Tell Us What You Really Think, Professor Baltimore

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 February 2008

BOSTON--After expounding on the science of AIDS and the prospects for international scientific development, outgoing AAAS President David Baltimore wrapped up his opening address here Friday night with a strident election-year message: America needs a political change, and President George W. Bush has been bad for science and bad for the world.

"I've held my breath awaiting new leaders in Washington ... who I consider true Americans," said Baltimore, who spoke at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher). The lines elicited neither applause nor boos from the crowd of about 1200. He called for a science debate among presidential candidates. "The United States allowed itself to become mesmerized by the terrorist threat," he said. Baltimore marveled at "how much growth there is in Europe while the U.S. has been fighting in Iraq," blasted Congress and the White House for passing "a budget that does not meet the needs" of American science, and called on Americans to "hold our head low in penance for the horrors inflicted by our country in Abu Ghraib."

In the cocktail hour that followed, an informal and certainly unscientific straw poll yielded few scientists who disagreed. Physicist Burt Kendall of Qualcomm in San Diego, California, called Baltimore's remarks "a most reasonable discussion" and criticized what he called the Bush Administration's poor funding of science and an "antiscience attitude of the Administration." European Commission official Michel Claessens called Baltimore's political comments "courageous."

Hearing politics discussed so explicitly at a science meeting "is not something I'm accustomed to," said statistician Keith Crank of Arlington, Virginia. But did he find Baltimore's remarks unseemly? "No, I didn't. ... I do appreciate to have science as an agenda of the political process."

Not everyone approved. "I don't think that science should get involved with politics like we heard today," said physicist and AAAS fellow George Gamota, formerly a military science manager at the Pentagon. He said that although he had opposed going to war with Iraq, Baltimore's comments oversimplified the risks of leaving Iraq now. And he called the flat budgets for health sciences while politicians increased physical sciences "a rebalancing."

Presidential Campaigns Call for Big Boosts to Research Funding

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
16 February 2008

BOSTON?Representatives of the two remaining major Democratic candidates for U.S. president both endorsed big budget increases for federally funded basic scientific research at a debate before hundreds of scientists today, with Senator Hillary Clinton's (D?NY) team offering decidedly more specifics on their plans.

Apart from that distinction, few policy differences emerged during the hour-and-half debate, held at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher) to generally positive reviews. None of the details the campaigns laid out was new. In addition, neither committed to a proposed science debate for the candidates themselves, which would be supported by major research organizations and thousands of U.S. scientists and which would take place on 18 April in Philadelphia. And both camps trained more fire on outgoing President George W. Bush than they did each other.

Calling for a war on "politicization" of federal science by political appointees, Thomas Kalil, Clinton's campaign adviser, pledged to "restore" the role of the president's science adviser, saying that the Bush White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy had been "banished to bureaucratic Siberia." He called for a doubling over 10 years of the basic research budgets at the U.S. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Pentagon, and National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Senator Barack Obama's (D?IL) campaign adviser Alec Ross spoke in more generalities, calling for a doubling of "basic science" funding in 5 years. He declined to say which agencies would get the boost. Ross did, though, repeatedly echo stump-speech lines by Obama calling for an end to the Washington influence of "special interests" and well-funded lobbyists. "We are going to restore science policy to science and scientists," said Ross. Among Obama's plans, Ross mentioned, was a call for $150 billion in new funds over the next decade to advance biofuels, hybrid cars, and improvements to the national power grid. We want "science not just for the sake of science," Ross said.

Kalil and Ross don't have a strong background in academic science or federal basic science policy. Neither, for example, had any names to offer when the moderator, Claudia Dreifus of The New York Times, asked which experts Obama or Clinton would appoint to an advisory council on bioethics. Ross, a social entrepreneur for a company that provides technology in poor communities, showed his relative inexperience with science policy by repeatedly sending the audience to "the Web site" for more details. (He did raise eyebrows, however, when he promised a space initiative that would hit "the newspapers" in the coming weeks.)

But Kalil, who worked on technology policy in Bill Clinton's White House and works as an administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, showed a bit more familiarity with the challenges facing federally funded scientists, declaring at one point that "these days, you have to do the experiment before you can write the grant."

Reaction by the crowd was mostly warm. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, medical geneticist Gilbert Omenn, a former head of AAAS, gave his approval to both candidates, lauding their respective "big, extensive programs" in science. Union of Concerned Scientists representative Michael Halpern said that both campaigns were "cautious" in their details but added that their presence showed "a wish to engage the scientific community." Molecular biologist Michael Chou, a graduate student at Harvard Medical School in Boston, was less kind: "It wasn't very deep."

The presumptive Republican candidate, Senator John McCain (R?AZ), was invited but sent regrets, said Albert Teich of AAAS. "They apparently would have liked to come." Representative Ron Paul (R?TX) and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee did not respond to AAAS's invitation. The Association of American Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges co-organized the event.

Although neither campaign would commit to a future science debate, Ross told the scientific community to continue to organize on science issues in the coming months. "You have to pound on the candidates," he said, emphasizing that his attendance showed how seriously the campaigns were taking the issue. "We get hundreds of these [requests], and we take very, very few of them," he added.

Warm Sea Urchins on Acid

By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 February 2008

BOSTON?Marine biologists break out in a cold sweat when they think about the impact of greenhouse gases on the oceans. It's not just the fact that global warming raises the temperature of the sea, scientists are also worried about acidity. The burning of fossil fuels pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and when it gets absorbed by seawater, it turns into carbonic acid and makes the oceans more acidic (ScienceNOW, 17 February 2007).

Warmer waters are stressful for marine life, making organisms such as coral more vulnerable to disease. A lower ocean pH--i.e., a more acidic environment--makes it harder for marine invertebrates to construct their shells. But there has been little work looking at the combined effects of warmer waters and stronger acidity.

At a symposium here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), physiologist Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported that the combination can be deadly for the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, that she works on. DNA studies are also revealing details about how the urchins battle the stress. "This is cutting-edge," says marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

The first step in the research was to see what damage is caused by simply altering acidity alone. Hofmann has several tanks that contain water with varying acidity. Some are filled with normal seawater, whereas others have the stronger acidity that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts will plague ocean waters in 2100. In the more acidic tanks, it became harder for sea urchin larvae to build their skeletons, Hofmann reported. DNA microarrays by postdoc Anne Todgham showed that genes involved in constructing calcium carbonate skeletons were three times more active than normal. "The larva is desperately trying to make its body," Hofmann said.

The effort takes a toll on the larvae. Those in the most acidic water grow "short and stumpy" skeletons, according to unpublished work by graduate student LaTisha Hammond and postdoc Mike O'Donnell. Other students in Hofmann's lab are modeling how those deformities might affect the distance larvae travel before settling down. It's not clear what the impact might be on adults, but Hofmann suspects that they could end up smaller than usual. That could hurt the valuable fishery for urchins, which are harvested for their eggs.

In other experiments, Hoffmann's team added the additional stress of heat to the acidic water. Postdoc Nann Fangue found that larvae survive brief stints in warmer water just fine if they live in normal temperature or high acidity. But subject them to water 9%26deg;C warmer, and about 7%26#37; of the larvae in higher acidity water die, compared with 2%26#37; of those in water with normal acidity. Double the temperature and roughly 29%26#37; of larvae in acidic waters keel over, compared with 16%26#37; of controls.

Although average ocean temperatures aren't expected to rise that high, they can rise about that much in tide pools, for example. And the results show that even greater mortality can result from the effort to cope with greater acidity. "Gretchen has the story dead on with the urchins," says Andrew Baker of the University of Miami in Florida, who is studying the effects of temperature and acidity on corals. "Clearly the effects are worse together than separate."

Hofmann is now working with Victoria Fabry of California State University, San Marcos, to study the impact of acidity and temperature on another organism, Limacina helicina. This pteropod, roughly the size of a peppercorn, is a key part of the food web in the southern ocean. Hofmann and Fabry did experiments in Antarctica last month, and the frozen samples are being flown back to her lab for DNA analysis.

Related site

A report on the impact of ocean acidification on marine organisms

A Grand Diversion in Louisiana

By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 February 2008

BOSTON?Decades of draining, dredging, and other mistreatment have taken a severe toll on Louisiana wetlands. Hurricane Katrina focused a spotlight on the need to restore the marshes, which can lessen the risk of water surging toward New Orleans. But any such plan would have to compete for money with other flood-protection projects, such as raising levees. Results of a new model, unveiled here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), may help win support for repairing the wetlands.

Louisiana wetlands face extreme challenges. Sea level is rising and the ground is sinking, both of which threaten to drown the marshes. Normally, sediment deposited by the Mississippi River helps build up the delta, allowing the marshes to stay above water. But engineering of the river to make it better for shipping has caused much of its sediment to flow into deep water.

One proposal to fix this is to divert river water out of the main channel so that it flows closer to shore. As sediment gets dumped there, it would build land that would turn into wetlands. It's never been clear exactly how much land would be created, however. That makes it harder to sell the concept to politicians, says ecologist Robert Twilley of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

So Twilley teamed up with geoscientist Christopher Paola of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and others. About 15 years ago, Paola helped design a computer model that predicts how rivers create deltas. It has been used extensively to help mining companies figure out how sediment from tailings will fill up their storage ponds. With conservative assumptions about sea level rise and the subsidence of the area, two diversion structures--large concrete sluices placed in the river embankment--would create about 700 square kilometers of land over 30 years, said Gary Parker of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. If sea level rises more slowly and land sinks less, the structures would build up 1000 square kilometers off the present coast.

"This is the largest and most aggressive element of a comprehensive plan," Twilley says. It would cost perhaps $500 million a year to build and operate. He hopes that the new analysis will persuade state legislators of the importance of the project. "They are going to have to put this in the top basket. I feel confident that the state will do that."

Denise Reed of the University of New Orleans in Louisiana agrees that the project is a good idea and that the new analysis may help win support for it. "This is pretty crucial information," she says.

I Hear You, My Monkey Brother

By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
11 February 2008

Monkeys have a brain region that responds selectively to the voices of other monkeys, according to new research. The finding should pave the way for studies on the neural basis of voice recognition and may help shed light on how the human brain changed as speech and language evolved.

In people, a small patch of the temporal lobe of the brain revs up in response to human speech but not to other sounds. This region is thought to play a role in recognizing individuals by voice, a talent we share with many animals. Yet little is known about the neural basis of voice recognition in any species. Recent studies with monkeys have claimed to demonstrate a voice region analogous to that in humans, but not all scientists have been convinced.

In the new study, neuroscientists led by Christopher Petkov and Nikos Logothetis, both of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in T?bingen, Germany, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity in macaques while the monkeys listened to a variety of sounds. Those included coos, grunts, and other macaque vocalizations, as well as the calls of other animals and natural noises such as thunder and running water. A small region of the monkeys' temporal lobes became active in response to monkey voices but not to other sounds, the researchers report online this week in Nature Neuroscience. The team also found that this brain region can distinguish the voices of individual monkeys: Responses diminished when the researchers played one monkey's voice repeatedly but perked up again when a new voice was played.

The monkey voice region may provide clues to the evolution of speech, Petkov says. One possibility, he notes, is that neural circuits in the brains of our distant primate ancestors, used for recognizing and evaluating the calls of other individuals, became the precursors for the neural circuits that evolved to handle more complex verbal communication such as speech.

"They've done a really nice job" of demonstrating that monkeys have a voice region very similar to that in the human brain, says neuroscientist Asif Ghazanfar of Princeton University. It's noteworthy, however, that the monkey and human voice regions are positioned somewhat differently in their respective temporal lobes, Ghazanfar says. He suspects that the voice-recognition region of our primate ancestors' brains migrated toward more recently evolved regions that decode and produce speech in the human brain--an example of the kind of neural reorganization that happened as language evolved.

Solid-State Drive Tech Breaks a Few Records

Pushing the envelope in solid-state drive (SSD) performance isn't anything to scoff at. But industry-watchers are far more excited about the potential impact that Texas Memory Systems' latest results could have in encouraging enterprises to adopt the technology. The vendor's RamSan-400 SSD product hit 291,208.58 input/output requests per second (IOPS), with an average response time of 0.86 milliseconds -- a record for benchmarking tests conducted through the Storage Performance Council (SPC), a storage industry association and standards body. Prior to the testing -- aimed at simulating typical online transaction processing environments -- IBM had held the SPC-1 performance record for a system built around its System Storage and SAN Volume Controller. Perhaps just as importantly, the latest test results also set a new price/performance record of 67 cents per IOPS. According to the SPC, the audited benchmark results validate that high computing performance can be achieved at a reasonable cost. "This makes the assertion that the technology can deliver at a price that's reasonable and demonstrates outstanding performance," Walter Baker, the association's administrator, told InternetNews.com. "It's not the end-all or be-all -- nothing's hit that level -- but if a enterprise needs speed and performance, it can be achieved at a good cost." The news comes as RAM- and flash-based SSD are gaining prominence, but the high costs and low capacities compared to magnetic media have thus far limited uptake among enterprise buyers. RAM-based solutions like Texas Memory's differ from flash-based offerings by nearly eliminating I/O wait time -- flash offers fast read rates but far slower write capability -- and application performance similar to hard disk RAID systems. Solutions based on RAM are typically much more pricey than flash offerings, however, with prices at about $700 per gigabyte compared to a $150 range. Additionally, both types are dramatically more expensive than magnetic media. The news also comes shortly after enterprise storage giant EMC began adding flash-based SSDs to its high-end Symmetrix DMX-4 systems -- a move lauded by industry experts as signaling to businesses that flash-based storage may be ready for prime time. However, one industry analyst noted that many of today's enterprises are taxing limits in compute workloads and RAM-based SDD could prove to be the right solution for specific needs. "This technology is still costly, much more expensive than smaller flash-based SSD options, but then again, the two approaches meet different needs," Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis, told . "The question is whether you need one big system, a powerful system like Texas Memory's, or can you get needed results in smaller, flash-based solutions that cost much less." "What this %26#91;benchmark results%26#93; will do, however, is help make people much more aware of the performance you get with pure SSD," he added. Not surprisingly, Texas Memory Systems is also proud of the record-setting performance. "These results tell a few different stories," Woody Hutsell, executive vice president at Texas Memory Systems, told InternetNews.com. "One, it tells our customers we have the number-one component to use. It demonstrates our technology has the best performance of any storage company when it comes to benchmarks. So when organizations need to buy high-performance they know we offer the lowest-cost solution. "It also pushes this technology further in adoption and improves the confidence factor," he added. The company set the new record using standard white box servers with 4GB RamSan-400 SSDs. QLogic QLE2462 host bus adapters and SANbox 5600 fabric switches were the only SAN elements included in the benchmarking. The results mark the second time Texas Memory has put its product through benchmark testing. The first effort, four years ago, also proved record-setting, Hutsell said. "A few years have passed and we knew the product had improved and we wanted to take the record back," he said.

With EqualLogic Buy Done, Dell Intros New Storage Line

SAN FRANCISCO -- Dell has just closed its acquisition of storage vendor EqualLogic and is wasting no time in ramping up its offerings. At a press briefing here the company today announced its first Dell-branded product, the Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series, a mid- to high-end storage offering that fills out Dell's product line. The PS5000 line is for companies with little or no Fibre Channel networking because it uses iSCSI (define) instead. The iSCSI protocol is an IP-based specification that allows SCSI devices to be controlled over an IP network. There will be three versions of the new storage line, the PS5000E, PS5000X and PS5000XV. The "E" model will be the high-capacity serial ATA unit, while the "X" will use serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives. The "XV" is based on high-speed, 15,000 RPM SAS drives, according to Praveen Asthana, director of enterprise storage at Dell. The PS5000E, because it uses SATA drives, is meant for high-capacity needs that can get by with slower performance. Using 1TB drives in the PS5000's four-by-four chassis, it can hold up to 16TB of storage. The higher-performance SAS drives used in the X and VX lines have much lower capacity: 6.4TB max for the X and 4.8TB for the XV with all 16 bays filled. All three units of the PS5000 line sit between Dell's mid-range AX series and the high-end CX series, which the company built in cooperation with EMC -- a partnership that Dell said it plans to continue. "This makes Dell an extremely broad provider of storage, meeting all of our customer needs, and provides a really broad product portfolio for our customers," he said. Additionally, the PS5000 series is backward-compatible with existing EqualLogic systems and can be run from the same console management software. EqualLogic makes Dell a player in storage, an area where it's been lacking, said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT Research. "If you look at HP and IBM and even Sun, there's a real benefit to a server vendor to offer a full storage solution, and Dell was finding it harder to compete without one," he told InternetNews.com. Prior to the acquisition, the best Dell could manage for storage was entry-level products like the MD3000i, he added.

Technical Analysis: A Retest On The Way?

Today's sharp downturn raises the odds of a retest of the lows; we'll be watching to make sure that internals like new lows and declining issues don't expand too much in the process. Looking at the intraday chart on the S%26P 500 (first chart below), we see a sharp drop at the open followed by a grind lower the rest of the day. This is potentially bullish action, since it suggests the possibility of an overreaction to the day's news %26#151; but the S%26P needs to clear that downtrend line at 1347 and falling to confirm that possibility. On the other hand, if the market continues lower from here, the decline could accelerate since we're already below the lower trendline of that pattern, so tomorrow's action could be important. To the upside, 1370-1380 is once again resistance (second chart), and next supports are 1322, 1310, 1300 and 1270-1275. The Dow (third chart) has support at 12,092 and 11,975-12,000, and 12,500 is once again resistance. The Nasdaq (fourth chart) has support at 2300, 2250 and 2200-2220, and 2387-2400 is once again resistance. Paul Shread is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and member of the Market Technicians Association.

Yahoo Moves Forward With Zimbra 5.0 Suite

Zimbra is out today with the first major release of its open source based Zimbra Collaboration (ZCS) solution since being acquired by Yahoo last year. Zimbra's ZCS release also comes at a particularly interesting time as Microsoft bids for ownership of Yahoo. ZCS 5.0 extends the feature set of ZCS and also introduces integrations with Yahoo products as Zimbra ramps up to compete against Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. "This is by far the largest release in terms of new features and technology that Zimbra has ever put together," said Scott Dietzen, a vice president of engineering at Yahoo and chief technology officer of its Zimbra group. "We're exciting about completing the mobility story and making great progress on unified messaging with instant messaging." With ZCS 5.0, Zimbra's solution is now available for wide array of mobile devices including all BlackBerry units and even the Apple iPhone. Zimbra has also included instant messaging integration with Yahoo Instant messenger as well. ZCS 5.0 also has a few other integrations with Yahoo including one for Flickr images and one for Yahoo Search. Dietzen explained that overall Zimbra is trying to do a better job of mashing up with Yahoo properties. Zimbra includes a collaboration server that handles the back end of e-mail, calendaring and collaboration, and a browser-based AJAX client front end, which runs on all major browsers. With the 5.0 release Zimbra is also hyping its desktop client as well which will now officially hit its 1.0 Beta release. Zimbra first began talking about the technology behind its desktop client just under a year ago. Dietzen noted that Zimbra is still looking for some additional feedback before declaring the Desktop client 1.0 release final. "This (Zimbra Desktop) is more about people that are curious about the Zimbra user experience and the things that make your calendar and email experience far more effective," Dietzen explained. "We've dramatically reduced barriers to getting people to easily try Zimbra." Now that it's part of Yahoo, Zimbra's technology will likely reach a far broader audience than the company could have achieved on its own. Dietzen noted that Yahoo's plan for Zimbra is multifaceted and includes both the further integration of Yahoo properties into Zimbra as well as the further integration of Zimbra into Yahoo. "The current release of Yahoo's consumer webmail is not derived from Zimbra technology," Dietzen said. "However you should have the expectation that some Zimbra technology will be surfaced to ultimately enhance the Yahoo community experience." Dietzen wouldn't elaborate further on Zimbra for Yahoo Mail other than to say that the Yahoo Mail community is thriving and currently satisfies its users. "The most important rule is if we're going to add in new tech and do no harm," Dietzen said. With the move to Yahoo, Zimbra also changed its license from a Mozilla public license plus attribution to a Yahoo Public License (YPL) which is an open source style license providing open source code. ZCS is available in an open source edition which is freely available and a Network version which is a paid offering. While Dietzen is enthusiastic about his relationship with his bosses at Yahoo, he is decidedly tight lipped about any potential ownership change at Yahoo with Microsoft's bid. "It would be inappropriate for me to comment," Dietzen said. "I don't have any direct insight into this. From a Zimbra perspective we just have to look after our business and our open source community and I'll do everything to make sure it's a healthy and successful community."

Physical Sciences Win Out Over Biomedicine in 2009 Budget Proposal

By Science staff
ScienceNOW Daily News
4 February 2008

President George W. Bush today proposed a flat budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2009 while asking for double-digit increases at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The numbers, part of his request to Congress for the 2009 fiscal year that begins 1 October, mirror previous budgets by emphasizing the physical sciences at the expense of the biomedical sciences.

The dichotomy has drawn a convoluted response from the scientific community, encapsulated by this comment from Robert Berdahl, president of the 62-member Association of American Universities. "Question: Is the President's budget good or bad for the vital research and education that is performed by America's research universities? Answer: Yes."

Presidential science adviser John Marburger says the increases for the physical sciences reflect the Administration's belief that a previous 5-year doubling of the NIH budget, which ended in 2003, threw the federal government's science portfolio out of whack. That's why, he noted, the Administration's request for a doubling of the physical sciences in its American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) would occur over 10 years. But Marburger also thinks that the biomedical community should be able to do more research with the same amount of money. "Frankly, I think that an argument can be made that better management [of NIH] can bring about much better productivity even with flat resources," he told reporters at a budget briefing. "The private sector does it all the time."

Predictably, that view doesn't sit well with biomedical scientists. "We reject the premise that funding science in one area or at one agency must come at the expense of another," says Bob Palazzo, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, Maryland. "There is no doubt that NSF and DOE merit the significant increases the president has proposed. But neglecting NIH at the same time is failing to grasp the interconnectedness of science."

Science lobbyists are counting on Congress to sustain the president's ACI request while pumping up NIH's flat budget. Last year, the community got the worst of both worlds with a last-minute cut in the DOE science and NSF budgets, whereas NIH's budget failed to keep up with inflation for the fifth straight year.

Here are highlights from this year's 2009 budget request for selected science agencies:

NIH
Despite the prospect of continued flat funding at $29.5 billion, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni sent a clear message to legislators about his priorities. "It's very important for NIH to keep its pipeline of new investigators up," Zerhouni told Science. "That's my first priority." Success rates on grants, he predicts, will remain the same or decline slightly, depending upon applications. The number of grants supported would stay flat. The budget also requests an increase of $20 million, to $1.7 billion, for NIH's biodefense research programs. "We really needed to buttress that," Zerhouni says.

The new budget includes no funding for the National Children's Study, a congressional favorite, and would redistribute its $111 million among the 27 institutes and centers. Even with that change, however, increases for individual institutes would stay far below the rate of inflation. Yet Zerhouni says that biomedical scientists should be grateful the situation isn't worse, given that the overall discretionary budget for the Department of Health and Human Services would decline by 2%26#37; in the president's request.

NSF
A 13.6%26#37; budget increase, to $6.85 billion, is NSF's reward for funding much of the country's academic research in the physical sciences. If approved by Congress, the boost would also salve the wounds left after legislators at the last minute took away most of an 8%26#37; presidential request in 2008 that Congress had further pumped up during the year-long budget process.

The agency's six research directorates would be the big winners, with a 16%26#37; boost to $5.59 billion led by 20%26#37; hikes for math and physical sciences, engineering, and computer sciences. But NSF rocked the ocean sciences community by deciding to pull its $331 million Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) off the table pending a final review later this year. "It was a big surprise to us," says Steve Bohlen of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership in Washington, D.C. "NSF had given us every indication that we were ready to go" after the agency conducted a preliminary review of the project in December.

NSF Director Arden Bement says that his decision last year to hold firm to a no-cost-overruns policy led to bumping OOI from the queue of projects in NSF's major research facilities account until OOI leaders had nailed down all aspects of the project. Bohlen notes that a delay will likely mean a higher overall cost for the project, an argument that Bement accepts. "I'd be lying if I said anything else," Bement told Science. "But it's a balancing act; we also need to follow our rules."

Elsewhere at the foundation, a 25%26#37; increase in the number of graduate research fellowships, to 3075, would drive an overall 8.9%26#37; increase in the $725 million education directorate. At the same time, an $11 million undergraduate scholarship program to entice science and math majors to become teachers would rise by less than $1 million. That's despite a reauthorization of NSF's program signed into law last summer, which called for a 10-fold increase in the program.

FDA
Under pressure after recent food and drug safety failures, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was one of the few agencies to enjoy a boost, with the Administration recommending a 5.7%26#37; increase to $2.4 billion. That figure includes more than $600 million in user fees paid mainly by drug companies. Under the president's plan, $42 million of the new money would go to strengthening food safety by better preventing and responding to food-borne illnesses and monitoring the nation's food supply. An extra $36 million would go toward drug safety activities, bringing total funding there to $389 million.

NIST
Funding for the agency's core research labs, which explore research on atomic clocks and other measurement techniques and standards, would grow 22%26#37;, to $634 million. That growth includes four new research initiatives: $12 million for toxicology research on nanoparticles, $10 million to improve biosciences measurement technologies, $5 million for cyber security, and nearly $6 million for optical communications and computing.

But not all compass needles are pointing north. As with previous budgets submitted by Republican Administrations, the current budget zeros out the Technology Innovation Program, the follow-on to the Advanced Technology Program, that aims to boost emerging technologies through cost sharing between government and industry. Also on the hit list this year is a small business manufacturing assistance program, which was cut to $4 million from $90 million last year. The cuts "reflect some difficult decisions about priorities," says NIST's acting director James Turner.

DOE
The 17.5%26#37; rise for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, to $4.72 billion, would restore the deepest cuts inflicted by the 2008 omnibus budget, which have led to the early termination of some experiments and scheduled layoffs (ScienceNOW, 18 December 2007). It also overcomes $125 million in congressional earmarks, money added by legislators for favorite projects.

The 2009 request includes $214.5 million for work on the international fusion experiment, ITER, after Congress zeroed out the promised $150 million U.S. contribution for 2008 (ScienceNOW, 21 December 2007). "That would allow us to be fully engaged in ITER again," says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, who warned that if current funding levels continue through 2009, "we're done" as participants in the project.

The request also includes $805 million for high-energy physics, 17%26#37; more than in 2008, which itself was a 6%26#37; cut from the $732 million spent in 2007. Because of that cut, officials at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, say they will have to lay off as many as 200 of the lab's 1900 scientists, technicians, and staff. The 2009 budget might help to reduce the layoff, but given the uncertainty in whether it would pass, officials still expect to lay off at least 150, says Fermilab Director Pier Oddone.

The biggest winner would be DOE's Basic Energy Sciences (BES) program, which supports research on materials sciences, condensed matter physics, chemistry, nanoscience and related fields. BES would receive $1.57 billion, 24%26#37; more than the $1.27 billion appropriated for 2008. That would allow BES to run its four synchrotron x-ray sources, three neutron sources, and five nanoscale science centers full time. Serving thousands of researchers from DOE's national labs and universities, such "user facilities" are running as much as 20%26#37; below capacity this year. BES would also spend $630 million on "core research," which includes research grants. That's a whopping 40%26#37; increase over the $450 million spent in 2008. The budget also provides money for new initiatives, such as $100 million for Energy Frontier Research Centers, which will focus on the basic science needed to develop breakthrough energy technologies.

NASA
The proposed 1.8%26#37; increase, to $17.6 billion, will still leave the space agency with too little money to keep its science and human exploration efforts on track. NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale put the best face on the increase, however, explaining that the request will provide for "steady progress" and noting that the 5-year funding plan increases at about 2.4%26#37; annually. NASA will plow more money--about $500 million--into Earth observation over the next 5 years in response to criticism that it has provided insufficient resources for this important research area. But the overall budget for science will remain "fairly fixed," she added. So a plan to focus on a Mars sample return by 2020 means that scientists must abandon other less ambitious Mars flights. And funding for astrophysics and heliospherics decreases in the president's plan.

Department of Defense
A $250 million increase in basic research spending for 2009, to $1.7 billion, is widely seen as a belated response to complaints that DOD was left out of ACI. Last summer, John Young, director for defense research and engineering, proposed an 11%26#37; boost in the agency's larger science and technology budget and a 20%26#37; boost to its basic research budget. Although the President's request doesn't go quite that far--the overall S%26T budget request for 2009 is $11.2 billion, only 4.2%26#37; higher--DOD's science managers and academic lobbyists say the memo clearly had an impact. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was receptive, they say, in part because of his background as a former university president and an author of Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which called for greater investments in basic defense research.

"There was a realization that we now have an entire table of potential threats, many of which we have never really invested any research dollars into," says William Rees, undersecretary for basic science. He says the increased funding, if approved by Congress, will help the agency tackle those threats by replenishing "a well of new ideas [that] is beginning to run dry."

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency has also fared well, with a proposed 10%26#37; increase, to $3.3 billion. Another highlight is a 50%26#37; boost, to $69 million, in the 3-year-old National Defense Education program. It aims to increase the number of domestic students going into defense-related science and engineering by awarding undergraduate and graduate fellowships.

Homeland Security
The President has requested $869 million for the department's Science and Technology directorate, a $39 million increase. But that includes a proposal to shrink university-based research programs run by the directorate from $49 million to $44 million. At the same time, the Administration wants to boost funding for the agency's Domestic Nuclear Detection Office by $80 million and add $35 million toward efforts to develop and deploy detection systems to guard against bioterrorist attacks.

Who Says Geeks Don't Like Football?

It's almost game time. Patriots vs. Giants. New York vs. New England. An undefeated season and a claim to the best team in football history hang in the balance. Yet looking at the towering ad buzz swirling around the Super Bowl, you can't help but feel like the countdown to kickoff is something of a smokescreen. For some, the real countdown anticipates the first break in the game, when the excitement begins in earnest and they finally get to see the hype that all the hype's truly about: the commercials. Last year, advertisers spent more than $161.8 million plugging their brands on TV, to a tune of $2.39 million for a 30-second spot, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the research firm's advertising tracker. This year, 30 seconds of fame will run you $2.7 million. That's the price of admission to the biggest stage in the advertising world. Nielsen reported that 93.1 million Americans tuned in to the Super Bowl last year. Going by the average increase in audience over the last six years Nielsen has reported, this year's audience could approach 95 million. That nearly one-third of the country's population will be watching is staggering enough. A recent comScore study adds an exclamation point to the advertising opportunity: Twenty-six percent of people who said they planned to watch the game said the ads were their favorite part. The industries that bought up the most airtime last year were beer, automotive and soft drinks. Sounds like a good match for football fans. By company, the biggest spenders were Budweiser, Coca-Cola and General Motors, according to Nielsen. Those three industries are again heavily represented in this year's advertising lineup, but there's no shortage of tech companies who've also ponied up to broadcast their message to the masses. Toshiba bought three spots -- one pre-game, one in-game and one post-game -- making what some might see as a last stand in the format wars. In addition to its LCD TVs, Toshiba is promoting several movie titles released in the HD DVD format, which, after some disappointing sales and the news that Warner Bros. would exclusively support Blu-Ray, seems to have all the momentum of a sinking ship. Then there's Amazon, which is not slated for a TV spot of its own, but will see plenty of exposure through its partnership with Pepsi Co. For this year's digital music giveaway, the soft drink giant has snubbed Apple in favor of Amazon. In Pepsi's "Magnetic Attraction spot," Justin Timberlake will kick off the biggest promotion in the soft drink company's history, offering $1 billion in prizes, including free downloads from the Amazon MP3 store. Through partnerships with all four major record labels, Amazon has amassed a huge catalog of music free from digital rights management (DRM) usage restrictions. (Of the big four, only EMI has licensed its DRM-free catalog to Apple's iTunes store.) Four years ago, Pepsi ran a similar download giveaway, only with the then-fledgling iTunes as a partner. Cars.com, a Super Bowl newcomer, is stepping into the fray with a spot promoting "Car Shopping Confidence." The Super Bowl ad is the beginning of a $200 million campaign -- the largest ever for Cars.com -- to rebrand itself as the essential online resource for car buyers. Among the other tech companies splurging for Super Bowl exposure are Dell, eTrade, Garmin and Careerbuilder.com, according to Advertising Age.
GoDaddy.com does it again Of course, when it comes to tech companies and the Super Bowl, the list would not be complete without GoDaddy.com. The domain name registry grabbed its place in Super Bowl advertising lore in 2005 with the spot "Wardrobe Malfunction," a play on Janet Jackson's halftime mishap at the previous year's Super Bowl. The spot featured GoDaddy spokesmodel Nikki Cappelli (played by model Candice Michelle) appearing at the "Broadcast Censorship Hearings," before a crusty old committee prescreening advertisers before the big game. Alas, one of the spaghetti straps on Cappelli's tank top had come undone. Hilarity ensued as she demonstrated her aerobic routine and dance steps to the indignant codgers presiding over the hearings. The Standards and Practices group at Fox didn't find it so funny. GoDaddy had purchased two time slots for the spot, but the network pulled the ad after its first airing. So GoDaddy not only got to show its ad to the world -- pushing the envelope as titillated viewers gasped, "Can they do that?" -- but then it got to scramble up to the moral high ground, crying "censorship!" Next page: GoDaddy's latest effort to tweak the censors

Wireless Spectrum Bids Trigger Open Access

A bidder on Thursday offered $4.71 billion for a key slice of wireless airwaves being sold by the government, triggering a condition that the spectrum be accessible to any device or software application. After 17 auction rounds, the bidding for the C block of 700-megahertz spectrum surpassed a $4.64 billion minimum set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As a result, the winner of the airwaves will have to abide by the open-access conditions, which had been sought by Internet search leader Google and adopted by the FCC before the auction. No further bids on the C-block airwaves occurred in the subsequent round of the auction, a development that could mean the bidding on the C-block airwaves is over. At the start of the auction, bidders were given a handful of waivers that allow them to sit out a round and still remain eligible to rejoin the bidding later. But Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast said all the bidders' waivers have probably been used. The bidders' identities are being kept secret, under FCC rules, until the entire auction ends. Analysts, however, have said the most likely bidders for the C-block airwaves are Verizon Wireless or Google. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group. The C block is one of five pieces of 700MHz spectrum being offered in auction. The 700MHz 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. Companies qualified to bid also include major wireless carriers such as AT%26T as well as possible new competitors like Google, satellite TV provider EchoStar and Cablevision Systems. The open-access requirement on the C block is aimed at spurring more competition in the wireless business. Currently, U.S. wireless carriers restrict the models of mobile phones used on their networks. They also limit the software that can be downloaded onto them, such as ringtones, music or Web browsers software. AT%26T and Verizon have been moving away from that restrictive stance in recent months. The auction is due to continue until there are no more bids. The top bids on Thursday morning totaled $13.69 billion for all five spectrum blocks.

Seagate And The Storage Spiral

Seagate Technology , the world's top supplier of disk drives, has an enviable problem these days: a dizzying array of storage hungry devices and datacenters that demand more capacity.What's a storage company to do? For one, make more drives to store all that content; two, place some bets on the future of hard disk technology, both in the enterprise and on the desktop. Seagate recently did that when it launched a solid-state, all Flash drive in its storage offerings. Seagate's offering, for example, uses NAND (define) Flash memory.The move won Seagate some plaudits from pundits. PC World ranked it among its 25 most innovative products in 2007, including one line with 265 megabytes of memory. According to PC World's tests, the $190 Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD edged out the $299 Samsung SpinPoint MH80 in straight performance as well as in power conservation, and in price. As the price of flash memory continues to decrease, expect engineers at Seagate to integrate even more solid state flash memory into traditional notebook hard drives in order to speed up access and save battery power. Seagate isn't the only one company integrating Flash in disk drives. SanDisk, for example, said this month that it would roll out more Flash-based drives for hard disk replacements in laptops with its 32 GB, 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD). Although it had marketed the hybrid drives in niche markets, the latest move signaled it would be going mainstream with the move. Seagate also announced a jump from fourth to second in worldwide share for 2.5-inch notebook PC and PC-related hard drives. Although pundits could argue it was late to market with 250 GB laptop drives (125 gigabyte per platter), the company's spin is that it offers the greenest as well as the best performing 5400 RPM mainstream notebook drive. Hard disks are made up of one or more platters, and the amount of data they can store is a function of the number of platters, the size of the platters, and the density of data on each one. Today, that translates to a cross vendor standard of 250 gigabytes per platter for 3.5 in drives and 125 gigabytes for 2.5 inch drives. So, a 500 gigabyte 3.5 inch disk will have two platters. In terms of their focus on the 2.5 inch notebook drives, one could argue that Seagate is betting on the right horse. In 2007, said laptop drive revenue exceeded desktop revenue for the first time. The company is projecting that by 2010 laptop units shipped will jump ahead of desktop units. PC shipment unit growth around the world is growing because of the mostly because of increasing notebook sales and also because of a significant increase in demand from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Middle East/Africa and of course Asia Pacific. But notebook sales alone can't explain the continued demand for disks, so where is all this data coming from and who is storing it? During the company's discussion of earnings for its second fiscal quarter, which ended Dec. 28, 2007, Brian Dexheimer, Seagate's chief marketing officer put it clearly: "DVR is over half of the demand of our 8.1 million shipped 2.5 inch drives. This compares with 50 million total units shipped overall in 2007. DVR growth of nearly 50 percent was a key driver." But the growth isn't all fun, games and movies: Enterprise demand has grown 16 percent from last year to 8.3 million units in total. Seagate said it shipped a record 5.3 million units during the quarter. Executives said they are seeing continued growth in the high capacity enterprise class SATA (define) products, with the continued adoption of drive to drive backup solution at the expense of tape. SATA (define) drives were traditionally installed in workstations and PCs while SCSI (define) was used preliminary in datacenter applications. But datacenter usage is shifting, as disk storage becomes competitive with tape storage, backups are trending from tape to disk arrays. Video is also moving into the datacenter, which demands nearline storage (define). Bill Watkins, Seagate's CEO, said during the same Webcast: "We reported another quarter of double-digit revenue and profitability growth year over year, driven by the continued strong demand of storage across virtually every market for digital content from the home to the enterprise." This demand actually caused capacity issues for Seagate. It anticipated the increased demand for the next generation 3.5 inch PC disks, but not for the same density 2.5 inch notebook disks: According to Wickersham, the 250 gigabyte green and fast notebook drives are now ramping up to shipping in volume. All in all, earnings rose by nearly three times for the quarter, compared to the same, year-ago time. This helps explain why, for now at least, another watchword for Seagate, as all this digital data sloshes around, is manufacturing capacity. Seagate said it has committed at least $900 million dollars this year to expand its ability to produce more storage devices.

eBay's PayPal Scoops Up Fraud Sciences

On Monday, eBay announced that its PayPal payment-services unit would acquire Fraud Services, a privately held Israeli company, for $169 million. Based in Tel Aviv, Fraud Sciences is a venture-capital-backed startup formed in April 2006, specializing in online risk assessment. Fraud Sciences' technology is designed to ferret out fraudulent credit card purchases by verifying that the person making the transaction is in fact the cardholder. The company's technique, known as "identity proofing," builds on existing behavioral and pattern-matching tactics that many online retailers and payments processors already use to detect fraud. "At PayPal we use the same type of tools, and we feel that Fraud Sciences technology is going to be very complementary," PayPal spokeswoman Sarah Gorman told InternetNews.com. Gorman said that Fraud Sciences' technology will build on what PayPal calls its neural detection technique, which approaches identity verification from the buyer and seller side. "It literally gets smarter with every transaction," Gorman said. Fraud Sciences has claimed that its system is 99.9 percent accurate, significantly reducing acceptance rates of fraudulent transactions, as well as the false negatives that reject legitimate purchases. The technology works by evaluating a composite of the purchaser's digital history to ensure that he is both a real person and the authorized cardholder. Beyond that, Gorman won't say what's in the secret sauce. The acquisition makes good on the promise that President and CEO-in-waiting John Donahoe made on last week's earnings call. Donahoe said that he would move aggressively to improve the safety and reliability of the shopping experience at the e-commerce giant. Risk tools relating to identity verification will improve the security of online transactions executed through PayPal, but eBay's payment-services division has run into other types of fraud over the years, particularly phishing. Gorman said that the acquisition of Fraud Sciences is just the first of many security-related enhancements that eBay will make this year. Tuesday morning, eBay is expected to make a series of announcements at the annual e-Commerce Forum in Washington, D.C. Some could involve other security aspects, such as phishing and counterfeit protection, Gorman said. eBay is also expected to announce pricing changes to its listing fees, fulfilling another promise made by executives last week. eBay said that it expects the acquisition of Fraud Sciences to close within the next 30 days, and that it should not significantly alter its 2008 financial guidance. Fraud Sciences will continue to operate out of Tel Aviv, and most of the company's employees will be offered jobs with PayPal, Gorman said. Fraud Sciences' executive team will work closely with PayPal during the transition.

Stocks Fall Despite Strong Earnings

Better than expected results from a number of top technology names boosted stocks in the early going Friday, but sellers soon took over to send the market sharply lower. Despite extreme volatility, Wall Street managed to finish the week with small gains in the Dow and S%26amp;P and just a 0.6% loss in the Nasdaq, as the Federal Reserve's biggest emergency rate cut since 1982 saved stocks from much steeper losses. Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Juniper Networks and Broadcom were among the names posting better than expected results late Thursday. All opened sharply higher Friday morning but ended the day mixed, with Microsoft and Juniper lower and Sun and Broadcom posting small gains. The selling started as the S%26amp;P 500 neared the 1370 level, the bottom of a 15-month trading range the index broke down out of last week, as traders began lowering their expectations for more rate cuts when the Federal Reserve meets next week. Expectations are for a one-quarter to one-half point rate cut, less than this week's three-quarter point emergency rate cut. E*Trade was a big gainer, up 8% on a restructuring plan, and Microchip Technology and Compuware were higher on their results. InsWeb jumped 29% after finishing its first year of profitability. Motorola rallied 6% despite an S%26amp;P credit rating cut, as the company rebounded from an 18% drubbing earlier this week. Synaptics, PMC-Sierra and Integrated Devices fell on their results. The Nasdaq lost 34 to 2336, the S%26amp;P fell 21 to 1330, and the Dow tumbled 171 to 12,207. Volume declined to 4.92 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.65 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 19-14 margin on the NYSE, and 16-14 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 73% on the NYSE, and 72% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 21-84 on the NYSE, and 42-114 on the Nasdaq.

Microsoft Gives Tech Stocks Reason to Rally

After leading the tech sector higher during the day, Microsoft kept the rally going after hours Thursday with another quarter of better than expected results and guidance. Microsoft shares rose 4% in late trading on top of a 4% rise during the day after the company posted a 30% sales increase to $16.37 billion, beating out the $15.95 billion that analysts expected, according to Thomson Financial. Microsoft's earnings of 50 cents a share were four cents better than expected, and the company's current quarter and full-year guidance were also as good or better than Wall Street analysts anticipated. Microsoft cited strong sales of Windows Vista for the results. The report was welcome news for a tech sector reeling from disappointing results from bellwethers like Intel and Apple, and added to a dramatic two-day rally on hopes for an economic turnaround. Juniper Networks was another big gainer in late trading, rising 8% on a 73% jump in earnings, and that coming on top of a 7% rise ahead of the report. The latest good news for the economy was a quick agreement by congressional leaders on a $145 billion economic stimulus package, the latest government effort to rescue the market and economy from the subprime mortgage market meltdown. eBay was left out of Thursday's market rally, falling 6% after lowering its current quarter outlook and announcing the retirement of CEO Meg Whitman. Qualcomm and Symantec were big winners after beating estimates, up 10% each, and Nokia soared 12% on its results, a sharp contrast to Motorola's 18% drop a day earlier. F5 and LSI rose more than 20% each on their earnings news, while Mercury Computing fell 32% on its results. AT%26T shed 3% after the company met estimates. Internet stocks were strong, with Yahoo, Google and Amazon up 5% or more, and HP, Dell and Cisco gained 4% each. The Nasdaq rose 44 to 2360, the S%26P gained 13 to 1352, and the Dow rose 108 to 12,378. Volume declined to 5.7 billion shares on the NYSE, and 3.05 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 21-12 margin on the NYSE, and 17-13 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 64% on the NYSE, and 73% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 16-79 on the NYSE, and 43-130 on the Nasdaq.

HP-UX Version 12? Don't Hold Your Breath

Some pieces of software seem to jump version numbers with every minor revision, while others seem to never change. In the case of HP's flagship Unix offering HP-UX 11i, HP is in no rush to move to version 12. That doesn't mean that the company isn't continuing to improve its Unix offering, however. Yet while the product receives updates, it won't get a new number in the near future because HP wants to communicate that applications will continue to run smoothly on any 11-series release, even on the newest versions. "If we move to a version 12, that would be a flag that something has changed and that users and developers need to recode or re-compile," Brian Cox, worldwide director of BCS software marketing, HP told InternetNews.com. "As it is, you can take any application from the very first HP-UX version 11 up to the recent HP-UX 11i Update 3 and it will run." "Our customers and partners hold compatibility of their applications to be at such regard that we don't want to violate that trust," Cox said. Though HP has shied away from moving its major version numbers forward, it hasn't stopped from putting out major releases. The most recent major update of HP-UX 11i was Update 3, which was released nearly a year ago in February 2007. HP's updates also have lengthy supported lifespans, with Update 3 set to be supported by HP until 2017. Cox explained that with HP-UX 11i version 1 and Update 2, the emphasis was on scalability. With Update 3, HP started building out the foundation for virtualization. In Update 4, which isn't expected until at least 2010, the plan is to provide better manageability of virtualized environments and even higher uptime levels than currently possible, Cox said. HP has also been busily producing interim enhancement releases between major updates. The interim releases, which come out every six months, provide bug fixes and other small tweaks. Following the Update 3 release in February 2007, HP issued a interim update in fall, codenamed "Vitality," Cox said. "Then, coming out this spring, we have another enhancement codenamed 'Versatility,' and then six months after that, the update is codenamed 'Vibrancy,'" Cox said. "We'll continue to march that forward until version 4, which will be a major new release." HP's release schedule has entailed some massive changes for the operating system. With the HP-UX 11i release, for instance, HP embraced the new Unix03 standard which aims to provide application portability across Unix03-certified operating systems. To date, IBM's AIX 5L V5.3, Sun Solaris 10 as well as Apple's OS X version 10.5 (AKA "Leopard") have been certified to be Unix03-compliant. HP's joining the ranks marked a significant development not just for HP-UX -- for which Unix03 was just the latest in a long wave of Unix certification efforts over the years -- but for the industry. "Standardization for the API's makes it easier for software developers to write and port code and it lowers their cost of maintenance," Cox said. "It's in classic contrast with the mainframes of the past where portability didn't exist."

Thank Warner Bros For Blu-ray Sales Spike?

There was much celebrating and gloating from the Blu-ray community across the Internet this week as weekly numbers from market researcher NPD Group seemed to indicate the near-even split in sales between Blu-ray and HD DVD had become completely one-sided. However, NPD cautions not to start dancing on HD DVD's grave. First off, HD doesn't have a grave yet, secondly, one week of numbers do not a trend make. Blu-ray and HD DVD are two competing formats battling it out for the chance to replace your DVD player as the next generation home media playback format. Both are fairly similar, with the only real difference being capacity. A single layer HD DVD disc holds 15GB of data while a single layer Blu-ray disc holds 25GB. HD DVD was developed by Toshiba while Blu-ray is a Sony creation. The two have been battling for the market for almost a year now, with the slight edge going to Blu-ray but not enough to put away HD DVD. Then it all seemed over in a flash when on the eve of CES, Warner Bros announced it would go exclusively Blu-ray. The HD DVD Consortium cancelled its CES events while the Blu-ray camp spent the entire conference gloating. The figures were not officially disclosed by NPD, a subscriber with access to the numbers let them out. NPD doesn't disclose weekly numbers because it says such short term data can give an inaccurate picture. "Weekly data can be very volatile and is designed to be used tactically," Stephen Baker, vice president of NPD, explained to InternetNews.com. "Because of that, brands and retailers can do all sorts of things in one week to change the direction of a category for a week. That's typically not a hard thing to do." However, Baker admitted he'd never seen a change this bad. For the week ending January 5, 2008, Blu-ray Disc player sales were at 15,257 units, while HD DVD player sales were at 14,558 units, for a near 50-50 split. One week later, after the Warner decision to stop supporting both Blu-ray and HD DVD and support Blu-ray only, the numbers went totally lopsided. Blu-ray sales were 21,770 units, a 42 percent gain, to HD's 1,758, an 88 percent plunge. On top of that Nielsen VideoScan reported the top selling high definition DVDs for the week of January 13, and it was entirely Blu-ray titles, with the critically-praised film "3:10 To Yuma" topping the list and three from the "Harry Potter" series making up the listing. Those "Harry Potter" titles are also available on HD DVD, as they are Warner titles and Warner does not go exclusive until the summer, but it reflects the difference in unit sales between the formats. "It was obviously a big shift, and I'm not saying %26#91;the Warner decision%26#93; didn't have anything to do with it," said Baker. "It likely did but there were other things to do with it as well." The following week, Toshiba made drastic cuts to its HD DVD players, slashing the prices by half, and that data is not in yet. Baker said NPD doesn't plan on releasing it, but added with a laugh "who knows what ends up out there again," in reference to DVD fan sites. Van Baker, research director with Gartner, said he was inclined to think the Warner deal did cause the huge shift. "It all depends on what films have been released recently and what promotions took place," he said. "That said, the Warner announcement and Microsoft comment, when they came out and said they could shift to a Blu-ray based Xbox easily, kinda pulled the rug out from under HD DVD." Microsoft's Xbox 360 console has an add-on HD DVD drive for $149. The company was asked at CES if a similar Blu-ray drive would be possible and company officials said it was easy enough to do. It just didn't say it would make a drive any time soon. Van Baker doesn't think HD DVD owners are abandoning their players, but it might be making people get off the fence. "What could be giving rise to this is some people who have been reticent, maybe they have a PS3 in the house, are now saying 'oh it's over now, I can buy movies.' So people who may have been on the fence are feeling justified in buying movies now." He said his bet is that the Blu-ray/HD format war "will be over by this Christmas. But we'll have to wait and see."

Zend Expands PHP Development and Deployment

For Zend Technologies, PHP is a lot more than just an open source programming language. Zend, the lead commercial backer behind PHP, is pushing its vision of PHP as a prominent platform for development and deployment of mission-critical applications with a pair of new products. Zend Studio for Eclipse is Zend's new PHP IDE(define), and Zend Platform 3.6 is the latest release of the company's enterprise-deployment platform for PHP. The new releases are part of the PHP vendor's strategy to move from point products to a complete suite for the application life cycle, as PHP continues to makes inroads against both Java and .NET. "When our customers build mission applications they take the whole Zend solution, since we deal with the whole life cycle from development to staging to production," Andi Gutmans, Zend's CTO, told InternetNews.com. "So they use Zend Core for their certified PHP, they use Zend Platform for getting performance, scalability and reliability for their production servers and then they use Zend Framework across the board to get the right methodology and best practices," Gutmans added. The Zend Platform got under way in 2005 with the last major release version 3.0 in February 2007. In the new version, 3.6, Zend has focused on further improving the performance of PHP deployments. "Performance management starts when a user clicks on a URL and until they get what they're looking for," Gutmans noted. "So we mapped that whole process and looked at where we could improve." One of the key improvements in Platform 3.6 is the ability to cache model view controller%26#150;based applications, which are increasingly popular in framework deployments. Gutmans explained that with the new MVC caching capabilities, instead of caching on a file basis Zend Platform can now cache on a URL basis. Additionally, Zend Platform allowed for high-performance sites to cache in shared memory, which further improves PHP delivery performance. While Zend Platform is available for both Linux and Windows Servers, Gutmans commented that the 3.6 release is geared toward Linux. "We're now working with Microsoft toward Windows Server 2008 and working on a road map for how to work with it," Gutmans said. Zend and Microsoft have a working partnership to make PHP run well on Windows platforms. On the development side, Zend's IDE version of Zend Studio has long been primarily used on Windows, and that's not expected to change with the new release of Zend Studio for Eclipse. The new Zend Studio for Eclipse is the first official release from Zend of its IDE based on the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PHT) project. Gutmans noted that Zend had more than 15,000 beta testers for Zend Studio for Eclipse, and the feedback received helped to make the final release a more stable product. Because the new Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, developers can now leverage the full Eclipse ecosystem of plug-ins to further expand the capabilities of the IDE. While Zend is pushing its new Eclipse-based IDE, it's not abandoning its non-Eclipse Zend Studio 5.5 customers. Zend has not officially set an end-of-life date yet for the non-Eclipse Zend Studio and has pledged to keep it current for minor fixes in a maintenance mode. "I think right now we have a very solid story for business-critical applications," Gutmans said. "What we're seeing today at Zend is that it's changing the way we work with customers," he added. According to Gutmans, the company set out on this path two years when it began working with Eclipse and Framework. "It's a strategy we've been seeing the benefit of," Gutmans noted. That's not to say there still isn't work for Zend to do to further improve PHP development and deployment. "I'm the CTO, so I always think there should be more that we should be doing," Gutmans said. "I want to do more around RIA (Rich internet applications), methodologies and more around business critical deployments. There is always a lot of work for Zend."

Yahoo, T-Mobile Team on Wireless Advertising in U.K.

As Yahoo continues to position a greater share of its business in the mobile space, it has formed another partnership with a major wireless carrier. On Thursday Yahoo announced that it has signed an exclusive agreement with T-Mobile to provide display advertising on the carrier's Web 'n' Walk Internet service in the United Kingdom. "We are focused on extending our leadership in both display advertising and in mobile services, and this new partnership demonstrates our continued momentum," a Yahoo spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to InternetNews.com. Under the agreement, Yahoo will become the exclusive provider of graphical ads on the T-Mobile Internet service in the U.K. The two companies expect the ads to go live in the first half of this year. In November 2006, Yahoo brokered a similar ad partnership in the U.K. with Vodafone. Together, the deals give Yahoo exclusive advertising rights to two of Britain's top five wireless carriers. The advertising deal is the first major news from Yahoo on the mobile front since the first week of January, when the company outlined several initiatives for enhancing Web content on wireless devices. The announcement included a mobile-widget program aimed at bringing in more content and Web applications from third parties. "We're committed to creating the best and richest mobile experience for all consumers, making it extremely personalized to their individual style and needs while opening up the Yahoo mobile platform to allow anyone to participate," Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said in his keynote address at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Last March Yahoo signaled its commitment to the wireless market with the launch of the Mobile Publisher Services platform, a suite of services aimed at brokering deals between publishers and advertisers looking to cash in on the fast-growing mobile sector. Mobile deals don't end with advertising, however. Yahoo, long hailed as the portal king, has signed numerous agreements with wireless carriers in Europe, Latin America and Asia to make its OneSearch the default home page for subscribers who surf the Web on their handset. Yahoo does not currently have exclusive advertising or content partnerships with any wireless carrier in the United States, but the company has been working actively with all major providers to stake a claim in the U.S. market.

Mandriva and Turbolinux Join Forces to Unite Linux

Mandriva Linux and Turbolinux are collaborating to create a common base for their respective Linux distributions. The joint effort will be called Manbo-Labs and involves developers from France, Japan and Brazil. While the Manbo-Labs effort is new, tying together multiple Linux distributions with a common base is not. In fact, Turbolinux and Conectiva Linux were part of the 2002 UnitedLinux effort to build a common Linux base. Conectiva has since merged with Mandrakesoft to form Mandriva. Novell and SCO (with its Caldera Linux product) were also part of the effort. UnitedLinux completely fell apart by 2004 for a number reasons, including the fact that SCO turned against Linux. According to Mandriva at least, the Manbo-Labs partnership is not a United Linux rehash. "The point of Manbo-Labs is not to create a common distribution but a common set of very low-level components like kernel, gcc, glibc and Xorg," Ann Nicolas, director of engineering at Mandriva, told InternetNews.com. "Putting together efforts, resources and experience is our common objective to make both distributions more competitive and efficient, as maintaining a complete base system needs quite a big amount of resources," she added. GCCand glibc are key infrastructure elements of an operational Linux system providing code compilation and code libraries. Xorg is a key foundation element for providing a GUI in Linux distributions. The Manbo effort will not be jointly working on the GNOME or KDE desktop layer that sits on top of Xorg. "Manbo-Labs work will benefit both on the desktop and the server side, as hardware support and management can be as tricky in server and desktop oriented distributions," Nicolas explained. Nicolas noted that the Manbo partnership is not about shared revenues; it's about shared development. She explained that Manbo is a joint financial effort to fund engineering dedicated to base system development. As part of the effort, Turbolinux and Mandriva are sharing developers in labs working on development, quality assurance and independent hardware vendor partnerships to certify the base system. "The main goal is to get concrete result as a set of common components that will improve quality and efficiency in Turbolinux and Mandriva," Nicholas said. "These components would have to be recognized by hardware manufacturers to help global certification and support." Although Turbolinux and Mandriva will share a common base, the Linux vendors have different views when it comes to Microsoft. In October 2007 Turbolinux and Microsoft signed a deal for interoperability and patent protection; Mandriva has no such agreement with Microsoft. In fact, Mandriva CEO Fran%26#231;ois Bancilhon is no friend of the company, recently issuing a public tirade against Microsoft and its competitive practices in Nigeria. Bancilhon has also written a blog post coming out strongly against Microsoft's patent protection. Nicolas commented that the Turbolinux partnership will not change anything in Mandriva's position regarding patents and proprietary software. The first Manbo-Labs release is expected this April, and it will be the base for the Mandriva Linux 2008 spring version.

Innovation on Macworld Expo Show Floor

SAN FRANCISCO %26#150; Maybe Macworld Expo should borrow a page from Apple and change its name. Last year, Apple changed its name from Apple Computer to simply Apple, Inc., reflecting its broader-than-Mac product portfolio. While there were plenty of Mac-related exhibitors at the annual show here this week, the exhibit floor was peppered with iPod, iPhone and iTouch-related products as well. Several products shown are designed to better integrate or help user's exchange data between Apple's different products. Eqinux previewed its TubeStick Hybrid, due out in February. The pocket-sized USB device is designed to bring digital and analog TV to Macs and PCs. The TubeStick includes two built-in receivers for watching free over the air digital HDTV as well as standard analog NTSC programs. It's priced at $129 with initial availability at the company's Web site. While there are plenty of TV receiver options for computer users, TubeStick adds community features. You can, for example, see what other users are watching and share comments while the shows are being broadcast. You can also schedule downloads using the system's electronic program guide and view them later on your iPhone or iPod. Nova media released FoneLink 1.5, a cell phone "companion" designed to facilitate the transfer of contact info from a non-Apple cell phone to a Mac and then onto an iPhone. The new release ($50, or free demo version includes a synchronization manager to sync contacts, dates, notes and bookmarks between a Mac and the cell phone. After the Fone2Phone has finished copying, iTunes can be used to sync and transfer the new data to an iPhone. "From one screen, everything is automatically copied," said Nova media spokesman Jan Fullemann. Ovolab showed off a new version of its unique Geophoto software for the Mac. Instead of organizing photos by name or other means, Geophoto lets you organize them by location by simply dragging images onto a world map or typing in the city, state or landmark name. The $19.99 software also has a social networking aspect, as it works with Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service, letting you see what other users are posting by clicking on specific geographical locations on the map. "You don't have to be connected to the Internet," Matteo da Pont, a software engineer with Ovolab, told InternetNews.com. But if you are connected, you can zoom into deeper levels down to street level." The Macworld Expo runs through January 18 and show organizers predict it will be the biggest in several years with over 400 exhibitors and over 50,000 people expected to attend.

Google's iGoogle Home Page Has New Themes

Google's come a long way from its famously sparse search page. Oh sure, the spartan look is still the default on Google's default search page, but the company's iGoogle personalized home page keeps getting more visual. Today, for example, Google announced further graphical extensions with the release of the iGoogle Themes API (define). With the API, developers can now create their own theme or background art for an iGoogle page. When it was launched last March, Google limited themes to a few it offered at the site. Now, borrowing a page from its Google Gadgets directory, Google is offering a Themes directory for users to post their work and share with others. As part of today's launch Google posted four very different custom themes from four designers. "Creating a theme is very simple; an XML file points to the image and there's support for dynamic themes that relate to the current time and geographic location," Jessica Ewing, senior product manager at Google, told InternetNews.com. "This is all about helping iGoogle users better connect with their page. There's a certain amount we can do, but by no means can we cover the unique artistic desires of all users." Ewing said iGoogle now has tens of millions of users worldwide. Certain elements of a Theme can't be changed, such as inclusion of the iGoogle logo. Ewing said Google takes fair use issues into account, but otherwise doesn't "editorialize" when approving Themes for the directory. Also, as with Gadgets, the Themes directory will soon include profile pages for developers available for users to see.

Mmmm ? Bacteria

By Elsa Youngsteadt
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 January 2008

When you eat a cup of yogurt, billions of bacteria make their way to your gut. Some researchers believe that these "probiotics" can be good for you, alleviating everything from bowel disease to allergies. Now, a team of researchers has shown that, at least in mice, supplementing food with a helping of "good" bacteria can cause profound metabolic changes, including some that may be linked to weight loss.

The human gut hosts 1000 species of microorganisms--more than a kilogram of cells in all. Recent studies indicate that this thriving ecosystem plays an important role in human health and may even contribute to obesity (ScienceNOW, 20 December 2006). Last year, Jeremy Nicholson, a biochemist at Imperial College London, and a team of researchers from Imperial College and the Nestl%26eacute; Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, showed that replacing mouse gut microbes with human microbes caused widespread metabolic changes in the mice (ScienceNOW, 23 May 2007). Nevertheless, scientists remained skeptical that probiotics could have a similar effect, because probiotic foods add only a few billion foreign microbes to a native population of tens of trillions.

In the new study, Nicholson's group returned to the mice harboring human gut microbes. The researchers supplemented the animals' diets with a solution containing one of two species of Lactobacillus bacteria, which are present in yogurt and baby formula. Control mice were given saline solution as a supplement.

After 2 weeks, the team measured the metabolic profiles of the mice, analyzing feces, urine, plasma, intestinal contents, and liver tissue. The results, published in the 15 January issue of Molecular Systems Biology, show that although the composition of gut microbes changed only slightly in the three groups of mice, the animals' metabolic profiles--including various markers for blood cholesterol and amino acid levels in the liver--were profoundly different.

Of particular note, says Nicholson, was the effect of probiotics on bile acids, which help the small intestine absorb fat. Probiotics diminished the function of the acids, Nicholson notes, which may make it harder for the animals to absorb fat--and thus should keep them slim. As for how a relatively small number of foreign microbes could have such a dramatic effect, Nicholson believes it results from communication with the native bugs. "Gut bacteria talk to each other," he says, so despite their relatively modest numbers, "probiotics have a huge effect on what those other bugs do."

Although he cautions that the gut is simpler in the experimental mice than in humans, Glenn Gibson, a microbiologist at Reading University in the U.K., calls the work "very thorough" and says that it foretells an exciting and potentially revolutionary future in which microbial interventions can correct metabolic abnormalities. "We can't change human genetics," he notes, "but if we can alter metabolism with minor changes in gut bacteria, that's very exciting."

Related sites

Science article on guts of chocolate lovers

Harvard University on health benefits of probiotics

Top Ten Intranets Dare To Differ

The virtual envelopes have been opened and the top ten winners announced this week for Nielsen Norman Group's annual Ten Best Designed Intranets competition. NNG, a well-known usability consulting firm, said the eighth annual competition attracted about a hundred entries worldwide. The ten winners included five organizations from the U.S., with the remainder from outside the country. With few notable exceptions, the ten winners are mostly large companies. In alphabetical order, they are:

• Bank of America, U.S.
• Bankinter, Spain
• Barnes %26 Noble, U.S.
• British Airways, U.K.
• Campbell Soup, U.S.
• Coldwell Banker Real Estate, U.S.
• IKEA North America Service, U.S.
• Ministry of Transport, New Zealand
• New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia
• SAP, Germany

NNG's director of research, Kara Pernice, said corporate intranets have improved significantly since it held the first contest. "CIOs and the rest of management have come to realize how important intranets are, which is really smart and long overdue," Pernice told InternetNews.com. "A bad intranet wastes employees' time and is a missed opportunity to help with knowledge transfer and getting people up to speed with what they need to know at the company." Pernice said it's also clear from the entries that companies, at least the ones with good intranets, are investing more resources in them. For instance, in the early years, she said, it was very common for just a single person to be in charge of intranet design. This year, the smallest intranet design team among the winners had two members, while twenty different people across different departments were involved in the design for British Airways' site. While Pernice conceded that there was a measure of subjectivity in picking winners, such as a basic impression of whether the intranet's look is appealing, NNG used a wide range of specific criteria based on its usability reports and client studies. The bar is also raised each year, as companies get more sophisticated in their intranet design, she said. Three winners came from the financial sector -- two banks and one real estate company. NNG speculates financial institutions have traditionally fared well in the competition because they typically invest a lot more in IT than other companies.
Click on the graphic for a view of Bank of America's intranet One reason for the investment is that because financial firms deal in complex transactions, training costs for internal applications can skyrocket if the right user-centered design isn't in place for local and remote branches. Another company with a few dollars in the bank and a heavy investment in IT is SAP, the enterprise software firm that represented the only technology company among this year's winners. Most of the winners are big firms, with an average of 50,000 employees. A notable exception is New Zealand's Ministry of Transport, with only 200 intranet users. Several of the winners make use of advanced personalization in their intranets. Pernice said personalization hasn't emerged more broadly on intranets because it's expensive, and if done wrong, ends up being counterproductive. Examples of effective personalization included Coldwell Banker. When salespeople log in to the realtor's intranet, they are shown personalized data like their individual sales targets, their current progress and leads that are being tracked. The realtor's employee directory also goes beyond the norm: A special feature, for example, helps agents find colleagues for referral. "Gone are the days when you're lucky to just get a welcome note from the CEO," Pernice said. "Companies are realizing intranets are a tool to help make money and make the right decisions." Sometimes a focus on a clear design can be more important than adding a bunch of features not everyone knows how to use. Pernice lauds the intranet by the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries in Australia for its simple, clear design. "They just did a very good job with colors and borders," she said. "You can tell what's a link and what to click on to go somewhere."
As clear as mud Most companies that enter an intranet design contest might be expected to have, at least, some visually appealing aspects. Pernice said while there was nothing "Frankensteinian" among the entries, a few made plenty of mistakes. Those gaffes include links that "drop a user off a cliff" and go nowhere. Another no-no, by NNG's reckoning, is overly branded sites. When you're already in Acme Inc.'s intranet, it's not necessary to brand the Acme search box, Acme's news of the day, Acme's Tips For Productivity, and so on, she said, adding that one company had its logo a clutter-filled five times on one page.
Tools of the trade Pernice said the rise in consumer social networks and multimedia content is also emerging as a driver of intranet innovation. "If you have YouTube on your Dell desktop at home, you start to wonder why you can't see video of the big company event at another office or the politician meeting the CEO," she said. "I have empathy for the poor IT guys who have to make sure the pipes work and implement all this." SAP is making it work. The big enterprise software maker dedicates a section of its intranet homepage to "SAP TV" -- with videos on various topics from SAP Cup soccer finals to doing business in Russia. NNG's report on the finalists points out that some 41 different products were used among the ten winners for their intranet platforms. "As with every year, we again conclude that intranet technology is an unsettled field with no clear winner," it found. Still, a handful of frequently used products stood out. Among most-used products this year were Microsoft's SharePoint and the Google Search Appliance. Others frequently used in intranets were Red Hat Linux, Lotus Notes and Domino and the Oracle database.

Technical Analysis: Bears Take Charge

Not much new to add from last Friday: the bears are still in charge, the Fed remains out of touch, and the last chance for the bulls remains 1360-1370 on the S%26amp;P, about 2% lower from here (see first chart below). All isn't lost quite yet, however. The NYSE advance-decline line (second chart) remains above its November and August lows, a sign that downside momentum could be waning, and the CBOE equity put-call index showed quite a spike today, a sign of fear by investors. But time is clearly running out for the bulls %26#151; and the economy. It would take a move above 1430-1440 on the S%26amp;P for the bullish case to begin to reassert itself. The Dow (third chart) is also running out of room here, with 12,500 a critical level, and the Nasdaq (fourth chart) needs to hold 2386-2400. To the upside, 12,724-12,748 and 2540-2554 would be a good start. Paul Shread is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and member of the Market Technicians Association.

Online Data Depositories Go Beyond Mere Storage

Online storage solutions are popping up everywhere on the Web, offering small home office and business users a variety of options. Most, if not all, provide easy-to-use upload and download functionality and file sharing capabilities%26#151;putting the data storage approach more than a few steps ahead of the granddaddy of online storage: FTP sites. The key elements setting services apart, at least at this point, are reliability, availability and extra-rich features. That%26#146;s what DigitalBucket is banking on in terms of market strategy. In public beta until early February, the San Jose-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider is built on Amazon%26#146;s Simple Storage Service%26#151;the e-commerce vendor%26#146;s own data infrastructure%26#151;an aspect that CEO Greg Hacobian claims provides high reliability and scalability few market competitors offer at this point. %26#147;Our focus is as a software provider that offers a reliable storage service that can expand with a business or user%26#146;s needs. People want to access stored data everywhere and anywhere they are, so providing a central location provides that kind of access as well as the ability to share,%26#148; explained Hacobian in an interview with . With a clean and simple site design, DigitalBucket makes account setup so simple it%26#146;s nearly silly. It%26#146;s just name, e-mail, password and the account (including clicking through an e-mail login link) is open in just minutes. Once logged in, hit the "manage your files" link and you%26#146;re able to load, download, share, e-mail and delete files in whatever folder set-up created. Moving files between folders is just drag and drop and users can even change document views in the file manager from icons to thumbnails to details. Want to know the last time you modified a stored doc? The file manager profile gives that info as part of the file detail data. But it%26#146;s really what lies behind the basic features that will cement the user experience given the varied files in play and online data interaction users have come to expect. With a quick login and a few clicks, users can post a file to a blog tethered to LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger or WordPress. Want to edit that business strategy presentation you stored last week? You don%26#146;t have to download it, edit it and then upload it back into storage. Thanks to DigitalBucket%26#146;s use of Zoho applications, users can edit Word, text, HTML, Excel and even graphical presentation files right where they%26#146;re housed. If you%26#146;re not content with the Zoho apps, you can edit with other online tools including Snipshot or Picnik. For the business enterprise, the tools and features provide more than decent collaboration abilities for sharing data with partners, clients and internal staff. It%26#146;s a snap to create sub accounts that then provide customized access privileges to clients/partners. And external users don%26#146;t need to be registered users%26#151;a nice ease of use feature as well. DigitalBucket.net is just one of dozens of online storage providers in play. To get a glimpse of the increasing list of competitors check out Backup Review, a good starting place for those shopping for such a service. But for a storage tool that%26#146;s clearly within economic reach of both individual users and SMBs, it%26#146;s clearly gone a few steps farther than many others offering data housing in the cloud. Innovative data storage providers are not only going the mile to provide reliable storage depositories, they%26#146;re re-crafting what was once considered just a locked data vault environment into a dynamic user environment.

Ma Bell Crushes Stocks

Rumors of a Countrywide Financial bankruptcy and comments from AT%26amp;T that raised slowdown fears sent stocks plunging on Tuesday. AT%26amp;T CEO Randall Stephenson told Bloomberg that the company is experiencing "softness" in its phone and broadband businesses and is disconnecting more customers for failing to pay their bills. AT%26amp;T shares cut their losses in half but still ended the day 5% lower, but the rest of the market ended the day at its lows, with the major indexes back in 10% "correction" territory. Countrywide once again denied bankruptcy rumors that have swirled around the nation's top mortgage lender, but its shares still fell 28% to a new 52-week low. E*Trade shares also hit a new yearly low, down 20% on the day. The Nasdaq fell for the eighth straight day, its longest losing streak since a similar decline in June 2006. Federal Reserve officials have yet to step up their campaign of interest rate cuts despite the growing chance of recession, and comments from Fed officials on the issue have been mixed this week, with some concern about inflation remaining. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke could settle the issue when he speaks on Thursday. Leap Wireless gained 6% on strong subscriber growth. VMware and Nvidia bounced back from recent declines with 2% gains, with Nvidia unveiling a new high-end graphics offering. Seagate fell 4% on a downgrade, and Microsoft was off more than 3% on the acquisition of enterprise search company FAST. Oracle was down 5% after CEO Larry Ellison sold shares under a prearranged trading plan. Credence Systems fell 20% after missing sales estimates and announcing plans for 30% layoffs. Citigroup reiterated its "sell" rating and $1 price target. The stock closed at $1.79. The Nasdaq fell 59 to 2440, the S%26amp;P tumbled 26 to 1390, and the Dow plunged 238 to 12,589. Volume rose to 4.7 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.65 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 21-11 margin on the NYSE, and 21-9 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 80% on the NYSE, and 80% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 58-518 on the NYSE, and 66-444 on the Nasdaq.

Sprint: WiMax on Track For April

Sprint Nextel is on track to launch commercial services for its next-generation WiMax high-speed wireless network at the end of April, Chief Technology Officer Barry West said on Tuesday. Speaking on a WiMax panel at the Consumer Electronics Show, West said Sprint would sell the service at reasonable rates with options including per day, week or month, as well as longer term contracts. But unlike typical phone services, Sprint does not plan to subsidize WiMax devices for customers. "People will be excited about our rates," West said. "They won't be ecstatic about them because we're not going to give it away." WiMax service fees could also be included in the purchase price of devices, such as WiMax-enabled cameras. Asked about the risks of introducing services based on a commercially untested technology during an economic downturn, West said he was not concerned and had not seen any signs of a pullback in electronics spending so far. "I really don't see it," West said in an interview with Reuters. "The fourth quarter for the consumer electronics industry ... was different, but it wasn't bad." Sprint hopes WiMax will help the No. 3 U.S. mobile service stand out from the competitors it has been losing ground to, including AT%26T and Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group. West said he is talking to operators developing WiMax services around the world to set up roaming agreements that make it easier for customers to use their devices abroad. "Roaming will be much more like the Wi-Fi world than it will be in the world of cellular phones," he said. Wi-Fi, a shorter-range predecessor of WiMax, is mostly used in laptops today and is commonly available in coffee shops and other public places around the world. Sprint plans to offer only a data card for laptops and a modem for desktop computers when it kicks off the service, and has no immediate plans to sell phones that include the technology, West said. Other devices will be sold through electronics retailers rather than Sprint, he said. West said he expects up to 10 WiMax devices to be available at the time Sprint launches its service. One of them is a Web browsing device that Nokia plans to sell. Fred Wright, a senior vice president for Motorola's wireless network equipment unit, said his company would have a multimedia wireless device ready for the market at the end of the third quarter or start of the fourth quarter. The device would support voice but calling would not be its main feature, Wright said. West also said a Korean company that he declined to name would start to sell a dedicated gaming device for WiMax in the first quarter of 2009. Sprint plans to kick off commercial services in the three markets, which have been testing the technology since December: Baltimore, Washington, DC and Chicago. He would not comment beyond the initial strategy as new Sprint Chief Executive Dan Hesse is reviewing future efforts amid criticism over the previously announced plan to spend $5 billion on the WiMax network by 2010. Sprint's initial technology suppliers for the service include Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Motorola and Nokia Siemens, a joint venture of Nokia and German network equipment maker Siemens AG. Chipmaker Intel is also a big promoter of WiMax.