Google Remains King of Searches

The bad press Google received about changes in its privacy policy hasn’t hurt the search giant’s  popularity among Net ferrets, according to reports released Friday by comScore and the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

During February, when the hysteria level about the privacy changes were at their height, Google still garnered 66.4 percent of all searches made on the Web, a slight increase over the previous month’s 66.2 percent share, according to comScore.

In a distant second place was Microsoft’s Bing, with 15.3 percent, compared to 15.2 percent in the previous month.

Yahoo, which uses Bing’s search engine, slipped during the period, to 13.8 percent from 14.1 percent.

The Yahoo-Microsoft combined share also dropped during the month, to 29.1 percent from 29.3 percent in January.

Bringing up the rear of the standings were Ask, with a share that remained unchanged during the period at three percent, and AOL which fell to 1.5 percent from 1.6 percent.

Don’t Search Me, Users Say

Pew’s survey on search engines explains why Google remains the top dog in the market. It found that 83 percent of the more than 2200 people it surveyed used Google for their search needs.

Finishing behind Google in the poll was Yahoo, with 6 percent of the respondents. That’s a far cry, Pew noted, from 2004 when 26 percent of those surveyed said they used Yahoo, compared to 47 percent for Google. Yahoo ditched its search engine for Bing in 2009.

Pew’s survey uncovered strong negative feelings by searchers about engines collecting data about them. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the survey sample frowned on engines using data collected from them to rank future search results.

Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of the respondents did not want engines tracking their searches to personalize them in the future and 68 percent opposed targeted advertising because they did not want their online behavior scrutinized by a search engine.

As opposed as those surveyed were to those behaviors by search engines, however, only 38 percent of them had a clue on how to limit the data collected about them on the Net.

On the plus side for search engines, confidence in search results remain relatively high. For example, 91 percent of the respondents said they found or mostly found what they were looking for with the search engine that they used.

In addition, nearly three quarters (73 percent) believed search results were accurate and trustworthy, almost two-thirds (66 percent) thought results were fair and unbiased, and more than half believed that over time the quality of search results had improved (55 percent) and that they had improved in relevance and usefulness (52 percent), too.

While the reports from comScore and Pew suggest that Google’s privacy changes and the heated discussion over search engine tracking that surrounded it haven’t tarnished the image of search engines among their users, the Pew survey does indicate that searchers don’t want their activity on the Internet tracked nor do they want their search results tampered with based on past behaviors.

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Intel Launches Xeon E5-2600

Intel has launched its long-awaited Xeon E5-2600 processor family, code-named Sandy Bridge, which it says provides an 80 percent improvement in performance compared to the previous Xeon 5600 series. The new processor is aimed at meeting the growing demands of cloud computing, consumerisation and big data.

Intel estimates that there will be 15 billion connected devices and 3 billion connected users by 2015. Meanwhile, the amount of global data centre IP traffic is forecast to grow by 33 percent annually, surpassing 4.8 zetabytes per year – more than three times the amount in 2011.

Intel aims to deal with this massive growth by focusing on four key areas – performance, energy efficiency, I/O bandwidth and security.

The Xeon E5 supports up to eight cores per processor, but HyperThreading effectively doubles that to 16 per socket. The new processors will also support more memory – up to 768GB in 24 slots – providing more DRAM for software applications and virtual machines to work with.

Intel’s Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) technology helps boost performance up to two times on compute-intensive applications like financial analysis and high performance computing, and the Xeon E5 processors also come with a new version of the Turbo Boost 2.0 overclocking mechanism.

Intel claims the Xeon E5 can improve energy efficiency by more than 50 percent, reducing total cost of ownership and helping customers to meet their growing data demands. It also supports tools to monitor and control power usage such as Intel Node Manager and Intel Data Centre Manager.

“The E5 will allow people on a standard data centre footprint who have a limited power budget and footprint to do twice as much in the same footprint, because there’s a 50 percent greater efficiency,” said Steve Pawlowski, Intel senior fellow and CTO of the Digital Enterprise Group, speaking to Techworld at a launch event in London.

“For a company like Amazon to be able to provide tens of thousands of cores and not have to pay any more for the energy than they did before, while doubling the performance, is huge. It depends on where you happen to be located, but energy costs roughly $1 million per megawatt, so anything that you can do to improve your performance and save is huge.”

In terms of I/O, the E5 processors include Intel Data Direct, which allows Ethernet routers and adapters to route I/O traffic directly to the processor cache, reducing power consumption and latency. They are also the first processors to integrate the I/O controller using PCI Express 3.0 directly into the microprocessor, tripling the movement of data and reducing latency by up to 30 percent.

Finally, the Xeon E5 family uses Intel’s Advanced Encryption Standard New Instruction (AES-NI) to quickly encrypt and decrypt data running over a range of applications and transactions. The company claims that this, together with Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology, will help organisations protect their data centres against attack.

Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors have been in the channel since the third quarter of 2011, and manufacturers including Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM are all ready with servers and workstations based on the Xeon E5-2600 architecture. Some – including Dell and HP - have already previewed their new server products.

The processor is available in 17 different versions, ranging in price from $198 to $2,050 in quantities of 1,000. UK prices have not been announced.

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IBM Developed Optical Chip That Can Transfer 1Tbps

IBM researchers have developed a prototype optical chip that can transfer data at 1Tbps (terabit per second), the equivalent of downloading 500 high-definition movies, using light pulses, the company said Thursday.

The chip, called Holey Optochip, is a parallel optical transceiver consisting of both a transmitter and a receiver, and is designed to handle the large amount of data created and transmitted over corporate and consumer networks as a result of new applications and services. It is expected to power future supercomputer and data center applications, an area where IBM already uses optical technology.

Optical networking can significantly improve data transfer rates by speeding the flow of data using light pulses, instead of sending electrons over wires, IBM said.

Researchers have been looking for ways to make use of optical signals together with standard low-cost and high-volume chip manufacturing techniques, to ensure the low cost and widespread use of such chips.

Scientists at IBM labs developed the Holey by fabricating 48 holes through a standard 90-nanometer silicon CMOS chip, IBM said. The holes allow optical access through the back of the chip to 24 receiver and 24 transmitter channels, it added.

The module is constructed with components that are commercially available, throwing open the possibility of manufacturing it at economies of scale, IBM said. The transceiver also meets green computing objectives, as it consumes less than 5 watts.

The scientists will report on the prototype on Thursday at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles. IBM aims to improve on the technology for its commercialization in the next decade with the collaboration of manufacturing partners.

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Seven New Features in Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ Beta 1

Exactly three months after the first alpha version of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” made its debut, the project’s developers on Thursday launched the first beta release of the operating system.

As a Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 12.04 is a particularly important iteration of Canonical’s Linux distribution. Just one more beta version of the free and open source software is scheduled–with an arrival date of March 29–before the launch of the final release on April 26.

“The team has been hard at work throughout this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs,” wrote Kate Stewart, Canonical’s Ubuntu Release Manager, in anannouncement on Thursday.

Among the new changes included in this first beta version are a feature enabling considerable power savings and a new CD image size of 703MB “to squeeze in every bit of package goodness we can on the installation CD images,” Stewart added.

Designed for testing purposes, Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 can now be downloaded from the project’s site. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the release’s key highlights.

1. A Taste of HUD

As hinted by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth in late January, Ubuntu’s new “Head-Up Display,” or “HUD,” interface makes its debut in this beta version. Dubbed as “a new way to quickly search and access any desktop application’s and indicator’s menu,” HUD can be accessed by pressing the Alt key and typing in a description of what you want to do. The software will then return a set of corresponding entries, including some fuzzy matching, the project team says. Over time, it also learns from your previous choices to make the search more and more accurate, they note.

2. Unity Tweaks

Ubuntu’s Unity interface has been nothing if not controversial, but in this new release, the “Appearance” panel in the software’s system settings lets you more easily configure some properties of Unity. For bookmark users, the Unity launcher now also includes Nautilus quicklist support.

3. ClickPad Support

Ubuntu 12.04 now includes support for ClickPads, or trackpads on which the physical button is integrated into the trackpad surface. Most Synaptics ClickPads are recognized out of the box in this new release, as are Apple MacBook trackpads. Coming in Ubuntu’s next release will be support for Apple Magic Trackpads and more Synaptics brand devices, the Ubuntu team says.

4. Power Savings

For the aforementioned power savings, RC6–the technology that allows GPUs to go into a very low power consumption state when the GPU is idle–is now enabled by default for Sandy Bridgesystems. The result can be improvements of between 40 and 60 percent in power usage under idle loads, the developers say.

5. LibreOffice 3.5 and Rhythmbox

Among the default applications in Ubuntu 12.04 are the newly updated LibreOffice 3.5 as well as Rhythmbox as the default music player.

6. Better Language Support

When users install new software through the Ubuntu Software Center, the corresponding language support packages–including translations and spell check modules–are now installed automatically as well, thus eliminating the need to open “Language Support” after installing new software.

7. A Fresh Kernel

Finally, upgrading from the second alpha release of Precise Pangolin, this new beta version includes the 3.2.0-17.27 Ubuntu kernel, which is based on version 3.2.6 of the upstream stableLinux kernel.

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Mac OS X Sales Zoom as Windows XP Finally Slumps

On the heels of the launch of Windows 8′s preview, new statistics show that Microsoft’s decade-old Windows XP again plummeted in usage share and will be surpassed by Windows 7 in June.

According to Internet metrics firm Net Applications, Windows XP lost 1.8 percentage points last month to drop to a 45.4 percent share. The decline was the largest since December 2011, and the fourth time in the last 12 months that the aged OS lost around two points of share.

Windows XP also reached a milestone in February, for the first time accounting for less than half of all machines running Windows. Of the PCs powered by Windows, 49.4 percent of them ran XP.

Meanwhile, Windows 7 continued its charge, gaining 1.7 percentage points to end February with 38.1 percent of the desktop operating system usage share.

Assuming their paces hold steady, Windows 7 will take the top spot from XP in June, and has an outside shot of doing so in May.

It couldn’t come too soon for Microsoft, which has been reminding customers that XP will stop receiving security updates in April 2014, and aggressively pushing Windows 7 as the next logical move.

Microsoft’s problem-plagued Vista — the 2007 edition that never managed to capture more than 20 percent of the market — lost about one-tenth of a percentage point, dropping to 8.1 percent.

Windows overall share receded slightly to 91.9 percent, the fourth straight month that the operating system has grown share, stayed flat or lost less than two-tenths of a percentage point. The last time Windows dropped by more than half a percentage point was October 2011.

The Wednesday release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview will not immediately affect share numbers — it’s not expected to ship until this fall — but if the radically-revamped OS catches on, it could mean the end of Windows 7′s climb.

Vista, for example, peaked the same month that Microsoft launched Windows 7 and has been sliding ever since.

Windows XP users will be able to upgrade to Windows 8, assuming their PCs meet the low-level system requirements of the latter: a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. Most analysts, however, expect XP owners, especially businesses that still rely on the old OS, to migrate to Windows 7 rather than that edition’s touch-centric successor.

During February, only 0.02 percent — or two PCs out of every 10,000 — ran Windows 8 Developer Preview, the September 2011 edition that Microsoft opened to all comers.

The next few months will show whether users are trying out Windows 8, and possibly predict its future adoption.

Three years ago when Microsoft delivered the public beta of Windows 7, that OS’s share jumped to 0.2 percent the month after the preview’s debut, and reached half a percentage point within four months. By the time Windows 7 shipped in October 2009, it had acquired a respectable 2.2 percent share.

The beta of Windows Vista was adopted by far fewer users, and the edition accounted for just 0.9 percent of all operating systems the month after it shipped. Vista didn’t reach Windows 7′s launch-month performance until a month and a half later.

If Windows 8′s pre-release adoption rate is on Vista’s scale Microsoft might be in trouble. However, if the Consumer Preview’s usage share quickly climbs, the company may have another hit on its hands.

Lion Gains Share

Like Windows 7, Apple’s Mac OS X gained ground in February, growing its share by more than half a percentage point and ending the month with 6.9 percent of the usage market. It was the Mac operating system’s biggest one-month increase in Net Applications’ tracking history, and put Apple within spitting distance of its October 2011 record amount of usage share.

Among Macs, OS X 10.7, aka Lion, again boosted its share; in February, the mid-2011 edition accounted for 38.9 percent of all Apple desktop operating systems in use.

Snow Leopard, or OS X 10.6, retained its lead over Lion, however. The 2009 version powered 43.4% of all Mac desktops and notebooks.

Apple has also announced a 2012 operating system upgrade, dubbed OS X Mountain Lion, that it will deliver in late summer. If experts are right, and Apple offers aMountain Lion upgrade free of charge to some Mac users, that edition’s share could climb much faster than either past for-a-fee OS X versions or even Windows 8.

Net Applications calculates operating system usage share with data obtained from more than 160 million unique visitors who browse 40,000 Web sites that the company monitors. More OS share data can be found on the company’s site.

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Windows 8 Consumer Preview Hits 1 Million Downloads

Microsoft’s Windows 8 Consumer Previewsaw more than one million downloads during the first day of its release, the Building Windows 8 team said via Twitter late Thursday. The beta version of Windows 8 posted on Wednesday morning; it’s not clear whether the first million downloads occurred within or just beyond the first 24 hours of availability. Microsoft recorded three million downloads of the Windows 8 Developer Preview between September and December, 2011.

The latest version of Windows is a dramatic departure from previous versions of Microsoft’s trademark OS. Most notably, the decades old PC desktop has been kicked from its perch as the main Windows interface in favor of a touch-centric Start screen that echoes Windows Phone 7. “Windows 8 reimagines Windows, from the chipset to the experience,” said Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows division.

iPad Challenger, PC Dud?

Expectations are high that Windows 8 (also designed for ARM SoCs) will enable tablet manufacturers to mount a serious challenge to Apple’s iPad, which Android tablets have so far failed to do. Whether Windows 8 will be a big winner on traditional PCs, however, is unclear. Microsoft says Windows 8 is just as easy to use with a mouse as it is with a touchscreen, but it requires users to learn a new way of navigating a Windows PC.

The start button is replaced with a hot corner that kicks you back to the new Metro-style touch-friendly Start screen. From there you can choose to open traditional desktop apps or use some of the new Metro apps such as Xbox LIVE Games, Maps, and a Metro-style Internet Explorer.

PC users will also have to be content with full-screen programs when using Metro-style apps, and must learn how to use the new Charms Bar on the far right of the Windows 8 display. The Charms Bar includes important system functions such as Settings, Search, settings for devices connected to your computer, and a new social-networking friendly Share button.

Windows 8 does offer some new features for PC desktop users, including a revampedfile transfer dialog box, tools to deal with duplicate files, faster boot times, and new SkyDrive integration with Windows Explorer (not yet available in the Consumer Preview).

But the main focus for Microsoft in Windows 8 is the touch experience, while the desktop has been turned into a second-class citizen. That appears to be Microsoft’s plan for the moment, anyway.  The reaction of regular PC users to Windows 8′s radical departure is unclear.

Nevertheless, the large numbers of Windows 8 Consumer Preview downloads suggests, at the very least, that users are interested in checking out the newest version of Windows. Also see “15 Awesome Windows 8 ‘Metro-Style’ Apps.”)

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Google Plows Ahead With Privacy Changes, as EU Concerns Remain

Google has implemented its highly controversial new privacy policy, despite requests from EU regulatory bodies to delay it until further investigations into its impact have taken place.

The policy will take effect from today and has allowed Google toconsolidate more than 60 of its privacy policies into one main document. By doing this, Google will be able to unify customer data across most of its products.

This will mostly affect those with a Google Account, where if a user is signed in, Google may combine information on that user from one service with information from other services.

However, the CNIL, an EU organisation that is charged with ensuring technology doesn’t infringe on citizens’ privacy, wrote to Google asking it to postpone the application of the new policy due to EU data protection authorities being “deeply concerned”.

“By merging the privacy policies of its services, Google makes it impossible to understand which purposes, personal data, recipients or access rights are relevant to the use of a specific service,” wrote the CNIL in a statement.

“As such, Google’s new policy fails to meet the requirements of the European Data Protection Directive regarding the information that must be provided to data subjects,” it continued.

“The CNIL and the EU data protection authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of data across services and have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing. They intend to address these questions in detail with Google’s representatives”.

Google confirmed in a blog today that the new privacy rules have been implemented and tried to resolve any “chatter and confusion” with an explanation of why it has consolidated its previous policy documents.

It states that it is not collecting any new or additional information about users, it won’t be selling personal data, it believes the new policy will be easier to understand and will enable it to provide a more personalised experience.

“We’ll continue to look for ways to make it simpler for you to understand and control how we use the information you entrust to us,” wrote Alma Whitten, director of privacy, product and engineering at Google.

“We build Google for you, and we think these changes will make our services even better”.

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