shanglian.org

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) had specific praise for the company Sapphire and its work producing algae-based gasoline, which he said will be commercially viable “any place with saltwater and sunshine.”

Inslee called it “the single most effective thing for creating jobs in energy efficiency and giving people an opportunity to lower their (energy) costs in the long run.”

The committee also rejected a Republican amendment to make carbon capture technologies eligible for loan guarantees.

By a largely partisan vote of 34 to 17, the House Energy and Commerce Committee ultimately approved the energy portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which spends about $25 billion on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and electricity transmission. (See our related story about the broadband portions of the bill.)

WASHINGTON–House Democrats rebuffed Republican attempts to include more loan guarantees for nuclear and clean coal technologies into the so-called stimulus package, along with Republican efforts to make the energy sections more market-oriented.

“This is a job stimulus bill, and there are literally 100,000 jobs that could be added if we increase our nuclear portfolio,” argued Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who introduced the amendment.

However, the committee rejected an amendment to extend the loan guarantees further to apply to “zero emissions energy”–which would make nuclear and clean coal power eligible for the loans.

California’s energy efficiency improved remarkably, in comparison with the rest of the country’s, after the state adopted decoupling 20 years ago, Inslee pointed out.

Republicans and Democrats were also divided over the proposal to decouple energy rates from usage. The purpose of decoupling, Democrats said, is to enable energy companies to promote energy efficiency without facing the threat of lower revenues.

Republicans were unconvinced and unsuccessfully tried to change that portion of the bill.

“I think this is the most anti-consumer vote any of us could make,” said Greg Walden (R-Ore.). “This is the reverse of an incentive system.”

“No amount of incentives will change the fact that no nuclear projects are ready,” said Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).

The legislation creates a loan guarantee program for renewable energy systems, and the committee on Thursday voted to extend the loan program to specifically apply to hydropower, as well as commercially viable “leading edge biofuel projects.”

Democrats insisted the amendments were inappropriate given that another portion of the stimulus package allocates $2.4 billion specifically for carbon capture and that using taxpayers’ money for nuclear power would not create immediate economic stimulus.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) also pointed out that $10 billion in loan guarantees were offered to the nuclear industry last year.

Large organizations are deploying more and more encryption technologies these days on laptops, tape backup systems, mobile devices–everywhere.

In my view, something has to give and every vendor involved in key management standards has to eat a big slice of humble pie. Large vendors who are paying lip service to the IEEE effort must get more engaged quickly. The standards body itself needs to adopt a “start small and grow” mentality, get a 1.0 specification to the market soon, and proceed from there.

Ironically, multilayer encryption may actually compromise data security. Why? If data is encrypted multiple times, someone better know about the chain of encryption events that took place. Each encryption activity relies on an encryption key to return digital gobbledygook into readable text (i.e. Cleartext). One lost encryption key and the data cannot be recovered. Avoiding this problem demands formalized processes and robust technologies for key management–creating, organizing, storing, and auditing encryption keys.

Following this logic, key management plays an extremely important role in the world of data security/privacy. The problem here is that the development of enterprise-class key management systems lags well behind the adoption of encryption technologies. Large organizations already have lots of islands of encryption and the situation is getting worse, not better.

Yes, they are concerned about regulatory compliance, data breaches, and embarrassing front-page headlines, but there is something else going on as well. Technology suppliers are now baking encryption into technology components and systems. As encryption becomes cheap and ubiquitous, risk-averse users will likely deploy it everywhere.

In my mind, there is something immoral about prioritizing individual corporate business agendas over a global effort to improve security. Do we as an industry want to be responsible for this outcome?

Why not integrate key management systems together to have centralized “command and control”? The problem here is the lack of solid key management standards. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers deserves a lot of credit for jumping into this messy situation with a key management standards effort dubbed P1619.3. There is a lot of brainpower behind P1619, but things are progressing slowly. In the meantime, users are crying for help.

If these things don’t happen, encryption key management will become a proprietary battle with multiple standards and one-off sales and marketing arrangements between vendors. Large organizations will be forced into extremely detailed and complex data security processes and the risk of unrecoverable data due to a lost encryption key grows exponentially.

So, all the government agencies that use Google Earth and want the public to be able to find their buildings could conceivably be in violation as well.

(via Search Engine Land)

But that’s exactly what California Assemblyman Joel Anderson, a Republican from El Cajon, is proposing in a measure dubbed “AB-255.”

That would not only reduce the usefulness of things like Google Maps and Google Earth, but it would be a huge undertaking for Google and would probably violate the First Amendment.

Google Street View blurs faces.

The company also began blurring peoples’ faces in its Street View interface on Google Maps last year in response to privacy concerns.

(Credit:
Google)

Imagine if all the hospitals, schools, churches, and government buildings that appear on online maps were nothing but blurs.

Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo told Computerworld that the company hopes to talk to Anderson about the proposed legislation.

As justification for the proposed censorship, Anderson is citing terrorism.

Privacy complaints have led Google to blur images of official buildings in several instances. The U.S. military banned Google from taking street view images from inside military bases and in 2007 India asked that certain government and military buildings be blurred.

“We heard from terrorists involved in the Mumbai attacks last year that they used Google Maps to select their targets and get knowledge about their targets. Hamas has said they were using Google Maps to target children’s schools,” Anderson told Computerworld. “What my bill does is limit the level of detail. It doesn’t stop people from getting directions. We don’t need to help bad people map their next target. What is the purpose of showing air ducts and elevator shafts? It does no good.”

The measure would apply to Web site operators and online services that make “a virtual globe browser available to members of the public” and fails to define what that is. It also specifies that a violation would constitute a criminal offense with fines of up to $250,000 per day.

In the end, she found each option had its challenges and each its benefits. She had a great time using the built-in speech synthesizer on the Linux version, while the Magic School Bus game that was on the Windows version was also enthralling.

What made the the experience so dramatic was how well the teachers incorporated the laptops into their teaching. It was the fact that the art teacher used the PCs for research, but had the students put them away and use their hands to make wax sculptures.

OLPC plans to reprise its “Give One, Get One” program this holiday season, which lets Americans pay for two machines–one of which they keep and the other of which they donate. However, in all cases, the one they get will be of the Linux variety.

Ella Taggart, the daughter of one of our editors, happily volunteered to put each of the devices through its paces. She spent an afternoon at CNET’s offices on Wednesday exploring the built-in software on each, looking up her spelling words on Wikipedia and attempting to visit her favorite Web sites.

And while developing nations will now have their choice of operating systems, those in the U.S. won’t enjoy the same flexibility.

But to really get a sense for each device and its unique appeal, I turned to an expert–an 8-year-old who’s far more representative of the target market than a reporter who has to dye her hair.

It was the fact that while each student had their own laptop, they still worked in groups as often as they worked alone.

Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News
Ella Taggart tests two versions of the XO laptop.

Microsoft general manager James Utzschneider notes that it’s also not comfortable with the lack of support that comes with the OLPC for those who take part in Give One, Get One.

At the same time, I don’t think either model simply dropped in the hands of children will do the trick. That meshes with the experience I had touring through the Bradesco Foundation school in Campinas, Brazil. It wasn’t the fact that all the students had Intel Classmate PCs that made the program stand out. It wasn’t the use of Windows over Linux.

Some countries have demanded that their students work on Linux, arguing open-source computers offer a chance for an independent software economy not tied to Microsoft. Many others, such as Peru, have demanded Windows, arguing that that’s what their students need to get good jobs. Ultimately, OLPC hopes to offer a dual-boot option, though that is still being developed.

With the Microsoft version, you get Windows, for all the good and bad that entails. It’s full-on Windows–XP Professional, in fact–and can run basically any software that can adjust itself to the mini-laptop’s diminutive screen and modest processor.

In part, that has to do with the fact that Microsoft offers a cut-rate version of Windows for large educational programs that doesn’t apply to the consumers here that buy the machines.

In the end, she said she liked the XO no matter what software it was running. It was fun and just the right size for her (even if all the adults complained about its small keyboard).

From my perspective, her experience shows not that the software doesn’t matter. It matters a great deal. But it’s all about how a school chooses to use the laptops. Used properly, as part of a well-thought-out curriculum, both models offer tremendous opportunities for students to learn about technology and how to use technology to learn about many other areas.

At the same time, having Windows allows students to take advantage not only of Microsoft’s dominant Office suite, but of all the educational software that has already been written for Windows.

For the past week, I’ve had two XO laptops on my desk, one of each OS variety.

On the outside, the Windows version of the XO laptop looks just like the Linux model. But simply booting up the device shows that the Windows version bears little resemblance to the original One Laptop Per Child device.

Web browsing was slow on the Linux model and the pointer and menu system somewhat complicated for someone used to Windows. Still, when it came time to borrow one for the night, she opted for the Linux model, in part because it had more built in than she had a chance to explore in her brief time at the office.

“This is Windows,” he said. “People want to be able to pick up the phone and call us if they can’t get something to work.”

But what’s missing in the Windows version is the personality that oozes out of the Linux incarnation. The Linux model comes with an integrated suite of educational games, programming tools, and other software, all built around a kid-friendly OS shell known as Sugar.

I’ve taken them both to coffee shops and let myself explore each machine. I’ll save my thoughts for a later post.

Microsoft has managed to slim down the OS enough to boot up off a 2GB flash memory card and has written drivers for a number of the XO laptop’s unique features, such as its scratch pad, game controller, and built-in camera.

The Windows version of the XO doesn’t have much of that built-in spunk, although a child-oriented programming tool known as Scratch did survive the Linux-to-Windows switch.

First spotted on: ValleyWag.

Under the Obama administration, clarity and openness has returned to these buildings in Google Earth and Google Maps. The White House and surrounding buildings have regained their rooftops (although the snipers and other security gear reportedly on 24/7 watch on the building are not discernible). The layout of the Naval Observatory grounds is now just about as clear as the surrounding area.

What’s with the change? A spokesperson at Google wouldn’t tell me much, but we know this: The Google geo team swapped out the image database they had been using, the one with the fuzzy images, with a new one. The old one came from the U.S. Geological Survey, a government agency. The maps arrived at Google pre-fuzzed. The new one, with no censorship, came from Digital Globe, a private company.

My Google contact would not agree with me that the changeover had anything to do with politics. Rather, she said, Google is constantly evaluating the quality of various data sets available to them, and simply decided that the Digital Globe data was now better than the USGS dataset. I don’t believe it, but regardless, I’m glad to see that our public ceremonial buildings are now viewable by, you know, the public.

The changeover happened on January 18, two days before President Obama’s inauguration, however Google had received the Digital Globe data prior to that. The change was part of a “regularly scheduled update,” I was told. The schedule is not public, but you can keep up to date on the changes the Google geo teams makes public on their blog.

See also 51 things you aren’t allowed to see on Google Maps, on ITSecurity.

During the Bush/Cheney administration, aerial views of the White House and vice president’s residence, the United State Naval Observatory, were obscured in Google Earth and Google Maps. The outlines of the White House were visible, but the roof of it and of the nearby Old Executive Office Building were replaced with featureless gray slabs. The grounds of the VP’s house were even more obscured: pixelated so much you couldn’t really tell what you were looking at.

I can see your house from here.

Most companies use the January Consumer Electronics Show to show the world their product lineup for the new year. But Sony deliberately holds back on its CES announcements; that’s because the company waits about eight weeks before returning to Las Vegas to have its own Sony-centric launch event, where it touts its new products for dealers, retailers, and journalists.

Photos: Sony hauls cameras, electronics to Vegas

Cameras and Camcorders
Photos: Sony hauls cameras, electronics to Vegas
Sony shows speedy CMOS superzoom*
Sony’s first to market with GPS-enabled, back-illuminated CMOS camcorder (CES)
Sony previews supertelephoto, other SLR lenses
Two new photo printers from Sony

Sony’s spring camcorders: Changes at the extremes (CES)
Does Sony DSC-G3 camera get wireless right? (CES)
Not dead yet: Sony rolls out two DVD-based Handycams (CES)
Sony’s new Flash-based Handycam puts an HD camcorder in your pocket (CES)
Sony takes on Flip Video, in Technicolor (CES)
Sony offers up Web camcorder with 5X zoom (CES)
Sony evolves its AVCHD hard-disk camcorders (CES)

Television
Sony wings ‘W’ LCDs with Yahoo widgets
Eco-friendly Sony HDTVs sense your presence (CES)
Sony’s Z-series of LCDs gets widgets, 240Hz (CES)
Sony XBR9 HDTVs up interactive ante with widgets (CES)
Photos: Sony 2009 HDTVs (CES)

Car Tech
Sony expands Xplod line of in-dash receivers (CES)

Portable Audio/Video
Sony updates EX headphone lineup
Sony offers two new options for DVD on the go
Sony boombox mistaken for magic toadstool
Sony Dream Machine for cheap, humble dreams
Sony confirms touch-screen X-Series Walkman (CES)
Sony W-Series Walkman: Wearable and wireless (CES)

Analysis from CNET News:
Sony switches gears at this year’s line show

* = includes video [click "playlist" in video window at the top of this section]

Here are the highlights of the company’s new March announcements. We’ve also included the CES product highlights, to give you an overview of Sony’s complete 2009 lineup:

Home Theater
New 2009 Sony AV receivers: Here comes the gloss*
Sony dishes out three five-disc DVD home theater in a box systems
Sony slims component home theater system
Sony lowers price on Blu-ray home theater systems*
Sony unveils HT-CT500 soundbar/subwoofer combo*
Sony’s BDP-S560 Blu-ray player goes wireless*

Apple may be the poster child for showing the industry how to compete effectively with Microsoft, but the company isn’t free of Redmond’s long arm just yet.

Regardless of which path Apple takes, at some point, it must address Microsoft Office. Yes, people could just run Office in a virtual machine or through Boot Camp, but that really only deepens its dependence on Microsoft.

No, to end Microsoft’s latent stranglehold on its Mac market share, Apple needs to do one of two things vis-a-vis office productivity: go disruptive with a Web-based offering in the manner that Google has, or invest deeply in OpenOffice.org to make it a viable, rock-solid enterprise competitor to Microsoft Office. The first path leads to Mountain View (Google). The second? To Menlo Park (Sun).

commentary

I love my Mac, but I couldn’t use it without Office. In this, I’m sure I’m not alone, which must give Apple pause whenever it celebrates its rising Mac market share.

Despite spending years, and millions of dollars in research and development, on its own suite of productivity software, 77 percent of
Mac users stick with
Microsoft Office, according to a TechFlash report.

The strategy won’t work. Until Apple actually starts winning market share with its iWork suite, it won’t matter if the five or six customers who actually use it can collaborate with each other.

What do you think Apple should do? Or does it matter?

Perhaps this is why Apple is releasing a SharePoint-esque knockoff designed around its Pages and Numbers programs, taking Microsoft head-on in document collaboration.

Chief Executive Mark Hurd remained upbeat during a call with analysts. “We executed well in a challenging market,” he said Wednesday afternoon. “I’m particularly pleased with the results of our Services segment. We now have a second segment with significant recurring revenues.” The Services unit contributed one third of the company’s profits during the first quarter.

“While the actions that we are taking today are difficult, we believe they will allow us to emerge from this recession in a powerful position to create value for our customers, employees and shareholders over the long term and be in a better position to fund 2009 bonus programs,” the company said in a follow-up statement.

“We assume market conditions seen in Q1 will persist,” Lesjak said.

From a company-wide standpoint, both Hurd and Lesjak pointed to HP’s cost structure as the key to its ability to ride out the recession with minimal damage. HP has long been very focused on keeping costs down and its executives are taking that to heart. Lesjak said during the call that the company would be reducing compensation and benefits across the board.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. PST with details from the conference call.

Hewlett-Packard is facing the reality of the recession, and finally slipped up on its earnings.

“It’s not a move to Netbooks that’s cannibalizing in this quarter. What you have is someone who was buying more thickly configured notebooks now buying more thinly configured,” Hurd said. “There’s not a significant phenomenon of ASPs (declining) in the HP lineup caused by Netbooks.”

Hurd’s base pay will decrease 20 percent, Executive Council members’ base pay will be cut 15 percent each, while other executives’ base pay will be cut by 10 percent. Exempt employees’ pay will be cut by 5 percent, and non-exempt employees’ by 2.5 percent, according to a company representative. HP will also decrease its 401(k) matching and employees can no longer buy discounted company stock.

For the fiscal first quarter, the PC maker earned a profit of $1.9 billion, or 75 cents per share. That’s down 9.5 percent from a profit of $2.1 billion, or 80 cents per share, the same quarter a year ago. It recorded a 1 percent uptick in revenue from a year ago, at $28.8 billion. Analysts were expecting revenue of $31.9 billion, and earnings of 93 cents per share. Part of the discrepancy is due to $431 million, or 18 cents per share, of adjustments, which HP is making in regard to amortization on purchased assets, restructuring and acquisition-related charges. Note that without the adjustments, HP would have delivered 96 cents per share as expected.

But the Services business was the lone bright spot. “Though there were pockets of organic growth, the slowdown in IT spending was global,” Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak said.

HP experienced revenue declines in every area of its business with the exception of Services, which is its EDS unit purchased last year. Services revenue increased 116 percent to $8.7 billion due mostly to the acquisition. Revenue from notebooks dropped 13 percent, and desktops 25 percent. HP’s total PC shipments were also down 4 percent for the quarter.

HP said it saw pressure on its hardware businesses “due to the slowing global economy,” and Hurd spent several minutes responding to an analyst’s question about the effect Netbooks are having on the company’s sales of traditional notebooks. Industry observers have expressed concern that Netbooks’ low cost would drive down overall average selling prices. Hurd said so far that hasn’t been issue for HP, but that time would tell. He did say that declining prices had more to do with the broadening of available products.

HP is forecasting that second-quarter revenue will decline 2 percent to 3 percent to between 84 cents and 86 cents per share.

HP’s stock dropped 6.4 percent to $32.02 in after-hours trading Wednesday.

The closure is the latest of several: the company announced plans in July to close offices in Denver and Dallas.

(Credit:
Google)

“We’ve found that despite everyone’s best efforts, the projects our engineers have been working on in Arizona have been, and remain, highly fragmented,” Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, wrote in a post on the Official Google Blog. “So after a lot of soul searching we have decided to incorporate work on these projects into teams elsewhere at Google.”

Google will be shuttering its Arizona office on November 21, the company announced on Friday.

Google's office in Tempe, Ariz., will be closing.

The office opened in 2006 on the campus of Arizona State University in Tempe, just south of Phoenix.

Since users complained of missing too many messages in 4.0 beta 1, the second beta now displays an orange notification icon in your system tray whenever you receive a new message. A panel will also light up in the app’s conversation window.

According to Skype’s product manager for Windows, Michael Bartlett, the changes have been mostly successful, though people aren’t glomming on to IM like Skype had hoped, and the application still doesn’t have everything users have been asking for.

Skype’s goals with 4.0 beta

It’s interesting that Skype choses to release three betas to users’ scrutiny before unveiling the final version. The tactic is one we’ve just seen with well-established communications appYahoo Messenger, which just released version 9.0 after two public beta cycles, and with Windows Live Messenger beta, which advertises the competing messenger’s new look. It could be risky laying out a rough draft of your software that’s inevitably flawed, but in terms of starting a discussion with users and gaining valuable market research for free, it seems to be working just fine.

Changes in 4.0 beta 2
Still, Skype 4.0 beta 2 answers requests to instate an optional compact view, notifications for missed calls and incoming messages, and the ability to group contacts together. Besides switching views, you’ll be able to resize most elements within the program window by dragging them, your profile photo or the size of the video screen on a video call included. Both are welcome additions that grant you more control over Skype’s display.

In other changes, the ability to simply drag and drop files into the conversation window has returned. So has the feature to organize contacts into groups, though the treatment differs in Skype 4.0 beta 2. Skype will honor any groups you’ve previously established (like coworkers), but also includes categories based on status, such as who is currently online, who you’ve recently contacted, and who you’re trying to add as a friend. We don’t personally find all these categories relevant, but you can easily delete any you don’t want and create your own in the contacts tab. We give Skype kudos for letting us populate categories by dragging and dropping in names from the master list.

Skype envisions a less cluttered version 4.0 that’s easier for novices to pick up without any prior experience. Skype also wants the redesign to unearth functions other than VoIP calling to get more people placing video calls, using Skype’s IM, and buying credit for its premium PC-to-landline calling and texting plan, Skype Out.

The ability to switch into the classic compact view is one concession to user demand that shows up in Skype 4.0 beta 2. Now you can toggle between the expanded default view that fuses the contact list and active conversation, and the traditional view, which breaks them into separate windows. This change definitely improves the way users will experience this version of the VoIP calling application, though we think it’s something Skype should have implemented from the start.

If you don’t like the new look, you can now switch to Skype’s classic view.

tag=dl-blog”>Skype 4.0 beta 2 (download) has done a lot of growing since the first beta for Windows rolled out this past June. While that release showed some success reorganizing Skype’s services, we predicted that folks would protest the gawky layout. We were right.

Still to come: Skype 4.0 beta 3
Skype 4.0 beta has really shaped up in this release, adding many features that usefully let the caller customize the display. Yet the work isn’t done. Skype plans to release one more beta before Skype 4.0 is deemed ready for prime time, and it will include call history, birthday reminders, and public chats, plus other changes that beta users will demand in chorus.

In this beta, message alerts pop up in the system tray.

(Credit:
Skype)

View contacts by Skype’s categories, or delete them and add your own.

(Credit:
Skype)

(Credit:
Skype)