peaceoption.org

The other service, called Babel, is more useful for people visiting Beijing as part of this summer’s Olympics. By calling a special phone number you can leave a voice message that will be translated to Mandarin in just a few seconds. It’s meant to be used as an on-the-go tool for English speakers who are over there to watch the games and who might run into translation issues while getting around.

I gave Babel a spin earlier this morning and had mixed results. You might as well give up for things like URLs or long words. Even when I spokes as slowly and as clearly as possible, it managed to flub up more than half of the words in some cases including classics like turning “point” into “porno” and “get” into “Georgia.” Regardless, its speed is truly impressive as it spits back results in just a few seconds. You can view my trials with it in the video below, or give it a spin yourself at 1-718-513-2969. You can also find the other local access numbers for the U.K. and Australia here.

If you’re a native Mandarin speaker, I’d love to hear how this does with English translations. Let me know in the comments.

Unfortunately, Babel requires calling a local U.S., U.K., or Australia local access number to access it, as there’s not currently one for China. The good news is that if you’re in the depths of a local Chinatown in one of these supported countries, you’ll be able to ask for directions or order a dish off a restaurant menu using your phone instead of having to point to it on a menu.

Telephony service JaJah has launched two completely different voice tools that are both useful in their own right. The first is a new “concierge” service that lets you call any of your contacts with voice dialing using a special local access number. It works even if your handset does not support voice dialing, and will connect you to that person as long as you’ve synced up your address book with JaJah’s.

But with this latest court decision, it looks as if Verizon may have to rethink its legal strategy. The company recently reached a deal with Comcast in which both companies agreed not to sue each other for a period of five years for any patent infringement. But there had been speculation that Verizon might target Time Warner Cable and Cablevision.

“Despite the decision, we believe our patents were infringed,” Verizon said in a statement. “We will continue to innovate and protect our intellectual property.”

Many analysts and experts believed that Verizon had been emboldened by its Vonage patent battle and was looking to go after bigger players, such as cable providers. Companies such as Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable have been offering VoIP services for the past few years. And they’ve been very successful in converting millions of Verizon customers to their service.

The telecommunications giant has accused Cox of violating six of its patents related to Internet telephony. But a jury for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia decided against Verizon on all six patents.

Verizon settled a similar suit against digital-phone service provider Vonage last year, squeezing about $117.5 million from the troubled provider of voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. Against Cox, it had been seeking past damages of $404 million.

The company also told The Wall Street Journal that it hasn’t decided whether to appeal the decision.

Verizon Communications suffered a major blow in its patent battles on Monday, when a federal court ruled that cable company Cox Communications had not infringed on its patents.

Ultimately, though, this deal wasn’t really about price for Microsoft. It was about the fact that the company is struggling mightily to compete against Google in the market for advertising-funded content and software.

Although Yahoo looked long and hard, the company really had no alternative that would allow shareholders to cash out now at anywhere near the price Microsoft was offering.

One of the big risks of heading down to Latin America right now is that something big could blow up–the Microsoft-Yahoo merger.

Still, the work is just beginning for the two companies. First of all, they have to secure regulatory approval. Although Microsoft faces a significant rival in Google, they have to convince regulators that they themselves will not be in a position to dominate any markets. In addition to the usual regulatory hurdles in Brussels, Seoul, and Washington, China could also pose a potential threat to the deal.

If and only if they can get past these hurdles, do Microsoft and Yahoo get to the real hard part–actually combining. Microsoft has a decent track record of absorbing smaller companies, but past deals pale in terms of the size and scope of the Yahoo move.

For all its challenges (and they are many), the deal was the single biggest thing Microsoft could do to bulk up ahead of what many see as an epic showdown over the next several years.

In many cases, Microsoft is not where it wants to be with its homegrown products, but has built them with its long-term vision in mind. Some of Yahoo’s products, by contrast, have more users today, but are built on vastly different technology, much of it based on open source.

Rest assured, I’ll be pushing on my sources even if I am a continent away. Still, the deal could break while I am asleep or something. To make sure my faithful readers are not left in the lurch, I offer my first take on the deal now:

It is how Microsoft handles these issues that will be critical. First and foremost, such decisions are critical to retaining the very talent that Microsoft has said it is looking to acquire. The decisions on which products to keep will be based on a number of factors. One of those factors will be which product is more popular today, but I would not expect that always to be the deciding factor.

Speaking of price, Microsoft did have to hike its bid to seal the bid (or didn’t–you’ll have to read the press release for that one). As the company pointed out during the drawn-out process, every extra dollar per share it paid added about $1.4 billion to the deal’s price tag.

WHEREVERTHEHECKIAM–As widely expected, Microsoft and Yahoo came to terms on a deal that will see the search pioneer absorbed by the software giant.

Microsoft will have to deal with both significant overlap as well as significant cultural differences. The company has indicated it has some plans under way already in terms of handling both issues, but wisely said it wants many of the decisions to be made by a group made up of leaders from both companies.

The USTR tried to allay concerns over the treaty at a public forum last month that gave some indication of what would be included in the agreement. Representatives of the USTR emphasized that the treaty would focus on the enforcement of policies already in place, rather than creating new, substantive policy agreements with other countries.

Even though they applaud the USTR’s efforts to bolster intellectual property protection, the senators said, they were concerned “about the breadth of the issues” the trade agreement could cover “and the specificity with which it could be written.”

Leahy and Specter authored the recently passed Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act. Before the legislation was approved by Congress, it was stripped of a controversial provision opposed by the Bush administration that would have given the Justice Department authority to pursue civil copyright infringement cases.

“Regarding the potential breadth of ACTA, we strongly urge you not to permit the agreement to address issues of liability for service providers or technological protection measures,” it said. “The contours of the law and liability exposure in these areas continue to be debated in the courts.”

As chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the two senators also support funding to assist foreign countries in combating U.S. intellectual property infringement.

However, many at the forum still expressed their misgivings over the agreement. A representative from Google said the treaty should not include any provisions regarding Internet policy, since U.S. Internet policy is still in its nascent stages. The senators’ letter mirrored those sentiments.

Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) sent a letter on Thursday to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab saying that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement currently under negotiation “could limit Congress’s ability to make appropriate refinements to intellectual property law in the future.”

Two senators known for their support of stringent intellectual property enforcement expressed concern on Thursday that an anti-counterfeiting treaty currently being drafted may be too far-reaching.

“We are disappointed that the Administration has been resistant to this effort and has opposed additional enforcement authority, such as civil enforcement in copyright cases where the violation rises to the level of criminal activity,” the letter says.

The speed of the negotiations and their lack of transparency compound the risk that the treaty will unnecessarily constrain Congress, the letter says.

(Credit:
IDC)

Worldwide PC processor shipments fell sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008, though Intel’s Atom chip bucked the trend, according to new data from IDC.

In the fourth quarter, processor unit shipments declined 17 percent quarter over quarter and 11.4 percent year over year, while market revenue declined 18 percent over the previous quarter and 22.2 percent compared to the year-earlier period to $6.78 billion, IDC said.

Looking ahead, IDC said demand remains so weak that it expects sequential processor unit shipment to decline in both the first and second quarters of 2009.

For the full year, total PC processor unit shipments grew 10 percent, while revenue grew 0.9 percent to $30.8 billion.

Intel’s Atom processor is proving to be recession-proof. The popular Netbook chip prevented overall unit decline percentages from going above 20 percent. Without Atom, worldwide PC processor unit shipments would have been significantly worse: declining 21.7 percent quarter over quarter and 21.6 percent year over year, IDC said.

Intel grabbed an 81.9 percent unit market share in the fourth quarter, up 1.1 percentage points over the previous quarter. AMD fell to 17.7 percent, a loss of less than 1 percentage point. For the full year, Intel had an 80.3 percent unit market share, a gain of nearly 3 percentage points, while AMD’s share dropped to 19.2 percent, a loss of 3.1 percentage points.

“The decline in PC processor unit shipments in the fourth quarter was the worst sequential decline since IDC started tracking processor shipments in 1996,” said Shane Rau, a chip analyst at IDC.

In 2008, Intel gained 4.8 percentage points in mobile PC processor market share, garnering 87.1 percent of the market. AMD finished with a 12.1 percent share of the mobile PC processor market, a loss of 5.3 percentage points.

To date, the results for multi-GPU performance have been problematic, typically another board will deliver only 1.5 times better performance. AMD is targeting 1.8 the performance with two chips running games in high resolution, and with four of them, about 2.5, according to earlier comments from Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics board houses two 4870 graphics processing units (GPUs) and competes with Nvidia’s fastest board, based on the GTX 280. In chip-to-chip competition, Nvidia’s GTX 280 generally beats a single 4870 in performance because it’s bigger and faster: the Nvidia chip packs 1.4 billion transistors onto one chip, while ATI has about 950 million.

In September, AMD is also expected to bring out the HD 4850 X2, a dual-chip board with slightly lower performance. The higher-end 4870 X2 is rated at 2.4 TFLOPs (or teraFLOPs a common yardstick for raw graphics chip compute power) and communicates with memory at 230GB per second, while the 4850 X2 is rated at 2.0 TFLOPs and has a memory bandwidth of 128GB/sec.

AMD has introduced a more advanced cross-GPU connection technology based on the PCIe Generation 2 standard. And the 4807 X2 can use two gigabytes of memory, compared to most high-end boards that use a maximum of one gigabyte. It also uses memory based on the new GDDR5 standard.

The lower-end 4850 X2 will be available in September for $399.

But because AMD puts two chips on one board and has improved chip-to-chip communication, the 4870 X2 is is expected to equal or exceed the Nvidia chip in many cases.

Advanced Micro Devices announced on Monday its most powerful graphics technology to date, going after Nvidia in the rarified–and closely watched–enthusiast game segment.

One of the central challenges for AMD is to make sure the performance scales up efficiently when more chips are added. This is the crux of AMD’s strategy: instead of building a large monolithic–albeit fast–chip as Nvidia typically does, AMD takes smaller chips and gangs them together for better performance.

AMD says the 4870 X2 delivers over 3X the bandwidth of the its previous dual-GPU board, the 3870 X2

Game PC vendors expect good things. “(The 4870 X2 is) more than a match for a single Nvidia GTX 280, and depending on the title sometimes a match for two GTX 280s,” said Kelt Reeves, CEO of game PC maker Falcon Northwest, responding to an email query. “Drivers are now ATI’s only weak area, so the 4870 X2’s performance and scaling with two 4870 X2s (QuadFire) often varies widely from title to title,” he said.

This also marks the current performance pinnacle of AMD’s strategy to beat Nvidia at the high end by building comparatively smaller chips and then ganging them together for better performance.

The 4870 X2 is priced at $549. Nvidia preemptively responded to this by cutting the price on the GTX 280 to $499 in July.

(Credit:
AMD)

Both boards will integrate 1600 stream processors, which do parallel processing on streams of data.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang, who took over the top executive post from Terry Semel in June, got a $1 salary and no stock or new options. That figure is unchanged from the year earlier, Yahoo said.

Decker’s stock and stock option compensation, as valued by Yahoo, dropped from $14.6 million in 2006 to $13 million in 2007, the company said.

Yahoo President Sue Decker saw her salary, bonus, and incentive play payment increase from $1.35 million in 2006 to $1.76 million in 2007, but factoring in stock and options, her overall compensation declined, the company said in regulatory filing Tuesday.

Susan Decker

(Credit:
Yahoo)

The company also said Semel exercised stock options worth $37.8 million in 2007. Semel left Yahoo’s board on January 31, the day before Microsoft offered to acquire Yahoo.

I had that experience last week when, as the last major stop on Road Trip 2008, I visited the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Oak Ridge National Lab to get a quick look at what is certainly one of the top facilities of its kind in the world.

For now, however, NCCS has Jaguar, X1E and Blue Gene, as well as some smaller machines, and operates on an annual budget of between $80 million and $100 million. That money pays for about 60 full-time staffers who support the scientists who come from all over to use the machine.

The IBM Blue Gene supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Lab. It is the 74th most-powerful computer on Earth, rated at 28 teraflops.

Nearby the X1E is IBM’s Blue Gene, the 74th most-powerful supercomputer in the world, rated to 28 teraflops, and clearly a study in efficiency, since it is orders of magnitude smaller than the Cray machine.

My host was computational scientist Bronson Messer, and during a whirlwind tour of the center, he showed me several of the world’s most powerful computers.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Today, Messer said, there is one petascale computer in the world, a machine at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. But soon, NCCS will add its own such machine, and Messer said he thinks that when that happens, in a year or so, the Oak Ridge lab will at least be tied with LANL for the top computing spot in the world.

When you first walk into the lab, you see a pretty impressive looking machine known as the Cray X1E. This is the world’s 175th most powerful computer, clocking 18 teraflops, or 18 trillion floating point operations per second. The X1E is so big that it has aisles that you can walk through, and it requires 16-inch water pipes built into the floor below to liquid-cool it.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn.–If you want to see someone’s face light up, try talking to a scientist in a supercomputer lab about their machines.

And if the research being done is published in open literature, then scientists are free to do what they want on the computers with no payments to NCCS. Messer said that there is a procedure for scientists who want to do proprietary research to help cover the lab’s costs, but that that hasn’t really happened yet.

“When you buy a computer this large,” Messer said, “You get to pick the color.”

Messer explained that the NCCS is a “user facility,” meaning that it is designed for open scientific research by just about anyone who wants to use it. That means, practically speaking, that researchers from other labs and universities around the country and world migrate to Oak Ridge for time on one of the center’s several world-beating machines.

The Cray Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Lab is the world’s fifth most powerful computer.

The Cray X1E at Oak Ridge National Lab’s supercomputer facility is the 175th most powerful computer in the world and the No. 1 vector supercomputer on Earth.

But what really struck me about Blue Gene is how much it looked like the giant transport ship used by the Jawas in the original Star Wars film–except sleeker and smaller.

Messer said NCCS has developed a very strong working relationship with Cray over the years and that there are some advantages to buying a machine like Jaguar, which has 7,832 AMD Barcelona Quad-Core Opteron processors.

Already it has another giant computer, the Jaguar, a Cray machine that, at 54 teraflops, is the fifth-most powerful supercomputer in the world. And now, Messer explained, the lab is going for what he called “petascale computing,” or the use of computers capable of more than a petaflop–a thousand teraflops.

A look inside one of the many panels of the Cray X1E at the Oak Ridge National Lab supercomputer facility.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

If you think about it, for any lab to have two massively powerful computers like the X1E and the Blue Gene is impressive. But NCCS is aiming higher.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Oak Ridge National Lab, which is a Department of Energy research center not far from Knoxville, Tenn., is probably most famous for being the place where the first plutonium was processed for the Manhattan Project during World War II. But these days, it is a hotbed of research into materials sciences, energy efficiency and, of course, supercomputing.

(Credit:
Center for Information Technology at Princeton University)

In a new type of attack that requires physical access to a target computer, an attacker can cut power to a machine that is in sleep mode, restore the power, and boot a malicious operating system from a USB drive or an
iPod that can copy the RAM contents.

“Overall, the significance is that disk encryption is not the silver bullet that we might have thought in its present state,” Halderman, said in an interview after the presentation. “Individuals and businesses that rely on disk encryption need to pay much closer attention to the physical security of their devices.”

An attacker can extend the data decay time period by cooling the chip off while the machine is running with a spray of “canned air” commonly used for cleaning keyboards of dust. With liquid nitrogen, an attacker could take days to retrieve the data if needed.

SAN JOSE, Calif.–Disk encryption, which people rely on for protecting sensitive data on laptops, can fairly easily be foiled, security researchers said in presenting a paper on a so-called “cold-boot attack” at the Usenix security conference on Wednesday.

But won’t the contents of the RAM be lost when the power is turned off? Actually, no, according to the team of mostly Princeton University researchers led by J. Alex Halderman, a doctoral candidate.

This video created by the research team explains how the attack is done:

The group found that contrary to common knowledge, RAM data fades gradually over a period spanning from a few seconds to a few minutes after the power is cut. This could give an attacker time to read the RAM data, including encryption keys, after rebooting into a different operating system or removing the memory chips and placing them into a different computer.

This image shows how data on a RAM chip fades gradually over time. The far left shot shows an image in memory five seconds after the power was cut, followed on the right by 30 seconds, 60 seconds and 5 minutes.

Popular disk encryption schemes like Microsoft’s Bitlocker in Vista don’t protect against this type of attack, and actually make the laptops more susceptible, the researchers said.

In addition to Halderman, the research team included Princeton professor Ed Felten, as well as Nadia Heninger, William Clarkson, Joseph Calandrino, and Ariel Feldman of Princeton; Jacob Appelbaum; Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and William Paul of Wind River Systems.

Viewers chose Peters’ video out of five finalists presented in YouTube’s video contest posing the question, “Why are you a Democrat in 2008?” The Democratic National Convention Committee picked the five finalists from hundreds of submissions. The Republican National Committee is hosting a corresponding contest, “Why are you a Republican in 2008?” but a winner has yet to be announced.

Interest in the party conventions has waned in recent years: Nielsen Media Research showed 15.5 million homes tuned in to the Democratic convention in 2004 and 16.8 million watched the Republican convention, compared with around 20 million who watched both parties’ conventions in 1992. The parties are turning to the Internet to bolster public engagement in the formal nominating processes, using Google Maps to answer questions, and podcasts to give updates on convention preparations.

Peters’ video, shown below, addresses the Iraq war, the environment, health care, and other issues. It will be shown during the Democratic convention, where Peters will get to record a video documenting Barack Obama’s activities for a day.

Rich Peters of Iowa City, Iowa, explained why he’s a Democrat in a simple video with a few scene changes, a dog as a prop, and straightforward analysis– and now YouTube will fly Peters to the Democratic Convention in Denver to present his video and travel with the press pool for a day.