sheltonlibrary.com

While that may be true, it won’t fit into the world’s thinnest notebooks, which makes the claim less impressive. The SSD from Super Talent measures 12.5 millimeters thick. Sure that sounds teeny tiny, but that’s more like pregnant-Nicole-Richie-thin compared to the 9.5-millimeter drives on the market, which are more like Nicole-Richie-after-Thanksgiving-dinner-thin: seems like a negligible difference in size, but has major implications. If you haven’t noticed, some PC makers are battling over who can create the skinniest notebook. So while packing 256GB into that size is impressive, thinner drives with less storage space are what the market is currently demanding.

Almost every hard drive maker is jumping on the solid-state bandwagon since solid state is expected to increase from its current 1 percent share in the memory market to almost 30 percent over the next three years. So expect the competition among them over who’s the thinnest, fastest, lightest, and prettiest to continue ratcheting up.

A solid-state drive maker is claiming its new 256GB drive is the world’s thinnest.

(Credit:
Super Talent)

In any case, the Super Talent SSD is a 2.5-inch drive that reads data at 65MB per second, writes at 50MB per second, and can withstand up to 16G of vibration. No price yet, but they sell to OEMs anyway.

2007: $5.18 billion

The Cleantech Group on Thursday published results of its quarterly numbers that show investment in the sector was stronger than expected.

2005: $2.5 billion

Investment leaped from $3.6 billion in 2006 to $5.18 billion in 2007.

Venture capital investment in
green-tech companies topped $5 billion in North America and Europe last year and shows no signs of slowing down.

The conditions for the influx of money to energy and environmental start-ups–high fossil fuel energy prices and favorable policies–will remain, which means that 2008 will likely see the same pace, said Nicholas Parker, chairman of Cleantech Group.

2004: $1.8 billion

Cleantech Group said that the number of deals over $100 million increased, which it saw as an indication of growing investor confidence.

2001: $714 million

Energy generation was the most active sector with 172 deals, totaling $2.75 billion.

2003: $1.7 billion

2002: $899 million

Behind that was energy storage at $471 million, transportation at $445 million, energy efficiency at $356 million, and recycling and waste with $291 million.

2006: $3.6 billion

Here’s a historical view of clean-tech investment, according to Cleantech Group:

“We foresee continued growth over 2008 as the clean-tech market cycle moves from early adoption to mainstream driver of wealth and job creation,” he said in a statement.

commentary

Yes, there’s much for Microsoft to do. It’s an imperfect commitment on Microsoft’s part, almost undoubtedly driven by the need to placate European Commission regulators and to preemptively allay US antitrust fears as a Yahoo! deal nears. But the key is to take what has been given (which, in Microsoft’s view, is massive - I think many underestimate just how hard this must be for many within the company, including Ballmer to swallow), and to continue pushing for more.

Michael Cunningham, general counsel for Red Hat, has posted a response to Microsoft’s pledge to greater transparency. Let’s just say that Michael isn’t overly impressed. Not until he sees more of a tangible commitment to transparency:

Of course, we’ve heard similar announcements before, almost always strategically timed for other effect. Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism. Three commitments by Microsoft would show that it really means what it is announcing today.

Michael then goes on to call for a commitment to open standards, cooperation with open source, and competition on a level-playing field. This is fair, but doesn’t really do more to clarify Microsoft’s stated intentions. It’s up to us to push Microsoft to deliver.

However, one thing that Microsoft could do is extend its Open Specification Promise to the API and protocol information it’s opening up, rather than demanding license fees for these. I called it a clever “channel sales” play (allow noncommercial development lawsuit-free, but bring in the guns once that software is commercialized), but I do think that we should applaud even baby steps. It’s absolutely appropriate, however, to push for the OSP to be applied to these APIs and protocols.

Eight years ago the U.S. regulatory authorities, and four years ago the European regulators made clear to Microsoft that its refusal to disclose interface information for its monopoly software products violates the law. So, it is hardly surprising to see even Microsoft state today that “interoperability across systems is an important requirement” and announce a “change in [its] approach to interoperability.”

The bill was stripped of a controversial measure that would have given federal prosecutors the power to file civil lawsuits against peer-to-peer users who violate copyright laws. The Commerce Department and Justice Department voiced their opposition to the provision in a letter this week, saying it would create “unnecessary bureaucracy.”

The Recording Industry of America gave resounding praise for the bill.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who pushed to have the controversial Justice Department provision removed, was still dissatisfied with the state of the bill.

This post was updated at 4:25 p.m. PDT with more details.

Not all of the Bush administration’s objections with the legislation were addressed, however. The bill replaces the body that currently enforces intellectual property law with a White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. The new coordinator will chair an inter-agency committee to combat counterfeiting and piracy. In its letter, the administration said the establishment of a White House IP coordinator was “objectionable on constitutional grounds.”

The Commerce Department said it is still reviewing the legislation as it was passed.

Other groups opposed to the bill also spoke out Friday.

“The legislation still includes provisions that overzealous federal prosecutors could misconstrue to allow the seizure of important components of our Internet infrastructure,” he said in a statement.

Rick Cotton, executive vice president and general counsel of NBC Universal, said concerns that the bill goes too far are unfounded.

The U.S. Senate on Friday unanimously passed a bipartisan bill backed by groups like the recording industry and the labor movement that would increase federal protections over intellectual property.

“Over the last 20 years, the flood of physical counterfeit projects and the scale of digital theft (have) gone off the chart,” he said. “What drives (the U.S. economy are) precisely technical invention, innovation, and creativity–if we don’t protect that, we dramatically undermine our economic future.”

“At a critical economic juncture, this bipartisan legislation provides enhanced protection for an important asset that helps lead our global competitiveness,” RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said. “Additional tools for intellectual-property enforcement are not just good for the copyright community but for consumers who will enjoy a wider array of legitimate offerings.”

“At a time when the entire digital world is going to less restrictive distribution models, and when the courts are aghast at the outlandish damages being inflicted on consumers in copyright cases, this bill goes entirely in the wrong direction,” said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge.

Introduced in July by Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act now moves to the House of Representatives, where it will be taken up either Friday or Saturday, before Congress adjourns.

The legislation still provides increased resources for the Justice Department to combat intellectual property theft and provide coordination for federal and state efforts against counterfeiting and piracy. It also increases penalties for intellectual property infringements.

Along with the recording industry, the bill is backed by the Chamber of Commerce, and labor groups like the AFL-CIO and Change to Win.

The music label, the largest of the country’s four top recording companies, has indeed acknowledged that the clip doesn’t violate their copyright and the clip has been reposted to YouTube. But Universal Music also argued before Fogel that it’s not up to copyright owners to determine fair use.

“The DMCA streamlined the process but the law also tried to balance it,” she said. What she is referring to is the DMCA’s requirement that companies first form a good-faith belief that material is infringing before trying to remove videos.

Fogel agreed and the wrote: “The unnecessary removal of non-infringing material causes significant injury to the public where time-sensitive or controversial subjects are involved and the counter-notification remedy does not sufficiently address these harms.”

But McSherry of EFF argues that the counter-notification remedy doesn’t protect people from unfounded claims and puts the onus on them to prove their innocence. She remembers that before the DMCA, a media company that wanted someone to remove allegedly infringing material would first have to convince a judge and then obtain a temporary restraining order.

Rook has little sympathy for the big media companies. He’s skeptical about their review process and whether Viacom employees eyeball all the videos. He said that had anyone actually seen his video, there could have been no way they would have accused him of copyright infringement. Rook also said that a year before Viacom sent the take-down notice, one of Viacom’s companies, MTV, had requested a viewing copy of his documentary.

In February 2007, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove Rook’s documentary about a professional wrestler, accusing him of using some of the company’s copyright material. The conglomerate was mistaken. None of the video or music Rook included in his film belonged to Viacom. Executives at the company apologized but the filmmaker still had to wait three weeks before the clip was reposted to YouTube, which he says hurt his efforts to market the film.

“The DMCA absolutely anticipated this very scenario,” Litvack said. “Universal said she infringed on her copyright and sent a take-down notice. She then has an opportunity to appeal to YouTube (counter-notification remedy), which is what she sought and the video was restored.”

EFF represents the Pennsylvania woman who sued Universal Music Group for demanding that YouTube remove her clip, which featured her infant son dancing to 30 seconds of the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy.” EFF has always argued that the video was a “textbook” example of fair use and Universal Music should have recognized that.

Perhaps Viacom’s position on handling take-down notices was best explained in the company’s letter to Rook.

Victor Rook, an indy filmmaker who was once wrongly accused by Viacom of copyright violations, is happy a judge has reminded media companies to think twice before calling someone a pirate.

But for copyright owners, Fogel’s decision may further complicate an already arduous process of tracking and removing pirated clips.

Mark Morril, Viacom’s deputy general counsel, wrote to Rook: “Having reviewed the video, we acknowledge that its inclusion in the take-down notice was an error and the error however was completely unintentional. We sincerely regret that this error affected your video. We note that YouTube and Google have adopted a policy that forces copyright owners like Viacom or yourself to shoulder the entire burden of monitoring for copyright infringement on the YouTube site.

The entire episode would have never occurred had “Viacom ever looked at the video,” Rook claims.

“If that doesn’t prove that Viacom knew my film wasn’t their material I don’t know what can,” Rook said.

“YouTube and Google have adopted a policy that forces copyright owners like Viacom… to shoulder the entire burden of monitoring for copyright infringement.” — A letter to YouTube user from Viacom

Mark Litvack, an entertainment lawyer with the Los Angeles law firm of Reed Smith, says that while it’s good for the judge to remind media companies to take a hard look at material before making accusations, he doesn’t think the lawsuit brought by the Pennsylvania woman is necessary.

Copyright owners, such as NBC Universal, Warner Bros., and Viacom, were put on notice Wednesday when U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that they must not order video be removed from Web sites indiscriminately. Before taking action against a clip, copyright owners, must form a “good-faith belief ” that a video is infringing, according to Corynne McSherry, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A Viacom spokesman said Thursday that the company has sent 350,000 take-down notices to YouTube. Each of the offending videos is first reviewed by Viacom staff before the notices are sent. The media power has acknowledged making mistakes but less than 1 percent of the time.

Fogel disagreed. In his 10-page decision, he reminds Universal Music that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already requires copyright owners to make a determination about fair use prior to sending take-down notices. “A consideration of the applicability of the fair use doctrine simply is part of that initial review,” Fogel wrote.

“Viacom has no alternative accept to repeatedly search the entire YouTube library,” the letter continued, “and send take-down notices…This is a massive effort. We have manually reviewed over 1.7 million clips on YouTube and have identified more than 187,000 pirated clips of our copyrighted content. In an effort of this scale, some inadvertent error is inevitable.”

I still have a few drum machines at home I want to connect the Tenori-On to before finishing up my full review. In the meantime, I suppose I can share some of the shots we took of the Tenori-On in our CNET photo studio. View the Yamaha Tenori-On photo gallery.

(Credit:
Donald Bell/CNET Networks)

OK, I have to admit I’ve been somewhat selfish with Yamaha’s Tenori-On music sequencer ever since it arrived at my desk a few weeks back. Can you blame me, really? The thing meets all my requirements for gadget coveting–it’s shiny, futuristic, noisy, and expensive.

Click to view Crave's Tenori-On photo gallery.

If the company wants to offer other IM services (from Yahoo, Google or AOL, say), Messenger must get top billing. And if the startup wants to offer any other IM service, it must pay Microsoft 25 cents a user per year for a site license.

Microsoft will gain more by enabling more people to use MSN than it will by squeezing quarters out of startups. Connecting its IM service with Yahoo!’s was a step in the right direction. This attempt to extort money from startups is 10 steps in the wrong direction.

commentary

Here’s the “deal”:

You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft. The company knows how to go against the grain. Just at the moment that the rest of the planet has discovered that there is huge value in opening up, Microsoft has been stalking the web, demanding payment from startups that want to allow users to import their MSN contact lists to other web services, as Fortune notes.

Just the sort of company with which I’d want to do business. You?

However, if a company wants to force its users to abandon 73% of their friends (assuming it’s roughly a three-way race between AIM (53 million active users), MSN (27 million active users), and Yahoo! (22 million active users), then they can use MSN for free! Wow! Dave Rosenberg calls this “bizarre and stupid.” I think he’s being overly generous.

Its excuse for this amazingly bad policy? That the agreements it’s seeking to impose “merely represent what Microsoft wants–not what it will ultimately get in each instance.” Wow! What a soothing response. “When we told the villagers that we planned to rape and pillage, that’s just what we wanted to do. We figured we could make do with simply pillaging.

Data is the future of lock-in, but some companies like Google are attempting to preserve user choice by signing up to data portability agreements. Not so Microsoft, which doesn’t seem to have learned much from its antitrust trial besides how to evade detection.

When I returned home I immediately rented Ed Harris’ Pollock biopic DVD, where he played the tortured master. There’s no reference to the hi-fi per-se, other than when in a fit of anger he stops a 78 RPM record from playing. The film’s exterior shots were filmed at the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Pollock’s studio is well preserved and you can see more of his dribbles and splatters all over the floor. If you’re interested in visiting the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center check the website for more info.

Left, inside the speaker/door; right, outside view.

I visited the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center last week in East Hampton, New York. While I was there learned the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock and his wife, artist Lee Krasner had a pretty cool hi-fi.

Pollock’s paintings now hang in museums, but it wasn’t until a 1949 article in Life magazine made him famous that his career took off (he had been painting since the 1930s). According to Google, “In November 2006 Pollock’s ‘No. 5, 1948′ became the world’s most expensive painting, when it was sold privately to an undisclosed buyer for the sum of $140,000,000. The previous owner was film and music-producer David Geffen.” While Pollock was alive he never sold a painting for more than $8,000.

It’s also interesting that the inside of the door that supports the horn and woofer originally came from Pollock’s studio, which is a separate building from the house. The inside of the door is covered with Pollock’s trademark paint splatters, drips, and blobs, probably made while making some of his more famous paintings. That discovery stopped me in my tracks.

The Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Ms. Harrison explained that Pollock loved to play his hi-fi really loud, especially when Krasner was out of the house. Some things never change.

The Audiophiliac ogles Pollock's hi-fi.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Yes, I was there for the art but then I noticed the horn speaker under the stairwell to the second floor of the house. Helen Harrison, the Pollock-Krasner House’s Director allowed me to open the door and examine the speaker system in greater detail. She told me the hi-fi was purchased by Pollock in 1954. In the room behind the staircase I spotted a Bogen DB-20 tube amplifier and a Crown (?) turntable I’ve never seen before. Ms. Harrison assured me the hi-fi still works, but the records that were on hand weren’t playable. Oh well.

Sounds mild enough, though I’m sure Comcast might have a problem with that. I’m not sure that most of the rest of us would mind so much.

Read the proposal for yourself, but the attacks are over the top. I wonder whether Glickman would toe the same line if Hollywood was making serious money from Internet downloads (and that day inevitably will arrive.) Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jon Healey fills in the picture:

The MPAA’s senior honcho is an experienced and capable lawyer, but is Glickman’s nostalgia for the pre-Internet era clouding his judgment about the movie industry’s future? Glickman delivered a speech (PDF) on Monday to the annual ShoWest convention in Las Vegas and it was a corker. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Dan Glickman, who runs Hollywood’s most powerful trade organization, has got to start watching something hipper than It’s a Wonderful Life.

But the bill that’s awaiting action in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, by (Markey and Pickering) doesn’t fit that description. It would make it U.S. policy to preserve the public’s access to “lawful” content, applications, and services online, carving out wide latitude for ISPs to interfere with infringing works. For example, ISPs couldn’t block all BitTorrent traffic simply because it might be used for piracy, but they could use video fingerprints to try to stop BitTorrent from being used to deliver bootlegged movies.

Now, back to the real world.

(Stage instructions: Slow fade out to the background theme of a Lawrence Welk polka, as Zuzu petals sprinkle across the Capitol Dome.)

But here’s my rule of thumb: When you find a collection of billion-dollar interests–in this case content companies, cable operators, and telcos–lining up on one side of the issue, you know the fix is in. Glickman is purposely demonizing the import of the Net neutrality bill proposed by Reps. Ed Markey and Chip Pickering and now waiting in the queue before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Yet Hollywood’s vision is focused on the near-term risk of piracy, rather than the long-term risk of its distribution pipelines deciding to collect extra tolls. Glickman argued in his speech that neutrality regulations would bar the use of emerging tools that ISPs can use to prevent piracy. That’s what some studio lobbyists have been telling lawmakers, too, in their efforts to derail neutrality legislation. And depending on how the regulations are written, they could be right.

Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today.

(Credit:
Declan McCullagh)

MPAA Dan Glickman: Nyet on Net neutrality

This is a high-stakes debate. Do we take a stand for intellectual property rights or cast them aside in the digital environment? Are we permitted to respond to consumers, innovate on their behalf, and compete with the world? Or are we told by our government to stand down? Today MPAA and all of our studios are standing up in opposition to broad-based government regulation of the Internet. We are opposing so-called “Net neutrality” government action. And, in the process, we are standing up for our customers, for our economy, and for the ability of content producers to continue to create great movies for the future.

Don’t believe for a minute that Glickman’s as clueless as that speech might suggest. He was a United States Congressman for Kansas’ 4th district from 1977 until 1995. Then he served as Secretary of Agriculture under Bill Clinton. He’s been running the MPAA since succeeding Jack Valenti in 2004. He knows his way around the corridors of power and how legislation gets passed in Washington. Glick’s doing what a smart hired hand representing any powerful interest group does: he’s exaggerating for effect.

Customized iPhone application homepages - without a hack! Finally, I can change my icons and shove Stocks and YouTube to the second page! I never used those applications anyway and, finally, here’s a way to get rid of them, well, not seeing them. That and I’ve added
Safari icon links to this newly freed real estate to The New York Times, Facebook mobile for the iPhone, SFGate and to CNET (of course). The best part of this new feature is the seizure-inducing icon-shake when you want to change the ordering and inclusion of icons (via a drop and drag feature) on the various pages (up to 9 pages, I’ve read) that contain your iPhone menus - perfect for all those developer applications that are coming.

Google Maps qausi-GPS. Pretty cool to know where you generally are while stuck in traffic. After hitting a button a circle appears to indicate where you are generally. Kind of looks more like a targeting device for Kang and Kodos but eh, I can see how this will be pretty useful.

I still stand by my original post that the updates promised for the
iPhone released today as firmware “update 1.1.3 “should be given a better number, maybe a 1.2?, to mark the great features and updates. Hoaxes and teasers aside, I can’t contain my giddiness - mass SMS text messages are back! That and many other neat features tracks the industry-wide trend of users being able to customize their iPhones to greater and greater lengths. Installation, via iTunes (which itself got an update) was quick - within 10 minutes I was up and running.

The changes I’ve noted and used so far that have made all the difference:

And, finally, SMS-texting en masse One of my New Year’s resolutions was actually to text less and call more. Well, with 1.1.3… let’s just say I probably won’t be keeping that resolution. I had been finding that, because mass text messages weren’t available, that I communicated with fewer people than I did with my Razr. After all, there are only so many individual text messages you can send while at a traffic light, or waiting in line at the store, it wasn’t only time-consuming, but tedious. Now, you can add multiple recipients - what the maximum number of recipients are is currently unclear, but sending the message does take longer. These text messages are denoted with a little group of people icon (how cute and convenient). What’s more, early polling data seems to indicate that recipients of the mass text message can’t tell it’s a mass text message. Responses from individuals are also segregated and not contained within the original mass text thread. Excellent.