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During the week, the U.S. Green Building Council passed a draft for an updated LEED (Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design) green-building certification for commercial buildings. Meanwhile, new LEED certifications for retail stores and neighborhood development are now available for public comment.

The U.S. Green Building Council held its annual Greenbuild Expo in Boston last week, exposing close to 30,000 people to the latest green-building technologies and materials.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

CBS Interactive recently opened a new Boston office and is applying for LEED certification. According to the general contractor, one of the hidden costs is simply delays that occur when contractors haven’t already bought from green-building suppliers.

People who attended the conference were impressed at the high number of attendees, a sign that what was once a fringe movement is becoming mainstream.

On the show floor, there were a number of products designed with the environment in mind, such as sustainably harvested wood, drywall made from recycled material, and kitchen counters made of recycled paper.

The study (click here for PDF) found that people pay on average 2 percent more for green buildings and that there are a range of benefits, including an average of 33 percent energy savings and health benefits to people.

There are certainly more options for energy-efficient appliances and products made with recycled materials than just a few years ago. But green-building practices are still far from commonplace. Typically, someone constructing a new building or retrofitting an existing one will need to make an extra effort to go “green.”

Click on the image to see a gallery of photos from the GreenBuild Expo conference show floor.

Clean-tech investing firm Good Energies weighed in on the green-building debate by publishing a study last week concluding that the premium people pay for a green building is smaller than commonly perceived.

The $6.9 million for broadband has been donated to advocacy group Connected Nation and to the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy — the bulk of it to Connected Nation — to promote better broadband access in public libraries in Arkansas, California, Kansas, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Virginia. The goal is to bring broadband Internet of at least 1.5 Mbps to every public library in each of those states.

Charitable causes are getting hit hard these days, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, formed by the eponymous Microsoft founder and his wife, announced Thursday the donation of nearly $14 million. About half, or $6.9 million, is going to two U.S. organizations promoting broadband connectivity, and another $7 million has been awarded to fight a parasitic illness that threatens millions of people in developing countries.

As for the other $7 million donation announced by the Gates Foundation on Thursday, it’s going to something very different: the Infectious Disease Research Institute, and it will be used for diagnosis and treatment of people in Africa who have been infected with Leishmania donovani, a parasite that causes visceral leishmaniasis.

Visceral leishmaniasis affects about 500,000 people per year, 10 percent of whom die. The Seattle-based IDRI is working to develop a vaccine for the disease.

There’s a recession angle to it: “As the economic crisis in the U.S. deepens, visits to public libraries are up across the country,” a release from the Gates Foundation explained. “Many libraries in states across the country are reporting that online services are in high demand, especially for job seekers, students, and people who do not have Internet access elsewhere.”

By offering a VPN service that doesn’t log its traffic, IPREDator is simultaneously setting itself apart from other Web-based VPN services and offering what looks like a way to legally evade IPRED. Without logs, users will be able to exchange data without worrying about a subpoena revealing to whom the data packets were going, or what their contents were.

The current beta is free and can be signed up for at the IPREDator site, although it’s taking only 500 testers. If anybody does get a chance to use the beta service, please post about it below.

Back in July 2008, torrent tracker The Pirate Bay announced plans to encrypt the Internet. That hasn’t happened yet, but they plan to offer a VPN tunneling service to the public starting April 1.

Dubbing the service IPREDator after the controversial Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that takes effect the same day. IPRED’s main goal is to make it easier for copyright holders to acquire the personal data of suspected illegal file sharers.

Other details about the new VPN service are thin, except that users will be asked to pay a small premium, approximately $6.77 or 5 euros, for the service. It’s also not clear if the service will be compatible with other non-file sharing uses, or if it will try to compete with other encrypted tunneling services like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC.

Every so often, something unsexy and boring becomes interesting. Few people drool over console servers, even those who deal with them on a regular basis, but an announcement by Opengear, an open-source console server company, manages to make them look sexy by appealing to resellers’ wallets.

Opengear’s VARs see up to 25 percent profit margins on console servers, notable because the market standard is about 3 percent to 5 percent.

While the primary beneficiaries of lowered prices are their customers, Opengear has identified and targeted another group that benefits–their partners.

However, part of Opengear’s cheery outlook might be good old-fashioned schadenfreude: Among their publicly held competitors, Digi International cut their first-quarter sales forecast by almost 15 percent and Lantronix was just delisted from the NASDAQ.

Part of that optimism may come from their management. CEO Bob Waldie is an open source veteran and one of the pioneers of embedded Linux who has taken a number of open-source start-ups through to acquisition (most recently, SnapGear which is now part of McAfee).

The channel often needs to sell console servers to manage their data centers, and Opengear is counting on gaining ground in what used to be a pass-through market. Is it sexy? No. But it is smart.

I talked to Opengear representatives who told me that their numbers are going up, with a record number of sales booked in December. The console server market is about $200 million annually, and Opengear is unusually optimistic about 2009.

By using free open-source software like Nagios and Powerman in addition to writing their own code, Opengear passes along significant price reductions compared with their competitors like Avocent, Lantronix, Perle Systems, and Digi International.

By keeping it simple and open source, the company is able to offer their partners something that competing products can’t–high returns.

Thank goodness. BusinessWeek’s new 25 Most Influential People on the Web list is refreshingly free of blowhard bloggers, busty video babes, and those wacky people who don’t seem to do anything except speak at conference after conference.

But there were two sectors of Net influencers who were conspicuously missing: one, anybody from the porn industry (I hear that’s kind of big on the Web); and two, prominent figures best known for hacking, spamming, and related online nastiness. Because bad guys can be a big deal too.

Because of the dominance of big names, it’s a pretty unsurprising list. But there are a few interesting choices: BusinessWeek names Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the list, rather than founder Mark Zuckerberg; late-night comedian Jon Stewart, whose wildly popular The Daily Show on Comedy Central led (indirectly, and among other factors) to parent company Viacom’s copyright suit against YouTube; and Jonathan Kaplan, whose Pure Digital Technologies created the low-end Flip camcorder, that device that has been pointed in the direction of so many cats.

Most of the list, rather, consists of the really big guys: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, whose company acquired MySpace. Then there are legit Web pioneers like Digg founder Kevin Rose, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

(Credit:
BusinessWeek)

Individually, a few tenths of a second here or there doesn’t make much difference. But it adds up fast. I spend hours a day using the Web–not just browsing, but also uploading photos, issuing instructions to my bank, editing documents online, and posting comments. As the Web gets more complex and more deeply embedded in my life, waiting for it gets more annoying.

• Chrome doesn’t respect changing monitor sizes well. When I move to a dual-monitor setup, Chrome stomps all over Windows’ task bar.

I recognize my color preference is at odds with Google’s performance push. Mozilla programmers found that supporting color profiles slowed Firefox 20 percent to 30 percent, though they reduced that number 4 percent to 5 percent with testing. Eventually, to get it lower, they went with a third way, applying color profiles only for tagged images, which caused only a 1 percent performance hit.

Those are my issues, and I’m sure other people have their own. What’s keeping you from switching to Chrome? Vote in the poll above and share your thoughts below.

Sorry if it sounds like I’m drinking the Google Kool-Aid here, but I switched from Mozilla
Firefox to Google Chrome as my default browser for the very reason Google’s executives said we should: speed. (Get Google Chrome from Download.com.)

Faster stripped-down Firefox
More to the point, Mozilla suggested I try a fresh installation of Firefox, one that’s not burdened by those pesky extensions. I hadn’t been running a large quantity, but I started with a fresh reinstallation of Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

• When I launch a new window, Chrome never starts it maximized, even if the last window was. This is a bit surprising, given Google’s laudable emphasis on showing as much real estate as possible. I always want my browser page maximized. On a related note, I miss Firefox’s maximized mode (hit F11 to try it out).

• Bad support for RSS subscription feeds. In Firefox, a site with an RSS feed gets an icon in the address bar, and clicking it signs me up for the subscription. In Chrome, I have to hope someone manually put a link on the page, but usually I just move back over to Firefox.

Here’s what coaxed me away: Chrome starts way faster than Firefox. Web pages load faster when I type in an address or click a link. The Omnibox–Chrome’s combination location bar and search box–often gets me where I want to go at least a keystroke faster, and I’m not terribly worried about sending Web navigation and search data to Google.

Other gripes
Chrome has other issues that frequently annoy me. Allow me to share.

I hadn’t set out to convert to Chrome. I just wanted to see how well it worked, so I used it to run my personal e-mail while at work. Then I added in reading RSS feeds. After a few weeks, I noticed that I was manually copying Web addresses to Chrome and realized that my subconscious mind had made its decision. So last week, I set it as my default browser, despite a range of criticisms (see below).

News.com Poll Why switch to Chrome?
What would it take to get you to switch to Chrome? If there’s no way you would, say why in the comments below.

But Google hasn’t even gotten to the stage of evaluating performance effects. “I don’t see how any sites could depend on this feature if it’s missing/disabled for 90 percent of users,” said Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson in a response to a request to add color management to Chrome, referring to the fact that color management is missing in Internet Explorer and not enabled yet in mainstream Firefox. “I’m all for it, but it’s definitely not a release priority.”

I reverted to the earlier tab-switching feature by adjusting Firefox’s behavior thus: First, type “about:config” into the address bar, then move past the warning message, then type “ctrlTab” into the “Filter” box, then double-click first on browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed and then on browser.ctrlTab.smoothScroll to set them to “false,” then restart the browser.

Reinstalling Firefox also reminded me of a feature in the forthcoming Firefox 3.1 that I was happy to leave behind: tab-switching behavior. I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, and use Ctrl-Tab hundreds of times daily to switch between browser tabs. I loathe the new Firefox mechanism, which switches to your most recently used tab rather than cycling one tab to the right, and showing a miniature preview version of the Web page instead of actually switching tabs. I don’t know if others’ brains work differently, but the new mechanism leaves me completely lost in a sea of tabs, forcing me to use the mouse, which slows me down.

Years ago, Firefox won me over chiefly with plug-ins, tabbed browsing, and some security advantages. But using Chrome removed a bit of friction from the Web I hadn’t realized was there. It felt like discovering I’d been driving with the parking brake on just a bit.

View results

Meanwhile, though, Chrome cycles the way I like, and in another nice move, it opens new tabs immediately to the right of the page I’m reading when I middle-click to open a page in a new tab. That conveniently groups related tasks together.

Off-color remarks
Here’s what’s keeping me an active Firefox user, though: Chrome’s lack of support for color profiles.

After I told Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker about my experience, she sounded a bit crestfallen. “We’ve been increasing our focus on performance for some time. Maybe comments such as yours will increase that,” she said.

• There’s no plug-in mechanism. I’m getting by, but there are some I’d like to have back.

Of course, disabling extensions is a shame, given that it’s one of Firefox’s big advantages. Google has promised an extensions framework at some point, and it’s the top-requested feature, with 381 people having starred it as a priority in Google’s issue-tracking system for Chrome.

Faster, faster, faster
Plug-ins and easy RSS support
A Mac OS X version
A Linux version
Better privacy from the Googlebot
Support from company’s internal Web tools
Other: share a comment why

• Selection and copy-paste issues. When I’m selecting text in Chrome, I don’t like how the blue selection box spreads wider than the text box. And when text is selected but I missed a few characters, I don’t like the inability to use Shift-right arrow keys to extend the selection a bit.

Apple’s Safari was the pioneer for color management, and Firefox added color profile support with version 3.0 if users manually enable it. With version 3.1, Firefox applies color profiles for images that have been tagged with one. As a result, images on my high-gamut monitor at home look fine in Firefox, but in Chrome they’re hideously garish and oversaturated. It’s a showstopper for me when I’m doing anything photo-related on the Web.

I have to say that Firefox picked up the pace a notch. But I compared it again with Chrome on many Web sites I use daily and a variety of others, and with the exception of Flickr and My Yahoo, I still found Chrome snappier.

(Credit:
Paul Ford)

Most images on the Web are encoded with a color scheme called sRGB, but there are others out there including AdobeRGB and Microsoft’s scRGB that can show a much broader range of colors. I’m a photography buff with an eensy-weensy photo business, so I prefer images to look as good as possible on the Web.

Now, I wasn’t there, but it’s highly unlikely this is anything close to what Dell was suggesting. Fortune writes that the “slapdown took many of the people in the audience by surprise.” Um, rightfully so. But that wasn’t the end of Putin’s verbal judo attack on Dell and his company. Near the conclusion of his talk, Putin reportedly talked up Russian scientists and how they are “respected not for their hardware, but for their software.” Double snap.

Putin immediately rebuffed the PC company’s founder. “We don’t need your help. We are not invalids. We don’t have limited mental capacity,” Putin responded. (I think the only appropriate response to that is, “Oh, snap!”)

Many have by now learned that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is a bit, uh, prickly. But Michael Dell found out first hand at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday.

Update: The video showed up on YouTube. Here it is:

During the opening of the show, Putin gave a wide-ranging, 40-minute speech. When it came time for questions, Dell asked “How can we help” you with your country’s IT infrastructure, according to a report in Fortune.

It’s worth noting that Davos can be a humbling place for Dell. My CNET News colleague Ina Fried was at Davos back in 2000 and remembers the sight of Dell flipping slides for a fellow tech executive when the two were part of a panel. The look on Dell’s face was priceless. Evidently slide jockey is not a role he coveted.

First a little background. Nvidia issued a statement July 2 saying it would take a charge of up to $200 million to cover repairs due to a “weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems.”

Nvidia also issued this written statement: “The GeForce 9600 GPU in the MacBook Pro does not have bad bumps. The material set (combination of underfill and bump) that is being used is similar to the material set that has been shipped in 100’s of millions of chipsets by the world’s largest semiconductor company (Intel).”

U.K. tech site The Inquirer is saying that bad bumps–”tiny balls of solder that hold a chip to the green printed circuit board”–are still present in the GeForce 9600 graphics chips that ship in the newest MacBook Pros. An issue that The Inquirer claims is the root of the problem.

Hara talked about how the original problem announced by Nvidia on July 2 was rectified. “A more robust underfill would have taken the stress off the bumps and kept that (original problem) from happening. What we did was, we just simply went to a more robust underfill. Stopped using that (previous) underfill, kept using high-lead bumps, but we changed the underfill. And now we don’t see the problem.”

Both Hewlett-Packard and Dell have come out with statements addressing the issue in laptops. And both companies have programs that try to fix the issue.

“Intel has shipped hundreds of millions of chipsets that use the same material-set combo. We’re using virtually the same materials that Intel uses in its chipsets,” Hara said.

Bad bumps? A U.K. tech site is alleging that the latest Apple MacBook Pros contain Nvidia graphics chips with the same “bad bumps” problem that Nvidia addressed this summer and said was rectified.

The Web site said it took a MacBook Pro off a store shelf, disassembled it, desoldered the chips, sawed them in half, encased them in Lucite, and ran them through a scanning electron microscope equipped with an X-ray microanalysis.

He continued: “When you build a device, it’s the material properties and everything in combination that leads to the robustness of the design. What we call the ‘material set.’ It’s a combination of the underfill (a kind of a glue that helps hold the chip down) and the bump together that creates that stability in that connection,” he said.

Nvidia said in a phone interview on Tuesday that this is dead wrong.

The Inquirer reporter “believes high-lead bumps are bad. That’s his underlying theory. It’s not true,” Hara said.

Nvidia vehemently disagreed with the allegations, calling them completely untrue. The Inquirer’s “initial analysis of problems with some of the older chips was already flawed,” said Michael Hara, vice president, investor relations and communications at Nvidia.

Hara also said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) ships a “staggering” number of chips to many companies worldwide with high-lead bumps. TSMC is the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer and makes chips for Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and many other companies.

As a result, The Inquirer alleges that the MacBook Pros with the GeForce 9600 chips have the older, defective high-lead bumps, while the MacBook Air and MacBook have the newer eutectic solder (newer, low-lead bumps).

So, in essence, the MacBook and MacBook Air are fine, while the MacBook Pro is problematic.

Last year Nokia bought out its Symbian partners for $410 million and then open sourced it. Now it would appear that the company’s ambitions relative to open source have only just begun.

“It is unlikely Nokia would be prepared to open-source a strategically important platform if it did not have another one in development,” said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight.

The idea seems to be that Symbian will be used for Nokia’s mass-market phones, just as it is today, but Linux will power its more strategic bets, with Nokia’s CFO recently calling Linux “terribly important” to the company. With that said, Nokia’s head of software engineering, Ari Jaaksi recently blogged, “Nokia’s vision is to bring open source and Linux to consumer mainstream.” So perhaps Nokia has a bigger plan for Linux than niche devices…

Nokia says Symbian plays a central role in its software strategy, but analysts say the role of Linux in the company’s Nokia phones is also set to increase, reflecting a mindset shift for a company that has long shunned using software from multiple vendors.

According to analysts quoted in this Reuters story, Linux may actually be Nokia’s biggest bet, not open-source Symbian.

commentary

Regardless, with Google pushing Linux in its Android phones and Nokia pushing Linux on its Internet tablets today, and possibly high-end phones tomorrow, Linux looks like it’s set to find a yet another market to disrupt and, eventually, dominate.

“We believe Nokia needs a more powerful mobile software platform to compete with the
iPhone and similar products,” Wood said, pointing to Linux as the likely candidate.

Cloud computing has become one of the dominant drives in the IT sector in recent months. It’s a loose term, but generally it refers to hosting applications away from local desktops and in an Internet-based computing resource, accessible by browser.

To foster the development of applications for cloud computing setups, VMware unveiled several “virtual appliance” offerings, including VMware Studio for authoring and packaging, and VMware Ready, for appliance validation.

Practitioners and proponents of cloud computing range from Dell, Amazon.com, and Google to VMware’s virtualization rival, Xen.

It remains to be seen, however, just how quickly the concept might catch on in business settings. To counter worries about such setups, VMware on Monday also announced its VCloud Initiative, which is intended to deliver a three-tiered set of offerings for “enterprise-class” cloud computing. In this effort, it has enlisted partners ranging from BT and Rackspace to Verizon Business.

The company on Monday opened up its VMworld 2008 conference with a flurry of announcements. Most notably it is aiming to turn its infrastructure products and technologies into what it’s calling a Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS). Using the data center system, VMware says, businesses will be able to unite servers, storage gear, and other networking resources together into an “on-premise cloud.”

VMware’s moves come as the virtualization leader is facing increased competition from Microsoft. Microsoft made a series of virtualization moves last week, including making free a version of its Hyper-V server virtualization software.

Virtualization specialist VMware is sticking its head in the clouds, and hoping for sunshine.