Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review – October 14th, '06

[JackSpratts]

Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete
David Pogue

“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,” predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.”

Whoops.

The great e-book fantasy burst shortly after that speech, along with the rest of the dot-com bubble. In 2003, Barnes & Noble shut its e-book store, Palm sold its e-book business to a Web site and most people left the whole idea for dead.

Not everybody, however. Some die-hards at Sony still believe that, properly designed, the e-book has a future. Their solution is the Sony Reader, a small, sleek, portable screen that will be introduced this month in some malls, at Borders bookstores and at sonystyle.com for $350.

E-books may have flopped the first time around, but you can’t deny that they offer some intriguing advantages. You can add dozens of them to your luggage without adding any more weight or bulk. You can adjust the type size. You can search the whole book in seconds, or insert an infinite number of bookmarks. No trees are destroyed to make e-books. And you can read during lunch without having to prop open your novel with a dangerously full can of soda.

If you’re sold on the idea, then you’ll find a lot to like in the Sony Reader — and a few things to dislike.

It’s a handsome half-inch-thick nine-ounce slab, a bit smaller than 5 inches by 7 inches, “bound” in a protective leatherette cover. You can turn pages individually, or jump ahead 10 percent of the book at a time. A “mark” button produces a visual dog-ear on the page corner.

What distinguishes Sony’s effort from all the failed e-book readers of years gone by, however, is the screen.

The Reader employs a remarkable new display technology from a company called E Ink. Sandwiched between layers of plastic film are millions of transparent, nearly microscopic liquid-filled spheres. White and black particles float inside them, as though inside the world’s tiniest snow globes. Depending on how the electrical charge is applied to the plastic film, either the black or white particles rise to the top of the little spheres, forming crisp patterns of black and white.

The result looks like ink on light gray paper. The “ink” is so close to the surface of the screen, it looks as if it’s been printed there. The reading experience is pleasant, natural and nothing like reading a computer screen.

There’s no backlight, however; you can read only by ambient light. Sony would probably argue that this trait makes the Reader even more like a traditional book, but it also means that you can’t read in bed with the lights off, as you can with a laptop or palmtop.

On the other hand, once those microspheres have formed the image of a page, they stay put without consuming any power. Amazingly enough, that means that you don’t have to turn the Reader off, ever. When you’re done for the night, just lay it on your bedside table; the current page remains on the screen without draining any battery power. (According to Sony, one prototype Reader in Japan has been displaying the same page for three years on a single charge.) Every instinct in your body will scream against leaving your gadget turned on all the time, but you’ll get over it.

The only time the Reader uses electricity, in fact, is when you actually turn a page. One charge is good for 7,500 page turns. That’s enough power to get you through “The Da Vinci Code” 16 times (electrical power, anyway). You can recharge the battery either from its power cord or from a computer’s U.S.B. jack.

The Reader can also display digital photos — they look surprisingly good, considering they’re being depicted using only four shades of gray — and play music files (noncopy-protected MP3 or AAC format) through headphones. With a good deal of preparation, you could even read along as the same audio book plays.

There are two ways to load up the Reader. You can copy your texts, photos and music to a memory card (Memory Stick or SD), which goes into a slot on the left side. That’s also how you can expand the Reader’s built-in storage (64 megabytes, enough for 80 books).

The other option is to import files into a somewhat buggy Windows program called Sony Connect. It’s the home base for the Reader in much the way iTunes is the home base for the iPod, although Sony Connect requires you to drag files manually; it doesn’t offer automatic synchronizing with the Reader.

This software is also the gateway to the Reader’s online bookstore. The catalog includes more than 10,000 books from a variety of publishers. Some, like “Freakonomics,” are priced like hardcover editions ($16); others, like “The Devil Wears Prada,” are priced like the paperbacks ($8). If you buy a Reader before the end of the year, Sony will include a coupon for $50 worth of books.

These books are copy-protected, of course. You can read them on a total of six machines, counting Readers that you own and Windows computers. You can’t give away or sell a book when you’re done with it, much less return it to the store.

The Reader also accepts standard plain text files and Word documents (only basic formatting survives), which means that you can help yourself to the 19,000 free, out-of-copyright books at Gutenberg.org. The Windows software can also download Web news stories (RSS feeds), which you can copy to the reader for daily train reading. PDF documents open on the Reader, too, but most are too big for the Reader screen, so the text winds up shrunk down to illegibility.

That’s not the only fine print, though. The Sony Reader has a few kinks to be ironed out.

Like an Etch A Sketch, the Reader’s screen has to wipe away each page before drawing the next one. Unfortunately, the result is a one-second white-black-white blink that quickly becomes annoying.

Tapping the “size” button cycles through three font sizes; holding it down rotates the page 90 degrees. The largest type is soothing to over-40 eyes, but also means that you have to turn pages more often, enduring even more of those distracting double blinks.

Sony has dreamed up some fairly baffling controls, too — not an easy feat on what should be a very simple machine. For example, the next/previous page buttons are at 2 and 8 o’clock on a dime-size desk. A circular control might make sense if it had buttons at all four points of the compass — but only two?

There’s no search function, video or clickable links, either. So much for those key e-book advantages.

Still, Sony got the big stuff right: the feel of the machine, the pleasantness of reading, the clarity of type. It’s not the only company hoping to resurrect the dream of electronic books, either. A spinoff from Royal Philips Electronics, iRex Technologies, sells a “work in progress” called the iLiad, which uses the same E Ink technology but offers wireless networking, a bigger screen, 16 shades of gray and a touch screen for scribbling notes, for $700. And last month, bloggers discovered that Amazon.com is working on an e-book reader (and store) of its own. (Search Google for “Amazon Kindle.”)

Is that it, then? Is the paper book doomed? Was it only a transitional gadget, a placeholder that came between stone tablets and e-books?

Not any time soon. The Sony Reader is an impressive achievement, and an important step toward a convenient alternative to bound books. It will make certain niche groups very happy: gadget freaks, lawyers with massive document stashes, doctors and pilots who check hefty reference texts, high school students with 35-pound backpacks and anyone who likes to read by the pool for 20 weeks at a time.

The masses, however, may continue to prefer the more established portable-document format. Those older reading machines never run out of power, cost about 2 percent as much and don’t break when dropped. You know: p-books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/te...ogue.html?8dpc





Indie Bookstores Fight Chains, Internet
Don Babwin

Adam Brent knew his 11-year-run selling best sellers and new releases was over when mail carriers started walking into his building to deliver books from Amazon.com to the tenants upstairs.

"Literally, they didn't walk downstairs or take the time to make a phone call," Brent said of the neighbors of Brent Books & Cards in the city's business district.

Brent's experience is shared by scores of independent bookstores around the nation that have been knocked out of business by huge chains like Borders Group Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc., massive retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and most recently Internet sites like Amazon.com.

But Brent is also part of a growing number of independent bookstore owners refusing to give up. He's closing his store this month but plans to reopen as a discount book store. Others are luring customers by putting in cafes or opening specialty shops that cater to a specific audience, like mystery lovers. Some are following the lead of public television and selling memberships. Or they're being saved by investors who can't bear the idea of losing these local institutions.

Not only that, but even as 200 to 300 independent book stores close a year, the number of independent book stores opening is creeping up.

"For a long time, from 1992 to 2002, you literally could count on two hands the number of openings," said Oren Teicher, chief operating officer of the American Booksellers Association. "In the last three years there are 60, 70, 80 stores opening" each year, he said.

That's welcome news for an association that's watched its membership plummet from 4,000 to about 1,800 since the early 1990s.

"There are a lot of ways to make money in the business," said Brent, whose father, Chicago bookseller Stuart Brent, closed the city's most famous bookstore after a half century in 1996.

Gary Kleiman, who owns BookBeat in the northern California community of Fairfax, decided the way to do it was to get rid of the clutter and make his store a gathering place.

"We had 10,000 or 13,000 books in the store," said Kleiman. "Now we have maybe 1,500."

Last fall, Kleiman gave all but a handful of his used books to charity. Then he tore down shelves and in their place put tables and chairs and a small stage for live performances. He started offering free wireless Internet access. And to help convince people to take advantage of it all he got a beer and wine license.

As for the books, most of the ones left are new and they're confined to the perimeter walls. While he's selling about the same number of books as he used to, new books are selling better. And his store has a lot more customers - eating, drinking and listening to music - than he did before. About 60 percent of the store's profits come from the cafe.

Kleiman's drastic move after six years of business is in large part the result two things he came to understand about the Internet.

The first was that there were just too many used books online and they were just too cheap - far cheaper than he could afford to sell them.

The second was that for all the talk about the speed of ordering books online, he could be faster.

"I can order today and they will be here tomorrow," he said - one reason customers choose him instead of the Internet.

Some bookstores have survived by giving their customers what they say chain stores often do not: Employees who know what they're talking about.

"You can discuss books with us. We are all readers," said Arlene Lynes, who opened Read Between the Lynes in Woodstock, Ill., in 2005. "To me, that's what's bringing people back."

Nowhere is the ability to discuss books more important than in mystery book stores. Jim Huang, who opened The Mystery Company in Carmel, Ind., said a key to the store's success since it opened about 3 1/2 years ago was recognizing that when it comes to mystery books, customers don't just want a place to buy them, they want a place to talk about them.

"We do everything we can think of to get readers to talk," said Huang, whose store has discussion groups, readings by authors and other events.

Huang also knows that when his customers find authors they like they want to read every one of their books - some of which have long since gone out of print.

That was obvious when he saw a beat up paperback copy of Kate Flora's "Chosen For Death," the first in a mystery series, going for $30 on the Internet.

Huang approached Flora about publishing the out-of-print book and now it is one of four fiction titles he publishes that are each the first in a series.

"That's where mystery readers want to start reading," he said.

Some bookstores have benefited from their ties to the community. Just this year, 14 investors got out their checkbooks and bought Brazos Bookstore in Houston, an institution for more than 30 years, after the owner announced that he would close it or sell it to take another job.

"There was an uprising of people in the community saying, 'We are not going to let this happen,'" said Jane Moser, the store's manager, who said that when news of the original 14 spread, 11 more joined them.

In Menlo Park, Calif., community members also came forward with funding when Kepler's Books closed in August of 2005. Kepler's reopened that October, thanks to more than $500,000 from 24 investors, and soon created a membership program.

About 2,000 people joined, pumping another $196,000 into the business, said Clark Kepler, whose father founded the store in 1955.

In the Bay Area, at least three other bookstores have implemented their own membership programs, said Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. Depending on the store and how much people give, they receive book bags, discount coupons, and invitations to members-only author receptions.

Landon makes it clear, though, that it's not gifts, coupons or special events that is prompting people to buy these memberships.

"It's like with the symphony or a theater company in town," he said. "You are joining but you are really donating. You are really doing it because you want that (store) to be part of the community."

Encouraged as they are by some success stories around the country, book store owners note that the brutal business has claimed some of the nation's most famous independent book stores, including Cody's Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Calif., and WordsWorth Books on Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. Most recently, Coliseum Books, a famed New York bookstore, announced it was closing for the second time in its 30-year history - this time for good.

Even Kepler's, which is celebrating the one-year anniversary of its reopening, serves as a reminder that independent bookstores remain threatened.

While all the publicity helped prompt more people to buy books from the store, sales have fallen back to where they were before the store closed last year, Kepler said.

"We need to have our loyal shoppers shop more frequently with us," he said. "We need to learn how to fill a need and not just be a soft spot in people's hearts."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-08-18-44-36





Not your typical bug hunt

A Challenge for Exterminators
John Markoff

On a whiteboard in a windowless Microsoft conference room here, an elegant curve drawn by a software-testing engineer captures both five years of frustration and more recent progress.

The principle behind the curve — that 80 percent of the consequences come from 20 percent of the causes — is rooted in a 19th-century observation about the distribution of wealth. But it also illustrates the challenge for the builders of the next generation of Windows and Office, the world’s largest-selling software packages.

As they scramble to get the programs to users by the end of the year, the equation is a simple one: making software reliable for most personal computer users is relatively easy; it is another matter, in a PC universe with tens of thousands of peripherals and software applications, to defeat the remaining bugs that cause significant problems for some users.

The effort to overhaul the Windows operating system, originally code-named Longhorn and since renamed Vista, was meant to offer a transformation to a new software foundation. But several ambitious initiatives failed to materialize in time, and the project started over from scratch three years ago. The result is more an evolutionary shift, focusing on visual modernization and ease of use.

Still, the company is within a month of completing work on new versions of both Windows and Office, having apparently overcome technical hurdles that as recently as August seemed to signal a quagmire.

“It looked bleak; it was a slog, but in the end this was a technical problem, and there was a turning point,” said Bharat Shyam, 37, a computer scientist who is director of Windows program management. “We’ve confounded the analysts and the press.”

As October arrived, a vote of confidence came from Wall Street when a Goldman Sachs analyst, Richard G. Sherlund, wrote that he expected the product to be introduced on time. “The Vista development organization has made rapid progress delivering improvements to Vista’s performance, reliability, and compatibility,” he said.

[On Friday, the company released what it said would be the final test version of Vista, named Release Candidate 2. If the response from testers is positive, the software will go into production by the end of the month.]

The debugging process has been urgent, with Microsoft scheduled to introduce Windows Vista and Office 2007 to corporate customers by the end of the year, and to home users early next year.

This coordinated introduction is a multibillion-dollar proposition for Microsoft, which has Windows running on some 845 million computers worldwide and Office on more than 450 million, according to the market research firm Gartner.

Indeed, it was the vast scale of the Windows testing program that saved the software development projects. Over the summer, the company began an extraordinary bug-tracking effort, abetted by volunteers and corporate partners who ran free copies of both Windows and Office designed to send data detailing each crash back to Microsoft computers.

The Office package, for example, has been tested by more than 3.5 million users; last month alone, more than 700,000 PC’s were running the software, generating more than 46 million separate work sessions. At Microsoft, 53,000 employee computers are running test versions.

Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft.

Such data supplements the company’s own testing in a center for Office referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less interesting name — Windows Test Technologies.)

This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly while looking for errors.

The testing effort for Windows Vista has been led by Mario Garzia, Microsoft’s director of Windows reliability. A former Bell Labs software engineer, Mr. Garzia says the complexity of the Vista and Office effort dwarfs anything he undertook for the nation’s telephone network.

“Everything is easy if you do it for a limited number of things,” he said. “When I was at Bell Labs, the problems were complex, but nothing compared to this.”

The test data from the second beta release of Vista alone generated 5.5 petabytes of information — the equivalent of the storage capacity of 690,000 home PC’s.

The resulting complexity can be seen in the dance that has gone on in recent months between Microsoft’s designers and its partners, who have been tailoring software and hardware to work with Vista.

On Sept. 1, for example, Microsoft released a version of Vista called Release Candidate 1 to a large group of outside testers, hoping to take advantage of their free time over the Labor Day weekend.

Immediately, Mr. Garzia recalled, a wave of crash data fed back to Microsoft disclosed a newly introduced bug that had been created by incompatibility with a software module (referred to as a device driver) written by a partner company.

That company was alerted to the problem, and a remedy was transmitted directly to the testers’ computers over the Internet within four days — a vast improvement in the gap between detection and repair, he said.

Despite the impending commercial arrival of the two software projects — which between them have involved the labors of more than 5,000 programmers and testers here — there is still uncertainty in the industry about how long it will take for Vista in particular to gain acceptance.

“We’ve been impressed with the progress, and they deserve a lot of credit,” said David Smith, a Gartner vice president, but that does not mean that Windows Vista will soon be in standard workplace use. Its deployment on a significant scale will not begin at most companies until 2008, Mr. Smith said.

Microsoft executives contend that such calculations are overly conservative, and they have been making the case that the use of Vista could pay for itself in saved labor and related costs in less than a year.

A more fundamental question for the industry is whether Vista will represent a new era for computing or be the last great push of the current epoch.

While Microsoft’s co-founder and chairman, Bill Gates, was able to turn his company abruptly in the mid-1990’s to respond to the challenge posed by Netscape, Microsoft has proved less effective in blunting a similar challenge to its dominance from Google.

Moreover, the rise of Google and other companies moving toward Internet-based software development raises doubts about the value of giant efforts like Windows and Office, which can take more than five years.

Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, has said he believes that the rise of advertising-supported Web services will increasingly undercut Microsoft’s software development model — using a proprietary software development system and selling shrink-wrapped applications.

In an internal company memo titled “Don’t Bet Against the Internet,” he wrote recently, “Almost no pure PC software companies are left (all is on the Internet), most proprietary standards (I’m thinking of Exchange e-mail and file systems protocols from Microsoft) are under attack from open protocols gaining share rapidly on the Internet.”

The larger struggle has had little influence on Ben Canning, who began his career at Microsoft testing software nine years ago after getting a graduate degree in philosophy from Reed College.

Rather, his days are consumed with working his way down that whiteboard curve.

Mr. Canning acknowledges that his degree prepared him for little beyond teaching philosophy — with the possible exception of finding and killing bugs in software, because philosophers are trained to analyze and solve particularly hard logical problems. For the last few months, his mind has been focused on the hard problems at the end of the curve.

“If you look at the mean time to crash for most Office customers, it’s very high,” he said. “There is a small minority that crash all the time, and they hate us, and we want to help.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/te...y/09vista.html





Vista to Take a Cue from Budget Windows
Dawn Kawamoto

Microsoft is sprinkling some features from Windows XP Starter Edition into Windows Vista, the next generation of its operating system.

The software maker plans to take the video help feature in XP Starter, which is geared to PC users in emerging markets, and put it into all versions of Vista, said Mike Wickstrand, a director for Windows Starter at Microsoft.

"This is 'trickle-up' innovation," Wickstrand said, noting that in most cases, technologies are geared toward early adopters and heavy users. Only later do they "trickle down" to beginning users, he said.

XP Starter is only available loaded onto a computer for purchase. The Vista Starter version is expected to be released early next year, when all versions of the long-awaited Vista update are supposed to hit the market.

The XP version, which debuted in November 2004 and has reached more than a million families in emerging markets, is offered in 25 languages. When Vista Starter is launched, that will be expanded to 79 languages.

"We wanted to reach deeper into markets that we previously didn't have the ability to touch," Wickstrand said.

Another addition to Vista Starter is the capability to open a limitless number of windows. In the XP version, people are restricted to only three windows at a time. However, both XP Starter and the update will continue to limit the number of programs that can run simultaneously to three.
http://news.com.com/Vista+to+take+a+...3-6123720.html





Lowdown: A Farewell to Gossip
David Carr

Psssst. Which New York gossip columnist, long rumored to be on the bubble, has penned his last item as of today?

Lloyd Grove has never been much for blind items. The man behind Lowdown, a five-day-a-week gossip column for The Daily News in New York, was sitting last week at a corner table at Pastis to confirm the rumor that started the day he got the job three years ago: the column has ended, along with his lucrative contract (an unnewspaperlike $300,000 a year, some said).

“Gossip columns are not federal judgeships,” he said. “I lasted three years and six weeks, which is a lot longer than many thought.”

A former writer of the Reliable Sources column in The Washington Post, Mr. Grove was hired by Mortimer B. Zuckerman, publisher of The Daily News, to countervail the dominance of Page Six, the New York Post’s 30-year-old corner on the tatty and tantalizing.

“I was a total impulse buy,” Mr. Grove said. “I was standing at the Miramax party at the Oscars and Mort was there with one of Michael Douglas’s ex-wives, and he pulled me aside and said, ‘Have you considered plying your trade in New York?’ ”

The answer was yes, and he began the column with much fanfare — his arrival was trumpeted in a Page 1 article in The New York Times — and a fair amount of Manhattan skepticism.

Many thought the trip from the relatively civilized environment of Washington whispers to the mosh pit of New York gossip would leave him bloodied. Before he started, one Page Six reporter said, “We will not rest until we send you back to Washington on a stretcher.” That was from Jared Paul Stern, who was carried off the field first after being accused of trying to blackmail Ronald W. Burkle. Mr. Grove at least outlasted him.

“This stuff is not for sissies, not for the faint of heart,” Mr. Grove said.

In New York, Mr. Grove stood out at parties, not just for his height (6 foot 3) but also for his abashed, embarrassed-to-be-here presence. He often conceded he did not know or care to learn the names of many of the A- and B-listers who are the mother’s milk of the industry. He worked his beat, but the juiciest bits of gossip go to the meat-eaters, the ones who are willing to fight for every scrap, true or not.

“My strong suit is not canoodling front,” he said. “I am for the most part completely incurious about Lindsay Lohan and her love life, although I’ve written my share about it.”

Mr. Grove did get his share of scoops, including the departure of Neal Shapiro, then president of NBC news, and a report on a novel commissioned by the drug industry to frighten people on the perils of taking cheap imported drugs. But he received more attention for announcing a ban on any mention of Paris Hilton in his column, which would be like The Times deciding one day not to cover the State Department.

“It was a craven play for attention and it worked; I got my only shot on the ‘Today’ show,” he said, but he could not resist a bit of self-mockery by adding: “It’s basically what I have been working toward for my whole life.”

Not one for regrets, he did allow that he had probably written more items on Foxy Brown than common sense would dictate. He knows that his absence will be most fondly felt not by those he afflicted — Mr. Grove generally had little appetite for drawing real blood — but by those he competed with.

“New York is not Washington, obviously,” he said. “There are about 20 different major industries that are headquartered here, and I am still on a New York learning curve. It takes time, learning about them, writing about them, so I am still on a learning curve, but it is not as steep as it once was.”

He mentions that he will remain on that curve.

“The end of my gossip column in The Daily News is not the end of my presence in New York,” he said. “I have discovered in the last few weeks, oddly enough, that I am still employable. I will be doing something that is multimedia, with components of Internet and television and print media.”

Mr. Grove suggested several times during our conversation that he was grateful to Mr. Zuckerman for the opportunity and pointed out that the publisher never once interfered with the content of his column, even if his friends were maimed in an item.

But he also suggested that Mr. Zuckerman’s throwdown with The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s company, the News Corporation, represents a difficult, perhaps insurmountable challenge. The reporting period for circulation has just ended, and The Daily News’s claim to being the No. 1 tabloid in the city could come under additional pressure.

“The Daily News and U.S. News are extras for him. Very serious, very expensive hobbies for Mort. He is not a dilettante, but it’s not why he is a billionaire,” Mr. Grove said. “Murdoch has ink running through his veins. The guy is the king of all media. And he is happy to own a newspaper in New York that loses money hand over fist in a way that Mort would never tolerate.”

Like the newspaper he worked for, Mr. Grove often found himself in conflict with modern tabloid imperatives of aggression, point of view and the naked pursuit of the tawdriest aspects of human behavior. Raised in Greenwich, Conn., and educated at Yale, Mr. Grove seemed to subscribe to the Oscar Wilde school of scandal, which suggested that gossip had its charms, but “scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”

In fact, good gossips are a surprisingly moralistic bunch, tut-tutting about all manner of human foible and fakery. Mr. Grove never seemed good at feigning or generating moral outrage, while few at The New York Post seemed so conflicted about their mission. Mr. Grove’s strengths — he is a serious newsman and a droll writer — along with his sometimes indifferent relationship to his chosen subject, proved to be a handicap. It’s hard to write down salacious items when one of your hands is occupied with holding your nose.

He does think that one contribution to the fight, however, will linger.

“Ever since I banned Paris Hilton, I haven’t heard a thing about her,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/bu...ia/09carr.html





Apple’s Options Disclosures Fail to Resolve Questions
Laurie J. Flynn

Apple Computer moved last week to answer questions about its problems with stock options, but in the end it left plenty unanswered, including the role played by Fred D. Anderson, who resigned Wednesday from the company’s board.

Mr. Anderson resigned after a special committee of directors disclosed that it had found irregularities with stock option grants made between 1997 and 2002, a period when he served as chief financial officer. The company said only that Mr. Anderson believed that it was “in Apple’s best interests” that he leave the board.

Mr. Anderson was once a trusted adviser to Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, and played an important role in the company’s financial turnaround. Analysts said he appeared to be paying the price for the problems with Apple’s stock options grants even through his degree of control over the program was unclear.

“I would say that Jobs and the Apple board threw Fred under the bus to keep it from hitting them,” said Lynn E. Turner, a former chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission and a managing director at Glass, Lewis & Company, which advises institutional investors on corporate governance.

Mr. Anderson, who declined to be interviewed, is also a board member at eBay, and a managing director at Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that has raised nearly $2 billion for investments in media and entertainment companies.

Apple’s board began looking into options practices in June, joining more than 100 other companies, including many in the technology industry, that were investigating the backdating of stock options to inflate their value.

Apple said last week that Mr. Jobs knew of some instances of backdating of options, though he did not benefit from those grants. The committee cleared all current employees, including Mr. Jobs, of any impropriety.

The absence of details in the company’s announcement left it unclear how the instances of backdating occurred, or what role Mr. Anderson or the Apple board may have played. Some Wall Street analysts expressed confidence that the internal investigation would put an end to concerns that Mr. Jobs might be in jeopardy. But the announcement is not likely to be the last word on Apple’s options problems, analysts said.

Charles M. Elson, the director of the Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, said that the board’s conclusions, while interesting, held no real authority. “In the end, it will be up to the S.E.C. to decide,” he said.

Federal prosecutors were briefed last Tuesday on the Apple board’s findings by legal representatives for the company, according to a person who had been briefed on the situation. It is unclear who the prosecutors are focusing on, or whether Mr. Jobs is a member of that group.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., said its review found that backdated options were granted on 15 dates.

“You don’t know what the scope of the problem really is,” said Brian Foley, an independent compensation consultant in White Plains. “They told you the number of grant dates, but not the number of grants. They told you that he was in the know on a few instances, but those could be a huge number of shares.”

The company reiterated that it expected to restate its financial results to account for the extra compensation expense related to the options. Mr. Foley questioned why the company had not yet quantified the potential impact for investors.

“After three months, you don’t know what the number is,” he said. “Come on.”

Apple said its investigation also “raised serious concerns” about the activities of two other former Apple officers, but a company statement released last week did not name them. An Apple spokesman declined to comment further on Friday.

Apple’s shares closed at $74.22 on Friday, down $1.16 from their closing price on Wednesday, before the news was announced.

In the backdating of stock options, a company typically selects a grant date when its stock price was lower, increasing the value of the options for employees who sell them later for a higher price.

Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/te...y/09apple.html





After Big Flops, Warner Hopes for ‘Sleeper’ Hit in Smaller Films
Laura M. Holson

When the romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally” was released in July 1989, it made just $1.1 million during its opening weekend. But Alan F. Horn, whose film company produced the movie, was confident that, given time, it could be a hit.

He was right. The movie earned $93 million at the domestic box office that summer.

“If it was today, the headline in Variety would have been ‘When Harry Met Disaster,’ ” Mr. Horn said in an interview. “They would have killed us after that first weekend and I don’t think we would have had a chance to build that movie. In today’s climate it wouldn’t have had a chance to breathe.”

In 2006, Mr. Horn, who is now president of Warner Brothers Entertainment, may be finding it hard to breathe himself. Last year Warner was the No. 1 studio at the domestic box office, bringing in $1.38 billion by bankrolling big-budget blockbusters like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Batman Begins.” But the same strategy this summer resulted in a string of expensive duds, like “Lady in the Water,” “The Ant Bully” and a remake of the ocean liner disaster film “The Poseidon Adventure” that sank faster than the ship itself.

As a result, Mr. Horn must now hope that one of a cadre of smaller, riskier films, like “The Departed,” “Blood Diamond” and “The Fountain,” will prove to be a sleeper hit like “When Harry Met Sally” and help pull Warner out of its No. 6 spot for the year so far.

Warner’s recent tumble in the studio rankings is a cautionary tale for Hollywood. As the studios begin to shrink their slates and make fewer movies, they are increasing their reliance on the big, expensive extravaganzas. Sometimes they succeed, as “Batman Begins” and the “Harry Potter” movies have for Warner, or as “Pirates of the Caribbean” did for the Walt Disney Company.

But the lackluster results for Warner’s blockbusters this summer show that the large tentpole features, like “Poseidon,” which cost more than $150 million to make but brought in only $60 million domestically, are not sure things, after all. And when they fail, they put more pressure on smaller films to open big.

“A safe bet isn’t safe at all these days. When you saw ‘Poseidon’ on paper, it looked safe. It wasn’t safe at all,” Mr. Horn said. “Is ‘The Departed’ safe? It’s got a great cast. Is ‘Harry Potter’ safe? It’s safe until we blow a movie and then the public will be furious. Categorically, there is no safe movie anymore.”

So far, Mr. Horn said, the summer’s poor showing has not resulted in any additional pressure from Time Warner’s corporate headquarters in New York. The only inquiries he has gotten questioning the studio’s strategy, he said, were from reporters.

But that is not to say that changes are not afoot on the Warner lot. Legendary Pictures, Warner’s financial partner for some of the studio’s most noticeable summer duds, including “Lady in the Water” and the animated “The Ant Bully,” is flexing its might, pressuring Warner to cut marketing costs.

“Our attitude has been, ‘Are we asking ourselves as a group how far we can push the envelope?’ ” asked Thomas Tull, chief executive of Legendary, which has a five-year, $600 million deal with Warner to co-finance and co-produce movies. In particular Mr. Tull has questioned whether Warner should spend as much on billboard and newspaper advertising, particularly in Los Angeles, where ads are sometimes bought just to appease the vanity of movie stars.

“The first thing is acknowledging we should have a discussion,” said Mr. Tull. “It may seem like a paltry $2 million but this is money we need to make up.”

Dawn Taubin, president of domestic marketing for Warner Brothers Pictures, said she met twice monthly with Legendary executives to discuss coming campaigns. “Nobody said, ‘Cut your budget by 10 percent,’ ” she said, adding that all campaigns were scrutinized case by case. “Still, there is always a dialogue about ‘Can you spend less?’ ”

For Warner, the summer got off on the wrong foot, with the release of “Superman Returns.” Since becoming president of production in 2002, Jeff Robinov has successfully paired offbeat directors with mainstream projects. Tim Burton, for instance, was not an obvious choice to direct “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” nor was Johnny Depp an obvious star. Christopher Nolan had never directed a costly event film before “Batman Begins.” And Alfonso Cuarón, the Mexican director of the very adult “Y Tu Mamá También” was a novel pick to direct the third “Harry Potter” released in 2004.

“They are all a little bit different,” Mr. Robinov said of the movies. “But the sensibilities are down the middle.”

By contrast, “Lady in the Water,” the spooky thriller directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and the animated “The Ant Bully,” produced by Tom Hanks, appeared to be conventional choices. “Superman Returns,” too, seemed safe from the start.

The director, Bryan Singer, had already proved his mettle in the action comic book genre, having directed the first two “X-Men” movies. There was pent-up interest among fans. Even the film’s star, Brandon Routh, was a look-alike of Christopher Reeve, who embodied Clark Kent more than two decades ago.

But critics complained that the movie was too long and lacked the action necessary to attract its core young male audience. And at a gathering of comic book fans last summer, Mr. Singer complained about the movie’s marketing.

Studio executives say it will make a profit. But in bringing in only $389 million at the worldwide box office, “Superman Returns” failed to live up to prerelease expectations.

“If Superman had done twice what it did, the whole summer would have looked different,” said Mr. Robinov. “It’s as much about perception as reality. Even with the failure of a movie like ‘Poseidon,’ we’ve had much smaller movies we’ve lost as much on.”

Mr. Horn agreed. “I’ve seen movies that cost $15 million lose as much as $20 million,” he said. “But when event movies don’t perform well, it is very high profile.”

Mr. Horn said Warner Brothers had no plans to alter its strategy. Other studios have entered the franchise film business, he said, suggesting that Warner’s decision was a sound one. Still, Warner will make fewer movies in the future — between 18 and 22 films a year — and will focus even more on blockbusters with worldwide appeal. (Think more “Harry Potter,” less “Beerfest.”)

“This is an aircraft carrier, not a riverboat,” said Mr. Horn.

Still Mr. Horn is more than happy to leave the summer behind him. And, in a welcome twist, early Oscar buzz is already swirling around two Warner movies, “The Departed,” a crime boss thriller directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, and “Blood Diamond,” also featuring Mr. DiCaprio.

“I don’t think they are obviously commercial films but I believe they are really good films,” said Mr. Robinov.

Some critics have called “The Departed” Mr. Scorsese’s best movie in years, outshining “Gangs of New York” and 2004’s “The Aviator.” “Blood Diamond,” a thriller about the diamond trade, set in Sierra Leone in the 1990’s, also is seen as promising, largely because of Mr. DiCaprio’s performance. Both, though, are blood-soaked and violent, which limits the audience.

Of Warner’s other Oscar hopefuls, it is hard to predict. George Clooney, usually a favorite with audiences, will star in “The Good German,” a black-and-white film directed by his former producing partner Steven Soderbergh. “The Fountain,” directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Hugh Jackman, is so far getting mixed reviews from those who have seen it.

The critical raves for “The Departed” have Mr. Horn cautiously optimistic. “Because it’s so unique it might get to a place where it as commercial as it can be,” said Mr. Horn.

“The Departed” brought in $27 million at the domestic box office this weekend, Mr. Scorsese’s best opening ever, and a good start. No doubt to Warner’s relief, it was better than the debut of “When Harry Met Sally.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/bu.../09warner.html





Hollywood Continues its Attack on Consumers
Gary Bourgeault

Hollywood is increasingly using one old technique that industries that can no longer compete do: they get laws passed to stifle the competition.

In this case I'm talking about TiVo's (TIVO) new Series3 HD model. It does have one strength that TV watchers will really like - the ability to record high definition programs.

Now the bad news: It won't come with TiVoToGo. For those of you that don't TiVo, TiVoToGo enables consumers to record programs and then transfer them to other devices or burn them to DVDs.

Concerning using the law, with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress in 1998, it restricts companies from building products that receive digital content without DRM restrictions in place. A company must get permission to build it.

Guess who runs the so-called nonprofit organization that makes those decisions? The cable companies! The organization called Cable Research Laboratories, or CableLabs has the decision-making power to decide these issues.

Here's the bottom line in this: Hollywood can no longer compete.

Derek Slater, a rep for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that examines the digital rights of consumers, says, "Hollywood has continually tried to rein in consumer freedom through its support of more restrictive, less useful devices, I am sure that TiVo is working with CableLabs to get some sort of feature approved, but it will not be the TiVoToGo that consumers have known and loved."

CableLabs says that TiVo hasn't brought anything to them to look at. The point is that they shouldn't have to do it in the first place.

A spokesman for TiVo said, "...We are currently working with CableLabs on several technologies centered around moving content around the home environment."

With the consumer increasingly becoming the decider of what and how they want to consumer media, for Hollywood to continually stand in the way and restrict their wishes is a boot-in-the-face to people. If they can't offer the product and means of transmission that consumers want, then they need to step aside and get out of the way of those that do.
http://www.bizofshowbiz.com/2006/10/...ts_attack.html





Blu-Ray Disc Lurches to 50GB
The Hollywood Reporter

Consumers will have access to the first 50GB Blu-ray disc, which boasts twice the capacity of a regular disc, when Sony Pictures releases the Adam Sandler comedy "Click" on Tuesday.

The dual-layer disc promises to deliver the interactivity and extras that backers of the next-generation, high-definition optical-disc format had been promising since the first movies were released in the format in June. Sony made the announcement Friday at the High Def 101 Conference in Los Angeles.

"Click" is one of three 50GB Blu-ray discs in the studio's pipeline. The others are Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down," coming Nov. 14, and "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," due Dec. 12.

Only two other studios have announced 50GB discs: 20th Century Fox is releasing "Kingdom of Heaven" on Nov. 14, and Lionsgate is preparing a dual-layer Blu-ray Disc of "The Descent" for a December release. Warner Bros. is expected to announce that its next wave of Blu-ray titles, hitting stores Oct. 31, will include one or more dual-layer discs.

Because of its greater capacity, the Blu-ray disc of "Click" will include all the bonus features from the DVD, in high-definition, as well as uncompressed PCM (pulse code modulation) audio.

Bonus features include an audio commentary with star Adam Sandler, director Frank Coraci, executive producer Tim Herlihy and writer Steve Koren; four deleted scenes; and seven short features, including a documentary on the film's special effects and a "Director's Take."

"Black Hawk" will be the first title to feature Sony's new "Blu-Wizard" playlist technology, which lets viewers customize the way they watch special features. Extras include an audio commentary with author Mark Bowden, screenwriter Ken Nolan, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Scott and U.S. Special Forces Veterans '93 as well as six making-of documentaries exploring various aspects of the movie's production.

"Talladega" comes with nine deleted and extended scenes, all in high-definition; an audio commentary with director Adam McKay and others; bonus race footage; a gag reel; three interviews; "Ricky & Cal" commercials and PSAs; a short feature on Will Ferrell returning to Talladega; and various other extras.

Meanwhile, Warner has slashed its projections for HD DVD and Blu-ray disc sales projections because of a slower-than-expected rollout of hardware and software.

As of Sept. 30, consumers had spent $25 million on the three HD players in the market--two HD DVD units from Toshiba, priced at $499 and $799, and one Blu-ray disc player, from Samsung, priced at $999--and $5 million on software, said Steve Nickerson, senior vice president of market management at Warner Home Video.

But with a second Blu-ray player from Panasonic now on the market and players from Philips, Sony and Pioneer expected within a month--as well as two next-generation HD-DVD players from Toshiba--spending should increase significantly, he said.

Warner projects that by year's end, consumers will have spent $750 million on hardware and $150 million on software for total spending of $900 million. Earlier in the year, the studio was projecting sales of $1.1 billion to $2.2 billion.

Still, Nickerson said, the studio believes the two high-definition disc formats will catch on with the public even faster than DVD because all three platforms for viewing--set-top, computer and video game console--are available in the first year. With DVD, the first computers equipped with DVD drives shipped in late 1998, more than a year after the format launched, while the first game console that could play DVDs was the PlayStation 2, which launched in November 2000.

By year's end, Nickerson said, WHV projects that there will be 1.7 million high-definition playback devices in consumer homes: 500,000 dedicated HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc set-top players, 1 million game consoles (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) and 200,000 computers with high-definition disc drives.
http://news.com.com/Blu-ray+disc+lur...3-6123837.html





The Long Zoom
Steven Johnson

Most eras have distinct “ways of seeing” that end up defining the period in retrospect: the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s. Our own defining view is what you might call the long zoom: the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity. And this is not just a way of seeing but also a way of thinking: moving conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics — and back again.

It is, by any measure, a difficult way of thinking, in part because our brains did not evolve tools to perceive or intuitively understand the scales of microbes or galaxies. You can catch glimpses of the long zoom in special-effects sequences, but to understand the connections between those different scales, to understand our place in the universe of the very large and the very small, you have to take another way in. To date, books and documentaries have done the best job of making the long zoom meaningful to mass audiences, starting with Charles and Ray Eames's proto-long-zoom “Powers of Ten” documentary of the 70’s, which took the viewer from the outer cosmos to the atoms spinning in the hand of a man lying by the lake in Chicago. But a decade or two from now, when we look back at this period, it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. It will be a computer game.

The designer of the game happens to be both the most famous and most critically acclaimed designer in the young medium’s history: Will Wright, the 46-year-old creator of the blockbuster hits SimCity and the Sims. When I visited with Wright recently, he was sitting in a greenhouselike office on the roof of an anonymous-looking complex in Emeryville, Calif., a few miles west of Oakland, where his studio is based. For the first few minutes of our meeting, Wright was having trouble with the atmosphere of the game, which is called Spore. He was trying to explain how some players will be able to create entire galaxies populated by artificial life forms when the game is introduced sometime late next year. He had pulled up the highest level of Spore — where the player gets to create and colonize a new planet — to demonstrate the way in which the game simulates the complex dynamics of ecosystems and food webs. But before he could colonize the planet, he had to cultivate an environment hospitable to life by heating up the surface or cooling it down and by adding moisture. Unfortunately, Spore’s planetary simulator —- like our own atmosphere — is vulnerable to the inconvenient truths of runaway feedback loops; as Wright added a little heat to his planet, it quickly spiraled into a molten fireball. And so our conversation lurched to a halt as Wright tried to get the right balance.

“O.K., now we’re finally cooling off,” he said, clicking furiously on his computer screen. “The temperature’s going down, so we can get more water in here. Oh, now we’ve got way too much atmosphere.” While adjusting the planet, he paused long enough to say: “It’s kind of like that labyrinth game where you’re rolling the ball around the maze, trying to drop it in the hole. Except we’ve got these inertial effects, where your planet starts heating up, and you’re trying to slow it down, but you get these runaway greenhouse effects.” He turned back to the screen. “O.K., our temperature’s pretty good; our atmosphere’s pretty good. Now let’s see if we can add water.”

This atmospheric balancing act is emblematic of Wright’s whole career: hitting that elusive sweet spot between difficulty and accessibility, between highbrow concepts and lowbrow diversion. If he can get the atmosphere-building tool to work, it could be both an addictive game-play element and, at the same time, a hands-on lesson in the dynamics of atmospheric systems. The challenge here is, ultimately, a smaller version of the larger challenge that faces Spore. No one doubts that the game will be the most ambitious work in the history of this new medium, whenever it is released. But for it to succeed as a game, it can’t just be complex. It also has to be fun.

If anyone can pull it off, it’s Will Wright. This is the guy who made the urban planning simulation SimCity into one of the all-time top-selling games in history. There is probably no one alive who has a comparable track record of combining arcane scientific theories and compulsively addictive entertainment.

But even Wright hasn’t tried to simulate an entire universe before.

I got a first glimpse of Spore six years ago, when I visited Wright to talk to him about the Sims Online, the networked version of the massive international hit, the Sims. We talked about the Sims Online and his general design philosophy for an hour or so, and then he cut off our conversation abruptly and said, “Let me show you something else that I’m really excited about — but you can’t write about it yet.” He then proceeded to show me a sequence of animations that looked, to my eyes at least, like the trip-out special-effects sequence at the end of “2001.” I had no idea what I was even looking at. It wasn’t at all clear where the game was or if it was a game at all.

Spore has progressed mightily over the past six years — an eternity in game-development time — though an official start date has yet to be set by its producer, Electronic Arts, the world’s largest game maker. “What you’re doing in Spore is layer by layer creating an entire world that at the end of the day is entirely yours: the creatures, the vehicles, the cities, the planets,” Wright explained. Those layers map onto different spatial scales that you advance through as you play: cell, creature, tribe, city, civilization and space. (As in most traditional games, once you have completed a level, you can always go back to it. A skilled gamer might be able to reach the highest level after 30 hours of play, but like all of Wright’s creations, the game has no definite ending.) As you begin playing Spore, you take on the role of a single-celled organism, swimming in a sea of nutrients and tiny predators. This part of the game has a streamlined, 2-D look that harks back to classic games from the 80’s like PacMan. Once you have accumulated enough “DNA points” or “evolutionary credits,” you acquire the use of a feature called the “creature editor,” and things start to get really interesting. You assemble a new life form to represent yourself using an almost comically intuitive tool. If you have the technical chops to assemble a Mr. Potato Head, you can build a creature in Spore. You start with a basic body type wrapped around a standard skeleton, and then you can pretty much do whatever you want to it: stretch it out, condense it, add seven asymmetrical legs and one pincer, give it eyes on both sides of its head or wrap a polka-dot skin texture around it. I’ve seen creatures designed as exact replicas of the Care Bears, and I’ve seen creatures that look like H.R. Giger’s sketches for “Alien.”

Once you have assembled your creature, you deposit it in a functioning ecosystem, a computer-generated world populated by plants, food, water, weather, predators and prey. At first you guide a single creature, instructing it to forage, hunt, drink, sleep, mate; your strategy evolves depending on the needs of your creature and the opportunities and threats presented by the environment. As you struggle your way through this early stage, you earn more DNA points that allow you to add new attributes to your creature — like humanlike intelligence — and eventually graduate to the next level, where you control a group of creatures that form a primitive tribe, augmented by simple tools. (Wright showed me a tribe bonding around a campfire, playing drums and dancing, before heading out for a communal hunting expedition.) At this point, the player moves from questions of basic metabolism to social dynamics: Is your tribe a band of warriors or a peace-loving commune? Is it intent on exploiting new technologies? Or does it focus on low-tech social camaraderie?

When your tribe has reached a sufficient level of sophistication, it will begin to form cities, and the player shifts to issues of trade and commerce or constructing roads and buildings. All the while, decisions made at earlier stages of the game continue to shape the current stage: adopting a carnivorous lifestyle in the creature stage changes the activities available to your subsequent tribe; a tribe of warriors will have a harder time building alliances with other cities when it reaches that stage. Eventually, you ascend to a United Nations-like perspective as you try to unify an entire planet divided between rival civilizations. Once you successfully pass from the “clash of civilizations” stage to the “end of history,” the game grants you that ultimate in Hegelian rewards: a spaceship. And then you’re off terraforming other planets and exploring an entire universe teeming with Spore life.

The different levels of Spore call for radically different styles of game play, each a subtle tribute to a canonical game of the past that influenced Wright. There is an elegance to those allusions, but as a game design strategy, it’s a risky move; most games don’t force you to juggle different genres. “When I looked at each scale,” Wright said, “the game play just seemed kind of natural to me: at the cellular level, you’d be PacMan; at the city level, it’d be Populous. I was worried about that, because mixed-genre games don’t do that well. But eventually we just decided to break the rules, and the genres would just be a kind of landmark that the players would recognize.”

To date, Wright has publicly demonstrated Spore on four occasions. Three of them were major game-industry conferences, all of which have triggered a frenzy of online analysis and debate. (Video clips of those demos have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube.) But for people who still think of game design as the province of nerds and arrested adolescents, Wright’s most striking public demo came earlier this summer in San Francisco during an onstage conversation with the musician and artist Brian Eno in front of a thousand rapt fans gathered at the Herbst Theater. The two men riffed comfortably onstage, talking about “generative” art that evolves in unpredictable ways, often determined by the audience and not the original creator. Eno played one or two examples of his generative compositions, and Wright showed off a few levels of Spore.

“We’ve both been working on similar lines,” Eno said recently on the phone from his Notting Hill studio when I asked him about the connections between his work and Wright’s, “and I suppose we’ve converged. Instead of making fixed definitive things that we put out into the world, I think we’ve both decided that it’s much more interesting to make things that even we can’t predict.”

One explanation for the widespread interest in Spore is the gaming industry’s recent troubles. Sales have been uneven, and the best-seller lists are stacked with franchise hits, games whose basic conventions were established years ago, like the Madden football series, the controversial Grand Theft Auto titles and Wright’s own Sims franchise, which has thus far spun off more than a dozen sequels and expansion packs. When you factor in the moral panics over violent gaming emanating from Washington, it makes for a somewhat depressing time to be a game developer. Spore promises an escape from this bleak present: the game itself is about as violent as a cartoon version of Animal Planet, which should come as welcome relief for an industry tired of public attacks on Grand Theft Auto as a corrupter of youth.

Another factor in the hype is Wright’s extraordinary track record. His original breakthrough game, SimCity, released in 1989, helped inaugurate an entire genre of gaming: the “god game,” in which the player supervises a bustling and multifaceted system, managing resources, juggling different objectives. Visit the racks at a game store and you’ll see dozens of titles that descend from Wright’s original design for SimCity, games that let you manage a railroad empire or an amusement park or a zoo. (There are at least three games currently on the market that let you recreate Ancient Rome.) The Sims — released in 2000 — narrowed the god-game vista to the realm of the living room and the neighborhood. It went on to become the best-selling PC game of all time, in part because it attracted an unusual number of female players. Instead of allowing you to create the civic infrastructure for a vast metropolis, the Sims let players explore the more quotidian decision-making of home economics: paying the bills, buying furniture and appliances, cooking dinner for the kids. It is one of the resounding paradoxes of the game industry that its all-time best seller consists largely of performing household chores.

The sales history for the Sims is, of course, part of the reason that so many people are following Spore so closely. Since its introduction, more than 70 million copies of the original game and its spinoffs have been sold, generating $1.6 billion in sales. (The biggest Hollywood moneymaker of all-time, “Titanic,” grossed $1.8 billion worldwide.)

But Spore — which will reportedly cost about $20 million to develop — promises to be more than just a blockbuster diversion. As Wright’s appearance with Eno suggests, the game perhaps deserves to be seen as a work of art first and foremost, a way of seeing and making sense of the world. If it succeeds, it may be in part because of the way its long-zoom perspective resonates with this particular moment in time. “I don’t know if we’re thinking about ‘powers of 10’ more, but we definitely bump into that perspective now in all kinds of cultural contexts,” says the game designer Ralph Koster, who wrote one of the best books to date about games and culture, “A Theory of Fun.” “But Will has definitely been thinking about it. There was always something powers-of-10-ish about SimCity. And way, way back in SimEarth” — Wright’s 1990 game — “there was a window that would pop up and say, ‘This key reserved for future expansion for putting your SimCity into your SimEarth.”’

“It’s funny how many people, average people who aren’t science buffs or hard-core gamers, get the elegance of the theme — the powers of 10 idea,” Wright told me in his Emeryville office, having finally given up on creating a viable atmosphere. “Everybody has a different take on it: for some people, it has a religious theme; for others, it’s awe at nature and science. But everybody seems to understand that it’s a valuable perspective, and it’s a perspective that they like to have. In a way, what I’m trying to do is connect the almost inconceivable universal scale to the deeply personal, because what you do in the game is deeply personal.”

The long-zoom perspective is one of the key ways in which Wright’s work dovetails with Eno’s. Their talk in San Francisco was sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, an organization created to facilitate thinking on immense temporal scales: a thousand years or beyond. (The “long now” is a coinage of Eno’s, and the group’s most famous project to date is the Clock of the Long Now, an engineering marvel designed to keep time for thousands of years.) “One of the things that’s obviously been happening for the past 100 or 200 years,” Eno told me, “is that the range of our experience has greatly expanded: we can see much smaller things and much bigger things than we ever could before. But we can also start thinking about much longer futures and much deeper pasts as well. That really makes a big difference to us as humans, because on the one hand it makes us realize that we’re very powerful in that we’re able to comprehend and see all of this universe. But it also makes us seem so much less significant. We’re a tiny blip on a tiny radar screen. I think this is a feeling that people are trying to come to terms with, the feeling of where do we fit in all of this.”

And arguably the best way to come to terms with that feeling is to explore those different scales of experience directly, to move from the near-invisible realm of microbes to the vast distances of galaxies. Of all the forms of culture available to us today, games may well be the most effective at conveying that elusive perspective, precisely because they are so immersive and participatory and because their design can be so open-ended. “I wanted to make a game that would recreate a drug induced epiphany,” Wright told me. “I want people to be able to step back five steps, five really big steps. To think about life itself and its potential galactic-scale impact. I want the gamers to have this awesome perspective handed to them in a game. And then let them decide how to interpret it.”

The idea of a video game’s tackling such complex subject matter may strike some readers as surprising, but in truth staggeringly complex games have long appeared prominently on the gaming best-seller lists. One of the most lucrative franchises in the history of computer games is the Civilization series, which lets players recreate the entire course of human economic and technological history, experimenting with different political and legal systems, exploring alternate time lines of scientific development. The collaborative worlds of hugely popular, networked online games like World of Warcraft have evolved entire economies and social systems that mimic the complexity of small nation-states in the real world. Spore may be more ambitious in scope than these games, but its two most important innovations lie elsewhere: in its system for generating user-created creatures and in the way it allows players to share their creations with others.

Conventional game development follows a predictable pattern: the game designers decide which objects and characters will inhabit the world of the game, and then animators create computer models for those objects and characters, which are then inserted into a game in a fixed state — an animation of Tiger Woods swinging a golf club or James Bond reaching for a gun or a character in the Sims taking out the trash. But Spore’s open-ended approach to creature design fundamentally broke that system. Before I met with Wright, Spore’s executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, gave me a tour of the Spore studio and introduced me to a barefoot, speed-talking “technology fellow” named Chris Hecker, who had helped develop Spore’s unique animation system. Hecker had a perfect one-liner for the technical hurdles the team faced: “The question is, How do you do animations for things you’ve never seen before?”

The solution Wright and his team hit upon revolves around something called “procedural animation,” a way for the game designer to model certain key behaviors — walk, run, grab, fight — without necessarily knowing anything about the basic body type of the creature itself. If you design a creature with five legs asymmetrically scattered around its body, the Spore animation engine will figure out how such a creature would walk. To demonstrate the adaptability of the system, Hecker pulled up a collection of a dozen Spore creatures on his monitor, each with a strikingly distinct body architecture. The initial image was comical enough: it looked as if the bizarre Cambrian-era fossils that Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in “Wonderful Life” had been reassembled for a police lineup. Some looked like slugs, some like spiders, some like extras from “Where the Wild Things Are.”

And then Hecker hit a key, and they all, miraculously, did a back flip, each in its own decidedly idiosyncratic way.

But surely, I asked, given the open-ended, no-two-creatures-alike nature of the editor, there are going to be some creatures that have body types that won’t perform certain actions? Hecker and Bradshaw nodded emphatically. They know that a certain percentage of their users will be building creatures deliberately designed to foil the procedural animation system. Those creatures won’t likely be “fit” in a traditional evolutionary sense, in that they will be less skilled at collecting food or avoiding predators. But they will be perversely satisfying to players keen on exploring the boundaries of the Spore architecture. Hecker pulled up a new lineup to demonstrate a clapping animation that included a creature whose cranium is so inconveniently located that clapping forces him to slap both his hands against the side of his head. It looked like slapstick comedy of the highest order — vaudeville meets “Monsters, Inc. ”

“Our philosophy is,” Bradshaw said, “if it’s going to break, it should break funny.”

The procedural approach has another fringe benefit, one that helped bring about Spore’s other major innovation. Characters and objects can be compressed down to incredibly small files. An entire planet in Spore — teeming with plants, weather and creatures — takes up about 80K of memory. By comparison, a typical song on your iPod is about 50 times larger. You could download an entire galaxy of Spore planets before you could download all the tracks on “Dark Side of the Moon.”

That small file size is crucial to the way the game allows players to share their creations with other players in the Spore universe. As you work your way through the Spore levels, your creatures are automatically sent back to the central Spore file servers, where they are then used to populate the worlds of other players. This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson’s notion of Panspermia — the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic “spores” of life from other planets. (Dyson’s concept is also the origin of the game’s title.) When you land on a new planet in the game’s final stage, it may be teeming with multiple exotic species, all of whom have evolved separately on other computers around the world, guided by the tastes and imagination of complete strangers. But these creatures will, crucially, have lives of their own once they have found their ways onto your machine. They will not be controlled by other players as you interact with them on your screen. Once they have migrated to your computer, they will act autonomously, based on the procedural animation and artificial-intelligence algorithms of the Spore software. By the same token, the creatures that you have lovingly brought to life will spread throughout the alternate universes of other Spore players, struggling for existence on their own, independent from your direct control.

In this respect, Spore breaks decisively from the fastest-growing genre in gaming today: the so-called massively multiplayer networked games — like World of Warcraft — where thousands of players share a single persistent virtual world, interacting with other players via their onscreen characters. (Interestingly, Wright’s only foray into massively multiplayer design — the online version of the Sims that launched in 2002 — was a flop.) When you visit a bustling town center in a multiplayer game and see hundreds of characters sharing the space, you are intensely aware that each of these onscreen characters is being controlled from moment to moment by a live, sentient human somewhere in the real world. The social element is very much in the foreground of the experience. Spore flips that model on its head. Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore “massively single player.”

It remains an open question whether this model will take hold with today’s players, who are increasingly used to the social dimension of online play. “I’m obviously biased toward the online worlds,” Koster said, “but the fact that I’ll never encounter someone else’s galactic empire that actually has some human brain behind it depresses me a little, because that would be awfully cool — especially with the scope and scale we’re talking about with Spore.”

When you visit the Spore studio in Emeryville, the largest open room looks, at first glance, like a standard well-financed Bay Area software company: the double-height loft-ceilings, the bean-bag chairs slung around an oversize monitor, the barefoot employees. But the art strung up on the walls suggests that something different is being concocted here. There are beautiful renderings of imagined Spore planets that demonstrate the range of aesthetics possible in the game: a lush, organic world called Shittake Moon; a surreal globe called Crabclaw with landmasses shaped like giant crustaceans. Everyone’s desk is populated by plastic action figures of Spore creatures, manufactured in-house by Wright’s employees using a 3-D printer that can generate a physical toy in a matter of minutes from a computer model. (Electronic Arts is investigating the possibility of selling customized Spore critters in toy stores as a side business.)

As Bradshaw, the executive producer, gave me a tour of the office, I found myself being reminded of something, but for a few minutes I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And then it hit me: the general feel of the place reminded me of my son’s kindergarten classroom, with its walls covered with renderings of imaginary worlds and creatures and its shelves filled with toys designed to teach and entertain at the same time.

When we finally made it up to his office, I asked Wright about the educational side of his game. “The big underlying theme is creativity,” he said. “We want to prove to the players that they can make these really cool things that they never thought they could make. It’s the computer as an amplifier of your imagination.” Like all of Wright’s games, Spore is likely to attract a broad range of age groups. A tech-savvy 7-year-old could easily obsess over the game, as could a mid-50’s reader of Jared Diamond or E.O. Wilson.

Of course, some of the content of Spore is fanciful. The “DNA points” that players accumulate have no real-world analogue, for instance, and thus far no one — that we know of — has been able to grow a life-sustaining environment on a lifeless planet. “I’ve had a few people ask me if I think Spore will help teach evolution,” Wright said, “and the ironic thing is that, if anything, we’re teaching intelligent design. I’ve seen a few games that relied on evolution — I’ve even designed some of them — and it’s just not as fun.” But, of course, there’s one crucial way in which Spore breaks from intelligent design. The universe of the game is not dominated by a single, all-powerful creator. It’s a universe governed by a million intelligent designers, each unleashing his or her creations to be fruitful and multiply, to conquer and befriend, to fly spaceships and fashion planets.

Despite the fictions, many of the themes of Spore are immensely valuable ones, particularly in an age of environmental crisis: the fragility of life, the connection between micro- and macro- scales, the complex networks of ecosystems and food webs, the impact of new technology on social systems. Spore’s players will get to experience firsthand how choices made on a local scale — a single creature’s decision to, say, adopt an omnivorous lifestyle — can end up having global repercussions. They will detect similarities between one level of the game and another, the complex balancing act of global trade mirroring the complex balancing act of building a sustainable environment. And traveling through a simulated universe, from cells to constellations, will, ideally, make them more curious about the real-world universe they already inhabit — and show them that they have the power to shape that universe as well.

“What’s very interesting about games,” Eno said, “is that they let you begin thinking about possibilities when you’re young enough to incorporate them into your life. So I think a game that says to people, You can make things that then have independent lives, that’s already quite an amazing idea. And then these things can interact with other people’s objects — that’s quite a grown-up idea.”

It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day. When I mentioned this to Eno, he immediately chimed in agreement. “I thought the same thing,” he said. “If you really want to reinvent education, look at games. They fold everything in: history, sociology, anthropology, chemistry — you can piggyback everything on it.

“But my wife made a good point when I was talking about this the other day. She says it’s important for kids to do boring things too. Because if you can find excitement in something boring, then you’re set up for life. Whereas if you constantly need entertainment, you might have a problem, because life is full of things that aren’t entertaining. So I think I’d have three days of Spore and two days of obligatory Latin.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08games.html





FDA Gets Mixed Advice on Nanotechnology
Andrew Bridges

The government must balance close oversight of the fast-growing field of nanotechnology against the risk of stifling new development, a Food and Drug Administration conference was told Tuesday.

These contrasting views emerged from a host of experts that the agency brought together to how it should regulate products containing tiny particles, some as small as one-millionth the width of the head of a pin.

Increasingly, those submicroscopic particles are being incorporated in the thousands of products overseen by the FDA, including drugs, foods, cosmetics and medical devices.

Those products account for roughly 20 cents of every dollar spent each year by U.S. consumers, giving the FDA a key role in both safeguarding the public and guiding the future development of nanotechnology.

"The success of nanotechnology will rely in large part on how FDA plays its regulatory role," said Michael Taylor of the University of Maryland's School of Public Health.

The key is to use science to weigh both the benefits and the risks of nanotechnology, said Matthew Jaffe of the U.S. Council of International Business. That's a balance the FDA already seeks to strike in assessing other products.

"We believe the regulatory process that is in place is significant and adequate to address the issues before the FDA," Jaffe said.

Nanotechnology involves the manufacture and manipulation of materials at the molecular or atomic level. At that scale, materials are measured in nanometers or billionths of a meter. Nanoscale materials are generally less than 100 nanometers in diameter. A sheet of paper, in comparison, is 100,000 nanometers thick. A human hair is 80,000 nanometers thick.

The FDA doesn't believe nanotechnology is inherently unsafe, but does acknowledge that materials at the nano scale can pose different safety issues than do things that are far larger.

The FDA wants to learn of new and emerging science issues related to nanotechnology, especially in regard to safety, said Randall Lutter, the agency's associate commissioner.

The topic vexes other countries as well.

"We cannot assume what we know about bulk-size substances applies to the nanotechnology-size substances," Philippe Martin, of the European Commission, told the meeting.

Martin cited the ring he wears: it's made of gold, is yellowish and inert. But take a gold nanoparticle one nanometer in size, and it turns both blue and mildly reactive. Bump the size up to three nanometers, and the gold turns a reddish hue and now acts like a catalyst.

"How do we assess such a tremendous difference in property?" said Delara Karkan, of Health Canada, in citing the same example.

Kathy Jo Wetter, of the civil society organization ETC Group, told the FDA it was understaffed, underfunded and ill-equipped to deal with nanotechnology. Wetter said hundreds of nano products have already crept onto the market with little scrutiny.

"Unfortunately, so far the U.S. government has acted as a cheerleader and not as a regulator," Wetter said.

Carolyn Cairns, a senior researcher at Consumers Union, told the FDA that nanomaterials should be regulated like any other new chemical substances and subjected to a full battery of tests before use.

Martin Philbert, a University of Michigan professor of toxicology, counseled the FDA to "avoid overregulation while remaining vigilant."

"The key is to manage the risk while deriving the maximum possible benefit from these materials," Philbert said.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has cataloged more than 320 nanotech consumer products, including vitamin sprays, bedsheets and anti-bacterial food-storage bags.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-10-13-55-50





ABC's Accidental Posting Enables Blogger to Find Foley's Message Partner
AP

ABC News' fleeting, inadvertent publishing of a computer screen name enabled a blogger to track down and make public the identity of a former congressional page who traded salacious messages with former Rep. Mark Foley.

In breaking the story of the now-burgeoning scandal, the network last Friday posted on its Web site a series of instant message exchanges between Foley and the teenager, Jordan Edmund, now 21. Edmund's name was not included.

But in one exchange the network inadvertently left his screen name on. It was quickly discovered and removed, replaced by a version with the name redacted. But a blogger was able to retrieve the deleted file, go on a computer detective mission and uncover the former page's identity.

Edmund, who now works on Republican Rep. Ernest Istook's campaign for Oklahoma governor, has not responded to requests for an interview.

Attorney Stephen Jones said he is representing Edmund in matters related to his work as a page and in reference to Foley.

In a news conference Thursday, Istook praised his employee, said the former page would cooperate with investigators and asked reporters to leave him alone.

``This is a young man who is bright,'' Istook said. ``He is hard working. He does not deserve the public embarrassment that he's facing right now.

``I believe there is no justification for putting this young man in the national media spotlight when what he needs and deserves is Christian compassion,'' he added.

The blogger -- known as ``Wild Bill'' from the ``Passionate America'' site -- who discovered the former page's identity describes the computer detective mission in detail on his Web site. ABC has taken additional steps to make sure no one can access the deleted messages, a spokesman said.

``To be clear, no one visiting our Web site would have simply stumbled on the old version,'' ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/15695895.htm





YouTube Blocked Video Mocking Clinton Administration

Limits imposed on access to clip critical of Albright-run North Korea policy

The popular video-sharing YouTube site, which is being purchased by Google for $1.65 billion, limited access to a political ad that mocks the Clinton administration's policy on North Korea, but contains no profanity, nudity or other factors generally thought objectionable.

The company announced a "flagging" policy change just this week, about the time that a controversial spoof by Republican filmmaker David Zucker depicting former Secretary of State Madeline Albright as a cheerleader for Islamic terrorists started appearing with a warning page in front, requiring verification that a viewer is 18 before the video will appear.

The short film by Zucker, who worked with "Scary Movie 4," "Airplane!" and other comedies, reportedly had been offered to the Republican Party for use as an ad, but it was declined. Then it appeared on the Drudge Report and also on YouTube.

However, after a brief period of accessibility, the verification page started appearing on YouTube. It asked that: "This video may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community. To view this video, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up." Today the verification page on the spoof was removed.

Some other YouTube videos on stripping or other explicit activities have similar advisories; some don't. But the campaign video doesn't contain any of those typically objectionable items.

It contains depictions and references to Albright and North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, with Albright presenting the dictator with a basketball and later singing Kum Ba Yah. At the same time, terrorists are sneaking past in the background or foreground.

The audio tells that, "Making nice to our enemies will not make them nice to us," and, "Some people think terrorists will change their ways if we only show them our good intentions."

The video continues, "But evil exists. History teaches that evil needs to be confronted. Evil dictators will be evil dictators no matter what we do.

"The security of the U.S. is not a game. Can we afford a party that treats it like one?" is how the video concludes.

YouTube's newest posting about such "flagging" came just a few days ago, as the political ad was making the rounds.

Maryrose, of The YouTube Team, said if any video viewer flags a video as inappropriate, it is forwarded to a queue for the company's customer support team to review.

"Videos are NEVER automatically removed simply because they've been flagged," Maryrose said. "Every single flagged video is reviewed by someone at YouTube who then determines if the video contains material that is against our terms of use."

If videos are flagged, viewers must sign in to watch.

And, the company said, sometimes flagged videos follow the companies guidelines, but "are not quite appropriate for all YouTube users. This could be due to a number of things – profanity, violence, adult content etc."

However, the political video contained none of those ingredients, unless satire also could be considered objectionable.

"The closest thing to an explicit image in the ad is a scene in which 'Albright' bends over and her skirt tears a bit in the seat, hardly the stuff that sets FCC commissioners' hearts aflutter," said a comment from Matthew Sheffield on the weblog Newbusters.org.

The commentator noted YouTube has "dismembered conservative and politically incorrect speech" in the past, pulling videos critical of Islam and even banning popular conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who is also a WND columnist.

Sexually suggestive videos were found on the site unblocked, as were entire episodes of television shows. So was a clip from a movie depicting the assassination of President Bush, "Death of a President."

"Perfectly OK to show our soldiers getting killed, but they'll be damned if they allow that anti-democrat ad," added "Spaceman Spiff" in a "Newsbusters online dialogue. "This [is] very scary to me. However, not surprising. But, now that they are owned by Google, we'll certainly be seeing a lot more of this censoring."

Google has come under its own criticism for holding an anti-conservative or anti-Republican agenda. It has been criticized in the past, according to a WND report for hosting "Paiderastia: The Boy Love Revival" site on its weblog.

It has in the past censored various Christian-themed ads, but allowed porn ads. In the past it has produced "President Bush" when searchers hunt for "miserable failure."

And a Google search for "liar" produced as the top choice a site for a biography for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a close ally with President Bush in the war on terror.

Sheffield said he believes the intention of YouTube's "censorship squad" was to limit access. Even though the same video may be available somewhere else, such as the Drudge Report, "lots of non-political and moderate folks don't read Drudge, but they might hear about the video from a friend and try to look it up in the search engine, only to be foiled in their attempts to decide whether it was truly 'objectionable.'"

jdhawk noted in the Newsbusters dialogue that Rush Limbaugh has been doing acerbic lampoons of "the Defeatocrats" for some time. "They are not only hilarious, but get right to the point. Of course, one can only visualize a scene when listening to one of his barbed zingers. Zucker has done to video what Rush has been doing to the audio genre. It can only be hoped that the RNC sees its way to release Zucker's work to a wider audience."

Bloggers also reported that the Council on American Islamic Relations has in the past taken steps to have anti-radical Islamist videos pulled from the YouTube site, and Malkin said she was told her video was pulled because it was "inappropriate."

The New York Times even was critical of the censorship of Malkin's piece, titled "First They Came," which talked of authors, politicians and filmmakers who had been made targets by Islamists.

"This is not to suggest that Ms. Malkin's video would not be particularly offensive to some people. There is little that Ms. Malkin says or does that is not. But it is hard to imagine what YouTube hopes to gain by punting such content, or what sort of uphill rhetoric battle it is setting itself up for when it does so," the Times report said.

One discussion board contributor responded: "Michelle Malkin offends people who spend every waking minute, and probably a significant portion of their dreams, scouring the universe for reasons to be offended. You only get the big target on your back from the MSM when you're conservative and you're scoring points on them with impunity. Go Michelle!"
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/articl...TICLE_ID=52405


Re:Subjective "Reporting"
enrevanche

subjective, let's see a quote from a blogger

"Perfectly OK to show our soldiers getting killed, but they'll be damned if they allow that anti-democrat ad," added "Spaceman Spiff" in a "Newsbusters online dialogue. "This [is] very scary to me. However, not surprising. But, now that they are owned by Google, we'll certainly be seeing a lot more of this censoring."

let's see this quote from the article

Sheffield said he believes the intention of YouTube's "censorship squad" was to limit access. Even though the same video may be available somewhere else, such as the Drudge Report, "lots of non-political and moderate folks don't read Drudge, but they might hear about the video from a friend and try to look it up in the search engine, only to be foiled in their attempts to decide whether it was truly 'objectionable.'"

and another gem of reporting

Bloggers also reported that the Council on American Islamic Relations has in the past taken steps to have anti-radical Islamist videos pulled from the YouTube site, and Malkin said she was told her video was pulled because it was "inappropriate."

This article is an opinion piece, it looks nothing like a factual article. It uses quotes form unknown bloggers as evidence. It presents only one side of the story. It does not try for even a second to be objective. For a factual article, it does not know when the movie was posted, how long it was freely availble, how long it was restricted and when it came unrestricted again. It makes a big deal out of nothing because youtubes policy is to investigate after someone marks a video as objectionable. These idiots would be all over youtube if they ran a different policy because children could be potentially exposed to nudity.

This article is about a censorship that is not even a censorship but the normal processes at google. This article simply attempts to resell the story to the American public that the media has liberal bias.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/10/13/1257215.shtml





Campus News

Generation Y Demands Privacy
Emelin Sosa

Generation Y is finally getting an overdue reality check on Internet security and realizing that Big Brother is online - just a mouse click away and going nowhere.

According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, about 90 percent of American 18 to 29 year olds are online. Unfortunately, spyware and unwanted programs being secretly loaded onto computers are also serious threats online. About 93 million American adults have experienced at least one computer problem in the past year that is consistent with problems caused by spyware or viruses. Nine out of 10 Internet users say they had to adjust their online behavior out of fear of falling victim to software intrusions, according to Pew Internet and American Life.

When the CAN-SPAM Act, which made it a misdemeanor to send spam with falsified header information, became law in 2003, many anti-spam activists greeted the new law with disappointment. The activists stated the Act would not prevent any spam but it seemed to give Federal approval to the practice and it was feared that spam would increase as a result of the law.

More than half of all Internet users complain that spam is a big problem and 53 percent of e-mail users say spam has made them less trusting of e-mail, according to Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Over the summer the University Information Technology Services (UITS) sent e-mails to all students announcing the implementation of new spam filtering devices. The new appliances would identify over 95 percent of the spam coming onto campus, as opposed to the two percent currently identified. The spam would carry the tag {SPAM} in front of the e-mail subject.

"I get less spam now than before," said Megan Madariaga, a 7th-semester biomedical engineering major.

UITS also upgraded the university firewall to block some common file sharing programs through which viruses might try to infect computers. According to the UITS help center, information is collected for every Internet session to help performance issues. This information includes IP address of the local and remote host, port number, traffic amount and a date/time stamp. The information is kept for about 100 days.

Viruses, spyware and spam are not the only things Internet users have to worry about, online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace have moved to the frontlines on the fight to regain online privacy.

Facebook was named as the second most "in" thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and losing only to the popular iPod according to a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey based LLC specializing in research concerning the college student market.

When Facebook announced it would become an open network, last month and anybody with an e-mail address would be able to join, a simultaneous uproar was heard in many schools across the country. Suddenly, a generation who did not see sharing music as stealing felt their privacy was been violated.

"I don't think the issue is privacy but control over who can see my profile," said Jessy Amiri, a 3rd-semester psychology and chemistry double major.

Even when the privacy settings are used people can still see profile pictures and a person status, Amiri said.

According to the Associated Press, from large public schools such as Western Kentucky to smaller private ones like Birmingham-Southern and Smith, incoming college students are getting lectured on the risks of Internet postings, particularly on social networks such as Facebook because potential employers might be looking at these sites.

"Employers have to realize that a student's social life and work should be kept separate," Amiri said.

Students should not be judged by employers solely based on their online profiles, Amiri said.

The double-edged sword of placing information on the Internet to share with others also means that prospective employers will be able to gain easy access to it, said Michael H. Kerntke, Chief Information Officer.

"I would question the wisdom of placing information on a `public' web site that I would not want my employer to become privy to," he said.

"The Internet is a very public place and anything you put on there is your responsibility," said Carolina Aguila, a 7th-semester ecology and evolutionary biology major.
http://www.dailycampus.com/media/sto...lycamp us.com





NPR’s News Chief Resigns After 9 Months
Katharine Q. Seelye

William K. Marimow, the top news executive at National Public Radio and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, has resigned after nine months in the job, the broadcasting network announced today. He agreed to become the ombudsman for the network.

The move is one of several changes within the network’s news division and signals a period of instability as many jobs are being filled hastily on an interim basis until permanent replacements can be found.

As part of its restructuring, the network is creating a new managing editor position to supervise shows and newscasts and has temporarily hired Richard Harris, who spent nine years as senior producer of ABC’s “Nightline” and “This Week” and was a former executive producer for NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

Some NPR employees who attended a staff meeting this morning when the changes were announced described it as harsh and even “nasty.” They also said that some of their colleagues praised Mr. Marimow for raising the network’s level of journalism.

Mr. Marimow, the former editor of The Baltimore Sun and an investigative reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he won his Pulitzers, was hired in 2004 to help strengthen and expand the news division after NPR received a bequest of $235 million from the late Joan B. Kroc, widow of Ray A. Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s. Since 1999, NPR’s weekly audience has doubled to almost 26 million listeners.

The network produces and distributes 150 hours of programming a week in conjunction with 815 public radio stations.

Mr. Marimow oversaw all activities of the news division, including approximately 350 employees and 36 bureaus around the world and such award-winning programs as “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.” As ombudsman, he will serve as the listeners’ representative, with no news responsibilities.

In a memo to the staff, Jay Kernis, the head of programming, cited three goals for the next few months: to replace Mr. Marimow, “maintain continuity in the division and advance our news growth projects, including creation of the digital newsroom.” He said the network had retained the Sucherman Consulting Group to conduct a national search for a replacement for Mr. Marimow and would also use an internal search committee.

Ellen Weiss, the national desk editor, is taking Mr. Marimow’s duties temporarily.

Colleagues said that Mr. Marimow, a long-time print journalist and investigative reporter, was perceived as having failed to adapt quickly enough to radio, particularly as radio converges with the Internet. They also said that he was on the wrong side of an internal power struggle.

He becomes the first major casualty of the two-week-old tenure of Ken Stern, NPR’s new chief executive, who replaced Kevin Klose, the chief executive who had hired Mr. Marimow from the Baltimore Sun. Mr. Klose remains at NPR as president. In promoting Mr. Marimow to vice president of news in February, Mr. Klose had overruled an internal search committee that included Mr. Stern and Mr. Kernis and had not recommended Mr. Marimow.

In announcing Mr. Marimow’s promotion back then, Mr. Kernis had said: “Bill is a dedicated journalist who has already demonstrated ability to make a difference at NPR News, both in our newsgathering and in the ways we translate it to emerging platforms that are critical to the expansion of our public service.”

In his memo today, Mr. Kernis said: “Bill leaves a newsroom that is stronger in its investigations, research and daily reporting. Bill’s skills also make him a great fit for the ombudsman role, which demands an appreciation for powerful journalism and how NPR delivers it day in, day out.”

In his own memo to the staff, Mr. Marimow said that during his tenure, he had created new beats, expanded the news division’s contribution to the network’s Web site, NPR.org, and had produced “a steady stream of solid investigative projects.”

He said that working at NPR had been “a revelation and an inspiration,” adding: “A revelation because I’ve learned about the beauty and the impact of the world of sound on the human heart and mind; an inspiration, because the work you do makes NPR a bastion of great journalism in a world in which great journalism is in short supply.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/bu...rtner=homepage





EU Rejects Spam Maker's Trademark Bid
AP

The producer of the canned pork product Spam has lost a bid to claim the word as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails. EU trademark officials rejected Hormel Foods Corp.'s appeal, dealing the company another setback in its struggle to prevent software companies from using the word "spam" in their products, a practice it argued was diluting its brand name.

The European Office of Trade Marks and Designs, noting that the vast majority of the hits yielded by a Google search for the word made no reference to the food, said that "the most evident meaning of the term SPAM for the consumers ... will certainly be unsolicited, usually commercial e-mail, rather than a designation for canned spicy ham."

The word Spam - short for "Spiced Ham" - was coined by Hormel in 1937 as part of a marketing campaign so successful the word became virtually synonymous with canned meat.

Its use to describe unwanted electronic communication is a reference to the popular 1970 Monty Python's Flying Circus comedy sketch in which Vikings in a diner repeatedly drown out conversation with the chant "Spam! Spam! Spam!"

While Hormel has embraced the pop culture reference - even helping to market "Spamalot," the musical comedy based on Monty Python's work - it has taken less kindly to attempts by businesses to incorporate the word into their product names. The company has been embroiled in a string of trademark disputes over the matter in the United States and elsewhere, fighting product names such as SpamBop, Spam Arrest, and Spam Cube.

"We do not object to use of this slang term to describe (unsolicited commercial e-mail)," the company said on its Web site, "although we do object to the use of the word "spam" as a trademark and to the use of our product image in association with that term."

"Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, 'Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?'"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...10-11-18-48-16





Venture Firm Shares a Jackpot
Miguel Helft and Matt Richtel

Even in Silicon Valley, it is rare for so much money to be made so fast — and by so few.

The biggest winners in the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube by Google are YouTube’s founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who have parlayed their stakes in the 19-month-old start-up into Google shares that are probably worth tens of millions. YouTube’s roughly 60 employees are no doubt celebrating as well.

But only one venture capital firm — Sequoia Capital — got in on what has turned out to be one of the hottest Internet deals since Google went public in 2004.

Sequoia, which is among the most successful venture firms in Silicon Valley, invested a total of $11.5 million in YouTube from November 2005 to April 2006. It may be walking away with more than 43 times that amount. Its stake in YouTube has been estimated at roughly 30 percent, which would give it a value of $495 million.

That kind of payday, especially for an investment that is less than 12 months old, is unusual even in Silicon Valley. But it is not likely to rank among Sequoia’s biggest. The firm, which was founded in 1972, has backed a roster of technology superstars including Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Yahoo and Google itself.

Sequoia’s go-it-alone investment in YouTube represents the kind of aggressive move for which Sequoia is known. A more traditional and safer approach would have been to share the risk and rewards with other investors. That is especially true with an early-stage investment in a company that since its inception has faced the prospect of costly lawsuits over the copyrighted material that peppers the site.

“They had an absurdly high level of confidence with what they were doing,” said Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and author of the blog Infectious Greed.

Sequoia did not return calls seeking comment.

The connection between Sequoia and YouTube can be traced back to Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Hurley’s days at PayPal. After PayPal was bought by eBay, the two men were looking for a new company to start. They hit upon the idea of a site that would help users exchange video files.

In the summer of 2005, the pair showed their site to another PayPal alumnus, Roelof Botha. Mr. Botha, who had been chief financial officer at PayPal, was by then a partner at Sequoia. In November 2005, he agreed to invest $3.5 million in YouTube. Five months later, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the site.

“It wouldn’t be surprising if they owned 30 percent,” said Michael Kwatinetz, a founding general partner at Azure Capital Partners.

The fact that the man who is perhaps Sequoia’s best-known partner, Michael Moritz, sits on the board of Google could have given the search giant more insights into the legal risks associated with YouTube, and therefore more confidence in pursuing a deal, Mr. Kedrosky said.

The deal by firms that share an investor is right out of the playbook of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture firm that imported from Japan the notion of a keiretsu, or network of companies with interlocking relationships, Mr. Kedrosky said.

“The whole idea of the keiretsu was friends selling to friends,” he said. “The model worked gangbusters for Kleiner Perkins.”

Venture firms like Sequoia typically raise funds from large institutional investors like pension funds and university endowments. They then invest those funds in promising start-ups, although they often end up with more misses than hits. At successful venture firms — and Sequoia ranks among the most successful — hits on the scale of YouTube more than make up for the misses.

A venture firm makes money only when the start-ups it has financed are sold or go public. It then splits profits among its investors after taking a share, which can be 20 to 25 percent.

The YouTube deal was the first major acquisition in the booming Internet video sector. In a conference call, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, called it “one of many investments that Google will be making to make sure that video has its proper place in people’s online lifestyle on the Internet worldwide.”

A Google spokesman said Mr. Schmidt was not necessarily talking about more acquisitions. But the prospect of more deals still has other venture capitalists and entrepreneurs salivating.

“It’s good to hope,” said Peter Clemente, chief marketing officer of ManiaTV, a Denver company that produces live video programming for the Internet. ManiaTV is backed by Benchmark Capital, Intel Capital and Centennial Partners.

Mike Hirshland, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners in Boston, said, “This is obviously the talk of the sector.” Polaris has invested $11 million in Heavy.com, an Internet video site founded in 1999 that aims at men ages 18 to 34. Mr. Hirshland called the deal the “first major venture-level return for an online video company, a sector that’s probably the most-watched and commented-on sector around the Internet.” He added: “It’s certainly the most hyped.”

The possibility of hype is leading some to worry about a bubble.

“It certainly starts to heat up the space a little bit,” said Mr. Kwatinetz, warning that Internet video might follow the same trajectory as, say, reality television, which was ignited by the success of “Survivor,” a show that was followed by a long list of imitators.

Indeed, the success of YouTube, as well as MySpace, the No. 2 video site on the Internet, has spawned a generation of competitors focused on the creation and sharing of videos, said Josh Felser, president of Grouper, a video sharing site purchased this year by Sony Pictures Entertainment for $65 million.

“There are hundreds,” Mr. Felser said. Some companies have already risen above the fray. In March, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital announced it had invested an undisclosed sum in vMix, a site that lets people upload videos and slide shows.

In April, Veoh Networks, which lets people share and watch videos, received $12.5 million from Spark Capital, Time Warner, and the Tornante Company, which is controlled by the former Disney chairman Michael D. Eisner.

Also in April, Revver, a video sharing site, received $8.7 million from the venture capitalists Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bessemer Venture Partners, among others. The company has since received more funding from Comcast Interactive Capital and Turner New Media Investments.

Joe Lazlo, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research, said the companies that are attracting funding are ones that are finding ways to differentiate themselves. He said one creative concept was that of Break.com, which allows people to post videos, then buys the more popular ones and runs ads with them.

But so far at least, Break.com is not biting at venture capital offers. Keith Richman, its chief executive, said the company had declined financing a number of times as it tried to build the business on its own.

Mr. Felser, the president of Grouper, said there was a limit to how much a video creation and sharing company can hope to grow independently, because of the expense of bandwidth and advertising infrastructure.

Katie Hafner contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/te.../10payday.html





With YouTube, Grad Student Hits Jackpot Again
Miguel Helft

For Jawed Karim, the $100,000 or so he would have to spend on a master’s degree at Stanford was never daunting. He hit an Internet jackpot in 2002 when PayPal, the online payment company he had joined early on, was bought by eBay.

On Monday, still early in his studies for the fall term, he got lucky again. This time he may have hit the Internet equivalent of the multistate PowerBall.

Mr. Karim is the third of the three founders of the video site YouTube, which Google has agreed to buy for $1.65 billion. He was present at YouTube’s creation, contributing some crucial ideas about a Web site where users could share video. But academia had more allure than the details of turning that idea into a business.

So while his partners Chad Hurley and Steven Chen built the company and went on to become Internet and media celebrities, he quietly went back to class, working toward a degree in computer science.

Mr. Karim, who is 27, became visibly uncomfortable when the subject turned to money, and he would not say what he stands to make when Google’s purchase of YouTube is completed. He said only that he is one of the company’s largest individual shareholders, though he owns less of the company than his two partners, whose stakes in the company are likely to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to some estimates. The deal was so enormous, he says, that his share was still plenty big.

“The sheer size of the acquisition almost makes the details irrelevant,” Mr. Karim said.

On Wednesday, during a walk across campus and a visit to his dorm room and the computer sciences building where he takes classes, Mr. Karim described himself as a nerd who gets excited about learning. Nothing in his understated demeanor suggests he is anything other than an ordinary graduate student, and he attracted little attention on campus in jeans, a blue polo shirt, a tan jacket and black Puma sneakers.

Mr. Karim said he might keep a hand in entrepreneurship, and he dreams of having an impact on the way people use the Internet — something he has already done. Philanthropy may have some appeal, down the road. But mostly he just wants to be a professor. He said he simply hopes to follow in the footsteps of other Stanford academics who struck it rich in Silicon Valley and went back to teaching.

“There’s a few billionaires in that building,” he said, standing in front of the William Gates Computer Science Building. But his chosen path will not preclude another stint at a start-up. “If I see another opportunity like YouTube, I can always do that,” he said.

David L. Dill, a professor of computer science at Stanford, said Mr. Karim’s choice was unusual.

“I’m impressed that given his success in business he decided to do the master’s program here,” Mr. Dill said. “The tradition here has been in the other direction,” he said, pointing to the founders of Google and Yahoo, who left Stanford for the business world.

Mr. Karim met Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen when all three of them worked at PayPal. After the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, netting Mr. Karim a few million dollars, they often talked about starting another company.

By early 2005, all three had left PayPal. They would often meet late at night for brainstorming sessions at Max’s Opera Café, near Stanford, Mr. Karim said. Sometimes they met at Mr. Hurley’s place in Menlo Park or Mr. Karim’s apartment on Sand Hill Road, down the street from Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that would become YouTube’s financial backer.

Mr. Karim said he pitched the idea of a video-sharing Web site to the group. But he made it clear that contributions from Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley were essential in turning his raw idea into what eventually became YouTube.

A YouTube spokeswoman said that the genesis of YouTube involved efforts by all three founders.

As early as February 2005, when the site was introduced, Mr. Karim said he and his partners had agreed that he would not become an employee, but rather an informal adviser to YouTube. He did not take a salary, benefits or even a formal title. “I was focused on school,” he said.

The decision meant that his stake in the company would be reduced, Mr. Karim said. “We negotiated something that we thought was fair.”

Roelof Botha, the Sequoia partner who led the investment in YouTube, said he would have preferred if Mr. Karim had stayed.

“I wish we could have kept him as part of the company,” Mr. Botha said. “He was very, very creative. We were doing everything we could to convince him to defer.”

Mr. Karim was born in East Germany in 1972. The family moved to West Germany a year later and to St. Paul, Minn., in 1992. His father, Naimul Karim, is a researcher at 3M and his mother, Christine Karim, is a research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota.

“To develop new things and be aware of new things, this is our life,” Ms. Karim said, explaining her son’s interest in technology and learning.

After graduating from high school, Jawed Karim chose to go to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in part because it was the school that the co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, and others who gave birth to the first popular Web browser attended.

“It wasn’t like I wanted to be the next Marc Andreessen, but it would be cool to be in the same place,” Mr. Karim said. In 2000, during his junior year, he dropped out to head to Silicon Valley, where he joined PayPal. He later finished his undergraduate degree by taking some courses online and some at Santa Clara University.

Armed with a video camera, Mr. Karim documented much of YouTube’s early life, including the meetings when the three discussed financing strategies and the brainstorming sessions in Mr. Hurley’s garage, where the company was hatched.

In his studio apartment in a residence hall for graduate students, he showed one of them, which he said was filmed in April 2005. In it, Mr. Chen talked about “getting pretty depressed” because there were only 50 or 60 videos on the YouTube site. Also, he said, “there’s not that many videos I’d want to watch.” The camera then turns to Mr. Hurley, who grins and says “Videos like these,” referring to the one Mr. Karim is filming.

Mr. Karim, who has remained in frequent contact with the other co-founders, said he was first informed of the talks with Google last week. On Monday, he was called in to the Palo Alto law offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to sign acquisition papers, and he briefly got to congratulate Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, he said.

Asked what he thought of the acquisition price, Mr. Karim said: “It sounded good to me.” When a reporter looked puzzled, he raised his eyebrows and added: “I was amazed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/te... tner=homepage



















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