We and others cried out in protest, since the data being delivered
included username, IP address and identifiers of all videos viewed on
. And the entity it was being delivered to has a penchant for
litigating over copyright infringement (some of their many lawsuits
are mentioned in the original post). The fear is that if data is
turned over to Viacom, any YouTube user who has watched a copyrighted
video would be subject to a lawsuit.

But not really. Everyone involved in the lawsuit (except the users,
who weren’t asked) agreed that a YouTube login ID isn’t personally
identifiable. The original Stanton order summarized: “Defendants do
not refute that the ?login ID is an anonymous pseudonym that users
create for themselves when they sign up with YouTube? which without
more ?cannot identify specific individuals?.”

So Viacom didn’t abandon any of their data rights, but they sure went
out of their way to suggest they did. And anyone who watched the will
know that users were absolutely identified based on nothing more than
a list of the search terms they entered. Does anyone really believe
that a motivated plaintiff couldn’t identify individuals based on a
user selected ID (mine is “TechCrunch”), IP address and a list of all
watched videos?

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Once you’ve logged into the MySpace application you are
presented with your own personalized home screen. You have immediate
access to your mood settings, profile, Friends Status and Mood,
Friends Updates, Comments, bulletins, and the ability to search for
other people. The interface feels a bit cramped on the iPhone’s
screen. Along the bottom you’ll find a row of five buttons that
immediately jump to home, mail, requests, friends, and photos.

The app also features a miniature version of My eBay. It shows you
active items and items where the auctions have ended at a glance that
you are watching, items you are buying or selling.

The Favorites button opens up a screen that will either display your
favorite streaming radio stations or individual songs you’ve
marked as favorites. Songs are added by touching the magnifying glass
next to the album art. You can find the song in iTunes or on AOL
Music. A “Remember This Song” feature allows you to add a
song to your favorites. Finally, there is a Recents button that does
exactly what it says – tracks your recent stations you listened to.

I’m not sure which classic rock song best describes the latest
in the Microsoft / Yahoo battle: “The Song Remains the
Same” or “Saturday Night’s All Right (For
Fighting)”? Both apply in their own right as yes, yet again.

The latest proposal sent to Yahoo on Friday had a 24-hour time limit
to accept. It would have had Microsoft take over Yahoo’s search
business while putting a new board of directors, as chosen by Icahn,
in place to run the rest of the company.

The company knows this and perhaps that is why it bluntly states that
it counter-offered Microsoft the option to buy the entire company for
$33-a-share or enter re-negotiations to just buy its search business.
It claims Microsoft rejected both offers.

Yahoo also takes a portion of its press release to call out Icahn for
being contradictory. It quotes him as saying previously that Yahoo
selling its only search business to Microsoft would be
“crazy.” Now he is a major force in trying to make such a
deal happen.

“Viacom and other plaintiffs never should have demanded private
viewing data in the first place,” a Google spokesman said in an
e-mail. “They should have agreed a week ago to let us anonymize it. We
are willing to discuss the disclosure of viewing activity of all the
relevant parties. But the simple issue of protecting user information
should be resolved now. Our users’ privacy should not be held hostage
to advance the plaintiffs’ additional litigation interests.”

Google balked over the issue of turning over information that would
include data about videos employees watched or uploaded to YouTube,
according to the sources. If Chad Hurley, one of YouTube’s co-
founders, uploaded a copyright video or viewed them, Viacom’s lawyers
believe they have a right to know about it, the sources said.

YouTube’s employee information could prove crucial to Viacom’s case
against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much
knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site. If YouTube employees
knew what was uploaded to the site–or posted pirated clips themselves
–YouTube could lose its protection under the .

YouTube has always argued that it has no way to prevent users from
uploading unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies, or other
copyrighted material, and adheres to the DMCA by also removing
infringing videos when notified by a copyright owner.

It’s safe to say that many copyright owners are skeptical of these
claims. For years, rumors have circulated in the technology sector
that some of YouTube employees salted the site, especially in its
early days, by posting clips from popular TV shows in order to bring
attention to the site. No evidence of this has ever surfaced.

) 11 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 12, 2008 12:11 PM PDT I did not
follow with detail this V-G affair but it seems to me that it is
following the SCO-IBM Unix affair in which SCO made a complain that
IBM should prove innocent… just the inverse of common law: you are
innocent up to the moment that you are proved guilty.Am I right? Am I
too far in understanding Viacom/RIAA/etc. lawyers? Reply to this
comment by July 12, 2008 1:54 PM PDT This kind of looks like “Viacom”
is scrabbling, a bit, to continue its, unfocused, IP-lawsuit (and
vicarious responsibility for the actions of others) claims.I also
notice that a totally unproven accusation (that Youtube employees,
allegedly, knowingly allowed, and/or encouraged, copyright-
infringement)… is actually being used to further justify an
apparently, otherwise, clearly dubious- attack.Can you say RED-
HERRING..? But, you know how corporations work… once they start down
a path, no matter how insanely-asinine, they will simply NEVER back-
down (even if… it ends-up tearing them apart, and costing their
stock-holders enormously). Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 2:54
PM PDT I’d like to see the reverse, that is, the uploading habits of
anyone from a Viacom IP, or using a Viacom (or viacom property domain,
such as comedycentral.com). Did anyone on The Daily Show, or any
staffer of those shows, or any other Viacom company, ever upload
something copyrighted to YouTube? Reply to this comment by July 12,
2008 5:11 PM PDT Relax. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:49 PM
PDT Viacom just wants to destroy the progression and the future of the
internet because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media,
like newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop
the new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You
either roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at
Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll
continue to head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the
NEW! Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just
wants to destroy the progression and the future of the internet
because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like
newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the
new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either
roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s
stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to
head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just wants to
dessstroy the progression and the future of the internet because they
have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old
like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new
generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it
rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately.
That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down,
down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment by
July 12, 2008 7:51 PM PDT Viacom just wants to dessstroy the
progression and the future of the internet because they have LOSSST to
the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old like oldy moldy
Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new generation, Web
2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it rolls right over
you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a
reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down, down, down
if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 7:53 PM PDT Viacom will lose to the future of the
internet if they don’t get with the new.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
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The situation is further complicated by the fact that Google can only
sell advertising around video that is not of questionable legal
provenance.

In countries such as the UK, people used to go to the pictures, as
they so quaintly call it, early just to see the adverts.

But with YouTube, Google has the issue of a dedicated following whose
attention-span rivals that of a hamster having a nervous breakdown.

Those sites that incorporated it early have the benefit of advertising
already being part of their culture.

When you have accumulated, say, fifty thousand, you could get a prize.
Maybe free child care for a year or something?

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The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, there was the other, perhaps thornier issue of why the
swastika suddenly disappeared from Google’s Hot Trends list.
Generally, when a term is searched by enough people to shoot it to the
top spot, it takes hours for it to fade from the list. An initial
inquiry to Google on what might have happened to the swastika was met
with a cagey reply. Instead of saying why it vanished, Google
suggested its own theory of why it had appeared.

Enter 4chan, one of the Internet’s most trafficked “image boards”
— a place where members congregate to chat and swap photos and
images — many of them related to Japanese anime cartoons. One
particularly well-known section of 4chan is called “b” — a rowdy
back channel filled with obscene images and profanity-riddled
discussion.

Google, it turned out, was right — probably. There is no way to
verify the chain of events, as 4chan posts are not archived and
generally cycle out of view within minutes. And a moderator for 4chan
said, “I’ve seen nothing to denote 4chan was involved at all.”

But Christophe Maximin, a 20-year-old French Web developer and
frequent 4chan user, said by phone from his home in London that he was
monitoring 4chan and watched the following scenario unfold:

According to Maximin, hundreds or even thousands of 4chan members gave
it a try. “They just wanted to know what it was,” Maximin said. “And
what Googling it would do.”

Obviously, there is no character for the swastika on the standard
keyboard. But Internet browsers can display many, many characters
— the trick is knowing the short code (called html) that
represents each. In this case, the code a 4chan member posted was the
shorthand for the swastika. Once the code is processed by a browser,
it shows up as the symbol.

The flurry of searches for the swastika code — most of which, it
seems, were by people who did not know what the code represented
— shot the swastika itself to the top of the Trends list.

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Without JavaScript
enabled, you might want to use , you can remember this preference.

Billions of dollars in capital and they give us a retread of
[digitalspace.com] from 1996? What’s next, GoogleMUD?

It was slow. It was clunky. The interface was pretty disappointing.
Hell, even the ‘Avatar choosing’ part was badly done. I couldn’t tell
if I was supposed to be designing my own somewhere or just ‘using
someone elses’. It seems to be a half-baked beta indeed.

Actually, calling it a beta is being generous. There are a lot of
interface quirks and bugs to work out, and the content (as far as
avatars, furniture, clothes, etc.) definitely feels more like a sample
of what will be available. Once they open it up to user created
content, I imagine there will be no shortage of “stuff”. FWIW, I
didn’t really have the connection problems the reviewer had. The whole
thing thing gets a little laggy in a crowded room, especially if the
room is full of junk, but I didn’t have any problems getting in. As
far as the sex themed rooms, they seemed pretty tame to me, at least
for now. (Uh, not that I checked them out or anything.) You’re limited
to streaming videos from YouTube, so you can’t show anything that
wouldn’t pass muster there. You can also display static images in a
“picture frame”, but the frames seems to be pretty broken at the
moment. They seem to only display a small portion of the image,
regardless of the resolution. So, at least for the moment, it’s pretty
much impossible to display anything pornographic. I imagine once they
open it up to user created content, though, it will become yet another
haven for furries.

Goatse I guess I can understand, Rick Rolls are damn funny but really,
is there a huge endorphin rush that comes from saying ‘first post’
that I am missing? I would think that after the first thousand times
it really would not be fun for even the most childish of people.

It could be a good thing if it was an antimatter copy of Second Life,
which was then brought into contact with the original Second Life.

Exactly…. Christian and Unbiased can’t really be said in the same
sentence and with a straight face.

I’m pretty sure slashdoter and unbiased can’t be said in the same
sentence with a stright face either. In fact you have to work pretty
hard to find anyone who is unbiased.

He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their
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1997-2008 , Inc.

Ultimately Google Mobile is more like a first stab at universal
search, because although the contact and web integration is nice, the
only local data it searches at the moment is your Contacts. That
leaves out calendars, notes, music, email, and bookmarks, among many
others. We’d kill to see integration with the rest of the iPhone’s
local data in the future.

UPDATE: After spending some time with it I’m also frustrated with the
local search. Right now the local search only provides Search for “x”
near me in the results when the word matches common local search terms
in a whitelist. If I want to use the app to find a place by name, I
have to switch specifically to a Local search only search to get the
“near me” option—and ultimately that’s about two clicks too many
to make it as useful as it could be.

you in the US, Jono? I tried to see that google mobile thingie from
the swiss app store, but not to be found there, so I switched over to
the US store, and presto, there it was

Hey barbino. No, I’m not in the US, I’m in the UK. Thanks for pointing
that out. Have you managed to download the app? I went to the US store
& found it, but when trying to download it I entered my Apple ID & it
recongnised I wasn’t in the US, so wouldn’t let me download it

The view — looking east toward Treasure Island, the surrounding water
and the Bay Bridge — is to die for.

But don’t look up: The FBI and the Secret Service, in the form of the
, maintain a regional office in the Hills Plaza building on the floor
above Google.

Having set up his answer, Newsom then posed a question: “What makes
Google so much better than its competitors?”

Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.

SPF, DKIM, and SenderID are not the cure-all for spam, and they aren’t
intended to be. But they are effective in weeding out spam in some
cases. They don’t work in the same way, but towards the same goal.

Co-founder Brin breathlessly joined Page and Schmidt about half an
hour into the interview. Brin had been riding a bicycle and said he
had a flat. In his remarks, Brin was very emotional about the need for
good teachers and schools in the U.S. He was responding indirectly to
New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein’s earlier presentation
about the state of education in the country. “Another important factor
that nobody talks about is teachers’ salaries,” Brin said. “Teachers
are among the lowest paid professionals. At Google, we’ve been paying
our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they’re among the
lowest paid employees. I think it’s really important to have a living
wage for teachers.”

This is what Sergey is really saying: $57,000 Reggio Emilia day care
is for OUR children, and NYC public school day care is for YOUR
children. “At Google, we’ve been paying our teachers 25 per cent
more, but even with that, they’re among the lowest paid employees.”
Public school teachers in the bay area make $70-90k. Sergey’s really
paying them 25% more? BULL—-

Campaigners have attacked the move as an invasion of privacy but
Google defended its actions, stating that it employs face-blurring
technology.

Street Map already allows people in the US to navigate using the
innovative tool. In addition, cycling enthusiasts can currently trace
the Tour de France route.

A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure that our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched. Google Maps Street View is
no exception.”

[July 3, 2008] Gartner revises Q1 numbers after getting some new
information on HP selling prices, while iSuppli has better news for
AMD. [July 3, 2008] While text messaging leads consumers’ must-have
features, signs point to good news for advancements being pushed by
handset makers, carriers and developers. [July 3, 2008] New research
finds overall broadband use spreading, but suggests that economic
squeeze might be slowing uptake among certain segments. [July 2,
2008] IDC did some counting on the rising cost of storage worldwide.

With petabytes of data floating around, Google developed its own
protocol for data interchange and now it’s open sourcing it.

This effort has been in since 2001. It’s now available as an open
source project Google hopes others will use and contribute toward.
Protocol Buffers could ultimately replace XML in some cases as a
speedier format for data interchange.

“You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can
use special generated source code to easily write and read your
structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a
variety of languages,” Google’s documentation states.

Cloud computing, in which software runs not on PCs or company servers
but instead on computers on the Internet, requires something of a leap
of faith both technologically and culturally. Those making the move
must get accustomed to a reliance on somebody else’s computing
infrastructure, and that can be scary.

Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)

Companies are working to address this side of the equation, too. One
prime example is the site, which shows the response time for a
Salesforce.com server transaction. It also details when problems
happened, what they affected, and what caused them.

Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.

Asked whether Google plans its own status dashboard, Chandra wouldn’t
share details but promised better help for users. “We’re trying to
find even more ways to be more transparent about reliability,” he
said.

Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.

Those with high-end services boast of “five nines” of reliability,
where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore
down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google’s Gmail
SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours
per year.

That might not be five nines, and it’s for Gmail only today, but
Google chooses to see the glass as half full.

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It became common to talk of pushing data “into the cloud” to represent
using the internet to send files to and from servers and Web sites.

Companies like Apple that sell storage “in the cloud” might not even
own the storage servers. They can lease the storage from large data
centers in more than one place. That way, adding more capacity is
quite easy. All those storage facilities can be combined into one
“virtual” server that grows as demand dictates.

You can open a word processor in your Web browser, create, edit and
save the text file and copy it to your computer all without installing
any software. It all happens over the Internet “in the cloud.”

The big exception is the U.S., which buys vastly more stuff than it
sells, and has done so for decades.

DigitalGlobe operates three imaging satellites: Worldview I, Worldview
II, and QuickBird. These satellites collect the highest resolution
commercial imagery of the Earth, and offer the largest image size, and
greatest on-board storage capacity and resolution compared to any
other commercial satellite imagery available today.

“High-quality mapping images are an essential component of any
effective navigation system. Access to DigitalGlobe’s advanced images
will enable us to dramatically improve the scope and quality of the
Ranger,” says Columbus CEO, Tsvika Freidman. “We are determined to
maintain our position as a leading player in the world of navigation
systems and are very excited to partner with DigitalGlobe to enable us
to maintain and enhance this position.”

Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. is a rising player in the field
of geographic information systems (GIS) and navigation applications.
The Company brings advanced software capabilities to a wide range of
users and devices, previously only accessible to trained professionals
on dedicated devices.

It’s an issue we’ve been following for months, of course: with stories
like along the way, among others.

However, the paper’s influence and its spittle-spewing rage are new
additions to the mix – and there’s an extra political angle, too.

I’d trust Google more than most governments, particularly ours and the
US, anyway – which in itself is very worrying. I have big issues with
our surveillance society, but as you say this is a snapshot and not
rolling film like the 300+ CCTV cameras that supposedly capture us
each day. I love using the US one to show people around where I used
to live so although it goes against some of my issues with privacy I
have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to this announcement and
can’t wait to use it.

It’s thoroughly legal for anyone to take photos of anything or anybody
in the street. Lots of Community Support Police Officers might think
otherwise, but it is. Likewise, anybody can put a CCTV camera on the
front of their building and video what they like. So it’s a quid pro
quo.

Does Northcliffe House in Kensington, home of the Mail, have CCTV
cameras on the front? In it an infringement of our civil liberties
that anybody walking past the front of their building should be
recorded?

Those UK burglars are just getting too lazy now. The Mail suggests
that they are using Google to ‘case the joints’ they are going to
break in to? Why can’t they have a bit of pride in their work and go
to those houses and break in like the good old days?

@lb001 @Charles. Bizarley the Mail seems to have left a text version
of the “almost criminal” (almost insane?) words of AN Wilson. So just
to ensure they are not lost for posterity:

You are being watched. Not by the KGB, or by the Inland Revenue, or
even by one of those strange vans parked in your street, which purport
to know whether or not you own a television licence.

You are being watched, rather, by Google, which wants to take a
photograph of every single front door in this country.

For some time the facility known as Google Earth has allowed us to
call up our own address – or anyone else’s address, for that matter -
and to home in on a photograph of our – or their – house.

If you search for a homeopathic cold cure, for example, on the Google
search engine then you will soon be bombarded by every quack medicine
man in California. Every single time you ‘Google’ something, the fact
is automatically recorded.

Google thereby builds up a profile of your range of interests. This
profile is of great marketing value.

Other companies, wishing to peddle their wares, can learn from these
Google profiles your tastes and likely areas of purchase.

His arguments are based on what he perceives to be the dangers of the
State keeping ever more watchful-tabs upon us. His fears ranged from
the potentially very serious – the holding of suspects without trial
for 42 days – to the comparatively trivial – local councils spying on
what rubbish we put into our wheely bins.

There are probably two sides to the arguments which political
libertarians such as David Davis attempt to raise. I would admit, as
would most people, to a good deal of uncertainty about the issue.

But that is an argument about the power of the state to interfere in
the lives of citizens.

And most of us would think that some element of discreet intrusion by
the State was legitimate.

The matter of Google is of a quite different order. This is a computer
company which is spying upon us for the sole purpose of exploiting us,
controlling us and making money out of us.

I am always very suspicious about people who do not like security
cameras etc…. What are they doing that they do not want the rest of
us to know about? These people need investigating.

Want to upgrade your iPhone? Only via O2′s site, which is wavering in
and out of reality… (updated) (and now they’re “gone”!)

The researchers’ proposal includes mining activity data to make
suggestions for activities, from what to watch on television to
finding your favorite songs on your MP3 player and playing them in the
room with the best acoustics. At the point at which Google is
proposing the idea of thinking for people as well as mining their
data, it might be time to worry about more than whether a link to the
company’s privacy policy is on its front page.

“I didn’t know there was this much drinking,” Newsom told the crowd of
Googlers, leaving unsaid his own .

In opening an office in the city, Newsom said that Google has saved
some its workers from a long commute down the 101 to the company’s
Mountain View headquarters. Granted, he conceded that San Francisco’s
public transit system faces challenges, ticking off several MUNI lines
that frequently run late or not at all.

Google is already thinking of easing the commutes within the office. A
slide is planned that will whisk workers between floors, in what is
perhaps the ultimate throwback to the Internet bubble years.

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So, it’s only natural that Google should eventually open an office
here, the mayor and proclaimed Thursday night in officially welcoming
to his city the company with the “don’t be evil” slogan.

After all, nearly every other mayor in the country boasts a Google
office, Newsom joked. And Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey
Brin are the .

“I have been beating on Larry and Sergey for years” to open an office
in San Francisco. City-dwelling employees who traded city fog for the
sun that beams over Google’s Mountain View headquarters seemed pleased
with their shorter, commutes.

Gavin Newsom is a fruitcake and an embarrassment to America, as is San
Francisco. Google should be ashamed of itself to ally itself with a
guy like this.

Chris Gaither oversees technology coverage as an assistant business
editor. He joined the Times in 2004 as a reporter covering the big
Internet companies and the changes they wrought on traditional media.
Before that he covered Silicon Valley, general technology news and the
occasional Southern California wildfire for the Boston Globe as its
only West Coast correspondent. He also has written for the New York
Times, the Miami Herald and Wired.com. He is still grappling to
comprehend a world in which his Red Sox have won two recent World
Series. chris.gaither @ latimes.com

Without providing many specifics, Yahoo said Microsoft renewed an
earlier bid to buy the company’s search engine and proposed turning
over the remaining pieces to a board controlled by Icahn.

Yahoo said it received the complex proposal Friday and was given less
than 24 hours to respond.

Backed into a corner, Yahoo lashed out in a blunt manner likely to
inject even more bad blood into its already venomous relationship with
Microsoft and Icahn.

“It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a
proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement. “While
this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with
what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned
into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our
stockholders.”

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment late
Saturday. Efforts to reach Icahn were unsuccessful.

The breakdown of those takeover negotiations infuriated many Yahoo
shareholders who fear the company’s stock price would plunge back
below $20 — a threshold reached just before Microsoft made its
initial bid in early January. Yahoo shares finished Friday at $23.57.

Since it dropped its bid to buy all of Yahoo, Microsoft had focused
its overtures on Yahoo’s search engine — the second most used
on the Internet behind Google Inc.’s.

Microsoft in May offered to buy Yahoo’s search operations for $1
billion and to spend another $8 billion to acquire a 16 percent stake
in Yahoo’s remaining operations.

Instead of selling its search engine to Microsoft, Yahoo opted to
forge an advertising partnership with rival Google Inc. That
represented a bit of irony because Google’s dominance of the Internet
search advertising market is the primary reason that Microsoft is
pursuing Yahoo.

As Google has become more successful, both Yahoo and Microsoft have
been regressing, a dynamic that many analysts believe make it
imperative for the two companies to put aside their differences and
combine forces.

But Yahoo’s alliance with Google is being closely vetted by antitrust
regulators because the two companies together control more than 80
percent of the U.S. search advertising market. To accommodate the
review, Yahoo and Google have voluntarily agreed to wait until late
September to begin working together.

Lively reminds me of something like IMVU, an instant messaging program
that enables 3D avatar chat, in that it provides off-the-shelf avatars
with teen appeal for socialising. It’s a pretty simple: it’s about
chatting in rooms that can be customised to reflect your taste, and is
nothing like as grandiose as something like Second Life or There. It’s
not a single persistent world, but a bunch of ad hoc virtual spaces
that let people come together and show off their avatar identity
through chatting and flirting.

Lively will allow online conversations to become realistic as users
‘sit down’ with one another in a virtual environment

Google Earth comes alive because it’s a living, breathing online
community which uses the power of social networks to layer value onto
a planet simulation. You enter a 3D space but can then easily locate
and activate 2D web information, such as pictures or Wikipedia
entries. It’s this integration of 2D and 3D which is so powerful, and
Google, which dominates the world’s text-based information and has
hell of a leg up in 3D via Google Earth, seems to me well placed to
create the ultimate mash-up of real and virtual world content. It will
be interesting to see how Lively develops, but for now, we don’t need
another stand alone virtual space: the real magic will happen when
these worlds start to collide.

Solid-state notebooks use electronic memory rather than a disk drive,
making them lighter and faster to start up

Thomas Claburn for the iPhone in his post from earlier today. He also
points out that the application points you to other Google products.
But they are browser-based applications, and not on-board native
applications. I was hoping for much more.

It could be that Google is reserving its best for Android, and it
probably should. Given Google and Apple’s love affair with each other,
though, I was expecting more.

I immediately start thinking of Second Life, There, and The Sims when
I peruse . It’s probably not going to end up being a Second Life
killer or anything else killer.  It’s simply just another option
for people, but from Google and people generally warm to them pretty
easily.  I looked through some of the rooms already created and saw
plenty with between 4,000 and 10,000 visitors.  One of the advantages
I see Lively having is that you can embed your room into websites. 
You just know Google will promote that through their millions of free
Blogger sites.

To download Lively, you need Windows XP/Vista with either IE or
Firefox.  Yep, another cloud based application.  We wouldn’t
expect anything else from Google, would we?

With no native application to install, it would likely not be a drain
on your battery.  Having an always available connection like 3G or Wi-
Fi would ensure that you can hop in and out of rooms at your leisure. 
To top it all off, location based chat rooms and hangouts would be
sure to go over well.  Imagine a room full of high school students
talking to each other in front of a landmark.  Or virtual tour guides
to answer questions from visitors and tourists. I could see virtual
movie or television sets where you can meet your favorite stars for
some Q&A.

Andy on :
I suppose Lively does have potential, but definitely needs a lot of
work to be the sort of app I’d like it to be. The biggest
problem with it, currently, is all the sexually oriented rooms that
are popping up all over the place, when this is a service meant for
those as young as 13. Either Google needs to do a better job with
blocking, or removing unsuitable content or they need to separate them
out (i.e. have 13 & older rooms and 18 & older rooms that are in a
separate location). For now I’m staying away until they have
some sort of legitimate solution figured out.

- Users from more than 120 countries come to learn new skills, share
information, and discover best practices, tips, and tricks that they
can use instantly. Be part of this extraordinary experience August
4–8, 2008, in San Diego, California.

… where retail meets industry – The fourth edition of the No. 1
European Navigation Event will take place in the inspiring environment
of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.

Separately, Google also released Browser Sync, a product designed for
keeping multiple versions of Firefox synchronised, under an open-
source licence.

Last month, Google said it would terminate support for Browser Sync,
and this week the company open sourced the code for the product’s
client software in order to allow the developer community to continue
to use and improve it, said Google developer Aaron Boodman in a blog
post. “It would be great to see the server ported to Google App
Engine, or support for Firefox 3 implemented,” Boodman wrote.

What was achieved there is recognised to be of fundamental importance
to both winning the war (Churchill visited to say ‘thank you’ to them)
and the development of the computer. Maybe Bill Gates doesn’t want to
support this museum because it underlines where electronic computing
started i.e. here, not the U.S.

Labour colleague Bob Laxton, MP for Derby North, said: “If there
is a way the Government can control it, they should.”

But law expert Mr Bampton said the company had a lot of work to do if
it was to avoid tricky legal situations. He said: “If a person
is photographed going into a sexually-transmitted disease clinic, you
could argue the information being revealed is personal, so there may
be grounds for a court case.

We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is
missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We
apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.

Google’s apology illustrates how sensitive the issue is. The
implication is that someone at Google judged the swastika
“inappropriate or offensive.” (Pornographic or profane terms rarely
appear on the trends list.)

Obviously the swastika carries hateful connotations. But if a service
purports to accurately represent people’s searches, who gets to decide
what counts as offensive? The swastika isn’t a derogatory term or
obscene word; it’s a symbol with a history.

Update(10:14 p.m.): Google has refused to comment on whether their
position is that a swastika is offensive. They would also not say if
it was an Israel-based employee who made the decision to remove the
entry from Hot Trends, though earlier a spokesperson stated that
delays in getting a comment on the situation were in part due to the
Google Trends team’s being based in Tel Aviv.

And yes, David, please update us in your keen investigation into those
nefarious Israeli Google employees and their insistence on considering
the swastika offensive. I’m sure you’d happily wear it on your
t-shirt, but most people have a slightly less ambivalent view of
symbolized evil.

Gosh Adina, are you serious? You might as well just say “white people
are all honkies”. You know, because some of them are, therefore they
all are. The symbol known as a “swastika” has a deeper history that
what you seem capable of recognizing. Its a bunch of lines in a
pattern. It wasn’t just a part of Hindi culture and German oppression.
Heck, it was even represented in some Native America tribes. But that
doesn’t mean folks have to “wear it on their t-shirt” to acknowledge a
simple fact – symbols can be easily distorted by groups of people.
Regardless…they are still symbols, meaningless to many as their the
cultural significance isn’t readily translatable. But they are still
symbols, and have different meanings.

The quest for search shows one thing clearly: It is slowly dawning on
people in the west that swastika IS the HOLIEST SYMBOL in Hinduism and
Buddhism.

Google has refused to comment on whether their position is that a
swastika is offensive. They expected to be honest. Why don’t they
comment if swastika is obscene, or objectionable and HOW.??

If “most” people fail to realise that it is an integral part of
Hinduim, then they are clearly ignorant. Worse, they are not prepared
to learn either.

Go to H-E-double hockey sticks, Adina. Some of us are quite aware of
the Hindu meaning and prefer to think of that symbolism rather than
the atrocity that the swastika received in the early 20th century. And
unlike you some of us prefer not to continue that atrocity by looking
for the good where it exists and expunge the bad. Rather than, oh, I
don’t know, continue to give some ugly concept any more publicity. So,
again, Go to H-E-double hockgy sticks, Adina.

I suppose this means the “most folks” who live in Europe or the US? Oh
wait, surely those millions who live in India and other parts of Asia
don’t count! What if they don’t see it as a hateful symbol? What if it
means something completely different to them? Oh of course, that
doesn’t matter, does it! This Eurocentric world view makes me sick.

If the sight of the swastika does offend you, then I may suggest no
traveling Asia east of Pakistan, because you can’t miss it. I think
the most blatant clashing of East and West, in regards to the
swastika, I’ve encountered was in Kochi in the Jewish Quarter, where a
simple spice shop, owned by Indian Jews is named ‘Swastik Spices’. And
the swastika is proudly displayed on their sign, windows, business
card and labels, right facing. i would gladly post the picture from
that establishment, if I could here.

This week, Google jumped into the battle against Bell Canada’s anti-
BitTorrent practices, this time through the country’s equivalent of
the FCC, and on different legal grounds than privacy advocates.

Since 1999, more than half of Canadians have downloaded video from the
Web, and about a quarter of Canadians do so at least once a week. So
the CRTC’s “broad investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the
flow of traffic” is extremely timely. Better to have some Internet
oversight urging Canadian content on the Web. The alternative is to
have our telephone, cable and satellite bills subsidizing commercial
appetites that hope to bypass the Canadian system altogether.

TORONTO — Google on Tuesday branded the use of “traffic-shaping”
technology by domestic phone giants to choke off BitTorrent and other
bandwidth hogs as “unjust discrimination” and contrary to Canadian
law. “The Internet is simply too important to allow Bell and other
broadband Internet access services to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google said in a 15-page filing to the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is weighing the
right of phone carriers to use packet filtering technology to manage
Internet traffic. Google gave its backing to smaller Canadian
Internet-access providers that lease phone lines to provide their
service to Canadians. Bell Canada and other phone giants have told the
CRTC that they should be allowed to hamper serial file-sharers that
greatly slow the time it takes online subscribers to legitimately
transfer music, video, software and other large files.

TORONTO — Google on Tuesday branded the use of “traffic-shaping”
technology by domestic phone giants to choke off BitTorrent and other
bandwidth hogs as “unjust discrimination” and contrary to Canadian
law. “The Internet is simply too important to allow Bell and other
broadband Internet access services to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google said in a 15-page filing to the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is weighing the
right of phone carriers to use packet filtering technology to manage
Internet traffic. Google gave its backing to smaller Canadian
Internet-access providers that lease phone lines to provide their
service to Canadians. Bell Canada and other phone giants have told the
CRTC that they should be allowed to hamper serial file-sharers that
greatly slow the time it takes online subscribers to legitimately
transfer music, video, software and other large files.

Subscribe to The Hollywood Reporter and see the entertainment industry
from its best angle: the inside looking out. Complete access to real-
time news and exclusive analysis that goes behind the scenes from film
to television, home video to digital media.

Internet giant says large carriers shouldn’t be slowing certain
traffic and is calling for a halt to the practice

Google Inc. says Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
that slow or restrict certain types of Internet traffic are violating
Canadian law and is calling on federal watchdogs to put a stop to the
process.

“The Internet is simply too important to allow [Bell and other
broadband Internet access services] to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google says in its filing.

Google’s comments, which were filed with the commission on July 3 and
made public by the CRTC over the weekend, were submitted in support of
a complaint made by the Canadian Association of Internet Providers
(CAIP), a group of independent Internet service providers (ISPs) that
lease network access from Bell.

Bell Canada – a division of Montreal-based BCE Inc. – has faced harsh
criticism from CAIP and other proponents of “net neutrality” over its
policies regarding the flow of content on its network. CAIP is
alleging that Bell is illegally managing their subscribers’ traffic.

“The commission should make clear in this proceeding that at least
blocking or degrading applications of consumers’ choice is prohibited
in Canada because it is not technologically and competitively
neutral,” Google says in the filing.

“This proceeding offers the commission an opportunity to start to draw
a line against telecom measures that are not technologically and
competitively neutral – protecting consumers, competition and
innovation.”

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The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
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business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
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769 comments
, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing
Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on
YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday. Although Google argued that turning
over the data would invade its users’ privacy, the .

and why not keeping them in a country where privacy still means
something, so that no US judge can touch them.

and why not keeping them in a country where privacy still means
something, so that no US judge can touch them.

Limiting the volume of records that could be requested at any time,
limiting the allowed uses for every record, and requiring them to be
destroyed a short time after loaded.

Also, the company in the foreign country could be prevented from
illicitly disclosing records, by having each log line independently
encrypted.

And there could be more than two pieces: there could be more than 1
subsidiary that has to agree to any massive information release
request.

Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way. The problem is that we I.T. people
are Data Hoarders. Even if the data isn’t useful today, or at all
useful into the foreseeable future, we still hang on to it. And we
save every detail we can just to prove how clever we are to have been
able to discover it in the first place. (Note: P2P program writers are
the same, and that’s how Media Sentry can tell you so much about
filesharers they discover on the Internet right down to the full
directory paths of files.) Now if storage wasn’t so d@mn cheap we
wouldn’t have this habit, but Moore’s Law applied to disc drives means
we no longer have to store 2-digit years and have Y2K problems. We
have these problems now instead.
This is why the RIAA is able to use IP addresses combined with
timestamps to identify ISP account holders. It doesn’t identify any
actual copyright infringers, but they don’t care as long as they have
somebody to sue. If these logs were deleted after 3 days this whole
RIAA mess would have been a non-starter.

Chances are that Google themselves has never had to follow-up on an IP
address to identify a user for anyone except the Chinese government
and/or the NSA, neither of which are our friends. The first poster who
asks why they keep this at all, let alone weren’t anonymizing it long
ago has it right. This is hardly the first time Google has had to turn
over access records so they certainly know that it can and will
happen.

Don’t be evil at Google seems to mean don’t destroy data you never
needed in the first place in the event that some government we want to
keep as our friend might want it. But now we find out that more than
just governments can get to it with baseless suits and moronic judges.

I would also like to know how the judge has completely ignored the
[privacilla.org]? If it’s on the Internet suddenly all privacy concern
automatically goes away, even if you’re engaged as a customer of a
company with a published privacy policy offering you many protections?

This is either a case of extreme naivete on the part of the judge in
ignoring the privacy ramifications in his incredible ruling, or quite
possibly a simple case of corruption. Such naivete would be so
incredible in a judge that isn’t senile, that corruption has to be far
more likely.

As for Google, their lawyers should have IMMEDIATELY said to the judge
“Our client cannot do that, on privacy grounds. Google’s duty to
protect the privacy of millions cannot be dismissed by a legal
ruling.” Judges are not omnipotent, even when some of them think they
are.

Google clearly should have anticipated this. Governments have
requested/required info on individual users before, as has been posted
many times to/. For some countries, Google even moved user data off-
shore, to protect it. Privacy advocates warned of this problem
happening.

But the problem isn’t Google, it’s us. We keep using Google, though we
knew about the risks and problems. The day a company risks significant
revenue over privacy, is the day they will pay attention to it.

…if you don’t have a Google login name. Google search works just
fine without one. It even works fine without any Google cookies.

It is a mistake to think you can anonymize this data. Sure, you could
strip everything out of the data, but then you would just have public
information, since youtube will tell you how many views each video has
already. So I presume the people who want to “anonymize” think they
will, like the AOL logs, give pseudonyms to people.

And this is what I can think of in 2 minutes. With more time a lot of
other things can leak.

Of course, I’ve never posted, so maybe that’s why.
I guess my IP address does ID “me”, however. My DSL address changes a
lot, but I assume the telco keeps those records… too.

So what’s the strongest form of protection for our personal
information? The famous “possession is 9 points of the law”. We should
possess our personal information and we should have to right to say
who can see it, and when.

We may THINK there’s no reason for Google to have to keep logs for 18
months, but these days I wouldn’t be surprised to find there’s some
hidden provision of the Patriot Act, or possibly some law we’ve never
heard of, which it’s illegal for us to hear of or read in the first
place. So maybe there IS a law requiring them to keep it for 18
months, it’s just not one the public is allowed to know of until it’s
used to prosecute them.

Only when there is centralized control of Internet usage is there a
privacy issue. Imagine being part of a cooperative with 34 connections
to various ISPs, and all of the 12000 users in the cooperative using
something like TOR. Standard Internet browser usage would be
anonymized completely. The idea that you should be identifiable comes
from the fact that there is a way currently to identify you. If your
packets arrived to the greater Internet backbone from more than one
source and more than one IP, it would be anonymous, and the ‘grid’
would be truly that. If you and 14999 of your friends decide to make a
mesh network using wireless and landline connections at each node, it
would be impossible for anyone to identify your network habits. It
would also be nearly impossible to cause a network-only outage. Power
loss could still be catastrophic. My point is this, if you truly want
anonymity, you have to work hard for it. Most people don’t want to.
Consequences of that are inevitable, unavoidable, costly.

There probably aren’t many people who have made money betting against
Google; the company repeatedly tops Wall Street expectations and
generally knocks the socks off investors. What’s not to love?

But as an economic downturn looms, deteriorating ad spending will
likely cramp Google’s style — if it hasn’t already. While Wall Street
largely anticipates a dandy second-quarter — the — we suspect the
economy has finally caught up with the search monstrosity.

“We’ve been wondering about [spending reductions] since the first
quarter,” says Jeffrey Lindsay, a Bernstein Research analyst. “I don’t
think the new CFO has really taken up his role just yet, but there’s a
growing body of evidence that Google is cutting back on wasting money.
They’re not quite at the point where they’re saving money, but at the
very least, they’re not wasting as much. And that’s probably a very
positive sign.”

Local cookbook authors and chefs will be there to guide kids through
hands-on cooking activities, and there will be live music from Banana
Slug String Band. Included in the entry price ($20 for adults, $12 for
ages 5-17, little guys free), are food tastings prepared by Google’s
chefs, smart folks that have figured out that working in a high-end
Silicon Valley cafeteria is a better deal than slaving away in a
restaurant.

The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Google
headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View.

The event and show premise are intriguing but I wonder how many
“regular” folks will be able to attend for the reasons mom3 mentioned.
————————Charles Siegel (of Charles Chocolates) may be
busy that day! If he’s at this Doof event, he’ll have to race back
over to his Chocolate Bar and factory in Emeryville, for a free open
house. http://www.charleschocolates.com/events.php

Hmm I read the nytimes article too. It seems that the highly paid
Google employees were asked to pay $2500/mo, up from some $1400.
Outrageous, except that the company was still kicking in over $3000/mo
per child. That’s $66,000/yr per child just for daycare. Apparently,
the cheaper daycare Google was providing before wasn’t good enough for
the Google parents who demanded and got the highest quality care
possible – the best food, the best teachers, the most teachers, the
best facilities – for pretty much whoever needed it at whatever cost.
For those who find the inhouse childcare too pricey, Google is
apparently going to also subsidize outside childcare. There’s some
controversy that Brin compared childcare to free food, but I wonder
how the childless employees feel about their coworkers getting the
equivalent of a Stanford education for less than half price while they
are being offered free M&M;’s. As someone who gets no subsidized
childcare, watching the Google drama is like watching people taking
turns at beating the goose that lays the golden eggs.

One of them was a £30m executive Airbus bought as a birthday
gift for his wife on her 44th birthday. (He is said to be planning to
give her a $1 billion 27-storey home on her next birthday complete
with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking — which
goes to show that you can top a £30m jet as a present.)

We expect it will be quite empty if the taxman continues to do his job
with such vigour.

The share price, I suspect, would be a touch healthier. That whole
decline in TV advertising would be nicely offset by the surge in
digital spending.

* Make bicycling safer for millions of bicyclists around the world. *
Empower world citizens to better adapt their lifestyles to face the
challenges of global climate change. * Help Google realize its core
mission of “organizing the world’s information and making
it universally accessible and useful.”

Google Maps currently offers a option for a number of cities in the
United States and around the world (but not Boston, for some reason).
Smith envisions that the link to “Bike There” would sit
next to the transit link.

Others have tried to create Google Maps mashups that offer bicycle
directions. The site offers bike directions for Portland, Ore., and
Milwaukee.

If you’re going to bike somewhere, you’d imagine that it
wouldn’t be much more than 40 kms (24.85 miles or a little over
an hour bike ride) away, right? Cause any more than that and
you’ll have a 3+ hour bike ride there and back. So why
wouldn’t you know how to get to a destination on your bike
that’s only an hour bike ride away? Get a life.

A future of poisoned oceans, withered crops, and irate polar bears is
nobody’s idea of a good time. It’s clear to anyone who is paying
attention that our civilization is due for an upgrade. Bright Green
covers the news, ideas, opinions, and trends littering the road to an
environmentally sustainable future.

Andrew Brown, founder and CEO of New Amsterdam Project, a Cambridge
company that hauls cargo via industrial tricycles.

As part of that effort, transit agencies around the world have been
trying to create web-based tools that help riders — and potential
riders — figure out how to get from Point A to Point B using buses
and trains. It’s a big deal, especially in big regions such as the
Southland where many people (including me) couldn’t begin to tell you
exactly which buses go where.

Metro, the largest transit provider in Los Angeles County, has for
several years had a trip planner on its website. In fact, it’s the
most popular feature on the website, according to the agency. There’s
also a stripped down version of the planner that works on cell phones.

Metro has been talking with Google for months and the blog even
reported in April that Google Transit was imminent. Well, not so fast.
“We’re still talking to them,” Marc Littman, a Metro spokesman, told
me yesterday afternoon. “There is no contract.”

Two sources, speaking on background, said there are several issues
that need to be resolved. One is boring and involves data formatting.
The other is not and involves whether Google intends to make money
from advertising placed on the maps. Like all transit agencies, Metro
is cash-strapped and looking for new revenue and apparently doesn’t
want to give proprietary information to a firm that may profit.

As for Google Transit, I spent some time playing around with it
yesterday and came away mostly impressed. It’s quick — quicker than
the Metro trip planner. And to have all that information housed on one
website is pretty convenient.

Metro’s bus and rail schedules are “proprietary”? Huh? Last I checked
they are distributed on paper, over the phone, on the web, and created
from start to finish, including the software systems used to maintain
the data, with taxpayer money. That doesn’t seem like something that
can be defined at “proprietary”. Move into the current century Metro,
and hand it over to Google. A transit agency so proud of its poor
product that it is frightened of someone else offering to improve it
for free? Yeah, sure, that’s what we pay them for….one can only
shake their head at yet another brilliantly dumb notion, public
transit information is “proprietary”. Metro gives away real time
traffic data for free – why should Google Transit be any different?
Guess car drivers still outrank bus riders – must be that sales tax
income from the high price of gas clouding their vision.

Yes, it does the job, mostly, but it’s flaky as hell and almost
impossible for a newbie to use. You have to learn all sorts of stupid
tricks, like knowing that for some reason the Universal City subway
stop is called “University City Sta” in the planner. It also does a
shoddy job of telling you how long a commute is gonna take.

I don’t bother with the map feature at Metro.net; it’s a joke. The
trip planner also suffers from constant crashes, something I don’t
*think* would carry over into Google (in the long term). I think that
Google’s interface promises a lot more user-friendliness, but I’d want
to know its flexibility: to option for Metro-only or bus-only routes,
for example. Click-and-drag for multiple-stop trips? If either Google
or Metro.net can manage that… HOT.

Google has added a significant new feature to the tool that
advertisers can use to select the keywords they want to bid for: the
ability to see roughly how many people actually search using those
terms.

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Excerpts from the blog After spending Friday morning playing with an
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But the rest of the world’s really going to wonder what the big deal
is this time around.

When Remote worked, it was fantastic, but it dropped the connection a
few times even though I was within 5 feet of my wireless router and
iTunes host laptop. It was usually pretty responsive, but there were a
few lags when choosing songs, especially if I tried to select a song
with Remote after starting one at the laptop.

You also can’t connect to iTunes over the network — you must be
on a Wi-Fi network to connect to the store.

Think carefully before taking the plunge. Not because of any
shortcomings with the phone. It’s lovely, and continues to define a
well-designed phone/mobile Web device.

The iPhone software will continue to get better and it may stay ahead
of the competition, but the phone hardware may seem dated soon,
especially the wimpy 2 megapixel camera that can’t take video.

As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I’m getting ready to depart
this space; I’ll have a fuller explanation tomorrow, sometime before
or after I get in line to buy the new iPhone.

In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun
events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May,
to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their
commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at
the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out
to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to
intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re
looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk,
have at it:

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material
from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly
prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

FITSNews – July 11, 2008 – Ever since the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he
wanted to “,” the nation’s interest in the testicles
of the Democratic presidential nominee has apparently gone through the
roof.

“Who would have thought anybody would use ‘Obama’
and ‘nuts’ in an actual news story?” said David
Feingold, a 30-year-old San Diego resident …

by at
I tried it and had to disable it because it ruins Google Reader’s best
feature: its speed. It’s painfully slow. It would take something
awfully amazing for me to put up with an add-on that tanks GR
performance.

A number of readers have noted Google’s , with which it is most
comparable. Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast
— at least an order of magnitude faster than XML.”

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Being 10x faster than XML to work with is entirely believable: If
you’re serializing directly to binary structures, those structures can
be directly manipulated without any parsing at all… and if you need
to do some byte-swapping and alignment adjustments to get them into
and out of native form for your current processor, those are still
operations which can be performed in a matter of a few CPU
instructions, rather than through a few hundred KB of libraries.

In any case, I’m hoping that some independent source conducts some
tests because I think anything we produced would probably have
unintentional biases in it. Of course, I’ll update the numbers in the
docs if they turn out to be wildly off-base.

It looks like Google has taken some of the good elements of CORBA and
IIOP into its own interchange format.While CORBA certainly is bloated
in a lot of ways, the IIOP wire protocol it uses is vastly faster and
more efficient than any XML out there.. and yes it is just as “open”
(publicly documented and Freely available for use in any open source
application) as any XML schema out there. J2EE uses IIOP as well and
its is technically possible to interoperate (although the problem with
CORBA is that different implementations never really interoperated as
they were supposed to). As a side note, I’d rather write IDL code than
an XML schema any day of the week too, but that’s another rant.

Obviously, those at Google felt XML didn’t work well for them. They
have the resources to invent a protocol and libraries to support it.
And, they are big enough to be their own ecosystem, which means as
long as everyone at Google is using their formats, interop is no
biggie. Good for them, I don’t begrudge that decision.

* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too
inefficient and verbose to use in the final game – all our XML data is
packed into our own proprietary binary data format.* We also only use
it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance,
we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in
XML format. We’re not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps
in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML’s value to us is in how
well it can glue large pieces of our game together.* All our latest
tools are written in C# and using the.NET platform (Windows is our
development platform, of course). It’s astoundingly easy to serialize
data structures to XML using.NET libraries – just a few lines of
code.* Because it’s a text-based format and human readable, if a file
breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what
changed, and why it’s breaking.

The point of this isn’t so much that it’s faster than XML (so is
everything else), it’s that google took everything that a real person
needs in a IDL and cut out everything else. Most IDLs have a serious
case of second system effect, where features are added that nobody
uses but seriously complicate the API. Even XML suffers from that
(have you ever seen the kind of data structure you need to store a
DOM, or what that does to library APIs for manipulating XML)? I’d use
it because 95% of the time all I need is something simple like this,
and the other 5% of the time I should go back and rethink my design
anyway. That said, there is still a case for XML, especially the self
documenting and human readable nature of the document, but there are a
lot of cases where it is used today where it only adds unnecessary
complexity and actually makes your code more difficult to maintain
instead of simpler.

4. Either communicating between programs that have the same knowledge
of message semantics, or preparation of pretty human-readable
documents.

Modify JSON so unquoted attributes are ‘type labels’ and define the
type of an attribute by giving a label or a default value. For
instance:

… now you have pretty much exactly the same message definition as
protocol buffers, but in pure JSON. It could also use some convention
like “@WORK” for labels/classes so that a normal JSON parser can parse
the message definitions. You can write a code generator to make access
classes for messages just by walking the json and looking at the
types. I don’t see that ‘required’ and ‘optional’ keywords help
much… imo defaults are generally better (even if they are nil). But
this could easily be expressed in a json message definition.

Maybe somebody can explain, but it doesn’t seem like protocol buffers
really have much advantages over JSON. It sounds like it is
effectively just a binary format for JSON-like data (name-value pairs
they say) along with a code generator to access it. The code generator
is nice, but this is like a day’s work max. Maybe I’m not
understanding google’s problems, but I’ll stick with JSON since it
actually is a cross-platform, language neutral data format… and you
can always optimize it if actually needed.

They open sourced the compiler (for C++, Java, and Python) that lets
you actually use the data interchange format. If you follow the link
you can download the code and start using it today. The code is open
source.

You think? Take BigTable. Wikipedia describes it as: ‘”a sparse,
distributed multi-dimensional sorted map”, sharing characteristics of
both row-oriented and column-oriented databases’. Sounds, to me, like
a specialized solution to a very specialized problem, a problem that,
I presume, didn’t fit with any existing solution. Same goes with GFS.
After all, do you really think they didn’t evaluate existing solutions
before embarking on building an entirely new distributed filesystem?
Do you really think they’re that stupid?

Google’s just-debuted virtual world is clunky right now, but expect it
to grow into a monster success – and play a leading role in business
as well a social networking.

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The company also recently donated $350,000 to Oregon and Portland
State Universities in support of open source development. Google open
source projects and efforts are documented at the Web site.

Internetnews.com recently had the opportunity to chat with DiBona
about the SoC and Google’s view on open source development.

This sort of thing had been done commercially before but nobody had
ever done it in an open source way. It was one of those projects that
we took and thought, “Well I don’t know if he can possibly succeed in
the time frame to complete the project,” but he did and it is pretty
remarkable.

For instance we have an article in there from a fellow who is applying
the concepts behind open source into biology. It’s sort of like,
here’s this core open source advance on how it’s been done over the
last six years, and then there are also people who have learned from
open source and what they’re doing, too.

Q: So there isn’t going to be a Google open source license? It’s just
the GPL and OSI-approved licenses for Google?

The OSI-approved slate is really the way to go. We don’t want to cause
any market confusion around creating yet another license. I’ve been
pretty cheered by Sun and Intel pulling back their particular licenses
– and reducing the number of OSI-approved licenses. I think it’s a
pretty good thing.

I love working at Google. It’s been fantastic. Not just the people I
work with but the depth of resources.

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I will be checking for updates in the Google Earth and whenever they
come, I will put both old and new pictures of Kagan, so that readers
can see the damage and changes caused by explosions.

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I don’t understand people. You could send your sync data to _any_
server, even your own, it will *never* be totally safe. Just *_don’t_*
send data that can potentially harm you if it’s intercepted.
Personally, I sync only my bookmarks, and I don’t give a damn if
anyone ever gets access to them.

I can’t imagine a company that actually does what the public asks?
They must have a secret agenda!

That’s not too shabby, in my book. I also would point out that it is
disingenuous to equate linux use with some license fee savings. If
linux had initially charged a license fee, then the world of linux
users would be using bsd. Linux is successful because it is free of
charge and free to use and free to modify. I think it is important
that we give back and the rest, and we do that, but to multiply the
number of machines running linux on the internet and consider that
money as having been stolen is antithetical to the whole idea behind
free software and open source.

Whereas Browser Sync is in the interest of technology/simplicity, I’d
see the source code of Windows ME being released in the interest of
tragic comedy more than anything…

Foxmarks is OK for syncing bookmarks, but GBS also synced your
history, open tabs, passwords (if you were brave enough) and cookies.
Having a synced history and cookies was very useful because you could
stay logged in to the same sites across any GBS’d computer.

Dang! First Reiserfs, now THIS…. I hope Linus checks criminal
records on patch submitters, or I’m TOTALLY switching to Vista;)

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Google has posted a new feature to its Maps service which allows users
to view the entire route of the Tour de France.

The map also serves as a promotion to kick off Street View in the
European version of Google Maps.

The service generated controversy when it debuted in the US and has
been cause for concern with UK privacy groups.

You can set a reminder e-mail at the same time that you’re adding an
event to your calendar. Just look for the gray box titled
“options.” Click “add a reminder” to schedule
an e-mail or pop-up reminder from five minutes to one week before the
event. By going through the “settings” link at the top
right of the screen, you can set up your mobile phone to receive
calendar notifications.

Even if you could find an external 5.25-inch drive, it’s far more
likely to have a serial connection than today’s more standard USB
port.

Most managed stock mutual funds have underperformed the market, as
measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500, an index that tracks 500 of
America’s leading companies. The problem is partly size.Imagine
running a $40 billion mutual fund. That might sound exciting, but it’s
difficult. You might keep 5 percent or so of the fund’s value in cash,
to cover people’s withdrawals. Those dollars won’t grow much. With
what’s left, you probably won’t be permitted to invest more than 5
percent of the fund’s value in any one stock. So you’ll have to own at
least 20 stocks. (Mutual funds typically invest in 50 to 200
companies.)To appreciate this overdiversification, consider Fidelity’s
mammoth Contrafund, valued at more than $75 billion. As of the end of
2007, its biggest holding was would be a great investment. Oops. Its
entire market value is just over $1 billion. You can’t buy entire
companies. If you’re limited, as many managers are, to not buying more
than 10 percent of any one company, you can spend only about $120
million on it. It’s hard to avoid spreading yourself too thin when
$120 million is merely a drop in your mutual fund’s bucket.

Institutional investors are mostly not tuned into the Google ()
Creative Suite. For Google and other SaaS-styled companies, it’s
not about product cycles. New products, particularly strategic ones,
do have a role to play and bear watching closely.

The problem is that many mainstream investors have a hard time sorting
out the important aspects of what’s going on at Google from the
unimportant ones. Offsetting the difficulty in separating the wheat
from the chaff is a blissfully short memory that generally means any
Google weak launches or eventual failures are forgotten quickly.

Developing a good feel for Google as an investment requires an ability
to make more “doesn’t matter” decisions than we have seen with
any technology company in the past.

In fact, one might speculate as to whether this sort of closed-to-open
strategy could become more formalized and popular. Suppose Google knew
in advance that this was their plan: they could have escrowed a copy
of the source code with some reliable third party, along with a
covenant to release on a certain date unless the covenant was revoked.
Such a plan might ultimately bring us more open source software, by
encouraging innovation with slightly lower risk.

In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent
traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project,
according to Hitwise’s June 2008 research.

“The data suggests Google Autos and Google Music,” Hopkins said. “I am
not sure we’ll see Google Government just yet!”

) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT Google has a
specific music search function already Reply to this comment by July
10, 2008 11:32 AM PDT google also has a specific government search
function already.it’s under the “Topic-specific search engines” Reply
to this comment

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Cloud computing, in which software runs not on PCs or company servers
but instead on computers on the Internet, requires something of a leap
of faith both technologically and culturally. Those making the move
must get accustomed to a reliance on somebody else’s computing
infrastructure, and that can be scary.

“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”

“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.

The software, AVE Video Fusion, “combines Google Earth-like features
with live camera videos projected on a 3D model” the video caption
says. “This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch
using C++ and OpenGL.” It runs on PCs and requires no custom hardware.

The El Segundo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2005 by computer
science and electrical engineering professors at the University of
Southern California.

The AVE Video Fusion software seamlessly blends five video streams
onto a 3D model of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington,
D.C., in this screenshot.

This screenshot shows a live USB camera and 18 live TV feeds projected
onto monitors in a lab in Hong Kong.

With so much fairy dust in the air over Apple’s day-early for a ride
to test out some of these apps. Be forewarned that the firmware has
not yet been Apple-approved for wide release and cannot be vouched
for.

is a prime example. It opens with a blinking search bar and with the
keypad already engaged. Like the optimized Web app version, suggested
matches are displayed as the search begins; this time they are listed
below the search field. Below the search space is a shortcut bar for
seeing the array of Google apps, including Gmail, Maps, Docs, and
Reader. These icons are themselves quick links for launching the Web-
optimized versions of Gmail and clan.

The app does save a fraction of time in bypassing Safari’s initial
loading of the iPhone-optimized page and works without a hitch.

We’ve covered several live blogging tools on Webware before. Rafe’s
favorite is . Both offer live updating, and options to let your
readers get notifications and reminders on when live coverage will
begin.

Update: While Google Docs works just fine as a live blogging tool,
there are some things to note about the embed option that some might
consider shortcomings.

I’ve embedded the original live blog after the break, which is simply
the same post as what’s seen above (sans update).

Google Autos or Google Music are the guesses that Hitwise hazarded
Wednesday. “Our thinking was that Google might want to fill natural
gaps in its portfolio of offerings based on the interests of its
users. We looked at which categories are receiving the most traffic
from Google in which Google does not have its own property,” .

In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent
traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project,
according to Hitwise’s June 2008 research.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t check if your favorite coffee
watering hole (or office) is going the way of $2 gas. According to The
Seattle Times, employees at stores that are facing closure have been
given some extra heads-up to either find new jobs or transfer
elsewhere.

Keep in mind that not all of the Starbucks locations listed are
definitely being shuttered. Most listings are based either on rumors
or speculation, since the first smattering of downed stores has not
yet been announced.

Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.

The downtime calls into question the importance that online Web
applications play in business use, as well as how Google’s free
document services have come to replace software solutions such as
Microsoft Office for some users or teams that use Google’s real-time
collaboration features.

Update 2: Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells us the problem
stemmed from the servers that control the view of the document
workspace as well as the home document listing. The data where your
documents were stored suffered no down time.

Interestingly enough, of the three services offered in Google Docs,
only the word processor and presentation tool were truly down. If you
had a link to a spreadsheet you could apparently view and edit it just
fine.

The DomainKeys technology is covered by a patent assigned to Yahoo.
The company released it under a dual-license scheme that allows the
companies to use it royalty-free under the GNU General Public License
(GPL 2.0), which enabled the Internet Engineering Task Force to
approve it as a proposed Internet standard.

It looks like it’s available to select users in select locations for
the time being, and indeed, I can’t access it from my Google account
yet. It’s also unclear whether this will get expanded to the mobile
version of Google Maps, where the availability of walking directions
would certainly help.

But Time Warner investors should not hold their breath if they think
this is an opportunity for the media company to finally rid itself of
the legacy of its disastrous 2001 Internet merger, once hailed as the
deal of the century.

Google’s “deal with Yahoo muddies the waters,” said Larry Haverty, a
portfolio manager at the Time Warner investor, Gabelli & Co.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” he said of Google exercising its option
on AOL.

So Viacom didn’t abandon any of their data rights, but they sure went
out of their way to suggest they did. And anyone who watched the will
know that users were absolutely identified based on nothing more than
a list of the search terms they entered. Does anyone really believe
that a motivated plaintiff couldn’t identify individuals based on a
user selected ID (mine is “TechCrunch”), IP address and a list of all
watched videos?

Here’s the problem – I don’t know if Viacom will live up to their
promise, or not. The fact that Google is to hand over employee data
tells me they’re not so sure, either. And frankly I shouldn’t have to
care or have to worry about Viacom’s trustworthiness. As a user I
interacted only with Google, and there are implicit and explicit
promised by Google to protect my data. If Google hands my data over to
Viacom, it doesn’t really matter to me if Viacom uses it or not. All I
will remember is that Google gathered and stored information without
my consent, and then handed it over at the first sign of trouble.

by July 12, 2008 1:19 AM PDT @JCPayne: Nonsense! AT&T/Bell South don’t
even come close to dominating 90% of the cell phone market ( In fact
Verizon alone has nearly as many phone users as AT&T/Bell South, and
we haven’t even mentioned T-Mobile, Sprint etc). By contrast,
Google/Yahoo will have 90% of the search market. Any pact that ends up
with 90% of any market power, concentrated in the hands of 2
companies, has to be stopped by the DOJ. I don?t care how ?non-
exclusive? the pact is. Who the heck else is Yahoo going to form a
pact with, outside this ?non-exclusive? pact with Google, given that
since Yang is barely on speaking terms with Microsoft, and outside
Microsoft , there is only another 1% or so search market left. Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 8:19 AM PDT Back@Kwasiowusu: For one
thing I wasn’t talking mobile phone service. I was talking the regular
old POTS system. (And fiberoptics system that it is rapidly becoming
instead.) The reason the national system was broken up into regional
units was to remove domination of the whole national telephone system.
Now, to allow Bellsouth and the former parts of SBC to merge together
(albeit changing their name to AT&T) that does very little to preserve
the competitive atmosphere in the United States when it comes to
telecoms and high speed Internet even…As far as Google-Yahoo
cooperation…. What monopoly??? They have a technology that every
other company and individual on the net has access to. **Pixels on a
website** is not proprietary. Anybody can come up with an onlinead
network …. You may have to be creative in getting sites to adopt
yours along with Google or Yahoo but none the less it can be done if
you’re smart enough.Clearly with all the resources Microsoft has–
they are admitting that they aren’t smart enough to put together an ad
network. Hence why they want to buy a ready-made one. (Yahoo’s)…..
So now we basically have Microsoft which launched a battle to take on
Google. They decided they would take Yahoo’s assets and try to
dominate Google, so Google went in cut a deal with Yahoo themselves
and Microsoft ends up as the odd-man out crying all those big
crocodile tears and wants to launch a big court case to win back their
plan of domination. BS I say… Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008
11:09 AM PDT Agreed w/ JCPayne. I strongly suspect that MSFT’s only
role in this is to act as a spoiler. Given that MSFT is mostly on the
defensive nowadays (when they should be busy trying to build core
products that are actually worth something), I suspect that they’ll
lose this one too. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 3:13 PM PDT
If Ballmer gets to address the committee, the company will be doomed.
Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 4:21 PM PDT @JCPayne, It
doesn?t make any difference whether you were talking about POTS or
about wireless. An AT&T hookup with Bellsouth still doesn?t even come
close to controlling 90% of the phone market, POTS or wireless. As at
today, cable companies like Time Warner, offer full phone service , as
well as broadband internet, in direct competition with phone companies
like AT&T, not to mention, millions of Americans don?t even bother to
sign up for wired phones anymore, simply preferring to use their cell
phones for all their phone calls, saving themselves the extra expense
of paying for a wired phone they hardly use. The old POTS phone lines
are increasingly irrelevant. Revenues for both AT&T and Verizon, from
wired POTS lines have been going down sharply for years. You simply
can?t compare the dying POTS business to a Google/Yahoo pact that end
up putting control of 90% of the very fast growing internet search in
the hands of just 2 companies Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 4:31 PM PDT @JCPayne, this bit by you is even more
laughable As far as Google- Yahoo cooperation…. What monopoly???
They have a technology that every other company and individual on the
net has access to?.You clearly have no idea what a monopoly is. Anyone
can use Google/Yahoo search, so therefore its not a monopoly? Will you
excusing me while I laugh? Unless you are gonna tell me that Google
gives away the source code of their highly secret search algorithms to
anyone to use as they like, then you are simply blowing smoke.
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The application has a settings screen that is accessible by pressing
the grey circled italic “i” in the upper right corner of
the Apps screen. In the settings pane, you can configure Google to
search your contacts, previous searches or websites. You can turn
Google suggestions on or off and even turn on Safe Search. Safe Search
will not pull up any adult topic returns in the search results.
Finally you can clear your search history.

The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.

AOL’s Radio App for the iPhone and iPod touch is a native
streaming application that is also location aware. Once you confirm
access to your location it reveals local radio stations that provide
streamed radio programming in your area. In the Houston Bay Area, the
app revealed four stations: 100.3 KILT, CNN 650 Radio News, HOT 95.7
and Sports Radio 610. Other locales like Atlanta, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Los Angeles, etc. are offered.

The latest proposal sent to Yahoo on Friday had a 24-hour time limit
to accept. It would have had Microsoft take over Yahoo’s search
business while putting a new board of directors, as chosen by Icahn,
in place to run the rest of the company.

Yahoo also takes a portion of its press release to call out Icahn for
being contradictory. It quotes him as saying previously that Yahoo
selling its only search business to Microsoft would be
“crazy.” Now he is a major force in trying to make such a
deal happen.

I continue to believe that one way or another, this deal is going to
happen. Microsoft simply has no other real options if it is serious
about gaining in the search business, while Yahoo simply looks like it
has no other options — period.

Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and
uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that
information, CNET News has learned.

As part of Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google’s
YouTube, two weeks ago to disclose records, such as IP addresses and
usernames. Google was also supposed to turn over records that included
the viewing and uploading histories of YouTube employees, according to
the sources.

Google balked over the issue of turning over information that would
include data about videos employees watched or uploaded to YouTube,
according to the sources. If Chad Hurley, one of YouTube’s co-
founders, uploaded a copyright video or viewed them, Viacom’s lawyers
believe they have a right to know about it, the sources said.

YouTube’s employee information could prove crucial to Viacom’s case
against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much
knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site. If YouTube employees
knew what was uploaded to the site–or posted pirated clips themselves
–YouTube could lose its protection under the .

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But the cinema companies were very clever in encouraging agencies to
create ads for movie theaters that the TV authorities wouldn’t accept.

Strangely, in the US, the nation that has created a whole new plane
for commerce, ads in movie theaters are still something of a surprise.

But with YouTube, Google has the issue of a dedicated following whose
attention-span rivals that of a hamster having a nervous breakdown.

Talk of pre-roll being their only choice reflects the fact that
perhaps 95% of all online video advertising is actually pre-roll.

is a good example, a site that claims to do 400 million page views a
month. Its video clips seem to have been ambushed by a very beige Brad
Paisley ad for Hersheys for at least the last month. Yet viewers seem
to accept it as they do any TV ad.

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The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.

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The swastika, the symbol of Nazism, still provokes strong feelings of
fear and anger. So it was something of a shock when late last week…

At some point on Thursday, a member of 4chan’s “b” channel posted a
simple two-part instruction. First, Google “卐”. Second, enjoy.

According to Maximin, hundreds or even thousands of 4chan members gave
it a try. “They just wanted to know what it was,” Maximin said. “And
what Googling it would do.”

Obviously, there is no character for the swastika on the standard
keyboard. But Internet browsers can display many, many characters
— the trick is knowing the short code (called html) that
represents each. In this case, the code a 4chan member posted was the
shorthand for the swastika. Once the code is processed by a browser,
it shows up as the symbol.

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
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This is hardly an objective review. Then again the Slashdot submitter
is also the author of the blog… When you read comments like “if it
wasn’t for the logo at the top left you wouldn’t even know it was
owned and operated by Google. The page is blend with no much color or
style” it really makes you wonder. Does it matter that Google didn’t
brand it everywhere they could like other companies? In classical
Google fashion, they took a simplified approach, which itself is a
form of Google branding (just look at google.com) Then the reviewer
goes on “It is 100% centered around the mouse, this for me is a
horrible defect that must be solved immediately. I happen to know
every keyboard shortcut known to man kind (sic) and I absolutely hate
the mouse. I am sure there are many people like me out there. “Well
good for you buddy. And great research you’ve done there in assuming
that everyone else is just like you. Finally he concludes with saying
he found “several Sex oriented rooms”. A quick glance through the room
index shows maybe a dozen of the 1000+ rooms that are listed there
have a sexual theme. Seems like a pretty good ratio considering the
amount of porn to be found on the internet and people’s computers in
relationship to the rest of the content on the web. But then again,
remember this blog is from “The Random thoughts of a Christian IT
Professional.”

He has a point on porn: the terms of service forbid it, much to my
dismay, I must say. But then, it is open for anyone older than 13 so I
see no way Google could get around that.

Are you kidding me? Porn the ultimate mark of success. The fact that
Lively has it before it has even taken off properly makes it like an
uber stamp of approval. Yes yes.

Besides the fact that guy obviously isn’t a native English speaker,
“several” and “maybe a dozen” seem pretty in line to me. His point
seems to be that Google isn’t being as tight with it as they are with
YouTube, which is certainly true (although I’d suspect that’s a result
of pre-takeover YouTube policies being carried on by Google). It’s not
a matter of any concern to me, but its his opinion. And it’s not like
adding keyboard shortcuts would eliminate mouse usage, as you seem to
think.

Direct hit to the nail head. I was truly let down with Second Life. I
will even go back here and there to see if things changed but they
never do. Last time I ventured into second life I searched for ‘Beach’
and was treated to a picture of a girl fingering herself. I had hopes
for Second Life for businesses that I work with to have open house and
virtual tours for lodging. I would not think about suggesting it
anymore.

I’m pretty sure slashdoter and unbiased can’t be said in the same
sentence with a stright face either. In fact you have to work pretty
hard to find anyone who is unbiased.

He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”

UPDATE: After spending some time with it I’m also frustrated with the
local search. Right now the local search only provides Search for “x”
near me in the results when the word matches common local search terms
in a whitelist. If I want to use the app to find a place by name, I
have to switch specifically to a Local search only search to get the
“near me” option—and ultimately that’s about two clicks too many
to make it as useful as it could be.

I’ve looked on the App Store in iTunes & on my iPhone but can’t find
it. Can anyone else see it?

Hey barbino. No, I’m not in the US, I’m in the UK. Thanks for pointing
that out. Have you managed to download the app? I went to the US store
& found it, but when trying to download it I entered my Apple ID & it
recongnised I wasn’t in the US, so wouldn’t let me download it

, Jul 11, 2008 07:24 PM
On Thursday evening, Google threw open the doors of its San Francisco
office to members of the media and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Though Google’s San Francisco office has been , the dust has cleared
and Google wanted to celebrate.

The view — looking east toward Treasure Island, the surrounding water
and the Bay Bridge — is to die for.

Newsom took, and seemingly deserves, some credit for that, due to his
efforts to bring high-tech companies into San Francisco. He noted that
46 biotech companies had opened offices in city and that other
technology companies have been setting up shop as well.

Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.

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DomainKeys is an e-mail or reject it outright. Yahoo! (which owns the
patent) has long been a proponent on this system, but many ISPs also
like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and Microsoft backs SenderID.

SPF has recently come under fire for not being effective for users who
redirect all mail to Gmail or other ISPs because the server
verification breaks and Google automatically rejects those forwarded
messages. This wouldn’t apply for DKIM, since DKIM is an encrypted
signature in the data of the message, independent of a server lookup.

Co-founder Brin breathlessly joined Page and Schmidt about half an
hour into the interview. Brin had been riding a bicycle and said he
had a flat. In his remarks, Brin was very emotional about the need for
good teachers and schools in the U.S. He was responding indirectly to
New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein’s earlier presentation
about the state of education in the country. “Another important factor
that nobody talks about is teachers’ salaries,” Brin said. “Teachers
are among the lowest paid professionals. At Google, we’ve been paying
our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they’re among the
lowest paid employees. I think it’s really important to have a living
wage for teachers.”

Hey nimish — maybe you didn’t read the fine print in google’s
prospectus: your common shares have 1/10th the voting power of those
held by the two founders + the CEO. Google’s “public” offering was a
complete artifice (some might say a fully-disclosed sham), something
barely *ever* reported by the financial press. They can do whatever
they want — there are no pesky shareholders to appease.

Thanks to a new feature from Google, you can now stand in Longview’s
Civic Circle, walk a portion of Lake Sacajawea, maybe even get a view
of your front door — all from your computer.Google recently
added parts of the local area to its Street View feature of Google
Maps, allowing users a 360-degree perspective from various locations
around Cowlitz County.Here’s how it works: Google drives through an
area with a special camera mounted on a car’s roof. The camera takes
360-degree photos along the way. Google then stitches the photos
together and puts them on the Web.The result: When you bring up an
address in Google Maps, a window pops up showing a photo of the
buildings, houses, people, cars and everything else that was in that
spot when Google snapped its picture. Click right, and the camera pans
right. Click left, and the camera pans left. Another set of arrows
allows you to move up and down the street, just as though you were
driving on it.What’s the point? In an e-mail, Google said Street View
can be used for “virtual tourism” checking for landmarks, or just
getting to know an area better.Some question whether the feature
raises privacy concerns. In other cities, the Google car has captured
a man walking out of a strip club, another man near an adult book
store and what appears to be prostitutes on a street corner. In one
case, a Chicago-area woman flashed the camera.The feature has been
limited to mostly large cities since it launched last year. Google
said it added Street View for Cowlitz County June 10, along with the
Portland area. By the time the photos make it onto the Web, they’re
typically between a few months and a year old, Google said.Street View
isn’t included for all of the area. Downtown Longview is conspicuously
absent. Google also skipped a lot of residential streets. It’s unclear
when, or if, the Google car will return to flesh out the rest of the
map.To check it out, visit . Type in an address and click “Street
View.”

Internet giant Google yesterday defended plans to photograph millions
of British homes and publish the snapshots online.

Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain
as part of the Street View project.

A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure that our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched. Google Maps Street View is
no exception.”

Jul 11, 2008, 8:33 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:30 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:27 am Jul
11, 2008, 8:13 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:04 am Jul 10, 2008, 6:10 am

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Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask

For most organizations Extensible Markup Language, or XML (), is the
lingua franca for data interchange. Apparently XML alone isn’t fast
enough for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so Google went off and developed its
own data format, called Protocol Buffers.

According to Google’s documentation, protocol buffers were initially
developed at Google to deal with an index server request/response
protocol.

, Google’s program manager for open source, noted Google encodes
almost any sort of structured information that needs to be passed
across the network or stored on disk using this protocol.

As to why after years of in-house development Google is now making
Protocol Buffers open source, Varda said it’s just a question of time.
“We have wanted to release protocol buffers for a long time,” he said.
“The only limitation was finding enough engineering time to get it
done.”

“There is some patent activity around Protocol Buffers, but I’d like
to point out that we use the Apache license, which grants permission
to use any applicable patents,” DiBona told InternetNews.com.

“We don’t have an SLA yet for Google Calendar or Google Docs, but it’s
something we’re moving quickly toward,” said Rishi Chandra, product
manager for Google Apps. Google wants “to get the same level of
reliability for all of Apps,” he said.

Google is a major proponent of cloud computing, with advocacy work
down to the level of of its own. The trend has the potential to
seriously redistribute wealth within the computing industry.

So naturally there’s some fear with cloud computing: it means you
can’t reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data
center servers.

“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.

Google is trying to communicate better with users and customers,
Chandra said, though he stopped short of revealing what the uptime is
for Google Docs or detailing why exactly it had problems earlier this
week.

Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.

Those with high-end services boast of “five nines” of reliability,
where services are available 99.999 percent of the year and therefore
down no more than 5 minutes and 15 seconds per year. Google’s Gmail
SLA, at 99.9 percent uptime, promises downtime of less than 9 hours
per year.

Comment reply Submit Cancel The posting of advertisements, profanity,
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In watching a Webcast of the iPhone introduction I heard Steve Jobs
mention the “cloud” when talking about the new Mobile Me service Apple
is rolling out. When he says the data is pushed from the cloud what
exactly does that mean?

–S. K., Arlington The cloud is a fancy term for a computer or
server in a data center somewhere other than at your house.
Apple’s new Mobile Me service lets users store files on a server owned
or leased by Apple. Those servers are accessed through any Internet
connected computer. That’s like having a big thumb drive “in the
clouds.”

Users of Google’s Google Docs service are really using the cloud. Not
only are the files stored on Google’s servers, the applications
themselves are stored there.

You can open a word processor in your Web browser, create, edit and
save the text file and copy it to your computer all without installing
any software. It all happens over the Internet “in the cloud.”

Trade Deficit
Everyone would agree they see more “Made in
Taiwan/China/Japan/etc…”tags than “Made in the USA” tags for the
past several years. Well, that “Made in _____” tag on your clothing
has an economic term sewn into it: trade deficit. A trade deficit
happens when one country buys more goods than it sells to other
countries.

But, countries aren’t businesses. They are, well, countries, and can
print all the money they want. People who deal with currencies, or
each country’s version of money, look at trade deficits as one way to
find out how much each country’s currency is worth. If you have to
print more money, each dollar you print can possibly lower the value
of the other dollars out there. Like stocks, you can buy and sell
currencies on what’s called the foreign-exchange market (or, if you
want a buzzword for the office, say Forex market).

DigitalGlobe operates three imaging satellites: Worldview I, Worldview
II, and QuickBird. These satellites collect the highest resolution
commercial imagery of the Earth, and offer the largest image size, and
greatest on-board storage capacity and resolution compared to any
other commercial satellite imagery available today.

There can be no assurance that such statements will be accurate and
actual results and future events could differ materially from those
anticipated in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation
to update forward-looking statements to reflect subsequently occurring
events or circumstances or to reflect unanticipated events or
developments.

Dutton Associates Announces Investment Opinion: General Steel Holdings
Strong Speculative Buy In Update Coverage By Dutton Associates

The paper’s front page is screaming furiously that the arrival of
Street View in the UK could be a privacy-invading nightmare – saying
Google’s cars “WILL PHOTOGRAPH EVERY DOOR IN BRITAIN”.

Personally, I’m torn. I use the US version of Street View a lot, but
don’t like the idea of a surveillance society. However, given the
number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day, I’m not sure that a
Google car counts as the biggest infringement of my liberties right
now.

I’d trust Google more than most governments, particularly ours and the
US, anyway – which in itself is very worrying. I have big issues with
our surveillance society, but as you say this is a snapshot and not
rolling film like the 300+ CCTV cameras that supposedly capture us
each day. I love using the US one to show people around where I used
to live so although it goes against some of my issues with privacy I
have to admit that I’ve been looking forward to this announcement and
can’t wait to use it.

In many respects I’m all for consideration of how our civil liberties
are perhaps being eroded. Yet in this instance I think the value of
the service outweighs anything against it.

It’s thoroughly legal for anyone to take photos of anything or anybody
in the street. Lots of Community Support Police Officers might think
otherwise, but it is. Likewise, anybody can put a CCTV camera on the
front of their building and video what they like. So it’s a quid pro
quo.

So if Google’s doing it in an organised manner, that’s not terrible as
it’s a genuinely useful service. And they’re putting it on the net for
all to see. If I want to see CCTV footage of myself from the dozens of
cameras that catch sight of me daily, I’m going to have to file a
significant number of Freedom of Information requests to see the
footage.

adambowie1 – sorry to be pedantic but hey it’s Friday afternoon. As a
Public Space CCTV manager I can tell you that any number of Freedom of
Information requests would be rejected as CCTV footage falls outside
of FOI as it is a Data Protection issue. So my advice is ask for a DP
form and save yourself some time.

Also it isn’t perfectly legal to set a camera up on your house and
film anything. If you camera looks onto anothers property you would be
breaching privacy rules and even filming past your own borders and
into the public space could be challenged.

As for the whole Streetview thing – it’s the same thing as Public
Space CCTV as far as I’m concerned. By being in the Public Space you
expect to be seen. Does it really matter if it’s by the bloke selling
The Big Issue or a bored office worker in Arizona?

But the reality is that I can point my camera into the public space in
front of my building and record it to my heart’s content. And I don’t
suppose that there’s anything to stop me putting it online or sending
it in to one of those “People do the funniest things..” type shows.

I must admit that I find it more scary that people stop me taking
photos outside in public places rather than me stopping Google from
doing the same. We all have cameras on our mobiles and happily snap
away anywhere.

Oh and it really isn’t like Enemy of the State. Most systems are so
underfunded that we cheer when we can get a copy off within the
confines of our own room never mind having the infrastructure to allow
MI5 to hack in.

Finally – thank god they cry – this Information Commissioner doesn’t
take many prisoners. The rules are there – they just need sticking to.

@lb001: “Is that libelous?” You can’t (except in extreme
circumstances) libel an organisation or company. I was going to make a
comment about the other quotes you offered but then realised those
*might* be libellous because they would be about a person. So I’ll
restrain myself to pointing out that Google doesn’t sell its data, and
doesn’t deal in phone numbers, so it can’t have any connection with
cold callers. However I can’t find the AN Wilson piece on the Mail’s
site, so perhaps he didn’t say that.

@lb001 @Charles. Bizarley the Mail seems to have left a text version
of the “almost criminal” (almost insane?) words of AN Wilson. So just
to ensure they are not lost for posterity:

You are being watched. Not by the KGB, or by the Inland Revenue, or
even by one of those strange vans parked in your street, which purport
to know whether or not you own a television licence.

You are being watched, rather, by Google, which wants to take a
photograph of every single front door in this country.

For some time the facility known as Google Earth has allowed us to
call up our own address – or anyone else’s address, for that matter -
and to home in on a photograph of our – or their – house.

Now the facility has been brought down to street level, and at the
press of a key on your computer, you will be able to summon up the
image of any street. An arrow on the picture will direct you to your
own door – or indeed to anyone else’s door

Aren’t invasions of personal privacy by commercial companies every bit
as indefensible as similar intrusions into our lives by a Big Brother
state?

But now, thanks to Google, we would be wrong to think that. Because of
the profiles built up by Google, we are now pursued every day by cold-
call telephone sales, and by online intrusions.

Other companies, wishing to peddle their wares, can learn from these
Google profiles your tastes and likely areas of purchase.

The Conservative MP David Davis has put the taxpayer to very great
expense by forcing a by-election on the issue of personal liberty.

How else could terrorists be apprehended in times of peace or war? How
else would it be possible for the Inland revenue to detect tax fraud?

Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.

Don’t worry if you aren’t getting an O2 iPhone – nobody else is
either. Especially if they haven’t sent their passport. (Updated;
again)

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008 Registered
in England and Wales. No. 908396 Registered office: Number 1 Scott
Place, Manchester M3 3GG ·

San Francsico Mayor Gavin Newsom (left) with Google co-founder Larry
Page at event held at Google’s Mountain View headquarters last year

In opening an office in the city, Newsom said that Google has saved
some its workers from a long commute down the 101 to the company’s
Mountain View headquarters. Granted, he conceded that San Francisco’s
public transit system faces challenges, ticking off several MUNI lines
that frequently run late or not at all.

“I love this company,” Newsom eventually effused before calling Google
co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who did not attend Thursday’s
festivities, “just wonderful human beings.”

“I have been beating on Larry and Sergey for years” to open an office
in San Francisco. City-dwelling employees who traded city fog for the
sun that beams over Google’s Mountain View headquarters seemed pleased
with their shorter, commutes.

The open house was attended by employees from all facets of Google’s
massive organization, including Google.org and the newbies from the
Doubleclick acquisition. Headlining the event was one of Google’s top
executives and public faces, Marissa Mayer.

“This is a city of doers and dreamers,” overflowing with technology
and new-media companies drawn to a place that celebrates, not just
tolerates, diversity, Newsom said, drawing applause.

Gavin Newsom is a fruitcake and an embarrassment to America, as is San
Francisco. Google should be ashamed of itself to ally itself with a
guy like this.

Michelle Quinn covers computers and digital music. She has chronicled
the digital revolution since 1993, when she wrote for the first issue
of Wired magazine about how computers were changing Hollywood special
effects. She covered Netscape’s 1995 public offering for the San
Francisco Chronicle and rode the roller coaster of the dot-com boom
and bust for the San Jose Mercury News. In the evenings, the Delaware
native can be found at home watching TV shows and movies on her
laptop, with another nearby to surf the Web. michelle.quinn @
latimes.com

As described by Yahoo in a statement released late Saturday, Microsoft
packaged its latest offer with activist investor Carl Icahn, a
billionaire who is seeking to overthrow Yahoo’s board of directors in
a shareholder meeting scheduled for Aug. 1.

Without providing many specifics, Yahoo said Microsoft renewed an
earlier bid to buy the company’s search engine and proposed turning
over the remaining pieces to a board controlled by Icahn.

“It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a
proposal,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in the statement. “While
this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with
what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned
into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our
stockholders.”

Yahoo said it unsuccessfully reiterated its willingness to sell the
entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share
— a bid that the software maker dangled in early May before
withdrawing it in a pique over Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang’s
demand for $37 per share.

Yahoo said the proposal that Microsoft submitted Friday “contains a
number of improvements,” but insisted it still wasn’t good enough.

Yahoo offered no concrete details about what Icahn had proposed to do
with the rest of the business, but indicated part of the plan included
selling the company’s Asian operations. The Sunnyvale-based company
pooh-poohed the notion of entrusting its business to Icahn, noting his
inexperience in the Internet industry.

Icahn, who has been challenging corporate boards for more than two
decades, owns a roughly 5 percent stake in Yahoo and hopes to make a
profit by pushing the company’s stock price above $30.

Instead of selling its search engine to Microsoft, Yahoo opted to
forge an advertising partnership with rival Google Inc. That
represented a bit of irony because Google’s dominance of the Internet
search advertising market is the primary reason that Microsoft is
pursuing Yahoo.

But Yahoo’s alliance with Google is being closely vetted by antitrust
regulators because the two companies together control more than 80
percent of the U.S. search advertising market. To accommodate the
review, Yahoo and Google have voluntarily agreed to wait until late
September to begin working together.

Google has quietly ventured into the virtual worlds space with a web-
based 3D chat application called Lively. Does it matter?

Google’s Lively team seem to want you to, uh, hang around in some cool
online chat rooms and exchange virtual hugs. To be honest, the whole
thing seems a bit underwhelming. Its launch reminds me a bit of
Google’s social network site, Orkut. This was another project, like
Lively, that was developed by a Google employee in part of the
“20 per cent time” devoted to individual pet projects, and
another one that has not really set the world alight. Orkut is a
perfectly respectable online community, but of course something of an
also-ran in a world now dominated by My Space and Facebook.

For now, Lively is what we’ve got: that’s the science fact. However,
given Google’s extraordinary scale and the immense possibilities
created by its huge web audience, I can’t help thinking more along the
lines of science fiction, imagining where Google could take this
technology and do something really interesting with it.

Lively will allow online conversations to become realistic as users
‘sit down’ with one another in a virtual environment

The second unique advantage is Google Earth. This is already an
amazing creation, a mirror world of incredible richness available free
on most PCs. You can already see the planet from space, dive down to
the street level and see incredible detail in 360-degree panoramas.
You can already build your own 3D buildings and add them to Google
Earth, and Google continues to add more content to this remarkable
piece of software.

Solid-state notebooks use electronic memory rather than a disk drive,
making them lighter and faster to start up

, Jul 10, 2008 05:27 PM
Sure, Google may have offered up a for the iPhone in the App Store
today, but what about applications for its vast number of services
other than search? I am seriously disappointed.

Blogger and Picasa are probably the two that make the most sense to
have available in a standalone form. But what I was really hoping for
was an application that lets you compose Google Documents on the
iPhone and then sync them with Google’s Docs online. Now that would
have been a very useful app indeed.

It could be that Google is reserving its best for Android, and it
probably should. Given Google and Apple’s love affair with each other,
though, I was expecting more.

I immediately start thinking of Second Life, There, and The Sims when
I peruse . It’s probably not going to end up being a Second Life
killer or anything else killer.  It’s simply just another option
for people, but from Google and people generally warm to them pretty
easily.  I looked through some of the rooms already created and saw
plenty with between 4,000 and 10,000 visitors.  One of the advantages
I see Lively having is that you can embed your room into websites. 
You just know Google will promote that through their millions of free
Blogger sites.

To download Lively, you need Windows XP/Vista with either IE or
Firefox.  Yep, another cloud based application.  We wouldn’t
expect anything else from Google, would we?

With no native application to install, it would likely not be a drain
on your battery.  Having an always available connection like 3G or Wi-
Fi would ensure that you can hop in and out of rooms at your leisure. 
To top it all off, location based chat rooms and hangouts would be
sure to go over well.  Imagine a room full of high school students
talking to each other in front of a landmark.  Or virtual tour guides
to answer questions from visitors and tourists. I could see virtual
movie or television sets where you can meet your favorite stars for
some Q&A.

is a former sales rep with a cellular provider. With around 10 years
worth of tech industry experience, he knows a thing or two. But
definitely not three.

… where retail meets industry – The fourth edition of the No. 1
European Navigation Event will take place in the inspiring environment
of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

“We decided to make this tool freely available as open source because
we feel it will be a valuable contribution to the information security
community, helping advance the community’s understanding of security
challenges associated with contemporary web technologies,” Zalewski
wrote. He added that Ratproxy is intended to complement active
crawlers and manual proxies, as well as other passive proxies.

It was not so long ago, April 1, 2004, when Google mail first
appeared. In 2005 there were 5.4 mln subscribers and 51 mln in early
2007. Do you know how many Gmail accounts were registered…

Users finding email apparently from eBay or PayPal in their inboxes
can thus in future be sure that it isn’t a phishing attempt. Users
will of course still have to be on their guard against other phishing
tricks, such as entering the sender as ‘poypal.com’. According to
Taylor, eBay and PayPal have worked hard on the solution of signing
absolutely all their email with domain keys. Google has apparently
been carrying out successful tests on the method for some weeks, with
no problems or complaints encountered, indeed few users have even
noticed the change. Google is hoping to set a good example for others.
The team behind DKIM is also that other companies will follow suit.
Uptake at present remains slight.

“Obviously, it’s not going to make it harder for someone
planning a burglary to have access to this.”

Internet giant Google has now deployed a fleet of camera cars in
Britain, where critics are branding the site an invasion of privacy.

“No doubt they would have to fuzz out the faces but that doesn’t
mean criminals won’t be able to see when there is a fancy BMW in the
driveway. But I don’t see how you could ban it. There isn’t an
international internet law.”

A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”

But law expert Mr Bampton said the company had a lot of work to do if
it was to avoid tricky legal situations. He said: “If a person
is photographed going into a sexually-transmitted disease clinic, you
could argue the information being revealed is personal, so there may
be grounds for a court case.

Special options are available to registered members. for the member
login page or to register as a member.

Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links.
We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google’s
Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will
provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which
queries visitors used to reach your site.

Update(10:14 p.m.): Google has refused to comment on whether their
position is that a swastika is offensive. They would also not say if
it was an Israel-based employee who made the decision to remove the
entry from Hot Trends, though earlier a spokesperson stated that
delays in getting a comment on the situation were in part due to the
Google Trends team’s being based in Tel Aviv.

Google is evil. They’ve never been a neutral arbiter of anything.
Money is all that matters. Get over it.

Google has refused to comment on whether their position is that a
swastika is offensive. They expected to be honest. Why don’t they
comment if swastika is obscene, or objectionable and HOW.??

Go to H-E-double hockey sticks, Adina. Some of us are quite aware of
the Hindu meaning and prefer to think of that symbolism rather than
the atrocity that the swastika received in the early 20th century. And
unlike you some of us prefer not to continue that atrocity by looking
for the good where it exists and expunge the bad. Rather than, oh, I
don’t know, continue to give some ugly concept any more publicity. So,
again, Go to H-E-double hockgy sticks, Adina.

“Despite the ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t
recognize it as a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been
its association with the murderous racism of the Nazis”

If the sight of the swastika does offend you, then I may suggest no
traveling Asia east of Pakistan, because you can’t miss it. I think
the most blatant clashing of East and West, in regards to the
swastika, I’ve encountered was in Kochi in the Jewish Quarter, where a
simple spice shop, owned by Indian Jews is named ‘Swastik Spices’. And
the swastika is proudly displayed on their sign, windows, business
card and labels, right facing. i would gladly post the picture from
that establishment, if I could here.

The Hindu swastika runs counter-clockwise – facing the left. The
swastika adopted by the Nazis faced to the right.

Not Canadian, But its interesting to watch this particular story. So
goes the north, so will follow the rest IMHO… so this seems to be
the thing to watch and learn from.

Toronto — Re Google Raises Fuss Over Bell’s Speed Bumps (Report on
Business, July 9): Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
have been slowing, shaping and restricting Internet traffic for some
time. In addition, the line between traditional television and new
media has been getting blurrier every day. Because of this, the CRTC
is set to revisit its 1999 decision to exempt the Internet from
regulation.

TORONTO — Google on Tuesday branded the use of “traffic-shaping”
technology by domestic phone giants to choke off BitTorrent and other
bandwidth hogs as “unjust discrimination” and contrary to Canadian
law. “The Internet is simply too important to allow Bell and other
broadband Internet access services to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google said in a 15-page filing to the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is weighing the
right of phone carriers to use packet filtering technology to manage
Internet traffic. Google gave its backing to smaller Canadian
Internet-access providers that lease phone lines to provide their
service to Canadians. Bell Canada and other phone giants have told the
CRTC that they should be allowed to hamper serial file-sharers that
greatly slow the time it takes online subscribers to legitimately
transfer music, video, software and other large files.

Subscribe to The Hollywood Reporter and see the entertainment industry
from its best angle: the inside looking out. Complete access to real-
time news and exclusive analysis that goes behind the scenes from film
to television, home video to digital media.

Google’s comments, which were filed with the commission on July 3 and
made public by the CRTC over the weekend, were submitted in support of
a complaint made by the Canadian Association of Internet Providers
(CAIP), a group of independent Internet service providers (ISPs) that
lease network access from Bell.

A spokesman for Bell declined to comment, saying the company would be
filing its response with the CRTC tomorrow.

Bell Canada – a division of Montreal-based BCE Inc. – has faced harsh
criticism from CAIP and other proponents of “net neutrality” over its
policies regarding the flow of content on its network. CAIP is
alleging that Bell is illegally managing their subscribers’ traffic.

“The CAIP complaint is really only the tip of the iceberg,” CRTC
chairman Konrad von Finckenstein told a telecom conference last month.

Some businesses are beginning to leverage social networking sites for
more than just connecting with old friends. They’re being used for
leads, referrals and recruiting.

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Because it doesn’t matter where the logs are housed as long as Google
does business in the U.S.. Housing them elsewhere does not make them
immune to a court order.

Because the use and manner which the records could be accessed would
be spelled out by some binding agreement.

The US-based Google would have half the information; the foreign “data
storage” company would have the other half — and no individual
record could be obtained without bitwise XOR’ing all pieces together.

We just have this compulsion to hang onto everything because we can,
and perhaps with the faint hope that somewhere down the line we’ll be
able to show extreme cleverness to our PHB’s when they ask some inane
question like, “Duh, how many unique IP addresses have accessed our
website since 1991?” and we’ll be able to say, “Give me 10 minute and
I’ll let you know (wag tail).”

> Google has just been stupid here about privacy, and now it’s coming
home to roost in a very public way.

Of course, I’ve never posted, so maybe that’s why.
I guess my IP address does ID “me”, however. My DSL address changes a
lot, but I assume the telco keeps those records… too.

So what’s the strongest form of protection for our personal
information? The famous “possession is 9 points of the law”. We should
possess our personal information and we should have to right to say
who can see it, and when.

(However, some people would no doubt trade away their privacy for
coupon discounts or whatever–but right now we have no choice. Lots of
companies (and of course including Google) collect lots of our
personal information and treat it like *THEIR* property when it should
belong to *US*.)

We may THINK there’s no reason for Google to have to keep logs for 18
months, but these days I wouldn’t be surprised to find there’s some
hidden provision of the Patriot Act, or possibly some law we’ve never
heard of, which it’s illegal for us to hear of or read in the first
place. So maybe there IS a law requiring them to keep it for 18
months, it’s just not one the public is allowed to know of until it’s
used to prosecute them.

Only when there is centralized control of Internet usage is there a
privacy issue. Imagine being part of a cooperative with 34 connections
to various ISPs, and all of the 12000 users in the cooperative using
something like TOR. Standard Internet browser usage would be
anonymized completely. The idea that you should be identifiable comes
from the fact that there is a way currently to identify you. If your
packets arrived to the greater Internet backbone from more than one
source and more than one IP, it would be anonymous, and the ‘grid’
would be truly that. If you and 14999 of your friends decide to make a
mesh network using wireless and landline connections at each node, it
would be impossible for anyone to identify your network habits. It
would also be nearly impossible to cause a network-only outage. Power
loss could still be catastrophic. My point is this, if you truly want
anonymity, you have to work hard for it. Most people don’t want to.
Consequences of that are inevitable, unavoidable, costly.

But as an economic downturn looms, deteriorating ad spending will
likely cramp Google’s style — if it hasn’t already. While Wall Street
largely anticipates a dandy second-quarter — the — we suspect the
economy has finally caught up with the search monstrosity.

That’s fine, but the signs are on the wall that the company is in
retrenchment mode: Last month, with the city, but we suspect timing
was an issue, too — why would a technology company fork over billions
of dollars for a hotel just as the economy slips into recession?

The aborted hotel deal doesn’t represent the full extent of Google’s
penny-pinching, either — the company recently closed a

If you want to give your kids a little more exposure to cooking and
nutritious food, and you’d enjoy the chance to snoop around Google’s
Headquarters, you might want to head to Mountain View this Saturday
for .

And, who knows, he might even be in sunny California right now playing
with a new Google toy rather than fretting about the next instalment
of Dancing on Ice.

The $2 trillion industry put in its worst performance during the first
half of the year since most credible records began

The luxury hotel group wants to buy Island off Guernsey that spent
much of the Second World War under German occupation

* Make bicycling safer for millions of bicyclists around the world. *
Empower world citizens to better adapt their lifestyles to face the
challenges of global climate change. * Help Google realize its core
mission of “organizing the world’s information and making
it universally accessible and useful.”

In recent months, Google has made a serious attempt to green its
image. Last November, the search giant launched .

Smith’s petition may be gaining some traction. In April, he
wrote that the city of Austin is in “” to provide bicycle
directions on Google Maps. He wasn’t able to get more
information than that.

If you’re going to bike somewhere, you’d imagine that it
wouldn’t be much more than 40 kms (24.85 miles or a little over
an hour bike ride) away, right? Cause any more than that and
you’ll have a 3+ hour bike ride there and back. So why
wouldn’t you know how to get to a destination on your bike
that’s only an hour bike ride away? Get a life.

One of the most fascinating ongoing stories in the world of
transportation, I think, is the use of technology to relay real-time
information to users. This runs the gamut from trying to give
motorists immediate information on freeway accidents to using cell
phones to tell someone the bus he’s waiting for has broken down.

The web search and advertising giant Google has recently jumped into
the game with a feature called Google Transit. In some areas, if you
do a search for directions on Google maps, you will also get
directions to reach your destination via mass transit.

As for Google Transit, I spent some time playing around with it
yesterday and came away mostly impressed. It’s quick — quicker than
the Metro trip planner. And to have all that information housed on one
website is pretty convenient.

Some quibbles: I thought the directions were sometimes less than
clear. For example, I asked the site to provide bus directions from
Magnolia Boulevard and San Fernando Road in downtown Burbank to the
Burbank airport. The directions were to take one bus to the Burbank
Metrolink station and switch to the “Empire Building” bus line, which
was followed by this odd note: “Direction — Arrive at Metrolink
station.”

What do you think Bottleneckers? Google Transit? Are you a believer? A
skeptic? The comment board awaits your wisdom….

Google is fast, easy and having all the data in one place is nice.
That said, no one can provide better itineraries and schedules than
the transit provider itsself.

Google also has the ability to infest your computer if they disagree
with you. Their google android project is 2-4 generations from
completion who really needs more from them than a search engine. One
of the grown ups probably thought of guugle ads revenue.

If Metro’s trip planner was nice to use, I could imagine them saying
no to google and keeping the ad revenue for themselves, but the Metro
trip planner is awful.

Google Maps is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not Google’s
fault that Apple is dumb and only allows limited bits of AJAX to work
on their phones.

While I’m mostly appreciative of this transit system from Google
(thank you Google), I too have a couple peeves to point out…

Nice to know I’m not the only one keeping up on these systems. They’re
very impressive and should be very helpful to many people in the
future. By the way, some Universities already have their own online
transit systems that provide real time data, and many of them are very
impressive. Example:

I don’t bother with the map feature at Metro.net; it’s a joke. The
trip planner also suffers from constant crashes, something I don’t
*think* would carry over into Google (in the long term). I think that
Google’s interface promises a lot more user-friendliness, but I’d want
to know its flexibility: to option for Metro-only or bus-only routes,
for example. Click-and-drag for multiple-stop trips? If either Google
or Metro.net can manage that… HOT.

If you are under 13 years of age you may read this message board, but
you may not participate.
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until they’ve been
approved.

Steve Hymon is The Times’ Road Sage. He covers traffic and
transportation in a region united by a confounding network of freeways
that frustrate drivers daily. The Bottleneck Blog is Steve’s website
home, where he breaks transportation news, reports on traffic tie-ups
and brings a critical but humorous eye to commuting in Southern
California. You can reach Steve at steve.hymon@latimes.com.

Google has added a significant new feature to the tool that
advertisers can use to select the keywords they want to bid for: the
ability to see roughly how many people actually search using those
terms.

The move is probably smart: advertisers love quantitative analysis,
and this gives them more hard data immediately.

) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 8:18 AM PDT Google trends
looks a lot like thatNath Reply to this comment by July 9, 2008 8:18
AM PDT Wow. Targeting? Reply to this comment

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But the rest of the world’s really going to wonder what the big deal
is this time around.

Maybe the applications I was using were slammed by all the new users
Friday, but it took longer than expected to connect to the news feeds
from the AP and The New York Times.

So is the iPhone 3G worth the $2,000 you’ll spend owning and operating
one for the next two years?

In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun
events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May,
to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and
spin in the digital age, do stop by.

Are we the sexiest blog ever? You better believe it, people. Even Amy
Adams (above) says so. And if she didn’t actually say it, you can bet
she’s thinking it.

Technically, you are correct – platform-agnostic data transfer has
been possible since Sun’s earliest RPC implementations. However, this
seems to be considerably lighter-weight (although so is Mount Everest)
and because order is specified, it’s going to be much simpler to pluck
specific data out of a data stream. You don’t need to have an order-
agnostic structure and then an ordering layer in each language-
specific library.
There have been all kinds of attempts to produce this sort of stuff.
RPC, DCE, Corba, DCOM, etc, are programmatic interfaces and handle
function calls, synchronization, etc. OPeNDAP is probably the closest
to Google’s architecture in that it is ONLY data. It’s more
sophisticated, as it handles much more complex data types than mere
structures, but it has its own overheads issues. It isn’t designed to
scale to terabyte databases, although it DOES scale extremely well and
is definitely the preferred method of delivering high-volume
structured scientific data – at least when compared to the RPC family
of methods, or indeed the XML family. I wouldn’t use it for the kind
of volume of data Google handles, though, you’d kill the servers.

I drink the XML kool-aid plenty — but there are things it’s good for,
and things it’s not. Serializing and parsing truly massive amounts of
data is part of the latter set.

We wanted to give an idea of the speed without trying to boast too
much or look like we were directly challenging anyone. Of course every
news outlet has chosen to highlight the speed comment — including the
numbers which were intended to be ballpark figures — more than was
intended, but I guess that isn’t surprising.

In any case, I’m hoping that some independent source conducts some
tests because I think anything we produced would probably have
unintentional biases in it. Of course, I’ll update the numbers in the
docs if they turn out to be wildly off-base.

both really from the same design sheet, but thrift has been
opensource’d for over a year, and has many more language bindings. its
been in use in several opensource projects (thrudb comes to mind), and
has much more extant articles/documentation.

Just wait for the XML zealots to come crashing and not believing that
XML is not the fastest, best, solution to all the world’s problems
(including cancer) and of course people at Google are amateurs and
id10ts and WHY DO YOU HATE XML kind of stuff.

* We only use it as a source format for our tools. XML is far too
inefficient and verbose to use in the final game – all our XML data is
packed into our own proprietary binary data format.* We also only use
it as a meta-data format, not a primary container type. For instance,
we store gameplay scripts, audio script, and cinematic meta-data in
XML format. We’re not foolish enough to store images, sounds, or maps
in a highly-verbose, text-based format. XML’s value to us is in how
well it can glue large pieces of our game together.* All our latest
tools are written in C# and using the.NET platform (Windows is our
development platform, of course). It’s astoundingly easy to serialize
data structures to XML using.NET libraries – just a few lines of
code.* Because it’s a text-based format and human readable, if a file
breaks in any way, we can just do a diff in source control to see what
changed, and why it’s breaking.

Since they’re Google people will clamor over this (as we’re doing
here) and the result will be at least a handful of folks will learn
and use it. Google’s key to success has always been finding fresh
talent and removing barriers from their contributing and advancement
so what I’ve seen they’ve done is A) help train potential employee’s
on how they’re tech and thought process works, and B) provide
themselves a filter by which to gauge the ability for a potential
employee to understand they’re system.
And as a bonus, they help undermine opponents who use competing
technologies by helping train the workforce away from their practices.
Overall I think it’s very intelligent and well done strategic move.

None of the above even remotely applies to anything practical except
UI/display formats — this is why XHTML and ODF (and because of that
at some extent XSL) are usable, SOAP is a load of crap, and for the
rest of purposes XML is used as a glorified CSL with angle brackets.
XML is widespread because monumentally stupid standard is still better
than no standard.

You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.

You think? Take BigTable. Wikipedia describes it as: ‘”a sparse,
distributed multi-dimensional sorted map”, sharing characteristics of
both row-oriented and column-oriented databases’. Sounds, to me, like
a specialized solution to a very specialized problem, a problem that,
I presume, didn’t fit with any existing solution. Same goes with GFS.
After all, do you really think they didn’t evaluate existing solutions
before embarking on building an entirely new distributed filesystem?
Do you really think they’re that stupid?

As for Protocol Buffers, given the existing solutions out there (such
as ASN.1 and CORBA) are generally ugly and/or over-engineered, it
sounds to me like they’re simply addressing a gap in the industry…
after all, XML and SOAP aren’t the end-all and be-all of generic
object-passing protocols.

He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”

Google’s just-debuted virtual world is clunky right now, but expect it
to grow into a monster success – and play a leading role in business
as well a social networking.

Google has emerged as one of the leading proponents of open source
software development, as a user of open source technologies and as a
developer of open source code. And as a funding source, Google’s open
source commitment is well known.

The company also recently donated $350,000 to Oregon and Portland
State Universities in support of open source development. Google open
source projects and efforts are documented at the Web site.

I don’t know if we’ll deal with them in a different way, but I think
we’ll be a lot more clear.

We have it structured very carefully so that we can include people in
other countries and also not invalidate the visas of students here in
the U.S. that took part. I think that next time should we do this it
will be a lot clearer up front that this is kind of complicated.

Q: Were there any real standout projects from Summer of Code that just
made you say “Wow”?

The point of the program wasn’t just to create software that everyone
could immediately use and that would change the world, but to create
developers that later on could create software that could develop that
kind of wonderful software. And we think it did that.

For instance we have an article in there from a fellow who is applying
the concepts behind open source into biology. It’s sort of like,
here’s this core open source advance on how it’s been done over the
last six years, and then there are also people who have learned from
open source and what they’re doing, too.

I haven’t done a deep reading of them. If they’re OSI-approved I would
consider them, but I would have to read them.

Q: What has your time at Google been like and has it been a positive
experience for you to work at Google?

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Live Ask

: No info on that. As far as I heard from friends in Bukhara,
everything seems to be more or less ok now….

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where
readers can share and discover new web pages.

Thats a good point. With Google you knew where you stood. They might
use your info to to target advertising. They might reveal it to the
government if ordered to do so. They would not be likely to sell it to
spammers or pass on lists of people who bookmark anti-Islamic sites to
an Al-Qaeda operative. Without google hosting it you need to host your
own or find someone you can trust.

Doesn’t Browser sync already supports encrypting your data? Even if it
doesn’t I am sure this capability can be added now that it is open-
source.

Well, I’d disagree, I think we’re doing fine from a kernel release
perspective. We could do more, and in time, we will, but we only
really started a concerted effort to release changes 3 years ago,
so…not so shabby. Red Hat has been more important than Google or any
linux -user- in the development of the kernel.

Your comments about manipulation are weirdly paranoid. The original
list that Greg posted was 20+ companies long, and originally didn’t
include us, as he didn’t count Andrew to us. He fixed that, and the
post I sent to you was from his talk at Google. It’s part of his
presentation to call out the company he visits, which is one of the
reasons we invited him out.

I’m sure there have been other examples, but this is the first and
possibly only example I can think of of a company *actually
responding* to requests for a discontinued product to be open-sourced.
Let alone actually going ahead and doing it.

I’m sure there’s better examples, but off the top of my head I know
that a few years ago, there was a petition started to release the
source code to [wikipedia.org], an old (yet brilliant) 3D RTS game
that still stands out amongst the crowd today. After a few months
(possibly a couple of years), Eidos scrambled together the source code
and released it to the community.Since then, the Warzone resurrection
project has come leaps and bounds – fixing bugs, improving what
platforms the game runs at, allowing higher resolutions, improving the
AI, etc.The only slight catch (that I’m aware of) is that the Video
CODEC used in the original game was proprietary, so Eidos couldn’t
release the source to that and the company that owns the CODEC
wouldn’t allow it to be distributed any more.

my settings is set to give trolls +1 and flamebait +2.It’s often some
of the most humerous and insightful comments. At other times it’s just
gay fiction.

Google has posted a new feature to its Maps service which allows users
to view the entire route of the Tour de France.

Q: I enter events into AOL’s calendar and program it to send me e-mail
to remind me. Unfortunately, a few months ago, I stopped receiving
e-mail reminders, and AOL has not been able to correct this problem.
Do you know of any other software programs that will let me enter
events into a calendar and receive e-mail to remind me?

You can set a reminder e-mail at the same time that you’re adding an
event to your calendar. Just look for the gray box titled
“options.” Click “add a reminder” to schedule
an e-mail or pop-up reminder from five minutes to one week before the
event. By going through the “settings” link at the top
right of the screen, you can set up your mobile phone to receive
calendar notifications.

The issue, as I’m sure you and the geeks you enlisted know, is that
external 5.25-inch floppy drives don’t appear to exist nowadays. As a
quick reminder, we’re talking about the large disks with holes in the
middle that flopped when you shook them.

Even if you could find an external 5.25-inch drive, it’s far more
likely to have a serial connection than today’s more standard USB
port.

If the data were stuck on 3.5-inch disks, you could order an external
3.5-inch floppy USB drive for $19.95 from FloppyDisk.com. The store
mentions on its site that it can’t find equivalent drives for
5.25-inch disks.

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the upper right of each item. — Courant.com

Mark your calendars for a day full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing: Reps from Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) :
As everyone has noted, the irony is that this time, the Microsoft guys
aren’t the ones under antitrust scrutiny.

The problem is that many mainstream investors have a hard time sorting
out the important aspects of what’s going on at Google from the
unimportant ones. Offsetting the difficulty in separating the wheat
from the chaff is a blissfully short memory that generally means any
Google weak launches or eventual failures are forgotten quickly.

Google remains an essential portfolio holding as they are perhaps the
best technology architecture for modern computing although they
occasionally put out some stinkers. (Requires Windows XP and Internet
Explorer?!)

Developing a good feel for Google as an investment requires an ability
to make more “doesn’t matter” decisions than we have seen with
any technology company in the past.

with a BSD-style license. The code is extensive – in addition to all
the required bits to hook it up to Firefox, you’ll find dozens of
Javascript files involved. Fortunately, the source is reasonably well-
commented, so it’s at least clear what’s happening where, if not how
to move it forward to the current version of Firefox.

In fact, one might speculate as to whether this sort of closed-to-open
strategy could become more formalized and popular. Suppose Google knew
in advance that this was their plan: they could have escrowed a copy
of the source code with some reliable third party, along with a
covenant to release on a certain date unless the covenant was revoked.
Such a plan might ultimately bring us more open source software, by
encouraging innovation with slightly lower risk.

© 2008 OStatic. Design by . Built on fine Open Source Software
from projects like , , , , and .

“The data suggests Google Autos and Google Music,” Hopkins said. “I am
not sure we’ll see Google Government just yet!”

) 2 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 9, 2008 2:54 PM PDT Google has a
specific music search function already Reply to this comment by July
10, 2008 11:32 AM PDT google also has a specific government search
function already.it’s under the “Topic-specific search engines” Reply
to this comment

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Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.

So naturally there’s some fear with cloud computing: it means you
can’t reboot your laptop or check for blinking red lights on the data
center servers.

“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”

“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.

“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.

That might not be five nines, and it’s for Gmail only today, but
Google chooses to see the glass as half full.

“We talk to customers, and 99.9 percent is mostly much higher than
most organizations with their internal service today,” Chandra said.

The software, AVE Video Fusion, “combines Google Earth-like features
with live camera videos projected on a 3D model” the video caption
says. “This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch
using C++ and OpenGL.” It runs on PCs and requires no custom hardware.

The El Segundo, Calif.-based company was founded in 2005 by computer
science and electrical engineering professors at the University of
Southern California.

Agarwal’s suggestions are to either set it up as a special page on
compatible blogging platforms so that your writings will show up like
a regular post, or to simply embed it on the page as I’ve done here.
One of the platform’s strong suits is that it lets several people work
on a document at the same time, which your standard blogging platform
likely won’t allow.

We’ve covered several live blogging tools on Webware before. Rafe’s
favorite is . Both offer live updating, and options to let your
readers get notifications and reminders on when live coverage will
begin.

Update: While Google Docs works just fine as a live blogging tool,
there are some things to note about the embed option that some might
consider shortcomings.

I’ve embedded the original live blog after the break, which is simply
the same post as what’s seen above (sans update).

In the top 20 classes of Internet sites toward which Google sent
traffic, only three have no corresponding in-house Google project,
according to Hitwise’s June 2008 research.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t check if your favorite coffee
watering hole (or office) is going the way of $2 gas. According to The
Seattle Times, employees at stores that are facing closure have been
given some extra heads-up to either find new jobs or transfer
elsewhere.

That extra foresight chronicling which stores will soon be going
under, even if their closures have not yet been announced.

Keep in mind that not all of the Starbucks locations listed are
definitely being shuttered. Most listings are based either on rumors
or speculation, since the first smattering of downed stores has not
yet been announced.

Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.

As a reminder, outages for Google Results should not result in data
loss. Google’s GFS (Google File System) backup method is one of the
most rigorous systems used by any data host. As I , a lost copy of
your data on one server is backed up in a dozen other places, so you
won’t even notice.

“For a short period this morning, our users had difficulty accessing
Google Docs. Some Google Apps users were also affected … We have now
resolved the problem. We know how important Google Docs is to our
users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

Update 2: Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells us the problem
stemmed from the servers that control the view of the document
workspace as well as the home document listing. The data where your
documents were stored suffered no down time.

A clause in Google’s 2005 purchase agreement for the AOL stake gives
the Web search leader the right, but not the obligation, to force a
public offering of the shares or a repurchase at fair market value as
of July 1, 2008.

The July 1 date was viewed months ago as a catalyst for the Time
Warner board of directors to speed discussions to spin off or sell AOL
to any interested party, including Yahoo, Microsoft or News Corp.

That is because a similar scenario played out when Comcast sought to
resolve its 21 percent stake in Time Warner Cable in 2003. The two
agreed to buy and divide the assets of the bankrupt cable operator
Adelphia, and the deal eventually led to the partial spinoff of Time
Warner Cable.

Renewed hopes for an AOL sale or merger sent Time Warner shares rising
as much as 2.6 percent on Monday after Citigroup named the company its
top pick within large cap media and entertainment stocks on the
conviction that AOL would be sold or merged into either Yahoo or
another company.

Jason Bazinet, a Citigroup analyst, estimated that the merger of AOL’s
advertising business and Yahoo would generate $900 million of annual
cost reductions.

AOL emerged as one of the most attractive alternatives for a deal with
either Microsoft or Yahoo after Microsoft walked away from its buyout
offer in May, but potential buyers have been wary of its history of
strategic missteps and of sluggish growth in its advertising business.

After Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy its search business and
struck a search ad deal with Google in June, the momentum for Internet
mergers has slowed, analysts said.

Google’s “deal with Yahoo muddies the waters,” said Larry Haverty, a
portfolio manager at the Time Warner investor, Gabelli & Co.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” he said of Google exercising its option
on AOL.

But “it’s looking increasingly less likely,” Lindsay said, that Time
Warner will find a taker for AOL. “There’s less incentive to take it
public now, and less likely that AOL will have a deal with either
Yahoo or Microsoft. It’s back to status quo with much lower energy.”

The country’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do
with intellectual ferment as economic clout.

Some of the group of slaves being helped by abolitionists raise their
hands after Dr. John Eibner of CSI International asked how many of
them had been beaten by their masters. (Tamara Banks, Special to The
Denver Post)

Led by the Arab/Dinka Peace Committee, they had walked south for
miles, and for days, on their journey to freedom. Many gave up. Those
who persevered waited under the tree for four days, and were now
nearing the end of their excruciating journey.

The grassroots group in Sudan invited CSI to join them in their
efforts to bring slaves back home.

“In 1995, we first encountered the reality of the slave raids in a
powerful way,” said Dr. John Eibner, who heads the teams of two or
three CSI members who go into Sudan every month to deliver
humanitarian aid, medicine, sorghum, survival kits and assistance in
returning slaves to their families. “The NGO’s [non-governmental
organizations] that were there had moved out, the Red Cross failed to
go in to help because the government of Sudan said no. So, the
international community allowed itself to be dictated to by the
government of Sudan that was responsible for the slave raiding.”

Among those on this trip were Eibner, an American, and Gunnar
Wiebalck, a German, who have made a career of shining a bright light
on social injustice, including working on the abolishment of apartheid
in South Africa. “Because the rest of the world was not — and
still is not — dealing with this issue of slavery, which is a
crime against humanity according to international law, we thought we
should come back and help this local, grassroots mechanism for getting
enslaved women and children back,” Eibner said.

“This abolitionist work fuels my passion to see each slave freed,” she
added. “There are still tens of thousands in slavery. I will not
abandon them.”

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“Love Marriage” tells the story of the way Sri Lankan politics affect
a family living in the United States. The story takes Yalini and her
family from suburban America to Toronto, where they are reunited with
an uncle who has left Sri Lanka after a life of militancy with the
Tamil Tigers. The book is about specific characters, not
representatives of a culture. Still, I had to do my homework to write
it, so I did become versed in some history. Add to that the fact that
my parents emigrated to the United States from Sri Lanka, and it makes
some sense for reading audiences, reporters and others to ask me
questions about the country.

Some people do, I’m sure. At readings around the country, I’ve met Sri
Lankans, immigrants and their children, who thank me for writing about
the conflict. But while I’m proud of my book, it certainly doesn’t
represent the voices of all Sri Lankans. It’s the story of one family.
Still, I know that some people at my readings may never hear much more
about Sri Lanka than what I say. All I can do is try to understand why
these questions are asked, be as reasonable and careful in my answers
as I can, clarify that I am a novelist and emphasize that I am only
one person answering — while still being as complete and thorough as
possible.

As a novelist, I should be free to write about whatever I want,
without worrying about the political significance people will attach
to it. Indeed, writing fiction means that I have license to diverge
from historical facts. It shouldn’t be my responsibility if some
readers have little knowledge of Sri Lanka beyond what they read in my
book or hear me say as a guest on a radio show. I also know, however,
that regardless of the caveats I put before what I say, my words may
carry the weight of an imagined community.

Orientalist, Historian, Political Scientist, Dr. Megalommatis, 51, is
the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of
encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles. He speaks, reads and
writes more than 15, modern and ancient, languages. He refuted Greek
nationalism, supported Martin Bernal´s Black Athena, and rejected the
Greco-Romano-centric version of History. He pleaded for the European
History by J. B. Duroselle, and defended the rights of the Turkish,
Pomak, Macedonian, Vlachian, Arvanitic, Latin Catholic, and Jewish
minorities of Greece. Born Christian Orthodox, he adhered to Islam
when 36, devoted to ideas of Muhyieldin Ibn al Arabi. Greek citizen
of Turkish origin, Prof. Megalommatis studied and/or worked in Turkey,
Greece, France, England, Belgium, Germany, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Iran,
Egypt and Russia, and carried out research trips throughout the Middle
East, Northeastern Africa and Central Asia. His career extended from
Research & Education, Journalism, Publications, Photography, and
Translation to Website Development, Human Rights Advocacy, Marketing,
Sales & Brokerage. He traveled in more than 80 countries in 5
continents. He defends the Right of Aramaeans, Oromos, Ogadenis,
Sidamas, Berbers, Afars, Anuak, Darfuris, Bejas, Balochs and Tibetans
to National Independence, demands international recognition for
Kosovo, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and Transnistria,
calls for National Unity in Somalia, and denounces Islamic Terrorism.

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the views, opinions and information communicated here. The
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A conservative ally of as press secretary in May 2006. Unlike
McClellan, who came to define caution and bland delivery, Mr Snow was
never shy about playing to the cameras.

A conservative ally of as press secretary in May 2006. Unlike
McClellan, who came to define caution and bland delivery, Mr Snow was
never shy about playing to the cameras.

Oneda’s remarks trail that Microsoft will drop the price of the Xbox
360 by $50 this Sunday. In the last three weeks, numerous sources and
retail fliers have confirmed the news, though Microsoft says it has
nothing to announce.

Find out how Lenovo laptops balance performance and portability. Visit
the Lenovo Resource Center for more info…

Japan has had the budget range of PS3 games , with Folkore,
Resistance, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Mobile Suit Gundam: Target in Sight
and Ridge Racer 7 all being available at a lower price in an effort to
have a second crack at the best-selling lists.

Then a list of SCEE titles due for price cuts in Europe , with
Resistance, Genji, F1, MotorStorm, Heavenly Sword, Lair, Folklore and
Ridge Racer 7 all becoming budget titles. Though none have been
confirmed as being part of a new Platinum range, the chances are,
looking at the titles, likely.

And now, on the eve of E3, it’s America’s turn. , which
purports to show the first three games being included in the PS3
Greatest Hits range. The games are, as the title of this post
suggested, MotorStorm, Resistance and Warhawk. Which are all games
that showed off the console’s early potential.

The console itself is still the most expensive of the three current-
gen choices, with the Nintendo Wii being cheap enough for families to
afford, and the Xbox 360 about to get a $50 price cut. But this new
range of re-releases, geared towards new PS3 owners on a budget could
help Sony shift some more units.

an epic campaign weaves the narrative, Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon
Rising will give players the freedom to handle military crisis
situations on their initiative. Unscripted missions will task players
with real objectives, such as laying down suppressing fire, covering a
friendly unit’s retreat or conducting short-range recon patrol.
Players will fight as infantry soldiers in battle, drive tanks in
armoured assaults, pilot helicopters in air strikes and infiltrate the
enemy in covert special operations utilising a wide variety of
realistic military weapons from knives and rifles to machine guns,
grenade launchers and laser designators for air strikes. Whatever the
situation, players will need to balance brute force with intelligent
use of tactics in their engagement against the full force of the PLA.

Many analysts and game journalists were wondering if Metal Gear Solid
4: Guns of the Patriots would spark a significant PlayStation 3
hardware sales surge, and that question has – for the most part – been
answered. We don’t yet have exact numbers from everywhere, but if the
latest Amazon response has been any indication, MGS4 is a definite
system seller.

I got the bundle the day it came out. walked into Wal mart around
11:30 AM, and three bundles were just sitting there. SWEEEEET. I got
it, plus they gave me a $100 gift card because it classifies as a blu-
ray player and they were having a promotion. I RULE!!!!!!!
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Online connectivity, high-definition media players and soon, personal
video recorders are fast becoming as important to consoles as driving
wheels, guitars and microphones.

Console add-ons such as driving wheels have been common for a long
time, but in the past few years, particularly with the rise of so-
called social gaming – titles that appeal beyond the traditional hard-
core gamers – there has been an explosion of new devices designed to
add value to basic consoles.

Sony’s PlayStation 2 has probably led the push. It’s old technology
compared with its next-generation rivals, but with an installed base
of about 2.5 million in Australia, it’s still the most common one in
homes.

The trend towards social gaming evident in the popularity of titles
such as the SingStar and Buzz series for the PS2, and Guitar Hero for
all consoles, has generated its own new set of peripherals.

Indeed, such was the success of Activision and Red Octane’s Guitar
Hero series, it has already spawned a challenger.

Both Rock Band and Guitar Hero World Tour are expected to hit the
market in Australia in the second half of the year, with an obvious
eye to Christmas sales and consolidating sales of next-generation
consoles.

Nintendo, for example, with its innovative motion-sensing Wii console,
has been the surprise packet of the next-generation console wars,
despite being technically not as advanced as its two main rivals.

“Our Nunchucks and controllers are huge sellers beyond what is
supplied with a core unit,” Nintendo Australia managing director Rose
Lappin says.

Microsoft, and its Xbox 360 platform, might be more aimed at a
traditional games audience, but the company has also made its approach
to games more modular to appeal to a wider market.

Spend a bit more, and a standard Xbox 360 package, for $499, adds a
20GB hard drive, headset, component audiovisual cable and an ethernet
cable.

Microsoft Xbox marketing manger Jeremy Hinton says the strategy is to
make next-generation games affordable to a wider market.

“We also want to make our systems very modular. Rather than offer a
single package with everything, we offer a range of packages to appeal
to what people want and can afford.

“To a certain extent we get tarred with the brush of being the hard-
core gamers’ console of choice, particularly with titles such as Halo,
but we also have a large number of family products.

“This time around, with what the Wii is offering, social games will be
coming faster to all platforms.”

“From the add-ons sector, we have quite an extensive range of
accessories – we have cameras, wireless headsets, wheels, network
adapters, extra memory modules and more,” Hinton says.

“Obviously, we think people will be interested in our consoles from
all different points of the line.”

“The games market, as we traditionally know it – the hard-core players
I suppose – are more with consoles such as the PS3 and the Xbox 360.
They are into online games, downloading digital content and so on.

Late last year the company ported the SingStar franchise to the PS3,
offering a more online experience than the original PS2 game.

“It is like iTunes meets YouTube and Myspace. There is so much
uploaded content, it is really creating a whole social environment of
its own.”

Buzz TV will let players select genres, play online against anyone
around the world, and let users create their own questions.

“So we have the PS3 now being able to be targetted at a much broader
base – more so than our competitors,” Ephraim says.

Microsoft used the Xbox as the basis for an add-on HD-DVD drive to
popularise that format, but the rival Blu-ray standard, supported by
Sony and offered on the PS3, won that standards war.

The company plans to go further, using the PS3 as the centrepiece of a
personal video recorder due out later this year or early next year,
Ephraim says.

Information provided on this page will not be used for any other
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Australia’s premier calendar for IT managers, chief information
officers and technologists featuring product launches, technology
clinics and management sessions. Updated each Tuesday.

PS3 Firmware update v2.40 came and went last week. It was live for
less time than I spend doing my hair very morning, and I’m
balding. But if the rumours are to be believed, a patched version of
the Xbox Live-mimicking update is coming on Wednesday July 7th…
maybe.

The new update is meant to have fixed all of the technical issues, and
will finally allow PS3 owners the chance to enjoy the in-game XMB, and
(not a copy of Xbox Live’s Achievements at all) Trophies.

It still amazes me that Sony saw fit to release a firmware update in
the obviously unfinished state it was in the first place. They either
rushed it through to get it out there and in working order before E3,
or they used PS3 owners connected to the Playstation network as
unknowing guinea pigs in order to test the update out for issues.

But!, Sony is trying to catch up by releasing software updates
designed specifically to brick you machine – they added some new
features of course to cover this up.

Bourne:
you got your ps3 broke due to 2.40? gutted, the only way to get your
ps3 back is to wipe the harddrive

matt – stfu. the ps3 were priced at $599 when they hit the market.
some of those bricked were old ps3 bought at the launch price. nice
job pointing out your ignorance.

Spideydog:
DAVE PARRACK going bald…now thats a headline…lol Sorry to
hear that brother Kev get back under he rock you once came, you troll.
Comparing RROD to 2.40 is utterly rediculas. You really are deserate
aren’t you?

(Is it true XBLA is getting Duke Nukem 3d..?? I will be jealous if it
is true)

Bourne:
the ps3 does have a removable hard drive… it uses a 2.5mm laptop
hard drive. You can remove it and replace it under warranty, it gives
details how to do it in the manual. As for reformatting, there are
tutorials on playstation blogs. You can use a computer i believe

kev:
bourne – in this case, you don’t need to send in the ps3 only
the hdd. after all, you guys are saying only the hdd is affected.
still waiting on sony’s public announcement saying they will fix
the bricked ones for free including shipping. anyone got a link for
that?

Xbox360 is the ultimate “lemon” console of ALL time. Up to
33% failure rate….1/3 of consoles sold died….That is a
feat that is going to be very hard to beat. But you can play it down
as much as you want and play up PS to make 360 look less significant
to make you feel better if you wish…FANBOY.

Personally, I still assert that it has a 100% failure rate, since
I’ve never heard of anyone owning one for more than a year that
hasn’t broken. Excepting (obviously) internet fanboys, who are
known for their honesty.

Before picking up Top Spin 3, you might want to think about visiting a
real-life tennis court and learning to master serving, volleying and
other Rafael Nadal-style Wimbledon magic.

It’s nowhere near that easy with Top Spin 3, which is almost as hard
to describe as it is to play. For starters, the Xbox 360 and
PlayStation 3 versions work with a time delay, forcing you to press
and release the racquet swing buttons a beat and a half before the
ball arrives. To get even halfway good, you also need to learn how to
aim well and take advantage of all the shoulder buttons and triggers
on the controller. This game makes the increasingly complicated Madden
NFL football series seem like Dig Dug by comparison.

What if you like a challenge? Then there’s a lot to love with Top Spin
3, looks included. With just a few tiny criticisms (every fifth
spectator seems to be wearing the same blue and fuchsia argyle
sweater), the visuals are impeccable, the animations are smooth and
the athletes bear a strong resemblance to their real-life
counterparts. The little touches are especially nice, such as the
sweat stains that start spreading if your character is wearing a dark
shirt. And the create-your-own character mode ties the Fight Night
series as the best I’ve seen for a sports title. You’ve got to
appreciate a game that lets you choose the volume and pitch of your
video game doppelganger’s grunt.

See, the PCers have always been a little elitist. Running around with
their noses in the air, because about 10 years ago, they knew all
their software was technically superior to console software. Yeah,
well, it ain’t 1998, anymore. And there’s a reason why GameStop, which
used to stock a full 9 feet worth of PC software, now has most of its
stores reduced to 3 feet of software jammed into the far corner. I’m
not going to get into it, but let’s just say that even if Episode 3
doesn’t come to the PS3, I won’t be heartbroken. I wasn’t even that
impressed with HL2 in the first place.

Okay, so it seems I’ve mastered Top Spin 3. I’m only a few points from
maxing out my customized character, and I’ve beaten everybody in the
game. It won’t be any problem for me to finish at #1 at the end of the
season (my final goal), and then I’ll be done. After playing more,
I’ve realized that Nadal is actually the toughest of the big trio,
just because he gets everything back and he hits 90% of his balls
shallow, which throws me off constantly. I’ve beaten him 2 out of 3
times, even though I lost the last in a 11-9 super tiebreak that
annoyed the crap out of me. Nobody else, Federer and Roddick included,
can touch me now. So I guess it’s good timing, just because Soul
Calibur IV is right around the corner (July 29), and I don’t have much
else to play. I’m still considering getting Battlefield: Bad Company -
I hear it’s very good – but other than that, I guess I’ll return to my
MGS playing so I can get ready for MGS4.

Oh, but I will be interested in Infinite Undiscovery. Even though it
irks me that Square-Enix seems to be abandoning the PS3 these days, I
do have a 360. And besides, it’s a promising RPG, and that’s all that
matters to me. Might have to check it out.

That’s hilarious…and so true (about the stock at Gamestop). Do you
remember when Gamestop used to be called Software Etc.?
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I kinda disagree with you Episode 3 when it comes to being on the
console. I hope it does. Orange Box was great, even though I only
experienced one freeze during the games. Half-Life 2 is a great game
and the episodes just build on that. Although I will agree with you
about Newell, he just needs to open his eyes to what gaming will be in
ten years from now. Only on consoles by the looks of it. Gamestop
doesn’t have selves on PC games here. They have two displays in the
middle of the store with all the PC games crammed into them. And they
are not even taken care of half the time. I still call them EB, just
because the one Gamestop we had in town, before the merge, was crap.
Their workers were/are rude as hell and don’t really care for you
business.
0 up, 1 down

you should certainly give Battlefield a go.. if anything to get a
review going! lol I think a lot of people put BF in the same bag as
CoD, but imo if youre in to FPS game then you will realise that they
are two very different games. one thing I really like about BF is the
feeling your actually on a side, rather than just not being able to
kill half of the guys on the map (aka TDM). The sense of war, all
fighting for a reason.. yeh, it goes quite nicely along side CoD in my
collection. you should try it! edit: ps.. I dont think Square is
leaving PS3, just that it just seems that way. years ago Square was
mainly on Nintendo.. then PS, now a ‘few’ titles have showed up on the
360. I dont think it will last (not saying that in a fanboy way)..
but some big titles will be popping out soon. when FFXIII comes out,
and Square see’s the fan base go nuts over it, they may start
concentrating on the PS3 again. to be honest (dont flame me).. I do
wonder how many years the 360 has in it before a new model comes out.,
maybe Square is just getting in there before it reaches the end of the
line in say a few years? Last edited by dillonthebunny on 7/13/2008
1:25:26 AM
1 up, 0 down

The newest PS3 features delivered by the firmware update included: an
update to the XrossMediaBar to allow users to access menu items
without having to log out of gameplay, in-game text message support,
and a new Google Search button. A new awards system for gamers was
also included.

Subscribe to Shacknews or for the scoop on all of your favorite games
on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, and PC/Windows.

“I’m not a fan of the direction this art is going…. The powerlines,
and capsules are cool… …”112 Comments

–> The Video Game Release List of 7/13 – 7/19 Football and monkeys
dominate this week, with an extra side golf and rocking. Scope out the
full li… 28 13hrs 10mins ago

–> Taking Stock: The Gibson-Goldstein Index The overall industry
index held steady this week, posting minor double-digit gains to close
at 90210… 18 1day 5hrs ago

Last year’s The Orange Box was a package lovingly created for fans of
the Half-Life franchise, but Valve isn’t quite yet done with Half-Life
2 (the focal point of The Orange Box).

Episode 3 is coming at some point, as evidenced by the first piece of
concept art – shown here – that has been circulating throughout the
Internet. If you check IntothePixel’s , you’ll see it there, and
you’ll also see something else: the art is labeled as “Half-Life EP3″
and the listed platforms are PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Considering Valve’s clear aversion to consoles and obvious PC
favoritism, we wonder if it might debut first on the PC. But more
importantly for PS3 owners, we’re wondering if Episode 3 will once
again be better on the 360 (Valve palmed off dev duties onto EA for
the PS3 version of The Orange Box), thereby annoying us once again.

Did anyone here play the orange box(ps3)? I was thinking about getting
it and just wondering if the gameplay was as bad as some people say it
is. I have read reviews that say it is absolutely awful and ruins the
game, more so on episode 2…but some say it isn’t all that bad and
worth picking up. I know it has alot to offer value wise but if it
runs like $hit it ain’t legit….. r.i.p. Johnnie Cochran
0 up, 0 down

I bought it…but didn’t open it because I read some stuff about it.
Apparently the PS3 version was “ported” bad and has glitches and
freezing throughout the game. So I returned it.You might want to rent
it.Last edited by matrixkurt on 7/11/2008 1:36:43 PM
0 up, 0 down

hate the FAt Guy. Orange Box Sux,but TF2 rullz, but the only problem
in the game is that theres alot of exploits like skywalking and etc
2 up, 1 down

sounds like it may not be as bad as some reviews said…plus it’s only
like 29.99 at wal-mart….which is why my cheap A$$ just might swoop.
Thanks for the info!
0 up, 0 down

Seems pretty straightforward. I beta tested once for a SOCOM PSP title
and it was pretty neat to get a plain brown box with an unreleased
game that said beta all over the disc. I kinda felt like a secret
agent and ran back into the house with glee until I realized the game
was horrible.

Im will be honured to be part of the beta testers and don’t
worry I have alot of free time in the evenings to test am out and give
feedback (hopefully positive one’s)

Well, perhaps it’s confirmation of that new 6-minute intro movie, or
the whole new level, or whatever, but we do know that the PS3 version
will boast everything from the 360 and PC version plus all the updates
that came for those versions. The Resistance 2 trailer will pop up as
well, so if you can’t make it to E3, just turn on the TV!

Awsome lol this is a game i knew from the beggening would come to PS3
1.Because the playstation brand was made up of RPG gamers n it would
be dumb to let them not get this 2.I swore when this was first unvield
it was announced for both PS3 and 360…..then it went to 360
exculsive..u jus dont get rid of coding for a PS3 game unless its a
full failur
0 up, 1 down

can you give me a link then? I can’t seem to find it, just the short
trailer thats been out forever.
0 up, 0 down

Um….haha 360.And Bioshock should be the # 1 game on everyone’s list
this holiday season.If you aren’t lined up to buy it the day it comes
out you obviously are stupid, ignorant or retarded.
1 up, 4 down

Both Sony’s U.S. and European game divisions will use Double
Fusion to insert ads into Sony’s games for the PS 3 game
console. Beyond supplying the technology to either insert ads into
games or add video ads to games at convenient spots, Double Fusion,
based in San Francisco, will also help the game publishers find
advertisers and work out the brand messages for targeting gamers.

Landing Sony is a big deal because the electronics giant is launching
its for its PlayStation Network this fall. The world, which has the
3-D avatars and scenery that resemble Linden Lab’s Second Life,
is a major social network aimed at keeping gamers entertained while
they’re not playing games. It will be chock full of in-game (or
in-world) ads.

Sony has sold more than 13 million PS 3s worldwide. The worldwide in-
game advertising industry is expected to grow 1,150 percent to $971.3
million between 2006 and 2011, according to the Yankee Group.

Now that the Dual Shock 3 is available everywhere – it hit Europe
last, finally becoming available on July 4 – many PS3 owners are
wondering: which current and future titles support the good ol’ force
feedback?

Well, you probably know most of the major games that do, but we
stumbled upon a very interesting list from the . As you can see, it’s
a very large list of titles that support the rumble feature, and there
are several names on there that should catch your attention. See,
there’s Eternal Sonata, an RPG that has not been confirmed for release
in either the U.S. or Europe (as far as we know). And there are a
bunch of other titles we’ve never heard of, including Punisher: War
Zone and Cinnamon Beats. We also see more than a few upcoming PSN
titles, which are worthy of our future attention.

its been around for a while.. but no one pays attention.. so now they
want you to start looking for the ads.. so they tell you.. and
everybody gets

This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was
edited on 11 July 2008 10:29

At least with the PC there will be options to “mod” or “hack” the ads
from appearing. Certainly worked with Hellgate ($hitty game that it
was).

Think I’m going to ask a couple of game devs I know for comments about
how these ads work, and how they are put wherever they are on the
display. I’m really quite interested in the background technology
now..

yep, lets replace all those funny gimmick adds with real ones because
that will increase the enjoyment for the gamers, wait a sec…….

Digital video: Music: Gaming: Software: Blogs: RSS feeds:
International: Navigate: About us: Contact us: © 1999-2008 by
AfterDawn Ltd.

I have a feeling the in-game advertising will be a little more
tasteful than that. I feel like it will make the atmosphere more
realistic. I think nothing kills the mood of a futuristic sci-fi more
than seeing a decripit fast food joint named Johnny’s Burgers and
Fries. Tell me you wouldn’t mind seeing a McDonald’s there instead.

I have to agree with Matt and Alex. So long as they don’t pop up and
don’t affect my bandwidth, I don’t care.

Adding realism is great. Being able to shoot/bomb/destroy ads like
billboards in game would make it ok. And if these ads were in an
online environment, maybe it would be even helpful for the advertisers
to know which of their ads are blown up more than others. Just a
thought.

Adding realism is great. Being able to shoot/bomb/destroy ads like
billboards in game would make it ok. And if these ads were in an
online environment, maybe it would be even helpful for the advertisers
to know which of their ads are blown up more than others. Just a
thought.

Adding realism is great. Being able to shoot/bomb/destroy ads like
billboards in game would make it ok. And if these ads were in an
online environment, maybe it would be even helpful for the advertisers
to know which of their ads are blown up more than others. Just a
thought.

The console is also expected to drive sales well into next year before
finally being overtaken by sales of standalone BD spinners, which at
the moment account for a pitiful slice of the market thanks to
ludicrous pricing and the fact that the manufacturers are still
finalising features and performance.

However, don’t expect Sony to react in turn, as according to GameRush
Entertainment, they’re happy with the current price of their next-gen
machine. They cite Signal Hill analyst Todd Greenwald, who had this to
say on the popular subject:

“We do not expect a price cut on the PS3 just yet. Sony appears to be
focused on profitability right now, and actually has some momentum
behind it now with the Blu-ray win, and its strongest line-up of
exclusive titles since the consoles launch (Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran
Turismo 5, LittleBigPlanet, Killzone 2, Resistance 2, Motorstorm 2,
etc).”

Sony will make money on the machine eventually, the only
dissappointment for me was how they “chopped and changed” the model
structure so many times I believe they left a confused customer base
trying to understand what they were really buying and what special
features they would benefit from. I own a 60GB model; I am very happy
that I got this model with all the features… I feel the newer models
are weaker and have short changed the customer somewhat.I will be
purchasing the “new” model rumoured to be released in August/Septembet
as a second back-up model, and one to be used in the lounge connected
to the HDTV. The current one I have sits in my room… let us see what
Sony has up it’s sleeves in the coming week… a very interesting week
it shall surely be!Q!”aLl RoAdS LeAd ToO HoMe”Last edited by Qubex on
7/10/2008 11:23:16 AM
0 up, 0 down

The ps3 has been around for 2 years and is supposedly going to be
around for another 8.Sony can’t go down too soon because they’ll have
no where to go down in the future.
1 up, 1 down

IMO Sony should drop the price, Sony needs to compete a little
stronger, forget about profit margins on the system and market the
hell out of it. This Gen feels sloppy compared to the last gen.
0 up, 0 down

Phil Rosenberg, Senior Vice President at Sony Computer Entertainment
America has gone on record today to state that the “PS3 is open for
the ad business” and how contextual in-game advertising is “positive
for the games medium.” What does he mean, and is it a good thing for
gamers? has today announced, alongside Sony Computer
Entertainment Europe, that Sony has entered into a partnership with a
company called in order to deliver “dynamic in-game advertising” on
the PlayStation 3 platform.

July 21 (8:00 am) – July 22 (11:59 pm), 2008Web
Linkwww.kmaustralia.com Moving forward with an enterprise approach to
knowledge, information…July 22 (9:00 am) – July 23 (11:59 pm),
2008Event: Toshiba MobileXchange 2008 What: The Tenth Annual
MobileXchange is the largest mobile c…July 22, 2008 (9:30 am – 12:00
pm)Sydney, July 22, 2008 http://www.aimia.com.au/i-cms?page=4539
Four experts share insights on …July 24 (8:45 am) – July 25 (11:59
pm), 2008Broadband Australia 2008 The original forum for debating
the future of Australia’s broadband i…September 10, 2008 (All
Day)Wednesday, 10 September 2008 The Westin Sydney The second
annual major industry event for the…

Bionic Commando: Rearmed, Capcom’s remake of its classic 8-bit
adventure, is going to be coming out on both Xbox Live Arcade and the
PlayStation Store. If we’re to believe producer Ben Judd, then the
PlayStation 3 version may be the best.
The first big feature on the Sony side of things will be remote play
support, meaning you’ll be able to take your game and play it on the
go through your PSP.

The other bonus is only teased by Judd, but it sounds like it could be
good: “There is one more VERY cool surprise for those of you who
purchase the PSN version… but that is another story for another
time.”

Hopefully the cool surprise is that they were just kidding when they
said the game wouldn’t have trophies.

release the game already. and on a side note, fix the
bioniccommando.com website too. not easy to navigate through…

Though the manic four-day trade show has been scaled back since its
overcrowded heyday, it’s still the most important games-related
gathering of the year. Sun Media will once again be there (this is our
eighth consecutive E3, believe it or not), and here’s a small sampling
of the rumours and questions on our minds as we take wing for the City
of Angels.

But Sony is also set to unveil an as-yet unannounced new PSP game
based on one of their highest-profile franchises. We’ve already seen
PSP versions of God Of War, Ratchet & Clank, Jak And Daxter and even
Killzone, so what does that leave? MotorStorm? Possibly, but unlikely.
Lair? Surely you jest.

All rights reserved. Proprietor and Publisher – The London Free Press,
P.O. Box 2280, 369 York Street, London Ontario Canada N6A 4G1

Obviously, we’d like to know more about this ‘dress’ business. It is
described as an “interactive fashion magazine” and allows user to
select and try out different outfits. But just on some stupid avatar,
for all the use that is. Its main selling point is that it looks
realistic, which you’d sort of expect from the PS3. Mind you, we’ll
still be laughing at how crap it seems when looking back five years
down the line.

‘dress’ is also supposed to make use of the PlayStation Network so
that users can interact, rate and share outfits. Sounds. Awful.

Well, perhaps it ain’t so “top secret,” anymore. We don’t think it’ll
pop up next week at E3, but we are hoping for confirmation from
LucasArts at some point in the very near future. We’ll keep you up to
speed on the issue.

YEEEESSSSSS…I LOVE BATTLEFRONT… I’m willing to bet that it will
be announced on a little sheet in box of The Force Unleashed… Just
like GOWIII was in Chains Of Olympus…
2 up, 0 down

Cool. Star wars Battlefield was a great idea.I’ll definitely be
getting this one.
2 up, 0 down

The gameplay footage is from the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 version,
confirmed by Treyarch to be running on the Call of Duty 4 engine. You
can get a taste of that in the footage which is full of destructible
environments, hiding behind cover and gunfire.

Gadget Review: You’ve heard the hype, now judge for yourself. Get a
hands-on tour of the new .

10.07.2008 While the Xbox 360 elite boasts a sturdy 120GB hard drive,
those opting for the less expensive standard version of the Xbox must
make do with 20GB of storage. But not for long if the rumour mill is
turning in the right direction, with reports suggesting Microsoft may
soon bump this up to a 60GB hard drive.

The 40GB PS3 is not on the market very long, so, as Engadget points
out, the new model may not necessarily be bumped up to 60GB or 80GB
but rather have some new addition or a fresh redesign.

Reviewed on 7/9/08 Updated on: 7/9/08 Release date: 9/23/08
UK REVIEW–The Buzz series has been a steady fixture in Europe for
many years, with seven different editions of the main game and four
versions of the Junior spin-off. Like many other Sony Europe games,
the series took its time getting across the Atlantic, but Buzz! The
Mega Quiz finally hit North American PlayStation 2s last year. Now,
the inevitable PlayStation 3 version has arrived in Europe, and Buzz!
Quiz TV uses the console’s increased functionality to offer custom
question sets, online play, and wireless buzzers for the first time.

The basic formula for Quiz TV is exactly the same as previous Buzz
games. The show is hosted by a character named Buzz (with Australian
soap star Jason Donovan reprising the voice), and it still includes
around 5,000 questions. The buzzers have received an upgrade and the
game comes bundled with four of the new wireless controllers. They
work incredibly well, and you’ll probably wonder how you put up with
those tangle-prone tethered remotes in the past. The only downside is
that the wireless remotes require two AA batteries each, but you can
use the original PlayStation 2 buzzers with the new game if you
prefer. As a bonus, the new wireless buzzers also work with all of the
old games.

Quiz TV has three main modes: a solo mode that pits you against the
clock, a local multiplayer mode you can play with up to seven friends,
and an online mode that pits you against players from around the
world. Sadly, though, only one person per console can play the game
online at any given time. Single-player mode is a rather dull
experience, a bit like playing a board game by yourself. You can’t
play against AI opponents, so instead you compete against yourself and
the clock to get the highest score possible within a limited time.
Buzz is designed to be a party game, and it’s a lot more fun when you
have a few companions to play with you.

The preset questions in Quiz TV aren’t generally difficult, but there
are certain questions that will stump all but the most ardent trivia
buffs. Unlike previous titles, Quiz TV doesn’t allow you to choose
between easy and hard questions before a game, with only one
difficulty setting on offer. Games typically start out easy at the
beginning and get slightly more difficult as you progress. Given that
the person with the lowest score at the end of each round chooses the
topic for the following round, there’s a bit of a rubber-band effect
that lets people catch up, assuming that they know their chosen
subject. Quiz TV also keeps tab of answered questions to ensure that
frequent players don’t have an unfair advantage through the
memorisation of repeated questions. To date, we don’t recall seeing
any single question asked more than once.

You can head over to mybuzzquiz.com and create quizzes using your
PlayStation Network ID. You’re able to set the privacy options on your
quizzes so that everyone may play them, or limit them so that only you
or your PS3 friends are able to see them. Quizzes can be tagged as
mature, and sorted into one of the predefined question categories such
as lifestyle, as well as subcategories such as video games. Each set
requires eight questions, and once entered, they’re scanned for
offensive language and submitted to the system. It takes only a matter
of minutes for them to be available to play in the game. Popular
topics include movies and TV, sports, general knowledge, and even
Chuck Norris. Once you’ve played a set, you can then rate it and
report offensive quizzes if any questionable material makes it
through. MyBuzz is one of the most compelling parts of the package,
and there’s already a burgeoning community around the game.

Although you can tailor questions to a specific subject, there’s no
option to play only the types of rounds that you want (for example,
Fastest Finger, Pie Fight, Point Builder, or Pass the Bomb) or to set
the total amount of questions or rounds in MyBuzz, or in regular
single or multiplayer games–it’s all up to the game. All of this
results in the experience becoming a bit repetitive after playing
through a few times.

Product Basic Spec: Platform: Playstation 3 Genre: Puzzle Number of
players: 1-8 Players Connectivity: Online,Broadband Only Offline
modes: Competitive Online modes: Competitive Resolution: 1080i,720p

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BEIJING, June 27 (Xinhuanet) — Playstation 3 has been a roughly 3.3
billion U.S. dollar loss for Sony Corp. since its launch last year,
according to the company’s fiscal 2008 annual report.

That breaks down to 2.16 billion dollars in 2007, and a 1.16 billion
dollar loss in 2008.

They went on to note that they’ve invested a great deal of money into
R&D for the console, a sum they might not be able to recoup if the PS3
“fails to achieve such favorable market penetration.”

Sony fanboys should take heart, however. Losing money on hardware is
relatively common in the video game biz, as companies routinely lower
prices to sell more units and thus stimulate software sales.

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Idiot Proof Way To Lose 9 Pounds Every 11 days safely.

Fathers Day may be over, but our five reasons to get Dad a Sony
Playstation 3 are still valid. .

Google and Yahoo have , leaving Microsoft out of the game completely.
For some readers this is welcome news? but others aren’t so happy.
Would you have preferred Google or Microsoft? Join the discussion.

talon118 says: The Microsoft Xbox 360 is overall a better gaming
console. Now is better than ever to buy one: The prices have dropped;
the games are better; and the online is the best (live). Overall the
Xbox 360 is the better bargain.

Slydawwg says: It’s funny to see the Xboxers still hanging on
promoting their system as the one. There are lots of good times to be
had with the Xbox if you can’t manage to acquire a PS3, but it’s over.

BearOnTheJob says: I guess it all depends on what Dad wants. If he
wants a kitschy, trendy, casual system, get the Wii. If he wants a
Blu-ray Disc player, get the PS3. If he wants to actually play games,
get an Xbox 360.

Adama says: Looks like Icahn can’t. Yahoo and Google merging? I
thought Microsoft buying Yahoo! was a bad deal, but this is even
worse.

Palm, Samsung, and other competitors are using the iPhone 3G launch as
a springboard for their own smart phones.

With an iPhone and the right app, you can sync your e-mail and
calendar, use voice search, play games, and more.

“PS3 is open for the ad business,” said Phil Rosenberg, Senior Vice
President, SCEA. “We are very excited about hosting contextually relevant and
well-crafted creative advertising on PS3. PlayStation is taking a major role
in enabling this fast-developing sector that is both positive and inevitable
for the games medium.”

Double Fusion reaches more consumers across the broadest range of
demographics than any other game advertising network. Utilizing their
award-winning fusion.sdk tm and fusion. runtime tm dynamic in-game ad serving
technologies originally developed for AAA hard core graphics-intensive video
games, the company has successfully expanded the idea that any game type,
genre, or platform can harness the power of advertising. Double Fusion
currently boasts over 30 top-tier game publishers in a portfolio reaching
gamers from 12 to 49 years old. The network’s acclaimed integrated marketing
solutions continue to inspire Fortune 500 companies to get in the game with
groundbreaking advertising campaigns. Privately held and headquartered in San
Francisco, Double Fusion has offices in Chicago, New York, Jerusalem, London
and Tokyo. More information about Double Fusion is available at
.

Advertisers interested in opportunities within the Double Fusion Network;
and developers and publishers interested in increasing their per-title
revenues through integrated and dynamic ad placement opportunities should
visit

Article : Sony Computer Entertainment America and Sony Computer
Entertainment Europe Announce Double Fusion as In-Game Advertising
Partner Print this article Share this article

Xbox360 Are the same as PS3 BUt XBOX LIVE IS WAY BETTER Even for 50
Bucks. Besides.

ps3 users better love this game, it will be the only one till next
year! hahaha this game along with splinter cell sux! stealth games
suk. by johnson from wilmatuky on 15/06/08 02:31 AM

im buying the game,but not now maybe next moth cuz i got other games
to finish and play. by omen from FL on 13/06/08 11:27 PM

An internal memo from Walmart shows the Playstation 3 being replaced
in August with a ‘new model’.

This doesn’t necessarily mean anything big is coming – it could be a
new anything, really. Perhaps they’re throwing in a DualShock 3.

Subscribe to Shacknews or for the scoop on all of your favorite games
on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, and PC/Windows.

–> Report: Flagship Studio Closes, Loses All IP Update: Flagship
community manager Taylor Balbi has denied Voodoo Extreme’s report that
he confirmed… 99 12hrs 51mins ago

–> Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe Media Features Superman, The Flash,
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DC Universe (PS3, X360) in the form of seven n… 107 20hrs 45mins ago

–> MTV Reponds to Konami’s Rock Band Patent Lawsuit; Claims Surprise,
‘Substantial Defenses’ MTV has chimed in on Japanese publisher
Konami’s recent lawsuit, which alleged that MTV subsidiary H… 9 1day
7hrs ago

Copyright 1996-2007 Shacknews LTD, All rights reserved. Shacknews
logos, lols, rofls, lmaos, and possibly also wtfs are service marks or
trade marks of Maarten. He will try to bathe with you. Watch out!
User-posted content, unless source quoted, is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain License.

The Secret Apprentice character will also appear in Namco Bandai’s
Soul Calibur IV game for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 alongside Darth
Vader and Yoda. We’re giving away a couple copies and some swag which
you can .

Also getting the new firmware treatment today is the . The latest
version 4.00 doesn’t have too much to brag about besides a Google
search option in its XMB and a few new video playback options.

We’ll have more on the PS3′s big 2.4 update in the coming weeks. What
else would you like to see in this update? Let us know by sounding off
in the comments section.

by June 18, 2008 6:49 PM PDT The 2.4 update for the PS3 will finally
be the final blow to the Xbox 360. So far, in game messaging and
achievements were the only reasons to justify paying for the Xbox and
Xbox live. Soon the PS3 will have these same features and don’t forget
that the Playstation Network is FREE. There will be no reason for
people to purchase the 360. Lastly, we have heard talk of the 360′s
avatars which will look extremely childish (as the Wii) in comparison
to the PS3′s virtual online community- HOMEThe PS3 momentum is
building and will soon be unstoppable.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
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by June 19, 2008 4:27 AM PDT Great news, I personally love
achievements, currently I have over 11,000 points. It is about time
for the ps3 to get a similar system. I’d like the Wii to follow suit
as well. The one thing still missing with the ps3 is custom
soundtracks, something the 360 has done since launch. Also in regards
to Scarface, it isn’t the final blow. The 360 has exclusives such as
Halo, Gears of War and Ninja Gaiden II. As long as the 360 has top
shelf exclusive games, it isn’t going anywhere. Which is a good thing,
competition benefits gamers. I love my ps3 and all, but having it be
the only system would be terrible. All the great updates the ps3 gets
is a direct result of the 360′s success.
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DualShock 3 combines the motion sensitivity of the SixAxis feature
with the vibration mode included in older PlayStation controllers.

According to Sony, almost all future PS3 releases will support
DualShock 3 and, as long as customers have upgraded to version 1.94 or
higher of the PS3 firmware, the controller is already compatible with
many existing PS3 titles.

Sony claimed that the rumble feature was excluded from the controller
after difficulties integrating the technology with the motion
sensitivity.

© Incisive Media Ltd. 2008. Incisive Media Limited, Haymarket
House, 28-29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4RX, is a company registered in
the United Kingdom with company registration number 04038503

Now, we’ve been hearing whispers and rumors about another PS3 model on
the way, fueled by reports from Sony who admit they will continue to
weigh the marketplace and the demands of gamers as they make future
adjustments. Yesterday, according to Joystiq, a Wal-Mart employee has
gone and leaked a list of products the company is having difficulty
keeping in stock. One of them is the 40GB PS3, which “will be replaced
with a new model in early August.” …woah, really? This is huge news,
but it could just be that they’re talking about replacing the Sixaxis
with the recently released Dual Shock 3 as part of the 40GB package,
so don’t get your hopes up just yet.

If and when ever Sony announce a slimmer cooler PS3, there will be
many who will have bought a PS3 a few days earlier and they’ll be mad.
So someone somewhere will be pissed when a slimmer PS3 comes along,
lol.Last edited by bamf on 7/9/2008 6:55:54 PM
0 up, 0 down

That would be cool. But I am happy with my March 07 60gig model. I
have not had one compatibility problem: it plays ps1/ps2 discs that
even my ps2 couldn’t (having to do with disc read speed, my guess).
Moreover, it purrs more quietly than a kitten, and doesn’t heat up
nearly as much as the earlier 60 and 20 giggers.
0 up, 0 down

dont forget a new ‘eco’ ps3 is meant to be coming out at somepoint
oo.. it might have that added on top the list of other stuff. bigger
HDD for me is the thing, i have a 60gig (uk)so i have BC, but i will
have to seek out a new Int Hdd soon. i am juggling 21gig spare memorty
all the time, i would rather not worry about it. shame ext drives dont
handle game data, as most of us would probably be sorted out.
0 up, 0 down

i think its that model that was on the news not so long ago…the one
that uses less energy or whatever…who knows…IM BUYING MINE TODAY
WOOHOO
1 up, 0 down

Well I agree with the Wii…considering you just buy a Wii and your
set without having to buy any more wires or hard drives etc. But the
360 being harder to buy than the PS3…meh maybe. I’m just saying that
there are MORE choices with the PS3 than necessary in my opinion. Like
someone has mentioned before, confusing consumers with too many
different models isn’t the greatest idea. Back in the day, Snes,
Sega,Nintendo,Atari, they were all 1 console per company or however
you wanna put it. So if you wanted to play a Snes game…you get a
Snes and snes games…no need to worry about which model you need to
get to make sure your playing the right one cuz there was only 1 to
pick. Sega same thing, only things you had to worry about is why
certain cartridges were taller with a yellow plastic thingy attached
vs a smaller black cartridge. btw…remember the game genie? lol I
just thought about it…what a hideous device!
0 up, 0 down

ok, if anything new comes out it’s going to be an 80GB model, all
they’re doing is, the new CPU is going to be 45nm, the RSX processor
is going down to 60nm and they made a new heatsink for the inside
that’s smaller and more efficient. (they might make a smaller case now
“slim case” since the heatsink was shrunk but that’s just rumours for
now) Also, for those wanting a bigger hard drive… do what I did,
swap it with a laptop hard drive. I put my 60GB PS3 HD in my Laptop
and swapped the laptop 160GB into the PS3. I have a 160GB PS3 Now. If
you don’t have a laptop. Buy a SATA 2.5″ 5200 RPM Hard Drive. the
little compartment on the side of the playstation is for the hard
drive. Take out 2 screws, pull the old on out and drop the new one in.
that’s it. No opening ps3 or anything. sony made that slot just for
this.
0 up, 0 down

I did the same thing, except with a 200 gig HDD.Took fuckin ages tho,
with all the music and game demos I had to transfer. Worth it tho.I
saw somewhere with a 350gig 2.5inch SATA HDD, for only like 60 quid.
Pretty awesome.
0 up, 0 down

that won’t work with me, i’ve got a 40 gb vaio (2003 (VERRRRY slow))
and a 40 gb ps3:P but in some ways its a 80 gb version since i linked
it to my vaio using mediasharing:D btw I WANT BC ON MY PS3:( my ps2
broke not very long ago:(
0 up, 0 down

Hey guys I need help, I cant update Gta4. For some reason i get signed
out of playstation network when i finish playing a game, when I try to
update GTA it doesn;t update it just sits there at 0%.
0 up, 0 down

its the PS3 SLIM……like the earlier reports.I can guarantee that it
is indeed the PS3 SLIM.The brochures for the new ps3 have been
distributed to all the SONY STORES. Trust me.
0 up, 0 down

i got a 40gb ps3 from walmart when they had the 100 dollar gift card
deal befor the mgs4 bundle came out and i didnt open it hopping to
trade it in for a 80gb bundle and from about two weeks i called 7
stores every day and one walmart store sayed that they stoped
shipments for all ps3s and they said they were waiting for a 120gb
model a circuit city also said that a new model would come out soon
and that they never ordered the mgs4 bundle
0 up, 0 down

I don’t know if this help much, but pretty much every online and
retail store in here in Norway is out of PS3s, they are all waiting
for shipments. It must be something Sony is doing, maybe planning a
new model because they usually would keep up the shipments supply.
0 up, 0 down

Hey BugzB, Happy belated birthday! I assure you, I thoroughly enjoyed
the ps3 on your behalf…
0 up, 0 down

This contest is open to all residents of the United States and Canada,
and will close on August 06, 2008 at 9:59 pm PST.

It’d be helpful if there was a list of games that were currently
supported. Which ones are currently suported, which are retroactive,
and which ones arn’t? I know Burnout Is … but what else?

This new addition of 2.41 is great. thankyou sony for the great
service. Keep up the good work.

@ShadowMasterX1 and Nineball2112look, almost all updates are good
(except if it bricks my biatch, and it has already froze and made me
sync my controller). I wasn’t saying the update isn’t good, I’m just
saying nothing has really changed, after all this time, and yes it
does feel rushed. you just can’t expect much from Sony’s updates I
guess (U said it urself). As far as legal issues, yeah, i hear people
saying that, but has Sony said anything about it? i saw ur patent
page, that’s wonderful and all, but Sony can do it, I want to hear
SONY say why some of these features weren’t added…… I like my PS3
and blu-rays and all the rich media features, but it seems like people
really defend Sony like they are part of their family. C’mon peoplez,
we payed $400 to $600 for this thing, shouldn’t we have a right to
expect some cool (small) things out of it? I know the PS3 has the
power to do it… and I’m getting sick of people saying some of us are
spoiled or are not true gamers. I happen to like a seamless integrated
experience, I like priv chat and music when I’m mashing on deathmatch,
and when ur comrade jumps online you can talk to them while swapping
out games or just go about ur biz while you plan with them. I know
Sony can do it, so I have a right to expect more from them. I’m sorry.
I own many consoles, and it started with an Atari 2600, but this is
here and now….

The 2.41 patch update seems to work just fine without any problems.
Glad to see Sony pull the 2.40 update when it discovered the problem.
Smart move on their part.

@ Flavour666Here’s your proof… I’ll give you two links. The first
link explains a bit about the patent and why it’s an issue for PS3
users.So ShadowMasterX1 isn’t trolling. He’s stating a FACT. Now
Flavour666… How about you apologizing to ShadowMasterX1 for slamming
him? How about you taking some time in the future to research things
before posting? How about you quit being a troll yourself?

in-game clock… the most under-rated feature of this update. well
thank god sony listen to their consumers wants. it’ll make there ps3
great for years to come.

The games I want to play now are on the PS3 and this feature helps me
enjoy the games and keep in contact with my buds. I am looking forward
to the other games coming out for the PS3 and it will be a while
before I get another game. There’s also games on the 360 that I will
eventually play also but I have no sense of urgency for them. This is
the generation of gaming I had always hoped for and have spent more
money and bought games sooner for it. I never bought a game at release
for the PS1, when I got the PS2 and the Xbox the only game I bought at
launch was MGS2 the rest of the games I bought till they were on the
greatest\/platinum hits lists. For this generation I have bought Dead
Rising along with 360, Gears Of War at launch, and Halo3 at launch. On
the PS3 I bought at launch MGS4(of course), Uncharted, COD4, and
Assassin’s Creed. Orange Box just for the PORTAL game.

I just wanted to say thankyou to everyone for all the positive
feedback on my comments. Whenever I post one it is truly sincere and I
mean it. Also I just opened up my union to everyone so come and join.
You are all welcome in it. On that note. The update is amazing and is
working great. To be honest I havent played my 360 for about 6 months
now. I actually gave it to my kid to use as a dvd player lol. That is
until gears comes out. However Ps3 is the most dominant system for me
right now and this year of 08 will be remembered as the year of sony.
I cant wait to see what they will unveil at E3. Man im so excited.
Keep up the good work sony. Your going to be around for a long long
time. Sony is a brand name that we can trust. They have lost 3 billion
dollars on ps3 and continue to make it a quality product. That just
goes to show that they are not greedy and honestly care about us as
customers and consumers. I take my hat off and personally thank you
sony. YOU ROCK!

Now if we had some games that you could actually earn trophies
playing, we would be somewhere. I guess that will have to wait till
update 4.00, and then that wont work so we will all have to wait till
4.00 1/2. At least by then, Sony might have Alone in the Dark on there
system, along with a bunch of other games that 360 owners have already
played.

i just wanted to say…i have owned both and the PS3 might be behind
in the online perspective as some people would argue, BUT the PS3 is
technologically dominating the 360.

Federal regulatory body says megapublisher has submitted required
information on proposed purchase of rival; further extension puts next
step six weeks away.
Posted Jul 8, 2008 10:58 am PT

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–> Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe Media Features Superman, The Flash,
Catwoman, Others Midway has released its E3 media for Mortal Kombat vs
DC Universe (PS3, X360) in the form of seven n… 107 20hrs 46mins ago

Amanda Bennett, 18, and Caleb Bridgeman, 16, enjoy a game in the new
console room at Head2Head Games on Dundas Street downtown. (Sue Reeve,
Sun Media)

The storefront haven for gamers will see a lot more of that kind of
carnage today when it opens its new “console room,” dedicated to the
hardcore gamer, with a day of free play, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and
again from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Today, for the free day of play, the store will have eight Xbox 360s,
three Wiis and four PlayStation 3s in the console room alone. Upstairs
it will still offer its usual complement of 42 computers, 18 for
Internet use and 24 for gaming.

The new room was born of necessity, said owner Carol Bennett. As the
console game industry has grown business at Head2Head is up more than
200 per cent over last year, she said.

Following last October), Midway announced Tuesday that the unlicensed
football sequel will be released for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this
fall.

I’m going to get this! I love madden and all, but once and a while I
want to break the rules.

Check out the first screens from Blitz: The League II below and keep
an eye out for our hands-on impressions from E3 next week.
July 8, 2008

“By partnering with Digital Extremes, 2K Games is delivering a fully
optimized experience that takes advantage of the PlayStation 3 system
hardware,” said Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K.

Digital Extremes is a development studio in the interactive
entertainment industry. The Canadian based developer is best known for
its co-creation of Epic Games’ Unreal.

Established in 2005 and headquartered in Novato, California, 2K Games
develops and publishes top-line PC, console and handheld entertainment
software, mainly focused in sports, high profile licenses and
specialty product. Take-Two Interactive Software is a developer,
marketer, distributor and publisher of interactive entertainment
software games for the PC, PlayStation3 and PlayStation2 computer
entertainment systems, PSP

Jai C.S. is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of
Jai’s articles, please visit his .

It’s 2008, and Tech companies STILL can’t figure out the art of
rolling out updates… Why is Steam so good at it, while billion
dollar corps fail? It’s not the technology.

Can someone confirm if 2.40 update fixed the mp4 streaming issue? I
can’t believe that Sony pulled the 2.4 update because a few PS3s got
bricked while it won’t even acknowledge the fact that there are so
many of us out there that lost the ability to stream mp4s from the
stupid 2.2 update.

Considering the fact that the firmware updates are FREE UPGRADES, I
think that a little more lattitude and a lot more grattitude should be
in order here.

@: same here. when I upgraded my 20GB HDD to 250GB, the backup utility
saved everything…games saves (PS3 and PS2) videos, downloaded games,
smut photos, smut videos…it’s was all there man…what is MAcBandit
talking about?

I have 4 games for my PS3, many demos and the free DLC for GHIII. The
backup came 16GB big and the biggest save i have is for Portal, wich
is about 500 megs… I would supose that it wouldn’t be that big if it
was only the gamesaves.

ideally i’d like to see sony add a feature where one can upload
his/her own top 5 games saves to a sony server and in turn have the
saves available whenever you login to another ps3. that would be
sweet!! but i doubt to see this until firmware 2.9x, hehe..

Gizmodo Australia moderates comments to avoid spam and abuse. We’re
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Players new to the series can now shoot, pass and check with ease. NHL
09 features Be A Pro, a game mode that will put you on the ice with a
dynamic new 3rd person camera that allows you to play the role of one
player. With a performance tracker grading your progress in more than
50 categories, you will know exactly where you need to improve to
become the next NHL superstar.

Use the drop down menu below to filter stories and videos the way you
want – when you want it!

Ascaron Entertainment, one of Europe’s leading game developers, today
announced that the PlayStation 3 version of their upcoming action RPG,
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will hit retail shelves this autumn.

“We’ve been working on this version for more than a year, and can now
proudly reveal it and its new features, to an entirely new audience.”

This version of Sacred 2: Fallen Angel will feature enhanced graphics,
5.1 Channel Dolby Surround Sound and support drop-in cooperative play,
as well as other multiplayer gaming modes via the Internet.

A Sky News account will also allow you to comment on blogs and take
part in online discussions.

Once you have logged in and you have tracked a story, by clicking on
the red icon the updates will display in the highlighted panel.

If you want to track a story, you need to log in to the Sky News
website.

A Sky News account will also allow you to comment on blogs and take
part in online discussions.

Once you have logged in and you have tracked a story, by clicking on
the red icon the updates will display in the highlighted panel.

–> MTV Reponds to Konami’s Rock Band Patent Lawsuit; Claims Surprise,
‘Substantial Defenses’ MTV has chimed in on Japanese publisher
Konami’s recent lawsuit, which alleged that MTV subsidiary H… 9 1day
7hrs ago

2. “Lost Odyssey” (Microsoft, for the Xbox 360): The epic tale of
immortal mercenary Kaim is a delight for fans of classic role-playing
games.

5. “Professor Layton and the Curious Village” (Nintendo, for the DS):
Charming characters wrestle with clever puzzles in this beautifully
written and illustrated gem.

_ENCORE: In May, Activision announced its strategy to maintain its
lead in the rhythm game competition: “Guitar Hero World Tour,” which
adds a microphone, drums and a virtual recording studio to the best-
selling franchise. But no one is expecting MTV Games’ “Rock Band” to
fade out.

Next week, you’ll be able to download 12 classic songs from The Who
for “Rock Band.” Harmonix had been trying to reproduce the entire
“Who’s Next” album, but Rigopolus said some of the master tapes
couldn’t be located.

Meanwhile, virtual rockers around the world are hoping, perhaps in
vain, for tunes from two other classic British bands. According to The
Financial Times of London, representative of The Beatles have had
discussions with both Activision and MTV Games. Led Zeppelin, however,
remains elusive. Peter Mensch, a partner at the firm that manages Zep
guitarist Jimmy Page, told The Wall Street Journal that the band is
unlikely to grant either company the necessary access to its master
tapes.

Born with the life-threatening illness duchenne muscular dystrophy,
Zak, 14, has been confined to a wheelchair most of his life. His only
enjoyment has been playing videogames with his mates, until thieves
broke into his Wollongong home last week.

The new PlayStation 3 and games were given to him by the Make a Wish
Foundation, which grants wishes to terminally ill children.

Zak recently spoke to Storm halfback Cooper Cronk, who invited him to
be a guest at the game.

Property Guide 2008 FIND OUT what your home is worth by consulting
Property Guide. You may be surprised.

Washington —- The government on Friday sent out the last of the
economic stimulus checks for people who filed tax returns before April
15. But the Internal Revenue Service stressed that it’s not too late
for those who haven’t yet filed returns to benefit from the payments.
The tax agency said it will continue processing tax returns and
issuing stimulus checks for much of the year. In particular, it is
urging some 5 million Social Security recipients and veterans who
don’t normally need to file returns to do so this year so they can
qualify for checks. It urged this group, and people who received
extensions for filing, to file by Oct. 15 to ensure they receive a
payment before the end of the year.

Washington —- As oil prices soared to a record high Friday, the
nation’s airlines and shipping companies stepped up calls for a
crackdown on financial speculation in energy markets, which they blame
for pushing up fuel costs. The Stop Oil Speculation coalition of
nearly 40 airlines, trucking companies and unions said at a news
conference that lawmakers must close loopholes that allow traders to
skirt federal restrictions on the purchase of contracts for oil and
other commodities. “This crisis deserves the full attention of
Congress —- now —- not next week, not next month or next
year,” said James May, president of the Air Transport Association of
America. The airline industry’s main trade group expects companies to
lose $10 billion this year —- on par with their worst combined
loss ever —- solely because of soaring fuel costs.

United Airlines’ parent, UAL Corp., said Friday it will record second-
quarter costs of as much as $2.7 billion to reduce the value of its
assets and pay employee severance. The cut in goodwill will produce a
noncash charge of as much as $2.3 billion, UAL said in a regulatory
filing Friday. Elsewhere, United offered voluntary buyouts to ramp
workers and customer service employees to trim as many as 400 jobs as
it cuts seating capacity.

Ever wondered of getting a free Playstation 3 easily? 07.07.2008
19:38:15Nobody in their true senses says a NO to free Playstation 3 or
free iPod and when you can choose your own gift then there is every
possibility that “cloud number nine” will be an easy place to visit
.(live-PR.com) – Gadgets4nowt.co.uk 6 July 2008 ( Live-pr ) Nobody in
their true senses says a NO to free gadget and when you get to choose
your own gift then there is every possibility that “cloud number nine”
will be an easy place to visit. Well gadgetsfornowt.co.uk does give
you the exact idea behind this concept. But one might wonder how
tricky this concept sounds but this website puts this concept in such
a way that even a person who does not know a thing about referral
marketing understand it quite easily and anyone can easily grab a free
iphone or some other free gadgets like ( ) free Wii, free iPod or free
Playstation 3. Well here it goes,the actual answer for the riddle. A
list of top notch gadgets are listed in this website which include
ipods, iphones, playstations,macbooks, wii’s and all you got to do is
sit back and register yourselves through a couple of pages and
recommend this to a few of your friend who don’t mind grabbing free
Playstation 3 or a free iPod. Once you have done this you have to wait
for your gadget to arrive at your door step. Well lets call spade a
spade but this is not as easy at it sounds. To get a free Playstation3
or a ( ) free iPod they just need a teeny tiny bit of work from you.
Once you finish registering yourself you have to take out an
advertiser’s offer. You have a list of advertisers such as online DVD
rentals, online libraries, online gaming etc. and you have to get
yourself into a deal with these advertisers which is not going to cost
you much. For all you know you might find one of these more
interesting than your actual free gift. The first thing you have to do
to make all the above things work is BELIEVE. Just keep telling
yourself that you have every possibility of getting all the latest
gadget like a Free iPod, ( ) free Playstation 3 or some other super
gadgets like a Free iPhone into your house without doing anything
illegal but just with your brains and you will be rewarded. But once
you have received a couple of gifts then you will automatically turn
into a pro. I personally think that instead of working for hours or
even extra hours in the Internet to save and buy a playstation or a
wii you can just get yourself a group of referrals and start building
your gadget collection now that in the nearest future you might see
your dream come true and grab your super ( ) free Wii. And I do see
gadgetsfornowt.co.uk coming up really well and is just a few months
away from getting really popular among all the similar websites.
Although looking at gadgetsfornowt.co.uk technically, the looks made
me believe that out of all such websites it does have a stand out look
that makes you believe that early birthday gifts are indeed possible.
I have seen many free offers site like gadgetsfornowt.co.uk but none
of them were so transparent of honest like them. Gadgetsfornowt.co.uk
explains the users the exact steps to follow to get their free gifts.
They also offer tips for you to get referrals easily, so that you
reach your target very soon. My recommendation is none other than
Gadgetsfornowt.co.uk, so why are you wasting your time, start grabbing
your ( ) free Playstation 3 and other cool gadgets now. CONTACT
INFORMATION Online Retailer Gadgets4nowt.co.uk ###

The first two Battlefront games on PC, PS2 and Xbox were developed by
Pandemic Studios. Rebellion handled the PSP edition of Battlefront II
and the PSP-only Renegade Squadron entry.

–> MTV Reponds to Konami’s Rock Band Patent Lawsuit; Claims Surprise,
‘Substantial Defenses’ MTV has chimed in on Japanese publisher
Konami’s recent lawsuit, which alleged that MTV subsidiary H… 9 1day
7hrs ago

PS3 as Blu-ray Player? Is anyone recommending the PlayStation 3 as the
best Blu-ray player for their customers? It doesn’t have RS-232 and
has crappy IR connectivity, but it does have Ethernet… .

I could see that since a bunch of my friends that did purchase a PS3
did so for the Blu-Ray mostly.

For those of us with a lowly one-room setup, the PS3 kicks butt. I
just hooked mine up to my HDMI-capable AVR, and shoved in a copy of a
movie. In less than 20 seconds, I was watching the flick. Total time
from unboxing to watching was about 5 min. Many of us don’t need
all of the fancy networking or multi-room remote controls. It might
not be the best for a networked house system, but for the rest of us,
it shines compared to the competition.

EA has revealed the first info on this autumn’s FIFA 09 for Xbox 360
and PS3. The game has been designed and customised to deliver a unique
gameplay experience that takes advantage of the systems’ strengths.

“We listened to our consumers to make the changes that they wanted,”
said David Rutter, Producer of FIFA 09 on the PlayStation 3 system and
Xbox 360. “No other game has over 250 feature changes and additions
focused on improving core gameplay. We have an absolutely authentic
recreation of the real sport through attention to detail.”

Sony reminds you there are a limited number of places for Beta Testing
and can’t guarantee everyone who signs up will be able to participate.

See, this is why PlayStation Home needs to make its way here as fast
as humanly possible.

Don’t get me wrong but I can watch E3 coverage on G4tv so I don’t see
the big deal for this particular event. I supposed European owners
might not get the E3 coverage like us in North America. Also wanted to
ask everyone, what is the big deal with Home? Admittedly, I was
excited when it was first announced last year but I’ve had time to
think and I prefer functionality rather than an evolutionary second-
life. I know I asking for it but do some of you get my drift? If there
is a screening room for the live coverage why not build a simplistic
version into the interface as it stands today?
0 up, 0 down

I had your exact thinking before I actually watched the video of it on
PSN.Download it and watch it…it will change your opinion and get you
excited for its release.
0 up, 0 down

Some of the men had been in captivity for more than 20 years, captured
by the Janjaweed (Arab for “Devil on Horseback”) and Arab slave
raiders during the so-called civil war.

Another man said he’d been a slave for 15 years, and had seen at least
three slaves killed for trying to escape.

This organized rescue of slaves was begun about 20 years ago by the
Sudanese themselves. The Arab/Dinka Peace Committee is a grassroots
organization that liberates Sudanese slaves. The covert operation
generally begins in cattle camps in the north, where the underground
network trades slaves for cattle vaccine. Each vaccine is worth about
$40, and it costs one or two vaccines per slave. Livestock is much
more valuable to the Arab slave masters than are human beings.

Pastor Heidi McGinness, Denver-based director of outreach for CSI-USA,
has made the journey to Sudan many times. “I live to see family
reunions,” McGuiness said. “Mothers, fathers reunited with sons and
daughters taken into slavery, thought dead but returned alive, is the
greatest joy one could observe.

“This abolitionist work fuels my passion to see each slave freed,” she
added. “There are still tens of thousands in slavery. I will not
abandon them.”

In Germany in the 20th century, it was the Holocaust. Some 50 years
later in Rwanda, genocide again. And now, in the 21st century, as we
talk about smart cars that can park themselves and sending people to
Mars, we still allow the barbaric treatment of humans. Genocide rears
its ugly head again. We’re a society with short-term memory and
information overload.

If slavery and genocide can go unchallenged on the other side of the
world, it will continue to fester, and then when it comes knocking on
our own door here in the U.S., in Denver, we will have only ourselves
to blame.

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Yalini, the protagonist of my novel “Love Marriage,” turns 25 this
month. “I was born in the early hours of the morning, on a day in late
July,” she says in the book. “And as I entered this new world, my
parents’ old one was being destroyed.” Moments after she is born, her
Sri Lankan father watches on television as the country he left erupts
into violence — the anti-Tamil riots known as “Black July.” With the
anniversary of those 1983 riots, Sri Lanka’s war also turns a quarter-
century old this month — and I find myself still debating how to
describe it. In practically every interview I give about the book, I
am asked an unanswerable question. This morning, in San Francisco, the
interviewer is Aimee Allison of radio station KPFA. We’re live,
talking about Sri Lanka.

I never have more than a few minutes to capture decades — centuries?
– of labyrinthine history. In recent years, especially following the
2004 tsunami and the collapse several months ago of a tattered cease-
fire between the government and the , a separatist militant group, Sri
Lanka has appeared in the news slightly more than usual. But even this
isn’t very much, so I can understand why the question is asked. Who’s
willing to give it more than those few minutes? I’m never sure, and so
I find myself wrestling to construct responsible boilerplate that at
least suggests Sri Lanka’s historical and political complexity. Of
course, when I wrote the book, this was not a job I aimed to do.

An island about 25 miles off the southern tip of India, Sri Lanka is a
complex place, with multiple ethnicities, religions, languages,
loyalties and histories. In July 1983, long-simmering tensions there
exploded into ethnic riots. An ambush of 13 soldiers from the
country’s ethnic Sinhalese majority by militants from its Tamil
minority ushered in days of anti-Tamil violence in which the
Sinhalese-dominated government was obviously complicit. Voter lists
made it easy to find Tamil citizens, Tamil stores and homes were
destroyed, and thousands of Tamils were killed. In the aftermath, many
Tamils emigrated, finding refuge in Western countries, including
Australia, Britain and Canada. Today, in those Western countries, the
players in Sri Lankan politics are generally characterized as the
Tamil Tigers, a militant separatist group fighting for a Tamil
homeland in the northern and eastern parts of the island, and the
government, which has discriminated against Tamils for decades.

Some people do, I’m sure. At readings around the country, I’ve met Sri
Lankans, immigrants and their children, who thank me for writing about
the conflict. But while I’m proud of my book, it certainly doesn’t
represent the voices of all Sri Lankans. It’s the story of one family.
Still, I know that some people at my readings may never hear much more
about Sri Lanka than what I say. All I can do is try to understand why
these questions are asked, be as reasonable and careful in my answers
as I can, clarify that I am a novelist and emphasize that I am only
one person answering — while still being as complete and thorough as
possible.

The threat followed quickly on from the announcement that Condoleezza
Rice signed a formal agreement with the Czech Republic to host the
radar for the controversial project.

Moscow argues that the missile shield would severely undermine the
balance of European security and regards the proposed missile shield
based in two former Communist countries as a hostile move.

“We will be forced to react not with diplomatic, but with
military-technical methods,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said
in a statement.

Dr Rice, the US Secretary of State, hailed the agreement as a step
forward for international security.

After 14 months of negotiations, the US is struggling to clinch
agreement with its other proposed partner – Poland – where it hopes to
locate the interceptor missiles designed to shoot down any incoming
rockets.

Poland’s tough negotiating position has even led to a threat from the
Pentagon to find an alternative site in the Baltic state of Lithuania.

“We were in the past in a similar situation and then we failed. We did
not accept the Marshall Plan…we should not allow a second error of
this kind,” he said.

“We have said both Georgia and Russia need to avoid provocative
behaviour but frankly some of the things the Russians did over the
last couple of months added to tension in the region,” Dr Rice said.

“Georgia is an independent state. It has to be treated like one. I
want to make very clear that the US commitment to Georgia’s
territorial integrity is strong.”

The radar agreement still has to pass through the Czech parliament
where the government only has a slim majority.

Terry L. Walker, Ladson, SC / USA – Sorry, they did not publish my
answer. Next, I think we pay too much attention to that game. It is
obviously on the one hand the present-day US does not have money to
accomplish such expensive project and is just puffing up. On the other
hand Russia perceives that and opposes urging Americans forward to
start the project ASAP ruining their economy.

If Russia wants the US to cancel plans of setting up missile defense,
then Russia needs to help the USA in dealing with Iran. But instead,
Russia is making Iran a stronger threat and that is why a missile
defense may be necessary for Europe’s security.

to Gerald Baxter: not you should mention functionality of brain cells.
Modern americans are descendants of bushrangers from Europe who tried
to escape punishment for crimes in motherland and killed indians to
occupy their territories. Nothing has changed since then. There’s
nothing to do with genes.

Alexy, Moscow–You didn’t mention Russian tanks rolling into
Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and turning what had been the “Prague
Spring” back into a Communist winter. Same people, or their proteges,
run Russia today as then. The Russian anti-missile argument simply has
no merit.

Arthur Simply put Russia is a threat to global stability,basically
their government does not want to respect human rights,there is too
much coruption and irresponsability at high levels of the govt.And
their handling of nuclear technologies is very controversial.

Orientalist, Historian, Political Scientist, Dr. Megalommatis, 51, is
the author of 12 books, dozens of scholarly articles, hundreds of
encyclopedia entries, and thousands of articles. He speaks, reads and
writes more than 15, modern and ancient, languages. He refuted Greek
nationalism, supported Martin Bernal´s Black Athena, and rejected the
Greco-Romano-centric version of History. He pleaded for the European
History by J. B. Duroselle, and defended the rights of the Turkish,
Pomak, Macedonian, Vlachian, Arvanitic, Latin Catholic, and Jewish
minorities of Greece. Born Christian Orthodox, he adhered to Islam
when 36, devoted to ideas of Muhyieldin Ibn al Arabi. Greek citizen
of Turkish origin, Prof. Megalommatis studied and/or worked in Turkey,
Greece, France, England, Belgium, Germany, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Iran,
Egypt and Russia, and carried out research trips throughout the Middle
East, Northeastern Africa and Central Asia. His career extended from
Research & Education, Journalism, Publications, Photography, and
Translation to Website Development, Human Rights Advocacy, Marketing,
Sales & Brokerage. He traveled in more than 80 countries in 5
continents. He defends the Right of Aramaeans, Oromos, Ogadenis,
Sidamas, Berbers, Afars, Anuak, Darfuris, Bejas, Balochs and Tibetans
to National Independence, demands international recognition for
Kosovo, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and Transnistria,
calls for National Unity in Somalia, and denounces Islamic Terrorism.

The younger slaves, children like Ahkmed, were born into slavery. His
mother was killed by her master. Ahkmed has no idea where his father
is, no clue of his age. The reddish tint in his hair shows how
malnourished he is. His clothes were ripped and dirty, barely hanging
on him.

This organized rescue of slaves was begun about 20 years ago by the
Sudanese themselves. The Arab/Dinka Peace Committee is a grassroots
organization that liberates Sudanese slaves. The covert operation
generally begins in cattle camps in the north, where the underground
network trades slaves for cattle vaccine. Each vaccine is worth about
$40, and it costs one or two vaccines per slave. Livestock is much
more valuable to the Arab slave masters than are human beings.

Pastor Heidi McGinness, Denver-based director of outreach for CSI-USA,
has made the journey to Sudan many times. “I live to see family
reunions,” McGuiness said. “Mothers, fathers reunited with sons and
daughters taken into slavery, thought dead but returned alive, is the
greatest joy one could observe.

And, let’s face it. These victims are black. Politically, Darfur is in
bed with China, which is in bed with the United States. Slavery in
Sudan is a three-pronged issue: race, religion and politics.

Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other
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I never have more than a few minutes to capture decades — centuries?
– of labyrinthine history. In recent years, especially following the
2004 tsunami and the collapse several months ago of a tattered cease-
fire between the government and the , a separatist militant group, Sri
Lanka has appeared in the news slightly more than usual. But even this
isn’t very much, so I can understand why the question is asked. Who’s
willing to give it more than those few minutes? I’m never sure, and so
I find myself wrestling to construct responsible boilerplate that at
least suggests Sri Lanka’s historical and political complexity. Of
course, when I wrote the book, this was not a job I aimed to do.

“Love Marriage” tells the story of the way Sri Lankan politics affect
a family living in the United States. The story takes Yalini and her
family from suburban America to Toronto, where they are reunited with
an uncle who has left Sri Lanka after a life of militancy with the
Tamil Tigers. The book is about specific characters, not
representatives of a culture. Still, I had to do my homework to write
it, so I did become versed in some history. Add to that the fact that
my parents emigrated to the United States from Sri Lanka, and it makes
some sense for reading audiences, reporters and others to ask me
questions about the country.

An island about 25 miles off the southern tip of India, Sri Lanka is a
complex place, with multiple ethnicities, religions, languages,
loyalties and histories. In July 1983, long-simmering tensions there
exploded into ethnic riots. An ambush of 13 soldiers from the
country’s ethnic Sinhalese majority by militants from its Tamil
minority ushered in days of anti-Tamil violence in which the
Sinhalese-dominated government was obviously complicit. Voter lists
made it easy to find Tamil citizens, Tamil stores and homes were
destroyed, and thousands of Tamils were killed. In the aftermath, many
Tamils emigrated, finding refuge in Western countries, including
Australia, Britain and Canada. Today, in those Western countries, the
players in Sri Lankan politics are generally characterized as the
Tamil Tigers, a militant separatist group fighting for a Tamil
homeland in the northern and eastern parts of the island, and the
government, which has discriminated against Tamils for decades.

I am hardly a substitute for all these voices. But I cannot dictate
how people hear me, and given these moments of opportunity to speak
publicly about a place that I love, I feel compelled to take them.

I was completely thrown. I don’t even remember how I began. Perhaps I
picked up the chalk and drew the lumpy map of the country. (The
professor: Does it really look like . . . that?) Or perhaps I began by
trying to explain the ethnic conflict. (The professor: Who are these
different groups? How did they originate? Can you explain the
different groups of Tamils? What do you mean, Ceylon Tamil? And the
up-country Tamils, who work on tea estates? And are the Muslims Tamil?
No? But don’t they speak Tamil?) Whatever I did, it was wrong — or
not right enough, or not complete enough. When the class ended, I was
still trying to explain Sri Lanka. We hadn’t even gotten to the book I
had been assigned to discuss. I left the room stunned at my inability
to put the country’s history into brief, teachable terms. You’ll thank
me later, the professor said. Next year, when your book comes out,
people will ask you that question — and then they will dissect your
answer.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008 :In a blatant effort to scuttle tomorrows one-
day strike by hundreds of unions, the Sri Lankan government has
mounted a terrorist scare, claiming to have information that the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) could set off bombs in the
South this week.

Earlier this month Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United
States District Court for the Southern District of New York, with
Google.

Viacom’s first line of defense when the negative press hit was
obfuscation. “Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any
personally identifiable information of any YouTube user. The
personally identifiable information that YouTube collects from its
users will be stripped from the data before it is transferred to
Viacom.”

Google’s self imposed is “Don’t be evil.” It doesn’t say “don’t be
evil unless there’s important litigation at stake.” Google’s
reputation is on the line, and how they respond will show their true
character. They’ve shown they’ll go to bat for employees, now it’s
time for them to show they’ll go to bat for their users.

Lawmakers, as well as the , should it team up with the industry’s No.
2 player Yahoo in the third-party advertising agreement.

by July 12, 2008 1:19 AM PDT @JCPayne: Nonsense! AT&T/Bell South don’t
even come close to dominating 90% of the cell phone market ( In fact
Verizon alone has nearly as many phone users as AT&T/Bell South, and
we haven’t even mentioned T-Mobile, Sprint etc). By contrast,
Google/Yahoo will have 90% of the search market. Any pact that ends up
with 90% of any market power, concentrated in the hands of 2
companies, has to be stopped by the DOJ. I don?t care how ?non-
exclusive? the pact is. Who the heck else is Yahoo going to form a
pact with, outside this ?non-exclusive? pact with Google, given that
since Yang is barely on speaking terms with Microsoft, and outside
Microsoft , there is only another 1% or so search market left. Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 8:19 AM PDT Back@Kwasiowusu: For one
thing I wasn’t talking mobile phone service. I was talking the regular
old POTS system. (And fiberoptics system that it is rapidly becoming
instead.) The reason the national system was broken up into regional
units was to remove domination of the whole national telephone system.
Now, to allow Bellsouth and the former parts of SBC to merge together
(albeit changing their name to AT&T) that does very little to preserve
the competitive atmosphere in the United States when it comes to
telecoms and high speed Internet even…As far as Google-Yahoo
cooperation…. What monopoly??? They have a technology that every
other company and individual on the net has access to. **Pixels on a
website** is not proprietary. Anybody can come up with an onlinead
network …. You may have to be creative in getting sites to adopt
yours along with Google or Yahoo but none the less it can be done if
you’re smart enough.Clearly with all the resources Microsoft has–
they are admitting that they aren’t smart enough to put together an ad
network. Hence why they want to buy a ready-made one. (Yahoo’s)…..
So now we basically have Microsoft which launched a battle to take on
Google. They decided they would take Yahoo’s assets and try to
dominate Google, so Google went in cut a deal with Yahoo themselves
and Microsoft ends up as the odd-man out crying all those big
crocodile tears and wants to launch a big court case to win back their
plan of domination. BS I say… Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008
11:09 AM PDT Agreed w/ JCPayne. I strongly suspect that MSFT’s only
role in this is to act as a spoiler. Given that MSFT is mostly on the
defensive nowadays (when they should be busy trying to build core
products that are actually worth something), I suspect that they’ll
lose this one too. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 3:13 PM PDT
If Ballmer gets to address the committee, the company will be doomed.
Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 4:21 PM PDT @JCPayne, It
doesn?t make any difference whether you were talking about POTS or
about wireless. An AT&T hookup with Bellsouth still doesn?t even come
close to controlling 90% of the phone market, POTS or wireless. As at
today, cable companies like Time Warner, offer full phone service , as
well as broadband internet, in direct competition with phone companies
like AT&T, not to mention, millions of Americans don?t even bother to
sign up for wired phones anymore, simply preferring to use their cell
phones for all their phone calls, saving themselves the extra expense
of paying for a wired phone they hardly use. The old POTS phone lines
are increasingly irrelevant. Revenues for both AT&T and Verizon, from
wired POTS lines have been going down sharply for years. You simply
can?t compare the dying POTS business to a Google/Yahoo pact that end
up putting control of 90% of the very fast growing internet search in
the hands of just 2 companies Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 4:31 PM PDT @JCPayne, this bit by you is even more
laughable As far as Google- Yahoo cooperation…. What monopoly???
They have a technology that every other company and individual on the
net has access to?.You clearly have no idea what a monopoly is. Anyone
can use Google/Yahoo search, so therefore its not a monopoly? Will you
excusing me while I laugh? Unless you are gonna tell me that Google
gives away the source code of their highly secret search algorithms to
anyone to use as they like, then you are simply blowing smoke.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
Processing

by July 12, 2008 4:49 PM PDT @JCPayne , you also claim that: ?with all
the resources Microsoft has– they are admitting that they aren’t
smart enough to put together an ad network?Yeah? You mean like how
Google tried their own video sharing network, failed at it, and went
and bought Youtube so they could dominate web video sharing ? Earth to
JCPayne, companies regular buy other companies. Google has bought
plenty of companies even in their short life span as a company. As for
Microsoft launching a strong protest against a Google/Yahoo pact, it
sounds very good to me. After all, Google has virtually taken
permanent residence at the DOJ and at the EU Commission, constantly
whining against non-existent ?crimes? that they claim Microsoft
thinking of committing, its only fair that Microsoft strongly hit back
against the very real danger of Google?s rabid monopolistic maneuvers,
while at the same time giving Google, the same thing Google has been
giving Microsoft in the last 5 years at least. Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 8:27 PM PDT Where is the lock in that keeps customers
dependent and keeps out competitors?All this proves is what everyone
already knew: MS can not succeed on a level playing field. Reply to
this comment

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The Web is now the place to go for news and entertainment. Look here
for the latest on blogs, music, video, virtual worlds, social
networking and more.

With the debut of the AppStore come a number of native applications
that replicate the functionality of already extant iPhone-optimized
Web sites. The impetus for creation of native applications has, thus
far, been driven by the ability to use location sensitivity, access to
the camera, and other iPhone technologies that are conventionally
inaccessible through MobileSafari.

The “Explore More Google Products” button brings you to a
page that shows all of Google’s Apps on one screen. Touching one
of those App icons results in Safari launching and bringing to that
application.

The My Friends section allows you to see your top friends, all of
them, those that are online, new friends, and friends with birthdays.
You also have complete access to your MySpace email. You can visit
your inbox, compose messages and even see your sent, saved and trashed
emails. The Mail icon at the bottom of the Apps screen notifies you
when you have new messages by displaying a white plus-sign inside of a
red circle.

The app also features a miniature version of My eBay. It shows you
active items and items where the auctions have ended at a glance that
you are watching, items you are buying or selling.

The company knows this and perhaps that is why it bluntly states that
it counter-offered Microsoft the option to buy the entire company for
$33-a-share or enter re-negotiations to just buy its search business.
It claims Microsoft rejected both offers.

Yahoo also name drops its new search advertising partner (and major
Microsoft rival), Google, quite prominently. Point number one of why
Yahoo rejected this latest deal reads:

I continue to believe that one way or another, this deal is going to
happen. Microsoft simply has no other real options if it is serious
about gaining in the search business, while Yahoo simply looks like it
has no other options — period.

Viacom wants to know which videos YouTube employees have watched and
uploaded to the site, and Google is refusing to provide that
information, CNET News has learned.

Since the judge issued the order, Viacom has been . “Viacom suggested
the initiative to anonymize the data, and we have been prepared to
accept anonymous information since day one,” said a Viacom spokesman.

Google may have a tougher time with this issue than the fight to
protect user information. Companies sue each other all the time and
frequently turn over computer records belonging to employees when
pertinent. Often, these records reveal e-mails, memos and other
documents that can shed light on events

YouTube has always argued that it has no way to prevent users from
uploading unauthorized copies of TV shows, movies, or other
copyrighted material, and adheres to the DMCA by also removing
infringing videos when notified by a copyright owner.

Google has been accused of encouraging massive copyright violations by
Viacom and by a group of copyright holders represented by the
Proskauer Rose law firm. The group in Britain and France, and U.S.
television journalist Robert Tur.

) 11 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 12, 2008 12:11 PM PDT I did not
follow with detail this V-G affair but it seems to me that it is
following the SCO-IBM Unix affair in which SCO made a complain that
IBM should prove innocent… just the inverse of common law: you are
innocent up to the moment that you are proved guilty.Am I right? Am I
too far in understanding Viacom/RIAA/etc. lawyers? Reply to this
comment by July 12, 2008 1:54 PM PDT This kind of looks like “Viacom”
is scrabbling, a bit, to continue its, unfocused, IP-lawsuit (and
vicarious responsibility for the actions of others) claims.I also
notice that a totally unproven accusation (that Youtube employees,
allegedly, knowingly allowed, and/or encouraged, copyright-
infringement)… is actually being used to further justify an
apparently, otherwise, clearly dubious- attack.Can you say RED-
HERRING..? But, you know how corporations work… once they start down
a path, no matter how insanely-asinine, they will simply NEVER back-
down (even if… it ends-up tearing them apart, and costing their
stock-holders enormously). Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 2:54
PM PDT I’d like to see the reverse, that is, the uploading habits of
anyone from a Viacom IP, or using a Viacom (or viacom property domain,
such as comedycentral.com). Did anyone on The Daily Show, or any
staffer of those shows, or any other Viacom company, ever upload
something copyrighted to YouTube? Reply to this comment by July 12,
2008 5:11 PM PDT Relax. Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:49 PM
PDT Viacom just wants to destroy the progression and the future of the
internet because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media,
like newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop
the new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You
either roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at
Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll
continue to head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the
NEW! Reply to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just
wants to destroy the progression and the future of the internet
because they have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like
newspapers, old like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the
new wave, the new generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either
roll with it or it rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s
stock price lately. That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to
head which is down, down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply
to this comment by July 12, 2008 7:50 PM PDT Viacom just wants to
dessstroy the progression and the future of the internet because they
have LOST to the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old
like oldy moldy Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new
generation, Web 2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it
rolls right over you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately.
That’s a reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down,
down, down if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment by
July 12, 2008 7:51 PM PDT Viacom just wants to dessstroy the
progression and the future of the internet because they have LOSSST to
the internet. They are old media, like newspapers, old like oldy moldy
Sumner Redstone. You can’t stop the new wave, the new generation, Web
2.0, 3.0 what have you. You either roll with it or it rolls right over
you. Have you looked at Viacom’s stock price lately. That’s a
reflection of where they’ll continue to head which is down, down, down
if they don’t get with the NEW! Reply to this comment
by July 12, 2008 7:53 PM PDT Viacom will lose to the future of the
internet if they don’t get with the new.
Reply to this comment View reply Hide reply
Processing

by July 12, 2008 11:30 PM PDT Chad and the team knew about SNL content
being on YouTube. It’s what made YouTube popular, showing copyrighted
clips from comedy shows off TV. The whole YouTube thing was based on
being an archive of video from all sources. Viacom, NBC Universal,
Disney, Sony, Fox and others should sue YouTube/Google for every
infraction. Basically YouTube is the Napster of video and should be
accountable for theft of copyrighted material. Reply to this comment

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The situation is further complicated by the fact that Google can only
sell advertising around video that is not of questionable legal
provenance.

When you have accumulated, say, fifty thousand, you could get a prize.
Maybe free child care for a year or something?

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COTA on July 4 put a trip-planning tool developed by on its Web site
that allows users to punch in starting and ending addresses and – with
clicks of a computer mouse – get step-by-step directions for taking
the bus to their destination. The routes are displayed on the popular
Google Maps platform.

“There is no question about it, the Google system is better,” he said.
“It’s got some great features and user-friendliness.”

For immediate access to this article, as well as the most recent
edition of Business First online, become a print subscriber.

The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.

The swastika, the symbol of Nazism, still provokes strong feelings of
fear and anger. So it was something of a shock when late last week…

It became the Web mystery du jour: How did the swastika get there, why
did it become so popular and who, or what, caused its demise? The
search for the answer sent Google-watchers on a chase that led through
China, Tel Aviv, London and finally back to the secretive company’s
Silicon Valley, Calif., headquarters, from which Google issued a rare
apology.

The tale began Thursday when Web users started to notice that one of
Google’s most intensively searched terms that morning was not a term
at all, but a symbol — the swastika. Often, the terms on the
list reflect a burst of interest in some news- or commerce-related
event, and readers can use the list as a kind of cultural heat map
— for example, when the iPhone 3G went on sale on Friday. Yet
somehow the swastika had ascended to the top of the list without a
single swastika-related news story or blog post.

“We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends,” it read. “In rare cases, when such
material is missed, we manually remove these results.

It was slow. It was clunky. The interface was pretty disappointing.
Hell, even the ‘Avatar choosing’ part was badly done. I couldn’t tell
if I was supposed to be designing my own somewhere or just ‘using
someone elses’. It seems to be a half-baked beta indeed.

“Second Life is not a game,” Dwight replied authoritatively. “It is a
multi-user virtual environment. It doesn’t have points or scores; it
doesn’t have winners or losers.”

So its a new Web 2.0-esque masturbation party where people can chat
with avatars, instead of on AIM or god forbid, calling them on the
phone.

Do you have a lawn, and if so, any particular thoughts on where I
should be in relation to it?

He who loses, wins the race, And parallel lines meet in space. — John
Boyd, “Last Starship from Earth”

iPhone/iPod touch only: Google’s first offering in the iPhone App
Store comes in the form of Google Mobile, an application that
integrates your local contacts and the web for seamless searching
between the two. Developed in part by one of our favorite programmers
Nicholas Jitkoff (), Google Mobile brings many of the things we love
about Quicksilver to the iPhone—namely universal search. From
one search box, you can look up web sites (I’m Feeling Lucky-style),
entries on Wikipedia, call any contact, or access their contact card.
The app also uses your location data for local search, so searching
for pizza will give you a link to search for pizza places in Google
Maps.

Ultimately Google Mobile is more like a first stab at universal
search, because although the contact and web integration is nice, the
only local data it searches at the moment is your Contacts. That
leaves out calendars, notes, music, email, and bookmarks, among many
others. We’d kill to see integration with the rest of the iPhone’s
local data in the future.

I’ve looked on the App Store in iTunes & on my iPhone but can’t find
it. Can anyone else see it?

you in the US, Jono? I tried to see that google mobile thingie from
the swiss app store, but not to be found there, so I switched over to
the US store, and presto, there it was

@: not sure if my first msg went thru, jono, are you located in the
US? if not, well, that’s the culprit, didnt see google mobile in the
swiss app store myself, then switched over to the US store, and
presto, there it was

The view — looking east toward Treasure Island, the surrounding water
and the Bay Bridge — is to die for.

Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.

According to Google’s official blog, Gmail users will no longer have
to worry about fake messages pretending to be from PayPal or eBay.
Google displays a message to its Gmail users above the email warning
that the message may not be from the sender that it claims. However,
if the message sender claims to be eBay or PayPal, will now
automatically check to see if the message has a DomainKey signature.
If the message doesn’t, the message will just disappear, leaving users
with a clean Inbox and the security of knowing that the ones that did
make it through really are from eBay and PayPal.

DomainKeys is an e-mail or reject it outright. Yahoo! (which owns the
patent) has long been a proponent on this system, but many ISPs also
like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), and Microsoft backs SenderID.

Hey nimish — maybe you didn’t read the fine print in google’s
prospectus: your common shares have 1/10th the voting power of those
held by the two founders + the CEO. Google’s “public” offering was a
complete artifice (some might say a fully-disclosed sham), something
barely *ever* reported by the financial press. They can do whatever
they want — there are no pesky shareholders to appease.

As part of a planned UK launch of Street View – a tool which allows
users to navigate using 360-degree street level pictures – the search
engine has deployed a fleet of camera cars to log details.

Campaigners have attacked the move as an invasion of privacy but
Google defended its actions, stating that it employs face-blurring
technology.

Google has confirmed it is now in the process of photographing Britain
as part of the Street View project.

The letter states that unless these fears are addressed, the campaign
group will be forced to lodge a complaint with the UK Information
Commissioner “with a request that Street View deployment be suspended
pending a formal investigation”.

Jul 11, 2008, 8:33 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:30 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:27 am Jul
11, 2008, 8:13 am Jul 11, 2008, 8:04 am Jul 10, 2008, 6:10 am

[July 3, 2008] Gartner revises Q1 numbers after getting some new
information on HP selling prices, while iSuppli has better news for
AMD. [July 3, 2008] While text messaging leads consumers’ must-have
features, signs point to good news for advancements being pushed by
handset makers, carriers and developers. [July 3, 2008] New research
finds overall broadband use spreading, but suggests that economic
squeeze might be slowing uptake among certain segments. [July 2,
2008] IDC did some counting on the rising cost of storage worldwide.

With petabytes of data floating around, Google developed its own
protocol for data interchange and now it’s open sourcing it.

Digg Del.icio.us furl StumbleUpon BlinkList Newsvine Magnolia Facebook
Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask

For most organizations Extensible Markup Language, or XML (), is the
lingua franca for data interchange. Apparently XML alone isn’t fast
enough for Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), so Google went off and developed its
own data format, called Protocol Buffers.

“You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can
use special generated source code to easily write and read your
structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a
variety of languages,” Google’s documentation states.

As to why after years of in-house development Google is now making
Protocol Buffers open source, Varda said it’s just a question of time.
“We have wanted to release protocol buffers for a long time,” he said.
“The only limitation was finding enough engineering time to get it
done.”

So far, Google has included support for C++, Java, and Python for
protocol buffers, though other languages are welcome.

Digg Del.icio.us furl StumbleUpon BlinkList Newsvine Magnolia Facebook
Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask

Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.

Google is a major proponent of cloud computing, with advocacy work
down to the level of of its own. The trend has the potential to
seriously redistribute wealth within the computing industry.

There are two broad categories of cloud computing. First are online
applications such as Google’s Apps, on which customers can run their
own applications.

Taking the plunge into the cloud Service level agreements are the kind
of contractual guarantees that appeal to CIOs making cost-benefit
analyses. But there’s a gut-level factor at play here, too.

Psychologically, it’s well-known in risk analysis circles that people
feel more comfortable with risk if they feel in control. Thus people
are often more comfortable driving a car on a congested freeway
compared with being flown somewhere in a commercial jet, regardless of
the relative safety of the two forms of transport.

Companies are working to address this side of the equation, too. One
prime example is the site, which shows the response time for a
Salesforce.com server transaction. It also details when problems
happened, what they affected, and what caused them.

Amazon.com, too, offers a . “A service dashboard is something our
developers asked us for, and we made the service available to them as
soon as possible,” said spokeswoman Kay Kinton.

“Own your own risk” And some others are even trying to make a business
out of reducing the uncertainties of cloud computing. One is open-
source monitoring and management software company . The company is
working hard to extend its monitoring service to other sites, too,
including Google App Engine, said Stacey Schneider, senior director of
marketing.

“You can’t get away from owning your own risk. This is slowing the
adoption of the cloud,” she said.

Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.

) 8 comments (Page 1 of 1) by July 11, 2008 1:01 PM PDT If could
computing can be standardized. I believe it will be a great benefit to
Business operating online. Could computing is probably less risky than
managing your own hardware. Especially, if you don’t have resources to
manage large servers and configurations. Google has the talent the
scale like few others do. Reply to this comment by July 11, 2008 1:47
PM PDT It will depend who’s going to own the data and what right the
provider when go out of business be forced to hand over data. Reply to
this comment
by July 11, 2008 3:31 PM PDT What’s the point of having a PERSONAL
computer when you are 100% reliant on a server? Haven’t we gone a full
circle now and arrived right back at the mainframe model that we SO
badly wanted to get away from? Let’s just bring all of the VAX’s out
of retirement and say that the last 15 years were a waste of effort!
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LAS VEGAS, July 11, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/
—-Columbus Geographic Systems (GIS) Ltd. (“Columbus”) (Pink Sheets:
CGSE) today announced it has reached an important understanding with
DigitalGlobe, world leader in high-resolution commercial imagery.
DigitalGlobe also supplies the popular Google Earth website with its
images. According to the understanding, Columbus will have access to
DigitalGlobe’s digital image bank for use in the Ranger navigation
system.

DigitalGlobe operates three imaging satellites: Worldview I, Worldview
II, and QuickBird. These satellites collect the highest resolution
commercial imagery of the Earth, and offer the largest image size, and
greatest on-board storage capacity and resolution compared to any
other commercial satellite imagery available today.

Columbus is a rapidly growing player in the geographic imaging systems
and navigation industry. The company’s leading product, Ranger, is a
cutting-edge navigation software package providing location-based, GPS
mapping, navigation, and information solutions for the off-road
environment.

– Highly-effective off road, outdoor GPS navigation tools, working on
a full range of devices including Car PC, PDA, and Personal Navigation
Devices (PND), with options for 3D imaging.

Dutton Associates Announces Investment Opinion: General Steel Holdings
Strong Speculative Buy In Update Coverage By Dutton Associates

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed. 2008 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say
the site is a ‘burglar’s charter’ that makes it easy for criminals to
check out potential victims.

It’s an issue we’ve been following for months, of course: with stories
like along the way, among others.

However, the paper’s influence and its spittle-spewing rage are new
additions to the mix – and there’s an extra political angle, too.

Just as David Davies standing on a civil liberties platform, so the
Mail continues to support the Tory leader, David Cameron.

But in this case, Cameron has very close links with Google – - and
it’ll be interesting to see if the Mail gets the Tory front bench to
take a stand on this issue, or if it just slides into history as
another one of the paper’s moments of fury.

In many respects I’m all for consideration of how our civil liberties
are perhaps being eroded. Yet in this instance I think the value of
the service outweighs anything against it.

So if Google’s doing it in an organised manner, that’s not terrible as
it’s a genuinely useful service. And they’re putting it on the net for
all to see. If I want to see CCTV footage of myself from the dozens of
cameras that catch sight of me daily, I’m going to have to file a
significant number of Freedom of Information requests to see the
footage.

‘However, given the number of CCTV cameras which spy on me every day,
I’m not sure that a Google car counts as the biggest infringement of
my liberties right now.’ It’s not a zero-sum game, is it? You don’t
just pick the things that seem the most threatening now and *ignore*
the rest, if only because it’s easier to sort out privacy implications
before they become huge problems. Maybe, for example, if a little more
attention had been paid to Google’s hoarding of data – or its
statements on the privacy of IP addresses – recent hoohas could have
been avoided. It’s this sort of attitude that makes me distrust so
many of the campaign groups who claim to be protecting me but who roll
over depending on who the threat comes from – and to value the ones
who don’t take no prisoners even when I think they’re being a little
creepy, intense or insane. By the way, would it really be better if
the feeds from all CCTV cameras were publically available?

I always get the feeling that only pedos and racists read The Mail.
And I am right. Its a nasty little rag which should be used only to
line the floor of a pig sty. Disgusting.

I think it’s a terrible invasion of privacy, which is why I’m going to
render their photo of my house useless by standing naked in the front
window at all times.

“But now, thanks to Google, we would be wrong to think that. Because
of the profiles built up by Google, we are now pursued every day by
cold- call telephone sales, and by online intrusions.

But seriously – I agree in part as I am as concerned with how our data
is circulated. That said I have far more fear of the private sector
than the public.

Given a choice I would rather have Google in my front bed room than
the Daily Mail any day of the week. I would have thought that the well
read Daily Mail folk would know that Google ”don’t do evil.” Keep
the good work up Google!!

@lb001: “Is that libelous?” You can’t (except in extreme
circumstances) libel an organisation or company. I was going to make a
comment about the other quotes you offered but then realised those
*might* be libellous because they would be about a person. So I’ll
restrain myself to pointing out that Google doesn’t sell its data, and
doesn’t deal in phone numbers, so it can’t have any connection with
cold callers. However I can’t find the AN Wilson piece on the Mail’s
site, so perhaps he didn’t say that.

@CharlesArthur. Daily Mail have removed it, but it is still available
in a cache form, if you type “invasion almost criminal” into Google,
and click the second, indented link.

Slander is when you make a wrongful comment about an individual,
defamation is when you make one about a company or organisation, I
believe. Although that might be wrong!

We are surely entitled to ask by what right Google is intruding into
our lives to this degree?

However much you feel ‘got at’ by advertisements, at least the
shopkeeper is not literally tugging your elbow.

But now, thanks to Google, we would be wrong to think that. Because of
the profiles built up by Google, we are now pursued every day by cold-
call telephone sales, and by online intrusions.

Other companies, wishing to peddle their wares, can learn from these
Google profiles your tastes and likely areas of purchase.

The Conservative MP David Davis has put the taxpayer to very great
expense by forcing a by-election on the issue of personal liberty.

His arguments are based on what he perceives to be the dangers of the
State keeping ever more watchful-tabs upon us. His fears ranged from
the potentially very serious – the holding of suspects without trial
for 42 days – to the comparatively trivial – local councils spying on
what rubbish we put into our wheely bins.

There are probably two sides to the arguments which political
libertarians such as David Davis attempt to raise. I would admit, as
would most people, to a good deal of uncertainty about the issue.

But that is an argument about the power of the state to interfere in
the lives of citizens.

Identity theft is one of the growing crimes of our age. A clever
manipulator of computers can reconstruct from a single electricity
bill, or one credit card, a huge raft of information about us,
including our bank account numbers and even our medical records. Such
thefts are rightly regarded as crimes.

Want to upgrade your iPhone? Only via O2′s site, which is wavering in
and out of reality… (updated) (and now they’re “gone”!)

The researchers’ proposal includes mining activity data to make
suggestions for activities, from what to watch on television to
finding your favorite songs on your MP3 player and playing them in the
room with the best acoustics. At the point at which Google is
proposing the idea of thinking for people as well as mining their
data, it might be time to worry about more than whether a link to the
company’s privacy policy is on its front page.

Turning civic booster, Newsom called San Francisco a city of dreamers
and entrepreneurs while touting its economic strength amid a
nationwide downturn.

To protect our readers from malicious comments SFGate asks that you
login or register to post a comment.

Alex Pham covers consumer electronics and video games (no, she doesn’t
get to play World of Warcraft all day). She has been a business
reporter for nearly two decades, writing for the Oregonian, the
Washington Post, USA Today and the Boston Globe before joining the
Times in 1999 at the peak of the dot.com bubble. When not chewing on
SEC filings, Alex enjoys mixing up Lego bricks with her son. alex.pham
@ latimes.com

Michelle Quinn covers computers and digital music. She has chronicled
the digital revolution since 1993, when she wrote for the first issue
of Wired magazine about how computers were changing Hollywood special
effects. She covered Netscape’s 1995 public offering for the San
Francisco Chronicle and rode the roller coaster of the dot-com boom
and bust for the San Jose Mercury News. In the evenings, the Delaware
native can be found at home watching TV shows and movies on her
laptop, with another nearby to surf the Web. michelle.quinn @
latimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo Inc. has rejected Microsoft’s latest
attempt to buy its online search operations in a “take or leave it”
proposal that Yahoo said would have dismantled its Internet franchise.

As described by Yahoo in a statement released late Saturday, Microsoft
packaged its latest offer with activist investor Carl Icahn, a
billionaire who is seeking to overthrow Yahoo’s board of directors in
a shareholder meeting scheduled for Aug. 1.

Yahoo said it received the complex proposal Friday and was given less
than 24 hours to respond.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment late
Saturday. Efforts to reach Icahn were unsuccessful.

Yahoo said it unsuccessfully reiterated its willingness to sell the
entire company to Microsoft for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share
— a bid that the software maker dangled in early May before
withdrawing it in a pique over Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang’s
demand for $37 per share.

Microsoft in May offered to buy Yahoo’s search operations for $1
billion and to spend another $8 billion to acquire a 16 percent stake
in Yahoo’s remaining operations.

Yahoo said the proposal that Microsoft submitted Friday “contains a
number of improvements,” but insisted it still wasn’t good enough.

As Google has become more successful, both Yahoo and Microsoft have
been regressing, a dynamic that many analysts believe make it
imperative for the two companies to put aside their differences and
combine forces.

Lively reminds me of something like IMVU, an instant messaging program
that enables 3D avatar chat, in that it provides off-the-shelf avatars
with teen appeal for socialising. It’s a pretty simple: it’s about
chatting in rooms that can be customised to reflect your taste, and is
nothing like as grandiose as something like Second Life or There. It’s
not a single persistent world, but a bunch of ad hoc virtual spaces
that let people come together and show off their avatar identity
through chatting and flirting.

One thing Google doesn’t do is bet against the web, and as you’d
expect Lively is firmly web-based: it runs in your browser after
you’ve downloaded an applet (if you’re lucky – it keeps crashing
my browsers). The idea of a 3D experience that can be easily built and
accessed via the web, rather than some huge downloadable client is a
solid one. It’s one of the principles behind virtual world heavy-
weight Ralph Koster’s company, Metaplaces. However, Metaplaces has
much grander ambitions, and wants to provide web-based tools that will
scale from simple games to rich virtual worlds: according to its
website, “We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play
everything, from anywhere.”

Google Earth comes alive because it’s a living, breathing online
community which uses the power of social networks to layer value onto
a planet simulation. You enter a 3D space but can then easily locate
and activate 2D web information, such as pictures or Wikipedia
entries. It’s this integration of 2D and 3D which is so powerful, and
Google, which dominates the world’s text-based information and has
hell of a leg up in 3D via Google Earth, seems to me well placed to
create the ultimate mash-up of real and virtual world content. It will
be interesting to see how Lively develops, but for now, we don’t need
another stand alone virtual space: the real magic will happen when
these worlds start to collide.

TypePad rolled out its blogging application for the iPhone. Google’s
Blogger received no such special treatment. There was at least one RSS
product available from the App Store, but Google’s Reader wasn’t one
of them. The list could go on.

It could be that Google is reserving its best for Android, and it
probably should. Given Google and Apple’s love affair with each other,
though, I was expecting more.

Tomorrow’s CIO: Do you have what it takes? Find out at the 2008
InformationWeek 500 Conference Sept. 14-16, St. Regis Resort, Monarch
Beach, Calif.

I can see Lively being implemented into Android, Apple and other
mobile platforms before too long.  Why send a boring old text message
to someone, when you can chat them up on the roof of a high-rise or in
the middle of the jungle?  Bring a handful of your friends in and
spend time debating the latest episode of The Hills or whatever kids
are watching these days. It would be easy to open the program or point
your browser to the chat rooms and talk away.

Looks like Peter and the gang at SpatialNetworking have a new release
in the works to include facebook and Twitter integration…

In addition to updating the popular Twitter and facebook service, it
can also tie in to your Google calendar and import from TripIt and
Doplr… cool. The tie in to Google Calendar is very powerful and
something that users are going love! See video demo below (source:
http://vimeo.com/1313233) – I can’t wait for a mobile client!

Serves the decision makers responsible for networking, voice data, and
video communications technologies at enterprise and service provider

Google has released as open source a web application assessment tool,
Ratproxy, that was designed to root out potential security flaws.

Separately, Google also released Browser Sync, a product designed for
keeping multiple versions of Firefox synchronised, under an open-
source licence.

Last month, Google said it would terminate support for Browser Sync,
and this week the company open sourced the code for the product’s
client software in order to allow the developer community to continue
to use and improve it, said Google developer Aaron Boodman in a blog
post. “It would be great to see the server ported to Google App
Engine, or support for Firefox 3 implemented,” Boodman wrote.

The main advantage of Ratproxy is its focus on Web 2.0 applications,
drawing on Google’s experience with such applications, Zalewski said.
For instance, it offers a number of advanced and unique checks,
content-sniffing functions capable of distinguishing between
stylesheets and Javascript code snippets, and the ability to take into
account particular browser-related quirks and content-handling
oddities, according to Zalewski’s documentation for Ratproxy. The
proxy can be used in a chain with third-party security testing
proxies, he said.

Google has come under increasing pressure in recent months to tighten
its security strategy. Last month StopBadware.org, a site sponsored by
Google, found that Google itself was one of the top five networks
hosting malicious web pages, largely due to the popularity among
attackers of Google-owned networks such as Blogger. The other four
top-five networks were based in China.

Google will no longer forward eBay and PayPal phishing emails to
recipients using its (DKIM) standard. The protocol provides for simple
signing of outgoing email using a key which is valid for the relevant
domain and can be queried by the recipient via the domain and matched
with the incoming email.

Users finding email apparently from eBay or PayPal in their inboxes
can thus in future be sure that it isn’t a phishing attempt. Users
will of course still have to be on their guard against other phishing
tricks, such as entering the sender as ‘poypal.com’. According to
Taylor, eBay and PayPal have worked hard on the solution of signing
absolutely all their email with domain keys. Google has apparently
been carrying out successful tests on the method for some weeks, with
no problems or complaints encountered, indeed few users have even
noticed the change. Google is hoping to set a good example for others.
The team behind DKIM is also that other companies will follow suit.
Uptake at present remains slight.

South Derbyshire MP Mark Todd said: “Taking photos of people
outside their homes leaves an opportunity for those images to be
misused.

A spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure our products
respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws,
in each country in which they are launched.”

But law expert Mr Bampton said the company had a lot of work to do if
it was to avoid tricky legal situations. He said: “If a person
is photographed going into a sexually-transmitted disease clinic, you
could argue the information being revealed is personal, so there may
be grounds for a court case.

Special options are available to registered members. for the member
login page or to register as a member.

By Cassidy FriedmanStaff writerThe people at Google first felt obliged
to capture images of the boring U.S. cities in their virtual tour of
America.Places like Manhattan, San Francisco and Los Angeles.But Twin
Falls locals say they’ve spotted the Internet company’s distinctive
camera car in their town, a sign the company must be planning to add
this town to the ranks of the big cities.The company can’t actually
say for sure – the cars now traversing the nation operate
independently. But a Google spokeswoman said it’s likely the car -
which shoots 360-degree street-level photographs of all public roads
where it travels – cruised through Twin Falls earlier this
month.Chances are, the car spotted in Twin Falls was first deployed to
a larger metropolitan area like Boise, before it expanded its trip
east through Twin Falls, said spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo.”We have
over 60 metropolitan areas,” Filadelfo said. “And within each of those
metropolitan areas we really try to include the surroundings. We think
everywhere can benefit from this. We think everybody, whether they
live in New York or Twin Falls can benefit.”Filadelfo said each car in
Google’s large fleet is armed with a sophisticated camera mounted on
its roof that shoots still photographs at and between
intersections.The photos, to be added to Google Maps at some
unspecified date in coming months, allows an on-screen visual tour.One
reason for the StreetView effort is to allow users the novelty of
taking a virtual drive through most American cities and a dozen or so
national parks. But the program also satisfies practical needs,
Filadelfo said.In one Midwestern state, department of transportation
officials use the program to identify dilapidated roads they need to
pave, Filadelfo said. It saves gas and time, they said. Viewers can
check out a restaurant’s ambience – at least exterior – before they
dine there. They can see a neighborhood before they rent a home on the
block.”We’ve seen a lot of really great uses of it and heard some
great feedback,” the spokeswoman said.It’s unclear how long the photos
will be of use, however. The company is unclear on when it might make
subsequent passes and update the street scenes.Google hit a patch of
rough road when some members of the public caught in StreetView’s
frames complained the photographs posted online invaded their
privacy.Viewers could request their face or private property be
blotted out.When shooting Manhattan in May, Google blurred all the
faces in its imagery, Filadelfo said.By June, despite having the clear
legal upper hand to shoot photographs of what takes place in public,
Google began blurring faces in all its shots. So don’t expect to be
famous for anything but your shirt and shoes, Twin Falls.”We thought
the focus was on business and geography and it just seemed a way to
preserve that,” Filadelfo said.Cassidy Friedman may be reached at
208-735-3241 or .

We have an automated system to identify and remove inappropriate or
offensive material in Hot Trends. In rare cases, when such material is
missed, we manually remove these results from our Hot Trends list. We
apologize to any users who were offended by this situation.

It’s truly pathetic that David Sarno believes that the question of
whether or not a swastika is offensive is “debatable”. Despite the
ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t recognize it as
a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been its association
with the murderous racism of the Nazis. When Sarno brightly refers to
the swastika as a symbol with a “multifacted history”, you’d think he
was referring to the peace sign.

“Svasti” is a Hindu (Sanskrit) word that translates as “well being.”
The svastika (swastika) was a sacred symbol to Hindus and Buddhists
alike, and one can find temples and homes adorned with it throughout
South Asia. Sadly, when Hitler appropriated the swastika as the symbol
of his National Socialist (Nazi) Party in the early 1930′s, it came to
represent evil and genocide. Thus, modern Western civilization abhors
it. When a Buddhist temple in LA decorated its fences with wrought
iron swastikas, many people became offended, because average Joe
America is simply not ready for a return to the original, peaceful
meaning of svasti (the memories of WWII and Bergen-Belsen are still
too fresh). The monks wisely decided to remove the symbols rather than
attempt to explain the sacred meaning to the clamoring crowds.
Ironically, the local Jewish community, well aware of the many
meanings of the swastika, came to the defense of the temple, declaring
that they had the right to display the swastika in its context as a
symbol of goodness.

….it’s too bad that a purported fount of information (Google) caters
to the indignation of a few ignorant individuals.

Why not post something educational which links to the “offensive”
image for the dingbats concerned, rather than kowtowing to “politcally
correct” outrage that only serves to reinforce the empowerment of a
symbol that shouldn’t be given such impact any more?

“Despite the ancient origins of the symbol, most folks today don’t
recognize it as a symbol of Hinduism — its primary meaning has been
its association with the murderous racism of the Nazis.”

I am surprised and dismayed that Google removed swastika from Google
Trends. After all, people will continue to search for swastika, trends
or no trends.

Thank god. Now that that’s out of my system I see I am not alone after
reading others’ opinions on Adina’s comment.

I suppose this means the “most folks” who live in Europe or the US? Oh
wait, surely those millions who live in India and other parts of Asia
don’t count! What if they don’t see it as a hateful symbol? What if it
means something completely different to them? Oh of course, that
doesn’t matter, does it! This Eurocentric world view makes me sick.

Censorship is generally evil. Censoring information about what is
being censored and who the censors are is particularly egregious.
Let’s not let Google keep mum about what precisely happened, because
by censoring the Hot Trends data, Google can mislead the people
concerning what they are thinking. After that, it is a tiny step for
most to be told what to think. Who made Google the world’s Ministry of
Propaganda?

The swastika is an ubiquitous symbol throughout all of South and East
Asia. And, incidentally, the ‘right facing’ is the most common form,
especially in the Hindu world. As right-facing means evolution and
left facing means involution, in the Hindu sense. In Buddhism when
facing right it stands for strength and intelligence and facing left
it stands for love and mercy. And is an important part of Dharma in
both religions as it signifies universal harmonies and the balance of
opposites.

Obviously, this symbol became popular in the early 20th century as a
symbol of good luck (often pre WWI air forces would use the symbol for
just that, ie Finland). Then it was high-jacked by the NSDAP for their
international symbol and evil, horrendous crimes against humanity
ensued across Europe under fascism.

Sounds like this is a lose-lose situation for Google. They shouldn’t
have taken it down. Since they issued a statement anyway, they should
have just explained the many OTHER different (and usually positive)
meanings of the symbol.

Here’s a more likely explanation. If you do a (Baidu is the Chinese
equivalent of Google), you’ll find that there was a swastika-related
story recently in the Chinese press that has gotten widespread
coverage over the past week. apparently there was a big mural-type
advertisement on a wall somewhere in xi’an (ancient capital of China,
geographically speaking it’s roughly in the center). the mural
contained a painting of a long black train with a nazi-inspired
swastika painted on the train’s head. judging from the baidu news
results, this story was literally reproduced in hundreds of online
news outlets. my sense of the article is that it’s meant to inspire
shock (as in, how could they not know this looks like a nazi
swastika?!), but also to provide the general lesson that the swastika
has negative connotations outside of buddhism (for those who don’t
know anything about the nazis? also remember: Buddhism comes from
India too). i’d say this story is what inspired all those google
searches, and not the simple fact that “good luck is on their minds.”

This week, Google jumped into the battle against Bell Canada’s anti-
BitTorrent practices, this time through the country’s equivalent of
the FCC, and on different legal grounds than privacy advocates.

Not Canadian, But its interesting to watch this particular story. So
goes the north, so will follow the rest IMHO… so this seems to be
the thing to watch and learn from.

Since 1999, more than half of Canadians have downloaded video from the
Web, and about a quarter of Canadians do so at least once a week. So
the CRTC’s “broad investigation into the way Canadian ISPs manage the
flow of traffic” is extremely timely. Better to have some Internet
oversight urging Canadian content on the Web. The alternative is to
have our telephone, cable and satellite bills subsidizing commercial
appetites that hope to bypass the Canadian system altogether.

TORONTO — Google on Tuesday branded the use of “traffic-shaping”
technology by domestic phone giants to choke off BitTorrent and other
bandwidth hogs as “unjust discrimination” and contrary to Canadian
law. “The Internet is simply too important to allow Bell and other
broadband Internet access services to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google said in a 15-page filing to the Canadian Radio-
television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is weighing the
right of phone carriers to use packet filtering technology to manage
Internet traffic. Google gave its backing to smaller Canadian
Internet-access providers that lease phone lines to provide their
service to Canadians. Bell Canada and other phone giants have told the
CRTC that they should be allowed to hamper serial file-sharers that
greatly slow the time it takes online subscribers to legitimately
transfer music, video, software and other large files.

Internet giant says large carriers shouldn’t be slowing certain
traffic and is calling for a halt to the practice

Google Inc. says Bell Canada and other telecommunications companies
that slow or restrict certain types of Internet traffic are violating
Canadian law and is calling on federal watchdogs to put a stop to the
process.

The technology titan calls Bell’s policy of slowing or “shaping”
certain forms of Internet traffic – mostly peer-to-peer file transfers
- “unjust discrimination” and says the practice should be prohibited
in Canada. It makes the argument in a recent filing with the Canadian
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

“The Internet is simply too important to allow [Bell and other
broadband Internet access services] to act as such a gatekeeper; the
Internet’s myriad benefits can only be fully realized when Canadian
carriers allow end users to choose the applications and content they
prefer,” Google says in its filing.

“The commission should make clear in this proceeding that at least
blocking or degrading applications of consumers’ choice is prohibited
in Canada because it is not technologically and competitively
neutral,” Google says in the filing.

When John Beck, design director at South Side-based , needed a
software developer with a specific skill set, he had several options
– post an online ad, comb through Google or seek personal referrals
from trusted contacts.

He logged onto LinkedIn, a 5-year-old professional networking site,
and cast out a call for help to his stable of online colleagues.

Some businesses are beginning to leverage social networking sites for
more than just connecting with old friends. They’re being used for
leads, referrals and recruiting.

If you are already a Pittsburgh Business Times subscriber please
create or sign into your bizjournals.com account to link your valid
print subscription and have access to the complete article.

The U.S. Small Business Administration armed Joey Johnson with the
money and motivation to step out and launch her graphic design
business. Johnson formed Graphic Mechanic Design Studio in October
2006, after running the company on the side for nearly a decade.

, ,
© 2008 , Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. The material on
this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or
otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of
bizjournals.

and why not keeping them in a country where privacy still means
something, so that no US judge can touch them.

And for google to “request all the records” from their separate
company formed to hold the records would be an operation requiring
special permission, extensive justification, and full disclosure,
regarding reasons for the request, which the board of the other
company would have to vote on (after researching to guarantee that
Google is not possibly under any kind of duress in making the request,
to release information).

The US-based Google would have half the information; the foreign “data
storage” company would have the other half — and no individual
record could be obtained without bitwise XOR’ing all pieces together.

And there could be more than two pieces: there could be more than 1
subsidiary that has to agree to any massive information release
request.

We just have this compulsion to hang onto everything because we can,
and perhaps with the faint hope that somewhere down the line we’ll be
able to show extreme cleverness to our PHB’s when they ask some inane
question like, “Duh, how many unique IP addresses have accessed our
website since 1991?” and we’ll be able to say, “Give me 10 minute and
I’ll let you know (wag tail).”

Chances are that Google themselves has never had to follow-up on an IP
address to identify a user for anyone except the Chinese government
and/or the NSA, neither of which are our friends. The first poster who
asks why they keep this at all, let alone weren’t anonymizing it long
ago has it right. This is hardly the first time Google has had to turn
over access records so they certainly know that it can and will
happen.

Don’t be evil at Google seems to mean don’t destroy data you never
needed in the first place in the event that some government we want to
keep as our friend might want it. But now we find out that more than
just governments can get to it with baseless suits and moronic judges.

Why do I feel like I’m the only person that takes “don’t be evil” with
a grain of salt. Google has been a great corporation because they
understood people on the Internet and how they wanted to be treated.
But, they also use that knowledge when they calculate how far they can
push the envelope. “Don’t be evil” has translated into webmail
accounts with massive amounts of space, web ads that’s don’t flash or
pop-up, and a search engine who’s front page maintains the very bland
basic HTML feel. Now people dream of Google being the great fixer in
any industry that has annoyed them over the years.

…if you don’t have a Google login name. Google search works just
fine without one. It even works fine without any Google cookies.

Why would the **AA sue me? I’ve never uploaded, downloaded, or
sideloaded any of their stuff. They have nothing I want. If they sue
me it will be because they fucked up and confounded me with someone
else.

If privacy is to have any meaning, then we need a right to protect our
personal information. Well, actually we already have the right, though
it’s a bit scattered around the Bill of Rights. (Speaking for
Americans, and only in theoretical terms as regards the current
administration.)

So what’s the strongest form of protection for our personal
information? The famous “possession is 9 points of the law”. We should
possess our personal information and we should have to right to say
who can see it, and when.

There is an interesting tie in here to something I’ve promoted all
along: If the last mile was owned by cooperative groups (meaning NOT
ISPs) then they could pool the IP addresses assigned in a random, and
meaningless way. That is to say that if 237 people in a housing
association were sharing DHCP IP addresses through a server system
with enough bandwidth that many ISPs could hook up and serve out email
and other services by user, it would be possible to hide the end user
IP. Then any stats by Google or others would apply to the group, not
an individual. Share that cooperative environment out amongst all the
people of your neighborhood or town where the number is now thousands
or tens of thousands and the problem of privacy becomes less of a
concern.

“We expect Google’s second-quarter results to be inline or slightly
better than consensus estimates, driven by: a) continued gains in
U.S.-search market share, b) international growth and c) monetization
improvements,” said Youssef Squali, a financial analyst for Jefferies
& Co.

The aborted hotel deal doesn’t represent the full extent of Google’s
penny-pinching, either — the company recently closed a

Or maybe it’s positively a sign that the company is finally getting
pinched by an economic slowdown.

Local cookbook authors and chefs will be there to guide kids through
hands-on cooking activities, and there will be live music from Banana
Slug String Band. Included in the entry price ($20 for adults, $12 for
ages 5-17, little guys free), are food tastings prepared by Google’s
chefs, smart folks that have figured out that working in a high-end
Silicon Valley cafeteria is a better deal than slaving away in a
restaurant.

The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Google
headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View.

WOW! Sounds like a great time. WOW! The cost of admission. With gas,
and admissions we would be looking at a cost of over $150 for our
family. We’ll just wait for the show,and in the mean time visit the
local farmers market ( met the farmers, food samples, education
stations, and shopping for the weeks meals at far less than $150).

The event and show premise are intriguing but I wonder how many
“regular” folks will be able to attend for the reasons mom3 mentioned.
————————Charles Siegel (of Charles Chocolates) may be
busy that day! If he’s at this Doof event, he’ll have to race back
over to his Chocolate Bar and factory in Emeryville, for a free open
house. http://www.charleschocolates.com/events.php

Ironic that this comes just days after the NY Times article blasting
Google for their decision to raise the prices of their in house
daycare by 75%! Its a shame that a trailblazing company like Google
chooses to make something as important as a childcare the realm of
only the very wealthy. Apparently Sergey Brin was quoted as saying
he’s tired of people getting so many perks like free food and
otherwise. Since when has childcare fallen on the same level as free
M&Ms;?

One of them was a £30m executive Airbus bought as a birthday
gift for his wife on her 44th birthday. (He is said to be planning to
give her a $1 billion 27-storey home on her next birthday complete
with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking — which
goes to show that you can top a £30m jet as a present.)

We expect it will be quite empty if the taxman continues to do his job
with such vigour.

This dream nearly happened. You see, another Michael — Green,
the former head of Carlton, which with Granada formed ITV in 2004
— had a chance to buy Google for a mere £400m (it was a
long time ago).

The $2 trillion industry put in its worst performance during the first
half of the year since most credible records began

The luxury hotel group wants to buy Island off Guernsey that spent
much of the Second World War under German occupation

A bike activist has collected more than 35,000 signatures on an online
petition asking Google to add a “Bike There” feature to .

Mr. Smith asks that the feature take into account bicycle lanes from
the area being mapped. The says that such a feature would:

Google Maps currently offers a option for a number of cities in the
United States and around the world (but not Boston, for some reason).
Smith envisions that the link to “Bike There” would sit
next to the transit link.

Others have tried to create Google Maps mashups that offer bicycle
directions. The site offers bike directions for Portland, Ore., and
Milwaukee.

People who walk places rather than drive tend to be more active,
right? Well why don’t those over-active people who don’t
like to drive to the end of their driveway to get the morning paper
walk down to a gas station and use the money that they saved by
walking on a map. Then they’ll be able to put that map in their
fanny-pack, walk out of the gas station, walk their over-active bodies
home and flip through the map and figure out a route on their own?!

First, the news: Google Transit and Metro are still in talks to bring
the popular online service to Los Angeles County. but a feature that
some people say Google does better.

Two sources, speaking on background, said there are several issues
that need to be resolved. One is boring and involves data formatting.
The other is not and involves whether Google intends to make money
from advertising placed on the maps. Like all transit agencies, Metro
is cash-strapped and looking for new revenue and apparently doesn’t
want to give proprietary information to a firm that may profit.

As for Google Transit, I spent some time playing around with it
yesterday and came away mostly impressed. It’s quick — quicker than
the Metro trip planner. And to have all that information housed on one
website is pretty convenient.

I asked the Google press office about this also and they replied that
Google Transit is currently available for Blackberry and Java-based
phones (here’s a from Google) and that Google is working to bring it
to more platforms. Note to Google: the 2.0 version of the iPhone comes
out next week and is expected to sell like hotcakes.

What do you think Bottleneckers? Google Transit? Are you a believer? A
skeptic? The comment board awaits your wisdom….

First of all, Google will give bizzare directions at times, especially
when involving walking- such as: walking across multi-lane highways
and in some cases even over water! Also, when Google maps walking
directions, they don’t have step by step walking directions and show
you walking through buildings, landmarks, etc. It basically draws a
line between the origin and destination, paying no attention to
streets.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Google Transit is great, but for more
detailed itineraries I will use the transit companies trip planner.

Google also has the ability to infest your computer if they disagree
with you. Their google android project is 2-4 generations from
completion who really needs more from them than a search engine. One
of the grown ups probably thought of guugle ads revenue.

Yes, it does the job, mostly, but it’s flaky as hell and almost
impossible for a newbie to use. You have to learn all sorts of stupid
tricks, like knowing that for some reason the Universal City subway
stop is called “University City Sta” in the planner. It also does a
shoddy job of telling you how long a commute is gonna take.

I say bring on Google. Yes Google’s system isn’t perfect, but it’s
essentially free and would let metro save money on bandwidth, upkeep,
and a bunch of other web costs while offering superior service.

BTW, if you are ever dismayed to find that the timetables on OCTA
signs don’t match what you were given on Google maps, don’t worry; the
signs are what’s wrong.

While I’m mostly appreciative of this transit system from Google
(thank you Google), I too have a couple peeves to point out…

BTW is Google (or Metro) even thinking about a real-time bus/train
locator by GPS, an extension of the marginally-helpful TransiTV?

Steve Hymon is The Times’ Road Sage. He covers traffic and
transportation in a region united by a confounding network of freeways
that frustrate drivers daily. The Bottleneck Blog is Steve’s website
home, where he breaks transportation news, reports on traffic tie-ups
and brings a critical but humorous eye to commuting in Southern
California. You can reach Steve at steve.hymon@latimes.com.

Google has added a significant new feature to the tool that
advertisers can use to select the keywords they want to bid for: the
ability to see roughly how many people actually search using those
terms.

The move is probably smart: advertisers love quantitative analysis,
and this gives them more hard data immediately.

Comment reply Submit Cancel The posting of advertisements, profanity,
or personal attacks is prohibited. Click here to review our .

After spending Friday morning playing with an iPhone 3G, I can see why
Apple enthusiasts lined up again for Steve Job’s latest wonderful
device.

But the rest of the world’s really going to wonder what the big deal
is this time around.

It’s an absolute breeze to install applications such as news feeds
from the AP and The New York Times, or the restaurant finder from
Seattle’s . You can load them from the phone, but it’s slow —
even with the faster network speeds. Or you could just click to add
them in iTunes, like a song.

Apple is heavy-handed with software developers writing iPhone
applications, but it pays off for consumers who get a consistent
experience downloading, finding and using the applications.

What appears even better is the process to synchronize the phone with
Exchange. However, I couldn’t complete this task because my employer
hasn’t tweaked its servers to accept iPhones yet, so I was unable to
finish the last step.

My tip of the day: Check with your IT department to be sure it has
authorized iPhones. Otherwise, you may get a message saying that it’s
unable to verify a certificate and the sync won’t work.

Think about what’s going to happen over the next two years: The
economy aside, it’s going to be a golden era for advanced phones and
mobile Internet devices.

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage
in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday,
July 17.

FITSNews – July 11, 2008 – Ever since the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he
wanted to “,” the nation’s interest in the testicles
of the Democratic presidential nominee has apparently gone through the
roof.

He’s right … who would have thunk it. Of course,
Obama’s nuts will never be as famous as .

by at
I tried it and had to disable it because it ruins Google Reader’s best
feature: its speed. It’s painfully slow. It would take something
awfully amazing for me to put up with an add-on that tanks GR
performance.

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A number of readers have noted Google’s , with which it is most
comparable. Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast
— at least an order of magnitude faster than XML.”

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted
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“Google protocol Buffers” is cooler than the OMG terminology, but this
kind of thing has been around for 20 years.

“Google’s blogger claims, “And, yes, it is very fast — at least an
order of magnitude faster than XML.” That is just because they aren’t
using enough XML!

I agree that the tiny “person” example is not a good benchmark case.
It was intended as a usage example, not a speed example, but I stuck
the speed numbers in there just meaning to give people a vague idea of
the difference. The “20-100 times faster” comment is based on testing
a variety of formats — both unrealistic ones and real-life formats
used in our search pipeline — against programmatically generated XML
equivalents (which may or may not themselves be realistic, though they
contain the same data with the same structure). libxml2 was used for
parsing XML. I don’t really know how libxml2′s speed compares to other
XML parsers, but I didn’t have a lot of time to investigate. The 20x
faster number comes from the largest data set (~100k-ish) while the
100x number comes from a very small message. The most realistic case
was about 50x. Sorry that I cannot provide exact details of the
benchmark setup since many of the test cases were proprietary internal
formats.

both really from the same design sheet, but thrift has been
opensource’d for over a year, and has many more language bindings. its
been in use in several opensource projects (thrudb comes to mind), and
has much more extant articles/documentation.

Obviously, those at Google felt XML didn’t work well for them. They
have the resources to invent a protocol and libraries to support it.
And, they are big enough to be their own ecosystem, which means as
long as everyone at Google is using their formats, interop is no
biggie. Good for them, I don’t begrudge that decision.

2. Verification in situations when it’s impossible to devise a
meaningful reaction to a failure (other than either “everything
failed, turn off the computers and go home” and “assume the data to be
valid anyway because ALL of it will have the same formatting error
because the same program generates it”)

4. Either communicating between programs that have the same knowledge
of message semantics, or preparation of pretty human-readable
documents.

Structurally Protocol Buffers are similar to JSON, yes. In fact, you
could use the classes generated by the Protocol Buffer compiler
together with some code that encodes and decodes them in JSON. This is
something some Google projects do internally since it’s useful for
communicating with AJAX apps. Writing a custom encoding that operates
on arbitrary protocol buffer classes is actually pretty easy since all
protocol message objects have a reflection interface (even in C++).

Modify JSON so unquoted attributes are ‘type labels’ and define the
type of an attribute by giving a label or a default value. For
instance:

Maybe somebody can explain, but it doesn’t seem like protocol buffers
really have much advantages over JSON. It sounds like it is
effectively just a binary format for JSON-like data (name-value pairs
they say) along with a code generator to access it. The code generator
is nice, but this is like a day’s work max. Maybe I’m not
understanding google’s problems, but I’ll stick with JSON since it
actually is a cross-platform, language neutral data format… and you
can always optimize it if actually needed.

Perl is to programming languages what English is to natural languages:
easy to fool around with, hard to learn well, but when you do, the
expressive power is incredible. And when you mess it up, nobody
understands what you’re trying to say.

Seems like you are missing the code they released that allows you to
implement this in a number of languages from the ‘get-go’.

You’ve also missed that they’ve just told the world how the majority
of their systems talk, something most people would find interesting
given how much Google does and the fact that one of Google’s strong
points is mangling huge amounts of data in a relatively quickly
manner.

As for Protocol Buffers, given the existing solutions out there (such
as ASN.1 and CORBA) are generally ugly and/or over-engineered, it
sounds to me like they’re simply addressing a gap in the industry…
after all, XML and SOAP aren’t the end-all and be-all of generic
object-passing protocols.

Google’s just-debuted virtual world is clunky right now, but expect it
to grow into a monster success – and play a leading role in business
as well a social networking.

[July 3, 2008] Gartner revises Q1 numbers after getting some new
information on HP selling prices, while iSuppli has better news for
AMD. [July 3, 2008] While text messaging leads consumers’ must-have
features, signs point to good news for advancements being pushed by
handset makers, carriers and developers. [July 3, 2008] New research
finds overall broadband use spreading, but suggests that economic
squeeze might be slowing uptake among certain segments. [July 2,
2008] IDC did some counting on the rising cost of storage worldwide.

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Tailrank Slashdot Technorati Google Bookmarks Yahoo Favorites Windows
Live Ask

Internetnews.com recently had the opportunity to chat with DiBona
about the SoC and Google’s view on open source development.

I don’t know if we’ll deal with them in a different way, but I think
we’ll be a lot more clear.

We had 49 different countries represented in the student body that we
had and some of the tax issues were pretty vexing for them. I think
that next year will be a little easier. The fact of the matter is
taxes are complicated. This isn’t a typical scholarship because it’s
based on performances measured by an external body.

We have it structured very carefully so that we can include people in
other countries and also not invalidate the visas of students here in
the U.S. that took part. I think that next time should we do this it
will be a lot clearer up front that this is kind of complicated.

Q: What was the experience like revising your landmark book Open
Sources some six years after first publication?

Q: One of the most widely used open source security tools, Nessus,
recently closed its source. There is now apparently a fork under
development. Is that something that Google would help to support?

It’s not really our thing and it’s not a matter of commenting or not.
Forks happen in open source software and I think it’s really healthy
that they do. Google doesn’t have a horse in that race.

Q: Is there any chance that Google would ever use one of the new ,
such as the Community License, that may well be free software-
compatible licenses?

We’re really happy with the Apache Software Foundation license and I
don’t think that it gets enough attention.

It’s good for us when we want to release software because it gives a
good amount of indemnification, which is what companies look for when
they release software. When we use software externally, the demands
that are put on us from a compliance point of view are pretty easy to
track.

I love working at Google. It’s been fantastic. Not just the people I
work with but the depth of resources.

It’s a remarkable environment for a computer scientist. Not just for
the amazing code that there is, either. Some of the code that we have
internally is just shockingly good.

: Yeah, I think you’re right. Plus, from some of the
descriptions I’m getting it sounds like rockets…

Officials stated 3 people were killed and 21 injured. However,
eyewitnesses [ru] and the city has returned to its normal life again

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Thats a good point. With Google you knew where you stood. They might
use your info to to target advertising. They might reveal it to the
government if ordered to do so. They would not be likely to sell it to
spammers or pass on lists of people who bookmark anti-Islamic sites to
an Al-Qaeda operative. Without google hosting it you need to host your
own or find someone you can trust.

I can’t imagine a company that actually does what the public asks?
They must have a secret agenda!

Well, I’d disagree, I think we’re doing fine from a kernel release
perspective. We could do more, and in time, we will, but we only
really started a concerted effort to release changes 3 years ago,
so…not so shabby. Red Hat has been more important than Google or any
linux -user- in the development of the kernel.

Your comments about manipulation are weirdly paranoid. The original
list that Greg posted was 20+ companies long, and originally didn’t
include us, as he didn’t count Andrew to us. He fixed that, and the
post I sent to you was from his talk at Google. It’s part of his
presentation to call out the company he visits, which is one of the
reasons we invited him out.

Google is built on software, some of which comes from the world of
open soruce, and most of which was written here. To give back, we both
release code from the company (a significant amount >1m lines per
year), fund external code (uncountable, really) and through the summer
of code, create new developers and even more code still (2.1m+ last
year, at least 3m this).

That’s not too shabby, in my book. I also would point out that it is
disingenuous to equate linux use with some license fee savings. If
linux had initially charged a license fee, then the world of linux
users would be using bsd. Linux is successful because it is free of
charge and free to use and free to modify. I think it is important
that we give back and the rest, and we do that, but to multiply the
number of machines running linux on the internet and consider that
money as having been stolen is antithetical to the whole idea behind
free software and open source.

If they’re not going to develop it any further, they might as well let
someone else have a go. Now all we have to do is convince Microsoft to
release the source code to Windows ME.

There’s no clear reason given as to why it’s being discontinued, but
if it’s due to lack of interest, it was probably lack of advertising;
I wasn’t even slightly aware of this project, and it sounds like
something I would have been very interested in. I use Foxmarks
religiously and have trouble functioning without it.

I’m sure there’s better examples, but off the top of my head I know
that a few years ago, there was a petition started to release the
source code to [wikipedia.org], an old (yet brilliant) 3D RTS game
that still stands out amongst the crowd today. After a few months
(possibly a couple of years), Eidos scrambled together the source code
and released it to the community.Since then, the Warzone resurrection
project has come leaps and bounds – fixing bugs, improving what
platforms the game runs at, allowing higher resolutions, improving the
AI, etc.The only slight catch (that I’m aware of) is that the Video
CODEC used in the original game was proprietary, so Eidos couldn’t
release the source to that and the company that owns the CODEC
wouldn’t allow it to be distributed any more.

Is Amazon no longer a third party? Granted I trust them as much as I
trust Google (and from an advertising perspective, they probably have
better data about me as they have actual data points for my purchases,
not just my purchase-related searches) but that still seems like a
rather dumb statement.

The angle places the user at street level and allows for complete
360-degree panning and zooming. Google said that the aim of the
project was to offer a perspective similar to that of a cyclist in the
race.

The service generated controversy when it debuted in the US and has
been cause for concern with UK privacy groups.

© Incisive Media Ltd. 2008. Incisive Media Limited, Haymarket
House, 28-29 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4RX, is a company registered in
the United Kingdom with company registration number 04038503

You can set a reminder e-mail at the same time that you’re adding an
event to your calendar. Just look for the gray box titled
“options.” Click “add a reminder” to schedule
an e-mail or pop-up reminder from five minutes to one week before the
event. By going through the “settings” link at the top
right of the screen, you can set up your mobile phone to receive
calendar notifications.

Q: I earn my living as a writer, and years of material I would love to
retrieve is on floppy disks down in my basement. The problem is, the
disks are 5.25-inch floppies. The only thing I can do, as far as I
know, is print every page and scan it into my computer. Can you help
me find an easier, quicker, high-tech fix? Everyone I have consulted
about this problem has been stumped, including some world-class geeks.

The issue, as I’m sure you and the geeks you enlisted know, is that
external 5.25-inch floppy drives don’t appear to exist nowadays. As a
quick reminder, we’re talking about the large disks with holes in the
middle that flopped when you shook them.

Even if you could find an external 5.25-inch drive, it’s far more
likely to have a serial connection than today’s more standard USB
port.

Mark your calendars for a day full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing: Reps from Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) :
As everyone has noted, the irony is that this time, the Microsoft guys
aren’t the ones under antitrust scrutiny.

with a BSD-style license. The code is extensive – in addition to all
the required bits to hook it up to Firefox, you’ll find dozens of
Javascript files involved. Fortunately, the source is reasonably well-
commented, so it’s at least clear what’s happening where, if not how
to move it forward to the current version of Firefox.

One way or another, releasing this code should ultimately satisfy
those users who have missed the project – either some enterprising
developer will bring things up to scratch for Firefox 3.0, or the best
ideas can be melded into Weave or other projects.

In any case, it’s good to see this particular project out in the open,
and as a Firefox user I’d love to see someone pick up the ball and run
with it.

© 2008 OStatic. Design by . Built on fine Open Source Software
from projects like , , , , and .

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Salesforce.com shows details about service responsiveness and
specifics about problems that do emerge. (Click image to see larger
version.)

Google, for example, offers a promising that Gmail, the online e-mail
component of its overall Google Apps service, will be available 99.9
percent of the time, with service credits extended to paying customers
if Gmail dips below that level.

“We don’t have an SLA yet for Google Calendar or Google Docs, but it’s
something we’re moving quickly toward,” said Rishi Chandra, product
manager for Google Apps. Google wants “to get the same level of
reliability for all of Apps,” he said.

Psychologically, it’s well-known in risk analysis circles that people
feel more comfortable with risk if they feel in control. Thus people
are often more comfortable driving a car on a congested freeway
compared with being flown somewhere in a commercial jet, regardless of
the relative safety of the two forms of transport.

“We’ve found working with our customers they want transparency. They
want to know exactly what’s going on all the time,” said Bruce
Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy. “If
there’s an issue, they’re not furious; they just want to know exactly
what’s going on.”

Risks of non-cloud computing, too Much ado can and should be made of
the risks of cloud computing, but it should be noted that even the
much more mature business of computing without a cloud has its risks.
Downtime, either with ailing or stolen PCs or with overtaxed or faulty
servers, is a serious problem there, too.

That might not be five nines, and it’s for Gmail only today, but
Google chooses to see the glass as half full.

“We talk to customers, and 99.9 percent is mostly much higher than
most organizations with their internal service today,” Chandra said.

A company called Sentinel, funded by the U.S. Defense Department, has
posted a that shows the viewer flying through 3D cityscapes with live
videos embedded in them.

The software, AVE Video Fusion, “combines Google Earth-like features
with live camera videos projected on a 3D model” the video caption
says. “This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch
using C++ and OpenGL.” It runs on PCs and requires no custom hardware.

Applications include wide-area surveillance systems such as those at
military bases, airports, railroad stations, borders, coastlines,
harbors, and power plants, .

More than 500 applications are already clustered in the App Store,
many of them tiny apps and widgets that have been custom-built to run
natively on the upgraded iPhone firmware. Most of these early entrants
are nearly identical to the iPhone-optimized versions previously
released by publishers to work with the iPhone Classic.

Amit Agarwal from blog today outlining how anyone can use the service
as a live blogging tool. The writing format, which has become an
increasingly popular way for bloggers to cover events as they’re
happening (mainly useful for things like Apple keynote speeches), but
also manages to work for smaller conferences and events, too.

By scrutinizing the traffic Google searches produce, Internet analysis
firm Hitwise in January . So what’s next?

That doesn’t mean that you can’t check if your favorite coffee
watering hole (or office) is going the way of $2 gas. According to The
Seattle Times, employees at stores that are facing closure have been
given some extra heads-up to either find new jobs or transfer
elsewhere.

Keep in mind that not all of the Starbucks locations listed are
definitely being shuttered. Most listings are based either on rumors
or speculation, since the first smattering of downed stores has not
yet been announced.

Google gives two reasons for its prohibition against manual
intervention. First is its belief that its own individual judgment is
never as good as the collective judgment of the Internet overall,
whose hyperlink structure forms part of the basis for Google ranking.

Second, fixing the algorithm rather than a specific result, if done
right, helps more than just one particular search. “Often a broken
query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our
ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only
improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and
often for all languages,” Singhal said.

Interestingly enough, of the three services offered in Google Docs,
only the word processor and presentation tool were truly down. If you
had a link to a spreadsheet you could apparently view and edit it just
fine.

The technology, , uses cryptography to verify the domain of the sender
of an e-mail. It allows e-mail providers to validate the domain from
which an e-mail originates, and it enables easier detection of
phishing attempts by helping identify abusive domains.

The DomainKeys technology is covered by a patent assigned to Yahoo.
The company released it under a dual-license scheme that allows the
companies to use it royalty-free under the GNU General Public License
(GPL 2.0), which enabled the Internet Engineering Task Force to
approve it as a proposed Internet standard.

Google Maps is starting to roll out a beta of walking directions in
addition to driving directions, on Monday.

It looks like it’s available to select users in select locations for
the time being, and indeed, I can’t access it from my Google account
yet. It’s also unclear whether this will get expanded to the mobile
version of Google Maps, where the availability of walking directions
would certainly help.

A clause in Google’s 2005 purchase agreement for the AOL stake gives
the Web search leader the right, but not the obligation, to force a
public offering of the shares or a repurchase at fair market value as
of July 1, 2008.

AOL and companies like News Corp’s MySpace have been driven to conduct
deal talks since Microsoft revealed its pursuit of Yahoo in February,
a takeover attempt that threatened to redraw the Internet landscape by
creating a more viable rival to Google.

The country’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do
with intellectual ferment as economic clout.

David Pogue looks at the Eye-Fi memory card, which stamps photos with
the location where they were taken.

David Pogue talks about how to save your old photo prints, cassette
tapes and vinyl records from the dustbin o…