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(Credit: Facebook Blog)
After the launch of Facebook Chat was promised last week, Facebook is finally rolling out the feature. Even though the release is limited at this time, Inside Facebook was lucky enough to get a look. It appears that the rollout is on a per-network basis, with reports coming in that many of the Ivy League schools and Stanford are among the first to have access.

While it is disappointing that Facebook Chat does not integrate with other IM services, it’s a smart move for Facebook. This will draw on Facebook’s huge user base and get a lot more people on their chat service. I wouldn’t be surprised if people tend to spend more time on Facebook as a result of the introduction of this new feature. Users may tend to keep a Facebook window open just for the purpose of sending and receiving instant messages. Instant messaging is already an overcrowded market, but I think that Facebook Chat adds a decent amount of value to the site.

Facebook's new chat feature

(Credit: Inside Facebook)

Unfortunately Facebook Chat has not yet rolled out in my network and I’m sure that a lot of you are in the same boat, but hopefully we will get to join the party soon. Who is seeing Facebook Chat live right now?

The chat feature is present on all of the Facebook pages and an IM window pops out when someone messages you. Conversation history is also integrated with Facebook Chat, but can be deleted if you choose to do so. Facebook has said that they are working on pulling other features of the site into Chat, such as having relevant mini-feed stories embedded into conversations.

Facebook Chat is the third prong of communication on Facebook, adding to the already existing Wall and Message features. Unlike most IM clients, it is built directly into the web page and is not a separate application. This is really comparable to the chat feature that Gmail has had for awhile, except it is exclusive to Facebook and does not integrate with third party instant messaging services.

But last year’s remarkably smooth, shortage-free launch of the original
iPhone undoubtedly has an impact too. This year, people are much more chill.

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

Disclosure: The CW is joint-owned by CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, CBS unit.

But who did show up, as evidenced by this picture taken with (naturally) my MacBook’s Webcam, is a broadcast operation from WPIX, the local affiliate of the TV network The CW.

Currently, there are only about five, and they’re a group of activists who are all together. Put in five more, and the snowball effect might start.

NEW YORK–It’s a lovely day here at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue and East 58th Street, at least so far. Temperatures are slated to hit 90 degrees within hours, and the short line for the iPhone 3G hasn’t gotten any longer. It comes out on Friday at 8 a.m., in just slightly less than three days.

I was explaining to a friend over breakfast this morning that I think there’s a critical-mass issue at hand; you need about 15 people in line to really get the ball rolling. Then would-be queuers will stop wavering and stake out a place to ensure that they get a phone on day 1.

There was no camera crew in sight, so it could be that the station just wants to have a choice spot carved out for Friday’s festivities. Or they could’ve been hunting for a story, only to find out that for the most part (the Waiting for Apples group notwithstanding), it’s still business as usual at the Apple store.

Blurry Webcam photo shows a network news truck, but no other hullabaloo, outside the Apple store on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

Tomorrow: The safe and easy way to create and share a Web-based calendar.

That got me thinking about the other useful features that Word makes difficult to find. Here are five neat tricks in Word 2003 and 2007 that you may not know about.

Add the current date to your documents in Word 2003 via the Date and Time options in the Field dialog box.

2: Change a document’s date automatically
I frequently reuse the same Word file, changing only the date and one or two other items. It’s simple enough to select the old date and start typing the new one until Word’s auto-fill feature kicks in to display the current date, which it adds when I press Enter. Now I save myself even those few keystrokes by using a Date and Time field set to the current date: Place the cursor where you want the date to appear, and in Word 2003, click Insert>Field. In Word 2007, choose the Insert tab and click Date & Time. In Word 2003, click Date in the Field names window. In both versions, choose your preferred date format. In Word 2007, check Update automatically. Finally, click OK.

3: Fit more text on a single page
In addition to the file backups you create yourself, Word keeps backups of the files you’ve opened recently by default. Still, there may be times when you want to print an archival copy of a lengthy Word document. Save paper by reformatting the document to fit more text per page.

Start by pressing Ctrl-A to select the entire file, and then in Word 2003, click Format>Font. In Word 2007, click the small arrow in the bottom-right corner of the Font section under the Home tab. Choose a smaller font size, though keep in mind that anything smaller than 6 points will be difficult to read without a magnifying glass.

1: Keep your paragraphs together
Too often Word breaks pages in exactly the wrong place, making printouts of your documents difficult to read. The Paragraph dialog box gives you more control over the appearance of your printouts. To open it in Word 2003, click anywhere in the paragraph and choose Format>Paragraph; in Word 2007, click the small arrow in the bottom-right corner of the Paragraph section under the ribbon’s Home tab. In both versions, check Keep with next (which is selected by default in Word 2003), and Keep lines together, which prevents a paragraph from being split between two pages. If you’d like a paragraph to begin a page, check Page break before.

If you don’t have a Manual duplex option in your printer settings, you can achieve the same effect by choosing Odd pages in the Print drop-down menu, then flip and collate the pages, return them to the paper tray, and click Even pages. Your printer may also have an option to print more than one page per sheet, though this option may render the text unreadable, so test it on a sample page before using it to print a long file.

Control the appearance of your printed documents by selecting these options under the Line and Page Breaks tab in Microsoft Word's Paragraph dialog box.

Tuesday, I described how to convert the outline of a Word document into a Powerpoint presentation automatically. I stated that this feature was missing in Word 2007, but Tim Anderson explained in his ITWriting blog that the function was still there, though you had to dig a little to find it: Click the Office icon in the top-left corner, choose Word Options at the bottom of the dialog, click Customize in the left pane, select All Commands in the Choose Commands From drop-down menu, scroll to and select Send to
Microsoft Office Powerpoint, and click Add to place this option in Word’s Quick Access toolbar, which appears just to the right of the Office icon.

Next, make the margins smaller by clicking File>Page Setup in Word 2003, or Page Layout>Margins>Custom Margins in Word 2007. Change the Top, Bottom, Left, and Right settings in Word 2007 to .16″, and in Word 2003, set Outside to 0.07″, Inside to 0.5″, Left to 0.25″, and Right to 0.25″. These are the smallest you can have while fitting all text on the printout.

4: Print on two sides of the paper
You can print on both sides of the paper even if your printer doesn’t support duplex printing by default, though you may have to flip and collate the paper yourself. In Word 2003, click File>Print; in Word 2007, click the Office icon and choose Print. If you see a “Manual duplex” option, select it and click OK. After the first side prints, you’ll be prompted to place the paper back into the input bin, blank side up. Do so and click OK again to print the second side.

Place the cursor where you want the new page to begin, and click Insert>Break>Next page>OK in Word 2003, or Insert>Page Break in Word 2007. Copy and paste the worksheet into the Word file, and repeat the steps to create another page break at the end of it. Now select the page, and in Word 2003, click File>Page Setup>Margins>Landscape; in Word 2007, choose Page Layout>Orientation>Landscape.

5: Place an object on its own page
Suppose you have an Excel worksheet you want to place on its own page in the middle of a Word document, and you want the page to print in landscape orientation while the rest of the document is in portrait mode. Piece of cake!

In August, HBGary has announced a partnership with McAfee to provide forensic tools for its enterprise offerings. HBGary specializes in monitoring information systems for external and internal threats.

In 2006, Purdy oversaw the first large-scale mock cyberattack, code-named Cyber Storm. A second mock attack, under Garcia, was held earlier this year.

On Wednesday, HBGary announced that Andy Purdy has joined their advisory board.

(Credit:
Andy Purdy)

Purdy, while a member of the White House, co-drafted the 2003 edition of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, then joined the Department of Homeland Security. There, he served on the tiger team that helped to form the National Cyber Security Division (NCSD) and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). He went to head both organizations and was dubbed by the media as the “cyberczar” of the United States until DHS appointed Greg Garcia as assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications.

Then the chip apparently went through a variety of significant design changes. It will still be the first Itanium to sport Intel’s serial processor communications link (QuickPath Interconnect–QPI) and integrated memory controllers. Those are both major enhancements, but otherwise Tukwila is a more conventional quad-core evolution of current Itanium designs. It will also be manufactured with a 65-nanometer process instead of the denser 45-nanometer process already used by the newest Intel Xeon CPUs. Along the way, the chip’s schedule has been publicly pushed back a number of times, now to early 2010.

During final system-level testing, we identified an opportunity to further enhance application scalability best optimized for high-end systems. This will result in a change to the Tukwila shipping schedule to Q1 2010.

commentary

In addition to better meeting the needs of our current Itanium customers, we believe this change will allow Tukwila systems a greater opportunity to gain share versus proprietary RISC solutions including Sparc and IBM Power. Tukwila is tracking to 2x performance vs its predecessor chip. This change is about delivering even further application scalability for mission critical workloads.

Intel has slipped out a revised schedule for its next-generation Itanium processor, code-named Tukwila. Again. This time it’s into 2010.

First, Intel changed the code-name to Tukwila after the Tanglewood Music Festival complained. This was back in 2003–to give you an idea of how long this particular project has been weaving its way through development. At that time, it was slated for something in the neighborhood of a 2007 release.

As a practical matter, delays to Itanium matter less to Intel and the server makers that use it (meaning Hewlett-Packard first and foremost) than in the case of x86 Xeon, where a delay of a few months can have a major revenue impact–vis-a-vis Advanced Micro Device’s Barcelona.

Intel released a statement Thursday on the schedule changes. It reads in part:

That may be true. However, the fact remains that this is yet another delay to the program. This will put Tukwila’s introduction more than two years after the debut of the current “Montvale” generation–which itself was a delayed and modest speedbump to “Montecito”–and one that Intel barely announced publicly.

Buyers of high-end servers like HP’s Superdome and NonStop value vendor relationships, reliability, and a wide range of enterprise-class capabilities far more than they do the last drop of performance. HP has done a good job of things like leveraging its c-Class BladeSystem infrastructure for its Itanium-based Integrity servers and putting together systematic go-to-market programs with partners such as SAP.

Tukwila has had an especially bumpy history. This generation of Itanium processor began life as a chip project code-named Tanglewood and was said to be envisioned as a radical multicore design by the ex-Digital Equipment Alpha engineers who worked on it.

Nonetheless, at some point, ongoing delays have to hurt competitiveness–especially given how IBM’s Power systems have been hitting on all cylinders the past few years.

Last week, another session on Apple FileVault was pulled at the request of its presenter, Charles Edge. He reportedly signed an agreement with Apple preventing him from talking about the vulnerablities he’d found.

Click here for full coverage of Black Hat 2008.

LAS VEGAS–A panel discussion with Apple employees talking about the company’s security practices was canceled by its moderator.

Black Hat founder and director Jeff Moss told ComputerWorld that “it was them talking about security engineering and how they take security seriously. It would have put Apple in a positive light.”

Then while eating lunch, a colleague pointed out this commentary by Mike Masnick at TechDirt and I laughed so hard I nearly passed a cheese sandwich through my nostrils:

There is a history to overcome. The movie and recording industries have been so willfully stupid about coexisting with new technology for so long that you knew this was coming. Truth be told, it’s hard to feel sorry about the extent of the popular blowback, even when it reaches such silly extremes. What’s more, Schumpeter was right about capitalism’s creatively destructive tendencies and Hollywood will have to figure out how to survive in a new era where technology can be its best friend or worst enemy.

“While the folks back in Hollywood have acting (sic) as though people with camcorders were a huge threat to the movie business, it appears that some folks outside of the Hollywood machine recognize that it’s not such a bad thing at all…In fact, it appears his only real problem is that the quality of recording isn’t so great, though he notes that hopefully this will drive more people to the theater to see a better quality version. It’s nice to see more folks in the movie business recognizing that unauthorized copies aren’t the end of the world.

Ah, now that’s more like it. Though back in the real world, I very much doubt most directors would be sanguine to learn that a goofball had ripped off their latest film. Unfortunately, creative people are unfairly paying for the sins of their corporate masters.

Torrent Freak offered a translation of the comments made by the director, Harald Zwart, to the Nettavisen.no:

“A Norwegian master of B moviemaking is thrilled someone would actually invest the time and effort to rip off one of his schlock extravaganzas so that the Porky’s crowd won’t have to do without this spring…and so on and so forth.”

They're not long and flat, but they're balls.

“I think it’s perfectly fine that some people choose to post the movie online. It shows that people are interested in it. In the IT society of today it’s naive to think that this wouldn’t happen. We consider it a huge compliment. After all, what has happened is that someone has smuggled a camera into a theater and then recorded the whole movie.”

OK, whatever. To each his own, I say. And I’m obviously having sport at Zwart’s expense. He’s not going to be confused with Bergmann or Felini but he is signed up to do a Pink Panther sequel in 2009.

So far the recording moguls have made nearly all the wrong moves. Maybe their cross-town neighbors will have better luck.

(Credit: Lizjones112 on Flickr)

As TechDirt is wont to say, that is straight from the, “exception-which-proves-the rule department.” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would have loved that business model. Since it’s so uncool to be proprietary anymore, I’m sure the blog’s everythingshouldbefree-meister won’t mind a mild rewrite of that terribly tendentious lede. To wit:

A director from Norway, whose movie credits include the critically acclaimed Agent Cody Banks as well as the unforgettable, One Night at McCool’s is thrilled someone thought so highly of his latest work as to pirate his latest oeuvre, Long Flat Balls 2. (Unfortunately, I missed the classic which preceded it.)

I would add one more thing: get your product into users’ hands.

The SOA (service-oriented architecture) marketplace has been a morass of vendor-speak, focused on selling software stacks instead of addressing the core issue, which is how to develop a cohesive architecture that will scale with your organization.

An SOA approach is as much about initial design as it is about refinement. A user needs to be able to try the products out and see if they work for their use-case before they are forced to choke down a massive license fee.

Over at InfoWorld, Dave Linthicum highlights five things that SOA vendors should know.
1. Make sure your product works.
2. Make sure you know what SOA is.
3. Get wise about the approach to SOA.
4. Don’t sell yourself as “one stop SOA shopping.”
5. Consider the future.

One of the inherent advantages of open source is that a product is available for download. Some vendors, like Oracle, make their whole SOA suite available for download, whereas other companies, like Software AG, make components available, and still others, like HP and SOA Software, make you pay before you get to do anything.

The more acquisitions, the more product confusion and the less ability for an end-user to figure out if the products serve their needs.

One of the primary purposes of a traditional protest is to educate the general public about a particular injustice or situation of concern. People along the street who aren’t involved in the demonstration are exposed to the chants, literature, and picket signs, and are forced to think critically about an issue they may not otherwise be focused on. News of the cyber-dissident demonstration will likely only travel by way of those who chose to report on it.

I’m a strong supporter of Reporters Without Borders. In the interest of full disclosure, the organization has been a strong advocate on my behalf in the past, but I have to question the effectiveness of this particular campaign. I highly doubt the Internet enemy countries will be moved by the demonstration, and few people outside those participating will ever even know about the protest, so I’m unsure who exactly Reporters Without Borders hopes to sway by this initiative.

(Credit: Reporters Without Borders)
In some parts of the world, such as the United States, the Internet is a relatively safe means to communicate and discuss controversial or unpopular subjects. Unfortunately this isn’t the case in all countries, and journalists, activists, and other outspoken individuals continue to be threatened and imprisoned at an alarming rate.

A similar event was held last year and attracted 40,000 participants. Though I’m not very optimistic about how effective this protest will be, I do plan to take part in this year’s demonstration and will provide an update from the virtual protest Wednesday.

In conjunction with the protest, Reporters Without Borders will release a new version of its Handbook for Cyber-dissidents, and an update to the organization’s list of “Internet enemies.” Though it wasn’t made clear on the site, it seems this updated list would likely correspond to the nine targets announced for the protest.

Update: An account of Wednesday’s protest has been posted to mediasphere.

If the 24-hour online demo had an embeddable component that visitors could post on their own blogs and profiles, then it seems like the campaign might stand a better chance of influencing more people and catalyzing some form of real change.

According to Reporters sans frontieres (Reporters Without Borders), there are 63 people around the world who are currently in prison for using the Internet to exercise their freedom of expression. Forty-nine of the imprisoned cyber-dissidents are from China; seven are from Vietnam, and two are from Syria. Libya, Jordan, Egypt, and Burma are each holding one person for online speech activities.

In an effort to “denounce government censorship of the Internet and to demand more online freedom,” (Credit: Reporters Without Borders)
Reporters Without Borders is organizing a 24-hour online demonstration on Wednesday and officially recognizing the date as Online Free Expression day. The protest will begin at 3:00 a.m. PT; those in attendance will be invited to build an avatar, write a message for their virtual picket sign and descend on one of nine “Internet enemies” (Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam).

The fact that John took the time to address this is an example of high-quality, new-school marketing. If you are not part of the conversation you are irrelevant.

Dave,

Allow me to offer my perspective on your opinions on our latest acquisitions being “off strategy”.

Specifically, your comments re:

At this point, what is Novell? It’s clearly not an open source company.
====
Response:

We’ve never tried to position Novell as solely an open source company. We are an infrastructure software company with a mixed portfolio of open source and open standards based software. While we may all prefer a world where the entire software stack that customers need to run their businesses be based on open source technologies…it’s simply not a reality of most if not all customer environments (today). Accordingly, we offer technologies that solve certain problems independent of the business model that created and licenses them. We clearly believe, as do you, in the power of the open source model and are major contributors to it. But it’s inaccurate to suggest that Novell acquisitions that aren’t pure open source are off strategy or ill founded.

We are positioning Novell as the leader in interoperability….and as you know we strongly believe the preferred operating system platform be Linux…yes SUSE Linux….and we also offer a portfolio of up the stack IT management solutions….yes most NOT open source developed or based. So the message from us is how we help clients leverage and extend their IT investments…not rip and replace. Again I respect your point of view, given your passion for MuleSource, for open source as the answer to all….we just don’t think the market is quite there yet.

Neither of the recent Novell acquisitions:
-Have a large volume of customers
-Are open source
-Have complimentary architectures (I think they are both Java but not sure)
==
Response:

SiteScape. This acquisition has been very well received by clients and the analysts who cover the collaboration space. It also has very significant roots in open source (ICEcorp project http://www.sitescape.com/products/icecore.php), a commitment we will maintain and extend. It’s not the largest acquisition we have made but it’s very important to our Groupwise franchise and was a logical next step in the partnership we had previously with SiteScape.

PlateSpin. I’ve said a lot about this….more at http://www.novell.com/company/blogs/cmo/

This is VERY on strategy for us. With this acquisition, we’ll extend our next generation data center capabilities by giving customers the ability to manage workloads across both physical and virtual infrastructures. It very nicely compliments our virtualization platform (SUSE Linux with XEN) and our management tools (ZENworks Orchestrator). PlateSpin has been sold to a “a large volume of customers” and now we have a solution that the over 2 million SUSE virtual servers in the market place can take advantage of (not to manage VMware, Citrix, Virtual Iron, Microsoft, etc).

Finally….I’m fine if you find it entertaining or instructive to “pick on ” (your words) Novell on your podcasts. I’ll just use, as you are, the open forum to react to opinion represented as fact.

Thanks

John Dragoon
Novell
CMO Link: John Dragoon’s Blog

I appreciate that John Dragoon, Novell’s CMO commented on my post about the company’s recent acquisitions. Had I read his blog earlier I probably would have had more insight. And really, I have no desire to pick on Novell…it’s just an easy target :>

The post is here, the full comment below for your reading pleasure.