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But the Barcelona debacle had to have changed the way AMD’s customers viewed the company, and the feedback appears to have been simple: Just make contact. Don’t swing for the fences.

For now, that plan appears unchanged, but with the departure of Fusion planner CTO Phil Hester and a 10 percent layoff going into effect over the next several months, something might have to give.

The changes seem designed to ensure AMD delivers on its promises. Barcelona was a crisis on two fronts: the technical execution problems that delayed the chip by almost a year, and the worry among AMD’s customers and investors that the company was in over its head in its transition into a stable, trusted enterprise computing supplier.

As recently as April, AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer was telling financial analysts that samples of Bulldozer were still on the schedule for 2009. But he neglected to mention how AMD intends to use it, because AMD isn’t confident enough in its plans for the Bulldozer cores to share them with the public, Allen said.

The question now is whether or not any further road map revisions are in store for AMD’s PC processor lineup. For some time, AMD had planned to introduce its “accelerated computing” initative, formerly known as the Fusion project, in 2009 in its notebook lineup.

Instead, AMD decided to push forward with the Sao Paolo and Magny-Cours products and reuse the existing core design used in Barcelona and planned for Shanghai and Istanbul. Upping the core count planned for that timeframe from 4 and 8 to 6 and 12 will deliver a nice performance boost, Allen said.

After all,Gucci Watches, before Opteron arrived, AMD had virtually no track record in the server market. Opteron changed that, making AMD a well-known quantity inside the server rooms of the Fortune 500 and a supplier to every major server vendor on the planet.

AMD has dramatically revised its future road map for server processors, adding a new six-core processor and pushing out the arrival of a next-generation core well into the next decade.

Istanbul is a clear response to Intel’s Dunnington processor, a six-core server chip also scheduled for the second half of this year. But Istanbul won’t be out until the second half of 2009, long after Intel’s Nehalem generation of processors has begun to ship.

(Credit:
AMD)

Istanbul, Sao Paolo, and Magny-Cours are the new chips on AMD’s roadmap, replacing a previous plan code-named Montreal.

The chip will buy AMD time, however, to concentrate on its new plan for 2010. Bulldozer was that plan as recently as July 2007, but plans for chips based on the Bulldozer core–a powerful, modular core designed as part of the Fusion project–vanished from AMD’s road map in December.

Server customers with heavily parallelized workloads will opt for Magny-Cours, while Sao Paolo will be the choice of customers that just need a few threads worth of performance to run at faster speeds. Clock speeds have yet to be determined, but the 6-core Sao Paolo will run faster than the 12-core Magny-Cours, Allen said.

Now that the company finally has the Barcelona mess in its rearview mirror, AMD has taken a hard look at its server plans. The chipmaker will extend the life of its current processor core technology through 2010, and has added a six-core processor code-named Istanbul for the second half of 2009.

Tearing up your road map is never a good sign, but at least it’s a signal that AMD is taking a pragmatic approach to the next several years. The company is in serious trouble,Cartier Watches, having lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several quarters and will probably need to break even in the second half of the year to save the job of CEO Hector Ruiz.

A four-core and eight-core design code-named Montreal, on the road map as recently as last December (click for PDF, slide 21), has disappeared entirely. It will be replaced by six-core and 12-core designs known as “Sao Paolo” and “Magny-Cours” (Formula 1 race venues, I’m told),Gemstone Rings, which are scheduled to arrive in the first half of 2010 and are based on the same underlying processor core technology as Barcelona, said Randy Allen, corporate vice president and head of AMD’s server division. That means those chips will not use the “Bulldozer” core first introduced by AMD in July 2007.

Sao Paolo and Magny-Cours will require a new chipset to accomodate the switch to faster DDR3 memory and will be built using AMD’s 45-nanometer manufacturing technology. Istanbul will drop into servers built for Barcelona or Shanghai, the 45-nanometer version of Barcelona scheduled for later this year, making for an easier transition for customers using Barcelona. Montreal was scheduled to introduce a new chipset into AMD’s lineup in 2009, but that won’t arrive now until 2010.

The Olympic Games in Beijing is proving to be a hit in the workplace.

Mobile usage also saw a significant boost, increasing from 210,000 on Friday to 476,062 on Monday. NBC, which said it polled users, said it was “stunned” at the number of users who were using mobile video download for the first time.

Traffic to Yahoo’s Olympics site also skyrocketed, up 86 percent to 5.2 million visitors compared with Sunday’s 2.8 million.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

As well as NBC is doing both on TV and on online, it begs the question of whether NBC’s policy of delaying popular events online until they have run on TV in prime time was a wise move or overly restrictive.

Traffic to Olympics-related Web sites soared Monday, the first full workday after the official opening of the games Friday, according to numbers released Wednesday by Nielsen Online (see chart below). More than 2 million people visited the video section of NBCOlympics.com, up nearly 140 percent from Sunday when the site had about 858,000 visitors, according to Nielsen. Overall visits to the site increased 40 percent to 4.6 million compared with Sunday’s 3.3 million.

Meanwhile, Nielsen Media Research reported that NBC’s TV coverage averaged more than 30 million viewers for the first three days of the games, a 26 percent increase compared with the same period during the Athens Games in 2004. The opening ceremony was last week’s most-watched program, attracting nearly 35 million viewers.

(Credit:
Nielsen Online)

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has tried something like this. As CNET News.com’s Ina Fried noted Wednesday:

Arnold Zafra over at Search Engine Journal wrote that he “cringed” when he heard about the news. Ouch.

It has run a number of programs including its Live Search Club that offer rewards for those that use its search. The Live Search Club effort briefly boosted Microsoft’s search market share last year, but the gains have proved short lived. Microsoft has been losing ground since then and has returned to a single digit share of the market.

A couple of thoughts:

But truth be told, it’s not the worst idea. What’s the harm in giving it a shot? In a recession–or whatever you want to call the current economic malaise in the United States–consumers are open to bribes (oh, I forgot: rebates). So why not see if this strikes the people’s fancy? But this is only a holding action. The reason more people use Google’s search is the user experience. It works better, so they keep returning. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer knows this. That’s why he still thinks making a move for some of Yahoo’s assets makes sense. He’s anxious about staying pat with Microsoft’s current search hand and wants to fix things, either through developing technology internally or buying it on the open market.

So the news is leaking out fast: Microsoft plans to lure users by dangling cash rebates to people who buy stuff using the company’s search. Will it work? At this point, I suppose it can’t hurt–though no doubt Microsoft is leaving itself open to being ridiculed as a Delancey Street hondler.

No way this is the final word.

The event will be Webcast live starting at 11 a.m. EDT/8 a.m. PDT. And anyone interested in tuning in can register at the Cisco Web site to sign up in advance.

Chambers and Gore will use Cisco’s telepresence system to communicate with a live audience at the VoiceCon trade show in in Orlando, Fla. They will discuss how unified communications technology, like the telepresence platform, can play a role in reducing carbon emissions, which are impacting climate change.

Al Gore

John Chambers

My colleague Martin LaMonica, who covers green technology, will be listening to the Webcast. So look for a blog post from him later Wednesday.

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers is joining the virtual stage with Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore on Wednesday morning to talk about climate change and technology innovation.

They’ll also discuss other ideas for how businesses can reduce greenhouse gas emissions through innovative technologies and how the technology industry can create a sustainable model for addressing climate change.

“Windows 7 is penciled for release in Q1 2010. And who knows, by then, Apple may have even gotten its enterprise act together,” Mendel writes.

Microsoft has been touting the fact that Vista adoption is actually on par with past releases, pointing to some new customers, such as the U.S. Air Force. Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte told CNET News on Wednesday that at the end of June, Vista was actually tracking slightly ahead of Windows XP in corporate adoption at the same stage in its lifecycle.

But even some of the company’s showcase early adopter customers are moving more slowly to Vista than originally planned. Continental Airlines said in June of last year that it expected to have 7,000 to 10,000 desktops moved to the operating system by the end of last year. As of May, it had only shifted about 2,600 machines to Vista. Continental now expects the majority of its machines to be on Vista by the end of this year, according to a recent white paper.

Expect to hear more about Vista adoption from Microsoft later on Thursday, when Veghte takes the stage at the company’s financial analyst meeting in Redmond, Wash. CNET’s Ina Fried is on the scene and will be reporting throughout the day.

More troubling for Microsoft may be the fact that most of those Vista installs are replacing versions of Windows other than Windows XP, which remains popular with both businesses and consumers. Forrester says 87.1 percent of companies surveyed continue to use Windows XP.

(Credit:
ProhibitOnions/Coca-Cola)

In a new study, Forrester Research uncovers some good news for Microsoft: Vista usage among businesses is up by more than 40 percent since January. The bad news: still, less than 10 percent of the 2,300 companies surveyed use Vista.

In the report, Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel writes that Vista is “New Coke,” and sees a strong case for bypassing the release altogether.

Blinkx will be presenting at a New Tech Meetup I’m moderating tomorrow, along with Seero, Seesmic, Mesmo, and Your Truman Show. The event is sold out but I’ll report on the highlights afterwards.

All the news that fits in your screensaver.

Now Blinkx is popping that idea out of the browser and putting it in a downloadable screensaver app. Blinkx Beat lets you create your own channels that automatically play when your screensaver pops on (or whenever you want, providing Blinkx Beat is configured as your PC’s default screensaver). You can also set it to display preconfigured channels like News or Sports.

Blinkx makes very slick video search technology that has been available for quite some time to consumers through Blinkx.com. One of the site’s cool features is that if you enter in a search term, it will play in succession all the videos it finds that term in.

It’s a nice-looking app but it’s already gotten me into trouble. I set up the Blinkx Beat screensaver and then got called off to a meeting. The video popped on to my screen, with audio, distracting and disturbing co-workers. When I got back to my desk, I was greeted with glares. Honestly, I never did get content-based screensavers. Who wants to run an app that’s most useful when you’re away from your PC? But if you want to use your PC as a stand-in for a TV that you’d otherwise always leave on, give it a shot.

To select videos from a playlist, you can use Blinkx’s attractive but uninformative video “wall,” which shows you moving thumbnails of videos in a channel, but not quite enough information to tell if they’re worth zooming in on.

Haute Secure is a free 32-bit or 64-bit download when used for home use; businesses will be charged to have their Web pages checked for malicious code. At the moment there is little technical support offered beyond a few FAQs and a users’ forum.

New Web threats today come not necessarily from sites built to host malicious content, but also from legitimate sites that have been compromised. A new safe Web surfing product, Haute Secure, is out of beta and available for free home use with both Internet Explorer and
Firefox. Founded in 2006 by former Microsoft security engineers, Haute Secure hopes to distinguish itself in a crowded field of products, including Grisoft Linkscanner and Finjan SecureBrowsing.

While we were pleased with the product’s ability to block threats on compromised Web sites, Haute Secure did, however, fail to identify a few recent non-exploit-related phishing sites, which surprised us. Using five sites recently reported to a reputable, independent phish-tracking site (most were active an hour or less), we noted that none were flagged as active by Haute Secure. Perhaps that’s because the pages themselves do not contain malicious code. Yet the pages do contain forms which, when filled out and sent in, could compromise your identity. Although Haute Secure uses phishing reports from Stopbadware.org and others, and will warn you of known fraudulent sites, we found the native anti-phishing protection in Internet Explorer and Firefox did a better job at flagging recently reported phishing sites.

Now, though, barely anyone remembers what Zatso is, and I’d be surprised if many of the WIAT folks do either. Since it was Sunday evening when I rolled through town, I decided to just stop and take a picture of their building and then live-blog this, but not to stop in and say hi.

And the service really required high-speed Internet to work.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Please stay tuned to Road Trip 2008 here on this blog, as well as on Twitter and on my Qik channel.

There’d be a pregnant pause, and then they’d say, “You’re a what? With who?”

Those of us who were hired as reporters were called cyberjournalists, and each of us was assigned to one TV station, somewhere out there in the U.S. My station was WIAT-TV, channel 42 in Birmingham, and this city’s CBS affiliate.

That was partially because we had some real talent there. Besides myself, there were two other Zatso reporters who ended up working for CNET News.com, and an editor went on to work for PBS’ Frontline.

Suffice it to say, Zatso didn’t last, though for a few months there it was considered a high-flying company with a bright future.

I’d get a deputy or the dispatcher on the phone and I’d say, “Hi, I’m Daniel Terdiman, I’m a cyberjournalist calling from Zatso in San Francisco, and I want to talk to someone about the drunk driver you arrested last night.”

After all, if I showed up at the door of a TV station in Birmingham and said I was a reporter from San Francisco doing a road trip project driving around the South, the likely response would be, “You’re a what? With who?”

Can you blame them? It would be like an alien arriving at your doorstep and announcing that they’re there to talk about the election for school board.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.–Back in 1999, in the salad days of the dot-com economy, when anyone with a start-up could launch an IPO and see their stock hit $80, I took my first steps into the world of reporting on the Internet.

The humor of the situation, of course, was doing the actual reporting. More often than I can recall, I would find myself reporting on some small crime story, and would have to call the dispatch center for some small sheriff’s office way out in the country, miles and miles from Birmingham.

So, as you can imagine, there weren’t that many people in Birmingham or our other cities with high-speed in 1999.

Living in San Francisco and trying to get my foot in the door, I took a job with a company called ReacTV. It was quickly renamed “Zatso,” as in “Is that so,” and its business was producing Web-based newscasts for the online sites of local TV stations around the country.

The headquarters of Birmingham, Ala., CBS affiliate WIAT-TV. As a cyberjournalist for Zatso.com, I covered news for WIAT from San Francisco.

The way Zatso worked was this: Each morning, I would call the station’s news director from my desk in San Francisco and get the rundown of the stories they were working on for that night’s newscast. We would pick five stories, and then I would go and basically do my own reporting on the stories, looking for additional angles to supplement what the channel 42 reporters were going to report on the news.

Well, Zatso was a good idea. Sort of. The problem was that the business model depended on working with stations in cities like Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and other smaller places. We hadn’t managed to sign on any clients in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco.

Then, once we were all done, my stories would go onto the WIAT Web site along with video from the five stories that we’d chosen. We did everything because back then, these stations weren’t yet capable of doing this kind of work themselves.

I found myself driving through Birmingham on Sunday on Road Trip 2008, on my way from Kennedy Space Center, where I reported on the Space Shuttle landing Saturday, to Huntsville, Ala., where I’ll be attending Space Camp on Monday. And I realized I had to stop for a little bit of nostalgia.

My two theories are that if you bump the machine it somehow triggers the hard drive to spin up or that there is a software glitch that needs to get fixed.

This has become an incredible annoyance as my main purpose for this laptop was to be able to use it on the fly. Lately I’ve found that I have run the whole battery out in about 8 hours with less than one hour of actual usage. At first I thought it was because the Airport was constantly scanning, which often drained my old MacBook Pro.

My one major pet peeve with the MacBook Air is that no matter what I do, it seems that this machine never goes fully to sleep. Somehow the battery is being drained (albeit at a slower rate) when I set the computer to “sleep” or when I close the lid.

Until someone can build a full-feature online-productivity suite, this is certainly a viable option.

Regular readers of this blog know that I don’t believe that Google Apps is a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Office.

For users who have Office installed on their PC, this is not as bad as you would think. It may be a little bit annoying, but the benefit is that they get to work on these documents and collaborate within the fully functional desktop application. The online application will track revisions and comments made on the document.

Via LiveSide.

Microsoft has also made a plug-in available for Office that makes accessing a workspace a bit smoother. It also enables users to edit things such as notes, lists, calendars, tasks, and contacts in the Web application.

A lot of Web 2.0 purists are going to be very quick to dismiss the notion that Office Live Workspace is a legitimate Web application, simply because of its dependence on the desktop version of Office. I would have to disagree with those people.

While Microsoft is not releasing a completely online version of its Office on Tuesday, it is releasing Office Live Workspace, an online-collaboration tool for Office that works in cooperation with the desktop application suite.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

While it may not be completely Web-based, Workspace offers a lot of value for collaboration on group projects, and it is not limited by online versions of the Office applications. People get to work in an environment that is familiar to them and do not sacrifice any functionality in exchange for collaboration.

Workspace enables users to view documents online, even if their computer doesn’t have Office installed. However, if they want to make edits, they have to download it and make changes in the appropriate Office application.

So far, we’ve only seen prototypes of a cell phone running Google’s Android platform, but InfoWorld has some gossip on what the first real device might be. According to a source “close to the situation”, HTC may become the first company to manufacture an Android device. Yet it also appears that Samsung, which also is a member of the Open Handset Alliance, is not far behind.

Details are slim but the source reported the following specs. The HTC device will be called the “Dream” and will be about 5 inches long by 3 inches wide. What’s more, it will feature an alphabetic keyboard that will either slide or swivel out from under the display. There isn’t much more to tell at the moment, but the above details match rumors that Forbes reported last year. We apologize that we can’t offer any photos of the Dream but we can give you a look at an Android prototype that we examined last month at the GSMA World Congress. See the video for more details.