesn’t offer a satellite view or a really close-up view of the road maps. It seems to me that these features would be useful, but I suppose that providing them would require much more on-board storage. The map can pop up over whatever TV show you’re watching, which makes it convenient to check the progress of the flight during commercials. There was an odd problem with this feature– the black pixels on the map overlay were actually transparent, so legends on the map (city names, etc.) were intermittently illegible depending on the TV image. This function worked well on the flight to DC, but was not reliable on the flight back. Even after we landed at SFO, the system showed the airplane was a few miles southwest of the airport.

The system has menu options called “Read” and “Shop”, but they were not active. It seems to me that unavailable options ought not to be displayed.

I was pleased to see that the music videos and some of the pre-recorded TV shows and movies are offered free of charge. For example, I found several of the TED Talks and an episode of Patrick Norton’s Tekzilla (an old one– episode 17 from January 2008).

Virgin provides a high-quality multimedia entertainment system with a 9″ touchscreen LCD at every seat. The system, called Red, carries 24 channels of live satellite TV (sourced from Dish Network), 20 channels of live satellite radio, a good variety of on-demand TV shows and music, movies, simple games, and even chat rooms. I checked frequently but never found anyone in the chat rooms on the way out; on the way back, this feature was disabled.

Bottom line– the electronics and the in-air food ordering are fun, but not enough to make a difference for me. I will certainly consider Virgin America for future travel, but I’ll continue to choose airlines based on price, schedule, and compatibility with my existing frequent-flyer miles, as I’ve always done.

The airline charges $25 extra for “premium” seats at the bulkheads and exit rows in the main cabin. As a fairly tall guy, I like this idea– it discourages people from taking these seats if they don’t need them, and makes them more likely to be available for those of us who really need them.

Virgin America seems to have learned some valuable lessons from the success of JetBlue on these transcontinental flights. Virgin provides fairly comfortable leather seats in the main cabin and attractive leather massage chairs in first class. The airline’s Airbus airplanes (my flights were on A320s) are attractively decorated inside with color-changing “mood lighting” (which remained set to blue and purple on my flights).

(Credit:
Virgin America)

Although Virgin America flies to several West Coast destinations, I spend most of my time on this end of the country anyway. The two choices that seemed most attractive were New York and Washington, DC. Ultimately I decided I could have a better time in DC and not spend so much money, so that’s where I went.

On the one hand, things looked very realistic, with the many digital video screens blaring high-fidelity but inane content out at me. On the other, there was only one person in evidence.

So, OK, this wasn’t really Times Square. Rather, it was a new technology demo from Multiverse Network, a leading virtual-world platform developer.

One is that all the video boards in the virtual Times Square are running different pieces of content, including at least a couple piping in video directly, and seamlessly, from YouTube. That’s not something I think we’ve seen before using any other platform.

In point of fact, the demo is pretty impressive, as evidenced by the video (click here for Windows Media format) Multiverse put up on its site.

Even though there’s only one avatar in the demo, Multiverse’s technology can support up to 1,000 on a single server.

Another nice element is what Multiverse calls its high-dynamic range lighting system, which can display the best possible lighting effects on a high-end gamer machine or lesser effects on a lower-end machine. The system determines the CPU and GPU power and adjusts the effects accordingly.

(Credit:
Multiverse Network)

I spent part of Friday afternoon in New York’s Times Square, but something wasn’t quite right.

In general, Multiverse just makes its platform available to any development team that wants to use it to create a new virtual world. But in this case, the company created the Times Square demo itself as a way to showcase some of its newest innovations.

But there are some other little bits of magic going on here.

Multiverse’s new virtual Times Square demo showcases the company’s latest technology, including the ability to pipe YouTube videos directly into a virtual world.

All in all, this is just a demo, and certainly not anything regular users can yet play around with. But to Multiverse, it’s indicative of what’s possible with its platform and therefore what any virtual-world developer using that platform can do with it.

Of course, I’m not really that big a fan of Times Square anyway. Now, if we can adjust that demo so I can bop over to Eighth Avenue and catch a bus from Port Authority to New Jersey, that would be impressive.

A couple of things make this special.

(Credit:
Multiverse Network)

First, if you’re familiar with virtual worlds like Second Life, this takes the graphics to another level of realism, and that’s a nice thing. Second, even though there’s only one avatar in the demo, it would be possible using its technology, Multiverse says, to populate the Times Square scene–or any using their platform–with up to 1,000 avatars, all off a single server.

(Credit:
Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

“Having access to international talent is a big part of what’s fueled our technology industry,” she said. “The statistics about new companies that have started up the last ten years and the number of founders who came from outside this country…I mean, this is just dumb.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz

“So you put a limit here, we’ll go hire there,” Schwartz added. “We’re not dumb.”

“It gets worse each year because our needs are greater,” Mulcahy added. But if I’m reading her correctly, Xerox’s boss doesn’t have any confidence that legislators are going to move quickly.

That’s the way things work in Washington but Schultz said the tenor of the battle over H-1Bs may take on a different look after the November election.

“You have to raise the quotas,” said Mulcahy, CEO at Xerox. Schwartz, who runs Sun Microsystems, struck the same theme.

That got a good laugh out of the swells, but I think Mulcahy nailed it with her answer.

I doubt their pitch would go down as well in places like Ohio or Michigan. So far, however, the H-1B debate hasn’t turned into a divisive presidential campaign issue. Neither the Clinton nor Obama camps have taken up the question. Ditto for John McCain. High-tech companies like Xerox and Sun want Congress to raise the cap on employee-sponsored green cards and offer quota exemptions to foreigners with serious math or technology chops. SIA President George Scalise, who is sitting 10 feet away from me, wants to give green cards to talented foreign students.

“There’s a perception that global trade and big business is leading to losses in the economy and (politicians) don’t want to get on the wrong side of that argument.”

PALO ALTO, Calif.–Anne Mulcahy and Jonathan Schwartz became the latest technology CEOs to call on the government to let more foreign-born computer engineers into the United States.

Anne Mulcahy and Jon Schwartz

“We have just been stuck on inaction in this country. It’s not pros or cons. It’s inaction, it’s the political polarization in this country that has made for extraordinary problems.

“Damned if I knew,” he said. “We’ve all tried. We’ve all done the perpetual flights to Washington to talk with them…there’s an element of, “Does that drive my election?” It’ll help this room. This room doesn’t represent a lot of voters. It represents a lot of money.”

(Credit:
Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

“A year or so ago, an effort to get comprehensive reform in immigration was tried with the (backing) of the President and Senators McCain and Kennedy. In the end, it didn’t fly. But that was the right track. All the people who were running against that idea (in the primaries)–have since lost. So that’s progress and let’s hope that it continues.”

So why can’t tech’s power elite get Washington to blow in its direction?

The message went down well with an audience of Silicon Valley elites gathering at Stanford Friday for a daylong conference on political economy. Then again, they were facing a free-trade crowd of true believers, including headliners like eBay’s Meg Whitman and former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, as well as guys representing big investment houses, venture capitalists, and money managers.