Sun is taking advantage of a NetBeans feature that phones home twice each month to record numbers of active users.

Jean Elliott, senior director for Java software product marketing, says Sun is not spying on users. The company merely wants an accurate measurement of the size of the NetBeans community and break the habit of open source vendors of citing downloads as proof of success. That’s important for companies like Sun trying to make money from services targeting developers and users.
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“We won’t rat out John Doe, we are using an active user measurement,” Elliott told Evans Data Corp’s (EDC’s) Developer Conference in Redwood City, California. “We got very obsessed at Sun with download rates.”

We understand NetBeans has incorporated the phone home feature for some time and the feature is on by default. However, Elliott said, NetBeans users can opt out and also specify when NetBeans should call Sun. To date, the company claims 300,000 active NetBeans users, up from 72,000 in November 2004. In due course, Sun wants to extend data capture to cover deployments.

SanDisk has released a new hard drive made of flash memory, and the price won’t completely break the bank.

The flash memory maker’s new flash drive sports 32GB of memory and is delivered in a package the same size and shape as a 2.5-inch diameter hard drive. Earlier this year, SanDisk released a 32GB drive in a 1.8-inch diameter package. Most notebooks come with 2.5-inch drives. Typically, 1.8-inch drives are used in MP3 players.

SanDisk is selling the 2.5-inch drive for $350 to large volume buyers. That’s far more than a 32GB hard drive typically would cost. Still, it’s less than SanDisk’s previous 1.8-inch drive, which cost $600 more than a conventional 32GB drive, according to SanDisk.

Brushing aside congressional suggestions that the nation is ill-prepared for the conversion to digital TV in 2009, the Department of Commerce on Monday unveiled its plan to help subsidize the switchover from analog.

In the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) plan, each household can claim two $40 coupons that they then can use toward the purchase of a set-top box that can translate digital signals so television shows can be viewed on analog TVs.

Malaysia deployed two sniffer dogs in its battle against music and movie piracy on Tuesday, becoming the first country in the world to use the animals to hunt for disks of illegal recordings hidden in cargo.

Two female Black Labradors, “Flo” and “Lucky”, demonstrated their technique by sniffing through piles of sealed cartons in an air cargo hangar and then signaling their handler about a suspect package by sitting down in front of it.

“It’s cost-effective, and in terms of time, it’s very effective too,” said Domestic Trade Minister Shafie Apdal, adding that the dogs took only 10 minutes to check boxes that security officials would have needed a day to plow through.

The Walt Disney Co. is launching a new Web site aimed at moms who are increasingly turning to the Internet for answers to everything from problems with teething babies to financing college. The new site, Disney Family, is a departure for the media conglomerate, which has primarily launched Web efforts to promote its own brands and products, keeping strict control over content and presentation.

By contrast, the new site is a one-stop site for parents, especially mothers, providing everything from Internet search to user-generated articles on key topics such as education and food, and, eventually, a “ParentPedia,” a compilation of information on 1,000 topics that can be expanded by users.

The site, to be announced Tuesday in Los Angeles, will go live later this week at http://www.family.com and remain in beta, or testing, stages until the summer, said Paul Yanover, executive vice president of Disney Online, a unit of the Walt Disney Internet Group.