saveballona.com

Actually, I don’t think I’m at the point morally. I mean come on, I don’t think I could sleep at night after spending $200 on a picture frame. Digital or not.

Samsung SPF-105V

8-inch screen
800×600 resolution
1GB internal memory
Auto on/off function
Auto photo resize
SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader, USB memory slot

8-inch screen
Built-in wireless feature optimized for use with Windows Live
800×600 high resolution
64MB internal memory
Auto-rotation function
802.11b/g wireless photo frame
Rechargeable battery
SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader, USB memory slot
InfoLink free information service (news, weather, stocks, USA Today) Frame Channel service that gets more than 400 channels of news, sports, cartoons, and more

Samsung SPF-85V

The 8-inch SPF-85V: save this one for the small, cute pics.

10-inch screen
1024×600 resolution
64MB internal memory
Auto-rotation function
802.11b/g wireless photo frame
Rechargeable battery
SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader, USB memory slot
InfoLink free information service (news, weather, stocks, USA Today) Frame Channel service that gets more than 400 channels of news, sports, cartoons, and more

Each of the models feature Samsung’s Starlight Touch Controls, which integrate the onscreen display (OSD) and disappear from the bezel after 10 seconds of inactivity. The two Wi-Fi enabled frames, the SPF-85V and SPF-105V are optimized for use with Windows Live Spaces for photo sharing. Also, these two frames come with Samsung’s InfoLink feature, which offers the ability to receive RSS feeds from USA Today and Frame Channel.

Digital photo frames. You love ‘em, I love ‘em. Well, actually I’ve only ever seen one in use before and that one was broken. Call me old-fashioned (or just old) but I guess I’m just not at the point financially where I can justify the price.

10-inch screen Rechargeable battery 1024×600 resolution
1GB internal memory
Auto photo resize
Rechargeable battery
SD/MMC/MS/XD card reader, USB memory slot

Samsung SPF-85H

(Credit:
Samsung )

Apparently I’m slowly moving into the minority on this. On Wednesday, Samsung announced four new digital photo frames.

The SPF-85H and the SPF-85V will be available September 1 for an estimated price of $129.99 and $199.99 respectively. The SPF-105P will be released on October 1 for $199.99. The SPF-105V is slated for November 1 for $289.99.

Samsung SPF-105P

Patient records have not been touched, Nelson said. IT cut off Net access for up to six hours on Friday in order to isolate the virus, the AP reported.

The hit includes computers at the university’s three hospitals, the Associated Press reported early Sunday.

University spokesman Chris Nelson said the outbreak was detected Thursday, the AP reported. By the next day, the worm had struck at the hospitals, medical school, and the nursing, pharmacy, and health colleges.

More than 700 computers at the University of Utah have been infected with the
Conficker worm.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the local editors just automatically ran it because everybody else in China was running it, then got over-ridden by management in the U.S. who realized how badly this would play outside of China… Such is the disconnect between China and the West on the Tibet issue.

Wherever you stand on these issues of cooperation with law enforcement, companies would be wise to think before they post.

Rebecca MacKinnon reports that the lists were down when she checked, and offers a guess as to what happened:

Yahoo has an especially public history of aiding Chinese authorities in a much more proactive way, most famously in the Shi Tao case, when Yahoo gave authorities identifying information about online comments led to Shi Tao’s imprisonment. Yahoo has scarcely heard the end of that, and its representatives, as well as some from Microsoft, have been called before U.S. Congressional committees. (Now the company’s blog has called for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to push for his release.)

Yahoo China and MSN China both briefly posted a “most wanted” list with photos of people Chinese authorities are trying to track down surrounding the recent events in Tibet, a French TV website reports.

UPDATE: Xinhua reports that portals including Yahoo had published the material.

NEC's CRVD-LMD wraps 2,880×900 pixels around the viewer.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

SAN FRANCISCO–Dell got a lot of attention at the Consumer Electronics Show when its Alienware group showed a mammoth curved-screen display for gamers, but NEC is hoping it’ll reach an even bigger market with its own version of the technology.

NEC was showing off a prototype of its 42-inch, 2,880×900-pixel, curved-screen display, the CRVD-LMD, at the Macworld trade show here this week. The monitor is geared for professionals such as medical scanners, photographers, and video animators who need an immersive display and a lot of real estate but don’t want their view interrupted by the frames of multiple monitors, said NEC marketing manager Tim Dreyer. It’ll include professional features such as color calibration, he added.

The screen is due to ship in nine or ten months, Dreyer said. Its price in dollars should be in the mid-four figure range, a price that professional markets might well have an easier time stomaching than even hardcore gamers.

The 25-pound curved screen itself uses a DLP rear-projection system, not LCD or plasma. The panel technology, as in the case of the Alienware model, comes from Ostendo Technologies, said Erhan Ercan, that company’s director of product marketing.

The prototype uses a dual-link DVI port to connect to a computer with a single graphics card, but the final version could use HDMI, Ercan said.

The prototype I saw was dim and had vertical banding artifacts resulting from the four projectors used to create the image, but those kinks will be worked out by the time the monitor ships, Dreyer said.

A few more numbers for the curious: The response time is less than 0.02 milliseconds, the brightness is 250 nits, and the “typical” contrast is 10,000:1, NEC said.

(Credit: Smith Magazine) Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Last year, SMITH Magazine re-ignited the micro-format by asking its readers for their own six-word memoirs. Thousands submitted short life stories, ranging from the bittersweet (”Three marriages. Two divorces. BA .333″), poignant (”Look Mom: I’ve finally written something”), and sad (”I still make coffee for two”) to the inspirational (”Business school? Bah! Pop music? Hurrah”) and aspirational (”Next Life Van Morrison Backup singer”). The magazine collected almost 1,000 of these six-word memoirs in the book “Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure,” including additions from celebrities including Stephen Colbert, Jane Goodall, Dave Eggers, and more. My six-word memoir is as follows: Blogging keeps me from writing more.

Dave McClure is becoming the Web version of a streetwise ghetto talker. In his latest post, Dave makes some good points, amid the street talk, in his attempt to define Web 3.0 and identify the winners in the race to colonize the Web.

In his day job, Dave is an investor and adviser to Web start-ups, and the more mild-mannered conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns, and a co-chair of the Web 2.0 Expo, which takes place April 22 through 25 in San Francisco.

I agree with Dave that the entities managing personal profile infrastructure, such as user IDs, social graphs, and online payment systems, will have a major advantage in colonizing and monetizing the Web. In his post, Dave wrote:

Because the Future of the Web belongs to whomever controls Search, Content, & these 3 core infrastructure components:

1. User Logins & Passwords

2. Friend Lists / Address Books

3. Payment Systems

Messaging systems (email, IM, and SMS / mobile phones) are the largest aggregations of user logins. They also have implicit social graph data & targeted friend lists buried in their data stores, but they will take a little mining to get to. The#1 and #2 players in messaging are Yahoo & Microsoft, with Google & AOL duking it out for #3 (note: Gmail is growing a lot faster than AOL). Also, if you consider messages on social networking systems, Facebook & MySpace are also significant players. These two have advantages over the others, since they have already built out Friend Lists, News Feeds, Social Apps, & other viral mechanisms in a way that allows amazingly fast & efficient (if spammy) distribution of content. They will get better at it, but they still need to discover better ways to monetize, and currently Google is doing that best via search, and ecommerce systems like eBay & Amazon are doing it well via traditional online shopping & online wallets (PayPal, Amazon 1-Click). Apple is also doing a pretty good job via iTunes of collecting & storing payment info for millions of users.

Dave asserts that Microsoft (with Yahoo) and Google (with AOL?) are best positioned to capitalize on his version of Web 3.0. Facebook, which has many of the pieces, as well as News Corp. (MySpace.com) and Apple will be factors.

Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly, 1942-47

(Credit:
Max Ernst)

As I wrote in a post about the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo union, one of the key elements of the deal is the combined reach of users of e-mail, instant messaging and other communications services.

Having contacts and related profile data provides a hub–the personal profile infrastructure–for building out a social network that is sticky, precision-targeted and monetizable at planetary scale. Facebook and MySpace are trying to build it from the ground up, adding richer communications services to their social graphs. Microsoft and Google are focused on engineering the social into their existing large-scale communications services.

They are all driving toward a social and semantically rich Web. It doesn’t need a name, but when it arrives it will be the third major phase of the World Wide Web, a web of relationships and meaning, not just pages and data.

You know my stance on bad e-cards, and in the same vein comes my dislike for in-text ad links that you find on some blogs. I’m not talking about Snap’s little Web site previews with its Snap Shots service, which people either love or hate, but the IntelliTXT stuff–the kind where you accidently moved your mouse near one and it opens up an ad that doesn’t go away for several seconds. Ryan Block from Engadget had a good missive on the matter back in August of last year, and I have to agree with the guy that it ruins the reader experience.

With that said, I’m really digging Viewdle’s new Name Widget service, which will cross check any names you mention in a blog post and serve up a tiny little video morsel of the person’s face when you hold your cursor over his or her name. The video clips in question come from larger pieces of video that have been run through a facial recognition database and cropped down to fit in an area the size of your thumb. Anyone can add to their blog posts or Web site free of charge with a few lines of JavaScript.

Hovering over the text link of someone's name gives you a quick video clip so you can ID him or her.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The best part is, to actually trigger the video you need to hold your mouse over the link for a good 3 seconds before the video starts playing, so your reading experience won’t be too bothered if you make the occasional brush.
If you end up actually clicking the name link, Viewdle will kick you over to Reuters, which has a bunch of links to videos where the person appears. Each link jumps you right to that spot. However, Viewdle doesn’t require you to link back to its Reuters page, which means you can jump the link wherever you please.

The service works with a variety of popular blogging tools like TypePad, Blogger, and WordPress. However, LiveJournal, Facebook, and MySpace users are out of luck since these sites don’t allow JavaScript from outside sites.

You can give it a spin on the names I’ve added after the break.

Related:
Yahoo Shortcuts: It’s everywhere you want to blog

Jessica Alba

George Bush

Ron Paul

The proliferation at Computex of ultra-small, inexpensive netbooks poses this pesky question: why are traditional ultra-compact laptops so expensive?

The Asus Eee PC 1000 debuted this week with a 10-inch screen, 40GB solid state drive, and Windows XP. Pricing has been rumored at between $600 and $700.

Features and size threaten to push the Eee PC 1000 netbook into a category traditionally referred to as subnotebooks–with one glaring difference: price.

Subnotebooks like the 11-inch Lenovo IdeaPad or Sony Vaio TZ series typically start at above $1,500 and go up from there, ranging up to $3,000.

HP mini-note and traditional ultra-portable notebooks: both ultra-compact designs, but big price gap

(Credit:
HP)

But as netbooks inevitably add more features, analysts and industry insiders are beginning to wonder what will happen to the traditional laptop category. “(If) you add more (gigabytes) of storage and a bigger screen, I don’t know what makes this any different than a normal laptop,” said Avi Cohen, a managing partner at Avian Securities.

Cohen said the obvious downside is a slower Atom processor–compared with a mainstream Core 2 chip–but on the upside Atom has better battery life. “Arguably there’s a category of consumers that don’t need such high processing power. Or, at least, a different kind of processing power,” Cohen said.

Maybe many more than computer makers realize. Industry sources familiar with Intel’s netbook strategy also see a potential clash of categories eventually. “Of course, it’s always been a concern, as (netbooks) gets more and more traction,” said one source familiar with Intel’s thinking on this topic.

And as netbooks add more features and creep up in price, Intel has to worry about the market confusion that may ensue. “Is a $700 laptop, even running Atom, a netbook?”–the source asked. That may be the question that laptop vendors and Intel will have to grapple with as the netbook category grows.

(An Intel company blog back in March described the netbook as a small laptop “designed for wireless communication and access to the Internet. And they cost about $250, making Netbooks a potentially disruptive and high volume market segment.”)

Of course, subnotebooks like the HP 2510p, Lenovo IdeaPad, and Sony Vaio TZ offer more features than today’s netbooks: faster processors, more memory, bigger hard disk drives, and usually larger screens than a netbook like the HP Mini-Note.

But two forces may be working against this purported advantage: One, all of these features may be overkill for a lot of consumers who use traditional, pricey subnotebooks for only email and simple Web browsing. And, two, netbook makers may continue to expand their offerings to push them closer to subnotebooks while keeping the price low.

This is something that Glenn Henry, CEO of Centaur, the Via Technologies subsidiary that designed the Isaiah processor, has said. “The one gigahertz (Isaiah) is plenty powerful enough to do lots of things,” Henry said. Via is also targeting the low-cost netbook category–and has been for some time. Its C7 processor is currently used in the HP Mini-Note 2133.

“If this category continues like it is, at the end of the year you may have mega hard drive-based netbooks,” said the source familiar with Intel’s strategy. “Let’s say someone comes out with a really nifty (design), it’s got some extra features, a bigger screen, and a few extra bells and whistles. I don’t think that’s a netbook even if it’s running an Atom processor.”

What is it then? That’s the $64,000 question.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says he knows exactly what Yahoo is worth and isn’t willing to go a dime over that, Silicon Alley Insider reported Thursday.

Ballmer, speaking to Microsoft employees in a so-called town hall conference call Thursday, also said an announcement regarding Yahoo is coming “in very short order,” the blog site reported. But what he meant by that is unclear, since he also noted that he had “nothing to say today.” A reporter for Silicon Alley Insider apparently listened in on the call.

Balllmer says he knows what Yahoo is worth.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

Ballmer also didn’t put a price tag to what he thinks Yahoo is worth, but his comments may indicate that talks between the two companies are still going on. The Yahoo comments came up during a question-and-answer session in which he reiterated Microsoft’s three options: Make a friendly deal, go hostile, or walk away.

The Microsoft chief exec also explained to his employees that Microsoft needs Yahoo in order to gain scale in the online market. “(Yahoo) accelerates scale. Gets us more advertisers, gets us search. Yahoo’s not a strategy. It’s a part of a strategy. We’re interested in paying for it at some level, and beyond that level we’re not willing to pay for it,” Ballmer said, according to Alley Insider.

Interestingly, Ballmer seems to believe that on the Internet, many people would think of his company as the underdog as it tries to play catchup with Google. “The world,” he said, “is rooting for us.”

John W. Thompson, chairman and CEO of Symantec, used part of his keynote address Tuesday at RSA 2008 to announce the merger of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance and the Information Technology Association of America.

CSIA includes the top security providers and seeks to influence security policy in the U.S. and the European Union; ITAA is a much larger policy group. He said “this will give CSIA a bigger platform and a stronger voice on these critical public policy issues and the ability to work with governments and key stakeholders around the world.”

In a press release, ITAA president and CEO Phil Bond said, “The global reach of CSIA, with its Brussels office, will bring valuable new perspective and resources to ITAA’s own Information Security program and complement our work with the World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA).”