Verdiem's Edison helps you get green

Sometimes it's the little things that count, especially when it comes to your carbon footprint.

When it comes to PC usage, those little things include turning off your computer when you're not using it. Enter Verdiem, with its free download called Edison, which it is offering to consumers to help with their PC power management at home.

Verdiem has a similar product for large enterprise customers--and they of course charge for it. But Edison is free, and available at the company Web site, or from Microsoft.com/environment. Microsoft and The Climate Savers Initiative are both supporting the launch of Edison.

There are more than 1 billion PCs in the world, and each is responsible for an average of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions every year, says Allison Cornia, Verdiem's vice president of marketing, adding, "Most people are really unaware how much energy PCs are wasting, and we want to draw a lot of attention to that."

I tried it out, and it seems easy enough. Download and register the program, and a window pops up. A series of tabs helps you customize your settings. Choose your peak work and non-work hours, and when you want Edison to save more or less power.
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Updates on the Latitude On

For those looking forward to getting Dell's upcoming Latitude On in their business portables, there's good news and bad news.

The good news is that the feature is slated to be introduced next month. Though the first phase will only allow data already stored on the hard disk to be retrieved, the full-fledged technology, which will be launched in December, will allow Latitude On users to access the Internet and emails much like ASUS' ExpressGate.

The bad news, however, is that Latitude On will be available only in the Latitude E4200 and E4300 for now. The larger Latitude notebooks will have this implemented only on refreshed models in the future. What's also disappointing is that you cannot upgrade existing Latitudes to get Latitude On, so you'll have to get the E4200 or E4300 if you want this feature.

We all love this Olympics, right? Not Adobe

Here's the way things work at Microsoft: After correcting shortcomings in the first and second editions of its software, version 3.0 of a Microsoft product usually silences the company's worst critics, allowing management to get on with business of crushing rivals. But I'll be first to acknowledge that Silverlight breaks with that pattern.

Since the start of the Beijing Olympics, I've been using the Silverlight 2 beta to access video over the Internet and it works just fine. As a loyal Flash user, I was surprised when Microsoft won the deal to supply NBC with video-viewing technology for the Olympics. There was the obvious old-school tie between Microsoft and NBC dating back to their collaboration building MSNBC. Still, this was Adobe Systems' game to lose. And lose it did--big time.

In the end, Microsoft was able to convince NBC it could do more by using Silverlight than by sticking with Flash. Rob Bennett, the general manager of sports for MSN, told me that it came down to a two-day meeting in November, where he brought in the Siliverlight team. I'm simplifying, but his pitch was that Flash's scalability had never been put to an Olympic-size test. Accurate or not, that argument left the desired impression. What's more, even though Silverlight was new on the surface, Microsoft argued that under covers, it was really based on very familiar Windows Media technologies.

"We talked about features like adaptive streaming, the ability to automatically keep checking how much bandwidth you have and deliver the appropriate quality stream and how to be smart about knowing what's coming up in the stream," Bennett said. He added that Microsoft made a point of playing up the scalability of the Windows Media format as well as the ways in which Silverlight could help NBC with copy protection of its video streams.
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Windows 7 details to come in October

Microsoft is launching its Windows 7 blog, but it still doesn't have much to say.

On the plus side, Windows engineering boss Steven Sinofsky did at least put a date to when he would share some more details.

"The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) on October 27 and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) the following week both represent the first venues where we will provide in-depth technical information about Windows 7," Sinofsky and Windows Core operating system head Jon Devaan wrote in a posting on Thursday. "This blog will provide context over the next 2+ months with regular posts about the behind the scenes development of the release and continue through the release of the product."

Microsoft had already said that Windows 7 would be on the PDC docket in some manner.

Sinofsky acknowledged that Microsoft continues to say less than many people would like, but repeated his standard line that the company doesn't want to share details until they have reached a certain level of concreteness.
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Olympic Games take the gold in the workplace

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

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.

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



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