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I’ve lamented the fact that Sun was missing the boat (blimp?) on the cloud for several months and have had zero discussion with anyone there about it. I’ve even gone as far as to say that we can’t have platform-as-a-service without Java in the cloud.

Gavin Clarke reports that Sun’s nascent cloud/grid/whatever effort is being turned into a separate cloud business unit lead by Sun’s chief sustainability officer, Dave Douglas.

Sun sort of had something with Project Caroline and they were early on the utility-computing bandwagon, but considering the massive dossier of software, hardware, and storage the company lays claim to, one would expect a lot more. In fact, I would argue that of all the BigCo vendors, Sun has the best chance of becoming a meaningful cloud vendor.

I do have to ask why Sun announced (leaked?) this today–just days after the joint initiative from HP, et al. and not at JavaOne just a few months ago. Despite my enthusiasm for Sun’s efforts (which I really hope to do well), this is the typically weak marketing the company gets beat up for.

Maybe someone will start reaching out to interested parties?

LOS ANGELES–Technology introduced at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference by SanDisk could boost solid-state drive performance in
Windows Vista by 100 times.

One metric, vRPM, enables comparisons in performance between a solid-state drive and a hard-disk drive or another SSD. The other metric, LDE, calculates the lifespan of a solid-state drive.

Click here for more news on Windows and WinHEC.

To maximize random write performance, SanDisk developed the ExtremeFFS flash file management system that uses a “page-based algorithm” so when “a sector of data is written, the SSD puts it where it is most convenient and efficient,” SanDisk said.

The largest supplier of flash memory cards unveiled an advanced flash file system for solid-state drives that “has the potential” to accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems.

“For SSDs to perform optimally in Windows Vista, and thus replicate or surpass the functionality of hard disk drives, a new flash management technology is needed to accelerate SSD write speed and endurance,” said Rich Heye, senior vice president and general manager for SanDisk’s solid-state drive business unit.

The result is an improvement in random write performance as well as in overall endurance.

Heye also introduced two metrics that can help users evaluate solid-state drives.

SanDisk will present this technology here at WinHEC 2008 on Wednesday. ExtremeFFS will ship in SanDisk products in 2009.

Despite being generally faster than hard-disk drives (particularly at reading data), solid-state drives fall short of hard disks when they randomly write data. Random writes are generally considered to be the Achilles heel of solid-state drives.

Follow your man-eating plant on Twitter

MIT's Luke Johnson and Sam Dyar program an autonomous robotic arm. Why do these guys want to kill me?

The machines are networked and communicate in real time. The project was put together by Nikolaus Correll, a postdoctoral assistant working in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with the aim of getting a similar system to someday work on a large, economically viable scale.

Feed me, Seymour!

Of course, in the near future, all farming in America might be done by semi-intelligent robots controlled by Skynet. Just think of what might happen if we let these things achieve self-awareness. I’m scared now. And hungry.

That is why I can’t fully get behind these robotic, automated tomato-farming machines being developed by MIT. Clearly, they’re Terminators sent from the future to try to kill me. Or Sarah Connor, though I’m not sure what she’s allergic to.

I mean where else would something so high-tech come from? The robots are just part of a system that monitors each individual tomato plant in an urban garden at the school, thereby watering it and dispensing food exactly when it needs it. This creates superior and more economically friendly crops, again clearly designed to kill me more efficiently.

(Credit:
Jason Dorfman, CSAIL/MIT)

Each robot in MIT’s garden is outfitted with a robotic arm and a watering pump, while the tomato plants themselves are equipped with local soil sensing, networking, and computation.

The researchers, in fact, envision a fully autonomous greenhouse, complete with robots, pots, and plants connected via computation, sensing, and communication.

Related stories:

(Credit:
Jason Dorfman, CSAIL/MIT)

Sensor battles senseless houseplant death

I’m allergic to tomatoes. Also black olives and mushrooms. That means I’m about the worst guy in the world to order a pizza with. But tomatoes are in about everything. Tacos, spaghetti–you name it, it’s got tomatoes.

Salesforce.com declined to comment on the report. Update 9:09 p.m.: So did Google.

Salesforce.com and Google share a vision of transforming computing tasks that today happen on corporate PCs or servers onto services available across the Internet.

It’s unverified at this point, but TechCrunch points to a Google Operating System blog post that details several bits of evidence that could point to some integration.

TechCrunch is reporting that Salesforce.com will announce on Monday a deal to resell Google online applications such as Google Docs to its customers.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineland has an interesting take and offers up this delish morsel:

More trouble for the SS Yahoo. The latest exec to bail: Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, Meanwhile, a big reorg is said to be on the way. All the while, Yahoo shares continue to get slammed. But even before the Schachter news, Yahoo had suffered through the resignations of several high-profile execs. What’s behind the rush for the exits? Is there a common theme or is it just happenstance?

How did Yahoo become such a loser company in anyone’s mind other than the idiotic investors who usually don’t seem to know what they’ve bought. Let’s have a little reality check about that big fat failure Yahoo supposedly is.

So is there also a contrarian case to be made against the naysayers? More than you might think, at first blush. For more, check out my interview with CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber.

“We are in the process of developing tools which are called ‘Claim Your Content,’” Schmidt said at the National Association of Broadcasters 2007 conference. “If people tell us this is a licensed copy, our computers will automatically detect that an illegal copy has been uploaded and then automatically delete it.”

Viacom, parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures, filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google last year. That case is expected to last years before being resolved and it could help decide what, if anything, a Web site’s responsibilities are when it comes to policing for copyright violations.

YouTube defended its efforts to protect copyright.

Google execs continue to say they respect copyright and are working to protect it. Schmidt said protecting copyright was in Google’s best interest.

Fans of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby can watch the “Mo cuishle” episode on YouTube as well as the coin toss scene from last year’s best picture winner No Country For Old Men.

Nonetheless, the controversy has damaged some of Google’s relationships in Hollywood.

Available on the site are literally countless clips from feature films and TV shows produced by small production companies as well as the largest entertainment conglomerates–including Viacom.

“We are critically dependent upon the production of copyright content,” Schmidt told the NAB audience a year ago. “Literally, people come to Google to get to somewhere where there is something of value. It’s very important that we not violate copyright.”

(Credit:
YouTube)

“Since launching in October, our Video Identification system has shown terrific results in its comprehensiveness, accuracy, and scalability,” a YouTube spokeswoman said in an e-mail. “Over 100 partners from independent content creators to large media companies are currently using Video ID to easily manage their content. Many have found it to be a helpful tool in generating revenue and exposure for their content in the world’s largest online video community.”

While copyright videos are still plentiful on YouTube, there are seemingly fewer complaints from Hollywood. The sources who are part of YouTube’s testing say the entertainment industry has shown a willingness to give YouTube time to improve filtering.

Schmidt went on to say YouTube was “close to turning this (system) on” and once that happened, copyright violation at the site “becomes a moot issue.” But following through on that promise has proven a challenge.

For a long time, numerous copyright owners accused YouTube and Google of profiting from piracy and deliberately dragging their feet in developing a way to cleanse the site. They argued that the availability of professionally created content–uploaded by users–is what draws people to YouTube and without that the site would lose much of its luster. YouTube has always denied the accusations.

Identifying video is not easy, YouTube execs have long said. About 10 hours of video is uploaded to the site every minute. In addition to policing an enormous volume of video, YouTube must first obtain high-quality copies so it can create a digital fingerprint of the film or show. Ideally, the automated system will recognize when someone uploads an unauthorized copy.

“Key into YouTube’s search field the names of the last five Academy Award winners in the best picture category and scenes from each will appear. Want to watch the first 10 minutes of the gangster flick, The Departed? They’re there.”

A copy of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's speech is available at YouTube

Key into YouTube’s search field the names of the last five Academy Award winners in the best picture category and scenes from each will appear. Want to watch the first 10 minutes of the gangster flick, The Departed? They’re there. Someone else posted a series of 12 separate scenes from the film, presumably to get around YouTube’s 10-minute clip limit.

Some content owners may have also concluded that some degree of piracy is inevitable.

Copyright clips abound
Certainly at this point, it’s hard to see much change at YouTube since launching Video ID.

LAS VEGAS–A year ago Wednesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt delighted an audience of TV and radio broadcasters when he promised to roll out a system that would mean the end of piracy at YouTube.

Executives with two entertainment companies that provide YouTube with feedback on its Video Identification system said the company’s filtering technology has fared well at times but is nowhere near perfect and overall test results are “inconclusive.” The sources, who requested anonymity because of the ongoing relationship with YouTube, added that managers at the video-sharing site continue to try and refine the system.

“We still see our content pop up on YouTube,” CNN.com Executive Producer Sandy Malcolm told the Associated Press this week. “You deal with it. You try to work with them on rights and things, but I don’t think you can completely stop it. You just try to beat the tide and try to get your content out as fast as you can.”

Coalition members have been trying to thwart the efforts of Conficker by pre-registering and locking up the domain names being used by the worm to distribute updates.

It also spreads via removable storage devices like USB drives, and network shares by guessing passwords and usernames, which is “causing it to spread like wild fire in the enterprise,” Jose Nazario, manager of security research for Arbor Networks, wrote on a company blog.

Over the past five days, Symantec has observed an average of 453,436 IP addresses infected per day with W32.Downadup.A and 1.7 million IP addresses infected per day with W32.Downadup.B, the company said in a blog posting.

The worm, which has been around since last year, spreads through a hole in Windows systems, exploiting a vulnerability that Microsoft patched in October.

Correction, 1:08 p.m. PST: This story initially misstated the amount of the reward. It is $250,000.

Microsoft on Thursday said it is offering a $250,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible for creating the
Conficker Internet worm that has infected millions of PCs.

Microsoft also announced that it has partnered with security companies, domain name providers, and others on a coordinated global response to the worm, also known as Downadup. Participating are: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), VeriSign, NeuStar, CNNIC, Afilias, Public Internet Registry, Global Domains International, M1D Global, AOL, Symantec, F-Secure, ISC, Georgia Tech, the Shadowserver Foundation, Arbor Networks, and Support Intelligence.

Microsoft said it is offering the reward because the worm constitutes a “criminal attack” and offering compensation should hasten prosecution. Residents of any country are eligible for the reward and should contact their international law enforcement authorities, the company said in a statement.

Infected machines, of which there could be as many as 12 million according to a guesstimate by Arbor Networks, could be used to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks on Web sites or seed a new worm, according to Symantec.

“W32.Downadup is the first successful worm to target a vulnerability in a remote service since W32.Sasser in 2004, and in doing so it has shown that the Internet is still a successful breeding ground for worms,” Symantec said.

“The worm seeks to update itself by using a long list of pseudo-randomly generated domain names to contact over HTTP and then grab new code,” Nazario wrote. “The algorithm for this domain name generation scheme has been cracked (by F-Secure and others) and has been used to pre-compute the names for pre-registration to prevent hostile parties from using this update feature. This has been facilitated - greatly facilitated - by ICANN, TLD operators, and various registrars working together with Microsoft and others to identify the names and grab the ones they need to. These records can then be pointed at sinkholes to discover Conficker-infected hosts checking in.”