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MacFixIt reports that fix should come with Mac OS X 10.5.3, currently in the works. AppleInsider has reported that Apple has been a little more active than usual with the release of new builds of 10.5.3 to developers, suggesting that the next version might arrive sooner rather than later. Mac OS X 10.5.2 shipped in February.

Apple has acknowledged video problems with the latest shipment of MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

Early customers of the Penryn refresh of the Apple notebooks had complained of flickering images during a QuickTime video playback on MacBooks and MacBook Pros shipping with the latest version of
Mac OS X Leopard, according to our colleagues over at MacFixIt. Several discussion threads have sprung up over on Apple’s user forums, and some customers report that Apple has now acknowledged the problem and is working on a fix.

After the account is confirmed, you’ll be asked whether you want to make this account a custom From address. This allows you to send mail from Gmail and make it appear to originate from that account. Click Yes if this sounds like something you might want to do.

I always think twice or even three times before I enter my e-mail address in a Web form. Even when the site gives me the option not to have any messages sent to the address (usually by unchecking the Web form’s “Notify me” entry that’s checked by default), I can’t help but think somehow, somewhere, some snake-oil salesman is going to get hold of my address.

Now I register at such sites using a separate e-mail account whose mail I filter out of my in-box. When I have to click a link in a confirmation e-mail to complete the registration, I simply look for the message in the folder I specified previously.

Add your throwaway account to Outlook via the Add New Email Account wizard.

Now add that account to your mail client. In Outlook 2007 and 2003, click Tools > Account Settings > New, choose “Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP, or HTTP,” and click Next. Add your account information on the next screen and click Next. Outlook will connect to the server automatically and send a test message.

Since I forward the mail sent to my ISP accounts to my Gmail in-box, I also need to keep messages sent to the throwaway account from cluttering that in-box. To add the account to Gmail, click Settings in the top-right corner, choose Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and select either Enable POP or Enable IMAP, whichever is appropriate for your account.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Keep mail sent to your throwaway account out of your Gmail in-box by selecting the bottom two options.

Once the account is in place, return to the Account Settings dialog box, select the account, and click the Change Folder button at the bottom of the window. Choose one of the existing folders, click New Folder, give the folder a name, click OK twice, and then Close.

When you need to access a confirmation e-mail sent to your throwaway address, just choose the label in the list at the bottom left of the Gmail in-box and select the message in the resulting window.

Now click the Accounts tab and choose “Add another mail account” in the “Get mail from other accounts” section. Enter the e-mail address and click Next Step. Add your password, check both “Label incoming messages” (the address is the default name for the label) and “Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox),” and click Add Account.

Start by creating a POP or IMAP account only for Web site registrations. Most ISPs offer multiple mail accounts for free. In fact, when I last checked, I had 114 free mail accounts available with my ISP. Of course, I’ve also registered five different domain names with that company, each of which comes with several mail accounts.(Maybe I could sublease the ones I’m not using.)

(Credit:
Gmail)

If your ISP doesn’t offer multiple e-mail accounts, sign up for a free account at a service such as Inbox.com. The company offers up to 5GB of mail storage for free and allows POP3 and SMTP access to your in-box.

Now, ARM isn’t dead yet. The iPhone uses an ARM processor because there’s no x86 processor that would work as well in that system. ARM processors will probably see at least two more generations in cell phones just because there’s so much ARM-based software out there (including all the software on the App Store).

I honestly don’t know whether Om Malik’s blog site, GigaOM, is intended to be informative or merely entertaining. I pointed out a previous example of the overwrought rhetoric that permeates that site last September (in the context of Comcast’s then-new usage cap policy), but generally, I try to ignore the nonsense there for the same reasons that I ignore talk radio.

The rest of Thursday’s GigaOM post is a hopelessly self-contradictory muddle that fails to reach any clear conclusions. I’ll just quote one more line near the end: “But the PC will be just one small (and shrinking) battleground to keep x86 relevant, amid a more mobile, visual, and power-sensitive world.”

And that’s why the GigaOM piece was preposterous.

Even then, three generations of process technology ago, the “x86 penalty” was down to a couple square millimeters of silicon. Today, the comparable figure is about 0.25 square millimeters. Not zero, certainly, but not a significant concern for chips that are a hundred times larger.

In January, the same staffer wrote a piece titled “Netbooks and the Death of x86 Computing” which reached the fantastic conclusion that Netbooks would “destroy the hegemony of x86 machines for personal computing.”

Yes, there are companies like Freescale (the subject of the January post on GigaOM) and Nvidia that are looking to push the ARM architecture into the Netbook space. But that idea never made much sense, and now that Intel and TSMC are working together to get Intel’s Atom x86 core into lower-cost SoC (system on chip) products, the ARM architecture will eventually have to retreat into the shrinking niche for supersmall, supercheap phones and consumer electronics gizmos for which x86 compatibility is of negligible value.

Well, as I pointed out just a few weeks later (in “The Netbook is dead. Long live the notebook!”), when the Netbook phenomenon ran up against the dominance of Intel and Microsoft in the PC market, it was the Netbook that died instead. Even at a $300 price point, people still want full PC compatibility.

But like it or not, GigaOM is widely read, and sometimes when a post there bears directly on a market that’s important to me, I can’t bear to let it go. This is one of those times.

What else is the App Store but the visible manifestation of the iPhone’s programmability?

So there can’t ever be a time when the world moves beyond x86. That’s 1980s thinking, just plain ignorance of what may be the most important trend in the microprocessor industry.

A slide from Fred Weber’s keynote presentation at Microprocessor Forum 2003 showing how x86 will evolve into systems from big servers down to handheld consumer devices.

So not only are x86 chips selling into a growing PC market, they’ll eventually start eating into ARM’s own strongholds. That can’t be bad for Intel.

Current economic woes aside, the PC market is hardly shrinking. You know what’s shrinking? The PC! As the PC shrinks, the PC market will grow. The MID (mobile Internet device) market isn’t much to speak of right now, for example, but once MID makers figure out what to build, MIDs will become more popular.

In his talk, “Towards Instruction Set Consolidation,” Weber made a simple point: “Technology has passed the point where instruction set costs are at all relevant.”

On Thursday, a GigaOM staffer wrote a piece titled “Can Intel Thrive in a Post x86 World?”

But by the turn of the century, ISA complexity was almost a dead issue, and that coffin’s final nail was pounded in by the keynote speech of then-Advanced Micro Devices CTO Fred Weber at Microprocessor Forum 2003, an event I had the honor of hosting.

But somewhere around 2012, we’re going to see x86 chips poking into that space. The value of instruction set compatibility with the PC market will persuade developers of new cell phone platforms to go with x86 chips, and eventually even established systems like the iPhone will switch over.

The headline is preposterous from beginning to end. It has two implications just in the eight words of the title: that Intel’s ability to “thrive” faces any imminent threats, and that the importance of the x86 architecture is declining.

In short, ARM chips aren’t cheaper or more power-efficient because of their instruction sets; they’re like that because they’re designed to be. And anything that an ARM chip can do to save cost or power can also be done by an x86 chip.

(Credit:
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.)

See, we learned a long time ago–those of us who cover this industry professionally, not just as a random assignment for some random blog–that the instruction set architecture (ISA), per se, doesn’t matter any more.

The choice of ISA was a big deal in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the extra complexity of an x86 instruction decoder was a large fraction of the total complexity of a microprocessor. That’s where the conflict between RISC and CISC came from.

And seriously, is anyone really not clear on the fact that the
Apple iPhone is a computer? It isn’t an embedded system. An embedded system is one in which the presence of a microprocessor is functionally irrelevant to the user. When a gizmo exposes its programmability to the user, it’s a computer.

MTR air speed is envisioned at a zippy 280 mph; that’s with a 1,600-pound payload. Range will be around 330 miles.

The proposed rotorcraft would be small enough to fit inside a plane, where the crew could kick it out the back loaded with supplies.

And, who knows, Cargo UAS operations may be a good place to park jittery V-22 Osprey pilots.

The unit, referred to generically as Cargo UAS (for Cargo Unmanned Aircraft System), should be autonomous, to the extent that it can take off and land, fly, manage in-flight contingencies, and follow an electronic signal to a landing zone. It must also be smart enough to avoid collisions–especially important, since the Navy may use it to evacuate casualties.

The vertical takeoff and landing tiltrotor is yet another aerial configuration the military would like to add to its unmanned-aircraft inventory.

One experimental model, the Mono Tiltrotor (MTR) by Baldwin Technology, is intended to integrate a coaxial rotor, a folding lifting wing system with a lightweight airframe and sophisticated kinematics to deliver a robotic flying box car. The U.S. Navy wants the MTR, or something similar, to deliver cargo to Marines on the ground.

So, when asked the name of your favorite teacher, feel free to respond “xyz” or with any random word or sentence that no one will guess. Then, of course, write it down in a safe place. The price for making up random answers is the burden of recovery. This is the eternal relationship between security and convenience. More security always entails less convenience.

Web mail may be one of those places where little white lies are acceptable. The governor of Alaska, who recently had her Yahoo e-mail exposed to the world, set herself up for failure by truthfully answering some questions.

If you didn’t last log in to your Gmail account when the message indicates, then someone knows your password.

Yahoo and Hotmail limit their secret questions to a handful of preselected questions. The straw that broke the camel’s back for the governor of Alaska was the question of where she met her spouse. Being a public figure, it didn’t take much guessing for someone to correctly answer this question and fool Yahoo into thinking that person was the governor. There were some other canned questions too, but they were also easy to answer using public information.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

If someone learned your Web mail password, would you know? It’s one thing to have your e-mail read, but it’s another to have it read over and over, day after day, by someone who knows your password and is smart enough not to tip their hat by changing it.

For one thing, the Web mail provider may not know enough about you to determine the true account owner. Worse still, anyone using a free Web mail account from Google (Gmail), Yahoo, or Microsoft (Hotmail) can’t expect to talk to a human being to resolve a problem with their account. Talking to person at Google requires a subscription to Google Apps Premier Edition for $50 a year. Microsoft and Yahoo similarly offer telephone support only to “premium” customers.

The location information is the same as Yahoo’s–country, state, and ZIP code. If you go the second route, an e-mail message is sent to the alternate e-mail account with two links, one for confirming the request and resetting the password and another for doing nothing.

If you no longer have access to the alternate e-mail address, Google advises you to “…try the ‘Forgot your password?’ link again after five days. At that point, you’ll be able to reset your password by answering the security question you provided when you created your account.”

Last account activity: 22 hours ago at IP 66.88.111.222. Details
or
Last account activity: 22 minutes ago on this computer. Details

I tested this using a Yahoo.com e-mail address as the alternate to a Gmail account. Word to the wise: don’t do this. The message from Gmail was treated as spam by Yahoo. The message includes a link that, when clicked, takes you to a Web page where you can enter a new password.

Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail all offer secure connections when you initially log on and enter your password. Hotmail and Yahoo then switch back to unsecured, HTTP, connections. Gmail offers an option to always use a secure HTTPS connection, even when reading and writing e-mail. Highly recommended.

Public figure or not, there is no reason to answer Web mail security questions truthfully. After all, who are you really lying to? A potential bad guy trying to learn your password.

Every Web mail system asks for personal information as a means of identification, should you lose your password. The problem is that this personal information can also be used by a bad guy to learn your password.

Classic Yahoo: Click on “Options” in the top right corner, then “Mail Options”, then (on the left) click on “Account Information” and re-enter your password. Yahoo will then display “Alternate Email 1″ and “Alternate Email 2.” Yahoo supports two alternate e-mail addresses, a great safety net, since our e-mail providers change over time.

Does someone already know your password?

Internet Protocol addresses can be linked to both an Internet service provider and a country, for sure, and maybe even to a city within the country. For more on this, see my earlier posting “What does your IP address say about you?”

Truthiness

Test password recovery

Clicking on the “Details” link offers a longer history of Gmail account activity and an indication of whether the account is currently logged on at another computer. Letting one person log in to a Gmail account simultaneously from two different computers strikes me as a design mistake. But given that design, Gmail users can log off other computers that are currently logged into the same account. Needless to say, this, too, can alert you that someone knows your password.

Alternate e-mail address

In August, blogger Alan Shimel of StillSecure wrote about his problems regaining access to a Yahoo e-mail account. Suffice it to say that if someone learns your Web mail password, it’s a very difficult situation–one that may not end well.

To review your security question in Gmail, click on the “Settings” link in the top-right corner, then go to the “Accounts” tab, and click on the “Google Account settings” link in the section of the same name. Finally, click on “Change security question.” You will have to re-enter your Gmail password.

Gmail is the most flexible of the major providers. It lets you choose your own secret question, thus giving you a fighting chance of picking a question to which no one else knows the answer. Still, if you have a safe place for storing passwords, a totally random answer can’t be guessed.

Secure connections

Potentially, there is much that Web mail providers can do to let account owners know that someone else is logging into their account when they’re asleep. As far as I can tell, Hotmail and Yahoo mail do absolutely nothing in this regard. Gmail, however, offers an audit trail, if you know where to look.

When Gmail users first log in, they should scroll down to the bottom of the initial page and look for a message such as:

Web mail accounts may start out as toys or curiosities, but for many people, they end up being important. A little homework now may save a ton of grief later.

If you forget a Gmail password, you’re taken here where, as with the other two systems, you enter the user ID and get in through a Captcha. At this point, there are no options. Google sends an e-mail to the alternate e-mail address. It doesn’t display the entire alternate e-mail address (Hotmail, in contrast, does); just the domain name.

If you care about a Web mail account, then some homework may be in order.

Anyone involved in backing up computer files knows the importance of testing the recovery process, and the same applies with Web mail. The best way to ensure that you can recover or reset your password is to try it.

Yahoo e-mail users may be in for a surprise. Simply knowing your password is not sufficient to view, let alone change, your security question. As described in How do I update my secret question? Yahoo requires you to “verify the Answer to your current Secret Question in order to update it.” I’m screwed.

There was an interesting article recently in The New York Times about getting locked out of a Gmail account.

Classic Hotmail: Click on “Options” in the top right corner, then View and Edit your personal information. Your alternate e-mail address is displayed along with a link to change it.

To enable this feature, Gmail users should click on “Settings” in the top-right corner, then on the default “General” tab, scroll to the bottom of the page, and turn on the radio button to “Always use https.”

Gmail error handling isn’t limited to just password recovery; they deal with a whole host of problems accessing your account, including:
I forgot my password
I forgot my username
My account has been compromised
My password doesn’t seem to be working
Loading issues
Another error or problem

If you’re like me, with no recollection or notes about the alternate e-mail address associated with your Web mail account, here’s how to check (after first logging in to your account):

One thing Web mail users should have associated with their account is an alternate e-mail address. This is typically optional, but it can be critical, should you get locked out. I think you’re safer not using an address from the same provider as your alternate. That is, don’t provide a Gmail e-mail address as the alternate for a Gmail account. Too many eggs in one basket.

Information about the most recent Gmail account activity is presented on the bottom of every Gmail Web page. For more, see Last account activity in the Gmail Help.

Hotmail password recovery starts with the option to either “Use my location information and secret answer to verify my identity” or to “Send password reset instructions to me in e-mail.” If you go the first route and answer the questions correctly, you get to choose a new password.

Gmail: Click on the “Settings” link in the top right corner, then go to the “Accounts” tab and click on the link in the “Google Account settings” section.

Users of the classic Hotmail system can review their security question by clicking on “options” in the top-right corner, then clicking on “View and edit your personal information.”

Yahoo password recovery (thanks to the governor of Alaska, it’s now the infamous Yahoo password recovery) starts out by asking for your birthday, country of residence, and postal code. Without this gatekeeper information, knowing the secret question is useless. Even something as simple as your postal code needs to be saved rather than remembered because, as Yahoo points out, it may be from your home, your office, or a prior residence or prior work location.

From Moconews:

As reported on Moconews, T-Mobile USA is planning to launch an open development platform for all of its phone platforms from upcoming Android to Java to Sidekick and Windows Mobile.

While this is an obvious attempt to compete with the iPhone App store it does a lot more to encourage ecosystems to be built around platforms that are not Apple.

Starting this fall, T-Mobile USA will take the extraordinary step of ditching its traditional deck on the phone and replacing it with a platform that’s open to almost any developer, multiple sources have told us. Think of *Apple’s* App store, but for the entire carrier’s handset line-up from smartphone to feature phone.

With Symbian having gone open source, the mobile market is getting much more interesting. There are more possibilities to bypass the carriers stronghold.

Thank you for your support.

Yahoo, which is embroiled in a proxy fight with major shareholder Carl Icahn, is seeking to persuade its investors to re-elect its current board at the August 1 shareholder meeting.

You are probably aware that Carl Icahn proposes to replace our entire board of directors with his hand-picked slate. Mr. Icahn has no credible plan, except to sell the company to Microsoft–despite the fact that Microsoft has publicly indicated that it has no current interest in such a transaction. Given Microsoft’s stated position of not wanting to acquire Yahoo, the election of Mr. Icahn’s slate could result in substantial erosion of stockholder value.

At all times, our board and management have made clear that they have been open to entering into any transaction, including a sale to Microsoft, if it valued the company fairly and offered our stockholders certainty that they would receive that value, an important consideration, given the likely lengthy regulatory review process before a deal would be approved.

The future of Yahoo and the value of your investment are in your hands. We ask you to vote for your highly qualified and dedicated directors today….

In this regard, you should know that we have, at all times, been open to a transaction with Microsoft, if it offers our stockholders full and certain value. We write to ask you to support our slate of highly qualified and capable directors standing for re-election.

In our opinion, Mr. Icahn and his slate are not the right individuals to guide Yahoo as a standalone company.

We Urge You To Act Now To Protect Your Investment By Rejecting Mr. Icahn’s Slate And By Voting For Our Board Today, By Telephone, Internet, Or By Signing, Dating, And Returning The Enclosed WHITE Proxy Card.

Icahn, meanwhile, is seeking to get his dissident slate of directors elected and is using his group to pressure Yahoo and Microsoft to undergo a full buyout of the Internet search pioneer. Currently, the two parties are in talks for Microsoft to buy or partner with Yahoo for a portion of its search business.

The vote you will cast for directors at Yahoo!’s August 1, 2008, annual meeting is the most important for stockholders in our history.

Last year, after making changes in management, our board oversaw an intensive review by the new management team, led by Jerry Yang, of Yahoo!s business and strategy. The result was a more focused strategy, a more streamlined company, and a significant acceleration of specific initiatives to capitalize on the fast-growing online-advertising market. As part of that strategy, we made a deliberate, disciplined decision to make investments that would generate greater long-term value for stockholders.

Yahoo’s shares were down a slight 0.30 percent, to $26.36 a share, in late-morning trading.

Our board also explored, and continues to explore, a variety of other ways to maximize stockholder value.

Dear Fellow Stockholder:

During this period, our board was fully engaged, meeting more than 20 times to review the status of the discussions with Microsoft and to consider other available alternatives to maximize stockholder value.

Carl Icahn Has No Credible Plan To Create Value.
Mr. Icahn’s only plan for Yahoo, if his slate is elected, is to hope that Microsoft–which withdrew its acquisition proposal more than a month ago and has since publicly reaffirmed that it is not now interested in a full acquisition–can be persuaded to come back to the table and agree to acquire our company. But this is not a strategy.

Our Board Is Committed To Maximizing Stockholder Value.
Our board carefully evaluated Microsoft’s original offer, and determined that it substantially undervalued our company and was not in the best interests of our stockholders.

Our current board has the independence, the experience, the knowledge, and the commitment to navigate the company through the rapidly changing Internet environment, execute on our initiatives to capitalize on the fast-growing online-advertising market, and to deliver value for Yahoo and its stockholders.

The key is the knowledge and experience to execute with this unique asset. We believe that successfully executing on our strategy of being the “starting point” for the most consumers on the Internet and the “must buy” for advertisers will enable us to generate double-digit growth in operating cash flow and will lead to improved stockholder returns.

Our recent financial results, coupled with a number of strategic acquisitions and a string of significant product rollouts, demonstrate that we are executing on our strategy:

Jerry Yang
Chief Executive Officer

Here is the letter, enclosed with Yahoo’s proxy statement from Chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang:

Yahoo announced on Monday that it filed its definitive proxy statement, which now allows the Internet search pioneer to begin its road show with investors.

With more than 500 million monthly users worldwide, many best-in-class technology platforms, and strategically unique Asian assets, we are well-positioned to capture growth in an online-advertising market that is projected to grow from approximately $40 billion in 2007 to approximately $75 billion in 2010.

Over the ensuing months, we engaged in serious discussions with Microsoft, including numerous face-to-face meetings, some of which included one or more of our independent directors.

We believe that the re-election of our current board is in the best interests of Yahoo’s stockholders. Under the leadership of the current board and management team, we are executing on our strategy to create value that is gaining traction. In addition, in responding to Microsoft Corporation’s proposal to acquire the company and exploring strategic alternatives, Yahoo’s board has been focused on one central goal: how best to maximize stockholder value.

Roy Bostock
Chairman of the Board

We started from a great place. Yahoo is clearly a one-of-a-kind asset. We’re a leader in search, a pioneer in mobile advertising, and the clear leader in display advertising–where we see the greatest growth opportunity in online advertising.

We’re continuing to see benefits from last year’s rollout of Panama, our new search monetization platform that is helping to close the monetization gap.
Our acquisitions of Right Media, BlueLithium, Zimbra, and Maven Networks have all helped advance our core strategies.
We are winning new business partners and expanding relationships with existing partners–WPP, Wal-Mart, CBS, and more than 770 newspapers now in our newspaper publisher consortium.
Soon, we will roll out our new advertising-management platform–AMP! from Yahoo–that will enable us to offer advertisers and publishers an extraordinarily simple, seamless way to market over the Internet, helping us further our goal of becoming the “must buy” for online advertising.

She argued that the Sonata batteries are a “clean technology” because they are more energy-efficient. The company also seeks to use less harmful reactive chemicals and no heavy metals.

Upstart Boston-Power is within months of having its long-lasting batteries shipped in notebook PCs, as it eyes expansion into portable power packs and electric
cars.

Hewlett-Packard last year said it has tested Boston-Power’s batteries.

Without mentioning HP by name, Lampe-Onnerud said Boston-Power expects to announce its first customer soon. A company representative on Wednesday said Sonata-powered laptops will be available early next year. Lampe-Onnerud added that the company is working with smaller laptop providers as well.

In two years, it expects to have a product for plug-in electric cars, she added. “The specifications for laptops and electric cars are remarkably close,” she said.

To manufacture its batteries–a significant business challenge for any new battery company–Boston-Power has set up factories in Taiwan and China.

I caught up with Lampe-Onnerud on Tuesday at the Fourth Conference on Clean Energy in Boston. Ironically, we bumped into each other at a water cooler where I was doing what so many laptop toters are stuck doing: plugging into a free outlet because my battery was dying.

Boston-Power founder and CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud holding a Sonata lithium ion battery cell.

The three-year-old company says its Sonata batteries are able to recharge to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes, versus two hours to get to a 90 percent charge in conventional notebook batteries. And Boston-Power’s batteries can be recharged 1,000 times before their performance starts to wane, versus 150 times in today’s laptops, according to founder and CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud. Typically, the amount of computing time that a laptop battery supplies goes down after hundreds of charges.

The company has done a number of things to improve lithium ion battery performance and safety, according to Lampe-Onnerud. The company has also redesigned the battery pack to have fewer cells and has made a number of manufacturing improvements, she explained.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

Lampe-Onnerud says the arrival of Sonata batteries will mean a completely different user experience, allowing people to go all day without having to carry cords and search out public power outlets.

Boston-Power, which has raised $70 million, has a technology road map to improve further on performance. In its labs, it has batteries able to recharge 1,400 times. Next year, it intends to release a portable power source for recharging consumer electronics, either through a USB connection or a small solar panel, Lampe-Onnerud said.