The Newspaper Shop -- Tuesday edition

[walktalker]

Fiorina ruffled by courtroom clash
Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina took the witness stand Tuesday and appeared irritated when attorneys for Walter Hewlett repeatedly pressed her on whether HP's integration efforts are faltering. During the opening day of testimony in Hewlett's attempt to block HP's $19 billion acquisition of Compaq Computer, his attorneys charged that "value capture" teams from HP and Compaq have questioned key financial projections about the merger's impact. "There are a lot of people involved and a lot of back and forth," Fiorina responded from the stand. "The value capture reports are not a full picture of what we could and should achieve."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-11-889648.html

Net radio picks up support in Congress
A group of congressional representatives is rallying to support independent Webcasters, urging a federal arbitration panel to give them a fair royalty rate for online radio. The group on Monday asked that the U.S. Library of Congress and the Copyright Office make sure the arbitration panel's proposed royalty fees would not stifle the industry, potentially forcing hundreds of small Webcasters out of business. The issue stems from a recommendation made by the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) that would require Webcasters to pay record companies a fraction of a cent for every song they stream online. For larger companies such as AOL Time Warner, royalty fees would increase substantially, but it wouldn't be crippling.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-890099.html

Are next-gen displays in sight?
Portable devices are getting closer to having longer battery life and slimmer designs because of improvements to the production of organic light-emitting diode displays from companies such as Philips Electronics. Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) is looked upon as a promising display technology that if fully realized could consume less power and be thinner than liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which dominate the lucrative multibillion-dollar flat-panel monitor market. But analysts don't expect OLED to unseat LCD anytime soon because, as with all emerging technologies, it takes time to streamline production and boost yields for high efficiencies and volumes.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-890051.html

Symbian opens OS source code
Symbian today said it will open most of the source code for its mobile operating system to third party developers, in its latest effort to encourage the creation of more software for the platform. The company also announced that German electronics giant Siemens has agreed to buy 5 percent of the company for more than 20-million euros ($17.8 million). The software company, which is co-owned by Psion as well as Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and others, already provides most of its code to its licensees, and will offer the same access to software developers through a new plan called the "Symbian Platinum Program".
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-889263.html

[b]In a pre-emptive strike to stave off the wrath of the movie industry, a small software company is asking a federal judge for permission to sell and market its product for copying DVDs. In a complaint filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, 321 Studios asked the court to declare that its DVD Copy Plus program does not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. "This lawsuit involves the ability of a small Internet company to market and sell an instruction manual and bundled computer software that teaches legal owners of DVD movies to make legitimate backup copies of the contents of a DVD for their own personal use," the suit states.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-889915.html

Are in-car gadgets driving us to distraction ?
General Motors announced a multiyear partnership Tuesday with the University of Illinois to study the mounting controversy of dashboard electronics and driver distraction. The Detroit-based automaker's research and development division teamed up with the university's Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the Urbana-Champaign campus. The goal is to determine how well humans can interact with in-vehicle technologies such as satellite navigation systems, dashboard entertainment systems and laptop computers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-889817.html

Europe plans to jail hackers
The European Commission has unveiled new proposals that could send Internet hackers and spreaders of computer viruses to jail for years. Industry and security experts welcomed the proposals, but said more needed to be done to get companies, cautious of bad publicity, to report Internet attacks and to boost law enforcement resources in the fight against cybercrime. Presenting the proposals, European Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Antonio Vitorino said on Tuesday there was a clear link between organized crime and Internet attacks.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-889332.html

Study: Users sticking with dial-up for now
Internet users are showing more willingness to pay for a high-speed broadband Internet connection, although large numbers remain happy with dial-up, a survey released Tuesday said. Jupiter Media Metrix, which calculated that just 16 percent of U.S. households have a broadband Internet connection, said 8.6 percent of the country's dial-up subscribers say they are highly likely to switch to broadband service in the next year.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-889311.html

The brains behind Kazaa
newsmakers Nikki Hemming has emerged as one of the most mysterious Internet executives in the world. Hemming, 35, is CEO of Sharman Networks. In late January, her little-known company bought the Kazaa Media Desktop (KMD), a popular post-Napster file-swapping program that is used by tens of millions of people worldwide. Even by the ordinarily eventful standards of the peer-to-peer world, the months since have been punctuated by controversy.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-890072.html

Musician to Napster judge: Let my music go
On Feb. 27, the mild-mannered professor -- Byrd teaches music history at the College of the Redwoods in Northern California -- decided to take his case to Marilyn Hall Patel, the federal judge overseeing the labels' lawsuit against Napster for copyright infringement. He wrote Patel a letter detailing how Sony had been giving him the cold shoulder for decades. His situation, he added, was hardly unique. "I am not alone," he wrote. "Literally thousands of musicians like me, who are purportedly represented by record companies and distributors in the current Napster case, are in my situation."
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/0...ght/index.html

State Spam Laws Rarely Enforced
Anyone cleaning out a bulging e-mail in box probably has wished for a law regulating spam, the unsolicited electronic messages that promise instant weight loss, overnight riches and triple-X pictures. Twenty states, including California, have laws governing the distribution of commercial e-mail to individuals and companies. Violations can lead to fines and even jail time.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-000023286apr01.story

Kazaa steps out of the shadows
A new candidate to become center of the file-swapping universe has been unveiled: Vanuatu, a small group of Islands in the South Pacific. That's where Sharman Networks, the parent company of the hugely popular Kazaa software, is registered to do business, according to Chief Executive Nikki Hemming. After months of speculation about the mysterious file-trading company, Hemming went public with this and other details of her business in a conference call late Tuesday.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-890197.html?tag=cd_mh

NYTimes.com offers "premium" clips
New York Times Digital started selling video clips of interviews with famous artists and public figures, the latest Net publisher to place a premium on broadcasts. TimesTalks Online is the Web site's first paid programming for streaming media. The original collection of six video broadcasts, originating from the The New York Times' Critic's Choice events held in New York earlier this year, features interviews with director Martin Scorsese, news anchor Peter Jennings and musician Lou Reed, among others. The interviews sell for $5.95 each or $19.95 as a collection.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-889931.html?tag=cd_mh

Flash News Flash: It's Accessible
People who design in Flash "consider themselves artists," said accessibility expert Joe Clark. "They find the idea of a blind person wanting to (use) their site to be slightly weird." However, Jason Smith defies that stereotype. In his job as a technical director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he helped to design an educational children's science site -- and he wanted to include some Flash-animated games.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,51638,00.html

Second space tourist set for take off
Africa's first person in space, Mark Shuttleworth, will blast off in a Russian rocket on Thursday. He hopes to use the 10-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS) to carry out Aids research. The internet tycoon will become the world's second space tourist to take off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He follows America's Dennis Tito who flew to the ISS in May 2001.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1945950.stm

More news later on

[TankGirl]

It's great to see my favorite newsman smiling again!
Thanks WT, can I have a cup of coffee as well?

- tg