It was a busy day for Sergey Brin in Manhattan. First he helped introduce the New York version of Google Transit. Then he rollerbladed 20 blocks north and west to the unveiling of the new HTC G1 phone, the first that uses Google’s Android phone software.
Someone at Google must not have searched for what happens on the East Side of New York in late September — the neighborhood was clogged as limousines shuttled dignitaries around for the opening of the United Nations session. Mr. Brin said he found that even on rollerblades, his path was blocked.
Blocking anything, however, was not on the agenda at the press event, held in a cavernous space under the 59th Street Bridge. Executives of Google, HTC and T-Mobile, the first carrier to introduce the phone, used the word “open” more often than a gaggle of pediatric dentists.
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Reports say Henry Nicholas, a Broadcom Corp. (Nasdaq: BRCM - message board) founder and former CEO, surrendered to government realtors today following making indicted on grievances connected to inventory opportunities backdating and, separately, drug use.
Documents unsealed today reveal this a grand jury indicted Nicholas for fraud and conspiracy in October. The Los Angeles things claims Nicholas was set to attain a court occurrence currently afternoon.
The !no! sensational part of the story comes for a terse 18-page indictment documenting Nicholas’s assumed drug use based on 1999 to 2005. (Nicholas left Broadcom in 2003, citing deep custom and family issues.)
It describes the majority of instances of Nicholas attaining MDMA (Ecstasy) for several parties and events, combined with Woodstock ‘99 and a Super Bowl. Later, the allegations branch out to insert cocaine, methamphetamines, and prescription drugs and also Valium.
Nicholas is accused of distributing drugs at a large number of houses and at an office-warehouse space he’d leased out. He’s in addition accused of lacing customers’ drinks without this knowledge and of hiring a Broadcom employee $1 million to stay quiet close to There are those of the goings-on. Prostitutes, of course, merit a brief mention.
Nicholas’s lifestyle has continued the subject of speculation from the time a lawsuit endure year accused him of producing an underground sex-and-drugs lair at his palatial home. (See Henry Nicholas, Party Animal?)
The inventory choices indictment is longer, at 65 pages, and chronicles particular instances of stated backdating of 1999 to 2002. Former CFO William J. Ruehle is furthermore named as a defendant in who indictment.
Broadcom has had to compete provided an continuous Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exploring during supply options. The SEC has put forward bills against thre executives combined with Nicholas. The two who got continue to provided Broadcom — CEO Henry Samueli and entire counsel David Dull — took leaves of absence of this posts as a result. (See Options Scandal Deepens at Broadcom.)
PHILADELPHIA - Comcast Corp. stated Thursday such a by the beginning of 2010 it plans to put up shoppers in a large amount of of its markets Internet aide so speedily properties serves to be able to download a high-definition movie in minutes.
The nation’s second-largest Internet benefits provider — and leading cable TV operator — would deploy a technology fit of delivering up to 100 megabits of information or a larger number of per instant in 20 per cent of its markets by the end of 2008, Comcast senior vice president of investor relations Marlene Dooner assumed at the Merrill Lynch U.S. Media Conference in London.
Dooner declared the quickness was “very competitive” providing Verizon’s fiber-optic Internet service, that had nearly 1.8 million subscribers in the previous quarter.
Among cable operators, Comcast has carried on one of the various aggressive in deploying a wideband technology labeled Docsis 3.0 to fend off competitors as further users download videos within the duration of the Internet.
Dooner too claimed Comcast expects to move the majority of its analog television channels to digital in a multitude of markets by the beginning of 2010. The Philadelphia-based organization had set a mission of reclaiming analog bandwidth in 20 per cent of its markets their year.
As competition increases, cable’s triple-play package — of video, Internet and phone assistance — is no longer exclusive due to the fact that phone and satellite TV firms are submiting comparable bundles.
In response, Comcast has carried on aggressively courting cost-conscious consumers, among its sector legislation and offerings this heap two services alternatively of three.
“We’ve responded. We’re amendment and we are certain it is working,” Dooner said.
The industry did take a toll on advertising, amidst profit low 5 per cent in the initial quarter in the wake of not including the present year’s additional broadcast week and a gain on political ads, Dooner said.
Softness was witnessed in automotive, true estate and retail advertising and in ad dealings in Florida, Michigan and California.
By FELICITY BARRINGER
A federal judge on Monday gave the Interior Department until May 15 to come to a decision on whether to give polar bears protection under the Endangered Species Act. The ruling, coming after nearly four months of departmental delays, rejected the government’s contention that the case was too complicated to decide before June 30.
Dot Earth: Court Forces Action on Polar Bears (April 29, 2008) “Defendants have been in violation of the law requiring them to publish” their decision on the bear’s status “for nearly 120 days,” Judge Claudia Wilken of Federal District Court in Oakland, Calif., wrote. In addition to setting a May 15 deadline, Judge Wilken ordered that the decision take effect immediately, setting aside the usual 30-day grace period.
In January 2007, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service issued a proposal to list the polar bear as threatened because warming global temperatures were melting the sea ice the animals use as a platform to hunt seals, breed and make dens.
The retreating ice covers an area of Arctic seas that is also the latest frontier for offshore oil and gas development — an activity that could be curtailed if the federal government gives polar bears protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Shortly after the Interior Department missed its original January deadline for a final rule, the agency held a $2.6 billion oil lease sale covering a 46,000-square-mile area of the Chukchi Sea off northwestern Alaska. Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, earlier this month accused the department of delaying the listing to ensure it did not affect the lease sale, an accusation Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has denied.
At a news conference earlier this month, the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said environmentalists were inappropriately trying to use existing environmental laws, like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act, to address climate change. The result, Ms. Perino said, would be a “regulatory train wreck.”
A draft of a final rule was prepared by the Alaska office of the Fish and Wildlife Service in December, Interior Department lawyers told the court in a brief filed earlier this month. This was reviewed by agency lawyers, who produced another draft on Feb. 22. The department said that the February draft was being reviewed by the Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks and that the issues involved were complex.
The environmental groups that had sued to force the Interior Department to act on the bear’s status were elated by the ruling. “Today’s decision is a huge victory for the polar bear,” said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups involved.
“By May 15th the polar bear should receive the protections it deserves under the Endangered Species Act,” Ms. Siegel said, “which is the first step toward saving the polar bear and the entire Arctic ecosystem from global warming.”
Shane Wolfe, Mr. Kempthorne’s press secretary, issued a brief statement on Tuesday saying: “We have received the court’s decision and are reviewing it. We will evaluate the legal options and will decide the appropriate course of action.”
Source:nytimes
The death of Windows XP may have been greatly exaggerated.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company could re-evaluate its plans to phase out Windows XP by June 30, if customers demand that it stick around. So far, they have not.
“XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter, but right now, we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments,” Ballmer said during a Thursday news conference in Belgium, according to Reuters.
Big-name computer makers are still scheduled to have to stop selling models with Windows XP installed by the end of June. Mainstream technical support will continue to be available for Windows XP through April 2009, and more limited support will continue through April 2014.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Windows XP’s impending demise: “If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter.”
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News.com)Microsoft does plan to continue selling Windows XP for a limited class of PCs it calls “ultralow-cost PCs.” It’s a category that covers machines with slower processors, smaller screens and, in many cases, flash memory, rather than a traditional hard drive, for storage.
Ballmer said most consumers are choosing to buy the current version of Windows, Vista. Many acquire Vista by default, however, since most new PCs ship with the operating system. Businesses have been slower to catch on, as many have clung to Windows XP and older versions of Windows.
While Microsoft ponders yet another stay of execution for Windows XP, it’s readying a new version of Windows, being developed under the code name “Windows 7.”
Earlier this month, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates indicated that Windows 7 could come within the next year–in some form, possibly a developer-oriented version–far ahead of the development schedule previously indicated by the software maker.
Ballmer on Thursday also reiterated Microsoft’s intention of appealing directly to Yahoo shareholders, if the company rejects Microsoft’s offer of $43.6 billion for the company.
“We’ve sent them a letter that says, ‘it’s a good price; please let us know. If you don’t let us know, maybe your shareholders will think it’s a good price,’” Reuters reported.
Source:
By Rick Weiss
Protein retrieved from a 68 millon-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone closely resembles the main protein in chicken and ostrich bones and is only distantly related to lizards’, strengthening the popular idea that birds, and not reptiles, are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.
The new work builds on a 2007 analysis showing remarkably close similarities between T. rex collagen and collagen from modern-day chickens, but that work did not include comparisons to other living species. Collagen is the primary protein in bones.
“We had made a very loose connection at first,” said John M. Asara of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who led both studies. “Now we’re able to make out robust evolutionary relationships and, with very high confidence, basically group the T. rex dinosaur with birds.”
More is at stake than T. rex’s prehistoric pedigree. Asara and his colleagues say their novel approach has the potential to redraw the evolutionary tree based on molecular data instead of the traditional comparisons of skeletal remains. Bones can be deceiving, because unrelated animals can have similar structures.
Key to the new finding — and the cause of some controversy — is the Asara team’s assertion that it retrieved a smidgen of intact collagen from the fossilized thigh bone of a T. rex. Biological materials generally degrade in the environment, and scientists who work with ancient DNA feel lucky when they find a sample that is 100,000 years old. Yet the T. rex protein specimen is more than 100 times older than that, leading some scientists to wonder whether it might be a more recent contaminant.
Mary H. Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who oversaw the protein’s extraction, said she was confident that what they were dealing with was dinosaur collagen, preserved because of favorable conditions in the Montana soil where the bone was buried.
“There is no evidence of contamination,” Schweitzer said, emphasizing the painstaking method developed by the team, which captures less than a millionth of a gram of protein for every five grams of bone.
But not everyone agrees.
Pavel Pevzner, director of the Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology at the University of California at San Diego, said his own research, soon to be published, refutes Asara’s work. He said he cannot describe details until they are published, but he was blunt in his response to the new study, which appears in today’s issue of the journal Science.
The findings are “a joke,” Pevzner wrote in an e-mail. “Serious evolutionary biologists will laugh reading this piece.”
It was unclear whether Pevzner disputes the link between birds and dinosaurs or simply distrusts the methods the team used.
Proteins are strands of amino acids, and the order of those various amino acids determines a protein’s identity and function. In the new analysis, the team compared the order of 89 amino acids from the T. rex sample to the equivalent collagen sequence from a chicken, an ostrich, an alligator and a green anole lizard, a reptile commonly used in laboratory research.
Source:
During a post-keynote luncheon with a few reporters, Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh and Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS) chief architect Neal Sample shared more details about the inside-out rewiring of the Web giant.
Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh expects version 1.0 of Y!Open to be available this year.
(Credit: Dan Farber)Balogh said that co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang is taking a personal interest in the project, which began in earnest as part of Yang’s 100-day plan, which he created when he took the helm of the company from Terry Semel in September of last year. He noted that Y!OS was started before Microsoft came knocking on Yahoo’s door. Balogh joined Yahoo from VeriSign just prior to Microsoft’s February 1, 2008 takeover bid.
Y!OS is expected to have a material impact on Yahoo’s page growth and time spent on the site, as well as revenue. It was baked into the calculations projecting a doubling of its operating cash flow from $1.9 billion to $3.7 in the three-year span.
Version 1.0 of what is being called Y!Open will be released at some unspecified time later this year, and will include a development environment for several properties, a social “activator” and graph engine, an events engine, and a single profile for users, Balogh said.
The activator engine handles the combining of different relationship groupings, such as the Yahoo Mail e-mail address book, Yahoo Messenger contacts, Flickr friends, Yahoo 360, and Yahoo Mash, Sample said. Yahoo will be careful to protect user privacy and won’t apply the information without user consent, he added.
“We have to replumb Yahoo to use a single profile and create feeds, a way to consume feeds and Web services APIs and to layer those mechanisms into the platform,” Balogh said.
Yahoo is part of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google and MySpace, and will be using the specification as part of the Yahoo application framework (see the slide below). OpenSocial allows applications to work across the major social networks, except Facebook at this point, without modification.
Yahoo’s new architecture, called Yahoo Open Strategy proves that the Internet is made of tubes.
(Credit: Yahoo)Users will have single control panel for assigning where they want the applications to live. Developers will be incented to carry the unified Yahoo user experience with them across other services, although it’s not required by the OpenSocial specification, Sample said.
Initially, Yahoo will be vetting applications that touch Yahoo Mail. “We don’t want to risk exposing user data,” Sample said. “Once they prove themselves we can open up more. We are starting with a toe in the water.”
SearchMonkey is the first fruit of Yahoo’s new open initiative. It allows developers to alter the presentation of search results, is currently in limited beta and will be in general release within the next several weeks, Balogh said.
Compared to creating a social graph and scaling the back end for 500 million users and 10 billion latent relationships among the Yahoo clan, SearchMonkey is relatively simple feat of openness.
Yahoo has an ambitious and complex task ahead to deliver version 1.0 within this year amidst other distractions, such as Microsoft’s courtship of the company. Balogh talks a good game: “The goal is nothing short of creating the best developer environment for creating Internet applications across the Web.” Now Yahoo has to show that it can execute.
Source:
First announced way, way back in July of last year, the nifty, wireless balance board accessory for the Wii finally has a North American release date: May 19. Get ready to engage those abs.
The Wii Fit bundle (available in Japan since last December) will sell for $89.99, according to Crave—not exactly cheap, but at least it’ll come bundled with a battery of exercises—involving yoga, aerobics, strength training, and balance—that’ll get you off the couch and, with any luck, make you break a sweat.
IGN (via Yahoo! Games) has a thorough preview of Wii Fit, but I’ll tick off some of the main points: You get the wireless, plastic balance board (which, apparently, supports a whopping 660 pounds, although it stops measuring over 330 pounds) plus the battery of 40 mini-games and exercises.
Among them: strength-training exercises, including a push-up/yoga combo (which sounds devilishly difficult), single-leg extensions, arm/leg lifts, a variety of squats and lunges, and side planks (ouch). There’s also plenty of aerobic action, including steps, runs, and rhythm boxing. Then there’s the yoga, complete with your standard deep breathing, half moons, a potpourri of poses, you name it. This ain’t no button-mashing on the couch.
What makes Wii Fit more fun than your standard exercise DVD is the on-screen trainer (either male or female, as IGN notes) who critiques your form and doles out encouragement, as needed.
Of course, the coolest element of Wii Fit is the wireless balance board, which incorporates two plastic pads—one for each foot—that precisely measure you weight and balance.
From the demos I’ve seen, the board does an uncanny job of detecting your overall stance and posture; indeed, based on your weight and balance, it’ll compute your body mass index (BMI) and tell you if you’re overweight, underweight, or just right. The Wii Fit software will also track your BMI daily and tell you your progress over time.
Early reviews have been generally positive; for example, Chris Kohler at Wired News tried Wii Fit for about a month and came away pretty happy, calling it a “convenient and helpful way for me to get back in shape.” Keep in mind, however, that Kohler didn’t so much lose weight as build muscle (not such a bad thing, considering that you’re playing a video game).
I haven’t had a chance to try Wii Fit myself, but the demo during last year’s E3 gaming conference looked pretty impressive; I especially liked the soccer ball head-butting game, which lets you (natch) head-butt a torrent of virtual soccer balls, all from the comfort of the balance board—nice. (Hmmmm…how about a surfing game? Or skateboarding?)
So, who out there’s looking forward to Wii Fit? Anyone else tried it? What about the price tag?
Source:tech.yahoo
| General |
2G Network |
GSM 900 / 1800 |
| |
GSM 850 / 1900 |
| Announced |
2008, April |
| Status |
Coming soon. Exp. release 2008, 2Q |
| Size |
Dimensions |
106 x 46 x 11.1 mm, 54 cc |
| Weight |
74 g |
| Display |
Type |
TFT, 65K colors |
| Size |
240 x 320 pixels, 2 inches |
| |
- Downloadable wallpapers, screensavers |
| Ringtones |
Type |
Polyphonic, MP3 |
| Customization |
Download |
| Vibration |
Yes |
| Memory |
Phonebook |
Yes, Photocall |
| Call records |
20 dialed, 20 received, 20 missed calls |
| Card slot |
No |
| Data |
GPRS |
Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps |
| HSCSD |
No |
| EDGE |
No |
| 3G |
No |
| WLAN |
No |
| Bluetooth |
Yes |
| Infrared port |
No |
| USB |
No |
| Features |
Messaging |
SMS, MMS, Email |
| Browser |
WAP 2.0/xHTML |
| Games |
Yes |
| Colors |
Cyber Green, Neon Blue, Perfect Purple |
| Camera |
1.3 MP, 1280 x 1024 pixels |
| |
- Java MIDP 2.0
- FM radio
- MP3 player
- Nokia Xpress Audio Messaging
- Advanced calculator
- Calendar
- Built-in handsfree |
| Battery |
|
Standard battery, Li-Ion 700 mAh (BL-4B) |
| Stand-by |
Up to 336 h |
| Talk time |
Up to 4 h 45 min |
| General |
2G Network |
GSM 900 / 1800 |
| |
GSM 850 / 1900 |
| Announced |
2008, April |
| Status |
Coming soon. Exp. release 2008, 2Q |
| Size |
Dimensions |
108 x 46 x 15 mm, 66 cc |
| Weight |
73.7 g |
| Display |
Type |
TFT, 65K colors |
| Size |
128 x 160 pixels |
| |
- Themes and wallpapers |
| Ringtones |
Type |
Polyphonic (24 channels), MP3 |
| Customization |
|
| Vibration |
Yes |
| Memory |
Phonebook |
Yes, up to 1000 entries |
| Call records |
20 dialed, 20 received, 20 missed calls |
| Card slot |
No |
| Data |
GPRS |
Yes |
| HSCSD |
No |
| EDGE |
Yes |
| 3G |
No |
| WLAN |
No |
| Bluetooth |
No |
| Infrared port |
No |
| USB |
No |
| Features |
Messaging |
SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging |
| Browser |
No |
| Games |
Yes |
| Colors |
Black, Slate Gray, Wine Red, Deep Plum |
| Camera |
VGA, 640×480 pixels, video |
| |
- Nokia Xpress Audio Messaging
- Calendar
- Calculator
- Voice memo
- Built-in handsfree
- English-Chinese dictionary |
| Battery |
|
Standard battery, Li-Ion 700 mAh (BL-5CA) |
| Stand-by |
Up to 424 h |
| Talk time |
Up to 7 h 40 min |
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