The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

"Desknote" laptops have power to burn
Consumers are prompting a new trend in mobile computing: the "desknote." By taking home large numbers of notebooks based on Intel Pentium 4 desktop processors over the holidays, consumers have legitimized a trend toward larger, more powerful notebooks that offer somewhat lower prices than more traditional laptops. Many industry observers had dismissed these so-called desknotes as a flash in the pan when they first appeared early last year. NPD Techworld, which tracks retail PC sales, says notebooks using desktop Pentium 4s were the best-selling laptop models during the 2002 holiday season.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-979763.html

IBM puts supercomputers for rent
IBM has begun a new program to rent out processing power on its own supercomputers, signing up a petrochemical company as a first customer. Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) is renting out more than one-third of its computing capacity from IBM, a move that lets the company deal better with surges in demand for computing services used to find oil and gas deposits. PGS has about 1,000 of its own dual-processor Linux computers interconnected into a single computing resource, but the company is also using about 400 more from IBM, said Chris Semple, manager of developing technologies at PGS. Eventually, IBM expects other petrochemical companies and life-sciences companies to become customers. The service "is a precursor of what should be a broad push into petroleum industry or life sciences," said David Turek, vice president of IBM's Linux clusters and grid products.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-979780.html

Paul Allen's Vulcan flies with mini-PCs
Vulcan Ventures wants to take the lap out of laptops. The investment company, set up and funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is showing at the Consumer Electronics Show here a design for a shrunken notebook PC that would weigh about a pound and rest comfortably in two hands. Vulcan is negotiating to license the design and associated software to major PC manufacturers, said Michael Agostino, technology analyst for the company. It expects to have a beta model available and actual devices for sale from major PC brands late this year, priced around the same as a midline laptop.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-979761.html

RealNetworks shores up content security
In the latest move to court consumer electronics manufacturers, RealNetworks on Thursday is introducing content security technology that supports disparate digital media delivery standards, including MPEG-4 and MP3. The Seattle-based software company is unveiling Helix DRM, digital-rights management technology designed to be format-agnostic protection for the delivery of content to PCs, home appliances and mobile devices. The technology supports the emerging video standard MPEG-4 and H.263; audio formats MP3, AAC and Narrowband AMR audio; and its RealAudio and RealVideo streaming formats. "It used to be that content owners would have separate DRM for each format that they wanted to support, and consumer electronics makers would have to implement a separate DRM engine to decrypt those files on their devices," said Dan Sheeran, vice president of media systems for RealNetworks.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-979792.html

Sony predicts rebirth of television
Sony's future may be coming full circle with a product that helped establish the company as a consumer-electronics giant. Sony's televisions have always played a major role not only in its success as a company but also in boosting its brand recognition. During a keynote speech here at the Consumer Electronics Show on Thursday, Sony President and Chief Operating Officer Kunitake Ando predicted the rebirth of the television as he touted new products and strategies that will guide the company throughout the year.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-979909.html

Little things mean a lot to Gates
Microsoft's latest plan to improve your life revolves around wristwatches and refrigerator magnets. Slicked-up versions of those common objects -- based on Microsoft's previously announced Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) -- were the highlights of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' opening keynote address Wednesday night at the Consumer Electronics Show here. Offering more of a greatest-hits show than usual, Gates mostly focused on updates of previously announced technology centered on the familiar theme of a fully networked home and display screens everywhere imaginable.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-979794.html

Is that "hot spot" hot or not?
A group whose certification mark for wireless gear is considered essential by U.S. manufacturers has now developed a seal of approval for commercial wireless "hot spots," places where wireless Web access is available to the public for a fee. Through its new Wi-Fi Zone program, the nonprofit Wi-Fi Alliance aims to bring some law to a varied collection of about 4,000 hot spots in the United States, all offering different experiences for users, Chairman Dennis Eaton said Thursday. "Our goal is to provide a reliable indicator that will allow customers to identify service providers who are committed to a common standard of quality," Eaton said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-979959.html?tag=fd_top

Microsoft enlists media allies
Microsoft announced expanded support for its media ventures on Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show 2003 in Las Vegas. The software giant said 11 new companies have bought into its new High-performance Media Access Technology (HighMAT), which makes it easier to move digital content between PCs and electronics devices such as CD players, car stereos and DVD players. New supporters include consumer-device manufacturers such as Apex Digital and Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics Industries, and software developers such as Ahead Software, B.H.A. and Pinnacle Systems, according to Microsoft. Consumer-electronics devices have traditionally differed from PCs in the way they display and open digital files, making crossover use of CDs, for example, a random and confusing experience for consumers. HighMAT is designed to smooth that translation.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979873.html?tag=fd_top

Virus companies fire back at naming accusations
Anti-virus companies have defended themselves against accusations that the fragmented naming system for viruses causes confusion amongst computer users, and may leave them exposed to danger. The charges were made in a report published by e-mail services company MessageLabs, which claims that the recent release of three different strains of the Yaha in the space of 11 days, causing havoc with the naming conventions used by the anti-virus industry. Although the three versions had names ranging from Yaha.J to Yaha.M, antivirus companies could not agree on which name went with which version of the virus.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/sec...0271080,00.htm

W3C releases scripting standard, caveat
The Web's leading standards body released a long-delayed recommendation for using scripts in Web pages but urged coders not to rely too heavily on scripting. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommended on Thursday its Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 HTML, a module of the group's set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for letting computer languages like JavaScript, Java or ECMAScript manipulate elements in an HTML or XHTML document. In practical terms, the DOM makes it easier to create Web pages with features that are more animated and functional. With scripts, authors can make Web pages process forms, launch pop-up menus and windows, and execute style changes on the fly. Without the DOM, authors would have to code separately for each scripting language to interact with each different browser. The DOM is meant to create a "write once, run everywhere" standard for Web page scripting.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979976.html?tag=fd_top

Standards body tries to improve on URLs
An international standards body announced Wednesday that it has taken on the task of improving on the omnipresent URL, or Web address, to give developers a cleaner way to design and locate Web services. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) said it has formed a technical committee to work out how resources -- such as data and services -- can be placed and found on a network without their being tied to a URL on a specific machine. To do this, the committee is designing the OASIS Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI), a method for identifying any resource -- from a Web service to a particular file -- across different network domains, applications and transport protocols.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-979716.html?tag=cd_mh

Cheap chips seen driving next tech wave
A coming wave of consumer devices featuring ultracheap and powerful microprocessors embedded in almost everything will drive the next decade of innovation in computing technology, a leading trend-spotter said Tuesday. Paul Saffo, the director of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Institute for the Future, said the shift to pervasive computing, in which chips are stitched into the fabric of ordinary life, would define technology in the coming years just as the personal computer did in the 1980s, and the Internet did in the 1990s. "We're in the middle of a 10-year shift," Saffo said in address at the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International Industry Strategy Symposium in the posh golf resort here. "Every 10 years a new technology comes along that drives demand." Embedded processor technologies that will lead to new applications include cheap sensors, such as those used in global positioning systems and video cameras, as well as radio frequency identification tags, Saffo said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-979617.html?tag=cd_mh

Major retailers to test "smart shelves"
Two major retailers and a consumer products giant are teaming up to test a new "smart shelf" technology that allows for real-time tracking of inventory levels. Gillette, Wal-Mart and the U.K.-based supermarket chain Tesco plan to install specially designed shelves that can read radio frequency waves emitted by microchips embedded in millions of shavers and related products. The shelves can scan the contents of the shelves and, via computer, alert store employees when supplies are running low or when theft is detected, said Gillette spokesman Paul Fox.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-979710.html

Schools profit from privacy settlement
Several law schools and privacy rights groups will benefit from a settlement that Amazon.com subsidiary Alexa Internet reached in 2001. Alexa Internet settled several class-action lawsuits in April 2001, which alleged that it misused consumers' personal information without their consent. Under the terms of the settlement, Alexa said it would destroy some of the personally identifiable records in its database and pay up to $40 per person to customers whose records were found in the database. According to a court order issued last month, at least one individual applied for the $40 disbursement. Alexa did not release any further information on how many individuals had been awarded money.
http://news.com.com/2100-1017-960088.html?tag=cd_mh

Lexmark invokes DMCA in toner suit
Printer maker Lexmark has found an unusual weapon to thwart rivals from selling replacement toner cartridges: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A federal judge in Kentucky has scheduled a hearing for Thursday in the case, which Lexmark filed against Static Control Components in an effort to slam the brakes on the toner cartridge remanufacturing industry. Lexmark is the No. 2 printer maker in the United States, behind Hewlett-Packard, and manufactures printers under the Dell Computer brand. This lawsuit is the latest of several recent DMCA cases -- both civil and criminal--that have tested the limits of the 1998 copyright law, in which Congress intended to limit Internet piracy. Eight movie studios wielded it to force 2600 magazine to delete a DVD-descrambling utility from its Web site, but the Justice Department lost a case last month against a Russian company that created a program that cracked Adobe's electronic books.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979791.html?tag=cd_mh

Norway piracy case brings activists hope
Internet and technology activists are hoping the acquittal of Norwegian programmer Jon Johansen in a digital piracy case signals a change in attitudes about copyright in the digital age. The acquittal in Oslo, Norway, of 19-year-old Johansen, one of the creators of the DVD-cracking code known as DeCSS, is one of several recent setbacks for intellectual-property holders seeking to exert more control over the digital versions of their products. "It feels a bit like the tide is turning in these copyright cases," said Cindy Cohn, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It really feels like there is some sanity creeping in." The EFF and others have been concerned that digital copyright law hampers legitimate research into encryption and other technological matters and stifles consumers' rights.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979769.html?tag=cd_mh

Microsoft e-book software cracked
A British programmer has released software online that is said to dismantle the anticopying technology in the Microsoft Reader e-book software, setting up another potential confrontation in the digital piracy wars. Independent programmer Dan Jackson has posted the program and its source code on his Web site, saying that he's working with the software's original creator, who wishes to remain anonymous. Although rumors of software that strips Microsoft's copy protection away from its e-book files have circulated before, this appears to be the first time such a program has been made available to the public. Jackson says he's responding to what he sees as serious flaws in the Reader software, and is not driven by any particular ideological motivation. He has an early-generation handheld computer that can't read modern Microsoft e-book files, and simply wanted a way to use the hardware he'd already purchased, he said in an interview conducted by instant messenger.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979778.html?tag=cd_mh

Congress to take on spam, copyright
When the 107th Congress ended its work last November, politicians discarded dozens of technology-related bills that had been briefly considered but were never enacted. Now that the 108th Congress has begun this week, some of those controversial proposals dealing with spam, copyright and Internet taxes will resurface -- and some stand a better chance of becoming law. One issue that is sure to remain a flash point this session will be the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has been the focus of intense scrutiny and a number of lawsuits. Beloved by the entertainment industry, the DMCA broadly prohibits bypassing the kind of copy-protection technology used in DVDs, computer software and electronic books.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979623.html?tag=cd_mh

Welcome to the browser jungle, Safari
Apple Computer's Safari browser offers little challenge to Microsoft's browser dominance, analysts said Tuesday, but the Mac maker could benefit enormously if it can wean itself from Internet Explorer. Apple's new releases are indicative of the company’s strategy to break out of its single-digit market share niche by focusing as much on software development as on the fancy hardware that drew thunderous applause from the faithful gathered here at Macworld Expo.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-979583.html?tag=cd_mh

Robots for the masses
A start-up company says it has developed a navigation system that is cheap enough to bring robots to the mass-consumer market. Pasadena, Calif.-based Evolution Robotics said its technology that lets a robot determine its position relative to its environment is based on wheel sensors and a Webcam that cost less than $50. That's a fraction of the cost of current robot navigation systems relying on laser range finders, which can cost $5,000, the company said. The company asserts that its relatively inexpensive system "will result in a new generation of products that were previously inconceivable." Evolution isn't alone in working on mobile robots and computer vision. Others include robot makers iRobot and ActivMedia Robotics, as well as computer vision specialists Tyzx and Point Grey Research.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-979841.html?tag=cd_mh

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