Author: Serkadis

The industry is all a buzz with the latest entry in the “I’m the thinnest laptop” competition. The latest Dell Adamo is definitely a strong contender, at 9.99 mm at some points. Of course, that’s just the official figure. I would have tested it myself but I forgot my calipers.

The Adamo definately does the sleek, simplistic look well.  About two inches bigger in both directions than a sheet of paper and only 3.2 lbs, you could almost forget you were carrying this thing around. Although forgetting you have $1800 in your arms might not be the most desirable…

Dell replaced the usual manual cover latch with a heat-sensitive capacitor. Just swipe your finger across the front edge and the lock disengages. When you open the Adamo, the screen doesn’t so much fold up as the keyboard folds down. It rests in the crazy position you see below. And it’s not just for looks, kids. The open space under the unit allows for more effective airflow, meaning no more burning laps while you work. The keyboard has full sized, metal keys, and the angle didn’t interfere with my typing at all. The touchpad on the other hand, is a little on the small size. This thing has multitouch support, but even my small hands found trouble getting multiple fingers on there. Another thing I didn’t like was that when you adjust the angle of the screen, it moves the angle of the keyboard as well.

Now I’m sure the question you’re all wondering is how in the world does this thing sit on your lap? Its actually pretty comfortable, and you can type without fear of knocking it off your lap with each keystroke. However, it does only have two points of contact so its not as secure against people bumping into you as other laptops.

As for the device’s internals, nothing jumps out at the eye. The screen is 13.4″. Powered by a 1.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with integrated graphics and 4 GB of DDR3 RAM. You get 128 GB of SSD, no word on whether that is upgradable yet. Wireless comes in two flavors, 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1. The only ports on the laptop are 2 USB 2.0 jacks, audio, and a DisplayPort out. Ethernet, HDMI, and the like can connect through the use of an external dongle.

Another cool feature is the replaceable battery. But you’ll have to be replacing it every 2 and a half hours. Not very long for a laptop that is designed for maximum mobility, but at that size? Can’t beat it.

You can expect the Adamo sometime this holiday season. Windows 7 comes standard as well as the diamond-etched logo on the cover. If you’re into that sort of thing.

NEW YORK, Nov 5 (Reuters) – A Ropes & Gray lawyer’s arrest in an insider trading case has embarrassed the corporate law firm in the latest scandal to cast a harsh spotlight on legal partnerships that oversee billions of dollars in deals each year.

U.S. prosecutors alleged on Thursday that Arthur Cutillo, in Ropes & Gray’s litigation department, gave out inside information about deals by the law firm’s clients.

These deals include buyouts by private equity firms like TPG [TPG.UL], Bain Capital and Silver Lake, all of whom used Ropes & Gray as their counsel. Cutillo joined the firm in 2005 and his practice focused on intellectual property.

Cutillo is one of 14 people newly charged in the biggest hedge fund-related case in history. The charges come nearly three weeks after Raj Rajaratnam, billionaire founder of hedge fund firm Galleon Group, and five others were arrested.

“For a law firm to have this out there is very, very uncomfortable because there is this immediate sense that that’s a major black eye,” said an mergers and acquisition lawyer at a major law firm. “No law firm wants to see its name in the lights in this way.”

Ropes & Gray said it was deeply disappointed and that the allegations suggest “an extreme breach of this person’s duty of trust to our clients and to the firm.”

Ropes & Gray, which was has more than 1,000 lawyers and professionals, said it was moving quickly to protect clients and co-operating fully with authorities.

POLICIES AND PROCEDURES

Cutillo is not the first lawyer to be allegedly involved in an insider trading scandal.

His arrest comes just days after a respected Toronto lawyer apparently committed suicide, while his alleged accomplice pleaded guilty to U.S. and Canadian criminal charges stemming from a 14-year insider trading scheme.

The lawyer, Gil Cornblum, worked in the Toronto office of Dorsey & Whitney LLP. He was a partner there when Dorsey fired him in May 2008, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC alleged some trades took place between 1994 and 1998, when Cornblum was “articling” in a Toronto law firm and later worked in the New York office of Sullivan & Cromwell.

One of the defendants in the case unveiled on Thursday, Michael Kimelman, is also a former Sullivan & Cromwell attorney, although he was at the elite New York-based firm for less than two years and left more than 10 years ago.

“Beyond policies and procedures, it’s fundamentally about the culture of the institution,” said John Reiss, global head of White & Case’s mergers and acquisitions group, without referring to any specific firm. “It’s the institution’s job to assure, quite simply, that people know not to communicate in any context private information.”

HUMAN NATURE

But mergers and acquisition lawyers at some rival law firms sympathized with Ropes & Gray’s predicament, saying the scandal could happen anywhere and clients are ultimately likely to see this as a one-off case due to a rogue employee.

“The policies are sufficient. It’s just human nature is what it is,” said Harold Gordon, a partner in Jones Day’s SEC practice. “It is virtually impossible to stop a rogue attorney from revealing client confidences if they are going to insist on doing that.”

These experts added that despite other recent insider trading cases involving corporate lawyers, law firms have enough policies and procedures in place and that such cases happen due to bad actors that no one can totally stop.

Indeed, one private equity firm said that a single rogue employee would not influence their decision to use the firm.

A spokesman for Ropes & Gray declined to comment further.

In a sign that it is business as usual for now, the firm advised TPG and Canada Pension Fund on a $4 billion buyout of IMS Health Inc (RX.N) — the biggest leveraged buyout deal of the year — announced on Thursday.

By Paritosh Bansal
(Additional reporting by Megan Davies; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

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One of our connects already did one for us, but there’s nothing like having a handset (and a box) in your own possession. Also what our guy reported seems to be spot on: this thing is thinner, lighter, and a lot more pocketable than Sprint’s HTC Hero. The only other change, we’re told, is that the DROID Eris has a proximity sensor on the screen. We’ll put together something more formal in a little bit, but in the meantime check out a couple photos after the jump!

So you live in Kansas, and you want to learn how to snowboard before that big trip to the mountains. What do you do? Well, you can always wait to get up the hill to buy some lessons, or you can pick up a Thrustmaster T-Freestyle NW controller, and you’ll be carving down a half-pipe in no time.

Made from real maple, the T-Freestyle is designed to work as either a snowboard or skateboard controller, the wooden deck replicates that flex and resistance that a real board posses, allowing for a better gaming experience. Thrustmaster also built in their new “rolling motion board” technology, which allows the controller to move like a real snowboard or skateboard, without dumping you on your tail.

The Thrustmaster T-Freestyle NW should be available at your favorite retailer at the end of this month, for the quite reasonable price of $29.99.

While I guess there are still some people who think that sitting around on your computer isn’t “interacting” with other people, I would have thought that the myth that computer users are loners died off a long time ago. However, apparently we still need studies to debunk that. The latest, from Annenberg and Pew found that people who use social networks have a larger social circle than those who don’t. And, no, the study didn’t just count how many friends you have on Facebook, but found out from people the number of people with whom they felt comfortable talking over important issues. That number was noticeably higher for those who used modern technology more frequently. So again, even though I had thought the stereotype died off ages ago, here’s a bit more evidence that being an internet geek doesn’t mean you’re a loner.

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By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

In New York City today, Verizon Wireless rolled out new additions to its expanding Android and LG Chocolate phone families, while also delivering sneak previews of a new, consumer-friendly ruggedized phone called the Casio G’zOne Brigade (shown above).

Like its previously announced top-of-the-line Android phone, known simply as the Droid, the less expensive Droid Eris will be available for the first time in Verizon stores tomorrow — which is also when pricing will be revealed.

Verizon hasn’t yet set pricing or an availability date for the Brigade, but sales of the Push to Talk phone from Casio will start some time over the next few weeks, said Kris Dunlap, Verizon’s Push to Talk product manager, during a demo at a press event in Manhattan.

In keeping with its lower price point, the Droid Eris has a lower resolution HVGA display in comparison to the Droid’s WVGA screen, and a slower processor running at 528 MHz.

More significantly, the Eris currently runs Android 1.5, in comparison to the higher-end phone’s GPS-enabled Android 2.0. That means it won’t be able to handle Google’s turn-by-turn voice navigation until a 2.0 upgrade becomes available for the phone, officials said at the event.

Both Verizon Android phones, though, will come with the same Google applications suite and Verizon’s Visual Voicemail, and both will allow downloads from the 10,000+ applications in Google’s online App store.

Unlike the Droid, which is made by Motorola, the Droid Eris is manufactured by HTC. The Eris is similar in form factor to HTC’s Hero, a phone offered by Sprint, but it’s slightly thinner.

In another demo at the event, Lauren Southwick, a Verizon marketing manager, showed an app called Join the Band running on the Chocolate Touch. Verizon’s new touch-enabled Chocolate phone is strongly focused on music playback, with features that include an FM tuner, the ability to sync music from the phone to a PC, and a music player for MP3, WMA, and unprotected AAC and AAC+, for example. You can use a special button on the phone to upload photos taken with a built-in 3.2 megapixel camera to social networking sites like Facebook.

In Join the Band, you can play along with any song you choose on a virtual drum set or piano keyboard. I thought the piano did a fine job when I banged out “Chopsticks” on it.

The Chocolate Touch’s video-capable camera can take four types of shots: Normal, Panorama, Intelligent, and Facial Makeover. Southwick sent a Panorama shot she took at the event to one of my e-mail addresses.

Verizon’s upcoming Brigade, on the other hand, is the third in a series of ruggedized and water-resistant phones targeted not just at people who work out-of-doors, but at those who like to bike, camp out, fish, and do other outdoor hobbies in their spare time. Like the other two recent tough phones, it meets 810F military specifications for conditions such as vibration, humidity, fog, and low and high temperature storage, Dunlap said.

Verizon hasn’t readied a spec sheet yet on the Brigade. But the new horizontal clamshell device — which will be available to all Verizon Wireless users, not just Push to Talk customers — will be the first ruggedized phone from Verizon to come with a hard QWERTY keyboard.

Dunlap also pointed to its large display, estimating that the Brigade’s screen is about the same size as that of Verizon’s Voyager. The Brigade will come with a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash, video capture, and LED light.

The Chocolate Touch and Brigade phones also support Verizon’s V Cast video and music services and VZ Navigator turn-by-turn navigation, while the two Droid phones from Verizon do not. Chocolate Touch will be available from VZW starting tomorrow for $79.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

Thinking of buying a Logitech keyboard or mouse? Now would be a good time. You can get the opulent G19 keyboard for $150 (technically, big savings), a G9x for $75, a G500 for $45, or a Performance MX for $75. And everything’s got free shipping!

Seriously, Logitech makes some of the best mice in the world, and these are great deals. For gaming, either of the G series mice will do, but for regular tasks, multiple CG writers swear by the Performance MX (or at least its MX revolution cousin). The deals are all at LogicBuy, which must have hijacked a truckload of these things.

G19 Keyboard
G9x Gaming Mouse
G500 Gaming Mouse
Performance MX Mouse

Found all these over at Tom’s Hardware, where they’ve got a few more deals of this sort today.

Just a few weeks ago, in writing about the pointlessness of “derivative rights” in copyright law, I questioned the “example” of an answer key for a textbook, noting that there was no reason to have it covered by copyright:

But, to me, this seems ridiculous on a basic common sense reading. I can’t fathom how anyone can (at least honestly) claim that copyright really has an idea/expression dichotomy and then say that Section 106(2) makes any sense at all. What’s wrong if someone else wants to produce an answer guide to an original textbook? Why would it ever make policy sense to deny such a right? In most cases, you would assume that the original creator of the textbook would have a better understanding of the topics and the answers, so an “unauthorized” answer key is unlikely to be as valuable. But why should it be prevented? On top of that, if the answer key is just answering questions, then how could it be infringement? Those answers are accurate “facts” responding to questions. If an answer key is infringing, then wouldn’t that make student answers infringing as well?

Apparently, though, others don’t agree — and they’re the folks who make the rules. Michael Scott points us to the news that a court has ruled that answers to a textbook questions are a derivative work, and someone who was selling such answers online was infringing on the copyright of the textbook publisher. This still makes no sense to me. First, there’s no “copying.” Second, isn’t answering a question a “factual” statement? How can answering a question be copyright infringement? From a policy and common sense perspective it makes no sense. But, that’s what you get with the way copyright law is these days. It’s not about the incentive to create, but about stifling competition and free speech. In the meantime, I can’t wait to see the next student sued for copyright infringement for answering his homework questions.

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Google has quietly gotten rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a thread featuring an explanation from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa.

"We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true," says Moskwa. "We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

Search marketers are wondering why Google tells people not to focus on PageRank and removes it from Webmaster Tools, but still keeps it in the Google Toolbar. "Back in 2007, Google wanted feedback on removing PageRank from the Toolbar," says Schwartz. "I felt it was a good idea but the idea died out. Google cannot remove PageRank from the Toolbar, it is too much of their branding. No matter how much Matt Cutts and the Google search quality and webmaster trends team want it removed, I cannot see Google’s executives allowing it."

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim says the role of PageRank has been reduced to nothing more than a "comfort blanket for SEO Noobs." He adds, "I say this, with a high degree of confidence that most experienced SEOs pour over the data in Google Webmaster Tools, whereas those new to the industry likely let the toolbar be their only guiding light."

He also notes, however, that PageRank data can still be useful. For example, it can be a good indicator of a site’s behavior in Google’s index. "Any green means ‘go.’ No green, means there’s something to investigate," says Beal.

Despite this usefulness though, Moskwa pretty much closes the case on Google’s position on it. In fact, she even points to a FAQ page about crawling, indexing, and ranking, which says that webmasters shouldn’t even bother thinking about it. It also says that PageRank is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed, and ranked.

What are your thoughts on PageRank? Discuss below.

This morning, when the President gave his opening remarks at the Tribal Nations Conference, the day looked very different.  By 5:02 EST when he was scheduled to give closing remarks, it was clear that all Americans were rightly concerned with the tragedy in Texas, and the President took his time to give his thoughts and prayers:

Now, I have to say, though, that beyond that, I plan to make some broader remarks about the challenges that lay ahead for Native Americans, as well as collaboration with our administration, but as some of you might have heard, there has been a tragic shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas.  We don’t yet know all the details at this moment; we will share them as we get them.  What we do know is that a number of American soldiers have been killed, and even more have been wounded in a horrific outburst of violence.

My immediate thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and with the families of the fallen, and with those who live and serve at Fort Hood.  These are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk and at times give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis.  It’s difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas.  It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil.

I’ve spoken to Secretary Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and I will continue to receive a constant stream of updates as new information comes in.  We are working with the Pentagon, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, all to ensure that Fort Hood is secure, and we will continue to support the community with the full resources of the federal government.

In the meantime, I would ask all Americans to keep the men and women of Fort Hood in your thoughts and prayers.  We will make sure that we get answers to every single question about this horrible incident.  And I want all of you to know that as Commander-in-Chief, there’s no greater honor but also no greater responsibility for me than to make sure that the extraordinary men and women in uniform are properly cared for and that their safety and security when they are at home is provided for.

So we are going to stay on this.  But I hope in the meantime that all of you recognize the scope of this tragedy, and keep everybody in their thoughts and prayers.

Happy post-Halloween! Thanks for sending in your costumes and thanks, most of you, for following the rules. That said, I’m proud to show you the 11 best costumes in this line-up, as judged by all of us at CG. I added one extra because we just couldn’t bear to choose between the various Iron Men we saw.

Here’s how to vote:

The pendulum on the entertainment industry’s push to have countries force ISPs to kick accused (not convicted) file sharers offline via a “three strikes” policy keeps swinging back and forth. While there was some capitulation recently, with the EU Parliament group that was negotiating with the EU Commission agreeing to remove the clause claiming that internet access was a human right, Hephaestus was the first of a few of you to send in word that negotiations have moved back a bit in the other direction. The new agreed upon text says that internet access is a human right, and that anyone should have the right to defend themselves against being kicked off the internet. But… (and it’s a big one) if internet access is such a human right, why should anyone ever need to defend themselves? That’s because the new text doesn’t really mean what it says. It will still allow countries to force ISPs to kick people off the internet without judicial review. The only thing it adds is that people will be able to appeal after the fact. That’s really not that helpful.

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Google has branched out (or more accurately, built up) yet again.  Simon Hampton, Director of European Policy and Public Affairs, announced today that the search giant’s established a Googleplex in Brussels, Belgium.

Hampton explained on the European Public Policy Blog, "Until now, our small policy team in Brussels worked from temporary abodes.  From now on, you can find us at Chausse d’Etterbeek 180 1040 Bruxelles, right in the heart of the European quarter."

A satellite view of the address makes it look like a very nice, green spot – exactly the sort of place you might expect Google to set up camp.  Unfortunately, Street View’s not available in the area to allow for a closer inspection.

Details about price, square footage, and other relevant stuff are also lacking (although Hampton promised that bright, Google-y furniture is on hand, along with a number of game consoles).

Anyway, it would appear that this move signals a real intent on Google’s part to become and stay involved in European politics.  Hampton wrote, "We hope to make our new Brussels Googleplex a periscope for policymakers peering into the future of the Internet."

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Rumors are flying around the intertubes that Best Buy Mobile and Walmart are willing and ready to sell you your new Motorola DROID a day early. Grab your keys, hop in your mom’s 1986 Honda Civic, and go get em’ tiger. If you manage to commandeer a DROID today be sure to stop back here and let us know where you’ve had success, and you can always link to some pictures of your new toy in the comments. Otherwise, if you’re in the market for a DROID, are you going to be hitting a Verizon Wireless store tomorrow instead of DROID-chasing today?

Thanks, Brezy!

Read

Best Buy Mobile said today it will install Google mobile applications in the smartphones it sells at its retail outlets.

Best Buy Mobile employees will install Google Mobile App on all compatible smartphones through its "Walk Out Working" program which is a free in-store smartphone setup.

Google will announce this additional method of getting Google Mobile App on its Mobile Blog and provide more information on a new Google and Best Buy Mobile website scheduled to launch on November 9.

Users can already download Google Mobile App from m.google.com but the partnership with Best Buy will likely lead to more adoption of the applications.

Key features of Google Mobile App include:

•     One-click access to Google – search Google without having to navigate to the internet
•     Search by voice – speak your query in plain English
•     My Location – search for local businesses without having to type your current location
•     Google Suggest – search for suggested queries and businesses that appear as you type
•     Links to other Google apps including Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube

   

 "We know that consumers want smartphones and, increasingly, they want to use applications," said Scott Moore, VP of Marketing for Best Buy Mobile. "The challenge is that people still need help understanding what is available to them and how they can bring it to life on their device."

"This partnership between Best Buy and Google serves that role and will go a long way in bringing applications to more consumers regardless of what device, carrier or platform they use."

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Analytics For Mobile Apps

> Bing Gets More Mobile Features In The US

>Apple App Store Hits 100,000