To say that the Virtual Console is “falling off” is an understatement. It’s now been more than a month straight of less than three releases per week.

Critics remain unimpressed. “Venter is claiming bragging rights to the world’s longest length of synthetic DNA, but size isn’t everything. The important question is not ‘how long?’ but ‘how wise?’” said Jim Thomas in a bio-watchdog
article castigating Venter.

Next step would be to insert the synthetic DNA into living cells and hope it becomes the world’s first artificially created, self-replicating organism.

The work, published online by Dan Gibson, Ph.D. in the journal Science, raises hopes for benefits like new drugs and pollution scarfing micro-organisms while spooking some with visions of biological warfare and patent wielding corporations controlling all future forms of synthetic life.

The researchers chemically created DNA fragments in the lab then used homologous recombination (a process that cells use to repair damage to their chromosomes) in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to rapidly build the entire bacterial chromosome from large sub-assemblies, according to the press release. “This extraordinary accomplishment is a technological marvel that was only made possible because of the unique and accomplished JCVI team,” said president and founder J. Craig Venter.

Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have created the largest man-made DNA structure to date, putting them one step closer to producing a completely synthetic organism, according to the institute.

“While synthetic biology is speeding ahead in the lab and in the marketplace, societal debate and regulatory oversight is stalled and there has been no meaningful or inclusive discussion on how to govern synthetic biology in a safe and just way. In the absence of democratic oversight profiteering industrialists are tinkering with the building blocks of life for their own private gain.”

Venter dismisses concerns that what JCVI is really creating is the “microbesoft” of synthetic life. His team has long been concerned with the societal issues surrounding its work and has undergone”significant ethical review” by experts who founds no reason why work should cease “as long as the scientists involved continued to engage public discussion,” according to the JCVI Web site.

Several blogs (see Techmeme) are reporting that Apple will roll out new products on September 9. As previously rumored, starting with missive from Digg’s Kevin Rose, Apple may be revamping the
iPod Nano and tweaking the iPod Touch with new software, as well delivering iTunes 8.0 with a recommendation engine and selective price cuts.

However, from various sources CNET News is hearing that Apple is gearing up its engine for something the week of September 8, so the September 9 date is likely more accurate than the rumors so far of what will be delivered to the
Mac and iPod devotees. Stay tuned as the build up to the next appearance of Steve Jobs and the unveiling of Apple’s latest wares continues.

Currently, ATI Radeon HD 4870 (L) and Nvida GeForce GT 120 are offered as standard graphics chips on Mac Pro

(Credit:
Apple)

The Quadro FX 4800, packing 192 processing cores, targets professional graphics customers, including scientists, engineers, and designers.

The Mac card features a standard 3-pin stereo connector for 3D stereoscopic imaging, critical to many core professional Mac applications, Nvidia said.

The 4800 also features a large 1.5GB frame buffer
(used to refresh the on-screen image) and memory bandwidth up to 76.8 gigabytes per second. By comparison, the Nvidia GeForce GT 120, which is currently offered by Apple as a standard graphics card on the Mac Pro, has memory bandwidth of 25.6GB/s.

The card also integrates two Dual Link DVI Connectors and Boot Camp Support for access to native Quadro GPU accelerated professional 3D graphics on Windows.

The Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 GPU for Mac lists for $1,799 and will be available in May 2009 through Apple.com, and select Apple resellers and workstation integrators. The card will also be available from PNY Technologies, Leadteck, and Elsa (Japan).

This graph shows the activity in the brain's pleasure center; there's more activity with wine subjects think costs $90 a bottle (top line) than the same wine priced at $10. The arrow shows the moment when the subjects started tasting the wine.

(Credit:
CalTech, Stanford)

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, “You get what you pay for.”

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that’s true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it’s exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that “changes in the
price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness,” they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This chart shows that people ranked taste of a $45 wine higher than the same wine priced at $5, and the same for a different wine marked $90 and $10.

(Credit:
CalTech, Stanford)

The research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists’ notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

“Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality,” the researchers said. “Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.”

That doesn’t mean Larrabee will be a slam dunk. Intel has a checkered past in the discrete graphics chip market and this 10-year-old CNET article about Intel’s 740 graphics processor reads eerily like some of the chatter about Intel’s Larrabee today.

But Intel is older and presumably wiser now. (Though of course that remains to be seen.) Here’s a quick look at how Intel depicts the future Larrabee architecture graphically.

Intel slide shows Larrabee with up to 48 cores

(Credit:
Intel)

Larrabee packs separate scalar and vector processing units

(Credit:
Intel)

Each Larrabee core has 256KB of level-2 cache

(Credit:
Intel)

Workload in games

(Credit:
Intel)

Movie-rental chain Blockbuster announced Tuesday that it has withdrawn its $1 billion bid for consumer electronics chain Circuit City.

Chief Executive James Keyes blamed “market conditions” for the demise of the proposed deal, valued at one time at more than $1.3 billion.

“Based on market conditions and the completion of our initial due diligence process, we have determined that it is not in the best interest of Blockbuster’s shareholders to proceed with an acquisition of Circuit City,” Keyes said in a statement. “We continue to believe in the strategic merits of a consumer retail proposition that would bring media content and electronic devices together under one brand. We will pursue this strategy through our Blockbuster stores as a way to diversify the business and better serve the entertainment retail segment.”

Blockbuster shares jumped nearly 12 percent, while Circuit City fell 14 percent in after-hours trading following the announcement.

Blockbuster made its offer for Circuit City in February but it was only made public in April.

A combination of the two companies would have added up to an $18 billion business, according to Blockbuster’s calculations. Both companies have struggled in the past year–Circuit City posted a $200 million loss near the end of 2007, and Blockbuster has been fending off Netflix’s success in online video rentals, as well as the growing threat of digital movie downloads.

Having had a day to ruminate about the Open Source Business Conference 2008, a few key takeaways suggest themselves. It was by far the best OSBC yet, with a far more diverse audience and speaking faculty that we’ve had before. This naturally leads to a diverse set of “conclusions” arising from the event:

Enterprises love open source but the business models necessary to fuel both their happiness and that of the vendors still need a lot of work.

Jon Williams of Kaplan Test suggested in his keynote, as Dirk Hohndel captures, that the more happy he is with his commercial open-source software, the less likely he will be to pay for it. Why? Because his developers will acquire the expertise over time to support themselves and because the product will mature to the point that support will be less necessary.

The vendor can respond in two ways: Innovation and proprietization (made up word). By innovation, Jon suggested that continual development of the product keeps it buggy (my word, not his) and out in front of his developers, such that support remains relevant. Vendors can also offer services like the JBoss Operations Network that make maintenance of the software easier.

A combination of both is optimal, but Dirk is right that it’s a bit depressing, this prospect of the customer leaving just when you’ve made them the happiest.
There is no clear leader in commercial open source anymore.

It used to be Red Hat, hands down. But Red Hat has been hands off for so long that the commercial open-source vendors have learned to fend for themselves. Microsoft and Sun have been far more interested in engaging with these vendors than Red Hat has (for various motivations). Red Hat has made some middling efforts to engage with its commercial peers, but it has not shown much desire to extend its market leadership into becoming the hub of the open-source ecosystem.

There have been good reasons for this absenteeism. Red Hat has been 100 percent focused on building its business. But Red Hat Exchange was an acknowledgement that its business, in part, also depends on the success of other open-source companies. A market of one is not very interesting.

My hope is that Jim Whitehurst will spend the time to engage with other open-source companies. We need Red Hat’s leadership. We need its channels. But we also have much to offer. No open-source company can afford to be an island unto itself.
Competition within the commercial open-source community is heating up.

This revealed itself in the open-source database panel (with deeper analysis at The 451 Group’s blog), but it’s also evident in the market wrangling between Novell and Red Hat, Pentaho and JasperSoft, Zimbra and Open Xchange, etc. While I think it’s fair to say that none of these companies spend a lot of time angling specifically against their open-source peers, it’s also true that they’re ready to do so when necessary. This is good. This is healthy. Let competition flourish.
With Microsoft and patents, the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak.

If there were an easy answer to how to keep its patent power against the HP’s, Oracle’s, IBM’s, etc. of the world and still engage the open-source community, I think Microsoft probably would have done it. It certainly will never be able to make much money directly from its patent licensing.

Oracle, Red Hat, IBM, Novell, and others have contributed patents to the Open Invention Network. That’s how you fix the downstream problem. Microsoft is trying to have its cake (patent club at the ready) and eat it, too (engage open source). But it can’t have it both ways. It really is an either/or. For it to be relevant in 21st-century software battles, it’s outdated patent strategy won’t win it any friends…or markets.
As Jim Whitehurst pointed out in his keynote, we really need to do a better job of bringing enterprises/customers into the open-source development community.

Stuart Cohen’s Collaborative Software Initiative is an interesting way to get there, but every vendor needs to be focused on this. We need to find efficient, protected ways for enterprises to engage with vendors, communities, and their peers. They are a massive development pool that still largely develops in isolation. That needs to change.
We are still in commercial open source’s infancy.

I think it very likely that business models and deployment models around open source will change over the years. We are nowhere close to optimizing how we sell, develop, and deploy open-source software. Not even remotely. The answers as to how will come from customers, not vendors. That’s what makes it such an exciting market to be in.

We clearly have a lot of work to do in 2008 to advance open source. Where there’s work, there’s money. Good times for open source.

It might not seem like a big deal that Silicon Valley is losing its middle class – defined as those who make between $30,000 and $80,000 per year. That is, unless you want to create a company that employs normal people who make normal wages, which is just about every company on the planet.

By most accounts, Silicon Valley is doing very well, adding jobs faster than the US national average. But this lack of reasonably paid employees is worrisome:

The consequence of the shift may undercut some of the basic mechanisms of the Valley economy, according to the authors of the report, by making upward mobility more difficult. “If you lose the middle, it’s harder to support the top,” said Doug Henton, an economist at Collaborative Economics, a research and consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., that helps prepare the annual report.

It’s also hard to support some of the basic mechanics of open-source companies (inside sales, technical support, etc.). I suppose this is why MySQL “near-shores” its lead generation and inside sales to Boise, Idaho, and other companies do the same in Austin, Salt Lake City, etc.

One thing you can’t near shore is diversity. While Silicon Valley boasts an exceptional 48 percent of households speaking a language other than English, the lack of income diversity somewhat moots this point. I loved living in the Valley except for this part. I didn’t want my kids growing up to think that money was a given. It’s not healthy. I didn’t want them at the Menlo School or Palo Alto High School. The sense of entitlement was palpable in the youth. (We should know – we struggled to find babysitters while at Stanford because no one needed to earn any money.)

Silicon Valley is a great place. I’ll concur with Fabrizio that it’s one of the best places to start a company. It’s only unfortunate that it’s apparently reserved for the most wealthy. That isn’t good for its long-term health.

Crunch files on someone else's servers with Mux.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Apple’s
iPhone users also get a treat, as Mux is setup to convert Flash videos on the fly to make them playable on the device. The only caveat is that you have to enter the URL in the mobile application, which would be a whole heck of a lot easier if the iPhone had a way to copy and paste. I tried it out on a few videos from around the Web and had mixed results. A surprising amount of video sites have done as much as possible to support mobile phones without Flash, including CollegeHumor, Break, and Dailymotion. However, those that don’t work without Flash on cell phones, such as Vimeo and MySpace, simply crashed the converter.

Another reason Mux is useful is for the folks who don’t want to have to plug in their phones to a computer to sync their media. You can simply send entire Web clips over to your phone using SMS. As long as you’ve got a data plan you can access the link anytime you want to watch or download the full video. It’s very handy.

Mux was created by the same team who did Cruxy, a media distributing service that debuted at the Under the Radar Media conference last summer.

See also:
ZamZar and iDesktop.tv