Indeed, during a developer conference session on Thursday, Google showed a variety of ways to gain deeper access to Glass. Some, such as running basic Android apps and even connecting a Bluetooth keyboard, can be done.

Google showed other hacks, such as running a version of Ubuntu Linux. Those actions, though, require deeper “root” access to the device. Google showed how developers can get such access, but cautions that doing so voids the warranty and could be irreversible.

That said, Google plans to make its factory image available so in most cases rooted Glass devices should be able to be returned to their original settings.

The session ended with a video showing a pair of the pricey specs being blended to a powdery mess, to heartfelt groans from the packed audience, many of whom forked over $1,500 to be among the first to buy the developer edition of Glass.

Showing a different level of interest in Glass, several members of Congress sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page on Thursday asking questions about privacy issues raised by the high-tech specs.

Update: At a follow-up Fireside Chat session with developers, Google reiterated that a software development kit for Glass is coming, but Google’s Charles Mendis said not to expect it soon.

Isabelle Olsson, the lead designer for Glass, showed off one of the bulky early prototype designs for Glass as well as a current prototype that combines Glass with prescription glasses.

Prescription Google Glass prototype

Olsson, who quips that she has been working on Glass since it was a phone attached to a scuba mask, said that the development of Glass was “so ambitious and very messy.”

Getting the device light enough has been a key, Olsson said.

“If it is not light you are not going to want to wear it for more than 10 minutes,” Olsson said. “We care about every gram.”

Asked what kind of apps the Glass team would like to see, Olsson said she wanted a karaoke app, while Mendis said he would like to see some fitness apps.

Google Glass product director Steve Lee said Glass is designed around brief glances or “micro-interactions,” rather than watching a movie or reading an entire book.

“That would be painful,” Lee said. “We don’t want to create zombies staring into the screen for long periods of time.

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
• Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors
• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

Brought by Linux group Hispalinux, the complaint claims Windows 8’s UEFI Secure Boot — a feature designed to protect Win 8 machines by only booting operating systems signed with a trusted certificate — is really just an anticompetitive “obstruction mechanism.”

“[UEFI Secure Boot] is a de facto technological jail for computer booting systems,” Hispalinux said in its complaint. “[It makes] Microsoft’s Windows platform less neutral than ever.”

Harsh words, but are they valid? Tough to say. UEFI Secure Boot clearly makes it more difficult to run anything other than Windows on Windows machines. That said, back in February the Linux Foundation in collaboration with Microsoft did release some software that enables Linux to work with machines running the UEFI. It’s not a perfect solution by any means. But it is a solution. And, as Microsoft has repeatedly noted, UEFI Secure Boot can be disabled. “We designed the firmware to allow the customer to disable secure boot,” Microsoft’s Tony Mangefeste wrote in a February blog post. “However, doing so comes at your own risk.”

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

“Multi-tasking productivity meets elegance and rigorous security in our tablet experience,“ Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a statement. “Our family of interfaces now scales across all screens, so your phone can provide tablet, PC and TV experiences when you dock it.”

Ubuntu is among a crowded field of challengers seeking to provide an alternative to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. The field of competitors includes Microsoft, with Windows and Windows Phone; BlackBerry with its BlackBerry OS; and Samsung, which has been developing its own mobile Linux plans, in addition to its Android and Windows work.

Ubuntu hopes to win some hearts, minds and design awards with its product, as well as support for multitasking, multiple user accounts and other features. Like BlackBerry 10, Ubuntu relies on using gestures rather than physical or software buttons to move among and within applications.

It is also making the pitch that it is offering a single user interface that can run on phones, computers, tablets and TVs.

Its tablet-specific work focuses on devices with screens from six inches to 20 inches.

The company plans to offer a developer preview of its tablet software on Thursday, and instructions on how the operating system can be installed on the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, along with the Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus phones.

The former Microsoft exec turned gaming entrepreneur didn’t rent out a hotel ballroom or hire Big Bird or Maroon 5 to get the attention of the press. In fact, as far as we know, Valve’s only presence at the show was a small private booth for meetings, and an interview with The Verge.

But since many covet Newell and his quirky company, when he speaks, everyone listens as if it were videogame gospel.

Valve is popular for producing mega hits like Half-Life and the Portal game series. It also gets huge props for Steam, its consumer-focused PC games-distribution platform (referred to by the rest of us as an app store).

This preamble is to help you better understand why it was a big deal when Newell said yesterday that Valve is building its own hardware that will essentially be a gaming and media hub for your whole house.

This isn’t some half-baked Kickstarter idea. With an estimated valuation of $3 billion, and more than 50 million users (in comparison, Xbox Live has 40 million), Valve has the money, the distribution system and the clout to try something outrageous.

And what Newell described to The Verge yesterday is a little out there.

He confirmed that the company is building a “Steam Box,” which will be a game and entertainment server for the home that can be used by eight TVs and eight controllers at one time.

For the average consumer who likes to stream Netflix to their TV, this will come off as pretty abstract stuff, especially when you hear more details.

First, it’s going to be built on the Linux OS, which is not exactly mainstream. Second, if not done absolutely correctly, hooking it up to multiple TVs sounds like a networking nightmare. Third, Valve says it will be inventing new types of controllers “that use a lot of biometric data.”

In July, Newell was interviewed onstage in Seattle, where he elaborated on this topic. He said touchscreens are “short-term,” and that your tongue is one of the best mechanical systems to your brain. “I don’t think tongue input will happen, but I do think we will have bands on our wrists, and you’ll be doing something with your hands, which are really expensive.”

In other words, we’re talking really sci-fi stuff here.

Generally, what’s interesting about Newell’s desire to build something on Linux is that he believes it is a hedge against Windows 8. Increasingly, operating systems have become locked down, where the OS maker, like Apple, owns the software distribution on the device, like the iPhone and the App Store. That’s happening on laptops and computers, as well, which is a threat to Steam.

On multiple occasions, the former Microsoft executive has disclosed his disdain for the software giant’s new operating system.

In the interview with The Verge, Newell put it bluntly: “Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business … When I started using it I was like ‘oh my god …’ I find [Windows 8] unusable.”

Newell can say pretty much whatever he wants. Valve is a privately held company with few or no investors, so there’s no pressure for a public offering or a sale. Clearly, if he wants to preannounce something, he will.

In addition to laying out some of the Steam Box’s specs and confirming its existence, he also discussed pricing. The boxes, which will be built by partners in some cases, will have three tiers, he said. The low-end device will start at $99. A midrange device could cost around $300, and the high-end device could be even pricier.

But when a Steam Box will be released remains a mystery. Presumably, to be competitive with the next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony, it would be expected around the end of this year.

To get some feedback on what Valve’s plans mean, I asked Pete Hawley, co-founder and chief product officer of Red Robot Labs, what he thinks. Although he’s creating a location-based games platform today, he previously worked at PlayStation, and just a month ago told me during a conversation that he thinks Valve will win the next console war.

“I think this news is huge,” he said. “Gabe and Valve are building something amazing here.”

Hawley also said that while the experience Newell describes today sounds futuristic, he could easily imagine the box appealing to a wide audience, ranging from everyday users who want to stream movies through a browser to the most hardcore gamers.

“The openness and ‘hackability’ is there for those core users that are more heavily engaged — the creators. I think you’ll see some users that absorb content, plugged into the TV like a traditional console,” Hawley said. “Others will run servers, create content, have their own store, push to multiple screens, etc., etc. I think its flexibility in that sense is really interesting.”

One daunting challenge, which Newell acknowledged in the interview, was getting Steam’s current content to work on Linux. This summer, Newell mentioned wanting to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux. Valve will also have to work on a way to get the content to work with a game controller. Since most of the titles today run on PCs, they use a mouse and a keyboard. As Newell told The Verge, “the problem to solve is how to interact with a Web browser, how to get all the games to support controllers, and how to make it all seamless.”

In the meantime, Valve has developed a feature called Big Picture, which allows you to connect Steam to your TV. Big Picture is designed to be used with a traditional game controller, but also supports a keyboard and mouse.

Here’s Valve’s video explaining Big Picture, which may also provide a sense of how Steam Box will eventually work:

I say that in jest, of course. But, yes, another contender has stepped up to the plate. On Wednesday, Canonical shared more details on Ubuntu, the Android-based operating system aimed squarely at taking the third-place seat behind the two current market leaders, Android and iOS.

I won’t get too far into the woods explaining the differences from Android proper — which are mostly pretty nerdy — but Canonical is positioning the OS as “more immersive, less cluttered” and easily navigable. The company also claims it is strong enough to function as a PC, which means that it can hook up to desktop peripherals and work like any old computer (though that sort of implementation wasn’t a huge draw for Motorola).

Here’s the thing. RIM already has a strong (though waning) foothold in the market. Microsoft is pumping hundreds of millions into its Windows Phone bet. And third-place contenders of the past, like webOS, have tried and failed to gain a meaningful following.

Even if you disregard those big players, there are others fighting for the title. Firefox will compete with a browser-based OS, and then there’s the Linux-based Tizen in development by Intel, Samsung and others.

So it’s hard for me to see how Ubuntu, which isn’t expected to ship on smartphones until at least 2014, will put up a decent fight.

Still, you can’t win if you don’t try. Good luck with that, Canonical.

Red Hat reported a per-share profit of 18 cents, missing the consensus of analysts, who had expected 29 cents a share. Net profit was $35 million, down from $40 million in the year-ago period. Sales were $323 million, up 15 percent year on year. Most of that was subscription revenue, which at $279 million was up 17 percent versus last year.

CFO Charlie Peters said in a statement that costs related to a new storage product increased expenses, as did two small acquisitions. Operating expenses were $224.7 million, up more than 23 percent from last year. The acquisitions reduced EPS by one cent.

Red Hat shares fell $1.52, or more than 2 percent, to $56.02 after hours. The shares closed at $57.54 during the regular session, down slightly. Before today’s after-hours drop, the shares had risen about 39 percent this year.

“We’re either right or we’re not. If we’re wrong, we deserve people throwing rocks at us.”

– Former SCO CEO Darl McBride in 2003

It has taken nearly a decade, but SCO’s hard-fought but ultimately ludicrous legal campaign against Linux is finally winding down, seemingly for good.

The company, now know as The SCO Group (TSG), filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection this week, conceding that there’s no longer any hope of a reorganization under Chapter 11. Its only option now is liquidation. Which is not to say that TSG has given up hope of prevailing in its litigation against IBM, which it sued back in 2003 for illegally distributing its proprietary Unix code with the Linux OS. As Groklaw reports, the company would like to press on in its battle against IBM, it just doesn’t really have the funds to continue.

“There is no reasonable chance of ‘rehabilitation’ in these cases as the Debtors’ estates have already sold substantially all of their assets and have no continuing business operations,” TSG wrote in its Chapter 7 filing. “Furthermore, the only reasonable opportunity for the Debtors’ estates to be in a position to pay outstanding administrative expenses and to potentially make a distribution to general unsecured creditors hinges upon a successful outcome in the District Court Action.”

In other words, the company literally has both feet in the grave and it’s still swinging wildly at IBM for allegedly “devaluing” its version of Unix.

A quick bit of history from an old post of mine:

“There’s No Free Lunch–or Free Linux.” That was the title of SCO CEO Darl McBride’s keynote address at the Computer Digital Expo in Las Vegas back in 2003, and it signaled the start of a long legal siege. Earlier that day, SCO announced plans to file suit against a large-scale user of Linux as part of its campaign against the open-source operating system.

“For the last several months, we have consistently stated and maintained that our System V code is in Linux,” McBride explained. “The claims SCO has are both broad and deep. These claims touch not just IBM but other vendors as well. They also touch certain industry consortia and corporate Linux end users. Our claims aren’t trivial. The violations of our intellectual property are not easily repaired. It is our intention to vigorously protect and enforce SCO’s intellectual property, System V source code and our copyrights. We’re now fully prepared to do that.”

And they did. SCO subsequently filed suit against IBM (IBM), auto giant DaimlerChrysler and a coterie of other companies, each time sounding the same theme: Our copyrighted UNIX code was illegally cobbled into Linux. You’re using it without a license. Pay up.

But SCO never specified exactly the Linux code it believes infringes on its copyrights, even in the face of repeated calls to do so from its defendants and the open source community. Indeed, it could be said that the company’s legal campaign against Linux was defined by its utter failure to prove that the open-source operating system contains any of its intellectual property.

But it dragged on for nine years. And now it seems it may finally be over.

But the questions stemming from the dispute don’t stop with the decision by Judge James Kleinberg ruling that Oracle must abide by the terms of promises it made to HP in 2010 when it settled an unrelated lawsuit concerning Oracle’s hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd.

First off for HP is the question of whether the damage to its Business Critical Server business unit, which sells the Integrity line of servers that use the chips, can be reversed. The damage is plain to see in HP’s financial results. For the first six months of the year, sales are off by $275 million, in a business unit that last year saw sales north of $1.1 billion. The uncertainty brought about by the lawsuit has hurt sales, and HP has made it clear it expects them to remain under pressure.

But it’s not lost sales that are hurting HP the most: A half-billion-dollar drop in sales at a company on track do $123 billion this year isn’t much to get excited about. It’s the profits. Legal filings made public over the course of the suit showed that HP derives a healthy portion of its profits from ongoing service and support contracts with companies that buy its Integrity servers. While HP doesn’t routinely break these numbers out in regulatory filings, documents showed that in 2010, HP derived about 15 percent of its profits on an EBIT basis (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) on business related to Itanium.

Reversing the trend will be hard. For one thing, the legal fight isn’t over. Oracle has promised both to appeal the decision and to continue to press its counter-claims against HP in court, so the uncertainty among HP customers will continue, though as HP’s enterprise chief Dave Donatelli put it to me in an interview in June, the first step toward saving the BCS business is winning the lawsuit.

HP does have a plan to move Itanium customers onto more mainstream servers. It’s called Odyssey, and it involves building a new generation of Business Critical Servers on a more mainstream platform, probably Intel’s Xeon. Over time — and it would take several years — Integrity customers could be persuaded to move in this direction. Exactly how HP preserves the highly profitable service and sales contracts upon which it has relied all these years isn’t entirely clear. One key piece of the strategy would likely involve the creation by HP of a version of its Unix operating system, called HP-UX, that runs on Intel’s mainstream x86 chips.

For Oracle’s part, while its appeal is pending it will have to rejigger its plans and issue an update to its database software for Itanium systems. Existing customers had nothing to worry about in the first place. But it now faces the prospect of paying out a significant damages award to HP. Even if it is as high as $4 billion as many reports have suggested — and it likely won’t be — Oracle’s balance sheet, flush with almost $31 billion in combined cash and short term investments, can take the hit.

But why let it go that far? HP CEO Meg Whitman has referred to the historical relationship that existed between HP and Oracle as “one of the great partnerships in IT history.” And Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said he likes Whitman.

There have been at least two rounds of settlement talks held before and during the trial. Now that the primary issue of the trial — whether Oracle was bound to stick to an agreement it made in 2010 — has been decided, perhaps there’s ground upon which to build the foundations of a third way out of the dispute.

Oracle’s point that the Itanium chip is nearing the end of its life has more merit than either HP or Intel would care to admit. There may indeed be a few more generations left of Itanium, but nothing can change the fact that the world of enterprise computing is turning its back on Unix and non-x86 chips. The research firm IDC noted in May that the size of the market for non-x86 servers as a percentage of the overall server market has declined to the lowest it has ever seen.

Both HP and Oracle have to respond to this. HP’s response is Odyssey. Oracle, which owns the legacy Sun Microsystems business of SPARC-based servers running Solaris, has its Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics hardware systems, all of which are based on Intel x86 chips. As the migration away from Unix plays out, customers of both HP’s Integrity line and Oracle’s SPARC systems are going to be forced to choose a way forward.

Depending on the case, both Oracle and HP will be jockeying for this emerging segment of post-Unix customers. One would think they’d want to do so with the maximum amount of customer goodwill. These are specialized customers — shared customers were the basis of the partnership in the first place — who don’t make their computing choices lightly and who tend to stick with one vendor for a long time. For them, the sight of these two tech industry heavyweights fighting so bitterly must be getting tiresome.

Newell, who spent 13 years at Microsoft working on Windows, is not well-known outside of the videogame industry, but the company he has built in Bellevue, Wash., cannot be overlooked.

Valve is not only a game developer, producing megahits like Portal 2, it owns and operates Steam, which is the largest consumer-focused digital games distribution platform in the industry. By some measures, it may be valued at $3 billion.

Last night, at a dinner sponsored by Covert & Co., Google Ventures and Perkins Coie, Newell unveiled some of his most quirky and secretive projects in an interview onstage with Ed Fries, former VP of game publishing at Microsoft.

Newell, who has a desk on wheels so he can quickly roll over to his favorite projects within the company, struggled at times to put into words how he sees the industry shaking out as companies like Microsoft and Apple move toward closed ecosystems. At one point, he even lamented that his presentation skills aren’t up to speed because Valve isn’t a public company.

Here are excerpts from the conversation that took place in a packed and noisy room with an under-powered speaker system:

On the future of videogame distribution

“Everything we are doing is not going to matter in the future. … We think about knitting together a platform for productivity, which sounds kind of weird, but what we are interested in is bringing together a platform where people’s actions create value for other people when they play. That’s the reason we hired an economist.

“We think the future is very different [from] successes we’ve had in the past. When you are playing a game, you are trying to think about creating value for other players, so the line between content player and creator is really fuzzy. We have a kid in Kansas making $150,000 a year making [virtual] hats. But that’s just a starting point.

“That causes us to have conversations with Adobe, and we say the next version of Photoshop should look like a free-to-play game, and they say, ‘We have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but it sounds really bad.’ And, then we say, ‘No, no, no. We think you are going to increase the value being created to your users, and you will create a market for their goods on a worldwide basis.’ But that takes a longer sell.

“This isn’t about videogames; it’s about thinking about goods and services in a digital world.”

On closed versus open platforms

“In order for innovation to happen, a bunch of things that aren’t happening on closed platforms need to occur. Valve wouldn’t exist today without the PC, or Epic, or Zynga, or Google. They all wouldn’t have existed without the openness of the platform. There’s a strong tempation to close the platform, because they look at what they can accomplish when they limit the competitors’ access to the platform, and they say ‘That’s really exciting.’”

“We are looking at the platform and saying, ‘We’ve been a free rider, and we’ve been able to benefit from everything that went into PCs and the Internet, and we have to continue to figure out how there will be open platforms.’”

On Valve’s interest in Linux

“The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior.

“We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It’s a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that’s true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality.

On the evolution of touch

“We think touch is short-term. The mouse and keyboard were stable for 25 years, but I think touch will be stable for 10 years. Post-touch will be stable for a really long time, longer than 25 years.

“Post touch, depending on how sci-fi you want to get, is a couple of different technologies combined together. The two problems are input and output. I haven’t had to do any presentations on this because I’m not a public company, so I don’t have any pretty slides.

“There’s some crazy speculative stuff. This is super nerdy, and you can tease us years from now, but as it turns out, your tongue is one of the best mechanical systems to your brain, but it’s disconcerting to have the person sitting next you go blah, blah, blah, blah.

“I don’t think tongue input will happen, but I do think we will have bands on our wrists, and you’ll be doing something with your hands, which are really expressive.”

On wearable computers

“I can go into the room and put on the $70,000 system we’ve built, and I look around the room with the software they’ve written, and they can overlay information on objects regardless of what my head or eyes are doing. Your eyes are troublesome buggers.”

The project was aimed at offering smartphones at prices that neither Android or Windows Phone could easily reach, but also would have required Nokia to try to woo developers for yet another operating system.

Nokia never officially confirmed the existence of Meltemi, so it likewise isn’t confirming its demise. However, sources tell AllThingsD that the project has been shelved, though elements of it may live on in other efforts.

The end of the Meltemi project comes as Nokia is cutting a further 10,000 jobs, closing a plant in Finland and shuttering research facilities in Canada and Germany. Nokia announced last year that it was ceasing active work on Meego, a separate Linux-based operating system that it had planned to use at the high end, before making the move to Windows Phone.

Asked about Meltemi on a conference call Thursday, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that he had never talked publicly about a development project by that name, but noted that Nokia was ending some development projects.

In its press release, Nokia also took pains to note its continued focus on its current low-end smartphone platforms, known as Series 30 and Series 40. Last week, the company announced new all-touch phones in its Series 40-based Asha line.

Mary McDowell, who has been leading Nokia’s low-end phone business, is among the executives leaving the company as part of a leadership shuffle.

Nokia also said it is working hard with Microsoft to find ways to bring Windows Phone to ever-lower price points. The company is continuing efforts in the Windows-based tablet arena, sources said, though the company has yet to announce any products there.

Richard Kerris, who helps lead Nokia’s efforts with developers, said that Thursday’s moves, while difficult, should allow the company to put more resources into its key projects.

“We have awesome products in the pipeline, and our developers are going to love them,” Kerris said.

Nokia is also exploring alternatives for another of its development environments, known as Qt, which today is used largely in embedded devices.

“We’re fans of Qt, and we’ll continue to support it in the near term, but are being open about looking for opportunities which may be best for this developer framework,” Kerris said.

On Tuesday, the consumer electronics giant joined the Linux Foundation, donating half a million dollars to the nonprofit and claiming a seat on its board of directors.

“We’re looking forward to increasing collaboration and support for our growing portfolio of Linux-based devices and to making contributions that advance Linux for all,” Samsung Electronics Vice President WonJoo Park said in a statement.

A savvy move for Samsung, which uses Linux in a number of its products and has been collaborating with Intel on Tizen, a new Linux-based platform for mobile devices. Snagging a seat on the Linux Foundation’s board should give it greater opportunity to steer Tizen’s development, which could be quite useful if it ever emerges as a viable alternative to Google’s Linux-based Android operating system, which it now uses extensively on its smartphones and tablets.

Obviously, that’s not the part that surprises me. But here is the bit that did: When you add up all those expenses over a server’s lifetime, labor costs amount to about 70 percent of the total, according to IBM. If you had asked me, I would have guessed the cost of power would outweigh the cost of ongoing labor. Silly me.

I talked with IBM’s Steve Mills about this earlier this week. He’s Big Blue’s senior vice president and group executive for Software and Systems. It’s not uncommon, he says, for a company to take weeks or even a month between a server’s arrival and its deployment.

IBM today announced a hardware system it calls PureSystems that can cut that deployment time to hours and reduce the lifetime labor cost associated with the server by about one-third.

Basically what IBM is doing here is bringing to bear its expertise in services. Having done so well running IT services for a few thousand different companies, it has learned a thing or two about efficiency.

And it makes perfect sense when you consider that much of IBM’s $107 billion in revenue is derived from its services business. Now it’s taking some of that learning and applying it to its hardware and software business, which accounts for about 40 percent of sales.

The key feature, Mills told me, is something called the Flex Systems Manager, which is some IBM-made software that automates a lot of the set-up and maintenance work that traditionally has to be done more or less manually by one or a team of IT managers. “The purpose of the code is to do discovery. … Can I locate every piece of hardware in the frame? What are the rules for configuring it? Can I locate all the software I need and what are the rules for configuring that?” Mills told me.

All that data has been gathered into a single screen that makes the relevant information available at a glance. Mills says the system can be up and running within four hours of arriving at a company’s loading dock. That’s a bold claim.

It’s all based around patterns that IBM has seen over and over again for different types of deployments and configuration options. See them often enough and you can develop software scripts that take a great deal of the manual labor out of the process.

Sometimes companies have their own unique or wonky business processes that even someone as experienced as IBM hasn’t seen before. If that’s the case, a company can craft its own pattern and translate that into software that can automate a process that’s unique to its business or internal rules.

IBM has also teamed up with 125 independent software vendors or ISVs to develop their own patterns that clients can quickly download in order to get up and running. (IBM put out a video on that, which I’ve taken the liberty of embedding below.)

It’s also pretty diverse from a computing standpoint. IBM being IBM, the system has different hardware options, including processors from Intel or its own Power line of chips. There are also three OS options: Windows, Linux and AIX, IBM’s proprietary flavor of Unix. There’s also a wide choice of virtual machine managers: VMWare, KVM, Microsoft’s HyperV and IBM’s own PowerVM.

In the end, the point is to allow a company’s employees to spend more time working on their key lines of business and less time making the computers run properly, which is at its most basic level the IT shop’s highest mission.

Commodore USA, the Florida-based start-up company that has been producing replicas of the popular Commodore computers of the 1980s, has introduced a new Commodore Amiga Mini, a 7.5-inch by 3-inch computer with an Intel i7 quad-core processor. Unlike the much, much earlier Amiga models, this one features two Wi-Fi antennae and Bluetooth capabilities.

This is clearly a product for, shall we say, enthusiasts. As with the original Amiga, the new version doesn’t come with a keyboard or display screen. It runs a Linux OS, and ranges in price from $1,995 to $2,495 (see update below).

Commodore USA says it plans to serve up more nostalgia in aluminum housings. It will put out more Amiga models in the next month or so, timed around the anniversary of the release of the Commodore Amiga 1000 in April 1985.

In addition to the Amiga, the company has announced a new “supreme” C64x, with 4 gigabytes of memory, an Intel D27000 dual core processor and an Nvidia GeForce GT 520 graphics card for “enhanced gaming capability.” This one comes with a mechanical keyboard, WiFi and Bluetooth capablilities, and HDMI and USB ports, so there are some modern touches to this retro piece.

In 2010, Commodore USA put out a replica of the popular Commodore 64 computer due to “high demand” and lots of emails from C64 fans, Commodore USA CEO Barry Altman said at the time.

Update: A day after Commodore USA announced the new Amiga Mini, it lowered the price of the computer due to “overwhelming outpouring of customer comments, along with those posted on the major tech blogs”. The starting price point of the Amiga Mini is now $1495. At the high end, however, an Amiga with a 600 GB solid state drive and 16GB of memory will still cost $3000.

Samsung apparently plans to merge its homegrown bada software with Tizen, which is itself the merger of multiple mobile Linux projects. An executive of the Korean electronics giant mentioned the move in an interview with Forbes last week, and on Monday confirmed the plans to Reuters.

The move means that apps written for bada (which is Korean for “ocean”) should run on Tizen, assuming that operating system finds its way onto devices. Tizen is a successor to MeeGo, an effort that was backed by both Intel and Nokia, until Nokia revamped its plans to focus on Windows Phone.

The timing for when the merger should be complete was not immediately clear, though Samsung told Forbes that the effort is already under way.

Citing sources, The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Samsung was working on a plan to open-source the operating system.

Though not sold on phones in the U.S., bada has gained some ground in other countries.

Update: Samsung tells AllThingsD that it is considering merging bada into Tizen, but that a final decision has not been reached.

“Samsung and other members of Tizen Association have not made a firm decision regarding the merge of bada and Tizen,” Samsung said in a statement. “We are carefully looking at it as an option to make the platforms serve better for customers. As Samsung’s essential part of multi-platform portfolio, bada will continue to play an important role in democratizing smartphone experience in all markets. Samsung will also support open source based development and continue to work together with other industry stakeholders.”

An expected software update on a slow day at the end of December is hardly big breaking news. But for start-up company Boxee, it signals a shift away from its software for PC browsers and a focus on Internet-connected TVs: The company says version 1.5 of the software will be its last Boxee update for PCs, Ubuntu and Mac computers.

It will be launched along with a Live TV dongle for the Boxee Box later in January.

Version 1.5 of the downloadable software on the Web will include better file support, a new onscreen display, search functionality, HTML5 WebKit-based browser, and will support multiple languages. It will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and higher, Linux Ubuntu 11.10, and will be available on Boxee.tv through the end of January.

And for those who would rather develop their own software for Boxee: The company is also releasing an open source version of its software.

The update won’t, however, offer PC users access to the same apps that are available on the Box, such as Netflix, Pandora and VUDU.

Boxee first launched in January 2010 as a Web application for watching Internet video online. In November 2010, it launched its awaited Boxee Box device, which came with a nifty Qwerty-style remote and offered a variety of apps — but it launched amid a growing market of Internet-connected TV boxes, including Apple TV, Google TV, Microsoft’s Xbox and the competitively-priced Roku box. At the time of the Boxee’s hardware launch, about 1.5 million people were using the Boxee software.

Boxee explained its shift away from Web software by saying it believes the future of TV will be driven by Internet-connected boxes, connected TVs and second screen devices like tablets. “While there are still many users who have computers connected to their TVs, we believe this use case is likely to decline as users find better alternatives,” Boxee wrote.

The company also said that the lack of premium apps on the downloadable version of Boxee was due to extensive DRM and certification requirements.

And though the immediate question over whether or not HP would ultimately keep the platform or sell it to someone else is now answered, it was clear from talking with Whitman and Andreessen that there are still a lot of issues to sort out. There are questions about business models, how to work with outside developers, hardware manufacturers, and even over how many people will keep their jobs.

It’s also notable that Andreessen was on hand because of his history with open source projects. As the creator of the Netscape Web browser, Andreessen was there for that company’s much-remembered IPO, its acquisition by AOL, and the transformation of the Netscape browser into an open source project now called Mozilla, which produces the popular browser Firefox.

My first question was about what kind of contribution — both financial and otherwise — HP is prepared to make to this new open source project.

AllThingsD: Meg, do you have any thoughts on how much you’re going to contribute to this webOS effort in terms of money and people at this point?

Whitman: I won’t give you a dollar number but I will tell you that it will be a substantial software investment but it will not break the bank at HP. This is a wonderful asset, actually, but what I was telling employees this morning is you’re a start-up now. You’re a start-up with a number of people, 750,000 installed devices out there, and with your first venture capitalist, and that’s HP. And let’s go figure out how to change the world out there.

The thought that it’s now a start-up makes me want to turn to you, Marc, and ask, what do you think of that?

Andreessen: I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved in a number of what I think have turned out to be very successful open sourcing projects that are a lot like this. And of course the big one that I was in the middle of was the transition from Netscape to Mozilla, which is not a perfect analogy but there are a lot of similarities and that just turned out marvelously well. And then obviously Linux has been a huge transformative force in the industry in the last 10 years, and both Linux as an open source project and Red Hat as a business have been spectacular. So we live in a world now where open source now, unlike 10 or 15 years ago, is mainstream, it’s widely accepted, it’s widely adopted, it’s trusted, enterprises are willing to bet on it, hardware companies are willing to bet on it, and chip companies build it into their plants from day one. So I think we have a real opportunity to have something really special happen.

Meg, in looking back to before your time as CEO when there was a plan to have webOS on printers and all the consumer PCs. Will there be any changes to those plans?

Whitman: I think we’ve got to walk before we run here. And let’s see what form webOS takes. In 2012 as you know we’re bringing two Windows 8 tablets to the market, we’re excited about that, we’re going to be working with them [Microsoft] constructively, but there may be an opportunity in 2013 to think of a different device, maybe come back to tablets. Let’s just see how it goes, but obviously HP would be one of the likely suspect hardware manufacturers for webOS.

So you’re not closing the door entirely to hardware down the road, just not right away?

Whitman: In all likelihood, not in 2012. The 2012 road map is already done.

One thing that comes to mind is that, based on our reporting, there may be headcount reductions in webOS at some point. Can you give us any clarity on that?

Whitman: I can’t. We have released no numbers on that and the reason is we don’t know. I’d tell you if I knew, but we don’t know. We’ve got to get a business plan, a product road map, a business model that we think will work, and decide how we’re going to engage with other hardware manufacturers, how we’re going to engage the open source community and that will determine ultimately the types and numbers of people.

The reason? A scary vulnerability in Java that was detected over the summer, and which Oracle has subsequently fixed, is being exploited by people who create the malware and crimeware that causes so many headaches for home users and corporate IT departments.

The risk is especially acute at large companies with big fleets of desktops and notebooks to manage. If you’re a home user, the patch is easy to install. But most employees don’t have administrative privileges on their work desktops or notebooks, so someone from the IT department has to come and install the patch for them.

That’s a big, time-consuming process, says HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7, a Cambridge, Mass-based company that specializes in helping companies stay ahead of new computer security vulnerabilities. He’s also the chief architect of Metasploit, which Rapid7 owns.

One of the reasons this particular vulnerability is so bad is that even after it was detected and fixed, it wasn’t fully understood how dangerous it is, Moore says. Crimeware creators somehow figured it out ahead of most security researchers, and started adding code to Web sites designed to take advantage of it. And that’s especially dangerous at this time of the year, when people are shopping online both at home and the office. “It’s kind of like a perfect storm,” Moore told me yesterday. Add to that the fact that many companies have IT staff taking vacation during the holiday season, and the timing couldn’t be worse.

Enterprise is historically bad at patching Java vulnerabilities anyway, because it doesn’t have the same automatic update tools that Windows or Adobe Flash does. “The tools for patching Java aren’t that great,” Moore told me. “A Java update just isn’t treated with the same fervor as a Windows update.”

So how bad is this one? The National Vulnerability Database rates it a 10 out of 10 on the severity scale, and also rates it as “low” on the access complexity scale — meaning it’s really easy for the bad guys to carry out an attack using it.

Security blogger Brian Krebs discovered the vulnerability being “weaponized,” that is, built into the software that computer criminals buy on the black market. For instance, those who have bought something called the Blackhole Exploit Kit, a $4,000 software toolkit used to target Windows machines, are getting automatic updates that include tools to take advantage of the Java vulnerability.

What to do until you can get all your machines updated with the latest version of Java? Simple, really: Disable it and block it at the firewall, until all the machines on the network that need the update have it, Moore says.

Rapid7, incidentally, is a security company on the rise. Just last month it raised a $50 million series C round of funding, led by Technology Crossover Ventures and joined by previous investors Bain Capital Ventures; Tim McAdam, a TCV partner, joined Rapid7′s board.

In addition, at an event it hosted for mobile developers in Seattle, the chipmaker said it was no longer supporting MeeGo, a Linux-based operating system, and instead was now focusing on an operating system called Tizen in partnership with Samsung.

The new operating system, which is based on Linux, will focus on supporting HTML5 to better compete in the future against Android and Apple.

Telmap will become part of Intel’s consumer services division and support Intel AppUp, an app store aimed at consumers who are looking to download software for their mobile phones or other devices.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Telmap, which has 210 employees and says it is profitable, provides mapping, local business listings and other location-based services for applications. It primarily works with wireless operators in Europe, and powers such applications as Orange Maps and Vodafone’s Find and Go.

Roughly seven million subscribers use the company’s services worldwide.

Peter Biddle, the general manager of Intel AppUp, explained to me that they wouldn’t be so bold to say that they are trying to compete against the “galactically” big Google Maps or Bing Maps franchises.

But he does see some wiggle room when it comes to working with third-party developers.

He said many developers today rely on Google Maps to provide directions or more information within their applications, but then must agree to various business licenses, which could change down the road.

If developers use mapping and location services from Telmap instead, they will own that relationship with the consumer, rather than sending them to Google or Microsoft. He goes into more detail in a blog post.

“What happens if Bing’s or Google’s licenses change?” he said. “Developers can provide an in-app experience without someone getting in between them and their users. We are not trying to get in between.”

By providing mapping services, Biddle hopes to attract more developers to AppUp, which is obviously way behind Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market.

Tizen is expected to launch its first mobile and ultrabook devices in mid-2012, and Biddle is hoping to attract six million consumers to the AppUp platform by next year.

The project is a Linux-based operating system code-named Meltemi, the Greek word for dry summer winds that blow across the Aegean Sea from the north. It is being led by Mary McDowell, the handset maker’s executive vice president in charge of mobile phones, these people say.

A spokesman for Nokia, Doug Dawson, declined to comment on the Finland-based company’s future products or technologies.

Nokia’s attempt to build its own software is another sign that the value in the technology industry is shifting from hardware to software. In the past year, Google Inc.’s Android software has dominated the midrange smartphone market while Apple Inc.’s iPhone, which runs Apple’s iOS software, has captured the high end.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »