Cisco's recent announcement that it was closing its Flip mini-camcorder business got us thinking. It's pretty clear that today's smartphones, with their excellent HD video cameras, are partly to blame for the Flip's demise. But how many other consumer products and services--digital or analog--are being killed off by the big, bad smartphone?

We've assembled a list of likely victims here. If you know of other smartphone-induced casualties, please tell us in the Comments section--or contact your local law enforcement authorities. Let's start with the most obvious victims...

When was the last time you carried a digital music player that couldn't do a dozen other things, too? When Apple unveiled the original iPhone in 2007, the die was cast: Portable audio devices incapable of doubling as gaming machines and Web browsers (see: iPod Touch) would slowly fade away. And the latest iPod Touch, which includes FaceTime video chat, is essentially a Wi-Fi video phone itself. Yes, the iPod Classic is still around, but its days may be numbered. And though Apple continues to ring up immense profits, its iPod business has been in decline for some time.

The Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP are still selling, but these portable game gadgets seem like relics from an era when people used cell phones strictly to make and receive calls. Today's smartphone, of course, is a gaming juggernaut: App stores for Apple and Android handsets offer tens of thousands of games. So why carry around a separate game console? And though console makers are stepping up their efforts, the smartphone guys are right there with them. Do you crave a new Nintendo 3DS for glasses-free 3D gaming? Well, 3D smartphones like the LG Thrill and HTC EVO 3D promise a similar thrill.

Point-and-Shoot Cameras

 An inexpensive point-and-shoot like the $250 Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX5V probably takes better pictures than your smartphone. But before long, the humble phone camera will match or surpass the photographic prowess of its point-and-shoot brethren. The latest handsets--in particular, the iPhone 4--capture crisp, clear images that many users consider suitable for scrapbooks and slideshows. Pretty soon, you'll park the point-and-shoot in the closet for good.

Remember Archos's lineup of portable media players? How about Apple's iPod Video 5th Generation? Both were built for video and audio consumption, two capabilities that have since migrated to the jack-of-all-trades smartphone. And today's plus-size handsets, such as the HTC ThunderBolt--with high-resolution, 4-inch-or-larger displays and 4G data speeds capable of handling HD video streaming--are the final nail in the coffin. The stand-alone portable media player is a goner.

 

"Note to self: Buy jacket with extra pockets to hold voice recorder, PDA, cell phone..." That's a voice memo from my digital recorder, circa 2001. Okay, not really--but my point is that stand-alone voice recorders were yet another digital device to carry around. No wonder they've gone the way of the PDA (see below). Dirt-cheap recorders such as the $29 Sony ICD-BX800 and the $54 Olympus VN-8100PC persist, but a smartphone with an app like the free RecForge Free (for Android) or the $2 Voice Record (for iPhone) is the sensible choice for any pocket-challenged gadget lover.

Portable GPS Navigation Devices

Why buy a separate GPS device for your car when your smartphone can perform the same tasks? Portable navigation hardware from major GPS players such as Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom are have grown more powerful and more affordable, but GPS-enabled smartphones deliver similar functionality. Interestingly, GPS vendors may be contributing to the demise of their portable devices by offering apps like Garmin's StreetPilot, which provides turn-by-turn directions for smartphone users. Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. 

It manages your contacts! It has a to-do list! It tracks expenses! Yes, the PDA was a handy contrivance back in the day when a 25-pound desktop PC and a 50-pound CRT monitor seemed welded to every workstation. But as cellphones began to acquire PDA capabilities in 2001, it became obvious that the phoneless digital assistant's days were numbered. Today, the term "PDA" sounds as anachronistic as "Pocket PC." Then again, today's smartphones are pocket PCs, aren't they?

Ever see a twenty-something rocking a wristwatch as a necessity, rather than as a fashion accessory? Probably not. The smartphone has become the 21st Century pocket watch, while the wristwatch has become, well, your father's timepiece. This may change, however, if tech-savvy watchmakers succeed in rekindling consumer interest in the arm-ready timekeeper. In fact, the wristwatch's resurgence may already be underway, at least in some geek circles. Sony introduced an Android-based wristwatch last year, and some clever techies have managed to turn the multitouch iPod Nano into a watch.

Source: PC World

The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) has run out of all but a handful of IPv4 addresses that it is holding in reserve for start-up network operators.APNIC is the first of the Internet's five regional Internet registries to deplete its free pool of IPv4 address space.

APNIC's news is another sign that CIOs and other IT executives need to begin migrating to IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol known as IPv4.BACKGROUND: IPv6 Tutorial

"For anybody who hasn't figured out that it's time to do IPv6, this is another wake-up call for them," says Owen DeLong, an IPv6 evangelist at Hurricane Electric and a member of the board of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the North American counterpart to APNIC.

Any CIO who isn't planning for IPv6 is "driving toward a brick wall and closing your eyes and hoping that it's going to disappear before you get there," DeLong says. Ignoring IPv6 "is not the best strategy."Most IPv4 address space is expected to be handed out by the regional Internet registries by the end of 2011.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and supports a virtually unlimited number of devices -- 2 to the 128th power.The Asia Pacific region has been gobbling up the most IPv4 address space in recent years; APNIC has apparently distributed more than 32 million IPv4 addresses to network operators in this region in the last two months alone.

APNIC has depleted its IPv4 address space "dramatically faster than people expected," DeLong says. "My guess is that a lot of operators in the Asia Pacific region realized the time of IPv4 depletion was drawing near and they rushed to get their applications in.

"DETAILS: The 6 biggest misconceptions about IPv6 

APNIC is holding 16.7 million IPv4 addresses -- dubbed a /8 in network engineering terms -- in reserve to distribute in tiny allotments of around 1,000 addresses each to new and emerging IPv6-based networks so they can continue to communicate with the largely IPv4-based Internet infrastructure.

ARIN, which doles out IPv4 and IPv6 address space to companies operating in North America, predicts that it will run out of IPv4 addresses this fall."RIPE [the European Internet registry] is going to be the next one to run out. I wouldn't count on them making it until July," DeLong says. "I think ARIN will make it to the end of this year; maybe we'll run out in October or November."

"RIPE [the European Internet registry] is going to be the next one to run out. I wouldn't count on them making it until July," DeLong says. "I think ARIN will make it to the end of this year; maybe we'll run out in October or November."

PANIC TIME QUIZ: Are you prepared for IPv6?

One wild card is whether Asian network operators who also do business in North America will begin requesting IPv4 address space from ARIN now that APNIC has none to give.

"This will probably accelerate consumption in the ARIN region slightly and in RIPE for the same reason because there are a very large number of companies that have operations in Asia, Europe and the Americas," DeLong says.

Source: Network world

An Iranian military commander Saturday accused the German electronics giant Siemens with helping U.S. and Israeli teams craft the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities. According to the Islamic Republic News Service (IRNA), Iran's state news agency, Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali laid some of the blame for Stuxnet on Siemens.

"Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us," Jalali told IRNA. Siemens did not reply to a request for comment on Jalali's accusations.

Jalali heads Iran's Passive Defense Organization, a military unit responsible for constructing and defending the country's nuclear enrichment facilities. He is a former commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guard.Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers, most notably a three-man team at Symantec, and by Ralph Langner of the German firm Langner Communications GmbH.

According to both Symantec and Langner, Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds . Gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, can fly apart if spun too fast.

Jalali suggested that Iranian officials would pursue Siemens in the courts."The Foreign Ministry and other relevant political and judicial organizations should lodge complaints at international courts," said Jalali. "The attacking countries should be held legally responsible for the cyberattack."

He also claimed that Iranian researchers had traced the attack to Israel and the U.S. "The investigations and research showed that the Stuxnet worm had been disseminated from sources in the U.S. and Israel," said Jalali, who added that the worm sent reports of infected systems to computers in Texas.

Jalali's allegations of U.S. and Israeli involvement were the first from an Iranian official, although President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly blamed the two countries for trying to destabilize his government.In January, the New York Times, citing confidential sources, said that Stuxnet was jointly created by the U.S. and Israel , with the latter using its covert nuclear facility at Dimona to test the worm's effectiveness on centrifuges like the ones Iran employs.

According to the Times, Siemens cooperated in 2008 with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to help experts there identify vulnerabilities in the SCADA hardware and software sold by the German firm. The lab -- located about 30 miles east of Idaho Falls, Idaho -- is the U.S. Department of Energy's lead nuclear research facility.

Jalali repeated earlier claims by others in Iran, including Ahmadinejad, that Stuxnet did not cause major damage or disrupt its nuclear enrichment program because researchers discovered the worm and instituted defenses.

"If we were not ready to tackle the crisis and their attack was successful, the attack could have created tragic incidents at the country's industrial sites and refineries," said Jalali.

He suggested that massive casualties could have resulted, and suggested that they might have been on the scale of the Bhopal, India disaster, where in 1984 a Union Carbide pesticide plant released chemicals that killed between 4,000 and 8,000 people.

Symantec, however, has said that Stuxnet was very successful. In a February update to its research on the worm, Symantec said the first attacks in June 2009 infected Iranian computers just 12 hours after the worm was compiled. The average time between compilation and infection was 19 days for the 10 successful attacks Symantec monitored over an 11-month span.

Source: Computerworld

Intel this week talked about some features in its upcoming Core chips based on Ivy Bridge chip architecture, which will bring improved graphics and application performance to PCs.

PCs with Ivy Bridge chips are due out next year, and will integrate support for Microsoft's DirectX 11, which will bring more depth and realism to graphics, said Phil Taylor, senior software engineer at Intel in a video published on the company's website. The chip will also render better graphics through shaders and post-processing capabilities.

Ivy Bridge processors will succeed the current Sandy Bridge family of Core processors, which are being used in recently announced laptops and desktops. Intel for the first time integrated the CPU and graphics processor inside a single chip with Sandy Bridge. Ivy Bridge has the underpinnings of Sandy Bridge, but chips will be made using the new 22-nanometer manufacturing process.

Current Sandy Bridge chips support DirectX 10.1, putting Intel behind Advanced Micro Devices, whose Fusion C- and E-series processors, released in January, integrate DirectX 11.

PCs with Ivy Bridge chips will also get an on-board bandwidth boost through support for the new PCI Express 3.0 protocol. The bus standard, finalized in November, will be able to transfer data at speeds of 8 gigatransfers per second, a 60 percent improvement over earlier specifications. The PCI Express 3.0 specification enables faster communication between components inside a system.

USB 3.0 will also be included in PCs based on Ivy Bridge, said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager for Intel's Data Center Group, during a keynote Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing. AMD this week integrated support for USB 3.0 in its Fusion chipsets, which will be used in PCs that ship this quarter.

Taylor said that Ivy Bridge will include support for HDMI 1.4a multimedia interface. External multimedia devices such as high-definition TVs can be connected to PCs through HDMI cables.

Ivy Bridge will also include updated instructions to boost graphics and application performance, and Intel hopes to reach out to developers later this year to write programs for the chip architecture, Taylor said. Intel will publish a developer guide and code samples so programs can be written to take advantage of the chip's extra features.

The iPad is a beautiful and useful device, but it sometimes gets shoved to the side when users are busy working on desktop computers—or even engaging in non-digital tasks. A new app makes productive use of the downtime, turning your tablet into a digital desk clock.

Vladstudio Desk Clock HD debuted last week in the App Store. The free download comes with seven different “wallpaper clock” options; for $1 more, users can upgrade to access the full app with more than 100 options. They range from old-fashioned wind-up watch faces to less-traditional digital landscapes that include the time among depictions of cats, whales, musical instruments, and other comforting images.

The app works in either portrait or landscape mode; users can choose whether they want to actually hear the seconds ticking away—an item that might appeal to older users who remember that clocks once made real “tick-tock” sounds, whether you wanted them to or not.

Source : Macworld

Vladstudio Desk Clock HD is compatible with iPads running iOS 4.2 or later.

A malicious Android app that shamed users for pirating software transmitted personal information to a URL controlled by the legitimate app's developer, a security company said today.The developer of "Walk and Text," the app whose code was recompiled and re-released on unauthorized online stores, denied the claim by AVAST Software, an anti-virus firm based in Prague.

Walk and Text, which costs $1.54 to download from the official Android Market, uses the smartphone's camera to show what's in front of users as they simultaneously walk and text, theoretically preventing them from slamming into signposts or stepping off curbs into traffic.

The Trojanized version of the app includes malicious code that texts an embarrassing anti-piracy message to each contact in the phone's address book."Hey, just downlaoded [sic] a pirated App off the Internet," the message reads. "Walk and Text for Android. Im [sic] stupid and cheap, it costed [sic] only 1 buck. Don't steal like I did!"

The rogue app -- which Symantec yesterday named "Android.Walkinwat" and identified as a Trojan horse -- also pilfers personal data from the phone, including the phone number and the device's unique identifier, and sends it to a remote server.According to AVAST, that data was sent to a URL controlled by Georgi Tanmazov, the CEO of Incorporate Apps, and the developer of Walk and Text, as well as other Android apps.

"It was very obvious that the information went to his URL," said Vincent Steckler, the CEO of AVAST in an interview Friday. "Was there something receiving the information? [Tanmazov] said there was not. But from what we could see, yes, there was something there receiving the information."

Tanmazov flatly denied that he created the malicious version of Walk and Text.

"AVAST has indeed claimed there is a link to our servers, but there was no such file on our servers, and logs could probably prove this," said Tanmazov in an e-mail interview, also on Friday. "There is also no personal information being saved on our servers and this could also easily be proven."

Steckler said that he has yet to see that proof, and called on Tanmazov to share his server logs.When asked if he would share the logs, Tanmazov agreed, but said he wasn't sure that such logs exist."The Web site is on a really cheap shared server and they delete stuff after three days I think," he said. "You understand that if we do have logs those are text files that could be altered so this will also not prove anything."

 One of the founding fathers of the original IBM PC, Mark Dean, says competition in the smartphone and tablet markets today is as wild as the early microcomputer battles between Apple, Commodore and IBM almost three decades ago.

he microcomputer wars gave way to the PC era, in which users gained continuously more computing power with advances in hardware, software, storage and networking technologies, said Dean, who was on the original IBM PC design team that developed the first personal computer, the IBM 5150, which was introduced in 1981 and priced starting at US$1,565.

In the late '70s and early '80s, microcomputers started replacing typewriters and ledgers as devices on which users could write documents, calculate and store information. The emergence of powerful tablets and smartphones is the next major inflection point, with computing power now reaching people's hands, said Dean, who is vice president of technical strategy at IBM Research. "It's just as wild today as it was back then," Dean said. 

IBM released a "PC," the IBM 5100 "portable computer" -- which wasn't considered a personal computer -- in 1975. The computer weighed approximately 50 pounds (22 kilograms), was sold for between $8,975 and $19,975, and was intended primarily for engineers, analysts and statisticians. 

Dean was on the design team for IBM's first personal computer, the 5150, which used an 8-bit Intel 8088 processor and included 16KB of RAM. The PC was based on Microsoft's DOS 1.0 OS and came with several applications including VisiCalc, a spreadsheet, and EasyWriter, a word processor. An expanded 5150 model came with 64KB of RAM and two floppy disk drives.

The idea behind the PC was to put together a set of applications and programming environments like BASIC that was sufficient to support the needs of businesses and individuals, Dean said. The company considered using a Motorola 68000 16-bit chip for the 5150, but the 8-bit Intel chip was more developed, provided application compatibility and was "easier to deal with," Dean said.  

IBM subsequently released in 1983 the PC-XT, which ran DOS 2.0 and came with a 10MB hard drive. It released in 1984 the PC-AT, which came with Intel's 286 processor and DOS 3.0. For subsequent PCs, IBM moved to its PS/2 OS, and then OS/2 OS, and Intel's 386 and 486 microprocessors -- although it eventually abandoned OS/2 and returned to Microsoft operating systems.

IBM lagged competitors such as Apple and Commodore, which had early starts and offered significant price and feature advantages. In 1977, Apple launched Apple II, one of the world's first widely used personal computers, and Commodore the same year started selling the popular PET computer. Apple subsequently released its first Macintosh in 1984. 

"It was a nascent market and nobody really won," Dean said. Apple may have offered better machines, but Dean said that IBM remained unfazed and focused on delivering the right product at the right price.IBM's PC ultimately won out over rivals because of its productive software stack and open architecture, Dean said. Users could reference the technical details of the PC, which were provided by IBM, and build a duplicate computer in a garage. By comparison, it was difficult to replicate other microcomputers because of the closed architecture, Dean said.

Dean led the development of the ISA (industry standard architecture) bus standard, which was key in the proliferation of PCs. The ISA interface provided expandability, allowing the connection of devices like printers, scanners and disk drives to the motherboard. That provided flexibility for computer makers looking to build PCs with their own components, Dean said. ISA was ultimately replaced by PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect), whose first specifications were officially released in 1992."We thought [ISA] would be replaced in three to four years. It provided enough functionality to survive many generations of PCs," Dean said. "It needed to be replaced, it lived long enough." 

Ultimately IBM left the PC business, selling its PC unit to Lenovo in mid-2005 in a US$1.75 billion deal. While IBM-compatible PCs still dominate the market, Apple is growing in popularity among users. Apple was the fifth-largest computer vendor in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2010 with an 8.7 percent market share, according to IDC. Shipments of Apple's Macintosh computers also grew in other parts of the world partly due to the brand awareness created by products like the iPad and iPhone.

IBM is now changing gears to adapt to the post-PC era, creating technologies for smartphones and tablets. IBM's research division is advancing software technologies such as databases and creating algorithms to predict and monitor weather and electricity usage, with the aim to deliver the information to mobile devices. It is also developing technologies to make mobile chips smaller, faster and more power-efficient.

For example, IBM has developed Creek Watch, an iPhone application that helps local water authorities, based on user feedback, track pollution, manage water resources and plan environmental programs.

"We are entering a new era that is driven by mobile devices," Dean said. "If I want to replace my wallet and make that a digital device ... that will happen." 

Dean also envisions natural-language interfaces to ultimately replace search engines to answer user questions. A high-performance supercomputer like Watson, which in February beat two former champions in a game of Jeopardy, will be able to use a natural-language interface to change the way users search and gather specific information.

But PCs will remain a viable computing option, with multiple data-entry options and larger screens being major advantages, Dean said."We have yet to find something more efficient than the keyboard to input information," Dean said. "We've tried voice recognition and translation ... but that has a ways to go."