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On the way to the victory lap, let's do a firmware fix

Samsung BD-P1000: new firmware (v1.4 available now) | CNET review

Samsung BD-P1400: new firmware (v1.5 available now) | CNET review

One word of advice for Samsung: it would be nice to get a changelog on those support pages (or even an “info.txt” in the Zip file) that lists the date of the update, and exactly what issues it’s addressing.

Samsung BD-P1200: new firmware (v2.1 available now) | CNET review

Blu-ray may be coasting to a format war victory over archrival HD DVD, but it’s still got some mopping up to do in the meantime–namely, improving player compatibility with some of the more popular movies already available. Samsung has begun rolling out firmware upgrades for all of its players to address issues that have plagued some users when watching Blu-ray versions of such favorites as Ratatouille, Spider-Man 3, Live Free or Die Hard, Blade Runner, and Pirates of the Caribbean 3. According to Samsung, the updates will be available as follows:

Update (1/25/2008): Despite some confusion on the part of Samsung’s customer service (see comment thread below), it appears that three of the four firmware updates are now available as scheduled. I have added the new version numbers to the links above.

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CNET)

The latter three models can be upgraded directly over the Internet via their Ethernet connection once their respective update goes live. For the BD-P1000 (or if you don’t have your player near a network connection), you’ll need to go to the support page on Samsung’s Web site, download a disc image to your PC, burn it to a CD or DVD, and then pop it in the player. Direct links are provided above.

Samsung BD-UP5000: new firmware (v1.0 available now) | CNET preview

Update (2/05/2008): The fourth and final update–the BD-P1200 v2.1 upgrade–is now available, three days after the originally scheduled date.

Netflix has declined to say what caused the glitch, how many customers were affected, or what the total cost was to the company.

“We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused,” Netflix told customers via e-mail. “We will issue a (5 percent) credit to your account in the next few days.”

On Monday, the Web’s leading movie-rental service suffered its second extended outage in the past nine months. This time, the glitch led to customers receiving their DVDs a day late. For those who were inconvenienced, Netflix is crediting their account 5 percent.

Netflix has extended an apology, in the form of a discount, to customers in the wake of an 11-hour site outage.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

With a competition called the Energy Smackdown, you might expect to walk away bruised and battered. But after a year of trying to “smack down” energy use in my home, I actually feel pretty good.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

Teams from three neighboring Boston-area cities were formed and competed to lower their energy use. About 60 households measured their energy use every month, along with how many miles they drove, flew, and how much trash they generated.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

Note: This piece is part of a package for Earth Day 2009. On deck for Tuesday is “Technologies to watch.”

Choosing energy-efficient appliances, which don’t necessarily cost more, isn’t dramatic behavioral change either yet helps spur demand for these goods. A programmable thermostat and low-flow shower heads are other no-brainers.

Strip away those high-profile factors and I think our score improved because of a few simple, even boring, things–sealing the cracks around the attic staircase, connecting electronics to power strips and turning them off at night, and using our bicycles for short trips. In general, sealing drafts in your home–rattling windows and such–makes a huge difference.

Click on this image for a photo gallery, compiled last year, of assorted green home retrofits.

During the lightbulb challenge, just a few small groups of people managed to replace 888 incandescent bulbs with more efficient compact fluorescents. That’s saving the equivalent of electricity to power 87 homes each year, or 650 homes over the life of the bulbs.

There were one-day competitions between teams for low-carbon travel, lighting, and home energy efficiency. Events were filmed along the way, including home energy audits and a “locavore banquet” made from locally procured food. Teams win by lowering the group’s overall carbon footprint after one year and on team event scores.

Look, Ma, no kilowatt-hours!

The second insight I’ve gained is, in my experience, greening your lifestyle just isn’t all that hard. Besides, who doesn’t want to lower their utility bills?

But right now, most of us have only a general idea of energy use. And yet, better awareness is a vital step to creating a more energy efficient society, say experts. When people realize that their second refrigerator is sucking up $50 a month in electricity to keep a few beers cool, they may decide to pull the plug and come up with an alternative. The same concept holds true in industry, where there is a lot of wasted energy.

Perhaps the bigger point is that “green living” is really about the choices you make every day. Are you going to recycle that old cell phone or send it to an incinerator or landfill?

Being something of an energy tech geek, my green-living beta test also involved some toys and science experiments. Before heading for work most days, I put a foldable solar panel connected to a backup battery on my deck. The juice I collect off-grid charges my cell phone, game machines, and rechargeable batteries.

Ready, set, go!

More impressive were the accomplishments of the different teams. Even eco-conscious families significantly cut their carbon footprint–some more than 60 percent. As of the halfway point in the contest, families on average reduced energy use by about 30 percent, according to Donald Kelley, the executive director of the BrainShift Foundation, which conceived of the Energy Smackdown.

In a transportation event, we biked over 20 miles, rather than carpool, to cover a course with the lowest pollution per person. Another time we consulted with a local chef on how to create a good-tasting banquet menu built around locally procured ingredients. (My wife’s sorbet dessert, made from locally picked raspberries, got top prize.)

Photos: Getting your green on for Earth Day

So how’d I do? Not too bad, considering I had already done quite a bit to lower my home’s energy consumption before signing on. The numbers aren’t complete, but it looks like we’ve cut our footprint in the range of 10 percent or 15 percent and that we’re on the low end of the scale in terms of total footprint.

Getting better energy data underpins a lot of
green-tech business strategies. A trial of a smart-grid program, for example, in the Seattle-area last year found that people reduced their energy consumption by 10 percent when they knew how much appliances consumed and the cost of energy.

To participate in the Energy Smackdown, we were required to get a home energy audit. There are many technologies you could invest in–solar energy, “geothermal” ground-source heat pumps, wind turbines. But the first step is sealing your home’s “envelope” from drafts and insulating. In other words, a caulk gun will pay off quicker than solar panels.

One Saturday morning, I joined in a sort of weatherization barn-raising at one team member’s home. After measuring the air leakage with a blow-door test, about 10 of us ran around with caulk guns and insulating foam to try to make the building more airtight. The blow door–essentially just a removable door with a large fan–exaggerates the air leaks to help locate them.

Almost a year ago, I signed my household up for the Energy Smackdown, a combination of a community-outreach program, contest, and cable TV show.

For starters, I found that getting a reasonably accurate measure of energy usage is not as trivial as you might expect. You have to go to the trouble, more than once, of gathering and entering data–how many kilowatt-hours, miles driven, therms consumed, etc. There are many companies developing home energy-monitoring tools, which should give people a better grip on where their money is going and how they compare to others.

View the full gallery

The grand finale for this year-long journey ends next month and, of course, I’m hoping for a victory for the hometown team. But if another city nudges us out for the win, my energy bills and I can say it’s still been a worthwhile trip.

Big and small changes
So we had a lot of fun, but you might ask, are these green efforts just feel-good puffery that have no real impact? I’d argue that this sort of activity, as playful as it was at times, hits on something important.

A blower door test, part of a home energy audit, measures how airtight a home with a fan and computer to measure air flow.

There’s no financial incentive, but bragging rights clearly go a long way to motivating teams to strategize and compete.

Using a power strip to completely shut off your electronics isn’t exactly a supreme sacrifice but it can shave real money from your electricity bill every year. In the U.S., “vampire energy” from plugged-in appliances is about 5 percent of the energy consumed and costs consumers $3 billion each year, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

It’s a bit more challenging to know how to improve your overall living space to be more energy efficient. But again, the resources are there–if you make the effort.

The various team events were a lot of fun because, I suspect, they tap into that American competitive spirit. And the activities really did connect neighbors and build community.

Working against our carbon count was air travel: two family flights to Europe and the Midwest threw our monthly numbers way out of whack.

At first, I was reluctant to sign on since I thought I couldn’t cut much more. But then I acquired a secret weapon: solar electric panels, which were installed last spring. Amazingly, our house has produced a bit more electricity than we consumed over the past year. That’s right. Last month, for instance, I had a $3.35 electric bill–and that’s after the $6.43 grid interconnection fee.

The challenge with these efficiency retrofit projects is that the tools to analyze the potential savings in energy, water, or materials are slow or inaccurate, according to Autodesk executives. A building owner may compile current energy use in a spreadsheet, for example, which is not connected to the building-management system or design software.

Last year, Autodesk acquired two companies that had developed analytical tools intended to bring more hard numbers to sustainable design efforts. When used with Autodesk’s existing applications, professionals such as architects, designers, and contractors can get a snapshot of how existing buildings perform in terms of energy and water use and can simulate the impact of architectural changes.

About 40 percent of energy use and greenhouse emissions come from buildings in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. And about 85 percent of the buildings that existing today will be around in 2050, Palmer said.

Green building retrofits are 5 percent to 9 percent of the commercial building marketplace now but are projected to grow to more than 20 percent in five years, according to a recent report from SmartMarket.

A screen shot from Ecotect, an application acquired by Autodesk that allows architects to measure and plan the environmental impact of design decisions. Based on an information model, the application here shows the heat gain inside a building from different sources, such as ventilation and the sun, during different times of the year.

That price and the training required means that individual homeowners are unlikely to use the software. But the commercial market is very large: Autodesk estimates that $400 billion a year will be spend on commercial renovations.

Autodesk, a company best known for its AutoCAD three-dimensional design software, has spent the past year developing extensions to its existing products focused on green renovations of existing commercial buildings, company executives said here on Monday.

For example, a company could use Ecotect analysis to simulate how much electricity could be generated by solar panels or how much daylight is available for internal lighting. Green Building Studio can then analyze how those choice will impact the environmental performance with data such as projected energy costs and water use.

WALTHAM, Mass.–Green buildings aren’t only for well heeled individuals and corporate headquarters. There’s an ocean of existing buildings ripe for an efficiency makeover.

For example, the federal government earlier this month issued an executive order (click for PDF) that mandates that all new federal buildings built by 2030 need to be net zero energy, or generate as much as they consume. Many of these regulations also apply to renovating existing buildings, Palmer said.

Autodesk now offers two add-on products to its Revit Architecture building-information modeling application to capture existing building data in a 3-D model and then simulate possible changes.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The focus on renovation is partly driven by the downturn in the building industry but also a raft of building efficiency mandates coming from national or state governments, said Catherine Palmer, the marketing manager for Architecture, Engineering & Construction solutions at Autodesk.

In Autodesk's lobby in Waltham, Mass, the company chose to display a number of projects, including printed three-dimensional models (on top) and a multi-layered map of a city that shows both buildings and underground infrastructure such as subways.

“A lot of people use rules of thumb,” Membreno said. “This empowers the architect and gives them data to back up their design decisions.”

From there, an application called Ecotect Analysis allows an architect to input various data, such as weather patterns and available daylight, and to see the environmental impact of different design choices. That building model can then be imported into a hosted application, called Green Building Studio, which will tell the user how the building will perform in terms of energy use, carbon emissions, and water.

During a demonstration on Monday, Autodesk technical marketing manager Chico Membreno showed how designers and architects can quickly convert photos of an existing building into a 3-D model in Revit.

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Autodesk)

Wanted: good building data

There are a number of examples of commercial buildings that have been retrofit to be more efficient. The Empire State Building, for example, did a $20 million conversion which is expected to lower energy consumption by 38 percent. Autodesk’s office here is a LEED-certified Platinum level building. Rather than tear down an existing structure, the company used the shell of existing building and remade the interior with a number of green-building features, such as light sensors, more sustainably produced materials, and the use natural daylight to cut down on artificial lighting.

The company has designed its sustainable analysis products for architects and building professionals and contractors working on new construction or renovations. But the tools could also be used to monitor whether green building investments measure up to expectations, which is often not the case. Energy-service companies, for example, need to quantify efficiency improvements to secure financing, said Palmer.

Autodesk executives declined to give a price for the software but a third-party review indicated that Revit Architecture’s suggested retail price was about $5,500.

Much as I prefer to avoid paper, sometimes you just need hard copy. And at those times, you don’t want to wait. Samsung’s ML-2510 laser printer cranks out 24 pages per minute, so there’s very little waiting required. Buy.com has the ML-2510 on sale for just $44.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate. These are new units, not refurbs, and shipping is gratis.

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Buy.com)

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Although CNET refers to this as a “workgroup” printer, to me that implies an Ethernet or Wi-Fi interface. The ML-2510 offers neither: It connects via USB or, if you’re working with older machines, a parallel port (remember those?). On the plus side, it’s a very compact model that offers a 250-sheet input tray and compatibility with Windows,
Mac, and Linux PCs.

A laser printer for $45 is a pretty sweet deal. A fast laser printer for $45 is just plain awesome. If you’re looking to outfit a home office or small business for volume printing and don’t mind waiting on a rebate, click no further.

Friedlander, in the letter, then asks Chandler to set a trial date to consider the employee severance plans as “promptly as the court’s schedule permits.”

In the letter to Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor William B. Chandler III, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Joel Friedlander of Bouchard Margules & Friedlander, states:

Yesterday, Yahoo!, Inc. (”Yahoo”) filed proxy materials confirming that a successful proxy contest by Carl Icahn would satisfy the first trigger of the Severance Plan, thereby allowing any employee to obtain full severance benefits if the employee is subsequently terminated or if the employee resigns based on a “substantial adverse alteration in the employee’s duties or responsibilities.” Yahoo further confirmed that the Severance Plan cannot be terminated during the pendency of the proxy contest and cannot be terminated by nominees elected by Mr. Icahn following a proxy contest.

In a move to add more grist to the mill, an attorney representing Yahoo shareholders dished up more material to support a call for a speedy hearing date on the company’s controversial employee severance plans, according to a letter sent Wednesday morning to the judge overseeing the shareholders lawsuit.

The letter to Chandler goes on to cite a post in Silicon Alley Insider, which attributes the severance plans as yet another reason why the blog’s author, Henry Blodget, would not vote for Icahn’s proxy slate.

That’s because, as previously reported, billionaire investor Carl Icahn’s proxy fight could be in jeopardy if the severance plans remain in place. If Icahn is successful in getting his dissident directors slate elected to a majority of the board seats, it would set off the first phase of Yahoo’s severance plans. The second phase would kick in if full-time employees are either terminated or resign because their jobs, or responsibilities, had been greatly altered. Yahoo’s outside compensation consultants note the plans could cost upwards of $2.1 billion if all of the company’s full-time employees made use of the severance plans.

The letter points to Yahoo’s proxy materials filed Tuesday, as well as a posting in Silicon Alley Insider.

Plaintiffs in the shareholders lawsuit are asking the judge to set a trial date to invalidate the severance plans, prior to Yahoo’s annual shareholders meeting on August 1.

If Yahoo’s goal in filing these supplemental proxy materials was to somehow negate the grounds for a prompt trial, they have accomplished the reverse.

OK, by now you must be on edge as to the power that these special relationships could possibly muster. And there, like a beacon in the night, “…indexed within 2 weeks…”

Could my eyes have deceived me? No, there it was, in the fine HTML print: “We have special relationships with the search engines.”

And it went on, even specifying that, “After the first month, it is only $300 month.” And apparently, “That’s all there is to it.”

I looked around for a bit and was almost ready to just mosey on by when, midway down on one page, it caught my eye, the claim of all claims, the one that I had heard rumors about, but until this day, had never actually come across in the wild: special relationships.

Are you looking for that edge online? Something that your competitors don’t have? Forget wasting all your energy on a great design and developing superior content–it’s not what you know, but who you work with.

As for the provider of the services that I found so amusing, well, with several pages with identical title tags, I have to question their expertise in SEO. As for their relationship with Google, it appears that only their home page has any PageRank, and seeing that it is a PR1, they might want to renegotiate their special relationship as they are clearly getting the short end of the stick.

Sooner or later, most of us in the industry get an e-mail, either passed on by someone we know, through our own e-mail, or possibly through one of our own sites that offers to help us achieve success online. Most of these are fairly nondescript and rather generic.

Wow. So 1990s.

For those of us in the industry, this brings both a chuckle and a sad realization that there are still people out there who will play into the desires and fears of Web site owners, offering some magical potion that will be their ticket to success.

OK, this one was particularly sad and amusing because of the two-week window. I mean, talk about working some miracles! Let’s face it–it’s 2008–in this day, you would almost have to work to not have a site (or even a fair amount of a site) be indexed within two weeks.

Certainly there are those who, after working so long in the industry, have established connections with those at the search engines, as peers do in nearly every industry. This does not equate to special powers to get the engines to overlook offenses or to serve up rankings based on these relationships. And if it did, I have to imagine that it would cost a bit more than $300 a month.

Then the other day, I had one passed on to me that was more than just a couple of lines of loose promises. This one proclaimed: “I specialize in getting sites listed at the top of Google in organic listings.”

Sadly, this is one of those things that gives search engine optimization a bad name. Just because someone claims to perform SEO, doesn’t mean that they can, nor should that then be a negative reflection on the industry.

For anyone who doubts this, Google itself has stated its view on the matter.

OK, so this one actually perked my curiosity. I couldn’t help but go check out the site.

What I like about the service is that it is unbelievably easy to sign up. There’s no registration, which is highly unusual for a product like this. You just give the service your blog URL and it spits back code you can embed in your site.

See also: Spottt, EntreCard, BlogRush.

It’s not a bad setup if you don’t mind running ads for your competitors. To be clear, though: you shouldn’t, because they’ll all be running ads for you in return. This isn’t a zero-sum game. A user who is interested in the topics you’re covering is not likely to abandon your site when they link over to another. A more engaged audience in any field is good for almost everyone (except perhaps for sites with large readerships that are coasting on their reputations).

Click-through on the BlogUpp units might not be huge, but if you have the real estate on your site, it’s worth experimenting with.

The service attempts to display on your site only links to blogs in your field. It does that by comparing RSS feeds of all its subscribers. It looks like it does a decent job; judge for yourself in the live demo spot embedded in this post. Update: Maybe not so much, at least at launch. Your results may be different from what I am seeing right now on my screen, and I hope they are: I get an ad for BlogUpp itself and another spot for a blog in a language I can’t even identify. We’ll see how well the blog-matching technology works as the network grows.

I got a ping recently about BlogUpp, a reciprocal advertising network for blogs. The concept is this: you submit your blog to the service, and it gets advertised to other BlogUpp users in proportion to the number of BlogUpp ad units you serve on your own site. And it’s free.

One downside, though, is that the service doesn’t yet offer any analytics to you: What traffic are you getting from the network? From which sites in particular? Where are your users linking off to from your site? This is stuff that competitive bloggers obsess over, but there’s none of it in this early version of BlogUpp. Also, you get no control of where your spots will appear or what spots appear on your site. The company does say it will filter out adult and illegal content, but it doesn’t let you blacklist blogs you don’t want to associate with.

BlogUpp makes money by reserving 10 percent of the ad spots for itself and monetizing them through Google. You’ll never see that money, though. For its subscribers, BlogUpp pays only in traffic.

Waste Management issued a statement just before John Drury was to undergo surgery on his brain, which is what Whitworth feels Apple should have done with Jobs. But Drury had a seizure three weeks before he had surgery, as Fortune reported in 1999; should Waste Management have disclosed anything at that point?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs learned he had cancer in October 2003, but didn't tell the world until August 2004, according to Fortune.

I do think, however, that Apple’s obsession with secrecy will come back to haunt it at some point. Some analysts estimate that Jobs is worth as much as $16 billion in market capitalization to Apple, and if he suffers some sort of relapse, the company’s stock will definitely suffer. Speculation has circled about Jobs’ health since 2004, and Apple has to be very careful how it will handle the issue in the future.

CEOs–even ones as public as Jobs–have a right to keep their health a private matter so long as they aren’t hurting their company. That’s what a board of directors is for, to decide at what point a CEO’s effectiveness has diminished for whatever reason. Clearly, Apple and Jobs didn’t encounter problems then–and have done pretty well since–so does it really matter when he learned of his illness?

Fortune says Jobs and Apple’s inner circle debated whether they had to reveal news of his diagnosis to shareholders, but decided they were not obligated to do so after consulting with outside lawyers. Jobs eventually decided to undergo surgery to remove the tumor, and Apple released an e-mail from Jobs to employees announcing he had received treatment the next day, August 1, 2004.

If the CEO is sick, do the shareholders have a right to know?

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

This is an extremely difficult situation to second-guess. If doctors are optimistic about the patient’s prognosis, and the executive remains outwardly healthy and alert, does anyone need to know? Obviously, nobody wants to see a repeat of Woodrow Wilson’s second term, when the president’s extremely poor condition following a stroke was kept a secret from the public, and even his own cabinet officials.

Did Jobs and Apple mislead shareholders by failing to disclose his diagnosis for so long? There’s no hard-and-fast rule for this situation–some companies decide to disclose an executive’s illness as soon as they learn of it; others decide to wait so long as the executive remains in day-to-day control of the company. Still, two corporate governance experts interviewed for the article say Apple should have disclosed Jobs was about to undergo surgery: “How would the shareholders have felt if they said he died on the operating table?” wondered Ralph Whitworth, a former director of Waste Management who was chairman of the board when its CEO was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

That’s the question raised, but not exactly answered, by a Fortune profile of Apple CEO Steve Jobs released Tuesday, the day of Apple’s annual shareholder meeting. The story reveals that after learning he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer in October 2003, Jobs kept his diagnosis secret for nine months–outside a small group of confidantes–while he attempted to seek alternative methods of treatment for a tumor.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. No one disputes that Jobs was totally in control of Apple up to the day he received surgery. No one has suggested that his ability to lead the company was affected by his decision to seek alternative treatment methods for his cancer, which he shelved in favor of surgery after discovering the tumor had grown, according to Fortune.

“We are caving to Intel,” wrote Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra in a February 2006 e-mail to Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s Windows chief at the time. “We are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience. (Computer makers) support our goals here and they’ve made graphics investments to drive the (user experience) with consumers. I don’t understand why we would cave on this when the potential to drive the full (user experience) is right in front of us.”

Check out these juicy passages highlighted by Todd Bishop at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Gates pressured Andy Grove to dump the development of its NSP software. He also held a one-on-one where he told his Intel counterpart that Microsoft had a big problem with Intel funding the development and distribution of free platform-level software. Here’s an excerpt from the court’s finding of fact:

The love-hate MS-Intel relationship goes back years. But back before getting gobsmacked by Google and the Web 2.0 crowd, Microsoft was famous for throwing its weight around–even with Intel. We got a peek at some of the back-and-forth between those two during the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit in the late 1990s.

Time was when Microsoft inspired dread in the tech industry. With a few exceptions, most rivals and partners did their best not to get on Bill Gates’ bad side.

Or this one from John Kalkman to Scott Di Valerio, who ran Microsoft’s relations with PC makers at the time:

In the meantime, I suspect Intel is likely to get an earful from its OEM customers as more e-mail revelations surface detailing backroom pressure on Microsoft over its “Vista Capable” program.

“In fact, Gates said, Intel could not count on Microsoft to support Intel’s next generation of microprocessors as long as Intel was developing platform-level software that competed with Windows. Intel’s senior executives knew full well that Intel would have difficultly selling PC microprocessors if Microsoft stopped cooperating in making them compatible with Windows and if Microsoft stated to OEMs that it did not support Intel’s chips. Faced with Gates’ threat, Intel agreed to stop developing platform-level interfaces that might draw support away from interfaces exposed by Windows.”

So why did Microsoft agree to a two-tiered Vista upgrade program that its managers knew was a mistake? The trove of e-mails released in connection with a pending class action lawsuit paint a Microsoft strangely unwilling to stand up to pushy Wintel partner Intel.

That was then and this is now. In the post-antitrust case era, Microsoft has new and equally pressing worries. On one hand, it has Neelie Kroes and the European Union to please. On the other, it’s desperate for all the allies it can muster. Would Microsoft have risked alienating Intel had Steve Ballmer picked up the phone to Paul Otellini and told him to back off? You can only wonder.

“In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded. This in turn did two things: 1. Decreased focus of OEMs planning and shipping higher end graphics for Vista-ready programs and 2. Reduced the focus by IHV’s to ready great WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) qualified graphics drivers. We can see this today with Intel’s inability to ship a compelling full featured 945 graphics driver for
Windows Vista.”