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“Transitive is a leader in cross-platform virtualization and a pioneer in developing technologies that allow applications written for one type of microprocessor and operating system to run on multiple platforms–with little or no modification,” IBM said in a statement. “As a result, the technology will enable customers to consolidate their Linux-based applications onto the IBM systems that make the most sense for their business needs.”

Transitive, the company best known for powering the emulation layer that helped ease Apple’s transition to Intel chips, announced Tuesday that it is being bought by IBM.

In addition to helping Apple create Rosetta, Transitive eased a number of different architecture transitions in the tech world, including SGI’s move from MIPS to Itanium processors as well as an effort by Intel to woo Sun Microsystems customers. IBM was also a customer, using Transitive’s tech to allow x86 workloads to run on Big Blue’s Power processor-based servers.

IBM didn’t say how much it would pay to acquire Transitive, which is headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif., and also has development efforts in Manchester, England. Transitive has about 100 employees. The deal is expected to close in early December.

IBM plans to continue to offer its PowerVM LX 86 product, which is based on Transitive technology. IBM is evaluating Transitive’s other products as part of its overall Systems product strategy.

No, it doesn’t mean that Microsoft needs to open-source all of its technology, or even all of the technology in one particular product (as here, with the browser). It just means that Microsoft should use the best software available, including when it is open source.

I fully expected to die never having heard a positive word escape Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s lips with regard to open source. Based on Ballmer’s comments made in Sydney on Friday, however, it may be time for me to start picking out my funeral arrangements.

[Question:] Why is IE [Internet Explorer] still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?…

I’m kidding, of course, but this could well be the most rational, pragmatic, open-source-related comment from Ballmer that I’ve ever read. Larry Dignan at ZDNet calls it a “throwaway line,” but I think it’s much more. It suggests that Microsoft truly has gotten its arms around open source and has discovered what nearly every other software vendor on the planet has discovered: open source can a useful component in a larger software strategy.

Speaking at a Power to Developers event, Steve Ballmer took questions from the audience and, as usual, was confronted by a question on open source. The significance here is not any earth-shaking pro-open source pronouncement from Ballmer. It’s that Ballmer neglected to throw chairs around the room and responded rationally. This is progress. Really.

[Ballmer's response:] Ballmer began his answer philosophically, saying Microsoft will need to look at what the browser is like in the future and, if there is no innovation around them, which he thinks is “likely”, Microsoft may still need its own browser because of proprietary extensions that broaden its functionality.

Stop the presses! Ballmer is a rational human being!!!

commentary

“There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service,” he said….”Open source is interesting,” he said. “Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for
IE 8.”

Depending on the type of service that is being offered, the professional on the patient side of the call could be a trained technician, or he or she could be a registered nurse or general practitioner doctor.

Part of the reason that telemedicine hasn’t taken off in a big way in the past has been cost. While technologies, such as telepresence may eventually reduce the cost of providing health care services, initially they are expensive to deploy. For example, Cisco’s high-end telepresence conferencing system that is sold to large companies to replicate a boardroom costs upward of $300,000.

“The thing that drives prices up is an imbalance between supply and demand,” Augustinos said. “But if you can more efficiently distribute the resources that exist and optimize those resources, then you can flatten the pricing curve.”

While high-definition cameras and screens have made it possible to diagnose many illnesses and injuries, there are still limitations. For example, the experience doesn’t allow doctors to actually touch patients, which in some circumstances can help them more accurately diagnose an illness or injury. But for many minor injuries and ailments, telemedicine works very well, experts say.

The partnership between Cisco and UnitedHealth is an important milestone in the telehealth movement because the companies will be working together to solve not only the technical and clinical hurdles that come with deploying this technology, but they will also be trying to solve the business problems for delivering health care.

Another scenario where HealthPresence is useful is when a doctor is examining a patient in his or her office and if he detects a problem during an examination that requires consultation with a specialist, he can look to see who is available in the network. Instead of writing a referral and having the patient schedule an appointment with a specialist, the doctor can dial-in the available specialist for the consultation right then and there.

Augustinos believes that using telemedicine in this way can help lower overall medical costs.

“Nurses and doctors are in short supply in some places, so depending on what level of care that is being provided, the HealthPresence system can be manned by less expensive resources,” Cisco’s Augustinos said. “By using a lower cost professional or technician, the insurer or medical group providing the service can maximize their resources.”

“Health care is a business,” said Bob Preston, vice president of solutions marketing at Polycom, another major telepresence provider in the health care market. “And if medical groups and health insurers can offer services to more patients via telepresence, while reducing their costs, they can increase their revenue.”

The private medical group NuPhysicia is using Polycom’s mobile Practioner Carts to provide walk-in health services at Houston-area Wal-Mart Stores. Instead of using higher paid nurse practioners at the retailer’s clinics, the group is using paramedics and remote doctors over the telepresence system to see patients.

Cisco HealthPresence Pod

And they all believe that the health care industry is finally ready to spend big bucks on expensive new technologies today to help stem rising costs for tomorrow.

“This is why we partnered with an insurance company, so that we could understand the business model to build a solution that will deliver effective, efficient care at a lower cost,” Augustinos said. “And the truth is that if we didn’t approach it that way, then we’d have wonderful technology that could provide excellent care to lots of people, but no one would want to buy it because they wouldn’t want to pay for it.”

The way it works is that a doctor sits on one side of the telepresence connection, while a medical professional mans the booth or cart on the patient side of the connection. This technician sets up the call and uses the medical equipment to examine the patient as directed by the doctor.

Typcially, these solutions are scaled-down versions of the high-end telepresence systems, but they also include adapters for medical devices that can provide vital sign monitoring, such as blood pressure, pulse rate, oxygen saturation and temperature, as well as interfaces for stethoscopes and otoscopes for examining ears.

In this case, patients willing to see the first available doctor would be triaged and a doctor, who meets the patients criteria, would be contacted via video-conference to examine the patient.

(Credit:
Cisco Systems)

“There is a huge shortage of general practitioners especially in rural areas,” Polycom’s Preston said. “And as the population ages and people become more immobile, telepresence solutions can help provide access to doctors to people who would otherwise have to travel long distances to see someone.”

Still, the rising cost of health care and predictions that these costs could cripple the nation, have increased the urgency for nontraditional solutions. This change in attitude coupled with the Obama administration’s plan to reform the health care system has stirred more interest from almost every big technology company in the country.

The current health care crisis has some experts saying that telemedicine’s time has finally come.

Polycom’s telepresence gear has also been used to serve people in rural communities. The Cherokee Health Systems has been using the mobile telepresence system to provide medical care to 17 rural school clinics in Tennesse with only two nurse practitioners. And NuPhysicia has used Polycom gear to provide medical care to workers on offshore oil rigs.

But Cisco’s Augustinos points out that telemedicine is not just for providing medical services to people living in remote areas. It can also be used in urban settings where access to health care professionals is readily available, but where patients must sit in waiting rooms for hours to be seen because demand is so high.

The first implementation of the Cisco/UnitedHealth Group partnership is to provide a mobile medical service called Connected Care. Working with an organization called Project HOPE, Connected Care will have a mobile truck or van that travels through four counties in New Mexico offering basic health screenings and treatment for chronic ailments, such as diabetes.

“We won’t solve every ill in health care industry,” he said. “But we are suggesting that if you optimize the scarce clinical resources that are available today, you can use the money that is put into the system more efficiently. And that is a start.”

Intel and General Electric are working on a home monitoring system. Google and IBM have also announced an in-home system that transmits data from devices such as blood-pressure cuffs and glucose meters via the Internet. And Cisco and Polycom have retrofitted their corporate telepresence systems to provide near-real-life interaction between patients and doctors.

One of the challenges in deploying telemedicine has been the fact that insurance companies have been more likely to reimburse traditional face-to-face doctor visits rather than procedures done remotely using telemedicine. But with the partnership between UnitedHealth Group, which insures some 70 million people in the U.S. and Cisco , it looks like insurance companies may be realizing the economic benefits of scaling the health care system virtually.

Cisco has designed its “HealthPresence” system as a small telepresence room, or “pod.” And Polycom offers a variety of products that range from full telepresence rooms to a mobile telepresence cart that can be wheeled from room to room in a hospital or clinic.

But he admitted that no technology, whether it comes from Cisco or anyone else, will be a magic pill to solve all of the health care system’s problems.

Using high-definition cameras and monitors, telepresence technology creates a “conferencing” experience that is so intimate people think they are in the same room with the people on the other end of the teleconference. Cisco and Polycom, two of the leading telepresence equipment providers on the market, have adapted technology they developed for large companies for use in medical environments.

A patient is examined remotely by a doctor using Cisco's HealthPresence system.

Augustinos explained that the concept is similar to using an 800 number to contact a any service provider’s customer support. People call the number, and they are asked to identify the problem or issue they’re having so the call can be routed to appropriate pool of operators.

(Credit:
Polycom)

Cisco and UnitedHealth Group have already tested their Connected Care program with Cisco’s own employees. In a pilot program launched last year, more than 300 Cisco employees in the company’s San Jose, Calif., headquarters used primary-care physicians in Los Angeles via the telemedicine system. Now the companies have expanded the trial to Cisco’s Raleigh, N.C., campus where 4,000 employees will have access to five primary care physicians in Cisco’s corporate health care center in San Jose.

And because these systems require the use of high-definition audio and video, which must be transmitted over an Internet connection between doctors and patients, these systems require significant amounts of bandwidth. This means that without ubiquitous broadband access throughout the country, the cost benefits and usefulness of the technology is limited.

These trials follow another pilot program that Cisco conducted last year at the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in Scotland. So far the results have been good. In addition to Cisco’s own employees being satisfied with the service, Cisco reported last week that roughly 93 percent of people who received care via the telepresence system in the Aberdeen trial said they would recommend the service to someone else.

Last week, technology giant Cisco Systems and a major U.S. insurer UnitedHealth Group announced a partnership in which UnitedHealth will use a Cisco product called HealthPresence to develop a national program to allow doctors to treat patients remotely. The program will initially focus on providing people in remote and under-served areas with health care. But Cisco and UnitedHealth representatives say eventually the program could be expanded throughout the country.

While technology companies have been touting the use of virtual technology to allow doctors to remotely examine and monitor patients for decades, up until recently the business case for deploying these expensive systems was hard to justify. But now as lawmakers in Washington, D.C. look for ways to fix the broken health care system, technologies, such as high-definition video conferencing and telepresence, are getting a second look.

The Polycom Practioner Cart

(Credit:
Cisco Systems)

“What is different right now is that the health care system in this country is being asked to deliver service more effectively and efficiently without increasing the available resources,” said Nick Augustinos, senior director with Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions group for global health. “So what’s needed now is a health care system that can scale. And that is what telepresence and other remote monitoring technologies can do by extending the natural reach of doctors and clinicians in a nontraditional way.”

Using presence technology, the Cisco HealthPresence product allows doctors to search the database in a given medical group or ecosystem to find a doctor or specialist anywhere in the country who is available at that moment to see a patient. This allows for a more efficient and cost-effective way to run an urgent care clinic that often sees walk-in patients.

Then the equipment sends data and images gathered during the examination via an Internet connection to the doctor. The doctor can control the camera to zoom into different parts of the body. At the same time, electronic medical records and other data can be viewed by the doctor on a separate computer screen.

Adobe has released a patch for a critical Flash Player problem that could let attackers take over people’s computers through content viewed in a browser.

This was no abstract, theoretical vulnerability, either.

“There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild via limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader v9 on Windows,” Adobe said in an earlier advisory about the problem.

Flash is very widely used in browsers to power features such as interactive stock charts and YouTube video streaming.

The vulnerability affected a file that shipped with Flash Player 9.x and 10.x for Windows,
Mac OS X, and Linux, and with Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix. Adobe said Thursday it fixed the problem in a security advisory, and Adobe’s Matt Rozen posted a note on Twitter that directed people to download the patched version from Adobe’s Flash download site.

To understand why, it’s important to understand what Microsoft was trying to accomplish by introducing the ribbon. For the full story, I highly recommend this video by Jensen Harris of the Office User Experience Team from MIX08. However, in a nutshell, the ribbon essentially ripped out years of accumulating menu items and other UI elements and replaced them with something designed from the ground up. It was a bold choice but the nature of the problem meant that it didn’t lend itself to a piecemeal fix–indeed, piecemeal fixes were what caused the problem in the first place.

For my part, I found the ribbon took some getting used to but now I like it for the most part. Like other Microsoft products, I find the design a bit garish but the mechanics generally work well enough for me.

The OpenOffice prototype, on the other hand, appears to add a ribbon while leaving the menu system extant. This way lays user interface madness even if it does provide more choices. Good design is often (indeed is usually) about constraining choice rather than expanding it.

However, I always found it more than a bit ironic that a lot of the same people who routinely claim that Microsoft doesn’t innovate were, in this case, suggesting this was a good opportunity to get users moved to OpenOffice where they could avoid such a disruptive change.

So I don’t see anything wrong, at least in principle, with OpenOffice introducing a ribbon interface. There are a lot of broader issues around OpenOffice and its future. These include Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, fragmented development by a variety of companies, and the lack of a clear mission at the level of the project as a whole. Part of the problem is that while a free/cheap, “good enough” word processor may be something that a lot of end users want, that’s not really a business for anyone. For its part, IBM has used OpenOffice to tie into document-related business processes. But that’s about something fundamentally different from OpenOffice, the word processor.

Beyond the question of what OpenOffice wants to be when it grows up, though, there is something specific about the prototype that bothers me.

I never got the ribbon-hate myself. Well, OK, that’s not really true. A lot of people don’t like change and a lot of people like ragging on Microsoft for whatever reason.

(For a different perspective, see the CNET piece by Dong Ngo.)

At the end of July, Sun posted a screenshot from “Project Renaissance,” an effort aimed at creating a new user interface (UI) for OpenOffice. The prototype includes a “ribbon” UI in the vein of the one that Microsoft introduced for Office 2007. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the user comments were critical and devolved into Microsoft bashing.

Be the first to tell me by e-mail what and where this is, and you will win a prize in the Road Trip picture of the day challenge.

Can you tell me what and where it is? If you’re the first to do so (by e-mail, to daniel–dot–terdiman–at–cnet–dot–com) you’ll win a prize in the Road Trip picture of the day challenge.

Good luck.

There are only two challenges left after today, so your chances at winning a prize are dwindling. Until Road Trip 2010, that is.

DENVER, Colo.–Over the years–and even several times during Road Trip 2009–I’ve seen a number of these kinds of buildings. They’ve been, variously, large, banal, awe-inspiring and, in some cases, worth detouring to see.

Update (Thursday, 11:37 a.m.): The answer is the Montana state capitol building, in Helena, Montana.

This one is different than the rest, however. It just looks unique.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Click here for the entire Road Trip 2009 package.

Last week when it first updated, we related our first impressions of Facebook for iPhone 3.0. Now that’s we’ve spent some more quality time with it over the weekend, we can confirm that the 3.0 update is huge. Sure, it takes up more room on your
iPhone or
iPod Touch, but that’s not what we meant.

But that feature is just one of many. See the new Facebook for iPhone 3.0 in action in this First Look video. If you have used it, let us know how you like it.

The real growth spurt comes from the pile of new and improved features that Facebook has poured into the app. They range from the typical–support for landscape mode, capability to change your profile picture–to the powerful–such as creating photo albums and kicking off a text message or call from the Facebook interface.

That last point echoes a central thesis in a June 2009 Wired article (”The Great Wall of Facebook”): by storing intensely personal data about real people–their likes and dislikes, e-mail addresses, friends, activities, and even phone numbers–Facebook is creating a formidable “second Internet” to rival Google. Indeed, the SMS and phone call triggers on Facebook for iPhone 3.0 (and a similar feature on Facebook for BlackBerry that hooks into your address book) do influence, even facilitate, the way you contact friends in real life. Now you can rely on a Web-based network as a point of entry to your actual social life.

Monday’s business day came and went with little public comment from the companies, but apparently efforts to restore data were more fruitful.

“For those who fall into this category, details will be sent out in the next 14 days - there is no action needed on the part of these customers,” T-Mobile said. “We however remain hopeful that for the majority of our customers, personal content can be recovered.”

T-Mobile said late on Monday that it may yet be able to recover Sidekick users’ information that it had previously thought was lost as part of a massive server failure by Microsoft’s Danger subsidiary.

That marks a significant change in tone. On Saturday, the carrier and Microsoft had warned that any data not on a customer’s phone at that point was likely gone forever.

T-Mobile did halt sales of the Sidekick as it investigated the issue.

Those who do suffer permanent data loss will get a $100 “customer appreciation card” good toward T-Mobile service or products, the carrier said in a statement.

(Credit:
CNET)

T-Mobile continued to urge customers not to remove the battery on the device, reset the Sidekick or let it run out of power while the company works to restore its servers.

“Recent efforts indicate the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible,” it said.

Rumors surfaced earlier this year that Qwest was trying to sell its long-haul fiber network at a price tag of between $2 to $3 billion. Qwest was expected to use the proceeds to help pay down its $14 billion in debt. But potential buyers of the network, such as Cogent Communications, AT&T, and Verizon Communications, balked at the high price. And in June, Qwest said that after a “strategic review,” it had decided to keep the network.

The outage caused some of Qwest’s customers to not be able to make and receive long distance phone calls. However, Qwest officials said that calls are now able to be completed.

Qwest Communications confirmed Thursday that the company experienced a long distance outage that lasted about two and a half hours.

The company was not able to provide details about what caused the outage nor was it able to provide details of how many customers were affected. But it’s believed that the outage disrupted service in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and parts of North Carolina and Florida.

Qwest, which is headquartered in Denver, has one of the nation’s largest long-haul fiber networks, which connects long distance calls to other carriers. The company sells its service and dark fiber (or optical fiber not in use) to other service providers, which then use the fiber or resell the service to their customers. The company also offers Internet and telephony services to large companies and government agencies.

“We are also committed to doing all we can to provide excellent and consistently reliable service to our customers and know that they depend on our communications services,” the company said in a statement.

A spokesman for the company said that Qwest’s enterprise customers can request a “Reason for Outage” document once the root cause analysis of the outage is complete.

“Every field of astrophysics, whether it’s our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe, every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble,” said Heidi Hammel, senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “You’re only getting the tiniest taste of what the astronomers are planning to do with Hubble over as many years as it can last.

A small portion of the 10-million-star Omega Centauri globular cluster orbiting the core of the Milky Way.

While enormous ground-based telescopes currently on the drawing boards will dwarf Hubble’s relatively modest mirror, Weiler said its position above the atmosphere guarantees it will remain at the forefront of astronomy for years to come.

Michael Griffin, O’Keefe’s successor, reinstated the repair mission after spacewalking astronauts demonstrated heat shield repair techniques. He also ordered engineers to process a second shuttle in parallel to serve as an emergency rescue vehicle if needed.

NASA spent some $887 million on the final Hubble servicing mission, pushing the total cost of the project to around $10 billion since its inception in the late 1970s.

The shuttle Atlantis roared into orbit May 11 on a fifth and final mission to service and upgrade the space telescope. The flight was canceled by former Administrator Sean O’Keefe in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster because heat shield repair techniques were not available and because a Hubble crew, operating in a different orbit, could not seek safe haven aboard the space station if a major problem prevented a safe re-entry.

“I think we have basically shoved aside the old textbooks and the old concepts of the universe we live in that were based entirely on this distorted view we have through the Earth’s atmosphere. And we have laid a foundation of clear vision that is the starting point from which all future UV/optical and near-infrared astronomy will proceed.”

The Atlantis astronauts also repaired two other instruments: the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which suffered a power supply failure in 2004, and the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which broke down in 2007. Neither instrument was designed to be serviced in orbit, but engineers devised custom tools and an ingenious plan that allowed the spacewalkers to bypass the failed electronics.

“So you could make a football field-sized telescope and never collect a photon because they aren’t there. Hubble is absolutely unique, we must have a telescope in space to complement the very large telescopes on the ground. Hubble is absolutely unique at those wavelengths. Nothing else can do it.”

(Credit:
NASA)

(Credit:
NASA)

Planetary nebula NGC 6302, a star in the final stages of its life, in a dramatic new photo from the repaired Hubble Space Telescope.

Asked to predict how Hubble will be remembered a century from now, senior Project Scientist David Leckrone said “we need to be humble. But in all humility, I truly believe that Hubble has fundamentally changed the course of modern astronomy and astrophysics. And it’s taken it in new directions.”

The repair crew installed an upgraded fine guidance sensor, new insulation, and a grapple fixture that will permit a future spacecraft to lock on and drive Hubble out of orbit when it is no longer able to do science.

During Atlantis’ mission, four spacewalkers, working in two-man teams, carried out five back-to-back spacewalks to install six new stabilizing gyroscopes, six new nickel-hydrogen battery packs, a replacement data computer, and two new instruments, the $132 million Wide Field Camera 3 and the $88 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Like all modern Hubble instruments, both were equipped with corrective optics to counteract the spherical aberration that prevents Hubble’s 94.5-inch mirror from achieving a sharp focus.

Along with unparalleled wide-field views of the cosmos, “the other thing Hubble can do that can never, ever be done from the ground is imaging in the ultraviolet and imaging in some of the near infrared wavelengths of light,” Hammel said. “Because our Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the photons before they get to the surface of the Earth.

“We’re giddy with the quality of the data that we have with this new telescope,” she said. “We’re especially excited to have the spectrographic data restored to Hubble. … We are entering a new era of astronomy. Hubble’s new beginning is just setting the stage for what’s going to be coming.”

(Credit:
NASA)

The pictures clearly show the fabled telescope is back in action, ready to resume its role as one of the most productive observatories on or off the planet, thanks to a dramatic five-spacewalk shuttle repair mission last May.

NASA scientists showed off spectacular new pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope Wednesday, a stunning gallery of remote galaxies, a stellar nursery, an enormous globular cluster packed with countless pinpoint stars, and a dying sun blowing off its outer atmosphere in butterfly-like wings of debris.

Visible light and infrared views of a star-forming cloud, showing an infant sun in the previously unseen interior.

“Bottom line, these professionals left Hubble as a new state-of-the-art telescope,” said Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for space science. “This is the fifth time we’ve had a new telescope up there, capable of continuing its historic scientific journey for at least five more years and, I would bet, a long time after that.”