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Credit: Susan Dove/CNET News.com

Credit: Susan Dove/CNET News.com

Very few people have sat out the
iPod revolution.

Credit: Susan Dove/CNET News.com

These two charts suggest that most people’s iPods have sent out to pasture, rather than dying on the battlefield. But it still seems high to me, although it didn’t have much of an impact on people’s perception of the iPod: 84 percent said they’d buy another one. For the record, I’ve never had any problems with either iPod I’ve owned.

At least, very few people who read CNET News.com and took the time to answer a poll about iPods, that is. Last week we asked readers to participate in an iPod survey to help inform a separate story on the future of the iPod, which ran over here.

This says to me that people are holding onto their iPods longer than I would have assumed. There have been lots of iPod revisions since 2003 and 2004, including the Nano and video iPods most notably. Perhaps the 2003-2004 respondents have had two iPods, and the 2005-2006 respondents have had one? My first iPod arrived for Christmas 2004.

We had more
Mac users respond to the survey than Windows users, which surprised me a bit. Forty-nine percent of respondents used a Mac to manage their iPod, compared with 41 percent of respondents who used Windows. And of those who own both an iPod and a Mac, 36 percent said they bought the Mac first, throwing a bit of a wrench into the halo theory. I use my Mac, obtained after my iPod, to manage my player.

Other results
On the subject of other MP3 player companies, 36 percent claimed to have never owned anything but an iPod. Creative and Rio ranked first and second among the other manufacturers, although “Other” was tied with Creative, suggesting I forgot someone notable. I owned a Rio before buying my first iPod.

The majority of people who responded to the poll were conservative iPod buyers. I myself have owned two, an iPod Mini and an iPod Nano. I was a little surprised by this, especially given the results of the next question. Just 341 people claim to have never owned an iPod, and that 8 percent figure was consistent throughout the survey.

Finally, 43 percent of respondents said they aren’t considering another MP3 player company. But of the 57 percent who said they would consider another company, Microsoft’s Zune topped the list, followed closely by Creative and Sony.

A few disclaimers: this survey was not sanctioned by The Official Group That Makes Surveys Officious, and should not be viewed as a competitor to data complied by professional survey companies or market research firms. I think it is more representative of CNET News.com readers than the general public, meaning that I think we drew from a group more enthusiastic about technology than the average consumer. And 83 percent of the responses came from U.S. computers.

There were many interesting tidbits, some of which I discussed in the other story, and some of which didn’t quite fit in with that piece. Here’s a look, and I’ll also put down my answers:

But as I write this Sunday, it’s been three days. My computerized control panel still drifts between 21.4 degrees centigrade and 21.7 degrees centigrade and there is a little crustiness around my mouth after three days of hot, dry, conditioned air.

I skipped back to my room and pressed the “down” button on the aircon control. Nothing.
Computers take some time to reprogram, don’t they? I sat in hope. And, well, a little sweat.

Perhaps you are skeptical about the notion that computers will, one day, actually control us.

In your room, there is another control panel that switches lights on and off and generally monitors the look and feel of your environment, including what temperature you are allowed to enjoy.

Rovinj, home of the Weekend Media Festival.

Perhaps you might imagine yourself to be a little dependent on your digital friend but not to the degree that it tells you what to do.

I don’t know about you, but I like things to be a little cold indoors when it’s hot outside, so I asked the nice man at reception whether I had misunderstood something about the control panel. What, indeed, did I have to do to make the room colder?

Ah, he told me, the computer system would like me to agree that 21 degrees is the optimum temperature. But he promised to reprogram it specially so that my room could be colder.

You don’t have to put your key card into a slot to enter your room. No, you wave it at a control panel and your door opens like that of the haunted castle in a horror movie.

(Credit: CC Akk Rus/Flickr)

Did I detect the sort of raised eyebrow on his head that said: “You, sir, don’t realize who’s calling the shots here”? Perhaps.

Rovinj is one of the most beautiful secrets in all the world, a place of such breathtaking charm and beauty that you simple do not want to leave. And the organizers put the speakers up at the aforementioned hotel, which seems to have dedicated itself to computerized logic.

It seems as if the computer has decided that you will only enjoy temperatures of 21 degrees centigrade (70 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher.

I went to bed, believing I would be waking to a cooler environment.
Still nothing. So the following morning, it was back to reception.

I am currently in Rovinj, Croatia, home of the Weekend Media Festival. The festival has speakers from companies such as Google, MTV, and Nokia and, well, there was this one speech Saturday titled, “Why advertise when you can Twitter?” given by a bald chap you might know.

Perhaps, however, you have never stayed at the Hotel Monte Mulini on Croatia’s Adriatic Coast.
Please allow me to explain.

Is this the beginning of the end? Or the end of the beginning?

As I walk to the bathroom, I find myself bowing to the control panel, hoping that, somehow, it will agree to make things cooler. I also find myself thinking whether the man on reception is human and whether there is such a person as the maintenance man at all.

“Oh, the computer is still not allowing you?” said the man at the desk. “I will speak to maintenance.”

Google plans to update its mechanism for ad quality scoring, a critical measurement that influences whether advertisements are placed next to search results so that judgments of ad quality are made immediately.

Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Google uses an auction system to determine which advertisers’ ads are placed next to search results, but the winners of the auction are determined by more than how much an advertiser is willing to pay. Google also effectively raises minimum bid requirements for ads that don’t meet its quality criteria, such as a good click-through rates or, in a newer addition, the speed at which an advertisers’ Web page loads. But changes are coming to this system.

With coming updates, ad quality will be judged at the time a user searches, Google said Thursday on its AdWords blog. Google will begin testing changes with a small set of users “within the next day or two,” before deploying the changes for everyone.

“We are replacing our static per-keyword Quality Scores with a system that will evaluate an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. This way, AdWords will use the most accurate, specific, and up-to-date performance information when determining whether an ad should be displayed,” Google said. Previously, Google used a static measurement of quality in assessing whether to display an advertiser’s ad for a particular keyword.

The real-time process also means that Google no longer will mark various keywords as unavailable to advertisers who previously had low ad quality scores for those keywords, Google said.

And the company is changing its mechanism for describing how advertisers can expect results. Instead of presenting them with the minimum bid required for each keyword, Google will show what cost advertisers should expect for high placement.

“We’re replacing minimum bids with a new, more meaningful metric: first-page bids. First-page bids are an estimate of the bid it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results on Google Web search,” Google said.

This was originally published at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

Gartner has tallied the global smartphone sales by operating system, and the results put Symbian as the top dog with market share of 47.1 percent with RIM’s BlackBerry OS a distant second at 19.5 percent.

Here’s a look at the figures for the fourth quarter:

And 2008:

The statistics are a very relevant followup to my post on Wednesday trying to sort out what platforms developers will ultimately pick. After all, each of these platforms will have marketplaces and there are only so many developers. And all of these platforms will be vying for share in what is expected to be a down market. IDC said Thursday that it expects global mobile phone shipments to fall 8.3 percent in 2009. So-called converged device shipments are expected to increase 3.4 percent globally.

What’s notable is that our unscientific poll revealed that few people saw Symbian as an operating system worth betting on.

Based on market share it appears that developers should be focused on creating applications for Symbian, Research in Motion, Windows Mobile, and the iPhone and iPod Touch as a turbo charge for growth. Palm remains too much of a wild card.

However, that decision isn’t all that easy to make. Excluding Symbian, the mobile operating systems are bunched together in market share. For 2008,
Mac OS X had growth of 245.7 percent, according to Gartner. The BlackBerry platform had the second best growth at 96.7 percent. Clearly, growth dictates focusing efforts on those two platforms.

Other notable points from Gartner’s tally:

Fourth quarter global smartphone units were 38.1 million, up 3.7 percent from a year ago. For 2008, 139.3 million smartphones were sold, up 13.9 percent from a year ago.

Nokia had market share of 40.8 percent in the smartphone market at the end of the fourth quarter with RIM second at 19.5 percent. Apple had 10.7 percent.

In the fourth quarter, Linux-based smartphone sales were up 19 percent from a year ago due to Android-based T-Mobile phones.

The Supreme Court has refused to consider appeals from Samsung Electronics in a case against Rambus, a memory design and patent licensing company, closing a saga that began in 2005 over alleged patent infringement.

The court’s decision to stay out of the case leaves in place an April appeals court ruling (PDF) that a district court had no jurisdiction to grant an order that–while technically in favor of Rambus–included negative opinions about the company.

Rambus first sued Samsung in 2005 for allegedly violating its patents of various dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, devices. Samsung immediately countersued in the Eastern District
Court of Virginia, claiming that the patents were invalid and unenforceable.

In a similar case, a district court found Rambus guilty of spoliation of evidence. Rambus quickly settled that case and, in September 2005, moved to dimiss
its claims against Samsung. However, Samsung’s attorney fees were still in dispute, so Rambus offered to fully compensate for them.

Samsung refused the offer but continued with its court motion to obtain them. The district court in July 2006 denied Samsung its attorney fees–in that sense ruling in favor of Rambus–but included in its ruling a lengthy opinion addressing allegations that Rambus was guilty of tampering with evidence.

Unhappy with this turn of events, Rambus argued that the court lacked jurisdiction to even give the ruling, since its offer to pay Samsung the attorney fees rendered the case moot. In April of this year, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sided with Rambus, vacating the previous order and remanding the case back to the court with instructions to dismiss Samsung’s complaint. The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear Samsung’s appeal leaves the lower court’s decision in place.

(Credit: Greatdreams) Johanna Blakley, Deputy Director at the USC Norman Lear Center, will moderate one of the most provocative panel discussions at SXSW Interactive next weekend: “Will Tomorrow’s World Still Need Designers?” Panelists include Alonzo Canada (Jump Associates), David Merkoski (frog design), and Helen Walters (BusinessWeek). In a blog post, Blakley has articulated some points that challenge the raison d’etre of a whole profession and will likely spark a heated debate:

“At Davos this year, four luminaries in the world of design were asked to predict what the future of design will be. The themes that arose from this discussion seemed to coalesce into two distinct categories that I’d venture to call ‘internal’ and ‘external.’ On the one hand, the speakers emphasized the importance of privacy and personal convenience — a degree of customization we’ve not seen before, that will first be available, as usual, to the world’s wealthiest 10%. Designers will create ingenious objects with hidden multi-functionality, devices that, for one reason or another, cloak what they can really do. We’ll also see designers pressed to find ways to better protect trade secrets and the valued expertise of the genius creator — in other words, designers will be designing objects that actually enhance their own professional lives and buttress their privileged position in society.

This vision of a rather elitist future of design was counterbalanced by a set of notions that implied a very different path for the world’s creative future — one that many designers with an instinct for self-preservation may treat with some dismay. On this end of the prediction spectrum I noticed a concentration on the external — an emphasis on transparency and simplicity and social responsibility. A belief that design that communicates its utility to the poorest 90% of the world will take precedence, and that mass design collaborations will serve a vaster public than professional designers have ever reached. This future of design would be world-changing and would mark a new direction for the practice of design — one that might not require designers.

Much has been made of the consequences of democratizing design. Already, the designer’s responsibility has shifted from creating objects and experiences to creating the conditions for innovation — putting into the hands of the masses the tools to make their own designs. However, the threat to the livelihood of designers may well go beyond packs of online amateurs.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that $1,000 worth of computation in the 2020s will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain. The result? By 2020, greatly extended human longevity (and a cure for the common cold, thank God); by 2030, nanobots that can repair our bodies on the fly; by 2040, machine back-ups of human memories. In the same time frame, we’ll spend less time in front of computers and more time inside of them, working and playing in virtual worlds.

And what comes along with all this amazing progress? A fear that we won’t be able to stay ahead of the game. As countless movies and sci-fi stories have told us, the terrorists could use this technology against us or the powerful computers that we’ve created could take over. While some critics have claimed that this is basically ‘the Rapture for nerds,’ Kurzweil — whose fan club includes Bill Gates, Marvin Minsky, and folks at the National Institute of Health — expects that by 2045, non-biological intelligence will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. Stanford’s Paul Saffo has asked, will this super intelligence treat us like pets or like food?

This presents an obvious quandary to designers, who may be regarded as the agents of our salvation or our destruction when ‘the Singularity’ (or the nerdocalypse) arrives. As Mary Shelley so brilliantly depicted in Frankenstein, playing God can have tremendous costs. If we’re the first species to take over our own evolution, will designers live like Gods or be chronically unemployed?”

The U.S. military has found the iPod Touch to be a valuable battlefield tool for soldiers.

(Credit:
Apple)

Updated at 1:25 p.m. PDT to clarify that apps being developed for
iPhone as well.

The hottest new battlefield weapon in Baghdad is also a hot item on the home front.

Apple’s iPod Touch is proving to be a valuable tool to members of the U.S. military, according to a report in Newsweek.

The report notes that the iPod performs many functions in this time of “networked warfare,” enabling soldiers to be linked with other soldiers, as well as intelligence resources, such as aerial images from drones and translation software.

Soldiers can use applications to add translated phrases to maps and photos, as well as show villagers video messages from local leaders. A new program called Vcommunicator translates spoken and written Arabic, Kurdish, as well as two Afghan languages.

Another application developed for the iPhone allows soldiers to take a photo of a street sign, upload it, and immediately receive intelligence on the local area, such as water and sympathizers. Because new recruits are already familiar with how the iPod and iPhone work, it’s also easier to train soldiers on loading content, the report notes.

Oh yeah, this rugged device, which retails for less than $230, was developed in the private sector without taxpayer money. Considering the military’s history of being charged for $435 hammers, $640 toilet seats, and $7,600 coffeemakers by contractors, this is a great deal.

Samsung's state of the art home theater in a box.

(Credit:
Samsung)

Samsung’s brand spanking new HT-BD2 home theater in a box put me through some changes. It’s the world’s first Blu-ray HTIB, so sure, it’s got picture quality to die for, and even boasts state of the art Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio surround 7.1 channel processing. The HT-BD2 also looks pretty hot, the Blu-ray player/A/V receiver’s curvaceous, high gloss style is drop-dead gorgeous, and the super-model thin tower speakers and chunky subwoofer are likewise designed for eye appeal.

But just that, the HT-BD2’s sonic splendors are in short supply, or to put it another way, it’s all show and no go. I’ll get into more detail about the sound in my CNET review that will appear early next month.

But the HT-BD2’s hefty price tag, $1,500, put me off. The Samsung sounds merely OK, not bad, just painfully average for a HTIB–clearly the product designers know that features and looks sell, and sound is a low priority. I’m sure Samsung will sell a ton of these things, but if you care about sound you can do a lot better for your $1,500. How good, let’s see.

I didn’t want to forfeit Blu-ray for this $1,500 dream system, so I selected Samsung’s BD-P1400 Blu-ray Player (street price, $350). It duplicates the HT-BD2’s video capabilities. Pioneer’s VSX-817 receiver typically goes for around $200-250, and would be a good match for our $900 speaker/subwoofer package.

Speakers? I have two favorites in this price range, Atlantic Technology’s sweet sounding System 920; you can read my CNET review here. PSB Speakers’ Alpha Series is a little pricier, but truly excellent. Four B1 bookshelf monitors, the Alpha C1 center speaker, and SubSeries 1 subwoofer would bring us in on budget. OK, maybe a little over, depending on the deals you score.

The shootout between this separates based system and the Samsung HT-BD2 wouldn’t take very long. The Samsung sounds like a home theater in a box–dynamically undernourished, with boomy, poorly defined bass, and no actual treble detail. Yes, the Samsung can play pretty loud, but sound quality isn’t a happening concept. It sounds like a very large table radio.

The Samsung Blu-ray, Pioneer receiver, and Atlantic Technology or PSB Speakers based system will sound awfully nice on music and movies. Bass will be deeper and tighter, with freewheeling dynamics, an open sounding midrange and yes, actual treble extension.

We’re talking big differences here, but it’s your money and you get to choose–slick style or good sound. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

A researcher over at the Internet Storm Center has created a powerful GUI that will set the kill-bits on vulnerable ActiveX controls used in Facebook, Myspace, and Yahoo apps. These popular apps came under attack on Monday after researchers Elazar Broad and Krystian Kloskowski disclosed their findings to a online security newsgroup.

On Tuesday, exploits for the Yahoo apps were reported circulating. There is currently no patch from the individual vendors, so the only workaround is to disable the several specific, vulnerable ActiveX controls. (ActiveX controls were developed by Microsoft for use with Internet Explorer and other browsers.)

The SANS tool, available here, eliminates the risks associated with editing the Windows system registry file. A command line version is available here.

The kill-bit tool first checks your system to see if any of the vulnerable CLSIDs exist. If so, the tool saves a copy of any values currently set, then updates the display to show that the CLSID–the unique sequence assigned to each ActiveX component that specifies which control you are using–exists. It also shows whether the kill-bit flag is set. To set the kill-bit, just check the box beside any of the affected ActiveX controls then click on the “Set” button. Unchecking any of the boxes will either reset the “Compatibility Flags” to their saved value or remove the CLSID entirely (if you didn’t have the control installed in the first place).

SANS suggests setting the kill-bits for all of the affected ActiveX controls, and, even if you don’t currently have one or more of these CLSIDs installed on your machine, go ahead set the kill-bit for controls that might be added to your system in the future.

A T-Mobile spokesman said on Tuesday that data someone posted to a security e-mail list over the weekend was legitimate T-Mobile data but not customer information, and that the phone company’s network was not hacked or breached as the poster claimed.

The statement raises more questions than it answers. If indeed there was no network hack, could there have been an inside leak? Or could it have been something as low-tech as dumpster diving, in which records are obtained from trash bins outside a company’s offices?

All T-Mobile would say is that it is investigating how the information was obtained.

On Saturday, someone posted to the Full Disclosure e-mail list claiming to have hacked into T-Mobile’s computer network.

“We have everything, their databases, confidential documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009,” the poster wrote, adding that the data was being offered up to the highest bidder. As evidence of the hack the post included a bunch of lines of codes that look like they reference some operating systems and possibly IP addresses.

T-Mobile said the data is not customer data, but declined to say what it is. On Monday, T-Mobile said it was investigating the situation.

Then late on Monday, the company issued a statement that said: “Regarding the recent claim on a Web site, we’ve identified the document from which information was copied, and believe possession of this alone is not enough to cause harm to our customers.”

On Tuesday, T-Mobile issued an updated statement that removed that wording and added: “The company is conducting a thorough investigation and at this time has found no evidence that customer information, or other company information, has been compromised. Reports to the contrary are inaccurate and should be corrected.”

T-Mobile says the data isn't customer data. So what is it?

(Credit:
T-Mobile)