Despite speaks of Symbian Carla and even Symbian Donna in the works for current and new devices alike, it now appears that the successor to the Nokia N8 might be the last new Symbian device we shall see from the Finns.

Nokia had originally promised continued support for Symbian following their plans to switch to Windows Phone as their primary OS last Mobile World Congress, with the intention of selling 150 million more Symbian devices before completely phasing the OS out.

It would seem their good intentions did not inspire enough Symbian fans out there and as such last month Nokia admitted that sales of Symbian devices were falling faster than they had anticipated (no doubt due in part to the aggressive promotion of Nokia Windows Phones).

Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop blamed the lackluster figures on ever-changing and increasingly difficult market conditions, influenced in particular by the demand for lower cost smartphones.

“We now believe that we will sell fewer Symbian devices than we anticipated,” he explained.

Outside of the passionate Symbian fan base, Nokia’s move to hasten the demise of the platform also has implications for a number of key partners as well.

Accenture acquired some 3000 Symbian developers from the Finnish mobile giant last summer and it would appear that now such a resource will be seldom used. A particularly sticky situation for Accenture who’s agreement ties them into providing continued Symbian development until 2016.

ST Ericsson hinted at Nokia’s unstable Symbian sales figures in guidance to their investors issued last week. The company cited a “very significant decline” in net sales expected this quarter as a result of a reduction, in the short term, of new product sales with one of our largest customers.”

We will have to wait and see how this news develops as there is still time for the trend to change, but is it too little, too late?

source : www.gsmarena.com

Even allowing for the warmer year with Heating Degree Days (about 820 in 2011 for us compared to a more typical 1,100, and a whopping 1,481 in 2010), I could see a small further improvement in heating efficiency last year. Some will have come from the aerogel insulation in my boy’s room, but one more gadget had not yet had time to contribute by this year end…

To save energy at home, you need not just better insulation, but also better air-tightness to avoid leaking warm air to the outside, especially in an icy gale.

Somehow at the same time it is important to maintain decent ventilation to avoid condensation, stuffiness and frankly a build up of pong (my youngest’s nappies were all the evidence you needed).

But this ventilation can’t just be ‘unplanned’ or ‘accidental’ via leaky walls or constantly open windows in the winter, so efficient buildings often use mechanical heat-recovery ventilation (MHRV) which forces stale air out, pulls fresh air in, and transfers the heat from the outgoing to the incoming air to get the ideal of both worlds. The same principle of countercurrent heat exchange grants penguins to stand on the ice and yet not have blood return to their hearts icy cold!

Because our house will probably always be too leaky for a whole-house MHRV system like the huge boys have, and because I’m kinda cheap, I have installed a single-room MHRV (a Vent-Axia HR25H) in our bathroom. It does seem to keep the air upstairs fresh without opening windows, and air is brought in at remarkably close to room temperature, but it is not helping as much as I’d hoped to keep humidity and condensation down overnight with all of us snoring away (up to 80 per cent relative humidity at night: recommended levels are 30%RH–60%RH).

Partly I’m tackling the humidity coming from the kitchen by putting on a portable dehumidifier in there (for example when laundry is drying) which is a lot more energy-efficient than the tumble dryier and also provides heat somewhere between electric and gas heating in terms of CO2 per kWh to the room.

It may also be time very soon to replace all or almost all of our ageing double-glazing with triple glazing to take away the cold surfaces for the condesation to form, plus continuing to superinsulate a bit at a time to make sure damp does not form on (or in) the exterior walls.

In summer we will just turn the MHRV off and have windows open as usual!

I continue to monitor the temperature with iButton sensors (read via OWFS on Linux on my SheevaPlug) in and around the boy’s room to keep an eye on insulation performance. Late January’s graph:

end-January iButton temperature strip-chart (click to enlarge)

shows the heating down when we were away a few days over Christmas. Also, after Christmas, it shows a higher daily minimum temperature and more stability since we are no longer throwing open windows in the morning to vent the fog now that we have the MHRV purring away 24×7.

Next page: Solar thermal, pumping heat

source : go.theregister.com

HP has also come out with their new 15.6-inch notebook, the Pavilion dv6-6c00. The machine sports 15.6-inch 1366 x 768 LCD display, a 2.40GHz Intel Core i3-2370M processor, an Intel HM65 Express Chipset, a 2GB DDR3 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, a DVD Super Multi Drive and runs on Windows 7 Home Premium OS. Price is set at 42,000 Yen (about $548). [HP]

source : feedproxy.google.com

Samsung, who alongside their mobile devices are famed for a pretty reputable display manufacturing arm, have joined forces with Corning, ideal known for their super scratch an shatter resistant Gorilla Glass, which features on a vast number of smartphones and tablets currently on the market.

Corning stress testing some of their most impressive works

The two names are planning to develop and manufacture a new specialty glass substrate to accommodate the fast expanding OLED market, under the product name of ‘Lotus Glass’.

Samsung already have some fine examples of OLED technology under their belt, including the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S II’s Super AMOLED Plus and of course their range of OLED tvs too.

The combined forces of these two names will produce an OLED backpane glass substrate for use by Samsung and, as the press release says “the broader Korean market”, which could involve the buy of such a product to companies like LG.

The reasoning behind the joint venture is thanks in-part to Samsung’s previous already prevalent presence in the display market.

OLED technology-based revenue was expected to exceed $4 billion in 2011 and by 2018 is expected to reach more than $20 billion (or approximately 16% of the total display industry).

So anticipate the pair to be riding high within the mobile display market over the next few years as this match, looks to be made in heaven.

Keep on reading for the official press release:

Corning and Samsung Mobile Display Form New OLED Glass Venture New business expands Cornings long-standing collaboration with Samsung

CORNING, N.Y., February 02, 2012 Corning Incorporated (NYSE: GLW) and Samsung Mobile Display Co., Ltd. have signed an agreement to establish a new equity venture for the manufacture of specialty glass substrates for the rapidly expanding organic light emitting diode (OLED) device market. The new business will be located in Korea.

Combining Cornings Lotus Glass substrate technology and Samsung Mobile Displays OLED display expertise, this new entity will be well-positioned to provide outstanding product solutions for current and future OLED technologies, from handheld and IT devices to massive TVs and beyond.

The newly formed entity will supply OLED backplane glass substrates for Samsung Mobile Display, as well as for the broader Korean market.

According to a recent NPD DisplaySearch report, OLED technology advanced rapidly in 2011, setting a trend that is forecasted to continue through this decade. They estimate that OLED display revenues will exceed $4 billion in 2011 (approximately 4% of flat panel display revenues), and will reach more than $20 billion (approximately 16% of the total display industry) by 2018.

Samsung is playing a leading role in this emerging market through its Galaxy mobile device products and Super OLED TV technology introduced in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show. Cornings on-going advanced glass technology development includes a strong focus on high-performance displays. Most recently, this focus has been demonstrated through Cornings new Lotus Glass substrates, which deliver the higher processing temperatures and improved dimensional stability needed to produce the new high performance displays.

“Samsung Mobile Display has led the global display industry by constantly seeking innovations and challenging current technologies’ limits. We are confident that combining our business powers with Corning’s technology leadership will deliver greater value to our clients, said Soo In Cho, Samsung Mobile Displays president and chief executive officer.

Corning and Samsung have a long and successful partnership in the display industry, dating back almost 40 years to the early days of television, said Wendell P. Weeks, Cornings chairman, chief executive officer, and president. The strength of our business relationship is built on Cornings capability to develop and make high-technology glass with the key attributes that enable Samsungs next-generation displays. Together, we have led the evolution of displays from the high-growth years of CRT, to our current successful business supplying world-leading substrates for todays high-definition LCD TVs, and now to the launch of this important new venture to advance OLED technology, Weeks stated.

source : www.gsmarena.com

For one thing, every time a user logs into Facebook they are presented with a promise: Facebook is “free and always will be”. Presumably “always” includes “post-IPO.”

But we do not have to take Facebook’s word for it. It’s in Facebook’s self-interest not to charge users. To encourage users to congregate on its service, Facebook cannot afford to scare them away with entrance fees, especially since using Facebook doesn’t have obvious monetary value to the users. It’s a way to connect with friends, colleagues and other people, and the more they connect, the higher their business value to advertisers wishing to reach them through Facebook.

Tinsley speculates that he “would happily spend a small amount of money each month to get an even more optimized user experience” – perhaps correcting Facebook’s “ad overload, slow feature rollouts, and a lack of customizable options”. But I’ve never actually heard anyone complain about ad overload (and as an Adblock Plus user, I’ve never seen a Facebook ad); if anything, people complain when Facebook changes the layout or swaps out features that they had grown accustomed to.

Perhaps people would pay to have Facebook stay exactly the same forever and ever?

Even if so, they are out of luck. It’s simply not in Facebook’s DNA to charge users for the service, whatever the other arguments in favour of this move might be. In the letter he wrote to accompany Facebook’s S-1, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg speaks about his aspiration “to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries”.

In other words, as important as money may be, it’s not his guiding principle. And if history is any guide, it will not become such. Lest we forget, Zuckerberg will still own Facebook post-IPO, given the controlling shares he will retain.

The ideal companies of the past 10 years have been those that have stayed true to their ideals. Companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Red Hat (Twitter, too, though it still has a ways to go to prove out its vision). These are companies that remain a bit aloof from Wall Street, dictating terms to The Street rather than following the herd in bleating out quarterly numbers.

Red Hat has long insisted on a relatively pure message of open source and open standards for enterprise infrastructure software. I’ve never seen this message waver, in public or private. Could the company sacrifice its ideals a bit to hawk a proprietary product? Sure. But instead we see the company acquiring proprietary code and open sourcing it, as Red Hat recently did with GlusterFS.

Amazon has invested heavily in infrastructure, at perilously low margins, since its inception, much to the chagrin of investors. And yet in so doing Amazon has set the bar to competition in retail so high that it’s difficult to see how others can compete. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has kept the company’s gears set to high growth for a long, long time, and it works. Amazon doesn’t have it in its DNA to be a high-margin business, anymore than Apple can be a low-margin business.

And then there is Google, which is at a crossroads.

Google has stayed pretty true to its mantra of organising the world’s information. But lately it has been tempted to compromise its role as neutral arbiter of information.

Whenever Google does veer from this ideal, as I’d argue it has with Google+, it doesn’t really work. Such products feel as if Google’s heart is not really in them. It’s worth watching to see if Google’s attempts to corral all user information into one central database, with all the potential for “evil” inherent in such a move, will ultimately sow the seeds of user discontent and abdication of Google’s services.

If Google sheds its essential Google DNA, providing neutral guidance to the world’s content, it will fail.

Back to Facebook. Zuckerberg’s company is all about friction-less sharing, which is inimical to high-friction paywalls and other such schemes. The ideal place to scout for Facebook’s revenue growth is in the social traits that have made it so wildly popular, and so stubbornly resistant to selling out its users for a mess of Wall Street pottage. ®

Matt Asay is senior vice president of business development at Nodeable, offering systems management for managing and analysing cloud-based data. He was formerly SVP of biz dev at HTML5 start-up Strobe and chief operating officer of Ubuntu commercial operation Canonical. With more than a decade spent in open source, Asay served as Alfresco’s general manager for the Americas and vice president of business development, and he helped put Novell on its open source track. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). His column, Open…and Shut, appears three times a week on The Register.

source : go.theregister.com

By Lucian Constantin | IDG News Service

The PHP Group released PHP 5.3.10 on Thursday in order to address a critical security flaw that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on servers running an older version of the Web development platform.

The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2012-0830 and was discovered by Stefan Esser, an independent security consultant and creator of the popular Suhosin security extension for PHP.

[ The Web browser is your portal to the world -- as well as the conduit that lets in many security threats. InfoWorld's expert contributors show you how to secure your Web browsers in this "Web Browser Security Deep Dive" PDF guide. ]

SecurityFocus classifies the issue as a design error because it was accidentally introduced while fixing a separate denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability in early January.

That vulnerability is known as CVE-2011-4885 and was disclosed in December 2011 at the Chaos Communication Congress by security researchers Alexander Klink and Julian Wälde.

It affects a number of Web development platforms including PHP, ASP.NET, Java and Python and can be exploited in a so-called hash collision attack. The PHP development team addressed CVE-2011-4885 in PHP 5.3.9, which was released on Jan. 10.

“The fix for the Hash Collision DoS introduced a new directive (max_input_vars) to limit the number of accepted input variables,” stated Carsten Eiram, chief security specialist at vulnerability research firm Secunia.

This error can be exploited by attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on a system that runs a vulnerable PHP installation. PHP 5.3.9 along with any older versions for which the hash collision DoS patch was backported, are affected, Eiram said.

Proof-of-concept code that exploits this vulnerability has already been published online, so the likelihood of attacks targeting CVE-2012-0830 are high. Web servers administrators are advised to upgrade to PHP 5.3.10 immediately.

source : www.infoworld.com

HP has released their new 17.3-inch notebook in Japan, the Pavilion dv7-6c00. The system offers a 17.3-inch 1600 x 900 LCD display, an Intel Core i5/i7 processor, an Intel HM65 Express Chipset, a Radeon HD 7470M 1GB GPU, a 2GB DDR3 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, a DVD Super Multi Drive and runs on Windows 7 Home Premium OS. Price starts at 49,980 Yen (about $656). [HP]

source : feedproxy.google.com

Froyo comes in a comfortable second, despite slipping 2.6 percent points to share. At this point most of the phones that were meant to get Gingerbread updates have already gotten those, so the Froyo share will probably only be influenced by new sales and phones reaching the end of their lives from now on.

Android is the third most popular release of the platform – its market share diminished by 0.9 percent points, but were enough for the bronze medal.

Honeycomb comes in next, its three revisions gaining just 0.1 percent point this month, but still securing 3.4% market share.

Android’s latest and greatest – 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich is only the fifth most widespread release of the popular platform. Still, it gained 0.4 percent points of market share in January – not bad for a platform that is only officially available on a couple of smartphones and one slate.

3.1 Honeycomb

3.2 Honeycomb

4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

4. Ice Cream Sandwich

The Android and releases are still on the map, though with shares of 1% and respectively, they are bound to disappear sooner, rather than later.

source : www.gsmarena.com

The company has been boasting that the serious chunk of change took a mere three weeks to raise the funding, and another six weeks to complete the formalities.

The in-trend VC firm has had its hand in investing, in various stages, a bunch of hot young digital darlings about town including Facebook, Airbnb, Foursquare, Pinterest, Skype, Twitter and Zynga.

In a detailed blog post, Ben Horowitz stated the group’s Midas touch hinges on building an exceptional and broad network of people from financiers to engineers, and training up entrpreneuers into “the ideal possible CEOs possible”.

“We are uniquely positioned to help the greatest technology entrepreneurs in the world build the ideal technology companies in the world, and that’s just what we’re going to do,” he wrote.

The well-connected social networkers claim that in 2011, they hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at their office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.

“We’ve built relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, and we’ve made more than 1,300 introductions to our portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio. We added over 550 executives to our network in 2011 and made more than 300 executive introductions to our portfolio companies. We’ve had almost 400 interactions with media on behalf of our portfolio companies,” Horowitz adds. ®

source : go.theregister.com

In the 10-Q filing, the company stated that it suffered multiple data breaches during 2010, and that data was stolen. Exactly what is missing the company isn’t saying, even though it believes it was unrelated to the company’s DNS servers. Senior management weren’t told of the attacks until September 2011, the filing claims, but security reporting procedures have since been revamped.

“The Company’s information security group was aware of the attacks shortly after the time of their occurrence and the group implemented remedial measures designed to mitigate the attacks and to detect and thwart similar additional attacks,” the filing reads.

“However, given the nature of such attacks, we can’t assure that our remedial actions will be sufficient to thwart future attacks or prevent the future loss of information. In addition, even though the Company is unaware of any situation in which possibly exfiltrated information has been used, we are unable to assure that such information was not or could not be used in the future.”

The company doesn’t state in the filing if the attacks were related to the wave of corporate hacks around that time, thought to originate from China, which took down some of the biggest names in the business, or if they are related to the attack on RSA’s SecureID system.

Symantec, which purchased Verisign’s security business in 2010 for $1.28bn, told The Register that it was confident that the security services were not compromised in the attack.

“Symantec takes the security and proper functionality of its solutions very seriously,” stated the company in an emailed statement. “The Trust Services (SSL), User Authentication (VIP) and other production systems acquired by Symantec were not compromised by the corporate network security breach mentioned in the Verisign quarterly filing.” ®

source : go.theregister.com