Congress urges peace talks in Net radio conflict

Slashdot It! Member of Congress expressed reluctance to intervene in a raging conflict over new Internet radio fees scheduled to take effect in scarcely two weeks, saying they hope Webcasters and the record industry can work things out.

The controversial fee decision by U.S. copyright judges earlier this year has prompted opponents--including large and small Webcasters, independent artists and record labels, public radio stations and listeners--to lobby for relief from Congress. So far, they've had some success, with nearly identical bills introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that would overturn the fee hikes.

But after hearing from both fans and foes of the new rules at a morning hearing here, leaders of the House's Small Business Committee admitted they were struggling with the best way to balance Webcaster concerns about bankruptcy with the need for fair artist compensation. They concluded that crafting a legislative fix isn't necessarily the best idea.

Through a quirk of history and politics, Webcasting rates and many other music-related licensing fees are set by a tribunal with members chosen by the Library of Congress, part of the legislative branch. That makes this area unusual among types of intellectual property: licensing rates for photographs, videos, movies, novels, and news articles are set by the free market, not the federal government.

Co-chairman Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) said it would be better for the parties to try to find common ground on their own because government intervention "often times (messes) things up even more than they already are."

Should Congress meddle? Not all of their colleagues, however, feel quite the same way. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) said in an appearance at Thursday's hearing that he firmly believes the government's Copyright Royalty Board has made a mistake that Congress may need to fix. He gave a pitch for his bill, called the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would level the royalty rates for Webcasters, satellite and cable radio broadcasters at 7.5 percent of their revenues. He did, however, say that he wouldn't object to the parties' working out their differences without Congress's help.

But many believe there's no way the bill will make its way through both chambers and to the president's desk before the fees kick in. Congress has been focusing on other hot-button topics of late, a weeklong July 4 recess looms, and no votes or debate are currently scheduled on the bill.

Inslee, for his part, said the "effort in Congress will continue and swell dramatically, because when those decisions are made to shut off Internet radio, whatever congressmen and women have heard to date, you're going to hear five to 10 times as much after July 15."

Outside of reaching a compromise on their own, another potential lifeline for the Webcasters fearing shutdown is a federal appeals court, which has been asked to delay the onset of the fees, but action there is also uncertain.

Thursday's hearing highlighted again the pronounced split over the need for the increased fees.

On one side are Webcasters, public radio operators and primarily independent, emerging artists and record labels, who argue that the changes will raise large Webcasters' costs by as much as 300 percent and small entities' costs by as much as 1,200 percent, effectively shutting them down. On the other side are arguably more established record labels and artists and SoundExchange, the nonprofit entity that collects the fees on their behalf, which argue the changes were the result of a fair, impartial 18-month proceeding and are necessary to compensate artists adequately in a digital age.

Some music industry representatives on Thursday urged politicians not to get lost in the Webcasters' rhetoric and protests like Tuesday's highly publicized "day of silence," in which a number of Webcasters shut off their normal music streams. After all, it is the 20 largest Internet radio operators, such as Yahoo Music, RealNetworks and Pandora, that are responsible for 95 percent of the royalty payments, they said.

Besides, SoundExchange has not been insensitive to the needs of small Webcasters, they argued. They were referring to an offer to cap the fees for those that fit into the "small" category--a move that the Internet radio industry rejected, saying it would effectively stunt its growth.

Opponents argued before the politicians that it's not just small Webcasters who will be crippled by the new fees. The three largest Webcasters alone are expected to have to pay more than a billion dollars per year, thanks to a requirement that they pay a minimum of $500 per "channel"--of which those services have thousands. A SoundExchange representative said Thursday that the group has offered to cap that fee at $2,500 per year, although it was not immediately clear whether that would satisfy the Webcasters.

Opponents who spoke at the hearing further argued that preserving as many Internet radio options as possible is in the interest not only of listeners, but artists, because it has given a voice to smaller names--like Joey Allcorn, a Georgia-based "classic country" singer who testified before the committee--who can't make the playlists of traditional radio stations. They also noted that Webcasters often provide listeners with links to e-commerce sites where they can purchase the albums they play, further generating publicity and revenue for the artists they play.

All Webcasters are asking Congress to do, said Bryan Miller, general manager of the indie rock Internet radio station WOXY.com, is to equalize the royalty rates required of comparable digital services. "We're not talking about (giving away) anything for free," he said.

Some people use the iPhone for charity purposes

Slashdot It! Clayman, a soft-spoken, bespectacled 21-year-old, graduated from the University of Chicago earlier in June and decided to spend a few days touring the Big Apple before starting his job as a consultant at enterprise software company SAP. He was staying in a youth hostel, exploring the city, when he walked by the massive glass cube of the Fifth Avenue Apple store and saw that the first person had already gotten in line to wait for the company's coveted iPhone.

Clayman has been involved in large-scale charity initiatives for some time, having once organized a charity stair climb at Chicago's Sears Tower--105 stories from the sub-basement to the summit--that raised $22,000 in donations for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. So he decided to change his New York tourism plans, hop in line, and use the experience as a way to support the nonprofit Taproot Foundation, which provides professional marketing and design services to nonprofits.

Waiting in line for days to be one of the first to obtain a pricey and highly desired piece of personal technology, whether it be the Windows 95 operating system, the PlayStation 3, or the iPhone, is arguably one of the ultimate expressions of Digital Age materialism. By turning that craze into a publicity initiative for charity, Clayman is putting a new spin on what could be thought of as an uglier aspect of the consumption culture.

He wasn't the only one who had the idea, though. A parallel sequence of events was taking place downtown, unbeknownst to Clayman. Johnny Vulkan, who works in product development for the new-media advertising agency Anomaly, was walking through Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood when he noticed iPhone advertisements outside the Apple store on Prince Street. "I thought, 'I wonder when the first crazy person is going to come out and line up?'" Vulkan said in an interview on Thursday morning. But like Clayman, Vulkan wondered how he could turn the media hype into a way to do some social good.

Anomaly, after all, handles the advertising for the AIDS charity Keep a Child Alive. Within a day, Vulkan decided that Keep a Child Alive volunteers would stake out the first position in the SoHo Apple Store's iPhone line, wait while wearing T-shirts from the organization, and "get our media moment and use it for a good cause," he said. By 7 a.m. Tuesday, he and several other volunteers had lined up. The organization began to solicit other recruits to sign up for three- to four-hour shifts in order to divide up the efforts, and soon there were about 80 people from both Keep a Child Alive and Anomaly who'd offered up their time.

Uptown at the Fifth Avenue store, Clayman's strategy for the Taproot Foundation is similar, but on a much smaller scale since he's more or less on his own. As soon as he gets his hands on the iPhone, he plans to list it on eBay and donate the profits that may incur from high demand. He'd never been involved with Taproot before, but admires its mission. "I chose Taproot because I thought it would be the best for New York," he said, citing its focus on urban legal activism.

Clayman's early spot in the line (second place) guarantees that he'll get some coverage and the occasional interview, and he's been wearing a Taproot T-shirt to publicize the organization. He's blogging about the experience, too. Additionally, the foundation has put out a press release announcing Clayman's intention to contribute the proceeds and spread the word about Taproot.

Sniffing wireless network traffic can tell a lot about you

Slashdot It! Simply booting up a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop can tell people sniffing wireless network traffic a lot about your computer--and about you.

Soon after a computer powers up, it starts looking for wireless networks and network services. Even if the wireless hardware is then shut-off, a snoop may already have caught interesting data. Much more information can be plucked out of the air if the computer is connected to an access point, in particular an access point without security.

"You're leaking all kinds of information that an attacker can use."

--David Maynor CTO, Errata Security

There are many tools that let anyone listen in on wireless network traffic. These tools can capture information such as usernames and passwords for e-mail accounts and instant message tools as well as data entered into unsecured Web sites. At the annual Defcon hacker gathering, a "wall of sheep" always lists captured login credentials.

Errata Security has developed another network sniffer that looks for traffic using 25 protocols, including those for the popular instant message clients as well as DHCP, SMNP, DNS and HTTP. This means the sniffer will capture requests for network addresses, network management tools, Web sites queries, Web traffic and more.

The Errata Security sniffer, dubbed Ferret, packs more punch than other network sniffers already available, such as Ethereal and Kismet, because it looks at so many different protocols, Graham said. Some at Black Hat called it "a network sniffer on steroids."

Snoops can use the sniffer tools to see all kinds of data from wireless-equipped computers, regardless of the operating system.

For example, as a Windows computer starts up it, it will emit the list of wireless networks the PC has connected to in the past, unless the user manually removed those entries from the preferred networks list in Windows. "The list can be used to determine where the laptop has been used," Graham said.

Apple Mac OS X computers will share information such as the version of the operating system through the Bonjour feature, Graham said. Bonjour is designed to let users create networks of nearby computers and devices.

Additionally, computers shortly after startup typically broadcasts the previous Internet Protocol address and details on networked drives or devices such as printers that it tries to connect to, Graham said.

And that's just the data snoops can sniff out of the air when a laptop is starting up. If the computer is then connected to a wireless network, particularly the unsecured type at hotels, airports and coffee shops, much more can be gleaned. Hackers have also cracked basic Wi-Fi security, so secured networks can't provide a security guarantee.

In general, experts advise against using wireless networks to connect to sensitive Web sites such as online banking. However, it is risky to use any online service that requires a password. The Errata Security team sniffed one reporter's e-mail username and password at Black Hat and displayed it during a presentation.

People who have the option of using a Virtual Private Network when connected to a wireless network should use it to establish a more secure connection, experts suggest. Also, on home routers WPA, or Wi-Fi Protected Access, offers improved security over the cracked WEP, or Wired Equivalent Privacy.

Microsoft ending Vista family discount

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Five months after its introduction, Microsoft is discontinuing a program that offered some Windows Vista purchasers the ability to buy additional copies of the operating system at a substantial discount.

Since Windows Vista went on sale to consumers at the end of January, U.S. and Canadian buyers of Vista Ultimate have had the option of buying up to two additional copies of Vista--albeit the Home Premium version--for an additional $50 apiece. The company had said it would re-evaluate the "Windows Vista Family Discount" after June 30.

In a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Microsoft product manager Nick White said the program would "sunset" as of 11:59 p.m. PDT on June 30.

"Around the time of the Windows Vista launch, we announced the Windows Vista Family Discount program to further persuade families to become early adopters of Windows Vista," White wrote. "We've been pleased with the response to the program, which has enabled thousands of multicomputer families to upgrade more than one PC in their home to Windows Vista."

The move immediately drew the ire of some users, who posted responses to White's posting.

"This really sucks," a poster by the username of Hartelc wrote on the site. "I thought it was bad enough that we have to pay $50 for an additional license to get a downgraded version of (Vista)."

White responded in a follow-up posting: "Sorry you're disappointed with the program and its pricing structure. This was a trial for us to see how people responded to the offer, and we've gotten lots of constructive (criticism) as to how we could make it better if we were to do it again in (the) future."

Another poster pointed out that the program Microsoft is ending falls well short of what Apple offers with Mac OS X, allowing up to five Macs in a home to use the same upgrade version of the Mac OS for $199. Apple has offered that option since 2002.

TV Colors With L.E.D.’s and Lasers

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Samsung Electronics America sells several high-definition TVs with light-emitting diode chips, which produce a far wider range of colors than the bulbs they replace.

HIGH-DEFINITION television sets grow ever more sophisticated, but the colors on many of the screens are still created the old-time way: with tubes or bulbs that give off white light that is filtered into primary colors and remixed.

Now, several manufacturers are replacing these bulbs with lasers and light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s. These lasers and L.E.D.’s do not beam white light, but rather its three basic building blocks: red, green and blue. Beams are emitted in a narrow band of wavelengths very close to those of single, pure colors, giving off the brilliant, saturated red of a blazing sunset or the shimmering, luminous blue of a rainbow.

Beam these three primary colors in varying intensities at the same spot on a television screen, and a palette of hues can be created in a wider range than in TVs without this technology.

The new lighting is already built into a handful of commercial TV sets. Last year, Samsung Electronics America, of Ridgefield Park, N.J., introduced its first TV with L.E.D.’s. This year, the company has added six more, all large-screen, high-definition models.

The L.E.D.’s within the sets, which are all rear-projection models, are made by Luminus Devices, of Woburn, Mass. They emit beams of red, green or blue light when current is passed through the semiconductor chips that house them. The L.E.D.’s are expected to last the lifetime of the TV, unlike the bulbs typically used in these rear-projection TVs, which must typically be replaced every few years at a cost of about $200 to $350.

Laser TVs, unlike L.E.D. models, are not yet on the commercial market, but several manufacturers have demonstrated them at trade shows. Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America in Irvine, Calif., said the company would show a large-screen laser TV at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next January. “It will spawn a new category for the premium end of the market,” he said.

The distinctive range of colors produced by lasers and L.E.D.’s may provide a competitive edge for rear-projection TVs, which have steadily lost market share to plasma and liquid crystal display models, said Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, a market research firm based in El Segundo, Calif.

ISuppli expects that 5.3 million rear-projection sets will be sold worldwide this year, making them the smallest segment of the TV market. In contrast, 74 million L.C.D. sets and 11 million plasma sets are projected to be sold, Mr. Semenza said.

Large-screen rear-projection TVs traditionally cost less than L.C.D. or plasma models with similar sizes of screens, but the rear-projection TVs are as much as 10 inches deeper.

Consumers may also appreciate the longevity of L.E.D.’s and lasers in rear-projection TVs, compared with the bulbs they are replacing. Rear-projection sets are typically lit by high-pressure white-light mercury lamps. “After a year or two, the lamp goes out,” Mr. Semenza said. “You spend $3,000 on the TV and then have to buy a light bulb for $300.”

L.E.D.’s and lasers offer a more efficient design. “With light bulbs, you have violent high-voltage arcs across the metal electrodes,” he said. “Eventually the bulb fails because metal from the electrodes is knocked off.”

For the first Samsung model with L.E.D.’s, viewers paid a premium of $1,200 above the price of a similar model with standard lighting, said Dan Schinasi, senior marketing manager for HDTV product planning at Samsung. “This year the premium dropped to $300,” he said, “and as the year goes on, we’re hopeful the premiums will shrink even more.”

The L.E.D.’s are in sets with screens of 50 inches (Model HL-T5087S, $2,299); 56 inches (HL-T5687S, $2,599), and 61 inches (HL-T6187S, $2,999), among others.

The sets use Luminus PhlatLight-brand L.E.D.’s. The red, blue, and green beams illuminate a Texas Instruments digital light processing chip where the image is created. This is a more direct method than starting with a white light source and filtering it into primary colors for recombination, said Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media, a market research firm in Norwalk, Conn.

“You start with pure spectral colors and mix them very efficiently,” he said.

Lasers promise an even wider range of colors than L.E.D.’s, Mr. Chinnock said. “The lasers produce extremely saturated colors — the red is very red.” In contrast, he said, the red in many displays has a lot of orange in it. Because of that limitation, it is harder to show the range of shades that the eye can see, for example, between red and orange.

LASER light may also help rear-projection sets become thinner. “You can create some different architectures in how the light is folded and managed inside the TV,” Mr. Chinnock said, “so that you could potentially get a rear-projection laser TV that’s 6 to 8 inches deep.”

One of the lasers widely demonstrated at trade shows is made by Novalux, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. “The lasers will be able to give more than 90 percent of the color range that our eyes can see,” said Jean-Michel Pelaprat, chief executive of Novalux. “That’s not available from plasma displays and L.C.D.’s, whose color gamut reaches only 40 percent and 35 percent, respectively.”

L.C.D. televisions, too, may soon be affected by the new light sources, Mr. Chinnock of Insight Media said. The next step may be to eliminate the cold cathode fluorescent lamps that illuminate the sets from the back.

“The idea is to replace these lamps with a laser or L.E.D. light source in the back, and get much better color saturation,” he said.

Mr. Schinasi of Samsung said the company was interested in lasers as a light source but was sticking with L.E.D.’s for now. “The L.E.D.’s are getting at least 30 percent brightness boosts every year,” he said. “If that continues, we might not need lasers even for the 67-inch and 72-inch screens.”

Mr. DeMartin of Mitsubishi said he was holding out for lasers. “The bottom line is that the L.E.D.’s can’t reproduce some of the truly deep greens and reds as well as the laser,” he said. “The laser can do this better.”

YouTube traffic surpasses rivals combined

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YouTube, which has had to pull copyrighted videos off its site after legal attacks by some big media franchises, has enjoyed a surge in U.S. audience share that leaves it far larger than the next 64 video-sharing sites combined, a survey found.

The U.S. market share of visits to YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion last November, rose 70 percent from January through May, online audience measurement firm Hitwise said in the survey published on Wednesday.

By contrast, visits to the next 64 largest sites tracked by Hitwise rose only 8 percent during 2007's first five months.

"As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50 percent greater than those 64 sites combined," Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott said in a summary of her firm's data.

YouTube's share of the U.S. online video market was 60.2 percent in May, according to Hitwise. Its closest rival, News Corp.'s MySpace Videos site, had 16.08 percent of market share, the survey of Web surfing habits showed.

YouTube's sister site, Google Video, held 7.81 percent, while Yahoo had 2.77 percent and Microsoft's MSN, 2.09 percent, according to the study.

Start-up Metacafe ranked No. 8 in U.S. visitors to video sites with 1.07 percent, Time Warner's AOL Media had 0.94 percent and Veoh was No. 10 at 0.86 percent, Hitwise said.

Viacom filed a copyright infringement suit against YouTube in March seeking more than $1 billion in damages and demanded that YouTube take down thousands of segments from its popular programs, including The Daily Show with John Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park.

A separate suit was filed in early May by plaintiffs including English soccer's Premier League. Both suits argue YouTube encourages massive copyright infringement to boost the site's traffic in the hopes of generating advertising sales.

Google has responded by saying that these lawsuits threaten the way people exchange information, news, entertainment and artistic expression over the Internet.

Many of the most popular YouTube videos come from so-called user-generated sources--the bedroom confessional produced by teenagers with cheap computer Webcams pointing at them is the archetypal format. The site's slogan is "Broadcast Yourself."

It also features unrestricted professional media programming like music videos, extreme sports feats like skateboarding, and politicians promoting their campaigns.

The Hitwise statistics track visitors to video sites, but do not capture whether or not visitors actually watched the video streams or embedded videos from these sites, she noted.

Prescott presented the data at the Searchnomics Internet industry conference held in Silicon Valley.

Mr. Bechtolsheim working on world's fastest computer

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Andreas Bechtolsheim plans to introduce his newest machine.

Today, at a high-performance computing conference in Dresden, Germany, he plans to introduce his newest machine: a supercomputer to be named the Sun Constellation System that will compete for the title as the world’s fastest when installation is complete this year.

“It is hard to believe that 30 years later I am still working on the same problem,” said Mr. Bechtolsheim, who is better known as Andy.

Between the milestones, Mr. Bechtolsheim, who is 51 years old, has designed a parade of computers that have continued to squeeze the most processing power or storage capacity into the smallest possible space. And, despite becoming one of the richest people in the world, he remains obsessed with designing ever more powerful computers. His new machine, which is currently being installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin, is the latest example of his trademark elegant and simple engineering. It is set apart from other supercomputers made from tens of thousands of networked microprocessor chips by Mr. Bechtolsheim’s ability to orchestrate the range of computing disciplines that are needed to create the fastest computers.

As such, he is the leading candidate to inherit the mantle of Seymour Cray, a famous computer designer who consistently designed the world’s fastest computers from the 1960s until his death in a car accident in 1996. “He is this amazing blend of artist and engineer and that reminds me of Seymour,” said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist and supercomputer user, who was an early customer of Sun Microsystems’ computers as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications during the 1980s.

Mr. Bechtolsheim’s 18-hour-a-day dedication to computer design is all the more remarkable because of his wealth. He has founded three successful companies in addition to being one of Google’s first financial backers. The initial $100,000 check he wrote to the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page is an investment now worth more than $1.5 billion.

None of that great wealth is apparent in the man who sits in a windowless conference room talking about supercomputing switching fabrics at a rapid-fire pace with his eyes closed and with one hand pressed against his face in concentration. A reporter who first interviewed Mr. Bechtolsheim in 1981 while he was still at Stanford, discovered last week that the computer scientist was still clad in Birkenstock sandals and still dressed like a graduate student.

Ola Torudbakken, a Sun engineer who worked for Mr. Bechtolsheim on the Texas supercomputer from his home in Norway, said it was routine to begin exchanging e-mail messages with Sun’s chief architect when it was 5 a.m. in California, then complete their conversations as late as midnight West Coast time when he was starting the next day’s work in Europe.

Since returning to Sun in 2004, Mr. Bechtolsheim has been appearing in technical settings, speaking about the problems impeding progress in the design of the fastest supercomputers. As supercomputers have shifted from custom processors to machines made from tens of thousands of off-the-shelf microprocessors, the design challenge has become how to permit the processors to share data needed to answer ever more complex scientific and engineering problems. Mr. Bechtolsheim has been critical of some of the biggest machines that have had high performance claims, but have performed poorly in real world applications.

Mr. Bechtolsheim thought he had found a solution to that problem by modifying an industry standard data switch, making it possible for any of the 13,000-plus Advanced Micro Devices Barcelona microprocessors to communicate with each other more than 10 times as fast as with existing switches.

Like Steve Wozniak, another Silicon Valley computer design luminary, Mr. Bechtolsheim became immersed in the world of computing in high school. According to John Fowler, the executive who runs Sun’s systems business, Mr. Bechtolsheim took a job in a machine shop while in high school in rural Germany. His boss asked him if he could build a system to make it possible to program an advanced milling machine. Mr. Bechtolsheim, constructed a computer and an operating system from scratch to control the machine. He then struck a licensing deal for his system which proved so successful that by the time he graduated from high school he was earning more than his father.

That led him to believe that studying computer science might be a worthy goal, Mr. Fowler said.

Before transferring to Stanford as a graduate student, Mr. Bechtolsheim attended graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University in 1976 where he joined an early project to build a cluster-based supercomputer. Mr. Bechtolsheim literally filed down plastic computer chip packages in order to make them small enough to squeeze into the design of an early system board, recalled Brian Reid, who was a graduate student with him at Carnegie Mellon.

People who know him well say that that persistence underscores his determination as a designer.

Mr. Bechtolsheim’s newest machine will ultimately be tested against his most powerful rival, I.B.M., in the $10 billion market for high-performance computers. I.B.M., based in Armonk, N.Y., now dominates the high end of the fastest computing ranks and expects to maintain that position when the newest Top500 supercomputer rankings are announced today in Dresden.

Indeed, I.B.M. will introduce a redesigned version of its BlueGene supercomputer, to be named BlueGene/P today at the conference, saying that the new machine, scheduled to be installed next year, will finally break the petaflop computing barrier — the ability to execute a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second.

Executives at I.B.M. are skeptical about the new Sun supercomputer, noting that the system is late to be installed. “Having done six generations of machines,” said Dave Turek, the company’s vice president of Deep Computing. “I have come to realize that very little goes right the first time.”

A number of Silicon Valley technologists are, however, betting on Mr. Bechtolsheim. “He’s a perfectionist,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, who worked with Mr. Bechtolsheim beginning in 1983 at Sun. “He works 18 hours a day and he’s very disciplined. Every computer he has built has been the fastest of its generation.”

Affiliates reviews

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Introduction

Summer is the perfect time for many things: vacation, picnics, camping, and spending time at the beach. Unfortunately, all this warm weather means that computers will not be running as cool as they normally would, and system stability can become threatened. Benchmark Reviews has recently tested the MaxOrb CL-P0369 from Thermaltake. Read on to discover if this product is a computer enthusiast and overclockers dream, or just another fancy fan with some heat pipes.

Thermaltake has been a longtime contender in the cooling solution industry, with new product being released as they make improvements over the older ones. For example, this MaxOrb cooler is a result of previous releases, such as the BlueOrb, which was in turn a revision of the GoldenOrb CPU cooler. Unlike the former products, the new MaxOrb is a lot more than just a tweaked design. Continue on to see the full extent of this redesigned cooler.

Features

• Six Independent Channel Heatpipe Cooling
  • Utilizes radial fins to generate smoother multi-directional airflow and reduce turbulence when fan is operating.
  • Creates open channels from the center to the outside to dissipate heat efficiently with cool air from all directions.
  • Utilizes multi-directional airflow to cool adjacent components such as chipsets and the surrounding VRM as well.
• Radiant Heat-Transfer
  • Six Independent channel heatpipes equipped on MaxOrb cover the entire surface of the heat source (CPU)
  • Heat is conducted tot eh surrounding fins very evenly through 6 independent circular heatpipes which provides swift heat transfer and maximum thermal dissipation.
• Extreme Silence and Maximum Cooling
  • VRFan Speed Control

Specifications

Socket: 754 / 775 / 939 / 940 / AM2 Dimensions: 143(L) x 144(D) x 95.2(H) mm Heatsink Material: Copper Base and Aluminum Fin Heatpipe: Copper Tube 6mm x 6pcs Fan Dimensions: 120x120x25mm Rated Voltage: 12V Started Voltage: 7V Power Input: 3.00W Fan Speed: 1300~2000 RPM Max CFM: 86.5 Max Air Pressure: 2.22mmH2O Noise: 16dBA ~ 24dBA Life Expectation: 50,000 Hrs Connector: 3 pin Weight: 465g

Read more at http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46&Itemid=47

Critical update for Intel Core CPUs

Slashdot It! A COUPLE OF WEEKS ago, we heard that Dell was dealing with a certain situation considering Intel dual-core MCW and quad-core KC marchitecture, and that the company was releasing urgent BIOS and microcode versions for its line up.

We learned that the affected CPUs are the Core 2 Duo E4000/E6000, Core 2 Quad Q6600, Core 2 Xtreme QX6800, QX6700 and QX6800.

In the mobile world, people with the Core 2 Duo T5000 and T7000 need to visit Microsoft's site, while the server guys will want to use motherboard BIOSes if they do not rely on Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The affected servers are Xeon 3000, 3200, 5100 and 5300s - or just about every model from the second generation of Core marchitecture.

Oddly enough, Yonah - 32-bit Core Duo processor - isn't among the affected cores.

We are assured that no product recall will happen, and that La Intella took all appropriate steps in order to minimise damage to its public image, because if a product recall happened, Intel's credibility would be ruined for good.

Anyway, if you have a Core CPU based machine, go to the link below to download the update. AMD processors are not affected at all, in case you were wondering.

Google Desktop Linux

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Google was set to launch a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop.

Google Desktop allows people to search the Web while also searching the full text of all the information on their computer, including Gmail and their Web search history. Because the index is stored locally on the computer, users can access Gmail and Web history while offline.

Google Desktop for Linux was written natively and uses Google's own desktop search algorithms, not existing Linux search applications such as Beagle, a company representative said. Only computers with x86 processors can use the software. It supports the Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, Novell Suse 10.1 and Red Flag 5 versions of Linux, and uses either the KDE and GNOME graphical user interfaces.

Although Google has released other projects as open-source software, where it can be freely modified and redistributed by anyone, Google Desktop for Linux is proprietary. The software was developed by Google's Beijing engineering team and is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.

Google also offers Linux versions of its Picasa photo-editing software, as well as Google Earth and Google Toolbar for Firefox.

Boeing 787's wings are very flexible

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Next May Boeing's scheduled to deliver the first 787, a new jet they're frantically trying to build right now, to All Nippon Airlines. The 787's been selling like gangbusters, putting Boeing out front, business-wise, versus its main competitor, Airbus. (Airbus, for its part, is working on the massive, double-decked A380 in a flat-out competition.)

Boeing's strategy with the 787 has been to make a light, efficient, smaller-scale jet to appeal to carriers concerned about costs. So among the other innovations, the company is making the wings out of carbon-fiber composite instead of metal. No one's ever really tried that before, so testing is critical. Here's the June 25 Aviation Week and Space Technology on that subject:

Boeing has completed static testing of a three-quarter wingbox, but engineers are still considering whether to limit testing of the full wing to a 150% load limit held for 3 sec. of to continue bending it to see when it breaks. "There's a raging debate within the engineering team to see if we should break it or not," says [787 General Manager Mike] Bair.

Breaking it isn't necessary for certification, but Bair says the wing is so strong and flexible that there's been talk that maybe it could be bend far enough for the wingtips to touch above the fuselage—or come quite close.

What the iPhone do not have?

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• Songs as Ringtones • Games • Any flash support • Instant Messaging • Picture messages (MMS) • Video recording • Voice recognition or voice dialing • Wireless Bluetooth Stereo Streaming (A2DP) • One-size-fits-all headset jack (May have to buy an adapter for certain headphones)

Stuff we already knew it didn't have • 3G (EV-DO/HSDPA) • GPS • A real keyboard • Removable battery • Expandable Storage • Direct iTunes Music Store Access (Over Wi-Fi or EDGE)

iPhone would not make a dent in Nokia's market share

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Nokia is headed toward 40 percent global-market share and Apple's iPhone won't make a dent in that, according to a U.S. distributor of mobiles and other wireless devices.

"Nokia's market share is on its way towards the 40 percent mark, and it has a superior standing in cheap, midrange as well as high-end wireless devices," Brightpoint Chief Executive Bob Laikin told Finnish financial daily Kauppalehti, in comments published.

Nokia, the world's top cell phone maker, is Brightpoint's largest customer. Nokia reported a global market share of 36 percent in the first quarter.

Laikin also said he expects that Apple's iPhone, set to go on sale Friday in the United States, will have only a novelty position in the market.

"Apple's iPhone will sell in the U.S. in the coming quarters maybe 1 to 2 million units. That is quite small, considering that perhaps 170 million cell phones are being shipped in North America this year," Laikin told Kauppalehti. Apple's phone costs $499 to $599, while many Americans wish to buy a device for $99, he said.

Discuss about this at http://chewontech.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?p=17#17

HP and Microsoft eying on supercomputer market

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Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard announced an extension of their long-running collaborative sales and marketing pact as they seek a bigger share in the growing market for supercomputers.

The two companies aim to give high-performance computers more "mass market" appeal by making them easier to deploy, support and manage. Enhancements will include work on Windows Compute Cluster Server that includes custom installation scripts and documentation aimed at making deployment easier. HP said there is now increased scalability of large clusters with the HP Message Passing Interface and InfiniBand drivers offering better performance in applications that require high-speed, low-latency communications.

Customers can "realistically expect to have a 64-node cluster deployed and running within two hours," HP said in a statement.

Earl Joseph, an analyst at IDC, said there will be "continuing strong growth, averaging over 20 percent a year, with (high-performance computing) standards-based clusters growing at even higher rates. End users are looking for easy-to-use systems and will likely go with vendors that can provide an easy transition from their desktop to (high-performance computing) servers," Joseph said.

IBM, for instance, announced that its latest Blue Gene computer, the Blue Gene/P, is capable of processing more that 3 quadrillion operations a second, or three petaflops. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.

And Sun announced the Constellation System, a high-performance computing platform that Sun executives claim will vault the company back into the top ranks of supercomputer manufacturers.

The influential Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, which currently has IBM in the top four positions, will be updated at the International Supercomputing Conference this week.

Visualization may break Vista's DRM

Slashdot It! Conspiracy theorists may link Microsoft Corp.'s abrupt decision not to remove restrictions on consumers virtualizing its Vista operating system to a Department of Justice agreement announced the same day or to a desire to jerk Intel Mac users around.

But the actual reason may be found in three little letters: DRM.

Vista's new digital rights management features enable movies or music files to be password-protected or made accessible only to authorized users for opening, viewing or changing.

Whether most users would call DRM a feature, however, is questionable. A close cousin to DRM technology, known as Windows Rights Management Services (which in turn is part of a larger category of technologies called Enterprise Digital Rights Management, or ERM), can help business users password-protect key documents and files, or assign the ability to open them only to trusted co-workers. But DRM's main purpose seems to be to help the Warner Bros. and Sony Musics of the world keep consumers from sharing movies and music. The entertainment industry claims that almost all blocked sharing is illegal; digital rights watchdogs argue that legitimate consumer uses are also blocked by such technology.

DRM is capable of blocking both overt piracy -- distributing movies via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks -- as well as other common scenarios that most consumers do not consider piracy, such as moving legally acquired music files from their desktop PCs to their notebook computers.

The problem is that virtualization, by accident, appears to break most of Vista's DRM and antipiracy schemes.

Virtualization software -- think VMware Inc.'s VMplayer, Microsoft's Virtual PC or Parallels Inc.'s Parallels Desktop -- allow computer users to boot one operating system but run a second one as a "guest" at the same time.

That can allow a user who has booted Windows Vista to load XP-only applications in a guest XP operating system, also known as a virtual machine (VM). Or it can let a user with an Intel Mac boot up the OS X operating system but also run Windows Vista or XP applications at the same time.

Microsoft's original plan was to announce on Tuesday changes to the contracts, known as end-user licensing agreements (EULA), for its Vista Home Basic and Home Premium editions. Those changes would permit buyers who use those editions to create VMs. The change was purely to the EULA; there is no technical limitation preventing knowledgeable users from virtualizing retail versions of Home Basic or Home Premium.

Microsoft allows only full retail versions of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate (as well as Vista Enterprise for big corporations) to run as virtual guests of a host PC. Vista Business and Ultimate cost $299 and $399, respectively. The simple change in Microsoft's license for the two cheaper editions -- Home Basic Edition and Home Premium Edition cost $199 and $239, respectively -- would have saved customers at least $60 and up to $200.

In addition, Microsoft planned to permit the use of DRM, IRM (Information Rights Management) and Vista's storage encryption technology, BitLocker, in a VM for any version of Vista.

Besides boosting flagging perceptions of Microsoft's overall virtualization strategy, the move would have made Vista virtualization much more attractive to a key and growing segment -- Intel Mac owners who want to run Windows software.

But at the last moment, Microsoft did a 360. Its explanation was terse: "Microsoft has reassessed the Windows virtualization policy and decided that we will maintain the original policy announced last Fall," said a spokesman in an e-mailed statement.

A perfect picture (of cross-purposes)

When a user creates a VM, the virtualization software takes a snapshot of the PC's hardware and then creates an exact copy of how that works in memory, according to DeGroot.

This ability to perfectly simulate the way the original PC ran (albeit more slowly than the original) is why VMs are such a useful tool. But a VM, once created, can be copied hundreds or thousands of times and ported over to radically different PCs without triggering the antipiracy and DRM schemes of most software or multimedia files, including Vista's. Those schemes raise red flags only if they realize they've been moved to another computer, DeGroot said.

Analysts say what probably happened behind the scenes is that Microsoft or one of its media partners decided at the last moment that encouraging consumers to use virtualization would, at least symbolically, be at odds with its attempts to enforce DRM.

Microsoft has more at stake than other high-tech firms, McGuire said, what with its partnerships with NBC, its Xbox gaming platform, its Media Center PCs and even its Zune music player.

"It's a very fine line that Redmond has to walk," McGuire said. "They have to answer to these companies if they want to have any hope of making the PC and their software the de facto usage model for multimedia."

The problem is that even if Microsoft -- and U.S. law -- insist it is still illegal to use virtualization to enable the sharing of software or movies or music, its antipiracy technology is powerless to stop it.

"It's absurd to expect that something demanded by a EULA is followed when technology and common practice permit otherwise," Sinnreich said. "Microsoft is banking on ongoing consumer naivete and goodwill. There will be a backlash against DRM in some not-so-distant future."

Would anyone have bothered?

Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy? Not anytime soon, say analysts.

One of the main obstacles is the massive size of VMs. Because they include the operating system, the simulated hardware, as well as the software and/or multimedia files, VMs can easily run in the tens of gigabytes, making them hard to exchange over the Internet. But DeGroot says that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself.

Online video recorders stoke new piracy concerns

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It took Brian Baker only five minutes to persuade a major U.S. television network that it needed his company's technology to protect their programs from Web pirates.

Using software easily found on the Internet, Baker, chief executive of Widevine Technologies, recorded a video clip stream from that network's Web site, stripped out the commercials and sent the company back the altered video.

The network executive's reaction? "Wow, we need protection now!" Baker recalled. "Major television operators are seeing their offerings re-posted on the Internet, often times with the advertising stripped out."

Media companies fear that video recording software will facilitate piracy and rob them of lucrative advertising revenue just as they are making more TV shows, movies and video available online.

Stream rippers, or software that records any online video and downloads it onto a computer hard drive, can be bought on the Internet these days for under $100. The technology is expected to move into the mainstream with the introduction of several new video players in the coming months.

"This is an application and development of great concern," said a major U.S. network executive, who declined to be identified. "This is a dramatic move in the wrong direction."

Media conglomerate Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google and its video sharing site YouTube demonstrates the lengths copyright owners will go to maintain ultimate control over where their entertainment ends up.

Three new recording video players are expected out before the end of 2007, with each company pursuing a different strategy.

RealNetworks' new media player, which will be available for public testing next week, allows users to record video streams with one click. It prevents a user from downloading video embedded with digital rights management, but it does not prevent the recording of all copyrighted content.

"The technology we built is a utility, it's a tool. The VCR or TiVo doesn't really understand where the stuff is coming from," said Jeff Chasen, a vice president at RealNetworks. "It's really up to the consumer."

RealNetworks and other media player makers see the software as a way for consumers to create a library of content they can view at a time that is convenient for them.

But media companies fear it could become a tool for pirates to widely distribute their entertainment and make money from it at their expense.

TiVo for the Internet Internet video start-up Veoh Networks unveiled a new product called VeohTV, a digital video recorder (DVR) for the Internet that can find and store material from nearly every site on the Web including the major networks.

Veoh contends that it does not violate copyright laws and records videos with commercials contained. Analysts said major networks may take legal action to prevent the company from showing their copyrighted content next to ads sold by Veoh.

Adobe Systems' new media player downloads video for offline viewing. Adobe, a leader with its flash video format, wants to hand over more control to media companies, allowing firms to serve ads and track video usage.

Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey said the media companies' reservations about the streaming video recorders demonstrates a lack of understanding. Smart companies will embrace, not shun, the technology, he said.

Seattle-based Widevine, which has or is close to deals with all the major U.S. networks, said its video protection technology is the answer for media companies.

Widevine, a survivor of the dot-com bust, encrypts digital content so that if the company's algorithm detects a user recording the material off the portal, it will stop the video stream.

The key, according to Widevine's Baker, is that the company's digital rights management technology ensures that commercials will not be tampered with.