The Newspaper Shop -- Thursday edition

[walktalker]

Nothing but good recycled paper

MS witness: Keep users out of Windows
Using a personal computer would turn into a confusing and frustrating experience under antitrust sanctions sought against Microsoft by nine states, a Microsoft executive testified on Thursday. Christopher Jones, in charge of development of the Windows operating system for desktop computers, said proposals to let computer makers and rival software developers tinker with parts of Windows would create chaos for consumers and hurt the computer industry.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-892082.html

RealNetworks: MPEG-4 could be DOA
Proposed licensing fees for MPEG-4, a next-generation video compression standard, could mean its early death on the personal computer, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser said in a press conference Wednesday. "The licensing structure is putting the technology on a path to become irrelevant in the PC industry," Glaser said after giving a keynote speech at the Streaming Media West conference here.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-892259.html

Fiorina grilled over key conversation
In a surprise move, an attorney for Walter Hewlett called Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina back to the witness stand Thursday to answer questions about a conference call between HP and a major investor. The March 19 conference call centered on getting Deutsche Bank to switch its stance to favoring HP's proposed merger with Compaq Computer in a crucial shareholder vote that same day. Hewlett is suing HP, where he is a board member, to block that merger, and a central question in his suit is whether HP exerted undue influence to sway the bank's vote.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-892054.html

Dr. Damn cleans house for file-swappers
The record companies had their Napster, and the stream of file-swapping companies that followed. The file-swapping companies now have their "Dr. Damn." For the past several weeks, the pseudonymous programmer, who says he's a male college student and declines to give his real name, has been releasing versions of popular file-swapping programs online with the advertising and user-tracking features stripped out. He's done Grokster and iMesh. And he's not alone.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-891761.html

Mothers and fathers of invention talk shop
Altering the future ain't what it used to be. At least that was the sense you got talking to some of the world-changing inventors gathered here Wednesday night for the presentation of the Lemelson-MIT Awards, which recognize key American inventors. Modern invention is increasingly focused on proprietary, corporate-funded research aimed at achieving narrowly defined business goals. The result has been an intellectual property melee in which companies try to stake claim to ideas as broad as Web links.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-892284.html?tag=fd_top

Lawmakers blast Patriot Act
Some lawmakers and civil libertarians are attacking the 6-month-old Patriot Act, saying it has "created the danger that Americans will be afraid to communicate freely over the Internet." Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Rep. Patsy Mink, D-Hi., along with the Free Expression Network -- a coalition of organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center -- blasted the act, saying it risks becoming an "unwise and unnecessary" restriction on free speech.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-892335.html?tag=fd_top

House tackles digital piracy
As U.S. House lawmakers on Thursday prepare to hear a progress report on discussions to solve digital content-protection issues, one consumer electronics maker said legislation to resolve the problems was "premature." The transition to digital has been slowed partly because of limited availability of digital programming, high-priced equipment needed to receive the signals, and the particularly prickly issue of potential piracy of content.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-892154.html?tag=fd_top

Why tech pollution's going global
Mention the word "industry" and "pollution," and most people probably think along the lines of coal-fired power plants and pesticide-slathered mega-farms. Ted Smith thinks about the computer on your desk. Smith is executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), a group formed 20 years ago to protest the contamination of groundwater in the heartland of California's high-tech industry. But as computers have become omnipresent in modern communities, the organization has evolved into a watchdog role, monitoring a wider landscape of occupational and environmental health issues around the world.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-892261.html?tag=fd_nc_1

Cyber-visionary comments on the nature of technology in the world today
Erik Davis, 34, is one of a group of mostly San Francisco Bay Area visionaries who helped create and define the techno-utopian cyberculture of the '90s. His 1998 book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information is an examination of the mystical underpinnings of our technology obsession. It is variously described as an "apocalyptic synopsis of this century's technological climax" and an "EEG of our silicon unconscious and a recovered memory of sacred technologies."
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/inquire/

Airline to put text messaging on flights
Singapore Airlines said Wednesday that passengers on select flights beginning in July would be able to send text messages to mobile phones around the world. Passengers will be able to send messages via Short Message Service (SMS) by using an LCD (liquid-crystal display) panel and handset fitted to their seats. To compose a message, people can either use the handset's numeric keypad or the touch-screen monitor. Unimobile, an India-based company, will act as the messaging broker between Singapore Airlines and 400 mobile phone operators in 130 countries. The application that powers the service was developed by Bothell, Wash.-based Matsushita Avionics Systems.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-891067.html?tag=cd_mh

Microsoft: Layoffs, changes in TV groups
Microsoft confirmed Wednesday that it is in the process of laying off employees in its television division and UltimateTV service group. The company also said it's expanding its TV software to work with low-end set-top boxes. In the television division, called Microsoft TV, the software giant said it would lay off about 60 workers, or less than 10 percent of that division's employees. Microsoft has already started letting go of about 140 employees from its UltimateTV service group, or about 33 percent of that group's staff.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-891413.html

May the Farce Be With Them
Fed up with Star Wars fan sites revealing plot secrets of his upcoming films, George Lucas dispatches two stormtroopers to take care of a list of unscrupulous webmasters. That's the opening scene in Jeff Cioletti and Lou Tambone's four-minute film called Silent But Deadly, selected as one of the finalists in the first Star Wars Fan Film Awards sponsored by AtomFilms and Lucasfilm.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,51939,00.html

We're Younger Than We Look
Astronomers measuring the last flickering heat of dying stars have come up with a new estimate for the age of the universe: about 13 billion years -- slightly younger than previous estimates. The finding gives "very comparable results" to an earlier study that used a different method to conclude the universe burst into existence with the theoretical "Big Bang" 13 billion to 14 billion years ago, experts say.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52099,00.html

Randy Bacteria Fostered Plague
A single swapped gene -- traded in the closest thing bacteria have to sex -- turned a relatively innocuous microbe into the agent of the Black Death, researchers said on Thursday. They said the gene allows Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes plague, to survive in the guts of fleas and thus to be passed from rats to people. Plague wiped out more than a quarter of Europe's population in the 14th century and still kills an average of 10 to 15 people every year in the United States, with between 1,000 and 3,000 cases reported every year globally.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,52094,00.html

Raising Alexandria Library
This was supposed to be a big week in the library world. The rebuilt great library of Alexandria, Egypt -- a $200 million facility that will house as many as 8 million books -- was scheduled to be officially inaugurated in festivities throughout the week, with everyone from Jimmy Carter to Stephen Jay Gould to Umberto Eco on hand for the opening. But those celebratory plans were scuttled because of the heightened Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Instead, Bibliotheca Alexandrina -- which ostensibly replaces the original that was destroyed more than a thousand years ago -- opened quietly to the public this week.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,52028,00.html

Two Words: Biodegradable Plastic
In the 1960s film The Graduate, a meddling family friend takes aimless collegiate Ben aside to proffer unwanted career advice: "plastics." More than 30 years later, the planet is choking on the stuff -- plastic packaging in particular. With green consciousness now taking root from Boston to Bangalore, the new hot career tip might be: "biodegradable plastics."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,51871,00.html

Ship With Dog Heads for Trouble
An abandoned refueling tanker, which has only a small dog on board, could create an ecological disaster if it runs aground at Johnston Atoll, the U.S. Coast Guard and the National Marine Fisheries Service said on Wednesday. The tanker Insiko 1907, which was crippled in a fire March 13, is about 250 nautical miles east of Johnston Atoll and drifting toward the atoll's protected wildlife refuge with its only passenger a small dog named Forgea.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52098,00.html

Searching for Answers in a Digital Universe
Jupiter, the brightest point in a recent moonless night sky, faded to a pale milk drop as it rose alongside the Tribute in Light that soared from the World Trade Center site during March of 2002. The sentiment of the memorial was touching, but the bright columns, along with the city's multitudes of other glittering lights are an astronomer's bane. Yet on the Upper West Side of Manhattan astrophysicist Mordecai-Mark Mac Low is peering deep into faint gas clouds and nebulae without so much as a squint.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnol..._020424-1.html

The Robots Are Coming
Morticia is quite the capable robot. She can scramble over the outback at about 15 kilometers per hour, climb stairs, survive a 10-meter drop onto a concrete floor and even navigate underwater. Not bad for a little critter that’s less than 20 centimeters high and 65 centimeters long — about the size of a small suitcase. Created under a U.S. Department of Defense contract by an MIT spinoff company called iRobot, Morticia is a military machine with a mission.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/garfinkel0502.asp

Pamela Anderson Wins One In Sex Video Fight
Actress Pamela Anderson and former husband Tommy Lee have gained a partial victory in a long-running battle over the distribution of what might be the most notorious sex video ever released on the Internet. A federal appeals court ruled this week that the Internet Entertainment Group (IEG) - a company that once operated the Club Love Web site famous for celebrity peep shows - did not have permission to distribute anywhere but on the Internet the 1997 hardcore "honeymoon video" of the former Baywatch star and her new rocker husband.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176130.html

Long-Time File-Swappers Buy More Music, Not Less - Update
Aram Sinnreich thinks it's time to inject some common sense into the discussion about how much damage Napster-style peer-to-peer file sharing really is doing to the music business. "As long as they resort to ham-handed scapegoating of consumer behaviors as a way to explain their poor performance," Jupiter Media Metrix entertainment analyst Aram Sinnreich said today, "they'll never make the steps it takes to evolve this industry."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176141.html

More news later on

[JackSpratts]

re:windows

the last argument of the truly deranged monopolist is always that more competition and more choice spells doom for the consumer. but it is never thus. so why are govermments worldwide still buying this tripe? were it not for connecticut and eight other states, microsofts' utter domination of all things desktop would be a fait acompli.

re:file swappers

of course they buy more music. anyone willing to jump thru the hoops necessary to master these p2ps is so into the stuff they can't help themselves. no doubt we'll be seeing more reports like this one in the future.

as always - wt!

- js.

[TankGirl]

WT!

Originally posted by walktalker
Long-Time File-Swappers Buy More Music, Not Less - Update
Aram Sinnreich thinks it's time to inject some common sense into the discussion about how much damage Napster-style peer-to-peer file sharing really is doing to the music business. "As long as they resort to ham-handed scapegoating of consumer behaviors as a way to explain their poor performance," Jupiter Media Metrix entertainment analyst Aram Sinnreich said today, "they'll never make the steps it takes to evolve this industry."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176141.html

also from the above:
Sinnreich acknowledges that the message of his research is complex, and might be hard for general public consumption at a time when the music industry is lobbying hard for legislative controls over digital music. But, he said, it is only a matter of time before the music industry has no more rhetorical cards to play and must admit it can't keep disseminating what he called "disinformation" about the way consumers use music on the Internet.

"At some point," Sinnreich said, "it rings untrue for everyone. From a strategy standpoint I've already had conversations with a number of record execs who acknowledge that our research is correct and they'd like to make things better.

- tg

[walktalker]

Originally posted by TankGirl
WT!
- tg

So, where's my usual ? I feel really lonesome here in Canada