[JackSpratts]

Splashdot effect

Falling Drops Land Without Bursting
Jack

Exploring what happens when liquids impact solid surfaces, Lei Xu and other researchers from the University of Chicago removed air from an environment and wound up removing the splash effect as well.

In this super slo-mo movie a drop of alcohol hits a sheet of glass, both in air and in a vacuum (760 vs.140 torr).

In air, the drop ruptures on impact, forming a wildly chaotic crown. In the airless environment the surface of the liquid remains strangely cohesive, the drop never breaking but flattening smoothly into a wider and wider circle like some mysterious alien substance.

Beyond the wow factor, practical applications may include improved printer technologies.





Blows or sucks?

Intel's Hard-to-Define Viiv Doesn't Live Up to the Hype
Rob Pegoraro

In January, Intel told the world that digital media would never be the same again.

During a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, chief executive Paul S. Otellini unveiled Viiv -- a combination of hardware and software that would combine functions of the TV, the DVD player, the VCR and the videogame console. Viiv (pronounced like "five") would make possible such novel feats as watching new movie releases online, catching South Africa's evening news in London and beaming video from one TV to another within your house.

In April, Viiv doesn't look much like that vision. On a typical Viiv box, Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion m7360y, it amounts to a smattering of free Web video clips and discounts on online music, movie and game rentals -- plus a nifty rainbow-hued Viiv sticker on the front of the computer.

Intel says that Viiv ( http://www.intel.com/viiv ) is still developing, that an update in the second half of this year will bring more features, and that the best Viiv devices are yet to come. But considering all the hype Intel ginned up around Viiv -- and the news coverage devoted to it -- this ranks as a phenomenally ho-hum product.

It's hard even to define Viiv. This brand amounts to a recipe Intel has prepared for computer manufacturers to follow on their own, which means that Intel's idea of Viiv may not coincide with what appears in stores.

Viiv's ingredients start with a dual-core Intel processor, which allows the computer to handle demanding video playback while also taking care of other chores, such as burning a CD or running a spyware scan. Then comes one of a handful of Intel digital-media chipsets equipped to play high-definition video and at least six channels of surround sound, plus Intel's Ethernet wired-networking hardware.

On the software end of things, Intel requires Microsoft's Media Center 2005 edition of Windows XP and its own "Quick Resume" feature, advertised as offering "instant on/off" capability, and Matrix Storage Technology backup software.

Problem is, the same basic hardware already exists on many non-Viiv desktops. Dual-core processors are standard fare on high-end computers, and those intended for media-center use have offered powerful graphics cards and surround sound for years. (HP's machine doesn't even use Intel's graphics chipset; as it turns out, Viiv manufacturers can make substitutions like that if they still meet overall performance requirements.)

Other Viiv ingredients are even less remarkable. The idea of mandating Intel or any other company's Ethernet hardware is a joke: Ethernet ports are commodity parts. Quick Resume doesn't actually put a Viiv computer in any sleep mode; it just turns off the display and speakers while barely affecting the rest of the machine. (You can provide a decent approximation of it by pressing the power button on your monitor.)

And the Matrix backup software can only be used if your computer has a second hard drive, internal or external, as big as or larger than its primary drive.

HP, in turn, has taken Intel's recipe and stuffed it into a numbingly unoriginal package that buries any inherent Viiv-aciousness. The m7360y (starting at $800) employs the same tower-case design as HP's other Media Center desktops, which in turn differ from most other Media Center desktops only by including WiFi wireless networking, LightScribe label-printing CD/DVD burners and bays for HP's removable Personal Media Drives.

So if you can't tell a Viiv machine by its appearance or its operation, what's left? Intel has signed up content providers to offer online exclusives to Viiv owners.

But once you're online with a Viiv computer, it's far easier to find ads touting this wealth of Viiv bonuses than any of these extras. That's because they can only be viewed through the Media Center interface's "Online Spotlight" screen-- traditionally a dumping ground for random marketing links.

All of the Viiv-exclusive content that I found on this HP required lengthy program installations that temporarily punted me out of the remote control-driven Media Center interface. (Apparently the concept of preloading this software eluded the folks at Intel and HP.)

The rewards for this work were surpassingly lame. For example, ESPN.com's lure of high-definition video turned out Friday morning to consist of three short clips -- one of which kept looping back to the start after a minute or so -- that filled only a fraction of the screen, as well as nine low-resolution clips taken from the previous night's SportsCenter. Yawn.

The worst experience of all came when I tried to view Intel's own showcase of Viiv content. At first, clicking this button yielded a "Windows Media Center Edition required" error. After rebooting the computer to try again, I was presented with a lengthy license agreement and an ActiveX installation dialog. The subsequent download seemed to stall out when the HP-bundled Norton Internet Security firewall warned that "EntriqMediaServer" was a high-risk program that it should always block.

Naturally, that was a Viiv component. After allowing it to proceed, I could see what I'd been waiting for: pointers to Viiv content that I'd already seen and discounts and coupons (such as $20 of free rentals at the Movielink site) that combined would not add up to the premium you'd likely pay for a Viiv machine.

Intel says Viiv will mean much more in the future. For example, the coming movie "10 Items or Less" will be sold as a digital download to Viiv owners within weeks of its debut in theaters. And in the second half of this year, Intel says Viiv computers will be joined by Viiv set-top boxes and networking devices, allowing people to watch Web video on their TVs. And we may also see smaller Viiv computers that depart from standard-issue PC design.

But in the meantime, Intel is only embarrassing itself with its half-witted hucksterism for Viiv.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...12.html?sub=AR





One Day Soon, Straphangers May Turn Pages With a Button
Doreen Carvajal

In the Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller "Minority Report," a subway passenger scans an issue of USA Today that is a plastic video screen, thin, foldable and wireless, with constantly changing text.

The scene is no longer science fiction. This month, De Tijd, a Belgian financial newspaper, started testing versions of electronic paper, a device with low-power digital screens embedded with digital ink — millions of microscopic capsules the width of a human hair made with organic material that display light or dark images in response to electrical charges.

This is only one test of new e-paper devices competing to become the iPod of the newspaper business. Other e-paper trials are being undertaken by the paper Les Echos, which is based here, by the newspaper trade group IFRA in Germany and, in the United States, by The New York Times.

The International Herald Tribune, which is owned by The New York Times Company, is also in discussions to make subscriptions available later this year for the same e-paper devices used by De Tijd, according to Michael Golden, the International Herald Tribune's publisher.

The devices used by De Tijd, called the iLiad E-reader, are made by iRex Technologies, a spinoff of Royal Philips Electronics. Sony will introduce its version of an e-reader with the microcapsule technology later this year. The devices, which will be able to download books, newspapers and podcasts, are expected to cost about $400.

For publishers confronting declining newspaper circulation in most parts of the world, the devices offer the tantalizing promise of reaching more readers while saving on printing and distribution costs. But after some highly publicized e-book machines failed to take off in the late 1990's, those long-held hopes have remained elusive.

The difference this time, developers and supporters say, is that the screens on the new hardware are made to reflect rather than transmit light, making them more like paper. The devices weigh about 13 ounces (light enough to be held in one hand while reading) and can be updated in Wi-Fi hot spots or through Internet connections (although they cannot be used to surf the Web yet). Their touch screens are also capable of doubling as notebooks to jot down information or to download books. Pages are turned with the touch of a button.

De Tijd, with 40,000 readers in Belgium, is essentially fitting its traditional print format to the device's screen, meaning that it is not changing the style of its newspaper. Twenty-five De Tijd readers received free e-paper devices on April 14, the start of a three-month trial that ultimately will reveal the habits of 200 readers, mostly highly educated men selected to match the demographic profile of its print readers.

"We know that our readers like to have their newspaper before they go to work, and we offer them paper newspapers before 7:30 a.m. But that's not enough," said Kris Laenens, De Tijd's manager of the project, who added that it needed to offer service to readers wherever and whenever they wanted it.

At this point, the e-paper cannot display color, offering just 16 shades of gray, and the screens are rigid. Those weaknesses have soured some newspaper publishers, according to e-paper developers like Plastic Logic in Britain, which said that there were more sophisticated devices in preparation that were bendable and weighed little more than a piece of paper. While the devices may display only in grays, they are interesting enough to attract some advertising agencies to participate in the tests.

"How do we deal with the lack of color?" asked Johan Hermans, a managing director of Agency.com in Brussels. "Can you advertise linked to the profile of the user — for example, if they're interested in the automobile sector?"

One advantage is that advertisements could change with the time of day, he said, letting agencies avoid showing beer ads in the morning or coffee ads in the evening. "All these types of things we're trying to examine," Mr. Hermans said.

Les Echos, which is owned by Pearson, the London-based parent company of The Financial Times, is taking a different approach. Instead of shifting the print format directly to a device, the company is customizing information with a look different from its traditional newspaper format, much as it would for its Web site version. The newspaper plans to test Sony's e-readers first, but the intention is to make the newspaper readable on a variety of devices. The plan is to offer the device "to our subscribers if they subscribe to Les Echos for a period of years," said Philippe Jannet, director of electronic publishing for Les Echos.

IFRA, based in Darmstadt, Germany, is pursuing an "eNews initiative" with 21 newspapers from 13 countries, including the Times Company, which will be testing electronic devices as part of the project. Toby Usnik, a spokesman for the company, said that the company joined the consortium of newspapers from Japan, Spain, Germany and France last year, and was pleased with the e-paper devices, which he called "impressive."

In May, the group will meet to plot the first phase of e-paper testing, said Jochen Dieckow, who is in charge of business and news media research for the newspaper trade organization. The group's goal is simply to evaluate the new market for e-newspapers.

"Many publishers take it seriously and we see it as a new media channel," Mr. Dieckow said. "Our impression is that there's a momentum now and many publishers want to be there at the start so they can form the market. One of the major issues is whether this will be a niche product or a mass product."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/bu.../24epaper.html





Trying to Halt A.M.D., Intel Plays to Business Market
Laurie J. Flynn

Less than a week after disappointing investors with a sharp drop in quarterly earnings, Intel plans to announce a fresh assault on the business computing market Monday as part of a plan to stem its loss of market share to Advanced Micro Devices.

The company is planning to introduce a new brand for a line of business products that will include technology intended to make it easier for companies to manage and maintain fleets of personal computers.

Nathan Brookwood, editor of Insight64, an industry newsletter that focuses on the microprocessor industry, said, "They're trying very hard to protect their dominant position and create some differentiation from A.M.D."

The business desktop market, where Intel still has a share of more than 90 percent of the market, is considered one of the last reliable bastions for Intel, which has been slowly losing share to Advanced Micro in the last year.

With the new brand, Intel hopes to repeat the success of Centrino, the name it gave three years ago to a set of components that provide built-in wireless capability for notebook personal computers. The program became a huge success. But the business market is more about a set of customers than a specific technological capability, and analysts are not convinced that business customers will see enough value in the Intel package to switch.

Users so far have shown lackluster interest in Viiv, the name Intel gave to a set of technologies for multimedia computing.

But even if Intel is successful in establishing the new business brand, the landscape of the chip industry has been transformed. Where there was once a single preferred source of chips for personal computers, there are now two competitive suppliers: Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

"Before this, A.M.D. was a wannabe, with inconsistent quality and enhancements," Mr. Brookwood said. "But they've changed the dynamics of the industry."

How much the momentum of the two companies has diverged became clear in recent earnings announcements. Last week, Intel reported a drop in profit and gross profit margin. And it lowered its forecast for the full year, saying it now expected revenue to decline 3 percent from last year's $38.8 billion, rather than improve 6 percent to 9 percent.

Advanced Micro's results, announced a week earlier, painted a different picture. For the first time, its first-quarter gross margin, at 58.4 percent, surpassed Intel's 54.9 percent — reflecting the price-cutting that Intel has undertaken to try to win back sales. And A.M.D. executives put the company's target for gross profit margin at 55 percent to 60 percent for this quarter, compared with Intel's 50 percent, plus or minus a couple of points, excluding share-based compensation effects of approximately 1 percent. (The expected reduction from first-quarter levels is primarily a result of a higher proportion of lower-margin products in the overall mix, along with higher microprocessor unit costs.) Advanced Micro's first quarter represented its 11th consecutive period of significantly better sales growth than Intel.

Investors have taken notice. Advanced Micro's stock, though it has recently given up some gains, has risen 43 percent in the last six months and 117 percent in the last year, closing Friday at $31.73. Intel shares have dropped 18 percent in the last six months, to $19.06.

How much market share Intel lost in the first quarter on either a per-unit or dollar basis will not be known for a week, when market research companies release updated figures.

But it remains much the larger company. During the fourth quarter of 2005, Intel's share declined to about 78 percent of the overall microprocessor business, from 82 percent a year earlier, while Advanced Micro's share rose to 21 percent, from 17 percent, according to Mercury Research.

Both companies are expected to benefit from pent-up demand that will be generated by the release of the Windows Vista operating system at year's end. But even more significant to Intel's effort to regain momentum is a fundamental new chip design that the company says it will begin to roll out in the third quarter.

"The new core microarchitecture is incredibly important," Mr. Brookwood said, "because the old architecture is what got them into this problem. Intel thought clock speed could drive performance for a decade, but they were wrong."

Instead, Intel discovered that gains in processing speed came at the price of greater power consumption and heat, forcing it to rethink its design approach and find other ways to achieve performance.

Advanced Micro was able to address the same goal more quickly, without having to overhaul its basic chip architecture, and as a result managed to leapfrog Intel in performance.

While Intel says it will have its problems under control in the second half of the year, not all analysts are convinced that it will meet its goal of returning to normal seasonal growth.

Mr. Brookwood is among the optimists. "As this year unfolds, Intel will become more competitive," he said. "The company is completing a two-year program digging out of the hole it got itself into."

But Eric Ross of ThinkEquity Partners, said, "I'm not convinced they will see the growth they're expecting in the second half."

For its part, Advanced Micro is trying to take advantage of every opportunity afforded by Intel's missteps as an opportunity to gain more of the market. "Our share gains continue," the chief executive, Hector Ruiz, said in a conference call with analysts after the company's earnings release. "We believe that once again, we took dollar share across server, notebook and desktop product offerings."

Andy D. Bryant, Intel's chief financial officer, said last week that Intel did not lose market share in terms of units during the first quarter, ended April 1, though he acknowledged that it might have lost market share as measured by revenue — again a reflection of Intel's price-cutting.

In the American retail market for personal computers — excluding direct-to-consumer sellers like Dell — Advanced Micro surged slightly past Intel last October, with its processors in 49.8 percent of all desktop and notebook computers sold, compared with 48.5 percent for Intel.

A.M.D. has forged an ever-closer relationship with some of its best customers, notably Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M. Some analysts have speculated that Dell, long a loyal Intel customer, may choose to increase its use of Advanced Micro chips, which are typically less expensive than Intel's.

Dell's share of the worldwide PC market fell slightly in the first quarter of 2006, to 18.1 percent, from 18.6 percent in the period a year earlier, according to the market researcher IDC. Today, the only Dell computers that do not use Intel chips are those marketed under the Alienware label, which Dell acquired last month.

Henri Richard, Advanced Micro's senior vice president for worldwide sales, took issue with those predicting an Intel comeback. "For some reason, analysts think history will repeat itself," he said in an interview. "I would argue that things are different now. We didn't have the breadth and depth of success we have now."

Things will not be the same inside Intel either. Paul S. Otellini, who took over as chief executive last spring, said last week that the company had begun undergoing the most significant analysis of its efficiencies since the 1980's. To help the bottom line, Mr. Bryant told analysts, Intel planned to cut more than $1 billion this year, taking about $400 million from research and development and $600 million out of administration and marketing.

Advanced Micro asserts that one of the few things holding it back is Intel's "monopolistic" business tactics. That, Advanced Micro hopes, will be addressed by a three-judge panel in California that is hearing its case in an antitrust suit it filed against Intel last summer.

Lawyers for the two companies have already met in court to begin establishing a timetable for the case, and are expected to do so again in September. Advanced Micro has asked that the trial begin in the first quarter of 2008, while Intel is asking for a start in September 2008. Litigation over one matter or another has been a constant factor in the two companies' relationship over several years.

If Intel's new chip initiative succeeds, the competitive equation could look different by then. And Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Raymond James & Associates, says investors are jumping too quickly to the conclusion that Intel's troubles cannot be repaired in the next few quarters.

"Things are in place for Intel to roll back A.M.D.'s gains," Mr. Kumar said. "Last year was unique. But it's just one bad year out of many for Intel, and one good year out of many for A.M.D."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/te...gy/24chip.html





B*B*B*Beta

Microsoft to Unveil New Internet Explorer
AP

Microsoft Corp. is releasing a new test version of Internet Explorer, the market-leading Web browser that is facing competition from smaller players.

The new beta, available Tuesday for free download to English-languages customers, includes fixes for problems that were causing Internet Explorer 7 to stop working, said Dean Hachamovitch, general manager in charge of Internet Explorer development.

With the previous test version, Hachamovitch said the most common problems reported involved banking and news sites, in part because of security changes.

Improving security can be tricky since any changes can cause legitimate Web sites to stop working, frustrating users.

Microsoft also added more guidance to help people using IE's new browser tab functions, which let a user view more than one Web site from within one window, using multiple "tabs."

This is Microsoft's third beta of Internet Explorer 7 made available to the general public, and Hachamovitch said there are plans for one more. The new version comes amid growing competition from browsers such as Firefox, which has long offered functions such as tabbed browsing. Some also consider other browsers to be more secure, since IE, with its market dominance, is a popular target for attacks.

The final version of Internet Explorer 7 is expected to be released in the second half of this year, around the time a version of Microsoft's new Windows operating system is expected to be available for business users.

Microsoft is releasing the new Windows, called Vista, to consumers in early 2007.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine..._Internet.html





Nokia Puts Your Digital Life in Your Hand
Jack Ewing

The handset maker introduces phones designed to do everything your video camera, computer, and iPod do. And they're always nearby

Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia's director of design strategy, sometimes begins the day by diving into a Finnish lake still partly covered in ice. He calls that a disruptive experience, and it's a metaphor for what Nokia (NOK ) is trying to do in the consumer electronics business. On Apr. 25, Nokia introduced new versions of its N series handsets, which mark the company's latest encroachment onto turf now occupied by outfits such as Sony (SNE ), Canon (CAJ ), and Apple (AAPL ).

If you are old fashioned enough to call these devices "phones," Nokia people will politely correct you. They are multimedia computers, which offer features and picture quality to rival digital cameras or camcorders, and music quality to challenge an iPod. And because they can connect to the Internet you can check e-mail, download songs, or even update your blog while on the go. (Thought the world already had enough blogs? Think again.)

The high-end N93 will hit stores in July and retail for $660. (Wireless service providers may offer deals to get that price down.) An upgrade of the existing N90, it moves Nokia further into camcorder territory. The new version can record 90 minutes of video and adds features such as the ability to connect directly to a TV for full-screen viewing.

SPECIAL FOCUS. Purchasers will also get a free copy of Adobe (ADBE ) Premier Elements 2.0 video editing software. Along with Carl Zeiss optics, image stabilization, and DVD-quality pictures, the software could encourage many casual users, at least, to use the N93 as their primary video camera. "It's a disruption of existing industries," says Anssi Vanjoki, a member of Nokia's executive board who is responsible for multimedia products.

Makers of digital cameras and MP3 players should also take note. All three new devices introduced at a Berlin press conference play music, take pictures, and browse the Internet. But Nokia gives each one a specialty, which it calls a "lead experience." The new $480 N73, with Zeiss optics and 3.2-megapixel resolution, is focused on amateur photographers, while the sleek-looking $380 N72 is aimed at the music and fashion crowd, particularly in Asia.

Should anyone miss the point, Nokia's press extravaganza in a spiffed-up Berlin warehouse ended with a video in which the camera slowly panned across a tableau of dusty, discarded electronic equipment -- including digital cameras and a cobweb-covered iPod. The message: Nokia plans to make these products obsolete.

EASE OF OWNERSHIP. But will people really forsake their specialized cameras and music players for a device that, deep down, is still a telephone? Maybe. Nokia devices have a couple of important advantages. One is their omnipresence. People always have their phones with them. "When you need your video camera, it's never with you. It's in a box under your bed," says Vanjoki. Camcorders have been around for years, but amateur news video has exploded in the few years since video-recording phones hit the market.

Most important may be the devices' connectivity, including a browser that can handle normal Web sites. In Berlin, Nokia also announced a partnership with Yahoo's (YHOO ) Flickr photo-sharing site. Built-in software will make it easy for owners of N series devices to upload photos to Flickr, where they will be accessible to friends and family. The new devices are also designed to connect to online music sites, PCs, and printers via wireless connections. Nokia is trying to ride along with the Internet's evolution into a space where people conduct their lives, letting them do so on the go.

Another element that justifies calling the N series phones "computers," is that users can add their own software programs. Given Nokia's marketing power, outside software developers have plenty of incentive to develop specialized applications, including custom spreadsheets that people in emerging countries are already using to keep track of street-market transactions.

GLOBAL CONVERGENCE. Design Director Ahtisaari has even heard of people in tropical climates modifying their phones so that they emit an insect-repelling tone. "People using multimedia will continue to surprise us," says Ahtisaari.

Nokia has shipped 5 million N series phones since their introduction last year, a fraction of the 100 million camera-equipped phones the company sold last year. But it predicts the market for "converged devices" will reach 250 million in 2008.

Naturally, Nokia is already thinking about the next features to add, such as global positioning and search capability, so people can find restaurants or other services close to wherever they happen to be. Small mobile tablets, which connect via the user's standard mobile handset, could challenge laptop makers.

WATCH YOUR BACK. The new devices also threaten telcos. Devices that can connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi networks can bypass the traditional voice infrastructure altogether. Vanjoki sees opportunities for telcos that offer the right content, such as video programs that can be viewed on mobile devices. And he points out, people who use their phones as computers are less likely to switch operators since they will also have to transfer all their stored personal data.

That's one positive thing for companies such as Vodafone (VDO ), Deutsche Telekom (DTE ), and France Telecom (FTE ). But given Nokia's global marketing might, the telcos as well as makers of consumer electronics should prepare themselves for some tough going ahead.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbi...425_598756.htm





Video Handsets Mostly Just Used as Phones
Alex Mindlin

Cellphone companies, especially Sprint and Verizon Wireless, have been aggressively promoting mobile video services, which cost an average of $10.70 a month for access to sports, news and weather clips. More than a quarter of cellphones now in use can play such videos. But only 1 percent of wireless subscribers are using their phones to watch them, according to a recent survey by the NPD Group, a market research firm.

Worse for the industry, most of those who do watch video on their cellphones have been with their current service provider for at least three years, meaning that they were not drawn by the availability — or the marketing — of mobile video. Wireless providers have been banking on video's ability to draw new customers.

"Many, many people just use their phones as a device to make and receive calls," said Drew Hull, research director for mobile content at the NPD Group. Until the price of video service drops, he said, "they still have no interest in paying extra for that service."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/te...y/24drill.html





AT&T Earnings Jump 63 Pct. On SBC Merger
Peter Svensson

APR. 25 8:11 A.M. ET AT&T Inc. said Tuesday its earnings rose 63.3 percent in the first quarter, the first period it reported combined results after SBC Communications Inc.'s acquisition of AT&T Corp., which closed late last year.

Net income was $1.445 billion, or 37 cents a share, for the January-March period, up from SBC's earnings of $885 million, or 27 cents a share, in the same period last year.

Excluding the costs of SBC's acquisition of AT&T Corp. and Cingular Wireless LLC's acquisition of AT&T Wireless, earnings were 52 cents a share, beating the average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Financial by 3 cents.

Revenue came to $15.8 billion, up 55 percent from $10.2 billion the previous year.

As expected, results were strong at Cingular, which reported its first-quarter earnings last week along with Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., which owns 40 percent of the venture. San Antonio-based AT&T Inc. owns the rest.

Cingular, already the country's largest cell-phone carrier, ended the quarter with 55.8 million subscribers, up 5.5 million from a year ago, and contributed $287 million to AT&T's income. Its revenue of $9 billion was not counted in AT&T's revenue.

Revenue in the traditional wired phone business was $14.7 billion, down 5.5 percent from SBC's and AT&T's combined results a year ago. The decline was due mainly to the continued free fall of the former AT&T Corp.'s consumer long-distance business. Even before the merger, AT&T stopped marketing the service due to dwindling margins and competition from regional phone companies like SBC.

The number of phone lines served also declined, to 49 million phone from 52 million, due to competition from is, cable and Internet calling. However, this was offset by added revenue from data services. AT&T added 511,000 broadband digital subscriber lines, for a total of 7.4 million.

AT&T chief executive Ed Whitacre said the integration of AT&T Corp. and SBC was going according to plan. The front-line sales force has been combined, and plans for integrating the networks are in place. Whitacre still expects the merger to save $600 million to $800 million this year.

Even as the former SBC is digesting its acquisition of AT&T Corp., it has announced another mega-merger. In March, AT&T announced a deal to buy BellSouth for $67 billion. The deal was initially expected to close by March 2007, but the companies said last week that they now expect the deal to close by the end of this year. A major reason for the deal is that it would give AT&T full control of growth engine Cingular.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/finan...h_down&chan=tc





AT&T to Slow Down Fiber Rollout?
Eric Bangeman

Project Lightspeed may be slowed down considerably, according to one industry analyst. His reasoning? It's not going to be fast enough.

AT&T's fiber network strategy differs substantially from rival Verizon's in that it is only laying fiber to the node. The primary implication is that bandwidth to the end user will be limited by the existing copper wire infrastructure that runs to individual homes. It also means that AT&T fiber customers will have their broadband speeds capped at 6Mbps, as AT&T will be reserving the rest of the 25Mbps node-to-home link for its IPTV programming.

In contrast, Verizon's Fios initiative is a fiber to the premises (FTTP) solution, which means that the beautiful optical stuff goes right to your doorstep. That enables Verizon to offer speeds of up to 30Mbps down/5Mbps up (albeit starting at US$179 per month) to its optical fiber customers. Even with those high speeds, Verizon will be using only about 20 percent of its network capacity for broadband. The rest of the roughly 4.2Gbps will be reserved for TV.

AT&T has countered, saying that the high speeds of Fios are "irrelevant" because of problems elsewhere on the backbone. As Nate pointed out in his coverage, that can definitely be the case for general web browsing, the speed of which is often dependent on factors other than the width of your bandwidth pipe. Of course, there are many other applications where the speed of your broadband connection is the limiting factor.

Industry analyst Anton Wahlman believes AT&T will in the short term begin to focus more on its Homezone package. Homezone is a partnership with DISH Networks parent EchoStar that combines AT&T phone and DSL service with DISH networks satellite programming. In the interim, AT&T may scale back Project Lightspeed deployment, running fiber to the premises in some locations (e.g., new developments) and bypassing others altogether.

"We believe the fundamental reason is that AT&T is likely realizing that 25 megabits isn't going to do the trick, but rather that it needs to plan for 100 megabits or more to the home today, with a path to Gigabit Ethernet to every home in the next five to 10 years at the most."

Since AT&T is casting its lot with IPTV, which is a switched system that only transmits a couple of channels at a time to the customer, it doesn't need the kind of bandwidth Verizon requires. Running fiber to the node instead of the home is also significantly cheaper. But if customers aren't going to bite, it makes sense to scale back on the next-gen network deployment until FTTP becomes cheaper. That is especially true if AT&T finds itself hard pressed to explain to current cable customers why its brand-new 6Mbps DSL + IPTV offering is better than the faster package they already have.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060425-6669.html





Raising the Bar at Samsung
Martin Fackler

Thirty-seven years ago, 36 employees began assembling electric fans in a small workshop in this city, just south of Seoul.

That company was Samsung Electronics, and it is now the world's largest and most profitable consumer electronics company. Its 123,000 employees make a range of products as diverse as cellphones and flat-panel televisions, washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Last year, it unseated Sony as the world's most valuable consumer electronics brand, according to a survey by the Interbrand Consulting Group.

So why is Kim Byung Cheol, a senior executive at Samsung, so anxious about his company's future? Because, Mr. Kim and others fret, Samsung still has not mastered one crucial factor: originality.

With deep pockets, Samsung has won over consumers with clever designs and multifunction gadgets, like camcorders that download songs and refrigerators that also surf the Internet. It has swept up awards for cellphone designs that look like dashboards, tuxedos or pebbles in a stream. Last year, the company had $59.2 billion in sales and reported profits of $7.9 billion, 13 times as much as the 2005 earnings forecast by its rival Sony.

But Samsung executives worry that the company, while excellent at refining other people's inventions, is relying on an outdated strategy that worked fine only as long as the company was climbing to the top. Now that it is the leader, they say, Samsung has to set itself apart by creating novel products of its own, especially if it wants to stay ahead of fast-rising rivals from China and Korea and fight off the comeback efforts of its Japanese competitors.

This means coming up not just with minor hits, but with breakthrough inventions like the Apple iPod or the Sony Walkman. Otherwise, Samsung risks the same fate as many of the once-formidable Japanese electronics giants it overtook on its way to the top.

"We are at a pivotal moment for the company," said Mr. Kim, a vice president in charge of long-term research and development. "If we don't become an innovator, we could end up like one of those Japanese companies, mired in difficulties."

Mr. Kim is helping lead Samsung's push to reach this goal, which the company is pursuing with the same ferocity and determination that it has used to conquer global markets. The company plans to invest $40 billion in research and development during the next five years, double what it spent in the preceding five years. It has more than doubled its number of researchers, to 32,000, from 13,900 six years ago.

Nowhere is Samsung's effort to reinvent itself more apparent than here in Suwon, where the company has built what it calls the largest research and development center in Asia. In recent years, it has erected towering glass offices and sprawling laboratories with space for 15,000 engineers. The center stands on the site of the company's original 1969 electric fan factory.

Suwon's newest facility is the Digital Research Center, completed in September, with the floor space of 30 football fields and audiovisual labs big enough for 9,000 researchers, though it has so far hired only 5,200. Of those, 150 are from foreign countries, including China, India and the United States.

Mr. Kim said the new labs reflected Samsung's shift from simply developing products toward basic research to find the next big idea.

"If you look at Samsung's R.& D. 10 years ago, we had a lot more D. than R.," Mr. Kim said from his office here. "Today, R. is getting much more attention."

If any company can transform itself, analysts say, Samsung can.

With a market value exceeding $96 billion, Samsung has done well, they say, because it is the rare corporate giant that remains nimble on its feet. It excels at identifying new technologies and business opportunities early, and then seizing control of the market with overwhelming production volume.

It did this perhaps most successfully with a new form of rear-projection TV, which replaced the first generation of bulky, dimly lighted sets that were the original big-screen televisions. The company saw its chance to break into the American market when Texas Instruments approached it at a 2001 trade show in Tokyo, Samsung executives said.

Texas Instruments gave Samsung information about a computer chip it had developed that used millions of microscopic mirrors embedded in a rotating disk to project bright full-color images onto screens. The American company had already shopped the chip to the Japanese makers Hitachi, Matsushita and Mitsubishi Electric, who were each developing a single TV model, the executives said.

Samsung jumped on the new technology, producing its first prototype within 12 months, in January 2002. Over the next months, Samsung introduced three models using the technology, called digital light processing, with prices for TV's ranging from $3,500 to $5,000, less than half the Japanese makers' prices at the time. By December 2003, Samsung had produced a million of the TV's, becoming the market leader.

"This new technology was the chance we needed," said David Steel, a vice president in Samsung's digital media division in Suwon. "Then we ruthlessly executed by moving faster than the competition, not only to catch up but to pass."

Mr. Steel says one secret to Samsung's speed is that it makes almost every major electronics component itself, from computer chips to plasma screens. Often, building new products means simply assembling these components in new combinations. He said this also permitted Samsung to go in new directions, building multifunctionality into household electronics and other consumer goods.

Samsung offers a camcorder that can also serve as an iPod-like music player, voice recorder, portable TV set and computer flash drive. One refrigerator model has a built-in tablet computer that not only controls temperature but also permits users to surf the Internet, watch television and send e-mail messages. One cellphone model works like a full-fledged digital camera and also plays music.

"We think big trends like convergence, and the move to wireless and networking, will play to our strengths," Mr. Steel said. Mr. Steel, a British citizen with a doctorate in physics, exemplifies a recent push by Samsung to attract foreign talent. Hired in 1999, he was the first non-Korean to reach top management.

Samsung's rivals see it as a formidable competitor but not yet a trailblazer. But that could change soon, they say.

"Our TVs are better," Nobuyuki Oneda, Sony's chief financial officer, said in an interview earlier this year. "But Samsung's cash flow is amazing. It is hard to invest in and develop products" at the same pace as Samsung. Another new Samsung strength, analysts say, is design. The company has design centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo, Shanghai and Milan. Recent designs for flat-panel TV's are based on trends from furniture shows in Italy.

At headquarters in Seoul, designers are told to find inspiration outside the office, and are given Wednesday afternoons off to do so, said Christian Collins, a senior manager in Samsung's cellphone division. One popular cellphone was modeled after the dashboard of a German sports car, said Mr. Collins, an American hired away from Verizon Wireless to work for Samsung.

Executives also note that Samsung has reinvented itself before.

When the company was founded as part of the Samsung industrial group, it was so little known that the only market where it could sell its first black-and-white TV sets was Panama. By the early 1990's, Samsung had become a successful producer of cheap commodity electronics, many of them sold under different brand names.

Then Lee Kun Hee, Samsung group chairman, started a sweeping makeover, pushing the company to focus on quality instead of quantity. "Change everything but your family," Mr. Lee told his work force.

Samsung pushed its way up the technological ladder, elbowing aside previous incumbents, most of them Japanese. In 1992, it became the world's largest producer of memory chips. In 1995, it made its first liquid-crystal display screen, a technology it eventually mastered to the point that the former front-runner, Sony, joined it in a joint venture to build L.C.D. screens.

Samsung has also tried hard to improve its international image. It has spent more than $6 billion since 1998 on marketing, helping sponsor the last five Olympics and erecting a large video sign in Times Square in 2002.

But for all its accomplishments, Samsung has failed to win the sort of brand recognition enjoyed by companies like Apple and Sony. Stepping up to the next level of corporate advancement, analysts say, requires inventing a product that reshapes an entire industry and serves as an icon for a generation.

Apple did it with the iPod, as Sony did a generation earlier with the Walkman, a 1979 product that still gives the company a technological cachet of cool that Samsung lacks.

"Samsung is a great company, but its products are still basically identical to everyone else's," said J. J. Park, an electronics analyst in the Seoul office of J. P. Morgan Securities. "Samsung is still waiting for its Walkman."

While acknowledging that it has not had such a hit product yet, Samsung says its push to turn itself into a research powerhouse is already showing results. Last year, Samsung registered 1,641 patents in the United States, ranking fifth among companies, behind Matsushita of Japan but ahead of Intel.

Executives say it is only a matter of time before Samsung comes up with a hit that will catapult it into the pantheon of global innovators.

"Those sort of innovative products come once in a generation," said Mr. Collins, of Samsung's cellphone division. "We've had lots of semi-iconic products, and we will have an iconic product soon enough."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/te...25samsung.html





Chinese $150 Linux Mini-PC Races OLPC to Market

A Chinese company is touting an inexpensive Linux-based computer as a way to close the "digital divide." YellowSheepRiver's $150 "Municator" appears to be available now, with a three-month leadtime, suggesting it could reach market well ahead of MIT's $100 "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) device.

The OLPC project was announced last fall, with laptop manufacturer Quanta Computer of Taiwan stepping forward to offer its manufacturing services shortly afterward. However, no specific delivery commitments appear to have been reached.

Additionally, the performance potential of the OLPC's $100 laptop design has drawn taunts from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, as well as Intel Chairman Craig Barret, who called the design a "$100 gadget." If the Municator lives up to YellowSheepRiver's promise of Pentium III-like performance, the Chinese device could enjoy a performance edge, in addition to its apparent time-to-market lead.

Chinese chips inside

YellowSheepRiver says it saved cost in its Municator YSR-639 design by sourcing the CPU, RAM, and other key chips from Chinese companies. China is now the world's third-largest producer of new semiconductor designs, according to research firm iSuppli.

According to YellowSheepRiver, the Municator is based on a 64-bit Godson-2 CPU from BLX Semiconductor. The Godson-2 chip, codenamed "Dragon," uses an instruction set based on the MIPS architecture; however, BLX is not a MIPS licensee. The Microprocessor Report suggested last summer that BLX could face legal challenges from MIPS if its chips reach the U.S., although some other sources suggest that the Godson chips do not include patented portions of the MIPS ISA (instruction set architecture), such as unaligned 32-bit load/store support.

The Municator's Godson-2 processor offers performance similar to a Pentium III, YellowRiver claims; however, a more useful comparison might be to MIPS's four-way superscalar R10000 processor, which shipped in 1995, and powered Silicon Graphics Unix workstations such as the O2, pictured at right. The Godson-2 also has a four-way superscalar design.

The Godson-2 chips in YellowSheepRiver's YSR-639 are clocked at 400MHz or 600MHz. They connect to a Marvel MV64420-BDM1C133 northbridge via a 133MHz FSB (front-side bus). The Marvel northbridge supports DDR RAM at 166MHz, via an SODIMM slot, and offers a 32-bit, 33MHz PCI bus. A VIA VT82C686B southbridge with 133/100/66MHz ATA bus completes the chipset.

YellowSheepRiver says it hopes one day to use an "SoC" (system-on-chip) version of the Godson-2 chipset that will integrate the processor and northbridge into a single chip, and save additional cost and power.

Other features

The OLPC design eschews a hard drive, to keep cost down, but has an LCD display. The Municator, in contrast, offers an S-video port, in order to support television displays, and comes with a 40GB external USB drive. The Municator also has rear-mounted IDE and power connectors that support the attachment of optional optical drives.

Other interfaces, according to YellowSheepRiver, include four front-mounted USB 2.0 ports, IrDA, and audio I/O. Additional rear-mounted interfaces include S-video, VGA, 10/100 Ethernet, serial, PS/2 keyboard/mouse, and IDE.

The Municator measures 7 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches (180 x 145 x 37mm), and weighs one pound, six ounces (0.65kg). It requires five amps of 12-volt power, and comes with a 45-watt auto-sensing 110/220 adapter. A lithium-ion battery pack is optionally available. Other options include WiFi and a modem.

The Municator runs "Thinix 3.0," a Linux variant that features support for user interfaces based on a keyboard, mouse, or both, according to YellowSheepRiver. Thinix is based on RPLinux, a distribution created by the China Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion (CSIP).

Availability

YellowSheepRiver says orders for its "Fitness Computer," possibly a codename for the YSR-639, can begin production within three months of order confirmation.

A video demonstrating the Municator is available here.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6301677114.html





Look, No Hard Drive: Flash Only
Martyn Williams

Samsung's solid-state disk drives are clear pointers to the way ahead, so it was with more than a little interest that we checked out a laptop equipped with flash memory instead of spinning platters at CeBIT.

— Samsung has developed a higher-capacity version of its solid-state disk (SSD), a flash-memory based replacement for hard-disk drives, and is showing it at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, this week.

The drive packs 32Gb of flash memory into a case the same size as a 1.8in, hard-disk drive. That capacity is double the 16Gb of a prototype device announced by Samsung last year and was made possible by the continuing miniaturization of flash-memory chip technology.

At CeBIT the solid-state disk is being demonstrated inside a Samsung laptop computer. Because the SSD is the same size and shape as the computer's hard drive it was relatively easy to replace the hard drive with the SSD, said Yun Mini, a spokeswoman for Samsung.

The SSD technology has three major benefits over hard drives, said Yun. The first is that data access is faster. This could be seen when the SSD-based laptop was booted up alongside the same model machine with a standard hard drive. The desktop appeared on the screen of the SSD laptop in about 18 seconds while the hard drive-based computer took about 31 seconds to reach the same point.

The second advantage comes in durability. Because there are no moving parts in the SSD it is much better at withstanding shock and unlikely that data will be lost if the laptop is dropped. The third major advantage is that it works silently, said Yun.

But for all these advantages there is a major hurdle that needs to be overcome before SSD can reach mass market — price. Flash memory costs around $30 per gigabyte so the memory needed for the 32Gb drive works out to about $960, before any other costs are taken into account.

Samsung thinks there are some military or industrial customers that have specialist applications that would benefit from the SSD and so might be more willing to pay a premium.

"At this moment it would be very expensive," said Yun, "but technology is moving very fast so in the near future it could be cheaper."

Prices for flash memory are coming down. In May last year, when Samsung first announced the technology, the flash memory price was about $55 per gigabyte. So it might just be a matter of time before such disks hit the mass market.
http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/200...flash_only.php





Review

ThinkFree Online
Michael W. Muchmore

While web-based office apps seem to be popping out of the woodwork almost daily—ajaxWrite, Writely, zoho, Num Sum—ThinkFree has been trying to take the productivity software market online since 1999. Today ThinkFree releases a major update to its suite, upgrading free online storage space from 30MB to 1GB and adding a new lightweight AJAX-based collaboration feature and the ability to apply folksonomy to a document through "tagging" (very Web 2.0). Another Web 2.0 feature of the suite is Mashup—when a web application incorporates functionality with other web services. In ThinkFree's case, the combination is with Flickr for inserting pictures into documents now, and later the company plans integrating Google and Yahoo for maps, and with del.icio.us for shared bookmarking.

ThinkFree uses both AJAX and Java. The company admits that AJAX is more portable in that it doesn't require a plug-in, but they contend that Java is needed to provide true Microsoft Office compatibility and functionality. Solutions like ajaxWrite can mimic an installed word processor interface with some success, but ThinkFree's take is that they don't want to limit users to one browser, as ajaxWrite does. And ThinkFree goes a lot farther than ajaxWrite in mimicking Microsoft Office functionality. Note that the office suite doesn't include a database app, so it's not really a complete replacement for Microsoft Office.

ThinkFree Online will be free; it's supported by banner ads, contextual ads based on what's in your document (similar to Google's Gmail ad strategy), and search ads. The company also hopes to lure users into upgrading to premium services like additional storage and ad-free operation.

Now let's take a look at this revamped webware in more depth. Continued... When you first start using ThinkFree Office Online, the first page you'll see is the "Webtop." This is the page with buttons for the three office applications, recent files, your online document folders, messages, and information on your account, such as used disk space and "points." The page also offers buttons for uploading files to your gigabyte of free online storage, and for sharing, publishing, and deleting documents.

Even while writing this article, the advantage of having your document stored online is very evident. Since the article was written partly at home and partly at the office, having it live in one place, without the need to send it back and forth in email attachments, was a definite boon. And if you're mostly working with word-processing documents or spreadsheets, ThinkFree's free 1GB of online storage can go a long way. For presentations, the file size becomes more of an issue.

You can upload any kind of file you want in your disk space—even an .exe file. Recent files is a handy shortcut on the ThinkFree home page.

A company rep said they're still working on the details of the "points" program. Users will be able to exchange points for services, such as more storage space, template and clip art downloads, or even additional features in future releases. Users will also be able to gain points by being good citizens, publishing popular files to others, commenting, tagging, rating, inviting others to join. You get a thousand points for signing up, and 100 points for getting an acquaintance to sign up; you can also buy points in increments of one thousand per dollar.

You can add as many folders as you want, but there's no hierarchical nesting: All the folders are visible at the same level on the Webtop. It would be nice if each of the areas on this management page and your My Office page had some associated help links. Perhaps the folks at ThinkFree will add this as the product evolves.

You can start a new document in any of the three "power edit" tools—Write, Calc, or Show—or you can choose Quick Edit.

The Quick edit button launches a popup prompting for a filename, then launches the Quick Editor. If you just click on the file, you'll get the third mode of display: Preview. This lets you see any of the three document types without any editing capability.

If you click on your user name, you get to your account settings:

Clicking on one of the office application buttons yields this dialog, allowing you to choose whether you want to use Quick Edit or Power Edit, which brings us to a discussion of the apps themselves. Continued... The first time you start any of the "power edit" tools, there's about a half-minute delay while the java code is downloaded to your system. After this initial delay, starting up the apps takes only a couple of seconds. The new version of ThinkFree gives you two ways to edit documents: With the AJAX-based Quick Edit tool, or through Power Edit, which opens the appropriate fuller-featured java-based application, Write, Show, or Calc.

Quick Edit lets you do quite a few things in word processing documents, such as drag-and-drop editing, inserting tables and pictures, and formatting text font, size, and color. There's even a separate Search and Replace—which already puts it ahead of ajaxWrite. You can also print and add symbols to a document in Quick Edit. But here too there's no help option—a definite usability drawback.

We tried adding images in this tool, but they didn't appear until after we saved and reopened the document. Another time when trying to open one of our documents, we occasionally got this error:

The full java word processor adds a menu bar and a far more Word-like interface:

When you look at the same file in Power Edit, you get the familiar squiggly red lines under words the spell checker doesn't recognize. You also get a ruler, and a help feature. But the help is pretty linear without searching for topics offered. You also get the ability to wrap text around pictures, and to export to PDF.

Unfortunately, when you click on the New Document icon, ThinkFree doesn't sprout up a new window and leave your current doc in place: You have to close the current document. You can get around this by going back to your Webtop and starting a new doc from there, but it would be nice if the button worked this way by default.

A word about cutting and pasting: There's no Paste Special command, and when you paste, for example, a formatted table from a web page into a Write doc, you lose any formatting, unlike in Word, where you have a choice to keep formatting or paste text only.

ThinkFree's autocorrect feature is welcome and quite complete, and shortcut keys like Ctrl-F, Ctrl-B, and Ctrl-I do just what they do in Word. Find and Replace, however, doesn't offer searching on formatting, for example finding any instance of text in italics.

You can insert fields (but no mail merge), text boxes, symbols, bookmarks, hyperlinks, and references, but not diagrams or objects as Word allows. There are some drawing tools at the bottom of the window for creating basic diagrams.

Formatting options are pretty robust, with styles like headings, bullets and numbering, multicolumn layouts, and dropcaps available. There's no Autoformat or Themes that Word has, but very few people probably use those anyway. Spell checking is there, but not grammar. Continued... At the time of our testing, the AJAX-based Quick Edit versions of Calc and Show were not yet available. We'll be sure to update this article if we find any interesting variances in these tools from the Quick Edit version of Write.

Calc offers full Excel compatibility: We even checked that its columns go up to IV and rows down to 65,536 as Excels do. This support includes multi-tab spreadsheets and named areas. There are enough functions, accessible from a function toolbar, to satisfy all be the most deeply technical Excel users. Strangely, the Calc app offers a user dictionary, whereas Write doesn't.

In Calc, displayed graphs with no problem and offered most formatting and other chart options, but little things like making labels opaque or transparent missing.

There's no Error Correction, but there aren't Excel's Goal Seek or Scenarios, and the Data menu of Excel, with all its database-like features such as Filtering and Pivot Tables, is completely absent. But again, these will only be missed by advanced users—not the vast majority of us who use Excel for general computation and charting.

Save As… lets you open from and save anywhere on your local disk as well as from your web storage space. As in the other ThinkFree apps, the Open dialog doesn't have the choice of recent documents, but of course you can see these on your Webtop. Browsing network drives just as fast as in Windows, if not sometimes faster.

Finally, you can save your spreadsheets as Scalable Vector Graphics and PDF, and even XML in addition to XLS. Continued... A side-by-side comparison of ThinkFree Show and Microsoft PowerPoint shows a remarkable similarity:

In fact, the only major features missing from Show are the ability to insert movies and sounds into your presentations and to use a macro language. Show even offers a few nicely designed presentation templates, and a good choice of transitions and animations. There are some collaboration features that Microsoft takes advantage of its NetMeeting, and PowerPoint's Set Up Show dialog offers a lot more options than Show does. But all in all, we feel that most PowerPoint users won't miss much by switching to ThinkFree Show. Continued...

You can share a document online with anyone through email by clicking on the Share button at the top of the edit window—they needn't join ThinkFree too. An even simpler way to make a ThinkFree creation available to anyone on the planet is the Publish feature. This lets you assign any file a URL that you can send to folks who might like to see your work. But these methods don't allow for collaborative editing. For that, everyone who is to participate needs to sign up for a ThinkFree account. But when you do send a file the simple way, if the user who gets the preview clicks one of the Edit buttons at the top of the window, he'll be sent to the main ThinkFree page where he can join.

At present, ThinkFree can save multiple revisions of a document a team is working on, but you can't see revisions in a single document as you can in Microsoft Office with the color-coded text. A ThinkFree company rep stated that they were planning to add this capability. Comments are supported, which will be visible to other members of the team sharing a doc.

There's also a basic messaging feature, but we think this is not a huge plus, as you'll already have the email of your collaborators, since they're required to use an email to sign up.

iCdocs
Part of ThinkFree's philosophy of making documents viewable on the web without the need for installed office applications is its iCdocs product. This basically lets any webmaster put code on his or her site that can display Office documents using JSP pages and APPLET tags so that users can view .doc, .xls, and .ppt files in their browser. So, if you wanted to put a PowerPoint presentation somewhere on your blog, iCdocs would allow you to do this. ThinkFree even has a dynamic page that automatically generates the code you need to put on your site to display the Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. The document doesn't even have to be in a ThinkFree storage area, it can be on any FTP server, too. Continued...

ThinkFree plays well with some other web services, such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and several blogging services. We tried to get it to post to our LiveJournal, but that seemed to be the one major blogging API not supported. The company says that later versions of ThinkFree (which, remember, can be updated seamlessly at any time as a web-based service) will support LiveJournal.

Here's an example of how you can add a Flickr picture into your document:

We were unable to test the integration with Google Maps or with del.icio.us at this time, but the company states these will be available soon, and we'll update this article to report any future findings. Continued...

ThinkFree's fairly full support of Microsoft Office file formats—and the fact that it's free—is great for anyone who needs to edit an Office document on the fly and to those who want to access docs from different locations without having to continually send updated email attachments. The collaboration features, especially the ability to share a file through email, will appeal to teams that need to co-edit documents and presentations.

We would wait a bit, however, before choosing ThinkFree as a company-standard business tool. ThinkFree Corp. needs to iron out some functionality and add an in-depth help feature with searching for topics. Another oddity of using this type of application is that occasionally you'll get a right-click menu for browser operations when you're not interested in, for example, going back one web page in your browsing history, but rather you just want some information about a button your mouse is over. Some, too, may hesitate to put their private documents on a web service.

Read more software reviews in our Software and Development section.

Editing in ThinkFree is by no means as snappy as with an installed program, occasionally there's the need to interact with the server over the Internet, and that always presents the possibility of delays. And finally, there's no equivalent to Access in the suite.

But we applaud all of the office functionality, the gigabyte of free space, and the collaboration features ThinkFree is offering for free, and their iCdocs service should prove useful to some webmasters.

Product: ThinkFree Online
Company: ThinkFree Corp.
Price: Free.
Pros: Free; excellent Microsoft Office compatibility; includes most useful Office features; 1GB online storage; works with web services like Flickr and map sites; nice document sharing features.
Cons: Slower than installed office apps; no database app; occasional interface quirks; no in-document revision marking; point system unclear.
Summary: ThinkFree gives you a lot considering you don't need to pay anything for it: A gigabyte of storage, Microsoft Office-compatible editors, a way to share documents and to have access to and the ability to edit them from anywhere. It's not going to put Microsoft Office out of business, but if you don't need that Office's advanced features, this free webware can be a godsend.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1952434,00.asp





A Red Flag In The Brain Game

America's dismal showing in a contest of college programmers highlights how China, India, and Eastern Europe are closing the tech talent gap
Steve Hamm

Ben Mickle, Matt Edwards, and Kshipra Bhawalkar looked as though they had just emerged from a minor auto wreck. The members of Duke University's computer programming team had solved only one problem in the world finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in San Antonio on Apr. 12. The winning team, from Saratov State University in Russia, solved six puzzles over the course of the grueling five-hour contest. Afterward, Duke coach Owen Astrachan tried to cheer up his team by pointing out that they were among ``the best of the best'' student programmers in the world. Edwards, 20, still distraught, couldn't resist a self-deprecating dig: ``We're the worst of the best of the best.''

Duke wasn't the only U.S. school to be skunked at the prestigious computing contest. Of the home teams, only Massachusetts Institute of Technology ranked among the 12 highest finishers. Most top spots were seized by teams from Eastern Europe and Asia. Until the late 1990s, U.S. teams dominated these contests. But the tide has turned. Last year not one was in the top dozen.

WAKE-UP CALL
The poor showings should serve as a wake-up call for government, industry, and educators. The output of American computer science programs is plummeting, even while that of Eastern European and Asian schools is rising. China and India, the new global tech powerhouses, are fueled by 900,000 engineering graduates of all types each year, more than triple the number of U.S. grads. Computer science is a key subset of engineering. ``If our talent base weakens, our lead in technology, business, and economics will fade faster than any of us can imagine,'' warns Richard Florida, a professor at George Mason University and author of The Flight of the Creative Class.

Software programmers are the seed corn of the Information Economy, yet America isn't producing enough. The Labor Dept. forecasts that ``computer/math scientist'' jobs, which include programming, will increase by 40%, from 2.5 million in 2002 to 3.5 million in 2012. Colleges aren't keeping up with demand. A 2005 survey of freshmen showed that just 1.1% planned to major in computer science, down from 3.7% in 2000.

For young Americans, a computing career isn't the draw it was even a few years ago. Never mind that experienced programmers make upwards of $100,000 and that the brainiest of them are the objects of heated bidding wars (YHOO ). Students fear that if they become programmers they'll lose their jobs to counterparts in India and China, who work for a fraction of the pay. Analysts say those worries are overblown: Programmers with leadership and business skills will do just fine. But the message isn't getting through.

Then there's the thrill factor, or lack thereof. Given the opportunity to make a mint on Wall Street or land a comfortable academic job, many math and science students are turning away from software. ``I couldn't really get excited about sitting in front of a computer and just writing programs,'' says Duke junior Brandon Levin, who has taken computer courses but is majoring in math and plans a career in academia.

You might think the influx of eager foreign students would make up for the deficit, but that's not happening. While about 25% of students enrolled in graduate computer science programs are foreign, many won't be able to stay in the country after graduation because of restrictive post-9/11 immigration policies. That's if they even want to work here anymore. Foreign students are increasingly returning to their home countries after graduation. Duke's Bhawalkar, 19, from Pune, India, plans to go back after getting a degree in math and computer science and attending grad school in the U.S. ``In the past, people from India stayed here after they got their degrees,'' she says. ``But now India is at a turning point. It's getting to be a leader.''

The foreign students have a palpable determination to succeed. Bhawalkar's role model is Srinivasa Ramanujan, an early 20th century Indian mathematician who became famous worldwide in spite of an inferior education. This year, as a Duke sophomore, Bhawalkar placed 70th among 2,500 top North American university students in the prestigious Putnam math competition. Her life goal is ``to make a mark in some discipline so people will say, 'That's Kshipra. She did this.'''

Bhawalkar is inspired by her entrepreneur parents. Her father, a chemical engineer by training, invented breakthrough water-purification systems that use biological processes. Mom runs the business. Bhawalkar showed signs of being a math prodigy in sixth grade and fixed on science after a family friend read her palm and told her she would be a scientist when she grew up. Says her mother, Vidula: ``She has seen us achieve something that's a first in the world, and she wants to do something better than her father.'' At Duke, Bhawalkar spends much of her time in a dorm room doing 35 to 40 hours per week of homework and extra reading.

It's not that foreign students are any smarter, say U.S. university leaders. They just have relentless discipline. The team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which finished first last year and fifth this year, uses past participants to train each successive team. ``We pile up experience year after year,'' says coach Yong Yu. The team practices year-round and puts in three hours a day during the months before the contest. U.S. teams typically spend much less time preparing.

``ARE WE HUNGRY ENOUGH?''
Some tech-industry leaders are concerned that U.S. students have become complacent. ``There has to be a passion to be innovative,'' says Nicholas M. Donofrio, executive vice-president for innovation and technology at IBM (IBM ), which sponsors the ACM contest. Donofrio's father was an Italian immigrant who worked three jobs to feed his family in Beacon, N.Y., then a gritty factory town. Donofrio questions whether Americans still have that kind of drive. ``Are we hungry enough?'' he asks. ``Or are we going to amble along and take our time? If so, the Indians and Chinese will close the gap and perhaps even surpass us. You can see the passion in their eyes. They're people on a mission.''

When BusinessWeek visited Duke on a Saturday in early April, it was clear why many American students don't have the intensity of their overseas counterparts. There are a zillion distractions. The campus was like a carnival, with concerts, outdoor parties, and sunbathing on the grass. Meanwhile, the programming team was sequestered in a concrete-and-steel computer science building writing algorithms on whiteboards and tapping out C++ code on a PC. Sample problem: You have a population of Tribbles (the furry Star Trek beasts) who live for a day. Each Tribble has the potential for producing a number of offspring. What's the probability that, after a certain number of generations, every Tribble will be dead?

Bhawalkar's teammates are no slouches. A year ago, Duke's ACM programming team (she was not yet on it) solved four problems in the world finals. Mickle, now a 21-year-old senior, got job offers from Google and Microsoft (MSFT ), and chose Microsoft. Edwards landed a Microsoft internship this summer. But they acknowledge that they don't have the dedication to programming that some overseas aces do. During a break, Edwards ticked off his list of college activities. In addition to classes and homework, he plays tennis four times a week, practices with the Ultimate Frisbee team, and sings in a choir. ``We're like pickers and choosers at a buffet rather than concentrating on one thing. Some of the other countries, they focus more,'' he said.

Is the answer to turn American students into programming-obsessed drudges? Even if you could do that, it would just make the field less popular. Duke coach Astrachan, the computer science department's director of undergraduate studies, says the way to reverse the decline in interest is to make computer science more compelling to students by linking it to practical, real-world situations. He has proposed two new double majors, computational biology and computational economics, applying programming to medicine and business. He's also developing a course on social networking Web sites such as MySpace, where students will build and manage Web sites -- learning about programming along the way.

Other academic and tech-industry leaders also are striving to make computing more exciting. The University of California at Berkeley and Georgia Institute of Technology, among others, are developing multidisciplinary programs linking technology, business, and social sciences. Intel (INTC ) and Microsoft sponsor student science and technology contests. Yet computer science advocates say that unless the government enacts sweeping legislation aimed at improving the nation's technology competitiveness -- legislation now bogged down in Congress -- there's a limit to what can be done. ``The attitude in the House is very toxic, and I don't see much chance of them coming together,'' says Deborah L. Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness.

While Congress was fiddling, the kids from Saratov State were marching toward victory in San Antonio. The 83 teams sat at tables that were gradually festooned with color-coded balloons signaling which group had solved which problems. After an announcer ticked off the last 10 seconds in the contest, Saratov's players, coaches, and hangers-on shouted with joy and gave each other back-pounding bear hugs. ``I feel euphoric,'' said team member Ivan Romanov. Victory was especially sweet, he added, because it came on the anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's 1961 voyage into space.

Gagarin's rocket ride shocked Americans out of their postwar complacency, sparking a national quest for tech superiority that led to such breakthroughs as the moon landing and the microchip. A trouncing in a programming contest doesn't inspire the same kind of response today. Truthfully, Americans just don't feel threatened enough to exert the effort. But if we wait too long, we might find ourselves playing catch-up again.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine...gn_id=bier_tca





Potheads and Sudafed
John Tierney

Police officers in the 1960's were fond of bumper stickers reading: "The next time you get mugged, call a hippie." Doctors today could use a variation: "The next time you're in pain, call a narc."

Washington's latest prescription for patients in pain is the statement issued last week by the Food and Drug Administration on the supposed evils of medical marijuana. The F.D.A. is being lambasted, rightly, by scientists for ignoring some evidence that marijuana can help severely ill patients. But it's the kind of statement given by a hostage trying to please his captors, who in this case are a coalition of Republican narcs on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Drug Enforcement Administration.

They've been engaged in a long-running war to get the F.D.A. to abandon some of its quaint principles, like the notion that it's not fair to deny a useful drug to patients just because a few criminals might abuse it. The agency has also dared to suggest that there should be a division of labor when it comes to drugs: scientists and doctors should figure out which ones work for patients, and narcotics agents should catch people who break drug laws.

The drug cops want everyone to share their mission. They think that doctors and pharmacists should catch patients who abuse painkillers — and that if the doctors or pharmacists aren't good enough detectives, they should go to jail for their naïveté.

This month, pharmacists across the country are being forced to lock up another menace to society: cold medicine. Allergy and cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine, a chemical that can illegally be used to make meth, must now be locked behind the counter under a provision in the new Patriot Act.

Don't ask what meth has to do with the war on terror. Not even the most ardent drug warriors have been able to establish an Osama-Sudafed link.

The F.D.A. opposed these restrictions for pharmacies because they'll drive up health care costs and effectively prevent medicine from reaching huge numbers of people (Americans suffer a billion colds per year). These costs are undeniable, but it's unclear that there are any net benefits.

In states that previously enacted their own restrictions, the police report that meth users simply switched from making their own to buying imported drugs that were stronger — and more expensive, so meth users commit more crimes to pay for their habit.

The Sudafed law gives you a preview of what's in store if Representative Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, succeeds in giving the D.E.A. a role in deciding which new drugs get approved. So far, despite a temporary success last year, he hasn't been able to impose this policy, but the F.D.A.'s biggest fear is that Congress will let the drug police veto new medications. In that case, who would ever develop a better painkiller? The benefits to patients would never outweigh the potential inconvenience to the police.

Officially, the D.E.A. says it wants patients to get the best medicine. But look at what it's done to scientists trying to study medical marijuana. They've gotten approval for their experiments from the F.D.A., but they can't get the high-quality marijuana they need because the D.E.A. won't allow it to be grown. The F.D.A. actually wants to know if the drug works, but the D.E.A. is following the just-say-know-nothing strategy: as long as researchers can't study marijuana, they can't come up with evidence that it's effective.

And as long as there's no conclusive evidence that medical marijuana works, the D.E.A. and its allies on Capitol Hill can go on blindly fighting it. Representative Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who's the most rabid drug warrior in Congress, has been pressuring the F.D.A. to crack down on medical marijuana. Last week the agency finally relented: in return for not having to start busting anyone, it issued a statement stressing the potential dangers and lack of extensive clinical trials establishing medical marijuana's effectiveness.

The statement was denounced as a victory of politics over science, but it's hard to see what political good it does the Republican Party.

Locking up crack and meth dealers is popular, but voters take a different view of cancer patients who swear by marijuana. Medical marijuana has been approved in referendums in four states that went red in 2004: Nevada, Montana, Colorado and Alaska. For G.O.P. voters fed up with their party's current big-government philosophy, the latest medical treatment from Washington's narcs is one more reason to stay home this November.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/25...ierney.html?hp





Wi-Fi Consumers Cautioned To Wait On New Gear
Marguerite Reardon

Two different groups testing new wireless products based on a draft standard of next-generation Wi-Fi technology caution consumers against buying pre-standard gear.

On Monday, the Fairpoint Group and the technology trade publication eWeek released results of tests conducted on new products using draft versions of the 802.11n standard. While eWeek's assessment is not nearly as negative as the analysis of the testing from the Fairpoint Group, both groups said they felt it was still too soon for consumers to buy products using 802.11n.

"I've always been a harsh critic of selling equipment that is compliant with a draft," said Craig Mathias, an analyst with Fairpoint Group. "But besides that I was reasonably underwhelmed in terms of the throughput and range of the draft compliant products."

eWeek was also critical of the new products.

"It is not advisable to invest in these products lock, stock and barrel," eWeek said in its article. "Enterprise-grade WLAN manufacturers continue to wait for the standard to fully bake, and enterprise customers should do the same."

The new 802.11n standard, which is expected to be finalized later this year, will allow notebook users to connect to wireless access points at much faster speeds than currently available with 802.11g technology. 802.11n will use a technology called MIMO (multiple-in, multiple-out) , which should improve the range and throughput of 802.11n products so that it can be used as a replacement for Ethernet cabling in an office and as a way to transmit video around a house without interrupted playback.

In January, the IEEE approved a draft version of 802.11n, after much controversy and infighting among chipmakers. In the last few months, several products have emerged on the market claiming to comply with the 802.11n draft.

Problems with the technology
But now that products are out in the market, groups testing draft 802.11n are finding that the technology has some problems. The Fairpoint Group compared the performance and interoperability of Buffalo Technology's AirStation Nfiniti router and client, which use Broadcom's draft 802.11n Intensi-fi chipset, and both versions of Netgear's RangeMax Next client and routers, which use draft 802.1n chips from Broadcom and Marvel, with Linksys' Wireless G and SRX400 equipment.

What the Fairpoint Group found during the testing was that the Linksys SRX400, which uses Airgo's third-generation MIMO technology that isn't compliant with the draft version of 802.11n, offered higher throughput at longer distances than all three of the other products tested, which used draft N technology.

The report also indicated that the "draft compliant" products did not connect at any faster speed or across any greater distance than existing 802.11g products, which typically transmit data between 20 and 24 mbps.

eWeek tested Linksys' new WRT300N Wireless-N Broadband Router and the WPC300N Wireless-N Note-book Adapter, which both use Draft 802.11n chip technology from Broadcom. The article said Linksys' draft 802.11n gear was the fastest wireless equipment at short distances the magazine had tested to date, "besting even a pair of products based on Airgo's Gen 3 True MIMO chipset."

But when it came to long distances, a key reason for developing the 802.11n standard, eWeek, like The Fairpoint Group, found gear based on the draft standard fell short. eWeek said that performance at 50 feet lagged considerably when compared with the products using Airgo chips.

"I wouldn’t read too much into these early tests," said Bill Bunch, director of marketing for wireless LAN for Broadcom. "The testing we have done has gotten results more like the eWeek test."

Bunch said the true value of Broadcom's draft 802.11n technology is that it interoperates with equipment from other draft N suppliers. But the Fairpoint Group found in its testing that this was not the case. Mathias said that he was unable to get equipment from Netgear and Buffalo Technology to talk to each other. What's more, he wasn't even able to get the two versions of the Netgear products to work together.

Bunch said the Fairpoint Group's results are flawed.

"I can guarantee you that it's a problem with the test," he said. "I have tested this myself at home, and it works. I look at these results and can see right away something was wrong with this test."

Mathias said that companies such as Broadcom are overhyping the capabilities of their products.

"These products have not been verified by the Wi-Fi Alliance," he said. "It's all marketing right now, and it's marketing out of control."
http://news.com.com/Wi-Fi+consumers+...3-6064605.html





Nokia Pushes Hard On Multimedia Phones

Handset giant Nokia, which said Tuesday that it has sold more than 5 million N-series multimedia phones since last year, plans to launch three new models this summer.

Anssi Vanjoki, the head of Nokia's multimedia unit, said the Finnish company expects the multimedia phone market worldwide to grow to 100 million units in 2006 and exceed 250 million in 2008.

"It is not a small market," he said at the launch of the new phones.

Research firm Canalys said about 50 million multimedia phones were sold in 2005, Vanjoki added.

The new N93 video camera model, with optical zoom, and the new N73 camera phone, which has a 3 megapixel Carl Zeiss lens, are both expected to hit the shelves in July. The new N72 music phone is expected to be available in June.

The unsubsidized retail prices will range from about $400 for the N72 to about $680 for the most expensive, the N93, Vanjoki said.

"I think the N72 and N73 will be successful phones that will sell well, but the N93 will be a niche product," said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst with market researcher Gartner.

She said that the new N-series devices were bulkier than those of rivals but that through design improvements, they had become small and thin enough to be acceptable.

Nokia reported stronger-than-expected first-quarter sales and earnings last week and singled out the success of its N70 model as its biggest revenue-generating handset in the quarter.

Nokia said the N70 camera phone was the biggest-selling third-generation mobile in the world in the first three months of the year, making up about 10 percent of the 3G market on its own.

Nokia also said it has agreed on cooperation with Yahoo's popular photo-sharing site Flickr.
http://news.com.com/Nokia+pushes+har...3-6064632.html





Mafia Insiders Infiltrating Firms, U.K. Cops Warn
Dan Ilett

Employees are still one of the greatest threats to corporate security, as "new-age" mafia gangs infiltrate companies, the U.K.'s crime-fighting agency has said.

Speaking on Tuesday at the Infosecurity 2006 conference in London, Tony Neate, e-crime liaison for the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), said insider "plants" are causing significant damage to companies.

"We have fraud and ID theft, but one of the big threats still comes from the trusted insiders. That is, people inside the company who are attacking the systems," he said.

"(Organized crime) has changed. You still have traditional organized crime, but now they have learned to compromise employees and contractors. (They are) new-age, maybe have computer degrees and are enterprising themselves. They have a wide circle of associates and new structures," he added.

Neate's comments are some of the first from SOCA, which so far has tended to shy away from press attention.

The British agency was formed earlier this month, and combines the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and experts from HM Revenue & Customs and the U.K. Immigration Service.

The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, which previously dealt with Internet crime in the U.K., has also been rolled into SOCA.

The agency is chaired by Sir Stephen Lander, a former director general of British internal counterintelligence agency MI5, and will have a budget of more than 400 million pounds ($706.3 million) and around 4,200 staff.

According to SOCA's annual plan, around 40 percent of its efforts will be directed toward combating drug trafficking; 25 percent toward organized immigration crime; and 10 percent toward individual and private sector fraud, including identity fraud and electronic fraud from Internet banking and e-commerce.

Dan Ilett of Silicon.com reported from London.
http://news.com.com/Mafia+insiders+i...3-6064954.html





Why Don't We Do It on the Internet?
Steven Levy

Go to iTunes or Rhapsody and search for "Beatles" and where do you wind up? Nowhere, man. The greatest rock group ever doesn't sell its songs online. That's why the managing director of the Beatles' record label, Neil Aspinall, made a stir recently when he revealed that the Fab Four were finally planning to sell their songs on Internet stores—but only after a long-term project of remastering the songs was completed.

Though Aspinall's comment made news, the impact was mitigated by the fact that the digital music world has already established itself, with no help from John, Paul, George and Ringo. It is telling that his remarks were made in the context of a London court case charging Apple Computer with violating the trademark of the Beatles' record label, Apple Corps, by selling music online. Instead of working with the Net's flagship of legal downloading, the band is suing it.

During their heyday, the mop tops could get away with anything (like selling watered-down versions of their U.K. albums in America, or "Revolution No. 9"). But the Beatles today (the living members and heirs of George and John) don't seem to understand that even they can't control the Internet. A glimpse of their thinking came in 2004, when the group considered going online with a service other than iTunes. Microsoft was building an Internet store to compete with iTunes, and the Fab Four's people actually discussed terms with the Softies. According to a source close to the negotiations (who would not be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue), the Beatles wanted $15 million for starters—not as an advance against royalties, but a cash payout—for a window of exclusivity that would end after 90 days. After that the Beatles would be free to sell their songs everywhere else on the Net. Even worse, the Beatles demanded that their tunes be treated differently from any other songs in the store. "It would be a walled garden, a Beatles store within the store," the source told me. "If you bought a Beatles song, you'd go immediately to checkout and wouldn't be able to add anyone else's songs to the purchase." This approach is antithetical to what makes an online music store successful—it must be so convenient and delightful that people pay for what is available on the file-sharing services free of charge. Microsoft walked away.

The Beatles' stance only hurts the band. Their obstinacy has not deterred millions of fans from loading Beatles music on computers and MP3 players—it just means that no one pays for the songs. Even George W. Bush has figured out how to get Beatles songs on his iPod. People simply rip the CDs they already own into iTunes or other jukebox software. Or they use their friends' CDs. Or they grab the songs online; according to the market-research firm NPD Group, the Beatles are the fifth most popular band among illegal downloaders.

The buzz among digital-music insiders is that if the two Apples settle the court case, part of that arrangement would be a deal that lets the Beatles sell their work on iTunes. (Neither party would comment on that.) The wrong way to do it would be the walled-garden approach, with premium prices for albums and restrictions on buying songs à la carte. The right way would be to follow in the path of another great band, U2, whose iTunes relationship has been a boon for both sides. Put the entire catalog online—as a pricey package for those who want it all, or available by the album or single song for everyone else at standard rates. A Beatles-branded custom-made iPod would be a huge seller. And a cool iTunes commercial with the band in silhouette would be a sensation.

During the mania years of the 1960s, John Lennon once described the Beatles as being bigger than Jesus. But in 2006, the Internet is bigger than the Beatles. Instead of fighting the Net, the Beatles can use it to reinvigorate their glory. What happened to "We can work it out"?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12440798/site/newsweek/





The Great Microsoft Blunder

Internet Explorer is a dead albatross.
John Dvorak

I think it can now be safely said, in hindsight, that Microsoft's entry into the browser business and its subsequent linking of the browser into the Windows operating system looks to be the worst decision—and perhaps the biggest, most costly gaffe—the company ever made. I call it the Great Microsoft Blunder.

It looks like a whopper that keeps whacking the company. The most recent bash came from the Eolas v. Microsoft patent suit over aspects of the ActiveX usage in Internet Explorer. Microsoft lost and was slapped with a $521 million settlement.

If the problem is not weird legal cases against the company, then it's the incredible losses in productivity at the company from the never-ending battle against spyware, viruses, and other security problems. All the work that has to go into keeping the browser afloat is time that could have been better spent on making Vista work as first advertised.

All of Microsoft's Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer. If you were to put together a comprehensive profit-and-loss statement for IE, there would be a zero in the profits column and billions in the losses column—billions.

The joke of it is that Microsoft is still working on this dead albatross and is apparently ready to roll out a new version, since most of the smart money has been fleeing to Firefox or Opera. This means new rounds of patches and lost money. Continue reading…

This fiasco and the great Microsoft Blunder began when Marc Andreessen, then of Netscape, made some silly, off-handed remark about how the browser would become the next platform for applications and suggested, in so many words, that Microsoft would be destroyed. Instead of the boys at Microsoft laughing out loud and then ignoring this remark, they started scrambling around like ants on a hot stove.

The next thing you know, Microsoft went Internet slaphappy. Besides cobbling together a browser from any code it could license, it rolled out all sorts of Internet magazines and various Internet-centric ideas to the point where it was obvious to anyone watching that the company itself was believing all the hype coming from outside.

The main piece of propaganda among the Internet-centric ideas was that the personal computer is dead. "There'll be no computers in a few short years, as everything will be embedded and become appliances," said all the experts.

This appliance malarkey comes and goes, but always goes. We still have computers, we still need operating systems, and we still need Microsoft Office. Yes, there are alternatives to everything, but the gold standards for all these basics make most of the money, no matter what anyone idealizes to the contrary.

But Microsoft buys the fear. It must have some of the lowest corporate self-esteem for any dominant company in the history of modern business. The company is like the panicky old woman wondering how she lost a penny in her purse while giving exact change in the express line at the grocery store. Hey lady, you are holding things up!

So what can Microsoft do about its dilemma? First, it needs to face the fact that this entire preoccupation with the browser business is bad for the company and bad for the user. Microsoft should pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately. It should then bless the Mozilla.org folks with a cash endowment and take an investment stake in Opera, to influence the future direction of browser technology from the outside in. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.

Of this I can assure you. People will not stop buying Microsoft Windows if there is no built-in browser. Opera and/or Firefox can be bundled with the OS as a courtesy, and all the defaults can lead to Microsoft.com if need be.

Of course we already know that this will never happen, since Microsoft is a creature of habit. So it will forever be plagued by its greatest blunder ever. Have fun, boys.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ZDM/story?id=1884077





Beatles Set to Join Online Music Revolution

The Beatles are preparing to sell their songs online after years of refusing to take part in the Internet music boom, according to testimony given by the head of their record company.

Neil Aspinall, a former Beatles road manager and managing director of Apple Corps, was a witness in the company's trademark lawsuit against Apple Computer.

He said that the company was digitally remastering the entire Beatles catalog, which would pave the way for selling the songs online.

"I think it would be wrong to offer downloads of the old masters when I am making new masters," he said in a written statement submitted to the High Court in London earlier this month.

"It would be better to wait and try to do them both simultaneously so that you then get the publicity of the new masters and the downloading, rather than just doing it ad hoc."

A spokeswoman for Apple Corps confirmed Aspinall's statement, and said that the company is preparing to make the Beatles catalog available through online music services.

"There's no firm date on any of this at the moment. There are a lot of projects that Apple are working on at the moment," she said on Thursday.

The Beatles have been high-profile holdouts from the booming online music sector, which saw sales triple to $1.1 billion in 2005.

Apple Corps, owned by Beatles Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and the estate of George Harrison, have accused Apple Computer of violating a 1991 agreement by using the Apple name and logo to sell music downloads through its market-leading iTunes Music Store.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1949261,00.asp





'Da Vinci Code' Movie Upsets Catholic Leaders
Elizabeth Putnam

Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks star in the movie version of the controversial book “The Da Vinci Code,” which will be released May 17.
When the novel "The Da Vinci Code" hit the shelves in 2003, the book and its author, Dan Brown, also hit a theological nerve.

Religious scholars and critics held meetings, wrote books and launched Web sites to debunk several aspects of the book's story line, most notably that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene had a child and the Roman Catholic group Opus Dei would do anything – including kill – to keep that secret.

Now, with the film adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code" scheduled to open in theaters May 19, a resurgence is afoot among Roman Catholic leaders to once again counter the book's view of Christian history.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, which includes the Danbury area, has joined in on the renewed efforts and is holding several events to answer questions the movie is expected to raise.

These events, hosted by clergy, will educate parishioners that "The Da Vinci Code" is not an historical representation or an accurate theological depiction of Christian history, said Joseph McAleer, diocesan spokesman.

"We are being proactive. This is an opportunity to remind and refresh Catholics about the teachings of our church," McAleer said.

"The Da Vinci Code" takes fictional characters and weaves them with real artwork, architecture and institutions, such as Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings and the Opus Dei organization. And it raises questions about Jesus' relationship with Mary Magdalene, the role of women throughout the Catholic Church's history and the purpose behind the Catholic organization Opus Dei.

This makes many Catholic leaders fear that the book creates an unclear message about the Catholic Church and Jesus Christ, but at the same time, many agree that it has created constructive dialogue about the church's past and an opportunity to educate.

The Rev. Albert Audette, pastor of St. Peter Parish in Danbury, said he might host his own forum about the book and movie, but he's uncertain if many people still have questions about the controversial 2003 book.

"But the church can be complicated. When you are 10,000 miles from Rome and the Vatican, the way it all operates can be confusing," he said.

Audette, who has read the book, has addressed it in sermons and said it's a marvelous book

"It sounds so factual, with institutional things, names and places. It's rather exciting," he said. "But it is fiction, and some people can get wrapped up into those things and read it as fact."

Monsignor Stephen DiGiovanni, pastor at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Stamford, will present a forum for young adults May 1 to underscore the book's inaccuracies.

And Monsignor Kevin Wallin, pastor at St. Augustine Cathedral in Bridgeport, will hold a talk, discussion and question and answer session May 4 in Bridgeport.

"The book created quite a stir in the minds of people about what the church has taught and what it believes. With the movie, those issues will resurface again," said Wallin, who visited sights in Scotland during the shooting of the film and has given numerous presentations on the accuracy and theological claims of the book.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also launched a Web site, www.jesusdecoded.com, in March to answer questions about "The Da Vinci Code" and to advertise an hour-long documentary called "Jesus Decoded" that will air on NBC stations in mid-May.

Recognizing the controversy surrounding the book, Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is producing the Tom Hanks-Ron Howard thriller movie, has given viewers a forum to discuss the questions raised by the book and upcoming movie.

The site www.thedavincidialogue.com offers users essays, quizzes and a discussion room about "The Da Vinci Code."

The author, Dan Brown, has acknowledged the book's controversial material.

"While it is my belief that some of the theories discussed by these characters may have merit, each individual reader must explore these characters' viewpoints and come to his or her own interpretations," Brown says on his Web site. "My hope in writing this novel was that the story would serve as a catalyst and a springboard for people to discuss the important topics of faith, religion, and history."
http://news.newstimeslive.com/storyprint.php?id=83154





Microsoft Complains Rivals Get 'Free Ride'
Aoife White and Matt Moore

Microsoft Corp. complained Wednesday that the European Commission had forced it to hand over trade secrets to rivals, effectively giving them a "free ride" on the work the software maker did to acquire new customers and develop new technologies.

But Microsoft's rivals said the company was trying to turn the case into a debate over intellectual property rights and skirt the commission's argument that Microsoft has abused its monopoly.

The European Commission's order for Microsoft Corp. to share its code so rivals' software can run smoothly with Windows took center stage Wednesday in the third day of the company's bid to have a landmark antitrust ruling against it overturned.

Microsoft lawyer Ian Forrester said the order had been an attempt "to handicap the (market) leader in perpetuity."

"The decision condemned a company for not saying yes to a company who requests a huge amount of secret technology for the future," he said.

"The Windows source code is copyright. It is valuable, the fruit of lots of effort," he said, adding that were it printed on paper, it would take up 12,650 pages.

Thomas Vinje, a lawyer for an industry group supporting the commission - the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, or ECIS - said Microsoft was blowing its patent rights out of proportion.

"Microsoft are trying to turn this into an intellectual property case when it's not," he said. "This is a case about abuse of a dominant position, about refusing to provide information to vendors."

Microsoft broke an informal agreement with EU advocates when it brought up the recent dispute over the company's compliance with the order to share its code- earning them a stern reprimand from Judge Bo Vesterdorf, who told Forrester to stick to the issue at stake.

Forrester had claimed that Microsoft was being threatened with 2 million euros ($2.4 million) in daily fines, backdated to Dec. 15, for not creating "a new copyright work" derived from Windows' secret source code.

EU regulators had asked Microsoft to supply a "complete and accurate" support manual for developers to help them make compatible software.

Last December, they charged Microsoft with not obeying the order after an independent monitor branded Microsoft's 12,650-page technical manual as "unfit at this stage for its intended purpose."

The world's largest software maker says it has the right to guard its valuable intellectual property, and maintains that it has worked strenuously to comply with the 2004 EU ruling that told it to pay a record 497 million euro ($613 million) fine.

The ruling was handed down after a five-year investigation concluded that Microsoft had taken advantage of its dominant position to damage rivals who offered server software and media player programs.

Forrester said Microsoft's server software was compatible with products made by other companies, such as those from Novell and Sun and using Linux and UNIX-based servers.

Microsoft executive John Shewchuk gave a presentation that showed the company's contention that server compatibility was a reality and worked with the Windows operating system, which runs on 95 percent of the world's personal computers.

"Microsoft spends an enormous amount of effort attempting to achieve interoperability," he said.

Lawyers for both Microsoft and the commission will expound on why the ruling should be lifted, or left unchanged, using evidence from IBM Corp., Novell Inc., Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. on systems compatibility.

None of those companies is currently involved in the legal battle, although they are members of two broad industry coalitions - the ECIS and the Software & Information Industry Association - that have backed the commission.

In a new complaint filed in February, ECIS said times have changed, but Microsoft's behavior has not. It claimed Microsoft is up to the same tricks - but on a wider scale.

Wednesday's focus differs from the first two days of the five-day hearings. On Tuesday, the company brushed off the claims that it tried to squeeze competitors, including RealNetworks Inc., out of the streaming media market.

Instead, it argued before the 13 judges of the Court of First Instance that it merely added extra functions to its operating systems to meet likely demand from consumers - part of a natural process of evolution in the technology sector.

While a court decision on the ruling is not due for months, a decision backing the commission could force Microsoft to change the way it does business in the future and endorse the EU's ability to hold back aggressive corporate behavior.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT





Mick Jagger Joins a New ABC Sitcom
Bill Carter

Trying to conjure some way to make a new television series stand out, show creators sometimes come up with pie-in-the-sky notions, like getting Jerry Seinfeld to come back and star in a sitcom, or inducing Vince Vaughn to quit movies.

But Mick Jagger?

By far the most unlikely star of a prospective fall situation comedy is that still-active lead singer of the Rolling Stones, who has signed on to an ABC pilot for its fall schedule. Just to increase the degree of unlikelihood, Mr. Jagger shot his scenes for the New York-based pilot in a hotel room in Auckland, New Zealand, last week.

That was the culmination of a saga at least as whimsical as the premise of the show, which, for now, anyway, is titled "Let's Rob Mick Jagger."

The writing team that came up with the idea, Rob Burnett, long David Letterman's executive producer, and his partner, Jon Beckerman, had previously created the NBC comedy-drama "Ed." As Mr. Burnett outlined the tale in a telephone interview, he and Mr. Beckerman "wondered if there was a way do a serialized comedy — something like a comedy version of 'Lost' or '24.' "

Hatched in numerous meetings, the concept centered on a janitor for a prominent New York building, to be played by the character actor Donal Logue. Down on his luck, the janitor sees a celebrity on television wallowing in his wealth during a tour of his new Manhattan penthouse. Enlisting a crew of similar ordinary but frustrated accomplices, the janitor conceives a plot to rob the big shot's apartment, a story line that would unfold over a 24-episode television season.

Mr. Burnett said that the series would track the plotting of the robbers, who would eventually ingratiate themselves with the apartment's glamorous owner. That would entail actually seeing the real-life celebrity interact on occasion with the fictional thieves.

The question was: Who could the celebrity be? "We didn't want it to be too on the nose, like Tom Cruise," Mr. Burnett said. "Not that he would have done it anyway."

The creators decided that they had to have the name before they could pitch the series effectively to network programmers. Finally they came up with it: "Jeff Goldblum seemed silly, just right," Mr. Burnett said. Not that the writers bothered to inform Mr. Goldblum that he had been selected by their imaginations. "He was just the place holder," Mr. Burnett said. Until a network committed to this goofy idea, the creators were not going to write a script to be sent to Mr. Goldblum to test his interest.

They just wanted to pitch his name. If a deal was made, they would write in Mr. Goldblum. If he declined to sign on, Mr. Burnett said, "we'd just rewrite it with another celebrity."

Not at all sure what reaction they would get, Mr. Burnett and Mr. Beckerman journeyed to Los Angeles from New York, accompanied by Mr. Logue, and met with the four major networks.

"We realized that we would know where we stood about one second into the meeting," Mr. Burnett said. "As soon as we said 'Let's Rob Jeff Goldblum,' we'd know. And we did. They all laughed."

Every network made an offer, but Fox and ABC went the extra mile, committing not just to a script, but to also guaranteeing that a pilot would be shot. Mr. Burnett said that he was impressed with Peter Liguori at Fox and Stephen McPherson at ABC, the top program executives at those networks. Eventually they chose ABC.

A script was written and a supporting cast secured, all except the guy with his name in the title. Mr. Goldblum was intrigued, Mr. Burnett said, but he had already committed to a pilot at NBC. With time running short — all the auditioning actors were still talking about knocking over Jeff Goldblum's place — the producers pondered a list of famous names, seeking one that might catch the nation's fancy and their own.

Finally Mr. McPherson threw out a name no one had considered: Mick Jagger. It was far-fetched, but the writing team loved the idea. They were more excited when Mr. Jagger's representatives sent word they enjoyed the script and would run it by the singer.

"We were thrilled, but we still didn't think it was real," Mr. Burnett said. The pilot was shot, with the celebrity's scenes left out, but with the other characters using Mr. Jagger's name as their target.

Finally Mr. Burnett got word that Mr. Jagger, then on tour with the Stones in Japan, had read the script himself and liked it very much. He would be calling Mr. Burnett directly on March 24. "I was a little scared to leave the house," Mr. Burnett said.

Mr. Jagger called at 2 a.m. "He was enthusiastic," Mr. Burnett said. "He asked all the right questions. How was the series going to build? Could the idea sustain? He seemed like a guy who cared a great deal about the quality of work he gets involved with."

The answers satisfied Mr. Jagger. He agreed to join the pilot. The only trouble was he would be halfway around the world for weeks. Mr. McPherson at ABC pressed to get the pilot completed with enough time for ABC to give it full consideration for its fall schedule.

Mr. Burnett and Mr. Beckerman flew to New Zealand on April 17. They first had to find a location that might pass as a Manhattan apartment, then hire a film crew. Finally they had to direct Mr. Jagger in his American sitcom debut.

A luxury hotel in Auckland stood in for the penthouse. The crew was professional. As for Mr. Jagger, he threw himself enthusiastically into the project, Mr. Burnett said. "He did a lot of ad-libbing. Some of the funniest stuff in the pilot came from him. He's just a smart, funny guy."

He is also now a star of an ABC pilot for the fall 2006 television season. Mr. Burnett, not wanting to jinx what has been a charmed project so far, said, "We just hope to be one of the ones they pick up."

If ABC does order the series, Mr. Jagger is expected to appear regularly, though not in every episode. "We'll work around his schedule," Mr. Burnett said. Not much has been worked out as to how successful the band of thieves might be in their heist, and like the serialized shows that inspired this one, a big question remains about how the series will continue after its first season.

Most likely Mr. Jagger's participation will end, one reason the title will almost surely not end up "Let's Rob Mick Jagger." Mr. Burnett said the first season of the prospective series might culminate in a twist that sets up a second season. "They could come up with a different scheme," Mr. Burnett said, referencing the many get-rich schemes of Ralph Kramden in "The Honeymooners."

Or "they could just rob someone else completely different," he said. "How about: 'Let's Rob Tiger Woods' ? "
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/ar... tner=homepage





Who axed you

Vista Firewall Shackled Due To Customer Demand: Microsoft
Munir Kotadia

The firewall in Windows Vista will, by default, have half its protection turned off because that is what enterprise customers have requested, according to the software giant.

When Windows Vista is released early next year its firewall will be set to only block incoming traffic even though it will be capable of blocking outgoing traffic. According to a statement from Microsoft, the firewall's protection will be curbed in order to make life easier for the company's enterprise customers.

"Because the nature of an outbound firewall is to restrict the traffic sent to specific ports, the outgoing access in the Windows Vista firewall is open by default," a Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet Australia. "The reason for this is Microsoft has received strong feedback from its customers, especially from large organisations and government departments, saying that they would like to manage this feature from an administrator level."

Microsoft claims that configuring the Vista firewall to block outgoing connections from rogue applications and malware will require a varying degree of technical knowledge, depending on each user's security requirements.

"Users need to understand how their applications undertake communication and connections and the associated threats and risks. This security requirement will vary amongst users and Microsoft is providing the capability to allow users to determine how they wish to leverage this security capability," the Microsoft spokesperson said.

Firewall specialist Zone Labs claims that users will require a "fairly high level of sophistication" in order to properly configure the Vista firewall. For consumers, the company said the task will be nothing less than "challenging".

"Outbound protection requires a fairly high level of sophistication to engage, and reports indicate that Microsoft expects that functionality to be used by IT professionals in a business networking environment," Laura Yecies, general manager at Zone Labs told ZDNet Australia.

"For consumers, it is challenging at best," she added.

Security specialist Michael Warrilow, director of Sydney-based analyst firm Hydrasight, believes that Microsoft has found it too difficult to create an all encompassing firewall. However, he said that by throttling the capabilities of the firewall the company is not ignoring its non-technical customer base.

"In effect, Microsoft is putting outbound [protection] in the 'too hard basket' for the time being," Warrilow told ZDNet Australia. "The firewall is to protect against inbound attacks -- instead of protecting the rest of the world from you."

The Microsoft spokesperson said that Vista's firewall is just one layer of security in the new operating system: "New features such as User Account Control (UAC), Windows Defender, and Internet Explorer Protected Mode along with improvements to Windows Firewall and Windows Update work together to help shield Windows Vista PCs from malware."
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/securit...9252954,00.htm





Cost Per Minute: Are Compact Discs A Good Value?
Bryan Dailey

You’ve heard many times on the pages of AVRev.com about how the woes of the music industry can’t be placed solely on the shoulders of peer-to-peer file swapping or piracy. The fact that the compact disc is still a poor value was never more evident to me than when I was at the mega electronics store WOW! in Long Beach, California this weekend. This staggeringly large store features a fully stocked Tower Records/Video, along with the newly merged CompUSA/Good Guys! I went in to pick up some toner for my laser printer and, for some reason, the once familiar but long forgotten desire to browse the CD racks came over me. I realized that in my collection of “must have” music, I had a gaping hole. I didn’t have the Metallica CD … And Justice for All, and I wasn’t about to break out my worn-out cassette version or download the album from Limewire for fear of Metallica’s strong-armed legal team, so I figured I’d pick up a copy at Tower Records.

I wandered up and down the aisles, remembering the days when I would actually care and get up for the upcoming release of a new album by a band I thought was amazing. Perhaps I’m showing my age as I hit my early thirties, but I just found it hard to get excited about anything I saw on the “new releases rack.” Then again, finding the next big thing wasn’t my goal. I wanted one of the best metal albums of all time and before I knew it, I was at the Metallica rack. Flipping through the CDs, I found that oh so familiar album cover with the crumbling statue of the Lady of Justice on the cover and almost didn’t flip the disc over to check the price, assuming it would be somewhere in the $11.99 to $14.99 range. Curiosity got the best of me and I flipped over the disc. To my amazement, the price tag read a staggering $18.99 and there was not the typical yellow “sale” sticker that I am so accustomed to seeing. If I wanted to rock to some “Shortest Straw” and “Harvester of Sorrow” in my car, I would have to plunk down quite bit of dough.

I have never considered myself cheap, but I found myself with a little case of sticker shock. In retail, there is a price where almost anything will sell. List your house at $50,000 over market value and, unless it’s a scorching hot market, the offers won’t come pouring in. For me, with this CD purchase, the decision came down to something simple: the $20 bill in my wallet. To go along with my craving for this Metallica disc was also craving for a strawberry smoothie at Jamba Juice. Had Tower priced the disc at what I felt to be a fair amount for a back catalogue record ($9.99 to $13.99), I would have bought it without hesitation. Because they swung for the fences, I left the disc in the bin, doing the retailer, the label and a reportedly financially starving Lars Ulrich no good whatsoever. I did buy the over-priced drink and then went home to purchase the exact disc I wanted, used, from eBay, for a little bit over $5 with $2 shipping. I know arguing over $10 here and there seems like I might be cheap, but I am not. I lunch in Beverly Hills every day, paying easily what the album would have cost me. I was making an economic protest about the value of the album. I understand overhead and royalties with the best of them, but at the same time the label has long ago paid for the production costs of such a great, multi-platinum heavy metal record. With CDs in jewel cases costing about $0.50, I was getting ripped off and I wasn’t going to stand for it, nor was I going to do anything illegal or immoral in response.

This lost “brick and mortar” sale due to an overpriced disc is becoming a common occurrence. I have often heard my friends saying, “ I just don’t buy music any more, because it’s too expensive and just not worth it,” or “Why don’t you just get it used?’ People are still buying DVDs by the millions each week, with “King Kong” selling a reported 6.5 million copies in its first week. A number-one-selling compact disc might be lucky to do 10 percent of that amount. Of course, this number could be a little skewed, as there are many more music releases in a given week than there are mainstream DVD releases, but the days of N’Sync or Eminem having first week sales well north of a million copies seem to be a thing of the past. It seems lately that even the biggest-selling albums in a particular year barely sell more than Peter Jackson’s big-budget thriller did in seven days.

Going back to a point we have always stressed at AVRev.com, the music industry, retailers included, needs to take a hard look at their prices and put their products better in line with the pricing structure of DVDs and videogames. When shopping for items at the grocery store, the price tags on the racks give a “price per ounce” breakdown. Although people don’t specifically realize it, many consumers do a mental “length of entertainment per dollar” equation in their heads. A jam-packed CD might clock in with 72 minutes of music. Priced at a respectable $15, that would come to a little over 20 cents a minute. On the other hand, I have frequently seen DVDs priced at $19 that on their covers say “featuring over five hours of bonus footage, deleted scenes, commentaries and bloopers.” Combine that with a feature movie length of 1.45 hours on average and you are looking at cost of less than five cents per minute. From a purely mathematical standpoint, the average CD just can’t compete with a DVD for value.
http://www.avrev.com/news/0406/20.metallica.shtml





Most Web Users Unable to Spot Spyware
Aviran Mordo

McAfee SiteAdvisor , which is pioneering Web safety by testing and rating nearly every trafficked site on the Internet has news for Internet users who think Web sites with clean, appealing graphics and national advertisers on the home page are always safe: “Think again.”

According to the first-ever Spyware Quiz conducted by SiteAdvisor, a staggering 97% of Internet users are just one click away from infecting their PCs with spyware, adware or some other kind of unwanted software. Even though the threat of spyware has received extensive media coverage, just 3% of the 14,000-plus consumers who took SiteAdvisor’s spyware quiz received perfect scores.

The survey challenged Web surfers to test their ability to detect which sites in a number of popular categories were free of adware or spyware. The examples in the quiz are taken from more than three million Web sites which SiteAdvisor has independently tested and rated for Web safety issues like spyware and spam. The first part of the quiz presented users with pairs of sites and asked them to pick which one of the pair was safe. The second part presented a series of file sharing software sites and asked which ones were spyware and adware free. The test has been available since March.

Among the survey’s most sobering conclusions:
Based on their choices, a majority of users (65%) would have been infected with adware or spyware many times over
The presence of national advertisers and a clean, uncluttered design seem to trick respondents into thinking a site is safe
Even users with a high “Spyware IQ” have a nearly 100% chance of visiting a dangerous site during 30 days of typical online searching and browsing activity
Users often miss the fine print that allows a dangerous Web site to claim it installs unwanted software legally

To take McAfee’s SiteAdvisor Spyware quiz, go to http://www.siteadvisor.com/spywarequiz .
http://www.aviransplace.com/index.ph...-spot-spyware/





Mind Games

Intellectual Ventures happily invests in invention, while the tech world trembles in fear. An inside look at Nathan Myhrvold's $400 million IP experiment.
Lisa Lerer

Last January a dozen of the world's most respected scientists gathered in a nondescript conference room at an office building outside of Seattle. They sat around a table cluttered with laptops and papers, snacked on bowls of beef jerky and Chex Mix, and plotted the next technological revolution.

The brainstorming session, practically unintelligible to those with a less-than-Mensa-level IQ, took place at the offices of Intellectual Ventures, a start-up founded in 2000 by former Microsoft Corporation chief technologist Nathan Myhrvold. No intellectual slouch himself, Myhrvold not only led the discussion, but was an eager contributor, sketching out flow charts on a large whiteboard at the front of the room. A handful of patent prosecutors, charged with translating "aha moments" into patent applications, desperately tried to follow along, noting every reference, pulling up obscure theorems on their computers, and snapping photos of Myhrvold's scribblings. Finally, after two days of discussion--over the merits of using new technologies in medical treatments--the group had a breakthrough. Jumping out of his seat, Myhrvold exclaimed, "This is Star Trek-level medicine!"

This is the friendly face of Intellectual Ventures. At the Bellevue, Washington-based company, the science hails from Star Trek but the business plays out like Star Wars. For the past six years, Myhrvold and his Jedi inventors have been brainstorming, developing, and patenting their best ideas. The company doesn't plan on manufacturing, or commercializing, a product. "We are a pure play about invention," says Myhrvold with prototypical passion. "Really big ideas have to come from somewhere."

But at Intellectual Ventures, not all the big ideas come from the Jedis. Another arm of the 100-employee company, headed up by former Intel Corporation in-house counsel Peter Detkin--a Darth Vader figure to many--has been buying up thousands of patents through shell corporations. A $400 million investment from some of the biggest technology companies, including Nokia Corporation, Intel, Apple Computer Inc., Sony Corporation, and Microsoft, funds the shopping spree. (None of these companies would comment for this story.) Some in the IP asset management field estimate that Intellectual Ventures has amassed 3,000-5,000 patents.

As the patent stockpile grows, so does the speculation--and the fear. IP lawyers and tech executives worry that Intellectual Ventures is less interested in changing the world with big ideas, and more focused on becoming an Ÿber-troll, wreaking litigation havoc across industries with its patents. So far the tight-lipped company hasn't revealed much about its plan. "We don't proactively tell our story." says Myhrvold, "There's little in telling our story that benefits us." But this winter Myhrvold seemed to change his mind, inviting IP Law & Business up to Bellevue. Intellectual Ventures promised candor, but delivered something a bit more translucent. While company management filled in some blanks in the Intellectual Ventures story, they refused to discuss financials or reveal details about licensing deals, citing confidentiality agreements. Still, these details may not have been enough to end the speculation. After only a few years in business, Intellectual Ventures may simply be too young to know whether it will turn to the dark side.

For now, Myhrvold's happy to strike back at critics who are crying troll. "They can't quite bring themselves to believe we are doing what we are doing," says Myhrvold. "[Critics think], 'They can't be screwing around with a bunch of ideas for that long,' " he adds with a quick laugh. But that, he says, is exactly what Intellectual Ventures is doing. The company focuses on creating new technologies. The rest--product development, commercialization, manufacturing--will be handled by joint ventures, licensing, and spin-off companies.

Intellectual Ventures represents a natural economic evolution, says Myhrvold. As the United States changes from a manufacturing to an ideas-based economy, making patents more valuable to businesses, a company based solely around IP seems almost inevitable. But coming up with marketable ideas might take ten years, he says. Intellectual Ventures plans on keeping the creditors at bay by becoming the Wal-Mart of the licensing world--a one-stop patent shop. To do that, the company needs a whole lot of intellectual property, says Myhrvold: "IP is a game where scale really matters. One patent could be worth nothing or $1 million. It's hard to plan on the economic value of a single patent." While Myhrvold acknowledges that Intellectual Ventures has "a lot of patents," he shies away from an exact number.

Few besides Myhrvold could lead a company with such a grand focus. The 47-year-old millionaire has had an intellectual life that would delight Da Vinci. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics, M.S. degrees in mathematical economics, geophysics, and space physics. As a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University, Myhrvold researched quantum physics with Stephen Hawking. He's also a published nature photographer and has had his state-of-the-art kitchen--and his recipes--featured in New York Times magazine. Intellectual Ventures' offices reflect his fanatical inquisitiveness: Antique microscopes and typewriters line the halls and a model of a full-scale Tyrannosaurus Rex head greets visitors in the lobby.

But even Da Vinci needed help. Along with cofounder and former Microsoftie Edward Jung, Myhrvold's recruited an all-star staff, including Detkin and Greg Gorder, previously a partner at Perkins Coie, who has more than 100 venture capital financings under his belt. According to a former Intellectual Ventures executive, who agreed to speak anonymously, these four managers get a little under 2 percent of the money they've raised--including the $400 million brought in from the company's investors.

Right now, Intellectual Ventures only has one homegrown patent. In November, the Patent and Trademark Office granted Myhrvold's company a patent for an image sensor that allows greater depth of field in photographs--not exactly a big idea, but as the company is patenting a mix of ideas from "bold and risky," says Myhrvold, "to less ambitious, incremental ones." More are coming: Intellectual Ventures has filed about 400 applications at the PTO, as well as several dozen international applications, says chief patent counsel Casey Tegreene.

Many of the patent applications come out of the company's invention sessions. Intellectual Ventures has held about 60 over the past three years. The majority of participating scientists work for the company as outside consultants, including Leroy Hood, inventor of the DNA sequencer; W. Daniel Hillis, chair of R&D consulting firm Applied Minds, Inc.; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Robert Langer.

After each session, a team of in-house patent lawyers comb through all the notes, papers, digital tapes, and photos from the session looking for promising ideas. The review is detailed and confidential: Lawyers and patent agents spend two to eight hours per hour of tape. To prevent the recordings from being used as evidence in future trials, they're automatically erased after six months. Intellectual Ventures then examines the market potential of the flagged ideas. One session can lead to as many as 80 applications. And only about 10 percent of the patent prosecution work gets outsourced--mostly to solo and small practitioners like Washington, D.C.-based Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox. With 15 in-house patent lawyers, Tegreene says that Intellectual Ventures is one of the biggest patent prosecution firms in the Northwest.

To figure out how to turn patents into profits, Myhrvold hired vice president Brent Frei, founder of Onyx Software Corp. and a former Microsoft programmer analyst. So far, Frei hasn't come up with much that he's willing to discuss. He speaks in generalizations, writing business school-type theories on his office whiteboard. The plan, he says, is to "invent across the spectrum." The hulking 6-foot-7-inch former Dartmouth football player draws a large graph, explaining Intellectual Ventures's business philosophy. At the bottom are emerging markets, like bioinformatics, and at the top, mass markets, areas like wi-fi, software, and cell phones. Presumably, Intellectual Ventures wants to be in all these spaces. "We're trying to get as much technology as possible and then figure out the best way to commercialize," says Frei. "We're not seeking $1 million to hold someone hostage," he says, instinctively answering the troll criticisms. With so much energy devoted to creation, Frei estimates that the first actual Intellectual Ventures-created business won't launch for at least six months to a year. "It's a long-term play," says Myhrvold. "Having patient investors is a key aspect."

Inventors won't have to be too patient. While the creative juices flow, the patent stockpile will pay the bills. "Today it's all about numbers and bulk," says Frei. Intellectual Ventures seeks out key patents in converging areas, like software, semiconductors, wireless, consumer electronics, networking, lasers, biotechnology, and medical devices. For example, says Frei, a company working in online banking also needs security and e-commerce technology. Theoretically, Intellectual Ventures would offer them freedom to operate with a licensing package covering those key areas.

Ideally, says Frei, Intellectual Ventures will collect a huge patent library and, for a fee, license a variety of different technologies. Most licenses will be nonexclusive, an offer made particularly to the investors. Some industries, like biotech, will require more expensive, exclusive licenses. "We reserve the right to be smart," says Myhrvold, describing how Intellectual Ventures will tailor licenses to individual industries.

Of course, a patent licensing strategy only works when backed by the threat of litigation. And the company's critics are only too happy to speculate about that threat. Some have theorized that Intellectual Ventures is just a front for its investors--a shield designed to protect them from patent suits. The tech giants can use Intellectual Ventures to buy small patent portfolios cheaply and pull them off the market, avoiding future litigation. Intellectual Ventures denies that its investors steer its acquisition strategy. "We are not controlled by anyone," says Frei. "We are amassing things that are valuable and going to get a market rate for them."

The former Intellectual Ventures executive claims that his former employer plans to hold entire industries hostage with high licensing fees, and the management team will be rewarded with a cut of the licensing revenue. Any company that refuses to take a license, or invest in Myhrvold's vision, says the executive, will face a lawsuit funded by some seriously deep pockets. Others paint a less nefarious picture, but fear that if Myhrvold's innovation model fails, the company, desperate for cash, will turn into an licensing monster--and no one but those investors will be safe: "If the business model starts to fail, then they're sitting there with a huge portfolio and a relatively straightforward way of getting return by sending letters to a lot of people who aren't investors," says Dewey Ballantine patent litigation partner Anthony Shaw.

"These are the trolls that call other people trolls," says Raymond Niro, name partner at Niro, Scavone, Haller & Niro, who is known for representing clients considered by many to be trolls.

Calling Peter Detkin a troll is like challenging a Grand Master to a quick game of chess. Detkin coined the term in 1999, after Intel was sued for infringing the patents of TechSearch, a small patent-holding company (now a subsidy of Acacia Technologies Group). When Detkin referred to TechSearch as a "patent extortionist," the company sued for libel. So the Intel team swapped in "troll," and an industry swear word was born. In 2001 Detkin told our sibling publication The Recorder "A patent troll is somebody who tries to make a lot of money off a patent that they are not practicing and have no intention of practicing and in most cases never practiced." Intellectual Ventures easily fits the bill.

Over dinner, at a trendy Silicon Valley restaurant a couple of blocks from his home, Detkin makes it clear that he doesn't like the tables being turned. "There's just no clear definition at this point," he says, pausing for a tortilla chip. "A troll has become just a word for 'A plaintiff I don't like.' " Detkin's updated definition: someone who takes a single patent or small portfolio of questionable value and asserts it purely for "nuisance value." That's not Intellectual Ventures, which seeks out quality patents, offering good inventors another avenue to monetize their work, he says. Intellectual Ventures, caring only about patents, has more alternatives to offer inventors than corporations. The company will incorporate royalty sharing, additional payment terms, and clauses that allow inventors to continue to invent into deals.

While not much is known about Detkin's patent shopping, the former Intellectual Ventures executive gives some details. Intellectual Ventures, says the executive, forms a new shell corporation each time it acquires a new patent portfolio. A special computer program names the companies, making them difficult to hunt down. The former executive pointed us to past monikers, including Thalveg Data Flow, Orange Computer, and Maquis Techtrix--all were traceable only to Seattle-area post office boxes [see "Patents Under Cover."].

Using fake companies to conduct real business isn't new to Detkin. "This is a Detkin trademark," says Niro, who represented TechSearch in the Intel litigation. During that case, Detkin created a shell corporation, Maelen Ltd., which offered TechSearch $325,000 for its patent, a price far lower than the millions at stake in the trial. The ploy failed when a judge realized that Maelen was really operating in Intel's interest.

Detkin, who joined Intellectual Ventures in 2002 after spending a week helicopter skiing in backcountry Canada, says that using shell corporations is just good business practice. "When you acquire assets you want to hold them separately," he says. "There's nothing nefarious about it." Companies often buy all kinds of assets under shell corporations to limit potential liability, he says.

Two years ago, Detkin set up a shell corporation called Brissac Electronic Holdings, and, under that name, bid on a portfolio of e-commerce-related patents at an auction in a California bankruptcy court. But Detkin dropped out after bidding crossed the $14.9 million line, and the portfolio went to Novell, Inc. [see "Going Once," October 2005]. "To date, I've found Intellectual Ventures to be professional and not overly aggressive," says James Malackowski, head of IP merchant bank Ocean Tomo, which ran the patent auction. But if Intellectual Ventures starts firing off lawsuits, says Malackowski, it will face a backlash and possibly even legislative regulation.

If that happens, Intellectual Ventures is ready: The company has already set up a lobbying presence in Washington, D.C., and is playing an active role in the legislative debate over patent reform. Myhrvold testified on the issue to the House subcommittee on the courts, the Internet, and intellectual property in April 2005, and last year Detkin submitted a written report on reform to the Antitrust Modernization Committee of the Federal Trade Commission. Both have spoken at industry group meetings and universities across the country. Intellectual Ventures, naturally, argues that patents protect ideas, not just products. Patent holders of all stripes should be able to get a court-ordered injunction, stopping the business operations of an infringing company.

On March 10 Intellectual Ventures, Myhrvold, and 20 inventors filed an amicus brief (written by lawyers from Susman Godfrey) with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting MercExchange, L.L.C. in its patent case against eBay Inc. A lower court ruled that the online auction company's Buy It Now feature infringed patents held by MercExchange, a small holding company. The court awarded damages, but refused to issue an injunction. EBay argues that it shouldn't be subject to an injunction, because MercExchange can't offer a competing service. Intellectual Ventures disagrees: "The right to exclusivity means nothing without injunctive relief," says Intellectual Ventures's filing. Briefs filed by Intellectual Ventures investors Intel, Microsoft, and Nokia took the opposite position, supporting eBay and weaker injunctions. The high court heard the case on March 29, and a decision is expected this month.

For now, patent injunctions are a theoretical matter for Intellectual Ventures, although the company isn't ruling out future patent lawsuits. "In some cases we'll have to sue," says Frei. But a suit is less lucrative, Frei maintains, than a small running royalty on a key patent paid by a lot of companies for ten to 15 years.

Besides, Myhrvold's curiosity (and funds) seem to have limits. "If I sue everyone, I spend all the money on lawyers," says the invention king, exasperated. "I still spend all my money on lawyers because of filing those damn things."
http://www.ipww.com/display.php/file...s/0506/venture





Judge Embeds a Puzzle in ‘Da Vinci Code’ Ruling
Sarah Lyall

Justice Peter Smith's 71-page ruling in the recent "Da Vinci Code" copyright case here is notable for many things: the judge's occasional forays into literary criticism, his snippy remarks about witnesses on both sides, and his fluent knowledge not only of copyright law but also of more esoteric topics like the history of the Knights Templar.

But there is more to it than that. Embedded in the first 13½ pages of the ruling is Justice Smith's very own secret code, one that when partly solved reveals its name: the Smithy Code.

"The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC," the judge writes in the 52nd paragraph of the ruling, alluding to his code and referring to the two works at issue in the case —"The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code" — by their initials. (In the United States, the book is called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail.")

On April 7 Justice Smith ruled that Random House, publisher of the megaselling "Da Vinci Code," did not violate the copyright of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," a nonfiction work published in 1982 that spins an elaborate theory about how Jesus married Mary Magdalene and how their descendants still live in southern France. Two of the book's authors contended that Dan Brown, who wrote "The Da Vinci Code," lifted the central "architecture" of their book and had thus violated their copyright. (The third author of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," Henry Lincoln, did not participate.)

The decision was a resounding slap in the face to the two plaintiffs, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. But it was also an opportunity for Justice Smith to indulge in a flight of judicial and cryptological fancy.

The first clue that a puzzle exists lies in the typeface of the ruling. Most of the document is printed in regular roman letters, the way one would expect. But some letters in the first 13½ pages appear in boldface italics, jarringly, in the midst of all the normal words. Thus, in the first paragraph of the decision, which refers to Mr. Leigh and Mr. Baigent, the "s" in the word "claimants" is italicized and boldfaced.

If you pluck all the italicized letters out of the text, you find that the first 10 spell "Smithy Code," an apparent play on "Da Vinci Code." But the next series of letters, some 30 or so, are a jumble, and this is the mystery that needs to be solved to break the code.

In a brief telephone interview on Wednesday, Justice Smith declined to provide a solution for a puzzled reporter. Nor would he explain how he had put the code in his ruling, or how long it took him to figure out how to do it.

"I can't discuss the judgment until after I retire," he said.

But in a series of brief and ultimately frustrating e-mail messages during the last couple of days, the judge provided a series of intriguing clues. First he said that the different ways codes are broken in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and "The Da Vinci Code" should be considered. The idea for the italicized letters, he suggested, came from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail."

He then suggested moving on to "The Da Vinci Code" and applying one of the code-breaking methods used by its protagonists to solve the mystery of the jumbled letters. "Think mathematics," he wrote at one point. He drew attention to his own entry in Who's Who — in which he lists an interest in the history of Jackie Fisher, an admiral who modernized the British Navy, a possible reason that his e-mail address contains the word "pescator," implying fisherman — and said that the date 2006 was significant.

He even mentioned a page number in "The Da Vinci Code" by way of trying to help. But he declined to go further, saying that "anything else gives it on a plate."

It has been nearly three weeks since he handed down the ruling. Probably disappointingly for Justice Smith, nobody seemed to notice anything unusual about it when it was first released. But he alluded to the possibility that there was something more soon afterward as a throwaway line in an e-mail exchange with a reporter for The New York Times, saying, "Did you find the coded message in the judgment?"

On vacation in Florida, the judge then declined via e-mail to elaborate much further, other than to refer to anomalies in the typeface. "Start with 's' and keep looking up to Page 18 approximately when the fonts stop," he wrote.

Meanwhile, back in London, Daniel Tench, a partner at the law firm Olswang, was reading the ruling and noticed something odd about the type. "At first I thought it was a mistake," he said on Wednesday. "It's not usual practice for a High Court judge to issue a ruling in which he has hidden an encrypted message."

Not knowing if there was anything there, though, Mr. Tench mentioned it to a reporter who compiles a column about legal affairs for The Times of London. After that paper printed a small item quoting him discussing the typeface, Mr. Tench was nonplussed to receive an e-mail message from Justice Smith confirming that yes, there was indeed a code, but that Mr. Tench had missed the first letter "s."

"It is always best to start at paragraph 1!" the judge wrote.

Speaking to the Bloomberg news service late on Wednesday, Justice Smith once again declined to provide any answers. Explaining why he made up his own code, he said it was "a bit of fun."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27code.html





A NEW VOICE

We are a growing coalition of Canadian music creators who share the common goal of having our voices heard about the laws and policies that affect our livelihoods. We are the people who actually create Canadian music. Without us, there would be no music for copyright laws to protect.

Until now, a group of multinational record labels has done most of the talking about what Canadian artists need out of copyright. Record companies and music publishers are not our enemies, but let’s be clear: lobbyists for major labels are looking out for their shareholders, and seldom speak for Canadian artists. Legislative proposals that would facilitate lawsuits against our fans or increase the labels’ control over the enjoyment of music are made not in our names, but on behalf of the labels’ foreign parent companies.

It is the government’s responsibility to protect Canadian artists from exploitation. This requires a firm commitment to programs that support Canadian music talent, and a fresh approach to copyright law reform. Canadian music creators have identified three principles that should guide the copyright reform process.
1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical

Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against our will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in our names. We oppose any copyright reforms that would make it easier for record companies to do this. The government should repeal provisions of the Copyright Act that allow labels to unfairly punish fans who share music for non-commercial purposes with statutory damages of $500 to $20,000 per song.
2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive

Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. The government should not blindly implement decade-old treaties designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers. Laws should protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies. Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice.
3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists

The vast majority of new Canadian music is not promoted by major labels, which focus mostly on foreign artists. The government should use other policy tools to support actual Canadian artists and a thriving musical and cultural scene. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms like the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent.
http://www.musiccreators.ca/

















Until next week,

- js.


















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

April 22nd, April 15th, April 8th, April 1st

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black