ComputerInsanity

Facebook appears to have made a third acquisition — this one smaller than its two previous buys. What’s more, Facebook has shut down the company’s service immediately.

Octazen is a Malaysian company comprising two employees. It provides scripts to import a user’s contacts into a website upon sign up, reports Gigaom.

Why would Facebook acquire the makers of an address book importer? It appears to be a talent buy, with Facebook employing the team and shutting down their service (aka acq-hire-sition). Liz Gannes quotes Facebook’s Larry Yu explaining:

This is part of our ongoing effort to add experienced, accomplished technical talent to help drive the company forward in its efforts to be the central way for people to connect and share information.

A statement on the Octazen site reads:

The Octazen team wanted to let you, our valued customers, know that the company recently received an offer to acquire most of the company’s assets and to employ those assets in a different direction. After carefully evaluating this offer, our team believes this is a wonderful opportunity of which we must take advantage.

As a result, effective immediately, Octazen will no longer accept new service contracts or renew existing service contracts, and will enter a transition period to wind down operations.

Facebook’s previous two acquisitions — Parakey (a web operating system) and FriendFeed (FriendFeed) (social aggregation and search) — both added excellent engineers to the Facebook team at the cost of the original services. While FriendFeed still exists, it’s barely used and the site’s features have largely been merged into Facebook, to the disappointment of loyal FriendFeed users.

When malware writers fail to generate clean, reliable code, just who can you trust? On the heels of many Windows XP 32-bit users facing blue screen of death errors and unwanted reboots, Microsoft is now confirming that there’s a little bit of malicious code sitting at the root of it all. A rootkit, to be specific, one called Alureon that compromises the atapi.sys file and others. This rootkit makes a system call via an address that, after the update, no longer corresponds to the particular call Alureon is trying to make. This is apparently the cause of the BSODs, not the update itself, and so those suffering from similar issues can resolve them by simply replacing corrupted system files via the recovery console.

Slashdot

Microsoft Malware Protection Center

Google’s always tiptoed around directly providing internet access to consumers with things like free airport WiFi and the free WiFi network it runs in Mountain View, but today the company announced that it’s getting in the game for real with the launch of a fiber-based ISP service that’ll offer 1Gbps speeds at “competitive prices” to select markets. The idea is to provide next-gen access to between 50,000 and 500,000 people and basically see what happens — and, as you’d expect, the new network will be a poster child for Google’s pro-net-neutrality efforts. Sounds good to us, but we’ve all got a ways to go before Eric Schmidt comes over with the lightpipe — Google’s just now asking for “interested communities” to apply, and launch markets will be announced later this year.

P.S.- Remember when Google bought all that fiber back in like 2005 and sparked all those rumors of a “GoogleNet”? It’s probably unrelated, but at least there’s a name to kick around.

Google, Application page

LED-backlit LCDs are where TV’s future and present meet—they’re the best LCDs you’ve ever seen, but they’re not as stunning as OLED displays, which will one day dominate all. They’re not cheap, but they’re not ludicrous either. Most importantly, they’re actually here.

I’ll CC You in the FL
With LCDs, it’s all about the backlighting. This defines contrast, brightness and other performance metrics. When you watch plasma TVs, OLED TVs or even old tube TVs, there’s light emanating from each pixel like it was a teeny tiny bulb. Not so with LCD—when you watch traditional LCD TV, you’re basically staring at one big lightbulb with a gel screen in front of it.

The typical old-school LCD backlighting tech is CCFL—a cold cathode fluorescent lamp—which is an array of the same kind of lights that make people’s lives miserable in offices around the world. The reason they aren’t the greatest as backlights for TV watching is that they light up the whole damn display. Because LCD is just a massive screen of tiny doors that open and close, light inevitably leaks through the closed doors, when they’re trying to show black, resulting in more of a glowy charcoal. Check out this shot from Home Theater mag to see what I mean:

LEDs (light emitting diodes) are different from say, an old school incandescent bulb, which heats up a filament to generate light, in that they’re electroluminescent—electricity passes through a semiconductor and the movement of the electrons just lights it up. Instead of having one lightbulb in the bottom of the screen, shining up through all of the LCD pixels, you can have arrays of LEDs that shine through smaller portions of the LCD screen, leaving other portions in the dark, so to speak.

OLED—”organic light emitting diode”—is slightly different. Since the electroluminescent component is organic and not a chip, each point of light can be much tinier. That’s why an LED TV still needs the LCD screen in front: there’s no way to have a single LED per pixel unless the screen is huge, and mounted to the side of a building in Times Square. OLEDs don’t: HD OLED displays are made up of red, green and blue dots, no LCD panel required.

LED Is As LED Does
So, Samsung’s term “LED TV” is more accurately—and more commonly—described as an LED-backlit LCD. But not all LED displays are created equal.

There are two major kinds of LED backlighting: Edge-lit and local dimming. Edge-lit displays are what they sound like—the LEDs are arranged in strips running along all four edges of the TV, like you can see in this gut shot from Cnet. A light guide directs the glowyness toward the center of the screen. The advantage of edge-lit displays is that they can get incredibly thin, are 40 percent more power-efficient than regular LCDs and are a bit cheaper than local-dimming TVs. But because they’re still shooting light indiscriminately across the LCD panel, they can’t pull off the black levels that a local dimming backlight setup can.

LED backlighting of the local dimming variety is how you build the best LCD TV in the world. It’s called local dimming, as you probably guessed, because there are a bunch of LED bulbs—hundreds in the Sony XBR8—arranged in a grid behind the screen. They can all be dark or brightly lit, or they can turn off individually or in clusters, making for the actual Dark Knight, rather than the Grayish Knight you’d see on many cheaper CCFL LCDs. Sets with local dimming are pricier than edge-lit—the Samsung’s local-dimming 46-incher started at $3,500, versus $2800 for one of their edge-lit models. They are thicker too.

What Color Is Your LED?
The color of the LEDs matters too, separating the best LED-backlit LCDs from the the merely great. Most LED sets just use white bulbs. The reason Sony’s XBR8 started out at $5,000—as much as Pioneer’s king-of-TVs Kuro—is because it uses tri-color LEDs in an RGB array. In each cluster, there are two green bulbs next to one red and one blue (greens aren’t as bright). The result is high contrast plus super clean, incredibly accurate color.

LED displays are getting cheaper, more quickly than originally expected, so we could see them go mainstream sooner. You already see the lower-end edge-lit LED tech used in mainstream stuff—MacBook Pro and Dell’s Mini 9 to name a couple. Which is a good thing, since the prophesied ascendancy of OLED in 2009 completely failed to happen. So we’ll have to make do with LED in the meantime. Just be sure to find out what kind when you’re buying.

That’s right folks, the Zune HD is real, and it’s coming this Fall. Microsoft officially announced the next iteration in their Zune line today, making it less of a tripped out pipe dream, and more of a totally tubular reality. The specs, which look exactly like that leak we saw, go like this: 3.3-inch, 480 x 272 OLED capacitive touchscreen display, built-in HD Radio receiver, HD output (utilizing a new dock — not on-board), and… not much more right now. Microsoft is doing away with the famed squircle in favor a full multitouch device, and they seemed to indicate that some new touch-friendly apps and games would be headed our way, though they were fairly mum when it came to details. The device will boast an IE-based, customized browser, but little else was said in the way of software.

Details are also scarce concerning storage capacities, CPU performance, and other crucial numbers, but it seems like they’ve got more in store come E3… and that’s the next big piece of news. Zune integration is coming to the Xbox and Xbox Live, as the Zune marketplace will step in to replace the current Live video resources, expanding the library and offering all kinds of new perks, like Zune’s first foray into international waters. According to the company, at E3 “attendees will see first-hand how Zune integrates into Xbox LIVE creating a game-changing entertainment experience” — we’re not entirely sure what the means right now, but it sounds sweet. Try to contain your excitement.

Microsoft’s just sent out a press release and launched an official Zune HD page.

Microsoft Announces the Expansion of the Zune Entertainment Service to New Platform and Markets; Confirms New Zune HD Portable Media Player

Premium Zune digital entertainment service to be available internationally on Xbox LIVE.

REDMOND, Wash. – May 26, 2009 – Microsoft Corp. today announced the evolution of Zune, the company’s end-to-end music and entertainment service, to a new platform and new markets. Zune will extend its video service to Xbox LIVE internationally this fall. This marks an important development in the Zune strategy and brings the Zune brand to more than 17 million international Xbox LIVE subscribers. In addition, Microsoft confirmed the next generation of the Zune portable media player, Zune HD. Available in the U.S. this fall, Zune HD is the first portable media player that combines a built-in HD Radio receiver, high-definition (HD) video output capabilities, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) touch screen, Wi-Fi and an Internet browser.

“The Zune music player is an integral part of the overall Zune experience, and we’re proud to be growing and extending our offering beyond the device,” said Enrique Rodriguez, corporate vice president of the Microsoft TV, Video and Music Business Group. “Delivering on Microsoft’s connected entertainment vision, this news marks a turning point for Zune as it brings cross-platform experiences and premium video content to living rooms around the world.”

Zune Service Expands to New Platform

Zune will be a premium partner in the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace, bringing an exciting catalog of TV and film to the platform. Zune will occupy the first slot within the Xbox user interface in the Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace, exposing the Zune brand experience to millions of new consumers for the first time. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) next week, attendees will see firsthand how Zune integrates into Xbox LIVE to create a game-changing entertainment experience.

Introducing Zune HD

Zune HD is the next iteration of the Zune device family and brings a new level of listening and viewing experiences to the portable media player category.

• Zune HD comes with a built-in HD Radio receiver so users can listen to higher-quality sound than traditional radio on the go. Users also will have access to the additional song and artist data broadcast by HD Radio stations as well as additional channels from their favorite stations multicasting in HD. If you don’t like the song playing on your station’s HD channel, switch to its HD2 or HD3 channels for additional programming.
• The bright OLED touch screen interface allows users to flip through music, movies and other content with ease, and the 16:9 widescreen format display (480×272 resolution) offers a premium viewing experience on the go.
• The HD-compatible output lets Zune HD customers playback supported HD video files from the device through a premium high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) audiovisual docking station (sold separately) direct to an HD TV in 720p.*
• Zune HD will include a full-screen Internet browser optimized for multitouch functionality.
• Zune HD is Wi-Fi enabled, allowing for instant streaming to the device from the more than 5 million-track Zune music store.

More information on Zune and related images is available at http://www.zune.net/press and http://www.zune.net/ZuneHD.

About Zune

Zune is Microsoft’s music and entertainment brand that provides an integrated digital entertainment experience. The Zune platform includes a line of portable digital media players, elegant software, the Zune Marketplace online store, Zune Pass music subscription service, and the Zune Social online music community, created to help people discover more music. Zune is part of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division and supports the company’s software-based services vision to help drive innovation in the digital entertainment space. More information can be found online at http://www.zune.net/en-us/press.

About Xbox LIVE

Xbox LIVE connects more than 17 million members across 26 countries to each other and the entertainment they love. Home of more content from one remote than can be found from any device connected to the television, Xbox LIVE is also a unified online social network bringing friends together, no matter where they are – in the living room or across the world. More information and Xbox LIVE membership can be found online at http://www.xbox.com/en-us/live.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

* Supported 720p HD video files play on the device, downscaled to fit the screen at 480 x 272 – not HD resolution. Zune HD and AV Dock, and an HDTV (all sold separately) are required to view video at HD resolution.

HD Radio™ and the HD Radio logo are proprietary trademarks of iBiquity Digital Corp.

Service pack 2 (SP2) was released for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 today. It is highly suggested that users update to this new service pack. Some features that it adds are:

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 is now available for download. The Vista SP2 update includes new support for recording Blu-ray discs straight from the Vista OS, updated support for Bluetooth v2.1, and bug fixes that address slow shutdowns and mysterious crashes.

You can download Vista SP2 directly from Microsoft at its Web site (348MB) or it will be automatically delivered to your Vista system via Windows Update within a few weeks, according to Microsoft. You must have Vista SP1 installed on your system to install the SP2 Vista.

Additional Vista SP2 Updates

Besides Blu-ray and Bluetooth support Vista SP2 also bring:

* Fixes Wi-Fi issues when Vista awakes from sleep mode.

* Improves performance of Vista desktop sidebar gadget allowing for RSS feeds to perform better.

* Address overall Vista system performance issues. Microsoft says SP2 repairs nearly 700 nagging Vista bugs and security updates.

* Boosts power management efficiency by 10 percent.

* Give your computer support for VIA Technologies’ new 64-bit CPU

* Let your system support exFAT, which can handle larger files and can also use UTC timestamps so you can synchronize files across different time zones.

Credit goes to PC World and to the author Tom Spring.