(Credit:
Brooke Crothers)

Update: One other quick impression. No excessive heat to speak of. Another challenge for designers of ultra-thin notebooks is how to effectively dissipate the heat that is generated by the core electronics, including the main processor, the graphics silicon, and hard drive. Apple has succeeded admirably. Admittedly, I am using the solid state drive (flash memory) version of the Air so there’s no hard drive heat to worry about and I don’t play games (some gamers have cited heat issues). Impressive nonetheless. More later.

One of the concerns I had–and I’m sure I’m not alone–is whether a notebook this thin will be flimsy and overly delicate. The answer is a resounding no. It feels more solid in my hands than the rugged, well-built, 1.6-inch-thick HP Compaq nc8000 I have used for many years (since 2003).

I finally got my hands on a MacBook Air. Though I’m sure I’m repeating what some others have said already, I needed to state one thing before I do a more extensive evaluation: this unbelievably thin notebook is rock solid.

The reason for this is the Air’s aluminum construction and light weight. In other words, when you pick up the Air, you sense an almost perfect balance of sturdiness and weight–despite the fact that the Air exceeds the dimensions of a typical, more-compact subnotebook.

2003 HP business notebook and MacBook Air

Here is the breakdown on the pricing changes for AT&T’s DSL service:

• Pro (3Mbps):$28.99 to $34

“Even with this adjustment, our pricing still beats cable’s standard pricing across the majority of our markets,” AT&T spokesman Brad Mays said in an e-mail. “We’re confident that customers will see the value in the service and that we’ll continue to grow our customer base.”

Customers subscribing to AT&T’s new U-verse service will not see a change in their bill, nor will customers who have service in the old BellSouth region. The company is not changing pricing on the $10 and $19.95 standalone DSL services that AT&T is required to offer as a condition of its merger with BellSouth. AT&T’s Elite subscribers, who get download speeds of 6Mbps also will not see a price change.

• No change to Basic (768Kpbs): $19.95

AT&T’s move to jack up pricing on its DSL service comes a month after CEO Randall Stephenson said that the weak economy was affecting the company’s DSL subscription numbers. A spokesman for the company said the price hike was done to “better reflect the value of the broadband service and market conditions.”

• No change to Elite (6Mbps): $34.99

• Pro (3Mbps): $24.99 to $30

AT&T has increased the price of its DSL service by $5 a month as the company faces slowing broadband growth, the company confirmed Tuesday.

• Basic (768Kbps): $14.99 to $19.95

The pricing change will apply to existing and new customers in AT&T’s original 13-state territory who subscribe to one of AT&T’s three lower-speed tiers of service.

• No change to Elite: $38.99

• Express (1.5Mbps) : $23.99 to $29

AT&T DSL Direct (standalone):

• Express (1.5Mbps): $19.99 to $25

The service does not, however, let publishers change the ranking of search results themselves.

It’s a great idea. Search engines do not do a universally good job of parsing search, and this initiative lets publishers regain some control over how their content is presented without allowing them to actually muck with search result ordering.

This is no ordinary search hit.

On the other hand, considering the “open” moniker Yahoo has put on the project, the company is being extremely cagey with the details of how it will actually work. I talked with Amit Kumar, Yahoo Search director of product management, who said that there is as of yet no open spec published for site managers to write to. Nor would he say if Yahoo will support Microformats for this platform–although the company has been using this open standard in some experiments (Yahoo Local, Yahoo Tech and Yahoo Movies UK).

Also, it’s not totally clear how users will get exposed to the “open”-powered results for all but the largest of sites. Big sites like Yelp and The New York Times will be blessed by Yahoo from the get-go, and users will see structured results instead of the straight text they do now, when the product launches. But newer and smaller sites will see their search results displayed in the old-fashioned way until either users vote the structured results into rotation or Yahoo manually approves their formats.

There’s more at play here than simply better search results (although that’s no small deal). As Google tried to do with Google Base, getting site publishers to submit structured data to a search engine gives the engines enormous new ammunition they can use to consolidate data, create new mashups of it, and display ever-more-targeted advertising. Publishers really can’t say no to this feature, since it will improve the display of their search results, but there may be a cost in the long run: why will Web users need to visit a site’s home page if a search site like Yahoo is able to parse and display its key content itself?

The idea is to get structured data into search results. For example, if you search for product, and one of the results is a CNET review, open search will know that CNET reviews contain numerical ratings and will display that number in an easy-to-read format. Other data that could make it into search results include addresses, phone numbers, photos, related stories, or basically anything the publisher wants to display to people who see their results on Yahoo search.

That’s the good news for Palm, which on Thursday reported a dismal fiscal fourth quarter, which ended May 30. For the quarter, Palm reported a loss of $91.5 million, or 78 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $41.1 million, or 40 cents a share. Revenue fell 71 percent to $86.8 million.

While it’s unlikely the Pre will catch up to Apple’s iPhone anytime soon, analysts are predicting a heavy volume of sales. Some say that the company could sell about 100,000 handsets in July and 200,000 in August.

But Palm’s new CEO, a former executive at Apple’s
iPhone music player division who replaced former CEO Ed Colligan earlier this month, thinks the company is on the right track with the Pre.

He didn’t give exact sales figures for the device, which has a touch screen and uses a new operating system call WebOS, but he added that he “couldn’t be happier with our launch.” Analysts estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Pres were sold in the first few days that the device was available. The phone is exclusively available on Sprint Nextel’s network.

One thing that might hold back adoption of the Palm Pre is the fact that only a handful of applications are yet available for the phone. But Palm executives said on the call that they are working to get more apps out to users. That said, the market research firm Medialets reports that Pre users have already downloaded over a million applications so far.

CEO Jon Rubinstein said Thursday during the company’s earnings conference call that sales of the
Palm Pre, which hit the market on June 6, have been “strong and growing.”

Palm announced big losses for its fiscal fourth quarter, the last quarter before its hot new smartphone hit the market, but executives see the Pre as the key to its turnaround.

Palm Pre

Palm has been banking on the Pre to help it revive its ailing smartphone business. But the company faces stiff competition from others, such as iPhone maker Apple and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion.

“The launch of Palm WebOS and Palm Pre was a major milestone in Palm’s transformation; we have now officially reentered the race,” Rubinstein said in a statement. “We have more to accomplish, but the groundwork is laid for a very promising future here at Palm.”

Rubinstein said he was confident that the company would meet demand for the new device.

Jim Breyer, a partner at venture capitalist firm Accel Partners, was named to Dell’s board of directors Monday.

(Credit:
Accel Partners)

Breyer is on the board of three companies, Wal-Mart, Facebook, and Marvel Entertainment, which conveniently intersect with areas of Dell’s business the company wants broaden and improve. As part of its makeover of its consumer business, Dell has embraced retail as a key driver of sales. It’s also looking to compete with Apple’s hipness factor, and plugging into popular culture and social media as a way of communicating with consumers could help the company in these goals.

Breyer, 47, will join the board immediately and will be up for official election at the company’s annual meeting in July. He will fill one of two slots left vacant by the impending departures of A.G. Lafley and Michael Miles, two directors who announced earlier this year they would not seek re-election.

Considering who he is replacing, Breyer’s appointment is useful in looking at where Dell is heading. Breyer’s solid credentials as a Silicon Valley money man, where he’s invested in 30 Web start-ups, will likely bring a fresh perspective to Dell’s board. Lafley and Miles–longtime leaders of Procter & Gamble and Philip Morris, respectively–are representative of the traditional business world establishment, but Dell has signaled that it’s willing to try new strategies in order to get the company back on track.

Battery-powered
cars aren’t the only route to reinventing cars. Biofuels are touted as a gasoline replacement but are coming under more fire for financial and environmental reasons.

Q: It seems the big conclusion from your report is that there are multiple pathways to cleaner transportation but it’s not necessarily going to be easy to improve efficiency?
Heywood: You’re right, there are a number of options. They haven’t happened already because they cost extra to improve the efficiency of vehicles. And in a sense, the bigger the improvement the more the cost–does it pay off? Issues like this have slowed down our progress in the past.

I just happen to have gone through some car buying lately. It’s really hard to hang onto your toughness. When you look at all the other things that matter about a car and the other things that we like about cars, it is really hard to hang onto the more stringent stuff that is indeed going to matter. But it gets pushed into the background a bit at time of sale.

How do you think hydrogen vehicles will evolve? Will they be a niche market?

Heywood: Fuel cells though are very different (from hybrids) and they’re going to need a brand-new fuel infrastructure–hydrogen–and it’s not easy to put that in. So I don’t think they’re a niche market. They will get out in some limited fleet testing. But whether it starts to take off in a serious way towards big time depends a lot on whether we see good ways to produce hydrogen that fit our future energy strategies much better. There are lots of questions, people working hard on these questions, but it’s going to hover at the modest level for quite awhile before we get a sense of whether this is ready for big time.

When we look at the numbers from a couple of years ago when legislation was written setting some very ambitious targets, we’re really not going to beat those targets on that time frame. Now, that’s not to say that biofuels won’t develop, and I think they will play a useful role overtime–they’re one of the few options, real options that we’ve got. But we’ve got to be very careful about the environmental impacts and unintended economic impacts of how we go about it.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles remain the elusive prize–technically elegant yet stubbornly hard to make commercial and environmentally sustainable.

I also think that a fee and rebate system (where consumers get a rebate for buying an efficient car) at the time of purchase motivates vehicle purchasers to pay attention to the fuel economy.

To get under the hood of transportation technology, just talk to John Heywood.

An MIT study lays out which technologies have the potential to be the most fuel efficient.

Heywood, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues took the proverbial big-picture view of transportation in a recent report on how the U.S. could slash gasoline usage by 2035.

(Credit:
MIT)

If you do tax fuels, it’s a revenue source for improving our roadway infrastructure, which is in strong need of reversing the downward slide in terms of its deterioration. And then (that would pay for) even providing some additional aspects to the infrastructure that would improve its capability of having people move with less congestion and save energy that way.

Depending on the cost of fuels that may well pay for itself over the life of the vehicle, but will that be 15 years from now, 20 years from now? We’ll be doing that kind of economic calculation much more carefully than we’re doing it today at the individual vehicle level.

I think that there is a broad trend of increasing electrification of our energy system, and using electricity and transportation in this way certainly does cut back on petroleum use significantly. So I think it’s got a lot of drivers pushing it in the right direction. Now it’s going to depend on how quickly can we pull the battery costs down. There’s a good shot at making these sensible total economic packages, but it’s not guaranteed.

MIT’s report concludes there’s great potential for transportation technology. If lightweight hybrids and plug-in hybrids, for example, were the primary vehicle by 2035, the U.S. fleet would use about half the fuel it currently uses, helping significantly lower greenhouse gas levels.

So lots of things can happen at different time scales–and then very long-term ideas like plug-in hybrids where we share the energy used for driving with electricity. And, of course, the hydrogen economy is being worked on seriously, but its implementation is still some ways away.

But it’s harder than we think it is to realize on these opportunities and particularly to realize on them in a very broad way, to make the nation’s fuel consumption go down. The fleet is growing all the time because the population is growing. So, I think we’ve got to work very hard to try and incentivize the steps that we have outlined and others have outlined.

So do you think this national goal of getting one third of our liquid fuel needs provided by biofuels by mid-century is too high?

Heywood: Well, I’m not going to say no because if you go mid-century that’s a long ways away. I think in a nearer-term sense–say going out 25 years instead of 40 to 50 years, 20 percent, maybe 25 percent (from biofuels) that may well develop. Not guaranteed, but I think that looks plausible and maybe it can go beyond that, particularly if you think of this developing in a global sense.

There’s also a weight reduction from the vehicle by substituting lighter materials. The more use of aluminum instead of steel or high-strength steel instead of standard steel, you get some useful weight reductions. That takes a bit longer because it’s got to be designed into the vehicles.

If it’s a couple of thousand dollars extra to share the energy between petroleum and electricity, that’s likely to be an attractive proposition. If it’s $5,000 extra, then that’s not as good, and if it’s more than that, that’s fairly worse.

Looking at all the constrained opportunities, which one seems like the easiest path to go down–just improving existing engines versus plug-in hybrids versus clean diesel, etc.?
Heywood: We’re seeing evidence right now as petroleum prices have gone way up over the last six months to a year. We’ve seen that what the buying public is doing is shifting down the size spectrum. So the really big vehicles, the sales are down significantly. At the small end with smaller vehicles, the demand is up significantly. There’s a long waiting list for the limited number of hybrids that are now available. So that will start to pull bigger numbers for existing hybrid vehicles and pull new hybrid models into the market. The auto companies are scrambling to both improve standard engine transmissions and also to develop some of these alternatives that are significantly more efficient.

I think that there are a number of reasons why over time this country needs a transition to taxing energy consumption in useful ways that motivate people to be more efficient in the technologies that they buy and then how they use these technologies.

Looking at the pace of technology development and the market “pull” of consumers, the report tries to sort out dead ends from more promising routes.

John Heywood, MIT professor and transportation technology expert

This is going to be a hell of a problem to sort out and really make progress on, particularly if you look to what reductions in greenhouse gases people are looking for by mid-century. I mean those are very, very aggressive and ambitious targets (and) they may well be necessary. So there’s lots of action in the near-term and the midterm and we really need some good ideas for the long-term.

Then there are some behavioral issues that are sometimes built into the system: We all like cars that are more fun to drive. More fun gets translated into more powerful (heavier) cars, so the market pulls ever-more powerful cars. The industry competes on providing the next car that’s more powerful than the last one. That’s been very detrimental to using better technology to directly reduce fuel consumption.

There has been a dispute whether plug-in hybrids are a technology that will scale. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla says that because they’re too expensive, they’ll never be used in large numbers outside of rich countries. What’s your view on the roles of plug-in hybrids?

Heywood: Well, he’s got a valid point. The batteries as we currently see them–even allowing for some development–are going to be expensive. In a plug-in hybrid you need a lot more battery so the incremental cost of that battery, which will depend on the electric range which you want, is going to be significant.

Do you get the feeling that there’s a real push among at least a significant portion of consumers for more fuel-efficient cars? I’m not sure if people are willing to give up big cars necessarily, but do you get the sense that consumers and the industry are committed to more efficient technologies?
Heywood: Well, everybody wants it. The challenge is it doesn’t come free. I have lots of discussions with friends and the broader public, and they ask, why don’t cars get 50 miles per gallon? Well, you can have 50-mile-per-gallon cars, but they don’t look like the cars that most people have been buying over the last few years, for example, because the bigger, the heavier, the more fuel it’s going to consume to drive in the way that we want to drive. So there’s sort of constrained opportunities, and that’s what we have trouble relating to.

But when it comes to big changes in transportation, he says that policies that encourage consumers to buy “green” are the only way to truly transform the nation’s fleet.

CNET News spoke to Heywood about the best transportation options for consumers and the country. For individuals, he says, our choices matter–buy fuel-efficient cars and don’t drive aggressively if you’d like to clean up your ride.

Someone would come back and say if you put more taxes on gasoline consumption it’s people who are hurting economically who will be further disadvantaged. What’s the response to that?

Heywood: One can recycle some of that back to the tax system if one takes an appropriate but thoughtful view of this issue that you’ve raised.

Your report said that biofuels would play a smaller role than anticipated. Why did you find that?

Heywood: Land availability is a constraint. How rapidly can we build (biofuels production) up? Can we distribute these alternative fuels so that we could use them?

I’m not saying I know the answer, but I think our strong point is that there are significant opportunities but they need incentivizing. If you want to take the last 25 years, there has been better technology in U.S. vehicles. Performance of vehicles has escalated enormously. Size and weight have gone up significantly and fuel consumption stayed roughly constant. Now, you can say, that’s because gasoline was cheap. Fair enough, but if we just rely on “the market,” the last 20 years of the market hasn’t helped this.

(Credit:
MIT)

Meanwhile, smaller cars would go a long way to efficiency but automakers tend to build bigger and bigger cars, responding to consumer demand.

You’ve been advocating for better fuel economy and less polluting vehicles for quite some time. What’s your level of optimism right now?

Heywood: Well, I think we are going in the right direction. This period where the prices of oil is high–and I think it may go down some, but it’s not going to go down to pretty high levels–that will continue to motivate people to shift what they do.

Bonus link: Also, if you’re in a more constructive frame of mind, the Japanese camera giant also shares instructions on how to make a Canon SLR out of balsa wood.

(Credit:
Canon)

A FredMiranda forum member named Sam posted some photographic details of his lens disassembly after his model suffered a stuck aperture, the mechanism that regulates how much light goes into the lens. Fittingly, the last photo he took was of an exhibit at a Parisian Arab-Islamic museum that features dozens of apertures.

As you might imagine, the lens is an amazing feat of electromechanical miniaturization. I found the most intriguing shots to be of the slotted mechanism that converts rotation of the focusing and zoom rings on the outside of the lens into movement of component assemblies on the inside. Also, the copper windings of the motors controlling the image stabilization are fascinating. I was a little surprised how small the broken aperture actually is. In all, there are dozens of components.

Canon’s 17-85mm zoom lens

Last year, Canon posted an interesting video showing the manufacturing process behind the EF 500mm f/4L IS USM lens that costs about $5,800. Now a photographer has posted his own site that that illustrates why the comparatively lowly EF-S 17-85MM f4-5.6 IS USM costs about $500.

Having stripped some screws and not kept track of the disassembly order, he decided against trying to reassemble it. “Overall, the inner workings were a bit more complex than I expected, but it was a nice linear process taking it apart,” he said.

So at the end of it all, he turned the lens into a pencil holder.

By now, YouTube and parent company Google should be expert at handling international crises. Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and Thailand are among the countries that have cut off access to the Web’s largest video site. Most of the countries have eventually brought it back.

The Chinese government has apparently moved to block YouTube once again.

A year ago, China blocked YouTube in an apparent attempt to prevent the outside world from anti-government protesters clashing with police inside Tibet. China eventually unblocked YouTube.

A Chinese official was asked about the ban during a press conference on Tuesday and said the “Chinese government has taken up management of the network according to the laws,” the Journal reported.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the government began blocking the site slowly over the past 24 hours. Quoting a Google spokesman, the Journal reported that the company has not been given a reason for the ban.

The auction ends this weekend.

As I write this, the leading bid is some A$390,000.

Still trying to conjure the inspired connection between the value of a man’s life and that of a famous baseball (of COURSE the baseball is worth more), I can only leave you to go to Mr. Usher’s site and perhaps yourselves attempt to reason with him.

And all I can say ask of potential buyers is that they gird themselves for strange occurrences.

Shockingly, the asterisk won. And Mr. Ecko cemented his place in the history of sport. As, some have said, a vacant noise.

I am concerned that Mr. Usher, in believing that his life is the equivalent of a baseball, may have stepped a little too far down the psychological gang plank.

Might he believe that the famous French writers Goscinny and Uderzo would be disinterred to write a sequel, based on Mr. Usher’s life, to their great “Asterix the Gaul”, and entitle it “Asterisk the Ball”?

If you’re thinking of splitting up with your lover tonight, please give it a little more thought.

Mr. Usher claims he will go to the airport when the auction is over and get on the first plane he sees.

When I say the whole of his life, I understand that he wants to keep his spleen, shins and heart, albeit broken into a thousand pieces.
However, his house, his sofa and his friends, well, they can all go.

Mr. Usher himself believes that if he is mad, he is suffering only from “inspired madness.”

Mr. Usher appears to be a genuine man. His site is full of interesting information about him, such as his buying and selling of
cars and his cycle hire business.

I fear that eBay might want to call Social Services in on this one.

Perhaps like you, I was initially touched by the story of Ian Usher, an Englishman living in Perth, Australia.

We don’t have much time.

Yet he also has a blog, the latest entry of which you may find disturbing.

As Mr. Usher says on his blog:
“The thing that truly amazes me is $750,000, for a baseball!! I have a soccer ball, an Aussie Rules football, and quite a few golfballs here too. I might go out to the sports store and buy a baseball too, assuming they stock them here!
Are you reading this, Marc Ecko?”

What might he expect Mr. Ecko to do with his house, belongings and friends? Might he hope that they would all be asterisked, each being a permanent monument to Mr. Usher’s despair?

Mr. Usher has suddenly discovered the tale of Marc Ecko, a soi-disant clothing enterpreneur, who paid $750,000 for Barry Bonds’ record-breaking home run ball in order to bathe in a deluge of goodwill messages.

This is a picture of a man helping his friend move house. Nothing more.

And also in order to see what it feels like to be a deity for a day. Yes, he was the bright spark who held a poll to ask whether the ball should go to the Baseball Hall of Fame with an asterisk scrawled on it.

So now Mr. Usher has convinced himself that he, too, is a record-breaking baseball and is begging Mr. Ecko to buy his life.

(Credit:
sillygwailo)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer continues to hemorrhage market share to Mozilla’s open-source
Firefox browser. But Microsoft is set to surpass Mozilla in one area: adoption of its open-source Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), according to research from Black Duck Software.

It’s a matter of coloring inside the CodePlex lines.

Of course, I suspect that Microsoft would rather beat Mozilla in browser market share than in license market share. But you can’t have everything, now can you?

For those developers looking to go “off-piste” with a different license, and particularly for those with a Microsoft inclination–as is the case with Microsoft open-source code hosting repository CodePlex–it’s far easier to opt to do so with the MS-PL versus the MPL, the Eclipse Public License, or another license.

The MPL offers some benefits over its long-serving peers like the GNU General Public License (50.17 percent market share), but often the benefits are outweighed by the sheer momentum of the GPL. Whatever its deficiencies, the GPL is a relatively well-understood license.

The MS-PL is now used by 1.02 percent of open-source projects. This is impressive given that it was only approved by the Open Source Initiative some two years ago. The Mozilla Public License (MPL), by contrast, has been around for many more years and is used by 1.25 percent of open-source projects, ranking ninth in terms of popularity. MS-PL is 10th but is gaining fast.

As CodePlex continues to gain in popularity, I expect we’ll see the MS-PL push past MPL and potentially even past the MIT License, which currently ranks seventh at 3.79 percent share. When that happens, it will be a sign that Microsoft has truly arrived as an open-source player.

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