The Weekly Round-Up: 13.08.04

It is a truth universally acknowledged that search engines are the new rock 'n' roll.

As the Beatles and the Stones dominated the charts in the swinging sixties, so Yahoo! and Google are very much top of the 'hit' parade in the naughty noughties.

The front pages of high-tech news services have been dominated by stories about the two companies in recent months. (See here; here and here if you doubt the Round-Up's inestimably sound word.)

While Yahoo! is clearly your Beatles - poppy, cheery and familiar - Google would obviously be your Stones - funkier, more interesting and (let's admit it) a lot cooler.

However, while the Beatles and the Stones worked to accommodate each other - often staggering releases of new record releases to avoid competing with each other and to better exploit the pocket money of teenage girls - in the online world of search engines it's a dog-litigate-dog existence.

That all ended this week as news broke that Google and Yahoo! had put aside their long-running spat over patent infringements and other legal squabbles and decided that in order to get along, all you need is love...

...and stock options. Lots and lots of stock options.

Much of the dispute centred around allegations that Google's advertising system - and primary revenue source - had infringed several patents of Yahoo!'s subsidiary Overture Services. This week's deal will see Google license some of the patents in perpetuity.

The legal love-in also put to bed another long-running debate centred on Yahoo!'s right to a hefty tranche of juicy Google stock options. Yahoo! will now receive a whopping 2.7 million shares of class A common Google stock. Yahoo! indeed.

Which is just as well considering the younger company this week announced its much-vaunted but somewhat troubled IPO was now firmly back on track (see here).

A Yahoo! spokeswoman said: "We're pleased with the terms of the settlement and glad to have the dispute resolved." A Google spokesman expressed similar pleasure before they both fell breathlessly into each others' arms.

What no-one mentioned as journalists' eyes were tactfully averted from the writhing couple on the floor was that analysts from Jupiter Research have forecast (as analysts are wont to do) that revenue from paid search listings is going to slow over the coming years (see here).

Which isn't great news for businesses that rely on said revenues to survive. Like Google, for example. Or Yahoo!.

But with love in the air why should the two want to listen to bad news from Jupiter when they could be swinging on the stars instead...

There were heady celebrations around Microsoft's Seattle campus in this week as the company finally got to announce the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 - a hefty 300MB bundle of security and feature upgrades (see here).

The festivities were particularly ebullient in the lush, spacious office of Microsoft chief executive officer and howler-monkey impersonator extraordinaire Steve Ballmer.

However, just as Steve was reaching for another celebratory banana, the 'cock-up alarm' bells started ringing in his office giving him such a fright he fell out of his tyre.

It emerged this week (see here) that the much-belated software upgrade - a key part of the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative - could do to a corporate network what a dodgy pawpaw could do for a tender simian tummy.

It transpires that some organisations may find installing the service pack could play havoc with their custom-built software and standard corporate applications as their systems are reconfigured by XP SP2. Some organisations are naturally wary.

Take IBM for example.

Big Blue has apparently posted an article on its corporate intranet requesting that its staff do not install SP2 for fear that it may be incompatible with some of its applications.

IBM neither confirmed nor denied the existence of the request to not install the service pack. A company representative said: "IBM will not confirm the authenticity" of the report. The little tease.

While Microsoft has put two release candidates - like SP2 with stabilisers on - in the hands of developers, IBM's memo shows that not every big company has tried backward-compatibility testing on their applications yet.

The roll-out of XP SP2 wasn't a priority for silicon.com's CIO Jury either (see here) – it simply wasn't a top priority.

Windows XP product manager Paul Randle said Microsoft has had very few reported compatibility issues with Service Pack 2 in the one million downloads it has registered in its previous incarnations.

"Testing has been enormous... in the vast majority of cases, there's been no issue whatsoever," although he admitted that a stance like IBM's was exactly the right one.

"The IBM approach is very sensible - it's looking at the deployment in a very controlled way."

However, if putting the fear into Big Blue's system administrators wasn't bad enough it also emerged that some of Microsoft's own staff had complained about falling foul of the flagship update - the splitters.

Apparently, the XP SP2 installation has caused chaos with the company's very own CRM products, causing some systems to topple over like a lemur on a potassium rush. (Microsoft has already issued a fix. A patch for the mother of all patches, if you will.)

Furthermore, on Thursday the company decided to allow companies that have Automatic Update running on their systems to leave the feature on, while temporarily blocking the download of XP SP2 (see here).

The company says the blocking tool will give companies up to four months to perform the upgrade on their own before automatically installing SP2.

Whenever will it all end, Steve? After all, if an infinite number of monkeys armed with an infinite number of typewriters can come up with a passable script for Hamlet surely the vast, assembled legions of Microsoft developers can eventually come up with a stable, secure operating system?

Best put the bananas back on ice for now...

Writing pithy press releases about technology can't be any easier than writing pithy weekly columns about technology but when the writing of the former goes awry it often makes writing the latter much easier, especially as copy deadlines start creeping up stealthily.

The very finest press release marries the factual with the whimsical while (crucially) not overselling itself - something a release from the University of Bradford this week totally failed to do.

It was with a healthy spoonful of scepticism that the Round-Up double-clicked on an email with a subject header that read 'Robot Movie 'A Reality' with New Degree'.

(It was the presence of the inverted commas perched nervously around 'A Reality' that really sold it for the Round-Up - the author of 'Well, not really, but heck let’s run with it anyway'.)

The movie in question is the Isaac Asimov-inspired, Will Smith vehicle I, Robot.

The premise is that some clever boffins create hordes of intelligent, lovable, huggable robots that inevitably go mental and start killing people with gay abandon despite earlier assurances that this was exactly the sort of thing they wouldn't do.

The press release began: "As Will Smith battles with intelligent robots in his latest movie blockbuster, the University of Bradford has launched a degree to turn the idea of “robots that think” into a reality."

"We are on the edge of a new robot revolution...Our new course Robotics with Artificial Intelligence will enable students to build robots that can use all the human senses and take a lead in this new technological revolution.”

"Hmm," opined one wag in the silicon.com editorial team this week, "So even though Hollywood has conclusively proven they will turn bad and start killing us, the University of Bradford has decided to create an army of intelligent robots that will inevitably take over the world and eat our kids."

"Maybe they shouldn’t have opened with the I, Robot angle..."

And finally, a couple of columns back the Round-Up brought you news that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI – them of screensaver fame) claimed that thanks to Moore's Law and faster processors, intelligent life in our galaxy will be found sooner rather later (see here).

(Assuming it exists at all, of course.)

However, while the chances of us finding 'them' is increasing, the chances of 'them' finding us is rapidly decreasing - and it's Telewest engineers that are to blame.

Actually, it's cable TV technology in general that's at fault, and not Telewest employees specifically.

At a recent conference, SETI pioneer Nick Drake said that television signals are increasingly being delivered by technologies like cable television that do not leak radio frequencies into space like the old sets.

According to New Scientist, the "radio-wave bubble" generated by television signals now extends a massive 50 light years from our solar system.

However, Drake warned that with the increase of cable television technology - which doesn't leak any radio waves into the cosmos - means that the chances of aliens, friendly or otherwise, detecting the Earth is diminishing rapidly.

He predicts that in around 100 years we'll be effectively invisible to detection by this method. Alone forever in the inky blackness of the void.

On the bright side, while we may be invisible to intelligent life elsewhere at least we can get a perfect reception to the QVC shopping channel.

And besides, in the future we'll have our intelligent, lovable, huggable robots to keep us company, eh? Aaargh! Gerroff!

"Kill, kill, kill..."

Finally, silicon.com reporter Andy McCue this week registered with the UK government's biometric ID trial. Read his account of the process here here and put any questions you may have about any form of biometrics to our panel of experts (see here).

Until next Friday, the Round-Up leaves with comforting news that the greatest threat to your system security could come from your cat.

Bad kitty. See here.

...and the obligatory list of headlines, for your reading pleasure:

CIO Jury: Windows XP Service Pack 2 – The verdict

Windows XP Service Pack 2: Will it cripple your network?

RFID gets skin-deep alternative

Windows XP SP 2... ready at last!

Virus alert: Mobile users bitten by damn Mosquitos!

44,000 prison inmates to be RFID-chipped