[JackSpratts]

"They move fast." – Jan Veilleux


"Cable companies have been busy trying to offer telephone services, and telephone companies are trying to duplicate the cable TV model. They should stop focusing on 20th century services and realize it's the 21st century. There are exciting new advanced services they could make money from." – Gary Bachula


"I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes. They were stealing them from the guitarists." – Daniel Levitin


"I have to laugh when people refer to XO as a weak or crippled machine and how kids should get a 'real' one. Trust me, I will give up my real one very soon and use only XO. It will be far better, in many new and important ways." – Nicholas Negroponte


"Really, we brought the adults back to the movies this year, which is part of the reason why we're doing so much better." – Jeff Blake


"Total domestic box office reached $9.4 billion, a shade shy of the 2004 record but 5 percent more than in 2005. Attendance was up 3.3 percent." – David M. Halbfinger


"In Weird Al's case, offering MP3s for free via his web site helped propel him into the Billboard Top 10 for the first time in his career." – Jacqui Cheng


"I know it all sounds bizarre because in a way, I’m funding their attacks against me and others like me." – Tenise Barker


"When even Muzak programmers are facing up to life during wartime, pop is no escape." – Jon Pareles


































Ho Ho Ho

The invitation was unexpected, posted as it was on the front page and coming at an awkward time. I had run out of room on my latest hardrive when my favorite tracker announced a “free” holiday special. They would suspend the count, or track, of all our downloads, so that those with poor ratios could grab as much as they wanted for Christmas. Since uploads would still be tracked it also offered members the chance to rebuild those bad ratios by uploading to scores of very hungry leechers. For those with good ratios like me it offered a way to splurge without care. No matter how much I leeched my ratio could only do one thing: improve, and it was going to last for ten whole days, right through Christmas and New Years.

I immediately told every member I knew. Might as well. If I couldn’t store anything, maybe they would let me have some of whatever they got later on.

Who was I kidding? This would be the opportunity of the year! The tracking site has a fearsome reputation for quality and motivated uploaders. In other words the stuff is great and there’s plenty of it! I hit the internets for some big-box hard drive deals. The next thing I knew I was out the door and in the car for a 120 gig mini a site said was in stock. It was, and it was small and slick but the sales girl showed me an even higher capacity model for less money. I bought two. Within less than an hour it was hooked up and my new 160GB external hard drive was slowly filling with holiday cheer.

Funny thing about the client I use. µTorrent has a few options that make short work of multiple downloads. To begin with the bittorrent protocol rapidly reserves all the space it needs to store a file. Whether it’s a single 7 gig movie or thousands of thumbnails, BT creates the folder, names the files and lays claim to the hard drive, all before completing a single transfer. This is normally a good thing since it makes sector collisions impossible, but it can make archiving problematic. It’s easy to move uncompleted projects to other folders without fully checking their status, especially when there are lots of them arriving at the same time. BT doesn’t flag incomplete files as such, and since the missing bits can be absolutely anywhere, once you’ve moved a file and killed the torrent the only way to know for certain is by painstakingly checking every one very thoroughly. If it’s a music download for instance it means exhaustively listening to every single bit in real time. To avoid this you’d wait until the client says it’s finished before archiving and changing folders and file names, but when you’re dealing with hundreds of items all at once mistakes will happen, and you can wind up damaging a lot of work. Fortunately µTorrent has a simple solution: It allows you to pre-select a final archive location that will receive the file, but only after it’s been certified complete, and it does this automatically. It will even move it to anther drive and continue tracking and seeding it if you like. I vaguely remembered seeing the feature but had never needed it and so wasn’t prepared for the repercussions of such massive multiple transfers. I queued up about 30 downloads and started carefully moving the completed folders when I realized this was going to be a major project and that’s when I looked around for a solution. I remembered something about the provision so I took a closer look at the preference panel, found it and selected the option right away. It made a huge difference over the course of what would become a zany holiday week.

The statistics at this particular site are fairly impressive. It tracks some 100,000 torrents upped by several thousand dedicated members. Most are music files and since a torrent usually comprises an album or discography, a “single” torrent will have anywhere from a dozen to a hundred files. My guess is there are around two million files at any one time with everything separated into standard categories like “Rock” or Hip-Hop,” “70’s” or “House” so it’s all easily searchable. It’s blindingly fast too. With excellent servers tracking all the various torrents searches never take more than a second or two. It’s almost always faster than Google. It updates in real time and with hundreds of torrents added daily you can see their progress by hitting the refresh button in your browser and watching the older entries crawl down the page, and eventually off the system entirely. They prune regularly. The content is very dynamic and if a torrent isn’t being leeched it’s gone in a matter of days. I’ve found it’s smart to start with the oldest first since they’re the closest to destruction, although most users start with the new stuff to get in on a hot up and boost their ratio. Depending on one’s needs either can be good strategies. For the free week, which they dubbed “Leechfest,” what I needed was content and lots of it. I wanted to see what a motivated leecher could grab in 9 days with some judicious pre-selection and a typical 1500/384 connection. My drives were humming. It was time to begin.

Starting with the very last torrent under the “60’s” section (number four thousand and something) I raced backwards towards the beginning, grabbing every single file I was interested in. Since I have little patience for bad sound this meant rips of at least V0 quality, although they were the exception. I was aiming for lossless flacs and that’s what I was getting. If 2006 wasn’t the year of the flac believe me, 2007 will be. They’re all over the place and if they don’t by themselves guarantee quality, a lossless rip is sure better than a lossy one and I was piling them on like a starving man at a Miami buffet. I buzzed through the A’s., D’s, F’s, H’s right up to and including the Z’s (I skipped a bunch), but more than a third were lossless. µTorrent handled the onslaught with ease and even my old clunker of a server that I picked up used at a computer fair dealt with it reasonably well. Things really have come a long way since Napster and Grokster. Memory leaks are basically history and resource use is way down. Frugal Bluebeards don’t need much in the way of pricey iron to swap gigs anymore. Pretty much anything that gets warm can plunder a hard drive. I think you can set yourself up for a trillion dollar lawsuit for less than a hundred bucks now. How’s that for leverage? I pushed it out of my mind and headed for the “70’s” section. On it went.

Did I mention I pinned my connection? It’s the first thing that happened and it got so bad I couldn’t surf. Pages took so long to load, the news was old before I saw it. I have neighbors who must think wireless security means if there’s no wire it must be secure so I was able to locate temporary signals for my laptop. Lucky for me, it’s how last week’s WiR got out. I was running a continuous 165 on my download meter, hour after hour, day after day, and it was all these transfers, there was nothing else moving. With the exception of a few minor dropouts from spontaneous synch loss (packets can’t make the trip if the queue is jammed so signal loss sometimes occurs) once I got rolling I didn’t stop for a sandwich. I averaged 12.25 GB down every day for 8 straight days. The whole Leechfest thing wound up netting me over 100 gigs in just under 10 days. I was impressed to put it mildly. Ecstatic might be a more accurate description and yet I wasn’t even a contender. There were reports of user totals in the terabyte range. I’m still trying that on for size.

As for me one thing is clear: short of swapping hard drives with another trader this was the fastest, most concentrated bout of quality file sharing I’ve ever participated in. It was the Woodstock of Peer-To-Peer, an electric orgy of bit swapping. It reminded me of my first few weeks on Napster when computer sessions were marathons and I wasn’t sleeping, but that was dial-up and the pickings were long in coming. Compared to that however this was the Oblivion Express. That it was sandwiched between Christmas and New Years made it all the more surreal. I couldn’t shut down, nobody could. There was So. Much. Stuff! What an end to 2006. What a fine start to 2007.

That I accomplished it with a fairly pedestrian internet connection, and one I’ve had throughout the 00’s is testament to where we are as file-sharers today and how despite corporate malfeasance P2P has flourished furiously. We are, to put it mildly, light years beyond our old Napster days. If you’ve just been futzing around here and there you won’t believe what’s going on today, but many of you already know, especially those with ultra fast connections. To that end I’ll be quadrupling my own download speed in the next few months. That’s going to be interesting. As for the next Leechfest, I fully expect it to be even bigger than this one, but that’s something I’ll need the next few months to wrap my mind around.



Leechfest - The JackStats:

Duration – 224 Hours (I missed the first 16 hrs)

Average Daily Download – 1065 Files, 11.78 GB

Completed Downloads - 9946 Total Files, 110 GB

MP3s – 5055, 28.1 GB

FLACs - 3014, 73.5 GB

M4As – 193, 2.12 GB

APEs – 13, 658 MB




















Enjoy,

Jack

























January 6th, 2007







Ailing Music Biz Set to Relax Digital Restrictions
Antony Bruno

The anti-digital rights management (DRM) bandwagon is getting more crowded by the day. Even some major-label executives are pushing for the right to sell digital downloads as unprotected MP3s.

In 2007, the majors will get the message, and the DRM wall will begin to crumble. Why? Because they'll no longer be able to point to a growing digital marketplace as justification that DRM works. Revenue from digital downloads and mobile content is expected to be flat or, in some cases, decline next year. If the digital market does in fact stall, alternatives to DRM will look much more attractive.

Revenue from digital music has yet to offset losses from still-declining CD sales, and digital track sales remain a cause for concern. Month-over-month download figures were largely flat through 2006, even in the face of year-over-year gains. If the expected post-holiday spike in download numbers that has occurred in the past two years is weak, look for the glass on the panic button to break.

"People in the industry will have a very different conversation in January when the dust clears and they realize just how bad this year really was," says Eric Garland, CEO of peer-to-peer (P2P) tracking firm BigChampagne.

Even more of a concern is mobile. According to Gartner G2 analyst Mike McGuire, the ringtone market -- currently contributing more than half of all digital revenue -- will soften during the next 12-18 months as it matures.

Meanwhile, the music industry wants a strong competitor to the monster it created called iTunes. Forcing would-be competitors to sell music incompatible with the popular iPod is not showing any signs of working. Removing DRM would attract powerful new players to the market, and that -- the theory goes -- will result in more buyers.

"The majors . . . have got to capitulate, or they will continue to have a fractured digital media market that will slow down and stagnate," says Terry McBride, president of Nettwerk Music Group, management home of such acts as Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne.

Here are five places to watch this year's DRM developments:

AMAZON

The online retailer reportedly is itching to get into digital downloads but is holding out for a DRM-free service. It sells as many iPods as anybody and is a haven for music that is disappearing from physical retail shelves. "They already have a relationship with our consumer the way that a lot of others don't," Blue Note GM Zach Hochkeppel says. Viewed as the biggest threat to iTunes, Amazon has the power to force a DRM strategy shift.

LIMEWIRE

Still in the process of settling with the music industry, the P2P file-sharing service wants to start charging its 40 million users $1 per download and share the revenue and user-behavior information with the music industry. But it wants to stay DRM-free. The company hired TAG Strategic consultant Ted Cohen, a former EMI exec, to convince the majors to at least test the idea for six months.

MYSPACE

The most popular Internet destination in the world is working with SnoCap to launch a music download service that would let musicians sell music directly from their profiles and that of their fans. But it will only sell files as MP3s. It is moving ahead by focusing on independent and unsigned artists willing to release unprotected music, and a successful showing would make the majors take notice.

EMUSIC

The indie-only specialist just surpassed 100 million downloads; it's the second-largest digital music retailer after iTunes, all sans DRM. CEO David Packman says he is not interested in selling major-label fare, but he may have no choice if majors suddenly allow his competitors to sell in MP3 as well. But even if the majors did relent to MP3 sales on eMusic, the company's business model would have to change--no label will agree to 50 downloads for $15 per month.

YAHOO MUSIC

GM David Goldberg has convinced Sony BMG and EMI Music Group to test the DRM-free waters with limited, promotional "experiments" involving Jessica Simpson, Jesse McCartney, Relient K and Norah Jones. The lessons learned from these tests will either speed or slow their path to eliminating DRM.
http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/new...archived=False





Music Biz Hopes to Profit From Consumer Content
Antony Bruno

If 2006 was the year of user-generated content, 2007 will be the year the music industry learns to generate new revenue from the hugely popular trend.

Labels are striking licensing deals with sites like YouTube so that fans can post copyrighted content or include it in videos they make themselves. Additionally, labels are expected to start releasing new types of content -- such as unused clips or video montages -- specifically created for fans to manipulate in new ways.

By doing so, record labels can then share in the advertising revenue these sites collect. Rather than just suing YouTube and its ilk for how their sites are used, the music industry can now profit from them, not to mention reap the promotional benefits.

"They're doing it anyway," says Ted Cohen, former EMI Music Group digital executive and now founding partner of consulting firm TAG Strategic. "There's a chance to monetize this behavior."

Additionally, music companies have the chance to let their fans actually sell music to one another via playlist-sharing services and peer-recommendation sites. Word-of-mouth marketing is exploding online through user-generated activity, creating a new generation of tastemakers. How well labels tap this effective source of music discovery will be a barometer of their overall digital strategies.

Here are five technologies shaping this space:

SNOCAP

Launched with much fanfare in 2005, SnoCap has generated little momentum to date. But after scoring a big win with MySpace, which selected it to power its digital music service, 2007 could be SnoCap's year. The company's audio fingerprinting technologies -- as well as those from Audible Magic and Gracenote -- will play a key role in monetizing user-generated content by shifting the burden of acquiring licenses for copyrighted works from the end user to the service provider. Each time a fan uploads a copyrighted track, for whatever purpose, the technology notes who owns the rights, which ad is on the page hosting the content and how much the service provider is then owed.

BRIGHTCOVE

Another method of monetizing existing behavior, Brightcove works with content owners like Warner Music Group to make videoclips available to fans wishing to post content on their blog or Web site. Its embedded video technology then tracks how many times a given clip is viewed and compensates rights holders via its advertising platform. With broadband now in 80% of U.S. Internet households, analysts expect video to be the most important form of online media next year.

VENICE PROJECT

Analyst group In-Stat predicts that the Venice Project's peer-to-peer video project will be "the big viral media sensation of 2007." Founded by the brains behind Kazaa and Skype -- Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom -- the service uses P2P technology to distribute video a la BitTorrent, but also lets users modify the content within the rules that copyright holders set in advance. Unlike Kazaa, the Venice Project is built from the get-go with a business model and respect for copyrights, and already has attracted Paramount Pictures, MTV Networks, Twentieth Century Fox Film and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment to the fold.

ILIKE

iLike is one of several taste-matching sites designed to offer music recommendations by comparing the musical preferences of members and matching those with similar interests. The sites' social-networking aspect provides a human element to counter competitors that rely too heavily on algorithms, and iLike's integration of Apple's iTunes music service sets it apart from the pack. None of these music-discovery services -- others include Last.fm, MOG and Mercora -- actually sell music themselves, instead linking to other services and often not taking a cut. But Ticketmaster's mid-December 25% investment in iLike illustrates how digital retailers and other music interests will seek to either partner or acquire such sites to better-link the discovery process with a sale.

PASSALONG

Peer-retailing services like PassAlong reward users for the sale of each digital track they recommend to friends. So far such services haven't been a big hit. But PassAlong's answer has been to branch out with applications like OnTour, which notify users when any artist in their digital music library is scheduled to appear in their town. As more social networks follow MySpace's lead and enter the digital music retail game, peer retailers like PassAlong, Weedshare and Peer Impact will become ripe for acquisition.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...010200030.html





Apple Faces US Lawsuit Over iTunes-iPod Link

Class-action suit alleges that Apple violates antitrust laws
Nancy Gohring

Apple Computer Inc. faces a lawsuit in the U.S., following similar charges in Europe, over tying its iTunes music store to the iPod digital music player.

Apple revealed the suit, submitted in July to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

The suit was filed by a user, Melanie Tucker, and seeks class-action status. It alleges that Apple violates antitrust laws by refusing to allow music bought in its iTunes store to be played on any digital music player besides the iPod. It also charges Apple with not making it clear to customers that music from the iTunes store and the iPod are incompatible with music and devices offered by other companies.

The suit asks that Apple be forbidden to continue to support the exclusive tie-in between iTunes and the iPod and that Apple pay damages to anyone who has bought an iPod or music from the iTunes store after April 28, 2003.

In November, Apple filed a motion with the court to dismiss the suit but on Dec. 20 the court denied that request.

A consumer group in France filed a similar suit in early 2005 that is still ongoing. In addition, consumer groups in several Nordic countries are preparing a case against Apple, also charging it with illegally tying the music store and music player together.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...lawsuit_1.html





Peer-To-Peer: Looking To 2007
Jackson West

On Saturday, I took a look at last year’s P2P news. Today I’ll extrapolate from some of those trends to look at what they might mean for the next year. The common thread that jumps out is that the medium of distributing content in general, and video content in particular, has undergone a fundamental shift, from scheduled, one-to-many to distributed, on-demand. And if legitimate services don’t figure out how to significantly improve the user experience, unauthorized means will continue to thrive.

Hi-Def Blowback: What’s taking high-definition so long to saturate the marketplace now that the hardware prices have finally begun to fall to reasonable levels? Crippleware. Simply put, from HDMI to software DRM to the lack of HD content made available because of piracy fears, mainstream consumers enter a Dantean circle of incompatibility hell. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will become the focus of consumer ire; Apple could put together a simple, functional solution and thereby set some standards; networks will leverage this to perpetuate one-way HD transmission — but unauthorized distribution will still offer the best user experience.

Ad-supported P2P: Corporate networks that distribute files via P2P should continue to spring up, though will likely flounder due to limited catalogs and content restrictions. Why take up bandwidth downloading ads and DRM’d content from an incomplete selection? A more interesting case would be for an existing Internet radio network to leverage nascent P2P streaming technology in order to cut bandwidth costs, thereby increasing profits from their current revenue streams.

“Traffic shaping” and Encryption: ISP efforts to minimize the amount of P2P traffic will continue, driving more and more P2P users (legitimate or otherwise) to implement packet encryption. Developers of software and protocols will likely respond by making it significantly easier, if not transparent, to do so. ISP efforts will likely focus on better packet prioritization algorithms and more blunt measures against heavy users generally.

Legitimate Distribution via Torrents: The competitive advantage that distributing large files over P2P networks has not gone unnoticed by content developers. Especially for small to medium businesses, the opportunity to reduce bandwidth expense will be too good to pass up. The download of boutique games, independent video and music and software trial versions over P2P networks will actually be encouraged by their rights holders.

More Bulk Lawsuits: With news that the German music industry will be employing the RIAA’s tactic of suing a small percentage of unauthorized file traders on a regular basis, look for the prosecution and defense of small-scale, non-commercial copyright abusers to become a profitable sector of the legal field. Neither the record companies nor the general public will be happy with the results either way, but law firms will certainly have an interest in the situation being perpetuated.

The Great BitTorrent Compromise: I don’t know which side will have to cede the most, but between BitTorrent and their content partners, something has to give if BitTorrent is going to become the go-to portal for online video. Either Bram and team will be succesful in convincing the studios to improve the experience, or BitTorrent’s growth will be dictated by the acceptance of the studios’ terms by their user base. In the meantime, look for content providers to continue failing miserably at developing their own distribution solutions.

Automated Content Policing: A number of new products that promise to spider online catalogs and flag copyrighted content will become vogue for both the discovery of infringing uses and for reporting content and context to refine ad targetting. Google’s deployment of their solution on YouTube should serve to indicate if such systems are currently realistic on a large scale. More aggressive policing could include more honeypots, client-side indexing by trojans and even malicious viruses.

Convergence: Ultimately, P2P will finally enable video content to divorce itself from being identified wholly with the television set. The sheer number and variety of devices that can play content combined with the many means of acquiring the content will ultimately change our language and behavior. The primary mediator of the experience will be software, from inexpensive tools to manage and time-shift media input across multiple inputs to the holy grail of convergence, a universal communication tool. Television’s last chance may be HDTV broadcast, but even that ship may have sailed already thanks to unauthorized, P2P-enabled distribution.
http://newteevee.com/2007/01/02/peer...oking-to-2007/





Which Movie Download Site Is Best?
Michael W. Muchmore

Sure, you've gone to YouTube and watched that occasional, amusing, few-minute-long video whose URL a friend emailed you. But what if you're in the mood for something longer and at a better picture quality? We took five services offering just that out for a spin: CinemaNow, MovieFlix, Movielink, Amazon's Unbox, and Starz's Vongo. Each has a somewhat different take on what your online movie downloading experience should be. They vary in what they offer, how you should pay, and whether you subscribe to a film library, rent, or purchase the content.

Though video on demand has been a glimmer in tech execs' eyes since the turn of the millennium, the enabling technologies are finally maturing, and two of the services we review just appeared in 2006—Amazon's Unbox and Starz's Vongo.

There are also a lot of illegal, pirated-movie download sites out there that we don't recommend and won't dignify with publishing the names or links of. Some of them are no more than web interfaces for file-sharing technologies like Bittorrent. When a site claims "all free" movies (which they make you pay a site subscription for), you can bet it's one of these.

The legal movie sites we review claim to take the trip to the video store or that wait for mail from Netflix out of your home theater viewings. Is the convenience worth it? What do you gain and what do you lose when switching to internet-delivered entertainment? Continued... CinemaNow offers five different ways to get and pay for your movies: Free, Subscription, Rent, Buy, and Burn to DVD. To help cut down on the possible confusion with so many different options, the tabbed page for each section has a "Learn How it Works" button:

The service offers a nice selection of free movies. And CinemaNow claims more than 4,000 feature-length films, television programs, and music concerts from licensors such as 20th Century Fox, Disney, Lionsgate, MGM, Miramax, NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Sony, Sundance Channel, and Warner Bros. Since the service includes adult content, it also provides parental controls.

CinemaNow requires Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player 10 or higher, but you don't have to download a separate catalog/player application to use it. It does require you to install an ActiveX control for Internet Explorer to play movies, however.

CinemaNow's site has a pretty thorough page on how to connect your PC to your television to see the movies on a bigger screen, but we still had to purchase a VGA-to-component converter to get our laptop to talk to our HDTV-ready TV understandably.

Let's now take a detailed look at each of CinemaNow's five levels of service:

Free
Free movies come from independent sources rather than the big movie studios, and they are stream-only. The Free area is very accessible and well organized, but you won't find many movies you've even heard of in there. Surprisingly, the Foreign movie section has more choices than you'll find in the more-expensive "Rent" or "Subscription," options, and there isn't even a Foreign genre choice for "Buy" or "Burn to DVD." We found a couple of very enjoyable but relatively unknown pictures you can watch on a shoestring. Free movies stream at your choice of 300Kb/s or 700Kb/s, neither delivers spectacular quality, but the 700K option was watchable on a non-huge screen. It would be nice to be able to search by picture quality—i.e., bitrates from 300 to 1500K. You may only be interested in titles that will look good on a bigger television.

The CinemaNow video player uses Windows Media Player behind the scenes when you're in the small ActiveX control, and overtly when you view in full screen. During fast panning scenes, we could see the jitter of lost frames. And when watching the free 2004 comedy Baptists at Our Barbecue, this occurred sometimes, but mostly the picture was perfectly watchable.

We did run into one problem of the image going upside-down, and then the window closing, but that may have been related to turning of hardware acceleration in order to take screen captures for this article.

Subscribe
Subscription selections weren't much hotter than the free ones, though you don't have to put up with the annoying ads as you do if you're watching free movies. Subscribing gives you access to more films, but they're still not top Hollywood releases and most are quite low-budget. Subscription also lets you download as many movies as you want. At the medium bitrate of 700K—the highest allowed for "subscribe" movies—we saw some banding, but the picture was usually better than VHS. A company rep told us that picture quality was often related to the quality of the print supplied to CinemaNow by the studios.

Rental gets you better picture quality—for some titles that offer Premium 1500K download bitrate—more film choices, and more up-to-date and in-demand movies. Rental fees start at 49 cents, but you won't find hit films at that price, those usually cost $3.99 or sometimes $2.99. Some categories have even less choice than the Free movies: in Foreign there was only one page of six films to choose from, whereas under Subscription there were three pages of choices. In general, you won't find anywhere near as many choices of movies to rent as you would on Netflix or at your local video store. But if it's raining, you're far from a store, and you don't want to wait for the Netflix package in the mail, renting this way is a viable option.

At the time of review, the movie Little Miss Sunshine was a new release on Netflix, but wasn't available as a rental on CinemaNow; it was available to buy for $14.95 however. Some titles in this section are only available in 700K, medium bitrate. For that, we'd expect them to be included among the Subscription choices rather than costing the extra rental fee. And some of the categories aren't exactly apt: Would you consider Ghostbusters II to belong in "Classics." We guess they include any movie older than ten years a "classic."

When you first download a Rent movie, you hit Rent Now and then get a checkout page. When you actually start downloading the film, you have to pick a directory to save the movie file too—something not very well explained in the software. The page for the movie we chose said it was a premium 1500K version, but when we actually paid and downloaded it, it turned out to be 1200K. The file format is WMV, and we could start watching it after about 15 minutes of downloading; it would have been quicker with a connection faster than our 150KB/sec DSL. Once you first click Watch Now, you have 24 hours to complete your viewing. Doing so launches whatever app is registered to play WMP files, in our case Winamp, which actually reported a bitrate of 1299K.

Be warned that you can only watch Rented movies on one PC; we made the mistake of downloading a Rent movie to an office PC, thinking we could continue watching it at home after logging in to the same account. Since we paid to watch the movie within 24 hours, we'd expect to be able to do so from anywhere we had web access.

In any case, we can report that the picture quality was excellent at 1200K on a 19-inch 1280x1024 LCD.

Buying Movies
This is where you pay usually $14.95 (older titles for $9.95, super in-demand ones for $19.95) to download a movie for keeps. A feature-length film takes about an hour to download over a fast connection. You can watch the movie while it downloads (after 10 percent or so of the movie's been downloaded) and view it while you're offline.

The movie choices were quite up to date in this section: At the time of review, Jackass Number 2 and Little Miss Sunshine were available—those titles were also new releases on Netflix. CinemaNow has deals with Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, MGM, Sony, and Warner Brothers to get this content—more sources than other internet movie download sites.

File size for bought movies is about 1.5GB, with encoding rates of 1200K to 1500K; most we saw here were 1200K.

An important difference between Buy and Rent is that when you Buy, you can watch the movie on more than one PC.

Burning DVDs
CinemaNow claims to be the only site that lets you burn Hollywood content. Downloading a movie for burning to DVD gets you the highest quality image. To download a movie for burning to DVD, you first have to download the 12MB DVD burning software. The burn feature has that telltale little "beta" tag, so the company seems to be covering themselves in case the feature doesn't work quite right.

The download preview only works after the movie's completely downloaded and is being converted to VTS format:

You can also play DVD from your HD without burning. When we did this, it tried to play in Windows Media Player, but you need DVD Decoder plugin to do so. These cost $15 to $20 to download.

After a couple of DVD blanks were rejected, we got CinemaNow to successfully burn a DVD, which did, as advertised, include the menus and special features, and was playable on our normal DVD player. But the picture quality was not first-rate DVD quality.

Product: CinemaNow

Company: CinemaNow

Price: Free for some less-in-demand movies; 29.95/month for Subscription

Pros: Burn complete DVDs; decent amount of free content

Cons: Picture quality for free and subscription content not so great; complicated strata of memberships.

Summary: CinemaNow is the most mature movie download site we've reviewed, and the only to let you burn DVDs of Hollywood content that will play in a regular DVD player. The selection of content is arguably the largest of any movie download service, and the ActiveX player does the job well using Windows Media Player. The five different ways of getting movies: Free, Subscribe, Rent, Buy, and Burn to DVD can be a bit confusing, but we'd rather have lots of choices than fewer.

Rating:

MovieFlix offers a large collection of free and subscription movies, but no top current blockbusters. Most of the films are a bit faded around the edges, but at the cheapest monthly fee of any service we reviewed, you can still find some enjoyable entertainment here.

MovieFlix has no player/manager software that you need to download. It relies on its web site and RealPlayer to get you the movies you want. (And this reviewer ain't a big fan of Real's many popups, messages, calls home, and other baggage.) If you pay the $7.95 monthly membership fee, you can also use Windows Media Player, though we couldn't get WMP to find the MovieFlix server, even after allowing it access in our firewall. And the MovieFlix help on the topic—"please make sure your Windows Media Player is properly installed"—was no help at all. An attempt on another computer at a different location, too, couldn't play the WMP version, stating the file type or codec wasn't supported.

Unlike any of the other services here, there's no download video rental: It's purely streaming. One nice thing over some of the other services is that you can fast forward and use the progress indicator to position your place in the film right away, without waiting for the entire movie to download.

The MovieFlix site is somewhat less sophisticated than the other services reviewed here, with a large field of genres to pick from, and when you click on one or search, you get an alphabetical text and link list, without thumbnails. You can search, but there's no Advanced Search as in CinemaNow, which lets you specify genre and such. You can, however sort the list by Year, Length, and whether the title requires membership.

When we say that the films are not major movies, we're talking about titles like the animated Aquarium of the Aliens and lots of stuff you haven't heard of from the 1930s to 1960s. And even pictures listed under "Member Favorites" had titles like Son of the Sheik and Zoltan Hound of Dracula.

Parental controls seem limited to a "Family Filter," which you can turn on and off. We couldn't even find help on the site about how to actually prevent anyone from just turning it back off if you've set it on.

The streams we viewed were coming in at 200Kbps and 225Kbps—lower than any other service, but that's one price you pay for instant gratification: Most of the other services make you wait ten minutes or so while the beginning of the film is downloading. This bitrate of MovieFlix doesn't lend itself to even a full-screen viewing on a 19-inch display, let alone a large television.

As you might expect for such a bare-bones service, there's no support for portable devices, or even for offline viewing.

MovieFlix doesn't offer in-demand recent movie hits, nor the ability to download films for rent or purchase, but for a quick entertainment fix, you can't beat the price.

Product: MovieFlix

Company: MovieFlix

Price: Free or $7.95/mo premium access to full collection.

Pros: Cheap and decent free movies selection; can rewind and fast forward right away; no extra software download; adult material.

Cons: Picture quality worse than other movie download sites; no new popular movies in library; adult material (with only weak parental control).

Summary: The low-priced MovieFlix is fine for a quick fix if you're absolutely bored and need feature-length entertainment, but you won't find recent popular movies, and the picture quality trails other movie download services.

Rating:

Vongo boasts over 2000 titles, but just over 100 available for rental. A big difference between this service and CinemaNow is that Vongo doesn't offer any way to permanently own a movie or burn it to a DVD. It also doesn't have any free movies; you either subscribe for $9.95 per month or rent individual titles.

When first running Vongo, our software firewall required a lot of okays to let it access the internet. You can play content on devices running Version 2 of the Microsoft Portable Media Center (PMC) operating system. At present, that pretty much limits you to Toshiba's Gigabeat S series.

There's an 8-page registration process, which tests your bandwidth and asks your preferences (including age range and whether you prefer mainstream or independent films). We noted that the user license states that the company can use personally identifiable information about you for marketing—pretty much par for these services.

You can sign up as either a Registered User or as a Member. Registering without membership entitles you to see what films are available to watch previews, rate films, and download Pay-per-view content. The $9.95/month Membership lets you fully use the service, giving you lots of included movies provided by Starz Entertainment and also gets you Starz's channel streaming. It also lets you watch movies on three separate devices.

The service requires you to download a software client that will let you select the movies you want to watch. A nice touch in this nicely designed application is that it will play the preview of any movie you're interested in.

It also (below the preview) shows you the download file size and format. But it doesn't tell you the bitrate, which determines the picture quality. You can download movies immediately or schedule them to download at any hour of the day. The service only lets you have 10 content files on your HD at a time, and you have 10 days to view content; pay-per-view selections must be watched within one 24-hour period.

You can also enter a Parental control password, but PG-13 and R and above are the only choices for control; CinemaNow offers more flexibility in this area. We noticed that our example recent releases, Jackass Number 2 and Little Miss Sunshine were not available on Vongo, so the content is limited by what's available to Starz. We did find some older mainstream flicks: Pretty Woman and Sleepless in Seattle, for example. And The Da Vinci Code, a recent release, was available in Pay-per-view.

The search only had four category listings: Action, Anime, Comedy, and Drama—far fewer than available on some of the other services. The browsing panel adds Kids & Family, Romance, Sci-Fi & Horror, and Starz Channel to that list.

When you hit Watch Now for a movie, you get Vongo's player:

Blowing this view up to full screen still doesn't allow fast forward or reverse, and the progress bar slider can't be used to advance or put back your position in the movie until after the whole movie has been downloaded. Your only choices are pause and stop. The resolution (as determined by opening the WMA file in the Vongo directory and playing a movie in Winamp) was 720x390 at a bitrate of 1395K for one film we downloaded, and the picture quality was quite satisfying. But we still saw banding in other movies, even on a 19-inch LCD. Another minor detractor from the cinematic experience was the intermittently appearing Starz logo in the lower-right hand corner of the screen.

We think the subscription choice in Vongo, at only $9.99 a month is the better way to go if you're interested in this service, with its slick player/downloader software. The number of titles included with the subscription is plentiful enough to keep you entertained for many hours. We think it would have been nice for Vongo to throw in a few free movies, as CinemaNow and MovieFlix do.

Product: Vongo

Company: Starz Entertainment Group

Price: $9.95 per month; free registration allows Pay-per-view access.

Pros: Plays previews on the movie catalog to help you decide; pretty good selection of movies you've heard of included with the subscription

Cons: Player doesn't fast forward or rewind; top current blockbusters not available; not many subgenres to sort by; no free movies; no permanent ownership of movies.

Summary: Vongo is a good deal as far as it goes—lots of movies and shows included for $9.99 a month, but you can't purchase movies permanently, the selection doesn't include current recent DVD releases of blockbusters, and the player is limited.

Rating:

Movielink has a good selection of recent titles—it should, as it's a joint venture of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. It doesn't require subscription fees and offers movies just two ways: Rent or Purchase. There's no subscription option and no monthly charge, but you have to register (which you can even do without a credit card, similar to CinemaNow). Renting works similarly to CinemaNow, while Purchasing lets you keep the movie but not burn it to DVD format. You can burn the movies to disk in WMF format. Some movies will only be available as purchases and others as rentals, depending on what the distribution gods of Hollywood have deemed allowable. Most purchase movies we saw went for $9.99, but some were as high as $19.99; rentals were mostly $2.99 or $3.99.

Some of the purchased movies seemed overpriced at $9.99—old movies you could find in the bargain bin for less at the video store. But we actually got a deal when renting: The movie we saw listed as a $2.99 rental, but turned out to only cost $1.19 at checkout! And we found top current films—e.g., Superman Returns—that turned out to cost half to rent than the catalog page showed.

For rented movies, you have 30 days to watch within one 24-hour period after download. As with the other services, you can start watching a movie even before you've finished downloading it, but the Manager started out a bit optimistic, reporting that we'd be able to watch in 2 minutes, only to later revise that to 17 minutes. It depends on whether you're using your internet bandwidth for other tasks.

Movielink offers a few free sample movies to give you a taste of what to expect. Like Vongo, the service uses client software, Movielink Manager, which you download before watching your first film. It's a very quick download and install, though Media Player update downloads made it a bit longer of a process for us, with three restarts required (though one should be blamed on WMP alone).

As to picture quality, the Movielink site explains, "For most movie downloads, Movielink uses a minimum encode rate of 1.3 Mbps and a peak of 4 Mbps, with sound encoded at 96kbps. Movielink movie downloads are provided in letterbox format, with an array of approximately 150,000 pixels…For the streaming previews, Movielink uses a constant bit rate (CBR) encoding of 300 kbps. The 1.3 Mbps movie download file contains more visual information than the 300 kbps streamed movie file and is therefore of better quality." DRM prevented us from viewing content in WinAmp, so we can't verify this.

As with Vongo, Movielink movies can also be downloaded for PMC (Windows Portable Media Center) devices. Unlike Vongo, the Manager software doesn't also serve as the catalog of films, so of course doesn't preview the movies unless you specifically download a preview.

Movielink doesn't appear to have any parental controls. There are ample genres to choose from: Foreign was even broken down into 12 countries plus "other," though there weren't a ton of films in each of these subcategories to choose from.

We like using MovieLink, its picture quality was very pleasing, software worked well and clearly, and it offers a good selection of recent titles to choose from.

Product: Movielink

Company: Movielink

Price: Per movie rental/purchase; generally $3.99 for rental and $9.99 to purchase.

Pros: Decent selection of recent DVD releases; no monthly fee.

Cons: No free movies; no subscription option.

Summary: Movielink does a good job of getting you recent, popular titles at decent resolution, its operation is clear and simple, but there's no subscription option to access a library of films.

Rating:

Amazon's video download service—the newest of the services here, launched in Fall 2006—claims to give you web-delivered DVD-quality video that's as easy as taking a disc out of a box. Unbox offers TV shows and movies for download and rental. The selection of over 2400 movies includes recent popular DVD releases. TV shows are $1.99, movie rentals are mostly $3.99, and movie purchases are about $15.

The service requires you to download the Unbox video player (a 3.8 MB download), which installs .Net Framework 2.0—the service requires Windows XP. You can set this application up on multiple PCs and share videos through Amazon's RemoteLoad system. There's very thorough Help on the site for all of this setup. The player has three panels: one for your video library, one for actually playing videos, and one for hooking up remote devices.

As you'd expect from an internet shopping powerhouse like Amazon, the categorization and recommendation features top the pack. Getting a movie into your player is smooth—no figuring out which directory you should save it in. While a movie is downloading, you can pause it from the notification icon in the desktop tray if you need bandwidth for other actions. Movies take between 20 minutes and an hour to download, depending on the speed of your broadband connection (and of course the length of the film).

Movies you've bought or rented appear in the right pane of the player. We successfully used RemoteLoad to download the movie we bought, SuperMan Returns, to another PC, which, as it was our workplace PC, the faster download speed meant we could start watching the movie after just a couple minutes. There's also a web page version of your library.

Though the 2.5Mb/sec bitrate of movies downloaded from Unbox is about half that of actual DVDs, the service uses the VC-1 codec that powers HD-DVD content. And indeed the picture quality we got with Unbox was the closest to DVD quality of any of the services we reviewed.

The movie player lets you fast forward and rewind even before the whole movie's been downloaded, using these controls, which autohide at the bottom of full screen play.

Unbox had the broadest claims for support of portable devices, including for most Plays for Sure certified video devices, with a link to a page listing such devices. The player's tab for devices is also well thought out. You just drag the movie from the left to the center panel in the Devices tab.

The service has no parental controls, but neither does it offer adult content.

We found Unbox to be one of the best services we tested, in terms of ease of use, content selection, and picture quality. It takes somewhat different skills than opening a DVD box, but it really isn't that much more difficult an operation.

Product: Unbox

Company: Amazon.com

Price: No subscription fee; TV shows $1.99, movie rentals $2.99-$3.99

Pros: Excellent image quality; good, easy-to-understand software; portable device support; recent and popular releases; ability to watch on multiple PCs.

Cons: No free or subscription content.

Summary: Amazon has possibly the best quality of the movie download services, and the content selection includes up-to-date, in-demand titles. Amazon's RemoteLoad feature, which allows you to download content to multiple machines, is how it should work.

Rating:

So what's the verdict on internet-delivered feature films? Mixed at best, but it's definitely a technology worth watching (literally).

Sure these services will save you a trip to the local video store or a wait for DVDs in the mail, but downloading a movie will take at least an hour—chances are you could get a DVD at the local video store faster. The selection of movies and picture quality isn't yet near what you get with Netflix or the brick-and-mortar video rental store. The average bitrate for a DVD is 5Mb/sec, compared with the best bitrate found in these services, Movielink's 1.3Mb/sec; most of the others were much lower.

Unless your internet connection is a T3 or better, you don't want to be doing too much on the internet besides downloading and watching your movie: It uses up all the bandwidth you can give it. Of course, there's always the chance your Internet connection gets interrupted in the middle of your watching a movie, though most of these services require a large prebuffer before letting you start viewing. But the point is, the faster your internet connection, the better prepared you are for using these services. Another consideration is that videos in excess of an hour of playtime take up some serious disk space; you'll want a fairly beefy hard disk if you plan on storing multiple movies this way.

Another issue is how to get the signal from your PC to your bigger-screen television. We tested with a laptop, most of which don't have TV-out connectors. We first tried connecting from the VGA port to an RGB adapter, but that doesn't support the component's Y Pr Pb signals. We ended up buying an AverMedia QuickPlay, which did the trick after some picture stretching and positioning in the graphics adapter's control panel.

Of course, watching movies from a PC player has drawbacks compared with just watching a DVD. Near the top of the list of these is the lack of a remote control. You could probably program a PC remote to control the player, but a preprogrammed remote would be helpful to more viewers. If you want to quickly pause your movie to get up for a snack, it's much easier on a remote than going to the PC. And if you want slow motion, it's not an option.

Also, all of these services are very limited by what the studios say is allowed: limited availability times, rent only or purchase only. If you go to a large video store, you're guaranteed a large selection of movies to rent or buy, and it's not like the studios ever say "Okay, you can't sell that title anymore, send it back to us."

Read up on Free Music Recommendation Services.

There are definite advantages to online video stores, but the services still have quite a bit of catching up to do with the ways you're currently used to getting your movie fix. And with these services, some movies become unavailable after a period based on what's allowed by the studios; it's not like a DVD in a rental store that will always be there. But since you can try all of these services by renting a movie for just a couple bucks, it's worth checking them out to see whether this new way of getting feature-length entertainment is for you.

The five services we looked at aren't the only ones out there; let us know your favorite way to get movies online in the ExtremeTech forum.

Finally, here's a summary of what you get with the five internet movie download services we reviewed:
Amazon Unbox CinemaNow MovieFlix Movielink Vongo

URL unbox.amazon.com CinemaNow.com MovieFlix.com movielink.com vongo.com

Price No subscription; rental usually about $3.99, purchase usually $9.99 $29.99/mo. or $99.95/yr $7.95/mo. No subscription; rental usually about $3.99, purchase usually $9.99 $9.99/month includes most movies; some rentals for $2.99-$3.99

Offers subscription for access to film library No Yes Yes No Yes

Movie rentals Yes Yes No Yes Yes

Movie purchase Yes Yes No Yes No

Burn movies to DVD No Yes No No (except in WMF) No

Number of genre subsets 18 18 36 24 7

Free movie selections No Yes Yes No No

Player/manager software to download Yes Yes, ActiveX Control RealPlayer Yes Yes

Bitrate 2.5 Mb/s 300-1500K 225K 1.3Mbps 1400K

OSes supported Windows XP Windows XP Any with RealPlayer support Windows XP Windows XP

Browser required Any IE IE IE Any

Mobile devices Portable Media Center No No Portable Media Center Portable Media Center

Adult content/parental filter No/No Yes/Yes Yes/Weak No/No No/Yes

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2078459,00.asp





Studios OK Movie Downloads Technology
Gary Gentile

Hollywood studios have approved a new technology and licensing arrangement that should remove a major obstacle consumers now face with burning movies they buy digitally over the Internet onto a DVD that will play everywhere.

Sonic Solutions Inc. is introducing on Thursday the Qflix system for adding a standard digital lock to DVDs burned in a computer or a retail kiosk.

The lock, known as "content scrambling system," or CSS, is backed by the studios, TV networks and other content creators and comes standard on prerecorded DVDs today. All DVD players come equipped with a key that fits the lock and allows for playback.

But movie download services such as Movielink, CinemaNow and Amazon.com's Unbox haven't been able to use CSS because studios fear widespread DVD burning could lead to piracy.

Studios have experimented with an alternative to CSS used by movie downloading service CinemaNow, but only a small number of titles are available for such burning and some users have complained of problems with playback.

With Qflix - and its studio-backed copy-protection system - consumers should have more options. But they'll need new blank DVDs and compatible DVD burners to use it.

The system can also be used in retail kiosks, which could hold hundreds of thousands of older films and TV shows for which studios don't see a huge market. Customers could pick a film, TV episode or an entire season's worth of shows and have them transferred to DVD on the spot.

Burning a DVD will take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes using Sonic's technology, the company said.

Consumers still would be subject to restrictions placed by the movie service and studios. For instance, using the copy-protection technology in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media system, a service could specify that a given title can be burned no more than two times.

Sonic has been working for three years to develop the technology and get studios to agree to amend the CSS license to allow a "download to burn" option.

"We are pleased and encouraged to see efforts like Sonic's creation of Qflix that addresses the need for industry standard protection," Chris Cookson, chief technology officer at Warner Bros. said in a statement.

The initial companies participating in Qflix include Verbatim Corp., which makes blank discs, the movie download service Movielink, video-on-demand provider Akimbo Systems Inc. and the Walgreen Co. chain of drug stores.

Studios must still figure out pricing schemes that appeal to consumers and protect its lucrative retail business. Some retailers, such as Wal-Mart, have talked about starting their own online downloading services or installing kiosks to burn DVDs in the store.

Also, most consumers will need a new DVD burner that includes the latest software. Some burners can be updated, Sonic said, and companies such as Plextor, a Qflix partner, are expected to market Qflix- enabled DVD burners that connect with a USB cable.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T





New Disc May Sway DVD Wars
Richard Siklos

Consumers wary of buying new high-definition DVD players because of a technology war reminiscent of the days of Betamax versus VHS will soon have a new kind of DVD that might make the decision less daunting.

Warner Brothers, which helped popularize the DVD more than a decade ago, plans to announce next week a single videodisc that can play films and television programs in both Blu-ray and HD-DVD, the rival DVD technologies.

Warner Brothers, a division of Time Warner, plans to formally announce the new disc, which it is calling a Total HD disc, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

Two rival camps introduced high-definition DVD players last year: a consortium called Blu-ray, backed by Sony and others, and a group called HD-DVD, backed by Toshiba and Microsoft. Retail and media executives say this clash of corporate titans and their incompatible machines has left some consumers bewildered and has slowed the introduction of what is intended to be the next great thing in home entertainment.

Executives at Time Warner and its Hollywood subsidiary hope to spur sales of new DVD players and movies by gaining the support of retailers and cajoling rival studios into making their film and television libraries available in both formats on a single disc.

In addition to reviving the ghost of the war that marked the introduction of videocassettes in the 1980s, the high-definition battle has been exacerbated by the decision of several major studios to support only one of the technologies.

Thus, for instance, a copy of 20th Century Fox’s “Ice Age: The Meltdown” is available only on Blu-ray, while Universal’s “The Break-Up” can be viewed only on a disc and player built with HD-DVD technology.

Barry M. Meyer, the chairman and chief executive of Warner Brothers, said in an interview that the company came up with the Total HD disc after concluding that neither Blu-ray nor HD-DVD was going the way of Betamax anytime soon.

“The next best thing is to recognize that there will be two formats and to make that not a negative for the consumer,” Mr. Meyer said. “We felt that the most significant constituency for us to satisfy was the consumer first, and the retailer second. The retailer wants to sell hardware and doesn’t want to be forced into stocking two formats for everything. This is ideal for them.”

In a world besotted with gadgetry, few consumer products have generated as much excitement — and head-scratching — as high-definition television. Flat-screen, high-definition TVs have been flying off the shelves for the last year and are now as common in homes as coffee pots. Yet few people are actually watching superclear high-definition programming.

Part of the disconnect is the lack of high-definition programming on cable and satellite television, and the additional outlay for decoder boxes and premium channels needed to get it. The rival movie player technologies have further blurred the outlook for high definition. Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital, predicted in a recent report that this would be the first year since the introduction of the DVD that consumer spending on the discs would decline, putting pressure on the studios that rely heavily on them for profits.

For now, Sony; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which is owned by private equity firms in partnership with the Comcast Corporation and Sony; 20th Century Fox, a division of the News Corporation; and Walt Disney Pictures are all exclusively releasing their DVDs in Blu-ray.

Universal Studios, which is owned by General Electric, is releasing only in HD-DVD. Warner and Paramount Pictures, a division of Viacom, are issuing DVDs in both formats.

Behind these allegiances are complex strategic questions revolving around everything from manufacturing costs to profit margins, debates over each format’s technical strengths and weaknesses, and how these players relate to Microsoft and Sony’s video-game strategies.

(Blu-ray players are built into the new Sony PlayStation 3, while Microsoft is selling HD-DVD drives that attach to its Xbox 360.)

Another wrinkle is plans by LG Electronics, and possibly other gadget makers attending the Las Vegas conference, to announce new DVD players with drives for both formats; however, such players will most likely be initially more expensive than other players.

Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the president of Time Warner, said the Total HD disc has a better chance of catching on than dual players. Research commissioned by Warner indicates that consumers are willing to pay several dollars more than current high-definition DVDs for a disc that works on both players. At the Web site for Best Buy, Warner’s “Superman Returns” DVD was selling yesterday for $19.99 in its standard format, $29.99 for Blu-ray and $34.99 for HD-DVD.

Still, it is not clear whether news of Warner’s Total HD disc would convince the studio heads who are backing one format or the other to release their wares in both. Sony, of course, has placed a big bet on Blu-ray’s success and does not want to relive the sting of Betamax’s defeat. The number of studios committed solely to Blu-ray has been seen as a competitive edge, particularly because HD-DVD came to market several months ahead of Blu-ray.

And HD-DVD’s boosters say they doubt gaming fans who have been snapping up the just-introduced PlayStation 3 will take advantage of its built-in Blu-ray player and buy movies as well as video games.

In recent interviews, executives at Fox and Disney were unequivocal in their support for Blu-ray. They said they believed that releasing DVDs in both formats would only prolong confusion and the emergence of a winning format. “I think the fastest way to end the format war is through decisiveness and strength,” said Bob Chapek, the president of Buena Vista Worldwide Entertainment, the home video arm of Walt Disney.

Like other Blu-ray proponents and partners, Mr. Chapek said that he favors Blu-ray because of its greater storage capacity and other attributes. HD-DVD offers the same vivid picture by storing less information on its disc, which means fewer minutes of video and other features. However, among its perceived advantages, HD-DVD players are less expensive.

Because of manufacturing complexities, the Total HD disc will not contain a standard format version, said Kevin Tsujihara, the president of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group. However, several months ago the company filed patents for a new disc incorporating all three formats, which it could produce in the future.

Mr. Tsujihara described the new disc as an elegant way for studios to make their content available more widely “in a way that is not conceding defeat” for the format they have been backing.

In the short term, Total HD would actually add to the number of formats retailers will have to stock, raising it from three to four. However, Irynne V. MacKay, senior vice president for entertainment products at Circuit City, said she supported the idea because it took pressure off consumers puzzling over which format to invest in. “The simpler the future is for us, the better,” said Ms. MacKay.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/te...y/04video.html





What Will They Think of Next?
Steve Ballmer

With the arrival of the new year, experts from the tech community look ahead to the innovations that could change the ways we work, play and communicate in 2007.

Right now, I am as excited by the prospects for technology-driven change as I've ever been. The impact of the Internet, e-mail and mobile phones has been so powerful that people tend to think the digital revolution has already happened. I think it's just getting started.

Many technologies have the potential to catch fire, including Internet television, mobile video devices and even robots. New business-intelligence technologies will make sophisticated data-analysis tools easy enough for anyone to use. New "digital rights" technology, which gives copyright holders more control over the distribution and reproduction of their work, will continue to transform the entertainment industry.

But when we look back in 10 years, it probably won't be a specific device or company that stands out. Instead, 2007 will be the year when unified communications technology helped us regain control of our information and our lives. Ironically, the proliferation of new technologies up until now has made communications harder, not easier.

In 2007, I believe that phone numbers and e-mail addresses will begin to give way to a single identity, and the desktop phone will merge with the PC and mobile phone. Messages will be routed to you on a device that will be smart enough to know whether you can be interrupted based on what you are doing and who the message is from. Instead of being ruled by e-mail and cell phones, we'll have control over when and how we can be reached, and by whom.
Steve Ballmer is the chief executive of Microsoft Corp.

The trend to watch in 2007: virtual worlds, one of the most populous of which is Second Life, a 3-D environment built and owned by its residents (currently about 2 million).

These digital playgrounds combine elements of social networking with aspects of a multiplayer online game. At Second Life's virtual marketplace, residents buy, sell and trade millions of dollars in digital goods. Even more fascinating from a business standpoint is that millions of dollars in real-world currency are being generated from the exchange of virtual dollars into hard cash.

A cottage industry is beginning to develop around virtual communities, with real-world businesses profiting from the sale of related goods and services. For instance, there's an e-commerce site that allows you to customize your "avatar" - the persona you create for yourself online - and another company that puts together custom games for organizations that want to use Second Life for training and education.

Second Life may not grow to the scale of a MySpace or a YouTube, but it may be laying the groundwork for something that will.
Ned Sherman is chief executive and publisher of Digital Media Wire (digitalmediawire.com).

I expect that this year, at least one file-sharing - or "peer-to-peer" - television service will hit the exponential growth curve of Napster, Skype and MySpace. YouTube woke up users to the Internet as a video platform, but because even a small video file can take up several megabytes, a centralized Web site such as YouTube needs to limit clips to a few minutes.

P2P applications make every recipient of a file also a potential server, distributing the load throughout the network. This is the technique Napster and Kazaa used to upend the music business. By leveraging the distributed power of the network, P2P video allows you to download and watch much larger programs more quickly than you could at a centralized Web site.

There are several candidates lined up to be the YouTube of P2P video. BitTorrent has content partnerships with major media companies. The Venice Project is being developed by the team that created Kazaa and Skype. Or, the winner might be one of the fast-growing P2P video companies already operating in China, such as Xunlei and PPLive.

Not enough attention is being paid to these services because of the perception that YouTube has already "won" the Internet video war. But central video hosting was just one battle. P2P video will become too big to ignore.
Kevin Werbach (werbach@wharton.upenn.edu) is an assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the organizer of the Supernova technology conference (supernova2007.com).

I'm willing to bet that 2007 is the year when somebody figures out how to make video advertising work in a YouTube world. And if I'm right, the TV industry is going to get very rocky, very fast.

I doubt that the same disruptive force will hit movies, however. The big-screen home-theater boom created a market for high-def films, and that factor-of-10 increase in downloading time bought Hollywood another five years or so to figure things out.

I also think that this will be a big year for video gamers, and not just because of the delightful game-play innovations of the Wii and the power of the Xbox 360. (I can't wait for Halo 3.) Equally important is the fact that all of the current-generation consoles now have built-in Internet connections. Their role as a bridge from the Net to the TV isn't just a big deal for gaming, it's also potentially a breakthrough moment for online video of all sorts.

We knew gaming competed with television for time, but now we're learning that mainstream acceptance of networked gaming may also create the greatest competitor for the broadcast distribution model itself.
Chris Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired magazine.

Kiss your laptop goodbye. Virtualization technologies are making it possible for all of us to move beyond personal computers.

Google and Microsoft are fighting over where you keep your "state" - your operating system, your applications and all your files. Google wants you to keep it on the Internet; Microsoft wants you to keep it on your laptop.

Virtualization technologies have been used for years to improve the usefulness of big servers. They allow a computer to move quickly and seamlessly among different operating systems with different "stacks" of applications.

Applied to personal computers, though, virtualization could radically expand the portability of all your computer work. A company called Moka5 has a program that keeps a snapshot copy of your state at all times. There is no reason why you could not carry that copy with you on different media - on a USB memory stick, on a cell phone or even an iPod - wherever there is some memory. Wherever you take it, your software, your files and your operating system will be available to use on any computer.

This splits the difference in the fight over where you store your work. You are no longer bound to a particular piece of hardware - and you also don't have to risk storing your stuff with a server-side provider such as Google.

More and more, you are in charge.
Hank Barry, a lawyer, was chief executive of Napster.

We will see migration of social applications as user-generated content moves to the WiFi environment. YouTube, MySpace and multi-user games will be available on hand-held devices, wherever you go. People will carry their digital assets much like their bacteria. Israeli tech guru Yossi Vardi calls it "continuous computing."

The nanotechnology world foreseen by K. Eric Drexler arrives in the form of MEMS, or microelectronic mechanical systems. Very inexpensive moving parts will be mass-produced like a semiconductor. But unlike semiconductors, they move. This is useful for anything that employs moving parts.

Synthetic biology pioneer George Church of Harvard University expects to see $3,000 personal genomics kits in stores.

Rod Brooks, director of MIT's computer lab, is looking at new Web services aimed at the baby boomer age group, who realize that, in terms of IT use, they've been passed by, missing out on IM, text-messaging, MySpace, etc.

But don't put much stock in predictions. Consider that YouTube/MySpace/Napster didn't change the real world for most people very much.
John Brockman is publisher and editor of Edge (edge.org).
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opi...oped-headlines





P-to-P Goes Hollywood

BitTorrent co-founder talks up business plans and death of DRM
InfoWorld Staff

With all the legal disputes arising from P-to-P (peer to peer) file sharing networks such as Napster, Gnutella, and KaZaa in recent years, it’s easy to forget that the concept of P-to-P networks is almost as old as the Internet itself. In fact, decentralized networks that harness the computing resources of hosts rather than servers are behind services as diverse as Usenet and IRC.

Since the late 1990s, however, the term P2P been sullied by its association with illegal online music and video swapping, not to mention software piracy. Now the folks over at BitTorrent hope to change that. In recent weeks, the San Francisco company has taken bold steps to shake off its “underground” status, landing $20 million in venture capital funding and striking content deals with leading media companies.

InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul F. Roberts caught up with BitTorrent co-founder Ashwin Navin to talk about the company’s fast evolving plans to be a commercial content distribution platform and take on the likes of iTunes as a media distribution hub.

InfoWorld: P-to-P has been associated with file sharing in the minds of many people, but you’re saying it has broader applications. What problems can BitTorrent solve that companies have now?

Ashwin Navin: One of the fundamental concepts of what people call Web 2.0 is that the audience has the capacity and the resources. Successful Web 2.0 companies harness the intelligence or resources of its audience. The Internet is a two-way medium, unlike the broadcast world. BitTorrent asks its audience to upload while it’s consuming, so that demand brings supply. And that’s the interesting concept, and it’s something that pure online retailers haven’t grasped yet. We’re trying to provide that layer of technology to everyone who’s providing content on the Internet.

IW: You’ve been described as a technology without a business model. How would you respond to that?

AN: I think our business model is pretty well defined. As far as we’re concerned, there are two ways for us to make money. The first is aggregating content and selling it to our audience; that’s our media business. The second is that we deliver content from customers’ Web sites. That’s our content delivery business. We’re going to launch both businesses early next year. The content aggregation business in February [2007].

IW: P-to-P has been a minefield of litigation. How do you navigate that minefield so that lawsuits don’t get in the way of your vision?

AN: We take comfort in the Supreme Court decision on Grokster. That placed a lot of emphasis on intent. So if you have the right intent you should take comfort in the fact that the law and any courtroom will look at what you’ve done to validate your status. From the very early days, [BitTorrent inventor] Bram [Cohen] never encouraged anyone to use BitTorrent for piracy. In fact, he said that would be a stupid thing to do, because BitTorrent doesn’t guarantee you any anonymity. In fact, we’ve gone to copyright holders and tried to engage them in licensing efforts so people can go out and license their content legally.

IW Nevertheless, people enjoy BitTorrent for the access it gives them to unlicensed content. Are you going to clean up torrents to get rid of that?

AN: Absolutely. BitTorrent.com is filtered so that we will not surface links for unlicensed content.

IW: Where is the fulcrum between sharing content and preventing free-form piracy?

AN: I actually don’t think that if content owner and content rights holders take an inventory of the way that people want to consume content and embrace, rather than fight it, DRM almost becomes irrelevant. If people can use content in the way they want offline and online they won’t care about DRM, because the content is consumed in a flexible use case.

IW: So over the time DRM goes away?

AN: Over time. Yes. There’s huge amounts of value for publishers to license a TV show over and over again. Today they can’t stomach the risk of allowing content to be published free and clear of DRM. But eventually they’ll realize that’s the way people are going to consume it anyway, so they might as well profit from it.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...1NMmain_1.html





Top 10 Media Trend Predictions for 2007
Ashkan Karbasfrooshan

1 - VIDEO

a) FLIGHT TO QUALITY IN CONTENT

As a result of a regression to the mean, users will demand more quality in online video. We’ve gone a bit too far to one end of the spectrum in terms of, well, having too much crap online. Folks, America’s Funniest Home Videos was one (albeit popular) show, but it was not the only show, on for 24/7, and one that spawned stars.

Yet, somehow every media company wants to make funny home videos the cornerstone of their digital video strategy. It’s lame, it’s enough. Move on.

For the love of all things holy, the folks at WatchMojo.com seem to put more time, energy and effort in the Web TV strategy that some major media companies do and let’s face it, that ain’t right.

b) CONSOLIDATION IN TECHNOLOGY

Way too many platforms, way too many formats etc., as an industry we need a sweeping determination of standards (imagine where online advertising would be if there was no standard ad sizes!)

We also will see a lot of companies merge due to a shortage of talent at the top (you simply can’t take an old media executive and parachute him at a Guba, for example, it will not succeed. But merge Revver and Guba, and you might have a match of senior management strengths. Of course, there could be ego matters, but that’s not our problem) or technology and content (say Revver has the “business model” but lacks content, and Metacafe has boatloads of content but no model - I have no idea if they do, just using as example), these could merge and will have to because…

The bottom line is that for most online video sites that are merely technology platforms will not see anymore VC money. The technology alone is not impenetrable. The audience is fickle. Heavy.com is a video site that just raised more money, but it’s a content aggregation and publishing site.

Read: Online Video: It was the best of times, It was the worst of times | Tough Times Ahead After GooTube Deal.


2 - PERSONALIZATION

For a few years now, we’ve seen developers, programmers, engineers, designers (can you tell I don’t know who does what - I’m kidding, well…) create fantastic tools, features and applications that streamline and facilitate the content creation and aggregation process. Blogging software is just one example.

We’ve seen publishers - old and new - increasingly harness and master these tools to better manage and distribute content.

We’ve also seen individual users pull up a seat at the big boys’ table and create compelling content. Rafat Ali has more influence that most if not all writers at the New York Times to web audiences, mind you. Along with the regression to the mean, these two will converge. But you get our point.

Lower along the totem pole, some of the content is crap, some of it is ok, some of it is wonderful (like my nugget of wisdom says: “there are hot girls in all countries!”).

Point is, people who want content will be able to pick and choose what they want (through RSS, newsletters, etc.) and people who create content can push it out by customizing what and how they produce content. Think MyYahoo! on a large scale.

The main challenge we face now is noise - pure and simple. Too many blogs all blogging about the same thing to get linked, too many image-sharing sites, too many video file-sharing sites… but this will start to “clean up” in 2007 and become a reality in 2008. One reason why to follow below.

3 - INTERMEDIATION

When Bear Stearns Cable and Satellite analyst Spencer Wang published: “Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment,” he was not saying anything new to legions of web-wannabe-analysts (the WWA baby!). And yes, yours truly is definitely included amongst the WWA.

Content has evolved online, we won’t see new portals per se, but we will see vertical portals, or countless niche sites, some of which produce niche, contextual content along verticals and others who do not create any content but simply aggregate it.

As a direct result of intermediation and personalization, a lot of people will drop Digging (I’m using the term here for what Digg represents: the good, bad and ugly of Web 2.0 and not only contributors to Digg) and the like and start doing similar things for themselves.

We have a social bookmarking tool that is ready to go that costs very little to create. There’s nothing defensible about that, and the system to duplicate it is somewhat easy.

As per Digg’s users: people are inherently greedy. Remember: “Greed is good…” and people will realize that toiling away to generate content for Digg while a select few laugh all the way to the bank is not a fair system, especially when the community is asked to clean up spammers and Digg gamers and the CEO says “What problem?”

At the end of the day, people want to be paid for their work.

Combine that with the fact that a lot of these diggers will hit puberty and they realize that they’d rather own a tiny space online instead of, well, you know what: nothing of Digg.

Social media will not disappear, but it will change. People will take ownership back. I edited a few posts to Wikipedia about two topics I know more of than the average person: Def Leppard and Alexander the Great (did I just admit that?). Yet the Wikimafia deleted it. So I built two sites to showcase my interest in Def Leppard and Alexander the Great.

4 - THE RETURN OF EMAIL

It won’t make large waves, but with CAN-SPAM having cleaned up the spam situation, and with more and more people signing up to feeds and what not, we see email marketing making a slow but sure return to the landscape in 2007.

5 - VERTICAL RISING

The rise of vertical communities will continue. You will have large vertical sites, you will have people maintaining tiny vertical sites. The point is, this is something that started in 2004 and 2005, rose to prominence thanks to things like Mr. Wang’s study and will only accelerate in 2007 and beyond.

6 - ACQUISITIONS & MANAGEMENT SHUFFLE

CNET (CNET) for sale? Perhaps. With Shelby Bonnie gone - nothing against Mr. Ashe - we see CNET being acquired. We also think it’s possible that CNET makes one or two small, somewhat medium-sized deals to bolster itself for an acquisition.

Yahoo! and AOL (TWX)? We think Google will block that like, being the tease that they are.

Microsoft (MSFT) won’t make a huge acquisition. It’s not in their culture. But we do see it ">buying an online ad company like Blue Lithium, aQuantive (AQNT) or Valueclick (VCLK). Read our analysis here.

But eBay (EBAY) will probably make a major move, maybe even with InterActive Corp (IACI). Together, they’ll have more bargaining power with advertisers, since both are traditionally weak there and mainly e-Commerce powerhouses. With e-Commerce gaining prominence, this will position them for growth over time.

Barry Diller will be needed as Meg Whitman will leave eBay. Where to? Keep reading.

Peter Levinsohn - who replaced Ross Levinsohn - will prove to be great in many ways but in the end Mr. Murdoch will begin to ask for immediate returns (as in, in addition to Google’s $900 million deal, which we think they overpaid for in a defensive move against Yahoo! and MSN) and a series of events will mark changes atop FIM.

While we put MySpace atop our Top 10 Best Web Acquisitions of All Time, in 2007 Mr. Murdoch will ask for more tangible results. After all, News Corp.’s (NWS) stock rose 30% in 2006 due to the giddiness over MySpace, so investors will ask to see financial results from FIM in 2007. Disney too rose 30% but it was powered on financial metrics, hence why we made Disney (DIS) the media stock of 2006.

What do all of these events mean?

Rupert Murdoch is clever and wise and for a few years will not not tinker with MySpace. But in May 2007, it will be two years and Mr. Murdoch will get impatient.

He’ll push Levinsohn to make changes at MySpace, who will in turn push Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson (MySpace founders) for changes. DeWolfe and Anderson will push back and grumblings from these two about their discontent over the Intermix deal, where they feel they were underpaid.

To quiet the potential mutiny, Murdoch will side with the MySpace guys, which in turn makes the job impossible for Levinsohn. News Corp. will begin to tweak with MySpace in subtle ways. Ultimately, by mid-year, Murdoch openly asks why not enough Fortune 500 advertisers are on the site “with the most pageviews” and as a result, will push to clean the site. The result: the users will migrate elsewhere… adding to the rise of the verticals.

After MySpace fails with advertisers, Rupert Murdoch will turn to eBay’s Meg Whitman and lure her to run FIM/MySpace. Between her experiences at Disney and eBay, Mr. Murdoch views her as perfect for the new and improved e-Commerce fueled MySpace. Peter Levinsohn will focus on other areas of FIM, notably, IGN’s Digital Distribution platform.

And speaking of IGN, IGN will drop its lawsuit against me (they lost Round 1 and know they cannot win Round 2), and, in a sudden twist of good karma, they will get a lot of positive press coverage after MySpace cools off.

Over time, IGN will look like the crown jewel as more and more media companies slowly but surely move to embrace IGN’s digital distribution platform. IGN’s in-game advertising continues to grow as video game companies hire IGN to plug away advertisers in their games. Meanwhile, IGN’s media properties continue to grow. Rumors begin to swirl that IGN is worth $6 billion (investors and analysts wonder where they have heard this before) and Mr. Murdoch is planning an IPO while Mark Jung, who has been sitting idle since leaving the firm, is rumored to have Great Hill Partners finance a potential buyout.

CBS Digital (CBS) and the NYT (NYT) will get into a slugfest over Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org. In the end, Ali prefers to walk to the beat of his own drums and Paidcontent.org remains independent. Neither company makes a deal. Quincy Smith wonders what his next career move will be when he sees few news takeover targets that will move the needle. He joins Montgomery Securities.

Viacom’s (VIA) Philip Dauman will go insane and pull 3 deals: one for less than $200 million in Q1, but the Street will say it’s not enough, so he’ll pull a $500 million and one massive one for $1 billion by year’s end.

Facebook will not sell. That ship has sailed. Of course, never say never, this could be the massive $1B+ deal Viacom finally pulls but we doubt it. Investor Peter Thiel’s mega successful hedge fund is making so much money that the notion of a modest Facebook exit of $1B is not worth his time. Zuckerberg graces cover after cover, while the MySpace guys’ jealousy raise to the point of rage.

Disney will grow organically online, we called it the stock of 2007 in media and it will simply look internally and test the waters by adding content from Disney, ABC and ESPN online. It’s squeaky clean image will help it with F500 advertisers online.

Disney will be even more successful in 2007 than in 2006.

7 - OLD MEDIA TO TAKE ON NEW MEDIA

After many failed attempts, old media will wake up and realize that Google is worth much more than they are combined and they try to collude to take on Google. They will continue to think defensively and ask Google to cease indexing their sites, Google refuses; things get ugly and they ask all video file sharing sites to take down videos. Google pays off one media company to play one against the others.

The charade ends when Google buys a media company: either a newspaper company, a magazine company or a radio company. The notion of a fat, juicy premium from Google makes the more diversified media companies calm down.

However, no offensive game plan: no successor to Napster or AllofMP3, no successor to or YouTube Killer.

All right, so they won’t ask Google not to index their content. But it would be a pretty amazing showdown.

The Street wonders how Yahoo!’s Terry Semel will fare… more on this below.

2006 marked a year when many old media companies fared well: Disney, News Corp, Time Warner and even Clear Channel (CCU) did well. We expect this to continue as many shed underperforming assets and expect more from faster growing divisions.

Which leads us to…

8 - OUTDOOR TAKES OFF

Clear Channel begins to integrate Wifi billboards, Viacom (or is it CBS Outdoors now?) enables digital outdoor signs to allow for audio and video ads, time-targeted and weather-targeted ads.

9 - SATELLITE RADIO CRASHES

Crash is too strong of a word, but we don’t see satellite radio getting stronger. For more details, click here. Sirius’ Mel Karmazin resigns… and joins Yahoo! as CEO. Terry Semel hands off the baton, looking like a genius and joins an old media company’s board.

10 - WIRELESS HYPE

We’re big believers in wireless, who isn’t? But it’s still 75% hype and 25% substance. There will be some common sense injected in this market: companies raising $100 million in financing? Give me a break.

So, there you have it.

DISCLOSURE: I think all disclosures are in there. Please note that as a writer and entrepreneur, some of these “so-called” trends I believe in so much that I am also trying to capitalize on. It’s not the other way around.

Otherwise, of the companies mentioned above I only own shares in Yahoo!
http://media.seekingalpha.com/article/23373





The Lazy Top 10 Anything
Dan Mitchell

AS any media consumer knows, this is the season of the list. Dan Hunter of the blog Terra Nova, which focuses on virtual worlds and online gaming, notes that late December “is the point where lazy editors tell their lazy pundits to knock out a couple of hundred words structured around the topic: ‘Top Ten Moments in X for 2006,’ ” where X stands for the subject the media outlet covers (terranova.blogs.com).

In the blogosphere, the top 10 moments of 2006 tend to involve navel gazing. Kyle Bunch of Blogebrity.com offered his list of the “Top 10 Blogebrities of 2006” to Laist.com. They included Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs, and Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com. At No. 1: Ze Frank, whose daily videos take on subjects ranging from trade sanctions on North Korea to which fresh fruits are best for wearing on your fingers (zefrank.com/theshow).

Most of the lists, though, are much more down to Earth. CNNMoney.com proffered the 10 “best and worst” technology stocks. The best: Nvidia, a maker of graphics chips whose shares doubled this year. The worst: ADC Telecommunications, whose stock has fallen by more than a third.

Advertising Age commissioned the Consumerist to write up “Top 10 Biggest Business Debacles” of 2006. The Consumerist did not include, say, the implosion of Amaranth Advisors, a hedge fund that lost $6.6 billion in bad bets on natural gas futures.

Rather, the No. 1 debacle was when an AOL customer service representative refused to cancel a customer’s account. That customer, Vincent Ferrari, recorded the call, and much to AOL’s chagrin, posted it online. “Subsequently,” the Consumerist notes, “AOL began to hemorrhage subscribers at record levels” (consumerist.com).

Consumeraffairs.org listed the year’s top 10 scams. If you believe the recent barrage of spam promoting pump-and-dump stock schemes must be at No. 1, you’re mistaken: it’s No. 6. The biggest scam based on complaints the site collected was the fake-lottery swindle, which promised victims (again, often via spam) that they had won money in a Canadian or European lottery. Targets were duped into sending money to cover insurance or taxes.

Some lists are particularly esoteric. The European-focused Tech Digest lists what it thinks are the top 10 “retro gadgets” of the year. Its No. 1 pick: the SpeckTone iPod docking station, which looks like “that ‘wireless’ your grandparents had,” but “is every bit the modern docking station” (techdigest.tv).

Looking back is only half the fun. Predictions for the coming year make up the other half.

Business 2.0 offers “15 Surprises Ahead in 2007.” At the top: “India and China race to the moon.” At No. 8: the release of Windows Vista, “bug fixes willing” (business2.com).

The burgeoning online-marketing blog ShoeMoney predicts that in 2007, Microsoft will acquire Yahoo, and offers 10 reasons. Most of them have to do with Microsoft being far behind Google and other competitors in areas including search technology, online video and social networking. ShoeMoney’s proprietor, Jeremy Schoemaker, believes Yahoo would give Microsoft a leg up (shoemoney.com).

Blogger Todd Russell offers a point-by-point rebuttal at MakeYouGoHmm.com.

Search Demographics Google says its top 10 searches this year were nearly all technology- or Web-focused. “Bebo” was the No. 1 search term, Google says. “MySpace” was No. 2.

Over at Yahoo, the results were a bit more, um, common. “Britney Spears” came out on top. “WWE” was No. 2. Other female celebrities made up most of the rest. AOL’s list showed that its users were more utilitarian, searching for “weather,” “dictionary” and “maps.”

“Looking back over the results,” writes Nicholas Carr on RoughType, “I think I can suggest the following market segmentation: Google users are dweebs. Yahoo users are horndogs. And AOL users are geezers” (roughtype.com).

A blogger at Business 2.0, though, notes that “these lists are essentially works of fiction produced by the search engines’ PR departments” (blogs.business2.com).

Complete links are at nytimes.com/business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/bu.../30online.html





It’s O.K. to Fall Behind the Technology Curve
Damon Darlin

The day after Christmas, prices on big screen TVs went down and Raul Axtle pounced.

Mr. Axtle and his 16-year-old son, Shaheen, headed to a Best Buy electronics store in Emeryville, Calif., to buy the TV that Shaheen had decided was the perfect screen for displaying video games, a 40-inch Samsung liquid crystal display flat panel.

It sold for $3,000 in April when it was introduced, but Mr. Axtle bought it for $1,600: $600 less than it was before Christmas.

And, yes, he knows it will be even cheaper tomorrow. “Everything keeps coming down in price,” he said. “Next year the TVs will be even better.”

Paying less in the future for a device that can do more is now taken for granted when shopping for consumer electronics. Gone is last century’s theory of planned obsolescence in which manufacturers designed and built products that would quickly wear out and have to be replaced. Whether it is a big flat screen TV or cellphone, handheld music player, digital camera, flash drive and or external hard drive, these electronics do not usually wear out before they are replaced. Rather, the consumer may feel compelled to buy because the device does more, does it faster or does it better for less money than the original.

“There is a fundamental shift that is taking place,” says Samir Bhavnani, research director at Current Analysis, a market research firm. “People thought a product would last 10 years. They keep it three years. They upgrade their cellphone every year.”

But this new form of obsolescence can stymie the consumer because it makes little sense to buy now if the product will be cheaper tomorrow. Knowing when to buy becomes as important as knowing what to buy, particularly now through the Super Bowl on Feb. 4 as retailers and manufacturers knock prices down to extend the holiday buying season.

Mr. Axtle, who already has a 51-inch Sony flat-panel TV in his “entertainment room,” thinks of TV like he did PCs more than a decade ago. “You’d get the most money could buy,” he said, but it wasn’t enough because the technology changed so quickly, making the PC obsolete in only a few years. “You couldn’t hope to get ahead,” he said.

The best advice to consumers back then was to “future proof” your PC by buying the one with the most memory, the biggest hard drive and the fastest processor. Now, when people buy PCs there is less thought given to getting ahead of the technology curve.

You cannot hope to keep pace with the technological change. You buy what you need when you need it — and when you can truly afford it.

It might be useful to apply the PC lessons to TVs and other devices. The best prices for TVs right now are for a level of screen resolution called 720p, which is what the Axtles bought.

The number is television industry shorthand for the number of pixels, or dots, on the screen. More pixels and the picture is more defined. So TVs with 1080p are better. But they are also more expensive. A 46-inch Sony liquid crystal display TV, for example, with 1080p resolution costs about 40 percent more than Sony’s 720p version. “If you buy 1080p, you pay a pretty high price premium,” Mr. Bhavnani said. “Ten years down the line, 1080p will still be fine and it will be cheaper.”

But isn’t something even better coming? Yes, 1440p, an even higher level of resolution, although at this point only one maker, a large but obscure Taiwanese manufacturer, Chi Mei Optoelectronics, claims to have one ready for production in 2007.

Do not get flummoxed thinking about ever-higher levels of resolution when you still have the faithful Magnavox with a cathode ray tube glowing in the living room. Stan Glasgow, president of Sony’s electronics unit in the United States, says resolution will continue to improve, just like digital cameras take pictures with more megapixels or PCs come with ever-larger hard drives. “It will be a longtime coming,” he said of the 1440p standard. (Several industry analysts said it would be affordable around the end of the decade.)

You want to know what to do now. The basic point to remember is that in screens with a diagonal measurement of less than 60 inches, which is what most people buy, it makes little difference whether the TV is 720p or 1080p. That is because if your TV is 10 feet away or more, you cannot tell the difference, said Carlton Bale, an engineer and home theater design consultant who runs a blog on big-screen TVs.

“Most people do not sit that close to their TV,” Mr. Bale said. His blog, carltonbale.com, has a useful chart (http://www.carltonbale.com/wp-conten...tion_chart.png) that shows how close a TV has to be to the viewer before it makes a difference.

So why does Mr. Bale want a 1080p screen? “Every enthusiast with a 720p home theater right now is wishing they’d waited for 1080p, myself included,” he said. He’d like to be able to take advantage of high-definition content on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc that is just hitting stores and of the more immersive real-theater feeling that comes when you sit close enough to the big-screen TV to fill most of your entire field of vision.

Nonetheless, he counsels against trying to future proof. “Don’t go for the highest-end model out there,” he said. “You probably won’t be able to regularly use the features of the highest-end models for a while.”

Screens, meanwhile, will get bigger. And prices are expected to fall at the same pace as recent years. While the resolution may not change drastically over the next few years, manufacturers have the technology to tweak the contrast ratio, color saturation and color accuracy to improve the picture quality in smaller increments.

“The rate of change in capabilities will go so much faster,” said Steve Tirado, chief executive of Silicon Image, a chip maker that specializes in the devices that connect one device to another. “It will only get better every year.”

Still, Mr. Tirado said: “It is of little comfort for consumers. It will be like the early days of the PC. At a certain point, it will be as good as it will ever be.”

That good-enough feeling has not hurt the recent sales of PCs, at least sales of notebook computers. Even though technological improvement of computers has slowed significantly, during the holidays, sales jumped 64 percent, according to NPD, a firm that tracks consumer products.

A similar effect was seen with digital cameras, where consumers are discovering that while they could buy 8- or 10-megapixel cameras, 5- and 6-megapixels is good enough. Camera makers reacted by styling cameras for different kinds of consumers and adding features like special modes for shooting underwater.

Despite earlier predictions that camera sales would slow, 2006 proved to be a record year, according to NPD. More than 30 million were sold in the United States, 20 percent more than the year before, as the average price of a digital camera dropped about 12 percent, to around $163, from $182 a year earlier.

As for 16-year-old Shaheen Axtle, after getting the TV, he was thinking about replacing his year-old cellphone. “There will always be something better,” he said. “I’m used to that by now.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/te...y/30money.html





UK in Plastic Electronics Drive
BBC

UK firm Plastic Logic has said it will build the world's first factory to produce plastic electronic devices.

The Cambridge-based company has secured $100m (£50.6m) venture capital funding for the German plant.

Once built it will manufacture circuits crucial for the development of novel gadgets such as electronic paper.

Unlike silicon, plastic circuits can be made using simple printing techniques and could dramatically reduce the price of consumer electronic goods.

The factory will be built in Dresden, known for its strength in silicon technology.

Plastic spin-out

Plastic Logic is a spin out from Cambridge University and has been developing plastic electronic devices since 2000.

The firm is working on "control circuits" that sit behind screens on electronic displays. In particular, it is working on the electronic circuitry for "electronic paper" displays.

These flexible devices can store the text of thousands of books or newspapers and could one day replace paper.

Industry experts forecast the market for plastic electronics could be worth $30billion by 2015.

When it is built in 2008, the new factory could produce one million control circuits in a market that is tipped to expand to 41.6 million units in 2010.

The factory will be backed by funding from Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ss/6227575.stm





Interactive Boom Drives Need for Better Upload Speed
Anick Jesdanun

Blame the Internet's legacy systems if Jay Glatfelter falls asleep Thursday mornings.

Co-host of an online audio show about "Lost," Glatfelter must wait about 40 minutes to finish posting his program to the Internet in the hours after ABC's Wednesday night broadcast. If he were downloading it as his listeners do, the same file would take only a few minutes over a cable modem.

"At 3 in the morning, that's really brutal," said Glatfelter, 21, who lives in Raleigh, N.C. "It's an extra 40 minutes and you want to go to sleep."

The information superhighway isn't truly equal in both directions. Cable and phone companies typically sell asymmetrical Internet services to households, reserving the bulk of the lanes for downloading movies and other files and leaving the shoulders at most for people to share, or upload, files with others.

The imbalance makes less sense as the Internet becomes truly interactive. Users are increasingly becoming contributors and not just consumers, sharing photos, video and in Glatfelter's case, podcasts.

In a nod to the trend of user-generated content, Time magazine recently named "You" -- everyone who has contributed -- as its Person of the Year.

It's a little-known fact because advertisements for cable and DSL services generally focus on download speeds. Glatfelter, like other Internet content providers, is stuck unless he shells out hundreds of dollars a month for business-grade services that provide equal speeds upstream and downstream.

Traffic boost: YouTube's rapid rise in 2006 -- and Google Inc.'s November purchase of the video-sharing site for $1.76 billion -- "clearly points to symmetric traffic as being important," said John Cioffi, a Stanford engineering professor and pioneer in DSL technology.

Furthermore, people also are increasingly sharing among themselves, rather than through central servers that normally absorb the upload pressures. In recent months, Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. and other movie studios began embracing the BitTorrent file-sharing system to more economically distribute online movies.

It's only a matter of time before people will want to retrieve digital media from home while vacationing at a beach house.

Yet the ability to upload still lags -- in some cases, downloads are 10 to 15 times faster.

"The system is a hangover of the old mass media days," said Paul Saffo, a technology analyst in Palo Alto, Calif. "Some consumers are uploading a tremendous amount of information and that's the thing the establishment just doesn't get."

Not an issue? Cable and phone providers insist they are keeping up with demand, in many cases increasing both upload and download speeds, but they say they haven't had a huge clamoring for symmetry.

"Speed has not been an issue for most of our customers, or we'd hear about them," said Mark Harrad, spokesman for Time Warner Cable.

AT&T Inc. spokesman Michael Coe said customers may indeed be sharing more files, but "the majority of their time is spent downloading. As needs change, we'll look at offerings that meet customers' needs, whether it's symmetric service or it's just higher upload speeds."

He said AT&T tripled its upload speeds within the past two years, but downloads remain four times faster for its middle-tier DSL service. The gap is wider for higher-priced plans.

Even Verizon Communications Inc.'s superfast FiOS initiative brings download speeds 2.5 to 7.5 times faster than uploads.

Technical trouble: The origins of the imbalance are technical. Too much uploading can interfere with download signals on DSL services, while cable TV providers must squeeze uploading within the broadcast spectrum below television's Channel 2.

But even as engineers overcome the limitations, it's unclear how much service providers will allocate to uploads. More bandwidth for sharing means less for television, video on demand and the like.

"In any kind of revenue-generating model, the consumer is willing to pay to receive something," said John Chapman, a distinguished engineer with Cisco Systems Inc. "A lot less consumers are willing to pay for the privilege of contributing" video and other media.

Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media, said cable and phone companies both see the Internet as threats to their traditional holds in video and voice.

For many Internet users, the imbalance still synchs with their needs.

YouTube visitors, for instance, view more than 100 million video clips a day but upload only 65,000. Elsewhere, the few uploads that people do send tend to be small files -- an e-mail attachment or text to a discussion board.

Furthermore, uploads aren't often time sensitive. Internet users can send photos and other items in the background, but want to watch the movie clip right away.

Americans can usually pay more if they need symmetric services, but many aren't even convinced they need high-speed service at all, said Maribel Lopez, a vice president with Forrester Research.

Sondra Lowell, 62, who uploads several video items a week to promote an independent movie she's producing in Los Angeles, only recently abandoned dial-up for a low-end DSL plan.

"I'm not doing too badly for their pricing," she said. "It's not like I'm uploading 100 a day where I really do need the speed."

And faster upload speeds won't always translate into performance, said Mike Baldwin, senior product manager for Symantec Corp.'s pcAnywhere remote-access software, which can generate data-heavy transfers. Other factors include computer speeds, available memory and bottlenecks elsewhere in the network, even the parts designed for symmetric traffic.

But most experts agree that demand for better upload speeds -- if not symmetric -- will only increase with time.

"We hear a lot about the dial-up wait," said John Horrigan, associate director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "If broadband providers aren't planning appropriately to increase upload speed, broadband wait may be emerging in the next several years."

Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime, said 10 minutes of camcorder footage would take more than eight hours to send at the highest resolution. As more people buy camcorders, he said, they will grow increasingly frustrated.

Telecommuters, meanwhile, want to send PowerPoints and other files as quickly as they can to their offices, and emerging tasks like online backups, video conferencing and telemedicine will tax systems even more, experts say.

"Users every year get a little more demanding," said Jake Soder, director of product management with broadband provider Speakeasy Inc.

Broadband options are already better in many countries outside the United States, thanks to better government incentives and fewer rural regions that are difficult to reach. There, residents have access to a wider range of symmetric services.

Gary Bachula, a vice president with the super-speedy, next-generation Internet2 network for government agencies and universities, said users in the United States might not even realize yet what they are missing. Service providers, he said, should be nudging customers toward data-intensive applications and realize they will pay more for value.

"Cable companies have been busy trying to offer telephone services, and telephone companies are trying to duplicate the cable TV model," Bachula said. "They should stop focusing on 20th century services and realize it's the 21st century. There are exciting new advanced services they could make money from."
http://www.yorkdispatch.com/business/ci_4935990





Venice Project Would Break Many Users' ISP Conditions
Venice Project would break many users' ISP conditions

Internet television system The Venice Project could break users' monthly internet bandwith limits in hours, according to the team behind it.

It downloads 320 megabytes (MB) per hour from users' computers, meaning that users could reach their monthly download limits in hours and that it could be unusable for bandwidth-capped users.

The Venice Project is the new system being developed by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the Scandinavian entrepreneurs behind the revolutionary services Kazaa and Skype. It is currently being used by 6,000 beta testers and is due to be launched next year.

The data transfer rate is revealed in the documentation sent to beta testers and the instructions make it very clear what the bandwidth requirements are so that users are not caught out.

Under a banner saying 'Important notice for users with limits on their internet usage', the document says: "The Venice Project is a streaming video application, and so uses a relatively high amount of bandwidth per hour. One hour of viewing is 320MB downloaded and 105 Megabytes uploaded, which means that it will exhaust a 1 Gigabyte cap in 10 hours. Also, the application continues to run in the background after you close the main window."

"For this reason, if you pay for your bandwidth usage per megabyte or have your usage capped by your ISP, you should be careful to always exit the Venice Project client completely when you are finished watching it," says the document

Many ISPs offer broadband connections which are unlimited to use by time, but have limits on the amount of data that can be transferred over the connection each month. Though limits are 'advisory' and not strict, users who regularly far exceed the limits break the terms of their deals.

BT's most basic broadband package BT Total Broadband Package 1, for example, has a 2GB monthly 'usage guideline'. This would be reached after 20 hours of viewing.

The software is also likely to transfer data even when not being used. The Venice system is going to run on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which means that users host and send the programmes to other users in an automated system.

OUT-LAW has seen screenshots from the system and talked to one of the testers of it, who reports very favourably on its use. "This is going to be the one. I've used some of the other software out there and it's fine, but my dad could use this, they've just got it right," he said. "It looks great, you fire it up and in two minutes you're live, you're watching television."

The source said that claims being made for the system being "near high definition" in terms of picture quality are wide of the mark. "It's not high definition. It's the same as normal television," he said.
http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=7604





The Digital Give And Take
Derek Slater

Many progressives are partying like it's 1992 in the wake of the November election. But when it comes to technology and civil liberties policy, the newly elected Congress presents both new opportunities and new challenges. The truth is, neither Democrats nor Republicans are universally good or bad across all digital rights issues.

The power shift in Congress is likely to generate greater scrutiny of government surveillance. Democrats have already indicated that they will hold hearings regarding the massive and illegal National Security Agency spying program. In a speech last week, incoming Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., deemed investigating the program a top priority and reportedly threatened to use subpoenas to get information from the Bush administration.

Such oversight is long overdue. It has now been over a year since the press first reported on this unprecedented violation of the Fourth Amendment and the legal safeguards set up by Congress. Three courts have already rejected the government's bogus arguments shielding the program from judicial scrutiny, including Judge Vaughn Walker in the EFF's case against AT&T for its role in the spying. Yet Congress has so far failed to thoroughly investigate the details of this still-shadowy program, let alone pass legislation to stop it. Instead, it spent significant energy last year considering proposals that could have rubberstamped the spying and let the government off the hook for breaking the law.

Fortunately, these bills stalled, but holding the line isn't enough. Investigative hearings could be an important step towards reining in this illegal activity and protecting the millions of ordinary Americans whose privacy is still being violated.

The newly elected Congress' effects may be more mixed when it comes to digital copyright and protecting the public's interests. Hollywood and major record labels have long sought legislation that would expand copyright holders' control over innovation and threaten your legitimate use of great gadgets like TiVos and iPods. A broad coalition of groups including EFF helped beat back such power grabs last year, but the entertainment industry will be back again with some of its Hill supporters in stronger positions.

Some Democrats are among the entertainment industry's strongest allies. For instance, incoming House Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee Chairman Howard Berman, D-Calif., hails from the Los Angeles area and is a well-known defender of large entertainment companies' interests. In 2002, he authored a bill that would have allowed copyright holders to break the law in their efforts to stop peer-to-peer file sharing. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced a bill last year that would have crippled digital radio and satellite devices, precluding anyone from creating a TiVo-for-radio without draconian recording restrictions.

On the other hand, Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., has championed the public's interest in digital copyright issues and will likely re-introduce a proposal that would help consumers exercise their rights to make legitimate use of copyrighted media. The record labels also lost a key ally in outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. Recording Industry Association of America Chairman Mitch Bainwol was formerly chief of staff for Senator Frist, who co-introduced Senator Feinstein's digital radio restrictions bill.

Finally, the election may bring broader, bipartisan support for electronic voting reform, but not because of who was or wasn't elected. When voting systems fail to make sure every vote is accurately counted, that's bad for our whole democracy, not just a particular candidate or political party.

Congress failed to pass electronic voting reform in 2006, and voters paid the price at the polls. Most significantly, millions of voters nationwide cast their votes on e-voting machines that lack paper trails. Voters thus could not verify that their votes were accurately recorded, and election officials were not able to conduct full and thorough recounts.

E-voting problems are especially tragic given that these machines were used in some of the nation's closest races. For instance, in Sarasota County, Florida, the congressional race was decided by 363 votes, yet over 18,000 ballots cast on the county's e-voting machines registered no vote in the race, an exceptional anomaly. A coalition of advocacy groups including EFF are representing Democratic and Republican voters in a lawsuit that seeks a re-vote.

This problem reaches beyond any one county or state. Thankfully, Congress can help provide a nationwide solution by passing Representative Rush Holt's, D-N.J., Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act this year. Holt's bill includes a requirement of a paper audit trail for all electronic voting machines, random audits, and public availability of all code used in elections. The bill gained the support of 220 bipartisan co-sponsors in the last Congress and will be re-introduced at the start of the new year.

That's just a sampling of technology and civil liberties issues likely to come up in 2007. For continuing updates on new legislation, check out EFF's blog and Action Center .
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/200...e_and_take.php





U.S. Bars Lab From Testing Electronic Voting
Christopher Drew

A laboratory that has tested most of the nation’s electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.

The company, Ciber Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colo., has also come under fire from analysts hired by New York State over its plans to test new voting machines for the state. New York could eventually spend $200 million to replace its aging lever devices.

Experts on voting systems say the Ciber problems underscore longstanding worries about lax inspections in the secretive world of voting-machine testing. The action by the federal Election Assistance Commission seems certain to fan growing concerns about the reliability and security of the devices.

The commission acted last summer, but the problem was not disclosed then. Officials at the commission and Ciber confirmed the action in recent interviews.

Ciber, the largest tester of the nation’s voting machine software, says it is fixing its problems and expects to gain certification soon.

Experts say the deficiencies of the laboratory suggest that crucial features like the vote-counting software and security against hacking may not have been thoroughly tested on many machines now in use.

“What’s scary is that we’ve been using systems in elections that Ciber had certified, and this calls into question those systems that they tested,” said Aviel D. Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins.

Professor Rubin said that although some software bugs had shown up quickly, in other instances “you might have to use the systems for a while before something happens.”

Officials at the commission and other election experts said it was essential for a laboratory to follow its quality-control procedures and document all its testing processes to instill confidence in the results.

Commission officials said that they were evaluating the overall diligence of the laboratory and that they did not try to determine whether its weaknesses had contributed to problems with specific machines.

Computer scientists have shown that some electronic machines now in use are vulnerable to hacking. Some scientists caution that even a simple software error could affect thousands of votes.

In various places, elections have been complicated by machines that did not start, flipped votes from one candidate to another or had trouble tallying the votes.

Until recently, the laboratories that test voting software and hardware have operated without federal scrutiny. Even though Washington and the states have spent billions to install the new technologies, the machine manufacturers have always paid for the tests that assess how well they work, and little has been disclosed about any flaws that were discovered.

As soon as federal officials began a new oversight program in July, they detected the problems with Ciber. The commission held up its application for interim accreditation, thus barring Ciber from approving new voting systems in most states.

Ciber, a large information technology company, also has a $3 million contract to help New York test proposed systems from six manufacturers. Nystec, a consulting firm in Rome, N.Y., that the state hired, filed a report in late September criticizing Ciber for creating a plan to test the software security that “did not specify any test methods or procedures for the majority of the requirements.” The report said the plan did not detail how Ciber would look for bugs in the computer code or check hacking defenses.

A spokeswoman for Ciber, Diane C. Stoner, said that the company believed that it had addressed all the problems and that it expected to receive its initial federal accreditation this month. Federal officials said they were evaluating the changes the company had made.

Ms. Stoner said in a statement that although the Election Assistance Commission had found deficiencies, they “were not because Ciber provided incomplete, inaccurate or flawed testing, but because we did not document to the E.A.C.’s liking all of the testing that we were performing.”

She added that the test plan cited in New York was just a draft and that Ciber had been working with Nystec to ensure additional security testing.

The co-chairman of the New York State Board of Elections, Douglas A. Kellner, said Ciber had tightened its testing. But Mr. Kellner said yesterday that Nystec and Ciber continued to haggle over the scope of the security testing.

New York is one of the last states to upgrade its machines, and it also has created some of the strictest standards for them. Mr. Kellner said only two of the six bidders, Diebold Election Systems and Liberty Election Systems, seemed close to meeting all the requirements.

Besides Ciber, two other companies, SysTest Labs of Denver and Wyle Laboratories, in El Segundo, Calif., test electronic voting machines. Ciber, which has been testing the machines since 1997, checks just software. Wyle examines hardware, and SysTest can look at both.

The chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, Paul S. DeGregorio, said SysTest and Wyle received interim accreditations last summer. Mr. DeGregorio said two other laboratories had also applied to enter the field.

Congress required greater federal oversight when it passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Since then, the government also put up more than $3 billion to help states and localities buy electronic machines, to avoid a repeat of the hanging punch-card chads that caused such confusion in the 2000 presidential election.

The commission was never given a substantial budget, and it did not finish creating the oversight program until last month. Until then, the laboratories had been at the heart of the system to evaluate voting machines, a system that seemed oddly cobbled together.

While the federal government created standards for the machines, most of the states enacted laws to make them binding. The states also monitored the testing, and much of that work was left to a handful of current and former state election officials who volunteered their time.

As a result, voting rights advocates and other critics have long been concerned about potential conflicts of interest, because the manufacturers hire the laboratories and largely try to ensure confidentiality.

Michael I. Shamos, a computer scientist who examines voting machines for Pennsylvania, said about half had significant defects that the laboratories should have caught.

Besides certifying the laboratories, the Election Assistance Commission will have three staff members and eight part-time technicians to approve test plans for each system and check the results. The manufacturers will be required to report mechanical breakdowns and botched tallies, and Mr. DeGregorio said those reports would be on the agency’s Web site.

Dr. Shamos said, “This is not the sea change that was needed.”

He said he was disappointed that the commission had hired some of the same people involved in the states’ monitoring program and that it never announced it had found problems with Ciber operations.

Dr. Rubin of Johns Hopkins said the laboratories should be required to hire teams of hackers to ferret out software vulnerabilities.

And the laboratories will still be paid by the voting machine companies, though a bill now in Congress could change that to government financing.

A recent appearance in Sarasota, Fla., by the SysTest Labs president, Brian T. Phillips, also raised eyebrows. After a Congressional election in the Sarasota area ended in a recount last month, the victorious Republican candidate hired Mr. Phillips as a consultant to monitor the state’s examination of whether there had been a malfunction in the voting machines.

Several critics questioned whether Mr. Phillips should have taken such work, either because of its partisan nature or because it represented such a public defense of the industry.

Mr. Phillips said he did not see any conflict because his laboratory had not tested the software used in Sarasota. And the project does not appear to have violated the ethics rules of the election commission.

Ian Urbina contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/wa...rtner=homepage





When ‘Refurbished’ Takes on an Earth-Friendly Vibe
Barry Rehfeld

JARED SELTZER faced more than the usual megabyte headaches recently while shopping for a desktop computer for his office in Takoma Park, Md. As the information technology director of the Center for a New American Dream, a small environmental group, he wanted to buy a computer that would be relatively easy on the ecosystem.

His search brought him to the Dell Web site, where he chose an OptiPlex model that had been refurbished.

“I wasn’t losing anything by not buying new,” Mr. Seltzer said. “And it was good that I was being true to what we’re about.”

Refurbished computers, he explained, are not generally made from old clunkers on their last legs. They are typically returned by buyers shortly after delivery and spruced up by the manufacturer. And they often have the same guarantees that new computers do.

Like many other consumers, Mr. Seltzer is concerned about the environmental effects of computers, which can contain hazardous substances including lead, cadmium and mercury, among others.

Hazards occur when these substances are extracted from the earth and, on the other end, when they are disposed of. At either end, toxic substances can find their way into the air, soil, water and eventually into people, where they have the potential to cause serious health problems.

Refurbished computers lessen the blow to the environment because they have effectively been recycled, albeit at warp speed. They can also be easier on the bank account. Mr. Seltzer’s desktop cost him $379 — less than half the $800 price of a new one.

Lynn Rubinstein, executive director of the Northeast Recycling Council in Brattleboro, Vt., faced a similar challenge when she needed to replace her personal laptop in October. She could not find a refurbished model to fit her needs, so she consulted the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, or Epeat, an electronics rating system available free at www.epeat.net.

The system, now five months old, is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and is meant primarily for bulk buyers. But it is useful for individuals, too. Electronics — only computers now, with more products to follow — can be achieve ratings of gold, silver or bronze.

Ratings are done largely on the honor system, subject to reviews by the Green Electronics Council, a nonprofit group in Portland, Ore., that maintains the list. Manufacturers score their products against a set of environmental standards, including levels of hazardous substances, energy efficiency and ease of recycling. There are 23 requirements just to win a bronze.

More than 300 types of desktops, laptops and monitors have received at least a bronze, and most also have a silver rating, which means that they also meet at least half of 28 optional standards. None of the computers have it to gold, which means that they would meet all the required standards as well as three-quarters of the optional ones.

An NEC monitor made from a corn-based plastic has the top score: 42, just two points shy of the gold standard. Dell, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo all have at least one desktop and laptop that qualify for silver.

Epeat-rated computers are likely to save buyers money on their electric bills. The E.P.A. estimates that 600,000 megawatts of energy, as well as 13 million pounds of hazardous waste, will be saved over the next five years by the purchase of Epeat-rated computers.

“It was enough for me just to get one that made the list at any level,” said Ms. Rubinstein, who chose a Dell Latitude computer that had a bronze rating. She paid the same price as she would have for a comparable laptop without an Epeat rating, but the Latitude was listed as having significantly lower levels of hazardous substances.

Consumers seeking new environmentally sound computers may also want to consider keeping their existing ones just a while longer, said Diganta Das, a research scientist at the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering at the University of Maryland in College Park. There will be a much broader selection of greener computers and other electronics by 2008 because all manufacturers are under pressure to make their products meet hazardous-substance standards that are as high or higher than those of Epeat, he said.

The push is coming from new technology and government initiatives. The most important political change came in July, when the European Union issued its Restrictions on Hazardous Substances. The RoHS directive essentially will require all manufacturers and retailers selling their products in the European Union to greatly reduce the presence of six hazards.

There is nothing like those standards in the United States, but the directive is nonetheless having an impact here. Wal-Mart Stores, for example, said last spring that it would sell the first laptop compliant with the European standards in the United States: a $700 Toshiba model. Other computer makers are quickly following suit.

CONCERNS about the environment don’t end once a computer has been bought. Consumers also need to consider what to do with their computers when it comes time to retire them.

According to the National Safety Council, three-quarters of all existing computers are sitting in closets and other places where they are no longer being used. Besides the closet option, there are two other main solutions: disposal and recycling.

Disposal, however, is the hardest on the environment. In May, New Hampshire became the fourth state — after California, Massachusetts and Maine — to ban the disposal of all video display devices from landfills and incinerators. Two months later, Minnesota passed a law prohibiting the disposal of monitors in the trash.

As for the recycling option, many localities offer programs. But the best recycling route may be the one back to the source: Many manufacturers now take back old computers free, and some of their parts can be reused.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/bu...y/31green.html





MP3s for a Nickel
Statastico

In online music news, the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) is suing the Russian website allofmp3.com for the comical sum of $1.65 trillion, more than double Russia’s nominal GDP of $763 billion. To be sure, allofmp3 is skating on thin legal ice by using loopholes in lax Russian copyright laws to sell MP3s discounted as much as 90% from iTunes pricing. But if it weren’t so legally ambiguous, who would complain about song downloads for as little as a dime?

A few weeks ago I had the good fortune of happening upon a Tower records in the process of liquidating its CDs for half price. The place was mobbed. It seems that while people no longer can stomach paying $19 for a CD, the $9.50 price point was much more tolerable. This is not as much a lesson in bricks and mortar versus online music, the lesson is that people buy more music when the music is less expensive.

iTunes has noticed that the $10 price point is significant to customers. But it’s still too high. After all, they’ve compressed a higher quality digital format, cut out shipping costs and eliminated printing of CD booklets. It’s possible to buy CDs online for a similar price, the only trouble is that you’ll have to wait for several days to receive it.

A couple of years ago during an NPR round table about digital rights management (DRM), someone suggested a groundbreaking approach. Why not put every song ever recorded online and let users download them for a nickel each? When allofmp3 started that’s basically what they did. At that price, there’s no reason not to be impulsive. Five cent downloads would reduce incentives for file sharing and encourage listeners to experiment with new music.

A nickel per song doesn’t sound like much revenue for artists, but artists would drastically increase sales volume. If artists picked up 60% of the revenues, or 3 cents per song, then selling an albums with a total of 15 songs would only earn them $.45. If 10 million people downloaded the album they would earn $4.5 million on album sales alone. And what if the artists benefited from the mashups and amateur remixes that now proliferate on the web? Artists could offer up song pieces for sale and then split revenues with bedroom DJs.

As hard drive prices decline, the cost of storing music approaches zero. And if the price of acquiring the music approaches zero, then people have no reason not to buy it. Imagine the innovative companies that might spring up: online DJs who choose playlists from your own MP3 collection. Or, while listening to online radio you could simply push the repeat button for a song you like. The service would charge you a nickel, download the song instantly to your hard drive. Better yet, store your music library of thousands of songs online and stream it wherever you go.

This will never appeal to the RIAA lawyers who make their living by imagineering $1.65 trillion lawsuits. But it would benefit the artists and the public. And artists that no longer make their living attempting to sell overpriced albums can always sell overpriced tickets to sold out concerts (there’s evidence that this is already happening), incentivizing bands to play live more often.

Statastico would love a copy of TV on the Radio’s critically acclaimed “Return to Cookie Mountain.” The single Wolf Like Me is fantastic, as is their live show and nearly everything they’ve produced thus far. So how does someone like me get music? At about $.27 per track emusic.com if my first choice. If they don’t have it (and they don’t), then I buy the CD and endure the long wait. There are many other options, so I decided to evaluate them compared to my dream website anysongonearthforanickel.com.

Statastico compiled an entirely biased and unscientific assessment of the methods most people might use to acquire music. There are two scores, the price score and the usability score. Price score was taken as the inverse of the price as a percentage of $11.50. In other words, if it’s free it scored 100 and if it is close to $11.50 it scored near 0. The usability score is based out of 100 and is the average of the scores from the following 6 categories:

1. Legality: Sharing songs with friends, file sharing and allofmp3.com scored 1 and 10 in this category; all others scored 100.
2. Ease of Use: File sharing is time consuming and risky, while amazon.com and iTunes are straightforward. Emusic was marked down to 75 because they require a subscription.
3. Music Selection: How many albums can you find? Predictably, our theoretical “any song on earth for a nickel” came out on top.
4. Flexibility: Can users share the music easily with other, are there digital rights management, can you re-download MP3s that you may have lost (as on emusic)? CDs scored slightly higher because they allow users to select their own music compression, allowing flexibility for more advanced compression formats in the future.
5. Audio Quality: CD format was given 100, AAC was rated higher than MP3s because of better quality at lower bitrates, and file sharing was marked down to 50 out of 100 because of inconsistent downloads.
6. Instant Gratification: How long it takes to get the music? Physical transfers involving UPS scored low, online transfers (except file sharing) scored higher.

As you can see, the fictional website anysongonearthforanickel.com wins. Of the next four best options only allofmp3 would (allegedly) pay royalties to TV on the Radio (emusic doesn’t carry the latest album).

The RIAA should remember that customers - especially young customers - are extremely price sensitive and tech savvy. The RIAA will never shut down peer-to-peer networks, (in fact allpeers just developed an add-on for Firefox). The RIAA must embrace innovation rather than outmoded business models. By shifting the paradigm to low-cost song downloads, artists may once again get paid for their hard work.
http://statastic.com/2007/01/04/mp3s-for-a-nickel/





Can Google Come Out to Play?
Deborah Schoeneman

ON a Thursday afternoon before the holidays, the game room at Google’s new offices in Chelsea was being put to good use. Two engineers were taking a break from coding at the pool table. A programmer in a purple Phish T-shirt was practicing juggling. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses blasted from the flat-screen television, where two 22-year-olds played Guitar Hero, a video game that lets players strum scaled-down guitars — karaoke without the singing.

Only one guitarist, Aaron Karp, worked for Google. “It’s very convenient that he works in such a cool place and invites me over,” said Mr. Karp’s roommate, Alex Hurst, who works in the breaking news division of CNN. “We don’t have this, or Razor scooters, at CNN. It makes me want to work here.”

Last August, Google started moving its 500-plus employees in New York from a cramped Times Square office to a former Port Authority building occupying a full city block, from Eighth Avenue to Ninth Avenue and from 15th Street to 16th Street.

The new office, which officially opened Oct. 2, is the company’s largest engineering center outside its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., which is dubbed the Googleplex.

You could be forgiven for not knowing that a satellite Google campus is growing in downtown Manhattan. There is no Google sign on the building, and it’s hard to catch a glimpse of a Googler, as employees call themselves, on the street because the company gives them every reason to stay within its candy-colored walls.

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan.

The New York tradition of leaving the office to network over lunch or an evening cocktail party has no place at Google, where employees are encouraged to socialize among themselves. There are groups of Gayglers, Newglers and Bikeglers (who bike to work together). Every Thursday afternoon there is a gathering with wine and beer called Thank God It’s Almost Friday (originally it was a T.G.I.F. event, modeled after one in Mountain View, but Googlers in New York didn’t want to stick around late on a Friday).

At lunch on a recent afternoon in the Hemispheres cafeteria, the two major Googler factions, engineers and sales representatives, tended to sit segregated at long tables. It was easy to tell them apart: engineers wore jeans, T-shirts and sneakers; sales representatives wore suits, no tie. There was nary a designer handbag or gray hair in the room. But you’re wrong about who the cool kids are. At last, engineers are the big men (and a few women) on campus.

“These are power geniuses,” said Jane Risen, a statuesque brunette who works in training for the sales staff and is considered among the best dressed on campus — she was wearing a brown blazer from the Gap. “If they don’t have the same social skill or style sense, they’re extremely interesting people or else they don’t get hired.”

The power geniuses are more straight-laced than some of their predecessors in Silicon Alley. During New York’s original dot-com boom, the entrepreneur Josh Harris of Pseudo.com was known for decadent parties in his loft offices that featured live sex shows. DoubleClick was the host of a legendary Willy Wonka-themed party for 2,000 with bartenders as orange Oompa Loompas.

The current Silicon Alley resurgence has brought back a bit of that tradition — the guys of CollegeHumor.com have been celebrating the largess of a multimillion-dollar investment from Barry Diller by holding dance parties at a TriBeCa loft — but the naughtiest it gets for Manhattan Googlers is custom-made trans fat-free ice-cream sandwiches.

FOOD is a major perk at the Manhattan Googleplex. Every Tuesday afternoon, tea with crumpets and scones is served. In the cafeteria a dry-erase board lists local purveyors of the ingredients in the meals like a sign at the Union Square Greenmarket. (Dry-erase boards are big in Google culture; ideas flow quickly).

All the free food has created a problem familiar to college freshmen. “Everyone gains 10 or 15 pounds when they start working here,” said James Tipon, a member of the sales team, who actively contributes to the four pounds of M&Ms consumed by New York Googlers daily. “I definitely gained that when I started working here, but I think I shed some of it,” Mr. Tipon said. “I try to be disciplined but it’s really hard.”

The strategy of keeping employees happy and committed to spending endless hours on campus seems to be working. Richard Burdon, 37, an engineer who joined Google two years ago, has been staying past midnight to prepare for the introduction of a project. (Google’s Manhattan engineers have been responsible for developing Google Maps and are working on some 100 other projects.)

“Google is about as interesting as starting your own startup because you can really follow your own ideas,” said Mr. Burdon, who previously worked for Goldman Sachs, Sony and I.B.M. The only time he could remember leaving the office during the workday was to buy a friend a birthday present.

Sure, the snacks and the employee affinity groups are nice. But the biggest perks are stock options dating from before Google’s initial public offering in August 2004.

The majority of New York Googlers joined the company after its initial public offering, and it was the success of that launch, along with the meteoric rise of the stock (still high, although the price on Friday was around $50 below its high point of $513 in November) that allowed a hiring boom, which lead to the move into new offices.

There doesn’t seem to be open initial public offering envy in the New York office among newer hires, although the question, “How long have you worked here?” carries more weight than at most companies. “I’m not jealous,” said one engineer, Ioannis Tsoukalidis, a recent M.I.T. graduate. “I’m still pretty happy I’m here.”

Google occupies about 300,000 square feet over three floors of its blocklong building. One reason it liked the site, according to the discussion among Google-watching bloggers, is because the building sits over a major Internet fiber-optic line running up Ninth Avenue.

For a Thank God It’s Almost Friday gathering on Dec. 14, Laura Garrett, a sales operations specialist, organized an art show. “Being a Googler and being part of Chelsea, I wanted to do something that was more downtownish than a typical Google event,” said Ms. Garrett, a blonde wearing Marc Jacobs heels. Williamsburg artists created the work on display, for prices from $225 to $8,000. About 150 Googlers showed up and five pieces sold.

It was the first time that employees could bring a guest to an event at their offices. The Empire State Building glowed red and green in the background as if color-coordinated to the Googleplex’s interiors rather than Christmas. By 6:30 p.m., Steve Saviano, 22, a software engineer, was hanging out with his fellow Googlers at a table littered with empty beer and wine bottles.

“This is academic life all over again,” Mr. Saviano said. “But I’m getting paid. This is a 100 percent better option than graduate school.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/fashion/31google.html





Woodies



And Now, Memory on a Twig
Brendan I. Koerner

WHILE entertaining viewers with tales of galactic voyaging and hostile aliens, the “Star Trek” franchise also preached the virtues of interracial (and interspecies) harmony, endearing it to millions. But according to Guido Ooms, a Dutch product designer, “Star Trek’ also warped the minds of consumers and product designers by portraying electronic gadgets as uniformly sleek and unadorned.

“The computer stuff that is coming out right now, it is all plastic and symmetrical and aerodynamic in shape, like ‘Star Trek’ stuff,” said Mr. Ooms, founder of the design studio Oooms in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. “I think there’s no reason for that, really, other than that it looks like it works properly.”

A year ago, Mr. Ooms and his girlfriend, the designer Karin van Lieshout, started brainstorming on ways to demonstrate that high-quality computer products needn’t look antiseptic. A result of their collaboration is a U.S.B. memory stick that takes its product description literally; it is a data storage drive encased in a real, handpicked piece of wood.

The memory stick began, like all of Mr. Ooms’s creations, as a series of rough sketches. In February, he posted the drawings to Core77.com, an online magazine for industrial designers. The feedback was so enthusiastic that Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout decided to make some prototypes, a process that started in a forest outside Eindhoven.

“We went into the woods with big shopping bags and found dead trees that were lying on the floor,” Mr. Ooms said. Not just any branch would do; they focused on sticks with unusually knobby protrusions, or with gnaw marks from rodents.

“Little animals, they make really nice carvings sometimes,” said Mr. Ooms, noting that one squirrel left a pattern resembling a Chinese dragon.

Back at the studio, Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout drilled holes through the center of each piece of wood, sanded and polished the exterior, then inserted a U.S.B. drive they had bought off the shelf from a local electronics shop. The drives were secured inside the wood with dabs of putty.

After the memory sticks went on sale last spring, customers began complaining that the putty wasn’t resilient enough; the drives kept breaking free from their organic casings. So Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout added another step to the construction process, lining each stick’s interior with a veneer of glue.

They also reduced the product’s maximum size, in response to criticism from Apple PowerBook users. Because the newest PowerBooks are so thin, Mr. Ooms said, larger sticks forced the laptops to rise at odd angles. In their forest expeditions, then, Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout must be careful to gather twigs with diameters of less than two inches.

Mr. Ooms says he has been surprised by the popularity of the memory sticks, which are available at Oooms.nl. He estimates that he has sold 3,000, at prices ranging from about $59 for a 256-megabyte version to nearly $92 for the top-of-the-line, one-gigabyte model.

The key to the product’s success, Mr. Ooms says, is the way it makes passers-by do a double take when they see the quintessential information-age accessory, a laptop, paired with the quintessential Stone Age utensil, a wooden stick.

Sales have been so brisk that Mr. Ooms is considering hiring some outside production help. Under a program in the Netherlands, he said, prisoners can be hired to perform basic manufacturing tasks — in this case, that would involve drilling the holes and sanding the twigs.

But there are limits to how much of the work can be outsourced to inmates: unless they can find a Dutch prison with a sizable forest on its grounds, Mr. Ooms and Ms. van Lieshout will continue handling the procurement of raw materials.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/bu...y/31goods.html





Not Everybody Loves Patricia
Jesse Green

AT Frank E. Campbell’s funeral chapel on Madison Avenue two weeks ago, friends and colleagues gathered to remember the actor Peter Boyle, who died on Dec. 12 at 71. They told stories about his impishness, his artfulness, his liberal fervor. Judy Collins sang “Amazing Grace.”

In the pews Patricia Heaton couldn’t stop sobbing. For the nine seasons she had played Debra Barone on the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” Mr. Boyle had played her Neanderthal father-in-law. They passed much of their downtime jousting about politics.

More conservative than he, she would call him a “pinko flag-burning Commie.” He would counter, “So tell me about this Christian God of yours.” Feeling unarmed for such battles, Ray Romano, the show’s star, said he usually hustled off “to see what the new doughnut was at the craft table.” He needn’t have. Their differences were serious, but the jibes were good-natured: tokens of closeness, not distance. And now he was gone.

And not just him. In the nearly two years since “Raymond,” one of America’s most popular television shows, went off the air, a lot of the former givens have disappeared. ABC toyed with but chose not to broadcast a new sitcom Ms. Heaton developed; a documentary that she produced (and that her husband, David Hunt, directed) had trouble finding a distributor.

“It was like I had been the queen of a planet where everyone loved me and did everything I asked, and suddenly I was back home on Earth,” she said with a laugh over breakfast recently. “I wasn’t worshiped anymore.”

She was speaking, in part, about the instant downgrading of her self-image from celebrity mother to plain old mom, complete with soccer schedules and puky laundry. (She and Mr. Hunt have four boys: 13, 11, 9 and 7.) But she was also speaking about the difficulty of finding satisfying film and television projects at 48, a difficulty that has led her to risk a return to the theater, which she pretty much ditched 16 years ago as one might ditch an abusive lover. In defiance of the usual Hollywood patterns, she is appearing not in a diva role, but as part of the ensemble cast of Theresa Rebeck’s new play “The Scene,” which opens off Broadway on Jan. 11 at Second Stage Theater.

For those familiar only with Ms. Heaton’s light comedy or political profile, her gale-force performance and her gleeful way with the obscenity-packed dialogue may come as a surprise. This is, after all, the same woman who walked out of the 2003 American Music Awards telecast, before her scheduled appearance, in disgust over the language and behavior of some presenters.

It’s also the woman who in 1998 became honorary co-chairwoman of Feminists for Life, a group whose goals include economic and social support for women who “refuse to choose” abortion. Ms. Heaton’s campus speeches and Washington lobbying resulted in the occasional snub from strangers (and the argumentative attention of friends like Mr. Boyle), but she managed to avoid the organized wrath of the left. More recently, however, she has found that the protective varnish of sitcom stardom degrades very quickly and that the ideal of affection, or even civility, among people who disagree is not widely upheld.

Her latest skirmish began several months ago when an industry friend expressed his concerns about embryonic stem-cell research. In Missouri, he explained, voters were considering a constitutional amendment that would permit the harvesting of stem cells from donated eggs and aborted fetuses. Because of the close race for control of Congress, the proposal drew national attention; the Democratic candidate for the Senate supported the amendment, while the Republican opposed it.

“I told my friend: ‘I don’t want to do anything about this. It’s not even my state,’ ” Ms. Heaton recalled. “But he said: ‘I just feel like I can’t sit by. I have to answer for my actions at the end of my life.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, thanks a lot, now I have to too, because you told me about it.’

“In the end,” she said wistfully, while nevertheless digging into a plate of blueberry pancakes, “you’re responsible for the knowledge you have.”

So she agreed to tape a 12-second message for a fund-raising video, in which she said: “Amendment 2 actually makes it a constitutional right for fertility clinics to pay women for eggs. Low-income women will be seduced by big checks, and extracting donor eggs is an extremely complicated, dangerous and painful procedure.”

But the video, which also included St. Louis sports figures, turned into a Mel Gibson-size nightmare when it got onto the Internet and, without her knowledge, was then shown as an advertisement on television during Game 4 of the World Series. It didn’t help that it looked so cheesy or that it began, inexplicably, with the actor Jim Caviezel (who had played Jesus in Mr. Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ”) staring weirdly at the camera and speaking in Aramaic.

“Oh my God, it was a disaster,” Ms. Heaton acknowledged. “And then there was the whole Michael J. Fox aspect.”

Also unbeknownst to Ms. Heaton, Mr. Fox, his Parkinsonian tremors clearly visible, had just appeared in an ad supporting the amendment. Because of the timing, her comments looked like a response to his and became associated with Rush Limbaugh’s suggestion that Mr. Fox was faking his symptoms for sympathy.

Ms. Heaton was appalled, she said. “Not only was the ad so bad, but why was it put on? It took the focus off of what we’re talking about, which is very serious, and made it look like a feud or something, a Hollywood tabloid subject, a media thing of pitting people against each other.”

The Internet floodgates opened. Web sites weighed in on “Fox v. Heaton” and generally eviscerated her. On YouTube.com, April Winchell, a California radio personality, posted a 38-second remix of Ms. Heaton’s clip. It starts out saying, “I’m Patricia Heaton, and I’m a religious zealot who thinks she knows what’s best for everybody” and gets uglier from there: “I could give you the whole story, but I’d rather beat you over the head with my Bible. And besides it’s not like stem-cell research makes you look younger. I mean, if it did, I’d be all over it.”

That last dig was a reference to Ms. Heaton’s plastic surgeries, about which she has been unusually candid. In her 2002 book, “Motherhood and Hollywood” (Villard), less a celebrity memoir than a collection of spiky, self-deprecating essays, she described herself as a “5-foot-2 runt” whose stomach, “after four C-sections and too many years of nursing,” had become “a big old wrinkly suede bag hanging down,” and whose breasts “had to be folded up like origami” to fit into strapless gowns. Now she looks toned and lovely.

If Ms. Heaton has made her surgery fair game, her political views are not so easily pigeonholed. Some derive from the “seamless garment” doctrine of her “devout Catholic upbringing” (she opposes both abortion and the death penalty) while others are clearly her own. (She supports gay rights and the use of most birth control.) And she is not, in person, prudish or judgmental. Most of her friends have had abortions, she said, and they’re still her friends.

It isn’t so much her views that cause her trouble as her unwillingness to finesse them for public consumption. She is compulsively honest, though she feels that’s not so much a virtue as “an illness, like Tourette’s.” Even her more extreme positions are stated without hedging: If it were up to her, she said, there would be no abortion for any reason. But she offers such thoughts with a sense of helplessness, as if she were trapped by the implications of her core principles.

And then there is her un-wingnutlike desire for conciliation. As soon as she realized what had happened, she sent Mr. Fox a message saying that she was sorry and that she prayed for his recovery. He responded graciously (the amendment passed with 51 percent of the vote) and later said, “If we can have a healthy dialogue about issues that people see differently, that’s marvelous.”

That’s a big if. Most of the dialogue, Ms. Heaton said, has been brutal: “People saying they hope my kids get sick and die so I’ll know what it’s like to need medical research.” Colleagues have attacked her at industry functions; gossips claiming to know her have described her as a horrible person. A theater Web site recently ran a discussion thread on boycotting “The Scene.” And castmates have told Ms. Heaton that their friends were saying things like: “You’re working with her? You know what her thing is, right?”

Ms. Rebeck, the playwright, knew and didn’t care. “That’s flawed thinking,” she said of the boycott chatter, “like what happened with the Dixie Chicks. And I would hate to think of liberals as the new conservatives. I don’t agree with all of Patty’s politics, but she’s not the kind of political thinker who drives you crazy with their solipsism, and I think the country might be in better shape if we could engage with each other in the way she does. Anyway, she’s pretty great in the play” — she called Ms. Heaton’s comic timing “something I dream about” and her emotional availability “staggering” — “so that’s where I come down.”

There’s a connection between responding credibly to a fictional situation and responding to real-world issues. But Ms. Heaton mistrusts that connection, even in herself, because she has seen how easily actors can manipulate emotions and turn an embarrassing need for attention into a cause.

“Being an actor, I love what we do,” she said, “but I don’t have that high a regard for it. And when embarrassing people, myself included, talk about their views, you just have to laugh. Who cares? And yet somebody’s given you a pulpit, so you do it. On the other hand, you can do a lot of good without going on CNN, and I totally respect actors who never discuss their views. I wish I was one of them. Too late now. I’m trying to get back in the box.”

It’s hard to see how she can do that while simultaneously exploring more and deeper means of expression. On “Raymond” she took a character who was something of a cipher in the pilot episode and filled her in with despair; her anger at being stuck with all the domestic chores was so visceral that it often seemed like a brick lobbed through the screen. Mr. Romano said that’s what got Ms. Heaton the job; it also won her two Emmys. She says she drew that anger directly from her experience as a wife in the middle passage — “the seething years” — of marriage.

But there was only so far she could take such insights within the confines of the sitcom format. “The Scene,” which is billed as a “brutal comedy,” is what might have happened if “Raymond” had been written for HBO and doctored by Dickens. In it Ms. Heaton plays Stella, a talk-show booker whose marriage to an out-of-work actor, played by Tony Shalhoub, spirals out of control. All of Stella’s carefully balanced disappointments and color-coded accommodations collapse in the face of something very much like evil.

Ms. Heaton knew instantly upon reading the play that she had to take the role. She understood Stella subcutaneously; when one of the characters described her as a “frigid Nazi priestess,” she felt it was almost a compliment. But she also understood the play’s unflinching moral outlook. Though it is set in high-rise Manhattan instead of a Cleveland suburb, it felt like home to her, with its portrait of people who know life is a battle between right and wrong but who don’t always have the will to join the right team.

Ms. Heaton’s parents left no doubt as to which team was which. They attended Mass every day, and their taste in interior decoration ran to pictures of St. Lucy holding her eyeballs on a platter. There wasn’t much room for young Patty’s “Look at me!” demands for attention, but her childhood was marked by nothing much worse than benign neglect until she was 12, when her mother died. The resulting flare of grief seemed to etch the pattern of her mother’s standards on her forever, and also her distance from them.

In college, and especially during eight subsequent years of hapless struggle in New York, that distance became a kind of no-man’s-land she had to traverse daily, from bad job to binge to church and back again. The churches varied: Catholic, Calvinist, New Age cult. (She now attends Sunday school, but not services, at a Presbyterian church.) Nothing closed the gap, not an early marriage or quick divorce, not sinning or atoning or jobs modeling shoes. By the time she left for Los Angeles in 1990, her “slightly annoying Ohio enthusiasm” had been expunged, and she was “emotionally battered.”

What finally helped was meaningful work, marrying Mr. Hunt and the huge responsibility of caring for children. (“And thank God I found somebody good to do it for me,” she said. “I mean, I wouldn’t hire just any Swedish nanny.”) The chaos of otherness calmed her down, brought her closer to her parents’ ideal of the sacrificial life, of “dying to yourself.” But living that ideal when you are an actor can be somewhat contradictory, which is pretty much the heart of Ms. Heaton’s artistic and personal drama as she awakes from a “16-year coma.” What is she good for? What is she called on to do?

She knows she often flubs the answers. “But I take comfort,” she said, “in noticing that all the people that God chose had problems and failings: David, Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene.” She spoke these names without special deference, as if they were pals from high school glee club. “God reached out to them specifically. And I’ve always felt closest to God when I’m on a stage. I guess it’s really useful to be damaged in this business, because it makes it possible for you to express things — and get paid for it.”

She laughed at herself. “Though it can,” she admitted, “be inconvenient in real life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/theater/31gree.html





Hubba *wheeze* hubba

The Graying of Naughty
Sharon Waxman

DE’BELLA — or Debbie, as everybody calls her — decided late in life to become a porn star. This year she turned 50, time, she knew, to chase her dream.

“I love sex,” she explained, biting into a Burger King special before embarking on her scene for the day at a rented house in the San Fernando Valley. She was wearing a bright pink satin and black chiffon nightie with a matching thong and heavy makeup.

“I decided I wanted to do something different,” she said. “I’d been working behind the scenes, and my friends said: ‘Why not do movies? Have some fun, and get paid for it?’ ”

So she has. Since May, De’Bella (she did not want her real name published) has used days off from her job as an administrative assistant at a sex-related entertainment company, Platinum X, to shoot about 30 scenes, with men mostly 19 and 20 year old.

And while she is sort of a novelty — appearing on “The Howard Stern Show” to talk about her new career — it is no longer unusual (hey, Hollywood, pay attention) to see women, and men, of a certain age performing in sex movies.

“There has been a greater openness to older performers than there once was,” said Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News, or AVN, the industry’s main trade paper. “Typically, once you got to 35, your possibilities were pretty much shot.”

Not anymore. The pornography industry, that multibillion-dollar-a-year symbol of airbrushed American carnality, is aging. The advent of Viagra, the maturing of sexually aware baby boomers and overall improved health and beauty are all contributing to the graying of naughty.

The biggest change is in the sexual desirability of women old enough to be the viewer’s mother. It has been fueled in part by pop culture’s embrace of the sexy 40-something women of “Desperate Housewives” and “Stacy’s Mom,” the 2003 hit song about a teenager’s mother who “has got it going on.”

The mature-woman genre represents one of the fastest growing areas of video pornography, say leading distributors and retailers, and next month it will be inaugurated as a category at the AVN Awards, the Oscars of the skin trade.

Most of the movies are like the one De’Bella is shooting on this particular day in the Valley, a gonzo shoot — meaning it is more or less plot-free sex for 40 minutes or so. De’Bella’s dark hair is up in a chignon, pinned with a couple of rhinestone clips. When her performing partner, Rod Fontana, 54, shows up — he’s tall and gangly with a shaved head — she smiles sweetly and shakes his hand. They have never met before.

“What’s the premise on this one?” he asks. “Pizza boy?”

Whatever. Within a few unscripted minutes they’re mostly unclothed, panting and moaning for the camera, engaged in sexual contortions and obviously unbothered by visiting onlookers.

The director, Urbano Martin, points his camera strategically, scarcely disguising his boredom. “I shoot specialty films,” he explains during a break in filming, adding that he has been in the business for 17 years. “Fat women, old women, hairy girls — all kinds. We feed the niche.”

The market for beautiful, airbrushed young women “is oversaturated,” he says. “This is more normal people, more meat on the bone, like what you have at home.”

De’Bella is not one of those otherworldly California creatures untouched by time. She looks like what she is, an attractive 50-year-old, with eyelids and cheeks that have succumbed to gravity and concentric circles of rippled skin on her belly from childbirth, three decades ago, and from dropping 38 pounds this year.

Still married to the same man after 28 years, De’Bella comes from a small town in Colorado and never imagined that she might become involved in pornography. “I was married and had a baby at 19,” she says. “I don’t know if I could have done it then.”

That baby grew up and moved to California to become a sex-film performer under the name Jewel De’Nyle, which started her mother down the same path.

De’Bella’s husband, Larry Schwarz, is fully supportive. “She’s doing it for the right reasons,” he said.

Other mature stars are retired pornography performers who have been lured back into the limelight, like a 40-something former star known as Lisa Ann, and 35-year-old Tiffany Mynx or the performer turned director Devinn Lane, who has started a Web site to recruit women for her hardcore short films.

Vicky Vette, 41, blond and buxom — who could pass for 10 years younger — jumped in a couple of years ago, explaining on her Web site that after a career as an accountant and housing contractor with her husband, she won an amateur photo contest in Hustler magazine and began making sex videos. (She declined an interview, perhaps because her husband committed suicide in June and in a letter discovered posthumously accused her of being a white supremacist. She has denied this.)

WHO watches this stuff? By far the most avid consumers of older-woman pornography, producers say, are young men fulfilling boyhood fantasies of teacher lust or yearning for the attractive mothers of their friends. Some, it has been suggested, may be tired of what one producer, Oren Cohen, has called, in a recent AVN article, “the young, helpless teen thing.”

David Joseph, 38, De’Bella’s boss and the president of Platinum X, said: “It’s totally an erotic thing people are attracted to. There’s a huge market out there for older women. I’m trying to understand it myself.”

But the older-woman fantasy is nothing new, even if the video pornography industry is scarcely more than three decades old. It may be that the revival of young men’s teenage fantasies, along with the sexual confidence of older women, is fueling the supply side as well as the demand.

The genre has been credited as the idea of Bonnie Kail, 48, the national sales manager of Wicked Pictures. A few years ago Ms. Kail was working for a small company, Heatwave Entertainment, which specialized in fetish sex, including so-called granny porn, which feature old women. She thought there was room for less freakish fantasy.

“I had said from my personal experience that, being divorced, I’m lucky if I can meet someone my age,” Ms. Kail recalled. “Most guys who want to date me are in their late 20s. So I thought, let’s get some hot-looking, 40-ish women and make that the theme.”

Her boss at the time, Gabor Szabo, was the first to package mature-women movies as a distinct genre, and nearly every other sex-movie company has followed with its own line. Popular titles include “Hot 50+” and “Housewives Unleashed.”

Still, the trend has taken a lot of the pornography world by surprise, including Mr. Joseph of Platinum X. When De’Bella asked him for permission to pursue a sex-film career in her spare time, he was mystified.

“It was weird to me,” he said. “She could be my mom. At first I thought it would blow over and that maybe no one would hire her. But then people started hiring her, and then they wanted her for magazines. It’s crazy. This is supposed to be an industry with the youngest, newest, most beautiful girls in the world. Isn’t youth what everyone wants?”

Apparently not. And if women performers traditionally last just a handful of years before losing their sizzle, there are male performers who have been stars for as long as there has been a thriving sex-film business in the Valley, ever since the shotgun marriage of video and sexual liberation in the 1970s.

Ron Jeremy, perhaps the industry’s best-known male star, is 53 and still appears in sex movies. Randy Spears, 45, has been performing in them for 20 years and is still going strong.

At 66, Dave Cummings bills himself as the oldest pornographic-film star working, though he is a relative newcomer to the business. Married for 22 years until his wife left him, as he put it, “for someone with hair,” Mr. Cummings has four grandchildren and a thriving film career.

“My daughter’s feeling is: ‘Dad, I love you. It doesn’t make any difference,’ ” he said by phone from San Diego, where he began swinging with couples after his divorce in the 1990s, which led to his sex-films gig. “My son thinks of me as his hero,” he added. “When he’s out chasing girls, he says, ‘Ever hear of Dave Cummings?’ My son is getting action because of me.”

The dirty little not-so-secret weapons of aging male performers are erectile aids like Viagra and Cialis. Mr. Cummings said he prefers Viagra, but uses it rarely, for instance when he is scheduled for back-to-back sex scenes or “when I’m working for a producer who’s very demanding.” De’Bella’s recent partner, Mr. Fontana, said he used only herbal stimulants.

Like a lot of experienced actors in the business, Mr. Cummings directs as well as acts in his movies (don’t ask: mirrors are involved), and they frequently play on dirty old man fantasies, with titles like “It’s a Daddy Thing,” “Sugar Daddy” and one just three months ago featuring a 19-year-old woman and a group of older sex-film stars. Mr. Cummings is on the cover of the DVD, leaning on a walker.

He intends to stay in the game as long as he can. “I’m not looking to get married,” he said. “I’m too old for that. I don’t know that there’s anyone out there I could easily find who could understand that the reason I’m not having sexual climax this morning isn’t because I don’t love her. It’s because I have to go to work.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/fa...287&ei=5087%0A





New 'Indiana Jones' Starts Filming in 2007
AP

George Lucas said Friday that filming of the long-awaited "Indiana Jones" movie will begin next year.

Harrison Ford, who appeared in the three earlier flicks, the last one coming in 1989, is set to star again.

Lucas said he and Steven Spielberg recently finalized the script for the film.

"It’s going to be fantastic. It’s going to be the best one yet," the 62-year-old filmmaker said during a break from preparing for his duties as grand marshal of Monday’s Rose Parade.

Exact film locations have not been decided yet, but Lucas said part of the movie will be shot in Los Angeles.

The fourth chapter of the "Indiana Jones" saga, which will hit theaters in May 2008, has been in development for over a decade with several screenwriters taking a crack at the script, but it only recently gained momentum.

Lucas kept mum about the plot, but said that the latest action flick will be a "character piece" that will include "very interesting mysteries."

"I think it’s going to be really cool," Lucas said.

At the inaugural Rome Film Festival in October, the 64-year-old Ford said he was excited to team up with Lucas and Spielberg again for the fourth "Indiana Jones" installment. Ford said he was "fit to continue" to play the title role despite his age.

Ford played Indiana Jones in 1981’s "Raiders of the Lost Ark," 1984’s "Temple of Doom" and 1989’s "The Last Crusade."

Lucas praised Ford for breathing life into his character.

"Mostly it’s the charm of Harrison that makes it work," he said.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1027178





Mel Gibson Loses it, Borat Takes Over the Planet: The Year in Pop Culture
Charlie McCollum

It was the year of YouTube, some inconvenient truths, "American Idol" and O.J. Simpson back on the loose. The still-defiant Dixie Chicks returned. Two wily veterans of the music wars came up with unexpected masterpieces.

The year saw the final words from Lemony Snicket, the death of a film master, a visit from a guy named Borat and the passing of one of TV’s finest series. Katie Couric flew high, Mel Gibson had his ups and downs, Tower Records vanished and "High School Musical" became a cultural phenomenon. These are some of the moments that defined our popular culture in 2006:

Top pop of the year:

There were other Web sites for viral videos, but the ultimate — a sort of TiVo for the nation — was YouTube. It resurrected dead TV shows ("Nobody’s Watching"), revived interest in others ("Saturday Night Live"), helped jump-start careers (Stephen Colbert), damaged careers (Michael Richards), altered political races (the U.S. Senate campaign in Virginia) and created its own iconic figures and cultural controversies (Lonelygirl15, the Chinese Backstreet Boys). In the end, the popular site was gobbled by Google (for a snappy $1.65 billion) and could end up losing its guerrilla cache. But for one year, it loomed large on the cultural landscape.

America gets ‘Musical’:

When "High School Musical" debuted on the Disney Channel, almost no one over the age of 18 noticed. But millions of teens and ‘tweens tuned in to the energetic, feel-good TV movie, turning Disney into the hottest cable channel, the movie’s soundtrack into the top-selling album of the year and the cast into bona fide stars. Now, there is a concert version playing arenas, stage productions in dozens of cities across the country and a sequel in the works.

Million little lies:

Author James Frey seemed to have it all: His book, "A Million Little Pieces," had received good reviews, became a No. 1 non-fiction bestseller and was blessed by none other than Oprah Winfrey. The only problem: Much of his inspirational memoir of drug addiction, crime, rehab and redemption never happened. When he appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to explain himself, the chagrined hostess treated him to a public pillorying.

Courting Katie:

For months, there had been rumors that Katie Couric, the star of NBC’s "Today Show," would take over the anchor desk on "The CBS Evening News," becoming the first woman to solo anchor a network evening newscast. Rumor became reality April 5 when Couric signed a three-year, $45 million deal to sit in the chair once occupied by Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. So far, Couric hasn’t been a big boost to the newscast’s ratings, but it takes a while.

An ‘Idol’ moment:

You could pick any of a number of moments from the past season of "American Idol" to make a point about its transcendent popularity and the way it dominated network TV. With no disrespect intended toward winner Taylor Hicks, we’ll go with the night in May when odds-on favorite Chris Daughtry got voted off, stunning the judges, Daughtry himself and seemingly much of the country. That his departure was talked about for weeks is a measure of just what a hold "Idol" had on America.

Return of the Chicks:

Three years after they talked smack about President Bush and the war in Iraq — and incurred the wrath of country music stations, right-wing talk show hosts and much of their fan base — a totally unrepentant Dixie Chicks finally came out with a new album, "Taking the Long Way," and hit the road for a national concert tour. While concerts in some red state cities were canceled for lack of ticket sales, the Chicks did big business elsewhere. The album hit No. 1 on the charts and earned the group five Grammy nominations.

Out of office:

Officially, "The West Wing" didn’t end its influential seven-season run until May. But that the seventh year of the White House drama would become its last was almost inevitable from the day John Spencer, who played presidential adviser Leo McGarry, died in December 2005. Spencer’s death made it difficult for the show to continue and slumping ratings ultimately made it impossible.

Warming signs:

Who would have thought a documentary on a subject like global warming with an Al Gore lecture as its centerpiece would become a big hit at the box office? "An Inconvenient Truth" did just that, doing big business at the multiplex and becoming one of the year’s most talked-about films. If Gore had been half as engaging on the campaign trail as he is in the film and during his appearances to promote "Truth," he might not have lost the presidential election six years ago.

Mel to pay:

It was a bad year — make that a very bad year — for Mel Gibson. In late July, the actor-director-icon got pulled over in his Lexus by a L.A. County deputy sheriff. His blood level was a snappy 0.12 percent, but that was only part of the problem. After the stop, Gibson launched into an anti-Semitic, profanity-laced tirade that got leaked to the press. Not even good reviews of his new "Apocalypto," a stint in rehab and a skillfully executed effort at spin control could undo the damage.

Master of mystery:

Hard to believe but four decades into his career, Bob Dylan came up with one of his finest albums. Simple-sounding but complex in its emotions and ideas, "Modern Times" mixed jazz, blues, old-time rock and folk with Dylan-esque takes on God, politics and American culture. One track, "Workingman’s Blues 2," may be, when all is said and done, one of the most powerful songs the Artful Dodger ever penned.

Is Borat!:

Sure, Sacha Baron Cohen’s "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" — now that’s a film title — is tasteless, offensive and, at times, just plain mean-spirited. But the faux documentary about a Kazakhstan reporter running amok in the United States also was hilarious, insightful and politically influential. It also struck a chord with moviegoers, bringing in more than $120 million at the box office. Even people who hadn’t seen it talked about it.

An American original:

Robert Altman did not go silently into that good night. To the very end, the 81-year-old was making films and planning to make films. And when he died Nov. 20, he left behind an imposing legacy of movies ("Nashville," "MASH," "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "The Player") and television work ("Combat!") that influenced and shaped a generation of younger filmmakers.

Game day:

In another era, fans would go into a frenzy over pop singers and movie stars, swarming theaters for a glimpse of their faves. These days, it’s the latest technology that attracts the mobs, and at the start of the holiday shopping season, nothing was hotter than Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s new Wii. People lined up for hours to grab one of the new game systems, and entrepreneurs were reselling PlayStations online for double the retail price. Some shifty folks robbed buyers of their systems as they left the store. Now, that’s the holiday spirit.

Towering inferno:

A moment of silence, please, for the passing of Tower Records. The record store chain was more than just a company. For a generation in the days before downloads and iPods, it was a place to hang out and talk about music, as well as to buy the latest albums and singles. But battered by the pressures of the growing Web economy, the chain filed for Chapter 11 and was sold to a liquidation company for $134.3 million. With that, Tower stores across the country started shutting their doors, ending an era.
http://www.newstimeslive.com/storyprint.php?id=1027038





Comcast Increasing Rates for 2.6 Million New England Customers
AP

The average Comcast Co. customer's bill in New England will increase about 3 percent starting Feb. 1, with standard cable service alone increasing 3.7 percent in the Hartford area.

Comcast, the largest cable TV provider in Connecticut, announced the rate increase Friday. It affects about 2.6 million customers in New England, including 525,000 in Connecticut.

Company officials attributed the increase to an $800 million investment in better products and services.

Comcast raised the average New England customer's bill by about 3.7 percent effective Feb. 1, 2006, including a roughly 7 percent increase in standard cable service in the Hartford area. The new rates go into effect Feb. 1, 2007.

Under the new increase, Comcast's standard cable service in the greater Hartford region will rise from $49.15 a month to $50.99, or 3.7 percent.

More than 65 percent of customers buy multiple products from Comcast, so the overall increase for the average customer in New England works out to about 3 percent, the company said.

Digital packages for cable will increase an average of $1.25 a month, partly offset by a 76-cent decrease in the cost of a cable box and remote.

Rates will not change for the company's digital voice service, high-speed Internet, home networking and cable modems, a la carte multicultural channels or Latino programming packages.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...12-30-11-42-45





JS Item of Interest

Ask Slashdot: Vista and the Music Industry
BanjoBob

"Vista locks down all the DRM functionality and actually reduces the quality of playback of some media. This includes both audio and video content. As a company creating music and video products, how can we use Vista to create, distribute, and use legal media? I have read nothing to indicate that Vista has a model to allow 'authorized' use without causing problems. Currently we use Windows 2000 and Linux products. If what we understand is true, Vista and future Microsoft products won't be viable options for us since prior to publication, media must be copied multiple times, edited, moved around, re-edited and often modified into various forms (trailers, etc.) before, during, and after production. This naturally includes backups and recovery. If Vista is intent on prohibiting these uses, then Microsoft is intent on keeping their products out of the realm of content creation and editing. How do others deal with these issues?"
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/31/2150255





Eventually to maintain that growth they'll have to start protecting rights or they'll become a victim like they have been victimizing the rest of the world. How good do you feel paying $10 to see a movie so the Chinese can pay a $1 for a DVD?

It's funny you mention that. I was in Thailand not too long ago, and the price of a legal, licensed VCD was about $1. Legal DVD's were about $40, because they were a luxury item that only the rich could afford anyway.

Companies charge whatever the market will bear. If movie studios think they can get $10 out of an American audience to watch a movie, that's what they'll charge. It doesn't matter what's going on in China, except to say that they'll throw up all sorts of technical and legal barriers to importing their cheaper goods from that region. Likewise, a new CD in Brazil can cost 3 - 5 dollars. Again, legally.

China and other less restrictive countries are looked upon as bastions of IP freedom because there are some major ways in which they are. India, for example, allowed knockoff drugs for a very long time on the grounds that it was immoral to value western company's exploitive drug pricing schemes above human life. Go to Taiwan and *gasp* you can get DVD players that will let you play movies you have legally bought and paid for in any region of the world. You can get CD's in other regions of the world where the corporations convicted of illegal price fixing actually compete with local music companies and pirate CD creators to come to a more reasonable cost structure. Heck, until a few weeks ago you had to travel abroad to get the cellphone you've purchased unlocked from that one restrictive provider.

All of the above seem reasonable, but are completely banned in the US. It's nice to go to a country where the huge companies do not simply write whatever laws they want, but have to contest with the needs of the consumer, who have alternatives to the restrictive legal route.

cgenman (325138)

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?si...034238&tid=164





Brief Outline of Medical Imaging Information Flow
Ears (71799)

This is part of the subtext both of the original article, and of this most recent post, so I thought I'd share what I know about it. FWIW, I'm a radiologist--that is, an MD who interprets the results of imaging studies--and an informatics geek.

Images are created on whatever imaging device--CT scanner, MR scanner, ultrasound machine, digital X-ray machine--and manipulated by the device's controlling system to do simple annotations, reformatting, etc. This is typically a Unix-based system running custom software designed and maintained by the device's vendor. The images are not usually interpreted on these systems.

From there, the images are sent to the PACS (Picutre Archiving and Communication System) [wikipedia.org], which is just a gigantic central image database. These also tend to be Unix-based systems.

There tend to be two front-ends for looking at images in the PACS database. The first is the radiologist's interface, which is a high-end video workstation dedicated to showing medical images with the greatest possible fidelity. Most systems I've seen are Windows-based (Windows 2000, in our case) and run software which was built by the the imaging system vendors in the late 1990's. Much is made of the "lossless" nature of the images which are displayed; for example, when you log into such a machine, you're warned about how "This is a medical device" and that you shouldn't mess with it. Much is also made of "diagnostic-quality monitors" and high-end video cards to drive the monitors. This is an artifact from the early days of digital imaging interpretation in radiology, when there was a great deal of concern about whether the quality of the digital images would be adequate for us to figure out what was going on in Grandma's chest X-ray if we weren't looking at a piece of acetate. Most of these concerns have died away, as the differences in resolution and dynamic range turned out to be relatively minor and the added conveniences of being able to manipulate the images digitally turned out to be huge. For example, the new LCDs I seen being put on PACS workstations are off-the-shelf Dell 22-inchers, as far as I can tell.

Finally, there are "non-diagnostic" interfaces to the PACS images, which do tend to be web-based. These are so non-radiologist doctors can look at the images, too. Some are IE-based, and use an ActiveX control to display the images, and some use a Java applet. These are displayed with lossy compression (since someone might want to look at them from off-site via a VPN), and officially are not allowed to be used for interpretation. And in fact, I wouldn't want to; it's a lot harder to see subtle things on them than on a full-blown PACS workstation. Part of that is just the interface (it's hard to use those stupid ActiveX/applet things) and part of it is crummy/mis-configured monitors, but I suppose compression artifacts could also play a role.

So, to review: you go see your doctor, Dr. Smith, in her office, and she orders a chest X-ray for you because you're coughing and have a fever. You come to the hospital, and the nice technologist takes frontal and lateral view of your chest on the digital X-ray machine. He then goes back to the X-ray control room, and sees that the images are pretty good, and so he sticks your name on them, and a marker of the date/time and his name, and so on, and then sends them to the hospital's PACS system. I (the radiologist) am working at my PACS workstation, going through the long list of all of the CT scans, MR scans, and X-rays taken in the hospital. I get to your chest X-ray and look at it; I don't seen any sign of pneumonia, so I write a report (the subject of a whole different set of informatics) that basically says "Clear lungs" and that gets entered into your electronic medical record. Then, Dr. Smith back in her office can see your X-ray via her Web-based interface. If she wonders about something she sees, she can call me up and say, "What's that stuff at the left apex?" and I pull up your X-ray again and say, "Oh, it's just the end of the first rib." So Dr. Smith doesn't give you antibiotics, tells you to rest and drink plenty of fluids, and you feel better in a few days.

My basic reaction to the DRM-protections in Vista with regards to medical imaging is that I can't imagine they'll have a significant effect. The current generation of hardware and software is adequate to the task of displaying the images for radiologists, and no one's in a hurry to mess with that. I'm sure these systems will still be running Windows 2000 for at least another five years and require only incremental upgrades in hardware.

The problem is this: the next generation of systems for displaying these datasets should be coming soon. There are a ton of ideas we could implement to make interpreting images more accurate, more efficient, and more useful to patients. Many barriers are in place to creating and installing such systems, however. Most of them have to do with the fact that the first generation systems (which are now in place pretty much everywhere) were designed without any idea of expansion, upgrade, or evolution. But the Vista DRM stuff will make engineering and delivering new solutions even more difficult and expensive, just because Windows platforms will be that much more difficult to work with, and hardware (especially high-end video hardware) will be more expensive. And I suspect that there are many little niches like this one where the cost of an all-out commitment to DRM will hinder innovation.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?s... &cid=17368942





The Bill of Wrongs

The 10 Most Outrageous Civil Liberties Violations of 2006
Dahlia Lithwick

I love those year-end roundups—ubiquitous annual lists of greatest films and albums and lip glosses and tractors. It's reassuring that all human information can be wrestled into bundles of 10. In that spirit, Slate proudly presents, the top 10 civil liberties nightmares of the year:

10. Attempt to Get Death Penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui
Long after it was clear the hapless Frenchman was neither the "20th hijacker" nor a key plotter in the attacks of 9/11, the government pressed to execute him as a "conspirator" in those attacks. Moussaoui's alleged participation? By failing to confess to what he may have known about the plot, which may have led the government to disrupt it, Moussaoui directly caused the deaths of thousands of people. This massive overreading of the federal conspiracy laws would be laughable were the stakes not so high. Thankfully, a jury rejected the notion that Moussaoui could be executed for the crime of merely wishing there had been a real connection between himself and 9/11.

9. Guantanamo Bay
It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking. After the Supreme Court struck down the military tribunals planned to try hundreds of detainees moldering on the base, and after the president agreed that it might be a good idea to close it down, the worst public relations fiasco since the Japanese internment camps lives on. Prisoners once deemed "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth" are either quietly released (and usually set free) or still awaiting trial. The lucky 75 to be tried there will be cheered to hear that the Pentagon has just unveiled plans to build a $125 million legal complex for the hearings. The government has now officially put more thought into the design of Guantanamo's court bathrooms than the charges against its prisoners.

8. Slagging the Media
Whether the Bush administration is reclassifying previously declassified documents, sidestepping the FOIA, threatening journalists for leaks on dubious legal grounds, or, most recently, using its subpoena power to try to wring secret documents from the ACLU, the administration has continued its "secrets at any price" campaign. Is this a constitutional crisis? Probably not. Annoying as hell? Definitely.

7. Slagging the Courts
It starts with the president's complaints about "activist judges," and evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to oversee federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the stripping of courts' authority to hear whole classes of cases—most recently any habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo detainees—almost seems reasonable. Each tiny incursion into the independence of the judiciary seems justified. Until you realize that the courts are often the only places that will defend our shrinking civil liberties. This leads to ...

6. The State-Secrets Doctrine
The Bush administration's insane argument in court is that judges should dismiss entire lawsuits over many of the outrages detailed on this very list. Why? Because the outrageously illegal things are themselves matters of top-secret national security. The administration has raised this claim in relation to its adventures in secret wiretapping and its fun with extraordinary rendition. A government privilege once used to sidestep civil claims has mushroomed into sweeping immunity for the administration's sometimes criminal behavior.

5. Government Snooping
Take your pick. There's the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program wherein the president breezily authorized spying on the phone calls of innocent citizens, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FBI's TALON database shows the government has been spying on nonterrorist groups, including Quakers, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and Veterans for Peace. The Patriot Act lives on. And that's just the stuff we know about.

4. Extraordinary Rendition
So, when does it start to become ordinary rendition? This government program has us FedEx-ing unindicted terror suspects abroad for interrogation/torture. Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen, was shipped off to Afghanistan for such treatment and then released without charges, based on some government confusion about his name. Heh heh. Canadian citizen Maher Arar claims he was tortured in Syria for a year, released without charges, and cleared by a Canadian commission. Attempts to vindicate the rights of such men? You'd need to circle back to the state-secrets doctrine, above.

3. Abuse of Jose Padilla
First, he was, according to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, "exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States." Then, he was planning to blow up apartments. Then he was just part of a vague terror conspiracy to commit jihad in Bosnia and Chechnya. Always, he was a U.S. citizen. After three and a half years, in which he was denied the most basic legal rights, it has now emerged that Padilla was either outright tortured or near-tortured. According to a recent motion, during Padilla's years of almost complete isolation, he was treated by the U.S. government to sensory and sleep deprivation, extreme cold, stress positions, threats of execution, and drugging with truth serum. Experts say he is too mentally damaged to stand trial. The Bush administration supported his motion for a mental competency assessment, in hopes that will help prevent his torture claims from ever coming to trial, or, as Yale Law School's inimitable Jack Balkin put it: "You can't believe Padilla when he says we tortured him because he's crazy from all the things we did to him."

2. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
This was the so-called compromise legislation that gave President Bush even more power than he initially had to detain and try so-called enemy combatants. He was generously handed the authority to define for himself the parameters of interrogation and torture and the responsibility to report upon it, since he'd been so good at that. What we allegedly did to Jose Padilla was once a dirty national secret. The MCA made it the law.

1. Hubris
Whenever the courts push back against the administration's unsupportable constitutional ideas—ideas about "inherent powers" and a "unitary executive" or the silliness of the Geneva Conventions or the limitless sweep of presidential powers during wartime—the Bush response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet.

What outrage did I forget? Send mail to Dahlia.Lithwick@hotmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless otherwise stipulated.)

Wishing you and yours a happy, and freer, New Year.
http://www.slate.com/id/2156397/





Chatterbox

Smalls said

Well.. I guess it’s about sharing music with the zune…

That new eyeball will disappear within a couple of days
http://techzo.com/wordpress/?p=242





Music of the Hemispheres
Clive Thompson

“Listen to this,” Daniel Levitin said. “What is it?” He hit a button on his computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip of music. It was just two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could immediately identify it: the opening lick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”

Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once on piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in Elton John’s live version of “Benny and the Jets.”

Dr. Levitin beamed. “You hear only one note, and you already know who it is,” he said. “So what I want to know is: How we do this? Why are we so good at recognizing music?”

This is not merely some whoa-dude epiphany that a music fan might have while listening to a radio contest. Dr. Levitin has devoted his career to exploring this question. He is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, perhaps the world’s leading lab in probing why music has such an intense effect on us.

“By the age of 5 we are all musical experts, so this stuff is clearly wired really deeply into us,” said Dr. Levitin, an eerily youthful-looking 49, surrounded by the pianos, guitars and enormous 16-track mixers that make his lab look more like a recording studio.

This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton), a layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording.

Dr. Levitin is singular among music scientists for actually having come out of the music industry. Before getting his Ph.D. he spent 15 years as a record producer, working with artists ranging from the Blue Öyster Cult to Chris Isaak. While still in graduate school he helped Stevie Wonder assemble a best-of collection; in 1992 Dr. Levitin’s sensitive ears detected that MCA Records had accidentally used third-generation backup tapes to produce seven Steely Dan CDs, and he embarrassed the label by disclosing it in Billboard magazine. He has earned nine gold and platinum albums, which he tucks in corners of his lab, office and basement at home. “They look a little scary when you put them all in one place, so I spread them around,” he said.

Martin Grant, the dean of science at McGill, compares Dr. Levitin’s split professional personality to that of Brian Greene, the pioneering string-theory scientist who also writes mass-market books. “Some people are good popularizers, and some are good scientists, but not usually both at once,” Dr. Grant said. “Dan’s actually cutting edge in his field.”

Scientifically, Dr. Levitin’s colleagues credit him for focusing attention on how music affects our emotions, turf that wasn’t often covered by previous generations of psychoacousticians, who studied narrower questions about how the brain perceives musical sounds. “The questions he asks are very very musical, very concerned with the fact that music is an art that we interact with, not just a bunch of noises,” said Rita Aiello, an adjunct professor in the department of psychology at New York University.

Ultimately, scientists say, his work offers a new way to unlock the mysteries of the brain: how memory works, how people with autism think, why our ancestors first picked up instruments and began to play, tens of thousands of years ago.

DR. LEVITIN originally became interested in producing in 1981, when his band — a punk outfit called the Mortals — went into the recording studio. None of the other members were interested in the process, so he made all the decisions behind the board. “I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes,” he said. “They were stealing them from the guitarists.” He dropped out of college to work with alternative bands.

Producers, he noted, were able to notice impossibly fine gradations of quality in music. Many could identify by ear the type of amplifiers and recording tape used on an album.

“So I started wondering: How was the brain able to do this?” Dr. Levitin said. “What’s going on there, and why are some people better than others? And why is music such an emotional experience?” He began sitting in on neuroscience classes at Stanford University.

“Even back then, Dan was never satisfied with the simple answer,” said Howie Klein, a former president of Reprise and Sire Records. “He was always poking and prodding.”

By the ’90s Dr. Levitin was disenchanted with the music industry. “When they’re dropping Van Morrison and Elvis Costello because they don’t sell enough records,” he said, “I knew it was time to move on.” Academic friends persuaded him to pursue a science degree. They bet that he would have good intuitions on how to design music experiments.

They were right. Traditionally music psychologists relied on “simple melodies they’d written themselves,” Dr. Levitin said. What could that tell anyone about the true impact of powerful music?

For his first experiment he came up with an elegant concept: He stopped people on the street and asked them to sing, entirely from memory, one of their favorite hit songs. The results were astonishingly accurate. Most people could hit the tempo of the original song within a four-percent margin of error, and two-thirds sang within a semitone of the original pitch, a level of accuracy that wouldn’t embarrass a pro.

“When you played the recording of them singing alongside the actual recording of the original song, it sounded like they were singing along,” Dr. Levitin said.

It was a remarkable feat. Most memories degrade and distort with time; why would pop music memories be so sharply encoded? Perhaps because music triggers the reward centers in our brains. In a study published last year Dr. Levitin and group of neuroscientists mapped out precisely how.

Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain’s sense of reward.

The cerebellum, an area normally associated with physical movement, reacted too, responding to what Dr. Levitin suspected was the brain’s predictions of where the song was going to go. As the brain internalizes the tempo, rhythm and emotional peaks of a song, the cerebellum begins reacting every time the song produces tension (that is, subtle deviations from its normal melody or tempo).

“When we saw all this activity going on precisely in sync, in this order, we knew we had the smoking gun,” he said. “We’ve always known that music is good for improving your mood. But this showed precisely how it happens.”

The subtlest reason that pop music is so flavorful to our brains is that it relies so strongly on timbre. Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones in any sound; it is why a tuba sounds so different from a flute even when they are playing the same melody in the same key. Popular performers or groups, Dr. Levitin argued, are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but because they create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to song. That quality explains why, for example, I could identify even a single note of Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.”

“Nobody else’s piano sounds quite like that,” he said, referring to Mr. John. “Pop musicians compose with timbre. Pitch and harmony are becoming less important.”

Dr. Levitin dragged me over to a lab computer to show me what he was talking about. “Listen to this,” he said, and played an MP3. It was pretty awful: a poorly recorded, nasal-sounding British band performing, for some reason, a Spanish-themed ballad.

Dr. Levitin grinned. “That,” he said, “is the original demo tape of the Beatles. It was rejected by every record company. And you can see why. To you and me it sounds terrible. But George Martin heard this and thought, ‘Oh yeah, I can imagine a multibillion-dollar industry built on this.’

“Now that’s musical genius.”

THE largest audience that Dr. Levitin has performed in front of was 1,000 people, when he played backup saxophone for Mel Tormé. Years of being onstage piqued Dr. Levitin’s interest in another aspect of musical experience: watching bands perform. Does the brain experience a live performance differently from a recorded one?

To find out, he and Bradley Vines, a graduate student, devised an interesting experiment. They took two clarinet performances and played them for three groups of listeners: one that heard audio only; one that saw a video only; and one that had audio and video. As each group listened, participants used a slider to indicate how their level of tension was rising or falling.

One rapid, complex passage caused tension in all groups, but less in the one watching and listening simultaneously. Why? Possibly, Dr. Levitin said, because of the performer’s body language: the clarinetist appeared to be relaxed even during that rapid-fire passage, and the audience picked up on his visual cues. The reverse was also true: when the clarinetist played in a subdued way but appeared animated, the people with only video felt more tension than those with only audio.

In another, similar experiment the clarinetist fell silent for a few bars. This time the viewers watching the video maintained a higher level of excitement because they could see that he was gearing up to launch into a new passage. The audio-only listeners had no such visual cues, and they regarded the silence as much less exciting.

This spring Dr. Levitin began an even more involved experiment to determine how much emotion is conveyed by live performers. In April he took participants in a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert — the conductor Keith Lockhart, five of the musicians and 15 audience members — and wired them with sensors to measure their state of arousal, including heart rate, body movements and muscle tension.

At one point during the performance Mr. Lockhart swung his wrist with such force that a sensor attached to his cuff went flying off. Dr. Levitin’s team tried to reattach it with duct tape, until the conductor objected — “Did you just put duct tape on an Armani?” he asked — and lighter surgical tape was used instead.

The point of the experiment is to determine whether the conductor creates noticeable changes in the emotional tenor of the performance. Dr. Levitin says he suspects there’s a domino effect: the conductor becomes particularly animated, transmits this to the orchestra and then to the audience, in a matter of seconds. Mr. Lockhart is skeptical. “As a conductor,” he said, “I’m a causatory force for music, but I’m not a causatory force for emotion.” But Dr. Levitin is still crunching the data.

“It might not turn out to be like that,” he said, “But wouldn’t it be cool if it did?”

Dr. Levitin’s work has occasionally undermined some cherished beliefs about music. For example recent years have seen an explosion of “Baby Mozart” videos and toys, based on the idea — popular since the ’80s — that musical and mathematical ability are inherently linked.

But Dr. Levitin argued that this could not be true, based on his study of people with Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that leaves people with low intelligence. Their peak mental capacities are typically those of young child, with no ability to calculate quantities. Dr. Levitin once asked a woman with Williams to hold up her hand for five seconds; she left it in the air for a minute and a half. “No concept of time at all,” he said, “and definitely no math.”

Yet people with Williams possess unusually high levels of musical ability. One Williams boy Dr. Levitin met was so poorly coordinated he could not open the case to his clarinet. But once he was holding the instrument, his coordination problems vanished, and he could play fluidly. Music cannot be indispensably correlated with math, Dr. Levitin noted, if Williams people can play music. He is now working on a study that compares autistics — some of whom have excellent mathematical ability, but little musical ability — to people with Williams; in the long run, he said, he thinks it could help shed light on why autistic brains develop so differently.

Not all of Dr. Levitin’s idea have been easily accepted. He argues, for example, that music is an evolutionary adaptation: something that men developed as a way to demonstrate reproductive fitness. (Before you laugh, consider the sex lives of today’s male rock stars.) Music also helped social groups cohere. “Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago,” he said.

But Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard known for his defense of evolutionary psychology, has publicly disparaged this idea. Dr. Pinker has called music “auditory cheesecake,” something pleasant but not evolutionarily nutritious. If it is a sexual signal for reproduction, then why, Dr. Pinker asked, does “a 60-year-old woman enjoy listening to classical music when she’s alone at home?” Dr. Levitin wrote an entire chapter refuting Dr. Pinker’s arguments; when I asked Dr. Pinker about Dr. Levitin’s book he said he hadn’t read it.

Nonetheless Dr. Levitin plugs on, and sometimes still plugs in. He continues to perform music, doing several gigs a year with Diminished Faculties, a ragtag band composed entirely of professors and students at McGill. On a recent December afternoon members assembled in a campus ballroom to do a sound check for their performance that evening at a holiday party. Playing a blue Stratocaster, Dr. Levitin crooned the Chris Isaak song “Wicked Game.” “I’m not a great guitarist, and I’m not a great singer,” he said.

But he is not bad, either, and still has those producer’s ears. When “Wicked Game” ended, the bass player began noodling idly, playing the first few notes of a song that seemed instantly familiar to all the younger students gathered. “That’s Nirvana, right?” Dr. Levitin said, cocking his head and squinting. “ ‘Come As You Are.’ I love that song.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/ar...424&ei=5087%0A






In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google
Miguel Helft

In brand-new offices with a still-empty game room and enough space to triple their staff of nearly 30, a trio of entrepreneurs is leading an Internet start-up with an improbable mission: to out- Google Google.

The three started Powerset, a company whose aim is to deliver better answers than any other search engine — including Google — by letting users type questions in plain English. And they have made believers of Silicon Valley investors whose fortunes turn on identifying the next big thing.

“There’s definitely a segment of the market that thinks we are crazy,” said Charles Moldow, a partner at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm that is Powerset’s principal financial backer. “In 2000, some people thought Google was crazy.”

Powerset is hardly alone. Even as Google continues to outmaneuver its main search rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft, plenty of newcomers — with names like hakia, ChaCha and Snap — are trying to beat the company at its own game. And Wikia Inc., a company started by a founder of Wikipedia, plans to develop a search engine that, like the popular Web-based encyclopedia, would be built by a community of programmers and users.

These ambitious quests reflect the renewed optimism sweeping technology centers like Silicon Valley and fueling a nascent Internet boom. It also shows how much the new Internet economy resembles a planetary system where everything and everyone orbits around search in general, and around Google in particular.

Silicon Valley is filled with start-ups whose main business proposition is to be bought by Google, or for that matter by Yahoo or Microsoft. Countless other start-ups rely on Google as their primary driver of traffic or on Google’s powerful advertising system as their primary source of income. Virtually all new companies compete with Google for scarce engineering talent. And divining Google’s next move has become a fixation for scores of technology blogs and a favorite parlor game among technology investors.

“There is way too much obsession with search, as if it were the end of the world,” said Esther Dyson, a well-known technology investor and forecaster. “Google equals money equals search equals search advertising; it all gets combined as if this is the last great business model.”

It may not be the last great business model, but Google has proved that search linked to advertising is a very large and lucrative business, and everyone — including Ms. Dyson, who invested a small sum in Powerset — seems to want a piece of it.

Since the beginning of 2004, venture capitalists have put nearly $350 million into no fewer than 79 start-ups that had something to do with Internet search, according to the National Venture Capital Association, an industry group.

An overwhelming majority are not trying to take Google head on, but rather are focusing on specialized slices of the search world, like searching for videos, blog postings or medical information. Since Google’s stated mission is to organize all of the world’s information, they may still find themselves in the search giant’s cross hairs. That is not necessarily bad, as being acquired by Google could be a financial bonanza for some of these entrepreneurs and investors.

But in the current boom, there is money even for those with the audacious goal of becoming a better Google.

Powerset recently received $12.5 million in financing. Hakia, which like Powerset is trying to create a “natural language” search engine, got $16 million. Another $16 million went to Snap, which has focused on presenting search results in a more compelling way and is experimenting with a new advertising model. And ChaCha, which uses paid researchers that act as virtual reference librarians to provide answers to users’ queries, got $6.1 million.

Still, recent history suggests that gaining traction is going to be difficult. Of dozens of search start-ups that were introduced in recent years, none had more than a 1 percent share of the United States search market in November, according to Nielsen NetRatings, a research firm that measures Internet traffic.

Amassing a large audience has proved to be a challenge even for those with a track record and resources. Consider A9, a search engine owned by Amazon.com that received positive reviews when it began in 2004 and was run by Udi Manber, a widely recognized search specialist. Despite some innovative features and early successes, A9 has captured only a tiny share of the market. Mr. Manber now works for Google, where he is vice president of engineering.

The setback apparently has not stopped Amazon or its chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, from pursuing profits in search. ChaCha said it counts an investment company owned by Mr. Bezos among its backers, and Amazon is an investor in Wikia. An Amazon spokeswoman said Mr. Bezos does not comment about his personal investments.

Some start-ups are similarly bullish. “We expect to be one of the top three search engines,” said Riza C. Berkan, the chief executive of hakia. It is a bold claim, given that hakia’s technology is not yet ready for prime time, and Mr. Berkan readily concedes it will take time to perfect it.

The dream, however, is quintessential Silicon Valley.

“It is hard for me to believe that anybody thinks they can take Google’s business from Google,” said Randy Komisar, a venture capitalist who was once known as Silicon Valley’s “virtual C.E.O.” for his role as a mentor to scores of technology firms. “But to call the game over because Google has been such a success would be to deny history.”

In some ways, the willingness of so many to make multimillion-dollar investments to take on Google and other search companies represents a startling change. In the late 1990s, when Microsoft dominated the technology world, inventors and investors did everything they could to avoid competing with the software company.

Yet many of today’s search start-ups are putting themselves squarely in the path of the Google steamroller. Most explain that decision in similar ways.

They say that Google’s dominance today is different from Microsoft’s in the late 90s when its operating system was a virtual monopoly and nearly impossible to break. In the Internet search industry, “you earn your right to be in business every day, page view after page view, click after click,” said Barney Pell, a founder and the chief executive of Powerset, whose search service is not yet available.

They also say that the market for search simply is too large to resist. Google, which, according to Nielsen, handles about half of all Internet searches in the United States, is valued at an astonishing $141 billion. So, the reasoning goes, anyone who can grab even a small slice of the search market could be well rewarded.

“You don’t need to be No. 1 to be worth billions of dollars,” said Allen Morgan, a partner at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital firm that invested $10 million in Snap. The company is also backed by Bill Gross, an Internet financier who pioneered the idea of linking ads and search results, only to see Google seize the powerful business model and improve on it.

Almost all of today’s search entrepreneurs also say that Google’s success lends credibility to their own long-shot quest.

When Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin first started tinkering with what would become Google, other search engines like AltaVista and Lycos and Excite were dominant. But the companies that owned them were distracted by efforts to diversify their businesses, and they took their eye off the ball of Internet search and stopped innovating.

Some now say that search has not evolved much in years, and that Google is similarly distracted as it introduces new products like word processors, spreadsheets and online payment systems and expands into online video, social networking and other businesses.

“The more Google starts to think about taking on Microsoft, the less it is a pure search play, and the more it opens the door for new innovations,” said Mr. Moldow, the Foundation Capital partner. “That’s great for us.”

But at the same time, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have thousands of engineers, including some of the world’s top search specialists, working on improving their search results. And they have spent billions building vast computer networks so they can respond instantly to the endless stream of queries from around the world.

Search “is becoming an increasingly capital-intensive business,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search. That makes it harder for start-ups to catch up to the giants, she said.

That is not stopping entrepreneurs from betting that they can. Powerset has search and natural-language experts among its two dozen employees, including former top engineers from Yahoo and a former chief linguist from Ask Jeeves, Ask.com’s predecessor. They are the kind of people who could easily land jobs at Google or Microsoft or Yahoo.

Steve Newcomb, a Powerset founder and veteran of several successful start-ups, said his company could become the next Google. Or, he said, if Google or someone else perfected natural-language search before Powerset, then his company would make a great acquisition for one of the other search companies. “We are a huge story no matter what,” he said.

Ms. Dyson, the technology commentator and Powerset investor, captured the optimism more concisely and with less swagger. “I love Google,” she said, “but I love the march of history.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/te.../01search.html





Loaded With Personalities, Now Satellite Radio May Try a Merger
Eric A. Taub

Last year’s debut of Howard Stern’s radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio put the technology on the map, raising the public’s awareness of satellite radio and helping to boost significantly subscriber totals for Sirius and its larger rival, XM Satellite Radio.

Today, thanks in part to the outsize radio personality, the Stern Effect has increased Sirius’s base to about six million subscribers, up 80 percent from one year ago. XM has increased its numbers by more than 30 percent, ending 2006 with 7.7 to 7.9 million customers.

“There is a tendency to view satellite radio as if the glass is half empty, and that it is a failure or disappointment,” said Craig Moffett, senior cable analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein.

“In fact, nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “Satellite radio is growing faster than any consumer product except for the iPod.”

But Sirius and XM shares have taken a battering on Wall Street, with prices for both off about 50 percent from their year-ago levels. On Friday, Sirius closed at $3.54, while XM ended the year at $14.45.

And now, the industry may be getting ready to try an even more dramatic third act — a possible attempt to merge the two services.

The benefits of a merger have been promoted by the chief executive of Sirius, Mel Karmazin, for a number of months, and Sirius officials continue to say that a merger would be a good thing. XM has not commented on the possibility, and neither company has said whether they have actually discussed the issue.

“When you have two companies in the same industry, we have a similar cost structure. Clearly, a merger makes sense from an investor’s point of view to reduce costs, and to have a better return,” said David Frear, the chief financial officer for Sirius.

Both companies have continued to lose hundreds of millions of dollars because of marketing and other subscriber acquisition expenses. During the year, XM sharply lowered its expectations for 2006 subscriber levels, from January’s predicted end-of-year total of 9 million to a maximum of 7.9 million. (Sirius reduced its subscription projection by about 100,000.)

Nate Davis, XM’s president, said his company believed that the slower-than-expected growth rate was of its own making and not a result of any market indifference. “We did not stimulate the market with new products,” he said.

XM’s most talked-about receivers, the Pioneer Inno and Samsung Helix, were first announced one year ago. Several new receiver models will be introduced later in 2007. In addition, production of some receivers was temporarily halted to stop a condition that was allowing satellite signals to be picked up by neighboring vehicles.

The hiccups typical of fledgling industries appear to be over. Both companies have their programming lineups largely in place and a wide range of receivers available in retail stores.

In addition to Howard Stern, Sirius features personalities like Deepak Chopra, Judith Regan, Richard Simmons and Martha Stewart. Sports programming includes N.B.A., N.F.L., and N.H.L. games; Nascar programming begins this year.

XM has shows with hosts including Bob Dylan, Ellen Degeneres, “Good Morning America” personalities, and Oprah Winfrey. XM broadcasts every Major League Baseball game as well as P.G.A. golf.

Yet the vast majority of programming remains duplicative. Each company offers a wide variety of rock, pop, folk, and other musical genres, as well as the same news channels, which include the BBC, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Sirius and XM each claim that their music channels are more compelling than the competition’s, but most casual listeners would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

“The services mirror each other tremendously,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst with the Envisioneering Group, a research firm. “More people know that one service has Howard Stern than know which one has him.”

Except for a relatively small handful of viewers looking for particular programs, consumers searching for a satellite service in a retail store often make their decision not on the merits of one over the other, but which one is more convenient to buy.

“For the subscriber, it all comes down to which one of the two is closer to the cash register. Customers cannot tell the difference between the two services,” Mr. Moffett said.

Customer choice will play an even smaller role in the coming years as both companies come to rely more on selling satellite radio as a factory-installed option on new cars, and less on receivers sold at retail stores.

Both companies have exclusive agreements with the automobile companies. Customers typically get free service for a number of months, and then must pay $12.95 a month to continue listening.

XM has exclusive arrangements with General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan and Porsche. Sirius has similar alliances with BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Kia and VW-Audi.

Today, about 63 percent of XM’s subscribers are buyers of new cars, and Sirius’s new subscribers are derived equally from new car and after-market sales. As more cars are equipped with satellite radios, the new car market could grow to as high as 70 percent of sales in the next few years, Mr. Moffett said.

“We see greater and greater demand in the car market,” said Mr. Davis of XM. “And we think the used car market will be an opportunity to sell to new subscribers.” Used car subscribers incur no additional hardware costs if the receiver is already in place.

And if the companies were to merge and effectively double their subscriber base, the new company could reduce programming costs through increased negotiating clout, removal of duplicative channels and elimination of redundant employees.

Whether Sirius and XM attempt to merge, a number of variables that will determine the size of the industry’s success remain unknown.

They include the number of new cars that will be equipped with satellite radio receivers; the percentage of new car owners who will subscribe after the free trial period ends; and whether purchasers of used cars equipped with satellite radio will be more or less likely to subscribe than new car owners.

The business may also be vulnerable to subscription overload, Mr. Doherty said, if consumers find that monthly recurring expenses from cellphone bills, cable TV, and other services are too high.

Yet even if that is true, there is little doubt that the concept of satellite radio is no longer alien to consumers. According to Sirius, 83 percent of consumers aged 18 to 55 are now aware of the technology.

Mr. Frear became personally cognizant of that when he tried to rent a car with a Sirius radio recently but found they were all taken.

“Every year, satellite radio just sinks deeper and deeper into the public consciousness,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/te...satellite.html