NEW NET Issues List for 17 Nov 2009

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 17 November 2009, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we're upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. AT&T webmail outage http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/25250/ “…AT&T Inc. rolled out a cloud computing platform that positions itself to take on Amazon.com's cloud computing services, but the telecommunication giant's webmail services for att.net and bellsouth.net suffered outages on the same day…it is "working closely with Sun to use the Sun Cloud Open Cloud Platform…In an event believed to be unrelated to the cloud computing launch, AT&T Internet users were experiencing technical difficulties with the company's webmail on both att.net and bellsouth.net for most of Monday morning…AT&T users were reported to be able to continue accessing their e-mail through AT&T-Yahoo's webpage…”

2. Internet to speak Arabic: Egypt http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20091115/tc_afp/internetgovernanceforumegypt “The agency in charge of assigning domain names today began accepting applications for domain names written in non-Latin languages, and Egypt…became the first to apply for a domain name in Arabic…Egypt has applied for an Arabic Internet domain name with a suffix equating in the ASCII character set to "masr," meaning Egypt in the Arabic language…”

3. YouTube Direct service to link citizen reporters and news organizations http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/nov/16/digital-media-youtube-direct-local-news “…YouTube Direct…allows news and media organisations to request, review, and rebroadcast clips directly from YouTube users…People around the world are taking up cameras and covering news in ways big and small - from documenting global events, to filming local town halls in neighborhoods. YouTube Direct empowers news and media organisations to easily connect with these citizen reporters, and use the power of our platform to cover the news better than ever before." The new service was beta-tested by the Huffington Post and will be used by National Public Radio and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others…”

4. Xobni for Outlook releases free preview of Salesforce extension http://www.xobni.com/blog/2009/11/17/xobni-for-outlook-releases-free-preview-of-salesforce-extension-now-available-to-everyone/ “…Last week we mentioned that our Enterprise customers were going to get access to our Salesforce Extension, and this week the offering gets even more exciting. We’re offering a free preview of our Salesforce Extension to all of our users…”

5. TinyChat Takes on Stickam and Ustream With New Service and API http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tinychat_takes_on_stickam_and_ustream.php “…TinyChat has established itself as a highly popular video chat service. Today, the company launched a new product, TinyChat.tv, which competes directly with established companies like Ustream and Stickam…”

6. Google’s Sample Chrome Extensions Are Working http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/16/google-chrome-extensions-sample/ “…Google looks to be on the verge of unleashing Chrome extension support in a major way. Not only does the home tab page on the new builds of Chromium (and the dev builds of Chrome) feature not-yet-turned-on links to what looks to be an extensions gallery, but there are plenty of references (and pictures) in the Chromium boards as to what Google is planning with extension support…both the Google Mail Checker and (Chromium) BuildBot Monitor are up and running in a new build of Chromium…”

7. Seven Tools to Map Your Company or Life History http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/11/seven-tools-to-map-your-compan.php “…Instead of locking away your memoirs in a journal or using a family tree to display shared connections, a map is one way you can preserve your history while leaving the door open for others to contribute. Below are seven tools to help you get started…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

8. Online gangs cash in on swine flu http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20091116/wr_nm/us_flu_antivirals_gangs “Criminal gangs are making millions of dollars out of the H1N1 flu pandemic by selling fake flu drugs over the internet, a web security firm said on Monday…Sophos said many of the gangs behind the sites were based in Russia and the top five countries buying fake Tamiflu and other medicines on the internet were the United States, Germany, Britain, Canada and France. Sophos spokesman Graham Cluley said a "worrying trend" toward stockpiling Tamiflu had already been seen in Britain -- Europe's worst-hit country in the H1N1 pandemic so far…”

9. Fake Verizon 'balance-checker' Is a Trojan http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20091114/tc_pcworld/fakeverizonbalancecheckerisatrojan “Cyber-criminals have started preying on Verizon Wireless customers, sending out spam e-mail messages that say their accounts are over the limit and offering them a "balance checker" program to review their payments. The e-mail messages, which look like they come from Verizon Wireless, are fakes; the balance checker is actually a malicious Trojan horse program. "If you run the tool, obviously, your computer is toast…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

10. Droid Becomes Fastest-Selling Android Phone to Date? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/droid_becomes_fastest-selling_android_phone_to_date.php “…according to mobile analytics firm Flurry…the Droid is now the fastest-selling Android phone to date, beating the sales of the myTouch 3G by more than four times…the company estimated the first-week sales for the Droid handsets as compared with both the myTouch 3G and Apple's iPhone 3GS. Although the iPhone still outsold the Droid within its first week, Flurry notes that the iPhone simultaneously launched in 8 countries worldwide while the Droid only launched in the U.S.…”

11. Android Market Badly Needs A Desktop Presence http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/15/android-market-app-store/ “I’ve spent the last week throughly enjoying my new Droid, and while I’ve come across some problems, most of my issues have simply been with the fact that Android does things differently than the iPhone…But there’s one big issue that needs far more than a UI tweak: Android Market…browsing the Market just isn’t as enjoyable as what Apple’s iTunes offers. If Android’s Market’s perception as a poor man’s App Store is going to change, this experience needs to improve…Using iTunes to download new applications isn’t just something people do when they need an app to accomplish a certain task. It’s something they do for fun. Clicking through various top apps exposes plenty of high quality games, apps from popular sites like Yelp, and even the occasional productivity tool. It’s all very fast too — you can easily download fifteen new apps in a single browsing session without breaking a sweat…”

12. Windows Mobile loses nearly a third of market share http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39877964,00.htm “…According to figures released by Gartner on Thursday, Microsoft's mobile operating system had 11 percent of the global smartphone market in Q3 2008. A year later, it had 7.9 percent of the market, while the iPhone's share had risen from 12.9 percent to 17.1 percent, and RIM's share had risen from 16 percent to 20.8 percent. Symbian's market share fell from 49.7 percent to 44.6 percent…”

13. Windows Marketplace for Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1 http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/archive/2009/11/16/windows-marketplace-for-windows-mobile-6-0-and-6-1.aspx “…Windows Marketplace for Mobile has today reached another major milestone by adding support for Windows Mobile 6 and 6.1 devices…Initially, Marketplace was available for the new Windows phones with Windows Mobile 6.5. Today, almost all people with phones running Windows Mobile 6.0 and above with a supporting data plan can now access Marketplace…”

Open Source

14. Microsoft's pseudo sudo patent doesn't really cover sudo http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/microsofts-psuedo-sudo-patent-doesnt-really-cover-sudo.ars “Righteous indignation erupted on the Internet last week following reports that Microsoft had patented sudo, a traditional command-line tool that is widely used on Linux and some UNIX platforms for selective privilege escalation…we're not so sure that the Microsoft patent in question is as egregious as the critics claim. Granting a patent on the underlying concept of sudo to Microsoft over two decades after the tool was invented by open source developers would indeed be foolish, but that is not at all what happened. A look beyond the short summary of the patent filing and into the body of the patent's actual claims reveals that Microsoft's "invention" is really quite different from the sudo command-line tool. It might, however, cover some technologies that have more recently arrived on the Linux desktop…”

15. The Linux consultant: The Maytag repairman of the IT world http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=1064 “…I was the lone Linux guy in the crowd…During the course of the day I pieced a few bits of conversation together and was able to finally draw a conclusion to that age old question “Why don’t more consultants roll out Linux?” The answer should have been obvious to me all along as I long had all of the information I needed. But after hearing what I heard from the collective mouths of an IT group with years of experience and a metro city’s worth of clients it became all too clear why Windows is always rolled out…the people I was with were all self-employed consultants who depend upon their client’s needed support for income. Needed support. That’s the key. My freelance clients…they rarely need me…”

16. First look at openSUSE 11.2 http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20091116#feature “…the new release of openSUSE…For this review I used my two usual systems, an HP Mini 110 netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 2 GB RAM, 16 GB SATA SSD storage) and my nearly 7-year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 (1 GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB HDD). The Toshiba laptop barely meets the published minimum RAM requirement for openSUSE 11.2…I downloaded both live CDs and the network installation image for 32-bit systems and decided to try out all three…”

SkyNet

17. Google Latitude Gets Snoopier: Adds Location History and Alerts http://www.pcworld.com/article/181907/google_latitude_gets_snoopier_adds_location_history_and_alerts.html “Just when you thought Google Latitude would no longer haunt your dreams, the service has been updated to make it a smidge creepier than before. Now Latitude tracks your location history and alerts you when your friends are nearby -- two add-ons that could make stalking that much easier! Location History is the creepiest of all, so thankfully this service is only for personal use and is not shared with Latitude friends…while it's currently private, the rise in popularity of location-based services such as Loopt, Stalqer and FourSquare may convince Google to later selectively publicize Location History to friends…”

18. Google Introduces 'Go' Programming Language http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/web_services/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221601138 “…Google on Tuesday released a new open source programming language called Go that's optimized for applications designed for massive scalability and multi-processor systems…Go is the second programming language Google has released this year. In July, the company released Simple, a BASIC dialect for developing Android applications. Pike says Go's goal is to serve as a systems language, in the way that C++ or C does today…Go began in 2007 as a group 20% project -- Google allows its workers to spend 20% of their time pursuing projects outside of their job responsibilities. In addition to Pike, contributors include Google engineers Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, and Russ Cox…Existing languages haven't been optimized for multi-core processors or massive scaling. Pike says that Go was conceived as a language for the kinds of programs written by Google engineers…”

19. Google book settlement revised, criticized http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/11/google-offers-revised-book-settlement-but-critics-unappeased.ars “…Google filed a revised version of its book settlement with the New York court that is overseeing the case. The new version limits the settlement to works published in a handful of English-speaking countries, and contains significant concessions that appear to be direct responses to some of the criticisms of the deal…Perhaps the most significant change made to the deal is the limit to its scope. The EU as a whole…objected to several aspects of the settlement…Google offered to add European publishers and authors to the board that oversaw the handling of book content, but that was apparently not enough to satisfy the European publishing business; as a result, most of the EU has been dropped. The exception is the UK, which is being included along with Canada and Australia…”

20. Google's Secret Chrome Plan for Browser Domination http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20091113/tc_pcworld/googlessecretchromeplanforbrowserdomination “…Google has been piecing together a Frankenstein that will rise and forever change the Web. It's called Google Chrome. SPDY (pronounced "speedy"), a new application-layer protocol. SPDY is true to its name and is capable of revving Web download speeds up to 55 percent…SPDY improves upon -- but will not replace -- our beloved HTTP protocol. It overrides parts of HTTP such as connection management and data transfer formats to intensify speeds…”

21. Google Translate Now Talks and Translates in Real-time http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-look-for-google-translate.html “…we've launched three new features as well as a new look and feel for Google Translate — a service that helps people access information throughout the world by enabling them to automatically translate text and and web pages into their own language. Google Translate offers 51 languages, representing over 98% of Internet users today. * Translate instantly…* Read and write any language…* Text-to-speech…”

22. Google Sites Offers Templates; Claims It's Easier Than Sharepoint http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/11/google-sites-offers-templates.php “Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting today, Google will provide templates that it claims makes it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets. Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites…”

General Technology

23. RFID Makes Slow And Steady Progress http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/RFID/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221601551 “…RFID was expected to change retailing forever. That didn't happen. Then it was expected to make the pharmaceutical market safe from counterfeit drugs. That didn't happen either. Still, the tracking technology has grown into a $5-billion-a-year industry, and shows up in lots of places--passports, transportation passes, livestock, hospitals, and in some instances, retail and pharmaceuticals. Radio-frequency identification technology was a niche technology until 2003, when Wal-Mart ordered its suppliers to put electronic product codes on pallets and cases of goods going to its warehouses and stores. Wal-Mart hoped to use EPC tags, which store details about products and transmit them to inventory systems using RFID chips and readers, to create a more-efficient supply chain…only about 600 of Wal-Mart's 20,000 suppliers have joined the effort. Suppliers such as Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark are no longer the public advocates of RFID they once were. The technology is complex and costly to implement, requiring investments in the chips…readers, software, and new business processes…”

24. Qualcomm Snapdragon smartbooks http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/11/qualcomm-hopes-snapdragon-smartbooks-take-bite-out-of-atom.ars “…Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor is finally coming to little laptops. The chip company has confirmed that its speedy ARM offering has been adopted by Lenovo for a new product with a netbook form-factor. The device will be available from AT&T…Its Cortex-A8 core packs 1GHz of processing power, delivering an impressive balance of performance and energy efficiency. The chip is already being used in a handful of ultra high-end smartphones, including the HTC HD2 and Sony Ericsson's upcoming Xperia X10 Android handset…The Snapdragon-powered Lenovo system will be one of the first products in a new class of mobile devices that hardware makers are calling smartbooks—portable computers that look like netbooks but offer longer battery life thanks to low-energy ARM chips…”

25. AMD shakes up x86 CPU world with two new designs http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/11/amd-bobcat-bulldozer.ars “…AMD bucked that trend Wednesday by unveiling details of its newly revamped roadmap, its two brand-new processor architectures, and its plans for CPU/GPU integration…Bobcat: AMD's new mobile architecture…AMD's new-from-the-ground-up microarchitecture that's aimed at portables and SoCs. Bobcat will compete with Atom and with VIA's Nano, though it has much more in common with the latter than the former…Bulldozer: AMD's server architecture. AMD's newly announced high-end processor architecture is a significant departure from the architecture that powers the company's existing processor line. It represents the implementation of an idea that quite a few folks have tossed around, but no one has really made work yet…AMD has taken two out-of-order back-ends and made them share a single front-end and a single floating-point/SIMD unit…”

Leisure & Entertainment

26. Nintendo needs to differentiate its portable game devices from smartphones http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/11/nintendo_admits_dark_future_if_it_cant_differentiate_from_iphone.html “…Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo, is reportedly an Apple fan who uses an iPhone and Mac laptop. He also denied that there is a rivalry between his company and Apple, noting that attempts to create one makes him "uncomfortable." But Iwata also allegedly sees the iPhone as enough of a threat that Nintendo must work to stand out from it and devices like it. "If we can't make clear why customers pay a lot of money to play games on Nintendo hardware and Nintendo software and differentiate ourselves from games on the mobile phone or iPhone, then our future is dark," he said…”

27. Growing Pains at Hulu http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/digital-downloads/broadband/e3i8f2c0287dc37ec6baf6209f20ced7140 “Hulu is starting to show signs of why it’s not easy to run a joint venture between competitors…reports are bubbling up about an increasing level of discord between Hulu’s own ad sales staff and the staffs of each of the site’s broadcast partners: ABC, NBC and Fox…the already complicated arrangement is likely to become more so, particularly given the prospect that NBC Universal may be sold to Comcast—which already operates its own online video site (Fancast) and has a markedly different philosophy regarding just how free TV content should be on the Internet…”

28. New Super Mario Bros. Wii review: impressive, and then some http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2009/11/new-super-mario-bros-wii-review-impressive-and-then-some.ars “…New Super Mario Bros. Wii is one of those games that will leave you disappointed after the first level, slightly happy after the first world, and then you'll be stuck with a huge grin on your face after blasting through the game with three friends. This is a magical game, made even more impressive by how rote it may seem at first…One of the more impressive feats the game pulls off is offering level design that is perfectly fine to play with a single player, but also benefits from having multiple people on the screen at once…”

29. Nook e-reader on sale Nov. 30 in Barnes & Noble stores http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=FF103E62-1A64-6A71-CE42119D5A49D2F2 “The Nook, a $259 e-reader from Barnes & Noble Inc., will hit the booksellers' stores on Nov. 30…The Nook is 7.7 inches by 4.9 inches and is a half inch thick. It weighs 11.2 ounces. The gray-scale E-ink display is 6 inches across diagonally, with a separate 3.5-inch color display below that can be used to search for book titles and for other purposes with its touchscreen keyboard. Barnes & Noble is comparing Nook to the Amazon.com Kindle 2, which is also $259. Kindle uses the Sprint Nextel Inc. wireless network for downloads of books, while Barnes & Noble will rely on AT&T and Wi-Fi. Most first releases and other popular books on both devices will sell for $9.95…”

Economy and Technology

30. Logitech Buys Videoconferencing Outfit LifeSize http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/11/logitech_buys_v.html “PC peripherals maker Logitech International has done its largest ever acquisition, by purchasing videoconferencing system maker LifeSize Communications for $405 million…What’s most interesting is the potential for Logitech to accelerate the commoditization of videoconferencing. The company specializes in high-volume manufacturing of PC mice, keyboards and other gizmos; it’s video business is essentially webcams, which bring in roughly $250 million of the company’s $1.9 billion in annual sales, says Logitech president Gerald Quindlen. LifeSize, on the other hand, makes stand-alone gear that lets users launch a HD-quality videoconference with a few keystrokes. Quindlen says Logitech will be able to apply its economies of scale and other cost savings to “make video mainstream.” Says LifeSize CEO Craig Malloy, “the opportunity is drive price points to the point that it’s a no brainer for every office and conference room in the world…”

31. The Intel-AMD Settlement: $1.25 B http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2009/tc20091115_692400.htm “…The financial settlement was hammered out very late in more than a half-year of negotiations that culminated in a Nov. 12 announcement that Intel (INTC) would pay $1.25 billion to resolve long-standing antitrust allegations by AMD (AMD). Several people close to both sides gave BusinessWeek a play-by-play outline of the dramatic and sometimes tense talks dating to April 2009. Money—and who would pay it—proved the thorniest point. People on both sides say AMD wanted payment in exchange for dropping antitrust allegations, while Intel said it should be compensated for giving an AMD subsidiary access to its patents…”

32. 13 Electric Vehicle Players Join Forces to Sway U.S. Policy http://earth2tech.com/2009/11/16/13-electric-vehicle-players-join-forces-to-sway-u-s-policy/ “…Top executives from 13 companies including California utility Pacific Gas & Electric, Japanese automaker Nissan, smart grid startup GridPoint, battery maker A123Systems, battery giant Johnson Controls-Saft, and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, are joining forces this morning as the founding members of a new alliance called the Electrification Coalition with a shared vision for how to transition the vehicle fleet off of gasoline and onto the electric grid…The group certainly has some heavyweights, with a combined market cap of more than $100 billion, but hardly represents the entirety of the energy, utility, auto or energy storage industries — or even just the EV sector…With the stated mission to “promote government action to facilitate deployment of electric vehicles on a mass scale,” the Electrification Coalition has released a 91-page policy paper this morning, advocating government action to boost the industry…”

33. Evernote, the startup that boosts your memory, raises $10 million http://venturebeat.com/2009/11/15/evernote-the-startup-that-boosts-your-memory-raises-10-million/ “Evernote, which lets you record almost any type of data and recall it when you need it, just raised $10 million in a second round of venture-backed financing…The Mountain View-based startup says it now has nearly 2 million users on its desktop clients and apps for the iPhone and Blackberry. They use a “freemium” model with a paid version that allows larger monthly uploads and syncs your files. …” [ http://gigaom.com/2009/11/16/evernote-gets-10-million-in-new-funding/ http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/03/25/evernote-your-longterm-memory/ http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/07/10/collaborating-with-evernote/ ]

Civilian Aerospace

34. SpaceX Protests Award of Launch Contract to Orbital http://www.spacenews.com/civil/091113-spacex-protests-launch-contract.html “Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) has challenged a U.S. government launch services order placed with Orbital Sciences Corp., arguing that under U.S. federal law the contract should have been competitively awarded. On Sept. 14, the U.S. Air Force issued a task order to Dulles, Va.-based Orbital to launch NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft using surplus missile hardware, according to an Oct. 26 protest filed with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Orbital has been launching government satellites with rockets based on ballistic missile motors since 2000…”

35. DISCOVERY OF WATER ICE ON THE MOON RAISES STAKES FOR GOOGLE LUNAR X PRIZE http://www.xprize.org/media-center/press-release/nasas-landmark-discovery-of-water-ice-on-the-moon-raises-stakes-for-googl “…The confirmation of the presence of water ice on the surface of the Moon is a game-changing discovery for space exploration. The Moon, already a hotly pursued destination of space agencies and private companies from around the world, becomes even more desirable with today’s news. With ready supplies of ice, future robotic spacecraft or human astronaut crews could generate not only drinking water but also gaseous hydrogen and oxygen —excellent propellants that could be used for further space exploration beyond the Moon. The discovery also provides new support for a private race to return to the Moon. The Google Lunar X PRIZE, a $30 million incentive prize created and operated by the X PRIZE Foundation, challenges privately funded teams from around the globe to send robots to explore the lunar surface and return high resolution video and imagery back to the Earth. The prize program includes a Water Detection Bonus, which pays additional prize money to teams that use robots on the lunar surface to provide confirmation of the presence of water ice…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

36. AMD Tops Supercomputer Race, But Intel Powers Most http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/182225/two_rival_supercomputers_duke_it_out_for_top_spot.html “…A Cray supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has regained the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer, overtaking the installation that was ranked at the top in June, while China entered the Top 10 with a hybrid Intel-AMD system. Crary XT5 Jaguar Supercomputer The upgraded Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, now boasts a speed of 1.759 petaflops per second from its 224,162 cores, while the IBM Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico slowed slightly to 1.042 petaflops per second after it was repartitioned…China's fastest supercomputer ever, the Tianhe-1 in the city of Tianjin, achieved 563 teraflops per second for the No. 5 ranking. It uses Intel Xeon processors with Advanced Micro Devices GPUs (graphics processing units) as accelerators. Each node of the 71,680-core system has two Xeons attached to two AMD GPUs, according to the compilers of the Top 500 list. Tianhe-1 was built by the National University of Defense Technology for the National SuperComputer Center and is intended to provide high-performance computing services in northeastern China. Applications will include petroleum exploration and aircraft design…Most of the Top 500 supercomputers -- 426 systems -- now use quad-core processors. Only 59 use dual-core chips, and just four systems are based on single-core architectures…Gigabit Ethernet is the internal interconnect technology in 259 installations, compared with 181 using InfiniBand …”

37. NVIDIA Unleashes Fermi GPU for HPC http://www.hpcwire.com/home/specialfeaturetopitem/NVIDIA-Unleashes-Fermi-GPU-for-HPC-70166447.html “NVIDIA has announced the first Fermi GPU products here at the Supercomputing Conference (SC09) in Portland, Oregon, where thousands of attendees will get a chance to see the company's next-generation chip in action…The new architecture offers double-precision (DP) floating point performance north of 500 gigaflops per chip, systematic support for ECC memory, L1 and L2 caches, GDDR5 support, and a raft of new features to make the processor more programmer friendly, including C++ support. In short, Fermi is designed as a true computational GPU that is designed to offer a much wider application aperture for HPC, visual computing and data analytics than any previous graphics processor…”

*****

NEW NET Issues List for 10 Nov 2009

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 10 November 2009, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we're upstairs at The Wooden Nickel, 217 E. College Avenue, Appleton, Wisconsin (downtown Appleton), http://www.woodennickelsportsbar.com. Good food and beverages. Bring your laptop -- free wifi. The owner of the Nickel, Tony, said Tuesday evenings are relatively quiet and that he'll turn off the speakers in the raised area near the front door to make it easier for NEW NET people to hear each other.

The ‘net

10 Nov 09 1. OU considers use of cloud computing http://www.kable.co.uk/open-university-cloud-computing-microsoft-google-03oct09 “…OU…will shortly be taking a decision about whether to deploy Google Apps or Microsoft Live@edu...not only will the OU be able to outsource email services for its 229,000 students, as well as its staff, taking away the maintenance burden from the university, but it will also be able to use the large document storage facilities offered by cloud computing systems. "In the longer term I can see more and more functionality accruing to cloud-based services," said Sclater. "We are watching very closely and having conversations with Microsoft and Google as we make our decision about which of those systems to go for…”

10 Nov 09 2. Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/technology/internet/07virtual.html “…Silicon Valley may have discovered the perfect business: charging real money for products that do not exist. These so-called virtual goods, like a $1 illustration of a Champagne bottle on Facebook or the $2.50 Halloween costume in the online game Sorority Life, are no more than a collection of pixels on a Web page. But it is quickly becoming commonplace for people to spend a few dollars on them to get ahead in an online game or to give a friend a gift on a social network. Analysts estimate that virtual goods could bring in a billion dollars in the United States and around $5 billion worldwide this year — all for things that, aside from perhaps a few hours of work by an artist and a programmer, cost nothing to produce…” [ http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/why-mainstream-media-is-dying.html http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/horrible-things-slink-back-into-zynga/ ]

10 Nov 09 3. A new Bing maps interface http://www.liveside.net/bingblog/archive/2009/11/09/hey-a-new-bing-maps-interface.aspx “…The navigation bars look to be simplified, and “Get Directions” is featured prominently on the www.bing.com/maps page...after the Welcome page, are Directions, “My Places” (this was called Collections, and yes your collections are still accessible), Share, Print, and Traffic. Here’s a closer look at My Places: Under “Explore”, user contributions can be sorted on (left to right in the icons): Items with pictures, Items with 3d Buildings, Items with MapCruncher Layers, and Items with Photosynths…”

10 Nov 09 4. Microsoft Bing Gives WiFi Users Free Search http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=117007 “…Microsoft's Bing and JiWire will announce Monday an advertising campaign, along with the results, that lets consumers gain free WiFi Internet access at participating hot spots in exchange for one search on the engine. Supported by JiWire's mobile advertising network, which reaches about 20 million unique consumers monthly, Bing's nationwide campaign runs across WiFi hotspots in airports and hotels…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

10 Nov 09 5. U.S/International Copyright Treaty Leaked, Trouble Ahead for ISPs & Users http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/copyright_treaty_leaked_trouble_for_isps_and_in.php “According to once-secret, now-leaked sections of the new, plurilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, global Internet users and ISPs might be in for a world of hurt in the near future. A U.S.-drafted chapter on Internet use would require ISPs to police user-generated content, to cut off Internet access for copyright violators, and to remove content that is accused of copyright violation without any proof of actual violation. The chapter also completely prohibits DRM workarounds, even for archiving or retrieving one's own work…Only 42 specific persons - such as representatives of Google, Intel, Verizon, Time Warner, Sony, News Corp, eBay, the MPAA, and the RIAA - were given access to the document under nondisclosure agreements: a corporate cabal hand-selected to help review the text of the final agreement. The politicians involved in creating the document are also heavily funded by entertainment, media, and IP corporations such as Sony, Time Warner, News Corp, and Disney…Internet users around the world are headed for a new regime of IP enforcement - a culture of invasive searches, minimal privacy, guilt until innocence is proven, and measures that would kill our normative behaviors of file-sharing, free software, media downloading, creative remixing, and even certain civil liberties…This all spells a huge boon to the established entertainment industry and a huge burder for ISPs…”

10 Nov 09 6. Windows 7 vulnerable to 8 out of 10 viruses http://www.sophos.com/blogs/chetw/g/2009/11/03/windows-7-vulnerable-8-10-viruses/ “…we settled in at SophosLabs and loaded a full release copy of Windows 7 on a clean machine. We configured it to follow the system defaults for User Account Control (UAC) and did not load any anti-virus software. We grabbed the next 10 unique samples that arrived in the SophosLabs feed to see how well the newer, more secure version of Windows and UAC held up. Unfortunately, despite Microsoft's claims, Windows 7 disappointed just like earlier versions of Windows. The good news is that, of the freshest 10 samples that arrived, 2 would not operate correctly under Windows 7. User Account Control did block one sample; however, its failure to block anything else just reinforces my warning prior to the Windows 7 launch that UAC's default configuration is not effective at protecting a PC from modern malware. Lesson learned? You still need to run anti-virus on Windows 7…”

10 Nov 09 7. Plumber vs. Programmer: who owns your businesses name and phone number? http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/11/plumber_vs_programmer_a_face_off_over_an_online_directory.html “…For more than 30 years, Evan Conklin has practiced plumbing in the Seattle area fixing broken water heaters, leaky faucets and malfunctioning toilets…But there's been at least one constant in Conklin's ever-changing profession: his phone number. That was until last Friday when Conklin stumbled upon HelpHive, a Seattle online directory of local service providers. Conklin couldn't believe what he saw. His business listing on HelpHive included a phone number, but it wasn't the one he'd used for the past 30 years. It was a new number generated and controlled by HelpHive, a proxy number of sorts that the Internet upstart had set up to track calls it was passing on to the plumber. Conklin was appalled with the idea that a third-party Web site could create a new phone number for his business, thinking that it was simply a way to get between him and his customer and to eventually start charging him for leads…”

10 Nov 09 8. 16 antivirus programs compared — none 'very good' http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2009/11/16_antivirus_programs_compared_none_very_good_1.html “…AV-Comparatives looked at 16 different security packages. The products were tested to see how well they detected threats and then removed them. The results are not what I'd call heartening. None of the products were rated "Very Good" based on AV-Comparatives' scale. The best any of them could muster was "Good", and only three products fell into that category for both detection and removal: eScan Anti-Virus 10.0, Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0 and Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus 2010…”

10 Nov 09 9. MS COFEE leaks all over the Internet http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/06/siren-gif-microsoft-cofee-law-enforcement-tool-leaks-all-over-the-internet/ “…Microsoft COFEE, the law enforcement tool that mystified so many of us (including Gizmodo~! and Ars Technica~!), is now available to download. If only there were a “bay” of some sort where, I don’t know, pirates hang out…COFEE is 100 percent useless to you. Given that, what makes COFEE so mysterious, so special? The sole reason is because it’s never been available before (unless, of course, you’re a law enforcement official)…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

10 Nov 09 10. Verizon Launches Prepaid Mobile Broadband Plans http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nf/20091105/tc_nf/69906 “…Laptop-toting road warriors who don't want to commit to a long-term mobile broadband data plan might be interested in a new offering from Verizon Wireless…Despite the potential cost savings for less-frequent mobile broadband users, the service may not prove as popular as prepaid mobile phone plans because the costs are high and the data limits are relatively low compared to contracts. Customers can purchase a traditional mobile broadband plan from Verizon for $30 a month with 5GB of data if they are willing to sign a contract…Verizon's prices aren't as competitive as other carriers. Virgin Mobile's Broadband2Go prepaid service relies on the same modem on Sprint's 3G network. Virgin Mobile charges $10 for 100MB of data transfers over a 10-day period, $20 for 250MB over a 30-day period…”

10 Nov 09 11. Starbucks Makes It Easier, Different to Get Free Wi-Fi http://wifinetnews.com/archives/2009/11/starbucks_makes_it_easier_different_to_get_free_wi-fi.html “…Under the current system, Starbucks has two tracks: a free card that stores value for purchases, and a membership card, that can optionally hold a dollar charge. The plain stored-value card exists mostly for convenience and usage tracking by Starbucks, but includes a few extras, one of which is the daily dose of Wi-Fi. To earn that benefit for 30 days, you either make a purchase with the card or add value (min. $5)…Starbucks is merging the two programs into one that will have no fees and no discount, but which offers a free drink on your birthday as well as a free drink for every 15 transactions after your first 30 transactions…After five transactions, you're boosted into the Green Level--green being Starbucks' corporate color--and you qualify for the daily Wi-Fi allotment with no further purchases…the FAQ says that you remain active at the green level for two years following your last transaction…”

10 Nov 09 12. The iPhone is the worst phone in the world http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39029453,49303754,00.htm?s_cid=96 “…The iPhone may be the greatest handheld surfing device ever to rock the mobile Web, and a fabulous media player to boot…But as an actual call-making phone, it's rubbish…Call quality on the iPhone is pathetic, and it's mostly because of the tiny speaker. It has to be aligned with your ear canal with the accuracy of a laser-guided ninja doing cataract surgery…The microphone is similarly craptastic, letting in all and sundry sounds to pollute your important calls…the worst of the iPhone's problems is its ability to sit there stealthily and ignore incoming calls…Battery life is the first casualty of smart-phone development, as the power of 3G, GPS, Wi-Fi and heavy-duty processing sucks the power out of over-miniaturised cells. But the iPhone was the first to really flaunt its slim body while you watched the bars drop almost in front of your eyes…If the iPhone is inaudible, unconnected, on fire and out of battery, why is the thing so popular? The fact is, although the iPhone is the worst phone in the world, it's the best handheld computer there is. Web browsing is a revelation, it's a fantastic music- and movie-playing iPod, and it's easy as pie to install thousands of apps that do everything from editing your photos to tuning your guitar. And unlike its competitors, its responsive touchscreen and crystal-clear user interface make tapping away on the iPhone a real pleasure…Just don't try to actually make a phone call on one.”

10 Nov 09 13. iPhone Superguide comes to the App Store... eventually http://www.macworld.com/article/143677/2009/11/iphone_superguide_iphone.html ; Top-Grossing iPhone Apps http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25971 ; GetJar: The unknown app store leader http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10392095-94.html ; iPhone Users Sue Gaming Company For Harvesting Cell Numbers http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=116920 [Because smartphones and smartphone app providers have the ability to gather data about app downloading and use, and because there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of apps, should apps, app stores or smartphone providers gather and publish data to show which apps are most likely to be worth installing on your phone?]

10 Nov 09 14. Motorola's Droid review: It's the best phone on Verizon http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/11/droid-review.html “…Motorola's Droid is the best Google phone on the market…Droid is the best phone on Verizon…The Droid hardware is a technical feat. It has a 5-megapixel camera with a flash that doesn't perform exceptionally well but still pretty great for a phone. The speaker is pleasantly loud. The touch-screen screen is gorgeous -- larger than the iPhone's with way more pixels per inch…After spending plenty of time with the iPhone and MyTouch, we realized just how much we don't miss physical keyboards…Android has really come a long way in a year. The software keyboard is smarter, the included apps more sophisticated and the subtleties of switching between programs more natural. But for as far as Google's operating system has come, it remains several steps behind Apple's iPhone in many respects…”

10 Nov 09 15. The Droid fails AS A PRODUCT when compared to Palm Pre and iPhone http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/08/droid-palm-pre-iphone-product-comparison/ “…They are right that Android is an interesting phone because it has interesting technology that goes further than the iPhone. What is better about the Droid? 1. It has a FAR better screen…2. Verizon is amazing. It didn’t drop on the usual dead zone on my route home…3. The call quality is noticeably better…4. There are some apps that are dramatically better…5. There are some features that are better on Android…6. It has a physical keyboard…7. Developers say they like the Android platform better and find that they are able to push apps to customers faster than on iPhone…8. Integration with Google’s apps (calendar, mail, etc) is better and deeper into the phone than on iPhone…if you read all of these you might be already headed out the door to buy the Droid. Here is why you might not want to head out the door yet…”

10 Nov 09 16. Droid Battery Life Requires New Charging Habits http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/181684/droid_battery_life_requires_new_charging_habits.html “…at least one other iPhone comparison that bears noticing, though…poor battery life could be an Achilles heel for the Droid invasion like the bacteria that took down the alien invasion force in War of the Worlds. Mobile phone manufacturers like to talk about battery life in terms of talk time vs. standby time...but smartphones are doing stuff even while they're just sitting there. Clearly we need a new way of considering battery life. PC World senior editor Robert Strohmeyer…charged it up until the Droid displayed a full charge, then set off for a busy day of work--new Droid in hand. He was surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed, when the Droid battery ran out of juice before he got home…If you're used to having a mobile phone instead of a mobile computing platform like the Droid, it may seem alarming that the device can't survive the day without a charge. The Droid battery life is not unusual, though, for smartphones and is really just indicative of the need to change charging habits to keep up with the needs of the device…”

10 Nov 09 17. Best Buy: $249 notebook this holiday season http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/10/best-buy-to-sell-a-249-notebook-this-holiday-season/ “…Best Buy has you covered with a $249 Acer laptop…an Intel Celeron 900 CPU, 2GB of memory, and a 160GB hard drive. Chances are the screen will be around 15-inches too and it will have the standard assortment of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DVD optical drive, webcam, and a 6-cell battery life…”

Open Source

10 Nov 09 18. Linux for grandma & grandpa http://blogs.computerworld.com/15040/linux_for_grandma_grandpa “…I can't spend all my time answering my mother-in-law's questions and worrying about what malware she might stumble over. So, I put desktop Linux on her laptop — and ever since then I've had a lot fewer late night calls. What's that? Linux is much too complicated and techie for someone who might have trouble navigating Outlook Express?...If your older relatives are like mine, they use the desktop for e-mail and the Internet, and that's about it. Firefox, with GMail for e-mail, looks and works the same on both Linux and Windows…you may want to add a few programs to their desktop to give them all full multimedia functionality, like Adobe Flash for Flash media, and VLC Media Player to play DVDs… with Windows, you must constantly be patching and re-patching it to keep it even halfway safe. If your older relatives are like mine, they're more likely to click on a Hallmark malware e-card than they are to OK an upgrade. With Linux, it's helpful if they can keep it up-to-date on their own, but it doesn't really matter if they don't. Not only is Linux simply more secure than Windows, the simple fact is that 99.9999% of all attacks are aimed at Windows…”

10 Nov 09 19. Virtualbox for solving a common small business problem http://blog.eracc.com/2009/11/05/gnulinux-virtualbox-for-solving-a-common-small-business-problem/ “…No one will use Linux until (insert application name here) runs natively on Linux…this is almost pure hyperbole…This article demonstrates one solution…most accountants that support small businesses only know QuickBooks. To be able to use these accountants the small business owner must use QuickBooks…Adding to this problem is many small businesses are very small businesses and may only need one computer for the entire business. This one computer must be used for web browsing and e-mail reading. Both of which are major inroads for malware on Microsoft systems. Yet the PC is also used for the accounting of the small business. Accounting data has a great deal of information that may be useful to criminals. However, malware is rife on Microsoft based systems making problematic any accounting data’s safety on a single multi-use Microsoft PC…I have just such a client that faced this same dilemma…he needed to use QuickBooks at the business so his long-time accountant could “do her thing” as she is one of the QuickBooks accountants I mention above. This computer at the business also had to handle e-mail and web browsing safely. This gentleman did not want to risk his accounting data on a Microsoft based PC that was multi-tasked with e-mail and web browsing. Yet he had to have all of those on his one office computer…I had explained to him we could solve his problem by running a real Microsoft OS in a virtual machine on Linux…”

10 Nov 09 20. TonidoPlug: Your Personal Cloud Server in a Plug http://maketecheasier.com/tonidoplug-your-personal-cloud-server-in-a-plug/2009/11/02#more-8105 “…Putting all your stuffs and confidential data on the cloud may seems like a good idea as it allows you to access to them anytime, anywhere. However, it can become a totally bad decision when the security of the cloud server is compromised or the third party providers wind up their services and all your data gone down with them…Tonido is a free software that turns your desktop into a personal server and allows you to access and share your files, media, calendar and apps from everywhere. Be it Windows, Mac or Linux, you simply install the software and have your own personal cloud server up and running in no time…if all your important data resides on your external backup drive and you wish to have your own cloud server running at all times without having to turn on your computer everytime, then TonidoPlug is the one for you. TonidoPlug is the hardware version of Tonido. It is a tiny, low power, low cost home server and NAS device powered by Tonido software. It comes with its own RAM and CPU (and preinstalled with Ubuntu). All you need to do is to plug it into the power socket and there you are, a server ready at your beckoning. It integrates nicely with all the features found in the Tonido software and allows you to access your files, music, pictures from anywhere…”

SkyNet

10 Nov 09 21. Is Google Dinging Music Search Results With Promo Songs? http://gigaom.com/2009/11/03/is-google-dinging-music-search-results-with-promo-songs/ “…Google’s new enhanced music search results will feature promotional songs from record labels, opening the door for Google to treat music search as a paid-content opportunity rather than just the shortest path to a song…The inclusion of promo material treads uncomfortably close to the line between neutral search and sponsored content. Rather than simply delivering an artist’s most popular songs in response to a query, Google is allowing someone else to hand-pick at least some of the songs that appear in its results — a small but real betrayal of user trust…by allowing a music vendor or a record label to choose what comes up first in a music search, Google is actually allowing promotional material to intrude on its putatively neutral results…”

10 Nov 09 22. Google Dashboard: Find Out What Google Knows About You http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/11/05/google-dashboard-find-out-what-google-knows-about-you/ “If you’re concerned that Google is starting to know a bit too much about you, you might be interested to find out that Google has released Google Dashboard, a window onto the data that Google stores about your accounts. All you need to do is go to www.google.com/dashboard and log in to your account. You’ll be presented with a list of all of the Google services that you use, and the data that is stored in them…”

10 Nov 09 23. Best Buy Will Help You Go Google Mobile http://www.pcworld.com/article/181592/best_buy_will_help_you_go_google_mobile.html “…Best Buy…partnering with Google to help install the Google Mobile app on new phones. Google likenes [sic] the partnership plan to the kind of conversation you might have with a friend. You've got a new phone, and your friend wants to tell you all about the benefits of Google's Mobile app. At Best Buy, you'll get a live demonstration of everything Google Mobile offers, and Best Buy staff will even help get the app running on your phone if you like. The app and the service are free. The benefits to Google are clear: More people will use Google on their phones, but what is Best Buy's getting out of this? Is it monetary compensation, or just the feeling that Best Buy's retail stores aren't irrelevant in the digital age?…”

10 Nov 09 24. Google Wave vs Twitter at conferences http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/11/google-wave-vs-twitter-at-conferences/ “…Twitter has quickly become the must-have channel for conference back-chat. Reading what other people tweet during a speech provides an extra dimension as you get a sense of what the audience is thinking…watch out Twitter. Google Wave is going to take this digitally-enabled conference back-channel a step further. At the recent Ecomm conference delegates were provided with Google Wave accounts. What resulted was a fantastic showcase of collaboration and crowd-sourcing…”

10 Nov 09 25. Google's holiday gift: Free WiFi in 47 airports http://www.geek.com/articles/news/google-offers-free-wi-fi-across-47-airports-from-today-20091110/ “Google is giving travellers an early Christmas present this year by rolling out free Wi-Fi access at 47 airports across the U.S. The free service is available from today and forms both a promotional tool for Google’s services and a way of raising money for charity…The offer forms an extension of the free in-flight Wi-Fi Google has already announced for Virgin America flights which also starts today and runs until January 15th (as will the airport Wi-Fi offer)…”

10 Nov 09 26. Gizmo5 Reportedly Acquired by Google http://www.pcworld.com/article/181791/googles_purchase_of_skype_rival_gizmo5_could_benefit_you.html “…Rumors have it that the acquisition-happy search giant has acquired Gizmo5, a Skype-like VoIP startup…The VoIP startup's technology provides Google with a PSTN link, or a means of enabling inbound and outbound calls to convention landline and cell phones. By integrating Gizmo5's tech with Google Voice, a clever call-management app that provides one number for all of your phones, and the Google Talk voice/chat client, a powerful phone service is born. "If you put all of this stuff together, you have something a lot more powerful than Skype," Abramson says. "Google has just gotten to where Skype wants to go a little faster, assuming the deal is done…”

10 Nov 09 27. New handbook for Google http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/brierdudley/2010231374_brier09.html “…the essential guide for Droid owners — and anyone else moving their life onto Google technology platforms — is a 384-pager written by The New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta. "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It" is a definitive, semiauthorized history of the enigmatic company and analysis of its upcoming challenges. The book is also a candid look at tensions within the Googleplex — between its idealism and commercial ambitions, iconoclastic founders and maturing company management challenges — and its overarching drive to play an ever bigger role in people's lives. Most striking of all, for people familiar with Microsoft's history, is how much Google resembles its nemesis in Redmond. Both have quirky and confrontational founders, dogged by accusations they poached breakout products, so fervent that they miss growing concerns about their fantastic success…”

10 Nov 09 28. Google looks to dominate smartphone advertising with AdMob acquisition http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_google_bought_admob.php “Google announced this morning that it has acquired 3-year old mobile display ad serving platform AdMob for $750 million, half the price it paid for YouTube in 2006. Why did Google make this move?...First, AdMob is a very strong company in a sector (mobile advertising) that everyone expects to become much more important in the future. Second, this is a chance to make a big move towards monetizing on Apple's iPhone platform while making sure that no one else does something similar to Android in the future…”

General Technology

10 Nov 09 29. Isabella Products and AT&T launch two-way sharing digital photo frames http://venturebeat.com/2009/11/05/isabella-products-and-att-launch-two-way-sharing-digital-photo-frames/ “Isabella Products is announcing Vizit, a two-way interactive digital photo frame that will share photos via AT&T’s wireless network. Most web-connected digital photo frames can display pictures via flash memory cards or receive them over the Internet. Concord, Mass.-based Isabella has made one that uses AT&T’s wireless data network to both share and receive photos…Vizit has an easy-to-use interface, real-time photo sharing, a touchscreen display, and remote photo management. The latter lets you manage photos when you log into VizitMe.com…With Vizit, you can take pictures of your kid on a camera phone in San Francisco and share them with grandparents across the country.…”

10 Nov 09 30. Parallels launches latest software to blend Mac and Windows apps http://venturebeat.com/2009/11/04/parallels-launches-latest-software-to-blend-mac-and-windows-apps/ “Parallels…is launching its Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac today. The software enables an Apple Mac computer to run Windows applications…Not only can you switch screens from the Mac OS to Windows, you can also use Windows applications alongside Mac apps. This convenience is why Parallels Desktop has more than two million users who run Windows…side by side with the Mac OS X…it should make companies like Microsoft nervous because it minimizes the importance of any given operating system…This new Desktop 5 for Mac software is compatible with Windows 7 applications…”

10 Nov 09 31. Multi-button OpenOfficeMouse http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/openofficemouse-crams-practically-a-million-buttons-onto-the-back-of-a-rodent-2009117/ “…How many mouse buttons do you really need? If you’re an Apple user, you only need one. A PC owner might get by with a two button mouse, but three buttons are better, since that opens up the easy possibility of tab and new file opening…Logitech sells numerous mice with thumb buttons, triggering email, volume, digital audio player track control and more…Are you the top cleric in your World of Warcraft guild? There’s rodents with a dozen buttons or more for the binding of all your healing spells…The new OpenOfficeMouse developed by WarMouse in partnership with the OpenOffice.org community doesn’t just put a dozen buttons on the face of the mouse: it crams eighteen in there, each with double-click functionality…”

10 Nov 09 32. Augmented Reality in the Future Of Business http://testfunda.com/examprep/mba-resource/current-affairs/article/augmented-reality-in-the-future-of-business.htm?assetid=13505466-1668-4c9b-8c77-bcb3711ef345 “…The number of technological gadgets and applications that have made themselves at home in our lives is mind-boggling. The latest generation of tools to do so is the range of “augmented Reality” devices and applications…Augmented reality is any perceived reality to which elements of technology give an additional perspective…Some of the aspects that it will affect in the future include…when you hold up your phone to a building to view the image, the device will let out a stream of information on the same, without you having to search for it…walking through a doorway would trigger access to the person’s medical records, allowing the doctor to see medical history without having to go through a lengthy procedure of question and answer…BMW has recently done a conceptual design where instructions for repair are flashed onto the glasses of a mechanic and he follows the given instructions…”

10 Nov 09 33. Seven perfectly legal ways to get Windows 7 cheap (or even free) http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1533 “…Windows 7…ranges from $120 for a Home Premium upgrade to $320 for a fully licensed copy of Windows 7 Ultimate…Most people have much better options available, if you know where to look…My goal in this post is to point you to deals that customers legitimately qualify for…”

10 Nov 09 34. The future of interface design http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/the-future-of-interface-design/ “…The future of how we interact with computers is exciting to say the least. What once seemed like nonsense outside of Hollywood and Science Fiction is now starting to find it’s way into reality, and some of the technology is a bit overwhelming. Have a taste of what the future of interface design has to offer…Heads Up Displays…Gesture-based Interfaces…Spatial Motion Interfaces…Augmented Reality…”

10 Nov 09 35. Children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/Profile.aspx?Cand=T&TRID=764 “…Michelle Khine arrived at the University of California­'s brand-new Merced campus eager to establish her first lab. She was experimenting with tiny liquid-filled channels in hopes of devising chip-based diagnostic tests, a discipline called microfluidics. The trouble was, the specialized equipment that she previously used to make microfluidic chips cost more than $100,000--money that wasn't immediately available…Khine remembered her favorite childhood toy: Shrinky Dinks, large sheets of thin plastic that can be colored with paint or ink and then shrunk in a hot oven…she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven…She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal…when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world…”

10 Nov 09 36. Cough into your mobile phone for instant diagnosis http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6530704/Cough-into-your-mobile-phone-for-instant-diagnosis.html “…Your mobile phone may soon be able to diagnose respiratory illnesses in seconds when you cough into it. Software being developed by American and Australian scientists will hopefully allow patients simply to cough into their phone, and it will tell them whether they have cold, flu, pneumonia or other respiratory diseases. Whether a cough is dry or wet, or “productive” or “non-productive” (referring to the presence of mucus on the lungs), can give a doctor information about what is causing that cough, for example whether it is caused by a bacterial or a viral infection…”

10 Nov 09 37. Apple's Mini DisplayPort officially adopted by VESA http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/10/apples_mini_displayport_officially_adopted_by_vesa.html “…DisplayPort 1.2 is a new standard VESA is finalizing that will double the technology's bandwidth capabilities to 21.6GB/s. It is said to support multiple monitors via a single connector, 3D displays, and higher resolutions, refresh rates and color depths. The Mini DisplayPort is a small form factor connector invented by Apple to fully support the VESA DisplayPort protocol. Unlike the Mini-DVI and Micro-DVI connectors common on previous generation Apple products, the port is capable of driving resolutions up to 2560x1600, which is commonly used on 30-inch displays…Mini DisplayPort is much smaller than DVI (Digital Video Interface) or VGA connectors and enables full function display output on ultrathin notebooks and netbooks…”

Leisure & Entertainment

10 Nov 09 38. The Beatles on iTunes: Don’t Hold Your Breath http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20091105/tc_pcworld/thebeatlesonitunesdontholdyourbreath “Wondering why there's so much hubbub over The Beatles selling all their albums on a USB drive? Because deep down inside, everyone's hoping that someday, the Beatles' catalog will come to Apple's iTunes (and maybe Amazon, too). From what I see, though, this is just wishful thinking, and if anything, we're further from an Apple-Beatles agreement than ever…”

10 Nov 09 39. Technology helps, but digital photography is still an art http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110603828.html “…as art lovers take in the hundreds of images mounted around town at FotoWeek D.C., most of them will probably look a fair amount like photos always have. The technology used to produce them, however, will almost certainly be new. They will have been shot and printed digitally…Twenty-five years ago, as a budding computer geek, he got his hands on what he thinks was the first Macintosh computer in the District -- bought, Adamson says, in the vacuum-cleaner section of Hecht's department store…a decade later, when Adamson became one of the first people in the country to make digital art prints, he didn't think the technology would ever be within the means of amateurs. His first digital printer, built around the complex Iris technology, cost him $150,000…Now that printers can cost a thousand times less than they used to, and any hobbyist can turn out an impressive image, I asked Adamson about the ubiquity of digital photography, its virtues and pitfalls…”

10 Nov 09 40. TEDx bite off more than they could chew? http://www.examiner.com/x-28238-Baltimore-Social-Media-Examiner~y2009m11d4-TEDx-bite-off-more-than-they-could-chew “…Starting tomorrow, the largest technology convention ever to see Baltimore City will commence at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). With the help of over 100 volunteers, TEDx (acronym for technology, entertainment and design) MidAtlantic will attract over 500 Baltimoreans and 20 A-, B-, and C-list speakers from around Baltimore and the nation…According to the TEDxMidatlantic website, TED conferences bring together the world’s leading thinkers and doers for a series of discussions, presentations and performances. The conference is meant to celebrate the convergence of Technology, Entertainment, and Design…”

10 Nov 09 41. The EXAMINE'd Life: Keeping Interactive Fiction Alive http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/05/the-examined-life-ke.html “…As with my earlier column on the new vanguard and returning classic franchises that are keeping point and click adventures alive a decade or more past their prime, there's one other genre that all but the hardest-of-the-core and its tight-knit community itself seem to have forgotten: the text adventure…it's a genre that certainly is flourishing deep in the underground at places like The IFDB, the IFWiki, the yearly IFComp(etition)…”

Economy and Technology

10 Nov 09 42. Skype Founders Settle With eBay http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/06/confirmed-skype-founders-settle-with-ebay-and-others-get-14-stake-in-skype-not-10/ “…eBay has just announced that it has reached a settlement with the founders of Skype, clearing the way for the sale of the Internet communication company to a consortium formed by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board…The original Skype founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, are now back in the game. The Scandinavian businessmen are getting 14 percent of Skype back for rights to the Global Index P2P technology their company Joltid controls (which is key to the Skype software)…”

10 Nov 09 43. Cisco's EMC Venture: Better Than a Buyout? http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2009/tc2009113_873211.htm “…Cisco used the event to unveil a joint venture with EMC (EMC) and a lineup of data center products in conjunction with EMC and VMware (VMW). Together, the companies will sell what they're billing as the building blocks of data centers, massive storehouses of computing power. Known as "Vblocks," the products include networking equipment from Cisco, computer storage gear from EMC, and VMware virtualization software, which is designed to boost the efficiency of servers, the computers that run Web sites and corporate networks…an alliance with EMC and VMware could help Cisco, one of techdom's most acquisitive companies, grab a larger share of customers' computing budgets without the cost and scrutiny of buying VMware outright…The deal "is a substitute for a formal merger between Cisco and EMC," he says. It "will serve as a foundation for what potentially could have been accomplished through a merger, without a lot of red tape." VMware, 82% owned by EMC, remains a coveted prize for a number of tech companies…”

10 Nov 09 44. Mint’s Aaron Patzer: “We Will End-Of-Life Quicken Online” In Six to Nine Months http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/03/mints-aaron-patzer-we-will-end-of-life-quicken-online-in-six-to-nine-months/ “…Intuit closed on its previously announced $170 million acquisition of personal budgeting site Mint, making Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer the new vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. He is now in charge of not only Mint.com, but also all of Quicken’s online and desktop products…“Over the next 6 to 9 months,” he says, “we will end-of-life Quicken Online and their customer’s data will be migrated over to Mint.” Just a few months ago, the Quicken Online team was questioning Mint’s success. Now, Patzer is their new boss…What I want to do is to take your stock transactions and everything you’ve tagged in Mint as a medical expense or business expense and push that over to see if you should itemize deductions. If we pull in your 1099s and deductions, we have done half your taxes for you. We could reduce the time it takes you to do your taxes to 20 minutes or less…”

10 Nov 09 45. Nvidia Frustrated by Underestimated Demand http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355496,00.asp “…Although Nvidia reported higher revenue and profits both sequentially and compared to the same quarter a year ago, chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang expressed frustration that the company couldn't do better…GPU sales increased sequentially by 25 percent to $465 million, according to Nvidia; desktop sales were up by 19 percent, while the mobile business climbed by 41 percent. Nvidia's professional business, based on its Tesla series of GPUs, climbed by 11 percent to $129.6 million, while its Tegra-driven consumer business increased by 22 percent to $61.2 million…If there was an underlying theme of the call, however, it was lost opportunities. Huang said Nvidia underestimated demand for its graphics chips, and as a result was supply-constrained for the entire quarter…” http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10391929-92.html “…Nvidia is already working with device makers who will use its Tegra chip in these designs next year. "I think that's going to be the next big form factor," he said. "More and more people that use the iPhone would like to have a bigger iPhone. And the fact that 4g is coming--20 megabits per second. What can't you do. I think this (market) space is about to go nuts…I really think we're on the cusp of our second personal computer revolution…”

10 Nov 09 46. Electronic Arts: $391 million loss, 1,500 job cuts http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_13748372 “…Electronic Arts, the world's second-largest video game maker, said Monday that it will slash its work force by 17 percent, or 1,500 jobs, and reported its 11th straight quarterly loss…the company struggles to right itself after missing the video game industry's shift from expensive game consoles like the Xbox 360 to casual games on Web sites like Facebook. It was also slow to create games for the wildly successful Nintendo Wii…”

Civilian Aerospace

10 Nov 09 47. Laser-powered space lift fails to work http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/6504242/Laser-powered-space-lift-fails-to-work.html “…A laser-powered robot failed to complete its climb up a long cable dangling from a helicopter on Wednesday in a $2 million (£1.2 million) attempt to test the real-life potential of the science fiction concept of lifts in space…The contest required the machines to climb 2,953 feet up a cable slung beneath a helicopter hovering nearly a mile high…Space Pirates team was first off the ground…Its climber, a flat machine several feet square, initially failed to respond to laser power…On the second try it began moving and then stopped…the laser could not stay locked on the machine. It failed to climb all the way up before the laser had to be shut off to protect satellites…other teams scheduled to compete later on Wednesday were the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team, known as USST, and LaserMotive of Seattle…”

10 Nov 09 48. Space Elevators Climbing Towards Reality http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/11/elevator-to-the-top-space-elevators-climbing-towards-reality/ “…The Space Elevator Games seeks to award prizes that are funded by NASA…for the development of technologies needed to build a Space Elevator…Yesterday, the group LaserMotive, successfully ran a climber up 1 kilometer of test cable at an average rate of just over 2 meters per second, qualifying for the 2nd place prize of $900,000. The craft is powered by a stationary laser beaming the power to operate to the climber. There are two other teams competing, The Kansas City Space Pirates and The University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team, and there is still a first prize of $1.1 million out there for climbing the kilometer at an average rate of 5 meters per second. These are the kind of early developments that could lead to a revolution in space travel as well as spark the imagination of the next generation…”

10 Nov 09 49. Space Hotel Takes Reservations for 2012 Opening http://www.space.com/news/091104-space-hotel.html “…Spacefarers can book a three-night stay at the Galactic Suite Space Resort for $4.4 million, the Barcelona-based company planning the hotel has said. So far 43 paying guests have already reserved a spot, while more than 200 have expressed interest…critics have questioned whether the hotel can really be ready so soon, and whether the company has enough money to see the plan through. Claramunt said an anonymous billionaire has fronted the company $3 billion to finance the project…”

10 Nov 09 50. Virgin Galactic: new satellite design http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/11/04/334386/virgin-galactic-considers-new-satellite-design.html “Virgin Galactic's proposed LauncherOne rocket may orbit a new mini satellite designed specifically for the launch vehicle to increase the payload's useful mass for power, propulsion or instruments…A previous Virgin Galactic study concluded an all-composite two-stage rocket, air launched by the WhiteKnight Two carrier aircraft, could orbit a 200kg (440lb) satellite…Virgin Galactic's target launch price is $2 million and the spaceline's president Will Whitehorn told the International Astronautical Congress in Daejeon that the service could be operating a year after his suborbital tourism was up and running…”

10 Nov 09 51. SpaceX Picks Launch Date for New Rocket's Debut http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/091102-spacex-falcon9-launchdate.html “Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has requested a Feb. 2 launch date for the maiden flight of its new Falcon 9 rocket, according to a recent launch range forecast issued by the U.S. Air Force's 45th Space Wing…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

10 Nov 09 52. Getting GPUs on the grid http://www.isgtw.org/?pid=1002127 “…Meet “Magic,” a supercomputing cluster based at the University of Buffalo’s CyberInfrastructure Laboratory (CI Lab). On the surface, Magic is like any other cluster of Dell nodes. “But then attached to each Dell node is an nVidia node, and each of these nVidia nodes have roughly 1000 graphical processing units,” said Russ Miller, the principal investigator for CI Lab. “Those GPUs are the same as the graphical processing unit in many laptops and desktops.” That’s the charm of these chips: because they are mass-manufactured for use in your average, run-of-the-mill computer, they are an extremely inexpensive way of boosting computational power. That boost comes at a price, however. “These roughly 1000 processors on each nVidia node are programmed in a synchronous process, basically bringing us back to programming methods of the 1960s,” said Miller. The parallel programs modern supercomputers run are already quite difficult to write…”

10 Nov 09 53. PRACE Stream Computing Workshop To Be Held in Stockholm http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/PRACE-Stream-Computing-Workshop-To-Be-Held-in-Stockholm-69308417.html “The Stockholm Stream Computing Center, in association with PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, will arrange a workshop on stream computing, Dec. 7–10, 2009, in Stockholm, Sweden at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The workshop will offer an introduction to OpenCL and stream/GPU programming. It will consist of lectures and hands-on experiences in using OpenCL on state-of-the-art stream processors…”

*****

NEW NET Issues List for 03 Nov 2009

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 03 November 2009, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we're upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/want-50mbps-internet-in-your-town-threaten-to-roll-out-your-own.ars “…Regional telco TDS Telecommunications last week issued a press release announcing a major milestone for the company: 50Mbps service over fiber optic cable to residents of Monticello, Minnesota…Even better is the price, which starts at $49.95 a month for 50Mbps fiber service without the need to buy other services…But the entire congratulatory press release glosses over a key fact: the reason that Monticello received a fiber network was the town's decision to install a municipal-owned fiber network to every home in town… spawning a set of TDS lawsuits that went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the town…”

2. Firefox 3.5.4 closes security holes http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10385082-264.html “…Mozilla released Firefox 3.5.4 for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Tuesday to patch six critical security holes and some other problems. The new browser version also improves stability and fixes a problem with clearing browser history…”

3. What Comes After the Real Time Web http://siliconangle.net/ver2/2009/10/28/what-comes-after-the-real-time-web/ “…The real-time Web, or what some of us call "The Stream," is not an end in itself, it’s a means to an end. So what will it enable, where is it headed, and what’s it going to look like when we look back at this trend in 10 or 20 years? The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves: 1) Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it’s simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos…2) Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention… What changes to our bodies, minds and organizations may result from these selective evolutionary pressures?... * Individual brains will get less good at things like memorization and recall, calculation, reasoning, and long-term planning and action. * Individual brains will get better at multi-tasking, information filtering, trend detection, and social communication… * Our bodies may actually improve in certain areas. We will become more, not less, mobile, as computation and the Web become increasingly embedded into our surroundings, and into augmented views of our environments. This may cause our bodies to get into better health and shape since we will be less sedentary, less at our desks, less in front of TV’s…”

4. Travel book goes mobile with scannable QR code http://www.physorg.com/news175882488.html “Now a technology called QR codes, for Quick Response, offers a way to forge a functional relationship between your guidebook and your smart phone. The codes are already big in Japan, but relatively unknown in the U.S. QR codes are essentially barcodes that can be scanned by smart phone cameras and other devices. You aim your camera at a QR code on a page in a travel book, for example, and it links to information online, such as a map or directions based on the user's location…QR codes can also appear in media other than books. You can scan them off a computer screen. They've been put on T-shirts and even billboards…Sounds neat? It is, except for the fact that this emerging technology still has a few bugs…”

5. Microsoft Drops Prices Of Cloud Apps http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterpriseapps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221500016 “…Microsoft has lowered the subscription prices for its cloud computing applications… The software giant has lowered the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite…from $15 a month per seat to $10 a month…For Exchange Online alone, its email software-as-a-service, the price drops from $10 to $5. Microsoft also has increased its standard e-mail storage per user from 5 Gbytes to 25 Gbytes -- the same amount that Google provides for Google Apps subscriptions…Google Apps, by comparison, which includes apps for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, in addition to email, costs only $50 per user per year…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

6. New LoroBot ransomware encrypts files, demands $100 for decryption http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=4748 “Researchers from CA have intercepted a new ransomware variant encrypting popular file extensions (.zip; .rar; .pdf; .rtf; .txt; .jpg; .jpeg; .waw; .mp3; .db; .xls; .docx; .xlsx; .doc) and demanding a $100 for the decryption software. According to the message which replaces the desktop’s background upon execution, the files are encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption, and that “there’s a 0% chance that you will be able to manually decrypt the files without the encryption key“. However, this particular cybercriminal appears to be bluffing since the ransomware encrypts the data using the XOR cipher. Naturally, by doing so he allowed CA’s researchers to release a free decryptor for Win32/Gpcode.J.…”

7. Gmail and the Constitution http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/10/29/on-gmail-and-the-constitution/ “…Is it kosher for a law enforcement agency to, pursuant to a lawfully granted search warrant, search your Gmail account without telling you? According to an opinion handed down earlier this year…the answer is yes…Judge Mosman concludes…Much of the reluctance to apply traditional notions of third party disclosure to the e-mail context seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the lack of privacy we all have in our e-mails. Some people seem to think that they are as private as letters, phone calls, or journal entries. The blunt fact is, they are not…”

8. Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/ “…companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on Facebook and MySpace through games like Farmville and Mobsters…these games try to get people to pay cash for in game currency so they can level up faster and have a better overall experience. Which is fine. But for users who won’t pay cash, a wide variety of “offers” are available where they can get in-game currency in exchange for lead gen-type offers. Most of these offers are bad for consumers because it confusingly gets them to pay far more for in-game currency than if they just paid cash…The games that scam the most, win…There can be only one reason Facebook and MySpace turn a blind eye to user protection – they’re getting such a huge cut of revenue back from these developers in advertising. If they turn off the spigot, they hurt themselves. Zynga may be spending $50 million a year on Facebook advertising alone, fueled partially by lead gen scams. Wonder how Facebook got to profitability way ahead of schedule?...a large portion of it is coming from users who’ve been tricked into one scam or another…It’s time for this to stop. Facebook and MySpace need to create and enforce rules against it so that game developers aren’t tempted to get a competitive edge by scamming users. And if Facebook/MySpace won’t protect users, then the government will have to step in…”

9. Thousands of Consumer Internet Connectivity Devices Are Vulnerable to Attack http://www.physorg.com/news175788913.html “…Many of these devices are easy targets for just about anyone with mal-intent. One can ‘log in’ to your home router and plant software in it, much like a virus, and record your network traffic or alter it; record phone conversations, or do just about anything nasty one can imagine…Stolfo found that certain types of consumer devices publicly accessible over the Internet have vulnerability rates as high as 41.62 percent. Among VoIP phones, the vulnerability rate was one in five…Like PCs, embedded devices contain software…To protect themselves, consumers need only read their instruction manual and follow the directions telling them how to go online and set up their machine so no one can break into it.…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

10. Google Maps Navigation: The First Killer App for Android 2.0 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_maps_navigation_the_killer_app_for_android_2.php “Android 2.0 just got its first killer app: Google Maps Navigation. Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 will be available for free and will be part of the default Google Maps app on Android 2.0 phones. The service offers all the features that users expect from a modern GPS app, including traffic data, 3D view and turn-by-turn voice guidance. Because it's connected to the Google cloud, the app can also display street view images, satellite imagery and real-time traffic data. Google also implemented a voice recognition feature. Two weeks ago, Google severed its ties with Tele Atlas and started to display its own mapping data instead. Today's launch of the Maps Navigation app explains why Google decided to do this. Google can now display these maps without having to pay royalties to a third party and without having to negotiate a new contract with Tele Atlas…”

11. Want a Droid for work e-mail? It'll cost you $15 extra http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/want-droid-work-e-mail-itll-cost-you-extra-575 “…Verizon offers three data plans for Droid customers: $30 month on top of your voice plan's rate for non-Exchange usage, $45 per month on top of your voice plan's rate for Exchange usage, and $50 per month total cost for a data-only plan (whether or not you use it to access Exchange)…”

12. iPhone cannot win the smartphone wars http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/iPhone-cannot-win-the-smartphone-wars/1256668455 “I'm going to make a bold prediction: Apple's iPhone will lose the mobile device wars…iPhone is to Android -- and somewhat Symbian OS -- handsets as Macintosh was to the DOS/Windows PC in the 1980s and 1990s…by the mid 1990s, Windows PCs pushed down Mac market share. The iPhone is poised to track similarly. Gartner predicts that Android OS shipments will exceed iPhone OS by 2012…Mobile devices like cell phones are sure to replace PCs…From this year, Gartner predicts that end users will spend more on smartphones than they will on notebooks. The analyst firm expects that most PC manufacturers will move into the smartphone market…the Windows PC is classic example of a robust and vital ecosystem. The Google informational/search platform is another. Around either platform, there is a discernible ecosystem of third parties -- not just software developers -- making lots of money. The two ecosystems are broad and deep. By comparison, Apple's App Store/iPhone/iPod touch platform is narrower and shallower, despite the depth of applications, because the ecosystem depends on a closed, end-to-end technology platform. Apple controls everything…”

13. Is the BlackBerry Doomed? http://www.toktumi.com/voipnews/blackberry-doomed/ “…At least part of RIM’s decline can be attributed to the surge in popularity of Apple’s iPhone and other smartphone devices…According to Gartner the BlackBerry will be leapfrogged by the iPhone, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Google Android platforms in three years. Having recently developed versions of our popular Line2 app for both the iPhone and Blackberry platforms, I can tell you one major reason for RIM’s difficulties: It is simply too difficult and too expensive to develop applications for the BlackBerry platform. Developing for the iPhone platform was a piece of cake – one OS, one hardware platform, a powerful, well-documented API, and a simple submission process for the app store…the BlackBerry was never intended to support an app marketplace for third party developers. As a result developing for the BlackBerry was a nightmare. There are dozens of different models, many with different screen sizes, features, hardware, etc. If your software works on one, it may not work on others – so you have to test every single phone, every time you make a change…”

14. Stalqer Peers Into Your iPhone For A New Level Of Creepiness http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/27/stalqer-peers-into-your-iphone-for-a-new-level-of-location-based-creepiness/ “…Foursquare and Loopt have put location-based social networks on the map…there’s a new kid on the block, called Stalqer, which best described as a Foursquare on steroids. The iPhone app…will be free…Stalqer is very similar to Foursquare in that it tracks your and your friends’ locations…Stalqer updates the location in the background, which Foursquare, and most other apps, don’t do at the moment. This is because the device does not allow third party apps to run in the background. But Stalqer has found a way to record your location without you having to actually open up the application…The app sets up an email account which operates in the background, and collects large amount of data out of the POP or IMAP handshake relevant to location, primarily via the IP address…So when the phone checks for mail, the app gets a location point…on average, every 15 minutes…”

15. Creative is latest to tackle e-book readers http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10387880-1.html “…Creative…showed off a working model of its first e-book reader, tentatively named the MediaBook, at its annual general meeting Thursday in Singapore. The device reportedly has a touch screen, text-to-speech function, and an SD memory card slot. It will run on Creative's Zii System-On-Chip technology and will be Internet-enabled…”

16. New mobile device does Twitter and only Twitter http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?&entry_id=50840 “The Twitter Peek, which debuts on Amazon.com today, flies in the face of the "everything-and-every-app-you'll-ever-need-in-your-life" marketing used to promote today's smart phones. This hand held device does Twitter and nothing but Twitter…Executives at Peek Inc. of New York aren't betting on the tech-savvy crowd…they believe the Twitter Peak [sic] will interest customers who own simple, inexpensive cell phones, yet still want to read their Twitter news updates and other tweets away from the desktop. "Twitter's more useful on a mobile device,'' said Peek founder and CEO Amol Sarva…Peek's first products introduced last year - the Peek Classic, which just does e-mail and costs $19.95, and the $59.95 Peek Pronto, which accesses up to five e-mail accounts and can send and receive text messages. Each requires a wireless service plans that start at $15 per month…the Twitter Peak [sic] costs $99 for six months, which includes the monthly wireless data service through T-Mobile, and $7.95 per month afterward, with no service contract. Or you can fork over a one-time $199 payment that includes wireless service for the lifetime of the device…”

17. Opera Mobile 10 Beta For Smartphones http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/opera-mobile-10-beta-for-nokia-and-other-symbians60-smartphones-released/ “It’s been about two months since Opera introduced the non-beta version of its Opera 10 desktop browser, and today the Norwegian software developer is following up on that release with that of the latest beta build of Opera Mobile, a custom browser specifically built to give Symbian and Windows Mobile equipped handset users a (much) more pleasant Web browsing experience…”

18. Augmented Reality Goes Mobile http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2009/tc2009112_434755.htm “…Once Monocle is activated, users looking through the iPhone camera can see reviews and other information about restaurants, stores, and other businesses in the direction the camera is pointing. Monocle was one of the first smartphone applications in the U.S. to use a technology known as augmented reality, which meshes digital information with actual images of the subject of that data. For many, augmented reality evokes images of what the Terminator sees as he homes in on a potential target, or the real time data seen by Luke Skywalker as he scans the barren Tatooine desertscape through a pair of field goggles. Augmented reality, also known by the acronym AR, has been around for at least two decades, but it has been largely relegated to applications in key areas such as training and inspection in automotive and aerospace manufacturing…”

Open Source

19. Citibank Doesn't Want Your Business, Linux Users http://consumerist.com/5393579/citibank-doesnt-want-your-business-linux-users “…Citibank won't let customers using Linux computers log in to their online accounts. Adam argues that in 2009 this doesn't make sense, especially when no other major corporate website blocks him like this…I frequently struggle with Citibank because they seem to have decided to not support Linux and Firefox as clients for their online credit card account management sites…I want to be able to access my accounts online from my PC like I do for my cell phone provider, three other banks, my 401k manager, my school and scores of other places where online paperwork takes place as part of the business of real life. I'm even able to do online business with the State of New York, the State of Calfifornia, the IRS and even some obscure federal agencies...I can successfully apply for and receive a credit card through Citibank using Firefox and Linux, but after they've got my business, I can't login to manage my account. What's up with that…”

20. Ford unveils open-source Sync developer platform http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13746_7-10385619-48.html “When Ford and Microsoft opened up their joint Sync platform for its own applications and updates, we wondered when the day would come that third-party developers would be given a crack at the in-vehicle infomatics interface. Well, that day may be on the horizon. Ford announced that it is testing an open-source platform to could be used in the future to develop applications that make use of Sync to connect to social networks in the cloud…the system is built on a Robotics Studio platform by Microsoft that has been layered with an open-source cloud-computing platform developed by Ford that will allow…interactions with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter…How can social network interactions be useful and safe in 2,000-plus pounds of steel moving at 70mph?…”

21. Open Source Hardware http://pcplus.techradar.com/node/3130/ “…Open-source hardware has reached its tipping point. If the time wasn’t ripe for this revolution, news of an open-source camera from a university wouldn’t have made it past the campus science journal. But Stanford’s Frankencamera project is popping up all over the radar…The Arduino computer project started as an inexpensive prototyping system and is now accessible to electronic students worldwide thanks to dozens of clones that spawned because of Arduino’s open specs. Then there’s the RepRap self-replicating open spec 3D printer that’s 50 times cheaper than commercial alternatives. Hardware maker VIA has released a reference design for a netbook, MIT plans to do the same with its solar-powered car and there’s even an open-source graphics card under development…Using non-proprietary standard hardware helps them keep their costs down…open-source hardware actually presents a business opportunity for the hardware vendors. Take the example of Cisco. When a licence violation forced the company to release the specs for one of its routers, sales picked up. A dozen or so third-party firmware projects mushroomed around the router and made it do things way beyond Cisco’s wildest imagination…”

22. Your own DNS http://www.wisnaes.com/2009/10/25/setting-up-your-own-dns-part-1-getting-started/ “…I have had a server in the house on and off over the years, but after moving to Brazil, it became a real need. The server is used for developing websites, testing different installations, caching updates for the workstations in the house, sharing files and sharing our laser printer as well as a number of other small things. It is also a way for me to learn more about networking, Linux servers etc. Learning is also one of the reasons why I would like to set up a small caching DNS that also resolves the stuff I have on my local network. This task has been a challenge, but with the help of a lot of different online documentation, friends that have given me tips about this and that, I have managed to get it to a point where I can truly say it is working. So I thought I would try to gather the information here, both to help others and for me to remember what I actually have done…”

23. Running Ubuntu 9.10 With Older PC Hardware http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_karmic_old&num=1 “…we looked at how Ubuntu 9.10 is running with older PC hardware…ran a set of tests across Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 9.04, and…Ubuntu 9.10…The laptop we used for this old PC hardware testing…had an Intel Pentium M 1.86GHz processor, Intel 915 + ICH6M Chipset, 2GB of system memory, an 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9AT00 IDE HDD, and an ATI Mobility Radeon X300 graphics processor… Ubuntu 9.10 also provided the best performance when compared to earlier Ubuntu releases from the past 18 months. However, in six of the eighteen tests that were run, there were notable performance regressions involving Ubuntu 9.10. Many performance improvements can be attributed to the switch from the EXT3 to EXT4 file-system by default, but in the tests that did not benefit from this newer file-system, it ended up degrading the performance…most users will find Ubuntu 9.10 worth the upgrade…”

24. Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/03/karmic_koala_frustration/ “…Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to the web for answers…”

25. Linux Software Roundup: Communications Apps http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ubuntu-linux-communications,review-31708.html “…we will be focusing on communications applications. While these apps still rely on Internet access to function, their focus is to allow the user to communicate with other individuals using the Internet simply as a transit medium. We will go over Personal Information Managers (PIM), email clients, Instant Messengers (IM), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) clients… Personal Information Managers (PIMs) are typically thought of as email clients deluxe, but they usually also include at least an address book, calendar, task manager, and some sort of system for taking notes…Evolution is incredibly user-friendly as far as PIMs go, without sacrificing advanced functions. I always wondered why many distros choose Evolution over Thunderbird, but I wonder no more. In short, Evolution gives even Outlook a run for it's money. If you don't like to run KDE apps, or if Kontact is simply overkill for your needs, go with Evolution…If your email address is provided to you by your ISP or the company that you work for, you will most likely need an email client…”

SkyNet

26. Google makes Similar Images part of image search http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10384618-248.html “Google on Tuesday announced that its similar-images feature is now a standard part of the company's image search technology…as a way for users to find images that share certain visual similarities with those in Google Images search results. This means that you could do a search for "ice cube" and very quickly fork out Google's results between images of the frozen chunks of water and the popular West Coast rapper…”

27. Google Music Search: Partners with MySpace, Lala, Gracenote and Others http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_music_launches.php “…Google Music…service is powered by Lala and MySpace's iLike. Other partners include Gracenote, iMeem, Pandora and Rhapsody. Google has also partnered with the major music labels: EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. Through Lala and iLike, Google will also be able to feature music from a large number of independent labels. This new service will be available only in the US for now and will be integrated in the default search results page…big winners here are obviously Lala and MySpace/iLike…”

28. More, more, more real estate in Google Maps http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/more-more-more-real-estate-in-google.html “…Google Maps has become an even more useful tool for online real estate searching. Here are a couple of things you can look out for next time you visit…we've made it easier to find real estate listings…simply select "Real Estate" from the 'More' button on the top right of any Google Map to discover listings…refine your search using the left hand panel - price, bedrooms, bathrooms…We've also added the ability to search for rental listings in the US…Google Maps is now showing even more information about an area as you pan around and zoom in. There are small icons on the map showing the names and location of businesses and prominent features of the neighborhood…”

29. Preview Google's Search Results http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/11/preview-googles-search-results.html “…If you click on "Show options" and select "Page previews" after performing a search, Google will show a longer snippet and a thumbnail for each search result…”

30. Google hybrid onboarding: cutting back on your long list of passwords http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/cutting-back-on-your-long-list-of.html “…Thanks to the utilization of new technology, we're now seeing large-scale success in eliminating the need for passwords while increasing the successful registration rate at websites to over 90%. The most visible examples come from Plaxo, Facebook, Yahoo! and Google using a technique the industry calls hybrid onboarding. In the past, if you're a Gmail user who got an invitation to use Plaxo or Facebook, you were asked to perform the traditional process of creating a new account with yet another password, and then you might also have been asked to provide the password of your email account so Plaxo or Facebook could look up the list of your friends. With hybrid onboarding, if you click on such an invitation in your Gmail…Clicking the large button on the Plaxo page takes you to a page at Google…If you give consent to share a few pieces of information, you are sent back to Plaxo with all key registration steps finished. The registration process used to involve more than 10 steps, including requiring you to find one of those "email validation" messages in your inbox. If you've followed the steps above, you can now sign into Plaxo more easily — by simply clicking a button…”

31. Eric Schmidt: What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_web_in_five_years.php “Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now:… * Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content. * Today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly. * Five years is a factor of ten in Moore's Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today. * Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away… * There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time. * "We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?"…”

32. Google: You too could win millions in stock http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10388919-265.html “…Google…granted a Founders' Prize--"a multimillion-dollar stock bonus"--to the team that developed Google Chrome…”

33. Mystery of Argleton, the 'Google' town that only exists online http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6474746/Mystery-of-Argleton-the-Google-town-that-only-exists-online.html “…Argleton, a 'phantom town' in Lancashire that appears on Google Maps and online directories but doesn't actually exist…The town appears on Google Maps in the middle of fields close to the M58 motorway, just south of Ormskirk…An internet search for the town now brings up a series of home, job and dating listings for people and places "in Argleton", as well as websites which help people find its nearest chiropractor and even plan jogging or hiking routes…Google and the company that supplies its mapping data are unable to explain the presence of the phantom town and are investigating…One theory is that Argleton could have been deliberately added, as a trap to catch companies that violate the map's copyright. So-called "trap streets" are often inserted by cartographers…Roy Bayfield, head of corporate marketing at what would be Argleton's closest university, Edge Hill, in Ormskirk, was so intrigued by the mystery that he walked to the where the internet indicated was the centre of Argleton to check that there was definitely nothing there…"I started to weave this amazing fantasy about the place, an alternative universe, a Narnia-like world. I was really fascinated by the appearance of a non-existent place that the internet had the power to make real and give a semi-existence." When Mr Bayfield reached Argleton – which appears on Google Maps between Aughton and Aughton Park – he found just acres of green, empty fields…”

General Technology

34. Turn Your Windows 7 Computer Into a WiFi Router In 5 Minutes, Free & No Hardware http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_turn_your_windows_7_computer_into_a_wireles.php “Connectify.me is a new service we just found out about. They've sussed out how to make any Windows 7 computer into a WiFi hotspot. Since we just installed Windows 7 on a spare laptop, we figured it was about time to make Windows do something cool, so we installed the app. We were quite literally up and running with other devices connected in five minutes…”

35. Microsoft Exec Taking Heat On Windows 7 Upgrades http://www.crn.com/software/221400164 “…Windows 7 upgrade media won't allow users to do a clean install on a hard drive that doesn't have a previous Windows version, and many customers are finding this out the hard way when they try to upgrade…Microsoft's EULA only allows Windows 7 upgrades to be installed on PCs that have a previous version of Windows already installed…”

36. Stackable memory advance brings flash-killer closer to market http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intel-and-numonyx-announce-stackable-phase-change-memory.ars “Intel…and its collaborator, Numonyx, have hit on a way to increase PCM densities by stacking memory arrays on top of one another. They've demonstrated at 64Mbit memory using the stacking technique…PCM, which combines the speed of DRAM and the non-volatility of flash memory, has been the subject of much excitement…each memory cell consists of a small chunk of a special alloy that changes its physical characteristics and electrical properties (i.e., it changes phase) in response to how it is heated and cooled…Because the PCM memory cells are so much simpler than a flash cell, and because the basic technology doesn't bump up against the same kinds of physical limits as magnetic storage, PCM holds out the potential for a massive boost in storage densities, in addition to its other desirable properties…”

37. Elders in a digital world http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/technology/personaltech/29basics.html “…Contrary to stereotypes, computers, social networks, e-mail and even video games are becoming essential parts of older peoples’ lives. Some of the highest growth rates in broadband use are happening among the elderly…Although challenges remain for many older people, any number of products can help them become more involved in the digital age. Here’s a look at some of the most popular ones…”

38. Construction robot inspired by sci-fi flick Aliens http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,26280648-5014239,00.html “…The Dual-Arm Power Amplification Robot gives users superhuman strength and resembles the hydraulic exoskeleton worn by Sigourney Weaver in the climactic scene of the sci-fi classic. The robot is being developed for disaster relief situations and can lift more than 100kg…Most robot researchers think that robots should move as automatically as possible with very little human instruction," Mr Shirogauchi said. "What we are developing is a robot which moves only when an instruction is given from a human and moves exactly according to that instruction." The robot's primary purpose is construction and comes with interchangeable parts to adapt to any situation…”

39. An App so You'll Never Forget http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23846/?a=f “…Smart.fm is one of several companies selling software designed to help users remember. The company's algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times…Those algorithms determine how often to present a piece of information to the user and in what context. For example, a completely new word and its translation are shown frequently, and a user is asked relatively easy questions about them, designed to jog the memory. But once the user has demonstrated the ability to recall that word and its meaning, this information will appear less often…”

Leisure & Entertainment

40. DSi LL: Nintendo supersizes its gaming handheld http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10385975-1.html “…Nintendo has taken the wraps off a new version of the DSi handheld that sports larger 4.25-inch dual screens…We're still scratching our head as to who would actually want one of these, since we've always felt the pocketable aspect of the DS/DSi was one of its great advantages…”

41. Board game Settlers of Catan comes to iPhone http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10383423-12.html “If you've never heard of Settlers of Catan, you owe it to yourself to read the Wired story, Monopoly Killer: Perfect German board game redefines genre. Then you owe it to yourself to buy a copy, as I did, and find two or three friends for one of the best board game experiences you'll ever have. No friends? No problem: Settlers of Catan just landed on the iPhone and iPod Touch. And you don't need 2-3 available humans, 3-4 available hours, and a flat surface to play it. For the uninitiated, Catan unfolds on an island. It's your job to score 10 victory points by capturing the most settlements, building the longest roads, and so on…”

42. Nintendo Profit Halved as Wii Console Sales Slow http://www.pcworld.com/article/174633/nintendo_profit_halved_as_wii_console_sales_slow.html “…Nintendo sold 5.75 million Wii consoles during the April to September period, down 43 percent on the same period a year earlier, it said Thursday. It also cut its full-year sales forecast for the period from April 2009 to March 2010 to 20 million consoles because of the poor results. It had been hoping to sell 26 million. The sharp drop in Wii sales was attributed to a lack of big-name games…”

43. Best Buy Prepares for the Post-DVD Era http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/best-buy-prepares-for-the-post-dvd-era/ “Best Buy sells a lot of DVDs, but it is taking another step to get ready for the day when that business shifts online. The giant electronics retailer on Tuesday is announcing a partnership with Sonic Solutions‘ Roxio CinemaNow service to deliver first-run DVDs streamed online directly to consumers. The idea…is to let consumers pay once for a DVD and then eventually be able to play it on any device: television, Blu-ray disc player, personal computer, handheld media player or smartphone…”

44. Kingston, Paramount Team Up on Movie Delivery Via Flash Memory http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/6825 “…Kingston and Paramount Digital Entertainment (PDE) announced a new delivery system for movies, on flash memory rather than optical media…the movies will be supplied on Kingston media in as part of bundle packages and for sale. The first such movie, “Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen” is currently available at all OfficeMax stores for $29.99. Customers receive this movie on a 4 GB Kingston DataTraveler drive…users obviously shouldn’t expect Blu-ray quality video. After all, a single-layer DVD is 4 GB in size…you are obviously losing quality, just vs. regular DVD. much less Blu-ray. One good thing is you can count on the drives themselves: Kingston Data Traveler drives have a five-year warranty and 24/7 tech support…”

Economy and Technology

45. Meet Zong+, A Mobile Payments Platform On Steroids And Potential PayPal Killer http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/29/meet-zong-a-mobile-payments-platform-on-steroids-and-potential-paypal-killer/ “…Zong’s model of billing micropayments to your cell phone bill…in 2009 alone, Zong has processed mobile payments for over 10 million unique users worldwide. Today, Zong is launching a new feature…Zong+, a extension of the mobile payment startup which lets users bill microtransactions to credit, debit and prepaid cards…in addition to making online purchases through their cell phone bill, Zong customers will also be able to link any type of payment card to their Zong account through a one-time entry process and continue to purchase goods by simply entering their mobile number and confirming the security transaction code sent to their phone…”

46. Amazon Speeds Checkout with PayPhrase http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_speeds_checkout_with_new_payphrase_technology.php “…Amazon.com has just announced a new checkout system called "PayPhrase" which speeds up the process of making online purchases by allowing shoppers to enter a unique phrase and 4-digit PIN number to complete their transaction. Both the phrase and PIN are created in advance and are linked to a shipping address and preferred method of payment. After the initial set up, PayPhrase users are no longer required to sign in or fill out credit card information when shopping online. Amazon already has a similar speedy checkout system known as "1-Click."…Although not designed to replace 1-Click, the new PayPhrase system is even easier to use and more flexible. Using this system, shoppers don't have to be signed in to the site with an Amazon account as is necessary with 1-Click…”

47. With Ribbit, BT Is Rethinking Its Voice Business http://gigaom.com/2009/10/30/why-bt-is-rethinking-the-voice-business/ “…BT, formerly known as British Telecom…bought Mountain View, Calif.,-based Ribbit for $105 million some 15 months ago…BT has fully embraced the new communications reality, one that goes beyond mere voice calls. And to show how serious it is, the company has made Ribbit founder Ted Griggs the chief technology officer of BT Voice…Ribbit…was started about three years ago with the promise of bringing together web and voice using a new kind of a platform, one that was able to take inputs from different communication tools — XMPP, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and Flash Media Server –- and make them talk to their “switch.”…Ribbit’s products merge traditional notions of communications with web applications and extend them. In other words, voice is viewed as just another API that can be used to enhance a user’s experience. Ribbit for Salesforce and Ribbit for Oracle are two examples of voice and the web coming together…” [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ribbit_mobile_launches_challenges_google_voice.php ]

48. Is this how Novell treats its customers? http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10387502-16.html “…in what strikes me as a first, Novell has publicized a customer loss, announcing to the world that the City of Los Angeles dropped it for Google Apps, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. Who at Novell could have possibly thought this was a good idea?...Until Novell's announcement, I had no idea that Los Angeles had dumped Novell GroupWise in favor of Google Apps, and suspect few others did, either. Novell, however, attacks Los Angeles' decision, arguing "The City of Los Angeles should have opted for this proven product [GroupWise] to ensure the security of its data and to save taxpayer money. They have taken a risk with no reward."…This isn't the Novell that I know. I used to work for Novell, and have never seen the company publicly criticize a customer, not even for defection…the only companies that benefit from this kind of customer abuse are IBM and Microsoft, because Novell slams Google Mail's alleged security and cost deficiencies, without them having to sully their hands…”

49. How technology really helps the economy http://www.physorg.com/news175509560.html “…Since about 1995, the U.S. economy has experienced a productivity resurgence…Some manufacturing companies have re-thought the whole production process…all of the companies we looked at, these organizational changes are bigger and more costly than the technology investments themselves…companies are adding value to the economy, but it's often showing up as greater consumer value rather than in GDP…There is a big disruption going on. This current recession, the Great Recession, is not a simple cyclical downturn in demand. Instead, when demand comes back, it's going to be for a lot of new products and new services and in whole new industries. So it's not just a Great Recession; it may be The Great Restructuring, a fundamental reorganization of business activity. It's not simply a matter of going back and buying the same things we used to buy. Some of them won't exist any more. One reason I think we're seeing such a lag in hiring and employment is that people aren't simply being hired back into the same old jobs they did before. It's going to take a lot of entrepreneurial activity to figure out the best way of grappling with these problems…”

Civilian Aerospace

50. Masten Space Systems take lead in $1 million race http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/30/2111070.aspx “…Masten Space Systems' Xoie rocket prototype has apparently taken the lead in a nail-biting race for a million-dollar prize from NASA. The Masten team's "try, try again" effort at California's Mojave Air and Space Port was aimed at winning the top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge's Level 2 contest. Although the official results are still pending, it looks as if today's flight was good enough to best Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which qualified for the prize with its Scorpius rocket last month. A dark-horse team in the race, California-based Unreasonable Rocket, still has a chance to snare the prize, either later today or on Saturday…”

51. Controversy erupts over mock lunar lander contest http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18087-controversy-erupts-over-mock-lunar-lander-contest.html “…Masten was originally offered just two days – Wednesday and Thursday – to attempt the competition flights. They were unable to start the vehicle's engine on Wednesday, and were able to make only one of the necessary two legs of the flight on Thursday, hampered by a fuel leak that caused the rocket to catch fire as it landed (see a video of the flight here). Lunar Lander Challenge judges then decided to allow Masten another opportunity to fly on Friday beyond the two they had originally scheduled, prompting a protest from Armadillo president John Carmack. Similar extensions have not been afforded teams in past years. "The rules have given the judges the discretion to do just about anything up to and including awarding prize money for best effort if they felt it necessary, so there may not be any grounds to challenge this, but I do feel that we have been robbed," Carmack wrote…”

52. Rocketeers win $1.65 million in prizes http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/11/02/2111070.aspx “…Masten Space Systems' Xoie rocket prototype has won a million-dollar prize from NASA, edging out…Armadillo Aerospace, which qualified for the prize with its Scorpius rocket in September. NASA said Armadillo would receive the Level 2 contest's $500,000 second prize. A different flight by a different rocket, known as Xombie, earned Masten the $150,000 second-place prize in the Lunar Lander Challenge's less ambitious Level 1 contest. Armadillo won the $350,000 top prize in Level 1 last year…The program, one of NASA's Centennial Challenges, was aimed at encouraging the development of new rocket technologies that could potentially be used in future spacecraft…Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge has had its intended impact, with impressive performances by multiple teams representing a new generation of aerospace entrepreneurs," Andrew Petro, NASA's Centennial Challenge program manager…questions were raised about the fairness of giving Masten an extra opportunity to launch beyond the scheduled times on Wednesday and Thursday. Armadillo team leader John Carmack said…For the past couple weeks, as it became clear that Masten had a real shot at completing the Level 2 Lunar Lander Challenge and bettering our landing accuracy, I have been kicking myself for not taking the competition more seriously and working on a better landing accuracy. If they pulled it off, I was prepared to congratulate them and give a bit of a sheepish mea culpa…The current situation, where Masten was allowed a third active day of competition, after trying and failing on both scheduled days, is different. I don't hold anything against Masten for using an additional time window that has been offered, since we wouldn't have passed it up if we were in their situation, but I do think this was a mistake on the judges' part. "I recognize that it is in the best interests of both the NASA Centennial Challenges department and the X Prize Foundation to award all the prize money this year, and that will likely have indirect benefits for us all in coming years…Permit me to be petty enough to be upset and bitter about a half-million dollars being taken from me and given to my competitor…but I do feel that we have been robbed…the judges decided to award Masten the million dollars and give Armadillo the $500,000 second prize. The contest started out with four competitors. One of the teams, BonNova, withdrew from the competition before making an official flight attempt. But the Unreasonable Rocket team…persevered to the very end. On Friday and Saturday, Unreasonable Rocket repeatedly tried to fly its Blue Ball rocket through the Lunar Lander Challenge's Level 1 course…Blue Ball eventually made it through the first leg of the Level 1 course on Saturday - but the rocket sustained damage during the landing and could not launch again for the second required leg…Unreasonable Rocket's Level 2 entrant, known as the Silver Ball, made a series of tethered test flights on Sunday. During the day's fourth test, the rocket severed the tether and crashed…Unreasonable Rocket's father-and-son team won high praise from onlookers as well as the organizers of the challenge. "They are only the third team to successfully fly the flight profile of the competition, so they have much to be proud of…”

53. KC Team Competes to Build an Elevator to Space http://www.fox4kc.com/wdaf-space-elevator-102909,0,5183920.story “…The Kansas City Space Pirates…are one of only three teams left in the space elevator competition at Edwards Air Force Base in the California Desert…"We're in it for the prize money, and the fact that it could change the state of mankind in the future, that's just all the better," said Brian Turner, captain of Kansas City Space Pirates…"These solar panels convert to electricity, which comes to the electronics on the back side, here, and powers this little motor," said Turner. The motor propels the robot up a cable attached to a helicopter more than half a mile in the air. The faster, the better…it's powered with a laser, shot through a custom-built telescope…we'll be beaming more energy to our robot in this competition than has ever been beamed to a remote moving device ever…The space elevator games start next week on Wednesday. You can watch it on NASA TV…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

54. China Joins Petaflop Club http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/China-Joins-Petaflop-Club-67358662.html “China…has unveiled "Tianhe," a 1.206 peak petaflop machine powered by a combination of 6,144 Intel CPUs and 5,120 AMD GPUs. Amazingly, the price tag was a mere $88.24 million. The system is installed at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT)…In the TOP500 sense, Tianhe would not be considered a true petaflop system. According to online reports, the machine achieves only(!) 563.1 teraflops with Linpack…Tianhe's rather low Linpack efficiency (Rmax/Rpeak) may limit its applicability somewhat…The NUDT machine didn't even manage to reach the 50 percent mark in efficiency…Most supers have a Linpack efficiency north of 75 percent…The new Earth Simulator in Japan boasts a 93.4 percent figure. Undoubtedly, the problem is related to extracting Linpack FLOPS from the GPUs. Although one would think these general purpose graphics processors would excel at this type of vector math, optimal Linpack performance is also dependent on a generous cache. Modern CPUs have plenty of it, but GPUs contain only limited internal caches…NVIDIA's upcoming Fermi processor will be the first GPU with a true cache hierarchy (not to mention much better double precision performance), so I imagine Linpack results on this architecture should be a good deal more impressive…Tianhe will represent an interesting test case for a CPU-GPU hybrid supercomputer…”

55. Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University Named CUDA Centers of Excellence http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/NVIDIA-Recognizes-Chinese-Academy-of-Sciences-and-Tsinghua-University-as-CUDA-Centers-of-Excellence-66938532.html “NVIDIA today announced that the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Tsinghua University have been recognized as CUDA Centers of Excellence for their commitment to furthering GPU Computing research and their teaching of parallel programming courses based on the CUDA architecture…NVIDIA's recognition of the CAS IPE and Tsinghua University stems, in part, from the institutions having demonstrated their commitment to revolutionizing science and engineering research with GPU Computing by leveraging NVIDIA Tesla GPUs across a host of science and engineering research projects…”

56. Compilers and More: A Computing Larrabee http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Compilers-and-More-A-Computing-Larrabee-67032637.html “…Intel has been careful to present Larrabee as a graphics processor that can also be used for highly parallel tasks such as game physics, avoiding the claim that it will be appropriate for HPC. The Intel marketing department isn't stupid, of course; they don't want to erode the market for their own very high-powered and successful (and highly profitable) Core-2 (and beyond) server processors. Nonetheless, it will be hard to prevent experimentation and even productization of HPC systems with Larrabee processors, either as the main CPU or as an attached accelerator…Larrabee looks an awful lot like an x86 cluster node; anyone who has experience building HPC clusters has pretty good intuition about the design tradeoffs that make for a balanced and effective system…Larrabee supports several kinds of parallelism. It was recently stated that Larrabee will have 32 cores in its first implementation…The Larrabee goes back to a simpler time, apparently back to the original Pentium dual-issue, in-order control unit. This simplifies the microarchitecture, freeing up chip real estate for other purposes, in this case for more cores…designers simplified the control unit in order to free chip resources and expand other capabilities. For RISC, this meant a larger register file and cache, while for Larrabee, it means more cores. Both solutions depend on software to deliver performance…”

57. NVIDIA and VSG Accelerate Oil & Gas Exploration http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/NVIDIA-and-VSG-Accelerate-Oil-Gas-Exploration-65993032.html “…Open Inventor 3D Graphics Toolkit will employ the NVIDIA CompleX scene-scaling acceleration engine, enabling the visualization and manipulation of huge data sets required for energy exploration. Open Inventor…advanced 3D applications to fully scale across the multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) powering NVIDIA Quadro Plex visual computing systems. This technology turns a single workstation into a visual supercomputer, providing engineers and scientists an immersive, ultra-high resolution experience capable of handling extremely large visual scenes, such as those used in seismic interpretation and other oil & gas-related research…"The value of NVIDIA application acceleration engines integrated into software like Open Inventor and powered by Quadro professional solutions is incredibly significant to the oil and gas industry…Geophysicists can…discover new energy reserves more rapidly and cost effectively than ever before…”

58. Researchers help ease transition to parallel programming http://www.physorg.com/news175509292.html “In 1995, a good computer chip had a clock speed of about 100 megahertz. Seven years later, in 2002, a good computer chip had a clock speed of about three gigahertz -- a 30-fold increase. And now, seven years later, a good computer chip has a clock speed of... still about three gigahertz…chip makers…adopted a new strategy for increasing computers' power: putting multiple "cores," or processing units, on each chip. In theory, a chip with two cores working in parallel can accomplish twice as much as a chip with one core. But software developers tend to see their programs as lists of sequential instructions, and they've had trouble breaking up those instructions in ways that take advantage of parallel processing. Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Saman Amarasinghe and his colleagues at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are giving them a hand. In the past, computer science researchers had hoped that sequential programs could be converted into parallel programs automatically. "I spent a good part of my life trying to do that," says Amarasinghe. But Amarasinghe has now come to the conclusion that "if you want to get parallel performance, you have to start writing parallel code…”

*****

NEW NET Issues List for 27 Oct 2009

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 27 October 2009, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we're upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. Web set for non-Latin addresses http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5ifCD3i8ViFKxT3-mmxRr7mElKH5g “…The internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names - or addresses - that can be written in non-Latin script…One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board is whether to allow entire internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic…He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday…”

2. Mozilla’s Raindrop Wants to Solve Your Communication Woes http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Mozilla_s_Raindrop_Wants_to_Solve_Your_Communication_Woes “Mozilla Labs has debuted a new web-based tool for integrating all your online communications — such as e-mail, Twitter, Skype and Facebook — into a single browser window. It uses a series of intelligent filters to highlight what’s important to you, bringing the conversations with people or updates from services you care about the most to the top, and keeping the stuff that can wait out of sight until you’re ready to look at it. It’s called Raindrop, and it fetches all of your communications from different sources like mail servers, Twitter and RSS feeds...At the moment, Raindrop is a developer release, which means there’s no installer to download…”

3. Bing Is in Your Facebook, Indexing Your Status http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Bing_Is_in_Your_Facebook__Indexing_Your_Status “…Facebook’s Twitter envy is showing again; the site recently announced a deal with Microsoft that will see public Facebook statuses indexed by a search engine for the first time. Although users sticking with Facebook’s default privacy settings won’t be affected, the move clearly shows Facebook moving beyond its closed, walled-garden beginnings…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

4. Homeland Security Director wants to hire a few good geeks http://thegovmonitor.com/world_news/united_states/homeland-security-director-on-securing-america-against-the-threat-of-cyber-attack-11694.html “…Earlier this month, we announced that DHS has been given expedited hiring authority to bring on up to 1,000 additional skilled cyber professionals…here is our message to those professionals and future-professionals: Not only does DHS want you, your nation needs you. We need our best and brightest, our finest computer scientists and engineers, mathematicians, and innovative thinkers…At DHS, you’ll work hard and you’ll be pushed because the stakes are high. And you will have an immediate opportunity to serve and to make a difference. Some of you will work to protect the nation in our National Protection and Programs Directorate, or NPPD. Others will join the Secret Service or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to help stop international financial criminals or sexual predators. All of you will have a chance to make a difference and to serve your nation. You’ll find a link on DHS.gov/Cyber where you can see the exciting positions that are already posted…”

5. Cyber Crooks Stole $40M From U.S. Small, Mid-Sized Firms http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/10/fbi_cyber_gangs_stole_40mi.html?wprss=securityfix “…Cyber criminals have stolen at least $40 million from small to mid-sized companies across America in a sophisticated but increasingly common form of online banking fraud, the FBI said…the perpetrators have stuck to the same basic tactics in each attack. They steal the victim's online banking credentials with the help of malicious software distributed through spam. The intruders then initiate a series of unauthorized bank transfers out of the company's online account in sub-$10,000 chunks to avoid banks' anti-money-laundering reporting requirements. From there, the funds are sent to so-called "money mules," willing or unwitting individuals recruited over the Internet through work-at-home job scams. When the mules pull the cash out of their accounts, they are instructed to wire it (minus a small commission) via services such as MoneyGram and Western Union, typically to organized criminal groups operating in countries like Moldova, Russia and Ukraine…”

6. Bredo botnet battles Zeus for control of PCs http://www.mxlogic.com/securitynews/viruses-worms/bredo-botnet-battles-zeus-for-control-of-pcs188.cfm “…A strain of Trojan malware identified as Bredo contains code that disables the Zeus/Zbot Trojan and moves files to prevent Zeus from reinstalling itself on reboot…The cybercriminals use networks of infected PCs - called botnets - to distribute malware and spam and for stealing user credentials, passwords and contact lists. The Zeus botnet has been spreading its malicious payload in spam emails that spoof messages form Microsoft Outlook, the IRS and companies' own IT departments. Users who click on a link in these messages can be infected by the Trojan upon visiting a malicious website.”

7. 40+ million tricked by 'scareware' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8313678.stm “Symantec says more than 40 million people have fallen victim to the "scareware" scam in the past 12 months…Scareware sellers use pop-up adverts deliberately designed to look legitimate…If the user then clicks on the message they are directed towards another site where they can download the fake anti-virus software they supposedly need to clean up their computer - for a fee of up to £60…the apparent fix could have a double impact on victims. "Obviously, you're losing your own hard-earned cash up front, but at the back end of that, if you're transacting with these guys online you're offering them credit card details, debit card details and other personal information…The findings were revealed in a report written following Symantec analysis of data collected from July 2008 to June 2009. Symantec said 43 million people fell for such scams during that period…”

8. Banned USB Drives May Get Thumbs Up http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4342869 “After being banned almost a year ago as bug-infested cyber threats, thumb drives may soon be allowed to plug back into U.S. Defense Department computers and networks. But not all thumb drives. And not for all computer users…Thumb drives were banned in November 2008 after thousands of military computers and networks became infected by worms, viruses and other malicious software…"Up until a year ago, we were using thumb drives all over the place," said Robert Carey, chief information officer of the U.S. Navy…The drives were ideal for moving information, Carey said. "You can easily buy a 10-gigabyte thumb drive and, wow, you can plug it in, download data and carry it around…”

9. Old Trick Threatens the Newest Weapons http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/science/27trojan.html “Despite a six-year effort to build trusted computer chips for military systems, the Pentagon now manufactures in secure facilities run by American companies only about 2 percent of the more than $3.5 billion of integrated circuits bought annually for use in military gear. That shortfall is viewed with concern by current and former United States military and intelligence agency executives who argue that the menace of so-called Trojan horses hidden in equipment circuitry is among the most severe threats the nation faces in the event of a war in which communications and weaponry rely on computer technology…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

10. Amazon stops selling Sprint-powered Kindle http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10381325-1.html “Just weeks after announcing a new $279 international version of its Kindle e-book reader, Amazon has chopped $20 off its price and made that model its only Kindle offering for both the domestic U.S. and international markets. In the process, the company has eliminated the U.S. version of the device, which used Sprint as the carrier for the Kindle's built-in wireless capabilities…new Kindles will tap into AT&T's data network…the Kindle DX will continue to use Sprint's data network (no international version of the DX has been announced) and no Sprint-powered Kindle devices will have their wireless cut off. As for reports that the Web browser is not available in the international Kindle, they may not be completely accurate…Gadget Lab is reporting that you can get to the English version of Wikipedia, which leaves some hope that Amazon may open the browser to other sites…”

11. T-Mobile offers no-contract, no-subsidy Even More Plus rate plans http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=8102 “…Even More and Even More Plus…plans have options for unlimited voice minutes, messaging, and data…Even More Plus plans come with no monthly contract…with the Even More Plus plans, any phones purchased through T-Mobile will be sold at the full retail price, which often is in the $400 to $600 range…The more conventionally priced Even More plans charge more per month, but offer a subsidized price for phone purchases…Over the course of a 24 month contract, that's an extra $480 (24 x $20) that is paid for the $350 up front subsidy on the phone - a net loss of $130 to the customer…”

12. Windows Mobile worries mount http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139841/Windows_Mobile_worries_mount_as_competition_heats_up “…Windows Mobile…once set the bar for other device makers, including Palm Inc. and Nokia…But then came Apple Inc.'s iPhone in 2007, and steady progress from BlackBerry and the arrival of Android devices…Heading into 2010, the momentum [for Windows Mobile] has dissipated and there has been wide speculation that Microsoft might be ready to bail out on the mobile operating system market altogether…Windows Mobile has a long future for a specialized group of users who deploy the ruggedized devices made by companies such as Motorola, Intermec and Pison Teklogix. It took many years for makers of rugged devices used mainly by warehouse workers and service and delivery drivers to convert their customers from DOS systems to Windows Mobile, so transitioning them to another OS would take years…”

13. How Moms Use Their iPhones http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iphone_moms_shopping_entertaining_kids.php “…mothers with iPhones regularly let their children use their phones, download games specifically for their children and often use their phones at grocery stores to compare prices and check their grocery lists. Not too long ago, mothers were still considered to be a hard group to reach through mobile applications…The iPhone's mainstream success has changed this, however, and iPhone moms have now become a desirable target demographic for marketers…96% of mothers with iPhones are involved in their family's purchasing decisions and 40% are the sole decision makers…”

Open Source

14. MakerBeam: An Open Source Building Kit http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/701662757/makerbeam-an-open-source-building-kit “MakerBeam is a toy and tool for the open source imagination. Build a fire-breathing robot dinosaur, a miniature CNC machine, a remote control car, whatever your overclocked brain can produce! Or build a castle, or that perfect enclosure to hold the circuitry for your custom electronics project. If you want to, scale it up! Scale by a factor of 2.5, 4, or 6, and your design can be rendered full-sized with easy, automatic conversion of parts. Not only a tool for adult geeks to make incredible fun stuff, it's also a fantastic way for children to do the same thing! If they're getting a little tired of Tinkertoys and are old enough for LEGO, they're ready for MakerBeam…”

15. Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/whitehouse-switch-drupal-opensource.html “…the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack…While open source is already widespread throughout the government, its adoption by the White House will almost certainly give permission for much wider uptake…”

16. Cash-strapped Latvia mulls switching from Microsoft http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20091022/tc_afp/latviagovernmenteconomyitcrisis “…Latvia is mulling whether to replace brand name office software like Microsoft with an open source equivalent as a cost-cutting measure, a government spokeswoman told AFP Thursday…It's done with just one goal -- to save some money," she said. The resolution recently signed by Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis is aimed at finding "an opportunity" -- financial and legal -- to switch the state "completely or in part" to using operating systems or software that "are not produced by the US Microsoft Corporation…”

SkyNet

17. Zoho Links Project Management Tool With Google Apps http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20091020/tc_pcworld/zoholinksprojectmanagementtoolwithgoogleapps “Zoho has integrated its online project management tool, along with some other features, with Google's Apps…Zoho Projects for Google Apps will let people sign on using their log-in and password for Google Apps. The accounts on both services will then be merged…users can put their documents from Google Apps into Zoho Projects, which has a host of features such as assigning tasks to people, setting milestones and meetings, sharing documents and running forum discussions and wikis as well as online group chat sessions. Milestone, tasks and meetings can also be imported into Google's Calendar. The calendar can also be embedded into Google Sites, a tool to create simple Web pages…Users can manage one project with Zoho's Google integration for free…”

18. Google Music: OneBox http://gigaom.com/2009/10/21/google-to-add-full-song-streams-not-a-full-music-service/ “…Google will soon launch a search product dubbed “OneBox” that will better organize results around music artists and provide music streams from Lala.com, MySpace-owned iLike.com and other services — including full-song streams, according to one of my sources who’s seen it firsthand. That would make it a modest innovation in user search experience, but not a game-changer that will upset iTunes or compete in the mobile sphere as some early reports have speculated. So modest, in fact, that it sounds a lot like what Yahoo has been doing since last fall with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody…”

19. Google to Index Twitter & Enter Real-Time Search http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_indexes_twitter.php “In the immediate wake of the announcement of Bing's indexing Twitter updates, Google has announced it will be doing the same. Taking the wind out of the sails of many a real-time search engine, Google's and Microsoft's announcements further put to rest a maelstrom of rumors swirling around the startup's possible acquisition and partnerships. Marissa Mayer wrote today on the official Google blog, "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months…”

20. Evolving the look of Google Maps http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/evolving-look-of-google-maps.html “Today the Google Maps team is rolling out a number of refinements to the look and feel of our maps, the biggest such changes since we first launched about 4.7 years ago. In that time we've been steadily adding details like walkways, address labels, bus stops, new country coverage, and improved satellite imagery, but the look of the map hasn't changed much. Today's changes are intended to keep the same information-rich map while making it easier to pick out the information that is most useful…”

21. Google adds batch-export feature to Docs http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39838925,00.htm “…Google said its Docs engineering team had created the feature working alongside the Data Liberation Front, a small team of engineers that the company set up to deal with import and export issues in Google's various online services. Users can now bundle multiple Google Docs in a choice of formats — including those for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and PDFs — then download them as a .zip file…” [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/liberate-your-google-docs-with-convert.html ]

22. Google Voice with your existing number http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-voice-with-your-existing-number.html “…you now can get Google Voice with a Google number OR with your existing mobile phone number. If you choose to use Google Voice with your existing number, you won't get some features (like call screening and recording), but you'll still get many others -- including Google voicemail…”

General Technology

23. Head-mounted display review http://thomaskcarpenter.com/2009/10/21/ismar09-hmd-review/ “…I had the oppertunity to experience what Microvision, Vuzix and ORALab/EvoOpticks had to offer. I’ll try to relate their talks and my experiences with their products and let you know if any of them have achieved augmented vision…”

24. Will e-bikes be the new 'commuter cool'? http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/electric.bicycles/index.html “…the couple has cut 50 percent of their car-use since they started electric biking…there are other benefits. Keith Felch dropped 30 pounds and his blood pressure fell 10 points in the first six months he owned the bike…Electric bikes are still somewhat of a novelty in the United States, but…Chinese electric bikes number more than 100 million…In the United States, about 200,000 electric bicycles were sold last year…about twice the number sold in 2005…”

25. Toshiba Launches Methanol Fuel Cells in Japan http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2009_10/pr2201.htm “…Toshiba…today announced the launch of its first direct methanol fuel-cell product: Dynario™, an external power source that delivers power to mobile digital consumer products…The power consumption of mobile electronic devices, including mobile phones, has greatly increased with added functionality, including TV reception and Internet connectivity. As a result, battery exhaustion has become a major concern. Dynario™'s DMFC delivers almost instant refueling that untethers electrical equipment from AC adapters and power outlets. It runs on mix of methanol and ambient oxygen, and the chemical reaction between the two in the fuel cell produces electricity…”

26. Tilera debuts 100-core chip http://gigaom.com/2009/10/25/chip-startup-tilera-dreams-the-impossible-dream/ “…Today, the 5-year-old startup is expected to launch a 100-core version of its chip aimed at web-scale computing. Tilera scoffs at quad core machines. The company’s chips already are used by 75 customers, and come with 36, 64, and now 100 cores…Tilera’s chips only burn 33-50 watts instead of 130 watts that top-of-the-line Nehalem silicon can…Doud sees this opportunity and hopes that Tilera’s unique architecture can outperform efforts by other startups (and even big chip vendors) and get inside boxes made by large OEMs such as Dell and HP or smaller vendors using x86 chips in their cloud appliances. But it’s this architecture issue that’s Tilera’s biggest weak point…huge chunks of code aimed at enterprise and personal computing are written for Intel’s x86 architecture…Tilera has to offer tools to help programmers write for its chips without learning a new programming language. Doud says he thinks 10 percent of web-scale computing jobs don’t need to keep the old style of coding for x86 chips, and if Tilera can break in there, that would be enough for now. Tilera already sells its chips to telecommunications equipment companies and for those trying to do rapid video and voice transcoding…he is betting that the huge shift that’s come about as a result of web-scale and cloud computing is a good time to challenge the need to keep writing for x86 chips…”

27. Engineers create fingernail-size chip that holds 1TB http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139716/Engineers_create_fingernail_size_chip_that_holds_1TB_of_data “…Engineers have created a new fingernail-size chip that can hold 1 trillion bytes (a terabyte) of data…Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers -- a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today's techniques…”

28. Microsoft Offers Windows 7 on USB Drives for Netbooks http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/Microsoft-Offers-Windows-7-on-USB-Drives-for-Netbooks-225258/ “…the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool [WUDT] will take an ISO image and create a bootable USB device that can be used to install Windows 7…The WUDT can also create a Windows 7 installation DVD from the ISO file as well…in order to boot off of a USB device (or external DVD player), you will need to configure your BIOS to boot off of that device…”

29. Windows 7: A Whopper of an OS, with a Side of Fries http://www.pcworld.com/article/174176/windows_7_a_whopper_of_an_os_with_a_side_of_fries.html “…in Japan. For the next seven days, Burger King will be a selling a gigantic seven-layer Whopper, which is apparently a gargantuan five-inches thick…” [http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2009/10/22/windows-7-party-with-seven-7x7-in-n-out-burgers/ ]

30. How to Install Windows 7 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2354687,00.asp “…The first thing to do is check whether your desktop or laptop PC is capable of running Windows 7…Officially, you need at least a 1-GHz CPU and 1GB RAM, but testers of the OS have successfully got it running on machines as out of date as a 266-MHz Pentium II with 96MB of RAM…There are lots of different editions of Windows 7, but only three you can buy: Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate…you have to do a clean installation—without the ability to carry your apps along—if you move from one level of Vista to another level of Windows 7…The exception is Windows 7 Ultimate, which will let you perform an in-place upgrade from any level of Vista—as long as you don't change whether you're using the 32- or 64-bit version. Don't forget to look into special pricing offers…The Student upgrade license is just $29.99…The rule of thumb is that if you have, or intend to install, more than 3GB of memory on your PC, you want 64-bit Windows…”

31. What Comes After Hard Drives? http://www.physorg.com/news175505861.html “…if HDDs continue to progress at their current pace, then in 2020 a two-disk, 2.5-inch disk drive will be capable of storing more than 14 TB and will cost about $40 (today, a typical 500 GB hard drive costs about $100). Although flash memories have also become popular - with advantages such as lower power consumption, faster read access time, and better mechanical reliability than HDDs - the cost per GB for flash memories is nearly 10 times that of HDDs. In addition, flash memory technology will reach technical limits that will prevent its continued scaling before 2020, keeping them from replacing HDDs…”

32. Xerox develops silver ink for wearable or throwaway electronics http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/10/26/xerox-developers-a-silver-ink-that-can-be-used-to-wearable-or-throwaway-electronics/ “Xerox researchers have invented a kind of ink that can conduct electricity and be used to put electronic circuits on top of plastics, film, and textiles. That means in the coming years we’ll be able to wear or bend our electronics. You could even print out your electronic gadget on plastic sheets, as if you were printing a document…With plastics, you can unroll a sheet and then deposit electronic circuitry on top of it, building it up layer after layer. It helps to have conductive ink. That is, you need something that contains metal but that you can print with or spray on. The Xerox team created what they call a “silver bullet.” It’s a silver ink that melts at 140 degrees celsius. Normally, metals melt at 1,000 degrees or so. But plastic itself melts at 150 degrees. So an ink laid on top of plastic can’t melt at a higher temperature or it will melt the plastic…”

33. Four-screen Intel laptop http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10358419-1.html “…If two displays on a notebook…don't do the trick for you, Intel's about to up the ante with four. Yes, that's four--one primary LCD screen and three auxiliary OLED screens above the keyboard. The aim here is to allow the user to organize information the way he or she prefers it. Touted as the world's first multitouch, multiscreen concept solution, the prototype (code-named Tangent Bay) was unveiled at the Mobility Meetup…”

Leisure & Entertainment

34. "Assassin's Creed" films to premier on YouTube October 27 http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20091019/tc_afp/usfranceitinternetfilmvideogamesubisoft “Ubisoft said Monday that a short film based on its blockbuster "Assassin's Creed" videogame will premier online at YouTube on October 27. The first "Assassin's Creed" animated short film created at the French videogame titan's Hybride Technologies studio in Canada will be featured on YouTube's home page for the first day…”

35. Google Prepares Music Search Service http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/google-preparing-music-service/ “…Google plans to launch a music service…rumored to be called “Google Music,” “Google Audio,” or “One Box,”…it will be announced next Wednesday, and that it will link out to two music services: Lala and iLike…”

36. E-books helping surge in library members http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6417660/E-books-helping-surge-in-library-members.html “E-books are helping libraries attract a flurry of new members, as readers embrace digital novels…Only a handful of libraries have started to offer the service, but many in the library world are hopeful that the revolution in digital reading can help transform libraries' fortunes, and that the majority of libraries will soon offer downloads as a matter of course, alongside the latest Dan Brown paperback. Fiona Marriott, at Luton Libraries, said: "In recent weeks the number of ebook downloads has been increasing fast, and there are people emailing us from all over the country and even abroad asking if they can join as members online…”

37. Nintendo to launch new DSi handheld in Japan http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20091026/tc_nm/us_nintendo “Nintendo Co plans to launch a new version of its DSi hand-held videogame player with a larger screen in Japan as early this year…Nintendo hopes the introduction of a large-screen version will kick-start demand for the DSi, whose monthly sales have slowed to a third of their peak levels following its launch…The existing version has a 3.25-inch screen, roughly the same size as Apple Inc's iPhone. The new version will have a screen larger than 4 inches…”

Economy and Technology

38. Yahoo 3Q profit soars http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20091020/ap_on_hi_te/us_earns_yahoo “Yahoo Inc. may finally be pulling out of a three-year slump that cast aside two CEOs and spurred a cost-costing spree that laid off about 2,000 workers. The purge is the main reason Yahoo's third-quarter profit more than tripled from last year to soar past analysts' relatively low expectations for the troubled Internet company. But the results released Tuesday also showed Yahoo's revenue fell by at least 12 percent for the third consecutive quarter. The revenue rut means Yahoo still has a long way to go on its comeback trail…”

39. Microsoft starts selling PCs online http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10381031-56.html “…Microsoft has started selling computers and third-party software via its online store. It's part of a broader push to try to give Windows the kind of lift that Apple has gotten from its network of retail stores. Microsoft had said it would sell PCs at its brick-and-mortar stores, but it plans to open just two of those this year, including a Scottsdale, Ariz., location that opens later Thursday. Early on Thursday, though, Microsoft revamped its online store, which had been an outlet only for Microsoft products…”

40. Nokia lawsuit could cost Apple $1 billion says analysts http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=27548 “…Neil Mawston at Strategy Analytics told Reuters, Apple could have to pay Nokia anything between $200 million and $1 billion for patents used in 34 million iPhones shipped so far…According to Nokia, they've been telling Apple for months now that they owe them money for the patents they're using, and Apple has refused to pay them anything. From Nokia's point of view, they've tried the carrot and to be nice guys, and now it's time to bring out the stick…”

Civilian Aerospace

41. Economy, rule change ground X Prize plans http://www.lcsun-news.com/ci_13641649 “The X Prize Cup, an event aimed at spurring innovation in space technology, won't be held this year in southern New Mexico, as it has in recent years. A change in the official rules for its featured space technology competition and a lack of funding on the state's part are to blame for its absence…the Cup was held in Las Cruces in the fall of 2005 and 2006 before being moved to Alamogordo in 2007, when it lost title sponsor, Wirefly…The highlight of the X Prize Cup has been the $2 million Lunar Lander Challenge, which pits companies against one another to advance technology for landing on the moon…a Federal Aviation Administration rule change this year allows companies to fly their vehicles from their own backyards, getting rid of the need to travel to a single destination…the state wasn't able to sponsor the event financially this year because of the poor economy. He said early on, the state invested about $2 million in sponsorships for the event. Later, when it moved to Alamogordo, the level dropped to about $750,000. But even that isn't possible this year…”

42. Rocket testing resumes in Butte http://www.montanasnewsstation.com/Global/story.asp?S=11356965 “…The aerospace professionals at Space Propulsion Group say if you mix paraffin wax with liquid oxygen and even nitrous, oxide you have the makings of a scientific masterpiece. "It has good performance, but it is also environmentally friendly. It uses nothing more toxic than liquid oxygen, just like the oxygen in the air that happens to be liquefied and paraffin as a fuel," Terry Spath of Spath Engineering explained. Most common in the industry today are rockets that use solid fuels and rockets that use liquid fuels. When you bring the two together, you have a hybrid rocket engine. The aeronautics specialists at Space Propulsion Group, a company from Sunnyvale, California, are testing a rocket, which combines paraffin wax and liquid oxygen, creating a cost efficient, environmentally friendly, hybrid technology in Butte this week…”

43. America's space efforts converge http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/21/2105109.aspx “Private-sector spaceflight is going public ... or is public-sector spaceflight going private? Space industry executives and space agency officials made clear at a conference today that "Old Space" and "New Space" are converging…"The way we do space business will change," Pat Hynes, director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, declared as she opened this week's International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, N.M. The biggest changes have to do with the blending of public and private initiatives…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

44. A Pervasive GPU Computing Strategy http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/A-Pervasive-GPU-Computing-Strategy-65667732.html “…A trio of announcements this week provides a rough outline of how the company intends to expand its GPU computing footprint. Cloud Computing Meets the GPU…NSF Puts GPU Super on Track…Georgia Tech announced that the NSF is pitching in $12 million over five years to fund a project for two GPU-equipped supercomputers under its Track 2 program…this is the first Track 2 award to go toward GPU-accelerated supers…Windows 7 Brings GPU Computing API…” [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/giot-gtw102009.php ]

45. GPUs: the next frontier in film http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8300310.stm “…The GPU is a specialised graphics processor that creates lighting effects and transforms objects every time a 3D scene is redrawn…The advent of the GPU is really the next big frontier for us. We have seen hundreds of times improvements over the last few months. This is taking Moore's Law out the window…This is a big leap and the amount of data that can be crunched, analysed and documented can be done a lot faster on the GPU than the CPU. On certain simulations, we are talking a 100-200 times improvement…”

46. CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 14 http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/220601124 “…This installment focuses on debugging techniques and how CUDA-GDB can be used to effectively diagnose and debug CUDA code -- with an emphasis on how to speed the process when looking through large amounts of data as well as the thread syntax and semantic differences needed to debug kernels while they are running on the GPU…”

47. NVIDIA GPUs Empower Software Developers http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/NVIDIA-GPUs-Empower-Software-Developers-65564117.html “…Windows 7…the ability it provides software developers to create powerful new digital media applications by harnessing the massive parallel processing power of NVIDIA GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs). Windows 7 gives developers this freedom through Microsoft's new DirectCompute application programming interface (API), which is being introduced as part of the Microsoft DirectX 11 API…DirectCompute will make it even easier for developers to create innovative applications that take advantage of the GPU's massively parallel processing power." NVIDIA has worked closely with Microsoft on the development, testing and validation of Microsoft DirectCompute…”

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NEW NET Issues List for 20 Oct 2009

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 20 October 2009, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we're upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. Atlanta to start giant 'mapathon' http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8305924.stm “…Atlanta, the capital of the US state of Georgia will soon be the world's most digitally mapped city, according to organisers of a massive "mapathon". OpenStreetMap, or OSM, is behind the effort…We aim to map everything from bike paths to emergency phones and police precincts…With OpenStreetMap, it's basically plug and play. We want you to take that data for free and use it how you see fit…When you have a lot of bright minds like we have here, give them a new toy like OpenStreetMap and they will come up with new applications and winning innovations around that information…he thought Atlanta would be able to lay claim to the title of the most digitally mapped city by the new year. "We understand the symbolism of achieving that aim and the currency it gives us as we try to persuade companies to set up here…”

2. Rio youth use GPS phones to put favelas on map http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20091017/tc_afp/lifestylebrazilsocialtechnologyinternet “…Rio's favelas are home to a third of the city's population, but are almost invisible on maps -- a situation five young women are trying to change with the help of GPS and the Internet. Rafaela Goncalves da Silva, 21, has lived in the Santa Marta favela, a poor and dangerous slum that was recently the target of a police pacification operation, since she was two years old…She is also among the five women recruited by youth organization Rede Jovem to use GPS-equipped cellphones to map and log the streets of Rio's favelas…Some of the streets being mapped do not have an official name. "I just ask the older residents what they call, the community calls the street," she said, tapping in one such name -- Paciencia Street -- into her cellphone…”

3. For online bargains, working together yields deals http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20091016/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_online_group_discounts “…Groupon, whose name combines "group" and "coupon," offers daily deals on products and services, such as tailored shirts, meals at restaurants and paintball games. There is a catch: A certain number of people in a given city must sign up for the deal to go through. So far, Groupon is succeeding where others have failed. In less than a year, its group-buying business has turned a profit and is expected to be available in more than two dozen cities by the end of the year…”

4. 100 Mbps by 2015 in Finland http://www.intomobile.com/2009/10/14/finland-becomes-the-first-country-to-make-broadband-a-legal-right.html “…Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications…The government had already decided to make a 100 Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

5. Kasperksy calls for end to net anonymity http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10376569-83.html “…The co-founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab…elaborated on the security strategy of rival Microsoft, as well as how cybercrime should be combated…Everyone should and must have an identification, or Internet passport. The Internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the U.S. military. That was just a limited group of people--hundreds, or maybe thousands. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong…to introduce it in the same way…I'd like to change the design of the Internet by introducing regulation--Internet passports, Internet police and international agreement--about following Internet standards. And if some countries don't agree with or don't pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off…”

6. Microsoft exposes Firefox users to drive-by malware downloads http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=4614 “…Remember that Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant add-on that Microsoft sneaked into Firefox without explicit permission from end users?...that add-on has a serious code execution vulnerability that exposes Firefox users to the “browse and you’re owned” attacks that are typically used in drive-by malware downloads…Microsoft’s security folks are actually recommending that Firefox users uninstall the buggy add-on: For Firefox users with .NET Framework 3.5 installed, you may use “Tools”-> “Add-ons” -> “Plugins”, select “Windows Presentation Foundation”, and click “Disable”…” [http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article08-600 ]

7. Evil Maid goes after TrueCrypt http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2009/10/evil-maid-goes-after-truecrypt.html “…we implemented the Evil Maid Attack against TrueCrypt system disk encryption in a form of a small bootable USB stick image that allows to perform the attack in an easy “plug-and-play” way. The whole infection process takes about 1 minute, and it’s well suited to be used by hotel maidsThe scenario we consider is when somebody left an encrypted laptop e.g. in a hotel room. Let’s assume the laptop uses full disk encryption like e.g. this provided by TrueCrypt or PGP Whole Disk Encryption. Many people believe, including some well known security experts, that it is advisable to fully power down your laptop when you use full disk encryption in order to prevent attacks via FireWire/PCMCIA or ”Coldboot” attacks…this is where our Evil Maid stick comes into play. All the attacker needs to do is to sneak into the user’s hotel room and boot the laptop from the Evil Maid USB Stick. After some 1-2 minutes, the target laptop’s gets infected with Evil Maid Sniffer that will record the disk encryption passphrase when the user enters it next time…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

8. Verizon Droid http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/18/verizon-droid-is-the-real-deal/ “Verizon and Motorola finally lifted the curtain on their new Droid Android phone yesterday. Make no mistake, this is Android’s flagship product…it will be available very soon, possibly as early as the end of this month…The phone is a three-way effort between Motorola, Verizon and Google. It looks a lot like the iPhone, and may even be as thin or thinner than the iPhone 3GS. It also has two key advantages over the iPhone – a slide out physical keyboard, and use of the Verizon network…the Droid is rumored to be powered by the TI OMAP3430, the same core that the iPhone and Palm Pre use, and which significantly outperforms Qualcomm 528MHz ARM11 based Android phones that exist today…Droid will also be running v.2.0 of Android, with a significantly upgraded user interface…According to people who’ve handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint…” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPYM-XTqcec ]

9. Droid, the phone that finally lets me cancel my iPhone http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/10/19/droid-the-phone-that-finally-lets-me-cancel-my-iphone-heres-why/ “…The iPhone won’t go away. It’s got way too much traction, especially with that generation of users…for whom the iPhone was an introduction to the “smartphone.” For them, the iPhone was an awesome upgrade to the iPod. It was a phone that also let you carry iTunes…For this generation, the iPhone is pretty cool, even though it is hopelessly clunky for the rest of us wanting to use it for critical tasks…for me, and millions of others, the Droid is still likely to be the answer if the reports about it are accurate (I haven’t seen the phone, but I’ve talked with someone who has worked directly with it)…Droid is going to be better than previous Android phones for several reasons. The earlier phones running on carrier T-Mobile, called G1, myTouch and most recently, the Cliq, lacked in three key areas: Hardware, user interface, and network power…”

10. Wal-Mart Partners to Provide Cell-Phone Service http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2354209,00.asp “Walmart is teaming up with prepaid carrier TracFone to offer Straight Talk, a no-contract wireless service. Users can choose between a $45 per month plan that offers unlimited calls, texts, and mobile Web access, or a $30 per month plan that provides 1,000 minutes, 1000 texts, and 30MB of mobile Web access…The service is available nationwide…”

11. Acer Debuts Liquid Android Smartphone, New Netbook http://www.pcworld.com/article/173628/acer_debuts_liquid_android_smartphone_new_netbook.html “Acer…announced two of its most highly anticipated products with Google's Android mobile operating system on board, the Liquid smartphone and an Aspire One netbook…its Aspire One with Android netbook…will run both Android and Microsoft Windows, and users will be able to switch between the two simply by clicking to switch OS…”

12. Plastic Logic unveils Que eBook reader http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/18/plastic-logic-unveils-its-que-ebook-reader-for-business-people/ “…The Que proReader is billed as an essential tool for busy professionals…a novel all-plastic design…because Plastic Logic has figured out how to manufacture a display that uses plastic electronics. It’s lightweight and is durable enough to withstand bending…The screen is 8.5 inches by 11 inches, and is less than a third of an inch thick. It’s pretty much like a pad of paper. It has wireless networking, a touch-screen interface…The battery can last for days. It can download books via Wi-Fi wireless networking and AT&T’s 3G data/phone network. The Que store, where users can buy books, is powered by Barnes & Noble…”

13. $259, dual-screen Barnes & Noble Nook reader http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/10/20/the-259-dual-screen-barnes-noble-nook-reader-gets-official/ “The Barnes & Noble Nook reader is here…for $259 and sport dual touchscreens along with wireless courtesy of WiFi and AT&T 3G wireless. Battery life isn’t too shabby either with a reported 10 day life off of an 3.5 hour charge…2GB of internal storage, a microSD slot, MP3 player, micro USB plug, 3.5MM jack and…dual screens with an Vizplex e-ink display up top and a 3.5-inch color LCD touchscreen on the bottom – but it’s the software that’s killer. The device will allow users to share books for 14 days at a time and it’s not just limited to other Nooks. The books can be read on cellphones and computers too…”

14. Netbooks Are The New Razor Scooter http://www.manyniches.com/developers/netbooks-are-the-new-razor-scooter/ “…2010 will see the rapid and inexorable decline of the popularity of the Netbook. I have been using a Netbook for more than 6 months, and using it with Windows 7. I finally gave up on my Lenovo S10 with 2GB of RAM…Netbooks will suffer the same fate as the Razor scooter…Razor first came on the hipster scene, it was back in the late 90s…Everyone, it seemed, had one of these things, and yet no one, it seemed, was actually riding them…just as quickly as they appeared, they largely disappeared from that scene. Sure, you still see them around, and they are certainly for sale, but there’s no flash there. The cool factor was gone once the lack of utility settled in. The same fate awaits the netbook. Let’s start with the issues…”

Open Source

15. Green Building's Open-Source Push http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc20091015_927728.htm “…the Energy Dept.'s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) launched this week an update of their plug-in for SketchUp, Google's open-source 3D building modeling tool. With a growing list of features, the latest version of the free OpenStudio plug-in will enable architects to create more detailed simulations of their designs' energy efficiency, and marks another step in the effort to make advanced green building design tools widely available at low or no cost…”

16. Home Automation with Linux http://www.linux.com/news/hardware/peripherals/135780-home-automation-with-linux “…Underlying any home automation system is the communication standard with which messages are relayed between components. The home automation industry has several…The oldest standards tended to use powerline signal transmission, but newer systems use RF exclusively or a combination of both. X10 is easily the most widely-known standard; it is an open standard using powerline transmission. Although it has a maximum signal rate of just 20 bits per second, the low cost of components makes it popular, particular for newcomers to the field. X10 was created in 1975, but a newer standard called INSTEON exists that is backwards compatible with it…Unlike X10, however, the INSTEON specification is patent-protected and available only from its creator, Smarthome Technology. C-Bus, Bus SCS, HomePNA, and Z-Wave are other standards growing in popularity, but which are controlled by either a single company or a trade group. In contrast, the LonWorks and KNX standards have been approved by the ISO, IEC, ANSI, or other standards bodies, and can be implemented without paying royalties…In addition to these home automation-focused standards, there are several other protocols that are often used to integrate devices into smart home systems, including the ZigBee wireless communication protocol and (increasingly) USB and Bluetooth…”

17. sensL Launch Open-Source PET Program http://www.photonicsonline.com/article.mvc/sensL-Launch-Open-Source-PET-Program-In-0001 “…This openPET program is the first of its kind in the Medical Imaging sector and is a concept jointly developed by researchers of sensL and LBNL…OpenPET is designed so that it is compatible with a wide variety of detectors and will be freely available to researchers and organisations within the Medical Imaging field. The openPET group believes this will speed the development of new Medical Imaging systems in the detection of cancer, Alzheimer's, and cardiac disease…We also envision an openPET user community that shares open-source software for data acquisition, calibration, etc., which will allow users to go from concept to working camera in record time…To date, open source has not been used in Medical Imaging. We believe it provides the fastest and most effective way to introduce our silicon photomultiplier technology to the market…”

SkyNet

18. Bugs hit Google Docs after upgrade http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139350/Bugs_hit_Google_Docs_after_recent_upgrade “…Google Docs…reports of performance issues due to software bugs following the recent updates. Users are having difficulties with file uploading, exportation, and printing from inside of Google Docs…Google Docs, built from the purchased Writely, and now challenged for its life by Google Wave, has had a long storied history of buggy code, 500 errors and the like. However, in recent months the stability of the Docs ecosystem has improved…”

19. New in Labs: Google Docs previews http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-in-labs-google-docs-previews.html “…I receive a ton of emails with links to documents that my co-workers and friends share with me…Opening these links in another tab or window is kind of annoying, plus it can be tough to keep the context of the email in mind while viewing the document. Starting today, you can preview the contents of a Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation right in your Gmail inbox…”

20. Google plans Google Editions online book store next year http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gr_qJI9KI8h7PBC-AEeknD3ezkegD9BBHAT80 “Google Inc. is launching a new online service for booksellers next year called Google Editions…the price per book would be set by their publishers and would start with between 400,000 to 600,000 books in the first half of 2010…The books bought from Google, and its partners, would be accessible on any gadget that has a Web browser…”

21. Google Analytics Now More Powerful, Flexible And Intelligent http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-analytics-now-more-powerful.html “…we're announcing a new set of Google Analytics features…Some add more power to existing capabilities. Others provide new flexibility to further customize and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of your enterprise. Finally, we'll introduce Analytics Intelligence…”

General Technology

22. iMovie update reveals new Apple video format http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10374263-37.html “…Dubbed iFrame, the new video format is based on industry standard technologies like H.264 video and AAC audio. As expected with H.264, iFrame produces much smaller file sizes than traditional video formats, while maintaining its high-quality video. Of course, the smaller file size increases import speed and helps with editing video files…two cameras were introduced earlier Tuesday and default to shooting video in the new format. iFrame shoots at 960x540. The cameras can also record in high-definition 1080p (1920x1080), as well as high-speed video formats for slow-motion playback…”

23. Wi-Fi Direct: Wi-Fi Is About to Get a Whole Lot Easier http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc20091013_683659.htm “…Going Wi-Fi is about to get a lot easier. For many consumers, setting up an in-home Wi-Fi connection point is something of a hassle. Before you can enjoy the convenience of logging onto the Web without cables and wires, you need to hook up some gear and create your own "hotspot”…that's set to change come mid-2010, when a tech upgrade will make it easier for users of consumer electronics to exchange files between electronic gadgets. On Oct. 14, the Wi-Fi Alliance…will release technology that effectively turns gadgets into mini access points, able to create wireless connections with other Wi-Fi-enabled gadgets or broadband modems within a radius of about 300 feet…The new technology, called Wi-Fi Direct, will be built directly into consumer electronics and automatically scan the vicinity for existing hotspots and the gamut of Wi-Fi equipped devices, including phones, computers, TVs, and gaming consoles. Owners of most existing Wi-Fi-enabled devices will be able to upgrade to Wi-Fi Direct with a simple software download…”

24. Origin 1TB external drive with hardware encryption http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/10/16/origin.adds.750gb.1tb.external.drives/ “Origin Storage…1TB and 750GB…drives feature AES hardware encryption and a six- to 18-digit PIN password. The drives have an LCD keypad for password input…The virtual keypad on the LCD has random number placement to help prevent onlookers to see the password as it's being entered, and the drives have a brute force attack detection system that will wipe the contents clean before the case is physically opened…”

25. Morphing Blob Robot http://www.physorg.com/news174831238.html “…the blob bot has stretchy silicone skin, which is composed of multiple cellular compartments that each contain a "jammable slurry." When some of these cells are unjammed, and an actuator in the center of the robot is inflated, the robot inflates in the areas of the unjammed cells. By controlling which cells are unjammed, the researchers can change the shape of the robot and make it roll in a specific direction. The new robot is being funded by DARPA, which gave iRobot $3.3 million to work on the chembot last year. The goal is to build a robot that can squeeze through tiny openings smaller than its own dimensions…”

26. Why Woz is hot on solid state storage http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9139300/Q_A_Why_Apple_s_co_founder_is_hot_on_solid_state_storage “…I had just agreed to have lunch in Los Gatos, [Calif.] with some of the engineers. I'd met a couple of really bright Ph.ds like [Fusion-io chief technology officer] David Flynn…He'd worked a very long time with a low budget at home, sort of the way we'd done it at Apple and he had gotten far enough to have developed some very good working models…I started asking questions like, how would it compare to this, or how would it compare to that technology?...The answers came back very knowledgeable and very much in line with my thinking about how you should design good products. They completed their financing round, which I had nothing to do with, and then they offered me a position in the company and I accepted. It's the first time I accepted a position in a company that I didn't create myself since 1972…”

27. Micron boosts NAND flash endurance six-fold http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139483/Micron_boosts_NAND_flash_endurance_six_fold “…Micron said that by using its 34-nanometer lithography technology to increase density, it has also been able to increase write performance -- or the number of writes/erase cycles that can be sustained over the flash memory's life -- six-fold on its MLC product and three-fold on the SLC flash memory. The six-fold performance increase translates into 30,000 write cycles on Micron's new MLC Enterprise NAND -- and 300,000 write cycles on its SLC NAND flash. Normally, MLC NAND can sustain an average of 5,000 write/erase cycles, with a maximum of 10,000 write/erase cycles…”

28. Gyrowheel could revolutionise how children learn to ride bikes http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6364781/Gyrowheel-could-revolutionise-how-children-learn-to-ride-bikes.html “…Rather than clinging to the back of the bicycle as the child wobbles along, parents can simply stand back and watch them pedal off on their own. The technology uses a gyroscope in the front wheel to make it extremely stable. It has three stability settings - high, medium and low. As the rider's skills improve, the stability setting can be adjusted…When turned on, Gyrowheel's inner disk spins up. It then senses unbalanced riding and re-centres the bike underneath the rider's weight as it starts to wobble, whether riding straight or turning…”

29. Crystalsol Is Getting Ready To Revolutionize Solar Energy http://www.arcticstartup.com/2009/10/16/crystalsol-is-getting-ready-to-revolutionize-solar-energy/ “…the production of conventional photovoltaic panels isn’t without environmental impacts, and it also uses rare metals which are increasingly difficult to source. Crystalsol, established in 2008 as a spin-off of the Tallinn University of Technology, is developing a product which gets rid of these negatives. The company’s key innovation is the use of tiny semiconductor crystals made of copper, zinc, tin and sulfo-selenide, CZTS for short, where each crystal works as a tiny solar cell. This technology is the combination of decades of research for the Russian military and Philips semiconductor know-how dating back to the 1960s…The modules are produced roll-to-roll – think paper manufacturing – which eliminates the scale-up issues that thin film producers usually face. Once production is up and running, which should be by mid 2011, Crystalsol forecasts production costs below €0.50 per watt…”

30. Sony Hologram Display Will Blow Your Mind http://www.pspworld.com/sony-psp/accessories/sony-hologram-display-will-blow-your-mind-011890.php “…On October 22, Sony will reveal a prototype display in Tokyo that comes surprisingly close to emulating the holographic images found in science fiction visions of the future…A circular device that stands about 30 cm tall and the width of a music CD, the prototype can display images in full 3D, viewable from all sides. We don't yet know how this wizardry works, but we speculate that some combination of flexible OLED technology and mirrors are responsible for the effect. Right now the prototype can display images only in the relatively fuzzy resolution of 128X96 pixels, giving images a ghostly and translucent effect…”

31. Billion-year ultra-dense memory chip developed http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1571&tag=col1;post-1571#more-1571 “…researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, have created a digital electromechanical memory device that consists of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube…we’ve created a memory device that features both ultra-high density and ultra-long lifetimes…The shuttle memory has application for archival storage, with information density as high as 10E12 bits/in2, and thermodynamic stability in excess of one billion years…the Domesday Book, the great survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086 and written on vellum, has survived over 900 years, while the 1986 BBC Domesday Project, a multimedia survey marking the 900th anniversary of the original Book, required migration from the original high-density laserdiscs within two decades because of media failure.” Zettl thinks the technology could be on the market within the next two years…”

32. Magic Mouse, iMacs, Mac minis lead Tuesday Apple update bomb http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/10/magic-mouse-imacs-mac-minis-lead-tuesday-apple-update-bomb.ars “…Apple dropped a hardware update bomb Tuesday morning with a brand-new desktop mouse, new iMacs, new low-end MacBooks, and a new Mac mini…Named the "Apple Magic Mouse"…the Mighty Mouse replacement has no buttons at all and sports a "seamless multi-touch surface." According to Apple, the multitouch surface covers the entire surface of the device, enabling users to scroll in any direction or swipe through webpages just by moving their fingers across the top…Apple reassures us that Magic Mouse "won't confuse a scroll with a swipe," presumably because of the magical chip embedded inside. Apple is trying to replicate the multitouch functionality of the trackpad on a mouse…Apple's venerable all-in-one desktop was also updated with the addition of a 27-inch model and a bump on the lower end to 21.5-inches. The new iMacs now sport 16x9 aspect ratios on LED-backlit screens, at resolutions of 1920x1080 (1080p) and 2560x1440, respectively. What's most interesting about the new 27-inch iMac is that they have Mini DisplayPort-in; this means that users will be able to connect external sources to the iMac's display, such as a DVD player or other computers, essentially allowing them to use the iMac as a TV or external monitor for a notebook…”

Leisure & Entertainment

33. nVidia Tegra wins contract for next-gen Nintendo DS http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/13/nvidia-tegra-wins-contract-for-next-gen-nintendo-ds.aspx “…CEO of nVidia…expects to see Tegra capturing 50% of nVidia's revenue within the next couple of years…the company managed to sway not just Microsoft with the Zune HD multimedia player…but also…Nintendo is going to use Tegra System-on-Chip processor for the successor of DS/DSi handheld console…Now, the billion dollar question is: if Nintendo chose nVidia for the handheld console, does that mean nVidia may have an entrance into the lucrative Wii business?…”

34. The song decoders http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/magazine/18Pandora-t.html “…the story of a company that has hired a bunch of “musicologists,” who sit at computers and listen to songs, one at a time, rating them element by element…The company, an Internet radio service called Pandora, is convinced that by pouring this information through a computer into an algorithm, it can guide you, the listener, to music that you like…Some elements that these musicologists (who, really, are musicians with day jobs) codify are technical, like beats per minute, or the presence of parallel octaves or block chords. Someone taking apart Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” documents the prevalence of harmony, chordal patterning, swung 16ths and the like. But their analysis goes beyond such objectively observable metrics…”

35. Eigenharp Alpha, Pico demo http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/16/eigenharp-alpha-pico-demo-and-mind-blowing-concert-hands-on/ “…John Lambert, Founder and Chairman of Eigenlabs, managed to sneak out of his busy schedule to give us the lowdown on the Eigenharps. It all started in his Devon barn about eight years ago and over time the Alpha was groomed into a 132-key beast, followed by the recently-developed, self-explanatory Pico. The defining character of both Eigenharps lies in their "completely new sensor technology" consisting of pressure sensitive keys, that can do dual-axis vibrato (not dissimilar to string instruments), accompanied by strip controllers for applying filters or pitch bend, or anything at all depending on how you configure them…”

Economy and Technology

36. An Open Letter To Derek Powazek On The Value Of SEO http://searchengineland.com/an-open-letter-to-derek-powazek-on-the-value-of-seo-27680 “…why SEO is indeed a legitimate form of marketing and those who provide the service are not all “scammers” who are out to “con” you…the “you just build it; you just put it out there” approach to search engines, sadly, doesn’t always cut it. Let me be clear. I totally agree with your core advice. Build a site for visitors. Have great content. These are the keys to success, not just with SEO but with anything you want to do. In fact, we just had an article on our site here reinforcing this…To succeed in attracting that audience, she should have a great site and great content — agreed. But does she have individual listings? Then she probably needs to kick them out into Google Base, in order to fully be listed in Google. Does your mythical web developer deal with Google Base much? And where’s her web site now? Is she running it off Blogger? Using her own domain? These have impacts on how both the search engines may see her as well as how she’s perceived. Does she have a blog in addition to a main site? That has an impact. Has she considered some unusual, creative ways to create content around real estate in her area, perhaps some catchy link bait, which may pull in the links she needs to rank better (which, by the way, is a recommended Google practice). Does she have a local office? If so, has she claimed her listing in Google Local? If so, has she updated her title to reflect that perhaps she has “newport beach homes for sale?” This is all SEO…”

37. The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, Hugely Profitable http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1 “…Thousands of other filmmakers and writers around the country are operating with the same loose standards, racing to produce the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishes every day. The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results…They shoot slapdash instructional videos with titles like “How To Draw a Greek Helmet” and “Dog Whistle Training Techniques.” They write guides about lunch meat safety and nonprofit administration….It starts with an algorithm. The algorithm is fed inputs from three sources: Search terms (popular terms from more than 100 sources comprising 2 billion searches a day), the ad market (a snapshot of which keywords are sought after and how much they are fetching), and the competition (what’s online already and where a term ranks in search results)…Pieces are not dreamed up by trained editors nor commissioned based on submitted questions. Instead they are assigned by an algorithm, which mines nearly a terabyte of search data, Internet traffic patterns, and keyword rates to determine what users want to know and how much advertisers will pay to appear next to the answers…fueled by the world’s unceasing desire to know how to grow avocado trees from pits or how to throw an Atlanta Braves-themed birthday party. It is a database of human needs, and if you haven’t stumbled on a Demand video or article yet, you soon will. By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month…what Demand has realized is that the Internet gets only half of the simplest economic formula right: It has the supply part down but ignores demand…”

38. Shazam’s business model http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/shazams-newest-fan-is-kleiner-perkins/ “…Shazam has abolished the nagging question about which song is playing. Its cellphone application lets people simply hold the phone toward the source of the music to identify it…Shazam’s app has been downloaded 10 million times on the iPhone and has 50 million users across all platforms, including BlackBerry and Android phones. It already helps people discover new music and results in more purchases from the iTunes Store than any other company…It will also move into other types of media, like video, and partner with media companies and artists, he said. For example, Shazam will likely start selling items like band tickets and merchandise from within the application…Shazam is a model for how businesses can be successful with iPhone applications, he said, because it began with something simple and started expanding once it got popular. Shazam is already cash-flow positive, he said, with a variety of revenue streams…” [http://www.midomi.com/ ]

39. Teen virtual world Meez sees profit http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10378322-36.html “Meez, a start-up that expanded last year from an avatar creation service into a full-out virtual world for teens, is touting some good news: it's been profitable since April…Meez has about 13 million registered users, 3 million unique hits per month, and only 20 full-time employees plus about 10 contractors. Where's the money coming from? Premium subscriptions, ads on the free version of the site, and virtual goods bought and sold with its internal "Coinz" currency--which includes a mobile virtual-gift deal with Verizon…”

Civilian Aerospace

40. The moon belongs to no one – yet http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427306.000-the-moon-belongs-to-no-one--yet.html “LAST week, NASA bombed the moon. Or rather, it crashed its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite into the moon's south pole in a bid to discover reserves of water and other resources…The race back to the moon has been prompted by the realisation that exploiting it may now be within reach. And it poses the question: who gets to use the moon's recoverable resources, such as oxygen or water?...the Lunar Treaty drafted by the United Nations in the 1990s has still not been signed by the space powers. Since this leaves the moon unprotected by law - the ultimate terra nullius - we may now see a scramble for territory…”

41. Virgin Galactic and the future of space tourism http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=t-minus-18-months-and-counting-virg-2009-10-15 “…Branson…predicts, his company is a scant 18 months from the first commercial near-orbit flight…the company hopes to become a private launcher of commercial satellites, putting some of the burgeoning number of orbiting machines into space for a fraction of the going rate. Though the tourist trips toward space will start suborbital, the ambitions for the business's future are at least solar system-scale: NASA astronaut training, a potential partnership with Bigelow Aerospace for inflatable hotels in space and even potentially the development of a two-person craft to tour the moon…”

42. Commercial Spaceflight http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574475091646686368.html “…The following is by astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Ken Bowersox, Jake Garn, Robert Gibson, Hank Hartsfield, John Herrington, Byron Lichtenberg, John Lounge, Rick Searfoss, Norman Thagard, Kathryn Thornton, Jim Voss and Charles Walker: we know that exploring space is a worthwhile and challenging endeavor…Public-private partnerships can leverage the agility and efficiency of the commercial sector while maintaining access to the skilled workers, technologies and facilities only available in the government…While it's completely appropriate for NASA to continue developing systems and the new technologies necessary to take crews farther out into our solar system, we believe that the commercial sector is fully capable of safely handling the critical task of low-Earth-orbit human transportation…”

43. $500,000 treasure dug up in lunar soil http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18001-500000-treasure-dug-up-in-lunar-soil.html “…It was NASA's third Regolith Excavation Challenge but the first in which any team's machine performed well enough to claim the bounty. A robot built by students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, picked up and deposited more than 440 kilograms of material to win…The Worcester bot used a half-metre-wide digging belt and bright blue lights to navigate in the clouds of dust it kicked up, winning its inventors the $500,000 and recognition from NASA officials…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

44. The Return of the Vector Processor http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7575 “…the Nvidia Fermi architecture…is going to be a game changer…My previous opinion of GP-GPU computing was certainly positive and I could see it changing the HPC game in some corners. Users were reporting fantastic speed-ups in some areas, new users could experiment with existing video cards, and the larger video market was going to keep the cost down. There were, however, some fundamental issues expressed by many of the more traditional HPC users. Until they were resolved, I assumed these issues would limit just how far GPU computing could go in the HPC world. Based on the Fermi technical material I have read, Nvidia has been listening and many of these issues have been addressed head-on… one way to look at GPU computing is the return of the vector or array processor to HPC…”

45. GPU Computing shows superior efficiency in Australian Outback http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/12/gpu-computing-shows-superior-efficiency-in-australian-outback.aspx “…MWA [Murchinson Widefield Array] is promising to be all what conventional installations such as afore mentioned VLA or the upcoming Chinese FAST cannot even dream of achieving. By installing hundreds or even thousands of small antennas in a grid organization, MWA is a highly-efficient design [without moving parts] that can cover up to 20 degrees of sky above us. This almost seven-fold increase in what Radio Telescopes can achieve opens a whole new world for scientists…The prototype installation is consisted out of 32 antenna clusters with each cluster formed out of 16 small antennas. The goal is to span 512 clusters over one square kilometer…the location isn't exactly reachable with a conventional power grid, thus a diesel-powered generator is being used. The generator creates limited supply of electricity, resulting in a very stingy budget for computing. The unfortunate part is the fact that array in its current shape needs 20 TFLOPS of computing power, with an overall power budget of just 20kW…Given that you would need around 200 CPUs for the job, as 200 Xeon 5500 CPUs at 3.2 GHz…Overall estimate in CPU-based setup was in excess of 55,000 Watts [55kW]…In around 1kW of power, scientists managed to squeeze 4.5TFLOPS [dual GTX 295 card], meaning "only" 5.5kW is needed for 20TFLOPS. With upcoming Fermi-based cards, Australians expect to build a 20TFLOPS setup using only3.3kW…”

46. Colfax Unveils First Eight Tesla GPU Server http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/Colfax-Server-Features-Eight-NVIDIA-Tesla-GPUs-64090602.html “…The Colfax CXT8000 supports up to 8 CPU cores and 1920 GPU cores with nearly 8 teraflops of peak single precision GPU performance in a single 4U system…in a small footprint, is much faster, and more energy-efficient than a CPU-only driven cluster…Basic 8 GPU configuration starts at $16,000…”

*****

NEW NET Issues List for 13 Oct 2009

Below is the final list of issues for the TUESDAY, 13 October 2009, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we're upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. Swedish Company Looks to Unify Photos on the Web http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20091009/tc_pcworld/swedishcompanylookstounifyphotosontheweb “A Swedish startup is edging closer to a Web-based service that provides a one-stop Web site where people can see their friends' photos, regardless of whether those friends use different photo-sharing sites or social networks. The company, Polar Rose, started out in 2004 specializing in facial-recognition technology. Polar Rose created a browser plug-in that popped up a small symbol when a browser opened a Web page containing a photo of a face…It was powerful technology, and it didn't sit well with people, even those who knew the photos they posted were public…Despite these photos being public and sharing it on Flickr and saying 'I'm OK with people viewing this,' people weren't comfortable being named," Nyholm said…Polar Rose changed its tack due to those concerns and began dealing only with "private" photos -- those on photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Facebook where people must authenticate themselves and have more granular control over who can view the photos…”

2. Mindjet boosts online collaboration with Catalyst http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20091008/tc_afp/usitinternetbusinessmindjet “…Mindjet…Catalyst technology…"attacks a major problem" in business by helping turn online brainstorming sessions into real-world results…Catalyst sets out to mimic the way people work together in the same room to solve problems…Catalyst team members can simultaneously video-conference while modifying a shared document on an online "white board." Photos, paperwork, sketches and other digitized data can also be shared…Internet telephony and text messaging capabilities are also built in Catalyst…Mindjet adopted early on mind-mapping and information visualization techniques…"With Catalyst, I have a place I can work, see what others are doing and move from a great meeting into a great strategy,"…Catalyst is hosted online as a service at a cost of 25 dollars per month per worker involved in projects…”

3. From Twitter to MySpace, social networks are now run by women over 35 http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6868818.ece “…New figures show that female users now dominate social-networking sites, and those aged 35 and over are among the fastest-growing demographic for many social networks…over half of all social-networking users in the UK are women. But almost 59 per cent of females “consume the content” of these sites…Men may be signed up to social networks, but when it comes to being active on them — talking to other people, organising social engagements and generally taking an interest in other people’s lives — it is women who rule…”

4. Take care with the online Microsoft Office freebies http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6850272.ece “…Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, is making three of its most popular programs free to use online…to compete with Google’s rival software, the company has had little choice but to give away some of its crown jewels…One of the drawbacks is that they have been “hobbled”…they contained only a fraction of the hundreds of features found in the paid-for software…The other hurdle with this vision of so-called “cloud computing” — the idea of software that runs in the window of a web browser instead of on your own computer — is the requirement for a speedy broadband connection…Even on a fast connection, the Web App versions of Microsoft’s software are noticeably slower than their desktop equivalents…Where the Web Apps concept comes into its own is as a means of sharing documents with friends and colleagues. Because the documents are housed on a server, and you get 25GB of online storage space with the service, you simply have to specify who, if anyone, you want to be able to access each file…”

5. Why Email No Longer Rules… http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574431151489408372.html “Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over…a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine. We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts…while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster…So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let's start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster…” [ http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/email-phenomenon-its-last-legs ]

6. Datacenter reliability: Microsoft & T-Mobile say “we probably lost all your Sidekick data” http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10372525-56.html “The massive data failure at Microsoft's Danger subsidiary threatens to put a dark cloud over the company's broader "software plus services" strategy. A key tenet of that approach is that businesses and consumers can trust Microsoft to reliably store valuable data…Microsoft's Danger unit experienced a huge outage that left many T-Mobile Sidekick users without access to their calendar, address book, and other key data…the Sidekick keeps nearly all its data in the cloud as opposed to keeping the primary copy on the devices themselves…The Danger outage comes just a month before Microsoft is expected to launch its operating system in the cloud--Windows Azure…One of the characteristics of Azure is that programs written for it can be run only via Microsoft's data centers and not on a company's own servers…the Azure setup is entirely different from what Danger uses: the Sidekick uses an architecture Microsoft inherited rather than built…”

7. Air New Zealand / IBM datacenter crash http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/10/12/ibm-generator-failure-causes-airline-chaos/ “A generator failure Sunday at an IBM data center in Auckland, New Zealand crippled key services for Air New Zealand…The data center outage crashed airport check-in systems, as well as on-line bookings and call center systems Sunday morning, affecting more than 10,000 passengers and throwing airports into disarray…IBM says service was restored to most clients within an hour, but local media reports say Air New Zealand’s ticketing kiosks were offline for up to six hours. Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe is not happy…I am struggling to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers…”

8. Researchers Advise Cyber Self Defense in the Cloud http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/173467/researchers_advise_cyber_self_defense_in_the_cloud.html “…the best defense against data theft, malware and viruses in the cloud is self defense, researchers at the Hack In The Box (HITB) security conference said…The loss of personal data by Sidekick smartphone users over the weekend, including contacts, calendar entries, photographs and other personal information, serves as another example of the potential pitfalls of trusting the Cloud. Danger, the Microsoft subsidiary that stores Sidekick data, said a service disruption almost certainly means user data has been lost for good…”

9. Federal Trade Commission's Coming War on Bloggers http://valleywag.gawker.com/5377517/the-federal-trade-commissions-coming-war-on-bloggers “The FTC is planning public hearings aimed at figuring out how to prop up dying newspapers…the FTC will be considering:…* "Proposals for changes in copyright law and doctrine, including the 'fair use' of news stories"…* "Proposals for greater public funding of public affairs news." The idea of a bailout for newspapers has been gaining momentum lately, and the FTC workshop shows that it's not going away any time soon…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

10. Comcast Employs New Botnet Alert System http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Employs-New-Botnet-Alert-System-104891 “…According to Comcast, the company is going to start issuing alerts on subscriber PCs (see screenshot below) should the user be showing the telltale signs of botnet or spam relay infection. The alert can either be ignored by the customer, or they can click on a link that will take them to the Comcast security center…For those interested in how the alert system works, Comcast has stopped by our forums to discuss it in more detail and field any questions you might have…you have to wonder how many infected customers will avoid the alert, given it looks a lot like the kind of phishing solicitations they're repeatedly told not to click on by the family computer nerd…”

11. FTC Responds to Blogger Fears: "That $11,000 Fine is Not True" http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jennifer-vilaga/slipstream/ftc-bloggers-its-not-medium-its-message-0 “…the Federal Trade Commission is trying to reign in freebie-grabbing bloggers and graft-happy social media users masquerading as unbiased critics…We asked a few other prominent bloggers what their biggest concerns were about the news, then we solicited responses to those concerns from Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC…Richard Cleland: “That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law. To the extent that I have seen and heard, people are not objecting to the disclosure requirements but to the fear of penalty if they inadvertently make a mistake. That’s the thing I don’t think people need to be concerned about. There’s no monetary penalty, in terms of the first violation, even in the worst case…”

12. Wife bans FBI head from online banking http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10370164-245.html “…FBI Director Robert Mueller was banned by his wife from doing online banking after he nearly fell for a phishing scam…He received an e-mail purporting to be from his bank that looked "perfectly legitimate" and which prompted him to verify some information. He started to follow the instructions but then realized that that "might not be such a good idea,"...He said he changed his passwords and tried to pass the incident off to his wife as a "teachable moment," but she was having none of it and told him…No more Internet banking for you…”

13. Contest aims to turn young hackers into cyber security ‘top guns’ http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6865432.ece “…Organisers of a series of online competitions are planning to emulate a US Government-backed scheme to encourage computer whiz-kids to work in internet security. The US Cyber Challenge was launched earlier this year to find 10,000 of America’s brightest young talents. A British version is being planned next year, with backing from the SANS Institute, a computer security training body. Entrants could be asked to play a series of virtual games where they have to extract passwords from a computer, capture websites…competitors have to analyse a hard drive to find evidence to convict criminals who have stolen guns; in another they have to defend a network from attacks…The initiative could become part of Britain’s newly launched national cyber security strategy…Lord West, the Security Minister, has said that Britain needs “youngsters who are deep into this stuff” to combat attacks…The winner of the first contest in the US Cyber Challenge was a 17-year-old student from Connecticut. Michael Coppola gained extra credit for breaking into the scoring system and awarding himself 10,000 points…”

14. New Ad-Aware offers behavioral detection http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10371489-12.html “Lavasoft has updated its popular malware and spyware detection and removal tool Ad-Aware. Rather than a dramatic redo, version 8.1 builds on the improvements made in the previous version. The new version is faster, has better removal abilities, and introduces a behavioral detection engine…fans of the free version do not get all the features available in the paid upgrades…”

15. The Evolution Of Click Fraud: Massive Chinese Operation http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/08/the-evolution-of-click-fraud-massive-chinese-operation-dormring1-uncovered/ “As long as advertisers pay for clicks, there will be click fraud. And the more people combat it, the more sophisticated the attacks become to get around the defenses that advertisers, search engines, and others put in place…Anchor Intelligence identified a click fraud ring being run out of China which involved 200,000 different IP addresses and racked up more than $3 million worth of fraudulent clicks across 2,000 advertisers in a two-week period. That money was never paid out…but who knows how long the ring was in operation before Anchor noticed. The operation was called DormRing1 because it was centered in dorms at technical universities in China such as the Shanghai Technology Institute… DormRing1..easily involved more than 1,000 people who set up more than 10,000 Websites to spread out the fraud…DormRing1 recruited student click fraud workers on Chinese social networks where and forums participants would post images of checks they were getting for their activities. One drummed up interest by talking about his plans to buy a car with the proceeds. Just like with any criminal organization, people at the lower rungs had to do a lot of grunt work to move up the ladder of trust and money…”

16. Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/att-doj-foia/ “The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying…The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens. The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records…”

17. What's replacing P2P, BitTorrent as pirate hangouts? http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139210/What_s_replacing_P2P_BitTorrent_as_pirate_hangouts_ “…Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast-moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites. Sites such as RapidShare, Megaupload, and Hotfile let anonymous users upload large files such as cracked software for free…"It's incredibly easy to use. And what you get is essentially your own private FTP server,"…While sites such as RapidShare allow free downloads, they make their money by charging heavy downloaders for premium memberships…Trade in pirated digital goods, whether it is movies, music or e-books or software, is what drives the popularity and business model of firms like RapidShare…The site is already among the top twenty most popular in the world…Uploads and downloads to Rapidshare account for 5% of all Internet traffic globally…”

18. Bahama Botnet Stealing Traffic From Google http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/20091008/tc_pcworld/clickforensicsbahamabotnetstealingtrafficfromgoogle “The Bahama botnet, a sophisticated network of compromised computers that is wreaking click-fraud havoc among advertisers…Bahama botnet not only turns ordinary, legitimate PCs into click-fraud perpetrators that dilute the effectiveness of ad campaigns…In the case of Google.com, compromised machines take their users to a fake page hosted in Canada that looks just like the real Google page…a user who intended to run a legitimate search on Google ends up unknowingly involved in a click-fraud scam in which Google also loses Web traffic and ad revenue…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

19. Android to grab No. 2 spot by 2012 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139026/Android_to_grab_No._2_spot_by_2012_says_Gartner “While the Google-backed Android mobile operating system currently runs on less than 2% of all smartphones, Gartner Inc. predicts it will surge to 14% of the global smartphone market in 2012 -- ahead of the iPhone, as well as Windows Mobile and BlackBerry smartphones. In that year, Gartner forecasts Android will actually rank second globally, behind the Symbian OS, which is used in Nokia devices that are highly popular in Europe and many countries outside the U.S. Symbian now runs on about half of all smartphones, but will fall to 39% in 2012…Dulaney said that smartphone interfaces seem to have headed off in two divergent ways, with iPhone's heavy focus on applications compared to Windows Mobile's and Symbian's focus on smartphone tasks and communications. But Android, he said, "has blended a focus on applications and tasks pretty well." Android's interface allows a user to perform frequently needed tasks without going back to the top of the logic tree to switch between tasks, he said. Makers of Android "have done a good job of knowing how you work on a phone…”

20. The Google Android party has begun http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12261_7-10370495-10356022.html “…Google Android phones are finally hitting the market en masse. In the past couple of months, nine devices using Google's mobile operating system have been announced…Starting next week, Sprint Nextel will introduce its first Android phone…Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest wireless operator, will also be getting two new Google Android phones in the coming weeks…Even AT&T, the second largest wireless provider in the U.S. and the exclusive U.S. carrier for the iPhone, is expected to have a Google Android phone soon…Device makers see Android as their biggest hope to compete against Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices in the smartphone market…”

21. A Chink In Android’s Armor http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/11/a-chink-in-androids-armor/ “…75 million phones running the Android operating system will be sold in 2012, says research firm Gartner…There’s just one problem…Each has different hardware, and different software, than the others…a number of high profile Android application developers…are extremely frustrated with Android right now. For the iPhone, they build once and maintain the code base. On Android, they built once for v.1.5, but are getting far less installs than the iPhone…they’re faced with a landslide of new handsets, some running v.1.6 and some courageous souls even running android v.2.0…There are whispers of backwards and forwards compatibility issues as well, making the problem even worse…”

22. Best Buy Announces MobileMe Competitor "mIQ" http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/best_buy_announces_mobileme_competitor_miq.php “…electronics retailer Best Buy announced a new mobile backup service called mIQ. Designed to compete with similar services like Apple's MobileMe or Microsoft's My Phone, mIQ offers up to 1 GB of storage space in the cloud for photos, video, contact and calendar information, SMS messages, and more. However, unlike its competitors, mIQ has a couple of distinct advantages: it's 100% free and anyone can sign up to use it…” [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2009/10/four-different-ways-to-sync-your-cellphone-with-the-cloud.ars ]

23. Kindle price lowered to $259 http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44219/97/ “Amazon is lowering the price of the Kindle to $259, down from $299 and launching a new reader compatible with global wireless networks. Kindle with US & International Wireless will enable readers to download content wirelessly in over 100 countries and territories…”

24. Apple Isn’t Even Bothering To Lie Anymore http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/06/apple-isnt-even-bothering-to-lie-anymore/ “…Apple’s chief complaint against the Google Voice application was “The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls…”…the real reason Apple won’t let Google Voice through is that they are scared out of their mind that Android and Google Voice will eat their iPhone lunch over the long term…you’d think they’d at least be consistent and apply the same arguments to other third party apps. At least until this whole FCC thing blows over. But Skype’s calling app, which uses Wifi, is totally fine. And yesterday, the Vonage iPhone app, which seems to be just as much of an issue as Google Voice based on that quote at the top, got the green light, too…”

25. Apple iPhone "No Refunds" Policy http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/173495/apple_no_refunds_policy_for_better_and_worse.html “…Apple's "no refunds" policy for iPhone App Store purchase is both not as bad--and worse--than it sounds…sometimes Apple itself is to blame for non-functional apps, but offers no help in those cases…every time Apple updates firmware, as in v3.0 upgrade, an app can be broken…I bought a language app for $25. Today it is not working properly because of the update and Apple would not refund my money. The developer says they sent an update but Apple has not approved it…”

26. LG’s Solar-Powered E-Book Reader http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/10/lgs-solar-powered-e-book-reader/ “…One of the big benefits of e-paper is that it sips electricity allowing devices to work for days rather than hours. LG’s foray into the e-book world extends this with a solar panel, helpfully placed on the front inside cover of the reader itself, and at just ten grams and less than a millimeter thick, it will be almost unnoticeable. If exposed to the sun for five hours, the TFT solar panel will give enough charge for a day of use. LG plans to up the efficiency and we can see a time when e-books will never need to be charged. Remember the first solar-powered calculators? They were a novelty which is now ubiquitous…”

Open Source

27. The Nokia N900 http://temporaryland.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/nokian900-not-just-an-itoy/ “…let me introduce to you the most amazing portable Linux computer ever to reach the consumer market…the N900 is a competitor in the smart phone market with the iPhone, Android devices, and the Palm Pre…some people who would have never been interested in an iPhone, or an Android device, or a Pre, are going to want this device, badly. At the same time, a lot of existing smart phone users are going to look at this and yawn…let me run you trough some of the facts that distinguish these devices to see why I think the N900 should be the right device for a lot of people…”

28. 5 Useful Tools to Access Linux Partition from Windows http://shibuvarkala.blogspot.com/2009/10/useful-tools-to-access-linux-partition.html “…If you currently have Windows OS running and you need some files for your work which you have stored on the Linux installation, you no longer have to shut down Windows and boot Linux…”

29. Linux Server Management: Five Tips http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/_featured/article.php/3843031/Linux-Server-Management-Five-Signs-Youre-Doing-I “…if you cannot tell a server (be it physical or virtual) to reinstall itself, then simply walk away knowing it will reload and return to full service, you are doing it wrong. Every network service, configuration file, and setting required for a server to function, absolutely must be automated and configured in your configuration management system…”

30. Play games installed on other computers with StreamMyGame http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/443-play-games-installed-on-other-computers-with-streamgames “StreamMyGame Server enables PC games to be played remotely by converting the game’s video and audio into a Game Stream and sending it over a home network to a second computer where you can view and play the game with the free StreamMyGame Player. The second computer can be a PC, laptop, PS3 or Linux device. The game can be played on the second computer without any lag…”

SkyNet

31. Practically Perfect PDF, Courtesy of Google http://www.pcworld.com/article/173343/practically_perfect_pdf_courtesy_of_google.html “…This is very simple and very useful: Google is now using the Web-based PDF viewer that I've been enjoying in Gmail to make it easier to view PDFs that you happen upon on the Web. You know it's available when you see a PDF in Google Search results with a "Quick View" link. Click it, and you get a nice view of the PDF that retains formatting and doesn't require you to download the PDF (or even to have a PDF viewer installed on your computer)…”

32. Introducing Google Search Options for mobile http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-search-options-for-mobile.html “Finding the exact information you need sometimes requires filtering and refining your search results. Earlier in the year, we launched a collection of tools called Search Options which enable you to easily and quickly do this from a computer. Today in the US, we are making Search Options available on Android/iPhone/Palm WebOS devices…”

33. Google's vision of the future of journalism http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/07/google-josh-cohen-interview “…its other experiments with how to present journalistic output, most recently Spotlight…follows an algorithm focusing on filtering special-interest articles, opinion pieces, investigative journalism and other articles of "lasting value"…Fast Flip, which creates an ad-hoc magazine of screenshots of news organisations' webpages…Google has rolled out nine new search options. These are hidden in the left sidebar and allow users to filter their results by hour or date range, or to look only within blogs, or for reviews. This means that Google's search can now be filtered to show results indexed minutes or seconds ago – ideal for researching a story…”

34. What the GDrive Could Look Like http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/update_to_google_sites_shows_us_what_the_gdrive_could_look_like.php “We have been hearing rumors about the Google Drive online storage service for years now. This mythical GDrive would give users the ability to easily store and access all of their files in the cloud. Lots of other services already offer this, of course, but few of them are at the center of our online lives as much as Google is. Yesterday, Google Sites, a service that lets users build their own websites without ever having to touch the HTML or CSS code, just launched an update to its unified 'insert' dialog. This dialog brings together all of your files from almost all of Google's services and looks a lot like we would imagine the GDrive to look like…”

35. Google Maps Ditches Tele Atlas http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_maps_ditches_teleatlas_in_favor_of_street_view_cars_crowdsourcing.php “…it now looks like Google is also ditching Tele Atlas as its data provider for Google Maps in the US in favor of a do-it-yourself approach. Google had been using data from Tele Atlas' maps since September 2008 after moving away from Navteq's data after Navteq was acquired by Nokia…The question, of course, is why Google plans to make its own maps now. For one, chances are that Google is currently paying Tele Atlas a lot of money for using its maps…if Google continues to make these maps easily available to developers without cumbersome licensing restrictions, it could bring radical change to the mapping business.”

36. Introducing Google Building Maker http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-building-maker.html “…Some of us here at Google spend almost all of our time thinking about one thing: How do we create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth? How do we make sure it's accurate, that it stays current and that it's useful to everyone who might want to use it? One of the best ways to get a big project done — and done well — is to open it up to the world. As such, today we're announcing the launch of Google Building Maker, a fun and simple (and crazy addictive, it turns out) tool for creating buildings for Google Earth…You can use Google SketchUp (our free, general-purpose 3D modeling tool) to edit or otherwise modify anything you make with Building Maker…” [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_launches_building_maker.php ]

37. Google Squared Gets Some Much Needed Improvements http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_squared_gets_some_much_needed_improvements.php “…Google announced some updates to Squared that should make it more useful. Now, if you do a search on Squared, for example, the results will contain up to 120 facts - up from 30 in the initial release…Squared also now gives users the option to sort columns…”

38. Google Maps: Your world, your map http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/your-world-your-map.html “…as part of our ongoing commitment to provide the richest, most up-to-date maps possible, we continuously explore ways to integrate new information from users and authoritative partners into Google Maps. Two years ago, we began allowing you to move map markers to improve address precision; since early last year, you've been able to add locations; and over the past few years, we've been partnering directly with transit agencies to integrate their data…we've worked directly with a wide range of authoritative information sources to create a new base map dataset…we've been able to add a lot of new, detailed information to Google Maps - information that helps people better explore and get around the real world. For example, college students will be pleased to see maps of many campuses; and cyclists will now find many more trails and paths to explore…we've added a new tool to Google Maps that lets you communicate directly with Google about any updates that you think need to be made to our maps. You'll find this "Report a Problem" link on the bottom right of Google Maps…If you submit your email address, we'll even keep you posted on our progress…”

39. Schmidt: Google Has Not Yet Found The Evil Room http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/schmidt-we-have-not-yet-found-the-evil-room/ “…Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt held an informal press conference…touching upon pretty much everything under the Google sun. One issue that kept on coming up was Google’s growing power in general. Google touches so many parts of the Web and our lives that concerns are rising that Google will use its power and all the knowledge it collects about us inappropriately…Later on, he prefaced another discussion of the (hypothetical) evil room by saying, “There are many reasons why we will not be like Microsoft.” Maybe he thinks the evil room is on Microsoft’s campus…Neither Schmidt nor Brin addressed the question of whether or not Google uses data from its non-search products to improve search in this manner, but Schmidt rejected the idea that customers are locked in…”

40. Google’s Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet/ “…the Google Books Settlement…would give the internet the largest and most comprehensive library in history, at the cost of granting Google a de facto monopoly. It’s hard to imagine any company better equipped to scan, catalog and index millions of books than Google. But a few geeks with long memories remember the last time Google assembled a giant library that promised to rescue orphaned content for future generations. And the tattered remnants of that online archive are a cautionary tale in what happens when Google simply loses interest. That library is Usenet…for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of “newsgroup” postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft…Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based Deja.com, and with it a Usenet archive going back to 1995…Later that year, Google deepened its archive with millions of posts that had been saved on aging magtape by a veteran Unix guru named Marc Spencer. The combined archives gave Google a library of 700 million articles from 35,000 newsgroups, spanning two decades. Salon hailed the accomplishment in an article headlined “The geeks who saved Usenet.”…Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins. On the surface, it looks as clean and shiny as every other Google service, which makes its rotting interior all the more jarring — like visiting Disneyland and finding broken windows and graffiti on Main Street USA…”

General Technology

41. Windows 7 doesn't boot faster http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10370369-56.html “Although Windows 7 has been praised for loading and shutting down faster than prior versions of Windows…the new operating system can take longer to get started than Windows Vista. Iolo Technlogies, which sells PC tune-up software, said its lab unit found that a brand-new machine running Windows 7 takes a minute and 34 seconds to become usable, as compared to a minute and 6 seconds for Windows Vista. Iolo notes that it measured not the time it takes for the desktop to appear--which can be as little as 40 seconds on a fresh installation of Windows 7--but rather the time it takes to become fully usable "with CPU cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved." The results are also fairly similar to what CNET found in its testing of the operating system…I have been using Windows 7 for months now and find myself rarely doing a full reboot and instead going in and out of sleep for days at a time--a process that moves particularly quickly. As is often the case with Windows, Iolo found that things only get worse over time. It found that a three-month-old machine can take up to a minute longer to boot, or 2 minutes and 34 seconds…”

42. Microsoft mulling 128-bit versions of Windows http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/10/microsoft-mulling-128-bit-versions-of-windows-8-windows-9.ars “…Robert Morgan is working to get IA-128 working backwards with full binary compatibility on the existing IA-64 instructions in the hardware simulation to work for Windows 8 and definitely Windows 9…This news is interesting because we always thought Windows 7 would be the last release that had 32-bit and 64-bit versions. This was brought on by the fact that Windows Server 2008 R2, the server version of Windows 7, was the first Windows Server release to be 64-bit only. The next client version of Windows should therefore follow suit, but apparently Microsoft is going to prepare it for 128-bit as well. We're not saying Windows 8 will definitely come in 64-bit and 128-bit flavors, but Microsoft is moving down that path, and at the very least, Windows 9 will…”

43. TDK plans 10-layer, 320GB optical disc http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/152428 “…TDK is hoping to give Blu-ray a generational kick in the pants with an upcoming format change, bumping that 50GB maximum capacity to a whopping 320GB…TDK is demonstrating the new discs this week at a Japanese trade show and says the disc is beyond prototype stage and is already reliable enough for commercial use…”

44. Data losses in Snow Leopard http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8304229.stm “Users of the new Apple operating system Snow Leopard are experiencing massive data losses when logging into their machines under a guest account…Users have in some cases lost their entire main profile, including sites, pictures, videos and documents…Those who use backup services including the Mac's own Time Machine can restore their lost data, but it appears that for those who do not, the data is permanently lost…”

45. Microsoft wants multicore boost from Windows 7 http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10372095-264.html “…with chips getting more processing cores instead of more gigahertz, is your next computer going to actually run your software faster? Microsoft is one of the companies that feels the pressure to most acutely when it comes to putting those cores to work…Windows 7 can support…as many as 256 processor cores compared with 64 for its predecessor…But what does 256 or even 64 processors have to do with a PC with four or eight cores?…”

Leisure & Entertainment

46. Netflix boss says DVD has two years left http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/152659 “…Netflix CEO Reed Hastings'…said in an interview with The Motley Fool…that DVD will only be the "primary delivery format" at the company for the next two years, though he did add that it would stick around in some fashion for the next decade or two…Hastings didn't note what would supplant DVD as the company's major movie format, but considering that Blu-ray remains a niche product, with 10 percent penetration or lower among most consumers, he's probably talking about streaming…”

47. Are Single-Player Games like Dragon Age Doomed? http://www.pcworld.com/article/173396/are_singleplayer_games_like_dragon_age_doomed.html “Is Bioware's Dragon Age the last of its kind? A solo-player game absent an integrated online component? Or is it actually the next step in what Spore designer Will Wright calls the "massively single player" experience? Dragon Age…heralds Bioware's return to fantasy role-playing, a "dark heroic fantasy" that lets you choose from six origin stories designed to change up your game in more than the usual cursory ways. It's out on November 17th. In the final part of our interview with the game's lead designer Mike Laidlaw, we talk about the "death" of single-player gaming…”

48. 21-year-old computer geek makes £1m with online game http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6264082/21-year-old-computer-geek-makes-1m-with-online-game.html “Joe Chedburn, a self-confessed geek, was just 16 when he came up with the idea to write an online game focused on crime. Torn, which is text-based and has no graphics, grew quickly and now has around 41,000 active users with over 1.3 million account holders. Although the game is free to play users can pay £3 every month to receive extra points and status…"Some days I can spend all day working on the site and sometimes it runs on its own but I am looking to expand it." Joe briefly studied IT after leaving school but turned his back on education in order to concentrate on making improvements to his online game…”

Economy and Technology

49. How a Startup’s Pet Project Became Profitable http://gigaom.com/2009/10/09/clustershot-how-a-startups-pet-project-became-profitable/ “When Canada’s Silverorange started developing ClusterShot, a web site through which people can upload and sell their photos online, in May of 2008, it was nothing more than a side project members of the 14-person web development firm worked on in the evenings and on weekends. Today the service consumes up to 25 percent of Silverorange’s development time and is profitable. ClusterShot earns revenue from selling annual Pro subscriptions, which cost $20 and provide users with their own personal photo store. So how did ClusterShot achieve profitability just eight months after it launched…”

50. The iPhone App Store Gold Rush May Be Running Low on Gold http://gizmodo.com/5375913/the-iphone-app-store-gold-rush-may-be-running-low-on-gold “…Newsweek claims…the App Store goldmine has dried out and some developers are barely getting by…I went from being envious of the supposed overnight millionaires to realizing that perhaps some or even most may not be all that well off after all…Newsweek interviewed a handful of those developers…and they're saying that the money's run out…perhaps the market for apps is maturing and as the number of competing programs increases, it's becoming much harder to develop and sell a runaway hit than in the past…”

51. Book Industry Prepares For New Business Models http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1767816/book_industry_prepares_for_new_business_models/index.html “The world's book trade meets in Frankfurt, Germany next week as the industry stands on the cusp of a long-feared transformation for which many are unprepared. Electronic readers such as Amazon’s kindle, book-sized screens that grab and display text from the Internet, are set to enter the mass market with a huge surge in sales this holiday shopping season. The shift has book publishers facing declining revenues as sales of discs, papers and books are replaced by less costly or free digitally distributed content. The phenomenon is similar to what the music and newspaper industries have experienced in recent years…But some are welcoming the digital transition…”

52. Nvidia Puts Chipsets For Intel CPUs On Hold http://www.crn.com/hardware/220400042 “Nvidia is postponing its development of chipsets for Intel's latest Nehalem-class processors pending the outcome of a legal dispute over the two companies' licensing agreement, Nvidia said Thursday. Intel's Core i7 and Core i5 desktop processors and the latest additions to its Xeon server/workstation lineup feature a new microarchitecture, code-named Nehalem -- Intel insists that Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia cannot build products for that class of processor under their 2004 patent-licensing agreement. Nvidia disputes the claim and alleged in a statement Thursday that Intel's "improper claims to customers" and "unfair business tactics" had made it effectively impossible" for the company to market chipsets for future Nehalem CPUs…”

Civilian Aerospace

53. A Xombie Qualifies for Lunar Lander Prize http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/07/2091980.aspx “…Masten Space Systems' Xombie rocket has prevailed in its second attempt to qualify for a $150,000 rocket prize from NASA…Xombie was built to go after the second prize in what's known as the Level 1 competition. (Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace won the $350,000 first prize last year.)…Armadillo Aerospace…qualified for the challenge's more ambitious $1 million Level 2 prize last month. Masten, Unreasonable Rocket and BonNova are going after Level 2 prizes as well. (Second prize is $500,000.)…if Masten and his team could maintain the kind of accuracy they achieved today during their upcoming Level 2 flight, "they'll beat Armadillo" for the million dollars. The best thing about today's outing was that it proved there's more than one prizeworthy competitor out there…”

54. A Private Space Shuttle http://www.newsweek.com/id/217018 “In the early 1970s, Freeman Dyson wrote an essay comparing space travel to the colonization of the New World and the settlement of the American West. The subject was fanciful, but that didn't keep Dyson, an eminent