Barence writes "Netbooks are more likely to fail within the first year than their more expensive laptop brethren, according to new research. SquareTrade, an independent US warranty provider, analyzed the failure rates of more than 30,000 laptops covered by its own warranties. It found that 5.8% of netbooks malfunctioned within the first year, compared to 4.7% for regular laptops and 4.2% for premium laptops costing more than $1,000. The research also raises question marks over the legendary reliability of Macs. Three PC manufacturers — Asus, Toshiba, and Sony — boasted better reliability rates than Apple. Macs have a 17.4% malfunction rate over three years, compared to market-leader Asus, which has a 15.6% failure rate. HP was the worst of the nine PC vendors listed, with a malfunction rate of 25.6% over three years."

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eldavojohn writes "Were you negatively affected by the recent ban on Xbox Live for modifying hardware you own? Did you modify yours for homebrew or altering things you paid for and not to engage in piracy? Abington IP would like to hear from you and may be able to help. From that page: 'If you are an Xbox Live subscriber, had your modified Xbox console banned from Xbox Live, were not refunded a prorated sum for the time left on your subscription, or have experienced other problems as a result of being banned, and would like to participate in a class action against Microsoft, please submit your information below.' Someone is finally standing up for the legitimate hobbyists. Should Microsoft worry?"

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College isn't cheap these days, even if you're attending public university. In that case, pretty much any discount offered to students is welcome. Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has just announced that it's offering a special discount on the full Office 2008 Business Edition for US college students, offering them a 70 percent discount off the usual retail price. Even if you're not a college student, though, the Mac BU is offering a range of "holiday" discounts on Office as well.

Office 2008 for Mac comes in two different editions. The Home & Student Edition includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage, and usually sells for $149.95. The Business Edition, includes Entourage Web Services Edition, which is compatible with Exchange, as well as Document Connection for Mac, Automator actions, templates, clip art, and more; it normally sells for $399.95.

Almost two-thirds of adults have broadband connections at home, but that's a long way from the ultimate goal: universal adoption of high speed Internet throughout the United States. Depending on which study you believe, we're everything from number 11 to 24 in international broadband penetration rankings.

So how do we get to somewhere near number one? The Federal Communications Commission's broadband task force has identified seven "gaps" or roadblocks along the path to the Holy Grail. The document doesn't offer any specific solutions to these problems. But the analysis offers clues as to where that National Broadband Plan the Commission has to crank out by February is going.

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Over the last two weeks, we've made improvements across Google Apps, some geared for individuals, others meant for business customers.

Green Robot icon in Gmail Labs
The green, orange and red chat bubbles in Gmail signal if your contacts are online, idle or unavailable, but as more people sign in from mobile devices, it's becoming harder to tell when someone is actually online at a computer or just connected with their phone. The Green Robot feature in Gmail Labs helps you spot when you might want to tailor your exchanges with more succinct messages for people who are signed in with Android-powered devices. Look for the green beaker icon at the top of Gmail to enable Green Robot and other Labs features.

Site templates
On Tuesday we launched templates for Google Sites. The templates gallery is filled with useful example sites ranging from wedding websites to corporate intranets, which you can copy and customize so they're just right. This lets you create a useful, visually appealing collaborative workspace in seconds. And if you have a great site other people would find useful, you can submit it to the gallery. If your business uses Google Sites, templates you submit stay private within your company.

More overflow storage for less
If you're using Google Apps to store photos and manage large volumes of personal email, you'll be happy to hear we're now offering more extra storage for less. Our new overflow storage plans start at $5 per year for 20 GB. For the most avid shutterbugs, the 16 TB plan is enough space for roughly 8 million high resolution pictures!

Improvements to Sync for Outlook
Last week, we released an update to Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, our tool that lets companies stop running Microsoft Exchange while still letting some employees use the familiar Outlook interface. Now, employees can sync multiple calendars between Outlook and Google Apps, and look up free/busy information from Exchange for co-workers who haven't migrated to Google Apps yet.

Google Apps Premier Edition innovation – Year in review
Businesses using Google Apps not only save money compared to running their own email systems, but also their employees get access to innovation at a much faster pace than with conventional business technologies. We've launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and on Thursday I hosted a webcast to recap noteworthy recent updates for businesses, including push email, contacts and calendar support for BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android, Sync for Microsoft Outlook, offline access and more. If you missed the webcast, you can watch it on YouTube.

Who's gone Google?
This week I'm pleased to welcome a new crop of companies, schools and public agencies that have recently switched to Google Apps, including Delta Hotels, Michigan State University, the City of Orlando and the Office of the New Mexico Attorney General. The Motorola Mobile Devices Division deployed Google Apps to its employees this week, and the Los Angeles City Council recently voted unanimously to move 30,000 city employees to Google Apps.

We hope these updates help you get even more from Google Apps. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

pickens writes "The EFF is reaching out for help after a company called Volomedia got the Patent Office to grant them exclusive rights to 'a method for providing episodic media' that could threaten the community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners. 'It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years,' writes Rebecca Jeschke. 'Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners.' To bust this patent, EFF is looking for additional 'prior art' — evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use (PDF) before November 19, 2003. 'In particular, we're looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes.'"

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An anonymous reader writes "I'm as much of a Linux fanboy as anyone else, but I've never thought of anything in computing as being worth a Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently, there are those who take global collaboration seriously, though..." The suggestion has been bouncing around the Portland Linux community, where Torvalds lives. Is it worthy of wider attention and discussion?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week, Google released an update to Google Chrome Frame. Version 4.0.245.1 is available and all users should be updated automatically, according to Google Chrome Releases. The release fixes issues where the plugin would not follow redirects properly, where network requests would fail randomly, and where it would freeze IE8 intermittently. What really caught our eye though, was the security fix that's included in the release, and especially who gets the credit for finding it:

An anonymous reader writes "It's great that unelected bureaucrats in California are clamoring to save energy, but when they target your big-screen TVs for elimination, consumers and manufacturers are apt to declare war. CEDIA and the CEA are up in arms over this. Audioholics has an interesting response that involves setting the TVs in 'SCAM' mode to meet the energy criteria technically without having to add additional cost or increase costs to consumers. 'In this mode, the display brightness/contrast settings would be set a few clicks to the right of zero, audio would be disabled and backlighting would be set to minimum. The power consumption should be measured in this mode much like an A/V receiver power consumption is measured with one channel driven at full rated power and the other channels at 1/8th power.' This is an example of an impending train wreck of unintended consequences, and many are grabbing the popcorn and pulling up chairs to watch."

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After Internet Explorer 9 was officially announced this week and a few tidbits on the release were shared by Microsoft, we had the opportunity to talk to Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer, to prod him for a little more information. 

The overriding theme for IE9, he told us, is delivering a great browser for everyone, especially for developers. The big areas Microsoft is targeting with this release are performance, interoperable standards, and text and graphics. While Hachamovitch made sure not to talk more about IE9 beyond what was already revealed at PDC09, he was quite happy to answer a few of our more general questions regarding Internet Explorer's future.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found several security holes in popular Firefox extensions that have an estimated total of 30 million downloads from AMO (the Addons Mozilla community site). Three 0-days were also released. Mozilla doesn't have a security model for extensions and Firefox fully trusts the code of the extensions. There are no security boundaries between extensions and, to make things even worse, an extension can silently modify another extension." The affected extensions are Sage version 1.4.3, InfoRSS 1.1.4.2, and Yoono 6.1.1 (and earlier versions). Clearly the problem is larger than just these three extensions.

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Outland Traveller writes "In a move that continues to shake the Second Life community of content creators, merchants, and consumers, Linden Labs has declared that free virtual content will no longer be searchable without listing payments on their website portal; and additional fees will be added with the intention of discouraging content listed for inexpensive selling prices. The move is particularly troubling because the online Web listing service is the de facto search engine for virtual content in Second Life, since the in-world search tools are unable to provide information about an object beyond name and location — basic textual descriptions, pictures, or descriptions of licensing, size, or content-category are not possible. While initially the change was explained as a response to community feedback, the residents involved in this feedback process were revealed to be fewer than 100 in number, primarily larger merchants among a community of millions. Within 24 hours of the announcement, the feedback thread has swelled to over 1,000 overwhelmingly negative responses. Additionally, in-world protests have erupted throughout the day, and over 20,000 objects have been voluntarily removed from the online store by angered merchants." Read on for more details on the brouhaha.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW — Unless you were hiding under a rock for most of the day yesterday, you're aware by now that Google held a press event at which the search giant pulled back the curtain on ChromeOS, the OS that's really a browser (and is based on the browser that's really an OS). The search giant announced that it is open-sourcing the OS, and described in detail much of its nature and function.

In this article, we'll recap only a few of the highlights of the announcement, because the news has been covered exhaustively elsewhere. Our main focus here is to provide some analysis and context, and to think about what ChromeOS means.

AdamWill writes "After the controversy over Fedora 12's controversial package installation authentication policy, including our discussion this week, the package maintainers have agreed that the controversial policy will be tightened to require root authentication for trusted package installation. Please see the official announcement and the development mailing list post for more details."

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When school media specialists and educators make an effort to become familiar with the social-networking web sites and technologies that today's students use each day, they can forge important learning connections with their students: That was one of the key messages to come out of the American Association of School Librarians' annual conference, held Nov. 5-8 in Charlotte, N.C. Key words: educational technology, AASL, library media specialist, school library, school media center, 21st century learning

Three school districts and a coalition of charter schools have agreed to be test kitchens for some radical ideas for improving teacher quality -- from paying new teachers to spend another year practicing before getting their own class to letting student test scores affect teacher pay. Key words: Bill and Melinda Gates, educational technology, school technology, school funding, teacher quality, Gates Foundation

Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that a federal judge has ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers — and thus the US government — is liable for a big chunk of the damage caused when hurricane Katrina pushed ashore on August 29, 2005 by failing to stop the natural widening of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet canal (aka Mr. Go) causing it to eventually bump up against the shore of Lake Borgne, on the city's east side. 'It is the court's opinion that the negligence of the corps, in this instance by failing to maintain the MR-GO properly, was not policy, but insouciance, myopia, and shortsightedness,' wrote US District Court Judge Stanwood Duval. Judge Duval said he believed it was the failure to shore up the outlet that 'doomed the channel to grow to two to three times its design width' allowing waves on Lake Borgne to enter the Mr. Go and travel into the east side of the city, battering the levees to a degree to which they were not designed. 'One of the greatest catastrophes in the history of the US' was both predictable and preventable, testified veteran Louisiana geologist Sherwood Gagliano, a former Corps consultant."

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The Younger Dryas period was an era of extinctions and ecosystem change that occurred just prior to the end of the last ice age. It's also a hot area of research right now, with some researchers suggesting that a comet or meteor struck the earth over North America, killing off megafauna like mammoths and mastodons. That prompted a response that suggested the evidence for an impact might just be a product of bad lab techniques. Now, a new study is out that tracks the decline of these giant herbivores using what the researchers term a "dung fungus." It turns out they may have been dying off well in advance of the Younger Dryas.

The problem with figuring out cause and effect when it comes to the events of the Younger Dryas is that so many things happened in a geological blink of an eye. The planet warmed rapidly about 15,000 years ago, bringing on the catchily named Bølling-Allerød warm period. But, instead of bringing the ice age to a close, the Younger Dryas arrived, returning glacial conditions to North America for over 1,000 years. The ice age didn't truly end until about 12,000 years ago. Somewhere during this climactic rollercoaster, humans arrived in North America in significant numbers, entire ecosystems that look nothing like the modern one came and vanished again, and every mammal that weighed more than 1,000kg went extinct—fully half of the mammals over 35kg died off, in fact.

Christmas Shopping writes with this excerpt from Kaspersky Labs' threatpost: "Back in September, when Google launched the Google Chome Frame plug-in for Internet Explorer users, Microsoft immediately warned that the move would increase the attack surface and make IE users less secure. Now comes word that a security researcher in the Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR) has discovered a 'high risk' security vulnerability that could allow an attacker to bypass cross-origin protections." "Google has hurried out a patch," he adds.

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thief21 writes "After claims that console versions Modern Warfare 2 had been recalled in Russia due to complaints from politicians and the gaming public over the infamous airport slaughter scene, it turns out the stories were completely untrue. Activision never released a console version of the game in Russia." Instead, they simply edited the notorious scene out of the PC version. They did this of their own volition, since Russia doesn't have a formal ratings committee.

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