Pc News

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Tips & Tweaks: What's Up at DEMO

Our editor in chief, the illustrious Harry McCracken, attended the DEMO show. DEMO gives companies the stage--and six minutes each--to show their wares. I didn't attend, but that didn't stop the PR people from badgering me.

The one DEMO announcement that caught my attention was the one from JaJah. There's a way to use the company's call-for-free service on a cell phone. Catch up on how JaJah works by reading "Quick & Easy Free Internet Calls."

That's exciting for a lot of people. For instance, last year my Luddite brother-in-law and his technically savvy son gave up their landline phones. They use their cell phone exclusively to make calls--and pay through the nose for unlimited calling. Now they can use JaJah Mobile and save a bunch of bucks.

Inside JaJah Mobile
Once you register with JaJah and download a plug-in, you just place a call as usual. You don't need to use a calling card number, call a special phone number, or make the call from an Internet hotspot.

The first phones supported are based on the Symbian OS and Java, such as the Nokia N70 or Nokia 6630. Go to JaJah's site and see if yours is currently supported. If your phone's on the list (my hand-cranked Nokia 5160 isn't) download the plug-in that tells your phone to send long-distance or international calls through the JaJah network. You can change the settings to make only some calls, or all calls, go through JaJah.

The price structure is the same as with regular JaJah calls: free to other JaJah users, 2.5 cents per minute in U.S. and Canada, and slightly more expensive for international calls. Read the Mobile FAQ for more info.

Here are a few other quick takes from DEMO:

Web-Page Highlighter. I-Lighter is a cool way to highlight, grab, and save text and graphics from virtually any Web site and store it for future use. You can also add notes to a page. The tool is a free add-in for both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

DIY Web Sites. SiteKreator is a $15-per-month Web site creator and management tool for small and medium-sized businesses. The package includes hosting, and interfaces with third party systems such as PayPal, e-commerce solutions, Google Search, and QuickBooks.

Port Your Apps. RingCube's $30 MojoPac gives you a way to squeeze practically any application onto virtually any device that has digital storage space--USB flash drive, an MP3 player, or a cell phone. Take the device to another PC and run your application.

Dig This: Are you tired? Save the "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" for when you're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Otherwise, you'll never be able to wrap yourself around the brilliant (or perhaps crazy) concepts.

Harry's DEMO Reports
Widgetbox: little Web-based applets.
Portable XM Satellite: Sirius's seriously handy, walk-around radio.
USB Rechargeables: Moixa's AA batteries charge from your computer via built-in USB connectors.
Retrevo: Search engine for gadgets.
RealTime: RealNetworks' browser for Web-based feeds.
Wi-Fi Rabbit: The DEMO product destined to be in our next "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time."
'Dig This' Bonanza
I was looking for a spot to cook up a quick greeting card. But you know how it is--you surf and end up finding a bunch of other nifty sites, and end up killing an hour. Here's what I bumped into...

The Vinyl Record Generator lets you customize a 45- or 78-rpm record.
If you want a fancy seal, try the Seal Generator.
Need a warning sign? Generate one!
If you have something to say, use the Comic Strip Generator. The site supplies dozens of comics; you supply the text.

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Google Blog Gets Hacked

A hacker broke into Google's main official blog and posted a false message on Saturday, saying that the company had decided to cancel a joint project with eBay.

The intrusion marks the second time this year that Google's official blog has fallen into unauthorized hands. In March, Google staffers deleted the so-called Google Blog by mistake and someone briefly took control of the Web address.

Blog Carries Corporate Messages
In Saturday's incident, someone exploited a bug in Blogger, the Google Web log publishing service on which Google Blog is hosted. The hacker published a note riddled with grammatical and spelling errors that said Google had ended its click-to-call advertising project with eBay because it was "monopolistic."

The next day, Karen Wickre, from the Google Blog team, alerted readers about the false posting and said the Blogger bug had been fixed, without detailing the breach. The eBay project remains alive and well, she wrote on the blog.

The Google Blog is one of the company's main communication tools. As official corporate messages similar to press releases, its postings often trigger news reports, analyst recommendations, and investor decisions.

Incident Could Erode Customer Confidence
Key to Google's success is that individuals and organizations trust that the company will keep their confidential information safe. Public displays of security vulnerabilities erode that confidence.

Google should learn a lesson from Microsoft, which didn't put enough emphasis on security years ago and suffered an industry backlash until it got the problem under control, said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group.

"I don't think security issues have reached a critical point for Google, but it needs to get its arms around these kinds of things and put a face out to their customers to indicate it is devoting adequate resources to security," he said.

Google can expect attacks against its systems to rise, because the more prominent a company is, the more attractive a target it becomes for malicious hackers, Enderle said.

"If Google gets a reputation for not taking security seriously enough, that will do them quite a bit of damage," he said.

Google's Services
On the consumer side, Google keeps massive logs of search queries, a portion of which are directly linked to specific Google account holders who have given the company permission to track their search activities.

For consumers, it also stores personal information like e-mail messages, digital photos and calendar entries via a variety of online services like its Gmail Web mail service, Picasa photo manager, and Google Calendar.

Organizations do business with Google on various fronts, including to advertise online, analyze their Web sites' traffic, process e-commerce transactions, and implement enterprise search systems, all of which involve entrusting Google with sensitive data.

A Google spokesman declined to comment beyond Wickre's blog posting.

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IPTV Set-Top Boxes on the Way

Microsoft and several manufacturers have announced the availability of new Internet television set-top boxes with advanced system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs, responding to demands from network operators for home devices with embedded systems.

Cisco Systems, Koninklijke Philips Electronics, Motorola, and Tatung are offering SoC-based IPTV set-top boxes designed to meet the needs of carriers deploying the Microsoft IPTV Edition software platform, the companies said Tuesday in a joint statement.

The systems include chip sets from Sigma Designs and STMicroelectronics.

Integrated System Design
"The early set-top boxes were based on PC architectures but what carriers really wanted were set-top boxes with embedded systems," said Rudy Roth, senior director product strategy in Philips' consumer electronics telco division. "The new boxes meet this demand."

Integrated into the boxes are several components, including the demodulator, MPEG-2 decoder, video output, and the processor, according to Roth. Security components for Microsoft's software are also included.

In addition, the new set-top boxes are equipped with technology to enable DVD-quality video at speeds up to 1.5 megabits per second) over ADSL2+ lines, Roth said.

The fully integrated home systems are designed to help carriers roll out IPTV services more easily, quickly, and cost-efficiently, the statement said.

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Mobile Core 2 Duo Delivers Only Slight Performance Gains

Eight months ago Intel rocked the mobile processor world with its first dual-core CPUs, which in our tests outpaced a similarly configured laptop running on a single-core processor by 30 percent when performing two tasks simultaneously. Now comes Core Duo's successor, Core 2 Duo, with claims of even better performance plus 64-bit support. Should you be kicking yourself for jumping the gun and buying a Core Duo notebook earlier this year?

PC World tests indicate that you shouldn't sweat it too much. Whereas Core 2 Duo desktops racked up dramatically higher test scores than their Pentium D--based counterparts, notebooks got only a small performance boost from the mobile Core 2 Duo (formerly code-named Merom). Battery life for comparable products was similar.

The latest descendants of Intel's Centrino-CPU-and-wireless-chip-set combination, Core 2 chips fall into two lines: the T5000 line, which includes the 1.66-GHz T5500 and the 1.83-GHz T5600; and the T7000 line, which features 2-GHz (the T7200), 2.16-GHz (the T7400), and 2.33-GHz (the T7600) models. (Intel says that it will produce low-voltage and ultra-low-voltage Core 2 Duo CPUs for the smallest ultraportables by summer 2007 and the end of 2007, respectively.)

Core Duo vs Core 2
Like their Core Duo predecessors, Core 2 Duo processors have a 667-MHz frontside bus, a 945 chip set, and a 3945ABG wireless chip set. The two most significant improvements are the doubling of Level 2 cache to 4MB (in the T7000 line) and support for 64-bit processing. The latter brings Intel's Core 2 Duo up to par with AMD's Turion 64 X2.

We tested three Core 2 Duo--based notebooks: a $1906 Dell XPS M1210 equipped with a 2-GHz T7200 chip (the Best Buy in our ultraportable chart, page 60); a $2164 Gateway M685-E desktop replacement with a 2.16-GHz T7400 chip, and an all-purpose $1499 HP Pavilion dv6000t with a 1.83-GHz T5600 chip. The biggest performance increase over laptops with same-speed Core Duo CPUs was 7 percent--enough to shave a few seconds off day-to-day business operations, but nothing more.

No Big Battery Gain
In our tests, Core 2 Duo didn't affect battery life much. The Dell, carrying a 12.1-inch wide-screen LCD and a 9-cell battery, did best here, running for 4 hours, 23 minutes.

Core 2 Duo chips cost the same as Core Duos used to, so you can expect fire sales as Intel begins to discount the older Core Duo chips. In view of the modest performance gains, shoppers should think long and hard before paying a premium for a Core 2 laptop.

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GPS Capability Enhanced in Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007

Microsoft today announced improved GPS (global positioning system) functionality in a new version of its travel and mapping software.

Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 With GPS Locator includes a new receiver from Pharos Science and Applications, the SiRFstarIII, for mapping locations to GPS coordinates. The new GPS locator is ten times more sensitive than its predecessor in the previous version of Streets & Trips, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 With GPS Locator sells for $129 in the United States, while the standard version of the software is available for $40.

How It Works
To use the new locator, customers can plug the GPS receiver included with the software into a notebook PC's USB (Universal Serial Bus) port, after which they can view maps and travel routes in real time. Buyers who want to use the locator wirelessly can purchase the necessary Bluetooth dock or CompactFlash card adaptor directly from Pharos, Microsoft said.

Besides mapping routes for people traveling by car, Streets & Trips includes points of interest--such as gas stations, hotels, restaurants, and national parks--on the map, in case travelers want to stop along the way.

In a press statement, Helen Chiang, a product manager at Microsoft, said that better GPS capability in Streets & Trips will give users of the software more confidence that the journey they've mapped in the software is the correct one.

Pharos, headquartered in Torrance, California, sells GPS navigation tools and location-based services for mobile devices.

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Ballmer Describes 'Internet-Style Simplicity'

ORLANDO -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Tuesday all but dismissed Google's just-announced $1.65 billion purchase of video-sharing service YouTube as a waste of money.

But he also said that part of his strategy for meeting the challenge posed by the delivery of applications, often for free, over the Internet will be to give IT managers applications that work with "Internet-style simplicity" inside an enterprise.

Aiming At Google
Ballmer took questions from Gartner analysts at Gartner's ITxpo conference in here this week on a range of issues, including Tuesday's news that one of Microsoft's major competitors, Google, has agreed to buy YouTube. "If you look at most of the content up at YouTube today, it is copyrighted material," said Ballmer.

For all the chatter about how YouTube is all about home video, in the end people want to see things like replays of the recent 60 Minutes interview with former Hewlett-Packard chairman Carly Fiorina, Ballmer said.

"The people who create content professionally are going to want that distributed everywhere--they will want it distributed and found through us and Yahoo," said Ballmer.

Ballmer didn't spell out how Microsoft plans to combat Google on this front. But he said at another point that his company, even when it's not first to market on something, keeps at it, "working and working and coming and coming," he said. "The bone doesn't fall out of our mouth."

That comment brought laughter from a conference that has drawn more than 6000 attendees. ITxpo runs through Friday.

Customer Concerns
On enterprise issues, Ballmer, in a question-and-answer session with Gartner analysts David Smith and Yvonne Genovese, offered more overview than detail, while leaving some issues like licensing largely alone.

Microsoft licensing has been problem for one attendee, S-E Haugen, vice president of IT at Strohl Systems Group in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. "They need to get better on licensing," he said. "You can't address licensing in a short session, and it's definitely nothing he wants to talk about because it is a sore point. It's sold in so many flavors and fashions."

Haugen said he's been unable to get straight answers from resellers about licensing costs, such as the cost of a SQL license on a server with four processors. He said he has documented three different answers from vendors about what the charge might be.

Ballmer did talk about the delivery of software over the Internet, and about the company's own Microsoft Live product. But he stressed that "most people, for the foreseeable future, are still going to want to run enterprise IT as enterprise IT. While more and more enterprises will use Internet-delivered services, it's not going to switch over."

But he added that Microsoft software will have a "click-to-run characteristic" inside a corporation's firewall, meaning Microsoft Office, for instance, could run on a corporate server. "We absolutely believe [in] evolving ... to this kind of click-to-run Internet style simplicity," said Ballmer.

Anticipating Updates
Greg Barkee, director of technology at Providence Health Plans in Beaverton, Oregon, said it will be interesting to see where Microsoft and others take the Live concept. "We're still pretty fat-client-centric," Barkee said.

"Anytime you can improve speed [and] efficiencies--it's a good thing, especially in the enterprise," Barkee said. "From what we continue to see, Microsoft's products seem to get bigger, fatter, [with] larger disk space, larger memory requirements. I don't buy that it's getting faster."

On the issue of competition from free software on the Internet, Ballmer said, "The key for us is to be able to show sufficient value." He pointed to the company's software assurance improvements in its upcoming Windows Vista release.

On that latter point, Steve Mihalik, director of application development at American Greetings, agreed. "Microsoft's value to us is going to be the key to whether or not pay for it," Mihalik said.

Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman said he believes that one major change Microsoft will be making is bringing an end to big release cycles for products such as Vista and Longhorn. The company will deliver upgrades "in smaller packages more often," he said. "If they don't do it, they are in trouble. They can't wait five years to deliver a new operating system."

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Lotus Notes Goes Blogging

IBM has added enterprise blogging capability to its venerable Lotus Notes/Domino e-mail and collaboration software in an incremental update available now.

In Lotus Notes and Domino Version 7.0.2, an update IBM announced Wednesday, the company has added the ability to install log templates on the Domino database. With them, enterprise employees can create, design and update Web blogs working within Notes, said Alan Lepofsky, a manager in marketing intelligence and communications for IBM.

While consumers have had a choice of Web-based blogging services, building blogs within Notes gives enterprise users a secure infrastructure on which to produce either internal or external blogs, he said.

IBM already runs several of its employee blogs on the new Lotus functionality, Lepofsky said. One example is Lepofsky's own blog, as well as those from other IBM staffers: Adam Gartenberg, Jeff Eisen, and Steve Castledine.

Another new collaboration feature in the 7.0.2 release is the ability for users to publish feeds from any Notes application to most standard RSS readers, Lepofsky said. "Rather than having to check and see if something new has been updated in a database, you will have an update to your RSS reader that can automatically let you know," he said.

Notes Goes Mobile
IBM also added new mobility technology to Lotus Notes. For the first time, mobile workers can run Notes from a USB pocket storage device with a small-footprint version of the application that fits in 512MB of flash memory, Lepofsky said. When a user installs Lotus Notes 7.0.2, one of the options they have is to install the client directly onto a USB stick, he said.

Lepofsky said the feature should be a big hit with workers who travel frequently and may need to access their Lotus application on the road, even if they don't have their laptops handy. "This is a great addition to the mobile story for Lotus Notes," he said.

Also new in the 7.0.2 release is support for more operating systems The software can now run on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server R2 X64 Platform, Novell SUSE 10 Linux (32-bit and 64-bit versions), and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Sun Solaris, and IBM AIX, i5/OS, and z/OS.

Notes was last updated a year ago, when IBM released Notes/Domino 7

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Google Refines Online Apps

Google has integrated its formerly separate spreadsheet and word processing applications, giving them a uniform user interface and a unified document repository.

By creating a common platform, Google seeks to make it easier for people to switch between Writely and Google Spreadsheets, Google officials said.

The combined product, called Google Docs & Spreadsheets, is becoming available in a beta test form today.

Answering Users
Google made it easier to switch back and forth between these two hosted applications because it has learned from user feedback that many people use both to work on similar tasks, such as making lists and plans, said product manager Jonathan Rochelle.

The effort also follows from Google's recently articulated strategy to group its many individual online services into fewer sets, said product manager Jen Mazzon. It's likely that other products will join the Writely and Spreadsheets group, she said.

Google has been on a tear this past year, introducing new products and services at a dizzying clip, and its top executives have recently expressed concern that people are confused and can't keep track of them.

The integration of Writely and Spreadsheets should be seamless to users, the product managers said.

Noticeable changes will include a more Google-like interface for Writely, which Google acquired in March when it bought the creator of the software, Upstartle. Another change will be the single list for documents and spreadsheets, with a shared search box.

Users will also be able to publish spreadsheets and word processing documents to an HTML page, such as a blog, as well as share them with others in view-only mode.

Nudging Microsoft?
Google's Writely and Spreadsheets are widely seen as shots across the bow of Microsoft, which has ruled the office productivity market with its Office suite.

While Microsoft's Office is made up of large PC-based applications, Google's applications are hosted on its servers, a model many consider more attractive and less cumbersome for users. In addition, Writely and Spreadsheets are free, while Microsoft's Office isn't.

Although the Microsoft suite contains more applications, which pack significantly more features, industry observers see Google moving decisively toward a full suite.

Google has a hosted application for Web page creation, called Google Page Creator, which Mazzon acknowledged might make sense to include in the Writely and Spreadsheets set.

If Google does want to offer a suite to rival Office, it will need to add a presentation application similar to Microsoft's PowerPoint. Google's product managers declined to comment when asked if Google is planning to offer such an application.

In August, Google launched Google Apps for Your Domain, a suite of hosted collaboration applications for small and medium-sized organizations that includes its Gmail Web mail service, online calendar, Talk instant messaging service, and Page Creator. That suite is free, although a version for large organizations will be fee-based. It's not clear whether Writely and Spreadsheets will be included in it.

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Vista-Ready Products for the Holidays

Microsoft continues its efforts to inform customers that they can purchase products compatible with Windows Vista as soon as the operating system is available.

At the Digital Life 2006 Conference in New York on Thursday, Microsoft is expected to announce that more than 250 hardware and software products have received either the "Certified for Windows Vista" or "Works with Windows Vista" logos, and will be available in time for the holiday shopping season in November and December.

While Windows Vista was originally supposed to ship for consumers around the same time, Microsoft in March pushed back that release until January 2007. Business users should have Vista sometime in November.

Products tagged "Certified for Windows Vista" will deliver a premium Windows Vista experience, while those tagged "Works with Windows Vista" are compatible with the OS and will work reliably with it.

Partners in the Spotlight
Mike Sievert, corporate vice president of Windows Client Marketing at Microsoft, is expected to highlight Vista-ready partner products in his keynote at the Digital Life show.

Sievert also is expected to show products still undergoing the logo testing process. Those products will include Canon's HV-10 HD Camcorder, Nvidia GeForce graphics cards, Logitech's MX3200 Laser cordless desktop set and MX Revolution mouse, among others.

He also will highlight that ATI Technologies, Canon, Logitech, and Nvidia have products available that have already qualified for the Certified for Windows Vista logo, and other companies, such as Belkin, CA, Corel, and D-Link Systems will have Certified for Windows Vista products available around the same time Vista is available.

Decoding 'Vista Capable' and 'Vista Premium Ready'
Microsoft has been making a major push to have PCs and third-party products ready to run on and with Windows Vista once it ships. PCs labeled "Windows Vista Capable" and "Windows Vista Premium Ready" are already on the market thanks to a program Microsoft launched with hardware partners earlier this year.

PCs with the Windows Vista Capable logo can run lower-end versions of Vista, such as Windows Vista Home Basic. Meanwhile, Windows Vista Premium Ready means the machines can run the higher-end versions of Vista, such as Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate.

In addition to the partner product news, Sievert on Thursday also will announce that two key software features of Vista--Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player 11--will soon be available for Windows XP. IE7 will be made available to Windows XP customers via free download in the next two weeks, and Windows Media Player 11 will be available as a free download beginning October 24, Microsoft said.

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Dell Unveils Multimedia Printers, Displays, TVs

NEW YORK -- Dell today introduced a range of new consumer electronics products aimed at giving customers more choices for creating a multimedia experience at home.

Here at DigitalLife--an annual showcase for the latest in consumer technology, gaming, and entertainment--Dell introduced wireless-enabled photo inkjet printers, LCD TVs, a new flat-panel monitor, and a new projector. The company also introduced enhancements to its XPS gaming notebook to improve the experience of playing games on the system, Dell said.

What's New
New and updated products from Dell introduced at DigitalLife include:

the Dell Photo AIO 966 and Photo 926 inkjet printers, which can work either wirelessly or while connected to a computer;
the Dell W3707C and W3207C high-definition LCD televisions;
the Dell 1800MP projector and E207WFP (wide flat-panel) monitor combo targeted for gaming or for viewing Blu-ray movies or high-definition video; and
mobile and high-performance features in the Dell XPS Gaming Notebook, including the nVidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX notebook GPU, the ability to tune Intel Core 2 Duo processor performance, and Dell's exclusive XPS LightFX technology, which enables users to synchronize the system lights with supported music or games.
In addition, Dell updated its MediaDirect technology with what it calls "instant-office" capabilities. On Dell laptops enhanced with MediaDirect--such as the XPS line and some Inspiron notebooks--users can view presentations, calendars, and contacts, as well as play music and view photos and videos without having to start Windows.

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Palm's New Treo 680: Affordable, Media Friendly

NEW YORK -- Palm today announced a new series of Treo smart phones designed to appeal to "price-sensitive" customers. The company also announced the immediate availability of a new, free Google Maps application for Treos based on the Palm operating system.

The announcements of the Treo 680 series and Google Maps for Palm OS-based Treos came at the DigitalLife trade show here. Palm CEO Ed Colligan was mum on pricing, but said the Treo 680 would ship in November and would be "lower cost and easier to use than any other Palm." The new Treo is a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE handset for use in the United States and Europe.

The Treo 680 targets today's media-hungry consumers. It comes with music, video, and photo slide-show players, and Palm says for a limited time it will sell unlocked versions of the phones with a Yahoo music bundle that will include a 1GB SD Card, a stereo headset, and a 30-day free trial to Yahoo's music service. Colligan said Palm expects 20 or more carriers around the world to offer the Treo 680 by the end of Palm's fiscal year next June 1.

Fashion-conscious Treo 680 buyers will be able to choose from four colors: copper, arctic, crimson, and graphite. The Treo 680 has an internal antenna and is smaller and sleeker than previous models. The phone runs the new Palm OS 5.4.

New Mail and Chat Features
Other features include an enhanced version of Palm's VersaMail e-mail application (version 3.5), which allows for more robust syncing of e-mail and now contacts and calendars as well, the company said. Another update brings a feature that displays SMS text-messaging exchanges as "threaded chats," similar to instant messaging.

Among other bells and whistles is the ability to respond to an incoming call with a preset text message such as "I'm busy now." The bundled Dataviz Documents To Go productivity software now supports viewing Adobe PDF files as well as editing and creating Microsoft Office files.

The Treo 680 smart phone also can function as an MP3 player, and has an integrated digital camera, camcorder, and video player. It sports a 320-by-320 touch screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, and Bluetooth 1.2. The 680 comes with 64MB of usable memory, with expansion available via an SD Card. Palm says the unit's battery is capable of 4 hours of talk time and 300 hours on standby.

Google Maps for Treos
The new Palm OS-optimized Google Maps for mobile lets Treo users get directions, perform local searches, view satellite imagery, and receive traffic updates while on the go.

Users will also be able to save favorite locations and routes.

The application will work on the Treo 680, 700p, 650, and 600 smart phones.

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Translation Software Put to the Test

The U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) will deploy IBM's speech-to-speech translation software to help U.S. forces serving in Iraq better communicate with local security forces and Iraqi citizens.

The USJFCOM acts as the "transformation laboratory" of the U.S. military developing and testing out new capabilities and then recommending their use to the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. The unit is turning to IBM and other companies for technology to translate natural speech in real-time to make up for a lack of military linguists proficient in Iraqi Arabic.

How It Works
IBM announced Thursday that the USJFCOM will deploy IBM Research's Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator system, also known as Mastor.

Mastor combines work on automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding and speech synthesis underway at IBM since 2001, said David Nahamoo, chief technology officer, human language technology at IBM Research. Over the last few years, IBM has also worked closely on Mastor with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

When used in Iraq, Mastor will act as an automated bidirectional, English-to-Iraqi Arabic translator capable of translating more than 50,000 English words and 100,000 Iraqi Arabic words.

For example, a U.S. military trainer looking to work with an Iraqi policeman could speak English into a microphone hooked up to the Mastor system running on a laptop. The IBM technology would recognize his English speech, translate it into Iraqi Arabic and then vocalize that translation for the Iraqi policeman to hear and vice versa. Mastor's graphical user interface displays both the original and translated phrase. It also includes what IBM calls a "back translation" of the individual words the system translated, to provide an additional level of confidence to the original speaker.

Designed for 'Benign' Environments
Initially, IBM will deliver 35 ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook laptops loaded with the Mastor software to USJFCOM in Iraq later this month.

"The system is designed for a benign environment," Wayne Richards, deputy branch chief, USJFCOM capabilities division, wrote in an e-mail interview. "Its recommended uses are hospitals, training of Iraqi police and military forces in classrooms, and in secure training areas on force protection and civil affairs operations."

The USJFCOM had input into the English and Iraqi Arabic words Mastor has been taught to recognize, Richards added. The agency transcribed and translated conversations that reflected particular mission areas so it could capture specific words, terms, and expressions for use in developing translation libraries leading to improvements in the accuracy in Mastor's translation.

"The [Mastor] product is not ready for full deployment and is being put into the field in a controlled environment which will be assessed by the government; feedback will be provided to DARPA, who will use the analyses to increase the technical readiness of the system," Richards wrote. DARPA will use the feedback to help guide IBM in further research and development efforts to improve Mastor.

Background
IBM has previously worked on three other language versions of Mastor to varying extents--English-to-Mandarin Chinese, English-to-Modern Standard Arabic and English-to-Spanish--Nahamoo said.

The company's keen to explore other avenues for the technology and already has a relationship in place with a commercial partner, Sharp. The Japanese company is to introduce a Japanese-to-English translation PDA later this year that is based on some of IBM's technologies in Mastor, notably its speech recognition and its text-to-speech capabilities, Nahamoo said.

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New Walkman Players

Sony is packing its new Walkman digital music players with noise cancelling and other audio enhancing technology in its latest attempt to challenge the dominance of Apple's iPod.

"The strongest point is audio quality," said Hiroshi Yoshioka, corporate senior vice president of Sony and head of its Walkman division, at a Tokyo news conference.

Audio Improvements
Front and center of Sony's marketing will be built-in noise cancelling. The system is tuned to cancel out background noise in the 100Hz to 1kHz range like that often present on trains, aircraft, or cars.

To do that, the system uses a microphone to detect the noise to be cancelled out. On the new Walkmans, that microphone is in the headphones, which means listeners must use the supplied headphones for the noise cancelling to work. In a demonstration on Thursday the headphones did a good job of cancelling out simulated train noise.

The noise cancelling is something that really has to be demonstrated to be understood, Sony said, so it is planning to offer such demonstrations in shops across Japan.

Two other features, both of which are headphone independent, include "clear stereo," a system that better separates the left and right channels and stops audio bleed between channels, and "clear base," which improves the bass response.

Specs--and Limitations
The players have a battery life of 50 hours, and can display album art on a small color OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display panel. Listeners can search through their music by song name, album name, or artist name.

The players are compatible with MP3, Windows Media, AAC, ATRAC, ATRAC Advanced Lossless and Linear PCM audio files. However, they won't play Windows Media or AAC tracks encoded with digital rights management: That limits downloads of DRM-protected tracks to stores using Sony's ATRAC system.

The new players, which will appear in Japan later this month and in other markets later this year, draw on Sony's rich history of audio engineering. Sony is aiming the devices at music fans. As part of this plan it will promote them through sponsorship of a series of events linked with Japanese cable TV music channels.

The players measure 3.4 by 1 by 0.6 inches and weigh 1.7 ounces.

Pricing
The S700-series, which come with noise cancelling and an FM radio, will come in versions with 4GB, 2GB, or 1GB of memory. They will cost around $243, $192, and $151 respectively.

In comparison, the 4GB version of Apple's iPod Nano costs $199 in Japan and the 8GB version is $249. That might make the 4GB Walkman look expensive at first glance, but when the price of a pair of noise cancelling headphones is added to the iPod price consumers might find Sony's price more reasonable.

Sony will also sell two models without noise cancelling or FM tuner. The S600 series will be available in 2GB and 1GB capacities and cost $167 and $126 respectively.

[Rasputin]

Intel to Launch Quad-Core Chips on November 13

In a race with rival Advanced Micro Devices, Intel will bring its quad-core chips to market in a new line of Hewlett-Packard workstations due to be introduced on November 13.

HP sent out invitations to the event but did not specify exact models and prices. The computers will probably use Intel's planned Xeon 5300 chip, and will be designed to run high-end applications like seismic analysis and visualization technologies from Ansys, Autodesk, Landmark Graphics, and Parametric Technology.


The launch would mean that Intel brings quad-core processors to market before AMD, a crucial win in a year when Intel has made as many headlines for its layoffs and missed earnings targets as for its technology.

AMD in 2007

AMD plans to release its own quad-core chips in the middle of 2007, and claims its monolithic design is superior to Intel's plan, which essentially glues two dual-cores chips together. But without having any hardware to test, analysts are divided on whether this detail will significantly affect the chips' performance.


Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini defended the company's design at last month's Intel Developer Forum, saying that customers would care more about the pure speed and performance of their computers than about how the chips inside it are packaged.


Compared to the ratcheting of clock speeds in conventional chips above 3 GHz and 4 GHz, multiple-core chips can accelerate processing tasks in desktops and servers without drawing more electricity and generating extra heat. They can also handle more than one instruction set at a time, allowing computers to multitask more efficiently.


The game enthusiast market will be a testing ground for the first quad-core chips, as Intel has already arranged to ship its Core 2 Extreme version of the chip to 13 gaming PC vendors, including Dell, Gateway, and VoodooPC, Otellini said at the show. The company plans to ship the Core 2 Quad version for mainstream desktops in the first quarter of 2007.


In contrast, the launch with HP next month will focus on high-end users in the fields of digital content creation, computer-aided engineering and design, and oil and gas exploration.


One of the earliest users of quad-core chips will be the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. HP invited reporters to witness the technology at a November 13 press conference called "Quad Fest."

[Rasputin]

Microsoft Says Regulations Won't Delay Vista In Europe

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to its upcoming Windows Vista operating system to satisfy regulators in the European Union. Despite the changes, it will still deliver Vista on schedule, it said today.

The company had earlier warned that Vista might be delayed in Europe because of regulatory authorities' concerns about the impact of the operating system on competition, but following what it described as "constructive dialogue" with competition authorities, it said today that it expected to release the software on schedule.

Authorities Remain Cautious

A European court is still considering Microsoft's appeal of an antitrust ruling two and a half years ago which found the company guilty of unfairly using its monopoly in desktop operating systems to strengthen its position in the markets for workgroup server and media player software.


The European Commission had expressed further concerns that Microsoft would use the launch of Vista to give it an unfair advantage in the security software market.


Microsoft has agreed to make a number of changes to Windows Vista in response to guidance from the E.U.'s competition regulator, the European Commission, the company said Friday.


It has also talked successfully with competition authorities in Korea, which have also raised concerns about Microsoft's business practices, and expects to ship Vista on time in that country as well, it said.

Worldwide Release

Microsoft plans to release the operating system on schedule, to its volume license business customers worldwide in November, and to other customers worldwide in January.


"We are excited to bring the security enhancements and innovative new features of Windows Vista to our customers and partners around the world, and we are committed to adhering to local law in every region," said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive officer, in a written statement.