News
Google Launches Music Search Feature
Dec 16th
The service delivers special pages with information on artists, their albums and songs.
By Antone Gonsalves
TechWeb News
Dec 15, 2005 04:09 PM
Google Inc. on Thursday launched a music search feature that delivers special pages with information on artists, their albums and songs.
The service is similar to what Google provides for other search categories, such as movies. Typing in the title of a movie playing in theatres will get a form at the top of results where a person can type in a zip code and get a list of showings and times.
In the music feature, typing in the name of an artist or group in Google’s general search form will deliver at the top of results an image icon that will take the visitor to the special page. The feature was added after Google found on its site a lot of search traffic on music terms like popular artist and albums, David Alpert, search quality product manager said on the company’s blog.
The music-search page does not currently include contextual ads, but the company has put out a call for stores selling music downloads, subscriptions or physical CDs to get in touch with the Mountain View, Calif., company if they want to be listed. Some album descriptions currently contain non-sponsored links to music stores.
For now, the feature works mostly for artists popular in the United States. Google, however, plans to expand its coverage to classical music, worldwide artist and lesser-known performers.
While it expects to increase its list of music stores over time, there’s no indication Google plans to stray from its mission of providing information and making money from sponsored links and other online advertising.
“Music is popular, and people want to find music,” Joe Wilcox, analyst for JupiterResearch said. “Google is first and foremost about information and connecting people to that information. To me, music makes perfect sense. The question is why didn’t Google do this sooner?”
Google is not the first to offer special pages related to general search queries that are music related. Such features are available on Yahoo Inc., Ask Jeeves, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN portal.
US BlackBerry service faces shutdown
Dec 16th
By Rhys Blakely and Agencies
The BlackBerry service, based on the handheld e-mail device that has become a must-have tool for the business elite, could be shutdown in the United States after a bitter legal battle over a key patent.
This week, NTP, a small firm that holds a crucial patent that allows e-mails to be sent to mobile devices, announced a licence agreement with Visto Corp – an arch-rival of Research In Motion. (RIM), the company that created the BlackBerry. The announcement could put further pressure on RIM to settle a patent claim from NTP which could be worth up to $1 billion (£565 million), or face having its service shut down altogether.
With neither side apparently prepared to concede any ground, the dispute seems set to continue. “It sounds like a little bit of Russian roulette,” Carl Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond, told AP.
Visto has also took out a legal writ against Microsoft, accusing the company of infringing patents. Visto said it is seeking a permanent injunction to stop Microsoft from “misappropriating” technology developed nearly ten years ago by Visto and its co-founder.
To avoid similar litigation, RIM competitors including Nokia and Good Technology have drawn up licence agreements with NTP, which is based in Arlington, Virginia. In addition to signing its deal with Visto, NTP bought a stake in the company, which licences its mobile e-mail technology to Sprint Nextel and Vodafone, the British-based telecoms company.
If a court orders a shutdown of BlackBerry’s service, it is likely to give users just 30 days’ notice to switch to other devices.
In the meantime, RIM’s share price has plunged 21 per cent this year amid growing concerns from users. RIM has 3.65 million BlackBerry subscribers, most of them in the United States. Competitors such as Nokia and Palm are already looking to grab sales from the market leader.
A federal jury in Richmond backed NTP’s patent claim in 2002. Since then, RIM’s appeals have failed and a $450 million settlement has unravelled. RIM is now relying on separate proceedings by the US patent office, which has preliminarily rejected the patents at issue, but is awaiting a court decision.
James Wallace, a lawyer for NTP, says he plans to argue in federal court in Virginia that these deals show there are available options for customers in the event of an injunction against RIM.
Although some industry observers believe NTP has no financial incentives to force a shutdown, lawyers for the company have claimed otherwise.
“I understand that theory, and when BlackBerry was the only game in town, there was a certain logic to it,” Mr Wallace said.
Mark Guibert, vice president of corporate marketing for RIM, said that he thinks most people will see through Visto’s “timing and rhetoric.”
“This is a small player looking for free publicity through a last-minute licence with undisclosed terms for patents that have been rejected by the patent office,” he said.
Meanwhile, customers have complained of being left in the dark over the future of the BlackBerry service.
Officials with Northwest Airlines were worried enough to demand a recent meeting with RIM.
Although the airline said it was satisfied with RIM’s information, it also noted that it had identified alternative suppliers and was continuing to monitor the BlackBerry situation to ensure service would not be interrupted.
In a statement, RIM said it was speaking directly to customers and partners to explain the patent office’s decisions and to “assure them that we have prepared a contingency plan to implement a software workaround should it eventually become necessary.”
‘Bronx Tale’ star has sad ending
Dec 16th
By TOM HAYS AND LARRY MCSHANE
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITERS
NEW YORK — In the dozen years between that sunny summer afternoon at Jones Beach and a frigid winter morning in the Bronx, life went terribly wrong for Lillo Brancato Jr.
It was in July 1993 that the handsome teen strolled out of the Atlantic Ocean and into a Hollywood career. A casting director on the beach was blown away by the kid’s dead-on impressions of Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. The young unknown was hired to star opposite his idol, De Niro, in the movie “A Bronx Tale.”
Last weekend, Brancato, now a 29-year-old with a serious drug habit, got caught in a burglary attempt with another man and ended up in a gun battle that left a police officer dead, authorities say. The actor is facing murder charges.
“Actor’s Bronx Tale Goes Bad,” read one tabloid headline.
“This is deeply disturbing news, a tragedy beyond comprehension,” De Niro said in a statement.
“A Bronx Tale” featured Brancato as De Niro’s son in a role that would have remarkable real-life parallels years later: Brancato played a young man torn between two worlds – his father’s honest, hardworking life as a bus driver, and the high life led by a glamorous neighborhood mobster. The physical resemblance between De Niro and Brancato alone was enough to make their on-screen relationship plausible.
Back then, the charismatic Brancato was described in a New York Times profile as “friendly, earnest, sweet-tempered.” He entertained De Niro by imitating Al Pacino.
Brancato’s career never exploded after his film debut, but work was steady: He appeared in more than a dozen films and several TV roles, most notably in “The Sopranos,” starring as a bumbling, wannabe mobster who gets whacked by Tony Soprano.
In the past year, though, the drama in Brancato’s life was all offstage. He was arrested twice on drug charges: for heroin possession in Yonkers, N.Y., and for being under the influence of a narcotic in Hermosa Beach, Calif., authorities said. He entered a substance abuse program.
Neighbors described loud fights with his on-and-off girlfriend, while his appearance suffered. His frame was scrawny, his skin tinged yellow.
If Brancato was an actor who played some bad guys, his alleged partner in the break-in and shootout last weekend was the real thing. Steven Armento, 48, was a low-level Genovese crime family associate until he was banished for drug addiction, authorities said.
“A lot of the people Lillo was hanging out with didn’t have his best interest at heart,” said Brancato’s manger, Garianno Lorenzo. “They were out to take advantage of him. Lillo only did harm to himself, with drugs. Never to someone else.”
According to authorities, the actor and the older man were drinking together at the Crazy Horse Cabaret strip club in the Bronx before deciding early Saturday to break into a basement apartment nearby and steal some Valium. Armento carried a .357 Smith & Wesson handgun; Brancato was not armed, police said.
Investigators believe Armento tried to enter the apartment through a broken window but couldn’t fit. The skinnier Brancato could, but he emerged empty-handed.
The sound of shattering glass awoke off-duty Officer Daniel Enchautegui, who lived in the neighborhood. He grabbed his badge and gun and confronted the men in an alley. A fierce gun battle erupted, with Armento firing first, police said.
The officer was hit in the chest. Though fatally wounded, he managed to empty his eight-shot pistol, hitting Armento six times and Brancato twice, police said. Backup officers caught a bloodied Brancato trying to get into his car. Armento had collapsed nearby.
Both men remain hospitalized. Armento was charged with first-degree murder, which carries life without parole. Brancato was accused of second-degree murder, punishable by 25 years to life. He was ordered held without bail Thursday, despite his lawyer’s argument that it was Armento who fired the fatal shot.
“He’s in physical pain. He’s in emotional pain,” defense attorney Mel Sachs said of Brancato outside the hospital. “He recognizes the tragedy here, but he’s not responsible for it.”
Two days before the shooting, Brancato was ticketed for disorderly conduct after his ex-girlfriend’s twin sister summoned police. When officers arrived, Brancato was sitting in the middle of the street. “Don’t you know who I am?!” he screamed.
US deploys new top fighter jet
Dec 16th
By Jim Wolf
Fri Dec 16, 2:43 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The futuristic F-22A “Raptor” fighter jet, designed to dominate the skies well into the 21st century, joined the U.S. combat fleet on Thursday, 20 years after it was conceived to fight Soviet MiGs over Europe.
The Air Force said “initial operational capability” had been achieved at the 1st Fighter Wing’s 27th Fighter Squadron at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia.
Pilots in the squadron, the Air Force’s oldest in continuous operation, have been training on the F-22, the Air Force’s most advanced weapon system, for about a year.
“If we go to war tomorrow, the Raptor will go with us,” Gen. Ronald Keys, head of the Air Force’s Air Combat command, said in a statement. He said an initial group of 12 was ready for combat worldwide or for homeland defense.
The squadron may swing through the Pacific next year, probably flying from Guam and elsewhere, though no decision has been made about where to best “showcase” it, Keys said in a later teleconference with reporters.
With the Soviet Union gone, defense analysts have cast the F-22 as the weapon of choice for any future U.S. conflict with China, for instance over Taiwan.
“There is a clear role for F-22 here,” said Daniel Goure, a former Pentagon strategist now at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Virginia, research group with close ties to the U.S. defense establishment.
The aircraft’s role is to “kick the doors down” in a conflict, as Pentagon officials put it, knocking out defenses on the ground and in the air to clear the way for other warplanes and forces.
The radar-evading Raptor is twice as reliable and three times more effective than the F-15C Eagle it is replacing as the top U.S. air-to-air fighter, according to Lockheed Martin Corp., its developer.
“It’s a fighter pilot’s dream,” said former F-15 pilot Col. Walter Givhan, lauding the plane’s integrated avionics, stealth and speed. Givhan is wing commander at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where the latest round of F-22 testing was completed.
Lockheed described the fighter as the world’s most advanced and said it was “relevant for the next 40 years.”
Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. are top F-22 subcontractors. United Technologies Corp.’s Pratt & Whitney unit makes the aircraft’s two engines.
STEALTHY AND SUPERSONIC
The Raptor combines low-observability, or stealth, with supersonic speed, agility and cockpit displays designed to boost greatly pilots’ awareness of the situation around them.
At a “fly-away” cost of about $130 million each for the most recent batch, not including research and development, it is also one of the most controversial U.S. warplanes ever.
Critics have termed it unaffordable overkill in a world without the potential threat of a Soviet Union able to send swarms of MiGs into a dogfight, which prompted its inception in 1986.
The Air Force is planning to stretch F-22 production until 2010 to keep Lockheed’s production line open pending arrival of its more affordable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter family of aircraft that will also go to the Navy, the Marines and co-developing nations that include Britain, Italy and Turkey.
The F-22 also has a ground attack capability to drop 250-pound (113.5-kg), small-diameter bombs or 1,000-pound (454-kg) Joint Direct Attack Munitions while flying at supersonic speeds.
Gen. Michael Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, has said the F-22 is needed against threats such as Russian-built surface-to-air missiles sold overseas.
Moseley said on Tuesday he hoped to buy 183 F-22s, four more than currently in the budget and enough for seven combat-ready squadrons, down from the 750 F-22s once planned.
Final assembly has been completed on 67 of the 107 F-22s already purchased by the Air Force, Lockheed’s program manager, Larry Lawson, said in a statement.
Kazakhs pull the plug on Borat’s Web site
Dec 13th
ALMATY (Reuters) – The authorities in Kazakhstan, angered by a British comedian’s satirical portrayal of a boorish, sexist and racist Kazakh television reporter, have pulled the plug on his alter ego’s Web site.
Sacha Baron Cohen plays Borat in his “Da Ali G Show” and last month he used the character’s Web site www.borat.kz to respond sarcastically to legal threats from the Central Asian state’s Foreign Ministry.
A government-appointed organization regulating Web sites that end in the .kz domain name for Kazakhstan confirmed on Tuesday it had suspended Cohen’s site.
“We’ve done this so he can’t badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name,” Nurlan Isin, President of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies, told Reuters. “He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains.”
Isin said the borat.kz Web site had broken new rules on all .kz sites maintaining two computer servers in Kazakhstan and had registered false names for its administrators.
Cohen, as Borat, hosted the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon last month and described shooting dogs for fun and said his wife could not leave Kazakhstan as she was a woman.
Afterwards, Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry said it could not rule out that he was under “political orders” to denigrate Kazakhstan’s name and threatened to sue him.
Cohen, who is Jewish, responded to the legal threats on the www.borat.kz site in character, saying: “I have no connection to Mr Cohen and fully support my government’s position to sue this Jew.”
In typical vein, he went on: “Please, captain of industry, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard working labor and some of the cleanest prostitutes in all of Central Asia.”
Borat is one of several outrageous characters devised by Cohen in his television shows. He shot to fame as Ali G, who mocks British street gang culture, and also plays Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion show presenter.
Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers
Dec 13th
By Eric Auchard
Mon Dec 12,12:19 AM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO – news) and Six Apart Ltd., creator of Movable Type — the most popular software used to create professional blogs — said on Sunday Yahoo will be the preferred supplier of Movable Type for small businesses.
The partnership is the latest in a string of deals by the world’s largest Internet media company as it seeks to embrace so-called “social media,” the new generation of Web sites that encourage Internet users to share written text, photos and videos.
On Friday, Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us, a site for users to share their favorite Web links. Earlier this year, it acquired Flickr, which offers a way to annotate and share photos.
Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for small business users, taking advantage of its scale and efficiency, Anil Dash, vice president of professional products for San Francisco-based Six Apart, said in a phone interview.
“This is going to be our recommended (sales) channel for small business,” he said.
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service.
Yahoo provides customers with a unique Web address, blogging tools and business-class e-mail services with spam and virus protections for less than $12 a month.
Movable Type is commonly used by businesses, Web designers and professional bloggers to create easily updated Web sites. Other blog software such as Google Inc.’s Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and Six Apart’s own Live Journal, are more often used to create blogs for individuals.
Yahoo hosts roughly 30 million individual Web sites, including hundreds of thousands of small business sites, said Rich Riley, general manager of Yahoo’s small business unit. One in eight U.S. online stores are hosted by Yahoo, he said.
Yahoo is one of the world’s largest suppliers of hosted Web sites, which refers to Web sites set and maintained for customers by Yahoo for a monthly subscription fee.
Six Apart said it had optimized the underlying software in Movable Type so that it responds twice as fast as the same software offered by Six Apart’s own Web site.
Six Apart continues to develop versions of Movable Type designed to run inside big businesses, along with its consumer-oriented Live Journal software and a quick set-up version of Movable Type known as TypePad.
Separately, Dash said Six Apart’s Japanese unit is developing a version of Movable Type to run on Oracle database software, in a bid to encourage wider use of blogs among big businesses. Six Apart was developed to run on open source database software originally.
Privately-held Six Apart, founded four years ago by husband-and-wife team Ben and Mena Trott, counts 100 employees worldwide. It has received nearly $12 million in funding from backers Neoteny Co. Ltd. and August Capital, Dash said.
Into the classics
Dec 9th
Here is an article about my sister Tara in today’s St. Pete newspaper.
Into the classics
Among Tampa Theatre’s jewels is a woman who loves old, unique buildings. But she also appreciates new, ribald jokes.
By RICK GERSHMAN
Published December 9, 2005
——————————————————————————–
DOWNTOWN – It’s a good thing Tampa Theatre is Tara Schroeder’s second home.
A few months ago, she pretty much lost her first one.
Schroeder, the theater’s community relations manager, was born and raised in New Orleans. She went to Loyola University there. Her parents and most of her family live there.
She was there, in fact, as Hurricane Katrina bore down.
The family fled in three cars. Schroeder’s brother John headed to Houston but went back a day later as the city flooded. No one heard from him for three days.
He eventually turned up in an airplane hangar, safe and, well, no less sound than usual.
“We thought he was dead,” Schroeder said, laughing. “The dumb a–.”
Schroeder and her mother had headed east, hitting a patch of hideous weather just as the hurricane came through. Schroeder – rhymes with loader – recalled phoning her boss and buddy, Tampa Theatre director John Bell.
She asked him to check their location on the weather.com Web site.
His reply, which Schroeder recited in a commanding, authoritative voice: “You are in the cone of death. Keep driving.”
She laughed at the memory, her voice echoing through the Tampa Theatre, where she sat in the balcony this week.
Later, Schroeder was being photographed on Franklin Street, in front of the iconic theater where she has worked for more than 13 years.
Someone told her an old bartender joke, the one about the pirate who walks into a bar with a steering wheel in his fly. Schroeder howled with laughter at the unprintable punchline and flashed the bright smile patrons have enjoyed for more than a decade.
See, she loves this place. She loves her job. She’d better – next April Fools’ Day, she will have been here exactly 14 years.
By some standards, that makes her the rookie. Sure, she has a couple of years on Mitchell Martin, the house manager, and Cathy Prance, the operations director.
But Bell is celebrating his 20th year as the theater’s director, and stage manager Gary Ratliff and chief projectionist Randy Stice predate him by several years.
It’s a very small staff with very little turnover.
Why do people stay so long?
“Brilliant management,” Bell deadpanned, then gestured about the grand auditorium: “Seriously, can you imagine coming into this place to work every day? It’s just a great place to come to work.”
Schroeder has seen tons of celebrities over the years, but her greatest memories are of everyday people. Like the 6-year-old girl and her grandmother, who showed up for The Wizard of Oz wearing matching ruby red slippers.
Then there’s the elderly man Schroeder spotted gazing wistfully at the marquee. When she asked if he had been there before, he regaled her with a tale of courting a young lady in the balcony when he was a teenager.
Tampa Theatre is in its 79th year, after all.
For Schroeder, this felt like home long before she moved to Tampa.
After earning a communications degree, she worked in Washington, D.C., for the League of Historic American Theaters. Bell was on the league’s board.
“I always loved historic places,” said Schroeder, who lives in Seminole Heights. “At the league, they paid me for running around the country and visiting historic theaters. And Tampa Theatre was always my favorite.”
When the position came open in 1992, Schroeder said, she knew it was for her.
Her duties include handling media and public relations, film programs, marketing, doing tours and coordinating educational programs. Her boss is pleased with the results.
“We’ve got a small staff, and everyone has to pitch in,” Bell said. “But Tara has just become indispensable.
“She not only attacks her job with passion but everything we ask her to do. For many people, she’s the public face of Tampa Theatre.”
-Rick Gershman can be reached at rgershman@sptimes.com or 813 226-3431. His blog is at www.sptimes.com/blogs/tampaarts Tara Schroeder
AGE: 42
JOB: Community relations manager, Tampa Theatre
MARITAL STATUS: Single but hopelessly in love with the theater.
BRUSH WITH CELEBRITY: Steve Guttenberg. There were lots of other ones, too, but we’re sticking with the guy from Three Men and a Baby who wasn’t Tom Selleck.
OR: Ted Danson.
OR: The baby.
ON THE THEATER’S DIVERSE PATRONS: In one day, a radio personality introduced George and Barbara Bush on the stage at 8 a.m. during a Bob Dole campaign tour stop. At 8 p.m., the same radio guy was wearing fishnet stockings and introducing The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
City begins free wireless Internet
Nov 30th
City begins free wireless Internet
03:46 PM CST on Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Alan Sayre / Associated Press
To help boost its stalled economy, hurricane-ravaged New Orleans is offering the nation’s first free wireless Internet network owned and run by a major city.
Mayor Ray Nagin said Tuesday the system would benefit residents and small businesses who still can’t get their Internet service restored over the city’s washed out telephone network, while showing the nation “that we are building New Orleans back.”
The system started operation Tuesday in the central business district and French Quarter. It’s to be available throughout the city in about a year.
Hundreds of similar projects in other cities have met with stiff opposition from phone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at blocking competition from government agencies — including a state law in Louisiana that needed to be sidestepped for the New Orleans project.
The city had been working on a Wi-Fi network before Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29, and police already were using the wireless system to monitor street security cameras.
Nagin said Katrina, which knocked out communications throughout the region, frustrating coordination of relief efforts, showed the need for a more-advanced system.
In case of another storm, the network will be able to connect telephone calls via the Internet.
“What we learned is a network like this is important as a backup in case all other communications fail,” the mayor said.
The system uses hardware mounted on street lights. Most of the $1 million in equipment was donated by three companies: Intel Corp., Tropos Networks Inc. and Pronto Networks. The companies also plan to donate equipment for the citywide expansion.
The network uses “mesh” technology to pass the wireless signal from pole to pole rather than each Wi-Fi transmitter being plugged directly into a physical network cable. That way, laptop users will be able to connect even in areas where the wireline phone network will take time to restore.
The system will provide download speeds of 512 kilobits per second as long as the city remains under a state of emergency. But the bandwidth will be slowed to 128 kbps in accordance with a limit set by Louisiana’s law once the city’s state of emergency is lifted at an unknown future date.
The service will remain free for residents and businesses after the state of emergency ends.
Phone and cable TV companies have fiercely opposed attempts at creating new taxpayer-owned utilities. The companies contend competition from government-run Internet service stymies their incentive to invest in upgrading their networks and services.
Critics have said commercial networks are often too expensive for the lower-income residents being targeted by the free or low-cost services now being considered by hundreds of municipalities around the country.
But David Grabert, a spokesman for Cox Communications, a major cable TV and high-speed Internet provider in the New Orleans area, said the Atlanta-based company welcomes the competition.
“This is a relatively slow-speed service, and we don’t look at it, at this point, as major competition for our high-speed service,” Grabert said. “We’re ready to compete with all comers.”
Many cities have partnered with private companies to build and operate their networks. Philadelphia, for example, is developing a citywide system that will be run by Earthlink Inc., unlike the New Orleans owned-and-operated system.
Nagin, who was Cox’s top executive in New Orleans before his election in 2002, said the city system would be “just one of several options” residents would have to get Internet service.
At 512 kbps, the New Orleans network is about seven times the speed of dial-up service, but slower than high-speed services provided by telephone and cable TV companies. Users will have to sign up with the city for an account.
Greg Meffert, the city’s technology director, conceded that private providers might have problems with the system.
“In the end, my job is to work for the city and what the city needs,” he said. “I’ll stand behind that.”
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Ebay Racist?
Nov 22nd
I was just doing some random searches in Google to see what kind of stuff I could find and I came across this. The advertisments on the right are paid advertising. What I noticed is that when you search for some racial keywords, it brings up an ad for Ebay.
In case they take them down or change them, I took screencaps of each one.
Nigga, Niggas, Mexicans, Ching.
So I just though it was interesting that these came up because someone had to have specified these exact keywords in the ebay adwords account.
Cruise passengers describe horror of pirate attack
Nov 7th
By BISHR EL-TOUNI
Associated Press
MAHE, Seychelles — A cruise liner that was attacked by pirates over the weekend docked safely on this Indian Ocean archipelago today after changing its course to escape.
Passengers described their horror as pirates in speedboats chased their luxury cruise liner at sea, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles — with smiles visible on faces otherwise hidden by ski masks.
