May 2008 Archives

"Talk about right place, right time. Quite by chance, astronomers have captured footage of a star blowing itself to smithereens.

Stars heavier than about eight times the mass of the sun meet their deaths in catastrophic explosions when their core runs out of fuel. The core can collapse into a black hole or neutron star, generating a shock wave that ploughs outwards, blasting the star's atmosphere apart.

Hundreds of supernovae are seen every year, but usually days or weeks after the event (in the Earth's time frame), when the optical glow of radioactive nickel in the debris reaches a peak. By then it is often too late to determine what kind of star exploded or what events led up to the blast.

Alicia Soderberg from Princeton University and her colleagues were using an X-ray detector on NASA's Swift space telescope to observe a galaxy 88 million light years away when they saw a brief but intense X-ray signal. This is characteristic of a supernova explosion, and is emitted by hot gas trapped just behind the shock wave as it bursts out of a star. "It only lasted a few minutes and then the whole show was over," says Soderberg."

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"A third giant red storm has flared up on Jupiter, joining the Great Red Spot and the recently developed Red Spot Junior. The spot, along with new measurements of record-high wind speeds on Red Spot Junior, come at a time when the solar system's largest planet is experiencing a time of global upheaval.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is an ancient, hurricane-like storm that may have been raging for 340 years or more, based on early observations with telescopes. At three times the width of Earth, it is the largest storm in the solar system.

It was recently joined by a similar, but smaller storm called Red Spot Junior. Red Spot Junior grew out of the merger of three smaller, white storms between 1998 and 2000 and turned red in 2006. It is about the size of Earth.

Now, a third red spot, about half the size of Red Spot Junior, has broken out on the giant gaseous planet. The spot, previously a white storm, now appears red in Hubble Space Telescope images taken on 9 and 10 May. The observations were led by Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, US.

No one knows for sure what gives the three spots their red colour. But one theory is that especially violent storms dredge up material from deeper in Jupiter's atmosphere, such as phosphorus-containing molecules, which undergo chemical reactions that turn them red when exposed to sunlight."

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"It's the basement apartment like no other. Life has been found 1.6 kilometres beneath the sea floor, at temperatures reaching 100 °C.

The discovery marks the deepest living cells ever to be found beneath the sea floor. Bacteria have been found deeper underneath the continents, but there they are rare. In comparison, the rocks beneath the sea appear to be teeming with life.

John Parkes, a geobiologist at the University of Cardiff, UK, hopes his team's discovery might one day help find life on other planets. He says it might even redefine what we understand as life, and, bizarrely, what we understand by "age".

Parkes has been hunting for deep life for over 20 years. Recently, he and his colleagues examined samples of a mud core extracted from between 860 metres and 1626 metres beneath the sea floor off the coast of Newfoundland.

They found simple organisms known as prokaryotes in every sample. Prokaryotes are organisms that often have just one cell. Their peculiarity is that, unlike any other form of life, their DNA is not neatly packed into a nucleus."

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"A new analysis of a canyon in the US state of Idaho lends support to the idea that Mars, which boasts similar canyons, had substantial rainfall and major floods early in its history.

Idaho's Box Canyon resembles a snake, with a sinuous body and a rounded head (see image at right). One theory suggests that such "amphitheater-headed" canyons form slowly, as seeping groundwater gradually erodes canyon walls in the snake's head.

That process might create some canyons in softer rock, say researchers led by Michael Lamb of the University of California, Berkeley, US. But they say such slow seepage could not have transported the metre-sized boulders that were carried downstream in Box Canyon, which is carved into harder basaltic bedrock.

"It requires a lot of water to remove them," Lamb says.

In fact, it would have required a megaflood - a catastrophic outpouring of massive amounts of water in a relatively short period. Such megafloods occurred numerous times in the western US several tens of thousands of years ago and played a significant role in shaping the landscape."

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"The technology needed to send a robotic probe to another solar system is far in the future at best. But one scientist says it's not too soon to start thinking about how to avoid contaminating extrasolar planets with hitchhiking microbes from Earth.

Even today's fastest spacecraft would take tens of thousands of years to reach the Sun's nearest neighbours, Proxima and Alpha Centauri, which lie just over 4 light years away and may host an Earth-like planet.

But some proposed technologies - such as nuclear propulsion, solar sails, and antimatter drives - could theoretically get a spacecraft to other solar systems in a human lifetime.

However far in the future such technologies may be, it is worth thinking about the potential problem of contaminating other solar systems with Earth life, according to a new paper by Charles Cockell of the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research at Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.

Why should we take the trouble to avoid such interstellar contamination? First, there is the "utilitarian desire to preserve examples of other life of potentially enormous scientific interest", Cockell says. In previous writings, he has also argued that humans have an ethical responsibility to avoid harming life in other solar systems."

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"As Burma's government finally allows foreign aid workers into the country, the UN is warning that only a few weeks remain before the country's main rice crop, in the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta, must be planted.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says that the damage caused by Cyclone Nargis to the region's irrigation canals and tidal defenses will have to be repaired before soils can start to recover from salt damage. So even if the next crop gets planted, it could yield less rice than usual.

Nargis, which hit southern Burma on 2 May, is now thought to have killed 134,000 people and left 2.4 million homeless. The UN estimates that only a quarter of the victims have received any assistance. There are reports of cholera among survivors, who have little or no shelter or clean water.
No-go delta

Foreign aid workers, and ordinary Burmese trying to bring help from elsewhere in the country, have been banned from going deep into the delta region. It was not immediately clear whether Friday's announcement, made by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon after a meeting with the junta's chief, General Than Shwe, meant foreign aid workers would be able to enter the delta, or when."

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"Landing on Mars is hard - as any glance at a list of failed missions will tell you. That's why there will be cheering and genuine relief this Sunday if all goes well and the Phoenix mission touches down safely on the planet's barren northern plains.

So far the indications are good. Mission controllers based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, US, say the spacecraft is healthy and behaving as it should.

Mars is cooperating, too. The weather reports are about as favourable as weather reports can get when you're landing on a -90 °C barren desert more than 270 million kilometres from the nearest motel.

The mission is not the first to attempt to explore Mars in a region far from the Red Planet's equator. In 1999, Mars Polar Lander, equipped with some of the same experiments that today make up Phoenix's science package, failed to reach the south polar regions of Mars intact.

Scientists have good reason for wanting to explore Mars at high latitudes. Remoting sensing indicates the presence of ice just below the surface where Phoenix will land. If it's really there, and accessible to Phoenix, the ice will carry detailed information about the Red Planet's climate history."

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"Indonesia is still digging in its heels over access to the most recent strains of the H5N1 flu virus.

Hit by most of the recent human cases of H5N1, Indonesia holds virus samples that could help develop the most effective vaccine if H5N1 goes pandemic. But the country has refused to share its samples without guarantees from rich nations that it will be allowed access to vaccines derived from them. So far it has sent the World Health Organization samples from only two of its 16 known cases this year.

A partial solution was reached last week when the Indonesian health minister announced that she will send gene sequences from the country's virus samples to a public database. Although this will allow researchers to track how the virus is evolving, vaccine development normally requires the viruses themselves and Indonesia is still mostly refusing to send those to foreign labs.

There may be another hope: the European Union has just approved Prepandrix, an H5N1 vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline. Although based on a 2004 virus from Vietnam, it managed to elicit immune reactions to other strains of H5N1 in human trials."

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"IF YOU thought it was hard finding the email address that some other john.smith hasn't already bagged, that's nothing compared with the difficulty you'll have getting an internet connection for your computer after 2011.

As of this month 85 per cent of the 4.3 billion available Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which identify devices connected to the net, are already in use. Within three years they will all be used up, according to a report by the OECD. "The situation is critical for the future of the internet economy," it says.

The report urges governments and businesses to upgrade from the current version, IPv4, to IPv6, which effectively has an unlimited number of IP addresses. IPv6 has been available for more than a decade but service providers have been slow to adopt it."

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"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Napster Inc., the digital music service, on Tuesday opened the world's biggest MP3 download store with more than 6 million songs in a direct challenge to Apple Inc's iTunes store.

The new Web-based music store will have digital songs from all major music labels as well as thousands of independent labels. The MP3-format songs will be compatible with the vast majority of digital media devices and mobile phones including Apple's popular iPod as well as its iPhone.

Before now Napster has focused on selling all-you-can-eat monthly streaming music subscription packages but has struggled to win over the majority of fans who want to be able to transfer songs they like on to a portable device such as the market-leading iPod.

The new Napster service tries to take on Apple's dominance in digital music by offering fans more songs without copy protection or digital rights management (DRM). Most of the six million songs on the iTunes Music store are available with Fairplay DRM, which prevents the songs from being played on most portable players other than the iPod."

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"TOKYO (AFP) - MySpace launched new services in Japan on Tuesday a day after Facebook launched a Japanese version amid growing competition here between social networking sites.

MySpace said it was partnering with 33 companies in Japan to create and encourage new stars and strengthen its support for the 55,000 artists and professionals who are registered with the site.

"Due to this partnership, we will energise the market by offering opportunities to young creators to release a CD, produce or participate in various events," it said in a statement.

MySpace's partners include some of Japan's largest recording companies EMI Music Japan and AVEX Entertainment, as well as the music shop HMV. They will organise auditions and talent shows to seek out new artists.

MySpace entered the Japanese market in 2006 in a joint venture between News Corp. and Japanese Internet giant Softbank Corp., hoping to entice customers away from Japan's hugely popular online social networking site Mixi."

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"MOSCOW (Reuters) - Google Inc dominates Internet searches across the world with a major exception of Russia, a gap which Russian-born co-founder Sergei Brin is keen to fill, he said in a newspaper interview.

"Now, we have incorporated far better morphology, which is very important in (the) Russian language," Brin said referring to a search technique which examines word construction.

Local Internet company and search engine Yandex receives about twice as many searches a day, Brin told Russian business newspaper Vedomosti during his first visit to Moscow in 4-1/2 years. "We think our search is better but it (Yandex) also has many talented people."

In February Yandex said it planned to float shares on Nasdaq later this year, an IPO which analysts estimated could value the company at around $3 billion.

Russia is an increasingly important market for Internet search engines which generate an estimated $40 billion a year from advertising worldwide. Internet user numbers are booming in Russia, which has a population of 142 million."

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"PARIS (Reuters) - The world's top handset maker Nokia Oyj expects the role of the Linux operating system in its product portfolio to increase as the role of its Internet-focused devices grows, company officials said.

Linux has so far had little success on cellphones, but its role is increasing as more new Linux-based models reach the market, while Google Inc gave it a vote of confidence by using it to build its Android platform on.

Nokia itself has used Linux for years in its Internet tablets, large phone-like devices used to access Internet on the go, but lacking calling functionality. "We will expand that range, and we believe that the role of Linux will grow," said Nokia spokesman Kari Tuutti.

Linux is the most popular type of open source operating system which is available to the public to be used, revised and shared -- meaning it has a large developer community which could result in more attractive programs and lower costs for the likes of Nokia.

Nokia has used the tablets to target technology-savvy consumers or support emerging technologies like WiMAX.

"It's going to be terribly important," Nokia's Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson told an investor conference when asked about the role of Linux-based tablets."

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"WASHINGTON - A Cisco Systems Inc. executive told a Senate subcommittee Tuesday that comments in an internal document about China's goal to "combat" a religious group did not reflect the company's views on censorship.

The PowerPoint presentation, which described China's technology status, included a slide that referred to goals to stop network-related crimes, guarantee the security and services of a public network and "combat 'Falun Gong' evil religion and other hostiles." Falun Gong is a spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government, which considers it a dangerous cult.

"In no case does the document propose that any Cisco products be provided to facilitate the political goals of the government and no reference to applications of our products to the goals of censorship or monitoring," Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on human rights and the law.

The subcommittee heard testimony from Cisco, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. executives about how U.S. Internet and technology companies do business with certain governments that censor and suppress the free speech of their citizens.

Chandler said that Cisco regrets that comments from a Chinese government official were included in the 2002 presentation, which also mentioned other technology projects.

However, Shiyu Zhou, deputy director of the humans rights group Global Internet Freedom Consortium, said Cisco's presentation offered planning, construction, technical training and other services to help China improve law enforcement and security network operations."

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"WILMINGTON, Del. - Lawyers on both sides of a shareholder lawsuit over Yahoo Inc.'s board's handling of Microsoft's $47.5 billion takeover offer are accusing one another of turning it into a public relations battle.

A Delaware judge weighing the shareholders' request to make their complaint against the company public held a private phone conference with lawyers for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo and dissident shareholders Tuesday morning.

Plaintiffs' attorney Joel Friedlander wrote in a letter to Chancellor William Chandler III last week that Internet pioneer Yahoo is trying to "whitewash embarrassing documents" it believes will damage the board's efforts to repel a proxy fight by activist investor Carl Icahn.

The two sides will submit additional arguments this week and next, and the judge will rule after that, Friedlander said Tuesday.

Much of the information the defendants want to keep secret, according to Friedlander, involves employee severance plans that Yahoo adopted shortly after software maker Microsoft Corp. made its initial bid on Jan. 31.

Adoption of the severance plans was an "unreasonable defensive measure" that breached the board's fiduciary duty to maximize value for Yahoo shareholders, the plaintiffs claim.

Icahn has nominated an alternate slate of candidates to oppose Yahoo's 10 current directors, including Chief Executive Jerry Yang, at Yahoo's July 3 annual meeting."

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"BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) has proposed to buy Yahoo Inc's (YHOO.O) search business and take a minority stake in the Web pioneer, stopping short of a full-out merger, a person familiar with the discussions said on Monday.

As part of the deal Yahoo would put its Asian assets, including significant minority stakes in Yahoo Japan (4689.T) and China's Alibaba Group, up for sale, while Microsoft would buy a chunk of what remains of the company, the source said.

The talks were revealed by the two companies on Sunday, but they declined to reveal the terms of the discussions. Earlier this month, Microsoft walked away from a proposal to acquire Yahoo for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, after Yahoo rebuffed the offer, saying it would only settle for $37 a share.

The new deal, if completed, would forge an alliance between the two companies that would represent an alternative means of competing with rival Google Inc (GOOG.O), whose ubiquitous search engine has made it an online advertising powerhouse.

The proposal represents an outline of Microsoft's current thinking and it does not yet put a value on Yahoo's search business, said the source, who was not authorized to speak on the record because the discussions are confidential."

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"A NASA review appears to spell the end for Gravity Probe B, the project conceived in the 1960s to measure how the Earth warps the fabric of nearby space-time.

A panel of about 15 experts commissioned by NASA analysed the performance of 10 NASA astrophysics missions that are currently operating in Earth orbit. A copy of the "senior review" obtained by New Scientist concludes that extending the lifetimes of the top nine missions "would be certain to deliver unique data of high scientific value". But Gravity Probe B didn't make the cut because the panel doubted further analysis of its results would yield significant new information.

Building and launching spacecraft is expensive, so maximising the use of those already in orbit can offer big benefits. But the expert panel said NASA didn't have the budget to support all the worthwhile missions.

It recommended that Gravity Probe B receive no additional funding after its current funding runs out in September.

Launched in 2004, the satellite used four precision-engineered gyroscopes to measure two effects - called the geodetic effect and frame dragging - predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The probe's data was unexpectedly noisy due to solar flares in March 2005 that interrupted the satellite's observations, as well as unexpected torques on the gyroscopes that changed their orientation, mimicking relativistic effects. Additional interruptions ultimately chopped the observing time into seven intervals, which reduced the precision the probe could attain."

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"NASA has cleared the space shuttle Discovery for launch on 31 May to deliver the centrepiece of Japan's space programme, a massive laboratory named Kibo, to the International Space Station.

Lift-off is scheduled for 1702 EDT (2102 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with docking at the space station expected two days later. "Right now we're in great shape," said launch director Mike Leinbach.

Officials said they were not expecting any delay to the shuttle mission due to the ongoing investigation of Russian Soyuz spacecraft that malfunctioned while returning space station crew members to Earth.

During the last two Soyuz landings, in April 2008 and October 2007, the craft descended more steeply than planned and landed off course.

That has raised questions about the use of a Soyuz spacecraft currently attached to the station as a means of escape for the station crew in an emergency.

But the agency's associate administrator for space operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, said that despite the two problematic Soyuz flights, the vehicle is considered safe enough to rely on for emergency returns.

He said he had visited Russia during the previous week to meet with the investigation team and did not see any concerns big enough to delay the shuttle launch. "I talked to [the team] about us setting up for the 31st launch," he said. "They told us that they were ready for us to go fly.""

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"The unlikely story of advanced 3G cellular service in the world's most tightly controlled and secretive country has turned another chapter with the start of network trials.

Cellular carrier Orascom said on Monday that it has completed the first 3G call on a WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) trial network in North Korea, and is working towards a commercial launch there later this year.

Orascom, based in Egypt, said in January that a 25-year exclusive license to offer 3G cellular service in the country had been awarded to CHEO Technology, a joint venture in which Orascom holds a 75 percent stake and Korea Post and Telecommunications holds the remaining 25 percent.

A full commercial service is scheduled to begin in the second half of the year, Orascom said.

In January, Orascom said it intended to provide voice, data and value-added services across the network, which represents a US$400 million investment."

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"Games consoles contain toxic chemicals that would not be allowed in young childrens' toys, even though the technology to eliminate them is available, according to a study by environmental lobby group Greenpeace. However, manufacturers are starting to eliminate some toxic chemicals from their products, Greenpeace said.

Greenpeace analyzed a PlayStation 3, a Wii and an Xbox 360 Elite for its report "Playing Dirty," published Tuesday.

The consoles, all bought in Europe last November, appeared to comply with the recently introduced European Union legislation on the reduction of hazardous substances (RoHS), as Greenpeace found no mercury or cadmium, and only trace amounts of lead and chromium. Some chemicals may have slipped by the testers, as Greenpeace did not have the resources to analyze every single component in the devices, it said.

However, the consoles all contained toxic or undesirable chemicals such as beryllium, found in circuit board contacts; PVC, found in electrical insulation; phthalates, used to soften plastics, and bromine, used as a fire retardant. Phthalates can have an effect on sexual development, especially in males, and some are banned from children's toys and childcare articles, especially if they can be chewed. (Game consoles are not considered toys under European legislation.) The other chemicals typically cause problems when products are disposed of: in landfill they can lead to pollution of water supplies, while if incinerated, they may release toxic particles into the atmosphere. Beryllium poses the biggest hazard to workers involved in recycling, Greenpeace said."

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"TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese videogame maker Square Enix Co Ltd (9684.T) said it is considering taking stakes in game developers to combat rising competition from established game publishers and other entertainment companies.

"Economies of scale and breadth of scope are getting important. It may be a business alliance or it may be us taking a stake in others, but we need to go beyond traditional Square Enix," Square Enix President Yoichi Wada told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Tokyo on Tuesday.

"We face competition not only from Japanese videogame companies but from game companies worldwide. We also see some new players from outside the videogame industry coming in," he said.

Game makers are rapidly consolidating to boost their competitiveness, with Electronic Arts (ERTS.O) planning to take over rival videogame maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc (TTWO.O), while Vivendi's (VIV.PA) game unit is merging with Activision Inc (ATVI.O)."

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"an Francisco - A code analysis of popular open source software projects has revealed that the quality and security of open source software continues to improve.

In its "Scan Report on Open Source Software 2008," Coverity analyzed more than 55 million lines of code on a recurring basis from more than 250 open source projects. Detailed Tuesday, the project utilized the Coverity Prevent static source code analyzer and was done during a two-year period. Some of the projects analyzed included the Apache Web server, Linux, Firefox, and the Samba file and printer sharing system. Scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby were examined as well.

"We run the source code through our static analysis tool, which identifies certain types of software defects for them and developers can look at the result," said David Maxwell, open source strategist for Coverity.

Coverity in its analysis found that open source developers are interested in code quality and making efforts to make it better and more secure, Maxwell said.

"We can see from the statistics many developers are quite passionate about writing good code," Maxwell said."

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"NEW YORK - Google's online filing cabinet for medical records opened to the public Monday, giving users instant electronic access to their health histories while reigniting privacy concerns.

Called Google Health, the service lets users link information from a handful of pharmacies and care providers, including Quest Diagnostics labs. Google plans to add more.

Similar offerings include Microsoft Corp.'s HealthVault and Revolution Health, which is backed by AOL co-founder Steve Case.

Google Health differentiates itself from the pack through its user interface and things like the public availability of its application program interface, or API, said Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the service.

Mary Adams, 45, a Cleveland Clinic patient who participated in the Google Health pilot, said that she was initially concerned about the privacy of her medical information.

Still, she felt safe enough to enroll and has been using the service for about six months, linking it with an online health management tool from the Cleveland Clinic and adding information on prescriptions and doctors to her online profile."

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"Virtualization has moved beyond applications themselves to software that makes those applications run faster over a network.

WAN (wide-area network) acceleration vendor Certeon on Monday introduced aCelera, an application-acceleration platform that comes without hardware and is designed to run on servers virtualized with VMware and with Microsoft's upcoming Hyper-V technology.

Like other application accelerators, aCelera shortens response times for applications that have to run over networks, namely between central and branch offices. But aCelera does it without a dedicated appliance. The software is designed to run on standard x86 hardware in one or more virtual machines, so it can share resources with an enterprise's overall computing infrastructure. This allows for scaling up application acceleration as needed and also avoids requiring users to buy a specialized device for each end of a WAN connection, said Gareth Taube, vice president of marketing at Certeon.

Many large enterprises are looking to server and storage virtualization to become more efficient and keep more IT gear at central sites. Centralization helps drive the need for WAN acceleration as branch-office employees rely on far-away data centers to run their applications. Certeon, a venture-capital-backed startup in Burlington, Massachusetts, is turning that technology to its advantage and claims to be the first to do so.

Certeon claims aCelera can cut the time required for applications to respond over WANs by 95 percent. The Linux-based software is compatible with VMware ESX and ESXi."

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"SAN FRANCISCO - Just two weeks after breaking off merger talks, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have been pulled back to the bargaining table by their fears about what might happen if they don't work out a deal.

For now, Microsoft and Yahoo are still dancing around the edges as they explore possible business arrangements without melding the two companies.

The notion of a half-baked deal didn't excite investors Monday as they got their first chance to react to Sunday's news that Microsoft and Yahoo are talking again.

Yahoo shares rose a scant 0.7 percent, or 2 cents, to close at $27.68 on Monday, while Microsoft shares fell 1.8 percent, or 53 cents, to close at $29.46.

But most analysts remain convinced the preliminary talks will culminate in Microsoft buying Yahoo for somewhere between $33 to $37 per share, a price that translates to $47.5 billion to $53 billion.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo issued statements Sunday acknowledging they haven't ruled out the possibility of a merger even though they aren't discussing one now.

Although their discussions fell apart this month in a disagreement over price, both Yahoo and Microsoft have powerful incentives to reach a compromise within the next few weeks."

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"SANTA CLARA, Calif.--As you might expect from a vice president of product marketing, Facebook's Chamath Palihapitiya can deliver a convincing sales pitch.

His sell: Facebook is the next-generation platform of the Internet that can turn any ambitious entrepreneur (with the right application) into an overnight success. He rattled off the stats to back up the argument.

The average development time, he said, for an entrepreneur to build a Facebook application is between two and 15 weeks, according to a self-reported survey of its developer community. The average number of employees to make those applications: between one and five people. And about 33 percent of Facebook application makers reported profits of up to $500,000 a month. Finally, at least one-quarter of the applications running on Facebook have 100,000 active daily users.

"The barrier to entry is lower than it's ever been," Palihapitiya said to an audience here Saturday at the TieCon conference. "When you build something social, you get immediately rewarded with distribution. You will allow your user base to be your marketers."

Palihapitiya, a former venture capitalist at the Mayfield Fund and one-time head of AOL's instant messaging application, knew his audience. TieCon is a two-day conference cut out for technology entrepreneurs; and it attracted as many as 4,000 attendees. But some attendees said that at times, the talk was too wonky (with terms like "social stack") and heavy on PowerPoint. At least one attendee said that the speech was a "good sell.""

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"Microsoft announced Sunday afternoon it has issued another proposal to Yahoo that calls for a transaction with Yahoo, but that would not involve the acquisition of all of Yahoo's assets.

The announcement comes just days after billionaire investor Carl Icahn launched a proxy fight to unseat Yahoo's current board at the Internet search pioneer's upcoming July 3 annual shareholders meeting.

Icahn, a large Yahoo stakeholder, aimed to pressure the search company to restart talks with Microsoft, after the software giant withdrew its unsolicited buyout bid of $33 a share on May 3.

While Microsoft has repeatedly said it has "moved on" after withdrawing its Yahoo bid, the software giant still faced the issue of how it would bolster its Internet business to compete against its archrival Google. And Yahoo--which, sources told News.com, considered the ball to be in Microsoft's court since it was the one to walk away from the deal--faced the ire of its major shareholders after those deal talks failed.

"Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo," Microsoft said in a statement.

"Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo or Microsoft or with other third parties," the software giant stated.

There is no guarantee, Microsoft was careful to say, that anything may come from these discussions. The company declined to comment beyond what it issued in its statement, a Microsoft spokesman said."

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"Microsoft has acknowledged that Windows Media Centers will block users from recording TV shows at the request of a broadcaster.

"Microsoft included technologies in Windows based on rules set forth by the (Federal Communications Commission)," a Microsoft spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "As part of these regulations, Windows Media Center fully adheres to the flags used by broadcasters and content owners to determine how their content is distributed and consumed."

The software company was responding to questions about why some users of Windows Vista Media Center were prevented from recording NBC Universal TV shows, American Gladiator and Medium on Monday night.

The "rules," in which the spokeswoman is apparently referring to are those proposed by the FCC, which would require software and hardware makers to honor "broadcast flags." The flags are code that broadcasters can insert into the data stream of TV shows that typically require restrictions on the recording of the shows. What she didn't say is that the "rules" aren't rules at all.

The courts struck down the FCC's proposal in 2005, saying the regulator lacked the authority to tell electronics makers how to interpret the signals they receive. Since then, Microsoft and other manufacturers have retained the option of whether to honor the flags."

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"Google co-founder Sergey Brin says that anti-Semitism forced his family to emigrate to the United States in 1979 when he was a child.

In an interview with the Israeli financial publication, TheMarker.com, Brin described the job discrimination which both his parents encountered in the Soviet academic field. (Here's the full interview in Hebrew, and part of it in English.)

Brin was in Israel to visit the local Google office as well as take part in a conference organized by Israel's president, Shimon Peres. The following are excerpts from the interview:

• Without a doubt the great suffering put on my parents in Russia because of anti-Semitism was the primary reason that they left Russia. And that has had a major influence on my life.

• My family had many challenges in Russia. My father wasn't able to work in his chosen field. Everything we had in Russia, we had to leave behind and start from scratch. This gave me a different perspective on life.

• You know, we learned to make do without anything. To live on nothing. And this certainly influenced me.

• When you're a Jew, you have a background of hardship, suffering, difficulties--and to turn that into success is part of the Jewish experience.

Brin was born in Moscow in 1973. His father Mikhail was prevented from realizing his ambition to become an astronomer because the Communist party, which then was in power, prevented Jews from entering the physics department. Brin's father subsequently worked as an economic planner after receiving his Ph.D. Brin's mother, Evgenya, was employed as a researcher by the Soviet gas and oil institute."

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"NEW YORK - The Internet is routinely used when making buying decisions, but its influence is small compared with offline channels such as friends and sales personnel, a new study finds.

Sunday's report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project looked at consumer behavior in purchasing music, cell phones and homes or renting apartments. It found the Internet's role to be indirect.

"The Internet helps people eliminate irrelevant alternatives," said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director. "The Internet may influence the choice modestly but has important consequences in getting better deals and in having a more focused search process along the way."

Only about 10 percent of real estate and cell phone buyers and 7 percent of music purchasers credit the Internet with having a major impact on their decision. And only a small portion -- 22 percent of the music buyers and 12 percent of cell phone purchasers -- ultimately bought their product over the Internet."

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"TROY, N.Y. - Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in "Second Life." A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier in AI research because it's a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

"It's a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now," said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries.

But first, a virtual reality check.

Edd is not running rampant through the cyber streets of "Second Life." He goes only where Bringsjord and his graduate students place him for tests. He can answer questions like "Where are you from?" but understands only English that has previously been translated into mathematical logic."

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"BEIJING - Almost nonstop, the uncensored opinions of Chinese citizens are popping up online, sent by text and instant message across a country shaken by its worst earthquake in three decades.

"Why were most of those killed in the earthquake children?" one post asked Thursday on FanFou, a microblogging site.

"How many donations will really reach the disaster area? This is doubtful," read another.

China is now home to the world's largest number of Internet and mobile phone users, and their hunger for quake news is forcing the government to let information flow in ways it hasn't before.

A fast-moving network of text messages, instant messages and blogs has been a powerful source of firsthand accounts of the disaster, as well as pleas for help and even passionate criticism of rescue efforts.

"I don't want to use the word transparent, but it's less censored, an almost free flow of discussion," said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the China Internet Project, which monitors and translates Chinese Web sites.

China is well known for controlling the flow of information.

"We didn't know that hundreds of thousands of lives passed away during the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 until many years after the disaster took place," sociologist Zheng Yefu said in a commentary last week in the Southern Metropolis News."

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"LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. mobile navigation device company Garmin Ltd (GRMN.O) is the mystery bidder behind a takeover approach for Britain's Raymarine Plc (RAY.L), the Sunday Telegraph reported, citing sources close to the deal.

Garmin's approach could be worth as much as 200 million pounds ($389 million), it said.

Raymarine, which makes navigation equipment for the marine market, said last month it had received an approach from an unnamed party, sending its shares rocketing.

The UK company makes a range of nautical devices including satellite navigation for boats, autopilots, satellite radio and radar systems. It is seen as an attractive target for larger players as the market for satellite and mobile navigational devices consolidates.

A number of private equity companies are also thought to be eyeing Raymarine, the Sunday Telegraph said.

Officials at Raymarine were not immediately available to comment."

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"Ricoh have released a new firmware update, version 2.03, for the GR Digital II compact digital camera. Version 2.03 fixes the following bug:

Modified the following phenomenon. A camera will not recognize the recommended flash from Sigma below.
EF-530 DG ST (SA-STTL)
EF-530 DG SUPER (SA-STTL)
EF-500 DG ST (SA-STTL)
EF-500 DG SUPER (SA-STTL)

Website: Ricoh GR Digital II Firmware Update 2.03"

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"NEW YORK - A company rooted in bringing the Internet to the masses, AOL is shifting its focus toward serving niche audiences with the launch of dozens of specialty Web sites.

The latest -- ParentDish for parents -- formally launched Friday, with The Boot for country music and The Boom Box for hip hop and R&B to follow on Tuesday.

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, branching out in hopes of doing a better job attracting crucial advertising revenue to offset its rapidly declining Internet access business, calls the niche sites "passion points."

The sites reflect a growing sophistication of Internet users, who are spending less time at portals like AOL.com and Yahoo.com. and directly seeking specialized content at more focused sites. Examples outside AOL include Boing Boing, which keeps tabs on technology and the Internet; The Sartorialist, on street style; or Mom Logic, on parenting and being a mom.

"The consumer market is clearly fragmenting," said Bill Wilson, AOL's executive vice president for vertical programming. "We wanted to give people many front doors, not just one front door to come in."

In a fourth-floor corner office at AOL's new headquarters, once home to the grand Wanamaker department store in New York's Greenwich Village, Wilson was passionate, even hurried, as he zipped through AOL's plans to diversify its offerings."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - A deadline for Take-Two Interactive Software shareholders to agree to a buyout by video game giant Electronic Arts has passed with neither firm commenting on the takeover bid's fate.

EA took its two-billion-dollar offer directly to Take-Two shareholders after the board of directors rejected the bid, saying it undervalues the company behind blockbuster video games including the hot "Grand Theft Auto" franchise.

EA set Friday as the expiration date for its offer to buy shares of Take-Two stock for 26 dollars each. Take-Two shares were priced slightly above that amount in after-hours trading.

"There is nothing going on right now," Take-Two spokeswoman Meg Maise said when asked about the status of the bid Friday afternoon. "It is in (EA's) court."

EA did not return AFP requests for comment.

Take-Two's board refused to even discuss a takeover with EA prior to the April 29 launch of "Grand Theft Auto IV: Liberty City Stories," which tallied a record-breaking 500 million dollars in sales in its first week."

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"In late 2004, the idea of city-wide Wi-Fi networks was electric. These metro-scale Wi-Fi networks would cross the chasm of the digital divide by bringing affordable broadband to low-income parts of major cities, and broadband of any kind to marginal neighborhoods, small towns, and largely rural counties. In mid-2008, the juice has drained out; yesterday, the last of the three major independent city-wide Wi-Fi network builders, MetroFi, said they're pulling the plug. EarthLink, another of the large providers, had already given notice of their exit in August 2007, and filed suit this week to remove the equipment for their flagship Philadelphia network. (Kite, a provider mostly in the Southwest, abandoned their Wi-Fi networks starting in early 2008.)

MetroFi predates the muni-Fi movement, having being founded in the early part of the century when broadband penetration via cable and DSL was still modest in many parts of the U.S., prices were high, and current and future speeds were low and expected low. Wi-Fi could compete admirably against these wired networks, it was thought, and against the weak first wave of third-generation (3G) cellular, on price, speed, and availability.The incumbents don't stand still, and Wi-Fi, designed for interiors, didn't scale well. While it turns out to be possible to build a large-scale seamless Wi-Fi network that delivers from 1 to 4 Mbps of service outdoors to a laptop, and indoors through a $100 to $200 signal booster, it also proved true that a provider needed two to three times the number of Wi-Fi nodes across a city to achieve those speeds than was estimated when networks were largely bid out in 2005 and 2006. If you budgeted for 20 to 25 nodes per square mile and need nearly 50 of these multi-thousand-dollar transceivers, it's hard to imagine how that affects the bottom line. USI Wireless, which biult Minneapolis's network, appears to be the only firm that got the numbers and engineering to add up for them so far."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - For years, video games have been blamed for turning kids into idle layabouts who only venture off the couch to fill up on potato chips and soda.

Nintendo Co Ltd (7974.OS) now aims to shatter that image with a game that aims to get players off the couch and lead them to stretch, shake and sweat their way to a healthy life.

"Wii Fit," which arrives on U.S. store shelves on Monday, is expected to draw new customers to Nintendo's wildly popular Wii video game console.

It is forecast to be the industry's latest blockbuster game after last month's "Grand Theft Auto 4," the criminal action title that racked up $500 million in global sales in one week.

"They'll sell everything they can manufacture," said Signal Hill analyst Todd Greenwald. "It extends the life cycle of the Wii a little bit and gets people to go out and buy another game from Nintendo."

The Wii has proven to be the runaway hit of the video game industry, thanks to its easy-to-learn motion-sensing controller, simple games and low price.

U.S. consumers bought 714,000 Wiis in April, nearly double the sales of Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Xbox 360 and Sony Corp's (6758.T) PlayStation 3 combined."

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"PHILADELPHIA - Former satellite TV provider EchoStar Corp. on Sunday will demonstrate its first product for cable companies at the industry's trade show: a unit that can tune in television and act as a cable modem.

The SlingModem, made by Sling Media Inc., which is owned by EchoStar, will combine modem functions with its popular Slingbox, which lets users watch broadcast, cable or satellite TV shows on any Internet-connected device such as laptops or cell phones, even when they're away from home.

For instance, it lets someone who subscribes to cable catch an HBO special on his laptop while he's on a business trip in Japan.

The unit, to be sold through cable companies, at least initially, was first announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

EchoStar, which recently spun off satellite TV provider Dish Network Corp. to focus on its equipment sales business, plans to unveil more cable products later in the year.

It will be EchoStar's first time to exhibit at the 2008 Cable Show in New Orleans, hosted by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."

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"PHILADEPHIA - Cable operators are riding high heading into this year's industry trade show, which kicks off this weekend.

After a dismal 2007 in which their shares took a big pounding, cable is seeing a rebound as Wall Street put more weight on their gains in high-speed Internet and digital voice rather than focusing mainly on their traditional video services.

Year-to-date, industry leader Comcast Corp.'s shares are up 21 percent after falling 57 percent in 2007. The stock rose 8.6 percent the day that the Philadelphia-based company posted a 23 percent increase in first-quarter operating profit despite losing 57,000 basic video subscribers; its new Internet, phone and digital video subscribers has made up the difference, and more.

Time Warner Cable Inc. shares are up 10 percent so far this year, recovering from a 33 percent freefall last year, while Cablevision Systems Corp.'s stock rose 2 percent after declining 14 percent in 2007.

For the most part, the slowing economy didn't seem to take much of a bite. Cable companies added more double- and triple-play customers -- people who bought two or three bundled services at lower rates than they would have paid a la carte.

"In the face of an uncertain economy, we're growing," said Kyle McSlarrow, chief executive of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, host of the 2008 Cable Show in New Orleans."

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"It's not a typical enterprise data warehouses story, but then NYSE Euronext (NYSE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is not a typical enterprise. For one thing, NYSE has not one but three warehouses, each approaching 100 terabytes. Then consider NYSE's queries, some of which interrogate more than 40 terabytes of data. The extreme data volumes and extreme query complexity led to an upgrade onto data warehouse appliances.

After a period of rampant growth and mergers with two smaller exchanges, NYSE knew its large and aging Oracle data warehouses needed replacement. After exploring alternatives in 2006, the company concluded a successful 45-day proof-of-concept project on a Netezza Performance Server (NPS) appliance in early 2007. The main warehouse for the New York Stock Exchange was migrated within two and a half months and went into production in May 2007. A second device, consolidating what had been two separate warehouses for the Chicago-based Arca Equities and Options markets, went into production in July. Yet another warehouse, one housing legacy data, will be migrated onto a third Netezza NPS.

The NYSE and Arca warehouses primarily support market surveillance, monitoring trade patterns and behaviors to ensure compliance with the rules of the exchanges, and these queries can be quite complex. "It's very possible that we could hit 40 to 50 terabytes of data in a single query," explains Steve Hirsch, chief data officer."

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"The iPhone's reach is expanding. Orange, France Telecom's flagship brand, announced that it will sell Apple's phone in additional countries in Europe, as well as the Middle East and Africa.

Orange said it will sell the iPhone in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and the African countries of Ivory Coast, Jordan, Cameroon, Botswana, Madagascar, Mali, Senegal, Mauritius and Reunion.

The deal expands the list of countries where Apple has agreed to operate on a nonexclusive basis. Of the countries announced in this deal, Orange will have exclusives only in Belgium and Romania.

Numerous Deals

Earlier this month, Vodafone announced it had signed a deal to provide the iPhone in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

Days ago, Swisscom announced it had won the right to sell the iPhone in Switzerland. "The iPhone will be available later this year," a statement on the company's Web site simply said. The fact that the firm won't sell the phone until later in the year suggests that it will sell a yet-to-be-announced 3G version.

The Swiss newspaper Le Matin reported that the Swisscom deal is for a 3G iPhone that would offer two-way chats, mobile TV and GPS navigation. The plan also calls for Swisscom to offer "attractive" incentives and a high-end plan to include mobile video and other carrier-provided services, Le Matin said."

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"SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang spent months fending off Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited takeover bid. Now he may only have a few weeks to persuade the software maker to revive its last offer of $47.5 billion, or risk being fired in a shareholder mutiny led by activist investor Carl Icahn.

Spurred on by outraged shareholders, Icahn notified Yahoo Thursday that he will lead a revolt to oust Yang and the rest of the Internet company's board unless they renew negotiations with Microsoft that fell apart May 3 when the two sides couldn't agree on a price.

In a response late Thursday, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock signaled that the Sunnyvale-based company is prepared to battle the New York financier.

Bostock criticized Icahn for having a "significant misunderstanding of the facts" about Microsoft's offer and the Yahoo board's response. He also emphasized that Yahoo remains open to a sale "if it offers our stockholders full and certain value."

To pressure Yahoo, Icahn has nominated an alternate slate of directors to replace the current board in an election scheduled July 3 at Yahoo's annual meeting. If the uprising is successful, an Icahn-led board presumably would fire Yang as CEO and try to negotiate a sale to Microsoft."

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"San Francisco - In the four months since InfoWorld asked businesses and individuals to sign a petition at SaveXP.com asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP for sale beyond the planned June 30 general end-of-sales date, more than 200,000 have signed up to add their voices. As of May 15, the count was 200,805 signatures, excluding duplicates and fake signups.

"We're pleased and a little bit amazed that so many people from throughout the world have felt so passionately about the need to keep XP on the market," said Executive Editor Galen Gruman. "We had heard grumblings throughout much of 2007 about dissatisfaction with Vista's high hardware requirements, questionable interface changes, slow performance, and incompatibilities with third-party software, but no one seemed to want to say so in public. That's changed since the petition's launch on Jan. 14."

The campaign has caused a media frenzy, with stories in most major newspapers and news Web sites, as well as in blogs and radio programs. Recently, for example, Business Week noted in a recent story on increasing enterprise adoption of the Macintosh that Windows Vista was perhaps one of the biggest stumbles in tech history. A separate report noted that large companies such as General Motors and Alaska Airlines are skipping Vista and instead waiting for the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7. And a major tech analyst firm has warned that Microsoft's many mishaps with Vista are putting the Windows franchise in jeopardy."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Embattled Yahoo Inc has struck an advertising partnership deal with WPP Group that will let WPP buy ads on Yahoo's online ad exchange, the companies said late on Thursday.

Yahoo, which recently spurned a $47.5 billion unsolicited takeover bid from Microsoft Corp only to face a proxy battle led by activist investor Carl Icahn this week, said the deal would first involve WPP units GroupM and 24/7 Real Media.

In a statement, the companies said that as part of the deal, WPP advertising agencies would, through its 24/7 Real Media arm, develop a proprietary advertising media trading platform that takes advantage of Yahoo's Right Media exchange.

Yahoo acquired Right Media last year in a bid to expand sales of the online display advertisements preferred by corporate brand marketers beyond its existing base of blue-chip clients to social network sites and other sites off Yahoo.

"More and more, we see the need for agencies and media and technology companies to work together to create a new level of value," said Mark Read, director of strategy and chief executive of the London ad conglomerate's WPP Digital unit."

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"The One Laptop Per Child Project and Microsoft plan to make both Windows and Linux available on a version of the project's XO laptop, the companies said Thursday.

The parties expect to deliver a dual-boot XO system in August or September that will have both the traditional Linux-based Sugar operating system of the XO and a low-cost student version of Windows XP, according to Kyle Austin, an OLPC representative.

OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte has referred in the past to a dual-boot XO model, but this is the first official announcement of such a system. The XO was developed by OLPC for children in developing countries. The availability of Windows on the system will give customers more choice in operating systems and let them use Windows-based educational software and tools, the parties said. Customers and partners worldwide have asked for Windows on the XO, they said.

Austin said the dual-boot system will have Sugar and Microsoft's Student Innovation Suite, a US$3 software offering that Chairman Bill Gates announced last year. Gates said the suite would include a version of Windows XP, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 for Microsoft Office and Windows Live Mail."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video game hardware and software rose 47 percent from a year earlier, as Take-Two Interactive Software Inc's "Grand Theft Auto 4" and Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii console stole the show.

The popularity of "Grand Theft Auto 4," however, failed to boost sales of Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 and Sony Corp's PlayStation 3, which both saw unit shipments fall sharply from the previous month.

U.S. consumers bought 188,000 Xbox 360s and 187,000 PS3s in April, data from market research firm NPD showed on Thursday. That was down from 262,000 units and 257,000 units in March.

"The Easter shift from April to March this year I think had an impact on sales during the month," Lazard Capital analyst Colin Sebastian said.

"I know on the hardware side it was a little light but let's see what a month of 'GTA' sales does for those platforms as well as a month without a holiday shift," Sebastian said."

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"A federal grand jury has indicted a mother on charges relating to harassment on MySpace, which preceded a 13-year-old girl's suicide.

The indictment, returned Thursday in Los Angeles, marks the first time that a social networking site user has been prosecuted on federal charges related to accessing protected computers.

Lori Drew, 49, of O'Fallon, Mo., has been charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on a 13-year-old girl, Megan Meier. Because of juvenile privacy rules, the victim -- who killed herself after receiving taunts on MySpace -- is referred to in the indictment only as M.T.M.

Prosecutors said Drew posed as a teenage boy who feigned romantic interest in the victim. The "boy" later told the girl during an online chat in October 2006 that the world would be a better place without her. Less than an hour later, Meier hanged herself. She died the next day."

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"Could insecticides in pet shampoos trigger autism spectrum disorders? That's the suggestion of one of the first large-scale population-based studies to look how environmental factors and their interactions with genes contribute to the condition.

Mothers of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were twice as likely to have reported using pet shampoos containing a class of insecticide called pyrethrins as those of healthy children, according to survey results presented Thursday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in London. The risk was greatest if the shampoo was used during the second trimester of pregnancy.

Meanwhile, another study suggests that exposure to organophosphate insecticides double the risk of developmental disorders, including autism. Organophosphates have previously been linked to Gulf War syndrome.

While many chemicals have previously been blamed for triggering autism, there have been very few rigorous studies designed to investigate the link.
Neuronal damage

To remedy this, Irva Hertz-Picciotto and her colleagues at the University of California in Davis, US, studied 333 children with ASD and 198 healthy children, and their families.

They collected blood and urine samples, as well as conducting in-depth questionnaires on medical history and any possible exposure to medications, household products or metals that could have occurred around the time of conception, during pregnancy, or after birth. They also collected information on lifestyle, and whether the children were breast-fed, for example."

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"LOL, OMG and TTYL: parents and teachers worry that teenagers' use of these and other forms of online shorthand is harming their language skills. Perhaps they will take comfort from a study suggesting that instant messaging (IM) actually represents "an expansive new linguistic renaissance".
"Instant messaging represents an expansive new linguistic renaissance"

Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis at the University of Toronto, Canada, say teenagers risk the disapproval of their elders if they use slang, and the scorn of their friends if they sound too buttoned-up. But instant messaging allows them to deploy a "robust mix" of colloquial and formal language. In a paper to be published in the spring 2008 issue of American Speech, the researchers argue that far from ruining teenagers' ability to communicate, IM lets teenagers show off what they can do with language.

"IM is interactive discourse among friends that is conducive to informal language," says Denis, "but at the same time, it is a written interface which tends to be more formal than speech."

He and Tagliamonte analysed more than a million words of IM communications and a quarter of a million spoken words produced by 72 people aged between 15 and 20. They found that although IM shared some of the patterns used in speech, its vocabulary and grammar tended to be relatively conservative. For example, teenagers are more likely to use the phrase "He was like, 'What's up?'" than "He said, 'What's up?'" when speaking - but the opposite is true when they are instant-messaging. This supports the idea that IM represents a hybrid form of communication."

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"ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A one-time dot-com billionaire was convicted Thursday of stock fraud and obstruction of justice after a court finding that he deceived investors in his Las Vegas software company.

Charles E. "Junior" Johnson was chief executive of PurchasePro Inc., a software company that went bankrupt as the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.

U.S. District Judge Walter Kelley found Johnson guilty on all counts after concluding he schemed to falsely inflate his company's revenue in the first three months of 2001.

The case has been under investigation for six years and resulted in convictions of six other PurchasePro executives.

Two midlevel executives at AOL, which had a marketing partnership with PurchasePro, were acquitted at an earlier trial.

Johnson compounded his problems by trying to alter documents used at his trial, which resulted in an additional charge of obstruction of justice.

Johnson's attorney, Yale Galanter, said he found it troubling that the judge relied in his ruling on testimony from other PurchasePro executives who had acknowledged lying to investigators."

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"A server problem at the U.S. National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.

The nsa.gov Web site was unresponsive at 7 a.m. Pacific time Thursday and continued to be unavailable throughout the morning for Internet users.

The Web site was unreachable because of a problem with the NSA's DNS (Domain Name System) servers, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer with Arbor Networks. DNS servers are used to translate things like the Web addresses typed into machine-readable Internet Protocol addresses that computers use to find each other on the Internet.

The agency's two authoritative DNS servers were unreachable Thursday morning, McPherson said.

Because this DNS information is sometimes cached by Internet service providers, the NSA would still be temporarily reachable by some users, but unless the problem is fixed, NSA servers will be knocked completely off-line. That means that e-mail sent to the agency will not be delivered, and in some cases, e-mail being sent by the NSA would not get through.

"We are aware of the situation and our techs are working on it," a NSA spokeswoman said at 9:45 a.m. PT. She declined to identify herself."

Link to full article

"FRANKFURT, Germany - Deutsche Telekom chief executive Rene Obermann said Thursday the company has so far sold more than 100,000 of Apple Inc.'s iPhones since the device's November debut in Germany.

At Telekom's annual general meeting in Cologne, Obermann said the iPhone was the most popular multimedia device sold by the company's T-Mobile cell phone division.

IPhone customers use the Internet 30 times more on average than other mobile telephone customers and that one-third of iPhone customers bought the most expensive service plans, Obermann said.

Company spokesman Alexander von Schmettow declined to specify the sales figure beyond 100,000 or forecast future sales but said the iPhone was "meeting expectations.""

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nintendo is finally bringing original downloadable games to its popular Wii video game console.

Nintendo's small white box is the smash hit of the video game industry, thanks to its easy-to-grasp controls and simple games that appeal to a broader audience.

But the Wii has lagged Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 in offering original games that can be downloaded right from the couch for as little as $5.

That has changed this week with the U.S. launch of WiiWare, a service that Nintendo says lets game makers experiment with quirky ideas that can be brought to fruition for a fraction of the cost of a regular title.

"The possibilities are great -- many of the most addictive and enjoyable games on Xbox 360 and PS3 are turning out to be the little downloads made by fledgling studios, and giving the power of the Wii controller set to these hungry, creative types will hopefully take the indie gaming movement further," video game news site IGN said earlier this year.

After debuting in Japan earlier this year, the service launched in the United States on Monday, with six new titles ranging from the familiar to the off-beat.

For example, one game is a simulation set in the familiar "Final Fantasy" franchise, while another is "LostWinds," a critically acclaimed adventure in which players use gusts of wind to explore a world and fight enemies."

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"NEW YORK - Cox Communications appears to be interfering with file-sharing by its Internet subscribers in the same manner that has landed Comcast Corp. in hot water with regulators, according to research obtained by The Associated Press.

A study based on the participation of 8,175 Internet users around the world found conclusive signs of blocked file-sharing connections only at three Internet service providers: Comcast and Cox in the U.S. and StarHub in Singapore.

Of the 788 Comcast subscribers who participated in the study, 491, or 62 percent, had their connections blocked. At Cox, 82 out of 151 subscribers, or 54 percent, were blocked, according to Krishna Gummadi at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany.

Philadelphia-based Comcast is the country's second-largest ISP, with 14.1 million subscribers. Atlanta-based Cox Communications is the fourth-largest, with 3.8 million. It is part of privately held Cox Enterprises Inc.

Comcast's practice of interfering with traffic was brought to light by user reports last year and confirmed by an AP investigation in October.

Consumer advocate groups and legal scholars criticized the interference, saying that letting an ISP selectively block some connections makes it a gatekeeper to the Internet. Their complaints prompted the Federal Communications Commission to launch an investigation, which is ongoing."

Link to full article

"Traditional land-line phones, once the bedrock of communications in the USA, are quickly going the way of eight-track tapes as consumers go wireless or choose Internet-based phone calling.

According to a report due to be released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics, nearly one out of every six homes in the USA - 15.8% - had only wireless telephones during the second half of 2007, up from 6.1% during the same period in 2004.

"America has a lot of gabbers," says Sameer Mithal, a senior principal with IBB Consulting in Princeton, N.J. "The ability to talk on the go is what Americans like to do."

For big carriers such as AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ), America's love fest with wireless is having a dramatic impact on what was once a core business.

In New York, land lines have plummeted 55% since 2000, according to a new report by Sanford C. Bernstein. New Jersey isn't far behind, with a 50% drop-off.

States with the fewest land-line losses include Connecticut with 10%, Texas, 20%, and California, 21%.

Even so, it won't take long for the other 49 states to catch up to or surpass New York, predicts analyst Craig Moffett, author of the report. "This is a business that is not showing any signs of recovery," he says."

Link to full article

"California's hands-free mobile phone law goes into effect on July 1st. Starting on that date, California drivers will no longer be able to use hand-held phones, but will instead either need to use a hands-free device, whether it's a headset or integrated into the car.

A study released Monday by the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates that California will have 300 fewer traffic fatalities a year once the law goes into effect. According to Jed Kolko, PPIC research fellow and study author, if such a ban were extended across the U.S., thousands of lives could be saved.

In a study released Monday, Jed Kolko, a fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, estimated that 300 fewer people will die each year in traffic accidents as a result of a pending hand-held cell-phone ban for California drivers. More than 4,000 people die in traffic accidents in the state every year.

Although he prepared no estimate for how many lives would be saved nationwide if hand-held phone use by drivers was banned in all states, Kolko said, "You'd be safe to say several thousand."

Kolko's study is sure to fuel two debates that have existed since cell phones became a common companion of drivers in the 1990s: whether phone use by drivers contributes to traffic accidents at all and whether hand-held versions are more distracting and dangerous than hands-free phones.
While it's great to see a study of this nature, it seems to be another one of those "common sense" type things. If you are using your cell phone, particularly dialing or holding it to your ear (much less texting), are you paying full attention to the road? We would hope everyone would answer "no." Once again, common sense."

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"JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Google Inc co-founder Sergey Brin said on Thursday advertising on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace was getting better, but was still not perfect.

"In general, it's been improving but we still have a long way to go," Brin told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in Jerusalem to mark Israel's 60th anniversary.

"Things have been going well this year...it's hard to predict where social networking will come out."

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in January the company was having trouble making inroads selling advertising into what is now the hottest market on the Internet.

Brin said it would take time to find the best formula to develop the social networking advertising business, to develop the right technology and to educate advertisers and users.

"People are expecting overnight to wake up to a miracle... but these things take time," he added.

Brin also repeated that he was "very happy" with a two-week test this month in which rival Yahoo used Google search advertisements. But he said he had nothing to add at this stage on any possible further tie-ups.

Microsoft Corp withdrew a $47.5 billion offer for Yahoo this month that was aimed at building an online advertising powerhouse to compete with Google. It is now under pressure to find an alternative, such as a search deal with its chief rival."

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"SAN FRANCISCO - Billionaire investor Carl Icahn reportedly has decided to lead a mutiny against Yahoo Inc.'s board in an attempt to pressure the directors into reviving negotiations to sell Yahoo to Microsoft Corp.

To turn up the heat on Yahoo's board, Icahn has lined up a slate of 10 directors to nominate as replacements, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site Wednesday, citing an unnamed person close to the matter.

Icahn hadn't returned phone messages from The Associated Press as of late Wednesday. His intentions should become clear soon, however, because Yahoo has set a Thursday deadline for submitting candidates to oppose its board at the company's July 3 annual meeting.

A representative of Sunnyvale-based Yahoo declined to comment.

Yahoo's board is on the hot seat for rejecting Microsoft's initial bid of $44.6 billion, or $31 per share, and taking measures that finally drove away the software maker.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer orally offered to raise the offer to $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, earlier this month. He withdrew the bid May 3 after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, acting on behalf of the board, held out for $37 per share -- a price that Yahoo's stock hasn't reached in more than two years.

Yahoo shares rose 58 cents to close at $27.14 Wednesday on hopes that Icahn would spearhead a stockholder revolt. They gained another 51 cents in after-hours trading."

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"TOKYO - NEC Corp.'s profit for the fiscal year through March more than doubled from the previous year as the Japanese electronics maker's mobile phone and computer-chip businesses swung to profit.

NEC, which did not provide numbers for the quarter, reported Thursday a 22.68 billion yen ($216 million) profit for the fiscal year ended March 31 -- a dramatic rise from 9.13 billion yen profit the previous year.

Fiscal year sales inched down 0.8 percent to 4.617 trillion yen ($44 billion) from 4.653 trillion yen.

NEC said sales dropped in electronic parts and in its personal computer business in Europe.

But costs cuts and other efforts buoyed profit, the company said. NEC's cell phone business had been losing money overseas, and its decision to withdraw from the overseas market in that sector stopped the red ink, it said.

The Tokyo-based maker of computer and network equipment is projecting a continuing recovery for the fiscal year through March 2009.

NEC expects profit for the year to surge 54 percent to 35 billion yen ($333.3 million) and sales to climb 4 percent to 4.8 trillion yen ($45.7 billion).

NEC shares rose 5 percent to 551 yen ($5.2) Thursday in Tokyo. Earnings were announced shortly after trading ended.

NEC is the latest Japanese electronics maker to report healthy earnings.

Sony Corp. shares jumped 9 percent in Thursday trading in Tokyo, a day after upbeat earnings that included a record fiscal year profit.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which is changing its name to Panasonic next month, saw its fiscal year profit gain 30 percent on year on strong sales of cell phones, flat-panel TVs and DVD players. It reported its annual earnings at the end of April."

"SAN JOSE, Calif. - Hackers often harness the combined power of thousands of virus-infected personal computers to pump out spam e-mail or disable targeted servers by overwhelming them with Internet traffic.

Now an Air Force colonel is suggesting the U.S. military build its own "botnet," or network of remotely controlled computers, to be ready to attack the computer networks of foreign enemies.

The proposal Col. Charles Williamson III outlined in the May edition of the Armed Forces Journal highlights the creative cyberwarfare strategies being hashed out by the military as hackers abroad step up their attacks on U.S. government computer networks and others around the world.

"The days of the fortress are gone, even in cyberspace," wrote Williamson, staff judge advocate for Air Force Intelligence in the Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. "While America must harden itself in cyberspace, we cannot afford to let adversaries maneuver in that domain uncontested."

The government wouldn't build its botnet by infecting innocent people's computers like criminal hackers, Williamson wrote. Instead, the military could use PCs it was going to throw away. And it could expand that botnet's computing horsepower by implanting its code on other government computers.

Williamson's commentary has ignited a debate in the computer security community about the wisdom of building a military botnet -- and the government's ability to control it. The tactic he suggests is called a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack.

It's what was used last year by hackers in a three-week assault that crippled government and corporate computer networks in the small Baltic nation of Estonia, which is highly computer-savvy.

It's frequently used by organized criminals to extort Web site owners, who end up paying up to keep their sites online, and by botnet operators to disrupt rivals.

Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, which operates the Internet Storm Center, an early warning system for computer attacks, said it would be easier for the military to lean on Internet providers to shut off traffic from hostile computers than to adopt the "carpet bombing" approach Williamson advocates.

"To me it's a silly solution to a problem that has much simpler solutions," he said in an interview. "What's wrong with it is that it's not instantaneous, it's not precise and it's not entirely effective. There are defenses you can set up against it -- whereas using a precision weapon, like working with the network guys, is pretty wonderful."

Some security experts, however, said a military botnet could help strengthen the United States' cyber defenses, and that it seems like a reasonable idea, provided the government owns the computers it's using.

Williamson concedes that one risk of a military botnet is that it could mistakenly return fire at the wrong computers -- even those within a government network -- if hackers successfully disguise their attacking computers through a process called Internet Protocol spoofing.

Hackers routinely launch attacks from computers in different countries from where they are physically so it's often difficult to determine where the offensives are coming from.

Williamson said the U.S. needs to develop better tools to detect incoming threats on the Internet and determine the true origin of attacks.

One of the thorniest issues the military would face is how to respond if the source of an attack turned out to be compromised computers within the U.S. or a friendly nation.

The military wouldn't be allowed to attack privately owned computers in the U.S. without an order from the president, so those incidents would have to be handled by law enforcement as a criminal matter, Williamson said. And the governments of countries friendly to the U.S. would have to cooperate to shut down marauding computers there.

"The biggest challenge will be political," he wrote. "How does the U.S. explain to its best friends that we had to shut down their computers? The best remedy for this is prevention."

Williamson, reached late Wednesday, said he couldn't comment beyond the opinion piece, under a request from the Air Force's public affairs office."

"San Francisco - Facing serious challenges to its dominance in the RIA (rich Internet application) space, Adobe Systems will refresh its bread-and-butter Flash Player technology Thursday with capabilities that could provide an edge on the RIA battleground.

Adobe officials argued that improvements in its new Flash Player 10 such as custom filters and effects are merely in response to customer demands. But the company nonetheless has seen its market niche -- rich graphical presentations via a browser plugin -- become more crowded lately. Microsoft's highly touted Silverlight technology is drawing attention from companies such as NBC while Sun plans to leverage the prevalence of its Java technology to promote its budding JavaFX RIA platform.

Analysts see Flash Player 10 as an answer to what else is going on in the marketplace.

"Everything in this space is a response," to keep up with the competition, said Jeffrey Hammond, senior analyst at Forrester. Flash, though, remains a leader with capabilities in drawing surface and canvas, he said.

"I think that Adobe continues to basically build on the Flash franchise and try to defend it," said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes. "It???s a competitive response in some ways.""

Link to full article

"The New York Stock Exchange and its European subsidiary exchanges are running their trading systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat announced Wednesday, as it unveiled a new marquee customer.

Linux has been known to be in use at several New York financial services firms, but few have stepped up to the podium to testify on the value of their implementations. As a result of mergers and acquisitions, the New York Stock Exchange has migrated over the last few years from HP-UX to IBM AIX to Sun Solaris to Linux. NYSE Group CIO Steve Rubinow said the conversion to Linux followed the acquisition of the Euronext exchange in 2007. Unlike some trading companies that suggest Linux is running their secondary systems, Rubinow emphasized that Linux is running the NYSE's mission-critical trading systems.

"Red Hat is like water; it's pervasive within our architecture. ... Without it, most of our computers wouldn't be running," he said in a prepared statement and in a video recorded for Red Hat's Web site.

Instead of running on proprietary hardware, the exchange, now known as NYSE Euronext, runs on 200 four-way HP ProLiant DL585 servers and 400 ProLiant BL 685c blade servers."

Link to full article

"BOSTON - After privacy complaints, Google Inc. is beginning to automatically blur faces of people captured in the street photos taken for its Internet map program. Rolling it out will take several months, however.

Although Google's Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year.

As specially equipped Google vehicles cruised city streets snapping panoramic images of homes and businesses, the resulting photos revealed people falling off bikes, exiting strip joints, crossing the street, sunbathing -- everyday, in-public things but nonetheless, things they might not have wanted preserved for posterity.

Some privacy advocates, including the influential Electronic Frontier Foundation, suggested that Google blur the images of people. That move, the critics pointed out, would not inhibit Street View's goal of helping people become familiar with the look and feel of a location before they travel there.

This week, Google revealed it had indeed begun deploying a facial-recognition algorithm that scans photos for mugs to blur. The changes are happening first in scenes in New York, before slowly expanding to the other 40 cities in Street View.

Google spokesman Larry Yu said the company is still tweaking the system. For now it tends to err on the side of blurring too many things -- things a computer erroneously interprets as faces -- but that is better than leaving too many faces unblurred, Yu said.

Yu said Google was responding not only to privacy complaints in the U.S., but also trying to head off legal or cultural objections that might emerge as Street View expands into other countries.

Rebecca Jeschke, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, praised Google's decision, but she added that "it's just a shame it didn't happen before the tool launched.""

"Canon has released updates for virtually all of its camera software. Digital Photo Professional 3.4.1, EOS Utility 2.4, ZoomBrowser EX 6.1.1a, Picture Style Editor 1.3 and Canon RAW Codec 1.3 are all now available. To download the updates, select your DSLR camera on the Canon USA website, then the Drivers and Downloads tab, and finally choose the appropriate operating system."

"Olympus have released firmware updates for their FE- range of entry-level digital compact cameras. Firmware version 1.1 is now available for the FE-350 Wide (pictured), FE-330, FE-310, FE-290 and the FE-270. There are two improvements:

- The camera's stability improves during operation.
- Changes have been made to the Korean version."

downloads

"A supernova remnant near the centre of the Milky Way has turned out to be the youngest known in our galaxy, plugging a puzzling gap in the astronomical record.

Known as G1.9+0.3, the remnant lies about 28,000 light years away. It was first identified as a ring-like supernova remnant in the early 1980s. Now, observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Large Array in New Mexico have shown that the diameter of the glowing gas shell has expanded by 16 per cent over the past 22 years.

If the speed of expansion is roughly constant, then the remnant is only about 140 years old, making it the youngest in the Milky Way. Previously, the most recent supernova was thought to have occurred around the year 1680, creating the ghostly remnant Cassiopeia A.

The latest supernova would not have been visible to 19th-century astronomers because it occurred in dense gas and dust near the galactic centre. "The best telescopes at that time would not have been able to collect enough light to see it," says Stephen Reynolds of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who led the Chandra study and revealed the results this week. "But the remnant shines in radio waves and X-rays, so X-ray and radio telescopes can see it.""

Link to full article

"he Vatican's chief astronomer says there is no conflict between believing in God and in the possibility of "extraterrestrial brothers" perhaps more evolved than humans.

"In my opinion this possibility (of life on other planets) exists," said Reverend Jose Gabriel Funes, a 45-year-old Jesuit priest who is head of the Vatican Observatory and a scientific adviser to Pope Benedict.

"How can we exclude that life has developed elsewhere," he told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an interview in its Tuesday-Wednesday edition, explaining that the large number of galaxies with their own planets made this possible.

Asked if he was referring to beings similar to humans or even more evolved than humans, he said: "Certainly, in a universe this big you can't exclude this hypothesis."

In the interview, headlined "The extraterrestrial is my brother," he said he saw no conflict between belief in such beings and faith in God.

"Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on Earth, there can be other beings, even intelligent, created by God. This is not in contrast with our faith because we can't put limits on God's creative freedom," he said. "Why can't we speak of a 'brother extraterrestrial'? It would still be part of creation," he said."

Link to full article

"The UK is making decades' worth of classified files relating to UFOs freely available to the public.

On Monday, the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) began a four-year-long project to transfer the files to the UK's National Archives, which will post them for public perusal. The announcement comes about one year after France made its UFO files available online.

The project is a response to massive public interest and numerous Freedom of Information (FOI) requests about UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects, that have been filed over the years. Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator at the MOD, called the release "a great day for open government and freedom of information".

When complete, the National Archive will contain some 160 UFO-related MOD files from the 1950s to 2007, representing the single largest release of records in the ministry's history."

Link to full article

"NASA's Phoenix spacecraft will experience a harrowing few minutes on 25 May when it hits Mars's atmosphere and attempts to land safely on the surface - without any airbags to cushion its fall.

Phoenix launched in August 2007 on a mission to Mars's icy north polar region. Changes in the Red Planet's tilt may have allowed the abundant ice there to melt as recently as 100,000 years ago, raising the tantalising possibility that microscopic life forms could once have eked out an existence in the region. Life might even be present there now in a dormant state.

The lander will dig down as much as 50 centimetres below the surface, collecting samples of soil and ice to better understand the region's past climate and check for carbon-containing molecules that could be associated with life.

But first, the spacecraft must make it to the surface in one piece. A host of critical manoeuvres have to go off just as planned in order to get the spacecraft safely to the surface, all of them designed to occur automatically. If it is successful, it will be the first probe since the Viking missions more than 30 years ago to land safely without airbags.

"This is no trip to grandma's for the weekend - there are many, many risks and uncertainties," says Ed Weiler, chief of NASA's science mission directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, US. "But as someone once said a long time ago about NASA, we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard, and the scientific payoff will be well worth the risk.""

Link to full article

"The most energetic particles in the universe have regained some of their former mystery. Last year, it seemed that the origin of these particles had finally been tracked down to a set of giant black holes in nearby galaxies, but a new study casts doubt on that conclusion.

Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, or UHECRs, are individual sub-atomic particles with energies up to about 1020 electron volts, far beyond anything achieved in particle accelerators.

When they hit the Earth's atmosphere, they produce a shower of other particles, and the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina has spotted more of these events than any other detector.

In November 2007, an Auger team looked at the arrival directions of the 27 highest-energy cosmic rays, and found that they fit a suggestive pattern. Most came from within 3° of the directions of nearby active galaxies, which hold supermassive black holes at their cores and emit many kinds of radiation. So it seemed that the galaxies were emitting UHECRs too.

Now researchers led by Igor Moskalenko of Stanford University in California, US, have looked more closely at these particular active galaxies, as well as others along the same line of sight. They find that they are an unremarkable bunch. "The sample consists mainly of low-power active galaxies," says Moskalenko."

Link to full article

"Any Star Trek fan knows that space travel is not always easy, but Microsoft wants to make travelling the "final frontier" as simple as turning on your computer.

The world's largest software maker launched a free software application called WorldWide Telescope on Monday that allows everyone from space novices to astronomy professors easily explore galaxies, star systems and distant planets.

The WorldWide Telescope stitches together 12 terabytes - the data equivalent of 2.6 billion pages of text - of pictures from sources including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The experience is similar to playing a video game, allowing users to zoom in and out of galaxies that are thousands of light years away. It allows seamless viewing of far-away star systems and rarely-seen space dust in breathtaking clarity.

A test version of the software is available for download here.

Microsoft archrival Google also has its eyes to the skies. Google Sky started as an add-on to Google Earth but was later upgraded to a version that could be used through a Web browser. Google's version is also free."

Link to full article

"A California nanotechnology research lab says it has created the first 3D material able to bend light in the opposite direction to natural materials. But some other specialists in the field remain sceptical about the claim.

Physicists have in recent years made it possible to bend, or refract, light in the opposite direction to any natural materials. These metamaterials make it possible to create invisibility cloaks that hide an object by steering light around it.

The refractive index of a material is a measure of how it bends light and for natural materials it is always positive. Metamaterials, though, can have negative refractive indexes.

This is achieved with tiny periodic structures that interact with the electric and magnetic fields that comprise light. The repeating structures need to be smaller than the light waves themselves, something that has limited them to long-wavelength light, or microwaves."

Link to full article

"Scientists have invited the public to trawl high-resolution images for signs of NASA's Mars Polar Lander, which went silent on arrival at Mars in 1999. Finding the wreckage might explain why the mission failed.

"If we can find the Mars Polar Lander and be convinced we understand what we're looking at, it might provide some clues as to what went wrong," says Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US. "There could be lessons there that are applicable to future landers."

The Mars Polar Lander was supposed to study the Martian climate as well as soil and ice close to the planet's south pole. But mission controllers lost contact with the probe when it landed. An investigation suggested it probably smashed onto the surface at high speed because the engines that should have slowed the craft's descent shut down too quickly.

Scientists thought they saw the dead lander in images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor satellite in 2000, but these turned out to be a mirage. Now images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are offering another chance for the probe to be found."

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"BEIJING, China--As I look out of my hotel room window on my first full day here, it is hard to tell where the clouds end and the haze of pollution begins. Smog, which worsens as the day progresses, obscures the Jundu and Xishan mountains ringing the city as well as the many monuments and landmark buildings in town.

China has spent nearly $17 billion (120 billion yuan) since 2001 to clean its capital city's notoriously dirty air, but the atmosphere is still filled with car and truck exhaust as well as the dust from innumerable construction sites and the smoke belched by coal-fired industrial and power facilities.

During various taxi rides through this sprawling and massive metropolis, I notice that none of the cars sharing the road--Volkswagens, Buicks, Chevys and Hyundais, to name a few of the makes--appear to be more than a few years old. The main arteries in town are jam-packed with vehicles day and night, and traffic continues to worsen as members of the growing Chinese middle class purchase their first cars, according to longtime resident Timothy Hui, program manager of the Beijing office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an international environmental group.

"There are too many people driving," a taxi driver, who declined to be identified by name, told me through a translator. "The only cars that should be allowed on the road are taxicabs and public transportation. Everyone wants to drive." Although taxis are relatively cheap in Beijing--it costs about $10 (70 yuan) plus toll for the 28 mile (45 kilometer) ride from the airport to downtown--purchasing a car is viewed as a major sign of arrival in the middle class.

Still, my driver may soon get his wish--at least temporarily. The city plans to close at least 144 of its nearly 1,500 gas stations and ban cars without appropriate license plates from the roads during the Olympics set to be held here from August 8 to 24. During a test run last year, the city eliminated 1.3 million cars from the road for four days, which resulted in a drop of more than 5,800 metric tons of air pollutants, according to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. As part of its effort to cleanse the Olympic air, the officials also to close or move factories to the suburbs, ban the burning of stubble in surrounding agricultural fields, and suspend all construction beginning July 1."

Link to full article

"Google has murdered the AdSense account run by one of the web's most influential anti-Scientology sites.

Yesterday, the search giant cut off all ads served to Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology and all its related organizations. This could have something do with the nature of the ads Google was serving. Many of the Google-driven ads funding the anti-Scientology site were paid for by the Church of Scientology.

"While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers," read Google's letter to Enturbulation, a kind of home base for the now famous Anonymous movement. "Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account."

Of course, it's not Enturbulation's fault that Google was serving the site pro-Scientology ads. AdSense automatically chooses ads based on a site's content. And like any AdSense advertiser, the Church of Scientology has the power to ban its ads from individual domains.

Google did not respond to our requests for comment. But it should be noted that the company's new AdSense policies say that partner sites may not include "advocacy against any individual, group, or organization."

That said, Google's terms and conditions also prohibit "any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google's reputation or goodwill." And this isn't always enforced. The Register, for instance, is an AdSense user, and it doesn't always champion Google's every move.

It should also be noted that the Church of Scientology wouldn't actually pay for ads posted to Enturbulation unless someone clicked on them. The question is whether the site's users would be interested in doing so. We leave that question to you.

Meanwhile, Enturbulation may lose between $400 and $500 a month in ad revenue.

Google's crackdown on Enturbulation's AdSense account follows similar actions by its YouTube subsidiary. Last month, the world's most popular video site vaporized an account run by Mark Bunker, a well-known anti-Scientology activist and one of the brains behind Enturbulation.

YouTube said it destroyed Bunker's video channel because he'd already had an account suspended for violations of site policy. But it seems this rule does not apply to the Church of Scientology."

Link to full article

"BRUSSELS (AFP) - NATO launched Wednesday a new cyber-defence training centre in Tallinn to defend against attacks over the Internet, a year after Estonia fell victim to a "cyber-war" blamed on Russian hackers.

At NATO headquarters in Brussels, seven member nations -- Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Spain -- signed documents formally establishing the Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in the Estonian capital.

"The need for a cyber-defence centre to be opened today is compelling," said General James Mattis, who heads NATO's transformation efforts. "It will help NATO defy and successfully counter the threats in this area."

The centre, due to open officially in 2009 but which has already been working informally, will conduct research and training on cyber warfare and have a staff of 30, half of them IT experts from the participating countries.

The choice of Estonia is no accident: besides having first-hand experience of a cyber-war, the country is home to a flourishing hi-tech industry which has earned it the nickname "E-stonia"."

Link to full article

"SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) said on Wednesday its Xbox 360 game machine beat Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) Wii and Sony Corp's (6758.T) PlayStation 3 to reach 10 million units in U.S. sales.

"History has shown us that the first company to reach 10 million in console sales wins the generation battle," Don Mattrick, a Microsoft senior vice president who heads the company's Xbox business, said in a statement.

The Xbox 360 was the first of this latest generation of game machines to launch in the United States when it was released in November 2005. The PS3 and Wii were launched in the United States a year later.

The Wii is closing in on the Xbox 360, with 8.8 million units sold as of the end of March, while Sony has totaled 4.1 million PS3 units sold, according to market research firm NPD.

Microsoft also said global membership of its Xbox Live online service reached 12 million members.

(Reporting by Daisuke Wakabayashi; Editing by Braden Reddall)"

"NEW YORK - Google has surpassed Yahoo to become the most popular Web site in the United States, according to comScore Inc.'s rankings by the number of unique monthly visitors.

Google Inc. has long been the Internet's leader in search, but its audience has trailed Yahoo Inc.'s when counting other services such as e-mail and photo sharing.

April's numbers, which Internet tracking firm comScore plans to formally release Thursday, show Google on top for the first time.

The lead is tiny -- 466,000 visitors out of about 141 million apiece. And while such measures are good as a gauge, they aren't known for precision. In fact, rival rankings from Nielsen Online already had Google as the top Web brand.

Still, comScore's finding is one more hint of Google's dominance over Internet pioneer Yahoo.

Jack Flanagan, comScore's executive vice president, said Google's dominance in search creates "a halo effect" that can boost its other services.

Google now has the Picasa online photo-sharing service, competing with Flickr from Yahoo. Google also has launched a site on finance, while its Gmail e-mail service keeps growing -- and competing with Yahoo.

Google's $1.76 billion purchase of YouTube in November 2006 gave it the leading video-sharing Web site.

According to comScore, Google's unique U.S. audience in April was 141.1 million, an 18 percent increase from the same month in 2007. Yahoo's audience grew 7 percent, to 140.6 million. Microsoft Corp. was third at about 121 million.

That said, Yahoo still leads in page views, meaning visitors spend more time there or return more often. Many Google users make a simple search request and quickly go elsewhere based on the results. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views to Google's 28.7 billion.

The comScore data come from its Media Metrix panel, recruited primarily using random phone-based techniques.

ComScore recently took heat for its data on paid search clicks, which come from a larger panel that relies heavily on online recruitment techniques dismissed by many more traditional pollsters.

In that case, however, Wall Street concerns that the faltering U.S. economy could bog down Google resulted largely from investors and analysts ignoring comScore's advice on how to interpret the paid-click data. Google wound up surpassing the analysts' predictions in producing a first-quarter profit of 30 percent."

"A security researcher has developed malicious rootkit software for Cisco Systems' routers, a development that has placed increasing scrutiny on the routers that carry the majority of the Internet's traffic.

Sebastian Muniz, a researcher with Core Security Technologies, developed the software, which he will unveil on May 22 at the EuSecWest conference in London.

Rootkits are stealthy programs that cover up their tracks on a computer, making them extremely hard to detect. To date, the vast majority of rootkits have been written for the Windows operating system, but this will mark the first time that someone has discussed a rootkit written for IOS, the Internetwork Operating System used by Cisco's routers. "An IOS rootkit is able to perform the tasks that any other rootkit would do on desktop computer operating systems," Muniz said in an e-mail interview."

Link to full article

"LOS ANGELES - Federal officials on Wednesday charged Broadcom Corp. co-founders Henry T. Nicholas III and Henry Samueli with falsifying the company's reported income by illegally backdating stock options for five years.

A criminal complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission also charges former chief financial officer William J. Ruehle and general counsel David Dull.

The four men are accused of violating federal securities laws by misrepresenting the dates on which stock options were granted to its executives and employees.

The SEC said that as a result of the scheme, Broadcom restated its financial results in January 2007 and reported more than $2 billion in additional compensation expenses.

"This egregious misconduct resulted in the largest accounting restatement to date arising from stock option backdating and warrants the significant sanctions sought from these individuals," said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement.

Phone messages left for attorneys representing Nicholas and Samueli were not immediately returned.

The Irvine-based communications chip maker agreed last month to pay $12 million to settle similar charges without admitting or denying the allegations."

"LG and Samsung this morning jointly said they would team up to promote a new standard for digital mobile TV in the US. Already submitted to the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) that governs HDTV, the unnamed format would use the existing wireless spectrum already in place for digital over-the-air broadcasts to conventional tuners. The choice would not only make adding portable TV simple for existing providers but would do so without impacting the bandwidth available for full-size digital broadcasts, the companies say.

The format should be tested this year by a group of interested broadcasters known as Open Mobile Video Coalition, the Korean firms say. Actual devices and services using the new mobile TV technology should be in place by early 2009.

An adoption of a more universal mobile TV standard is considered crucial for bringing the US up to par with Korea, Japan, and other regions in the world which already offer unprotected mobile TV formats for phones and portable media players. AT&T and Verizon already offer mobile TV for their cellphones but do so using the encrypted MediaFLO format, which prevents users from tuning in without getting permission from their cellular carrier or a similar provider."

"KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Embarq Corp. will hold onto its wireless customer base for the time being, but could hand it over to another carrier next year, the company's chief financial officer said Wednesday.

Speaking in Washington, D.C., at an analyst conference broadcast on the Web, Gene Betts said the company would continue serving those customers until at least 2009.

"After that, we may decide to transition them to a carrier," he said.

Embarq, the nation's fourth-largest landline phone company, sold wireless services in its 18-state market through a partnership with Sprint Nextel Corp., which spun off the Overland Park, Kan.-based company in 2006. The service was sold in package deals aimed at improving competition with cable companies, which have increasingly gone after traditional telephone customer bases.

Embarq stopped marketing the service after the first of the year, however, because sales weren't meeting internal expectations. Betts said Embarq envisioned drawing 1 million or more wireless customers but ended up with only 112,000 by the end of 2007.

"It was becoming apparent that we couldn't obtain enough wireless customers to make a big difference," Betts said.

He said the company will instead continue developing and selling products that better combine home and wireless phone service, such as features that transfer phone calls seamlessly between the two or provide unified voicemail.

"We're trying to make functionality that integrates with any wireless device and isn't tied to a particular carrier," he said.

Betts said Embarq, which has struggled like other traditional telephone companies as customers drop landline service in favor of wireless or Internet-based telephone carriers, is looking to move into other arenas to boost revenue.

For example, the company has begun offering home computer repair service in some markets, taking advantage of high demand and the company's large pool of field technicians, he said.

"Maybe we could act as the CIO for residences and small business," he said. "We're just trialing it to see if it makes sense."

Embarq shares were up $1.10, or 2.4 percent, to $46.09 in midday trading Wednesday."

"TOKYO - Drivers in Japan can check on their pets, turn lights and air conditioning on and off and lock their front doors -- all from inside their cars -- with a new navigation system from Panasonic.

In addition to guiding drivers to destinations as regular global positioning system navigation gadgets do, the $3,400 Strada F-Class will link to the home through any Internet-capable mobile phone.

Users could use the phone itself to communicate with your Web-enabled home, but Panasonic says it's easier while driving to use the Strada F-Class.

Users just touch icons on the navigation system's screen that read "turn off the light" or "lock the door." They can make it look as though they're home -- to ward off burglars -- by turning lights off and then on, all while they're away, said Naohisa Morimoto, an official with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which puts out Panasonic brand products.

The catch is that they need a Web-enabled camera, front door and other devices. Only about 2,000 homes in Japan have such Net-linking systems, Morimoto said. But Panasonic offers home servers for about $1,900 in Japan, and cheaper ones are available.

Panasonic hopes to sell about 8,000 of the Strada F-Class monthly in Japan after they go on sale June 13. There are no overseas sales plans."

"SAN JOSE, Calif. - Switzerland's leading telecommunications company has signed with Apple Inc. to carry the iPhone later this year, making the multimedia gadget available in one more country as Apple prepares a new version with a speedier Internet connection.

Swisscom AG, which has 5.1 million mobile phone subscribers, posted a note on its Web site Wednesday alerting customers that it will carry the iPhone later this year. The Bern, Switzerland-based company offered no further details.

Cupertino-based Apple Inc. has been snapping up contracts with wireless providers around the world in recent weeks ahead of the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in June in San Francisco, where Chief Executive Steve Jobs is widely expected to announce the next-generation iPhone.

Among those deals are pacts with providers in Latin America, Canada, Italy and the Asia-Pacific region including agreements covering Australia, India and the Philippines. The iPhone already was being sold through exclusive contracts in the United States, Britain, Germany and France.

Apple is hustling to meet its goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008, a target some analysts believe can be met only with a new version of the iPhone.

The current model works only on so-called 2.5G networks instead of the faster 3G, or third-generation, cell phone networks, a limitation Jobs said was caused by the large size and heavy power consumption of 3G chips available when the iPhone was being designed.

The difference in performance is the equivalent of using a dial-up Internet connection versus a high-speed broadband connection.

Apple said early this week that it has sold out of the current model of the iPhone in its U.S. and U.K. online stores, a sign that a new edition is imminent. Apple is known for reducing its inventory of a given product ahead of a major upgrade.

Apple shares rose 45 cents to $190.41 in midday trading."

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Verizon Wireless said on Wednesday it joined a consortium working on a Linux-based mobile operating system expected to rival a mobile system being developed by a group headed by Google Inc (GOOG.O).

The announcement that the No. 2 U.S. mobile service joined the LiMo Foundation follows signals last month that AT&T Inc (T.N) would support Android, the Linux operating system being developed by Google and about 30 partners.

Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and Vodafone Group Plc (VOD.L), said it would take a seat on the foundation's board and expects to sell its first phones based on the LiMo operating system in 2009.

"We'll start with a few simpler devices and work our way up," Verizon Wireless Network Vice President Kyle Malady said on a conference call with reporters.

Malady said that while Verizon would continue to support other operating systems such as that used in Research In Motion Ltd's (RIM.TO) BlackBerry, the LiMo system would be the company's operating system of choice."

Link to full article

"Two king-pins in the technology industry announced Tuesday a merger agreement valued at $13.9 billion, with Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) set to acquire computer consulting firm Electronic Data Systems Corp. (NYSE: EDS) in an effort to compete more
aggressively with rival IBM in the technology services business.

The deal, which is set to close later this year, will more than double HP's revenue derived from I.T. services, which the company says amounted to $16.6 billion in fiscal '07.

The acquistion will produce a new services group under the EDS moniker with an HP tagline. Known as "EDS -- An HP Company," the services group will be based in EDS's current headquarters in Plano, Texas, with Ronald A. Rittenmeyer, the current CEO of EDS, continuing at the helm.

Enough To Beat IBM?

Combining forces with EDS makes HP "a lot more competitive by having a whole lot more services personnel," according to Roger Kay, principal analyst with Endpoint Technologies. "IBM is the gold standard. This gives them a better shot at it."

HP's roots in services go back to its 2002 acquisition of Compaq, which itself bought Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) back in 1998. "They have a pretty good services group, but they wanted to compete with IBM," Kay said. "This puts them closer to that goal."

One question is how well the companies will integrate, but Kay doesn't expect many problems on that front. HP CEO Mark Hurd is "known as good at integrating," Kay said."

Link to full article

"it sells within a few years to find new revenue streams amid decreasing handset prices, a senior official at the world's top cellphone maker said.

Michael Halbherr, the head of Nokia's location-based activities, told Reuters he remains comfortable with Nokia's year-old goal for seeing up to 50 percent of its phones equipped with global positioning system (GPS) chips in 2010 to 2012.

"We are planning to ship 35 million GPS units this year," Halbherr said, adding "and many more location-enabled phones that use cell-towers to orient themselves on the map."

"You will see few 'E' or 'N' Series phones without GPS," he said.

Last year Nokia sold 437 million phones, and it expects the volume to grow more than 10 percent this year. It sold 38 million phones in its multimedia range "N Series" and some 7 million "E Series" business phones.

GPS chips use orbiting satellites to pinpoint the whereabouts of a phone user, thereby enabling a host of location-based services. SiRF Technology Holdings Inc is the world's largest maker of GPS chips.

Last October, when unveiling an $8.1 billion offer for U.S. based digital map supplier Navteq , Nokia said it would have tens of navigation-enabled phones on the market by end-2008.

It sells five models with built-in GPS and has unveiled four more which will ship in the coming months.

Halbherr said his company's GPS phone strategy goes far beyond the phones themselves.

It's part of a comprehensive strategy to make location-enabled, context-aware phones available across its product line, he said.

Beyond phones specially equipped with location-finding technology, all Nokia phones stand to benefit as GPS phone users move about and effectively update Nokia Maps in real time for other phone users.

"Location will ultimately be in every device," Halbherr declared, not just the half of phones with special GPS chips.

In addition to GPS chips, Nokia's strategy involves pushing Wi-Fi enabled devices that use local wireless network antennas to achieve more or less the same location-awareness in these devices. Even phones without GPS or Wi-Fi can use local cellphone towers to identify their position on maps, he noted.

Nokia Maps, first introduced in early 2006, will come out with a version 2.0 for phones worldwide later this month.

Halbherr mocks the current rush by Internet companies such as Google , Yahoo and Microsoft to deliver all their services as centralized, Web-based services over the network, rather than using the growing powers of the device in users' hands.

"I believe memory and computation speed will grow faster than bandwidth," he said. "I am not a believer in cloud computing."

"All the American navigation solutions are basically server based, which overloads the network and degrades the consumer experience," Halbherr said, referring to both Internet map services and companies specializing in car navigation.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard; Additional reporting by Tarmo Virki in Helsinki, editing by Will Waterman)
© Copyright 2007 Reuters."

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"TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp posted a surprise quarterly loss on Wednesday after a weak stock market ate into the value of securities held by its financial arm, but it forecast a bigger-than-expected profit this year as it boosts sales of digital cameras and flat TVs.

Sony, locked in a three-way battle with Microsoft Corp and Nintendo Co Ltd in the game industry, has been able to narrow losses on the PlayStation 3 game console by cutting manufacturing costs and expanding sales.

The electronics and entertainment conglomerate has also enjoyed strong sales of Cyber-shot digital cameras, VAIO PCs and handheld video cameras, helping push its operating profit up more than five-fold in the business year that ended on March 31.

"Considering that Sony was operating under adverse economic conditions, including a strong yen, both the results and outlook seem to show that Sony's stamina has grown stronger," said Kazuhara Miura, an analyst at Daiwa Institute of Research.

It suffered an operating loss of 4.7 billion yen ($45 million) in January-March, an improvement from a 113 billion yen loss a year earlier but short of an average estimate of a 27.3 billion yen profit from five analysts surveyed by Reuters.

The fourth-quarter loss was due mainly to a slide in the value of stocks and convertible bonds held by its financial division.

Sony said it expects operating profit to grow 20 percent to 450 billion yen in the year to March 2009, beating the market consensus of 428.5 billion yen. It sees revenues rising 1 percent to 9 trillion yen.

Japanese exporters including Sony are facing tough business conditions this year due to a firmer yen, rising raw materials prices and signs of a slowdown in the global economy.

Sony aims to sell 17 million liquid crystal display TVs in the year to next March, up from 10.6 million in the year just ended. That compares with Sharp Corp's target to sell 10 million LCD TVs and Matsushita's plans to sell 11 million flat TVs.

"The business environment is not so good but we will generate sales growth from LCD TVs," Sony Chief Financial Officer Nobuyuki Oneda told a news conference.

IMPROVING ITS GAME

In a bid to secure enough display panels for its Bravia LCD TVs, Sony plans to take a one-third stake in Sharp's 380 billion yen LCD panel plant set for completion by March 2010.

It will also be building a new LCD panel production line with Samsung Electronics Co Ltd , Sony's partner in panel production but its archrival in retail outlets.

For the full year that ended on March 31, operating profit surged to 374.5 billion yen from 71.8 billion yen, helped by smaller losses and one-off gains from the sale of part of its former headquarters site and chip-making facilities.

But the result still missed Sony's own forecast in January of 410 billion yen.

Sony's financial services division, which includes its life insurance and banking operations, posted an operating loss of 30 billion yen for the fourth quarter, a sharp downswing from an operating profit of 29.5 billion yen a year earlier.

Sony said it planned to double its dividend in the current year to 50 yen.

Shares in Sony closed up 1.3 percent at 4,850 yen ahead of the announcement, but are still down 22 percent since the start of 2008, underperforming a fall of 7 percent in the Tokyo stock market's electrical machinery index.

Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Managment, said the market may react positively to Sony's outlook, especially since it is based on a currency rate of 100 yen to the dollar and the dollar is now at 105 yen.

"The game business is likely to drastically improve and the LCD TV business is also expected to be profitable. If Sony can accomplish these two things, it can easily lift its earnings forecasts, unless the yen starts trading around 90 yen," he said.

($1=103.76 Yen)

(Additional reporting by Taiga Uranaka, Mayumi Negishi, Nathan Layne and Aiko Hayashi; Editing by Michael Watson)
© Copyright 2007 Reuters."

" Engineers testing a recently launched Japanese data communications satellite have succeeded in establishing a two-way Internet link running at 1.2G bps (bits per second) each way, they said Monday.

The speed represents a record for satellite communications, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.

The tests were carried out on May 2 as part of verification of the Kizuna satellite. In the tests data was transmitted on two 622M-bps channels both up to the satellite and down to a receiving antenna. Together the combined data transmission speed was 1.2G bps.

Kizuna was launched on Feb. 23 and is intended to provide high-speed Internet links to homes and offices in remote areas, to organizations as a back-up during natural disasters and to improve regional communications links in Asia."

Link to full article

"SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. launched its WorldWide Telescope late Monday, bringing the free Web-based program for zooming around the universe to a broad audience.

WorldWide Telescope, developed by Microsoft's research arm, knits together images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and others.

Computer users can browse through the galaxy on their own or take guided tours of different outer-space destinations developed by astronomers and academics.

The site lets users choose from a number of different telescopes and switch between different light wavelengths.

"The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, in a statement.

_"

Link to full article

"While Sun executives have said that JavaFX, the company's nascent rich Internet application (RIA) development product family and eventual competitor to Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, will be entirely open source, a FAQ page on Sun's site appears to contradict that.

"The JavaFX Script language, currently being developed with the community's help (see OpenJFX project), will have a grammar and syntax that are open source. Some parts of the language are already open source," it states, but adds, "the JavaFX compiler, runtime engine, player, and tools currently under development are not expected to be open source."

Simon Brocklehurst, CEO of software development company Psynixis, noted the FAQ's wording in a recent blog post.

"I'm pretty sure that potential JavaFX developers would be interested in getting some better understanding on this," Brocklehurst wrote. "Certainly, the lack of clarity has stopped me getting my hands dirty with JavaFX technology for the time being.""

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"SANTIAGO, Chile - A prosecutor was appointed Monday to investigate how a computer hacker accessed government data for 6 million Chileans and posted it to the Internet.

Prosecutor Jose Ignacio Escobar, a specialist in high-tech crime, opened the probe as the government announced plans to step up data protection.

Police chief Jaime Jara said the weekend data leak did not include financial records and was less serious than first thought.

The information accessed by a hacker included identity card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mails and academic records.

"For what we have seen until now, the leaked data does not include information related to banking accounts, salaries or other economic aspects," Jara said.

The data was taken early Friday from servers at the Education Ministry, the Electoral Service and the military, he said."

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"For hardcore gamers, controlling a video-game character is second nature. You use one joystick to run, use another stick to look around, press the right trigger to shoot and use various buttons to open doors, take cover or talk to other characters.

It all seems so obvious that I'm surprised when someone else of my generation doesn't get it. My brother-in-law, for example, is an experienced hunter and golfer -- but he has trouble firing a gun or swinging a club in virtual reality. Perhaps game controls have just gotten too complicated.

A game like "Grand Theft Auto IV" is designed for die-hards who can drive, shoot and talk on a cell phone (virtually, that is) simultaneously. After a few hours, though, you long for something simpler, where you're only doing one thing at a time. Such simple pleasures should be part of any gamer's diet, especially if you want to play with friends who aren't as hardcore.

_"Boom Blox" (Electronic Arts, for the Wii, $39.99): This is the first fruit of a much ballyhooed collaboration between EA and Steven Spielberg, but if you're expecting an Indiana Jones-style spectacle, you'll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you're seeking a fun-for-the-whole-family experience, "Boom Blox" delivers."

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - What do you want your cell phone to be able to do?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.'s upcoming Android mobile operating system.

In the process, they revealed the power of an open system like Android to shake up the mobile phone industry, where wireless companies are being pressured to loosen the control they have maintained over what devices do. If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation.

For these students at least, cell phones should be all about location, location, location. Most of the projects produced by the seven teams of students involved programs that let phones track people's physical place -- or that of their friends -- to help them do things and meet up."

Link to full article

"HP said Tuesday morning that it has signed a deal to acquire IT outsourcer EDS for $13.9 billion, or $25.00 per share.

The deal has been approved by both companies' boards of directors, and is expected to close in the second half of this year. (See our FAQ for details on what the deal means for enterprises and the IT services industry.)

HP said it will more than double its services revenue.

The deal will greatly expand HP's IT services business and catapult it to the number two spot close behind IBM, whose Global Technology Services division has long been a strong profit generator for the company."

Link to full article

"Wireless Enterprise Symposium, Orlando, Florida - May 12, 2008 - Quickoffice, the leading global provider of mobile office productivity software and solutions, and DynoPlex, the leading developer of enterprise mobile office solutions for BlackBerry® handhelds, recently acquired by Quickoffice, today announced the immediate availability of a new release of eOffice. For the first time, BlackBerry users are able to open, view, edit and create native Microsoft Office documents in their original format and save the document with high data integrity.

The eOffice solution works on all currently shipping BlackBerry devices, connected both through BlackBerry Enterprise Server architecture and carrier-hosted BlackBerry Internet Service solution for individual customers. eOffice is immediately available without any upgrade requirements to the enterprise server or the BlackBerry device operating system.

The eOffice application allows users to open native attachments sent via email, stored on the device memory card or transferred to the BlackBerry. eOffice also enables users to create new documents and spreadsheets with comprehensive editing capabilities. Edited documents retain all original formatting, allowing users to make changes and save or send with complete confidence. All features, including editing native files, are available even when the BlackBerry is not wirelessly connected or in airplane offline mode. eOffice is also seamlessly integrated with BlackBerry's email client.

"Mobile professionals rely heavily on their BlackBerry handhelds to conduct work while away from the office," said Paul Moreton, vice president of product management for Quickoffice. "Our recent acquisition of DynoPlex enables us to have productivity applications across a variety of platforms. We're excited be the first to provide a native Office suite for BlackBerry users and look forward to continuing to provide the next-level of performance to our customers."

eOffice includes the following Word, Excel and Sharepoint features:

* View, edit and create 'real' Word documents with all formatting, tables and embedded graphics displayed; includes comprehensive editing features and a power spell-checker
* View, edit and create new Excel files including charting; powerful features to modify spreadsheets such as control over formatting and updating formulas with an extensive list of built-in functions
* Integration with Sharepoint plus an online account with unlimited space for storing, retrieving, faxing and printing documents

eOffice will be showcased at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium, May 13-15, in Orlando, Florida."

Link to full article

"DENVER (Billboard) - Perhaps no single device has had more impact on mobile music than Apple's iPhone. While only 6.7 percent of overall mobile customers use their phone to listen to music, rising to 27.9 percent for smartphone users, a full 74.1 percent of iPhone owners reported using the device as an MP3 player, according to M:Metrics.

The majority of this music, however, is transferred from the computer, rather than purchased through the phone and downloaded wirelessly. That may change this summer once Apple unveils what many expect will be a new version of the iconic device, featuring access to high-speed third-generation (3G) wireless networks.

The company has not made an official announcement, but signs point to an early June release. Apple has stopped restocking retailers with the current iPhone version, which analysts say is a sure sign that a new model is imminent. Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is scheduled for June 9, and CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote address."

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"SAN FRANCISCO - It is the burning question in tech circles, and Mike Murphy answers it before it is completed.

"I hear it every time I'm on a (tech) panel," Murphy, Facebook's vice president of media sales, says with a wry smile.

He's referring to the inevitable question on when Facebook and other social-networking sites will turn their steep market valuations into mounds of currency. (Invariably, Murphy answers that Facebook has a long list of major advertisers.)

Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites have been the rage of the tech industry for more than a year. Following investments by Microsoft and News Corp., the companies are valued in the billions of dollars and are considered blueprints for how to build a website. Yet a deeper question lingers: How are they going to consistently produce profits to match their soaring valuations?"

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"They are one of the defining images of earthquakes the world over, from Kobe in Japan to Oakland, California: bridges whose sections have slipped from their supports, crashing to earth like discarded playing cards. How much better if they could be held in place by cables that stretch during the quake and then pull them back into place when it's over.

That's the prospect held out this week by a team led by Reginald DesRoches, a civil engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. DesRoches has demonstrated for the first time that anchoring the decks of bridges or highway overpasses with restraining cables made from "smart" shape memory alloys, rather than traditional steel cables, could help the structures survive quakes or hurricanes."

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"San Francisco - One of the joys of being a Web programmer is heading to a dinner party, a haircut, or a reunion and fielding the pitches for everyone's dream for a brilliant Web application. Everyone is always happy to cut you in for 5, 10, maybe even 15 percent of the equity if you just build out the Web site that's sort of like a combination of Twitter, AltaVista, Eliza, TurboTax, and the corner pharmacy, but cooler.

Google App Engine is meant for dreams like these. You write a bit of code in Python, customize some HTML, and bingo, you've got your database-backed dynamic Web site up and running in a few short minutes. The magic comes when the world starts flocking to your Web application, and Google's cloud of computers quickly adapts to the load, handling everything the public demands. There's no need for you to buy servers, load balancers, or special DNS tables. Google's application cloud handles all of the grungy deployment headaches.

I played around with the App Engine SDK and, sure enough, developed and deployed applications on my desktop with just a few minutes of work. I didn't upload them to the cloud because I didn't make it into the beta program, but I was able to simulate the experience on my office server. The billions of hits haven't shown up yet, but it has only been a few hours now. It works and it is quite simple."

Link to full article

"San Francisco - Sun Microsystems is trying to rejuvenate Java, using the JavaOne conference last week to position the 13-year-old Java platform as a foundation for next-generation technologies in such spaces as rich Internet applications and cloud-based services.

Sun reiterated intentions first expressed at last year's JavaOne to catapult Java more into the rich Internet application space via its JavaFX technology. To follow up its words with actions, Sun rolled out a host of improvements, including video codec technology for the base Java platform, and promoted a planned cloud services platform called Project Hydrazine.

Sun also remained atop its open-source soapbox, calling itself the world's largest open-source software company.

"It looks like Sun's got a lot more vision these days," said Brad Molander, lead software engineer with National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC), which provides software for utility companies. "A few years' back, I was kind of confused on what their direction was and where they're going, but with the purchase of MySQL and the effort being put into JavaFX and Swing and the rich clients again, it seems like they have a lot better vision of the future.""

Link to full article

"An earthquake registering 7.8 on the Richter Scale knocked out mobile phone service in the western Chinese city of Chengdu, although fixed-line networks remained in service, Chinese state television reported Monday afternoon.

Mobile phone service in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, was not available because of the earthquake, a representative of the Sichuan Earthquake Bureau told China Central Television (CCTV) in a live telephone interview. He did not specify whether the networks of both China Mobile, the nation's and world's largest mobile carrier, and China Unicom, China's other major mobile carrier, were affected.

A CCTV reporter in Chengdu confirmed that mobile service was not available, but that fixed-line service from Chengdu was still operating, as he called CCTV's studios in Beijing from a public phone. CCTV advised people watching in the area to remain calm and not jam phone lines with calls to family and friends."

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"A "serious security flaw" in Gmail turns Google's e-mail service into a spamming machine, according to a recent security report.

INSERT, the Information Security Research Team, has created a proof of concept that exploits the "trust hierarchy" that exists between mail service providers. By exploiting a flaw in the way Google forwards messages, a spammer can send thousands of bulk e-mails through Google's SMTP service, bypassing Google's 500-address bulk e-mail limit and identity fraud protections.

The report notes that with the rising volume of spam, e-mail providers have turned to whitelists and blacklists to help root out IP addresses of known spammers. Because, Gmail falls into the trusted whitelist category, messages are allowed "carte blanche" to bypass spam filtering.

INSERT's report notes that no extraordinary Internet expertise is necessary to exploit the flaw."

Link to full article

"Olive oil producers generally guess the best time to harvest their olives by
checking the fruit's color. The olive has to hit that perfect spot where they've just turned ripe--purple to black--but aren't yet falling to the ground. Now, scientists at Israel's Ben-Gurion University are helping them out with nuclear magnetic resonance, also known as NMR. NMR is usually used medically to create images or measure a specimen's levels of proteins and fat. But this is the first time it's being used industrially.

Researchers first take digital photos of olives at different levels of ripeness.
Then they put the olives in the NMR machine. Within a few seconds it determines the olives' oil content. Combing the photos with the oil information allows scientists to create a database correlating peak oil with perfect color. A farmer in the field could take pictures of his crop. A special camera would average the olives' color and tell him the optimal time to harvest. In a test, a local farmer learned that if he had harvested his crop 10 days earlier, he could have gotten 25 percent more olive oil."

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"Boeing has begun assembly on the third flight-test airplane for the 787 Dreamliner. A total of 857 Dreamliners have been ordered since the plane was announced in 2003, making it the fastest-selling wide body airliner in history. The first airplane to fly is on track for "power on" in June.

The Dreamliner is the first aircraft to be 80% composite by volume, making it lighter and more efficient than competitors. The flight-test airplane was the fifth Dreamliner to be loaded into the first position of the 787 production system. The fatigue test airframe and the second flight-test airplane have advanced to the next production stage. After assembly is complete, the interior of the airplane will be fitted.

"We are receiving assemblies that are much more complete," said Jack Jones, vice president of 787 Final Assembly and Change Incorporation. "The second flight-test airplane had a 50 percent reduction in the amount of incomplete work as compared to the first airplane. 'Traveled work' on this airplane is 65 percent less than on the first." Jones stated that after the interior was installed, "we'll see the 787 in what is close to a final delivery configuration.""

Boeing

"Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

Yahoo is partnering with the leading social networks so its users can take advantage of the freeing of user data, and it will also be crafting its own social network and APIs as part of its forthcoming Yahoo Open Strategy."

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"Sun Microsystems has bragged for 13 years now that Java security features keep the programming technology virus-free. Apparently, the same doesn't hold for the JavaOne trade show.

The San Francisco Department of Public Health put out a release Thursday with an alert that "several" people had become ill after attending or working at conferences at the city's Moscone Convention Center between April 30 and Thursday. That includes the time when the JavaOne confab took over the space. JavaOne opened its doors on Sunday and ends Friday.

The culprit specified in the alert was the norovirus.

To clarify, this is a virus that makes you barf and gives you diarrhea. It's not the kind of virus that sends Viagra-pitching e-mails to all your friends or treats you to a Rick Astley sing-along every time you turn on your computer.

No, you won't drop dead from it. Norovirus is better known as one of the viruses that causes a nasty stomach flu. Symptoms only last about a day or two, but it's highly contagious. Just to up the gross-out factor: Norovirus is found in the fecal matter or vomit of people who are infected. If they don't wash their hands properly, they spread it when they handle food or drinks. "

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Powerset on Sunday unveiled tools for searching Wikipedia that use conversational phrasing instead of keywords, marking the first step of its challenge to established Web search services such as Google.

Powerset's technology breaks down the meaning of words and sentences into related concepts, freeing users from always needing to type the exact words they want to find.

The closely watched Silicon Valley start-up is offering a way of searching millions of entries in Wikipedia's online encyclopedia, helping users find detailed answers to questions rather than isolated links that require further research.

For example, a user who wants to know how many wives King Henry VIII had (six, or two, depending on your definition of marriage) can find an answer via Powerset's service at http://tinyurl.com/5qpcr9/.

San Francisco-based Powerset is looking to leapfrog the current generation of services that rely on keyword searches such as Google Inc, Yahoo Inc, Microsoft Corp and IAC InterActiveCorp's Ask.com."

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"CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Once upon a time, people bonded with their co-workers on office softball teams and traded gossip at the watercooler.

OK, so those days aren't gone yet. But as big companies parcel Information Age work to people in widely dispersed locations, it's getting harder for colleagues to develop the camaraderie that comes from being in the same place. Beyond making work less fun, feeling disconnected from comrades might be a drag on productivity.

Now technology researchers are trying to replicate old-fashioned office interactions by transforming everyday business software for the new era of work. The historically dry-as-sawdust products are borrowing elements from video games and social-networking Web sites.

You can tell just from looking at the Beehive program under development at IBM Corp. that something is different. Beehive's color scheme is bright yellow, not IBM's standard blue. The cheerfulness reflects the fact that Beehive is meant to encourage far-flung co-workers to like each other more."

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"Astronomers have started monitoring about a million massive stars to see if any suddenly vanish, seemingly without a trace. Such a disappearing act would support a theory that some massive stars simply implode when they die, rather than exploding in brilliant supernovae or gamma-ray bursts.

As a massive star ages, it accumulates iron in its core. Eventually, this iron core grows so massive that it is crushed by its own gravity, forming a black hole.

Sometimes the process is accompanied by a supernova, when the star's outer layers explode outwards to produce a brilliant flash of light at visible wavelengths. In rare cases, black hole births are even more spectacular, with the star firing out powerful jets of high-energy radiation as it dies - a phenomenon known as a gamma-ray burst.

But as many as half of black hole births may happen more stealthily, with no explosion to mark the event. A new survey led by Christopher Kochanek of Ohio State University in Columbus, US, may detect these events by watching massive stars suddenly wink out."

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"In the movie The Day After Tomorrow, the world froze pretty quickly when a major ocean current, dubbed the "ocean conveyor belt", turned off.

While that was a work of fiction, slowdowns of the conveyor are possible and researchers have now found a way of giving us a few years' advance notice.

Although even 10 years' warning would be too late to do anything about preventing such an event, it could help people plan ahead to adapt, they say.

The ocean conveyor plays a major role in spreading heat around the globe - keeping Europe warmer than it otherwise would be, for example.

To look for possible early warning signs of such a slowdown in the current, Ed Hawkins and Rowan Sutton of the University of Reading, UK, used a climate model developed by the Met Office's Hadley Centre.

The study "is the first to demonstrate that such rapid changes are potentially predictable," Hawkins says. "It is a first step in designing a possible 'early warning system'.""

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"Flakes of iron snow could be falling inside the planet Mercury, according to a new experiment. This hot metal snowfall might help generate Mercury's puzzling magnetic field.

Researchers in the US have attempted to recreate the likely conditions within Mercury's liquid outer core, which is thought to be a mixture of iron and sulphur.

They used an arrangement of magnesium-oxide blocks, called a multi-anvil cell, to squeeze their iron and sulphur mixture to immense pressures, at temperatures above 2000 °Celsius. Iron crystals formed in the mixture.

"We saw iron crystals gathered at the bottom of the sample, while the liquid phase stayed on top," says team member Jie Li of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Mercury's iron snow should form simple cubic crystals, rather than the intricate hexagonal patterns of water-ice snowflakes on Earth."

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"A new way to examine the composition of luminous jets of ionised gas known as "plasma needles" could speed their progress towards their use for dental treatment and other medical uses.

A plasma is a cloud of gas broken down into a mélange of free electrons and ions.

At atmospheric pressure and temperature most plasmas reach thousands of degrees Celsius. But in recent years physicists have created "plasma needles" that are cold enough to touch but deadly to bacteria.

Chinese researchers have now built a device that generates a cold plasma and can also measure the flow of electrons inside it. That could help reveal new insights into the nature of such plasmas so they can be fine-tuned for biomedical use."

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"Does drinking infant formula made of cow's milk increase the risk of developing type 1 diabetes?

In 1993, a Finnish study found that consuming dairy products early on correlated with diabetes risk. One explanation is that beta-lactoglobulin, a protein in cow's, but not human, milk prompts babies to make antibodies that also attack glycodelin, a protein vital for training the immune system. The mistuned immune system then mistakenly destroys insulin-producing pancreatic cells, leading to type 1 diabetes.
"The mistuned immune system mistakenly destroys insulin-producing cells"

Now Marcia Goldfarb of the company Anatek-EP in Portland, Maine, has found that five children with type 1 diabetes, who were fed cow's-milk formula, all have antibodies to beta-lactoglobulin (Journal of Proteome Research, DOI: 10.1021/pr800041d).

"

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"How times have changed. Instead of large amounts of meat and spuds, some of the first Americans enjoyed healthy doses of seaweed.

The evidence comes from 27 litres of material collected from the Monte Verde site in southern Chile, widely accepted as the oldest settlement in the Americas. Nine species of seaweed, carbon dated at 13,980 to 14,220 years old, played a major role in a diet that included land plants and animals.

Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, argues that the seaweeds were used both as food and medicine. Some were found in remains of ancient hearths and others had been chewed into clumps, or "cuds," which may have been used for medicinal purposes. Indigenous people still use the same species medicinally.

Several of the seaweed species seem to have come from a rocky marine bay that was about 15 kilometres south of the ancient settlement, but three other types are found only on sandy open-ocean shores that, at the time, were 90 km west of the site.

The choice of seaweeds, and local land plants also identified at the site, show that the residents had good knowledge of both coastal resources and foods from the interior, which allowed them to stay in the region year-round, concludes Dillehay, who has studied Monte Verde for three decades."

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"Here's one thing the folks at Apple could teach their friends at AT&T: how to parcel out the good news.

Case in point: the Starbucks-iPhone-Wi-Fi deal that's been on and off all week and generating all the wrong kind of headlines (see for example, here).

If Steve Jobs were running AT&T, he would have kept it simple. And a surprise. The first we would have heard about it would be when he announced it, with a flourish, as a fait accompli. Starting today, free unlimited Wi-Fi for every iPhone owner at all 7,000 Starbucks coffee shops and every other AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot -- 17,000 in the U.S., 70,000 around the world.

Boom.

What we got instead was the public relations equivalent of second-day coffee, starting with the press release AT&T (T) issued back in February. The 13-paragraph document talks about free Wi-Fi for "AT&T broadband, AT&T U-verseSM Internet [and] AT&T's remote access services business customers" but never mentions Apple (AAPL) or the iPhone -- two hot-button words that would have given the news some real buzz."

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"he Federal Communications Commission will test the transition to digital television in North Carolina.

The FCC announced this week that it will have broadcasters shut off their analog signals Sept. 8, in Wilmington, N.C. to see what, if any, snares arise. Broadcasters will conduct the test five months before the nation switches to digital television on Feb. 17, 2009.

The National Association of Broadcasters applauded the decision, but raised several questions about the test.

"The FCC-initiated experiment in Wilmington can shed light on a number of issues surrounding the national DTV transition in February 2009," NAB VP of the Digital Television Transition Jonathan Collegio said in a statement. "The results must be objectively reviewed to determine how or whether the findings can be applied nationwide. NAB will be fully supportive of our local television broadcasters in this effort."

The NAB said its members look forward to gaining more information. That includes: how local, state, and federal governments will inform Wilmington-area residents of the experiment; whether the government will prioritize converter box requests from the test market area; how to minimize confusion that could arise from having two transition dates among nearby localities; how satellite operators will prepare; how the government will confirm that cable operators are prepared for the early shut-off; and whether the government will ensure that analog subscribers can still watch television."

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"NEW YORK - Shares of Activision Inc. hit a record high Friday after the video game publisher reported profit and sales that soared past guidance and Wall Street's expectations.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company's stock jumped $2.01, or 7.3 percent, to $29.71 Friday, after earlier hitting an all-time high of $30.15. The stock movement could make Activision's pending acquisition by French media conglomerate Vivendi SA more valuable.

Activision said Thursday the deal is on track to close in the next few weeks. The new publicly held company, to be called Activision Blizzard, will rival Electronic Arts Inc. as the world's largest video game publisher. Vivendi will own a 52 percent stake.

As part of the deal, shares of Vivendi Games will be converted into 295.3 million new shares of Activision at $27.50 per share, for a value of $8.1 billion. The deal also calls for Vivendi to purchase 62.9 million newly issued Activision shares the same price."

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"NEW YORK - Wholesale fees for Internet addresses ending in ".org" will increase 10 percent Nov. 9.

Public Interest Registry, which operates the ".org" domain name, disclosed the planned fee increase in a May 1 letter to the Internet's key oversight agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The fee increase does not require the organization's approval.

The per-name fee is what PIR collect annually from registrars, the companies that sell domain names on their behalf. Such charges are generally incorporated in the prices companies, groups and individuals pay to register names, and they apply to new registrations, transfers and renewals.

The increase brings the annual fee to $6.75. Last year, PIR imposed a 2.5 percent fee increase to $6.15."

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"San Francisco - Sun Microsystems is counting on the ubiquitous nature of Java to help its JavaFX technology compete in the rich Internet application (RIA) space against rivals Adobe Systems and Microsoft.

A browser plug-in for JavaFX will be featured in the Java SE (Standard Edition) 6 Update 10 release due this fall. Both Adobe, with its Flash platform, and Microsoft, with Silverlight, are offering plug-in platforms for rich Internet applications. But Sun plans to provide the industry-leading rich client with JavaFX, said Param Singh, Sun senior director of Java marketing. The Java runtime helps make this possible, he stressed during an interview at the JavaOne conference on Thursday afternoon.

"The Java runtime is on over 900 million desktops today," Singh said. Every month, there are 40 million downloads of updates to the Java runtime, he said. Additionally, there are more than 2.2 mobile phones with Java on them, not to mention Java's presence in 100 percent of Blu-ray devices, said Singh."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Playing video games does not turn children into deranged, blood-thirsty super-killers, according to a new book by a pair of Harvard researchers.

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team at Harvard Medical School, detail their views in "Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do," which came out last month and promises to reshape the debate on the effects of video games on kids.

"What I hope people realize is that there is no data to support the simple-minded concerns that video games cause violence," Kutner told Reuters.

The pair reached that conclusion after conducting a two-year study of more than 1,200 middle-school children about their attitudes towards video games.

It was a different approach than most other studies, which have focused on laboratory experiments that attempt to use actions like ringing a loud buzzer as a measure of aggression."

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"You think your personal information is priceless. But everything has a price, even your stolen bank account information.

McAfee Avert Labs has discovered a price list that criminals use to buy and sell credit card numbers, bank account log-ins, and other consumer data that have been filched from unsuspecting Web surfers.

"Last Friday morning in France, my investigations lead me to visit a site proposing top-quality data for a higher price than usual," writes Francois Paget of McAfee. "But when we look at this data we understand that as everywhere, you have to pay for quality."

For example, a Washington Mutual Bank account in the U.S. with an available balance of $14,400 is priced at 600 euros ($924), while a Citibank UK account with an available balance of 10,044 pounds is priced at 850 euros ($1,310).

There's even a guarantee that if the buyer is unable to log into the account within 24 hours, maybe because the owner of the data canceled the account, the buyer can get a replacement stolen account to use.

Criminals can even buy skimmers, fake face-plates for ATM machines that steal credit card data when the card is swiped, and so-called "dump tracks" used to create fake credit cards, the McAfee blog entry says."

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"Dupont and Dainippon Screen Manufacturing will form a strategic alliance to develop mass production techniques for organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, according to an announcement made in Japan.

The focus is on developing better processes and printing equipment for the fabrication of OLED displays.

OLEDs are attracting interest because the panels are paper thin but offer extremely high-quality images, superb color saturation, and fast response times. And they draw little power because they don't require a backlight.

At the same time, they face durability challenges. The organic matter used to illuminate the image can by ruined by the elements, so special sealing technology is necessary. Also, a new study by DisplaySearch found that the brightness on Sony's 11-inch XEL-1 TV began to degrade significantly after 1,000 hours."

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"Google may be getting cold feet. In a last-ditch effort to avoid a merger with Microsoft, Yahoo said it was considering teaming with Google in a search advertising deal. But some Google executives are now questioning whether that's a good idea, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

One major hurdle: A Google-Yahoo tieup could face tough scrutiny from regulators in Washington and the European Union. Last month Yahoo (YHOO) ran a two-week test displaying some of Google's (GOOG) search ads on Yahoo's homepage. Both Yahoo and Google executives said the experiment went well. The two are reportedly in talks to outsource Google's search technology in a non-exclusive arrangement.

Spokespeople from both Google and Yahoo declined to comment.

Google may have wedged its way into the mix in order to break up Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that Google was a factor when the software giant walked away from its $47.5 billion offer last Saturday. In a letter to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Ballmer said his company would not be willing to deal with the "host of regulatory and legal problems" that it would inevitably inherit if Yahoo partnered with Google."

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"In the aftermath of the Yahoo and Microsoft dust up, News Corp. says it is staying out of the mess.

News Corp. (NWS) had previously been linked to Yahoo (YHOO) and then switched camps to join Microsoft (MSFT) in its pursuit to acquire Yahoo. Microsoft eventually went it alone and four days ago, the behemoth walked away from its $47.5 billion offer with plans to look into alternatives to beef up its online ad unit. News Corp., which owns social networking site MySpace, shot down any rumors that it will partner with Microsoft.

"We're not in discussions with Microsoft. There are no discussions," said Peter Chernin, chief operating officer of News Corp. during an earnings call Wednesday with shareholders.

Chernin said that the company holds "regular conversations with everyone in the space," but has not held any talks with Yahoo or Time Warner's AOL (TWX) in the last "couple weeks." Added CEO Rupert Murdoch, "Nor have I."

In an effort to stave off Microsoft's unsolicited bid, Yahoo said it was pursuing other deals like partnering with AOL or Google (GOOG). At one point, Yahoo also considered a tie-up with News Corp.'s MySpace. With its massive and highly-engaged audience, a MySpace partnership was seen as way to attract advertisers and help bring economies of scale for either Microsoft and Yahoo. Though Microsoft has a minor stake in Facebook, neither have developed a major social networking presence."

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"The European Space Agency has launched a lively campaign to recruit talented new astronauts for future missions to the International Space Station, the Moon and possibly beyond.

ESA hopes to inject some young blood into its astronaut corps. Currently Europe has only eight astronauts, with an average age of 50. The agency wants to recruit four more, ideally aged 27 to 37.

"If we have a Moon programme and if Europe commits to participating in that, I anticipate that one of those who we are selecting now will walk on the Moon," says Gerhard Thiele, head of ESA's astronaut corps.

On Thursday, ESA held a press conference at London's Science Museum to kick off the recruitment campaign in the UK. Alan Thirkettle, ESA's programme manager for the space station, said the "inspirational" astronaut programme aims to drive technological development and economic competitiveness across the continent."

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"We have all heard how a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon may cause storms in far off places. But it seems that environmental effects can go in the other direction too - reductions in air pollution in North America have led to severe droughts in the Amazon rainforest, according to a new study.

In 2005, the Amazon suffered one of the worst droughts of the past century. Rivers ran so low that they were unnavigable to shipping, and thousands of forest fires raged.

El Niño effects are usually suspected, but there was a problem - there were no El Niño effects that year.

Peter Cox of the University of Exeter, UK, wondered if changes in sulphate particles in the atmosphere could be responsible.
Falling pollution

Sulphates, largely produced from coal-burning power plants, are known to reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the land and ocean below, and counteracting some of heating from greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide."

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"Two whirling dust devils towering nearly a kilometre high have been seen at the exact spot where the Phoenix Mars lander is due to touch down in a few weeks. The dust vortices should pose no threat to the landing, but could provide dramatic views from the probe when it alights on the flat, relatively barren landscape.

Phoenix is due to land in an oval-shaped region dubbed "Green Valley" in Mars's northern polar region on 25 May. In preparation for the landing, other spacecraft already at Mars, including NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), have been monitoring the site.

On 20 April, MRO spotted two dust devils at the centre of the landing ellipse, which measures 20 by 100 kilometres across. Based on the shadows the dust devils cast on the surface, researchers estimate that one stretched to about 920 metres in height, while the other reached 790 metres.

Dust devils are created when vortices of air - set in motion when warm air rises from the surface on an otherwise still day - pick up dust from the ground. The dust reaches such great heights because of the Red Planet's relatively low gravity."

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"A miniature detector could pick out magnetic rocks on Mars that might harbour telltale signs of ancient life.

The instrument could select rocks that contain a magnetic compound - magnetite - that is also produced by bacteria on Earth. The rocks could then be brought back to Earth for closer examination.

Other efforts to find signs of life on Mars have focused on organic molecules, but Soon Sam Kim of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US, wants to look for crystals of magnetite like those made by terrestrial bacteria.

"Because it's just a mineral, it has a better chance of survival over billions of years," Kim told New Scientist.

John Miller, a physics professor at the University of Houston in Texas, US, who has worked on ways of finding life on Mars, says: "It looks like a very interesting idea - to look for signatures of these crystals on Mars directly."
"

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"Would America be a better place if more people with science training held elective office? One organization that thinks so is Scientists and Engineers for America, or SEA. On May 10th, they're holding a day-long workshop in Washington, D.C., to teach researchers the nuts and bolts of running for office. More than 70 attendees have signed up.

SEA points out that understanding a lot of today's most pressing challenges requires a science background. Energy, health care, climate, even general competitiveness are all deeply connected to scientific research and progress. Even more important may be the general intellectual approach that scientists could bring. The group's director, Lesley Stone, says, "Scientists and engineers have an appreciation for the kind of evidence-based decision making necessary for tackling our nation's most pressing problems." "

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"A new more secure technology for guarding against theft from nuclear reactors has passed its first test.

Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., successfully monitored the power output of a relatively small nuclear power reactor by measuring the number of antineutrinos--ghostly particles generated by nuclear fission--that struck a refrigerator-size tank of liquid.

Although the technology still has hurdles to overcome, it could pave the way for a new tool in efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Nuclear reactors offer a potential source of weapons-grade materials to would-be bomb makers, particularly plutonium, which gradually accumulates in the uranium fuel rods that power a reactor.

As part of its work to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an organization established in 1957 by international treaty to promote peaceful uses of nuclear power, monitors and inspects nuclear reactors used for research as well as those that generate electricity.

Inspectors compare operators' records with its own monitoring data to assess whether the reactor could have produced excess plutonium beyond what the operators declared, says Julian Whichello, head of the IAEA's Novel Technologies Program."

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"It sounds like something out of a bad science fiction novel. During World War II, a fungus called Tricoderma reesei ate its way through US military uniforms and tents in the South Pacific. It chewed up the cloth and used special enzymes to convert the indigestible cellulose into simple sugars. Now that infamous fungus is getting some good publicity. It looks like it might hold a key to improving the production of biofuels.

Scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory published a paper on the fungus's genetic sequence in this week's Nature Biotechnology. The organism uses a surprisingly small number of genes to produce its cellulose-munching enzymes. Scientists say this means its production is extremely efficient. They hope to capitalize on the genetic information to find more efficient and cheaper ways to break down cellulose for ethanol in biofuel production. That cellulose could come from a native plant like switchgrass, or even from municipal waste. And fuel from waste, say scientists, is a more carbon-neutral way to power our cars. Which might make veterans forgive the fungus that ate their shirts."

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"For $1,000 and up, several new companies will scan an individual's entire genome for clues about ancestry, potential health limitations and the inheritance of traits such as lactose intolerance. Clients can compare their DNA with a celebrity's or invite friends and family members to share genetic profiles. Despite the comprehensive reports and background data these Web-based services deliver, some observers believe the information is more recreational than relevant.

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests have existed for at least a decade, and in recent years the number of choices has exploded. Whereas most of these offerings probe for only a small number of gene variants, advances in genome chips now allow a quick, inexpensive search for a wide range of targets all at once. Navigenics in Redwood Shores, Calif., 23andMe in Mountain View, Calif., and deCODE Genetics in Reykjavik, Iceland, recently began scanning for markers associated with as many as two dozen conditions and traits. And for upward of $350,000, Knome in Cambridge, Mass., enables customers to join J. Craig Venter and James D. Watson in the elite cadre of humans who have had their entire genome sequenced, analyzed and interpreted.

With new tools, reference sequences and big study populations in hand, geneticists have found increasingly robust associations between DNA variations and disease susceptibility. But the data are still incomplete and sometimes conflicting, cautions Muin Khoury, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's public health genomics office. For now, he says, sequencing one's genome or scanning for susceptibility markers offers "no useful information.""

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"Chinese health-care officials are scrambling to contain the outbreak of a contagious and sometimes deadly intestinal virus--known as Enterovirus 71 (EV71)--that has already claimed the lives of at least 28 children and is likely to continue spreading. EV71 can cause hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD), a condition that may bring on fever, blisters in the mouth and a rash on the hands and feet. The most affected city is Fuyang where at least 3,736 cases of EV71 have been reported, according to the International Business Times .

Those sickened by EV71 often show serious symptoms, the International Society for Infectious Diseases reports. It can also lead to meningitis, encephalitis, pulmonary edema, and paralysis in some children. There is no vaccine. So far there have been 15,799 cases of hand, foot and mouth disease this year, China's official Xinhua News Agency says, cropping up in areas ranging from the tropical island province of Hainan in the south to Jilin province in the northeast and Yunnan province in the southwest, according to the International Herald Tribune.

In a May 4 AP story, a spokesman for the World Health Organization's regional Western Pacific office crystallized the cause for concern. "That's an extraordinarily high case fatality rate, and that's what caught our attention," said Peter Cordingley. "Otherwise, it would have passed under the radar." WHO issued a warning last week predicting that the outbreak will likely continue in China for the next few months because the virus tends to thrive in hot weather. It advised disinfection and frequent hand washing to prevent its spread, along with closing schools and daycare centers in hard-hit areas, according to the AP."

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"Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical devices. Could the brain also fall into that category? Of course, all our thoughts, sensations and actions arise from bioelectricity generated by neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits inside our skull. Electrical signals between neurons generate electric fields that radiate out of brain tissue as electrical waves that can be picked up by electrodes touching a person's scalp. Measurements of such brainwaves in EEGs provide powerful insight into brain function and a valuable diagnostic tool for doctors. Indeed, so fundamental are brainwaves to the internal workings of the mind, they have become the ultimate, legal definition drawing the line between life and death.

Brainwaves change with a healthy person's conscious and unconscious mental activity and state of arousal. But scientists can do more with brainwaves than just listen in on the brain at work-they can selectively control brain function by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). This technique uses powerful pulses of electromagnetic radiation beamed into a person's brain to jam or excite particular brain circuits."

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"It's accepted that a large meteor impact 65 million years ago was responsible for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Which opened up niches for birds and mammals. But last week at an evolution conference at The Rockefeller University in New York City, New Zealand biologist David Penny questioned whether the dinosaurs might not have already been on their way out.

Penny concentrated on fossils of pterodactyls and birds. Turns out that the average wing spans of pterodactyls had been getting steadily larger before the big impact. By the time the meteor hit, pterodactyls still making a mark in the fossil record had wingspans well over 30 feet. Meanwhile, it looks like the Cretaceous version of shore birds were becoming relatively common, based on fossil findings. So perhaps the smaller pterodactyls had disappeared because the new kid in town, birds, were out-competing them. Penny's view was certainly not uniformly accepted by other meeting attendees. But it's an interesting question, whether the meteor might have been not the first strike, but the last straw."

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"Global warming may prove worse for insects--and other cold-blooded critters--living in the steamy tropics than for their counterparts living closer to the frigid polar regions, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Even though climate change is likely to affect areas near the poles, tropical insects are already living in conditions that verge on being too hot for them, which means they could be teetering on the edge of extinction.

Take the shield bug--also known as the stinkbug for the nasty smelling liquid it spews when attacked. There are varieties of the insect in both the U.K. and Kenya. But although the shield bugs in the former may prosper as a result of a warmer climate in their region, their counterparts in Kenya (and other parts of Africa) may find themselves unable to cope with the heat, according to the research--and, if they cannot adapt or move, they may perish. "The current climate is at its optimum temperature," says study co-author and biogeochemist Curtis Deutsch of the University of California, Los Angeles. "Any warming was going to push them towards reduced fitness.""

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"Earlier this week, we covered the debate in Congress over a bill that would define net neutrality as part of the nation's official broadband policy and direct the FCC to ensure that it happens. But regulating communications may not be the only way to get net neutrality enacted; a bill introduced today by Representatives John Conyers (D-MI) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) treats it as an antitrust issue and amends the Clayton Act accordingly.

The bill, the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, will enter the record as H.R. 5994. The text does not differ significantly from a previous attempt that went by the same name in 2006. The bill is intended to "promote competition, to facilitate trade, and to ensure competitive and non-discriminatory access to the Internet."

It does so by outlawing discriminatory fees for providing content, applications, or services over the 'Net. Internet providers also have to interact fully with the networks of their competitors and provide equal access to all users and any devices they wish to put on the network. Network providers would be allowed to provide favored service to specific types of data but, if they do, they have to provide that same favoritism to anybody transmitting the data, and couldn't charge for it.

The primary differences from the previous version of the bill come in the exceptions. As in the earlier bill, ISPs would be allowed to manage network traffic in a nondiscriminatory manner, and could discriminate to favor emergency communications or to comply with law enforcement. Three new provisions, however, add additional exceptions for marketing purposes, parental controls, and improving quality of service in a nondiscriminatory manner."

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"SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- With a bill like a duck, a tail like a beaver and snake-like venom hidden in heel spurs, the platypus could be the result of some strange genetic experiment.

And it is, scientists say: evolution.

A scientific team published the genetic makeup of the Australian animal in the scientific journal Nature on Thursday, confirming that its features -- which straddle multiple animal classes -- are reflected in its DNA.

The research could help explain how mammals, including humans, evolved from reptiles millions of years ago, they said.

"At first glance, the platypus appears as if it was the result of an evolutionary accident," said Francis S. Collins, director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, which funded the study.

"But as weird as this animal looks, its genome sequence is priceless for understanding how mammalian biological processes evolved," Collins said in a statement.

More than 100 scientists from the United States, Australia, Japan and other nations took part in mapping the genome, using DNA collected from a female platypus named Glennie."

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"Google has been boosting its Google Apps product suite as fit for corporate use for months, with new security and deployment features arriving on a regular basis. The company's latest endeavor, Google Web Security for Enterprise, is now available, and promises to provide a consistent level of system security whether an end-user is surfing from the office or working at home halfway across town.

The new service is branded under Google's "Powered by Postini" product line and, according to the company, "provides real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. An additional feature extends the same protections to users working remotely on laptops in hotels, cafes, and even guest networks." The service is presumably activated by signing in directly to a Google service, as Google explicitly states that workers do not need access to a corporate network.

Unlike other Google-purchased companies languished for a long time after being acquired, the Postini brand and related products have been the foundation of many of Google's corporate-oriented initiatives this year. It's a marked contrast to the company's behavior in recent years, during which several companies were purchased and apparently left to rot with no clear sense of how their own products and services would be integrated into the Google product portfolio. "

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"People living in the earliest known settlement in the Americas harvested seaweed and other marine plants from a coastline more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) away, new research shows.

Scientists discovered several species of seaweed and marine algae dating back more than 14,000 years at the Monte Verde archaeological site in south-central Chile.

The findings suggest that these early Americans were beachcombers with a tradition of using coastal resources, says study lead author Tom Dillehay.

"At least some first Americans had a broad spectrum diet, because we're seeing that they exploited a wide range of resources from multiple environmental zones--terrestrial, coastal, and so forth," said Dillehay, an anthropologist at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University."

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"A U.S. judge has ruled on a nearly US$111 million copyright-infringement decision against TorrentSpy.com, the BitTorrent peer-to-peer search site.

Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles awarded the judgment to the Motion Picture Association of America, the MPAA announced late Wednesday. Cooper entered a default judgment against the operators of TorrentSpy in December, saying they had destroyed evidence related to an MPAA lawsuit against them.

Last May, another judge ordered TorrentSpy to keep server logs, user IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and other information in support of the MPAA's lawsuit against the site. Cooper ruled in December that TorrentSpy had ignored that order.

Valence Media, the company operating TorrentSpy, shut down the site in March. The company, based in the Caribbean, has filed for bankruptcy.

Cooper issued a permanent injunction prohibiting the company from further infringing any of the studios' copyrights. The judgment, of $30,000 per infringement, was for willful inducement of copyright infringement, contributory infringement and vicarious copyright infringement, the MPAA said."

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"SEOUL (Reuters) - Young, tech-savvy South Koreans are making coupon clipping a thing of the past and turning to their mobile phones instead.

Some of the fastest-growing mobile phone services in the country let retailers send discount coupons and users send gift certificates for anything from lattes to movie tickets through their handsets.

The merchandise vouchers have a barcode embedded in the message. Users show the coupon on the screen and retailers scan the barcode to apply the discount.

"People can actually receive products from places just by showing their phones," Ryu Mina, a spokeswoman with mobile service provider SK Telecom.

She said people may forget their coupons but always carry their cell phones."

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"MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Google Inc.'s top executives expressed hope Thursday that the Internet search leader will be able to form a potentially lucrative advertising partnership with Yahoo Inc. -- a deal that would lower the odds of Microsoft Corp. renewing its attempts to buy Yahoo.

"We have been talking to Yahoo and we are very excited to be working with them," Google co-founder Sergey Brin told reporters before the company's annual shareholders meeting. "We share a lot of values with them."

Neither Brin nor Google Chairman Eric Schmidt would indicate how far along the two sides are in their negotiations after a two-week test was completed last month. During the trial run, Google supplied a small portion of the text-based ads that appeared alongside the search results on Yahoo's Web site.

Because Google's technology proved it could select more profitable ads, the alliance could help Yahoo snap out of a prolonged slump that made it vulnerable to Microsoft's unsolicited buyout bid. Microsoft orally raised the bid to $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, before pulling it off the table last weekend.

Microsoft cited Yahoo's willingness to subordinate its own ad system to Google's as a major reason for dropping its bid."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Activision Inc (ATVI.O) posted a quarterly profit on Thursday that blew past expectations as demand for its "Guitar Hero 3" and "Call of Duty 4" video games made up for a complete lack of new releases.

The two games, released late last year, drove Activision to a profit, excluding stock-based compensation costs, of just under $55 million, or 17 cents per share, more than triple the average expectation of 5 cents among Wall Street analysts on Reuters Estimates.

Revenue was $602.5 million, towering 93 percent above a year ago and burying the average estimate of $373.6 million.

"It's the ongoing popularity of 'Guitar Hero' and 'Call of Duty'. It just shows what can happen in terms of performance when you have blockbuster hit titles," said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets."

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"I'm not embarrassed to admit it: I'm a big fan of Office 2007. I think Microsoft got a lot right with its latest release, starting with the ribbon interface and including any number of tweaks and improvements that make my day easier. I can't say I'm thrilled about the price of the suite, however; nor the countless SKUs to choose from. Plus, I'm also a big Linux fan. That's why I always try to keep my eye on the current state of OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite founded by Sun Microsystems.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 has just entered public beta, and it promises plenty of improvements from the previous version. Mac users, in particular, will be pleased with the new native Aqua UI. Unfortunately, however, the one feature that I was really looking forward to on the Windows side-- compatibility with the Office 2007 XML file formats-- could still clearly use a lot of work.

As an experiment, I saved a simple Word 2003 document in Word 2007 format. Office 2007 opened it just fine, but OpenOffice.org Writer only got as far as the first two lines of the text; instead of skipping the next line, the rest was truncated. An Excel 2007 template fared no better. OpenOffice.org Calc preserved labels, numbers, and formulae; macros, embedded graphics, and page layout options disappeared. A plain.xlsx file created with the same template yielded identical results."

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"SEATTLE - Without the influx of Web traffic that Microsoft bet would quickly follow a Yahoo buyout, the software maker is facing a long slog if it wants to turn its money-losing online services business into a Google-killer.

Since it withdrew a $47.5 billion bid for Yahoo Inc. after talks collapsed, Microsoft Corp. has offered little insight into what "Plan C" will entail. In that vacuum, experts are scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas, with many concluding that they actually don't know what could get Microsoft out of its pickle.

It is not clear Microsoft can do this alone -- and in fact, it's not always clear what "this" is. Some analysts say Microsoft must increase its search traffic to attract advertisers. Others believe Microsoft should concede that market to Google Inc. and find success elsewhere -- leapfrogging rivals in areas such as display and mobile advertising."

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"Beijing (China) - The Chinese government is chastising several online providers, including Google maps, for providing "illegal" satellite imagery of the country and neighboring islands. Min Yiren, the deputy director of China's State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM), says as many as 10,000 online maps are illegal and publish sensitive information or incorrectly depict national borders.

"Some websites publish sensitive or confidential geographical information, which might leak state secrets and threaten national security," Yiren said.

The SBSM and eight other departments are currently examining thousands of online maps and the government is threatening to shut down or block any sites which do not make the "required corrections".

While China is apparently miffed at the disclosure of its secret (well not any more) submarine base near Hainan, the country is also concerned about online map providers labeling Taiwan as a separate country. In addition, China wants several disputed island chains including the South China Islands, Diaoyu Islands and Chiwei Island to be labeled as belonging to China. The islands are currently claimed by several countries including Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Japan.

China certainly has the power to shut down servers in the country, its can only block access - through the Chinese firewall - to foreign providers."

"BOSTON (Reuters) - Pierre Avignon is no pirate, but he does not believe in paying for software.

His computer is filled with programs like Symphony -- a free suite that he downloaded from an International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) website (http://symphony.lotus.com).

It performs work for which he used to rely on Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Word word processor, Excel spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentation builder, all components of the Microsoft Office software suite.

"It is free. It is a great deal," says Avignon, a 43-year-old graphics designer from West Newbury, Massachusetts.

Free software was once almost exclusively borne of a grass-roots effort -- with an anti-Microsoft bent -- seeking alternatives to paid software. The movement produced myriad programs, but only a handful of widely used titles such as the Linux operating system.

Microsoft says Office has 500 million users.

Growth in the availability of broadband Internet access has spawned a new type of free software -- programs that its developers host on their own servers and have designed to foster collaboration among users by making documents easy to share."

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" SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - MySpace announced Thursday it is opening the gates of its popular online community by letting users automatically transfer profile information to other social-networking websites.

MySpace said it will kick off a "data availability" project in coming weeks by letting members share profile information with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter and that it is open to working with arch-rival Facebook.

"The walls around the garden are coming down," said MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe.

"We, alongside our data availability launch partners, are pioneering a new way for the global community to integrate their social experiences Web-wide."

Social-networking website devotees are renowned for devoting vast amounts of time and energy to customizing profile pages with pictures, videos, written musings, music, and links to blogs, websites and friends."

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"MINNEAPOLIS - Best Buy, the largest U.S. consumer electronics chain, has moved into Europe with a $2.1 billion investment in the continent's largest cell phone retailer, the companies announced Thursday.

Best Buy's 50 percent stake in a joint venture with Carphone Warehouse Group PLC will allow it to roll out its trademark big box stores in Europe, with the London-based company putting its 2,400 European stores into the new operation.

In a conference call with analysts, the companies said they have been speaking for four years, and have collaborated for two, developing Best Buy Mobile in the U.S., and bringing Best Buy's Geek Squad, a 24-hour computer support task force, to Europe.

"We believe our combined expertise has potential to result in significant financial upside as we together attempt to transform retail in Europe through the Carphone Warehouse, Phone House and Best Buy brands," said Brian Dunn, president and chief operating officer of Carphone Warehouse.

Brad Anderson, chief executive of Richfield-based Best Buy, said the companies share similar cultures and customer-related skills. He said the joint venture will allow Best Buy to grow."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Social networking site Facebook announced an agreement on Thursday with 49 U.S. state attorneys general and the District of Columbia to increase efforts to protect its youngest members from sexual predators.

The additional safety measures follow a similar agreement in January struck by larger rival MySpace, which also included every state apart from Texas.

Facebook said it would focus on improving the technology it employs to weed out inappropriate online behavior, and to make it tougher for adults to make friends with minors.

The agreement reflects its commitment to "keeping kids safe online," said Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer.

Both the Facebook and MySpace agreements were in response to calls from attorneys general to improve online safeguards.

The millions of youngsters who share everything from music tastes to intimate details of their lives online have turned social networks into hunting grounds for sexual predators.

Without checks, an adult can pose as a minor and lure a child into parting with information."

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"SAN JOSE, Calif. - Grappling with major layoffs and a stock price that's been chopped nearly in half since last year, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. kept new details about its turnaround plans close to the vest Thursday in a very brief annual meeting with shareholders.

The Sunnyvale-based company's chief executive, Hector Ruiz, notably did not discuss AMD's long-awaited plans to cut its heavy manufacturing costs. His 20-minute speech was punctuated with just one question from a shareholder -- about why AMD doesn't sponsor professional golf tournaments to increase its visibility.

A spokesman said the company typically has short annual meetings.

AMD is the world's No. 2 maker of microprocessors, the brains of personal computers, and it and much larger rival Intel Corp. spend billions of dollars each year refining their manufacturing processes, which make up a large part of both companies' expenses and intellectual property."

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"LONDON (Reuters) - The rise of gadgets like the iPhone, Blackberry and Xbox threatens to unravel the decades of innovation that helped to build the Internet, a leading academic has warned in a new book.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the latest must-have devices are sealed, "sterile" boxes that stifle creativity and turn consumers into passive users of technology.

Unlike home computers, new Internet-enabled gadgets don't lend themselves to the sort of tinkering and collaboration that leads to technological advances, he says.

The mix of gadgets, over-regulation and Internet security fears could destroy the old system where mainstream technology could be "influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field."

"I don't want to see a two-tier world where only the experts can survive ... and the non-experts are stuck between something they don't understand and something that limits them," Zittrain told Reuters in an interview."

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"Mozilla warned Wednesday that a malicious program inserted adware code into a Firefox plugin that has been downloaded thousands of times over the past three months.

Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was polluted with adware, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder said in a blog posting. "Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy," she wrote. "Mozilla does virus scans at upload time but the virus scanner did not catch this issue until several months after the upload."

Mozilla is now going to add additional scans of its software to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, she said."

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"All gold rushes have to come to an end some time, and according to one new report, Facebook's developer platform is no exception.

Facebook developer Jesse Farmer, creator of developer analytics service Adonomics, did an extensive amount of number-crunching after coming to an odd observation earlier this year: "Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community," Farmer wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply."

Farmer's research confirmed his speculation: that activity in the Facebook developer forum, from posts per day to highly active users, had fallen notably from January to April. In other words, that likely means there's less activity on the part of independent developers hoping to tap into Facebook's massive audience.

One possible reason why, Farmer wrote, is the fact that Facebook isn't the only hub for social-network application developers anymore. Google kick-started the OpenSocial standard last year, and Bebo, newly acquired by AOL, is currently the only social network that supports both Facebook and OpenSocial applications.

It could also mean, as Farmer pointed out, less chatter taking place in an open forum as application creators grow more concerned about the effect of competition in the packed developer space."

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"The U.S. Department of Energy awarded $126.6 million in grants on Tuesday to test carbon capture and storage in underground caverns.

Two sites in Ohio and California will try to verify that carbon dioxide gas can be pumped in geological formations and stored safely. The CO2 will be delivered from an ethanol plant in Ohio and a power plant in California.

The grants are subject to approval from Congress. When private money is included, the amount spent on the projects will be about $180 million over ten years, the DOE said.

The Bush Administration and many other energy experts consider carbon capture and storage an important tool in reducing greenhouse gases emissions in the atmosphere.

The DOE has identified enough underground "sinks" to store 1,000 years of storage capacity. Pumping CO2 can also aid in extraction more from oil and gas wells."

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"Piracy is running rampant, according to a report from the U.S. government. Not the kind of pirates with eye patches and parrots on their shoulders, but rather the kind that downloads content illegally from the Internet, counterfeits products, and generally hijacks the profits of pharmaceuticals, electronics, software, and other goods. China and Russia were singled out in particular for their weak protections of intellectual property rights (IPR).

The report, known as Special 301, is conducted annually by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to examine the global state of IPR in accordance with the Special 301 provisions of the Trade Act of 1974. This year, the USTR designated 46 countries in one of three "watch list" categories. China and Russia -- which were both given kudos for improved measures against pirates and counterfeiters -- made their way to the top of the list, followed by other trading partners, including Argentina, Israel, Pakistan and Thailand."

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"San Francisco - Upcoming versions of the Java platform will be fitted with capabilities such as flexibility, OSGi support, and modularity, Sun Microsystems officials said Tuesday afternoon at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco.

Roadmaps were detailed for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 6 and Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 7. Java SE serves as a base Java platform, with the Enterprise version adding enterprise-level capabilities.

With Java EE 6, Sun seeks to increase flexibility in implementing the platform.

"For EE 6, the theme is what I like to call rightsizing, which essentially means making the platform the right size for you," said Roberto Chinnici, Java EE platform lead at Sun.

With version 6, profiles will be created based on specific needs, such as a Web profile focused on Web developers, Chinnici said. The Web profile is not fully defined yet, but will feature technologies that appear in the vast majority of Web applications. Other profiles are expected such as a telecommunications profile that features SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) services."

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"Demand for storage is doubling every 18 to 24 months, and within five years, Roberson expects to see a "yottabyte year" when the industry as a whole ships 1 yottabyte, or 1,000 exabytes, of storage capacity. HP is investing heavily in this area because it sees a big opportunity: Enterprises will be putting much of their focus and spending there in the next two years, Roberson said. Currently, 45% of all hard drives in the world, from PCs to data centers, are sold by HP, he said.

Managing many terabytes of storage is far different from taking care of a few hundred gigabytes on a PC, said Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. analyst Mark Peters.

"You reach a point where just the sheer scale of what you're managing becomes the problem," Peters said."

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"Bill Gates to dealmakers: cool your heels.

With its multibillion-dollar Yahoo merger bid yanked from the table, the Microsoft chairman said in a Tokyo press conference on Wednesday that the software giant has no immediate plans to jump on another deal, according to an Associated Press report.

"At this point, Microsoft is focused on its independent strategy," Gates said during the press conference.

The Microsoft founder recounted how the Redmond giant had spent a lot of energy on trying to wrap up a deal with Yahoo, but it ultimately decided that it was better to leave it behind.

Gates reiterated Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's plan: pursue an independent path to grow the company's search advertising and online-services business.

That Plan B, as outlined by CNET News.com's Ina Fried, could include such things as beefing up its engineering ranks and looking at other business partnerships.

Some of those partnerships could include Facebook, in which Microsoft is already a minority investor, and MySpace.com. "

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"A Republican congressman who has sponsored legislation banning access to social-networking Web sites in schools and libraries has found a new target of displeasure: Second Life.

Rep. Mark Kirk, who is seeking re-election this year, staged a press conference at a library in his suburban Chicago district on Tuesday to highlight what he called the "dangers" of the virtual world to children. Flanked by local officials, he also released a letter asking Federal Trade Commission Chairman William E. Kovacic to "take action to warn parents of the similar dangers and sexually explicit content found on Second Life."

Kirk said he was appalled that Second Life has no age verification features built into its registration process, and he claimed that there are "countless locations" outside of the service's teen-designated area where virtual prostitution, drug deals, and "other wholly inappropriate activities" occur.

According to a Chicago Tribune report, Kirk recounted an aide's failed attempt to create an avatar on the site as a 10-year-old--and a subsequently successful attempt to log in as an 18-year-old."

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"Borland Software has sold its CodeGear development tools division to Embarcadero Technologies for about $23 million, the companies said Wednesday.

CodeGear sells the products that Borland used to be best known for--its JBuilder Java development tool, Delphi, and C++Builder. More recently, CodeGear has created development tools for PHP and Ruby.

Two years ago, Borland CEO Tod Nielsen announced a plan to sell off the tools division separate from its application lifecycle management product line. The tools division has been hurt from competition from free, open-source products, notably the Eclipse IDE."

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"Worried about your civil liberties and privacy? Then it may come as a shock to discover that you have unwittingly been allowing your phone to signal your every move.

Bluetooth, a wireless link built into many cellphones, makes our movements trackable by anyone equipped with a PC and an appropriate receiver. Vassilis Kostakos at the University of Bath in the UK placed four Bluetooth receivers in the city's centre. Over four months, his team tracked 10,000 Bluetooth phones and was able to "capture and analyse people's encounters" in pubs, streets and shops.

Bluetooth is now more of a privacy threat than the more frequently publicised RFID chips, Kostakos says. "If people are worried, they should turn off the Bluetooth function on their mobile phones.""

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"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sprint Nextel Corp (S.N) and Clearwire Corp (CLWR.O) are planning a $14.5 billion venture to build a wireless high-speed Internet network based on the emerging WiMax technology.

Comcast Corp (CMSCA.O), Time Warner Cable Inc (TWC.N), Intel Corp (INTC.O), Google Inc (GOOG.O) and cable operator Bright House Networks are expected to kick in $3.2 billion to help finance the venture.

The deal, announced on Wednesday, will provide much needed funding for Sprint and Clearwire and allow cable providers to offer wireless services to help them compete with rivals AT&T Inc (T.N) and Verizon Communications (VZ.N).

AT&T and Verizon have been battling for market share from cable companies by offering packages of television, Internet, phone and wireless services.

WiMax promises to blanket entire cities with Web access for laptops, cell phones and other wireless devices at speeds up to five times faster than traditional wireless networks but is a largely unproven technology. Wi-Fi, by contrast, is a short range service covering small areas like coffee shops."

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"Caps on the price of sending an SMS from a mobile phone while abroad came a step closer Wednesday, when the European Commission launched a two-month public consultation into its rules on mobile phone roaming charges.

Mobile phone manufacturers, network operators and consumer groups have been invited to submit comments about the effectiveness of the regulation on roaming charges for voice calls that came into force last year.

As well as seeking general feedback on the impact of the European Union law, the Commission also asked stakeholders whether regulation is necessary for data roaming services and SMS in light of current retail prices and market developments.

The results of the consultation will influence the Commission's decision whether or not to extend the existing roaming law to include data and SMS roaming charges.

A report published by the European Regulators Group in January showed that on average across the E.U., users had to pay 5.24 per megabyte of data and 0.29 for an SMS sent while roaming in the third quarter of 2007. The Commission suspects that this is disproportionately high compared to data and SMS prices when sent from a person's home country."

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"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Software publisher Take-Two Interactive Software Inc (TTWO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) on Wednesday said it sold some 6 million units of its criminal action game "Grand Theft Auto 4" in its first week, with estimated retail sales exceeding $500 million.

The company, which is facing a takeover offer from rival Electronic Arts Inc (ERTS.O: Quote, Profile, Research), said it sold about 3.6 million units globally at its debut on April 29."

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"TOKYO (AP) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says the company isn't pursuing other deals following the withdrawal of its $47.5 billion takeover bid for Yahoo.

He said Wednesday in Tokyo that the company put "a lot of effort" in the talks with Yahoo Inc., and has decided they should pursue "our independent paths."

Over the weekend, Microsoft withdrew its 3-month-old unsolicited bid for Yahoo after seeing the impasse with Yahoo's board over a mutually acceptable sales price.

"Now at this point Microsoft is focused on its independent strategy," he told reporters."

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"SYDNEY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict will text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney in July, hoping going digital will help him connect better with a younger audience.

The Pope will text daily messages of inspiration and hope during the six-day Sydney event while digital prayer walls will be erected at event sites and the church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook.

The Catholic Church said it decided to use technology to connect to the estimated 225,000 young Catholics expected to attend the World Youth Day (WYD) celebrations that start on July 15."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Just how serious was Microsoft Corp. about raising its bid to $47.5 billion for slumping Internet pioneer Yahoo Inc.?

The answer is taking on greater importance as more outraged Yahoo shareholders threaten to sue the company's board -- or try replacing the 10 directors -- for the way they responded to Microsoft's sweetened offer.

With shareholders up in arms, Sunnyvale-based Yahoo has been trying to raise doubts about the legitimacy of Microsoft's last bid of $33 a share by pointing out that it wasn't submitted in writing.

There is even a theory circulating that Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer dangled the new offer before his Yahoo counterpart, Jerry Yang, fully knowing that it would be spurned and open a window for him to flee a deal that was starting to look like a potential albatross."

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"SEOUL (AFP) - South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak, the leader of one of the world's most wired nations, is facing a barrage of online scaremongering and criticism over his decision to resume US beef imports.

The presidential Blue House has been forced to deny a spate of rumours spread by the Internet or mobile phone texts about the supposed dangers of mad cow disease -- including a claim that diapers contain dangerous US beef proteins.

"First human death from mad cow disease reported on May 2" and "Consuming just 0.01 gram of US beef will kill you" are among the other groundless rumours circulating among schoolchildren and others.

Another text message from an unknown source claims that Lee, born in Japan's Osaka city, is seeking to yield the disputed Dokdo islets to Japan.

The messages fan anger among teenagers against the president, who took office in February and, ironically, vowed to make young people more Internet-savvy.

Lee's Grand National Party (GNP) was alarmed at a survey this week which put his support rate at below 30 percent, a record low for a new president, the JoongAng Daily reported.

A web petition launched last month seeking Lee's impeachment has received more than one million signatures. It has no legal effect.

Lee's online homepage was paralyzed by users who bombarded it with messages protesting against the beef deal.

On the eve of a summit with President George W. Bush last month, Seoul agreed to lift its intermittent ban on US beef, imposed in 2003 over mad cow concerns.

Opening the beef market is an essential precondition for US approval of a separate and sweeping free trade pact. But Lee was accused of rushing into the beef deal at the risk of public health.

Rumours about the perils of mad cow disease, accompanied by murky videos purportedly showing infected cows, have been spreading fast through the Internet and mobile messaging.

Thousands of people, mostly in their teens, have attended candlelit vigils demanding the scrapping of the beef deal.

"During breaks in class, mad cow perils are the main topic these days," said one teenage participant.

Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted a government official as saying the situation was starting to take on an anti-American hue -- just like in 2002, when the death of two schoolgirls accidentally hit by a US military vehicle led to a wave of anti-American protests.

The government has launched online and on-air campaigns to calm the public, saying mad cow fears are totally groundless.

"There is not a single case or shred of evidence to support the claims," says the Blue House website.

At a meeting of top officials and GNP leaders on Wednesday, Prime Minister Han Seung-Soo said the beef issue was being exploited by politicians.

"The government will sternly deal with those seeking to create instability by spreading groundless rumours and staging illegal protests," Han said.

Journalism professor Ahn Dong-Geun of Hanyang University said many teenagers easily absorb groundless rumours as facts. "It seems like they are swept away by mob psychology," he was quoted as telling the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper.

Sociology professor Chun Sangchin of Sogang University has said the government is also to blame for failing to explain its decision to open the beef market."

"LONDON (Reuters) - BT Group (BT.L) signaled its return to the mobile market on Wednesday by launching a Blackberry-style smart-phone as part of its broadband deal for users to surf the Web and make calls when not at home.

"Communications services are converging, and it is clear that customers want consistent access to the things that matter not only at home, but in the palm of their hands wherever they are," said Consumer managing director John Petter.

BT, a former monopoly and Britain's dominant fixed-line operator, is among the few large telecom groups in Europe not to own a mobile network after it demerged its mobile operation in 2001.

Consumers will have a choice of two smart phones from Taiwan-based High Tech Computer Corp (HTC) (2498.TW) which will connect to the Internet at broadband speeds and provide cheaper calls when in a WiFi hotspot.

The blackberry email device was originally popular with business executives but it is increasingly attracting a wider consumer market. Consumers are also moving to mobile networks and away from landlines to make their calls."

"SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Universal Music Group confirmed Tuesday that it has reached a deal with file-sharing site Qtrax to allow free, legal downloads of UMG music.

Qtrax announced in January that it had the backing of"all the major labels" to distribute music free online, generating revenue with ads. But New York-based Warner Music Group Corp., said it had not authorized the use of its content on Qtrax's service. UMG and EMI Group PLC also said at the time they did not have licensing deals in place with Qtrax.

UMG spokesman Peter Lofrumento confirmed Tuesday that an agreement has been reached but declined to elaborate or to say whether a contract has been signed.

"All of UMG's music available digitally will be available for free, legal downloads on Qtrax," Qtrax spokeswoman Shamin Abas told The Associated Press.

A joint UMG-Qtrax statement said UMG and its artists and songwriters will be compensated for the use of their content.

Abas said users "will be able to purchase music-related items" on the site.

Qtrax first launched in 2002 but shut down after a few months to avoid potential legal trouble."

"Adware pushers have found a new way to trick you into downloading their annoying products: fake MP3 files.

On Tuesday, security vendor McAfee reported that it's seen a huge spike in fake MP3 files spreading on peer-to-peer networks. Although the files have names that make them look like audio recordings, they're really Trojan horse programs that try to install a shoddy media player and adware on your computer, said Craig Schmugar, a researcher with McAfee.

"Once you run it, there is no content. You're taken to this site to install this player which you don't really need," he said.

Fake file names include: preview-t-3545425-changing times earth wind.mp3 and t-3545425-just got lucky.mp3. Schmugar listed more filenames, as well as details on the adware, in a Tuesday blog posting.

Users are first asked to OK an end-user license agreement before the Trojan installs two programs, Mirar and NetNucleus, on their PCs.

Ironically, while the Mirar software tells users that it doesn't display popups, NetNucleus does deliver popup ads, so users who do not realize that they are installing two programs might feel tricked, Schmugar said. "You have a Window telling you that there are no popups and right behind it is a popup."

Although McAfee has seen some nasty software disguising itself as media files in the past, it has never seen anything on this scale, Schmugar said. Over the past 24 hours, nearly a third of the McAfee customers who reported data back to the security company have detected these files, he said.

In the past few days McAfee has spotted the files on more than 360,000 users' desktops."

"IT managers often assume that open source software is more secure than proprietary commercial software. Anyone who uses open source can examine the original code to spot any lurking vulnerabilities, and potentially even fix the vulnerabilities themselves. With proprietary software, you have to trust the vendor to do it all for you.

But open source's supposed security advantage assumes three things: 1.) Someone is actually looking at the code; 2.) Security vulnerabilities are getting reported and fixed; and 3.) Information about those fixes makes its way to Linux distributors and other software vendors, who apply the fixes to their products. But what those things aren't happening? As a customer, how can you be sure?

A new initiative aims to help. Founded in March, oCERT is a Computer Security Response Team created specifically to act as a clearinghouse for security information about all kinds of open source software."

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"VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Video-game publisher Electronic Arts unveiled two initiatives Tuesday to breathe new life into its sports business by making games that are easier to play and customized for Nintendo's popular Wii console.

Key games such as "Madden" football, "NBA Live" and "FIFA" soccer will come out in special versions for the Wii, which has become the best-selling game system by drawing in older and female players with friendly graphics and simple motion-sensing controls.

EA is also starting a sub-brand dubbed Freestyle that will be home to a new set of games not tied to any existing league and therefore free of expensive licensing rights. The first game will be "Facebreaker," a cartoonish and whimsical boxing game due out in September.

"We can't be blind to the fact that different consumers are coming into games now and shame on us if we can't evolve and develop something for that crowd," Peter Moore, head of EA Sports, told Reuters.

EA expects to have sold about $1.3 billion worth of sports games in its fiscal year just ended in March, accounting for more than a third of total revenue.

Known for their sharp graphics and attention to detail, EA's sports games are among the industry's best-selling titles each year. But many gamers have criticized them for including few groundbreaking new features and increasingly complex controls that make them tough to play.

Showing off this year's lineup of sports titles at a new conference in EA's Vancouver studio, Moore said the company had not forgotten about its core fans who want the most realistic experience.

"While we have no intention whatsoever of dumbing down the experience that we all love and that drives this multibillion dollar business ... we need to make sports games more approachable," Moore said.

Caught off guard by the Wii's success following its launch in late 2006, EA tried to adapt its sports games to the Wii, an effort Moore admitted amounted to basically tacking on the motion controls without changing the core game.

Moore, who joined EA from Microsoft's games division to head up the sports business last September, said the new approach to the Wii marked a dramatic rethinking of what those players wanted from a game.

The model was "Wii Sports," a title from Nintendo included with every Wii that took bowling, baseball, golf, tennis and boxing and reduced them to a handful of simple motions.

"We learned some hard lessons. That was the type of sports experience they were looking for and we saw that and decided we needed to redefine what our sports games were about," Moore said. This year, EA's top sports games for the Wii will have "All-Play" added to their titles.

While versions for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 will be similar to previous years, the "All-Play" titles will have options to use simpler controls and quicker games.

"It's like how swimming pools have a deep end and a shallow end. EA Sports has really only built a swimming pool with a deep end. It's intimidating for a lot of people to jump right in the deep end. With All-Play, we're building a shallow end," Moore added."

"PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Sprint Nextel Corp. is close to finalizing a deal to get financing for its new wireless broadband network from a group that includes Comcast Corp. and Google Inc., according to a person close to the talks.

The group, which also includes Time Warner Cable Inc., Bright House Networks, Intel Corp., and Clearwire Corp., is expected to announce as early as Wednesday morning a $12 billion deal to create a national network that uses the WiMax technology, said the person, who asked not to be named because public release of details hasn't been authorized.

Sprint will merge its WiMax division, worth billions of dollars, with Clearwire, which has been building its own WiMax network. Sprint will be the majority owner of the new company, to be called Clearwire.

WiMax promises faster download speeds than the latest networks run by cell-phone operators, and it's even seen as a potential competitor to fixed-line broadband like DSL.

Sprint and Clearwire, a startup founded by cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, have already announced their plans to build out a network using WiMax technology, but had been looking for outside funding.

The combined venture will get more than $3 billion in funding, the person said.

Philadelphia-based Comcast will contribute slightly more than $1 billion, Intel is putting in $1 billion, Time Warner Cable of New York will contribute $550 million, Google is contributing $500 million and Bright House's part is $100 million.

Details about the the deal were reported by The Wall Street Journal on its Web site Tuesday.

The venture will give the cable companies the option to provide wireless service by buying wholesale access to the WiMax network and then reselling it. The big cable companies have already called off a disappointing run with cell phone service in conjunction with Sprint.

Rivals such as AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless have eschewed WiMax, opting instead for upgrades to their current wireless broadband networks and a future technology called Long Term Evolution.

Intel has been heavily involved in developing WiMax and will be making WiMax chips for computers, set-top boxes and cell phones. Google will provide its search function.

Unlike the cable companies' previous wireless deal with Sprint, which led to co-branded cell phones in a plan called "Pivot," the WiMax collaboration will give cable control over marketing and operations. This control was missing in Pivot, which cable companies said helped hasten its demise.

Sprint's adoption of WiMax was championed by former Chief Executive Gary Forsee. His departure, and Sprint's poor financial performance, spurred the need to find investors. The cost of its WiMax buildout was estimated at more than $5 billion over the next several years, said Phil Redman, research vice president at Gartner Inc.

Clearwire Corp. already provides wireless Internet service in some parts of the country, using a WiMax-like technology."

"Seattle (WA) - If you're looking for that rare album from the '70s and don't want to spend a fortune on Ebay, Amazon's "CreateSpace" service may have the answer for you.

The custom CD company announced this week that it has teamed up with EMI Music and Sony BMG, two labels usually up for starting new trends in the digital age, to bring out-of-print albums back in full glory.

Amazon acquired CreateSpace, formerly known as CustomFlix, in July of 2005. The online service allows users to pick from select music and video content and have it burned to a custom CD or DVD.

Since then the online retail giant has launched its own digital music and video service, taking more of a center stage, and the service offered by CreateSpace has become somewhat obsolete.

Amazon said it would use its existing data to determine which albums are of the highest interest to consumers. Even though an item may become out of print, Amazon still lists it on its website for third-party sellers to come forward and offer it, usually at a premium.

Some of the vintage albums coming back for digital distribution include Joe Strummer's "Earthquake Weather," Grant Green's "Carryin' On," and Henry Mancini's "Hatari Soundtrack."

Another interesting aspect of the new service is that Amazon will print the discs directly from its distribution centers. "Printing these titles in our own fulfillment centers saves transportation costs and transportation fuel," it said."

"Berkeley (CA) - In supercomputing, the sky is the limit, literally. In an effort to enable more credible global climate change predictions, researchers from UC Berkeley believe that the way to go is a new kind of cloud supercomputer that includes 20 million processors delivering a peak performance of 200 PFlops to simulate 1-km scale climate models. At the same time, this proposed system would not require a power plant all for itself. How that is possible you ask? These guys are looking into ultra-efficient embedded RISC CPUs.

We are just about ready to transition from the Gigaflop into the Petaflop era and today we heard about a new proposal from UC Berkeley and Tensilica that, at least on paper, could put supercomputer development into warp speed. In a dramatic departure from current supercomputer architectures and upcoming hybrid systems, this proposed system would rely on embedded processors with minimal power consumption.

The researchers believe that 20 million Tensilica RISC processors would deliver at least 10 PFlops of sustained performance, while topping out at about 200 PFlops. The power consumption of such a system is estimated at about 4 Mega Watts and the construction and typical operation cost at about $75 million. A 200 PFlops system that is built on today's common architecture could cost up to $1 billion and consume 200 Mega Watts - which is the equivalent of what a city with 100,000 people consumes.

In comparison, the currently fastest supercomputer tops out at 576 GFlops.

There is little performance information about Tensilica's Xtensa LX extensible processors, which could allow us to compare them to what your typical server processor offers. What we know, however, is that Tensilica builds its processors in 90 nm and 130 nm processes and runs the chips at clock speeds between 150 and 450 MHz. The power consumption is "less than 0.1 mWatt per MHz", which puts such a processor at a power consumption of about 45 mWatts in a worst case scenario, according to the manufacturer.

So, what would a 200 PFlop system be able to accomplish?

According to the researchers, such a computer would make global climate change predictions more understandable and more credible. Climate models are created today largely by using historical data of rainfall, hurricanes, sea surface temperatures and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Accurate cloud simulations are much more complex, however, and well within the reach of current supercomputers. Past cloud models, the researcher claim, lack the details that could improve the accuracy of climate predictions: The required accuracy can only be provided by a system that can cope with 1 km-scale models that provide rich details not available in existing models.

To develop such a 1-km cloud model, the scientists said they will need a supercomputer that is 1000 times more powerful than what is available today, the researchers say. And the proposed 200 PFlops Tensilica system could put them into that range, at least in theory.

However, the UC Berkeley researchers claim that this "climate computer" is not just a concept: Michael Wehner, Lenny Oliker and John Shalf said they have been working with scientists from Colorado State University to build a prototype system in order to run a new global atmospheric model developed at Colorado State University. "What we have demonstrated is that in the exascale computing regime, it makes more sense to target machine design for specific applications," Wehner said. "It will be impractical from a cost and power perspective to build general-purpose machines like today's supercomputers." "

"Superconducting magnets could help a fleet of spacecraft fly in precise formation without using up limited fuel reserves, two groups of researchers say. But others foresee problems with the technology.

Many proposals for groundbreaking space missions require multiple spacecraft to fly in formation, including NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder, which would hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars, and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), which would search for ripples in the fabric of space called gravitational waves.

One way to keep spacecraft in the right arrangement is to use thrusters, which fire jets of gas to push a craft in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, thrusters can limit the lifetime of a mission because they rely on limited supplies of fuel.

But two groups of researchers are developing a technology that replaces thrusters with electromagnets, which they say can keep spacecraft in formation without the need for fuel.

In this scenario, each spacecraft in the fleet would be outfitted with coils made of superconducting wire. Running electric currents through the coils turns each spacecraft into a magnet with a north and south pole.

By adjusting the current, the orientation of the poles can be changed to either attract multiple spacecraft towards each other or push them farther apart, keeping them at the desired distance."

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"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Barnes & Noble Inc, the world's largest bookseller, said on Tuesday it will sell digital and print magazine subscriptions though its online segment, BN.com.

The retailer said the site will sell subscriptions to more than 1,000 magazines at up to 90 percent off newsstand prices. More than 12,000 back issues of different magazines will also be available digitally, the company added.

In order to produce the digital content, the company said BN.com partnered with digital publishing company Zinio LLC. Last year, Zinio created a feature on BN.com offering users interactive book and magazine previews.

M2 Media Group will help fulfill print subscriptions, Barnes & Noble said.

Barnes & Noble shares rose 10 cents to $31.27 in late-afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange."

"Microsoft is expected to announce Tuesday in Seoul, South Korea, that it will develop a version of its Microsoft Auto software for the Hyundai Kia Automotive Group, the world's fifth-largest automaker.

Microsoft already has a deal with the Ford Motor Company for its Sync system, which uses voice activation technology to operate cellphones and play digital music.

With both Ford and Hyundai as customers, Microsoft's software could potentially be put into more than eight million vehicles worldwide each year. Its competitors include OnStar from General Motors, Johnson Controls and QNX Software Systems from Harman International.

Systems based on Microsoft Auto are available in Fiat Group vehicles in Europe and South America, as well as in 12 Ford models in North America.

Microsoft Auto will first appear in Hyundai vehicles in North America in 2010, said Martin Thall, general manager of Microsoft's automotive business unit. Subsequent versions will give drivers voice control over navigation systems and video entertainment, in addition to cellphones and digital music players.

The Hyundai deal suggests that Microsoft may be achieving the critical mass it needs to encourage other companies to create links to its auto software, in much the same way that third parties create software applications to run on Windows-based PCs. "

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"Another entrepreneur is trying their hand at selling unsanctioned Mac OS X desktops.

AppleInsider spotted an eBay listing on Tuesday for a generic desktop tower running Mac OS X Leopard, weeks after Psystar made a very public show of defying Apple's licensing agreement for Leopard with its Open Computer. "Chris555" is selling the unbranded desktop for a fixed price of $549.99, plus $50 shipping and handling.

Is this the latest in a wave of Mac clone makers emboldened by Psystar? Apple has remained silent on the issue to this point, but lawyers think the company would have a good chance of enforcing its end-user licensing agreement against companies trying to make a profit on Mac OS X computers. The agreement says the operating system can only be installed on a single Apple-labeled computer.

Apple has left the OS X hacking community pretty much undisturbed, but it will be interesting to see how long it waits before taking action against commercial providers of its operating system."

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"Picture a fat slice of chocolate cake, its thick caramel glaze oozing onto a plate. Your brain, right now, is thinking just like a junkie's, a new study suggests.

To test the hormone's effect on the brain, his team gave a small dose to 12 people a few hours after breakfast. Then, the researchers scanned the subjects' brains while they looked at pictures of pizza, hamburgers and other tempting foods. Dagher's team compared the results to brain scans taken before volunteers received the dose of ghrelin."

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