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“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.

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

(Credit:
CNET News)

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.

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

“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.”

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.

(Credit:
CNET News)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Huang was especially upset about Intel’s claims of boosting integrated graphics performance in the future, saying Intel’s claims paled against what Nvidia will achieve by that time.

“We don’t typically like to do this. It’s just that we’ve been taking it and taking it and taking it. Every single frickin’ day. Are you allowed to say that word? Every day all over the world. Enough is enough.”

Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang let rip with a diatribe against Intel at Nvidia’s financial analyst day on Thursday. Huang cited frustration with recent Intel comments stating that discrete graphics cards will become “unnecessary.”

When asked to comment, Intel spokesman Dan Snyder said, “Are you surprised? Nvidia’s CEO has been very vocal about their feelings for several months now, so I don’t think any of this comes as a surprise.”

Huang also attacked Intel’s marketing machine. “Just because they have this enormous marketing budget. Just because they have platforms everywhere in the world. It doesn’t make it right. To take on smaller companies. It’s just not right.”

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang

Because Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, includes integrated-graphics silicon in most of its chipsets the company has become the world’s largest supplier of graphics chips. Its upcoming Nehalem processors will move the graphics from the chipset onto the same piece of silicon as the main processor. A design that is expected to result in vastly better performance.

Intel also has plans to bring out a graphics engine code-named Larrabee that uses “many cores” to take on high-end engineering and scientific applications. And presumably games too.

“Claim after claim after claim. They’re just false. They cross the line of fair play,” he said. “Here’s another one. Nvidia’s gonna be dead. Because we’re (Intel) sticking the graphics in the CPU and (Nvidia) will have no place to stick it,” he said.

Huang also mounted an aggressive defense of gaming on the PC–one of the main reasons many consumers opt for Nvidia graphics chips. He began by claiming that Intel graphics can’t run games. “We’re not the only ones saying this. This is Tim Sweeney. One of the most important game developers in the entire world. ‘Intel is incapable of running modern games. Intel’s integrated graphics just don’t work. I don’t think they will ever work.’ This wasn’t said in 1994. This was said on March 10, 2008,” Huang said.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

This image of Intel as an unstoppable graphics juggernaut is what Huang takes issue with. What set him off initially was a comment from an Intel graphics and gaming technologist who said that consumers “probably won’t need” discrete cards in the future. Nvidia’s primary business is designing and supplying graphics chips for discrete graphics cards that go into PCs.

“(It’s) one of the most important apps. I play games. A lot more people play games today than before. It’s a big industry. We happen to think games are important. Game developers are important. Game players are important. Online games, important. Retail games, important. First person shooters, important. Simulation games, important. I’m a perfectly grown adult. I’m not ashamed of them.”

(Note: A contrarian take on the graphics market states that Nvidia remains the #1 graphics supplier because approximately 73 million Intel integrated graphics processors (IGP) are unused in systems due to “double-attach” with an Nvidia solution, according to Doug Freedman of American Technology Research. More here at ExtremeTech.)

The move follows Broadcom’s agreement last month to pay a civil penalty of $12 million to settle SEC charges that it fraudulently backdated stock options.

Ruehle and Dull each personally benefited from the backdating scheme by receiving and exercising backdated grants that were in-the-money by more than $100,000 for Ruehle and $1.8 million for Dull, the SEC said in a statement.

Major said Broadcom would not comment on allegations, but pointed out that the charges were “half a decade to nearly a decade” old.

The SEC charges that, from 1998 to 2003, the four schemed to fraudulently backdate stock-option grants, failing to record billions of dollars of compensation expenses, and falsifying documents to further the fraud. As a result of the scheme, Broadcom restated its financial results in January 2007 and reported more than $2 billion in additional compensation expenses, the SEC said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two current and two former key executives of chipmaker Broadcom with backdating stock options.

Samueli, who co-founded the company, also resigned as chairman of the board. The board appointed director John Major to serve as nonexecutive chairman.

The SEC announced Wednesday it had filed a federal complaint against Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Henry Samueli and general counsel David Dull, as well as former Chief Executive Officer Henry Nicholas and former Chief Financial Officer William Ruehle. The chipmaker later announced that Samueli and Dull had taken leaves of absence from their positions until the matter is resolved.

For this and other instances, it’s helpful to have a dual-licensing strategy. In this way, customers get all the benefits of open source, especially the ability to view and modify source code to suit their particular needs, without the obligation to contribute back derivative works.

Most enterprises needn’t worry about the “viral” aspect of open-source licenses. Because most enterprises use software for internal purposes, rather than distribute it, they don’t trigger the standard open-source requirement to contribute back derivative works. A recent Federal Computer Week article by John Moore does an admirable job of clarifying this.

commentary

Unfortunately, this perpetuates the problem that Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat has been highlighting: the more software created in isolation, the greater the industry’s inefficiency and the higher the cost of software. Dual-licensing doesn’t solve this problem. It is, however, a good way to help guide enterprises into open source on comforting terms.

There are, however, instances in which an enterprise might well trigger the contribution requirement of open-source licensing. If a company sold off a division to another company, complete with the servers running modified open-source software, this would likely trigger a “distribution” and might well affect the value of the deal.

With a rating of 98, officially a “blue sky day” but only by two points, Beijing yesterday had the dirtiest air among monitored cities according to the Chinese government Web site that releases daily pollution figures.

Despite advertised measures to decrease pollution, as the one-month countdown to the Beijing Olympics approaches, the government’s numbers rank Beijing as having the dirtiest air in China.

This does not mean that the air will not get cleaner this month. Large numbers of personal vehicles, as well as cargo trucks that do not have Beijing license plates, will be taken off the roads in efforts to reduce
car pollution. Additionally, the hyperactive construction with huge numbers of buildings scheduled for completion or undergoing rushed renovation before the Games will stop completely late this month when a citywide construction freeze goes into effect.

The government is planning drastic measures. I hope for the sake of the athletes, visitors, and Beijing residents that they have clear, clean skies. But let’s not kid ourselves: the pollution problem in Beijing is not going to go away any time soon. Cleaning up for two weeks may be a nice show, but the city really needs drastic measures. My favorite option: even bigger car taxes than exist now, and get that subway going.

Only four other cities, including the capitals of Sichuan, Qinghai, and Liaoning Provinces, ranked above 90 on the scale.

The video game industry is abuzz over the possibility of Take-Two Interactive and Electronic Arts joining hands and become the world’s most powerful video game developer. According to EA, such a move will improve its lineup of games and help consolidate its presence in the industry.

Some tout this acquisition as the next logical step for a video game industry that’s becoming more consolidated. Others say that EA’s takeover of Take-Two could actually increase the value of games and create a company that will offer some of the most impressive titles we have ever seen, thanks to the combined efforts of developers.

Consolidation in the video game industry could ruin its ability to offer innovation and compelling titles. Of course, the developers claim that consolidation will give companies the ability to offer more compelling titles, but I just don’t see it.

In fact, consolidation has spawned an industry that’s dominated by sequel after sequel and enough first-person shooters and sports games that barely differ from year to year, that when unique and innovative titles comes along like Spore, the entire industry jumps for joy.

A quick glance at EA’s upcoming lineup of games tells you everything you need to know about consolidation. Aside from Spore, it’s dominated by sequels and titles that will do little but provide the same basic experience we’ve come to expect from today’s games.

And if EA and Take-Two–two of the biggest culprits of derivative gaming– combine to form one major developer, this will only get worse.

I understand that selling games is a business and unless developers make money, they won’t stay open for long. But I also understand that innovation is the brainchild of a developer’s desire to do something unique out of love for what they do. And if the hype surrounding Spore and LittleBigPlanet are any indication of the community’s desire for innovative titles, I think more developers would be best-served offering those kind of titles.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

But alas, that won’t happen. Market research and sales figures dictate more sequels and first-person shooters because those sell and most companies believe that there’s no reason to risk developing an innovative title that may or may not appeal to consumers when the guaranteed money is in light updates to known titles.

Take-Two hasn’t been so delighted about EA’s acquisition attempts. The company has let the offer deadlines slip countless times–the last happened just nine days ago–but it still can’t quite shake EA. And this time around, the companies have signed a confidentiality agreement that would ensure both sides don’t go public with the closed-door proceedings.

Since the age of consolidation hit the video game industry, it has changed drastically. Granted, sales are higher than they ever have been and more people are playing video games than ever before, but the video games themselves have lost much of their appeal.

But consolidation has a larger, more important affect on gaming: it turns developers into game lovers that just want to create new and unique titles to developers that are run by suits and care only about the profit potential of each title.

That sentiment may ring true in some cases, and every now and then, there’s a flash of something unique, but if this acquisition becomes a reality and EA swallows up one of the biggest developers in the industry, it spells trouble for gamers and the industry itself.

Microsoft is evaluating an offer of as much as $32 to $33 per share, well over the present $29.12 value of Microsoft’s offer, but “major Yahoo shareholders” are angling for $35 to $37 per share, the paper reported.

Microsoft’s board of directors met Wednesday to evaluate options in its attempt to acquire Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal reported.

An announcement of the board’s conclusions could come after the meeting, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the situation.

“Our robot could provide the human precision necessary to upkeep, actually better than a human is capable of, and not costing the large amount in intensive labor costs,” Precise Path co-founder, president, and CTO Doug Traster told CNET News in a phone interview.

What’s green, weighs 650 pounds, goes 3.5 mph, and costs more than $25,000?

The RG3 robot lawn mower is "whisper quiet," according to one of its inventors.

So what makes this an environmentally conscious lawnmower?

The RG3 (Robotic Greens Mower 3) from Precise Path debuted a few weeks ago at the 2009 Golf Industry Show in New Orleans. It’s a robot lawnmower that uses two lead acid batteries to run its 24-volt DC motor, and one to run its computer, offering about three hours of mowing before needing to be recharged.

(Credit:
Precise Path)

It’s a robot that could only have grown out of the American robotic heartland, and it did. Traster was a technical manager for the Indy Robot Racing team in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Scott Jones, his co-founder and the Precise Path chairman, is an alumni of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab.

“They provide a reference in space,” Traster said. “In our case we’re in open space. There’s nothing you can block and the end of the green is an arbitrary curve. You can’t block it off with a beam of light. So we calculate the distance and then you triangulate. You use four beacons they are about 4 inches in diameter and a couple feet tall and weigh about 7 pounds.”

While lead acid batteries are a dubious green improvement over gas mowers, the mower offers a solution to another environmental issue.

“This is not like some other robot mowers where they wander through and hope the grass is cut. We have to have 100 percent coverage in a single pass and straight lines as well. Because we know where we are at, we can do patterns as well to accommodate the designs golf courses sometimes like to have. You can program it to do any pattern,” Traster said.

The navigation system on the robot mower uses a combination of ultrasonics and infrared to triangulate its location within a perimeter created by four beacons.

In addition to mowing golf greens, the company is developing add-ons for the device that would allow golf course superintendents to use the robots to also mow fairways, rake sand traps, and spot treat with pesticides and fertilizers.

Because the RG3 is “whisper quiet” and doesn’t need daylight to navigate itself, the mower can be used at night. Early morning mowing is not just convenient to fitting in more tee-times.

(Credit:
Precise Path)

The founders of the company decided to craft a robot lawnmower for the golf industry because they saw a need that could be filled with a bot, and an industry that would not scoff at a hefty price tag for high-tech maintenance equipment. While the company hopes to continue to develop the tech to bring the price down, right now the RG3 has a suggested retail price of $29,500.

Not something you or I will ever buy, but a gadget golf course superintendents may go gaga over.

The beacons are set out by the operator around the green he or she wants to mow. After the mower does its thing, the operator must pick them up and move them to set the mower up at the next green.

Mowing between 3-4 am significantly reduces grass diseases, which in turn reduces the need for using water-polluting fungicides, pesticides, and fertilizers, according to info provided by Precise Path. (The GSA and a few other sources I checked also support their claim that a 3 or 4am mow greatly reduces certain grass diseases.)

Precise Path's R3G robot mower has a suggested retail price of $29,500.

While it’s a logical stretch to say this makes the mower Green, maybe it’s something that would be truly appreciated by golf course superintendents.