The Newspaper Shop -- Wednesday edition

[walktalker]

Microsoft finalizing next-gen Office
Microsoft is finalizing plans for the next version of its Office business software, which will likely include new Web services, communication and collaboration features, said sources familiar with the company's plans. Moreover, many of the features once planned as part of Microsoft's .Net My Services consumer Web services strategy may now find their way into Office, sources said. Microsoft has not set a release date for the next version of the business software, which has been referred to internally as Office.Net or Next Generation Office.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-914027.html

Big Blue's building a nano think tank
IBM has created a small group within its semiconductor division to work with a select few nanotechnology start-ups on manufacturing issues and in exploring trends, another incremental step toward molecular computing. The group, part of the emerging-products organization inside IBM Microelectronics, will serve two main purposes. It will let Big Blue get a better view of the current state of nanotechnology research outside the company, and it could help a handful of companies get beyond the prototype stage, said Thomas Thies, director of physical sciences at IBM, speaking at the Nanotech Planet conference here Tuesday.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-914395.html

No snitching for Sonicblue -- for now
A judge on Wednesday granted digital video recorder company Sonicblue a stay in its request to reverse an order that would force it to monitor the viewing habits of its customers. Earlier this month, a federal magistrate ordered Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sonicblue to develop software that would allow it to monitor the viewing habits of its ReplayTV set-top box owners. The order also required Sonicblue to hand that information over to the plaintiffs in the copyright-infringement case -- a group of entertainment powerhouses including AOL Time Warner, MGM, Disney, and the big three TV networks.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-914445.html

Sun slaps a price tag on StarOffice
Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 6.0 will go on sale May 21 with a price of $75.95, the company will announce Wednesday, in a more concerted effort by the server specialist to take on Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant Office. StarOffice 5.2 has been available as a free download since Sun acquired the StarOffice product line in 1999, but Sun said earlier this year it would charge for the new version and provide better support for customers using it.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-913868.html

Bugs zapped from Linux Outlook clone
The open-source Ximian project has released a new version of Evolution, the Microsoft Outlook clone for Linux, fixing a glitch that can crash the software. Evolution 1.0.5 also fixes a list of less serious bugs. Evolution is remarkable because it allows Linux users to connect to a Microsoft Exchange server. Microsoft has not developed Exchange connectors for operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS that compete with its own Windows platform, and the lack of Exchange software is a major factor keeping many business users from shifting to non-Windows software.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-914115.html

'Deceptive Duo' suspects in FBI swoop
The FBI executed search warrants against two former online vandals it believes to be the members of the "patriot" hacking group the Deceptive Duo, CNET News.com has learned. Agents confiscated computer equipment from Robert Lyttle, previously convicted of defacing dozens of sites under the moniker Pimpshiz, in California on Monday in connection to the Deceptive Duo case. The bureau also took equipment from The-Rev, a former member of the hacking group Sm0ked Crew, in Florida on Sunday, said a friend of the two hackers.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-914280.html

Microsoft trims Xbox price
Microsoft fired the second shot in the video game industry's growing price war, dropping its Xbox system from $299 to $199 in the United States, effective Wednesday. The cut follows by one day rival Sony's decision to make an identical cut in the North American price of its PlayStation 2. The move leaves all the major game consoles -- PS2, Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube -- at $199. Nintendo said Tuesday it has no plans to lower the GameCube's price.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-913832.html

Fans meet the dark side of Web tickets
With tickets in hand, Craig Rankin thought he was going to see the new "Star Wars" movie early Wednesday morning. Instead, the showing was just a phantom menace. Rankin's ticket for "Attack of the Clones," which he purchased online through Moviefone, was for a show time of 12:01 a.m. on May 15. But when the Berkeley, Calif., resident showed up at the theater late Tuesday night to take his place in line for the show, the theater was shutting down, and workers there told him he'd have to wait until Thursday to see the show. "I knew it would be too good to be true. I knew the movie was supposed to come out on the 16th," Rankin said. "But it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that the tickets were correct."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-914469.html?tag=fd_top

Teen accused of IM harassment
A Boston-area teen has had his instant messaging wings clipped following charges that he used the medium to harass girls and their families. Under the terms of a pretrial probation agreement signed Monday by the unidentified teen and others involved in the case, the resident of North Reading, Mass., risks criminal prosecution if he engages in "unsupervised" use of IM and other computing applications, according to the North Reading Police Department.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-914471.html?tag=fd_top

Online radio heard in Congress
Independent Webcasters and the recording industry testified at a Senate hearing Wednesday over a proposed royalty rate for online radio, just days before a federal arbitration panel rules on a licensing regime for the new medium. The issue stems from a recommendation made by the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) that would require Webcasters to pay record companies 0.14 cents per listener per song and over-the-air broadcasters to pay 0.07 cents per song for streaming online.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-914261.html?tag=fd_top

States: Microsoft urged Linux retaliation
A Microsoft executive urged the company to quietly retaliate against supporters of the rival Linux operating system in an August 2000 memo that nine states still suing the software giant want admitted as evidence. Late Monday, the nine states seeking stiff antitrust sanctions against Microsoft asked the judge in the case to reconsider her decision that shielded Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates from the e-mail message during his testimony last month.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-913761.html?tag=cd_mh

Net firms turning to tradition in advertising
Having long sought to set the Internet apart from traditional advertising media, the online industry is now fighting to close the perception gap that it helped create. While the feeble status of Net advertising can largely be blamed on the dot-com bust, some of its lingering problems hang on the disconnect between ways of measuring the performance of offline and online media. For example, ad buyers steeped in the vernacular of print, outdoor and broadcast media still don't understand how to reach a specific audience on the Internet.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-913619.html

Opera expands its Linux language range
Norway's Opera Software is targeting Eastern European and Asian markets with the final 6.0 release of its browser for Linux, unveiled Wednesday. The new version is the first of the open-source operating system to support the Unicode Worldwide Character Set, which increases support for non-Roman characters -- a development particularly important for Asian languages. Unicode will also make it possible to create local versions of the browser for Eastern European countries.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-914185.html?tag=cd_mh

The Day the Napster Died
Napster, the software application that ignited the music file-trading frenzy, came to an apparent end on Tuesday after its board of directors nixed a sale that would have kept the company afloat. When founder Shawn Fanning and CEO Konrad Hilbers abruptly resigned on Tuesday, the company that launched the most innovative Internet program was gone, just like that.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,52540,00.html

Turkey Passes Strict Net Law
After a 10-hour Turkish parliament session during which a scuffle was averted, a media law severely limiting freedom of expression on the Web passed with no change early Wednesday. The approval of the law comes as Turkey struggles to meet Copenhagen criteria for European Union membership, and does not sit well with representatives of the 15-nation bloc, who have called on Turkish authorities to review it immediately.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52558,00.html

Hot on the Contrails of Weather
Scientists have long suspected that airplane condensation trails -- the wispy, white tails found in the wake of high-flying jets -- form larger cloud banks that substantially alter the atmosphere's heat balance. These jet-generated clouds, called contrails, may in turn play an important role in shaping our weather. However, testing this proposition has been tricky. Scientists can't just ground all the planes across, say, North America and then study the before-and-after data.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,52512,00.html

Net Clearinghouse for Creatives
An Internet clearinghouse being launched Thursday seeks to counteract the barriers to creativity that its founders believe current copyright protection law fosters. The Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization based at Stanford University and formed by legal scholars and Web publishers, will encourage authors and other creative people to donate selected writings, music, video and other works for free exchange.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,52562,00.html

Fans Try to Save Historic Arcade
Hundreds of sentimental gamers are rallying to save a 20-year-old arcade in Pasadena, California, that may be shut down due to alleged multiple building violations by the owner. Eddy Hemaratanatorn opened the Pak Mann arcade in 1982. It's been a popular place to hold tournaments and one of the few arcades that has remained open as home consoles have become the platform of choice.
http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,52424,00.html

Digital animators are closing in on the complex system that makes a face come alive
Faces hit walls all the time in the movies, but this was different: The wall these digital filmmakers kept running up against was the face itself. Bodies, animators insist, are quite doable - no longer that big a deal. Hands are a bit more of a challenge, yet easily within reach. But the face! The face is the one area where muscles don't necessarily attach to bone: Often, muscles fold one atop the other, one into the other. Moreover, these 44 facial muscles are capable of producing some 5,000 different expressions. And some, especially in the wake of Final Fantasy, the all-digital, $140 million box office bust, were beginning to ask themselves whether this particular wall was even theoretically scalable.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/face.html

Rights Group Joins Fight Against DVR Snooping Order
A civil liberties coalition has joined SonicBlue to fend off a court order that SonicBlue begin logging what customers do with its ReplayTV 4000 digital video recorder (DVR). In a "friend-of-the-court" brief filed in a Los Angeles federal court Monday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) argued that court-order surveillance of ReplayTV users to satisfy litigious movie studious and television broadcasters would trample on the consumers' privacy rights.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002May14.html

Hubble's 'Pillars of Creation' are fading
It is the most famous picture ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Released in 1995, the image - dubbed the Pillars of Creation - has become an icon for the grandeur and beauty of the cosmos. The Eagle Nebula, as it is known, was described at the time as a region of intense star formation; you can see bright stars sprinkled across the image and embedded in the vast columns of gas and dust. Now, however, the latest observations (looking at wavelengths outside the optical region of the spectrum) suggest the Eagle is anything but a stellar breeding ground - it is, in fact, producing very few stars and fading fast.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1987449.stm

At MIT, they can put words in our mouths
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created the first realistic videos of people saying things they never said - a scientific leap that raises unsettling questions about falsifying the moving image. In one demonstration, the researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera, and then reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking entirely new sentences, and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese, a language she does not speak. The results were enough to fool viewers consistently, the researchers report.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/13..._mouths+.shtml

Space Weapons For Earth Wars
While the latest Star Wars sci-fi saga makes its way to a cinema near you, a true-to-life space drama is unfolding as a new breed of weaponry may soon populate the heavens. Military planners paint a picture of inevitability concerning space weapons. Certain experts foresee a proliferation of anti-satellites and space mines. Others suggest urgent need for totally secure, jam-proof satellite links along with a squadron of quick-reaction space bombers. Perhaps more "out there", but openly discussed by military space strategists, are orbiting laser and particle beam weapons that focus killer rays of energy to zap satellites, enemy warheads in flight, or even blast targets on Earth.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnol..._020515-1.html

Virtual reality lets parents "touch" fetus in womb
Parents-to-be can now "feel" a baby in the womb with the aid of a computer system that converts ultrasound images into a tactile virtual picture. A 3D ultrasound image of the baby is generated by layering successive 2D pictures on top of one another. The computer then traces the features of the fetus and allows the 3D shapes to be felt using a "haptic" device, which resembles a robot arm.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992284

All-silicon radios could make everything wireless
Intel makes microchips, not radios. But if the company’s newest manufacturing plans pan out, the distinction between the two products may disappear. According to chief technology officer Patrick Gelsinger, Intel is quickly learning how to build tiny radio transceivers from the same material it uses in microchips: silicon. Research progress inspired Gelsinger to announce in February an audacious plan to put a silicon-based radio on the corner of every microchip the company sells, within as little as five years, at no extra cost to customers. The announcement puts Intel at the forefront of industry efforts to build all-in-one chips that could replace the jumble of costly parts in cell phones and other wireless gadgets.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/innovation10602.asp

Accuracy is addictive
Ever since humans took to exploring beyond their front yard, they have sought ways of determining where they are and where they are going. But until fairly recently, the best positioning tools available — landmarks, celestial guidance and dead reckoning — all had disadvantages. Some were too local or complicated; others too finicky or inaccurate. In her book “Longitude”, Dava Sobel wrote that an inability to establish their whereabouts reliably caused every great captain in the age of exploration, from Vasco da Gama to Sir Francis Drake, to become lost when at sea. During the 1950s, with their first artificial satellite in the works, the generals of the former Soviet Union were mulling over the merits of building a satellite navigation system.
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/...ory_id=1020779

Clothier Helps Fashions Own Defeat In Domain Dispute
Internet addresses packing the famous labels of Ralph Lauren and Polo fashions and an alleged cybersquatter who didn't even bother to respond to the accusation would normally add up to a slam-dunk decision for a trademark holder under a fast- track system to resolve disputes over domain names. However, an arbitrator assigned by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has ruled that the U.S.-based fashion marketer fell short in proving that the current holder of the domains Ralph- Lauren-Polo.com and Polo-Style.com is using the addresses in bad faith.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176608.html

Canadian Pharmacists Take Action On U.S. Internet Sales
U.S. authorities trying to stop the flow of prescription drugs purchased from foreign companies on the Internet have received some enforcement help north of the border. The Ontario College of Pharmacists (OCP) in Canada announced Tuesday that it had laid a total of 15 charges against two medical professionals, a number of companies and one of the companies' directors in a crackdown on an operation that filled prescriptions online.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176589.html

Copyright License Fee Would Ease File-Swap Problems
If Internet users paid a "reasonable" flat fee to their Internet service provider in exchange for access to entertainment content that could be downloaded or streamed, many of the divisive legal issues related to online file-swapping could be resolved, a spokeswoman for Verizon today told Newsbytes. "A compulsory copyright license is a mechanism used in copyright law," Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel for the telecommunications company. "Users pay a fee, then there is no copyright violation and content owners would have a new source of revenue."
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/176579.html

More news later on

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[JackSpratts]

Excellent as always WT. Some of the best news on the net!

- js.

[floydian slip]

Originally posted by walktalker
The Day the Napster Died
Napster, the software application that ignited the music file-trading frenzy, came to an apparent end on Tuesday after its board of directors nixed a sale that would have kept the company afloat. When founder Shawn Fanning and CEO Konrad Hilbers abruptly resigned on Tuesday, the company that launched the most innovative Internet program was gone, just like that.
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,52540,00.html

Napster is Dead!

LONG LIVE NAPSTER !!

[tbozfan]

Thanks for the news - u seem to find the most interesting stories hehe. BTW I LOVE those banner ad things hahahaha.

[ab-NORM-al]

Originally posted by floydian slip





LONG LIVE NAPSTER !!

I will add
Long Live Napsterites!!!


It was the peeps that made the prog what it was....and we're still here!!

Hi all!!!

thanks WT!