Artificial Playmates for Autistic Children

By Elsa Youngsteadt
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 February 2008

BOSTON--Children with autism spectrum disorder are unable to sustain play, make-believe games, and fluid social interaction--at least with real people. But psychologist and linguist Justine Cassell of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that interaction with virtual peers releases hidden social skills in these children.

A virtual child is a cartoonish-looking, gender-neutral 8-year-old that appears on a TV or projection screen. When it interacts with a real child, half of the action takes place in the real world, and half in the virtual world. Thanks to sensors on the toys, the children can pass dolls back and forth between worlds, and the virtual child "watches" the real child as he or she plays. The virtual child can also speak in a recorded child's voice and even uses lifelike expressions and gestures.

At a press briefing yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), Cassell said that she and her colleagues originally developed virtual children 10 years ago, in part to study how literacy and conversation skills develop in normal children. But "every time I presented the work," she said, a parent of an autistic child would come to her and ask, 'Please, can I get a copy of this software for my child?' "

Indeed, the group's newest research, presented at a session this morning, demonstrates that interaction with virtual playmates may unlock social aptitude in autistic children. During unsupervised play with typical children, autistic children don't fill in pauses in conversation, nor do they ask or answer questions in a natural flow. But with a virtual playmate, autistic children begin to do all these things after as little as 20 minutes. In another experiment, the autistic children were given the opportunity to "become" the virtual child. When they hid behind a curtain and manipulated the digital child by means of a control panel, their virtual stand-ins interacted with typical children in socially sensitive ways.

Cassell says autistic children may be more at ease with virtual playmates because the virtual children are more predictable, which could make them seem less threatening. Preliminary brain scans show that typical people have to think harder to relate to a virtual human than to a real one, and Cassell speculates that the reverse may be true in autistic children. But will the autistic children's newfound social savvy translate to subsequent interactions with real children? "That's the million-dollar question," Cassell told Science.

Theoretical linguist Cynthia Zocca, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, who attended Cassell's presentation, enjoyed seeing the role of linguistics in creating virtual children capable of conversation. She says it's nice to see how the work is helping children in the real world.

Related sites

Cassell's Web site, with more on the research

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development on autism

Bidding Near End in FCC Spectrum Auction?

Bidding stalled on Tuesday in the closely watched auction of a piece of wireless airwaves that the U.S. government is selling, according to data released by the Federal Communications Commission. There were no new offers for the nationwide "C" block slice of wireless spectrum to top previous high bids totaling $4.74 billion. Tuesday's pause prompted speculation that bidding for the C block spectrum may have run its course, and that the most likely possible winner could be either Verizon Wireless or Internet search leader Google. Bidders' identities are kept secret until the entire auction ends, under FCC rules. The end won't come until bidding has stopped on all five blocks of spectrum up for sale in the auction, which will probably take at least another week or two. The $4.74 billion in bids for eight regional pieces of the C block on Monday surpassed a $4.71 billion offer made last Thursday for a nationwide package of the spectrum. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast said there were several possible scenarios as to which companies had bid on the C block airwaves. The most likely of those, she said, is that Verizon Wireless pushed the C block bids up to $4.74 billion on Monday in order to top an earlier bid by Google. It was also possible that the earlier, $4.71 billion offer was made by Verizon Wireless, and that another competitor is aiming to force Verizon to up its bid, Arbogast said. Bidding on the C block had temporarily stalled on Friday after Thursday's $4.71 billion offer. That bid exceeded a $4.64 billion minimum price set by the FCC and triggered a condition sought by Google that would require the winner to make the spectrum accessible to any device or software application. Analysts have said Google may drop out of the bidding after hitting the minimum price, content to let Verizon acquire the C block spectrum as long as the open-access conditions are guaranteed. The C block is one of five groups of 700-megahertz spectrum being offered. The top bids on Tuesday totaled almost $18.94 billion for all five blocks, raising more money than any previous FCC auction. The 700-megahertz signals are valuable because they can go long distances and penetrate thick walls. The airwaves are being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009. Other potential bidders in the auction that began January 24 range from entrenched carriers AT%26T and Verizon Wireless, to possible new competitors like Google, EchoStar Communications and Cablevision Systems. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group.

Cisco Sees Slowdown

Cisco told investors on Wednesday exactly what they didn't want to hear: that growth slowed dramatically in January and may not rebound for several months. The assessment from CEO John Chambers on the company's conference call sent Cisco's shares skidding by 7% in after-hours trading to a new 52-week low. Cisco's sales for the quarter that ended in January rose 16.5% to $9.83 billion, just ahead of Wall Street estimates, while pro forma earnings of 38 cents a share, or $2.4 billion, met the Thomson Financial consensus estimate. But Chambers said sales growth slowed to less than 10% last month, and while he said that may be an "aberration," he said it was prudent to assume that the "extremely challenging" environment "may continue for the next several months," so the company lowered its sales growth forecast to 10%. Wall Street analysts were looking for 15% growth in the current quarter. "We are seeing our U.S. and European customers being increasingly cautious," said Chambers, but he added that the company remains well positioned to meet its long-term growth target of 12-17%. The news followed other weak recent economic indicators %26#151; including an unexpected slump in the service sector last month that sent U.S. stocks plunging on Tuesday. Stocks lost ground again on Wednesday, as a Federal Reserve official's warning about inflation added to slowdown fears. JDS Uniphase was a bright spot, soaring 26% after beating estimates and raising guidance, and Multi-Fineline was up 37% on its results. Micron fell 10.8% on inventory concerns. FormFactor, CNET, Riverbed, Travelzoo, CommVault, Double-Take and Radisys fell on their results. The Nasdaq lost 30 to 2278, the S%26P fell 10 to 1326, and the Dow lost 65 to 12,200. Volume declined to 3.98 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.47 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 20-12 margin on the NYSE, and 19-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 69% on the NYSE, and 74% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 15-80 on the NYSE, and 41-129 on the Nasdaq.

Dell Support Offerings Get Customizable

The "Simplifying IT" beat goes on with Dell, as it announces another element in that initiative -- a less-complex array of support programs. The new Dell ProSupport program reduces its 10 previous service offerings down to two customizable packages. The packages -- ProSupport for IT and ProSupport for End-Users -- are for business/corporate customers. (Consumers will still have to stick with the India call centers for support.) While consolidating the number of support programs it offers, Dell offers some flexibility, allowing customers to configure their support program for their exact needs. "The standard model of break/fix for my computers no longer is working," Tim Mixon, senior marketing manager for Dell Global Services, told InternetNews.com. "We have people out there with varying levels of expertise and we need to take care of people based on how they use the technology." Ideally, this means immediate response in just a few hours or longer-term forensic support for nagging issues, depending on the options a customer selects. For example, imagine an IT professional, working in a mission-critical environment, knows a blown switch is causing a server to lag. In this case, a Dell customer who's purchased the "fast-track dispatch" option could get a switch sent out, pronto -- dispensing with the troubleshooting steps because problem is known. Support also now extends to commonly used applications, a first for the company. As a result, Dell offers a support option for customers likely to need help figuring out how to (for instance) add a pivot table in Excel. The new service options also include proactive support. In that case, if a customer finds that it repeatedly faces the same problems -- like crashing systems -- Dell support can dig into their environment to determine the underlying problem, Mixon said. The new contracts will not replace existing Dell service contracts, Mixon said. "The one thing we won't do is touch existing contracts, as most people have signaled they don't want to do that," he said. "Going forward, they can combine ProSupport. If they want to add new features like fast-track dispatch, they can add it." ProSupport is the latest idea to come from IdeaStorm, the Web site Dell set up to solicit customer feedback. "We got a lot of good ideas from IdeaStorm," Mixon said. In addition to revamping its support plans, Dell also said it is making its support more consistent globally. The company said it began finding that many customers had been receiving varying levels of assistance, depending on their location. The company said it's now working to ensure it offers customers a more consistent level of support across the globe.

Regulators Would Watch Any Google-Yahoo Tie-up

Google might be able to stymie Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo by forging a deal to run Yahoo's Web search operations or buy a minority stake -- but even that risks the ire of antitrust regulators. Microsoft on Friday offered to pay $44.6 billion for Yahoo, an ailing Web star that has been under pressure from Wall Street to either cut jobs or make more money on advertising. To fend off Microsoft's overture, a Yahoo source said on Sunday the search company would consider a business alliance with Google. Google, which has 58.4 percent of the U.S. Web search market, would probably be prevented by U.S. antitrust enforcers from buying Yahoo, which holds 22.9 percent of the search market, according to ComScore, antitrust experts said. "The probability that (a Google-Yahoo deal) would pass antitrust muster is a lot lower than the Yahoo-Microsoft deal would pass muster," said Luke Froeb, a former director of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Economics. Aaron Edlin, who teaches law and economics at the University of California in Berkeley, said Google could help Yahoo stay out of Microsoft's grip with a carefully targeted buy like "an investment in stock, 10 or 20 percent, a noncontrolling interest." Google and Microsoft are bitter rivals. Microsoft staunchly opposed Google's offer to buy advertising company DoubleClick for $3.1 billion last year, but U.S. antitrust regulators approved the deal in December. One alternative that Yahoo and Google appear ready to consider is to revive an old arrangement where Yahoo relied on Google to power Web searches on its site. Yahoo was Google's highest profile customer from 1999 to early 2004. Regulators would still have the option to stop such a partnership, though it could prove lucrative to Yahoo. Google has a three-year, $900 million deal to run searches for MySpace, the world's largest social network site. "Google and Yahoo have a longer history of working together than Yahoo and Microsoft," said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Oppenheimer %26 Company in San Francisco. "Yahoo has to make a decision about how much upside they make from working with Google as a partner versus selling out to Microsoft." While any deal between Yahoo and Google would reflect a hard-nosed business decision, many cultural ties join the two Silicon Valley Internet giants. Aggarwal says one big appeal of Google's search advertising system is that it generates 45 percent more revenue per search than Yahoo's own search system and at least that percentage relative to Microsoft searches. David Lisi, a lawyer with Howry, said that even licensing searches from Google could draw regulatory concern -- though not necessarily an outright rejection. "Technology having moved on ... now they're competitors," he said. "It's the kind of thing that regulators would take a look at. I can't tell you what they'd decide." Lisi said that Yahoo might consider breaking itself up but called that possibility "very remote." He added, "I think Yahoo is looking for the third alternative. Nobody wants to get into a bidding war with Microsoft but Yahoo will offer licensing," he said, adding that Google may try to convince a media or other company to partner with Yahoo. In this hypothetical situation, Lisi said that Google might say, "'We will sweeten the pot and be a strategic partner with Yahoo.' That might be enough."

Apple Offers iPhone, iPod Touch With More Memory

Apple on Tuesday introduced models of its iPhone and iPod touch devices with double the memory available in previous versions. The products come on the heels of Apple's launch last month of a service that lets iPhone and iPod users rent and download movies to watch on their devices. "There are a lot of users out there for whom there is never enough memory," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's head of global marketing for iPod and iPhone. "We've given people more and more content that they can put on their iPhones," Joswiak said. Apple, which said in January that it had sold more than 4 million iPhones since sales began last June, will now offer an iPhone with 16 gigabytes of flash memory, the kind that stores data on microchips instead of a spinning disk drive. The iPod touch, a wireless touch-screen device that plays music and videos, adds a 32-gigabyte model. Both of the new devices will sell for $499, Apple said. Apple will continue to sell its iPhone with 8 gigabytes of memory for $399. A 16-gigabyte version of the iPod touch remains at $399 and an 8-gigabyte model, at $299. The updated models come amid a slump in Apple's stock, due to fears that a U.S. recession could make consumers less likely to buy its iPods, Mac computers or other products. Asked whether Apple expected the new models to boost sales, Joswiak said: "We always put our products out there and hope the market likes them. The higher-capacity models have always done well." Apple shares were up 30 cents at $131.95 in morning Nasdaq trade. The stock has fallen more than 33 percent so far this year.

Ballmer Fills in 'Software-Plus-Services' Plan

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer this week detailed perhaps the most complete high-level view of the company's emerging software-plus-services strategy that it has presented so far. Ballmer's talk came in a "Strategic Update" presentation given on Monday to Wall Street analysts, which reiterated in part how the company's bid to acquire Yahoo fits into its overall business. The annual meeting is a regular event planned long before the company's record-setting offer for Yahoo last Friday. As a result, Ballmer spent most of his time describing Microsoft's longer-term efforts -- including how its products fit into its emerging "software-plus-services" push, and how the company intends to monetize each product category. More than two years ago, Microsoft began espousing its own version of the industry's burgeoning software-as-a-service business model (SaaS) (define). Unlike some competitors, Microsoft's software-plus-services plan does not -- at least not immediately -- transition the company to a strictly Web-based business model. Instead, it has chosen a route that uses the Web to offer some services that are available to users through a simple browser interface %26#150; like competitors' offerings. At the same time, it is also offering services "in the cloud" that enhance the power of rich clients such as PCs running Windows and Office. "When we talk about the transformation of our business to a world of software-plus-services, we're talking about everything we do transforming over the next several years to a world of software-plus-services," Ballmer told analysts. "Each and every one of these businesses, on top of a consistent cloud platform, transitions to have additional revenue and profit opportunities, based upon this transformation to the cloud," he added. Several pieces of the software-plus-services puzzle have already begun to emerge. For instance, in the area of Windows, the company is well underway rolling out its Windows Live Services products, which are free to users and funded by advertising. For corporate desktop users, however, advertising is not appropriate, so the company will monetize its offerings in that category as part of its Microsoft-hosted Online Services for Business, providing functions on a subscription basis. Introduced last fall, Microsoft's Online Services for Business are available to large enterprises with 5,000 or more seats. The offering features hosted versions of Exchange e-mail, SharePoint document management and Office Communications. In terms of core server capabilities such as virtualization, security and management, high-performance computing, and Web serving, Ballmer said those functions will be offered "in the cloud" %26#150; that is, as part of the company's growing online infrastructure. Those, too, will be offered on a subscription basis. "One of the toughest things for most companies %26#133; is actually to do the deployment of their servers, their datacenters, the propagation of applications to those servers," Ballmer said. "As we productize the cloud platform that I talked about, that becomes a subscription-based service that we can offer small companies, startups, larger companies, and you'll hear more about this opportunity and this investment over the course of the next 12 months." The plan resonated with at least one industry-watcher. "That is more detail than they've given %26#91;previously%26#93;, but it makes sense," Matt Rosoff, lead analyst for consumer products and corporate news at researcher Directions on Microsoft told InternetNews.com in an e-mail. "I don't think larger businesses would be willing to accept advertising in hosted applications, and a lot of them are already on multiyear license agreements with Microsoft, so moving to a subscription basis wouldn't be too jarring," Rosoff said. For small and medium-sized businesses and consumers, Microsoft is introducing products such as Office Live Workspace, which is free but ad-supported. It's also offering Office Live Small Business, which is free for a basic version, but more feature-packed editions are subscription-based. Also targeting small and medium-sized businesses are Microsoft's plans for offering its own hosted versions of its Dynamics-branded business management products -- notably, Dynamics CRM Live, an upcoming version of CRM 4.0 hosted by the Redmond, Wash. software colossus itself. Normally, CRM 4.0, which just shipped, is available for customers to self-host or for partners who will provide the hosting. CRM Live is currently in beta test and is scheduled for general availability during the first half of 2008. It will be available on a subscription basis. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Live consumer-oriented offerings will tend to remain advertising-funded. These include Live Search, which competes with Google and Yahoo's search engines. Of course, Microsoft's MSN portal and its aQuantive acquisition also support the company's ad-driven offerings. Though Ballmer didn't mention Yahoo's products specifically, Yahoo's search engine and advertising technologies would likely fall under this category. Its other services, such as Yahoo Mail and the Flickr photo sharing service, also would appear to fit in the same bin as Microsoft's Live consumer services. The presentation also positioned the company's popular Xbox Live subscription-based online gaming service as a software-plus-service product, alongside subscription offerings for Microsoft's Zune music player and its Mediaroom IPTV set-top box technologies. It also includes advertising on Windows Live Mobile-based devices. Additionally, the company gains revenues, and plans to gain more, via transactions on its Xbox Live, Zune and Mediaroom offerings. "I want to make sure that you understand that in every one of these cases, we are investing in some software-plus-services-based opportunity to extend our value," Ballmer said. So what about the proposed Yahoo takeover? "What we're trying to do is take some momentum that we have and ask, 'How do we really increase that momentum even further? What else can we do?'" he added.

Teleworkers Feel Safe, Threaten Network Security

Business employees working remotely say they believe the Internet is getting safer. But they're actually one of the reasons it's so unsafe, according to a new study. The study, conducted by researcher Insight Express and sponsored by Cisco, polled 2,000 remote access workers in 10 countries. Most of the respondents (56 percent) said they felt the Internet was safe in 2007, as opposed to 48 percent in 2006. Ironically, as was the case in the earlier 2006 study, the results found a wide gap between teleworkers' perceptions about security and the reality. Worse, they themselves are evidently contributing to the problem, thanks to unsafe activities. The study found that remote workers regularly engage in risky behavior -- opening e-mails from unknown sources, using corporate PCs for personal activities and "hijacking" their neighbors' Wi-Fi connections. Forty-four percent of global respondents in 2007 said they felt it was acceptable to use their employer's PC for personal activities, down slightly from 45 percent in 2006. The U.S. trended in the opposite direction, however. Forty percent in 2007 admitted to misusing an employer-owned PC for their own purposes -- a sizable increase from the 29 percent reported in 2006. More specifically, 43 percent of respondents worldwide admitted to doing personal Internet shopping on their corporate PC, a small increase from 39 percent the previous year. In the U.S., that figure is again far larger. Respondents admitting to shopping online with their employer's PC rose to 62 percent in 2007, up from 46 percent the year before. Other unsafe behavior included allowing non-employees to share an employer-owned PC. On a global basis, 21 percent of respondents admitted to the practice -- up from 20 percent in 2006. Additionally, 12 percent worldwide said they helped themselves to a neighbor's Wi-Fi connection, a 1 percent increase from the previous year. The study also examined respondents' motivation for engaging in behavior that potentially undermined the security of their PC and corporate network. Twenty percent of the study's respondents reported using their corporate PC for personal online shopping because of a lack of time -- they'd never complete personal chores if they didn't do them while "at work." Respondents also had an answer for why they shared their employer-owned PC with friends and family: 32 percent of those polled said they simply didn't see anything wrong with the practice. When it came to reasons why they "borrowed" their neighbor's wireless Internet connectivity, some 22 percent of respondents claimed they couldn't tell whether they were using someone else's Wi-Fi or their own. With so many users engaging in risky activities, it seems odd that believe security is actually improving. What's behind such a disparity? Patrick Grey, senior security strategist at Cisco, sees a decreasing sense among remote workers, ensuring that they fail to remain diligent. "We haven't seen major worms in a few years -- things have changed with the bad guys going underground using more stealthy methods," Grey told InternetNews.com. "With this reduction of gross attacks, we have a false sense of security among the user population." The recent Storm worm has not proven a wake-up call because it's not of the same category as the Zotob, Blaster and Sasser worms of the past, Grey said. Those worms were harmful in that they shut down computers, so infection proved impossible to overlook. "Storm is insidious in the fact that people don't know they are being compromised," he added. Users also fail to understand the security implications of some of their behaviors, Grey said. For instance, remote workers may not know there are risks in just visiting a Web site, so they might not think much of using an employer's PC for shopping or other personal activities. In some cases, teleworkers will disconnect from their corporate VPN to shop online, then reconnecting afterward, Grey said. However, doing so could mean the user brings malware with them once they reconnect, endangering the corporate network. Workers may not be wholly at fault for failing to understand how their actions could threaten network security. Instead, their companies' IT administrators could bear some responsibility because they haven't done an adequate job explaining the problem, according to John Stewart, Cisco's chief security officer. In a Webcast discussing the study's findings, Stewart said IT professionals industry-wide still have a long way to go in explaining to employees why they should take caution in their activities, whether at home or in the office. "We still haven't done enough," Stewart said. "The whole concept of 'work versus home' is completely disappearing in front of our eyes. We've got to remember we're crossing the chasms of 'work versus play' and they're becoming the same thing."

Chip Market Thrived in '07, Sees Strong Demand in '08

Don't talk recession to the chip industry. Both the semiconductor and graphics processing unit (GPU) sectors showed great growth in 2007 and are thus far expected to hold their own in 2008. Average selling prices (ASPs), on the other hand, are a different story. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) reported that despite a 100 percent increase in the memory bits sold this year -- that is, the overall amount of gigabits sold -- the overall annual revenue for memory still fell because ASPs dropped so much. The reason is that capacity managed to somehow exceed demand, according to John Greenagel, a spokesman for the SIA. "In some of these countries, the expansion is subsidized by government. Whenever that happens and people invest without regard for what they got for capital, it does tend to drive overcapacity," he told InternetNews.com. It remains to be seen if this trend will continue into 2008. The SIA reported that worldwide sales of semiconductors grew 3.2 percent in 2007 to $255.6 billion. Worldwide sales in the fourth quarter of 2007 were $66.8 billion, an increase of 2.5 percent over 2006 fourth quarter sales, and worldwide sales in December were $22.3 billion, up 2.5 percent over December 2006. The 3.2 percent growth is quite a shortfall from the SIA's initial projection of 10 percent growth for the year back in November 2006. Greenagel said the problem wasn't demand but the collapse in prices. Between the glut of memory and the price war between AMD and Intel, it was a buyer's market. Even with the talk of an economic slowdown in the U.S., things look good for the chip market. "So far, we have not seen any collapse of demand. PC sales were strong last year, Greenagel said. "We're looking at slightly lower sales this year but that's with a larger base. He added, "Cell phone unit sales grew 20 percent last year, so they may taper off a bit but it's still growing, especially outside the U.S." The biggest market is consumer devices -- mobile phones, iPods and DVD players -- which account for 55 percent of sales. India and China are growing exponentially and have bypassed laying landlines and gone straight to cellular. China alone is said to have a middle-class population of more than 300 million people, more than the entire population of the United States. The result has been a decreased dependence on the U.S. to make a market. In 1998, the U.S. was 41 percent of the entire semiconductor market. By 2007, it was down to 23.4 percent, according to Greenagel. Personal computer sales account for approximately 40 percent of all semiconductor consumption, and mobile is continuing to drive sales. Mobile PC unit sales grew 32.2 percent while desktop unit sales grew by 4.1 percent. For 2008, the SIA predicts a growth rate of 7.7 percent, to $276.9 billion. "The demand drivers are still very strong despite the ominous things that have economists worried about the economy," Greenagel said. On the graphics front, the latest sales figures from Jon Peddie Associates shows graphics sales are charging forward with no sign of a slowdown. Sales topped 100 million for the first time ever in the fourth quarter of 2007, to 106.4 million. That's a 27 percent increase over the 83.5 million units. Most notable, said Peddie, president of the company, was the tremendous growth in discrete mobile chips. Most laptops use integrated graphics to offer basic 3D graphics. But with laptops becoming more popular as desktop alternatives, people are demanding more powerful graphics chips for tasks such as gaming and DVD playback. Of those 106.4 million graphics chips, 39.6 million went into laptops. That's 37 percent of the total market. Desktop graphics units gained only 8.3 percent in the same quarter. Peddie said AMD gained a good amount of ground in both desktop and laptop chips with its new graphics parts. AMD, through its ATI unit, had 18 percent of the market to Intel's 54 percent and nVidia's 26 percent in the first quarter of 2007. By Q4, AMD had 29.1 percent, Intel had fallen to 46.8 percent and nVidia slipped to 22.8 percent. AMD released a new part recently, and it has gotten great reviews, while nVidia has been tweaking its G90 processor, released in late 2006. ATI and nVidia used to keep crazy release schedules, releasing a whole new generation once per year, with a refresh six months later. Peddie said that simply can't be done any more. "These companies are increasing the time between releases because they have become so complicated. They simply couldn't keep up with that old release cycle," he said. Peddie expects discrete notebook parts to expand in 2008. "It's the smallest of the four but growing," he said. "More and more notebook manufacturers will offer discrete instead of integrated." It will be needed for the bigger monitors; next year, he said there will be laptops with a 19-inch monitor. He believes the overall year will come just under 10 percent for annualized growth with the usual seasonality. Q1 traditionally has a drop coming off the holiday season rush. It may be worse due to economic concerns but he added it's too soon to tell. Both nVidia and AMD have not given road maps for the year.

BlackBerry Blackouts Balance Life And Work

It may be wishful thinking, but a Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry smartphones at night or on weekends and holidays. Trying to re-establish a proper balance between work and life, Citizenship and Immigration Canada is starting by trying to cut the chains to what some have called CrackBerries. The department's deputy minister, Richard Fadden, sent out a memo asking employees to implement a BlackBerry blackout between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. and on weekends and holidays. "Work/life quality is a priority for me and this organization because achieving it benefits us both as individuals and as a department," Fadden wrote. "When we can balance our work and personal responsibilities, we as a team stand to not only serve and perform more effectively but also to attract and keep employees to help us build a stronger Canada." BlackBerries, made by Canadian-based Research In Motion, are handheld communication devices used to send e-mails and make phone calls, thus allowing people to bring the office to their homes, vehicles or even the ski slopes. They have become an essential workplace tool in politics, business and the professions. Fadden also asked employees not to use BlackBerries during meetings and also not to schedule meetings over lunch. "I expect that some of you will consider the above a bit artificial. They may be a little, but I believe we have to start somewhere, and since reducing the quantity of work is unlikely to yield short-term results, we are 'attacking' some of the stresses around work," he said. He said he understood there might be times when implementing all his requests won't be possible, but people should do their best to respect the new rules. A spokeswoman for the department was unable to say what guidelines would be given for handling emergencies.

Mergers, Bailouts Outweigh Job Losses, Google

Traders had a lot of mixed signals to deal with on Friday, and in the end, they chose to side with the bullish ones. Stock futures were down overnight after Google missed Wall Street estimates, then up big in the early morning on Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo. They took another hit less than an hour later on news that the U.S. economy unexpectedly shed 17,000 jobs last month. And that was all by 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time, an hour before the stock market opened for trading. The regular trading session went much the same way, with reports of pending bailouts of bond insurers eventually tipping the scale in favor of the bulls. The market has had a lot of cross-currents to digest in the last two weeks. On one hand, there has been economic weakness from the credit market fallout, as exemplified Friday by Google's slowing growth and rising joblessness. Yet Microsoft's offer of a 62% premium for Yahoo suggests the stock market may be deeply undervalued, and with the Federal Reserve aggressively slashing interest rates, perhaps better times are not that far off, or at least the worst already priced in. That was the argument that carried the day on Friday. Yahoo shares soared 48% to $28.38, lower than Microsoft's $31 a share offer, as traders wait to see if a deal can be reached. But with Yahoo shares mired in a downtrend and facing another tough year, the company's board will be hard-pressed to argue that Microsoft's offer isn't in the best interest of shareholders. Microsoft's offer was well-timed, both because of Yahoo's troubles and because it came on the heels of a disappointing earnings report from Google. Google's shares plunged 8.5%, or $48.40, to $515.90, well below the stock's 52-week high of $747.24 set in November. But for Google, the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is also a sign of just how much trouble the search giant has given its more established rivals. Microsoft, meanwhile, lost 6.6% on news of its nearly $45 billion bid for Yahoo. Motorola was another big mover on Friday, gaining 10% after saying it could sell its handset business. VeriSign and Altera were up after their results beat analysts' forecasts, while Digital River fell on its earnings report. The Nasdaq climbed 23 to 2413, the S%26P gained 16 to 1395, and the Dow rose 92 to 12,743. Volume fell to 4.65 billion shares on the NYSE, but rose to 3.1 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 26-6 margin on the NYSE, and 20-9 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 84% on the NYSE, and 72% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 49-57 on the NYSE, and 62-92 on the Nasdaq.

Open Source OS/2: The Impossible Dream

For nearly three years, a group of OS/2 supporters has been asking IBM to offer up the source to the long-abandoned operating system. For three years, IBM has said no. Is it finally time to relegate the petition to the same retirement patch as OS/2 itself? The latest rejection from IBM's legal department came just two weeks ago. The letter from Yvonne Perkins in IBM's Enterprise Platform Software group read, in part, "We have considered the positioning of OS/2 and open source several times in the past, and for a variety of business, technical, and legal reasons we have decided to not pursue any OS/2 open source projects." As a project abandoned in 1997, OS/2 doesn't seem to have much value left in it, especially when comparing its kernel with Linux and Mac OS X today. But some of the underlying object-oriented (define) (OO) technologies in its desktop could have some value, since other than OS X, there really isn't an OO desktop on the market. With some of the old Workplace Shell technologies, it would be possible to build componentized apps like Lego bricks that inherited capabilities from other apps and shared services. Linux doesn't have this with KDE (define) and GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) (define), its two competing interfaces. OS/2 has been off the retail market since 1997 and off the market entirely since 2005. Serenity Station handles some sales and support, but IBM itself is trying to migrate customers off the platform. There have been a few snide reactions, but the bulk of open source advocates have an inkling that IBM is simply unable to offer up OS/2 source code. The situation with OS/2 is actually worse than most realized. If the state of OS/2 is any indication, then don't hold your breath for any other older, multipartner projects to ever see the light of day. David Moskowitz, president of the consultancy Productivity Solutions and a contributor of a few lines of code to OS/2 in his own right, said the Free Software Foundation is not new, but the concept of open source is relatively recent. "From 1987 to 1997, the concept of open source as we know it didn't exist," he said. "The code simply wasn't maintained for this kind of release." Moskowitz and others said there's simply no way OS/2 could be released because it was not maintained in a manner compatible with open source development. "Community people seem to think it's a matter of Jonathan Schwartz saying 'it's open source' and magically the next day there's a full copy of the code in a Subversion project ready for download," said Simon Phipps, chief open source office for Sun Microsystems and a former IBM staffer. "It's not like that." Specifically, a company's internal source code is not kept in a state for public consumption. It has to be put into a distributable package, and all of the headers need to be changed -- which means testing to make sure all the files still work together. And that's assuming the code passes all legal checks. Sun started discussing open sourcing Java all the way back in 2001, according to Phipps. From 2001 to 2003, it did some investigative work to find out how hard it was going to be. "Once they decided to go for it, it took us a year to get the code in a state where it could be put under an open source license," Phipps said. And that was Java, a programming language -- not an entire OS. Java is a project under current development at Sun, which created more than 95 percent of the source in house, and the project's leader, James Gosling, is still with the company. In the case of OS/2, development ceased more than a decade ago, and a large amount of the code belongs to Microsoft, which is not known for releasing its code. Even worse, it had been developed in IBM's Boca Raton facility, which closed in 1996. Today, no one knows where all the code actually is: The staff and everything held at Boca has been scattered to the wind, according to Moskowitz. Assuming IBM even had all the code in one place, it would have to go through all of it, line by line, and find out who wrote what -- an IBM staffer, a Microsoft programmer or a third party. "Without having all the code, all the contracts and potentially all the access to people ... it's extraordinarily difficult for IBM to determine what is absolutely releaseable unfettered," Moskowitz said. The code is such a mix of sources that he said he had no idea if something even remotely buildable could be cobbled together. Moskowitz gave an example of how daunting a prospect assessing OS/2 could be: He had once been charged with clearing an application for release. Going through 100,000 lines of code cost $250,000 and took a team of eight nearly four months to track down all of the contracts and people involved. Too often, the team would identify a staffer believed to have written a single line of code -- only to discover that they merely rewrote the code, which had initially been authored by another staffer. Then, the task became chasing down the original coder. In some instances, one line of code ultimately might have been worked on by four or five people. And that was a simple app. OS/2, until version 3, was a complex, joint Microsoft/IBM development. Originally known as OS/2 NT, it was going to be Microsoft's high-end operating system until the two companies had their highly publicized split in 1990. At that time, David Cutler, a programmer extraordinaire, defected from DEC to Microsoft and wrote what would be the kernel of Windows NT 3.1. Prior to that, both companies had programmers working at each other's facilities. Unless every line of code in OS/2 is signed, people vetting the code today will have no way of knowing who wrote a particular bit of code, and when. Sun has also released the Solaris operating system as an open source project, but was only able to do so because it bought an outright perpetual license in 1994 from Novell, which owned the Unix System V source on which Solaris was based. In the case of Solaris, Phipps said Sun needed to do four years of due diligence to prepare it for release. Phipps said such situations often prove just too expensive, because the effort requires nearly as many lawyers as programmers. And without a clear business case, the undertaking may simply prove unjustifiable. "The investment in patent searches, code scrubbing and due diligence is huge," Phipps said. "It involves a great deal of engineering and a great deal of legal work." "I can see IBM looking at that and deciding they don't have any money to waste on OS/2, which they won't make any money from anyway," he added.

Minding the Climate-Change Gap

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
1 February 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Officials with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have decided to add a key climate sensor to a satellite scheduled to launch in 2010, ScienceNOW has learned. Scientists say the move will help ensure a continuous 22-year data set on climate change, which has been threatened by a Pentagon plan to strip six climate sensors from a key Earth-observing satellite (Science, 31 August 2007, p.1167).

The announcement, expected to be made today during a White House conference call with reporters, relates to the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) sensor. That device measures radiation reflected up from Earth to space and is a crucial tool for climate researchers to quantify global warming. But 2 years ago, during a mandatory Pentagon review, a similar Earth radiation-measuring device and five others were pulled from the planned $12.5 billion National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) satellite to make the program less risky and save money, the Pentagon said. The satellite was also delayed 3 years, to 2013, due to difficulties with a weather sensor.

That move threatened to disrupt the ongoing collection of climate-change data by three CERES sensors already in orbit on satellites expected to last only a few more years. The earliest of these sensors has been logging Earth-radiation numbers since 2000. In addition, the new CERES sensors must be calibrated with one another before the older sensors stop working. A disruption in the data stream could make it extremely difficult to track the progress of global warming.

To prevent this from happening, NASA and NOAA will put the new CERES sensor onto a smaller NPOESS pilot satellite. By adding a CERES sensor to the 2010 mission, "you have some additional insurance" that researchers will maintain their data set at least through 2015, says David Ryan of Northrop Grumman, which is building NPOESS.

Scientists are pleased by the move, says NASA climate scientist Bruce Wielicki. But they're not out of the woods yet. The government hasn't decided whether to restore an Earth-radiation sensor to the 2013 NPOESS mission, which would keep data flowing through 2020. The tenuous state of crucial climate measurements, says Wielicki, reflects the low status of the earth sciences. "They never allowed climate requirements to drive the [NPOESS] system," he says.

Related site

The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System

Microsoft Takes CRM 4 International

Microsoft said Wednesday that it has begun shipping the first eight language editions of Dynamics CRM 4.0 on schedule. The company shipped the English edition of the product just before Christmas and said, at that time, it would begin shipping the first batch of other language versions in January. The first delivery totals eight languages %26#150; counting English %26#150; including French, Spanish, and simplified Chinese, the company said in a statement. Also included in this batch are Danish, Dutch, Finnish, and German editions. In addition, the company said it's on track to ship 17 more language versions within 90 days for a total of 25, the statement continued. Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the name of the latest version of Microsoft's customer relationship management software that it sells to partners who then provide it as a hosted-service to customers, or that customers purchase and host themselves internally. Additionally, a Microsoft-hosted version of CRM 4.0 is also currently in beta testing and will be available under the name CRM Live during the first half of the year as part of Microsoft%26#146;s "Live" branded software-plus-services strategy, the company has said. The additional 17 languages scheduled to ship in the next three months include Arabic, Brazilian, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Hong Kong Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, traditional Chinese and Turkish. The most notable feature in CRM 4.0 is its so-called "multitenant" architecture, which enables a hosting partner, for instance, to run only one copy of the server but support multiple customers simultaneously and securely. "Multitenancy is the big thing," Laurie McCabe, senior analyst at researcher AMI Partners told InternetNews.com. Combined with the multilingual support, that%26#146;s an indication of Microsoft%26#146;s intent. "It%26#146;s clear that they%26#146;re serious about going after the global market," she added. Not surprisingly, Microsoft agrees. "%26#91;With CRM 4.0%26#93; you have a fully multitenancy, multicurrency, and multilanguage situation," Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, told InternetNews.com. For example, a hosting partner can provide multilingual access to CRM 4.0 running on its server and still be running a single copy of the server, he added. Among other new features, the latest version adds business process automation based on Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation. It also provides new collaboration capabilities with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, such as real-time presence indicators within the CRM application. Dynamics CRM was previously last updated to version 3.0 two years ago. That release supported 22 languages but did not feature multitenancy support. Microsoft said it is also planning a 12-week, 50-city, 20 nation tour to promote Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Google's Earnings Below Consensus; Google Unfazed

What happens when the Internet's cash cow stops giving milk? If investors weren't already spooked about this country's macroeconomic woes creeping into the tech economy, they might be now. The after-hours sell-off has begun, as Google released fourth-quarter earnings that fell below analysts' expectations despite exhibiting substantial growth and a hopeful outlook for the future. "We're optimistic about 2008," Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt told analysts on a conference call following the earnings release. "We have growing revenue streams across a broad range of verticals and markets." Google reported fourth quarter net income of $1.21 billion, or $3.79 per diluted share, up from $1.03 billion, or $3.29 per diluted share, in the same quarter last year. Excluding special items, earnings per share amounted to $4.43, falling below analysts' estimates of $4.47 per share. Total Q4 revenues were $4.83 billion, a 51 percent increase over the same period the previous year, and up 14 percent from the third quarter of 2007. Shares rose $16.03 (2.92 percent) to close at $564.30, but fell more than 7 percent in after-hours trading as investors looked askance at the disappointing earnings and the slowing growth in paid ad clicks. Predictably, the key revenue drivers were Google's core operations of search and advertising, with a growing contribution from the Web-based software applications Google knows simply as "apps." These were the three areas that Chief Financial Officer George Reyes identified as Google's main businesses, for both last quarter and the future, but it was in one of these areas that Google had to report one of its most disappointing metrics. The number of aggregate paid clicks, which includes clicks on ads on Google's sites and the sites of its AdSense affiliates, increased nine percent over the third quarter, disappointing many analysts. The executives on the call offered two explanations. The third quarter was aberrantly successful on that front, they said, suggesting that a sequential comparison makes Google a victim of its own success. The second answer to the mild disappointment of the AdSense clickthroughs could well become an opportunity. "Social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as we had expected," Reyes said. Sergey Brin, one of Google's founders and its current president of technology, echoed Reyes' admission. "We have had a challenge in Q4 with social networking challenges as a whole," he said, repeating the operative word. "It didn't pan out as well as we had hoped." The executives would not answer specific questions about Google's $900 million ad deal with MySpace, noting that the AdSense program serves advertisements to many social networks, and that Google, just like everyone else, is still tinkering with the monetization strategy for the social sites. In a momentary digression from the murky financials of the social Web, Brin touted the November launch of the OpenSocial common developer standard, which he said has been adopted by at least 20 social networks. Schmidt was also buoyantly optimistic about Google's international expansion and the emerging opportunities of the mobile market. "More than half of our search traffic is outside the United States," Schmidt said, but that's just the beginning. "The international market is still nascent." A significant portion of Google's new employees are being hired abroad, as it continues to open in new markets and expand operations in existing ones. YouTube is available in 17 languages, Brin noted. On the mobile front, Schmidt's enthusiasm was unbridled. Though he wouldn't offer any short-term growth projections, he said that down the road %26#150; 10 or 20 years from now %26#150; people would conduct more searches on mobile devices than on PCs. He heralded Apple's iPhone as the "first of its generation," referring to mobile devices that offer a Web experience of comparable quality to a computer. "We hope that this is going to make mobile %26#91;Internet%26#93; as frictionless as it is on your desktop," Brin echoed, taking the opportunity to "give a shout-out to Android." Brin also touted the transformative potential of the Open Handset Alliance, which Google launched last year to encourage interoperability of applications on mobile devices. The executives declined to answer any questions about the ongoing wireless spectrum auction. In response to a question regarding the pending acquisition of DoubleClick, currently under review by the European Commission, Reyes simply said that Google was working with regulators to address their concerns. "We're certainly hopeful that it will get cleared," he said. In response to the question that is inevitably asked at least once on every earnings call this season %26#150; the one about the imminent, sustained economic downturn %26#150; Senior Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg was pointed, explaining that he did "not necessarily agree with the thesis" of the question. "We have not seen any negative impact from the rumors of recession," he said.

Black Duck Opens Code Center

Tracking which software licenses are being used as part of an application development lifecycle is an important activity. Developers need to know where code is being used and whether or not it has been approved for use. Software licensing vendor Black Duck now claims to have both parts of the software licensing issue conundrum in check with its new Code Center application working in concert with Black Duck's protexIP software compliance management platform. "What we have designed is an enterprise class management system that is designed to enable software developers to maximize the use of code components and also maximize re-use scenarios using either open source or third party code," Black Duck CEO Doug Levin told InternetNews.com. Black Duck's Code Center includes search, selection and approval workflow capabilities as well as a whole set of tracking mechanisms for software components. Levin noted that code re-use is becoming increasingly more common with enterprises using open source code components as well as third-party Java source code in the form of .jar files. In addition to identifying what is being used as part of a particular software development project, Code Center also enables users to check to see if a particular piece of code is being used somewhere else. Levin noted that as code components move throughout the application development lifecycle it's good to be able identify the source of where the code the code came from as well whether or not it has already been approved for use. While code management is a very competitive market with big vendors like IBM's Rational holding sway, Levin sees Code Center as being a complementary effort. "IBM is a strategic partner of ours and we'll integrate with the whole range of Rational projects," Levin said. "We don't compete with Rational because the main benefit of Code Center is for dealing with components that are outside of the company and are being licensed in or downloaded. Most rational product deal with software files that are located inside the company and don't have an outside component. So we're very complementary." In addition to IBM Rational, Code Center also has support for Eclipse and will work with Eclipse based IDEs (define). The Black Duck Code Center will be available as a standalone product though Levin noted it makes sense to be used together with Black Duck's current flagship product protexIP. Levin explained that what protexIP does is code analysis to do the final build report for an application identifying all the included licenses and any associated licensing issues. In Levin's view Code Center makes sense at the beginning of the software development lifecycle as a complement to what protexIP can do at the end. That said, there could be a need for protexIP at the beginning of the process as well helping developers to try and determine what a particular component of open source or third party code actually contains from a licensing perspective. One of Levin's success criteria for the roll out of Code Center in fact is that a good number of Black Duck's existing protexIP customers adopt Code Center. There has been increasing emphasis in recent months on managing open source code in order to ensure that it is being used properly. The Software Freedom Law Center bringing legal suits on behalf of developers against a trio of companies including Verizon. Black Duck's protexIP is among the solutions that may help to keep enterprises away from the courtroom. Just last week HP launched its own effort to help enterprises with open source licensing issues. "We think there is a whole group of enterprise customers that are that just starting to adopt open source and they are looking to support it," Levin said. "We hope they will start with Code Center and then back into protexIP"