If you want to understand Microsoft’s motivation for buying Yahoo, look at the price cuts announced today for Windows Vista. (Stay with me on this.)

The price cuts for boxed copies of Vista are especially big in developing countries, where users will be able to buy full versions of the operating system for the price they would have paid for an upgrade. (The better to prevent piracy, Microsoft says.)

In the United States, the main difference will be with the Premium edition (now $129 instead of $159) and the Ultimate ($219, down from $299).

Microsoft says the cuts are meant to lift sales in retail stores, a small segment of the Windows market. The vast majority of operating systems, of course, are sold bundled with computers.

Microsoft’s many critics are gloating that this shows Vista shipped with far more bugs than features.

No matter how good Vista may be, there is another force at work here: The price people are willing to pay for software is coming down.

A software package — even an operating system — seems out of whack at $299 or even $159, when there is so much that can now be done free over the Web or through free downloads like iTunes and Google’s Picasa. Those prices also don’t really jibe with the cost of personal computers, which now start at $500.

Microsoft itself has already confronted this by creating the “Student and Teacher” version of Office. Now you can buy Word, Excel and PowerPoint (not Outlook) for $129 (plus whatever guilt you feel as you justify the purchase by saying that your spinning class at the gym makes you a student).

One look at Microsoft’s high profit margins certainly raises questions about how long this business model can continue before someone creates a more efficient model. The combination of the open source movement, the Web, and the advertising-supported software model epitomized by Google are starting to have the long-predicted effect.

So while the prices Microsoft can charge for its boxed software may be falling, the price it will pay for its own Web software and advertising play — Yahoo — is likely to rise.

Source

Sonos joins forces with online music masterminds

Wireless music champion Sonos has teamed up with Napster to offer direct music downloads via effortless button-pushes on its handy wireless controller. You don’t even need a PC.
The Sonos wireless multi-room digital music system, as everyone calls it, pipes MP3s from your networked PC to any room boasting a Sonos box and a couple of speakers. With each room being controlled separately via the wireless controller, or your PC. Feel the power!
No longer will we be limited by a three-CD music collection, as Napster’s millions of tracks can be sorted through with the same ease as falling off small logs. You can also mix it up with your own collection.
To tempt folks over, all UK Sonos owners will get a free 30-day Napster trial, after that it’s £9.95 per month for the privilege.

Essentials
Sonos digital music system
Price: £279 – £699

Discover just how much your gadgets are adding to your electricity bill - and help save the planet

If you find the streetlights outside dimming every time you turn on your TV it might be time to invest in this clever, ingenious device.
Dubbed the The Wattson, it keeps a watchful eye on your ‘leccy consumption, giving a digital readout and glowing in appropriate hues – blue for dolphin-friendly low power use and red for snow-cap melting, national-grid jeopardising, high energy usage.
How does it work? Elementary dear gadgeteer. By clipping a small transceiver onto your meter box – that whirring, spinning thing in the basement with the numbers – Wattson can keep direct tabs on how much electricity’s being used. Switch off your devices one by one and you can see exactly how much your TV’s stand-by mode is draining – and how much it’s costing you.
It’ll even hook up to a PC via USB and send its data back to the Wattson mother ship to calculate just how much energy the Wattson global community has saved. Makes you feel all warm inside, don’t it?

Essentials
The Wattson
Price: £150

It came out of nowhere, 50 years ago Thursday, on Oct. 4, 1957. Or so it seemed to a dumbstruck American public. Powered into space by a Soviet R-7 rocket, a silvery satellite named Sputnik Zemlyi sped 142 miles up from the launching pad, left its power source behind and began to circle the globe.

This “traveling companion of the earth” (as the Russian name translates), the first man-made object ever put into orbit, was a small and rather silly-looking thing, 23 inches in diameter and 184 pounds, with four feathery antennas swept back like a windblown comb-over from its high-gloss sphere. Sailing out there untethered above the atmosphere, the Russian-made “new moon” sent back to earth, along with its beep-beep radio signal, shock wave after reverberant shock wave of change. Some have receded into history’s tide. Others are still clearly felt today, half a century later.

Complacent in its 1950s Baby Boom cocoon of middle-class prosperity, America stood slack-jawed in amazement, awe, envy and a rush of fear. As a country, we didn’t know what had hit us. In some important ways, we’re still feeling the impact.

Sputnik gave us the space race and the arms race, NASA and Neil Armstrong’s first footprints on the moon. It gave us a fresh flood of Cold War rhetoric and a firm resolve to revitalize, at least temporarily, the American classroom. It made science popular in multiple senses of the word, flying into the consciousness of people everywhere and remaining there in a kind of perpetual, unpredictable orbit. It bequeathed both “Star Wars” and Star Wars, the latter being Ronald Reagan’s scheme for a space-based anti-missile defense system. It put “The Right Stuff” into our collective mythology and left behind, as part of the space program’s dark-side-of-the-moon uncertainties, the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) shuttle disasters.

The little silver ball’s legacies include such artifacts as “The Jetsons” and lunar-looking living room chairs, bomb shelters and starburst chandeliers, Stanley Kubrick’s “2001″ and Chronicle columnist Herb Caen’s coinage of “beatnik,” a conflation of Sputnik and the freshly christened Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel “On the Road” had been published a month before the launch). Commentators of the period compared Sputnik, apparently without irony, to Pearl Harbor, Columbus’ discovery of America and the second coming of Christ. Twelve years after the end of World War II, NBC Radio called the Russian feat and its aftermath “the most important story of the century.”

Hyperbole notwithstanding, Sputnik is the satellite that keeps on giving. Its vapor trails can be found in everything from Silicon Valley pioneers and Dish TV to the collective response to 9/11 and an American foreign policy still defined by the narrative of high-stakes triumphalism over a demonized foe. In No Child Left Behind and the politics of scientific research grants, “Battlestar Galactica” and the fiction of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (”Sputnik Sweetheart”), that first satellite keeps revolving through the spacious realms of contemporary life. Yet another space exploration history, “In the Shadow of the Moon,” is in theaters now.

For David Hoffman, director of the forthcoming documentary “Sputnik Mania,” 1957 and 2007 have various direct satellite links. What happened in education, he said by telephone from Washington, D.C., was “this fundamental change, for every teacher in every school, from rote learning to individualistic thinking, creating this whole new desire to experiment and innovate. It’s impossible to overrate how important that’s been.” One after another creator of an Internet startup, Hoffman said, “credit their success to what happened in schools after Sputnik.”

Novelist Stephen King was 10 years old and sitting in a movie theater in Maine when news of the Sputnik launch reached him. The film stuttered to a stop, and the theater manager made the announcement that a Russian satellite was in orbit. “King and his buddies thought it was the end of the world,” said Hoffman. “He (King) claims that was the start of his desire to write scary stories. Everything changed at that moment.”

It wasn’t only men who felt the force of the Russians’ feat, Hoffman pointed out. “Women started going to MIT for the first time. Hillary Clinton was in fourth grade when Sputnik happened.” Perhaps, in the odds-on favorite to win the 2008 Democratic nomination for president, we have a task-oriented policymaker whose gender-blind singleness of purpose was formed in part by the Sputnik challenge.

Women figure quite differently in the thinking of Constance Penley, the author of “NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America” and a professor of film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara. For her, the male-dominated Sputnik legacy played out in a twisted NASA agenda forcing women astronauts into the teacher-in-space mold. “They couldn’t be astronauts without the alibi of being involved in education. They (NASA) wanted someone safe, someone everyone could identify with.” That held true, said Penley, for Sally Ride, Mae Jemison and Christa McAuliffe, who died in the Challenger explosion. Image control, as Hoffman’s film shows, was always an important component of the public response to Sputnik.

Penley believes that “because of bad policy and bad choices, the space program has lost its cultural, utopian resonance for science, exploration and adventure.” And yet, as she concedes, vestiges of the Sputnik-inspired aspiration persist. A 2006 “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” ad campaign for the United Negro College Fund featured the image of a rocket blasting off from a young boy’s head.

Emily Rosenberg, a professor of history at UC Irvine, credits John F. Kennedy for turning the Sputnik panic “into a new frontier and romance of putting a man on the moon. He was a master of weaving themes of fear and hope. The combination is a very powerful motivator. That’s one reason his legacy has remained.” Bill Clinton “tried to hit that note,” said Rosenberg, “but he didn’t do the fear thing. Recently it’s just been fear, fear, fear. I think that the more inspirational side that characterized the space race, for better or worse, has gone completely missing.”

Watching “Sputnik Mania” is, to a large degree, a time-capsule journey. Hoffman stitches together period TV and film footage, commentary and some contemporary interviews to tell the story of the Sputnik launch and its importance at the time. Eisenhower and Khrushchev, the ostensible figureheads of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, emerge as battle-weary sages who pulled on their own military experience to prevent their respective generals from escalating the arms race into all-out warfare. A variety of Democrats, including Sam Rayburn, Scoop Jackson, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, are portrayed as alarmists eager to turn up the heat on the Russians. As Speaker of the House Rayburn saw it, Sputnik put “Christian civilization in greater danger than it had been for 20 centuries.”

But as the movie’s time line stretches out, past the launch of Sputnik 2 with Laika the dog onboard, past the U.S. Vanguard missile blunder (”Kaputnik,” “Flopnik”) in December 1957 and onto the successful launch of a U.S. satellite in January 1958, “Sputnik Mania” itself seems to move into a larger orbit. You sense both the fervor and futility, the courage and confusion that can take hold in times of perceived crisis.

Watch the ’50s Civil Defense film sequence about the orderly evacuation of a big city in the event of a nuclear attack, and thoughts of what actually happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina come to mind. A comparable film from Russia, about gas-masked citizens calmly tamping down radiation fallout with their feet, summons the devastating realities of Chernobyl. Discussion of the burst in math and science education in American schools that Sputnik induced carries the baleful shadow of Proposition 13 and other erosions of public education.

Hoffman doesn’t make such points of comparison in his film; they’re left for viewers to supply on their own. But by phone he connected the American reactions to Sputnik and 9/11, 44 years later. “We can be spun up to a state of fear very easily,” said Hoffman. “We can be made to be scared, and when we’re scared we really react.” But a country that mobilized in various ways after Sputnik, he went on, seems paralyzed by the quagmire in Iraq and the amorphous threat of global warming. “The country still has capacities that it did 50 years ago,” he said, “but we don’t seem to have the will.”

Daniel Schorr, the 91-year-old newsman and commentator, gets one of the last words in “Sputnik Mania.” It’s a benediction of guarded hope - hope that the 50 years of Sputnik afterspin might finally yield “peaceful evidence of our capabilities.”

Credits to Steven Winn
Source

No, it doesn’t have the amount of hype and speculation an iPhone did before its release, but we don’t think there has even been this much anticipation for a BlackBerry, ever. The hidden-in-a-dark-secret-underground-lab BlackBerry 9xxx has sent out a couple distress calls to us, pleading to let people know it’s coming and what it should have in store for the incredibly faithful and addicted BlackBerry users. First off, 3G. It most certainly will have a 3G radio and we’re not talking about the European bands. (The actual 3G bands are not yet clear, but we can only assume North American 3G is a go.) Second, this isn’t your momma’s 3G, this is going to be HSDPA. Forget the Wi-Fi scam, this is real speed with simultaneous voice and data! That isn’t the best part, though…we’ve been told it will rock a 600MHz processor! Finally. We shouldn’t have those necessary and annoying lag times when performing basic tasks, and there should be a drastic reduction of the bottleneck for Internet speeds on the device. What we reported ages ago still seems to be spot on — RIM is actively looking at integrating a Backup/Restore function to facilitate transferring your entire backup to an on board memory card. We’re trying to lock down a solid release date at this point in time, but if we had to guess, we won’t see it this year.

Soruce

The owner paid $8,000 for this Ohio-plated Volkswagen pool table bus with integrated storage area for balls and other supplies beneath its engine flap.

Here comes Sanwa’s NT-MA2, offering the functions of a standard mouse AND a numpad in ONE device.
Whether you like it or not, it can certainly be interesting, especially for the laptop owners (because CAPS ON to type numbers is only funny for about 2 seconds).
Take 40 Euros off your pocket if you want one of these.
Available in white or black, 53×108x33mm.

Well, you can’t say they didn’t warn you.

Apple released an update for the iPhone on Thursday that brings the Wi-Fi Music Store to the device, as well as several security fixes and enhanced features. But, as expected, it also turns iPhones that were unlocked to run on cellular networks other than AT&T’s into little more than emergency call boxes.

Macworld reported two iPhones in its office with SIM (subscriber identity module) hacks did not work after the update was installed. A message prompted the phone’s owner to install “an unlocked and valid SIM card” before the phone could be completely activated. It’s almost like the phone was in the same pre-activation limbo stage that frustrated many iPhone users waiting for activation the first weekend the device went on sale.

Gizmodo is reporting that both the original SIM cards as well as new SIM cards from AT&T won’t work in iPhones that had been activated with the original SIM card, then unlocked from the network. That could present a huge problem for iPhone owners who thought they could get around the reactivation process by getting a new AT&T SIM card.

Other reports are trickling in of similar experiences. It appears that those who downloaded the “jailbreaking” software application that lets you install third-party software aren’t running into the same problems if they are still using AT&T’s network. However, they are reporting that their third-party applications have vanished upon reactivation.

by Tom Krazit, CNET NEWS

SONY sells the front projector most significant machine “VPL-VW200” which adopts the reflected type liquid crystal panel “SXRD” of the full HD/1,920×1,080 dot from November 20th. As for price 1,360,000 5,000 Yen.

The front projector which loads 0.61 type full HD SXRD panels of 240Hz drive /120fps indication correspondence of new development. With SXRD approximately 2.5ms than past and high speed you are proud of liquid crystal response efficiency, but by the fact that it corresponds to 120Hz indication, the afterimage impression is less, the image expression where the fine impression is high was made actualization possible.

It develops with the same “BRAVIA” brand as the liquid crystal television of the same company. Loading the animated picture response efficiency improvement technology “motion flow” which has been adopted even with the liquid crystal television. Not only animated picture improvement such that the intermediate frame is formed, when photographing inspecting the becoming dim of the picture which it occurs, the image processing “IB reduction” which it revises and, loading the frame processing “film projection” function of new development. Motion flow adjusting to image, effective setting of 3 stages being possible, is possible to also OFF.

As for the lens, [karutsuaisubario] [tetsusa] of optical 1.8 time which receives the glass lens which administers front multiple acid resisting coating to the tube of the aluminum, (F2.54~3.53). It loads also electromotive zoom mechanism. As for projection distance of 100 type wide 3.1~5.3m.

From dynamic contraction control operation “advanced iris output light 2” and the lamp is arranged, combining the “high contrast plate” contrast 35,000: 1 is actualized. As for brightness 800 lumina. The lamp loaded pure [kisenonranpu] of output, 400W “made the white expression where the red and beige kind of reappearance which shines and the coming out which are fresh are good possible”, that you say. Also lamp “LMP-H400” for exchange to be prepared, as for price 103,950 Yen.

The image engine loading the “brassiere beer engine professional”. High picture quality creative technology “DRC-MFv2.5” and so on is built in, Takasina rank hi-vision image is formed from various image signals. In addition, you say that the dynamic range and the sharp Ness adjustment range of image are expanded. In addition, finely it can do picture quality setting and gamma setting with the personal computer, also “ImageDirector 3.0” belongs.

2 systems of the HDMI input terminal it equips, corresponds to each image signal of 1080/60p, 50p and 24p. In addition, HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronic Control) we support, power source gearing the connected equipment such as AV amplifier with becomes possible. The input terminal other than HDMI equips, the component and S image, the composite, the D-Sub 15 pin (analog RGB/component common use) each 1 systems. The trigger terminal and the RS-232C terminal, Ethernet (RJ-45) it has.

Metallic Shine 5 layer coating of the dark blue is administered to the basket body heaven surface, the high-class impression is raised. In order to lighten the oppressive feeling, adopting the design which utilizes curved line. As for fan noise approximately 22dB. As for electric power consumption maximum 650W. As for external size 496×574×175mm (width ## depth ## height), as for weight approximately 20kg.

Remote control of the new design belongs. Preparing the direct key which can adjust contrast and brightness and sharp Ness etc directly. Also back light mechanism has. It is finished in the design which uses the aluminum plate of the same dark blue, as the substance is the high-class impression.