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Pity poor AMD. The scrappy semiconductor vendor has cut a particularly impressive product swath since 2003, when it launched its Opteron server processor and followed up with worthy dual- and quad-core architectures. But the financial rewards haven't been commensurate with AMD's technical prowess, and yesterday Dirk Meyer was named CEO. Here's what he needs to do to get AMD back on the beam.

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It was 12 years ago tonight that a 747 loaded with 230 people took off from JFK in New York, gently tilted itself over the Atlantic toward Paris, and exploded. Amid the many memorials flooding the Web today, almost none are focusing on the still-lingering controversy over the official cause of the disaster.

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Steve Jobs is ruining the new iPhone apps! OK, I guess should explain. Take a perfectly good Apps Store entry, such as the AIM client. It won't work unless it's front-and-center on your phone. That is, AIM won't run in the background on your iPhone, meaning you can't launch it and then go over and check your e-mail, browse the Web, or listen to music.

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If you're interested in looking beneath the iPhone's pretty case and seeing what makes it tick, the folks at TechOnline have posted a couple of "Teardown TV" videos, which pry the 3G model apart and reveal the chips inside.

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I had a great time videotaping the launch of the iPhone 3G on Friday at Apple's big "glass house" store on 59th Street in New York City. The fanfolk were friendly, famed CBS news analyst Jeff Greenfield was gracious, and the Apple public relations woman was, er, just as peachy nice as one would expect (watch the end of my three-minute video to see).

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I'm at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where customers are lining up to buy the iPhone 3G. Check out my photos.

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The latest installment in my whirlwind social-networking world tour is a video look at Zude, the hottest mashup-your-own-Web-page-until-you-drop -- that's the most succinct definition I could come up with -- platform out there. (Part one of the "tour" was this look at SocialText.)

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I'd almost given up trying to find a fresh angle on the 3G iPhone -- Pogue and Mossberg have weighed in, so what could possibly left for us wretched B-listers? Then I found this post, on an Apple forum: "I was thinking of selling my old iPhone for the new 3G. I was flooded with emails with people wanting to buy it ASAP for almost the full price. Am I missing something?"

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You know you've got a public-relations crisis on your hands when Valleywag ditches its preferred format of gossipy innuendo in favor of serious journalism. But that's how it's playing out, now that New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera has picked up the news that Googly folk will see their on-site child day-care bills rise by up to $1,000 a month.

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It can't really come as a surprise, the item the other day in Variety, reporting that the median age of viewers of broadcast-network television is 50. Here's the question, though: Have the young'uns deserted TV because the Internet is so much more compelling or because the former is even more unwatchable than episodes of Tila Tequila?

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Reports from the field indicate that AMD's quad-core Opteron processor has rebounded big time from problems surrounding its launch late last year. Several resellers tell me that customers have been snapping up significant numbers of quad-core Opteron systems, including high-end, four-socket servers with 16 cores In all. Meanwhile, AMD has rounded out its Opteron lineup with a host of new parts.

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A great idea hit me after reading George Will's column last Friday, lamenting our “shortage” of qualified high-tech workers. Sadly, Will sidestepped the controversial issue of whether foreign nationals undercut U.S. engineers by working for less under the H-1B visa program. So why not enforce domestic pay levels for these folks, and lift the current annual cap of 140,000 H-1B green cards? Under my plan, everybody would be happy.

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I'm big on community-centric sites as the next Web wave. My three regular readers know that from my recent post, Joomla Rocks, Or How To Build A Professional Web Site For No Money Down. While Joomla is indeed fantastic, there's another platform that's probably better out of the box for corporate users. It's called Socialtext, and I've got a video with company chairman Ross Mayfield to show you the high points.

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I got onto the subject of SQL injection thanks to Intel software blogger Kenneth Graf, who caught my attention with a post provocatively entitled, "Your password is potentially dangerous." (Who knew ? :) While SQL injection is nothing new, it remains a downright terrifying security threat, since it's a very easy way for hackers to get into the database behind your Web site.

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No one else has voiced support to the AP for drawing a line in the virtual sand and attempting to preserve the tattered remnants of the profession of journalism, so it falls to me. Here goes: Just like the New York Mets with their firing of manager Willie Randolph, the AP botched big time the implementation of its copyright cease-and-desist claim against a tiny Web site, but the basic point was correct. Here's why.

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Is it too simplistic to state that "we've left the PC era and we're now in the era of social computing"? That's how Tony Clement, CEO of social-collaboration software house Aegeon, put it in a fascinating session at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Here's my take on his provocative statement.

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There's a name for security on a shoestring budget, where you're constrained by economic realities and so you delude yourself that the minimal steps you've taken are "good enough" to protect your organization against workaday threats. But the reality is, they're not good enough and you ain't protected.

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A couple of thoughts on Apple's introduction of its 3G iPhone, about which it's now becoming clear that the reality can never live up to the advance hype. First off -- I admit it -- I want one, even though there's nary a scratch on my "old" EDGE iPhone. Second, one is likely to get a much better deal -- like, cheaper service for near-equivalent functionality -- by waiting until next year for a Google phone.

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Science-fiction icon Ray Bradbury, who was quoted the other day as saying that e-books will never succeed because they're "not books," is wrong.They're succeeding already, and they are -- pretty much -- books.

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Sure, Google engineer director Steve Horowitz says "I'm here to tell you there is actually no GPhone" in this interesting Android demonstration video I've linked to. But then he goes on to show off a GPhone prototype he's been working with for the last six months. So let's go to the videotape.

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In April, shortly after I bought my very own iPhone, I blogged about the device's design flaws, pointing out the 5 Areas Where Apple's iPhone Falls Short. With the new 3G iPhone on the way, the question to ask now is whether all the lingering annoyances are being fixed. Here's my blow-by-blow assessment.

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Working in a garage-based company that's looking to create its first killer Web site? Or maybe you're toiling in the bowels of a behemoth corporation, wondering why you're mired in an old-fashioned, "waterfall" software-development process when all you wanna do is board that Web 2.0 train, and quickly. Well, I've got the answer for you, and it's called Joomla.

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Here's a holiday weekend thought experiment, which doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore given the high price of gas: If you were stranded in the middle of nowhere, what digital tunes would you have to have on your music player to survive the boredom? In the old days, radio stations called this challenge "Desert Island Discs." I'm updating it for the MP3 era; read on for my list.

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Microsoft has just snared a U.S. patent for proactive virus protection, which is how security software helps secure your PC when it encounters shape-shifting malware not already in its antivirus definition file. What I want to know is, what does this mean for all the other vendors -- like McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky, and Trend Micro -- that have been selling proactive protection software for years? Do they now have to pay Microsoft protection; I mean, royalties?

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I've been following the debate surrounding U.S. Senate authorization of funding for President Bush's Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative. A bunch of senators are complaining that they don't know precisely what they're funding and that there's all sorts of secrecy involved. Hey, of course much of the plan is secret! It's about security, stupid.

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Roaming the show floor at Web 2.0 Expo recently, I was surprised to hear that Yahoo has a story to tell developers every bit as good as Google's. That's the message that came through loud and clear -- and with a British accent -- in my video conversation with Sophie Major, international program manager for the Yahoo Developer Network.

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When eBay announced back in January that it was pulling the plug on its longtime policy of letting sellers leave negative feedback on buyers, those self-same sellers were royally peeved. Now that the policy is set to go into effect, on Monday, May 19, the ire of eBay sellers shows no sign of abating. Boy, are they p.o.'d. Here's what they're telling me.

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I suppose it makes perfect sense that the network perceived as the favorite of old folks that advertisers no longer covet would attempt to leapfrog its competition by making a big splash in online. However, in moving to acquire CNET Networks for $1.8 billion, just what exactly is CBS getting? A new-age media company at the cutting edge, or a leader of the Web 1.0 world which lately has been slow to adapt?

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You gotta give Google props for its openness, in terms of its executives speaking in plain English and not treating a launch as an excuse to engage in robotic sloganeering. (Remember "We'll release it when our customers tell us it's ready"?) On the other hand, the problem with Google's new Friend Connect is that it's nowhere near as open as competitive offerings from Facebook and MySpace. Hey, Google, open means open. What part don't you understand?

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I've spent this weekend -- yes, the life of a tech journalist is that exciting -- not Twittering but rather mulling the significance of the incident involving the White Plains, N.Y., girl who led the police to recover her stolen Mac after she took a picture of the thieves using the laptop's "Back to My Mac" feature.

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The resilience of the U.S. economy in the face of recent recession worries is a wonderful thing to behold. If you're like me, you've resigned yourself to a kind of schizoid view of the current business cycle. Greatly simplified, it boils down to: average people, very worried; businesses, not so much. Or, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it in a recent interview: "What recession?"

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Self-replicating programs, which spread unchecked across the Internet, are always bad. Except when they're good. At least that's the theory behind U.S Patent number 7,296,923, awarded to Symantec for "Using a benevolent worm to assess and correct computer security vulnerabilities."

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Viral marketing is moving into areas you'd never have thought. Take software-as-a-service, where upstart Workday, a company formed in 2005 by PeopleSoft founder and ex-CEO Dave Duffield, is posting up on YouTube a series of short videos -- OK, they're commercials -- which poke virtual fingers in the eyes of industry powerhouse SAP.

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Corporate calling. Corporate who? Long, boring, time-wasting, day-deadening, you can't get out of it, corporate online Web and phone meeting, that's who. (This is my Internet Age version of a knock, knock joke, and just about as unfunny.) But if all-hands-on-deck meetings are like death and taxes -- i.e., unavoidable -- at least WebEx is working to energize them so that they'll be more useful. Call it collaboration on Web steroids.

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It hit me yesterday, when I was reading fellow blogger Eric Zeman's complaint about the difficulties he's had typing accurately on the iPhone's soft keyboard. That's a problem I've kvetched about constantly, most recently in "5 Areas Where Apple's iPhone Falls Short." But I think I've figured out the solution, and, surprisingly, it's not a hard keypad a la my beloved BlackBerry.

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When I lambasted the iPhone in a recent post for its numerous shortcomings, Wolfe's Den readers responded in droves with comments. As is par for the course, most criticized me for my criticisms of the sainted Apple. (Hey, I own an iPhone now and am trying to get into the iPhone Developer Program, so how anti-Apple can I be?) However, many readers responded with their gripes about still-unaddressed iPhone failings. Here's their list.

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An IBM security expert ripped the scab off the dirty little secrets of the security industry in a highly entertaining presentation Wednesday at Interop. Joshua Corman, principal security analyst at IBM Internet Security Systems, highlighted the gaping divide between what customers think they're buying (safety) versus what security vendors are most intent on selling (stuff that'll bring in the bucks). Here, in condensed form, is his list.

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Tuesday's morning keynote at the killer Interop conference was given by C.K. Prahalad, a business professor who's not only got a keen sense of how technology impacts the globalized marketplace, but a social conscience and a sense of humanity, too. Who knew such a powerful combo was even possible?

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Remember, you read it here first. Wolfe's three laws of the brave new Web 2.0 world are: Mobile is the new desktop, the home page is dead, and social networks like Facebook and MySpace presage the media company of the future. These catchy Web 2.0 catch-phrases popped into my head during a heavy week of session-sitting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here's why I'm optimistic that those of us who are ready to embrace the virtual future are going to be in for a fun ride.

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I don't know much about Ruby On Rails, the open-source framework which allows you to develop Web applications. Fortunately, walking the halls of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I ran into someone who does, and he's offering a free online course where you can learn about it for yourself.

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The people who really understand the Web know that nobody really understands the Web. (Zen enough for you?) Or, to put it more accessibly, to succeed, you can't try to out-think what your users want. You just have to try ... stuff. Which is why I'm so excited to be headed out to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

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For two weeks now, I've been the relatively happy owner of an iPhone. Still, I have some major complaints, and I know the folks in Cupertino are just waiting to hear what I've got to say. The problem is that the iPhone is a great gadget and conversation-starter, but not yet a true corporate tool.

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I've found the perfect excuse to spend part of my workday surfing social-networking sites, and get paid for it, too. I do it by developing Facebook apps. My latest is a feed for the TechWeb Digital Library [login required], which will allow you to see our latest white papers, Web casts, and research reports via a little link residing right on your own personal FB page.

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I've changed my mind about Intel's new downsized Atom processor, which is being pitched by the semiconductor behemoth as a little chip with enough power to deliver a biiiiiig handheld Web-browsing experience. My initial thought was: Who needs a mobile Internet Device (MID), when you're already toting around a laptop, smartphone, iPod, Bluetooth earpiece, and who knows what else? Then I heard about Gigabyte's prototype MID.

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Pulling together a list of my favorite Vista apps, I've run into a problem. The piece of software I keep coming back to isn't sexy and doesn't perform any extraordinary technical functions. It's often unheralded and frequently slammed. Yet its user interface is beautifully designed and it's a pleasure to use. If you haven't guessed already, I'm talking about Microsoft Word 2007.

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Is a six-minute discussion about data center consolidation boring? Maybe, but if you want to hear a cogent disposition of the salient issues -- like power and cooling considerations, virtualization, and how to get the most server bang for your buck -- click ahead to see my talk with AMD VP for commercial business Kevin Knox. But whatever you do, don't tell Kevin servers are "hot."

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April Fools'. (Though it's not a stretch to imagine a bunch of television execs sitting around the conference table, and one of them says, "Hey, I've got this great idea." Not.) All of which is a roundabout way of getting at the point that users of all media -- includes Web sites like this one -- want what they want, when they want it, and how they want it.

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After a long wait, Intel's hot new Core 2 Extreme QX9770 quad-core processor is finally here. Intel has been in something of a stealth mode with this chip, sending out review units -- like the one I used to build the PC shown in the new video included in this post.

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I've finally completed my project to build a performance PC with Intel's upcoming, top-of-the-line Core 2 Extreme QX9770 quad-core processor. Since I had all that speed to spare, I decided to do a dual-boot setup, installing both Windows Vista and XP. Boy, was I surprised. I'm a big Vista fan, but it's shocking to be reminded just how much faster Windows XP really is. And, as a Vista fan, this makes me angry.

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I'm a bit late weighing in on the death of Arthur C. Clarke, who was buried Saturday in Sri Lanka, having taken (me, not him) some much-needed time off to contemplate various things. (Hey, if there's one key element in Clarke's writings, it's long time spans where nothing much happens.) So here's my contrarian thought, amid all the laudatory obits about this sci-fi pioneer.

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