Broadcast Radio Turns 100

GraWil writes

"On Christmas eve 1906, a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden presented the world's first wireless radio broadcast from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA. The transmission included Christmas music and was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies. Fessenden was a key rival of Marconi in the early 1900s who, using morse-code, succeeded in passing signals across the Atlantic in 1901. Fessenden's work was the first real departure from Marconi's damped-wave-coherer system for telegraphy and represent the first pioneering steps toward radio communications and radio broadcasting. He later became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of his radio-related patents, which were eventually acquired by RCA."

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News Corp., Liberty Media reach deal

Media barons Rupert Murdoch and John Malone ended a two-year battle Friday with Liberty Media agreeing to swap an $11 billion stake in News Corp. for control of satellite TV provider DirecTV and other assets.

The deal will secure Murdoch's grip on News Corp., the global media empire he founded from a single newspaper in Australia. It also will mark the return of Malone's Liberty Media as a major player in U.S. television programming and distribution.

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Girl Gamer Makes a Killing

Fifteen minutes ago, I thought I was good at video games. I spent an entire summer in college playing Halo like it was my job. But right now, my opponent is blasting me to shreds again and again, knocking me and my big rocket launcher to oblivion with a peashooter -- and a snicker. Bonnie "Xena" Burton, a 15-year-old professional gamer, is whupping my ass online at Microsoft's Xbox Live site.

Bonnie was an early member of the PMS Clan, an all-girl gaming club of more than 250 members. Their motto: "We may have boobs, but that doesn't make us nØØbs." I glance at the scoreboard and feel sorry for any gamer who takes her on without taking her seriously. Our current score: 25 to -2. Translation: She's killed me 25 times, and I've landed on my own grenade twice. When I look back at the main screen, I'm dead again.

Luckily, Bonnie isn't here just to chase me down with a smoking barrel. When she's not competing, she moonlights as one of 14 elite gaming coaches at Gaming-Lessons.com. The business was started in 2005, and it already has celebrity clients like NBA players Luke Walton and Richard Jefferson and rappers Lil Dru and Moka Blast.

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AllPeers Adds Chat: Becomes Relevant Again

AllPeers, a Firefox P2P file sharing plugin, had incredible hype when it launched in August (the rumors had been around for nearly a year at that point). People were calling it the “killer app” for Firefox, and the company is backed by early investors in Skype, Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. And since AllPeers is a Firefox extension, it works across all platforms.

But some of the hype was lost as AllPeers found itself among a flock of competitors - we compared four of them here. We named it the best, but noted that all parties to the transfer had to have AllPeers installed, something some of the others didn’t require.

Today they released a new version of AllPeers. There are a number of minor tweaks, including the way they handle file organization. But the exciting update is that they added a pop up chat feature. This would be extremely popular as a stand alone plugin, and adding it to AllPeers is a no brainer. You can now chat with friends as you send files, or just chat with friends without sending files.

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Sun's Looking Glass 3D Desktop Released

Sun Microsystems this week released "Looking Glass," a 3D desktop interface that provides an OS-neutral version of some of the elements found in OS X and Microsoft's newly-released Vista OS.

Looking Glass, which was first shown off in 2003 and released as an open-source project in 2004, allows users to run a Java-based desktop environment on top of Windows, or on Linux or Solaris. The software allows certain applications to be run in a "2.5D" environment, allowing them to be rotated in 3D space to maximize the available desktop space.

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Microsoft has filed for two patents covering technology used to organize and read syndicated Web feeds, such as those delivered via the widely used Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, family of formats.

The pair of applications were made public by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for what appears to be the first time on Thursday, following the expiration of a requisite 18-month window in which applications are generally kept secret.

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Red Hat earnings shrug off Oracle threat

Red Hat's net income subsided in its most recent quarter, but revenue increased as the Linux seller shrugged off the arrival of Oracle as a direct competitor.

For the quarter ended November 30, the company's net income was $15.5 million, down 37 percent compared with the same period a year ago. But its revenue increased 45 percent to $105.8 million. The net income of 14 cents per share, excluding various charges like stock option expenses, beat the average expectation of 12 cents per share predicted by analysts surveyed by First Call.

"Revenue, earnings and cash flow all exceeded our expectations," said Red Hat Chief Executive Matthew Szulik in a conference call. Factoring in expenses--including $8.5 million in stock option expenses--the company's net income was 7 cents per share.

"It looks like the world is not coming to an end for you guys after all," said Merrill Lynch analyst Kash Rangan shortly afterward.

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MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes

prawnonthebarbie writes:

"Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail: the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now. Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape. However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."
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The Top 21 Tech Screwups of 2006

From exploding laptops to corporate spying to Rocketboom's bust, a review of the year's gaffes and blunders.

It was a year where the world's biggest software company had to admit its flagship operating system was going to be delayed--yet again. And the number one PC manufacturer was caught spying on reporters and board members.

In 2006, turning on your laptop was an adventure in flammability. Of course, lots of government and corporate officials didn't have to worry about their notebook bursting into flames--they'd already lost theirs--along with the personal records of millions of Americans.

Surfing the Net you stood a good chance of being hoaxed by an actress pretending to be a lonely teenager or a blogger in the employ of the planet's largest retailer. If you subscribed to AOL, your searches might have been shared with the rest of the Web. And if you did anything stupid, somebody with a video camera and a YouTube account was probably there to broadcast it to the world.

Here, then, on the following pages we humbly offer our nominations for the biggest tech mistakes of the year. (And if you notice any errors in this article, please--keep them to yourself.)

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Updates for Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey 'critical'

"Highly critical" security updates have been released to patch flaws in the popular Firefox web browser and related programs that could allow an attacker to hijack computers running the software.

The Danish security firm Secunia updated its security advisory on Thursday for software distributed by the Mozilla Foundation, citing alerts issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) and Mozilla. "Highly critical" is the second-most severe alert rating on Secunia's five-point scale.

"Mozilla products contain a memory corruption vulnerability related to SVG processing," reads the U.S. CERT note issued on Wednesday, referring to the way in which the software handles imagery known as Scalable Vector Graphics.

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Turn Off Unnecessary Windows XP Services

Turning off unnecessary services in Windows XP can greatly reduce your exploit risk, while improving system performance. It's a good time to inject that often there are all sorts of "download optimizers" and other cute programs that vendors like to push on users. The first rule is "If you don't know you need it, you probably don't."

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FRANKFURT (Reuters) — Germany's Siemens AG has set a new speed record for electrical processing of data through a fiber-optic cable, it said on Wednesday, opening the possibility of cheaper Internet and data networks.

Siemens said in a statement it had processed data using exclusively electrical means at 107 gigabits per second—roughly two full DVDs per second—and sent it over a single optical fiber channel in a 100 mile-long (161-kilometre) U.S. network, the first time outside of a laboratory.

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Creative ships stylish wireless earphones

Already bought the one you love an iPod, Zune, Zen or somesuch? Want to know what to get 'em next? Ask Creative, and it'll suggest a pair of its new Bluetooth 'phones, among the least bulky wireless cans we've seen.

The SE2300 set comprises the usual transmitter dongle, which plugs into any player's 3.5mm earphone socket, digitises the audio stream and beams it to the 'phones. These are a pair of clip-on speakers connected by a cable - so they're not entirely wire-free, unlike older 'phones with a headband.

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Fender bender crooks swipe $190K in chips

Crooks in California stole $190,000 in chips after staging what investigators reckon was a planned car collision.

A silver Mazda car containing around 100,000 microchips was rear-ended by a white van in Santa Clara on Tuesday. But when the victim left his car to inspect the damage and exchange insurance details, one of the occupants of the van slipped into the Mazda (license plate 4NKV115) and drove it away. The van driver then drove off, leaving the victim stunned.

"We suspect, based on the fact that the cargo was so valuable, that these guys had been planning this and maybe had staked out the chip warehouse and waited for somebody to come by with a huge delivery," Santa Clara police Detective David Tanquary told the San Francisco Chronicle. "[The collision] was just a distraction technique to get him out of his vehicle."

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Vista Could Sap Notebook PC Battery Life

Notebook PC users who upgrade to Microsoft's Windows Vista may have to disable some of the new operating system's flashy graphics features to avoid seeing a decrease in battery life compared to when running Windows XP.

The drop will come from the extra power needed to run the high-end processors, graphics cards, and memory capacity required to support Vista. Microsoft has designed the new OS to deliver novel visual effects such as the translucent "Aero" windows on the desktop interface and to offer improved performance as a digital media hub. The business version of the OS was released last month, with the consumer version due out next month.

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Intel to Launch Core 2 Quad Chip in January

Intel plans to launch the third model of its four-core processor in January, continuing its efforts to stay ahead of Advanced Micro Devices on the next-generation processor family.

Intel will launch the Core 2 Quad chip for high-end desktop PCs during the CES trade show in Las Vegas the week of Jan. 8, industry sources said. The new chip follows Intel's launch in November of its quad-core Xeon 5300 for servers and Core 2 Extreme QX6700 for gamers.

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Vodka.com domain sells for $3 million

The billionaire Russian entrepreneur behind Russia's biggest vodka maker has paid $3 million to acquire the vodka.com domain, part of a bid to expand into the U.S. market, a broker said on Thursday.

Sedo.com, the Web domain brokering unit that is part of Germany's United Internet AG, said it had acted as the sales agent in the deal.

Conglomerate Russian Standard, controlled by Roustam Tariko, paid $3 million to an undisclosed seller in a deal completed December 4, according to a Sedo.com spokesman. A New York-based spokeswoman for Russian Standard confirmed the $3 million price tag.
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Oceans could rise by nearly 5 feet by 2100

The world's oceans may rise by up to 140 centimeters (4 feet 7 inches) by 2100 due to global warming, a faster than expected increase that could threaten low-lying coasts from Florida to Bangladesh, a researcher said on Thursday.

"The possibility of a faster sea level rise needs to be considered when planning adaptation measures such as coastal defenses," Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research wrote in the journal Science.

His study, based on air temperatures and past sea level changes rather than computer models, suggested seas could rise by 50-140 cms by 2100, well above the 9-88 cms projected by the scientific panel that advises the United Nations.

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Oracle profit rises 21 percent in second quarter

Oracle on Monday posted a 21 percent rise in quarterly profit, helped by sales of business software licenses to the customers of acquired rivals like Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft.

Net income for the fiscal second quarter rose to $967 million, or 18 cents per share, from $798 million, or 15 cents per share, a year ago. Revenue rose 26 percent to $4.2 billion.

Excluding items, the company posted a per-share profit of 22 cents. Analysts on average were expecting the world's biggest database software maker to post a per-share profit before items of 22 cents on revenue of $4.16 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.
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Skype worm on the loose

Internet security firm Websense has discovered a worm that uses Skype to propagate.

Skype is best known for allowing subscribers to make free telephone calls over the Internet. The company has more than 7 million subscribers and was acquired just over a year ago by online auction firm eBay for $2.6 billion.

Early reports indicate that the worm sends messages via Skype Chat, an instant-messenging tool. The messages ask recipients to download and run a file called sp.exe.

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Opera adds security layer

Opera Software on Monday added another security layer to its browser that is designed to alert users in real time if the site they are visiting is legitimate or a phishing site.

In a move to extend the security features of its Opera 8 browser, the free Opera 9.1 update includes technology from digital certificate provider GeoTrust and phishing information clearinghouse PhishTank.
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Dell CFO stepping down in January

Jim Schneider, Dell's chief financial officer, will step down from his position by the end of January, while the SEC continues to investigate the company's accounting practices.

Donald Carty, the former chief executive and chief financial officer of AMR--the parent company of American Airlines--will replace Schneider, Dell announced Tuesday. Carty has been on Dell's board of directors since 1992 and chaired the audit committee, which is conducting its own investigation into Dell's accounting practices.

Carty will assume the title of vice chairman and chief financial officer, keeping his position on the board. He will officially start his executive duties on January 2, with Schneider staying on until the end of the month to help with the transition, a company representative said.

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FCC vote could speed up telecom TV

Phone companies looking to compete against cable operators in the TV market could get help Wednesday in their fight to streamline the video franchise process.

During its open monthly meeting, the Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on new rules that would make it easier for phone companies to secure local video franchise agreements, which spell out requirements for everything from equipment to environmental protections.

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Faster external drives arriving--slowly

Brace yourself: there are good odds another port will start popping up on PCs soon.

This one is for eSATA, an external version of the technology that's used to connect hard drives inside the PC chassis. Unlike USB and FireWire, eSATA (external Serial ATA) lets external drives communicate at the same speed as internal drives, so the technology would be welcome for those trying to back up digital photo archives or who need added capacity for storing digital music or recording video.

The big question for eSATA now is how widely and quickly it will catch on. But even cautious people in the industry are optimistic that, at a minimum, it will be built into higher-end PCs starting next year.

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Skype's Free Phone Call Plan Will Soon Have Annual Fee

The New York Times is reporting that Skype has said it would begin charging $30 a year for unlimited calls to landline and mobile phones within the United States and Canada. From the article:

"As a promotion, Skype began allowing its users to place free domestic 'SkypeOut' calls from their computers to traditional and mobile phones last May. At the time, the company said the promotion would extend only through year's end. The company is offering a half-price subscription to those who sign up before Jan. 31. Calls from one computer to another have been and will continue to be free."

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Microsoft pulls Mac security update

A security update issued Tuesday for the Mac version of Microsoft Office was posted in error, the software maker said. The company encouraged consumers to uninstall the patch, which is still being tested.

"Due to human error, they were accidentally published to the public Web sites before our full testing release process was complete," a Microsoft security official said Wednesday on the company's Security Response Center blog. "As soon as we discovered the error, we moved quickly to address it and remove the pre-release binaries from our public sites."

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Fujitsu prepares 300GB notebook drive

Fujitsu is planning to release a 300GB hard drive for notebooks, which it says will set a record for SATA (serial ATA)-based 2.5-inch drives.

The vendor argues that the capacity of these kind of drives is now so high that they can replace the need for 3.5-inch desktop PC hard drives, which traditionally have offered greater storage capabilities.

Fujitsu will utilize perpendicular recording to achieve the new level of 300GB. Its 2.5-inch drive, called the MHX2300BT, is scheduled for release in February 2007.

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Al Shugart, hard-drive pioneer, dies at 76

Al Shugart--the man who founded Seagate Technology, convinced his pet dog to run for public office, and favored Hawaiian shirts over business suits--has died at age 76.

The California native passed away at a hospital from heart failure Tuesday, a Seagate representative said.

Shugart played an integral role in the development of the hard-drive industry. He was part of the original team of engineers at IBM that developed the first hard-drive storage system, which came out 50 years ago this year.

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IBM to give birth to 'Second Life' business group

IBM will launch an official group in January to deal with Second Life and other virtual realms from which the company hopes to profit.

Virtual reality and other visual interface work is the next project on IBM's plate, Irving Wladawsky-Berger said in an interview at CNET's Second Life offices. Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM, led the company's response to earlier technologies that rewrote the rules of the computing industry, such as e-commerce and Linux.

"I have been playing a strong role in helping us start our 3D Internet and virtual-world efforts. We are launching a new EBO in this area in January--that is, an emerging business opportunity--much like we did with Linux and the grid," Wladawsky-Berger said Tuesday. IBM believes the virtual realm has potential for training, conferences and commerce, he said.

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Google unveils unorthodox stock option auction

Google plans to start an unorthodox stock options program in April that will allow employees to sell their vested options in an online auction, the search giant announced late Tuesday.

Traditionally, employees have two ways to deal with stock options: exercise (take ownership) of them once they have "vested" and sell them at the current trading price, and pay back the company for their so-called strike price (that's typically the trading price the day the options were granted), or hold on to them after exercising them.

This new, Transferable Stock Option program gives nonexecutive Google employees a third option: a secondary market of sorts managed by Morgan Stanley where preapproved financial institutions can bid on vested options. It doesn't apply to options granted prior to the search giant's initial public offering.

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Tunisia shares 'Star Wars' set

MATMATA, Tunisia — I have never been a "Star Wars" aficionado, to tell you the truth. The closest I ever came to appreciating the movie was singing along to the "Star Wars" ring tone on my colleague's cell phone.

That is, until I took a trip to the planet Tatooine itself — a real place in the middle of the north African desert, a well-kept secret of Tunisia.

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Sun puts 16 cores on its 'Rock' chip

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems, already an aggressive advocate of multicore processing, will try to stay a step ahead of the game by putting 16 cores in its high-end Rock chip.

With overheating capping chip speeds, chipmakers have been scrambling to improve performance instead by packing multiple processing engines onto a single slice of silicon. Sun got an early start with its UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" processor, which has eight cores, and it looks like Rock will keep the company a step ahead of the competition.

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The 10 Gadgets That Changed the World

Here is an excellent article on Wired which lists (in their opinion) the top 10 gadgets in the modern era that changed the world.

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Microsoft trying to find its voice

Microsoft is dipping its toe a little further into the world of telephony.

The software maker, which has high hopes that the convergence of voice and data networks will allow it to get into the unified communications market, is ready with its first test software for running business phone systems.

In June, Microsoft touted its plans for the market. This week, Microsoft is launching a private beta, which will allow about 2,500 people to try out its call-handling software, known as Office Communications Server.

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Study: Most Arctic sea ice could disappear by 2040

A new study says that the predictions that most of the ice in the Arctic could disappear by 2060 was optimistic.

A paper from the National Center for Atmospheric Research predicts that the erosion of the sea ice in the Arctic could begin to rapidly accelerate starting in 2025. By 2040 or 2045, roughly 80 percent of the ice in the Arctic could be gone. Only about 2 million square kilometers would be left, said Marika Holland, lead author of the paper. Two million square kilometers is about the size of Alaska.

"The ice is quite stable until 2025 and then, boom, it just goes," Holland said Monday during a presentation at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union taking place in San Francisco this week.

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Mozilla Ships Alpha Release of Firefox 3.0

Mozilla today hit an early milestone on the road to the next version of its open-source browser, but the final product is still a year away, developers say.

The Mozilla team released its first alpha release of Firefox 3.0 today, giving Firefox and Web application developers an early look at the next-generation browser. This release is not intended for regular users, not even those who like to play around with early versions of a product, Mozilla said.

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Doom celebrates 13th birthday

Doom, the game that defined the first-person shoot-'em-up category, turned 13 yesterday - an appropriate anniversary to mark the debut of the SCI-FI and horror-themed title. The game was made available to the public, via an FTP site, on 10 December 1993.

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Pirates Activate Copies of Vista Over Spoofed Server

Despite its best efforts, Microsoft's activation server gets cracked.

Despite all the talk surrounding its security and beefed up anti-piracy measures we all knew that it wouldn't take long for hackers to take a stab at Vista's activation scheme. Cracked copies of Windows Vista started flooding the internet soon after the operating system was released to manufacturing and ahead of its official release.

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