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The current blocking may be related to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. China’s sport authority has banned the issuing of Internet domain names based on the country’s Olympic gold medal-winning athletes to anyone but the medalists themselves, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

Moonlinght tells us more about the Olympic angle:

GoDaddy, the world’s leading domain name registrar, is inaccessible in China, writes Moonlight Blog. Possible reasons? Efforts to prevent people from registering Olympic winners’ names, or the hope that Chinese users will register domains in China.

The General Administration of Sport (GAS) provided the CNNIC with a full list of China’s Olympic team prior to the Games’ opening on August 8, and had registered all available domain names for athletes in Chinese characters and in Pinyin. Those who had already registered before the GAS order could not keep the the domain names anymore; they were forced to give it to the medalist “as a gift”.

If the goal is to make it less convenient (though by no means impossible) for Chinese to register non-Chinese domain names, this may represent an effort to keep Chinese-published material under home control.

The company’s software, called the Solution Factory, automates the process of patching software for security problems and resolves conflicts among different components of a software “stack.”

SpikeSource is trying to attract other platform companies. Company executives wouldn’t say which vendors they are talking to, but some likely targets would be SAP, Microsoft, AMD, and IBM, which of each have ISV programs.

The company originally launched around the idea that businesses needed support and maintenance services for strictly open-source products.

The SpikeSource service is also an attempt to expand beyond the company’s roots in open-source product certification.

Intel on Wednesday said it is using the software service to check that Intel-aligned application companies comply with Intel’s hardware optimization technology. The program is scheduled to be available this summer.

“Platform vendors are in a war of trying to recruit ISVs (independent software vendors) to build solutions for their platforms and embed key technologies into their applications,” said Dominic Sartorio, director of product management. This software “makes it easier to embed technologies and certify things.”

The company also announced that Intel, a customer, has invested an additional $10 million into SpikeSource. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Fidelity Venture Partners, CMEA Ventures, and DAG Venture reinvested for an undisclosed sum.

SpikeSource on Friday is introducing a version of its automated support and testing service tuned for the needs of IT industry platform providers.

The twist with this product, which is hosted, is that SpikeSource will seek to create versions of it specific to large vendors’ platforms.

But it has shifted its focus toward ISVs that serve small and medium-size businesses. Increasingly, those ISVs and their customers use a mix of open-source and closed-source products, said Doug Laird, vice president of marketing.

Audi recently said it will have an all-electric car in 10 years. General Motors is expected to bring out the Chevy Volt in 2010.

The company told the Associated Press that it is impressed with demand: it has taken 600 orders for the Roadster and has a waiting list of another 400. CEO Elon Musk owns the first one produced.

“The Apple stores have worked out well. It’s a fantastic consumer experience,” Musk told AutoWeek. “We wanted a nontraditional automotive experience, and we have it.”

The Roaster will have a range of 220 miles per charge and the mileage equivalent of 135 miles per gallon.

Think said it will bring its electric town cars to the United States next year.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulz/CNET Networks)

Tesla can lay claim to putting all-electric
cars back on the map, with its racy Roadster. But it certainly won’t be alone for long.

The location of the site in the tony Westwood neighborhood reflects the high-end shopping experience it intends to create for the flashy $109,000 Tesla Roadster. The next store, slated to open in San Carlos, Calif. in a couple months, will be set up to appeal to the Silicon Valley tech elite.

The company plans to make a luxury sedan next year called the Whitestar that will come in two versions: an all-electric model that will run entirely on its lithium ion battery pack, and a range-extended vehicle that will also use liquid fuel to extend its range.

The sex appeal of the Roadster is rooted in the electric motor as well: with powerful torque, it can go from standing still to 60 mph in less than 4 seconds.

Tesla Roadsters ready to roll. Click on the image to see a photo gallery of Roadsters in production.

The fancy showroom near Beverly Hills takes its inspiration from Apple stores, Musk said.

Tesla Motors opened its first dealership in Santa Monica, Calif., on Friday, attracting a gaggle of reporters.

The tool is set up just like any old spreadsheet, except that you can predefine any row by what you’re planning to put in it. You can drop in text and numbers or insert media like a YouTube video or hosted photo. In the chart embedded below I managed to throw in two videos with just a copy and paste. You can also increase your fill-out speed using simple keyboard shortcuts that let you skip ahead either by row or column. Some of the auto-formatting is especially well done. For example, writing yes or no automatically turns the cell green or red respectively. Trying to do that in Google Spreadsheets can be a pain unless you’ve got a template set up or take the time to format the cells.

To see an introductory video of Tablefy, hit the break below.

What makes the tool really neat is that you can grab any bit of data from another chart and add it to your “comparison basket.” It will automatically link up any related data like height, weight, age, etc., and put it in the right row across all the tables you’ve added. This lets you come up with crazy combinations. For example, I compared the
XBox 360 to Iron Man (both awesome). More beneficial creations include a presidential nominee comparison, popular water filters going sink-to-sink, and a listing of poisonous plants to avoid.

Tablefy’s Features from Tablefy on Vimeo.

Chart creators can also declare a winner between each column of data. Likewise anyone who reads that chart can agree or disagree through the comments or with a simple radio button.

Tablefy reminds me a lot of data comparison and tracking service Swivel. The big difference between the two being Tablefy’s focus on just charts, whereas Swivel branches out into scatter plots, bar graphs, and pie charts. Swivel also has a huge head start on user- and service-generated data. For use in things like term papers or business reports, users are likely to see Swivel if only for this richer mass of searchable data.

Are you a stats junkie? If you’re like me and could make comparison charts all day long you should check out Tablefy, a simple service that lets you quickly put together large and complex tables of data. You can compare whatever you want, and there’s already a handful of user-created data tables like superhero stats, sports
car specifications, and even a well-done chart of several popular blogging tools going head-to-head.

go to the table!

Unless you instruct it otherwise, Zimbra Desktop will synchronize your in-box but not folders where you may have filed message. You can manually sync folders when you click on them, but the process worked erratically for me.

Any of the 263 million Yahoo Mail users who were antsy for change now have something they can sink their teeth into.

Zimbra’s tags and Gmail’s labels didn’t synchronize, though. And tags are specific to an e-mail account, so clicking on a tag will show only a subset of messages within one

Update 11:03 a.m. PDT: I added more comment from Zimbra. Update 9:25 a.m. PDT: I added more background and details about my hands-on test.

Other top priorities are making the documents better and endowing Zimbra Desktop with the instant-messaging feature available in the browser-based version, Robb said.

One feature I liked, similar to Gmail’s conversation view, shows a small triangle next to e-mail messages that are part of a back-and-forth exchange. Clicking on the triangle expands the e-mail header list so you can see all the messages of the exchange.

The software can be used to connect to Yahoo Mail and also to other accounts such as AOL or Gmail that support remote access via POP (Post Office Protocol) or the newer IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).

Zimbra Desktop’s productivity suite elements are workable but nothing to write home about. Unlike Google Docs,
Microsoft Office files can’t be opened, and there’s no presentation software. The spreadsheet is extremely spartan, and runs awkwardly inside the word-processing application.

But Zimbra Desktop, while using browser interface technology called Ajax that can give Web browsers an elaborate interface, actually runs as a standalone application. It employs Java software to store data locally, and it’s a hefty download–38MB for Windows, 34MB for
Mac OS X, and 44MB for Linux.

The first real fruits of Yahoo’s $350 million acquisition of Zimbra are becoming apparent with the release Thursday of the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. The e-mail software, available as a free download for Windows and Mac, works when the user is offline, and it offers options for basic online word processing and spreadsheets, task management, and file storage.

Yahoo’s Zimbra and Yahoo Mail programmers now are working more closely together, though, and the two projects will be converging somewhat.

Zimbra Desktop can handle multiple accounts; I had no trouble setting up access to my Gmail account.

Zimbra Desktop means that Yahoo beat out Google in the race to provide e-mail that also works offline, but it took a different approach to get there. Google looks to be adding offline access through the open-source Gears project, a plug-in that augments a Web browser’s abilities.

Zimbra Desktop gives access to basic word-processing abilities, with documents stored online. (Click to enlarge.)

However, it’s not perfect. It didn’t seem connected to my Yahoo address book for contacts or calendar for events.

Zimbra Desktop's e-mail interface should be familiar to users of either Outlook or Yahoo Mail. (Click for larger version.)

So why use Zimbra Desktop when regular e-mail client software has provided offline access to e-mail for well over a decade?

(Credit:
CNET News)

There's still work to be done getting Zimbra to run as a standalone application. This is the error message that I got after complications minimizing the application.

Yahoo has formed a new group focusing on cloud computing, in which services available on the Internet substitute for local applications. But until the day when a reliable, fast Internet connection is available anywhere, offline access to applications is a significant feature.

Web e-mail comes full circle
Existing Zimbra customers can use the e-mail application through a regular browser, letting them access their e-mail from a machine that doesn’t have Zimbra Desktop installed. But the Web client version doesn’t offer offline access, said John Robb, Zimbra’s vice president of product marketing.

Also, Yahoo Mail customers can’t use the Zimbra browser-based interface yet, so they won’t get access to Zimbra features when borrowing friends’ computers or using airport kiosks.

And right now Zimbra customers only can run the software by installing it on their own servers. Yahoo is working on a hosted version that Yahoo itself will run, he said, that will launch in coming quarters.

Zimbra Desktop shows an icon in Windows’ system tray, but not as an application in the Taskbar. I had one significant problem: When I was trying out a spreadsheet and minimized all my applications, not even the system tray icon was visible. Manually terminating the process didn’t work either; an error message indicates Zimbra Desktop is still running somewhere on my system. Hello, reboot.

After many months of quiet integration, Zimbra’s ascent within Yahoo has been apparent. As part of a major reorganization in June, Zimbra leader Scott Dietzen was named to run all of Yahoo’s messaging and communication work.

“We’ve aimed to blur the line between an Ajax Web-client and a conventional desktop application, and this release is a leap towards reaching that goal,” Zimbra’s Mike Morse said in a blog posting Thursday.

Webmail is a compelling facet of cloud computing, letting people reach their e-mail from any number of computers or mobile devices. But from a user’s point of view, Zimbra Desktop’s approach–a downloadable application that doesn’t run in a browser–is actually more like traditional e-mail client software such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird.

“The exciting thing is you’re getting the Zimbra features that haven’t been available to people without the Zimbra server,” Robb said, specifically mentioning conversations, tagging, small applications called Zimlets, and rich searching features such as the ability find all messages from a particular person and with a PDF attached.

(Credit:
CNET News)

“You should see a lot of synergy between the Yahoo Mail team and the Zimbra team. This is a first example,” Robb said. “You’ll see Zimbra technology appearing in many parts of the Yahoo Mail experience, and things from Yahoo Mail will come over to the Zimbra side.”

Another feature I was glad to see is tags, which, similar to Gmail labels, let you describe e-mail messages in a more useful way than filing them into folders. Folders are better than nothing, but I hate having to decide which folder to use for a message that belongs to more than category–travel, photography, and family, to pick one example.

Robb confirmed that address book and calendar synchronization don’t yet work. “We believe those are mandatory features to make it generally available,” he said.

Test-driving Zimbra Desktop
I had no trouble installing, configuring, and running Zimbra Desktop to send and receive e-mail. As with Yahoo’s Webmail interface, it mirrors Microsoft Outlook’s look and keyboard shortcuts.

So we’re going to encourage open-source innovation on our platforms, and around our platforms. And, you know, we see interesting things where bits and pieces of technology, commercial companies are now starting to provide it in an open-source form or to digest in an open-source form. And we’re open to that as well. But our fundamental business model will remain kind of commercial software, advertising, enterprise licensing, etc.

But at least he’s willing to work with those who do grok that the future of software business (meaning: money) is open source:

Steve Ballmer is at least willing to talk with the open-source crowd now, as his comments at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 demonstrate. He’s just not willing to actually engage in open source as an appreciable part of his company’s business. Fair enough.

commentary

Will we interoperate with products that come from like Linux, from the open-source world? Yes, we will. Will we encourage people who want to do open-source development to do it on top of Windows? Yes, we’re proud that the best PHP system in the world is actually the one that runs on Windows today, not the one that runs on Linux.

No. 1, are our products likely to be open-sourced? No. We do provide our source code in special situations, but open source also implies free, free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference. (Applause.)

You’ve come a long way, Ballmer. I hope you recognize that you have a long way to go, but progress is progress.

Ballmer lacks the imagination to conceive of a world where Microsoft could open-source code and still make a lot of money (He’s apparently not heard of “Google.”):

Make Windows an open platform for our mutual customers and we’re ready to do business. That may not mean open source today, but it should also not mean entrapment through patent deals.

One word of caution: Don’t make patent licensing a hurdle that your open-source (or proprietary) partners have to leap to do business with Microsoft. We won’t. Novell plugged its nose and did it in the name of interoperability, but it has rarely mentioned the patent covenant since then (not exactly a ringing endorsement). Microsoft may have noticed that its partner announcements with leading open-source companies like MySQL dried up after the Novell deal.

Search for songs and add them to your playlist on the fly with Mix Turtle.

New music search tool Mix Turtle is a very simple and elegant way to search for hosted music tracks. It provides search-as-you-type suggestions and a playlist creation tool that lets you add any search result to your mix just by clicking the big plus button next to it.

Mix Turtle’s database houses more than 2 million tracks. I was able to find some basic tracks from big bands with ease, including live tracks and remixes. For indie stuff you might be better off perusing eMusic’s catalog.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

See also: Songza, SeeqPod, Deezer, TinySong, and SkreemR.

Like other music search engines, Mix Turtle provides variations on results if there are multiple sources. You can shuffle between each of these in succession and it will automatically jump to whichever one is still online since being indexed. It’s not as elegant as mix tape creator MixWit’s track surfer (which blends Seeqpod and Skreemr), but you can very quickly scour results and find what you’re looking for.

Unfortunately, there are no real player controls that let you tweak things like a volume level or advance to a different part of the track, but you can simply pause it or jump to another track on your list with just a single click. Your playlist also stays with you from search to search, but remains out of sight. It can be summoned with a right click on your mouse.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Postica has to be one of the more single-serving Web apps I’ve seen in a long time. The service lets you create a slew of tiny sticky notes that can be maneuvered around the confines of your browser with ajaxian flair. They don’t hover over pages you’re looking at like Diigo or Fleck; instead it’s all about your personal note space. Whatever notes you create are saved, and can be accessed from wherever. You can also share them with others, and they can send notes to your workspace, too.

I’m still wary to recommend Postica over something like Shifd, a similar Web-based sticky note service that does a much better job integrating URLs, addresses, and letting you access and sync up your notes on both desktops and mobile phones. The one area where Postica has the leg up is file sharing, but you’ve got to be patient for each upload to make its way there.

Little post-its made easy, but that's about all you can do with Postica.

Each note is confined to just 140 characters, the same length as an SMS text message or a note on Twitter. You can also add a single file to each note. I managed to get a few image files that were over 5MB in size, but it choked on the 50MB video file I tried. There’s no documentation on what the size limit is, or if you’ll run into any sort of cap on total storage so I’d stick to small files like PDFs, pictures, and office docs.

“This is an important reminder to all Facebook users that they must exercise caution about which third-party applications they install on their profile, and everyone should remember that Facebook does not approve applications before they are made available on their site,” Cluley wrote. “You really are putting your trust in complete strangers when you add that next application to your Facebook profile.”

A new piece of malware making the rounds on Facebook falsely warns users that their friends have had problems viewing their profiles, posing a potential threat to users’ personal information.

The rogue application, dubbed “Error Check System,” displays an error message in the notifications section that reads “(Friend’s name) has faced some errors when checking your profile View The Errors Message.”

“The worry is that in many people’s rush to find out more about the suspicious application’s behaviour on Facebook they may well run straight into a scareware author’s trap,” Cluley wrote. However, he noted, “Is it possible that the original Facebook application was actually a red herring, and the real dangerous payload came from people Googling for information?”

Facebook users already infected by the application can uninstall it by using the Edit tab in the Applications section of their Facebook profile.

But the warnings are fake and a viral attempt to spread the application and recruit more Facebook users, according to Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos. While saying that there is no evidence of personal information theft, Cluley noted in a blog posting that utilizing an error message about the recipient’s profile was “sneaky.”

However, non-Facebook members are at risk as well. A Web search of “Error Check System” will yield a link to a site that contains code that will initiate a fake virus scan and try to fool users into installing malware disguised as antivirus software, Cluley wrote in a second blog. Sophos identified the malware as Sus/FakeAV-A and Troj/FakeAV-LL.

Mike Jennings from Google, who was giving the demonstration, covered up the phone’s branding with tape, but it seemed pretty obvious that it’s probably the HTC Dream. Not too much is revealed about the device itself, but we did get a sneak peek at what looks to be the final version of the Android OS. Consensus seems to be that it’s a lot more polished than previous demonstrations, and though we can’t tell too much from the blurry video, it looks to be true. It definitely got us ramped up again for the eventual release of the device. Check out this YouTube video someone captured of the demo, and see for yourself.

(Via Gizmodo and TechRadar)

Journalists and developers at the Google Developer Day event in London Tuesday were treated to an unexpected demonstration of the upcoming Android handset.