The Age of the Web Hermit
Phil Hartup
Modern Life is Rubbish
The last ten years have seen the Internet move from a global porn distribution network to becoming one of the true wonders of the modern world. (And also a much faster porn distribution network). While communication over the internet has always been fast, it has never been as easy to use as it is today. Compatible hardware was never so common, nor had the net generated such obscene amounts of money.
Before the internet it used to take years, decades even, to build a corporation worth billions on the stock market, yet compared to the likes of Google and Amazon even the meteoric rise of Microsoft seems ponderous. The internet has ripped up old notions of time and space, with people now able like never before to exchange ideas, data and, most importantly of all, money. Transactions can happen almost instantly with as much confidence and security as might be present in a day to day physical transaction. Whilst fraud on the internet is always a danger, it is still no more risky than braving a trip to the shops.
So in this world where fortunes are made and lost by trading in nothing more substantial than data; where you can choose your friends and acquaintances not just from the people you meet at work or down the pub, but from all over the world; where you can get almost any item from any where delivered to your door without having to leave your desk; we have to ask ourselves - is there anything that we really need good old fashioned Real Life for any more? Is a life of doing things and meeting people as our primitive ancestors in the late 20th Century knew it becoming redundant?
The Web Hermit
The notion of people living most of their lives in the internet is not a new one. The Centre For Online and Internet Addiction was founded in 1995, so even back then in the days of dial up and Windows 3.1 there were certifiable web addicts. Back then excessive web-usage was seen as an addiction and the chief reason for this is that in those days the web, for the overwhelming number of users, was a diversion. While the internet as a research tool even back then was substantially more convenient and useful than any trip to your average public library, the principle usage was frivolous. The idea that a person could work, shop, chat, play and even find romance on the Internet was an accepted possibility, but people still attached a stigma to it.
As the Internet comes of age we are seeing that stigma removed, as the web becomes less an amusing diversion and more a useful tool which in some fields is practically a necessity. As the first generation born into the Information Age reaches adulthood, we are seeing the possibility for almost the entirety of a persons life to be handled online, where real life and online are effectively the same thing.
It is the era of the Web Hermit.
Stayin' Alive
Prioritising your online existence above your physical one is all well and good until you starve, die of exposure, or run out of money at the Internet Cafe. If the Web Hermit is to exist at all he needs to be able to take care of the essentials of life. While our ancestors needed food, shelter, clean water and a pointy stick to keep the barbarians at bay, our thoroughly modern Web Hermit knows that all these things can easily be acquired over the internet. All he needs is a bank account and a supply of money to pour into it.
Online banks such as First Direct represent some of the first forays by major, established corporations into the ethereal world of the Internet. Internet banks are strange entities, lacking branches, tellers or even any actual cash if you so wish. Using electronic transactions and a credit card it’s possible to never have to deal with that vulgar paper money stuff at all. Online banking has never been so easy to set up and use and provides many advantages over its physical world equivalent.
First Direct allows you to manage all your cash on the net, whilst Starbucks allows you to get on the web at the majority of its coffee shops.
So our web hermit now has an overdraft and he has credit cards, but if he wants to move out of his mothers cellar before he hits thirty he needs an income. With a lot of office jobs these days requiring little more than a computer which can send and receive emails and a telephone, it is not hard to set yourself up almost anywhere. A WiFi capable laptop and a mobile phone mean that the office can pretty much travel anywhere. This is where we see one of the more enticing advantages to the life of the Web Hermit - when so much of your life is online you can get to it anywhere there’s a connection, which could mean a coffee shop of a resort on the Spanish Riviera.
Having an ordinary job and working via the web is one thing, but of course the alternative is to simply make money out of the web itself, and there are many ways to do this. The explosion in the popularity of internet gambling has brought together millions of rubes in easily accessible shoals and the web is full of the exploits of those who harvest the online Poker rooms after the pubs have emptied on a Friday or Saturday night. If you prefer a more predictable type of gambling there’s always playing the markets, with share and currency dealing on the web easier than its ever been. If you want something a little more stable than gambling in its various forms then there are other alternatives. Ebay allows for the easy sale and distribution of goods or outside of this there are innumerable websites selling everything from t-shirts to miniature pet pigs.
Businesses that before would have been high street shops with a tiny customer base can now reach hundreds of millions of potential customers. Where before to open a small business such as a clothing shop you’d need stock to display, premises and staff, now all you need is a website to get the ball rolling. Making money through the internet isn’t just an option any more, for an increasing number of businesses it’s a necessary move.
So you’ve got your bank account, you’ve got your income, and you’ve still not had to put your trousers on today. Not bad. But naturally, man does not live by bread alone.
VGaming
For some amongst us, the idea of spending the majority of a 24 hour period in front of a game of sort or another is nothing new. We’ve all known, or been, that guy so enamoured of his new game that he loses track of time and before he knows what’s what he’s missed an appointment, or accidentally played through til dawn without noticing the time, or died of exhaustion. Being sat in front of a PC gives you all the ways to kill time in the world and more, but this capacity for a device to take over a persons life for extended periods of time is nothing new.
Spending too much time in World Of Warcraft is no different to spending all day fishing, or on the golf course, or working on your car or a million other distractions where a person can relax and do their own thing. That said, the MMORPG is one of the first mediums to properly allow a person to exist more as a web entity than as an actual person and while they are certainly not a new phenomena (as anybody who camped the early morning rare spawns in Ultima Online can tell you), the scale of their spread throughout the gaming community can not be underestimated. Players create their avatar in these games and, by and large, while he she or it is not exactly a fully rounded character it’s safe to say that few players live their in game lives as they do their lives outside.
The well to do and respectable accountant becomes the trash talking rogue camping the new player areas, and the failing computer studies undergraduate becomes a PvP hero and legendary guild leader. The debate as to how bad online gaming is for a person and in what amounts has raged for nearly as long as there have been online games. Some might say that playing World Of Warcraft or Counter-Strike is not the most active of pastimes. This is true, but it’s not as if, in the event of the Blizzard servers suddenly all crashing and wiping themselves, the six million players of World of Warcraft would suddenly pick up footballs, hop on bicycles and head off to the park for some fresh air and a kick about. Do games make people inactive, or do inactive people flock to games?
Some might also say that online games lack the camaraderie and teamwork of, for example, playing for a local sports team. This is perhaps true, though we live in an age were many gaming clans and communities have been around for years, with players knowing each other for just as long. With voice communications in use during play and in many cases get togethers in the most easily reached country for drinking binges, we are starting to see the gaming clan emerge as a social group. While the most disturbing quality of the latest generations of online games could be said to be their addictiveness and their capacity to consume huge swathes of time, it is fair to say that in the main this is at least time spent with friends. One of the greatest factors that keeps a player in an MMORPG is their ties to their friends in game.
So our Web Hermit has got game, he’s got a clan, and he’s got people to talk to while he’s gaming. With Xbox Live leading the way for even consoles to become sociable gaming systems we’re seeing a revolution in online play. Gone are the days of the silent unwashed loner in his basement blazing away at complete strangers, now we see the gamer is a more rounded individual, communicating with others using TeamSpeak and maintaining enduring friendships which extend beyond just the game itself. He still doesn’t have to wash, or put any trousers on, though.
Recreation and Procreation
Gaming is not the be all and end all of online recreation though. If you like something a little more cultural then you can peruse the contents of a great many galleries and art collections such as the Tate gallery. Apart from visual art, the web is also home to almost every music track ever recorded, every movie ever made and every book ever written if you’re willing to hunt around a bit. It’s a sobering thought that your PC sitting in front of you right now could be give you the absolute best works that humanity has produced in the fields of art, literature, music and cinematography for nothing more than a bit of searching. There’s nothing to stop our Web Hermit from being a renaissance man, or a punk, or a TV addict or anything else.
As with any pioneering venture the internet has somewhat outrun law enforcement, and as such we live in the golden age of data piracy. While our Web Hermit might be something of a naughty pixie in the eyes of the media corporations, he’s probably savvy enough to get everything he wants off the web without having to open his wallet. Any and all cultural excesses are available to our listless specimen in front of his monitor. That’s all well and good, but the real advantage of the Web Hermit is not that he can manage his entire world from his computer at home. The true beauty of life as a Web Hermit is that because your income, finances and friends are all accessible on line, you can get to them from anywhere.
It’s perfectly possible to remain as the archetypal cellar dweller, but with the internet accessible easily throughout the developed world there really is no reason for the Web Hermit to physically be in any one place in preference to another. With email and messenger programs blissfully indifferent to which end of the planet you’re connecting from, with all the manifold research resources of the internet to play with and with Skype saving you from breaking the bank on the phone, geography has never been less important.
So if you can work from anywhere, can you get to anywhere? Naturally. Booking flights, hotels, activities and arranging to meet friends abroad has never been easier. This is again where we are seeing how the internet is not just becoming an option, it is becoming the preferable way to handle transactions. While booking online is one way to arrange holidays, it is fast becoming the only way to get hold of tickets for gigs, festivals and sporting events. With tickets over the phone for a lot of events selling out in minutes - if at first you don’t succeed, for nearly every event you can think of there’s a ticket on Ebay for it.
Being able to travel the world and get touted tickets to the best gigs and so on is all fine and dandy, but the Web Hermit can’t live alone forever. The majority of people meet their life partner at work. Since the Web Hermit makes his money on the internet then it’s fair enough that he should also seek a partner here. Internet dating has not exactly revolutionised dating as we know it. Dates are still pretty much exactly as they have always been, however the process of finding somebody to go on a date with has become so much easier that hunting for a partner has become less of a pursuit and more of a series of auditions.
Rather than lamenting having nobody to go out with your active Internet spouse-hunter can maintain a Fonz-worthy dating schedule without going to all the hassle of actually finding the likely candidates in their natural environment. As with any process designed to help find a partner those who have been successful will swear by it and those for whom it has failed will swear at it, but in any case with millions of subscribers to dating websites in the UK alone, the odds of our Web Hermit finding true love, or at least his first wife, are pretty favourable.
The Future
Web Hermits have never been exceptionally rare. However what is defining the modern internet dweller is not the amount of time that is spent online, it is how productive that time is and what can be achieved in it. For many people, the web can no longer be separated from their real life by the convenient ‘virtual’ tag. Reality, for more and more people, is inextricably tied up in the Internet. The web has allowed people to mix and congregate into social groups based on common interests rather than locality, and the result is that while physically the Web Hermit may appear more isolated than would seem healthy, he or she can still be a part of a close social unit.
Time will tell how strong the electronic ties that hold together internet societies will be. Civil society in the physical world could arguably be on the wane but on the internet, at least in these early years, we are seeing the reverse. Communities are becoming more stable and businesses to cater to them have been established. We are still in the relatively early days of the era of the Web Hermit and who is to say what will become of them? In years to come will we see grey haired old warhorses meeting up in their faded clan t-shirts sharing stories down the Dog And Duck of taking down the Molten Core fifty years ago? Will parents tell their children the enchanting tale of how they exchanged smiley faces in the Singles (19-29) room on Yahoo and knew that they were meant to be? There’s no way to know for sure where the Internet is going and where it will take the people who rely on it, but there can be no disputing that it is now integral to the fabric of modern society.
For our Web Hermit, being able to live, work and thrive in this environment with nothing more than a computer, an internet connection and a head full of passwords can only be a headstart in life.
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/07..._Hermit/1.html
The Tech Support Of The Crowds: Qunu
Rafe Needleman
In my experience, the best technical support on any product will come from somebody who actually uses and likes the product, not a paid support rep following a script. That's why people use open message boards. Message boards have always amazed me, though because so many people are willing to chip in and help people they don't know. But they work, and whatever the topic you need help with, there's almost certainly a group of people online willing to lend their earnest advice.
If you can't wait for a response in a message board, you can try a new service, Qunu, which is trying to replicate the message board community spirit, but in real time. Qunu connects you via instant message to an expert on the topic you need help with.
Qunu experts register themselves and tell the system what they know about. People who need help select a topic, and the system then connects the two people via IM.
At the moment the system is used mostly by programmers and other geeks, partly because experts on Qunu have to use a Jabber-compatible chat client. (Help-seekers don't need a chat client at all -- they communicate via the Qunu Web site.) The system should expand over time. Support for more popular chat networks like AOL's is forthcoming, which may pull in experts from other fields. Integration with voice chat and video may be added too.
Qunu is free, but it's clear that connecting people who need advice to experts could generate revenue. Like Ether, Qunu can expose consultants and service providers to their potential customers. Co-founder Helmar Rudolph told me he is setting up a "pro zone" on Qunu for experts who want to sell their advice instead of giving it away.
Maintaining the quality of the community of experts is going to be key to Qunu's success, and Rudolph told me that Qunu already has a reputation system, it's just not visible to users yet. Not only will it put at the top of lists experts who are the are most responsive and receive the best ratings, but it will also temporarily suppress the display of experts who answer a disproportionate number of queries, so everybody gets a chance to participate.
Qunu is a great idea. We already know that crowds are wise. They're altruistic and they love to talk, too. Qunu harnesses that.
http://news.com.com/2061-12572_3-609...4685&subj=news
Gracenote, music publishers in lyrics deal
Catalog Owners Mull Suits Against Unauthorized Sites
Sue Zeidler
U.S. digital entertainment company Gracenote on Thursday said it obtained licenses to distribute lyrics as music publishers mulled legal action against Web sites that provide them without authorization.
"When we first approached the publishers with this, they were excited. They thought lyrics had been an untapped resource for them and there's quite a bit of lyrics being taken for free on the Web," Ross Blanchard, Gracenote's vice president of business development, told Reuters in an interview.
Gracenote obtained the rights to the lyrics of more than 1 million songs from the North American catalogs of Bertelsmann AG's BMG Music Publishing, Vivendi's Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, jointly owned by Sony Corp and Michael Jackson, peermusic and other publishers.
Gracenote also said it was talking with all of its partners, including Yahoo Inc. and Apple Computer Inc's iTunes, on its plans to launch a service to offer legal and accurate lyrics for all digital media.
The service, to be initially available in North America, would be the first industry-backed move to providing lyrics legally, Gracenote said.
Until now, consumers' access to song lyrics has been largely through unauthorized sources, which usually provide inaccurate content, the company said.
Publishing industry officials cited Web sites such as lyrics.com and azlyrics.com among those who provide their catalogs' lyrics without their authorization. These sites could not be reached for comment.
"This license creates a new revenue stream which will guarantee that songwriters are paid for their work," said Nicholas Firth, chairman and chief executive officer of BMG Music Publishing.
Ralph Peer II, Firth's counterpart at peermusic, said licensing lyrics should boost worldwide music publishing revenues, estimated at about $4 billion annually. Peer said he hopes the unauthorized sites will seek licenses.
"I think we'll see a reasonable increase, as much as a 5 percent increase, in industry music publishing revenues five years out from where we are right now," Peer said.
"Clearly, there are copyright issues involving these unlicensed sites, which are making good income through advertising and other sources, while the composers are not getting their due," he said.
Gracenote's Blanchard said it was up to digital music retailers to decide how they will package or price the lyrics, but he did not expect it would involve significant added costs to consumers.
"We anticipate that you'll see different kinds of offers in the market, where lyrics are combined with recorded music in a total package like a subscription. This extra element should help drive sales growth. There are a lot of ways the services will derive value outside of adding an extra charge," he said.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9001803
Mickey Spillane, Creator Of Detective Mike Hammer, Dies
AP
Mickey Spillane considered himself a "writer" as opposed to an "author," defining a writer as someone whose books sell.
"This is an income-generating job," he told The Associated Press during a 2001 interview. "Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood."
The macho, Brooklyn-born mystery writer, who wowed millions of readers with the shoot-'em-up sex and violence of gumshoe Mike Hammer, died Monday at 88. Spillane's wife, Jane, told The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News he had cancer.
After starting out in comic books, Spillane wrote his first Mike Hammer novel, "I, the Jury," in 1946. Twelve more followed, with sales topping 100 million. Notable titles included "The Killing Man," "The Girl Hunters" and "One Lonely Night."
Many Hammer books were made into movies, including the classic film noir "Kiss Me, Deadly" and "The Girl Hunters," in which Spillane himself starred. Hammer stories were also featured on television in the series "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer" and in made-for-TV movies. In the 1980s, Spillane appeared in a string of Miller Lite beer commercials.
"Thanks Mickey for giving the world so much pleasure during your time with us," actor Stacy Keach, who portrayed Hammer on TV in the 1980s, said in a statement Monday. "We shall miss you, but we are comforted by the knowledge that your work and Mike Hammer will live forever."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/enter/story.php?id=1006335
Mickey Spillane, 88, Critic-Proof Writer of Pulpy Mike Hammer Novels, Dies
Richard Severo
Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer, the heroic but frequently sadistic private detective who blasted his way through some of the most violent novels of the 1940’s and 50’s, died yesterday at his home in Murrells Inlet, S.C. He was 88 and had homes in South Carolina and New York City.
His death was confirmed by Brian Edgerton of Goldfinch Funeral Home in Murrells Inlet, a village south of Myrtle Beach. Other details were not immediately available.
Scorned by many critics for his artless plots, his reliance on unlikely coincidence and a simplistic understanding of the law, Mr. Spillane nevertheless achieved instant success with his first novel, “I, the Jury,” published in 1947. He cemented his popularity over the next few years with books like “Vengeance Is Mine,” “My Gun Is Quick,” “The Big Kill” and “Kiss Me, Deadly,” which became the best of the several movies based on his books, in 1955, with Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer.
As the books kept coming, some critics softened toward him. The Times Literary Supplement of London described his 1961 novel, “The Deep,” as “nasty” but nevertheless exhibiting “a genuine narrative grip.”
Mr. Spillane referred to his own material as “the chewing gum of American literature” and laughed at the critics. “I’m not writing for the critics,” he said. “I’m writing for the public.” He described himself as a “money writer,” in that “I write when I need money.”
“I have no fans,” he told one interviewer. “You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.”
His customers remained loyal even after the Hammer character became much imitated and later generations of pulp writers produced books filled with even more violence than Mr. Spillane’s.
Mr. Spillane’s mother was a Presbyterian and his father a Catholic; when he was coming into his own as a fiction writer, Mr. Spillane liked to say that he was “christened in two churches and neither took.” But in 1951, he became a Jehovah’s Witness, and he persuaded his mother and his first wife to convert. Instead of writing, he spent most of his time going door to door, spreading the message of the Bible. He wrote no books from 1952 to 1961, and those he wrote later, some fans said, lacked the vintage sadism of the first five, in which a total of 48 people were killed.
Mr. Spillane’s marriages to Mary Ann Pearce and Sherri Malinou ended in divorce. He married Jane Rodgers Johnson in 1983. His children, all by his first wife, were Kathy, Mark, Mike and Carolyn; he also had two stepchildren from his third marriage, Britt and Lisa. Details about survivors were not immediately released.
Mr. Spillane took issue with those who complained that his books had too much sex. How could there be sex, he asked, when so many women were shot? He noted the conspicuous role women played among his victims: Mary (abandoned), Anne L. (drowned in a bathtub), Lola (fatally stabbed), Ethel (whipped before she was shot), Marsha (shot) and Ellen (like Mary, given the heave-ho).
And then there was Velda, Mike Hammer’s blond, beautiful and patient companion in several novels. Hammer made no advances toward her and all she got for her trouble was being shot, assaulted, strung up naked and whipped.
In “I, the Jury,” Hammer became so angry at a female psychiatrist that he shot her in her “stark naked” stomach. (“Stark naked” was a phrase that Mr. Spillane rather liked.) As she died, she asked, “Mike, how could you?” To which Hammer replied, “It was easy.”
The Saturday Review of Literature summarized the book as “lurid action, lurid characters, lurid plot, lurid finish.” Anthony Boucher, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it “a spectacularly bad book.” But it enjoyed enormous sales and convinced Mr. Spillane that he could earn a living as a writer. He bought some land near Newburgh, N.Y., 60 miles north of New York City, built a cinder-block house there and proceeded to churn out his special brand of carnage. One bad guy was shot to death by a year-old baby, and in another book Mike Hammer wounded a malefactor just badly enough that he could watch him burn to death.
Frank Morrison Spillane was born on March 9, 1918, in Brooklyn, the son of John J. and Catherine A. Spillane; Mickey was a nickname for his baptismal name, Michael. He was educated in schools in Brooklyn and in Elizabeth, N.J., and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1935. During his school years, he entertained friends by telling them his own ghost stories. He attended what is now called Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kan., without graduating.
During the 1930’s, he worked as a lifeguard at Breezy Point, Queens; during the 1940 Christmas season, he sold $1 ties at Gimbels department store. There he met Joe Gill, another Brooklynite, whose brother, Ray, was an editor at Funnies Inc., a comic-book producer in Midtown Manhattan. Mr. Spillane convinced Ray that he could write comic books.
The day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Mr. Spillane enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and became a fighter pilot. To his dismay, he was stationed in Florida and Mississippi for the duration of the war, training others to be fighter pilots. After the war, he returned to Funnies Inc., but soon tired of comic-book writing and turned to novels.
Aside from his detective stories, he wrote two well received, nonviolent children’s books, “The Day the Sea Rolled Back” (1979), which won a prize from the Junior Literary Guild, and “The Ship That Never Was” (1982).
Among his other novels were “The Long Wait” (1951), “The Girl Hunters” (1962), “Day of the Guns” (1964), “The Death Dealers” (1965), “The Twisted Thing” (1966) and “Body Lovers” (1967). He also was a writer of a screenplay based on “The Girl Hunters,” produced by Colorama Features in 1963.
Mr. Spillane’s most famous hero became the protagonist of two successful television series. The first, “Mike Hammer,” with Darren McGavin, ran from 1956 to 1959. “Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer,” with Stacy Keach, ran from 1984 to 1987. Mr. Keach also starred in “Mike Hammer, Private Eye,” from 1997 to 1998.
Mr. Spillane also did some acting; he played Mike Hammer and other “tough detective” roles and parodies on television and in movies. He also appeared in more than 100 Miller Lite beer commercials.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/arts/18spillane.html
Caucus Groups Privately Schmooze Lawmakers
AP
One House lawmaker joined 98 of them. A senator joined one because sugar beet growers asked him to. Members of the House and Senate belong to hundreds of informal clubs -- usually known as caucuses -- that have sprung up to advocate for special interests, with little public accountability.
At the Andrews Air Force Base golf course recently, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus teamed up with lobbyists in groups that were carefully crafted in advance.
And on a recent sunny day, House members who belong to the Congressional Sportsmen's Caucus left suits and ties behind, grabbed shotguns and headed for the firing range in suburban Glenn Dale, Md.
The lawmakers got expert shooting advice from Olympic double trap champion Kim Rhode while they mingled with representatives of the outdoor-sports industry who footed the bill for the ''Great Congressional Shoot-Out'' and barbecue.
There was no public accounting for the special interest money. No talk about votes or hearings back at the Capitol. Just the hollers of ''pull'' and the pop, pop, pop of shotguns aiming for clay targets flying through the sun-filled sky.
Congress has allowed the caucuses to be affiliated with foundations that can raise unlimited amounts of money from special interests to finance social events and activities without having to disclose expenses or donations -- as lawmakers must for campaigns, political action committee and other groups.
That means no scrutiny by ethics enforcers, campaign finance regulators or the public.
The Associated Press surveyed Congress, identifying more than 500 such clubs and their members. Caucus events financed by special interests ranged from golf tournaments to Caribbean trips, AP found.
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SPECIAL INTEREST SCHMOOZING
The caucuses offer companies, interest groups and their lobbyists an opportunity to schmooze lawmakers out of public sight. Usually, all it takes is money. Some groups include:
--The Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation rounded up gunmakers Beretta and Winchester, the National Rifle Association, Wal-Mart and outfitters Cabela's and Bass Pro Shops to sponsor the shootout, according to the invitation.
--At the Congressional Hispanic Caucus golf outing, Rep. Nick Rahall II, D-W.Va., hit the course with a lobbyist for the Teamsters union and a retired admiral who heads the Nuclear Energy Institute.
''It wasn't an accident,'' Rahall said of the threesome. The lawmaker hails from an energy-producing state where Teamsters are influential.
-- The Congressional Internet Caucus lets high-tech and Internet companies like AT&T, Google and Microsoft serve on an advisory committee, giving industry a chance to bend lawmakers' ears and show off their latest technology.
-- The sugar growers' lobby credits its access to the House Sugar Caucus and the Senate Sweetener Caucus for helping to maintain quotas that keep cheaper foreign sugar out of the U.S. market.
''In the past 10 years we have steadily been building momentum, and I think certainly having a caucus out there having leaders telling our good story is one of the reasons why,'' said Phillip Hayes of the American Sugar Alliance.
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ADVANTAGES FOR LAWMAKERS
Any member of Congress can form a caucus simply by writing a ''Dear Colleague'' letter inviting others to join.
The caucuses bring like-minded politicians together to promote particular issues. The groups also can aid lawmakers' fundraising connections, raise their profiles on issues that affect politically powerful interests back home and provide hobnobbing with celebrities or recreation that costs them nothing.
Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., boasts membership in 98 such clubs. At least 189 lawmakers belong to a dozen or more, an Associated Press survey of Congress found.
Sen. Conrad Burns, a member of 18 caucuses, said he joined the Sweetener Caucus at the behest of sugar beet growers in his state.
''I don't think I've ever attended,'' Burns, R-Mont., said of caucus meetings. ''I do what my growers tell me. I know we grow a lot of sugar beets in Montana.''
Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., has nothing to do with caucuses. He said some lawmakers use them ''to cover their tails'' and hide their voting records.
''People will vote for a budget resolution that blocks your ability to provide decent funding for health or education, and then join a caucus or write some letter on behalf of a program for some disease,'' he said.
Government watchdog Fred Wertheimer, head of Democracy 21, wants caucuses to disclose their activities and finances.
''Members often create caucuses around particular interests or specific legislative goals,'' he said. ''They're bound to attract the special interests that have policy concerns in that area. And they create opportunities for financial help, for campaign contributions to those members.''
Lawmakers tout caucus memberships to prospective donors.
Arkansas Democratic Rep. Marion Berry's campaign noted on a fundraising invitation that he is chairman of the Blue Dog Task Force on Health, Education and Welfare. A fundraising flier for Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., billed him as vice chairman of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus.
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THE CELEBRITY DRAW
Some caucuses involve more obscure industry issues. To raise their profiles, some use star power.
NASCAR great Richard Petty posed for photos with lawmakers as he visited Capitol Hill on behalf of the Specialty Equipment Market Association, which holds a Washington rally every other year attended by lawmakers in the Automotive Performance and Motorsports Caucus.
Legislation that would let trade associations such as SEMA offer health insurance is among the group's priorities. So is heading off new federal regulation.
Many of the businesses that make race car parts belong to SEMA. Their message to Washington: ''We're good guys. ... We don't bother you, you don't bother us,'' Petty said. ''Just realize we're trying to make a living.''
Members of the Congressional Arts Caucus were lobbied by singer Carole King, who pushed for more arts funding with a performance.
Arts Caucus and Entertainment Caucus members got to hobnob with stars, including actors George Wendt of ''Cheers'' and Patty Duke and her son, ''Lord of the Rings'' actor Sean Astin.
''We realize we live in a society that is drawn to celebrities,'' said Robin Bronk, executive director of the Creative Coalition, which sponsors such events. ''We try and use the power of the entertainment industry to shine a spotlight on issues of social importance.''
That group's issues include tax breaks for production companies that make movies and TV shows, more arts funding and opposition to government indecency regulations.
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KEEPING THE PUBLIC AWAY
Some caucuses and their affiliated groups, including the Sportsmen's Foundation, try to keep the public and press away from events where lawmakers mingle with lobbyists.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute refused AP access to its spring golf tournament at Andrews Air Force Base, home of the president's Air Force One jet. From the base golf shop, lawmakers could be seen getting into golf carts with lobbyists.
The event's sponsors included sportswear maker Nike, drug industry lobby PhRMA, The Coca-Cola Co., the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. The parent company of Philip Morris, Altria, paid for breakfast, and AT&T sponsored golf carts.
Signs identifying golf pairings listed Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., playing with representatives of Strategic Impact and Pinnacle West Capital Corp., while Rep. Joe Baca, D-Calif. played with two Coca-Cola officials.
Baca, Pastor and Hispanic Caucus Chairman Grace Napolitano, D-Calif., did not return multiple calls seeking comment.
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LAWMAKERS AS LOBBYISTS: KATRINA AND THE CASINOS
Lawmakers often serve as lobbyists to sway colleagues on issues important to their caucuses.
When Congress was considering reconstruction aid after Hurricane Katrina, anti-gambling lawmakers opposed giving any money to casinos on the Gulf Coast.
The Congressional Gaming Caucus, led by Nevada House members Jim Gibbons, a Republican, and Democrat Shelley Berkley, began pressing fellow lawmakers to include the casinos.
The caucus forged a compromise. Hotels with casinos received recovery aid to help rebuild the lodging portions of their complexes.
Berkley said she's proud to serve as co-chair of the Gaming Caucus, which lets her introduce executives from her former industry to colleagues.
''When I was chairman of the board of the Nevada Hotel/Motel Association, a lot of middle management gaming executives were members of my board. They are running these hotels now. My relationship is up close and personal,'' she said.
Berkley benefits from the relationship with a political fundraiser every other year at a Las Vegas hotel.
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TALES OF THE CARIBBEAN
Caucuses can offer a range of perks, including travel to resorts.
Rep. Donald Payne, co-chairman of the Caribbean Caucus, made at least 14 trips to Caribbean islands, Panama and Puerto Rico between November 2000 and the end of 2005. Among the visits: Payne and other caucus members attended the 10th anniversary of the Caribbean Multi-National Business Conference in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, last November.
The conference was held at the Wyndham Sugar Bay Resort & Spa, which describes itself as a ''beach-and-water sport lover's paradise.''
Payne, D-N.J., said caucus members helped Caribbean nations get U.S. hurricane relief and met with heads of state about drug trafficking, AIDS, trade and port security.
''If it's the Caribbean caucus, you have to go to the Caribbean,'' Payne said.
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THE SHOOT-OUT
The Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation rented a shooting range in a Maryland suburb in mid-May. The group's motto: ''We give sportsmen a voice ... and a seat at the table.''
Although the range is in a public park near Washington, the foundation made sure a range official and uniformed officer were at the entrance to turn the public away.
Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., finished as the overall top gun in the shooting competition. Reps. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., and Don Young, R-Alaska, also won trophies.
Peterson hardly missed with his Ruger Red Label 12-gauge. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., admittedly didn't shoot well. He left his personal gun at home in Kansas and had to use shotguns provided by the hosts.
After the competition, lawmakers were treated to a live band and a buffet of shrimp, barbecue, oysters, chicken, cole slaw and potato salad. Trophies were handed out.
Back at the Capitol, senators debated the heated issue of immigration while the House gaveled to order, passed eight bills or resolutions by voice vote and held more than a half-dozen hearings on various legislation.
Peterson and Tiahrt said they didn't discuss legislation or view the shootout as a special way for lobbyists to make their case.
''From my point of view, people who come to this are people I know and talk to all the time,'' Peterson said. ''I don't think folks out there would think they're getting access they don't get already.''
Added Tiahrt: ''The lobbying community can come by my office any time.''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/A...nal-Clubs.html
Windows Is Ready to Tout PC’s as Gaming Devices
Seth Schiesel
Quick, name the world’s most popular electronic game system.
If PlayStation or Xbox popped into your head, that’s understandable. Sony and Microsoft, the companies that make those machines, have spent rafts of cash over the years trying to make those brands synonymous with video games. But however understandable, if you answered PlayStation or Xbox or even Nintendo, you were also wrong.
In fact, the world’s most popular game machine is the personal computer. And that doesn’t mean Macintoshes; Macs are essentially nowhere in the game world. That means PC’s based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Windows PC’s and in Microsoft surveys about half of them report playing games. That doesn’t include the legions of office-bound Solitaire and Minesweeper addicts who don’t even think of themselves as gamers. (You are, though!)
But as popular as PC gaming is and has been, the general public has never really thought of the home computer as a primary game system. That is no accident. For the first few decades of the digital age, Microsoft’s top goal was to get computers into as many homes as possible. Bill Gates and friends knew that a family was more likely to spend $1,000 on its first computer if was meant to help little Johnny with his homework, or send baby pictures to Grandma, or help with the taxes, rather than if the family was thinking about the PC’s ability to send them into outer space or the depths of a dragon’s lair.
Well, here come the dragons.
After years of treating games, game players and game makers as the vaguely disreputable loons of the PC family, Microsoft is making a major strategic shift. Just as games are becoming a core part of mainstream entertainment, Microsoft is beginning to embrace gaming as a core part of using a computer. That means marketing the PC as the world’s most powerful gaming system and revamping Windows to make it more game-friendly.
Now that the computer business is about convincing people who already have PC’s to buy new ones (rather than their first one), Microsoft executives say they have realized that emphasizing games is a great way to do that.
“Previously we’ve had game technology built into Windows, but we didn’t approach gaming as one of Windows’ fundamental applications, and that’s what we want to start to do,” Rich Wickham, the director of Microsoft’s Windows gaming group, said during a recent visit to New York. “That means supporting developers more closely, seeding great games, making games easier to install and play, and having a unified marketing presence.”
The bigger picture is that PC gaming is surging these days even without Microsoft’s help. A few years ago, the conventional wisdom in game circles (even at Microsoft) was that PC gaming was stagnant, a niche backwater that would soon be swamped by consoles like PlayStation and Xbox.
The tsunami most game executives didn’t see coming was the rise in subscription-based online PC gaming, which wasn’t reflected in the retail sales charts that dominate big screens in boardrooms. Online PC games like Lineage II and World of Warcraft are on pace to take in more than $2 billion this year worldwide.
At the same time, publishers are coming to appreciate that having a strong portfolio of PC games can help them through the tough times that accompany the transition to a new generation of consoles every few years. With the introduction of the Xbox 360 just last November and the scheduled debuts of Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii this fall, game publishers have been suffering as customers adjust and wait for the new consoles. Perhaps the biggest hit of the year has been the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a game with a fanatical PC fan base (though the game has sold more copies for the Xbox 360).
So with the two new Japanese consoles coming this fall, Microsoft will try to blunt their impact in two ways. The first is an all-but-certain price cut on the Xbox 360. The second will be a new marketing and branding campaign around Windows gaming. That means advertising, but just as important, it also means some long overdue help for the sad patch of real estate known as the PC games section in stores.
“There’s no question about it: Windows games at retail is a disaster,” Mr. Wickham said, “and we’re going to fix that.”
This is what he means: If you walk into a game store or the game section at a Wal-Mart these days, the PlayStation games have a clearly marked area of their own. All the PlayStation game boxes look somewhat similar, and the overall impression is that PlayStation is a unified community of games and products. Same with the Xbox area. Same with the Nintendo area. This is because Sony, Microsoft’s Xbox group and Nintendo try to make their products as attractive as possible in stores and offer financial incentives to retailers to make that happen.
The PC games area, however, usually looks like a dump. Games may be organized haphazardly, they all look different, and they are probably stacked on some dusty shelf in the back of the store. For decades PC games have been the children of a hundred mothers, with each publisher pursuing its own retail strategy, if any at all. Having learned how to do retail marketing correctly with the Xbox, look for Microsoft to apply most of those lessons to PC games this fall.
So there will certainly be some new buzz around computer games this holiday season. But that will hardly compare with what the general public should expect to hear about PC gaming from Microsoft early next year as the company trots out its next version of Windows, called Vista. As Microsoft tries to persuade millions of people around the world to upgrade to Vista, enhanced support for gaming is going to be one of the main selling points.
So even if your current computer does the taxes just fine, there may be dragons in your future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/te...gy/18vide.html
Avast, Me Critics! Ye Kill the Fun: Critics and the Masses Disagree About Film Choices
A. O. Scott
Let’s start with a few numbers. At Rottentomatoes.com, a Web site that quantifies movie reviews on a 100-point scale, the aggregate score for “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” stands at a sodden 54. Metacritic.com, a similar site, crunches the critical prose of the nation’s reviewers and comes up with a numerical grade of 52 out of 100. Even in an era of rampant grade inflation, that’s a solid F.
Meanwhile, over at boxofficemojo.com, where the daily grosses are tabulated, the second installment in the “Pirates” series, which opened on July 7, plunders onward, trailing broken records in its wake. Its $136 million first-weekend take was the highest three-day tally in history, building on a best-ever $55 million on that Friday, and it is cruising into blockbuster territory at a furious clip. As of this writing, a mere 10 days into its run, the movie has brought in $258.2 million, a hit by any measure.
All of which makes “Dead Man’s Chest” a fascinating sequel — not to “Curse of the Black Pearl,” which inaugurated the franchise three years ago, but to “The Da Vinci Code.” Way back in the early days of the Hollywood summer — the third week in May, to be precise — America’s finest critics trooped into screening rooms in Cannes, Los Angeles, New York and points between, saw Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s best seller, and emerged in a fit of collective grouchiness. The movie promptly pocketed some of the biggest opening-weekend grosses in the history of its studio, Sony.
For the second time this summer, then, my colleagues and I must face a frequently — and not always politely — asked question: What is wrong with you people? I will, for now, suppress the impulse to turn the question on the moviegoing public, which persists in paying good money to see bad movies that I see free. I don’t for a minute believe that financial success contradicts negative critical judgment; $500 million from now, “Dead Man’s Chest” will still be, in my estimation, occasionally amusing, frequently tedious and entirely too long. But the discrepancy between what critics think and how the public behaves is of perennial interest because it throws into relief some basic questions about taste, economics and the nature of popular entertainment, as well as the more vexing issue of what, exactly, critics are for.
Are we out of touch with the audience? Why do we go sniffing after art where everyone else is looking for fun, and spoiling everybody’s fun when it doesn’t live up to our notion or art? What gives us the right to yell “bomb” outside a crowded theater? Variations on these questions arrive regularly in our e-mail in-boxes, and also constitute a major theme in the comments sections of film blogs and Web sites. Online, everyone is a critic, which is as it should be: professional prerogatives aside, a critic is really just anyone who thinks out loud about something he or she cares about, and gets into arguments with fellow enthusiasts. But it would be silly to pretend that those professional prerogatives don’t exist, and that they don’t foster a degree of resentment. Entitled elites, self-regarding experts, bearers of intellectual or institutional authority, misfits who get to see a movie before anybody else and then take it upon themselves to give away the ending: such people are easy targets of populist anger. Just who do we think we are?
There is no easy answer to this question. Film criticism — at least as practiced in the general-interest daily and weekly press — has never been a specialist pursuit. Movies, more than any other art form, are understood to be common cultural property, something everyone can enjoy, which makes any claim of expertise suspect. Therefore, a certain estrangement between us and them — or me and you, to put it plainly — has been built into the enterprise from the start.
The current schism is in some ways nothing new: go back and read reviews in The New York Times of “Top Gun,” “Crocodile Dundee” and “The Karate Kid Part II” to see how some of my predecessors dealt with three of the top-earning movies 20 years ago. (The Australian with the big knife was treated more kindly than the flyboy or the high-kicker, by the way.) And the divide between critic and public may also be temporary. Last year, during the Great Box-Office Slump of 2005, we all seemed happy to shrug together at the mediocrity of the big studio offerings.
No more. Whatever the slump might have portended for the movie industry, it appears to be over for the moment, and the critics have resumed their customary role of scapegoat. The modern blockbuster — the movie that millions of people line up to see more or less simultaneously, on the first convenient showing on the opening weekend — can be seen as the fulfillment of the democratic ideal the movies were born to fulfill. To stand outside that happy communal experience and, worse, to regard it with skepticism or with scorn, is to be a crank, a malcontent, a snob.
So we’re damned if we don’t. And sometimes, also, if we do. When our breathless praise garlands advertisements for movies the public greets with a shrug, we look like suckers or shills. But these accusations would stick only if the job of the critic were to reflect, predict or influence the public taste.
That, however, is the job of the Hollywood studios, in particular of their marketing and publicity departments, and it is the professional duty of critics to be out of touch with — to be independent of — their concerns. These companies spend tens of millions of dollars to persuade you that the opening of a movie is a public event, a cultural experience you will want to be part of. The campaign of persuasion starts weeks or months — or, in the case of multisequel cash cows, years — before the tickets go on sale, with the goal of making their purchase a foregone conclusion by the time the first reviews appear. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the judgment of critics almost never makes the difference between failure and success, at least for mass-release, big-budget movies like “Dead Man’s Chest” or “The Da Vinci Code.”
So why review them? Why not let the market do its work, let the audience have its fun and occupy ourselves with the arcana — the art — we critics ostensibly prefer? The obvious answer is that art, or at least the kind of pleasure, wonder and surprise we associate with art, often pops out of commerce, and we want to be around to celebrate when it does and to complain when it doesn’t. But the deeper answer is that our love of movies is sometimes expressed as a mistrust of the people who make and sell them, and even of the people who see them. We take entertainment very seriously, which is to say that we don’t go to the movies for fun. Or for money. We do it for you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/movies/18crit.html
Comcast Censors ABC's Nightline
Preston Gralla
Think there's no reason for Congress to pass net neutrality laws? Consider this: Comcast recently censored ABC's Nightline on its Comcast Broadband TV service by deleting the part of the broadcast that said a Comcast technician was sleeping on a customer's couch instead of installing residential broadband.
The Consumerist shows both the original broadcast and censored broadcast.
In the original, someone was interviewed who noted that a Comcast technician fell asleep on the couch because he had called Comcast technical support, and was put on hold for an hour.
Pretty embarassing. So Comcast, rather than beef up technical its support, instead censored the show when it was shown on the Comcast Broadband service.
At the moment, this is more amusing than anything else. But what happens if a broadband provider decides it wants to curry favor with a politician, to get the politician to vote a certain way? Will Comcast or other ISPs censor coverage of the politician?
So for now, this censorship is no big deal. But it's a perfect example of why we need net neutrality.
http://techsearch.cmp.com/blog/archi...t_censors.html
Comcast Update
When Consumerist readers and users of Comcast's tv-over-internet service watched our clip on Nightline, they were surprised to see that Comcast appeared to censor out a part that was critical of the cable operator. Whither the Sleepy Comcast Tech? We pointed this out to the segment's producer. 50 minutes later, we got this email from Comcast Corporate Communications:
We noticed your most recent post on the Consumerist about the Nightline segment and wanted to clear up the facts. Comcast receives thousands of news segments from ABC for our comcast.net site and has not edited any of those segments, including Friday night's episode about blogs. We post the segments as we receive them directly from ABC and Nightline.
We have called our contact at ABC and the producer of your segment and they told us that they believe that their encoder may have inadvertently shortened the segment at the commercial break in error. We asked them to re-encode the entire segment, which they agreed to do. We will post the entire segment on Comcast.net as soon as we receive it.
If this is true, it's strange then that the cut happens several seconds before the commercial and then we cut into a story that followed right after the rest of the consumer piece...
We don't know who encodes who, but we don't think episode producers actually have much to do with that process. Therefore, we find it odd that Comcast would declare the ABC producer affirmatively said it was an ABC encoder problem that cause the cut. Either way you slice it, it's certainly terribly convenient for Comcast.
http://consumerist.com/consumer/yout...ory-188133.php
How To
Create a Torrent and Tracker
Send Cams to Campers!
Jack
Simplest instructions I’ve ever seen on a subject that’s baffled the best of them. Greek geek's moving-pointer
uTorrent demo makes it so easy you'll be framing your very own MPAA takedown notice before the summer’s over. Jack Valenti gives it an A for
Arresting!
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...d.php?p=247474
Microsoft Sues 26 US Companies For Piracy
Nate Anderson
Bill Gates didn't make his billions by sitting behind a desk in Redmond and watching as resellers across the country ripped off his company's products, and he's not about to start doing it now.
Microsoft has just dropped the hammer on 26 US resellers that the company suspects of selling pirated software outright or pre-loading it onto PC hard drives. The company filed lawsuits against firms in Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and South Carolina after "secret shopper" tests turned up illicit software.
Sales International LLC of Conyers, Georgia, for instance, is accused of trafficking in counterfeit Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP authenticity labels, while the Chicago Computer Club Corp. allegedly distributed illicit versions of Office Professional 2003. Perhaps the strangest cases on the list are the two against companies that have been in trouble before over the exact same issue. Pearl River Computers (NY) and Microcomp Solution Inc. (CO) are both accused of illegally distributing copies of Office 2003 even though both firms had previously settled claims with Microsoft regarding software piracy. Either there's a lot of money to be made in piracy, or some folks simply enjoy hoisting the Jolly Roger.
Microsoft refers to software piracy as a "pandemic," and it's easy to see why it would be one of the company's chief concerns. Despite the occasional Xbox 360 or the rumored iPod-killing Zune, Microsoft still has most of its resources invested in software development. The company has experimented with new tools such as Windows Genuine Advantage, which is designed to smoke out software counterfeiters. Though such measures may control casual copying, they have so far proved no match for professional pirates.
26 lawsuits won't put an end to software piracy in the US, but Microsoft hopes that the move will set an example both for resellers and for their customers, who may scrutinize deals more closely when they seem too good to be true.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060718-7284.html
Q n A
Getting Online on the Go
By J. D. Biersdorfer
Q. Is there a way to get online by connecting a cellphone to a laptop computer?
A. Many mobile phones can serve double duty as laptop modems these days. This can come in handy when you’re nowhere near a wireless hotspot, an Ethernet network or even a telephone landline. If both the phone and the laptop can support Bluetooth connections, you can even link them wirelessly.
In general, if you don’t have Bluetooth capability, you will need a data cable that connects your phone to your computer’s U.S.B. port. Some phones include this cable in the box, but if your model didn’t come with one, you can find them for less than $30 at electronics shops or sites like
www.3gcables.com.
You will need to sign up for a data plan from your wireless phone company, and you may need to install driver software on your laptop so the computer can recognize the phone. Some carriers also have their own connection programs that make it easy to jump on the airwaves. Check with your wireless service provider for the specific hardware, software and procedures needed to get the laptop online. Some companies have their own connection kits that give you everything you need to use the Internet anywhere you can get a cellphone signal.
Fighting Spam With Better Tools
Q. I’m using Microsoft Outlook 2000 and I get a lot of junk mail. Someone suggested that I upgrade to Outlook 2003. Is this the only and best way to protect against receiving junk mail? If I upgrade to Outlook 2003, can I save my current and old mail?
A. Outlook 2003 comes with better tools for fighting spam than previous versions of the software, including a robust and adjustable junk-mail filter. Upgrading to Outlook 2003 from Outlook 2000 should be a fairly seamless process, and the new program should import your mailboxes and personal settings for you during the installation process. (As with any new program installation, however, making a backup of your system or critical files first is always a good idea.)
Upgrading your Outlook software is not the only way to fight spam. There are several spam-filter programs available that work alongside your e-mail application to help weed out unwanted mail. Some of these include SpamEater Pro ($25;
www.hms.com), Spamfire ($40;
www.matterform.com) and Qurb ($30;
www.qurb.com). All three have free trial versions available.
If you mainly use Outlook just for mail and contacts, switching to a newer mail program that includes junk-mail filters is another option. Mozilla Thunderbird, free software available at
www.mozilla.com/thunderbird, can import your Outlook data and screen your mail for you. A step-by-step guide to doing just that is at opensourcearticles.com/thunderbird_15/english/part_06.
Teaching a Mouse New Tricks
Q. I have one of those new Mac mice that’s supposed to sense which side I click on and perform the appropriate function, but I keep clicking it wrong and getting stuck on the contextual menus. Can I change the way the mouse reacts?
A. Most modern computer mice allow you to adjust and customize the various button functions. Many new Macintosh computers include Apple’s Mighty Mouse, a touch- and squeeze-sensitive mouse with a small rotating ball for scrolling up and down and side to side. You can change the way the mouse reacts when you press its various parts by going to System Preferences under the Apple menu and clicking on the Keyboard & Mouse icon.
When you click the tab for Mouse, you can then select the functions you wish the mouse to perform when you press the left side, right side, scroll ball or sides of the mouse. For example, if you’re left-handed, you can flip the normal right-click and left-click buttons around. You can also program the mouse to open certain programs when you press down on the scroll bar or sides.
In Windows, you can get to the Mouse settings by going to the Start Menu and choosing the Mouse icon in the Control Panel area. Here, you can do things like change your primary and secondary buttons.
If you have traded in your standard mouse for a specialized multifunction mouse or trackball, you most likely have several other options for programming your buttons.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/te...gy/20askk.html
Stealth Rootkit Makes Its Debut In The Real World
Peter Pollack
Antivirus researchers and microbiologists are similar in that they both have occasionally predicted the rise of a new type of malignant attack before it is actually seen in the wild. In the biological arena, the continued spread of drug-resistant bacteria would be one example of this. In the world of electrons and data, some researchers had already prophesied the rise of rootkits that would be designed to hide themselves from ordinary means of detection.
Backdoor.Rustock.A is the first such stealth rootkit found outside the environs of the antivirus lab. Although Rustock.A (or Mailbot.AZ, as the F-Secure experts are calling it) is being rated by Symantec as an easy threat containment with a low distribution level, it uses some new techniques that make it virtually impossible to detect using conventional means.
A standard way of locating a rootkit's footprints on a computer is to count the number of running processes from two different viewpoints. First, the virus detection software counts the processes from a high level, just as Windows Task Manager might. Then the software shifts to a much lower level and counts the processes again. If the number is the identical, everything is considered acceptable. If the number varies, a problem will be suspected and the software is put to work.
Rustock.A avoids this straightforward detection method by burying its processes within the driver and kernel threads. Since the process count is unchanged, ordinary antivirus software will miss it completely.
Like a tricked-out Batmobile, Rustock.A also makes use of some classic stealth techniques to avoid detection: it can recognize when virus detection software is running and then alter its behavior to avoid that software; it hides its driver in an alternate data stream (ADS), then removes itself from the list of hidden drivers; it doesn't hook into any native APIs; and finally, it is polymorphic, so that its code is constantly changing.
Rustock.A has already been proven to run on beta versions of Windows Vista, so this is clearly a rootkit designed with the future in mind.
So far, Rustock.A has done comparatively little damage, and both Symantec and F-Secure have released updates to assist in locating and removing it. However, researchers say that there is reason to suspect that future versions are already in the works, and that other virus designers will be looking to exploit and improve upon some of the principles demonstrated in Rustock.A.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060717-7283.html
Microsoft Buys Winternals, Gains Russinovich
Jeremy Reimer
You may remember Mark Russinovich as being the first to discover and expose the infamous Sony rootkit. Russinovich has had a long and storied career delving into the murky depths of Windows' internals, and many have expressed the opinion that he knows more about the guts of Microsoft operating systems than anyone outside of Microsoft itself.
That's all about to change. Microsoft has announced that they are acquiring Russinovich's company, Winternals. Winternals provides a number of utility programs for Windows operating systems, including system repair and recovery tools for business customers. The company is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Russinovich will be working in Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division (PSD) with the job title of "Technical Fellow," an honor currently bestowed on a mere 14 people at the company. His partner and Winternals co-founder, Bryce Cogswell, will be joining the Core Operating Systems Division in the role of Software Architect—recall that Bill Gates' official job title has been "Chief Software Architect" for some years now.
Microsoft plans to continue selling Winternals' products, although the company says that it is "currently finalizing plans on how these products and technologies can be best integrated with existing Microsoft technologies to maximize future customer value." This makes it seem likely that some of the famous recovery tools could end up integrated with Windows itself in future releases.
Russinovich and Cogswell founded Winternals and a companion company, Sysinternals (originally NTInternals) back in 1996. Winternals provided the commercial side of the enterprise, while Sysinternals was a web site that offered useful freeware utilities, technical tips, and commentary by the two cofounders. Mark also worked for the web site and magazine WindowsITPro, providing useful commentary on a wide array of topics. Russinovich says that Sysinternals will remain operating for the time being, and he will continue to talk about Windows technologies in his blog and at industry conferences.
Much of Mark's work has come through careful analysis of the low-level plumbing of Windows NT, discovering many secrets without having full access to the operating system's source code. Over the years, he has become regarded as a respected operating systems researcher, often speaking out about shortcomings in the Windows NT line, which includes Windows NT, 2000, XP, Server 2003, and the upcoming Vista. He has written articles comparing NT to Linux, discussing NT's VMS heritage, and was a key speaker at the LinuxWorld conference in 2000. Both he and Microsoft appear to be very pleased by the acquisition. Russinovich seems excited by the possibilities offered by his new job, and Microsoft is a better company with him on board.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060718-7287.html
OpenOffice.org Less Secure Than Microsoft Office?
Eric Bangeman
OpenOffice.org has been increasing in both popularity and visibility over the past several months. Version 2.0 has added a number of new features to bring it closer to feature parity with Microsoft Office, and it also offers full support for the Open Document format. However, a report just released by the French Ministry of Defense says that it still falls short of Microsoft's office suite in one important area: security.
The classified report follows a one-year study by the Ministry comparing the popular open-source suite to its commercial competitor. During a demonstration for other parts of the French government on July 5, lab director Lt. Col. Eric Filiol showed some off some malevolent code the Ministry had developed in order to discover the weak points of both office suites. The researchers found that OpenOffice.org was more susceptible to certain attacks, including those made via macros.
In some instances, malevolent macros were considered to be secure by the open-source package, and as a result, users were not informed when they were executed. This was in contrast to Office, which barrages users with warnings each time a document with macros is opened.
Lt. Col. Filiol notes that the problems are conceptual, rather than due to sloppy coding. "We did not exploit security holes," he said. Filiol thinks that OpenOffice.org's rush to achieve a level of features and functionality comparable to that of Microsoft Office has led it to neglect security issues.
Representatives from the Ministry of Defense will present their findings to OpenOffice.org, which will then begin to address security issues over the course of the office suite's development. In the meantime, the Ministry's work may prove to be a small setback for OpenOffice.org, as some would-be users—including the city of Paris—reconsider widespread deployments of the free app. It could also be another blow for Sun, which offers consulting services for OpenOffice.org in France.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060718-7288.html
Bijou Burnout
For Some Netflix Users, Red Envelopes Gather Dust
Matt Phillips
Having grown up in a religious family that seldom went to movies, David Morrison didn't see a film in the theater until his early 20s. So when the Greensboro, N.C., resident heard about the DVD-by-mail rental service Netflix, he figured he could use it to watch great films he may have missed.
When he first joined, he packed his Netflix queue -- a member's running list of rental requests -- with diverse films. He watched Robert Flaherty's 1922 documentary "Nanook of the North," which follows an Inuit man's struggle to survive in the Arctic; Roman Polanski's 1974 detective film, "Chinatown"; and Sofia Coppola's 2000 teenage suicide drama "The Virgin Suicides."
But soon, his excitement over the arrival of the bright red Netflix envelopes began to ebb. And the DVDs began to collect, unwatched, on his coffee table. "They were just coming to my house, sitting around and I was sending them back," said Mr. Morrison, 37, who cancelled his subscription after a few months.
Netflix Inc., which boasts nearly five million members, often trumpets how its all-you-can-eat rental model is changing the way people are watching movies. But Netflix may also be changing the way people don't watch them. Through its Web site, Netflix makes it easy to comb through a massive catalog of 60,000 films. It offers access to everything from Charlie Chaplin's 1921 silent tramp movie "The Kid" to recent Academy Award-winners like "Crash." And some members admit that when browsing the Netflix backlog, they overestimate their appetite for off-the-beaten-track films. The result: Sometimes DVDs languish for months without being watched.
"It's a paradox of abundance," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. If people aren't pressured to see a movie in a specific time frame, he said, viewers tend to put it lower on their priority list. "When you have every choice in front of you, you have less urgency about any particular choice," he added.
The result can be a type of guilt-fueled Netflix bottleneck for users, who may not feel like watching a film but are also loathe to return it, said Mike Kaltschnee, who writes a popular blog called HackingNetflix. He's experienced the sensation himself. He twice rented Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," kept it for weeks, only to send it back unwatched. He cites his Catholic upbringing for his inability to watch the sometimes-brutal depiction of Christ's last days. "It's childish almost. It's just a movie. But I could not put it in the DVD player," he said. "And I know I'm not alone."
High-brow vs. Low-brow
High-brow, dense or dark movies, like "The Passion of the Christ," prove particularly tough for some Netflix members to watch.
Member Lisa Snider added "Hotel Rwanda," -- a film set against the central African nation's ethnic massacres of the 1990s -- to her Netflix queue after it was nominated for three Academy Awards. But it sat for two months in her home before she mailed it back unwatched. "I could have bought that movie three times, I'm sure, for my rental fee," said the 37-year-old Ojai, Calif., resident.
Yet, Ms. Snider said she had no trouble zipping through her next Netflix pick: "Junebug," a comedy about an art dealer's experience with a quirky Southern family. "It's just sort of a kooky movie," she said.
Netflix officials declined to disclose data on how often movies are shipped or what types of movies tend to be returned quickly, citing competitive concerns. But a company spokesman said the fact that some people let movies linger for months before watching them, doesn't hurt its business.
Researchers have documented this behavior among movie-watchers. In a 1999 experiment, a group of volunteers were asked to choose movies to rent from a list of 24 videos. Their options were a mix of what researchers termed "low-brow" movies -- including "My Cousin Vinny" and "Groundhog Day" -- and "high-brow" offerings, such as "Schindler's List" or the subtitled "Like Water for Chocolate." The researchers found that when people chose movies to watch the same day, they often picked comedies or action films. But when they were asked to pick movies to watch at a later date, they were more likely to make "high-brow" selections.
For example, the subjects were much more likely to select Steven Spielberg's Holocaust survival drama "Schindler's List" to watch in the future, rather than on the same night. "It's a movie that's really miserable to watch but you feel like you should watch it," said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the study's authors.
Unlimited Choices, No Late Fees
Others eye Netflix's nature as a subscription service as a way to explain why people rent, but sometimes don't watch. Users pay a flat monthly fee for the service. There are no late fees to compel users to return the movies quickly, though Netflix restricts how many DVDs members can have out at a time.
Such subscription services tap into a powerful vein of human instinct, said Peter Fader, a marketing professor who studies consumer behavior at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "People want unfettered access to things. They want whatever they want, to have as much as they want, when they want it," said Mr. Fader. "And they're willing to pay irrationally for it."
Even consumer behavior experts can't completely shake this habit. At one point, Mr. Fader had two Netflix DVDs -- both part of Ken Burns' "Baseball" documentary series -- sitting at his home for more than six months. He describes the series as "weighty," but didn't want to send them back. "It's too much of an admission to say, 'I give up,'" Mr. Fader said.
When Phillip Ginder and his wife first joined Netflix in November 2002, they zipped through their queues -- often receiving, watching and re-sending movies in the same day. But more recently, the 30-year-old longshoreman said their DVD metabolism has dropped considerably.
For instance, the couple has let "The Aristocrats," a documentary in which a slew of comedians tell the same raunchy joke, languish at their San Pedro, Calif., home for four months. Mr. Ginder said he has been unable to coordinate a time to watch it with his wife and roommate, who both want to see it. "Until that perfect moment arrives, it's sitting there," he said.
Some Netflix members argue that unwatched movies are part of the price you pay for having access to Netflix's broad catalog. Girish Shambu, a professor of business management at Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., has been a longtime, heavy-duty Netflix user. For around $50 a month, his plan lets him rent eight DVDs at one time. "Part of the price you pay is some movies you don't get to watch," said Mr. Shambu, 42, a part-time film critic. "Some movies do collect dust."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...l?mod=rss_free
For CBS’s Fall Lineup, Check Inside Your Refrigerator
David S. Joachim
IN September, CBS plans to start using a new place to advertise its fall television lineup: your breakfast.
The network plans to announce today that it will place laser imprints of its trademark eye insignia, as well as logos for some of its shows, on eggs — 35 million of them in September and October. CBS’s copywriters are referring to the medium as “egg-vertising,” hinting at the wordplay they have in store. Some of their planned slogans: “CSI” (“Crack the Case on CBS”); “The Amazing Race” (“Scramble to Win on CBS”); and “Shark” (“Hard-Boiled Drama.”). Variations on the ad for its Monday night lineup of comedy shows include “Shelling Out Laughs,” “Funny Side Up” and “Leave the Yolks to Us.”
George Schweitzer, president of the CBS marketing group, said he was hoping to generate some laughter in American kitchens. “We’ve gone through every possible sad takeoff on shelling and scrambling and frying,” he said, adding, “It’s a great way to reach people in an unexpected form.”
Newspapers, magazines and Web sites are so crowded with ads for entertainment programming that CBS was ready to try something different, Mr. Schweitzer said. The best thing about the egg concept was its intrusiveness.
“You can’t avoid it,” he said. He liked the idea so much that he arranged for CBS to be the only advertiser this fall to use the new etching technology. •The CBS ads are the first to use imprinting technology developed by a company called EggFusion, based in Deerfield, Ill. Bradley Parker, who founded the company, wanted to reassure shoppers that egg producers were not placing old eggs in new cartons, so he developed a laser-etching technique to put the expiration date directly on an egg during the washing and grading process.
EggFusion, which was founded in 2001, started production last year with one egg company, Radlo Foods, which has since produced 30 million Born Free brand farm-raised eggs with etching. In May, EggFusion landed its first large grocery chain, A.& P., which will use the imprints on 400,000 America’s Choice conventional eggs sold each day in A.& P., Waldbaum’s, Food Emporium and Super Fresh stores from Connecticut to Maryland. Mr. Parker, whose family runs a chicken farm in North Carolina, knew that the way to get egg producers to cooperate was to make it worth their while. His answer was advertising on eggs.
“It’s unlike any other ad medium in the world, because you are looking at the medium while you are using it,” he says.
Egg producers, distributors and retailers all share in the ad revenue. EggFusion is selling the ads on its own, but plans to enlist the help of advertising agencies, company executives said.
As EggFusion sees it, consumers look at a single egg shells at least a few times: when they open a carton in the store to see if any eggs are cracked, if they transfer them from the carton to the refrigerator, and when they crack them open.
Mr. Parker said the destination of eggs was tracked so precisely that he envisioned being able to offer localized advertising, even aiming at specific ZIP codes, to promote events like local food festivals and concerts. He is setting aside a portion of the ads for charities, too, he said. The imprint is applied in the packaging plant, as the eggs are washed, graded and “candled,” or inspected for flaws, when the eggs are held by calipers and moved along a production line at 225 feet a minute. Right before an egg is packaged, laser light is applied to the shell, giving it the etching. Each imprint takes 34 milliseconds to 73 milliseconds, so the processing of eggs is not appreciably slowed down, Mr. Parker said.
The etching is ultrathin, to a depth of 50 to 90 micrometers, or 5 percent of the shell’s thickness. The imprint cannot be altered without breaking the shell, Mr. Parker said, in contrast to Europe, where ink is used to apply expiration dates on eggs.
“Ink is alcohol dye, so it can be wiped off. And ink splatters,” he said.
•A similar process to EggFusion’s has been used on a limited scale in the United States with fruits and vegetables, but mostly for replacing the price stickers used by grocers to track inventory and ring up an order.
It is not clear how commonly old eggs are placed in new cartons to appear fresher than they are. Repackaging is illegal, said Al Pope, president of the United Egg Producers industry group, and he says he believes it is rarely done. However, “If a consumer feels that having a date on the egg has some value, then it’s up to the consumer,” he said. “We believe in choices.”
Shaun M. Emerson, EggFusion’s chief executive, said: “I’m not sure you could ever know” how often repackaging old eggs occurs.
EggFusion has technicians assigned to each egg plant, and it owns the equipment and the freshness data, to ensure that no tampering occurs, the company’s executives said.
The eggs also carry a code that can be checked on a Web site,
www.myfreshegg.com, to find out where the egg originated, the date it left the plant and the names of the distributor and retailer.
Both Radlo and A.& P. pay for the etchings — they will not say how much — but because A.& P.’s eggs will carry the CBS ads, it will also share in the ad revenue. But is egg-vertising an idea with staying power, or will the novelty expire after a few dozen bad puns?
“At this point it’s too early to tell,” Mr. Schweitzer of CBS acknowledges. “I think it’s like you know good ideas when you see them.”
Link
Microsoft and Nortel Plan Phone Venture
The Microsoft Corporation said on Tuesday that it had formed an alliance with Nortel Networks as part of a push to run traditional business telephone systems on PC software.
Nortel, the Canadian telecommunications equipment supplier, said that it expected more than $1 billion in additional revenue from the four-year pact, which calls for the companies to work together on research and development and be partners on sales and marketing.
Microsoft aims to simplify the way workers communicate with one another by using software to link phones to computers so that they can handle voice functions.
Nortel shares rose 11 cents, to $2.07; Microsoft shares rose 26 cents, to $22.74.
Microsoft and Nortel said that under the deal, which can be extended, they will license some of each other’s intellectual property.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/te...gy/19soft.html
Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life
John Markoff
Robot cars drive themselves across the desert, electronic eyes perform lifeguard duty in swimming pools and virtual enemies with humanlike behavior battle video game players.
These are some fruits of the research field known as artificial intelligence, where reality is finally catching up to the science-fiction hype. A half-century after the term was coined, both scientists and engineers say they are making rapid progress in simulating the human brain, and their work is finding its way into a new wave of real-world products.
The advances can also be seen in the emergence of bold new projects intended to create more ambitious machines that can improve safety and security, entertain and inform, or just handle everyday tasks. At Stanford University, for instance, computer scientists are developing a robot that can use a hammer and a screwdriver to assemble an Ikea bookcase (a project beyond the reach of many humans) as well as tidy up after a party, load a dishwasher or take out the trash.
One pioneer in the field is building an electronic butler that could hold a conversation with its master — á la HAL in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” — or order more pet food.
Though most of the truly futuristic projects are probably years from the commercial market, scientists say that after a lull, artificial intelligence has rapidly grown far more sophisticated. Today some scientists are beginning to use the term cognitive computing, to distinguish their research from an earlier generation of artificial intelligence work. What sets the new researchers apart is a wealth of new biological data on how the human brain functions.
“There’s definitely been a palpable upswing in methods, competence and boldness,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. “At conferences you are hearing the phrase ‘human-level A.I.,’ and people are saying that without blushing.”
Cognitive computing is still more of a research discipline than an industry that can be measured in revenue or profits. It is pursued in various pockets of academia and the business world. And despite some of the more startling achievements, improvements in the field are measured largely in increments: voice recognition systems with decreasing failure rates, or computerized cameras that can recognize more faces and objects than before.
Still, there have been rapid innovations in many areas: voice control systems are now standard features in midpriced automobiles, and advanced artificial reason techniques are now routinely used in inexpensive video games to make the characters’ actions more lifelike.
A French company, Poseidon Technologies, sells underwater vision systems for swimming pools that function as lifeguard assistants, issuing alerts when people are drowning, and the system has saved lives in Europe.
Last October, a robot car designed by a team of Stanford engineers covered 132 miles of desert road without human intervention to capture a $2 million prize offered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Pentagon. The feat was particularly striking because 18 months earlier, during the first such competition, the best vehicle got no farther than seven miles, becoming stuck after driving off a mountain road.
Now the Pentagon agency has upped the ante: Next year the robots will be back on the road, this time in a simulated traffic setting. It is being called the “urban challenge.”
At Microsoft, researchers are working on the idea of “predestination.” They envision a software program that guesses where you are traveling based on previous trips, and then offers information that might be useful based on where the software thinks you are going.
Tellme Networks, a company in Mountain View, Calif., that provides voice recognition services for both customer service and telephone directory applications, is a good indicator of the progress that is being made in relatively constrained situations, like looking up a phone number or transferring a call.
Tellme supplies the system that automates directory information for toll-free business listings. When the service was first introduced in 2001, it could correctly answer fewer than 37 percent of phone calls without a human operator’s help. As the system has been constantly refined, the figure has now risen to 74 percent.
More striking advances are likely to come from new biological models of the brain. Researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland, are building large-scale computer models to study how the brain works; they have used an I.B.M. parallel supercomputer to create the most detailed three-dimensional model to date of a column of 10,000 neurons in the neocortex.
“The goal of my lab in the past 10 to 12 years has been to go inside these little columns and try to figure out how they are built with exquisite detail,” said Henry Markram, a research scientist who is head of the Blue Brain project. “You can really now zoom in on single cells and watch the electrical activity emerging.”
Blue Brain researchers say they believe the simulation will provide fundamental insights that can be applied by scientists who are trying to simulate brain functions.
Another well-known researcher is Robert Hecht-Nielsen, who is seeking to build an electronic butler called Chancellor that would be able to listen, speak and provide in-home concierge services. He contends that with adequate resources, he could create such a machine within five years.
Although some people are skeptical that Mr. Hecht-Nielsen can achieve what he describes, he does have one successful artificial intelligence business under his belt. In 1986, he founded HNC Software, which sold systems to detect credit card fraud using neural network technology designed to mimic biological circuits in the brain. HNC was sold in 2002 to the Fair Isaac Corporation, where Mr. Hecht-Nielsen is a vice president and leads a small research group.
Last year he began speaking publicly about his theory of “confabulation,” a hypothesis about the way the brain makes decisions. At a recent I.B.M. symposium, Mr. Hecht-Nielsen showed off a model of confabulation, demonstrating how his software program could read two sentences from The Detroit Free Press and create a third sentence that both made sense and was a natural extension of the previous text.
For example, the program read: “He started his goodbyes with a morning audience with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, sharing coffee, tea, cookies and his desire for a golf rematch with her son, Prince Andrew. The visit came after Clinton made the rounds through Ireland and Northern Ireland to offer support for the flagging peace process there.”
The program then generated a sentence that read: “The two leaders also discussed bilateral cooperation in various fields.”
Artificial intelligence had its origins in 1950, when the mathematician Alan Turing proposed a test to determine whether or not a machine could think or be conscious. The test involved having a person face two teleprinter machines, only one of which had a human behind it. If the human judge could not tell which terminal was controlled by the human, the machine could be said to be intelligent.
In the late 1950’s a field of study emerged that tried to build systems that replicated human abilities like speech, hearing, manual tasks and reasoning.
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the original artificial intelligence researchers began designing computer software programs they called “expert systems,” which were essentially databases accompanied by a set of logical rules. They were handicapped both by underpowered computers and by the absence of the wealth of data that today’s researchers have amassed about the actual structure and function of the biological brain.
Those shortcomings led to the failure of a first generation of artificial intelligence companies in the 1980’s, which became known as the A.I. Winter. Recently, however, researchers have begun to speak of an A.I. Spring emerging as scientists develop theories on the workings of the human mind. They are being aided by the exponential increase in processing power, which has created computers with millions of times the power of those available to researchers in the 1960’s — at consumer prices.
“There is a new synthesis of four fields, including mathematics, neuroscience, computer science and psychology,” said Dharmendra S. Modha, an I.B.M. computer scientist. “The implication of this is amazing. What you are seeing is that cognitive computing is at a cusp where it’s knocking on the door of potentially mainstream applications.”
At Stanford, researchers are hoping to make fundamental progress in mobile robotics, building machines that can carry out tasks around the home, like the current generation of robotic floor vacuums, only more advanced. The field has recently been dominated by Japan and South Korea, but the Stanford researchers have sketched out a three-year plan to bring the United States to parity.
At the moment, the Stanford team is working on the first steps necessary to make the robot they are building function well in an American household. The team is focusing on systems that will consistently recognize standard doorknobs and is building robot hands to open doors.
“It’s time to build an A.I. robot,” said Andrew Ng, a Stanford computer scientist and a leader of the project, called Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, or Stair. “The dream is to put a robot in every home.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/te...718&ei=5087%0A
For the Future of Borders, a Focus on Innovation
Motoko Rich
George L. Jones, the newly appointed chief executive of Borders Group, one of the nation’s largest book retailers, is a onetime aspiring rock star who went on to help Target create its bargain upscale aesthetic and revived the Scooby-Doo character for Warner Brothers.
Now Mr. Jones, 55, who was most recently chief executive of Saks Department Store Group, has the task of leading a company beset by intense competition from online and other retailers, lagging sales and changes in the way consumers want their books, music and movies delivered.
In his first interview since he officially started his job on Monday, Mr. Jones gave no bold plans for his tenure. Instead, he said yesterday that he wanted to focus on learning more about how the business worked and executing Borders’ already announced strategy to put Seattle’s Best Coffee shops and Paperchase stationery outlets into its stores. (The company bought Paperchase, a British retailer, in 2004.)
That said, Mr. Jones, who grew up in Little Rock, Ark., added, “I do think there might be opportunities here to do things differently.” He declined to give specifics but said, “What you can expect is that we will be an innovative company.”
Late yesterday the company said in a securities filing that Mr. Jones would be paid a base salary of $775,000 a year with the opportunity to earn a maximum annual bonus of $1.2 million.
The announcement last Thursday of Mr. Jones’s appointment to replace the retiring chief executive, Greg Josefowicz, coincided with the company’s admission that its fiscal second-quarter losses would be higher than expected. It said that losses for the quarter ending July 29 were expected to be between 28 cents and 32 cents a share, compared with the 10 cents to 20 cents range it had projected.
The company, which operates the Borders and Waldenbooks brands, attributed much of that loss to charges related to Mr. Josefowicz’s retirement and the closing of a distribution center. But it also said that second-quarter sales would be lower than originally thought, with sales declining in all stores.
Since the announcement, the company’s stock, which had already been drifting downward, has fallen 5.6 percent.
In the interview by telephone from the company’s headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich., Mr. Jones recognized the company’s challenges, but he said: “This is not a broken business. It’s a company that has a strong foundation in businesses that I am passionate about.”
To the relief of the company’s 35,000 employees, Mr. Jones said he did not plan to cut jobs. “I don’t think this is a situation that all of a sudden you make this a great company by cutting out a lot of expenses,” he said.
Mr. Jones said that he was excited to take the job because he loves spending time in bookstores and enjoys reading biographies, travel guides and the novels of John Grisham and James Patterson. He also loves music — classic rock like Steely Dan, the Beatles and the Eagles — and owns more than 1,000 movies on DVD’s, he said.
One area where he sees opportunity, he said, is in translating the time consumers spend inside Borders stores into more dollars spent. “Our customers on average spend a lot longer in a store than what I’ve been used to,” he said. But, he added, “they like our stores; they’re staying there, but they’re not spending as much as they could.”
Mr. Jones said that with many music buyers migrating to digital downloads, the stores were already shrinking the space allocated to CD’s. “While we’re continuing in the music business, it does not now justify the space we have in the stores,” he said. “So we’re better off shrinking the music space and putting in Paperchase. And if you want to try new things and new ideas, one of the things is you have to find a place to put it.”
In considering how the company could compete with its chief rival, Barnes & Noble, as well as with online retailers, Mr. Jones said the solution was not to do the same things as the others. When he joined Target in the 1980’s, Wal-Mart was starting to dominate markets by offering lower prices. At first Target also tried to compete on price, Mr. Jones said, but quickly realized it could not. “So we increased the focus to trading up and making it a more fashionable shopping experience,” he said.
He declined to say how Borders might distinguish itself from Barnes & Noble, but he said that while “people in our company can easily go in and tell a lot of differences between a Borders and a Barnes & Noble, I wonder how many of the average customers might tend to get them confused.”
Still, he said, “Changing for the sake of change is not a smart thing to do.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/books/19jone.html
E-mail the New Snail Mail?
MySpace, texting more en vogue
AP
E-mail is so last millennium.
Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder – a parent, teacher or a boss – or to receive an attached file. But increasingly, the former darling of high-tech communication is losing favor to instant and text messaging, and to the chatter generated on blogs and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
The shift is starting to creep into workplace communication, too.
"In this world of instant gratification, e-mail has become the new snail mail," says 25-year-old Rachel Quizon from Norwalk, Calif. She became addicted to instant messaging in college, where many students are logged on 24/7.
Much like home postal boxes have become receptacles for junk mail, bills and the occasional greeting card, electronic mailboxes have become cluttered with spam. That makes them a pain to weed through, and the problem is only expected to worsen as some e-mail providers allow online marketers to bypass spam filters for a fee.
Beyond that, e-mail has become most associated with school and work.
"It used to be just fun," says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley. "Now it's about parents and authority."
It means that many people often don't respond to e-mails unless they have to.
Boyd's own Web page carries this note: "please note that i'm months behind on e-mail and i may not respond in a timely manner." She, too, is more easily reached with the "ping" of an instant message.
That said, no one is predicting the death of e-mail. Besides its usefulness in formal correspondence, it also offers the ability to send something from "one to many," says Anne Kirah, a senior design anthropologist at Microsoft who studies people's high-tech habits. That might include an announcement for a club or invitation to a party.
Quizon e-mails frequently in her corporate communications job at a hospital, and also uses it when she needs documentation – for instance, when dealing with vendors for her upcoming wedding. In those cases, she says e-mail "still holds more clout."
But when immediacy is a factor – as it often is – most young people much prefer the telephone or instant messaging for everything from casual to heart-to-heart conversations, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
"And there is a very strong sense that the migration away from e-mail continues," says Lee Rainie, the director at Pew.
For many young people, it's about choosing the best communication tool for the situation.
You might use text messaging during a meeting that requires quiet, Rainie says, or make a phone call to discuss sensitive subjects so there's no written record.
Still, some who've gotten caught up in the trend toward brevity wonder if it's making things too impersonal. "Don't want to see someone? Then call them. Don't want to call someone? E-mail them. Don't want to take the trouble of writing sentences? Text them," says 33-year-old Matthew Felling, an admitted "serial texter" who is also the spokesman for the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington.
"It's the ultimate social crutch to avoid personal communication."
But others don't see it that way. They think the shift toward IM and text is simply more efficient and convenient.
Chintan Talati, 28, often uses instant message with other younger peers at his work, a California-based Web site that provides automotive information to consumers. He prefers IM over e-mail. "It's a way to get a quicker answer," he says.
His baby boomer colleagues don't necessarily share that view – and often find instant messaging overwhelming.
Boyd has found much the same in her research at Berkeley.
"Adults who learn to use IM later have major difficulty talking to more than two people at one time – whereas the teens who grew up on it have no problem talking to a bazillion people at once," Boyd says. "They understand how to negotiate the interruptions a lot better."
Kirah, at Microsoft, even thinks young people's brains work differently because they've grown up with IM, making them more adept at it.
For that reason, she says bosses should go right ahead and use their e-mail – and shouldn't feel threatened by IM.
"Like parents, they try to control their children," she says. "But companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate."
The focus, she says, should be the outcome.
"Nine to 5 has been replaced with 'Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline,' " Kirah says of young people's work habits. "They're saying 'I might work until 2 a.m. that night. But I will do it all on my terms.' "
On the Net:
Pew:
http://www.pewinternet.org
http://news.newstimes.com/storyprint.php?id=1006359
Viacom and The Onion: Parody or Deal?
It almost sounds like one of The Onion’s made-up news items: Variety is reporting — without even mentioning sources, much less identifying them — that Viacom may acquire The Onion, the satirical newspaper and Web site whose headlines made “Area Man” into a minor celebrity. Other sources, including the Huffington Post, Paidcontent.org and Gawker, have also reported on a potential Viacom-Onion connection, even as they played up the speculative nature of the story.
While a source tells DealBook that such a deal has indeed been discussed, it is in very early stages and may never happen.
At first blush, a free, fake newspaper may sound like an odd acquisition for Viacom. But The Onion’s ersatz news, while different in tone from that offered by the Viacom-owned Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” could conceivably fit in well with the media giant’s Web strategy.
Also, The Onion’s A.V. Club, though largely unheralded, features well-regarded (and totally serious) criticism of music, movies, books and games. With the backing of Viacom, the A.V. Club’s reviews could be put in front of a lot more people and pose a challenge to more traditional sources of arts criticism.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=5437
An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth
Michael Kimmelman
“Playing the Piano for Pleasure” is a minor classic of self-help by Charles Cooke promoting musical amateurism, published in 1941 in the upbeat style of Dale Carnegie. It lays out a strict regime of practice and discipline, the musical equivalent to a better body in 30 days. “We will worm our way, expending considerable effort, into the small end of the cornucopia,” he promises, “in order that we may later emerge, expending less effort and having the time of our life, out of the large end.”
I was reminded of Cooke while visiting the Grolier Club, where a show called “Teaching America to Draw” provides a refresher course in pencil-pushing and other sorts of sketching as a collective pastime. It’s about that golden era, from the time of the founding fathers nearly to Cooke’s day, when educated Americans drew as a matter of course.
Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness.
From 1820 to 1860, more than 145,000 drawing manuals circulated, now souvenirs of our bygone cultural aspirations. Not many of these manuals are still intact because they were so heavily used, worn down like church relics, which supplicants rubbed smooth from caressing.
We’re addicted to convenience today. Cellphone cameras are handy, but they’re also the equivalent of fast-food meals. Their ubiquity has multiplied our distance from drawing as a measure of self-worth and a practical tool. Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.
Drawing promoted meditation and stillness. “A sustained act of will is essential to drawing,” Paul Valéry put it. “Nothing could be more opposed to reverie, since the requisite concentration must be continually diverting the natural course of physical movements, on its guard against any seductive curve asserting itself.”
A century ago it was possible for a Philadelphia educator named J. Liberty Tadd to instruct young women to stand in pigsties to learn to draw animals directly from nature. There’s an illustration in the show from Tadd’s “New Methods of Education” of a girl in a long, improbably immaculate dress sketching pigs on a blackboard.
The exhibition is full of such exhortatory books, many of them discomfiting today because they presume a degree of skill among ordinary citizens — even children — that would now be regarded as noteworthy in the art world. There are exceptions, like a popular manual from the 1840’s by Benjamin Coe, one of Frederic Church’s teachers, who, to judge from his illustration of a maiden in a glen, needed a little brushing-up on perspective.
On the other hand, there’s J. T. Bowen’s “United States Drawing Book,” from 1839, with its moody view of a crumbling cathedral in a landscape, and P. Fishe Reed’s “Little Corporal’s Drawing Book,” a progressive manual from 1869 with bird drawings that Audubon might have been proud to make, conjuring an America in which 10-year-olds are absorbed not by Game Boys and iPods but by the finer points of mastering realism.
Clearly these manuals were aspirational no less than educational or recreational. It’s hard to imagine that most American schoolchildren during the 1870’s could duplicate the leaves and bugs and complicated curlicue patterns that Herman Krusi Jr. drew in his manuals for classroom instruction. But Americans wanted their children to: that’s the point.
Something happened between then and now, and it wasn’t just the invention of gadgets that eliminated the need to draw.
There was also a philosophical change, away from drawing as a practical endeavor and toward art appreciation. From dexterity and discipline to feelings and self-esteem: the shift in values is implied by some of the later books in the show. Consciously or not, they parallel changes in modern art, which threw out the rule books of draftsmanship and proposed a new, free-thinking attitude.
As for expending effort to become skilled at drawing, the post-Cooke postwar generation introduced Paint by Numbers, and the situation has gone downhill from there.
“Drawing in America is as much a basic human activity today as it has always been, even if it is not perceived to be as necessary to economic and cultural progress,” Albert A. Anderson Jr. writes in the slim pamphlet accompanying the show.
I don’t think so. Drawing and doodling are not the same. With the arts, American adults have acquiesced to playing the passive role of receivers.
In a new memoir, “Let Me Finish,” Roger Angell recalls trips to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium in the 1930’s with his father, who also liked to join pickup games when middle-age American men still did that. Today baseball is like the arts, with grown-ups mostly preferring not to break a sweat. “We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it,” Mr. Angell writes.
So it is with classical music, painting and drawing, professional renditions of which are now so widely available that most people probably can’t or don’t imagine there’s any point in bothering to do these things themselves. Communities of amateurs still thrive, but they are self-selecting groups. A vast majority of society seems to presume that culture is something specialists produce.
Rembrandt Peale published one of the drawing manuals in the Grolier Club show. Besides being an artist, Peale became Pennsylvania’s first high school art teacher in the 1830’s, hired by Alexander Dallas Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin. People, Franklin pointed out, can often “express ideas more clearly with a lead pencil or a bit of chalk” than with words. “Drawing is a kind of universal language, understood by all nations,” he reminded Americans.
We have given it up, at a cost that, as Franklin might have put it, is beyond words. Mr. Angell goes on in his book to say that television and sports journalism have taught us all about the skills and salaries and private lives of professional ballplayers, on whom we now focus, instead of playing the game ourselves.
As a consequence, he writes, “we don’t like them as much as we once did, and we don’t like ourselves much, either.”
You can draw the analogy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/ar...a7a&ei=5087%0A
Yahoo Collapses On Results, Forecast
New ad platform delayed until fourth quarter
Bambi Francisco
Shares of Yahoo Inc. fell as much as 19% in early trading Wednesday after the Internet giant reported disappointing second-quarter results and issued a sales forecast for the current quarter that was weaker than expected.
Yahoo also delayed the release of a new search-advertising technology that it hopes will improve the profitability of that business, which lags that of search leader Google Inc.
The stock, (YHOO ) which has now fallen more than 30% this year, dropped as low as $25.95 soon after the open of U.S. markets, on heavy trading volume.
Late Tuesday, Yahoo reported that net sales, which exclude the payments the company makes to other Web sites to acquire traffic, rose 28% to $1.12 billion from $875 million. Analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call expected net sales of $1.14 billion. For the third quarter, meanwhile, Yahoo said it expects to generate between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion in sales, compared to analysts' expectations of $1.2 billion. The size of the stock drop suggests that many who had bought the shares expected Yahoo to raise its forecast for the rest of 2006.
"This is the second quarter in a row that they failed to raise their forecast, which means momentum investors are headed for the door," said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Global Crown Capital who rates Yahoo shares as overweight.
Yahoo faces stiff competition in the market for Internet searches from Google, which makes more profit from each search query than Yahoo and is much more profitable overall. To help close the gap, Yahoo plans to launch its new search platform. But the company pushed back the release date of the technology to the fourth quarter from an expected third-quarter launch.
"To meet the standards that we believe our clients should expect from us, we think it is prudent to add some extra time to our original estimates for the commercial launch," Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said on a conference call.
The company said it expects to earn between $445 million and $505 million in operating income, before certain items, which could fall below some analysts' expectations for $491 million. For the full year, Yahoo expects to earn between $1.92 billion and $2.06 billion in operating income and sales of $4.6 billion to $4.85 billion. Analysts were expecting full-year sales of $4.78 billion. Yahoo said late Tuesday that second-quarter profit fell to $164 million, or 11 cents a share, from $755 million, or 51 cents, a year ago. The comparable 2005 period included a large one-time investment gain and but not the cost of employee stock options, as now required by law. Analysts had expected earnings of 12 cents a share, on the basis of generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo said sales rose 26% to $1.58 billion from $1.25 billion, as more businesses bought advertising on the company's Internet pages. Visitors to its sites surged thanks in part to interest in soccer's World Cup tournament. Yahoo delivered more than 138 million video streams related to the event.
On a positive note, Yahoo's Web sites, which provide everything from search results to health-related articles to music and video entertainment, are also seeing more traffic. The number of visits to Yahoo online properties in the second quarter rose 9% from a year earlier to almost 106 million monthly U.S. visitors, according to the research firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo's sales growth has also benefited as more companies shift ad spending away from traditional print media to the Internet. Yahoo generated 88% of its total sales from marketing, which includes advertisements on search results pages and branded advertising from across Yahoo's non-search properties.
"Branded advertising appears to have grown materially stronger than search advertising," wrote Mark Mahaney, an analyst at Citigroup. Yahoo does not break out the revenues from its marketing division. The remainder of Yahoo's sales comes from fee-based businesses, such as broadband access, premium mail services and dating services. Yahoo generated $190 million in its fee business, up 19% from a year ago. Yahoo ended the quarter with 14.3 million paying members, and expects to end the year with more than 16 million paid relationships.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...DC4%7D&siteid=
Storytelling, Not Journalism, Spurs Most Blogs
Many people see Web journals, or blogs, as alternatives to the mainstream media, but most Americans who run them do so as a hobby rather than a vocation, according to a report released on Wednesday.
About 77 percent of blog authors, or bloggers, said they post to express themselves creatively rather to get noticed or paid, according to the report, released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The report also found that 37 percent of bloggers cited their life and experiences as their primary topics, while politics and government came in second at 11 percent.
Entertainment was the next-most-popular blog topic, with 7 percent, followed by sports, at 6 percent and news at 5 percent. Religion or spirituality was the aim of 2 percent.
About 8 percent of Internet users, or 12 million American adults, keep a blog, Pew estimated. Some 39 percent of U.S. Web users, or 57 million adults, read them, the researchers said.
More than half, or 54 percent, of bloggers are under age 30.
U.S. bloggers are evenly divided between men and women, and are more racially diverse than the Web population in general: Forty percent are nonwhite.
About 34 percent see their blogging as a form of journalism; 65 percent disagreed. Just over a third of bloggers said they engage often in journalistic activities such as verifying facts and linking to source material.
More than 40 percent of bloggers said they never quote sources or other media directly. Eleven percent said they post corrections. Sixty-one percent said they rarely or never get permission to use copyright material.
Fifty-five percent of bloggers write under a pseudonym. Nearly nine out of ten bloggers invite comments from other readers. Four out of five blogs use text, while 72 percent display photos. Audio links play on 30 percent of blogs.
Eighty-two percent of bloggers think they will still be blogging in a year. Three percent say they have quit.
The Pew report was based on a telephone survey of 233 self-identified bloggers conducted between July 2005 and February 2006. The error margin was 6.7 percent.
The report may understate rapid changes in how people blog, as 13 percent of those surveyed used LiveJournal software to blog, MySpace was used by 9 percent and Blogger 6 percent of the time. MySpace has proliferated since the survey ended and far outnumbers other tools.
http://news.com.com/Storytelling%2C+...3-6095805.html
Google Exec Challenges Berners-Lee
Candace Lombardi
A Google executive challenged Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee on his ideas for a Semantic Web during a conference in Boston on artificial intelligence.
On Tuesday, Berners-Lee, the father of the Web and the current director of the World Wide Web Consortium, gave the keynote on artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web at a conference sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
He said the next stage of the Web is about making data accessible for artificial intelligence to locate and analyze. A Semantic Web, a Web with linked data easily readable by machines, would make available more knowledge for reuse in serendipitous applications by people and organizations who are not the ones who originally created or published the information, Berners-Lee said.
The speech covered Berners-Lee's known proposal for Web developers to use semantic languages in addition to HTML. He stressed the importance of using persistent URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) for identifying information. Consistent use of these specifications, said Berners-Lee, will allow the Semantic Web to maintain the collaborative nature the World Wide Web was originally intended to have.
At the end of the keynote, however, things took a different turn. Google Director of Search and AAAI Fellow Peter Norvig was the first to the microphone during the Q&A session, and he took the opportunity to raise a few points.
"What I get a lot is: 'Why are you against the Semantic Web?' I am not against the Semantic Web. But from Google's point of view, there are a few things you need to overcome, incompetence being the first," Norvig said. Norvig clarified that it was not Berners-Lee or his group that he was referring to as incompetent, but the general user.
"We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step. The second problem is competition. Some commercial providers say, 'I'm the leader. Why should I standardize?' The third problem is one of deception. We deal every day with people who try to rank higher in the results and then try to sell someone Viagra when that's not what they are looking for. With less human oversight with the Semantic Web, we are worried about it being easier to be deceptive," Norvig said.
"While you own the data that's fine, but when somebody breaks and says, 'If you use our enterprise system, we will have all your data in RDF. We care because we've got the best database.' That is much more powerful," Berners-Lee said. To illustrate his stance, he used the example of bookstores initially withholding information on stock levels and purchase price but then breaking them as others did.
Berners-Lee agreed with Norvig that deception on the Internet is a problem, but he argued that part of the Semantic Web is about identifying the originator of information, and identifying why the information can be trusted, not just the content of the information itself.
"Google is in a situation to do wonderful things, as it did with the Web in general, and add a whole other facet to the graphs--the rules that are testing which data source. It will be a much richer environment," Berners-Lee told the search giant executive.
http://news.com.com/Google+exec+chal...3-6095705.html
Nobody is Listening to the Modern Hearing Problem
Christopher Wanjek
The buzz on the Internet is about the buzz you might not be able to hear.
It all started when a clever gent in Wales invented a device to chase away young hooligans loitering about malls and storefronts. The device, now patented and called the Mosquito, sends out a high-pitch shrill that only young ears can hear.
As we age, we lose the ability to detect higher-frequency sounds. Most people over age 30 can't hear anything higher than 16 kilohertz, regardless of how loud the sound is. The Mosquito's buzz is at 17 kilohertz, and it is loud and annoying, which sends the little punks scurrying. Score one for the adults.
But then some clever punk turned the tables. Teenagers are now downloading the Mosquito MP3 and using it as a ring-tone in school because teachers can't hear it. Score one for the kids.
All this is fun and games, but no one seems to be concerned about the health issue this has revealed. There is natural age-related hearing loss, called presbycusis. And then there's unnatural, accelerated hearing loss from noise. Most 30-year-olds should be able to hear a 17-kilohertz sound. This is the case in quiet societies in remote regions such as Nepal and parts of Africa. The fact that many of us cannot hear the Mosquito is a result of an epidemic of noise-induced hearing loss, not just aging.
The culprits
According to decade-old data from the National Institutes of Health, more than a third of the 28 million Americans with hearing difficulties lost their hearing at least partially due to noise.
And the problem is getting worse year by year. The ability to detect high frequency is the first to go, followed by volume in general.
The culprits are headphones, killer amps, and the proliferation of power tools and other loud home appliances that our grandparents didn't have.
I find it astounding that no one seems to care. Unless you're living in a cave or the White House, you would know, for example, that condoms can prevent pregnancy and many sexually transmitted diseases. Yet there is no similar awareness about (and free distribution of) earplugs to protect hearing.
Fighting the problem
The government seems lukewarm on hearing protection. Again, unless you're living in a cave or the White House, you know that soldiers in Iraq long lacked body armor. What is not known so well is that they still lack earplugs and instructions on why and how to use them. As a result, combat soldiers in Iraq are 50 times more likely to suffer permanent hearing damage compared to non-combat soldiers, according to a December 2005 study in American Journal of Audiology. Perhaps a quarter or more soldiers returning home have hearing loss, although there's no official statistics because the Army didn't bother conducting hearing tests beforehand.
Closer to home, the real scandal about illegal workers is not that they're stealing American jobs but that they are allowed to work without protections, such as earplugs. Pass by any construction site, and you will see that sometimes even the jackhammer operator, let alone the workers encircling him, has no ear protection.
There are rules. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health guidelines state that workers shouldn't be exposed to 110 decibels for more than 1.5 minutes during a daily 8-hour shift.
When you're not working, though, you are apparently allowed to be pummeled at a rock concert for two hours by sound that is about 10 times louder than this, at 120 decibels or higher.
Famously losing their hearing
To no surprise, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltry, the two surviving members of The Who, which made the Guinness Book of World Records back in the 1970s as being the loudest rock group, have profound hearing loss [Townshend has publicized his problem as being caused by headphones]. So too do many older rockers, only now admitting it. And I bet you yourself have some degree of loss.
I recommend anyone over age 35 to get a hearing test just to understand how much hearing you may have lost. There are tests on the Internet. They might not be entirely accurate, but they will give you a sense of what your frequency cutoff is. Mine was around 15 kilohertz in my left ear and 16 kilohertz in my right ear. I could hear the Mosquito MP3, though, likely because it is not a true 17-khz wave.
The fact that my left ear is a little worse is evidence of noise-induced hearing loss. This is the ear I use most often on the telephone, because I dial with my right hand, and this is the one that gets punished with loud dial tones and surprise fax sounds.
An audiologist confirmed my hearing loss, even though I haven't worn headphones or sought out loud noise. The test was a real eye-opener—and ear-closer.
Can you hear the ring tone? Find out
here.
http://www.livescience.com/humanbiol...d_hearing.html
Why Screaming Doesn't Make You Deaf
Ker Than
As you scream for your favorite sports team, special brain cells kick in to protect your auditory system from the sound of your own voice, a new study suggests.
These cells dampen your auditory neurons' ability to detect incoming sounds. The moment you shut up, the inhibition signal stops and your hearing returns to normal, so you can then be deafened by the screams of the guy next to you.
Scientists call this signal a corollary discharge. In crickets, on which the study was done, it's sent from the motor neurons responsible for generating loud mating calls to sensory neurons involved in hearing. The signal is sent via middlemen called interneurons.
Biologists have long known that corollary discharge interneurons, or CDIs, must exist. Only in recent years, however, have they started finding them. The new cricket study is the first to pinpoint CDIs for the auditory system.
Listen to me
Animals generate sounds to communicate, to attract mates, and to ward off rivals. Some animals, like dolphins and bats, even hunt with sounds.
CDIs help resolve two problems that sound-generating animals have. They protect creatures from their own sounds, and they allow animals to distinguish between sounds that they've created and ones from outside sources.
"It's difficult to say whether crickets can distinguish between self-generated and external sounds, but a similar mechanism in humans might explain how we can recognize our own voice," study leader James Poulet from the University of Cambridge told LiveScience..
Scientists haven't yet identified CDIs in humans but imaging studies have shown that auditory areas in our brains are suppressed during speech.
More to it
In addition to CDIs, humans have a so-called "middle ear reflex" that also helps to protect our hearing from loud sounds. Two tiny muscles are attached to bones in the middle part of our ears. When we're exposed to sudden loud noises, these muscles contract and make our auditory systems less responsive to incoming sounds.
Unlike corollary discharges, the middle ear reflex dampens hearing only in response to external sounds. Also, because it is only a reflex, the response becomes less vigorous with repetition and long exposure.
CDIs are not unique to the auditory system. In monkeys, visual CDIs help keep the visual scene stable even as the eyes move around rapidly. Scientists suspect CDIs exist for other sensory systems as well, including touch.
This could help explain why we can't tickle ourselves.
"The corollary discharge is not present when someone else tickles us," Poulet explained. "Therefore the sensory response in the brain is much greater and the tickle appears much more ticklish."
Another recent study found that the brain can anticipate your effort to tickle yourself, and it discounts the sensation.
http://www.livescience.com/animalwor..._deafness.html
Price of Virtual Living: Patience, Privacy
Peggy Mihelich
The virtual worlds depicted in the movies "The Matrix" and "Minority Report" can often seem far too real in today's world of computers, e-mail, instant messaging, MP3 players, cell phones, laptops, Wi-Fi and RFID.
Many of us can't get through a day without scanning, dialing or logging into a digital world so deeply embedded that living without 1s and 0s seems almost unthinkable -- and maybe impossible.
"We now live in an era where the technology is becoming mandatory instead of a choice. ...We have found ourselves tethered to our technology in a way that has really changed our lifestyle," said Larry Rosen, co-author of the book "TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @Work @Home @Play."
In 2004 the Census Bureau estimated that 62 percent of the U.S. population owned and used a cell phone. The IT consulting firm Yankee Group estimates that figure will reach about 82 percent by 2009.
About 73 percent of Americans age 18 or older use the Internet, up from 66 percent in January 2005, according to an April 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The Department of Commerce estimates e-commerce sales at $25.2 billion for the first quarter of 2006, an estimated increase of 25.6 percent from the first quarter of 2005.
"The Internet's become a mass phenomenon in this country. It really has had an impact on how people get information and stay in touch with other folks," Pew researcher John Horrigan said.
The virtual world also has given millions of people a place to express opinions and ideas they are often too afraid to voice in the real world.
"When you are sitting and communicating in the virtual world nobody sees you." Rosen said. "Tons of research shows that when you are not visible you feel more inclined to say things that you would never say face to face."
The virtual self
The Web's anonymity factor has helped transform social patterns.
"There're so many ways to meet people on the Internet and you don't have to try so hard," said Andrew Engle, a 32-year-old Atlanta-area audio technician and member of the social networking site MySpace.
Social Web sites have become the ultimate marketing tool, "the virtuoso of yourself," according to MIT sociology professor Sherry Turkle.
A March 2006 Pew survey of online dating patterns found that 31 percent of American adults say they know someone who has used a dating Web site like Match.com or Yahoo! Personals. Many have found long-term relationships and married someone they met online.
But for all the successes of the social Web, there are limits to meeting and getting to know someone on the Internet.
"It's a nice way to communicate ... but what you are always doing is trying to make that person exactly what you want them to be," Rosen said. "And when you finally meet in the real world, it turns out they are not exactly what you've expected."
Online communities like "Second Life" and "The Sims Online" let members assume another identity -- a different name, job, spouse - separate from the real world. Online role-playing games like "EverQuest" and "Entropia Universe" let members create virtual economies where they can amass digital fortunes.
Turkle, who has studied and talked to members of these online societies, says many feel their virtual lives are better and more fulfilling than their real lives.
Identity play itself is not harmful, she says, but it can become harmful if it crowds out other aspects of life.
"All of this would be fine and interesting and no big deal except people are spending 80 to 100 hours a week doing it. And that's the problem," she said.
Loss of patience
Time in the virtual world takes us away from time spent in the real world. Though studies are inconclusive and ongoing, some psychologists warn that too much virtual exposure can undercut face-to-face interaction, lead to depression and isolation, and erode our patience.
"We don't have the tolerance any more to wait," Rosen said. "Listening to people talk slowly or talk, period -- we just can't tolerate it."
A recent Associated Press poll found that Americans start to feel impatient after 5 minutes on hold on the phone or 15 minutes in line.
Technology has brought us to a world where we have to have it when we want it, and we want to have it all simultaneously.
"Kids now can talk to you, have their iPod stuck in their ears, be on MySpace and ... [instant message] five people," Rosen said. "They don't even think of it as technology. They think of it as air. It's just there."
E-mail lets us send a quick response, and IM lets us carry on a real-time conversation with someone halfway around the world - a great and inexpensive convenience, but a behind-the-screen form of communication.
"When you're missing all those [spoken and visual] cues ... you have to read between the lines effectively," Rosen said. "And we do a lot of that, and we do misinterpret very easily."
Rosen notes that despite the drawbacks, technology has at least gotten us communicating. Pew's research even suggests the Web can foster deep communication.
"The Internet plays an important role in helping people reach out to their social networks in times of need," Horrigan said. "People use the quick e-mail to maintain their social networks. And then when they need to reach out and get information as part of a big decision, they set those networks into motion to get the kind of support they need."
The digital paper trail
If we are growing closer online, it's a closeness that some people fear is being too closely monitored.
"We are on the cusp of creating a surveillance society in the United States," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Steinhardt says he worries that we're moving in a direction where our "every movement, our every action, our every utterance and, soon people will claim, our thoughts can be tracked and monitored."
Already, global positioning satellites hover over us, security cameras watch our movements, retailers track our purchasing patterns, our e-mail and Internet use can be monitored, and RFID tags -- tiny chips with antennas - let our cars speed through tollbooths without having to stop and pay.
Such advances often bring great convenience -- and leave behind a digital paper trail of our daily lives.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, is pushing for the creation of a privacy bill of rights to protect personal data.
"Our economy is increasingly data-driven," she told the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy convention in June. "We've dramatically ramped up surveillance in our efforts to fight terrorists who hide among innocent civilians. But every day, the news contains a story of how the records of millions of consumers, veterans, patients have been compromised."
A Federal Trade Commission survey found that from 1999 to 2003 more than 27 million Americans were victims of identity theft, costing them and businesses more than $50 billion.
Personal data used to be protected by "practical obscurity," meaning that public records existed on paper or in isolated databases in courthouses and government offices. The information was legally within reach, but accessing it usually took hours or days and a lot of leg work.
But that's changing, Steinhardt said. Communication, transaction and other public and private records have moved online, and they can be pulled together in minutes to create a picture of our lives.
Typing someone's name into a search engine or online phone directory can reveal where they live. Going to their local government Web site can reveal how much their house is worth - and how much they pay in property taxes. Checking another Web site can reveal how much they contributed to political campaigns.
Need for privacy
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to secretly monitor e-mail and phone calls to and from the country to track people suspected of terrorist activity.
USA Today reported this year that BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T provided the NSA with records from billions of domestic phone calls after 9/11.
BellSouth and Verizon denied it, and the newspaper later said it could not establish that they had ever contracted with the NSA to provide such records. AT&T has not denied the story but said it would not provide such information without legal authorization.
Steinhardt says laws are needed to establish rights of privacy and control over our information, as well as encryption technologies to keep our data safe.
But Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a public policy, pro-technology think tank, says technology is not the enemy and should not be feared.
"Each little front to stop technology is a losing battle and, frankly, a battle that should be lost because technology makes our lives better," Atkinson said.
Would we do away with e-mail, he asks, just because the government can track it? "Everybody would laugh because e-mail is a powerful, wonderful technology."
What's needed, he said, are laws that protect privacy but don't block technology completely.
"It is inevitable that the economy and society will become virtually and completely digital," he said. "Whether that happens in 20 years or five years or 50 years, it's going to happen."
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/07/13/d...rld/index.html
'Bridget Jones' Blogger Fire Fury
British secretary in Paris becomes Online 'cause celebre'
A British secretary working in Paris who says she was fired because her Paris employer objected to her Weblog has provoked an old and New Media storm.
Unmarried mother Catherine Sanderson -- "La Petite Anglaise" to 3,000 regular readers of her Internet diary -- is launching legal action in France, claiming unfair dismissal against accountancy firm Dixon Wilson, British media reports say.
The "old fashioned" firm was never named in her blog. Sanderson, 33, also remained anonymous -- except for her photograph on her Web site.
Now Sanderson claims to have been "dooced" -- the New Media term for getting fired for what you write in a blog after a Web designer lost her job for writing about her job and colleagues on her site, Dooce.com.
The rise and fall of "La Petite Anglaise" has added a new dimension to her tales of life with "Mr Frog", the French father of her three-year-old daughter "Tadpole" and office life with her "old school type" boss in the firm and other senior partners with "plummy Oxbridge accents," the UK's Press Association says.
Sanderson told the Daily Mail she was "made to feel like a naughty schoolgirl called up before the head" when Dixon Wilson suspended her.
Sanderson claims she was dismissed for "gross misconduct" because her blog, clearly carrying her picture, risked bringing the company into disrepute. She was also accused of using office time to write her blog.
Among references to her work at the accountancy firm was, under the heading "Titilation" the moment she revealed her cleavage during a video conference and descriptions of the office Christmas party.
At this event she revealed that her boss had committed the "unforgivable faux pas" of pulling a Christmas cracker before the senior partner.
One boss she describes as "very old school... He wears braces and sock suspenders (although I don't have any firsthand experience of those), stays in gentlemen's clubs when in London, and calls secretaries 'typists.'
"When I speak to him, I can't prevent myself from mirroring his plummy Oxbridge accent. His presence at this precise moment is both unhelpful and potentially embarrassing."
As news of Sanderson's dismissal was revealed, her blog "hits" more than trebled to 10,000, PA said.
On Wednesday more than 220 followers of her Web site recorded their comments on her dismissal. Most condemned her employers for targeting the world of the blogger and urged Sanderson to keep fighting.
But a few warned her that being online carried the same degree of responsibility as any other form of communication.
Now the course of her legal challenge -- one of the first involving bloggers' rights -- can be followed by a global audience if she chooses to continue her Bridget Jones-style saga, PA reported.
Originally from York, northern England, she has always worked in Paris, saying she started her Web site on a whim one day, after reading The Guardian's guide to Weblogs "and becoming engrossed in the adventures of Belle de Jour."
According to the British media reports she is now fighting for compensation from a French industrial tribunal of more than £54,000 ($98,000) -- two years' pay.
Dixon Wilson refused to comment on the case but according to the Daily Mail one senior partner at the firm was said to have been "incandescent with rage" about what she had written about him.
'Matter of principle'
Sanderson says she is fighting the case as "a matter of principle" to establish her private right to blog.
On Wednesday Daily Telegraph Paris correspondent Colin Randall, who first wrote about the plight of "La Petite Anglaise," used his own blog to ask whether print journalism is about to be smothered by the online age and "the march of the New Media."
One blogger responded: "I find it interesting that bloggers claim to be `the New Media' and then complain about being terminated from their positions at companies for being bloggers: would you expect to be terminated if you `moonlighted' for the traditional media?
"Say you worked for a large corporation, and in your spare time you wrote an anonymous 'insider's view' column for the Financial Times. Would you expect anything less than termination upon discovery?"
But another asked: "Where does the influence your employer has on your day-to-day life stop?"
On Sanderson's own Web site the vast bulk of correspondents supported her, but one blogger warned: "You do have to be so careful with publishing these days, and it's a mistake to think that blogging, because it is so easy, is any different."
Another wrote from Canada: "I do not intend for this to sound mean-spirited, but seriously, did you not see this coming?"
Sanderson told the Daily Mail she planned a book and had had "already worked out some proposals for publishers."
One of her supporters wrote encouragingly on her Web site: "You, Petite, are about to become infamous!"
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe...log/index.html
Which New Browser Is Best: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, or Opera 9?
Michael W. Muchmore
For a long time, there was nothing to talk about in web browsers. You used Internet Explorer, and that was it. Oh, to be sure, some Mozilla/Netscape holdouts clung to their ways, as did a smattering of users of Opera, Konqueror, and other obscurities. Internet Explorer itself hasn't had a major version change since the release of 6.0 in 2001, so there wasn't much to talk about there, either for five long years.
That's all changed, thanks to that phoenixlike incarnation of Netscape technology, Firefox. In one year, the open-source darling Firefox has pulled within a dead heat of browser the browser popularity crown, at least on the ExtremeTech site, where each browser claims just over 43 percent of our viewers. This spurred Microsoft to leave off its complacency, and serious development of the formerly dominant browser restarted in earnest.
Right at this moment, big changes have or are about to occur in three well-known browsers: Internet Explorer is finally being updated, with version 7 in its third beta and almost ready to roll out the door; Firefox is also ripening an upgrade beta for its Version 2.0—it's in beta 1; and finally Opera, which has a devoted but smaller following, has recently come out with Version 9.0.
So, three new browsers in the same year, after no action for a half decade. How do they stack up? We do a comparison of features, usability, memory, and disk usage to help you decide which you should spend your hard earned…oh wait a minute, they're all free, so you can pick the one you want without worrying about out of pocket. Keep in mind: We're just looking at what's there right now, and not considering what the browser developers may have planned for later additions. Also, these are such feature-rich apps that it would be impossible to compare every little detail—which has support for Atom feeds or importing OPML, and advanced Java settings, for example—we'll stick to the stuff that's most apparent to regular users. Let's take the browsers out for a spin, then, shall we?
Here's a summary of each of the browser's features:
Feature Firefox 2 Beta 1 Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 Opera 9.00
Tabbed browsing Yes Yes Yes
Add-ins Yes—Extensions Yes—Add-Ons Widgets
Themes Yes No No
Built-in search with multiple engine choice Yes Yes Yes
Pop-up blocker Yes Yes Yes
Anti-Phishing Yes Yes No
Favorites button No Yes No
RSS reader Yes Yes Yes
Download manager Yes No Yes
Can remember open tabs for next session No Yes Yes
Save group of tabs as bookmark Yes Yes Yes
Macintosh/Linux version Yes/Yes No/No Yes
BitTorrent client No No Yes
Spell-checker for text boxes Yes No No—but GNU Aspell available
Download pause Yes No Yes (stop and resume transfer)
For such a major sounding version number increase—to 2.0—most users will be hard pressed to see much difference between this beta and Firefox 1.5. There's a lot more under the hood in the new version, for developers—JavaScript 1.7, client-side session and persistent storage, SVG (scalable vector graphics), SAX (Simple API for XML), and more. These developer features should translate into more features for end users in the long run.
For us little guys looking at the new browser now, the biggest changes are the spell checker in text boxes, renaming of the Go menu to History, combining Extensions with Themes in one dialog, and anti-phishing tool which you can find deep in a Setting tab.
Here's the list of everything that's new in Firefox 2, according to its developers:
• Built in Phishing Protection.
• Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
• Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
• Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
• Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
• Inline spell checking in text boxes
• Search plug-in manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
• New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
• Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
• New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
• New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
• Support for JavaScript 1.7
• Support for client-side session and persistent storage
• Extended search plug-in format
• Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions
• Support for SVG text using svg:textPath
If you uncheck the Check to see if the site I'm visiting might be a scam option and then recheck it, you get a wordy dialog explaining that you'll send data to Google's log about fishy pages. When we tried to switch between local and by asking, the only choice was Google, and that was grayed out.
We were unable to find a site that tripped this tool after setting it to run. We threw every URL from patently spam emails we could find. Perhaps we really did win a million euros or owe that eBay user's PayPal account for that $465 we don't remember bidding on. Even if we entered a URL that was known to be a phishing site, found on security sites that keep track of such things, we couldn't trip the feature.
The spellcheck for text boxes was an interesting frill, using the familiar dotted colored lines under words of questionable orthography. In Firefox, zoom only zooms text, not pictures, but there's a wider range of text sizes to zoom to than in IE6.
RSS feeds are nicely handled in Firefox. When you navigate to a site that contains an RSS feed, the little orange feed button will appear in the right side of the address box. Clicking this brings up the following page: The answer you always hear when discussing a missing feature in Firefox is, "You can do it with an Extension." That usually is the case, and the Firefox Extension capability is elegant, powerful, and easy to use:
The link in this dialog goes to a full, organized guide of available extensions.
It's also nice that Firefox offers Themes:
But all the themes we found merely changed the interface buttons and perhaps added an image to the top menu area; they don't change the window borders the way you can with WindowBlinds. And beware that most themes haven't yet been updated to work with Firefox 2.
With XUL, AJAX and other technologies, Firefox has the most programmable interface of the browsers, allowing developers to pretty much use it as a foundation for their web-based applications. One example is the limited word processor from Michael Robertson's new company Ajax 13, ajaxWrite.
One peeve: Why isn't there still a one-click button for adding a new tab? You can use the middle mouse button if you know about it—and if your mouse has one (laptop users need not apply)—on new links, but sometimes you want a new empty tab, which in Firefox requires going through menus, or double clicking on the empty space to the right of the last tab (if you knew about that—usability is about making needed features obvious).
The security and tabbed browsing brought people to Firefox, and the extensions are what keeps them there. But it's a question of whether you're the type of person who likes to tinker with things to get them just how you want them, or to have something that comes with all the options built in. Extensions, themes, and interface programmability make Firefox the most flexible browser out there. But this programmability and its tremendous market share increase make it a target for security threats, which to their credit, the Firefox community of developers has addressed with a security updates.
If you really want to see a version of Firefox that's revamped, check out the Gecko-based Flock, which has added Web 2.0 features like tags, mashups with photo sharing and social bookmarking sites, and blogging. Flock also has implemented interesting interface features like a star button for quick favorite adds to both local and shared online sets, a topbar for browsing pictures, and a blog editor.
Microsoft's major themes for the new Internet Explorer are "easier and more secure." We think catching up to the competition with stuff like tabbed browser windows, add-ins, and built-in search is probably also pretty high on the agenda, too. And it's a major overhaul from Version 6. The beta browser sports a new, slick, streamlined look:
Note that by default, IE7 dispenses with the standard menu choices at the top, instead using icons with drop-downs. The star button lets you easily add a site to your Favorites, but only locally, unlike Flock, which can simultaneously save them to an online social bookmarking site like del.icio.us. Also, the refresh and Home buttons have moved over to the right of the address box. We're not sure we love that, but we're sure they have the usability testing numbers to justify it.
Tabbed browsing is fairly well-done in IE7, and you can even turn it off if you're an old-fashioned sort:
You have to hover over the blank, small tab to the right of the active ones to create a new blank tab; we wonder why this isn't always visible?
One feature unique to IE7 is its tile view of your tabs, called Quick Tabs, accessible from an icon just to the right of the add favorites icon:
Unlike the other two browsers in this roundup, IE7 has an RSS button that's always there below the address bar. If a site contains a feed, the button turns orange and lets you subscribe. Presentation of feeds is nicely done:
The entries could be a bit more tightly laid out, and it's interesting that the browser adds links to Digg and del.icio.us for each entry.
IE7 doesn't have quite the add-on library that Firefox has, and many of the "add-ons" are things like toolbars and even standalone apps. Oddly, we even found an entry for the Opera Browser among IE7's list of Add-Ons. Also, most of the add-ons don't customize the interface as they do in Firefox, and there aren't as many fun ones as there are in Opera Widgets.
Page zoom is much improved in IE7. In addition to holding down the Ctrl key and spinning the mouse wheel in and out, there's a zoom control in the lower right corner of the screen (see first picture of IE7). In Version 6, you could only zoom among the five text sizes, but in 7 you can zoom the page and pictures over a ridiculous range of small and large size, and the scroll bars zoom along with the browser contents.
IE7 adds some welcome conveniences for printing, too: It scales pages so they don't cut off on the side of the page—we've all run into this when printing web pages.
Security
IE has been possibly the biggest target of security attacks over the last decade, with updates to cover holes a regular occurrence. Since Bill Gates's edict demanding "trustworthy computing" in 2002, Microsoft has been making big efforts towards eliminating these security holes, and IE 7 is intended to be a model child of this initiative. Defender, now in beta 2, is the major salvo in this direction; it's anti-spyware software that both finds spyware on your system and monitors for it in real time while you browse with IE.
According to Microsoft, the following security features are to be found in IE7:
• ActiveX Opt-in
• Security Status Bar
• Phishing Filter
• Cross-Domain Barriers
• Delete Browsing History
• Address Bar Protection
• International Domain Name Anti-spoofing
• URL Handling Security
• Fix My Settings
• Add-ons Disabled Mode
• Features Unique to Windows Vista
And when Windows Vista rolls around, they also plan to add a Protected Mode (where IE runs in its own sandbox) and Parental Controls. When went to some questionable sites, we could see the little animated icon in the lower right doing its job; hovering the cursor over it yielded the tooltip: "Phishing Filter is checking this website." It also caught a website that was trying to install an add-in.
In his column of a couple months ago, Jason Cross has said that IE7 Isn't Good Enough. His main complaints are that the new browser has taken too long to launch, and that it doesn't support the middle mouse button. This reviewer agrees that Microsoft should not have sat on its market-share laurels for five years without producing a new version of IE, but that doesn't mean the new browser doesn't include major advances. If the Firefox 2 beta is any indication, that browser won't be wowing anyone with incredible new features that would send it way ahead of the new IE version any time soon. As to the middle mouse button, it is a nice feature, but we're not sure what percentage of users even know of its existence.
Microsoft doesn't expect to convert the Firefox religious, but rather to bring over those who might have abandoned IE because of its security problems and lack of a tabbed interface. IE7 is a fine effort in this direction.
The Norway-based Opera Software has made a bigger dent in the mobile browser market, with deals for its Opera Mini with T-Mobile and Sony Ericsson, and recently with Nintendo being chosen as the browser on the Wii.
Opera was the first browser of all to feature tabbed browsing windows, debuting them in 1995. We think the browser does a darn good job implementing tabs in terms of usability and visibility, as well. The clear "Add new tab" button, and the default ability to close every tab—and now, when you hover the cursor over a tab, you get a thumbnail of the site on that tab—all show Opera to be a forerunner in the tab department. Of course, we're sure there are Firefox extensions that enable these behaviors, but having them built into the default application is nice.
Opera is the only non-beta in our roundup, and its new features include widgets, content blocking, BitTorrent, and a search engine editor.
Even in some features other than tabs, the other two market-leading browsers are playing catch-up with Opera—built-in RSS reader and saving groups of open tabs for later sessions, zooming text and pictures, and the X on each tab to close it. Here's the complete list of what its makers say is new in Opera 9:
• Content blocking
• BitTorrent support
• Widgets
• Search engine editor
• Site preferences
• New installer. One package—30 languages
• Integrated source viewer
• opera:config for advanced settings configuration
• Tab use best: Thumbnails when you hover the cursor over a tab.
Widgets in Opera are more like small standalone applications that can interact with the internet and live outside the browser, rather than interface elements that can change the basic behavior of the browser, as Firefox's extensions are.
The new BitTorrent support in Opera 9 is fairly unobtrusive; you simply go to a BitTorrent index web site, and when you click on a torrent link (a URL ending with the .torrent extension), you'll get this dialog:
After you give this the OK, your torrent will start downloading, and will appear in the regular Transfers page. There's also a dropdown choice in the built-in search to help you find torrents without the need to find a separate torrent search page.
On the topic of basic interface elements, we got a lot of use out of the sidebar in Opera pulls out when you click the left edge of the window. This can display bookmarks, history, widgets, notes, transfers, and links on the current page. Pretty darn handy.
And Opera still boasts several unique conveniences like Mouse gestures, and the Fast-forward button, which finds the most likely Next Page link and takes you there. Mouse gestures aren't for everyone, but they can save you keystrokes with a little practice. One simple example: To go back to the previous page, hold down the right mouse button and click the left mouse button. Fast forward worked perfectly on ExtremeTech reviews, finding the next page easily without requiring you to hunt for the Next link. A personal favorite convenience in Opera is Paste and Go, which lets you paste a URL into the address bar or a search term into the search box and load it in one click: It's the kind of thing that's so obvious but someone had to think of actually doing it. Paste-and-go is also available as a choice from the right-click context menu and as a keyboard shortcut.
One small convenience that was missing in Opera and that this reviewer has used frequently in Internet Explorer and Firefox is hitting Ctrl-Enter to add the "www." and ".com" to your entry on the address bar and just go to that URL by typing the meat of the domain name. We're happy to see that the shortcut now works in Opera 9. Rounding out the navigation aids: Middle clicking the mouse scroll wheel can close a tab and open a link in a new tab, and you can choose whether to have an X on all tabs to close them.
Another nice little touch in Opera is the progress bar at the right of the address bar, which tells you what percent of the page and the number of images that have been loaded from the site. The other browsers have progress bars, but we like the extra information here.
One oddity about Opera is that it opens popups that you want within the same browser frame, instead of in their own windows; this behavior can be changed in Advanced Preferences dialog, however.
Opera was the first browser with tabs, support RSS support, and now it's the only one with a built-in BitTorrent client and tab thumbnails (though IE7's Quick Tabs almost serves the same function). It's still the only with a fast-forward button and mouse gestures, and there are lot of other little conveniences that its developers cleverly incorporated—one-click Paste-and-Go, for example. Add to this that it's the fastest to load in testing and does best on the Acid2 web standards test, and we have to scratch our heads as to why its market share among browsers isn't greater.
We tested memory usage for the browsers both empty and with six tabs loaded. We also compare the last released versions of Firefox (1.5) and Internet Explorer, where pertinent. Memory and disk tests were done on a Pentium D system at 3.2GHz with 2GB of RAM, running Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed and load speed tests on a Sony Vaio 1.5GHz Pentium M system with 512MB RAM. Before we took the measurements, we executed the command rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks.
With no pages loaded, and with no bookmarks, and otherwise with default download settings, here was the memory use for each of the browsers:
Memory Usage (no pages loaded)
Firefox 2 Beta 1: 42K
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 24K
Opera 9.0: 53K
IE 6.0: 17K
Firefox 1.5.0.4: 17.8
We also tested memory use on the browsers with a bunch of tabs loaded. We used the same group of tabbed pages on all of the browsers—ExtremeTech home, Yahoo, PCMag.com, YouTube, BBC World, and Flickr (with the same picture showing). With this tab load the results were as follows:
Memory Usage Loading Six Tabs
Firefox 2 Beta 1: 73K
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 70K
Opera 9.0: 52K
IE 6.0: 155K
Firefox 1.5.0.4: 56K
Disk usage for each was as follows:
Disk Usage
Firefox 2 Beta 1: 18.8MB
Opera 9.0: 20.7MB
IE 6.0: 1.9MB
Firefox 1.5.0.4: 18.6MB
None of this would tax a reasonably updated machine. The low IE6 size can be explained by that program's reliance on code already in Windows.
One performance point is noticeable when you just want to get browsing fast—startup time. We did these tests on a slower machine, a Sony Vaio 1.5GHz Pentium M system with 512MB RAM. We defragged the disk, ran rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks, and started each up after a reboot in case any code remained in memory from a previous session. These scores are the averages of three test runs.
Startup Time (average time in seconds)
Firefox 2 Beta 1: 12
Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 7.7
Opera 9.0: 5
Firefox 1.5.0.4: 12.5
Standards Compliance
We also ran the browsers through the Acid2 Browser Test, from the Web Standard Project. It's an attempt to test how well a browser complies with web standards. While these are standards on the books—HTML4, CSS1, PNG, and Data URLs—they're not in widespread use, and are more of a refection on features developers would like to be able use in the future.
Clearly IE7 has some work to do if it hopes to do well on this test. Firefox still has some issues, and Opera is in good shape. Mind you, we didn't run into any noticeably misrendered pages in several days of testing the browsers, so this is probably more important for the future than for current sites. One incompatibility issue we did run into was that IE7 didn't not correctly handle the frames in our content management web application.
Users will reap some benefits from upgrading to any of these browsers, and all are excellently engineered, well-working software with lots of convenience, capability, and security.
We still think the tab interface in Opera—by far the most mature tab implementation of the bunch—is the easiest to use and understand: At the left of the tabs, there's a "New Tab" mini-tab, with an icon of a page and a plus sign. What could be clearer? In IE7, you don't see that you can add a tab unless you happen to hover the cursor over the small empty tab top to the right of the currently active one; in Firefox 2, you can get a new tab if you know to double-click the space to the right of the last tab, right click the tab and pick New tab from the choices, or actually go up to the File/New tab choice on the main menus. Opera, too, was the fastest to load in our testing and conformed to the standards tested by the Acid2 Browser Test.
Opera alone currently lacks an anti-phishing feature, but we wonder how critical this lacuna is; how about people just learning to be a little circumspect about where they enter their passwords and personal info? If you enter your bank's URL, you're safe, if an email sends you to a site that looks like your bank's, beware. More helpful is Microsoft's anti-malware tool, Defender, which scans your system for spyware you may catch while browsing.
If people switched to Firefox for tabbed browsing windows and extensions, they'll no longer have those reasons to shun Microsoft's slick new browser—as long as they can wait for its release. Microsoft seems to have enough confidence in the stability of Beta 3 to put its download button on the front page of its Internet Explorer site, rather than hidden in some developer area of the site. With IE7 so seemingly fully baked, we have to wonder why Microsoft is waiting for Vista to release it. Oh yeah, I guess they want another reason for you to buy Vista.
If the switch to Firefox was made for security—a major motivator, with all the holes found in IE and well publicized, the question is harder to answer. Microsoft has really taken security to heart, but only time will tell. With Firefox becoming such a market leader and boasting so much programmability, it's bound to become a prime target for hackers. For privacy, all have a "Delete Private Data" choice under their Tools menu—a nice way to keep people from seeing where you've been on the web.
IE7 now emulates the other two browsers by finally including a built-in search text box in the browser—yes you could always type your search into the address bar and get MSN search results, but the address bar is for URLs, not searches. RSS handling is another area where the other two have caught up to Opera, and all the browsers now do a decent job handling your subscriptions.
Read about a different animal in web browsing: 3D browsers.
If it's add-ons or extensions you want, Firefox still has the upper hand, with the most free plug-ins of any browser, but IE7 already has a decent catalog—though some cost money—and there are plenty of nifty "widgets" available for Opera 9 already. But neither of these offers the flexibility of Firefox's extensions and programmer hooks. And unlike Firefox, and Opera, Macintosh and Linux users need not apply with IE7.
These are all fine apps; we recommend you give them each a spin—it's a free download, after all—and stick with the one you find the most comfortable. Just keep in mind that IE7 is still beta (and you'll need to check the Show Updates box in Control Panel's Add Remove Programs window if you want to remove it), and Firefox is even earlier beta. For most users, it probably makes sense to wait for a later beta for Firefox and go ahead and try IE7 with a little caution. And don't worry about losing your bookmarks or favorites: With any of these upgrades, your bookmarks with come along for the upgrade ride.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1990859,00.asp
Hacked Ad Seen on MySpace Served Spyware to a Million
An online banner advertisement that ran on MySpace.com and other sites over the past week used a Windows security flaw to infect more than a million users with spyware when people merely browsed the sites with unpatched versions of Windows, according to data collected by iDefense, a Verisign company.
Michael La Pilla, an iDefense "malcode" analyst, said he first spotted the attack Sunday while browsing MySpace on a Linux-based machine. When he browsed a page headed with an ad for DeckOutYourDeck.com, his browser asked him whether he wanted to open a file called exp.wmf. Microsoft released a patch in January to fix a serious security flaw in the way Windows renders WMF (Windows Metafile) images, and online criminal groups have been using the flaw to install adware, keystroke loggers and all manner of invasive software for the past seven months.
Internet Explorer users who visited a Web page containing this ad and whose IE was not equipped with the WMF patch would not get that warning. Rather, their machines would silently download a Trojan horse program that installs junk software in the PurityScan/ClickSpring family of adware. This stuff bombards the user with pop-up ads and tracks their Web usage. Only a little more than half of the anti-virus programs used at anti-virus testing service AV-Test.org flagged the various programs that the Trojan tried to download as malicious or suspicious.
Using software that captures and analyzes Web traffic, La Pilla found that the installation program contacted a Russian-language Web server in Turkey that tracks how many times the program was installed, presumably because most of this adware is installed by third parties who get paid for each installation. The data there indicate that the adware was installed on 1.07 million computers, La Pilla said, adding that all seven of the Internet addresses contacted by the downloader Trojan appear to be inactive at this time.
La Pilla said he also spotted the ad trying to serve up adware on Webshots.com, a popular photo-sharing site. It's not clear when this particular campaign started, he said, but an anonymous user at the invaluable CastleCops security forum posted information about a similar attack spotted on MySpace on July 12. Users at this online gaming forum apparently spotted the same WMF exploit being served via the DeckOutYourDeck ad as early as July 8.
A WHOIS database search for Deckoutyourdeck.com listed a fax machine as a contact phone number, but also contained an e-mail contact at RedTurtleInvestments.com. A WHOIS search on that domain turned up an address at Springfusion.com, which appears to be a fairly new online-affiliate marketing company. Springfusion.com is registered to a guy in Seattle, who -- when I contacted him via e-mail -- replied that he was not connected with any of the sites I looked up.
What is clear from this attack is that there are plenty of people who still haven't installed this security update from Microsoft. It's also fairly obvious that scammers and online criminals are targeting high-traffic Web sites. Alexa currently rates MySpace as the sixth most-visited site on the Web (Webshots.com earned a distant 137th most-visited ranking).
I left a message with Webshots and with MySpace's media hotline, and will update this post if I hear anything from either of them.
Update, 2:50 p.m. ET:A Webshots vice president called back to say the company didn't have any information on the attack, but that it was investigating.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/secur...are_to_mo.html
Open Source In The National Interest
Matt Asay
Computer Business Review has an interesting review of the United States Department of Defense report "Open Technology Development". [PDF] If you haven't read it, you need to take a look. It is one of the most clear-sighted documents on open source that I've yet read, and should banish CIO doubts as to the core benefits of open source: cost savings, security, speed of development, robustness of development, etc.
SCO and others have been crying 'Foul' on the US government's increasing adoption of open source, suggesting (as Darl McBride writes here in his letter to the US Senate and House)
"I assert that open source software - available widely through the Internet - has the potential to provide our nation's enemies or potential enemies with computing capabilities that are restricted by US law."
Think that's a bit silly? Try this one, from the CEO of Green Hills Software:
"Now that foreign intelligence agencies and terrorists know that Linux is going to control our most advanced defense systems, they can use fake identities to contribute subversive software that will soon be incorporated into our most advanced defense systems."
Apparently O'Dowd (Green Hills CEO) has never actually taken the time to learn how open source and, specifically, Linux, operates. But we'll forgive his abject ignorance on the condition that someone pays his tuition to head back to school at some point. He needs it.
Anyway, back to the Department of Defense's report. It has a treasure trove of insight, nicely counterbalancing the ignorance noted above:
Currently within DoD, there is no internal distribution policy or mechanism for DoD developed and paid for software code. By not enabling internal distribution, DoD creates an arbitrary scarcity of its own software code, which increases the development and maintenance costs of information technology across the Department.
Other negative consequences include lock-in to obsolete proprietary technologies, the inability to extend existing capabilities in months vs. years, and snarls of interoperability that stem from the opacity and stove-piping of information systems....
Software code has become central to the warfighter's ability to conduct missions. If this shift is going to be an advantage, rather than an Achilles' heel, DoD must pursue an active strategy to manage its software knowledge base and foster an internal culture of open interfaces, modularity and reuse. This entails a parallel shift in acquisitions methodologies and business process to facilitate discovery and re-use of software code across DoD.
The national security implications of open technology development (OTD) are clear: increased technological agility for warfighters, more robust and competitive options for program managers, and higher levels of accountability in the defense industrial base....
DoD needs to use open technology design and development methodologies to increase the speed at which military systems are delivered to the warfighter, and accelerate the development of new, adaptive capabilities that leverage DoD's massive investments in software infrastructure.
To be fair, the DoD is not talking about open source exclusively in this report. It is talking more broadly about open development:
In the private sector, changes in design methodologies for software development are enabling enormous gains in productivity and efficiency. Individuals and companies are able to leverage open technology platforms to rapidly deploy new solutions and capabilities to improve their competitive advantage. These open technology platforms may be open source or proprietary software applications with open standards and published interfaces that allow the rapid development of new capabilities by third parties without coordination agreements.
It's the mash-up mentality, in some ways, that seems to appeal most to the DoD. But it's not just about "Web 2.0" thinking. It's about how to make the DoD a participant in the wider software community, thereby saving development cycles and development dollars, as this fascinating excerpt indicates:
DoD has two competing interests:
Provide for the defense of the U.S., and;
Support and grow the U.S. industrial base, which provides materiel and systems so that DoD can accomplish its mission.
These trade-offs are well understood for physical goods and services, but not as well understood for digital ones. DoD can easily calculate the cost difference between developing or acquiring a physical good or service by simply comparing make or buy costs. There is however a fundamental difference between physical and digital products. Digital goods (software code, music, movies, etc.) once created can be copied perfectly with relative ease: limiting distribution enforces scarcity, but that scarcity is arbitrary and negotiated, rather than an innate property of the product. Software's ability to be replicated also means it can be incorporated into other software systems without "using up" the original component, as one would with physical components.
The business model of purchasing physical goods and services has served DoD well in the past; but it falls short when applied to software acquisition. By treating DoD-developed software code as a physical good, DoD is limiting and restricting the ability of the market to compete for the provision of new and innovative solutions and capabilities. By enabling industry to leverage an open code development model, DoD would provide the market incentives to increase the agility and competitiveness of the industrial base.
Currently within DoD, there is no internal distribution policy or mechanism for DoD developed and paid for software code. By not enabling internal distribution, DoD creates an arbitrary scarcity of its own software code, which increases the development and maintenance costs of information technology across the Department. Other negative consequences include lock-in to obsolete proprietary technologies, the inability to extend existing capabilities in months vs. years, and snarls of interoperability that stem from the opacity and stove-piping of information systems.
DoD needs to evaluate the impact that locking into one set of proprietary standards or products may have to its ability to react and respond to adversaries and more importantly, to technological change that is accelerating regardless of military conflict. In order to remain competitive in a rapidly shifting technological landscape (including the disruptive technologies leveraged by our adversaries), DoD's software development and business processes must break out of the industrial-era acquisitions mold.
Amazing stuff. The DoD summarizes as follows, and shows a clear understanding of open source's benefits:
To summarize: OSS and open source development methodologies are important to the National Security and National Interest of the U.S. for the following reasons:
Enhances agility of IT industries to more rapidly adapt and change to user needed capabilities.
Strengthens the industrial base by not protecting industry from competition. Makes industry more likely to compete on ideas and execution versus product lock-in.
Adoption recognizes a change in our position with regard to balance of trade of IT.
Enables DoD to secure the infrastructure and increase security by understanding what is actually in the source code of software installed in DoD networks.
Rapidly respond to adversary actions as well as rapid changes in the technology industrial base.
Amen. Now if you're a CIO tasked with saving money and resources for a large or small enterprise, wouldn't it seem prudent to follow the lead of an organization tasked with saving taxpayers' money and lives? Yeah. Me, too.
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openreso...urce_in_1.html
Croatian Government Adopts Free Software Policy
Apply Open Sauce on the Balkans
Nick Farrell
THE CROATIAN government has decided to adopt a free software policy and move entirely to Open Source.
According to a document with the catchy title "Directions for Development and Use of Open Source Code Computer Programmes in Bodies and Institutions of State Administration" the Government says it needs to develop, prepare and procure open-source software.
Basically it feels that proprietary software leads to too much dependence on suppliers, which can damage the market competition.
It also says that open source programmes make the government's business more transparent and free access to information.
It reckons that Open Source will also save the Croatian tax payers huge amounts of cash while at the same time strengthening the domestic information science industry.
The report is available
here.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33120
Radio
2006 State of the Format Address
Mike Lyons
We're fine. Stations are getting higher ratings...and fund-drives are more effective and often shorter, meeting goals that you couldn't have imagined six years ago. That means the efficiency and effectiveness of the product is better. And the future is extremely encouraging, especially when you consider the shape of those stations over on the commercial side.
Frank Zappa once said, "WITHOUT MUSIC TO DECORATE IT, TIME IS JUST A BUNCH OF BORING PRODUCTION DEADLINES, OR, DATES BY WHICH BILLS MUST BE PAID."
Sounds like a "day in the life" of a typical commercial music station today.
BIG PICTURE: Commercial radio has lost 13% of its audience in the last ten years while new choices for sonic entertainment continue to explode across the marketplace.
New West Records' Jeff Cook and I were both noting recently that XM's Cross-Country channel, programmed by our old friend Jessie Scott, will likely pass the current top country station in the USA, Chicago's WUSN, in cume this summer to become the number one country station in the land!
As the New York Times' Tom Friedman said in his best selling book "The World Is Flat," our world is changing. All the old commercial signals are now falling down while non-commercial stations rise with a better product that's commercial -free and accumulating more and more acceptance with the American listening public.
Commercial radio hasn't got a chance with the laptop generation. The product of almost every contemporary music format is too modal and now they have built themselves into a box of 3 or 400 songs along with a presentation that is so static it begs any attention at all from an active listener.
And the other shoe dropped during the last year.
For the typical modal commercial music station today, it can no longer expect listeners to stay tuned through a 4 or 5 minute commercial break. Listeners know that nothing special or worthwhile is coming next. When they hear a human voice, it is simply interpreted as a trigger that commercials are coming and its time to go.
The broadcast television networks saw the agencies cut back their spending this year on account of this same problem. And soon commercial radio may start feeling the same thing.
Commercial radio HAS invested capitol in HD-radio. But the large ownership groups were never expecting that to wholly save their ass. And Clear Channel's Mark Mays himself said last week that they'll have to wait another year to 18 months before the price-point on an HD tuner gets below $100 to ignite a, hoped for, wave of new adopters.
Meanwhile, it's Pearl Jam's "Live" or Boston's "More Than a Feeling" again...again...and again.
Fact is, radio's growth has just about evaporated except for non-commercial FM. And when that happens, Wall Street is not happy. Look at today...for the last three quarters CBS has basically offered stations for sale at every investors conference call (they offered 35 stations for sale later on Friday)...Jeff Smulyan is trying to take Emmis private...and this week Cumulus was busy buying back their own stock.
And the quick-fix schemes continue to pay-off on a shorter and shorter basis. Last year-go JACK or Classic-hits and get a four book run. They're almost all down now. Reggaeton? Down in Dallas, Miami and LA.
Shit, there's only Daddy Yankee and six other artists.
Turns out to be a three-book up run and...what do they do next? I mean, its pathetic. And sad.
When there is no investment or risk put into the product, the customers eventually pick up on it. After a decade of these format stunts, the bloom is truly off-the-rose. Nobody's buying it!
Meanwhile, this past year at Non-Commercial AAA, the format grew by another ten stations, sixth straight year of more new signals. We lost most of WDET in Detroit. KRVO in Portland, KZPL in Kansas City and WOKI in Knoxville. We got new AAA stations WCOO in Charleston, South Carolina, WGCS in South Bend/Notre Dame, WFIT in Melbourne, Florida, KTKE at Truckee CA/Lake Tahoe, WUSP in Wisconsin Rapids, Clear Channel's first Americana station at WTCR Huntington, West Virginia along with 8 new AAA HD stations from Clear Channel, CBS and Greater Media.
You've seen the incredible state-of-the-art studios here at the Public Radio Partnership's WFPK.
WYEP in Pittsburgh, WMNF in Tampa and WFUV in New York City also now have new killer facilities. And WFUV got their new power increase too, now covering completely the number one market in the country.
Earlier critiques that I have made at this convention have apparently been taken to heart, though I know its not just me but now I hear rotations have increased, tempo has become a larger priority and the old cliched Non-commercial golf-coverage tone of delivery is becoming harder to find.
(in a whisper) "Dan...I think K.T. Tunstall is using a seven-iron here. Should go right to left"
One last thing - I had one specific dream when I was invited to my first Non-Comm. I hoped that the ambitions and ideals of us as a programming community would eventually spill up to the management level. So that team goals could be achieved more effectively.
I've slowly seen that come to fruition and hope that the new managers I've met here bring their wisdom and honesty to the management and development meetings here. In 2006, Non-Commercial AAA radio can deliver listeners and value that commercial music radio would give their left nut to deliver. People believe, treasure and respond to a well-programmed AAA station.
Be grateful for your good fortune and keep doing the right thing because today's commercial broadcasters can't or won't.
That's the Truthiness of Non-Comm AAA today.
http://www.triplearadio.com/news/
Indie Singer Offers New Music Model
Matt Cowan
As major music companies search for ways to make profit, the Canadian artist formerly known as Jane Siberry offers listeners a choice.
The musician who now goes by the name Issa has instituted a self-determined pricing policy for people downloading songs from her website.
Video report.
Money money money
Microsoft Tops Profit Forecast, Sets Share Buyback
Microsoft Corp. <MSFT.O> on Thursday posted a 23.5 percent drop in quarterly net profit, but raised its outlook for the current fiscal year as orders for upcoming products exceed expectations, lifting its shares by 6 percent.
The company also announced a new share buyback program that includes a $20 billion tender offer scheduled for next month and an authorization for up to $20 billion in additional buybacks through 2011.
The software maker reported a net profit of $2.83 billion, or 28 cents per diluted share, for its fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30. A year ago, Microsoft delivered a net profit of $3.7 billion, or 34 cents per share, boosted by a tax gain.
Fourth-quarter revenue rose 16 percent to $11.8 billion.
Excluding a legal charge, Microsoft earned 31 cents per share. On that basis, analysts, on average, had forecast Microsoft to report a profit of 30 cents per share on revenue of $11.6 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.
Microsoft caught investors by surprise in April when it revealed plans to invest an additional $2.6 billion to fund its flagging Web operations and other new businesses. The move dampened optimism that new products and an online strategy shift would bear fruit this business year.
In the current year, Microsoft expects to earn between $1.43 and $1.47 per share. Its previous forecast was $1.36 to $1.41 per share.
Since the company reported fiscal third-quarter earnings on April 27, the stock has fallen about 16 percent versus a 5 percent decline on the S&P 500 index. <.SPX>
But Microsoft shares were up 6.1 percent at $24.25 in after-hours trade after closing at $22.85 on Nasdaq.
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...T-EARNS-DC.XML
Google Profit Doubles In Quarter
Web search leader Google Inc. <GOOG.O> on Thursday quarterly profits doubled as the company dodged the slowing growth trend that has hurt rivals Yahoo and eBay.
The results, which significantly beat market expectations, sent Google's shares up nearly 2 percent in after-hours trade.
Second-quarter net income rose to $721 million, or $2.33 per diluted share, compared with the year-earlier quarter's $343 million, or $1.19 per share. That beat analysts' consensus estimate of $1.95 a share, according to Reuters Estimates.
Revenue rose 77 percent to $2.46 billion. Wall Street was looking for revenue, on average, of $2.40 billion. Forecasts ranged between $2.30 billion and $2.52 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.
"Overall the revenue came in certainly better than what I had been looking for and, I believe, certainly with respect to revenue relative to Street expectations," said David Garrity, analyst at Dinosaur Securities.
"The fact that you have got that kind of growth coming from overseas, where it's mostly going through Google's own network, probably can be seen as positive."
Excluding one-time items and stock-based compensation expenses, the Mountain View, California-based company reported a profit of $2.49 per share. On that basis, analysts had forecast $2.22 a share.
The company said it paid out traffic acquisition costs of $785 million, or 32 percent of advertising revenues, to affiliated Web sites that drive customers to view Google ads.
"We're very, very happy with having such a strong quarter in a seasonally weak period for us," Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told investors on a conference call to discuss the results. He added "it looks like our model continues to work extremely well."
Google's stock rose $6.91, or 1.8 percent, in after-hours trade, after jittery investors drove the stock down 3 percent to $387.12 in regular session trading on Nasdaq ahead of the results. The stock has lost 8 percent so far this year.
"At this level, Google is pretty attractively valued," said Global Crown Capital analyst Martin Pyykkonen.
Google shares hit a peak of $475 in January before investor concerns about maturing growth in the industry, and the need by Google and others to spend more on product development, led the stock lower.
On Thursday, the company reaffirmed that it will invest at a considerably higher rate in computers, networks and data centers than its expected rate of revenue growth in 2006.
Debate is raging over whether Google -- which enjoys growth rates three-to-four times faster than other major Internet companies -- is vulnerable to slowing industry growth trends or is itself a disruptive force taking share from rivals.
On Tuesday, Yahoo posted second-quarter profit in line with expectations but postponed an upgrade to an advertising system designed to compete with Google, and its shares suffered its biggest one-day percentage decline ever.
"Margins are a little bit better on at-consensus revenue growth," said Pyykkonen, who added that the margin improvement may be explained by more favorable tax rates.
"What the (revenue number) implies is that maybe they didn't take as much market share as was presumed from Yahoo's numbers the other day," Pyykkonen said.
http://today.reuters.com/business/ne...yID=nN20300321
Apple Posts $472M Profit On Revenues of $4.37B
AppleInsider Staff
Apple on Wednesday announced financial results for its fiscal 2006 third quarter ended July 1, 2006, posting revenue of $4.37 billion and a net quarterly profit of $472 million, or $.54 per diluted share.
These results compare to revenue of $3.52 billion and a net profit of $320 million, or $.37 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 30.3 percent, up from 29.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 39 percent of the quarter's revenue.
Apple shipped 1,327,000 Macintosh computers and 8,111,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 12 percent growth in Macs and 32 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter.
"We're thrilled with the growth of our Mac business, and especially that over 75 percent of the Macs sold during the quarter used Intel processors. This is the smoothest and most successful transition that any of us have ever experienced," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "In addition, iPod continued to earn a US market share of over 75 percent and we are extremely excited about future iPod products in our pipeline."
"We're very pleased to report the second highest quarterly sales and earnings in Apple's history, resulting in year-over-year revenue growth of 24 percent and earnings growth of 48 percent," said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO. "Looking ahead to the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006, we expect revenue of about $4.5 to $4.6 billion. We expect GAAP earnings per diluted share of about $.46 to $.48, including an estimated $.03 per share expense impact from non- cash stock-based compensation, translating to non-GAAP EPS of about $.49 to $.51."
As previously announced, an internal investigation discovered irregularities related to the issuance of certain stock option grants made between 1997 and 2001. A special committee of Apple's outside directors has hired independent counsel to perform an investigation and the Company has informed the SEC. At this time, based upon the irregularities identified to date, management does not anticipate any material adjustment to the financial results included in this earnings release. However, if additional irregularities are identified by the independent investigation, a material adjustment to the financial information could be required.
Apple will provide live streaming of its Q3 2006 financial results conference call utilizing QuickTime, Apple's standards-based technology for live and on-demand audio and video streaming. The live webcast will begin at 2:00 p.m. PDT on Wednesday. AppleInsider will provide coverage.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1894
Crave Talk: Robberies Rise, Escape With Your iPod
Just a week ago, Gamespot journalist Guy Cocker, who works in the same building as Crave, was mugged ten minutes away from the CNET offices here in central London. His assailants held what felt like a semi-automatic weapon to the back of Cocker's head and told him, "we're taking all your stuff". They then took his Motorola L6 Slvr (iTunes compatible).
Cocker told us, "I chased them -- two of them threw me against a wall and took everything. It's lucky I didn't have my usual stash of gadgets on me -- my iPod, my Archos AV500 or my laptop. Mugging in London is out of control. I had my Motorola L6 grabbed right out of my hand".
The papers this morning would seem to agree with Cocker. "Rise in crime blamed on iPods", yells the front page of London's Metro. "Muggers targeting iPod users," says ITV. This is the reaction to the government's revelation that robberies across the UK have risen 8 per cent in the last year, from 90,747 to 98,204. The Home Secretary, John Reid, attributes this to the irresistible lure of "young people carrying expensive goods, such as mobile phones and MP3 players". A separate British Crime Survey, however, suggests robbery has risen by 22 per cent, to 311,000.
What can you do to foil the 8.2 per cent rise in people out to steal your iPod? The slow fix is calling for social regeneration to eliminate the state of poverty that motivates people to steal. But, if that all sounds a bit communist to you, then here are some suggestions that require very little outlay but could save your iPod from theft.
The paperback method
Cut an iPod-shaped hole in an old paperback book and insert the iPod into the cavity. This method has worked for centuries as a way of hiding valuable items without drawing attention to them. Put the iPod inside the paperback while you're walking through volatile areas and then remove it to listen to when you're back in safe territory. You could also cut a hole for the headphone lead, and run the buds out to your ears. Unfortunately, listening to a paperback novel will probably draw more attention to you than the iPod alone ever would. Anti-mugger rating: 8/10
The Coke can method
Get a Coke can, drink the contents, rinse out the can. Carefully cut the lid section off the can. Superglue a small magnet to the inside of the upper lip of the can so that it's flush with the open top of the can. Place the iPod inside and put the lid on the can. If you've cut the can correctly, the magnet should hold the lid tightly shut. Unless your mugger is exceptionally thirsty, they're unlikely to steal your Coke. Anti-mugger rating: 9/10
The gaffer tape method
This involves gaffer taping your iPod to your body. If you've ever watched a movie where someone is "fitted for a wire" by the FBI or similar, then you'll know what we're getting at here. This is a two stage deterrent. Firstly, your mugger will have to commit himself to partially undressing you if they want your iPod. Most muggers will find this distasteful.
The second deterrent takes advantage of the fact that most muggers want to get away quickly. When confronted by an iPod that has been taped to your chest by 15 loops of tightly wound gaffer tape he is likely to abandon you for easier pickings. Anti-mugger rating: 7/10
The Christopher Walken method
Pulp Fiction fans will remember Christopher Walken's speech to the child of a man killed in Vietnam. His father had asked Walken's character to look after his watch when the two were captured and held in a Vietnamese prison camp. Wanting to keep the watch safe from the guards, "he hid it in the one place he knew he could hide somethin'". Anti-mugger rating: 10/10
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic...9282165,00.htm
Roll Up Your Sleeves and Indulge in a Miami Vice
Guy Trebay
SOME pop culture phenomena have the life span of a mayfly. Others have the staying power of a plutonium rod. The phenomenally popular “Miami Vice” flickered across screens for barely five seasons — 1984 to 1989 — on NBC, yet the effects of its influence on television, movies, music and most lastingly, of course, fashion, were so potent and unforeseeable that one can pick up their radioactive signals 17 years after the series shut down.
The cop show lives on in reruns, on DVD and now in a new movie directed by the show’s executive producer, Michael Mann, which opens nationwide at the end of this month. While violent and stylized and packed with the gritty and hyper-real effects now obtainable through the miracle of computerization, “Miami Vice,” the movie, is set in the unfashionable present and thus unlikely to jump-start any trends.
True, each of its stars does his bit to add spin to the visual images originally conjured by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in the roles of James (Sonny) Crockett and Ricardo (Rico) Tubbs. But aside from a porn-star mustache that Colin Farrell, the new Crockett, wears, and the Malcolm X meets R. Kelly goatee Jamie Foxx affects in the movie, there is nothing stylistically to compare with the crazy subtropical brio of images from the 80’s TV show. Its Necco Wafer palette and ironic macho were ideal for an unsubtle era of big hair, big government and big bad gangsters hauling kilos for the Medellín cartel in cigarette boats backlighted by a Harvey Wallbanger sky.
“The way Michael Mann did the costumes has nothing to do with real cops,” said Jim Moore, the creative director of GQ magazine. “But it influenced everything we did at the time.”
The extent to which the show played a part in the sartorial recasting of the American man is difficult to overestimate. Before “Miami Vice,” which was conceived as a cop show for the MTV generation, adult males were not often in the habit of wearing T-shirts under sports coats or shoes minus socks. Most guys without ties in the 1980’s would have been considered slobs or candidates for the unemployment line. Pastel-colored trousers were reserved for caddies, pastel-colored vehicles for pimps. Suits in the late Reagan era were still substantially lined and padded and as rigidly shaped as Barcaloungers, although with sleeves. Loose, crumpled garments were considered work wear for convicts or gigolos. Hardly anybody without a begging cup wore a straw hat.
Although it’s hard now to remember the radical statement these gestures once constituted, before “Miami Vice” few men except bank tellers rolled up their jacket sleeves, and about the only folks who flipped up their blazer collars were the singer George Michael or patrons in some Fort Lauderdale gentlemen-only bar. “It’s the first point in fashion history where you can really show a TV having that influence on fashion,” said Mr. Moore, adding that a two-day growth of beard before “Miami Vice” was a sure sign of a impending bumhood. “ ‘Miami Vice’ made stubble cool,” he said. It has stayed cool far too long, and this is something Mr. Mann should be required to answer for.
When he orchestrated the look of the original show, Mr. Mann was venturing into stylistic territory already staked out by Italian designers, people like Gianni Versace, Gianfranco Ferré or Giorgio Armani, the man generally credited with introducing the world to the unconstructed suit — that is, without padding, a lining or internal stiffening. This might be as good a time as any to amend the old canard about Mr. Armani being the inventor of the floppy suit. It was long a staple of Neapolitan haberdashery, developed by tailors sent to London by wealthy patrons to apprentice on Savile Row. Being superior craftsmen, the tailors absorbed everything there was to know about British cuts and suit construction. Being Neapolitans, they blithely tossed out the window most of the knowledge they had acquired. It is generally too hot in Naples to dress like Bertie Wooster. But it is not too hot in Milan, where Mr. Armani adapted the look before wholesaling it to the world.
“Miami Vice” may also have marked the earliest mainstream appearance of that indestructible cultural chimera, the metrosexual. “As tough as Sonny Crockett was meant to be,” the dude on a boat with a pet alligator named Elvis, “he still had the meticulously groomed scruff on his face and the pastel, linen-y sports jackets,” said Dan Peres, the editor of Details. “That all was certainly a part of the cultural moment that allowed men to embrace their vanity a little more openly.”
It was their big weapons, of course, that gave the “Miami Vice” guys confidence enough to wear girly clothes and to moisturize. From the start the show unabashedly showcased the latest and scariest in armory, something it has in common with the new film, which rarely shows anyone unholstering a pistol when there’s a submachine gun around.
From the pilot episode, in which Crockett carried a sleek automatic, it was clear that the show sought to telegraph macho credibility and insider cool by swiping a tactic rappers were using successfully in their lyrical boasting, outgunning both everyday criminals and cops on the beat. So what if weapons experts considered the Bren Ten stainless steel pistol that was used for several early seasons to have been a dud, prone to malfunction and with a magazine that cost $100?
“The gun was a nice design, but you couldn’t find or afford the damn magazine,” said Garry James, a senior editor at Guns & Ammo. The Bren Ten was abandoned and replaced by a variety of other pistols, including one uncannily like a gold-plated model later found and looted from Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad, and then seized by the British Customs and Excise Service early in 2003.
If the graphic and preening look of “Miami Vice” style made excellent joke fodder, visually easy to parody (as the cast of “Friends” did, in hilarious flashback), it also provided an enduring stylistic touchstone for consumers, who apparently never lost affection for Crockett and Tubbs.
Gamers still play “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” with its undercover officers looking like wonky virtual versions of Johnson and Thomas. Donatella Versace still designs men’s wear, as she did for the spring 2007 season shown recently in Milan, that modifies deftly, but only slightly, the defining elements of Pan-American style, circa Pablo Escobar and Manuel Noriega.
“Miami and ‘Miami Vice’ represented a magical time,” in the 1980’s, Ms. Versace said in an e-mail message, understatedly characterizing the era as colorful and “even excessive.” With her latest collection, Ms. Versace explained, “I returned to my roots and to a Miami that was very important to me in the late 80’s and early 90’s.”
Mr. Armani, too, plays games with the clichés of Latin macho; at his Emporio Armani presentation in June the designer sent models out wearing glue-on lip hair that looked a lot like the mustache Mr. Farrell has in the film.
With few exceptions, most purveyors of high-end design left “Miami Vice” behind a long time ago. Yet the effects of the show never really disappeared from the marketplace. “Our customer is a working guy who always wanted to look fashionable and set himself apart from the crowd,” said Neil Mulhall, the president of International Male, the mass market catalog clothier known for mesh pouch thongs and ruffled Byronic poets’ shirts. In its spring 2006 catalog, International Male offers a selection of suits in pink pastel linen and shirts of semi-sheer embroidered voile that could easily have been swiped from the set of “Miami Vice,” the television show or the film. “It’s a little bit forward and a little bit retro,” said Mr. Mulhall, neatly summing up the whole enterprise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/fa...IAMI.html?8dpc
Until next week,
-
js.
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