Pc News

[Rasputin]

Digital downloads included in UK chart count-down

Digital album downloads will be included in the British album charts for the first time this weekend in recognition of the growing trend of music lovers to access their favorite tracks via this means.

The Official UK Charts Company said it had been running "test charts" since the beginning of 2006 after collecting digital album sales data since the early days of downloading.

"Digital album download data is significant and robust enough to be integrated into the main Official Albums Chart," said the company's Charts Director Omar Maskatiya.

In the first three months of the year, traditionally a slow sales period, music fans downloaded over 825,000 digital albums -- the equivalent of nearly 50 percent of last year's digital album market.

Tracking downloads so far this week, Morrissey looks likely to be the first number one album of the newly-integrated chart with his release "Ringleader Of The Tormentors" while Embrace's "This New Day" looks set to be the biggest-selling download album.

[Rasputin]

Europeans rush to register .eu domain names

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans rushed to sign up for .eu Internet domain suffixes on Friday, the first day for registrations by individuals, the European Commission said.

"The demand of European citizens and companies will show whether they believe in Europe," Commissioner for Information and Society Viviane Reding told reporters.

In addition to the .eu domain, each of the 25 member countries has its own domain suffix, as well as the familiar .com, .org and .int. names to choose from.

Reding said about 300,000 people had applied for the .eu suffix in the first hour on Friday.

European residents can apply by going to domain registrars listed at www.eurid.org, the Commission said.

The domain name has been open to businesses and organizations since December with more than 300,000 applications, of which 54,000 have been approved.

The Commission expects EURiD to register around 240,000 companies and organizations by the end of this year.

That figure is small compared with the 40 million .com domain names, about 10 million German .de names and .net with 7 million names, a Commission official said.

[Rasputin]

Protect Your Health Privacy

Electronic sharing of health information is still in the "Wild West" stage of federal regulation, privacy advocates say.

With Congress considering legislation to create a nationwide electronic health information sharing system, privacy advocates say the time for patients to make their voices heard is now. The privacy groups say federal regulations now allow patients' information to be distributed to more than 800,000 health-related businesses and government agencies without permission. Go here for some background on this issue.


"Right now it is the Wild West in health technology. You (health IT companies) can do whatever you want to do and sort of shoot 'em' in all of the little towns," says patient privacy advocate Deborah Peel.


But there are some steps patients can take to protect what Peel, a doctor and founder of Patient Privacy Rights,calls "the most sensitive data about us."

Ensuring Your Security

If a patient is concerned about privacy, says American Medical Association's Joseph Heyman, the most important thing to do is ask questions.


"If they're going to be sending your information over the Internet, you need to ensure that they are using an encrypted process," Heyman advises. The AMA has information on how this is done.


It's important to ask about the destination of information because some doctors use transcribing services overseas where companies do not have to follow U.S. privacy regulations, he says.


Also, ask insurers how they use the information they gather. Heyman says insurance companies often use personal information for administrative purposes like research on the quality of care provided by doctors and hospitals.


Patient Privacy Rights' Web site offers a downloadable letter that patients can take to a health care provider to request that access to medical records be restricted. Peel says they do not have to comply, but a providera??s answer will let be informative of how it uses medical information.

[Rasputin]

Disney to make TV shows available free on Web

Walt Disney Co.'s ABC Television will offer some of its most popular shows, such as "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," for free on the Internet in a two-month trial, the company said on Monday.

Advertising revenue will support the trial run on ABC.com, with advertisers AT&T Inc., Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble Co. and Universal Pictures already signed up.

"Commander in Chief" and "Alias" along with "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" will be available on the Web in May and June, starting the day after they are first broadcast.

Viewers will be able to pause and move between "chapters" in an episode but will not be able to skip ads that are technically embedded.

Disney is also launching a high-speed Internet channel for soap opera fans, called Soapnetic on April 17 for subscribers to Verizon Communications Corp.'s Internet services.

[Rasputin]

The Print Shop: Printer Makers Answer Your Urgent Questions

When I signed off last month, I asked for questions, suggestions, or gripes that I could take to the major printer vendors on your behalf. I've been overwhelmed by your feedback and received questions from as far away as New Zealand and Slovenia.

It quickly became apparent that, although I couldn't possibly include everything you were worried about in one column, some questions were more common than others. Accordingly, I've spent the last couple of weeks chasing ten of the biggest printer vendors for their official responses to your most asked and most interesting questions.


I'll kick things off with topics of special interest to business but also applicable to the rest of us: ink smears, legal-size paper support by multifunction printers, 64-bit driver availability, and wireless networking options. In the next column, I'll look at some of the photo-related issues: all-in-ones that print onto CDs or DVDs, minimizing photo edge cropping, and printing gallery-quality prints and slides.


Note that some questions and responses have been edited for brevity.


If you'd like to see what PC World thought of many printer models, click on any of the following links to see a list of printers we've reviewed from that company: Brother, Canon, Dell, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, Oki Data Americas, Ricoh, Samsung, and Xerox.

[Rasputin]

Queen Elizabeth sent first e-mail in 1976

Queen Elizabeth sent her first e-mail as long as 30 years ago, according to a list of 80 facts about the monarch released by Buckingham Palace to mark her 80th birthday on April 21.

No details of the e-mail were included, except that it was sent from a British army base in 1976.

The 40th monarch since William the Conqueror, she has undertaken over 256 official visits overseas during her 54-year reign and has received some bizarre gifts, the list revealed.

They included jaguars and sloths from Brazil, two black beavers from Canada, a grove of maple trees and 7 kg of prawns.

The queen traveled on the London underground for the first time in 1939 and attended her first FA football cup final in 1953, two experiences she never showed much appetite for repeating.

But dogs and horses were a different matter: she has owned more than 30 corgis in her reign, starting with Susan who was an 18th birthday present in 1944. Her first pony, Peggy, was given to her by her grandfather King George V when she was four years old.

The 80 facts are on www.royal.gov.uk

[Rasputin]

MySpace.com hires child safety czar from Microsoft

News Corp. is set on Tuesday to name a security czar to oversee child safety measures on MySpace.com, the popular teen dating and music site that has provoked an outcry among parents who fear they have not done enough to thwart sexual predators.

Hemanshu (Hemu) Nigam, now director of Consumer Security Outreach & Child Safe Computing at Microsoft Corp., will head up safety, education, privacy and law enforcement oversight programs for MySpace and other Fox Web properties.

The appointment is effective May 1, News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, the parent of MySpace, said in a statement.

The move is one of several responses MySpace and its owners have taken in recent months to respond to harsh criticism by parent groups, legal authorities and politicians.

Just last week, a U.S. Congressional committee held hearings on potential laws to thwart the sexual exploitation of children online.

MySpace, which began as a music fan site, has caught fire as the most popular online forum for teenagers to hang out and express themselves with peers. Largely a U.S. cultural phenomenon, MySpace now counts 69 million members.

[Rasputin]

Sony Unveils Vaio L Series Desktop PCs

Sony Wednesday unveiled its new mid-year PC line-up for Japan, including a new product family, the Vaio L desktop series.

The total line consists of 41 models. Absent are the Blu-ray Disc-based machines that are expected to go on sale in the middle of this year.


The new Vaio L desktop machines are all-in-one models in which the computer circuitry is built behind the monitor so the whole thing looks similar to a flat-panel television.


Sony debuted two main types: the LA series has a 19-inch widescreen display and wireless keyboard and the LB series has a 15.4-inch widescreen display and attached keyboard. The keyboard on the latter model is attached to the main body on hinges just under the display and can be folded up to cover most of the display when not in use. This is reminiscent of the Vaio W and M machines that Sony has sold in the past.

[Rasputin]

Beatles set to join online music revolution

The Beatles are preparing to sell their songs online after years of refusing to take part in the Internet music boom, according to testimony given by the head of their record company.

Neil Aspinall, a former Beatles road manager and managing director of Apple Corps, was a witness in the company's trademark lawsuit against Apple Computer.

He said that the company was digitally remastering the entire Beatles catalog, which would pave the way for selling the songs online.

"I think it would be wrong to offer downloads of the old masters when I am making new masters," he said in a written statement submitted to the High Court in London earlier this month.

"It would be better to wait and try to do them both simultaneously so that you then get the publicity of the new masters and the downloading, rather than just doing it ad hoc."

[Rasputin]

First Look: WordPerfect Office Offers More for Less

If you're tired of waiting for Microsoft's delayed Office 2007, consider this: Feature for feature and dollar for dollar, Corel's $300 WordPerfect Office X3 Standard tops the $400 Office 2003 Standard in every category.

All five principal apps--WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Presentations, Mail, and Presentations Graphics--are first rate. Leading the pack is the WordPerfect word processor. For many WordPerfect users, one feature puts the program head-and-shoulders above Word and every other word processor: Reveal Codes. This View menu option opens a pane at the base of the screen showing the document's formatting codes. For fine-grain control over a file's look and content, nothing beats it.

Compatibility Assured

You needn't worry about Office users' not being able to open and edit the files you create with WordPerfect Office. In WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Presentations, you're given the option of working in the mode of the program's Office equivalents (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, respectively).

[Rasputin]

First Look: Windows Live Search Offers New Tools

Google still gets raves for its stark design and simple search results, but frankly I think it's boring. So I give Microsoft credit for offering some interesting new features in its latest crack at Web search: the Windows Live Search beta.

Some of the changes in Windows Live Search seem a little gimmicky, like the slider that shows more or less text for each result, but others--such as an "infinite scroll" of results, scalable image thumbnails, and easy search customization--could very well make your everyday searching more pleasurable.


It's unlikely many people will abandon Google for this beta, which is very much a work in progress. Several times while I was testing the service using Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.5, and SeaMonkey (with the Mozilla 1.8 engine), the site simply refused to load.

Scrolling Results, Scalable Images

Of all the new features, I quickly came to appreciate Windows Live Search's ability to scroll through seemingly endless results. Still, in this beta the motion felt herky-jerky, as if it were advancing along notches on a gear, rather than smoothly scrolling down the Web page.


An added feature of more dubious value is the slider control on the top right of the Windows Live Search results that lets you view more or less text in each listing. Unfortunately, there's little difference among the three settings: Click to the left of the default to see only the page title and URL, or click to the right of the default to see a 'Search within this site' text box. When I tested it, searching via this feature sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

[Rasputin]

Fox will put TV reruns on the Internet: report

News Corp.'s Fox network has signed a six-year agreement with its 187 affiliated stations that will let it show reruns of its television programs on the Internet, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Thursday.

The revenue-sharing agreement allows Fox to make 60 percent of its prime-time schedule available online the morning after the shows air, the Journal reported.

The formula is complex, but stations essentially will get a 12.5 percent cut after costs, the paper also reported.

A News Corp. spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

Fox is the home of hit programs such as "American Idol" and "The Simpsons," and is the latest television network to take a shot at making its programming available online as more people turn to the Internet for entertainment.

Walt Disney Co.'s ABC television network announcement earlier this week that it will offer some of its most popular shows, including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," for free on an advertising-supported Web service.

[Rasputin]

Could a Patent Lawsuit Stop the Xbox 360?

An injunction that could disrupt the distribution of the Xbox 360 game console is possible because of a patent suit that Lucent Technologies has filed against Microsoft, according to attorneys who practice intellectual property (IP) law.

Lucent filed suit against the software vendor last month in a U.S. District Court in San Diego. The networking company, which currently is in the process of merging with Alcatel, says Microsoft has violated a patent it holds on the built-in MPEG-2 decoding capability of the console. At issue is patent number 5,227,878, "Adaptive Coding and Decoding of Frames and Fields of Video."


"I don't think there is any question there's an injunctive threat [from the case]," says Steve Akerly, a partner with law firm McDermott Will & Emery who focuses on IP.

[Rasputin]

Cell phones ready to start dialing for dollars

Forget about cash and credit cards. There's a new payment alternative for buying CDs, DVDs and other such entertainment pleasures -- your cell phone.

Online payment specialist PayPal, a unit of Internet auction giant eBay, has introduced PayPal Mobile to North America. The wireless version of its service enables users to buy goods and exchange money using their phones. Transactions are conducted by secure text message.

Music heavyweights Universal Music Group and MTV already are supporting the technology.

UMG will use PayPal Mobile to sell CDs by the Pussycat Dolls, Mary J. Blige and Daddy Yankee in direct-marketing initiatives. Rollout is imminent. And MTV plans to use it to sell basic merchandise from its Web store, including T-shirts and DVDs.

Other big-name media and entertainment brands, including 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, Bravo and the NBA Store, hope to drive similar impulse buys by offering items for purchase via PayPal Mobile.

[Rasputin]

First Look: Windows Live Search Offers New Tools

Google still gets raves for its stark design and simple search results, but frankly I think it's boring. So I give Microsoft credit for offering some interesting new features in its latest crack at Web search: the Windows Live Search beta.

Some of the changes in Windows Live Search seem a little gimmicky, like the slider that shows more or less text for each result, but others--such as an "infinite scroll" of results, scalable image thumbnails, and easy search customization--could very well make your everyday searching more pleasurable.


It's unlikely many people will abandon Google for this beta, which is very much a work in progress. Several times while I was testing the service using Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.5, and SeaMonkey (with the Mozilla 1.8 engine), the site simply refused to load.

Scrolling Results, Scalable Images

Of all the new features, I quickly came to appreciate Windows Live Search's ability to scroll through seemingly endless results. Still, in this beta the motion felt herky-jerky, as if it were advancing along notches on a gear, rather than smoothly scrolling down the Web page.