Author: Serkadis

Intel’s effort to get computers in the hands of the world’s school kids is making good progress, based on the latest information from the chip maker.

In 2006, the world’s biggest chip maker started the program of creating low-cost laptops that could be used in classrooms, and Intel has outlasted some of its rivals in pushing the program forward. Now it has shipped more than 2 million units through local distributors in more than 30 countries, said Agnes Kwan, a spokeswoman at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

By comparison, One Laptop Per Child says it has 1.5 million units shipped and another million on order. Kwan acknowledged it is hard work. The company has to work with governments, local industry providers, and software companies. But resistance to the idea of putting computers in the classroom has melted away and there are more countries participating now.

Three new ones include Argentina, which will provide 250,000 Intel-powered Classmate PCs starting this spring in secondary schools. It is targeting 16-year-old to 18-year-old students in 1,500 schools across 24 states in Argentina. The Argentine government is funding the program, which is being administered by the United Nations.

Brazil’s Ministry of Education is providoing 150,000 Classmate PCs in a pilot program in 300 primary schools in 27 states. The rollout begins in the next two months. And in Turkey, the local government of Kocaeli will distribute 26,000 Classmate PCs to all fifth graders by the end of the school year. Intel is providing teacher training in all of the city’s 369 public schools.

Intel has three models that are operating system agnostic, and they include Microsoft’s Windows 7 software. The competition still includes rivals such as NComputing, which makes thin clients that attach to a master PC. With NComputing’s solution, one computer can power the monitors and computing for 10 or so students.

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Someone finally said it.

A security consulting firm that Google brought in to investigate an attack last month — the one that compromised the Gmail accounts of two Chinese political activists — told Computerworld today that they “believe the attack code was designed and launched with support from Chinese authorities.”

This explains the involvement of the U.S. State Department, which met with Chinese diplomats this week. The department is drafting a formal denouncement which will put the heat directly on Premier Wen Jiabao.

Mandiant, a security incident response and forensics firm based in Washington, D.C., worked with Google to reverse-engineer the attack. Carlos Carrillo, a principal consultant with the firm, spoke to Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer on Friday:

Carrillo was the project manager for the Google investigation. During an interview Friday, he frequently chose his words carefully, saying that there was much he couldn’t discuss because the work was ongoing.

“The malware was unique,” Carrillo said. “It had unique characteristics … it was … let’s just say it was unique.”

When asked if the code quality pointed toward Chinese state support, Carrillo answered, “I would say so.”

It now appears that for some weeks, Google may have had ample evidence that the Chinese government was behind the break-ins, and that the State Department confronted Chinese authorities with that evidence.

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Looks like the movie studios are beginning to realize that Netflix is racing away with the streaming market, and things are starting to change fast: hot on the heels of Warner forcing Netflix to accept delayed DVD rentals in exchange for better streaming terms, Disney and Starz are reportedly renegotiating their deal, and blocking Netflix is one of the terms. Most new releases on Netflix right now are part of the StarzPlay package, and the studios don’t get a cut, since they’ve already sold those rights to Starz. As we all know, the studios aren’t big fans of not getting a cut, so what Disney is trying to do is block Netflix from dealing with Starz and force it to license streaming rights directly — not the end of the world and certainly not impossible, but a move that has the potential to disrupt service and raise prices. As of right now, things are status quo and no one’s talking on the record, but we’ve got the feeling there’s a shakeout coming — stay tuned.

Disney renegotiating Starz deal, might pull movies from Netflix streaming originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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	Karel Navarro / AP
	Rescue dog Duncan peers between the legs of Peruvian firefighter Gustavo Villavisencio as they prepare to leave Lima for Haiti.

Rescuers from all around the world are converging on Haiti in the wake of this week’s earthquake – and not all of them are human. Finding survivors amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince is a job tailor-made for dogs and devices.

The search-and-rescue operation “appears to be unprecedented in scale,” Discovery.com reports.

Many of those teams, such as Virginia Task Force 1 and California Task Force 2, have been in this kind of situation before – for example, after the catastrophic Iranian earthquake of 2003 or the collapse of a Haitian school in 2008. But the magnitude of this week’s disaster is so great that rescue teams who have never before gone into an international operation are being pulled into action.

“This is an unusual situation,” said Debra Tosch, executive director of the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation.

We found an interesting little blub about a software program that converts images into music. Specifically, it “converts the RGB, Red, Green, and Blue, values of every pixel of an image and plays a 3 note harmony based on the RGB values. It reads the pixels from top left to bottom right playing a song a long the way.” According to señor willburns1 on his blog (link), “most of the time it seems like set a child loose on a piano but it is sometimes pretty cool.”

Intrigued, I thought I’d spice up this Friday afternoon with audio created from some of my favorite images, but alas! it was not to be. It seems there’s a patent on this technology, and Kenji Kojima, the creator of <a href="RGB MusicLab, was told to stop:

Dear people,
I was informed that I had to remove RGB MusicLab from the web site from a person who had a patent that enabling the interpretation of color as music. I have never heard it was a patent and believed it belonged to all humankind. However I have to obey the US law.

Kenji Kojima

Some samples are still online, if MIDI is your thing.

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It will be a long time before we understand all the ramifications of Google’s decision to cease censoring their Chinese services — and the cyber-attack on their corporate and user data that prompted that change of heart. The story is still confusing in parts (Sky Canaves at the WSJ clarifies some of the more muddled reports). Nonetheless some intriguing new details have emerged since the initial announcement — but they raise as many questions as they answer.

Reporting by the New York Times has fleshed out the implication in Google’s announcement that the attacks were co-ordinated, or at least conducted with the approval of, Chinese government agencies. And in a detailed analysis, Computer World writes that the security breach included an attack on Google’s internal intercept systems, used to comply with requests from United States law enforcement.

Security experts have long warned that systems designed to make compliance with lawful interception more convenient can also create security vulnerabilities of their own. By providing an attractive one stop shop for outside attackers, surveillance compliance systems by their very nature often override the secure compartmentalization of data.

Security breaches that involve lawful interception systems are not new (see the Greek mobile eavesdropping scandal in 2005), and we’re sure it will happen again. When a security conscious company like Google can get hit, it is a wake up call to all corporations about the dangers of hosting systems designed to snoop of their customers. What would the agent of a foreign power do with full access to Sprint Nextel’s convenient live web interface for GPS location data on its fifty million subscribers?

We know that Google was not the only company targeted by this attack: other names mentioned have included Yahoo, Symantec, Juniper, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical. We don’t know whether those attacks obtained proprietary information or personal user data. But users of these companies’ products are rightfully concerned and we’d hope and expect more public statements that clarify this important difference.

The Obama Administration is also reacting to the Google China news. Secretary Clinton was already booked to make a detailed policy announcement on global Internet freedom next week; the White House has already said it supports Google. But what does government support for a censorship-free Internet look like? Advocacy groups and think-tanks have long suggested that blocking Internet traffic at the border of a country may be a violation of WTO free trade agreements. Foreign Policy runs with the idea, and looks in detail at the idea of “Firewall Protectionism”.

If China were attempting to block the import of American tires, instead of American Internet media, would Americans applaud Goodyear and Congress for not putting up a fight against blatant WTO violations?

Reuters also reports that lawmakers are using the Google announcement as impetus for a proposed US law that, among other measures, would require Internet companies to keep records of requests for information from violating countries, and report them to the State department.

Will more United States government involvement in online free speech issues lead to greater international pressure on censorious countries like China? Or will it serve to aggravate US allies who have their own less visible systems of censorship, which as Rebecca MacKinnon notes, now includes traditional allies like France and Italy?

A deathbed divorce for Dennis Hopper? The cancer-stricken actor has filed for divorce from his wife of nearly 14 years.

The 73-year-old Easy Rider actor filed for divorce from his fifth wife, Victoria Hopper, in Los Angeles on Thursday. Hopper cites irreconcilable differences as the reason for the split. The date of separation was listed as January 12, 2010. Hopper, who was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in October, requests that both parties pay attorneys fees. However, the Crash star asks that spousal support be awarded to Victoria.

A family friend told The Huffington Post that Hopper is mentally incapacitated from the various medications he’s taking to ease the pain of his cancer.

“It’s truly a tragedy, and sadly it’s all about the money and who inherits what,” a source revealed to The National Enquirer this week. “This is about getting Victoria out of the will, nothing more, nothing less.”

Dennis married Victoria on April 12, 1996. They have a six-year-old daughter named Galen. Dennis is asking that the couple share joint custody

British Columbia, Canada | Watery Wonders

Strong currents surge through the narrow entrance to Seymour Inlet.

In the middle stands the small Tremble Island (also called Turret Rock), so called because it’s said to shake at peak tides when the current races past at an overpowering 16-20 knots.

One story tells how an early land surveyor chose to stay on Tremble Island during a strong tide but the island vibrated so violently that he lay face down, clinging to the roots of small bushes, stuffing grass into his ears to block out the noise.

The islands trees are covered in numerous signs, left by crews of ships that are trying to get in and out and had to wait for the tides. Some of the signs date back over 100 years.

A few folks sent in Andy Oram’s recent blog post that noted how countries like India, China and Brazil were gaining more power on the international diplomatic stage, and that could mean a pushback against more draconian intellectual property attempts. Brazil, China and India have all realized that, as developing nations, they often benefit greatly from reduced intellectual property regimes:

As I understand the argument, the institutions responsible for passing new rules respond to the most powerful countries. The US and Europe are on the decline in these organizations. All the countries that benefit from looser IP regimes–China, India, Brazil–are growing in economic strength and are finding themselves in more and more seats at the tables of the world’s closed economic institutions. For just one concrete example, look at the shift of responsibility in recent years from the G-7 to the G-20. The G-7 is a familiar set of countries that were powerful from the 1950s through the 1970s. The G-20 is truly diverse, bringing in strong economies from around the world (but still just the ones with some international economic clout).

I’ll believe it when I see it. While it is true that those other countries have a seat at the table, it’s still the lobbyists from the US and Europe that seem to be dictating the agenda. In recent years, we’ve definitely pushed increasingly draconian IP laws on those countries. So until we see more serious pushback (and Brazil is really the only major country I can remember that has been proactive on that front — India and China have appeared more willing to claim that they’ll move toward US-style IP rules) it’s difficult to believe this is really happening just yet.

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The “Busiest Penis In Sports Today” wants to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake. The Associated Press reports that 34-year-old PGA champ Tiger Woods plans to lend his help to the relief efforts.

The president of the Tiger Woods Foundation, Greg McLaughlin, tells the newswire that the golfer’s staff is currently evaluating the best way to help the Haitian people, devastated by a 7.0 earthquake on Tuesday.
The billionaire has been out of the spotlight since news of his sex scandal surfaced in December.

Rumors that Tiger would be aiding in the relief efforts surfaced after hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons Tweeted Thursday the golfer could spend upward of $3 million “sending a mobile hospital with 50 EMTs to go set up a triage.”

According to RadarOnline.com the sex-addicted ace golfer Tiger Woods is getting treatment at a top sex addiction program in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Scotland, U.K. | Horticultural Marvels

Snail-shaped grass mounds, twisting DNA helix sculptures and undulating waves of rhododendrons make up The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a thirty-acre garden designed by architecture theorist Charles Jencks and his late wife, Maggie Keswick.

Located at their private residence, Portrack House, near Dumfries, Scotland, the garden’s design is guided by the fundamentals of modern physics and, according to Jencks, brings out the basic elements that underlie the cosmos. From 1989 until Keswick’s death in 1995, Jencks and his wife, an expert on Chinese gardens, met with horticulturists and scientists in order to design a landscape that would bridge the worlds of art, nature and science.

Perhaps viewed as an unconventional approach to landscaping, the garden features a dizzying display of geometric fractals that all illuminate – or at least are inspired by – concepts of black holes, string theory, and the “Big Bang.” The garden features five major areas connected by a number of man-made lakes, bridges and other architectural works, including large white staircases and terraces that zigzag down a green hillside, representing the story of the creation of the universe.

Jencks continued work on the garden through 2007. Today, it is open to the public one day a year through the Scotland’s Gardens Scheme and helps to raise money for Maggie’s Centres, a cancer care foundation named after Jenck’s late wife.

Memphis, Tennessee | Miniatures

The Mississippi is the second longest river in the world, but in Memphis, Tennessee you can see it all in one short afternoon.

The River Walk is a 5-block long replica of the lower Mississippi river, from Cairo, IL, to New Orleans, LA. Each 30″ stride is equivalent to one mile on the actual river. Along your journey, you’ll revisit historical events and learn about geographical transformations.

The “1,000” mile journey concludes at the Gulf of Mexico, a one acre enclosure that holds 1.3 million gallons of water. There, visitors can enjoy a leisurely pedal boat ride around the Gulf area with the Memphis skyline in the background.

Larry King has landed the first interview with the mother and husband of late actress Brittany Murphy, who died on her bathroom floor Dec. 20. The interview with Sharon Murphy and Simon Monjack will air on CNN’s Larry King Live Wednesday, Jan. 20, the one month anniversary of the star’s death.

“You want to know what broke Brittany Murphy’s heart? Hollywood broke Brittany Murphy’s heart,” Monjack tells King in the emotional chat.

There’s a new wave of drama headed to the 14th season of The Bachelor.

Contestant Tenley Molzahn is pregnant!

Tenley, 25, drops the bombshell on lovelorn pilot Jake Pavelka in a preview of next week’s episode. Tenley, who works in the Admissions Office of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Huntington Beach, California was previously married, and has said on the show, “I haven’t dated anyone since my ex-husband….”

No word just yet who fathered the baby.

The pregnancy announcement comes just weeks after the revelation that contestant Rozlyn Papa, a 28-year-old single mother from Virginia, allegedly had an “inappropriate” relationship with Bachelor producer Ryan Callahan. Although Rozlyn denies it, Bachelor host Chris Harrison, as well as numerous other women in the house, insists Papa had sex with the married Callahan. Ryan’s wife has since filed for divorce.

The Bachelor airs Monday on ABC.

Filed under: Etc., Government/Legal, BMW, Mini, Earnings/Financials

BMW gave us the Mini Cooper, Mini Convertible and Mini Clubman. We’ve also seen the Mini Countryman, Mini Coupé and Mini Roadster. Well, how about a Mini roller coaster?

According to The Sun News, Freestyle Music Park of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, is operating a roller coaster with six-passenger cars that bear a striking resemblence to BMW’s Mini Cooper – make that a near exact copy. Understandably, BMW is less than pleased as the park’s owners don’t have permission to be rolling unauthorized knock-offs around the rails (likely pulling more G’s than the actual production models). Following an unanswered cease-and-desist letter back in November, BMW of North America LLC and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG filed a suit against FPI MB Entertainment Tuesday for trademark infringement and false designation of origin.

The owners of the park, who purchased it out of bankruptcy just last year, claim this is all just a misunderstanding. They understand BMW’s position regarding the “Round About” coaster and expect to work something out with the German automaker in the near future. BMW, on the other hand, is not only looking for the cars to be pulled off the track, they’re seeking damages, too. They had better get in line – there are reportedly more than a dozen liens filed against the financially-troubled park for unpaid services since July. Thanks for the tip, Mason!

[Source: The Sun News]

Report: BMW sues amusement park over Mini coaster originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ll be taking a long weekend in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day – a day that celebrates the legacy of the civil-rights leader and provides an opportunity to carry on his work through service. This weekend, thousands of Americans are contributing humanitarian services in Haiti, where millions are in need.

We have a lane smack bang in the middle of the city named in honour of AC/DC. A tribute, not just to the band, but to the cultural vitality of Melbourne and her 50 year history of innovative music.

You can’t help but belt out “It’s a long way to top if you want to rock and roll!” when you stroll past.

It’s going to be a lot longer to the top now.

The Tote Hotel has nurtured our musicians. It’s supported the newer groups, giving them exposure and gaining them fans. As these musos continued to charm audiences, their skills were sharpened and their talent blossomed. It’s hardly a surprise that Melbourne has been the Mecca for rock music since 1960.

Our live music venues have been the envy of other cities.

But knuckle-headed decision-making is out to wipe live music venues from Melbourne.

The Tote has to go. It’s been deemed ‘high risk’.

In thirty years of live bands the highest risk has been the inability to get to the bar for a drink. I speak as a former patron whose greatest horror was being trapped in the beer garden and having to walk around to the main bar via the street to avoid the hand-clapping crowd.

OK. I understand that alcohol and violence can go hand in hand. This puerile behaviour is considered par for the course in some of the city central nightclubs, much of it perpetrated by the security hoons.

Just because I’m an old age pensioner doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how young men behave when they throw down grog.

Violence is a serious issue, but one that has nothing to do with the Tote.

My Opinion

I had my say on the ABC about the Tote.

You can hear my comments here at ‘Long term Local defends the Tote’

What’s your opinion?

Spare a shilling for a glass of sweet sherry

If Patrick Bateman had a cellphone, he’d probably be rocking a Droid (with a Phil Collins ringtone, natch) after Verizon topped four of six major categories in Zagat’s debut Wireless Carriers Survey.

Verizon scored high marks in Overall, Reliability, Coverage, and Customer Service, leading me to believe that perhaps this survey was taken before their infamous $350 ETF. AT&T’s wide margin of victory in the Products category is likely due largely to the iPhone, while T-Mobile eeked out a win in Value, which, I guess it’s all relative.

But enough about winners! Let’s talk about Sprint. Dead last in three of the main six categories, not first in any of the extended sixteen. At least they get a Participant ribbon? [Zagat and Image via Consumerist]

Jimmy Kimmel’s biting spoof of embattled late night veteran Jay Leno was so popular that ABC’s airing an encore presentation of it! On Kimmel’s Jimmy Kimmel Live Tuesday, the comedian donned a salt and pepper wig and prosthetic chin to parody Leno for an entire hour. Even guest Chevy Chase got in on the gag, appearing on stage in costume as Conan O’Brien.

In case you missed, a repeat airing of Jimmy taking the stage as Jay will air this Monday, Jan. 18 @ 12:05 AM on ABC.

In related news, last night’s edition of The Jay Leno Show was downright brutal! Jay invited Jimmy to appear on the program’s question-answer segment, Ten@Ten; presumably to reassure viewers that there were no hard feelings over Kimmel’s spoof…..Let’s just say things didn’t go quite as planned. Kimmel viciously ethered television’s strongest jaw — on his own show — in support of fellow late night presenter Conan, who will likely be replaced by Leno as host of The Tonight Show next month.