Google.org, Google's philanthropic venture, has started stating its ambitions and placing some of its $2 billion in funding. In keeping with the search giant's style, the initial investments are low and the ambitions are global.
Google.org's five "core initiatives" over the next five to 10 years include identifying infectious diseases and droughts early in their spread; getting information on essential public services to poor populations in developing nations; promoting growth of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the developing world.
Two earlier initiatives, fostering renewable electricity generation at a price cheaper than coal-fired power and promotion of electric vehicles (presumably powered by renewable power) were announced in November .
The initiatives represent a mix of concerns shared by key Google executives and tries to exploit the technical skills the company believes can give it particular impact. "We are trying to rely on things related to Google's core competency, where we can really make a difference," says Sheryl Sandberg, a Google vice president and founding board member of Google.org. "We wanted ideas where we could say, 'If we get this right, it will change the world.' "
The first grants, which amount to approximately $25 million, will not shift the planet or even put a dent in Google.org's grubstake. Five million dollars is going to an organization called InSTEDD (for Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), which looks for gaps in information flow among relief and response organizations. Another $2 million has been given to a nongovernmental organization in India called Pratham, which conducts large-scale assessments on the delivery and quality of education to the poor.
There were numerous smaller grants announced in both the disease mapping and social services initiatives, but no investments yet in small businesses or electric vehicles. In November, Google.org announced a $10 million investment in eSolar, a Pasadena, Calif., company working on thermal power from sunlight.
Sandberg and Google.org head Larry Brilliant drew on people they knew from their earlier lives (at, respectively, global health and the U.S. Treasury) to head the corporation's big initiatives.
The push to increase small and medium-sized business in the developing world is headed by Sonal Shah, who came to Google after stints at Goldman Sachs, and earlier in the U.S. Treasury Department, working on development in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as at start-ups in environmental and alternative energy businesses.
"Fifty percent of the gross domestic product in the developed world comes from small and medium-sized businesses, but in the developing world it's just 25%," Shah notes. "We've already met with financial institutions in Kenya, Tanzania and India that want to lend but don't have the tools. We want to lower the transaction costs, find new ways of establishing credit history and create opportunities for exit rounds."
Mark Smolinski, in charge of predicting and preventing disease and drought, knew Brilliant while he was at the Center for Disease Control, and more recently ran research in biological weapons programs at Ted Turner's Nuclear Threat Initiative. That job involved building regional disease surveillance systems in the Mideast, something he now hopes can be built on a global scale. Google, he says, "can build technology to fill information gaps between health ministries, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector."
There have been almost 40 new communicable diseases identified in the last 30 years, he notes, and more will likely arise as a growing world population brings people in closer contact with each other and disease-bearing animals. "Our biggest threat, though, is the lack of an adequate public health workforce," Smolinski says. "Without that, we'll never be able to handle a disease outbreak, so we're very interested in developing that."
Dan W. Reicher, the director of climate change and energy at Google.org, knew Sandberg during the Clinton administration, when he directed $1 billion a year in alternative energy programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. He will probably spend the big bucks at Google.org, too, since his brief involves financing projects between the levels "between the pilot level and a big commercial roll out," where private equity often balks.
"We're talking hundreds of millions, that's what it's going to take," Reicher says. The most promising initiatives near term, he thinks, include solar thermal, high-altitude wind power and deep drilling to tap geothermal power. "We're hiring scientists and deploying capital soon," he says, "with world energy consumption going up so fast, the percent being spent on non-hydro alternatives to fossil fuels is actually going down."
Lant Pritchett, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard, sees his work consulting for Google.org's initiative to better inform and empower poor people in developing nations as "a thin end of the wedge" that will improve the way money already allocated for the poor is spent. "In India, Pratham (an organization Google.org is funding) tested fifth graders on whether they could read. In some places, the kids couldn't even hold the letters up correctly." Since then, he says, the effort has become a national issue, with principals held accountable for their performance.
Google shunned nonprofit status as too restrictive for its philanthropic aims, instead choosing to make both grants and for-profit investments. Each initiative has a director and small staff, but individual budgets are not fixed and may vary widely. Google.org wants competition for ideas and projects, and like Google's core businesses, plans to make future moves based on feedback from earlier investments. In addition, Google.org expects to spend relatively little to promote social services or small business, both of which are geared to more efficiently utilize existing capital and services. Projects like power generation, on the other hand, may cost hundreds of millions of dollars, since Google.org will endeavor to prove engineering concepts by building out power plants.
Executives expect a certain amount of ridicule for their unconventional and risky approach to problem-solving. "A lot (of the initiatives) could fail," says Brilliant. "They are risky and unconventional." They are also designed to break down "false choices," he says, between trade and aid.
Sound cocky? "Of course, you could call us arrogant--it's Google," says one official. "But we're motivated to think big."
The video game business is back and it's booming. And after a long transition to a new generation of game consoles, game software makers are starting to get in on the action.
U.S. retail sales of video game hardware, software and accessories hit a record high of $17.94 billion in 2007, up a staggering 43 percent from 2006, according to data released Thursday by market research firm NPD Group. Software sales, which had been mired in slow growth since 2002, grew 34 percent to $8.64 billion.
In December alone - easily the biggest month of the year for the industry - total sales grew 28 percent to $4.82 billion, while software sales rose 36 percent to $2.37 billion.
"You would think with the economy being what it is, that people would be holding on to more of their cash for a rainy day, but they certainly emptied their wallets for video games this holiday," said Anita Frazier, an analyst at NPD.
Indeed, the good news for the game industry follows reports of disappointingly slow overall retail sales in December. The implication is that consumers are shifting a significant portion of their holiday spending toward video games.The news is particularly cheery for game software makers such as Electronic Arts, who have seen slowing sales and falling profits thanks to the costly move to new game technology.
Last year was the second strong year in a row for the game industry, after overall sales rose 19 percent last year. Butthe growth in 2006 was largely spurred by sales of new hardware. Sony released the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo the Wii in November 2006, and Microsoft released its Xbox 360 in November 2005.
In contrast, this year's growth came across the board. In addition to the growth in sales of software, hardware sales were up 54 percent to $7.04 billion and accessory sales rose 52 percent to $2.26 billion. In fact, each product category hit record sales levels, NPD said."The industry (was) bolstered by strong performance in every product category," said Frazier.
In the high-profile console battle, Nintendo was the winner in both December - by a hair - and for the year. Despite the company's ongoing supply problems, U.S. consumers bought 1.35 million Wiis last month.By comparison, they purchased 1.26 million Xbox 360s and 797,600 PlayStation 3s. Sony sold another 1.1 million PlayStation 2s.
For the year, Nintendo sold 6.29 million Wiis in the U.S., while Microsoft sold 4.62 million Xbox 360s and Sony sold just 2.56 million PlayStation 3s.
But perhaps more stunning was the number of DS handhelds Nintendo sold in December. Consumer bought 2.47 million last month. That's more than twice the 1.06 million PlayStation Portables that Sony sold. Overall, U.S. consumers purchased 8.5 million DSs last year, compared to 3.82 million PSPs.
"Nintendo has certainly been the belle of the hardware ball this year," said Frazier. "The DS has driven portable gaming to a new level."
In terms of software sales, Activision had a big month in December, with three games ranking among the top 10 sellers: "Call of Duty 4" for the Xbox 360 - which was the top selling game overall for the month with 1.47 million copies sold - and both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360 versions of "Guitar Hero III."
For the year, the top selling game was Microsoft's "Halo 3," which sold 4.82 million copies. Of the top 10 games for the year, three were for the Xbox 360, three were for the Wii, three were for the PlayStation 2. No game for the PlayStation 3 ranked in the top 10.
Scientists at a California company reported yesterday they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, a significant advance toward the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients suffering from various diseases.
Creation of the embryos -- grown from cells taken from the company's chief executive and one of its investors -- also offered sobering evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies. That reality could prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill, where the debate over human cloning has died down of late.
Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors consider ready for transfer to a woman's womb -- a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.
No one knows if those embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies. But the study leader, who is also the medical director of a fertility clinic, said they looked robust, even as he emphasized that he has no interest in cloning people.
"It's unethical and it's illegal and we hope no one else does it either," said Samuel H. Wood, chief executive of Stemagen in La Jolla, whose skin cells were cloned and who led the study with Andrew J. French, the firm's scientific officer.
The closely held company hopes to make embryos that are clones, or genetic twins, of patients, then harvest stem cells from those embryos and grow them into replacement tissues. When transplanted into patients, the tissues would not be rejected because the immune system would see them as "self."
"All our efforts are being directed toward personalized medicine and diseases," said Wood, adding that the scientists did not try to extract stem cells from the first embryos they made because they were focused on proving they could make the clones.
Other stem cell scientists expressed optimism but said they wanted to see the work repeated and more details presented.
"I'd really like to believe it, but I'm not sold yet," said Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass. He said the report did not show the results of molecular tests that scientists typically do to prove that the cloning process was complete. And he and George Daley, a stem cell scientist at Children's Hospital in Boston, said the embryos look only marginally healthy in photos.
The work is the latest evidence, however, that the field is recovering from the scientific and public relations debacle of 2005, when similar claims by Korean scientists proved to have been fabricated. But opponents of research on human embryos lashed out at the approach.
"This study seems to confirm that human cloning . . . is technically possible," said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "It does not show that a viable or normal embryonic stem cell line can be derived this way, or that any such cell has 'therapeutic' value. It does not answer the ethical or social questions about the mass-production of developing human lives in order to destroy them . . . It only tells us that these questions are more urgent than ever."
Other critics noted that scientists in Japan and Wisconsin recently discovered a way to "reprogram" stem cells directly from skin cells, without having to make embryos as a middle step.
Let's face it -- that VHS camcorder you're still holding on to would probably do you more good as a Salvation Army donation than anything else, but if you've got even a single DIY bone in your person, don't hand it over just yet. The same fellow that brought you the $40 spy glasses is at it once more, this time concocting a night vision "headset" with just a VHS camcorder viewfinder, a dozen ultra-bright LEDs, black / white mini camera and a few other nuts and bolts. After all was said and done, we're left with a device that enables you to easily see in darkness and record your journey. We know, you can't wait to tell your SO how right you were about hanging on to that clunker for one more year, so after you return, click on through for the instructional video and get to work, you hear?
If you're looking to gain respect for your gear as a serious business-class tool, there's no better way than to infiltrate those Big Four accounting firms still using Lotus Notes. According to a piece carried by the Associated Press, Lotus Notes eMail is coming to Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. We kid you not. The announcement is expected as early as Sunday the 20th, the day IBM's annual Lotusphere conference kicks off in Orlando. The software is free for those with existing licenses which means IT is going to have a hell of a time keeping it out of users' hands. If true, the application would presumably be the first official, third-party app developed with Apple's new iPhone SDK. IBM is also expected to announce their free Lotus Symphony flavor of OpenOffice for the Mac at the same time. An IBM spokesman seemingly confirmed the announcements by saying that Apple and IBM have, "a lot in common. We're going to cross-pollinate." Let's just hope they manage to untangle that jumbled Notes UI for finger-friendly navigation during the mating ritual, eh?
Quite frankly, it was hard to take Netflix's sudden freeing of its Watch Instantly feature as anything but a response to Apple's forthcoming iTunes movie rentals, but according to a piece at The New York Times, the two are actually aiming at different markets. After speaking with Netflix's Reed Hastings, it was found that the vast majority of its streamable content was "older," and considering that users of this service can never look forward to brand new releases being available, the cost (i.e. free to most mail-in subscribers) makes sense. As for Apple, it's able to focus on crowds who are looking for a more robust, generally fresher selection, but of course, you'll pay the premium each time you indulge. Furthermore, Netflix has yet to make transferring video to any display / device other than your monitor easy, and while an LG STB is indeed on the horizon, the differences in content selection are still likely to lure separate eyes. For more on the how's and why's behind the battle that probably isn't, go on down and tag the read link.
Dell must be doing something right, because according to recent sales figures, the PC maker has topped HP as the number one computer supplier in the States. The Texas-based computer-maker saw sales hit 5.35-million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 (a jump of 15.2-percent over the previous year), while HP came in second with a paltry and embarrassing 4.5-million units shipped. Interestingly, the third and fourth-place slots filled by Apple and Acer swapped hands, with Acer taking the lead due to its recent purchase of Gateway, resulting in a crazy 294.2-percent gain. The increase in numbers of the leader, however, seems to stem from Dell's shift out of direct sales to the sale of systems at retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, though internationally HP still rules the roost, garnering a 19-percent market share worldwide. Of course, if they can overtake in America, Dell can certainly turn it around elsewhere. Watch your back, HP.
Researchers at a US laboratory claim to have created the darkest material ever; a carbon nanotube which is one atom thick and rolled into a cylinder. For an object to be completely black, it must absorb all the colors of light over every angle and wavelength while reflecting none back, and scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, may have just gotten one step closer. The team built an array of vertically aligned, low-density nanotubes -- rough on the surface to minimize reflections -- and then measured the optical properties. They discovered that the objects very good at absorbing light, while downright rotten at reflecting it, thus creating a new standard for "blackness." In practice, their nanotubes could form a super-black object, leading to the creation of more efficient solar panels or solar cells, or more importantly, a Kuro display that goes beyond absolute black. "They've made the blackest material known to science," Says Professor Sir John Pendry, though Shaft's representatives have called for a recount.
We haven't exactly gotten a torrent of email complaints from angry Best Buy customers, but for anyone wondering why the $230 Insignia 10.4-inch photo frame got pulled from shelves last week, here's your answer: they were manufactured, like devices sometimes are, with a supposedly "old and easily removed" trojan. Funny, though, that the internal memo we got has Best Buy dragging its feet, intending to send a letter to potentially infected customers only "once a solution has been tested and confirmed." Here's a solution: recall the frames and send everyone some anti-virus software and a free appointment with the Geek Squad, instead of letting sites like ours break the news that Best Buy isn't moving fast to fix its digital security mishaps. The memo is posted after the break.
--snip--
Earlier this month, it came to our attention that some units of the Insignia 10.4-inch digital photo frame (SKU 8483866) have a known Trojan virus. This virus was pre-installed during the manufacturing process. It affects only Windows applications and will only be initiated if the digital picture frame is connected to a PC via a USB cable. Customers who have not connected the digital picture frame to a PC, or those who have updated anti-virus software should be fully protected.
While the virus is old and is easily removed from the picture frame by up-to-date anti-virus software, all units were pulled from shelves the first week of January as a precautionary measure to protect our customers. Those units will be returned via the standard warehouse send back process and the model is now discontinued. Once a solution has been tested and confirmed, a letter will be sent to customers who purchased the product. Geek Squad employees have instructions to resolve the issue in the meantime. If a customer returns one of these units to your store or has questions or concerns about a virus, please direct them to the Geek Squad. Please note: No other Insignia digital picture frame products are affected by this issue.
If your livelihood is dependent upon the computer, but you also have problems with repetitive stress injuries (RSI), carpal tunnel, or are just plain lazy, speech dictation software is practically essential in order to keep doing your job. Here at Ars, some of us know from experience—Associate Editor Nate Anderson is head cheerleader for Nuance's Dragon Naturally Speaking, and reviewed it in 2006. But there's one problem with Dragon—it's Windows-only. If you're a Mac user and want to use speech dictation software, you either have to use a PC (or a virtual machine) in order to use Dragon, or just plain do without.
Until now. Well, sort of. A company called MacSpeech has offered a product called iListen for the Mac since 2000, originally debuting for Mac OS 9 and later making the transition to Mac OS X. But iListen had numerous limitations, and no one serious about dictation even considered it an alternative to the superior Windows competition. At Macworld 2008, MacSpeech unveiled a new product that the company promises to change dictation on the Mac forever.
As Nate noted on his staff journal this week, MacSpeech has now licensed the technology behind Dragon Naturally Speaking for its new product, MacSpeech Dictate (iListen is no more). MacSpeech claims that, with Nuance's speech processing engine, Dictate is more accurate than iListen ever could be. We hit up the MacSpeech booth on the Macworld Expo floor to find out more about the software.
First off, Dictate is not shipping yet (contrary to conflicting reports on the Web). The software is still in beta, and we weren't allowed to play with it directly—instead, we had to watch a demo. With Dictate, "training" the software to your voice only takes ten minutes, the company claims, which will then bring the software up to 95 percent accuracy. From there, it learns based on your speech. Like Dragon (read Nate's review for more detail), there are a number of commands you can use to correct errors if they crop up, in addition to commands that can be used to open, close, switch, and otherwise control various Mac applications. If more than one person uses your Mac and wants to use Dictate, you can set up different profiles for each person's voice—in addition to plain ol' American English, Dictate is capable of understanding a number of accents, including (as our demo showed us) Australian English.
The software is "the same idea" as iListen, the MacSpeech spokesperson told us, but "can train faster and has far better accuracy than the old program." From the demo, it did indeed appear to be quite accurate, although the trained software still exhibited what we here at Ars like to describe as "Dragonspeak" (this joke is the bane of Nate's existence). Dragonspeak is the insertion of words that sound similar to spoken words, but are just plain wrong. This, of course, is easily corrected, but nobody's perfect.
The interface looked clean and Mac-like, and was relatively unobtrusive, save for the command window that stayed on top and was apparently not-minimizable in the beta that was demoed to me. The spokesperson seemed confident that this would change in the shipping version.
The black squares on the right are the Dictate interface
MacSpeech says that Dictate will ship on February 15 at $199 (and comes with a headset), but those who preorder at the conference will be able to get it for $149. There is also a crossgrade option, the price of which varies depending on which version of iListen you previously owned. I hope to be able to try it out and tell you my own experiences with Dictate once it ships.
A couple on a casual stroll in Madagascar recently discovered a new gigantic palm that flowers itself to death.
Taller than a six-story building, with a trunk 1.5 feet (0.5 meter) in diameter, it is the most massive palm discovered to date in Madagascar.
After the plant has rocketed to its full height, a vast candelabra-like structure of flowers develops above its leaves, said William Baker, a scientist with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London.
Baker and colleague John Dransfield have studied and cataloged the plant.
"The [structure] produces hundreds of thousands of flowers, which drip with nectar when they are open," he said. "It is truly spectacular."
Once pollinated, each flower turns into a fruit. The palm's nutrient reserves then become depleted, the crown collapses, and the tree dies a prolonged death.
The palm is dubbed Tahina spectabilis—in the local language, Malagasy, spectabilis means "blessed" or "to be protected." It's the only known palm in a genus new to science, the researchers say.
Their research appears in the January 17 issue of the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.
Mystery Palm
Xavier and Natalie Metz, a French couple who run a cashew plantation in remote northwestern Madagascar, first noticed the mystery palm in September 2006 at the foot of a limestone outcrop.
The enormity of the plant and its large flowers at the top caught their eyes. They posted photos of the palm on the International Palm Society bulletin board in December 2006, where Dransfield and his team soon caught wind of the discovery.
So said one adamant Facebook user in the wake of the news that game manufacturers Hasbro and Mattel were trying to do something about the wildly popular, unquestionably addictive online game known as Scrabulous.
The game, which rose to fame when its creators turned it into an embeddable Facebook application, is a word game that's a whole lot like the classic board game Scrabble. It uses a playing board with "bonus" spots just like Scrabble. In fact, the rules are identical to Scrabble's.
The companies in charge of the "real" Scrabble, for obvious reasons, aren't happy.
Game companies Hasbro, which distributes Scrabble in North America, and Mattel, which is responsible for its overseas trademarks, have reportedly asked Facebook to remove the game from its application directory. And you can tell it's a serious legal matter because nobody's talking.
Facebook declined to confirm the report, and it said that it has not yet issued any kind of statement about Scrabulous; representatives from Hasbro did not respond to calls for comment.
The similarities between Scrabble and Scrabulous are crystal-clear, and it's a no-brainer to see why Hasbro and Mattel are miffed. To add to that, Scrabulous serves up advertisements, which means that its creators are making money off the concept. But what the game companies really ought to do is take a step back and realize that they can use Scrabulous to their advantage--without removing the viral game from Facebook.
Fans of Scrabulous, for one, aren't happy about the takedown news. On Facebook, an unofficial group called "Save Scrabulous" is growing fast, with more than 7,000 users at last count (and 5,000 hours before.) Its members, including the aforementioned "hunger striker," are livid.
"Leave Scrabulous alone!" one of them posted in the group's message board, a thinly veiled allusion to the "Leave Britney Alone" viral video.
Others were more visceral: "I've burnt my Scrabble board in protest!" one exclaimed.
A game of Scrabulous on Facebook.
Scrabulous is the creation of two brothers in India, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, who founded Scrabulous.com in 2006. When Facebook launched its developer platform in May, the Agarwallas soon transformed their Scrabble spin-off into an application designed for the social network, and it caught on like wildfire. More than 2 million Facebook members are active Scrabulous users, and several hundred thousand of them play the game each day.
It was a catch-22 for the Agarwallas. The "Scrabulous guys" became Facebook celebrities, but the exposure meant that they were much more visible--and so were the obvious similarities between Scrabble and Scrabulous.
"It wouldn't be an issue if Scrabulous weren't so popular, right?" observed Darren Herman, director of digital media for marketing firm The Media Kitchen. It's the sheer mass of Facebook Scrabulous users that have made it a high-profile case as well as an inevitably ugly situation, if the game is indeed taken down. "We're seeing the power of social media in its early days. Since we're still trying to figure out the rules of the game, no pun intended, these types of issues are bound to arise."
In other words, according to Herman, the debate over Scrabulous is indicative of the fact that the world--or at least certain mainstays of the game industry--still hasn't quite figured out that a traditional course of action just doesn't always work on the Web.
"I don't think they are crazy to think this way," Darren Herman said when asked if Hasbro and Mattel are totally off base. "Scrabble came out in a time when everyone guarded their (intellectual property) tightly."
In the old order, a takedown notice may have been the only route. But this is the Web, and plenty of people have pointed out that Hasbro and Mattel are sitting on a marketing gold mine with Scrabulous. They have a gleefully addicted fan base, a machine for viral buzz (Facebook's platform), and the deep pockets to offer to buy Scrabulous outright--or at least strike an innovative advertising deal.
There's also no direct competitor. Neither Hasbro nor Mattel operates a Web-based, ad-supported version of Scrabble; video game manufacturer Electronic Arts owns the rights to electronic versions of the game, and it currently sells a PC game of Scrabble for about $20. (EA was not available for comment on the Scrabulous issue.) With Scrabulous, all three companies may be sitting on a marketing treasure trove.
Hasbro and Mattel might not get it. But the members of Save Scrabulous think that they do.
"Do these greedy fools not realize that they should be paying the creators of Scrabulous for all the damn fans of the game they created?" one angry Scrabulous fan from the United Kingdom asked on the group's "wall." He brought up a further point--that this is getting people excited about the musty old board game in a way they haven't in years. "It's like the music vids put on YouTube. It makes me buy tracks I never would have done, and frankly, before this game emerged, Scrabble was just something for rainy days in my childhood."
Another member of the group put it more concisely. "Scrabulous brought Scrabble back in style. They should be thankful."
There's certainly plenty more than just hard science going on in space, and it now looks like a group of researchers from the University of Tokyo are aiming to get in on that action as well. To that end, they've teamed up with the brains behind the Japan Origami Airplane Association to develop an origami aircraft that'll supposedly be capable of surviving the flight from the International Space Station to the Earth's surface. They even seem to have made some progress already, with them set to test an eight centimeter long prototype in the wind tunnel at the University of Tokyo later this week, where it'll face wind speeds up to 5,300 miles per hour. Of course, it'll face a few more obstacles than that in space, although the researchers assure us the plane has been "treated to withstand intense heat."
The 24-hr. limit for the new movie rental service on iTunes is creating a lot of talk in the blogosphere, about how much time is really needed for downloadable films to be viewed, and whether Apple's DRM movie strategy will succeed.
When you rent a movie on Apple's service, you have the relative ownership of the movie for 30 days, but once you click on 'play,' there are only 24 hours to watch it, or it will disappear into space. This is the same amount of time that many on-demand Cable-TV services give their movies, and people have griped about that before as well.
The problem begins with the fact that 24-hour timeslots are hard to fit in the schedule of multi-tasking, over-worked adults, even during the weekends. You say, well, if you don’t have the full time to watch the movie, don't click on 'play' and shut up about it. Well, rental services were supposed to help the schedule-heavy adult, and they do, when you own the disc, or when the regular 2-4 day rental went into effect in Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and the Mom-and-Pop's many years ago. The point is that the convenience of downloading and watching a movie immediately isn't that great that you should lose the former rental flexibility, and so harshly.
Many people have already suggested that one single play of a movie is the answer (regardless of the time constraint), or, like David Pogue of the New York Times, that a 27-hour limit will be enough for regular people to catch up on a movie.
Regarding Apple and its ability to move the video between PCs and its portable players, the 24-hour break might not be too difficult to overcome if you have a (very) long commute everyday and watch your rented movies exclusively on the portable Apple devices. But you'd have to be pretty diligent about it. And for those who will only watch the movies at home, like Pogue mentions in his example, it's very easy to lose 24 hours by doing nothing-- a nap here, dinner there, movie gone, and pay again.
Until this time limit constraint is expanded, I'll stay with Netflix only. Renting movies on Netflix is good for people like me who put off their entertainment until they have enough time to really enjoy it. Depending on the amount of non-fun responsibilities I might have in any given week, I might choose to watch a movie the day I receive it in the mail, or 3 weeks later. And I can watch half of The Fellowship of the Ring tonight, and finish it off on Saturday. It’ll cost me in the sense that I’m not swapping movies every other day and taking advantage of the 3-at-a-time deal, but psychologically, I prefer not worry about a deadline regarding disposable entertainment.
On Tuesday, Steve Jobs unveiled four developments. Item 1: Time Capsule, a wireless backup hard drive for your entire network. It’s sleek and, considering it doubles as a wireless router, not unreasonably priced ($500 for a terabyte of storage).
Item 2: Software enhancements to the iPhone and iPod Touch. One of them pinpoints your current location on a Google map — pretty sneaky, considering these gadgets don’t actually have G.P.S. (Instead, they calculate your location by consulting signal strength from nearby wireless Internet hot spots and — on the iPhone — cellular towers.)
Item 3: Downloadable movies. You pay $4 for a new release, which you must finish watching 24 hours after you start.
That’s the same deal offered by Amazon, Vudu and so on, but Apple has deals with every major movie studio (although the selection will be slim at first). And you can start watching a movie on the computer, and finish it on your iPod or iPhone.Item 3.5: New software and a lower price ($230) for Apple’s slow-selling Apple TV. Now this set-top box can download rent-a-movies (and Flickr photos, and iTunes music, and podcasts) for viewing on your TV directly — no computer required.
Apple’s last and best announcement, though, was its hotly rumored three-pound laptop, called the MacBook Air ($1,800). Apple says it’s the thinnest laptop in the world, and no wonder; this thing looks like it’s descended from a spatula.
It’s a stunningly beautiful aluminum slab, three-quarters of an inch thick. Its edges are beveled to look even thinner. When it’s on a table, you might mistake this laptop for a placemat.
The MacBook Air’s footprint is no smaller than the existing MacBook in the other dimensions (12.8 by 9.8 inches). There’s some margin around the 13.3-inch screen and full-size keyboard, and that edge-tapering business wastes a bit of internal space.
But for anyone who shares Apple’s admiration for elegance, the tradeoff is worth it. This laptop’s cool aluminum skin and smooth edges make it ridiculously satisfying to hold, carry, open and close. You can’t take your eyes or your hands off it.
Unlike other ultraportables, this one makes no sacrifice in screen size, keyboard size or battery life (Apple claims five hours a charge).
It also has an oversized trackpad that lets you scroll, rotate or magnify photos and other objects using iPhonish two-finger gestures (in Apple programs only, alas).
You can’t make a three-pound laptop without sacrificing something, however. And some serious sacrifices were made on this machine.
Here’s the toughest one to take: the battery is sealed inside. You can’t swap it out during a long flight.
That’s a familiar Apple trick for saving bulk; as on the iPod and iPhone, sealing the battery eliminates the need for a walled compartment, battery contacts and a door. But when this battery no longer holds a charge, a couple years from now, you’ll have to pay Apple $130 to install a new one.
The hard drive is the same miniature type that’s in the iPod. Its 80 gigabytes is plenty for office work, but a little tight for big photo or video collections.
Just as the Web’s rumor mill had predicted, you can order the MacBook Air with, instead, a 64-gigabyte solid-state drive (an up-and-coming acronym to learn: S.S.D.), meaning it’s made of flash memory instead of spinning disks. With no moving parts, an S.S.D. is extremely rugged; it’s also supposed to offer improved battery life and better speed, especially in starting up and opening programs.
Yet Apple is down playing this option, probably because these drives are still so small and expensive: the S.S.D. adds $1,000 to the Air’s price. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t yet measured the speed and battery benefits, and doesn’t yet have any S.S.D.-equipped models to test.
As on most ultraportables, the Air also sacrifices a CD/DVD drive. You can buy Apple’s external U.S.B. drive for $100, if you’re so inclined — it’s tiny, just a hair bigger than an actual DVD.
But get this: Apple says that you don’t need a CD/DVD drive at all.
We're not sure why JVC didn't announce their new Everio ¥100,000 GZ-MG740 (about $942) last week with all their other models. Nevertheless, the new 40GB peer to the 30GB GZ-MG730 was just announced in Japan. Other than the disk bump (and "Victor" not "JVC" badge), it's a spec-for-spec twin to the 7.38-megapixel model MG730 which shoots 720 x 480 pixel video -- right on down to that tiny 1.3-inch hard disk. That makes it the flagship model of their non-HD shooters. But you don't really care about non-HD camcorders anymore do you? No worries, we can respect that
Although there's no arguing that the 6-inch e-ink display used in both the Kindle and the Sony PRS-505 looks beautiful, we're not exactly huge fans of endless scrolling -- which is why we're pretty intrigued by these shots of the Hanlin V9 that just popped up on on the Mobileread forums. The update to the V3 features a 9.7-inch display that definitely cranks the overall dimensions, but being able to view a full letter-size page seems like a tangible enough benefit -- and the addition of WiFi, EV-DO, and handwriting recognition just sweetens the pot. Apparently there are some issues mass-producing that screen, but when they get sorted pricing will land somewhere between $599 and $699 -- numbers that will probably keep this thing at the intriguing curiosity level for now.
Read - Hands-on with the V9 at Mobileread
Read - V9 product page
At the nexus of MacWorld and the Detoit Auto Show is this, the iPhone dock for the Land Rover LRX concept car. Our brethren at Autoblog had a chance to sit down with Mr. Sandy Boyes, the LRX's interior designer, to get a better understanding of the iPhone's role in the vehicle. When docked, the iPhone would upload your music, seat settings, steering wheel settings, and all the information for the car's "transfigurable displays." Better yet, he suggests that the dock (iPhone or otherwise) could be offered as a "premium pack" in near-term cars -- there's no need to wait. Check the video after the break.
If you're barbaric enough to still use disposal alkaline batteries instead of new generation rechargeables like Eneloops, then you'll be stoked by this news Atouk. Panasonic's new EVOLTA lineup is said to perform "almost 1.3 - 2 times" longer that their existing alkalines. In fact, they now claim to have the "longest lasting AA battery cell in the world." For that, Panny will charge you an approximate 15% premium when they hit the market on April 26th.
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. - Business software maker Oracle Corp. said Wednesday it agreed to buy BEA Systems Inc. for about $7.85 billion, a compromise price that ends a months-long dispute over the value of the software company.
The price represents a premium of 24 percent over BEA‘s closing share price of $15.58 on Tuesday.
Oracle said it expects BEA to add 1 cent to 2 cents per share to adjusted earnings in the first year after the deal closes. That requires stockholder and regulatory approval.
Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to buy open-source software maker MySQL AB for $1 billion, and said its fiscal second-quarter net income nearly doubled on boosted margins, according to preliminary results.
Sun is paying $800 million in cash and assuming $200 million in options to acquire MySQL. The Swedish company makes open-source database software used by companies such as online search leader Google Inc., social-networking site Facebook Inc. and Finnish phone maker Nokia Corp.
The purchase continues Sun's history in open-source development. Sun in 1999 purchased a company that developed StarOffice - which competed with Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite of products. Over the years, Sun has enhanced its suite, and contributed to an open-source version of the product for free downloading.
"Sun's culture and business model complements MySQL's own by sharing the same ideals that we have had since our foundation -- software freedom, online innovation and community and partner participation," said MySQL CEO Marten Mickos.
Sun said the deal will help spread MySQL's software to large corporations, which have been the biggest customers of Sun's servers and software, and boost its distribution through Sun's relationships with other server makers such as International Business Machines Corp. and Dell Inc.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun also said it expects to record net income for the quarter ended Dec. 30 of $230 million to $265 million, or 28 cents to 32 cents a share, compared with $133 million, or 15 cents a share, a year earlier.
The company said it expects second-quarter gross margins of 48%, compared with 45% a year earlier. Sun expects revenue to grow about 1% to $3.6 billion.
"Our preliminary results for the second quarter reflect solid execution and continued operational progress," said Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz. "The future is even brighter today as evidenced by our agreement to acquire MySQL, one of the fastest growing players in the $15 billion database market."
In a major step toward helping victims of paralysis walk again, researchers at Duke University Medical Center today announced that they had proved monkeys can use their brainpower to control the walking patterns of robots.
The Duke researchers, working with the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, implanted Idoya, a rhesus monkey, with electrodes that gathered signals from her brain's motor and sensory cortex cells as she ambled along on a specially built child-size treadmill. The electrodes recorded the cells' responses as the monkey walked on the treadmill at different speeds; simultaneously, sensors on Idoya's legs tracked their patterns of movement. The information was transmitted in real time from their lab in Durham, N.C., to control the commands of a five-foot-tall humanoid robot in Kyoto, Japan.
"We can read signals from cortical areas…the motor and sensory areas of the brain that are involved in the generation of the motor program to walk," says Duke neuroscientist Miguel A. L. Nicolelis. "And we are able to read these signals, decode them, and send them to a device…a bipedal robot that actually starts walking like a monkey."
Through the electrodes implanted in Idoya's brain, researchers found that certain neurons in several regions fire at different phases and frequencies, depending on their role in the complex, multimuscle motor process. During the experiment, the robot continued to move for several minutes after Idoya stopped strolling on her treadmill, indicating that her neural impulses were controlling the metal man's limbs. "She was certainly thinking about the same thing as when she was walking," Nicolelis says. "If she was thinking about grasping bananas, we wouldn't get the same patterns."
The goal of Nicolelis and his colleagues is to pave the way for real-time direct interfaces between a brain and electronic and mechanical devices that could be used to restore sensory and motor functions lost through injury or disease. "Our hope is that one day soon," Nicolelis and his former postdoctoral fellow Sidarta Ribeiro wrote in a December 2006 Scientific American article entitled "Seeking the Neural Code," "we will also master sufficient syntax to talk back to the brain, which would allow us, for example, to build a human prosthetic arm laden with sensors to send tactile feedback into the somatosensory cortex of its user."
I’m in Las Vegas, doing the rounds of press conferences that kick off the annual Consumer Electronics Shows. Everyone lined up early for the most-anticipated one—Toshiba Corp.’s.
If gadgets could look forlorn, Toshiba’s three new HD DVD players looked just that sitting on stage ahead of the executives’ speeches. Jody Sally, vice president of digital audio/visual equipment, which includes Toshiba HD DVD player lineup, looked on the verge of tears during her truncated three-minute presentation in which reports of HD DVD’s sales progress became moot following Warner Brothers decision to exclusively support the rival Blu-ray high definition DVD format later this year.
Sally tried to put on a good game face, though, noting that HD DVD unit sales over the holiday shopping period accounted for 49.3% of the market. What she didn’t note was that the figure would then translate to Blu-ray capturing the majority of sales of standalone players despite heavy Toshiba discounting. And those numbers do not include PlayStation 3 sales.
Industry watchers were abuzz with reports that retailers were seeing heavy return rates on HD DVD players since Christmas after buyers realized many of the movies they wanted were only on Blu-ray.
Sally and Toshiba America President Akio Ozaka remain defiant, saying they continue to believe HD DVD is the best format for consumers.
Unfortunately for them, the content industry appears to think otherwise.
Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, took several big gambles Tuesday, betting that he could repeat his success in selling digital music by persuading Hollywood to allow Apple to rent digital movies, while at the same time returning to his original Macintosh roots with an elegant — but limited — ultralight computer called the MacBook Air.
Mr. Jobs has made his keynote presentation at the opening of the Macworld Expo trade show here a consistent marketing tour de force in recent years. And although Mr. Jobs did not return to the heights of media frenzy that he reached with the introduction of the iPhone a year ago, his presentation on Tuesday trod familiar, and popular, ground.
While introducing products and services from Apple’s best-known areas, Mr. Jobs concentrated on the movie rental service and the new notebook computer.
The terms of the service are similar to those offered by other companies. In an interview after the speech, Mr. Jobs insisted that Apple was the first distributor to persuade all of the major studios to join in its rental strategy. But the risk for Apple is that consumers may not like the limits placed on their movie viewing.
For the iTunes movie rentals, consumers will have 30 days to begin watching, then 24 hours to finish the movie before it is erased from the hard disk. Mr. Jobs said that after extended negotiations both sides felt this was an obvious strategy.
The movie studios, he said, knew it was time: “We talked to them and talked to them and finally a bit flipped. They know the rental model; we came to the conclusion it was the right model. It took months and it took a lot of discussions, but it wasn’t really that difficult once the bit flipped.”
In that interview, Mr. Jobs took pride in demonstrating the MacBook Air, a three-pound notebook computer that will sell at a base price of $1,799. Mr. Jobs said that in order to reach his goal of making the industry’s thinnest computer, Apple’s designers made a series of trade-offs that the majority of laptop buyers may not appreciate.
The computer uses a 1.8-inch disk drive, on which no more than 80 gigabytes of data can be stored. Memory is limited to a standard two gigabytes of RAM and its processor is slower than those of Apple’s other laptops. The design team jettisoned an optical disk storage device for playing DVDs. Mr. Jobs demonstrated a feature called Remote Disk that will make it possible to play the contents of a DVD via a wireless network from another Macintosh or Windows PC. Also, the MacBook Air’s battery is not removable.
Responding to a question about the growing array of media, including digital photographs, movies and music, that now swell most users’ hard drives, Mr. Jobs said, “Maybe this isn’t the computer for you.”
In the interview, Mr. Jobs chastised the recording industry for its efforts to handicap Apple and iTunes by offering digital music without digital rights management copy protection through competitors like Amazon.
“They’re trying to create a competitor to iTunes by denying us D.R.M.-free music,” he said. He noted, however, that because one major label, EMI, and independent music producers are selling D.R.M.-free music through Apple, iTunes customers now have access to what he said was about 35 percent of the market without copy protection.
“It’s been frustrating us a little,” he acknowledged. “The music industry and iTunes need to find a way to work together because we’re the best vehicle they have.”
During his presentation, Mr. Jobs also demonstrated the first major software upgrade for the iPhone. He surprised analysts by reporting that Apple sold four million iPhones during their first six months on the market, a number significantly above most market research firms’ projections.
He demonstrated a handful of features that have been added to the phone, including a navigation feature that allows the phone to find the user’s rough location on a map by using network databases that record the location of cellphone towers and Wi-Fi hot spots.
Apple shares slipped, losing $9.74, or 5.5 percent, to close at $169.04. In after-hours trading, shares fell another 3.6 percent.
Microsoft, once again, is in the crosshairs of European antitrust regulators, but major American technology companies have to wonder whether this will stop with Microsoft.
This time, the European Union announced, it is going after Microsoft’s Office and the company’s browser-bundling strategy. The move comes on the heels of a court victory last fall for the European regulators, upholding fines and sanctions against the world’s largest software maker, in a case that began in 1998. Microsoft was ordered to share more technical information so rivals’ server software would work smoothly with Windows, and it had to offer a version of Windows without a media player for Internet music and videos. Those remedies, it seems, have had little effect on the software market.
But the ruling by the Luxembourg-based Court of First Instance, legal analysts say, has emboldened the European regulators. The browser-bundling complaint, they note, closely tracks the media player case — both software that Microsoft has included at no cost or tied to its dominant Windows desktop operating system. The Office complaint, they add, mirrors the technology-sharing issues in server software. Potential rivals in word processing and spreadsheet software, either desktop programs like Open Office or Web-based like Google Apps, will be more formidable competitors if they can seamlessly share documents with Office users.
“The European authorities feel they have the court on their side now on these issues,” said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University.
Slowing down Microsoft would help the company’s rivals in America, but they could also feel the bite from a broadly aggressive antitrust watchdog in Europe.
Welcoming the court victory last September, Neelie Kroes, the European Union competition commissioner, suggested a vision of antitrust policy that has to give dominant companies pause. She noted that Microsoft has 95 percent of the market for desktop operating systems and said she would like to see this shrink. “You can’t draw a line and say exactly 50 percent is correct, but a significant drop in market share is what we would like to see,” she said.
Setting ground rules for competition is one thing, but seeking to determine outcomes is another. In European antitrust, there is more a doctrine of “reining in” powerful companies than there is in the United States.
The next clue about Europe’s antitrust attitudes will be its decision on Google’s planned purchase of DoubleClick, a takeover that has already received an approving nod in Washington. It is indeed a very separate matter from the Microsoft case, but the outcome will be telling.
F-Secure is warning Mac users to beware of a rogue software application that is making the rounds.
The application, MacSweeper, purports to clean a user's Mac, but in reality will "always" claim to find something wrong with a user's system and seek payment to remove the unwanted file or spyware, security researcher F-Secure noted in a blog posting Tuesday.
"It's a scam...when you visit the MacSweeper Web site with a PC and click on "Scan", it will tell you that you have security vulnerabilities in folders that only exist on a Mac like system_root/home. Fake? Oh yeah," according to F-Secure.
F-Secure also points to MacSweeper's company description, which is an exact copy of the description posted on the Web site for security titan Symantec.
Users who stumble across the MacSweeper site and download and run its security scan will always find something that it claims needs to be removed, Patrik Runald, an F-Secure security response manager, said in an e-mail interview.
When users click on the "remove" button, MacSweeper will ask them to buy the product, a "lifetime" subscription for $39.99.
"Considering the nature of the product, I wouldn't recommend anyone to give away their credit card details...While you might get a keycode, there's no telling what they will use your credit card details for in the future," Runald notes.
MacSweeper marks the first time a rouge cleaning tool has been developed and targeted to Mac users, indicating the platform is gaining enough users that it is catching the attention of malicious code writers, according to F-Secure.
Others have raised questions about MacSweeper, as well, according to a forum post on Mac OSX Hints.
Apple (AAPL - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) announced its next charge into solidifying and expanding its computer and digital media empires, introducing a much-awaited lightweight notebook and announcing a video rental service through its popular iTunes store.
But these new additions to Apple's arsenal, announced by CEO Steve Jobs at the company's annual Macworld Conference & Expo here, couldn't offset a sell-the-news reaction amid a broader market selloff; the stock was recently down $11.83, or 6.6%, to $166.95.
The new notebook computer, Mac Air, is billed as the world's thinnest notebook, and can fit inside an envelope with its 13.3-inch widescreen display, a full size keyboard, a built-in camera, a touch feature on its keypad.
The notebook sports an Intel (INTC - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) Core 2 Duo processor, a battery life of up to 5 hours, but no CD-DVD drive and is priced at $1799 and will start shipping in two weeks.
"This is perhaps the best notebook we have ever shipped," Apple CEO Steve Jobs told attendees during his keynote address.
Under the company's new video rental service, movies will cost $2.99 for library titles and $3.99 a movie for new releases. High-definition movie rentals will also be available through iTunes for a dollar more, said Jobs.
Users can also directly rent movies from iTunes through Apple TV. The company also knocked down the pricing of Apple TV to $229 from $299, even as existing Apple TV users will get a free software upgrade.
For movie rentals, users will have 30 days to keep a movie and a 24-hour window to finish a title they have started watching. But they can watch a movie as many times as they want during that 30-day period, said Jobs, and transfer the titles to another device in the middle, including to an iPod, iPhone, or a PC.
Apple will have 1,000 films available through iTunes by February, but, in what could be a key for video rental rivals, new films won't be available 30 days after their release on DVDs. However, in a late surprise almost all the major studios, including Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, New Line Cinema, Disney (DIS - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), Paramount, Universal, and Sony Pictures, are participating in Apple's venture.
Jobs also announced the company has sold 4 million iPhones in the 200 days since the mobile phone went on sale -- an average of 20,000 a day.
In the third quarter, Apple gathered 19.5% of the smartphone market, compared with 39% by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIMM - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), 9.8% by Palm (PALM - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) and 7.4% by Nokia (NOK - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr), according to data from Gartner.
Apple said it has sold 4 billion songs and more than 125 million TV episodes on iTunes, Jobs said..
Other announcements included a note that Microsoft (MSFT - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) has started shipping the Office Mac 2008 software suite for Mac users.
Jobs also introduced a new product, Time Capsule, as a back-up appliance that allows Mac users to wirelessly backup their data the machine. Time Capsule will be sold in two versions starting February, 500-gigabyte for $299 and 1 terabyte for $499.
Apple's latest operating system, Leopard, has sold more than 5 million copies in the three months since its release in October, and about 20% of users running the Mac OS X operating system, Leopard's predecessor, have upgraded to Leopard, said Jobs
The flyby, the first visit to Mercury in more than 33 years by an emissary from Earth, will mark a key moment in a NASA mission that will ultimately place the first satellite into orbit around the tiny planet that sits closest to the sun.
The planetary science community is eagerly awaiting images and information that should shed light on some of the enduring mysteries about the planet -- such as where in the solar system it was formed and why its hard metal core is so large and its outer rock crust so scant, compared with those of Earth and the other rocky planets.
"Mercury is a difficult place to get to, and it's taken a long time to get back," said principal investigator Sean Solomon, who has worked on the mission for more than 11 years. "But now we're in place to learn things about one of our few sister rocky planets, and we're ready for some real surprises."
The desk-size spacecraft was launched in 2004 and has taken a circuitous path to Mercury, swinging twice by Venus and once by Earth for gravity assists. Messenger will make two more passes by Mercury to let the planet's gravity slow it down enough for it to swing into orbit in 2011.
Still, today's whisker-close flyby will be, NASA officials say, a high point of the mission. Not only will the spacecraft pass within a record 124 miles of Mercury's surface at a relative speed of more than 16,000 mph, but it also will quickly begin sending back its first observations of the physical and magnetic makeup of the planet, to be made by instruments that could answer some of the most basic questions about Mercury's character and history. It will be the closest pass by Messenger in the entire mission, and the nearest to the planet's equator.
"The biggest mystery of Mercury is why it has so much heavy metal -- a core very different in size from other planets," Solomon said. "We think we can begin to unravel the mystery once we know the chemical makeup of the planet's surface."
There are several competing theories on how Mercury came to be what and where it is. One is that the searing heat of the sun stripped the crust off a once-larger planet and left primarily the core. Another is that the planet collided with another celestial body during a time when the early solar system was cluttered with them. Under this theory, Mercury's outer crust and mantle were smashed away and the planet was knocked into its close-in orbit.
Because Mercury is so close to the sun, designing a spacecraft that could stand the heat and calculating a trajectory that would place Messenger into orbit -- rather than plunging into the sun -- were daunting tasks. Temperatures on the ceramic-cloth sunscreen that protects its instruments will reach 600 degrees Fahrenheit.
The spacecraft's instruments were designed never to face the sun because they would otherwise quickly overheat and be destroyed, and even pointing them at Mercury will be done for very limited periods. On the side facing the sun, the planet reaches 1,100 degrees at the equator, and on the dark side, it drops to as low as 300 degrees below zero.
The name of the probe, Messenger, is an the acronym for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging. It is the first spacecraft to visit Mercury since Mariner 10 in 1974, at a cost of $446 million for the life of its mission. Reflecting the new technologies and logistical knowledge that made the mission and its unprecedented orbiting possible, the European and Japanese space agencies will also be sending spacecraft to Mercury soon.
The planet they will scrutinize has craters, volcanoes, and many unusual and unexplained features, including what might be frozen water in polar crevasses protected from the sun. Its mass is only 5 percent that of Earth's, but its metal core accounts for 60 percent of that mass (compared with about 30 percent for Earth and Venus, and 20 percent for Mars). Mercury also has an active magnetic field in its thin atmosphere, the only rocky planet other than Earth with that feature. And it contains one of the largest impact craters in the solar system -- the Caloris Basin, which is 800 miles in diameter, or about a quarter of the planet's diameter.
Right around noon today, if all goes as planned, a spacecraft called Messenger will swoop past the planet Mercury and begin two days of unprecedented picture-taking and data-collecting.
Comcast this week received a letter from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asking that the cable provider respond in writing by January 25 regarding accusations that it is blocking access to certain file-sharing applications.
"We did receive a letter from the FCC asking us to respond in writing to the Free Press, Media Access Project complaint," said Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice.
On Monday, the FCC also opened a public comment period on the Free Press petition that will examine whether "degrading peer-to-peer traffic" violates FCC rules for reasonable network management.
In addition, the FCC will examine a petition from file-sharing company Vuze that asks for clarification on what constitutes "reasonable network management." The inquiry will also touch on whether text messaging and short codes are subject to the FCC's non-discrimination rules, prompted by Verizon Wireless' decision to ban and then allow Naral Pro-Choice America to use its mobile network for an abortion-rights text program.
The letter Comcast received from the FCC "is different and separate from the three dockets that the FCC has opened asking for public comment on various broadband network processes and the Verizon text messaging issue," Fitzmaurice said.
Comcast has not made any decisions about whether it will submit public comments, she said.
The commission's wireline competition bureau will accept comments until February 13 and reply comments until February 28. The bureau will also examine a petition from file-sharing company Vuze that asks for clarification on what constitutes "reasonable network management."
At issue is an October article from the Associated Press that accused Comcast of using software from Sandvine to block customer access to P2P services like BitTorrent and Gnutella.
Comcast admitted to "delaying" P2P traffic when traffic levels were high, but denied that P2P access was being blocked. Internet groups were not convinced, so they filed a complaint with the FCC in November calling on the commission to stop Comcast from violating customer rights.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that the commission would investigate the complaint to ensure that customers were not being blocked.
After that announcement, Comcast pledged to "work with the commission" on the issue, according to David L. Cohen, executive vice president for Comcast. "We believe our practices are in accordance with the FCC's policy statement on the Internet."
"These inquiries will go a long way to setting out a road map for determining who will control the Internet, and whether texting will be seen in the same light as wireless voice services," said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, one of the groups that filed the complaint with the FCC. "We look forward to participating in these dockets, and we anticipate that at the end of the day, consumers will have more control over their Internet and wireless experiences than they do now."
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission, fresh from a major court victory over Microsoft, launched new antitrust investigations into the software giant on Monday, on suspicion it abused its market dominance.
Brussels will see whether Microsoft broke competition rules to help its Web browser and its Office and Outlook products, after complaints from Norwegian Web browser company Opera and a coalition of technology firms including IBM.
The move goes to the heart of the company's lucrative near-monopoly over personal computer operating systems, word processing, spreadsheets and office collaboration software.
The Commission is asking if Microsoft used the same tactics to hamper rivals that the European Union's second-highest court found illegal in September, in the culmination of a 6-year antitrust investigation.
The Commission, Europe's top competition regulator, made no new charges against Microsoft but said it "will further investigate the case as a matter of priority."
Microsoft said it would cooperate fully. "We are committed to ensuring that Microsoft is in full compliance with European law and court obligations," it said in a statement.
NEW COMPETITION
The technology coalition, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), wants rival word processors such as Open Office to run smoothly with Office, so documents can be exchanged across formats without losing any data.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Shares of Apple Inc. rose Monday as anticipation grew ahead of the annual Macworld conference and expo, at which the gadget and computer maker is expected to announce plans to enter the movie-rental business.
Last year, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. This year, who knows.
Apple shares rose $5.20, or 3 percent, to $177.89 in morning trading.
The tech sector experienced a general boost during morning trading, after a strong preliminary fourth-quarter earnings estimate from International Business Machines Corp. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index rose more than 25 points to 2,465.09 in morning trading.
The annual Macworld conference, at which Apple often unveils new products and services, was set to begin Monday in San Francisco and run through the week. Last year, Apple used the event to introduce the iPhone and Apple TV set-top box, setting off months of frenzied anticipation over the iPhone in particular, which was released in late June.
In an early Monday note to clients, Banc of America Securities analyst Scott D. Craig predicted several new product announcements will come at Macworld.
Like many others, the analyst expects Apple to announce a digital movie rental service that operates through its online iTunes Store.
"While we are not sure about timing, as this is largely dependent on deals with the movie studios, we believe that the company may use Macworld as an opportunity to introduce such a service," he wrote.
He also anticipates the introduction of an ultra-slim notebook, refreshed iPhone and iPod Touch models with increased storage capacity. He added it's possible that Apple also will announce a refreshed Apple TV.
Craig also thinks it is also possible that Apple will introduce a touch-screen tablet during the conference.
"We do note that historically, tablets have not sold well at other vendors, so we would like to see what is new with Apple's potential tablet and how it may be used," he wrote.
Craig also raised his first-quarter earnings estimates for Apple, citing healthy demand for the company's desktop and laptop computers.
The analyst rates Apple shares "Buy" with a $200 price target.
In a client note, JPMorgan analyst Bill Shope echoed many of Craig's predictions about Macworld, noting it will be hard for Apple to top last year's iPhone launch.
Also, the analyst doesn't see evidence that any Macworld announcements "will force any near-term change in estimates or sentiment."
(Bloomberg) -- Cloned cows, pigs and goats and their offspring are safe to enter the U.S. food supply, regulators found amid criticism from lawmakers, consumer groups and worried eaters.
The Food and Drug Administration posted a summary of a final report backing the use of cloned food on its Web site today after a seven-year review. The agency hasn't recommended any special labeling for such products, and the report did not say whether this means a voluntary moratorium on sales, agreed to by the industry in 2001, is lifted.
The proposal drew 30,500 comments from the public, and Congress passed legislation urging the FDA to study cloning further before acting. The agency's decision to move ahead anyway benefits closely held companies, including ViaGen Inc. and Trans Ova Genetics, which have already cloned hundreds of elite animals for breeders around the country.
``The FDA has concluded that meat and milk from clones of cattle, swine and goats, and the offspring of clones from any species traditionally consumed as food, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals,'' the agency said in its summary report. The FDA declined immediate comment, and scheduled a noon conference with the news media.
European regulators came to the same conclusion as the FDA in a draft assessment of cloning released Jan. 11. The European Food Safety Authority is taking comments on its proposal to allow meat and milk from cloned animals until Feb. 25.
Ethical Debate
Cloning has been a matter of public fascination and ethical debate since Scottish scientists announced in 1997 that they had produced a cloned sheep they named Dolly. Concern that eating products from such animals may be unsafe -- and that the animals themselves are needlessly exposed to more health problems -- increased after Dolly, suffering from an incurable lung disease, was euthanized at an early age.
Surveys show that many American consumers are reluctant to eat animals produced through biotechnology. A third of adults said they would never buy milk or meat from cloned animals even if the FDA determined it was safe, according to a poll released in 2006 by the Center for Food, Nutrition and Agriculture Policy at the University of Maryland in College Park.
Tyson Foods Inc., the largest U.S. meat producer, said it will consider both government regulations and customer preference before deciding whether to sell cloned meat should it become commercially available.
Tyson's Plans
``Tyson currently has no plans to purchase cloned livestock, especially since it will likely be a long time before such animals would even be available for market,'' said Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson in an e-mail response to questions. ``Whatever measures we ultimately take will be guided by government regulations and the desires of our customers and consumers.''
Dean Foods Co., the biggest U.S. dairy distributor, has said it won't use milk from cloned cows because of a potential consumer backlash. The Dallas-based company hasn't decided whether it will use milk from the progeny of clones, spokeswoman Marguerite Copel said on Jan. 7.
ViaGen and Trans Ova have pledged to register all of their livestock clones so food manufacturers can exclude the animals if they choose, though the program won't apply to the natural- born offspring of replicated animals. Testing for this link is impossible, and it shouldn't make consumers wary of eating meat and dairy products, ViaGen Chief Executive Officer Mark Walton said in a Dec. 19 phone interview.
Consumer Concern
``If you were to go ask a consumer today if they were concerned about offspring, they would say `Of course I am,''' Walton said. ``When you educate and provide the information and help them understand that progeny and offspring are not cloned, the comfort level goes way, way up.''
Industry groups including the American Meat Institute, the National Milk Producers Federation, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute have said they support registering clones as a way to ease public queasiness.
There are now an estimated 650 live clones in the U.S., mostly cattle produced by Austin, Texas-based ViaGen and Trans Ova, of Sioux Center, Iowa. The companies charge about $13,500 to copy a cow, and they expect the clones to be used exclusively for breeding bigger, stronger and perhaps tastier herds.
Cloning allows ranchers to replicate a prize-winning animal or replace one that is injured or aging. About 80 percent of ViaGen's animals so far have gone into the entertainment business as rodeo horses, bucking bulls and show cows. The rest went to ranchers betting the FDA would repeal the voluntary moratorium on sale of food from clones and their offspring.
Senate Amendment
The FDA issued its draft proposal in December 2006 and had said it could announce a decision by the end of 2007.
Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat who has raised objections to cloned food, sent a letter in December to FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach telling him not to ``pull a fast one'' by acting on cloned foods without conducting additional studies sought by lawmakers.
The Senate included an amendment that would have required more study of cloning in a $286 billion farm bill that awaits negotiation with the House. Congress earlier added language urging the FDA to delay action in an omnibus spending measure signed by President George W. Bush.
The Center for Food Safety has also challenged the agency's review of the scientific data supporting cloned food. The FDA relied on incomplete evidence and misrepresented its findings, the Washington-based consumer group said in a 32-page critique submitted among the public comments.
Clone Production
To produce clones, scientists grow copies of cells from the original animal in a lab dish, and then extract genetic material. The DNA from the animal to be cloned is inserted into an egg whose nucleus has been removed, and the resulting embryo is implanted in an animal that will serve as the clone's surrogate mother.
Supporters say the technology isn't a big leap from artificial insemination or genetically modifying rice and corn, tools that are now widely used on cattle ranches and farms.
``This is an additional technology that will find a place to contribute to an increased food supply and a safer food supply,'' said Jerry Baker, chief executive officer of the Federation of Animal Science Societies in Savoy, Illinois, in a Jan. 7 phone interview. The group represents more than 40,000 scientists in animal agriculture around the world.
The ATP GPS Photo Finder is designed to ease the geotagging chore.
ATP Electronics has announced a device called the GPS Photo Finder that's designed to take some of the trouble out of geotagging your photos.
The device, like many GPS receivers, keeps track of its location based on signals from satellites. What's different is that instead of marrying that location data with your photos on a computer using special software, the Photo Finder has an SD card slot and handles the tagging by itself, the company said. When you copy photos to your computer, the location data is embedded in the JPEG files.
The device should go on sale for $99 in the next couple weeks, said marketing manager Jeffray Hsieh. It also includes a USB port that lets you plug in a flash card reader if your camera uses CompactFlash memory cards or some other format. It's based on the highly regarded SiRF Star III GPS chip.
Sadly, the device supports only JPEG files at this stage. Most photographers shoot only JPEG--indeed, most cameras have no other option--but higher-end models such as SLRs also support raw files, which record the image sensor data with no in-camera processing. And the kind of enthusiasts who shoot raw sometimes are the kinds of enthusiasts who like to geotag photos.
"We'll definitely continue to develop additional support for raw formats," Hsieh said, "but because of the fragmentation between camera manufacturers, it will be a challenge."
The company also plans on adding the ability to export track logs as a KML route file, a record of a person's trip that can be imported into Google Earth software. The company also is planning on adding altitude and direction data that some GPS devices can supply.
The Photo Finder also includes a screen that's can display the time, a feature designed to help nip geotagging time zone complications in the bud.
Personally, I geotag photos for personal archival reasons: which church/mountain/beach was that photo? Various Web sites also can take advantage geotagged photos.
I see that Infoworld has started a campaign to save XP. I'm sure the Linux world will feel a little wry about that one.
The XP-to-Vista transition is a pretty clear example of the way proprietary operatings fail users. Everyone is happy with XP, says Infoworld , and it's got plenty of life in it.
So, Infoworld asks, please can we keep it? The site is running a rather jolly Doomsday clock, a petition, and a blog at SaveXP.com. 
Microsoft is pulling the plug (stopping selling XP) at the end of June, and resellers can only go on selling it till the end of 2008. But why is this, if demand is high? And what are the chances of "saving" XP?
Moving people on, is obviously in Microsoft's interest, as more new PCs, mean more profits (though we've seen elsewhere that in many circumstances, the familiar and trusted XP commands a higher price than most versions of Vista). Infoworld makes the parallel with windows Millennium edition (though the number of users and the amount of development cost was far smaller, in that case.
Unlike previous Windows versions, Microsoft could build a business model around keeping XP going more or less forever. It's got better copyright protection than previous versions, so XP users would be likely to have paid money that will reach Microsoft.
But fundamentally, Microsoft upgrade cycles don't fit well with what people want in PCs. In the early days of IT, new versions were necessary, because the technology changed rapidly and radically. If I remember rightly, I upgraded to Windows 95 so I could use a CD drive, moved on to Windows 2000 so I could use USB, and to XP for stability, roll-back and automatic online upgrades.
Now, new features can be added easily. A PC is like a VCR or a maybe a fridge, and I'd rather it stayed as stable as possible. I don't want to have to get a new VCR every year (though with writeable DVDs, Blu-Ray, and hard disks, htere's pressure to do so. We certainly don't want to replace our fridges.
It's extremely Ironic that, while killing it off for business users with one hand, Microsoft is thinking of allowing XP to live on the OLPC XO - a laptop which originally chose Linux to bail out of Microsoft's expensive upgrade cycles.
The challenge now is for Microsoft to create a model that actually delivers what users want, at a level of cost and disruption they are prepared to accept.
Linux - and the basic maturing of technology - has set this challenge, because finally, there are alternatives.
SCOTLAND currently landfills around 7 million tonnes of waste a year – around 2 million tonnes of which comes from households across the country.
The bulk of this waste ends up buried deep in landfill sites rotting and produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which contributes to climate change.
We can, however, all play a part in protecting our environment - now and for future generations - and the 10 greener pledges below are a good place to start.
You don't have to make 10 pledges. Why not start with the simple pledge to recycle more household waste?
It may not seem a lot but recycling can make a big difference if we all do it more. Recycling just one glass bottle saves enough energy to power a TV for an hour and a half.
Over £800 million worth of food is wasted in Scotland each year. The average person in Scotland throws away their own body weight in waste every seven weeks! Stopping this would save enough carbon dioxide to take the equivalent of one in four cars off the road.
It's becoming easier all the time to recycle your waste. Kerbside recycling is now available to 75% of Scottish homes and there recycling facilities are also available at most supermarkets. There are likely to be council refuse centres and other recycling locations near where you live.
The Sort-it website will help you find out what materials can be recycled where in your area.
With just a few simple changes to your daily routine you can take a big step toward reducing the amount of your waste.
Reduce the amount of food waste you create by thinking more about the amount of food you buy, how it's stored and the size of portions cooked. Also, where you can, get creative with your leftovers as the bulk of thrown away food is perfectly edible. For more advice on limiting food waste, check out: www.wasteawarelovefood.org.uk/
Reuse carrier bags instead of taking new ones every time you visit the shops – simply keep the same one and use it again and again!
Buy rechargeable batteries instead of disposables and save money while helping to save the environment from waste pollution.
By reducing the amount of waste we create, reusing what we can and recycling what we can't, we can each do our bit to build a greener, sustainable Scotland – today and for the generations to come.
Check out the 10 greener pledges below and see what you can do?
10 Greener Pledges 2008
•Recycl
e household waste using locally-provided facilities.
•Turn the tap off when brushing your teeth
•Switch to using energy-saving light bulbs
•Leave the car at home at least once a week, and cycle, walk, share a car or use public transport more often
•Use rechargeable batteries instead of disposable ones
•Reuse carrier bags when you shop
•Buy more seasonal and unpackaged food
•Hang your washing up to dry rather than using a tumbler dryer
•Organise or volunteer in an environmental project in your local community
•Pay back the environmental impact of any flights you take and choose not to fly when there's a suitable alternative
For more information on waste awareness, log onto:
www.wasteawarescotland.org.uk
www.itsourfuture.co.uk/ourfuture
As it stands, there's almost twice as much bandwidth across the Atlantic as there is across the Pacific. But with new U.S. FCC approval for the first ever China-U.S. fiber link, this is all about to change.
The score right now 5,547 to 2,726. That's the current Atlantic vs. Pacific bandwidth score in Gigabits per second, according to TeleGeography. The Trans-Pacific Express "will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second, and the system will have a design capacity of up to 5.12 Tbps to support future Internet growth and advanced applications such as video and e-commerce," writes ChinaTechNews.
Construction has been underway since September, and should be complete before the Olympics. Internet speeds in Beijing are generally pretty good in my experience, but further south in Shanghai, much of the transpacific traffic is terribly sluggish on a variety of connections. Perhaps this is a matter of higher demand there, but with the FCC's approval for the cable to land in Oregon, things should get better soon.