Website

What done of many lyric sites clearly differs from song lyric which available in Yahoo. Because Yahoo will become authorized song lyric site under agreement with loaded song producer. Yahoo will share the advantage along the length of the lyric still be presented.

Around 400.000 song lyrics which available in Yahoo come from around 9.000 different artists, starts from The Beatles and Bob Dylan till the stars like Radiohead and Beyonce. Almost around 100 music companies contributes their lyrics at Yahoo Lyrics, counted among the big companys like BMG, EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music, and Warner Music. Yahoo cooperates with Gracenote which has owned the license to overspreading song lyrics from various record producers.

Other sites might possibly have number of song lyrics far bigger than Yahoo. But, Yahoo believes, library of the lyric will be enthused because free of advertisement pop-up which can be exploited by spyware or computer virus to infiltrate to computer when user downloading the lyric.

"Yahoo will become new earnings source for artist and song producer by watering down people to remember or differentiates song that is ordinary they hear in radio or in website," said Phil Leigh, music observer from Inside Media Digital. Yahoo hopes its new service can generate new enthusiasm for industrial development of music.

AP

Possible Apple is still lucky. By the Big name, they can hold mutually EMI music lable for song content. But Payplay has not as lucky as Apple. Lot of they songs content are band without lable or indie label. While Digital Beat Store, even has not applied online system payment, but is the first online music shop which capable to accomodate Indonesia indie song. Amazon till now has just sold music in the Album form by online, but the rumor said they will launch music retail this year.

Apparition of online music shop more or less is influence to the change of industry music distribution. At the same time is first step to eliminate the useless of Digital Right Management (DRM) protection. Initially DRM is expected able to depress number of piracy song but in the reality, piracy always happens. Moreover with the cheap price of download song indicates that DRM only add charges only. The proof, online store its gives the song price that competitive and cheap enough.

Online store is believed to have excessive appreciation pattern to someone masterpiece. Till now song creator or music singer must divide their advantage with the record lables which work as publisher. Hence no wonder if more bands and artist without lable joining in sale of online music that advantage gotten from sale also bigger.

Apple has own selling system. US $1,29 for songs without DRM, while for song with DRM is esteemed by 99 cents only. While Payplay, what claims has 1,3 million song lists, only sell 88 cents for one song.

The nonprofit "One Laptop per Child" project said on Thursday it might sell versions of its kid-friendly laptops in the United States, reversing its earlier position of only distributing them to the poorest country.

"We can't ignore the United States. ... We are looking at it very seriously," Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology academic who founded the project, told analysts and reporters.

Once notorious as the $100 laptop, the lime-green-and-white devices are inching up in price. In February, the laptop projected said they would sell for $150 each. Negroponte now puts their price tag at $176 apiece.

They would go at a upper price to U.S. schools, he said, because more income are invested in American education than in developing nations, even in the poorest U.S. states.

The laptop features a string pulley to charge its battery, a keyboard that switches between languages, a digital video camera, wireless connectivity and Linux open-source operating software customized for remote regions.

Reuters

MySpace China introduced itself as a "locally owned, operated and managed company" in which News Corp-owned MySpace Inc was only one among several shareholders.

"Our team here will have the sole right to decide the operation model, the technology platform as well as the product strategy," said MySpace China CEO Luo Chuan, a former Microsoft executive.

"It's very unlike the other multinationals you might have heard about or seen in the Chinese market."

MySpace China may have been spurred to emphasize its local uniqueness by the fact that international Internet companies' goes to enter China have so far tended to end in collapse, observers said.

Despite MySpace China's hard work to differentiate itself, MySpace Inc will be signified with three board members.

They include Murdoch's wife, Wendy Deng, as well as MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, Luo said.

Investors in MySpace China also consist of International Data Group and China Broadband Capital Partners, an investment company founded by former China Netcom Group Corp chief executive Edward Tian.

Luo refused at a briefing to give specific details about the size of the investment or the share that MySpace Inc accounts for. Analysts have said that it was essential for MySpace Inc to enter into a partnership with local companies in order to increase access to China's tightly controlled Internet.

MySpace is one of the world's most famous websites, but the MySpace China community is still in its test phase, custom-made from the US version, and will gradually be developed to meet the needs of Chinese users, the company said.

Negotiations have been in improvement since News Corp Chairman Murdoch announced last October that he would bring MySpace to China, according to earlier reports.

afp

Symantec perceive, US become the fertile farm of various program and intruder action like spam, phising and malicious code. Penetrating of spam estimated to reach 59% of all e-mail traffic. Decrease 5% from previously period. Spam Mostly contained of lure photograph and scheme of financial deception .

After US, country that noted become the spreader of lot garbage program is China. At same period, noted 10% of security threat come from Chinese.

Next, Symantec mention the Germany with 7% of attacker program totalizeing from the existing attack.

America also lead the " boot" activity, which capable to control the computer from long distance so can trigger the appearance of spam and other bother various action. Computer which infected with "boot" is mostly in China, with 27 percentage from totalizeing of world boot infection.

This Research is the Symantec first time to check the attack based on its state origin. Research focussed at attack that happened in second semester 2006, more than 120 million computer running made in Symantec antivirus software.

Minister for Home Affairs Wong Kan Seng said the government has investigated "a few" Singaporeans who have been influenced by radical Islamic ideas they read from the Internet, local media quoted him as saying in parliament on Friday.

There are about 6,000 websites in cyberspace promoting militant ideologies, a situation that is breeding a group of "self-radicalised individuals" who can pose a danger to their societies, said Wong, one of two deputy prime ministers.

"The Internal Security Department has investigated a few Singaporeans who had become attracted to terrorist and radical ideas purveyed in the mass media, particularly the Internet," he said.

One of them was a young Muslim who came to believe that it was permissible to wage a "holy war" in the name of religion regardless of the origin of the fatwa, or Islamic decree, the Straits Times quoted the minister as saying.

The young man even grew to admire Osama bin Laden, leader of the Al-Qaeda militancy blamed for the September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Another Singaporean was investigated after he developed an interest in radical ideology while studying overseas.

When he returned to Singapore, he was in contact with other like-minded persons on the Internet, "eventually even communicating with foreign individuals involved in terrorist recruitment and financing," Wong said.

The report did not say what the conclusion of the investigations were.

With the help of local religious leaders, the government is also going online to counter these ideas on the Internet, the minister said.

"Taking the counter-ideology effort online is a significant direction since it is impractical to try to shut down all terrorist websites," he said.

As part of Singapore's ideological battle, Wong cited Muhammad Haniff Hassan, a research analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies here who has created an Internet blog to refute extremist ideology and also published a book.

www.afp.com

The satellite, along with a smaller test prototype, was launched from the country's space center on a remote southern Japan island atop an H-2A rocket, the workhorse of Japan's space program.

Japanese space agency spokesman Satoki Kurokawa described the liftoff — which had been postponed three times due to poor weather — as a success. Television footage showed the rocket racing up through cloudy skies.

The launch of the radar satellite enhances a multibillion dollar, decade-old plan for Japan to have round-the-clock surveillance of the secretive North and other areas Japan wants to peer in on.

But weaknesses in the satellites' capabilities have led to criticism that the program is a waste of money and, with better data available on the commercial market, that Japan will continue to be dependent on Washington for its core intelligence.

The launch also comes just a month after China demonstrated its ability to shoot satellites out of orbit with ground-based missiles. Japan and other countries, including the United States, have strongly protested Beijing's anti-satellite test.

China has defended the test as peaceful, and said it presents no country with a threat.

Japanese space officials say the satellites provide an important means for the country to independently collect intelligence, and say improvements in the satellites' capabilities are in the works.

The prototype launched Friday, for example, features higher-resolution optics that can be used in the future to improve the quality of the satellites' photographs from orbit.

Japan launched its first pair of spy satellites into orbit in March 2003. The program grew out of concern following North Korea's launch of a ballistic missile over Japan's main island in 1998.

The government's original plan was to put a total of eight intelligence-gathering satellites into orbit through 2006. However, it suffered a major setback in November 2003, when a rocket carrying the second set of spy satellites malfunctioned and was destroyed in mid-flight.

Officials say they are back on course now.

"Our crisis management has improved substantially," said Yasuhiro Itakura of the Cabinet office in charge of the program.

Though Japan's intelligence-gathering satellites are not under military control, Japan's ruling party proposed late last year that the military be allowed to use the country's space program. The proposal still needs to be approved by Parliament.

Since 1969, Japan's space program has been limited by a parliamentary resolution committed to peaceful uses. The new proposal would restrict military use of the program to self-defense, officials say.

www.ap.org

Frances E. Allen, 75, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques for optimizing the performance of compilers, the programs that translate one computer language into another. This process is required to turn programming code into the binary zeros and ones actually read by a computer's colossal array of minuscule switches.

Allen joined IBM in 1957 after completing a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan. At the time, IBM recruited women by circulating a brochure on campuses that was titled "My Fair Ladies."

When Allen joined Big Blue, an IBM team led by John Backus had just completed Fortran, one of the first high-level programming languages.

The point of Fortran was to develop a system that could operate a computer just as efficiently as previous "hand-coded" approaches directly assembled by programmers. Allen recalled Wednesday that her task at IBM was to replicate the achievement on multiple kinds of computers.

"I had the good fortune to work on one big project on good machines after another," she said.

Her work led her into varied assignments, including writing intelligence analysis software for the National Security Agency. More recently she helped design software for IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer.

She retired in 2002 but has stayed active in programs that encourage girls and women to study computer science.

"It's a very tough problem overall," she said. "Constant attention to it is important."

Since the Turing Award was first given in 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery, previous winners have included luminaries in encryption, artificial intelligence, hypertext, networking and other vital elements of modern computing. All were men, including Backus, the 1977 winner.

Allen called it "high time for a woman," though she quickly added: "That's not why I got it."

BRIAN BERGSTEIN

www.ap.org

"I remember thinking, there's got to be more supporters out there," said Farouk, 26, who advises student government at the University at Missouri at Columbia.

Farouk's group had 100 members in the first hour. In less than five days, 10,000. By the third week, nearly 200,000. Yesterday, a month after he created the group, it clocked in 278,100 members.

There are more than 500 Obama groups on Facebook. One of the first, "Students for Barack Obama" was created on July 7 by Meredith Segal, a junior at Bowdoin College who first heard of Obama when he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Instead of starting "a petition or something" to encourage the freshman senator to run for president, she turned to her Facebook page, created a group and invited people (first her friends, later strangers) to join.

Now it's a political action committee with nearly 62,000 members and chapters in 80 colleges, the most structured grass-roots student movement -- there's a director of field operations, an Internet director, a finance director and a blog team director -- in the presidential campaign so far. "Young people are on the Web," said Segal, 21. "That's how we're organizing."

At the center of a virtual community Obama's Facebook supporters post photos of Obama on their pages alongside snapshots of birthday parties, nephews and girlfriends. They link to the latest Obama news ("Gov. Kaine of Va. to endorse Obama"), talk about their favorite Obama quotes ("I think mine is, 'I'm so overexposed, I'm making Paris Hilton look like a recluse' ") and engage in a 24-hour conversation about their candidate ("I told you guys sometime back that once Obama announces his candidacy, the sharks are going to come biting . . ."), linked to one another in the kind of community reserved for longtime players of the video game World of Warcraft or incessant "American Idol" fans.

A few weeks ago, Segal's group staged a rally at George Mason University that drew an estimated 3,000 students -- and an appearance from Obama himself. This past Sunday, her group's Iowa State University chapter helped promote a rally that attracted more than 5,000.

But will they rock the vote? While the Illinois senator's presidential campaign has outpaced his rivals in the enthusiasm it has generated on Facebook and other social networking sites such as Friendster.com and MySpace.com, no one knows whether such online excitement can translate to votes.

Ask Howard Dean, the Web candidate of 2004. The former Democratic Vermont governor raised millions of dollars on the Web, generated huge amounts of buzz and then learned during the Iowa caucuses that online excitement did not guarantee offline foot soldiers -- or the right foot soldiers in a state that likes its volunteers homegrown.

Meetup.com helped energize the Dean campaign, but more sophisticated social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace were not a factor during the 2004 election. A recent Pew Research Center poll, however, reported that 54 percent of 18-to-25-year-olds have used them. And Joe Trippi, who spearheaded Dean's e-campaign, is among those who believe they will play a significant role in the current race.

"It took our campaign six months to get 139,000 people on an e-mail list," Trippi said. "It took one Facebook group, what, barely a month to get 200,000? That's astronomical."

Feeding a hunger among young voters Peter Levine, deputy director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan research center at the University of Maryland that studies young voters, predicts what he calls "the Facebook Effect."

"Everybody -- the pundits, the online strategists -- have been waiting for the first candidate to really hit a home run with the social networking sites," Levine said. "Obama's message is attractive to a certain type of young person. He's saying, 'You have a role to play. This is about you. About your role.' There's a real hunger for that kind of message."

Added Todd Zeigler of the Bivings Group, a D.C.-based Internet communications firm that works with Republicans: "The key point here is that the support for Obama on these social networking sites is not being driven by the campaign itself. It is something spontaneous as opposed to something the campaign itself is orchestrating. This shows a real enthusiasm for Obama's candidacy among young people that you aren't seeing for any other candidates at this point."

Borrowing from the experts Obama's main Democratic opponents, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and former senator John Edwards (N.C.), have also used the Web to speak directly to voters, sidestepping mainstream media. But the Illinois senator's campaign seems to have taken some of its cues from sites such as Facebook. The campaign Web site, launched last Saturday, allows visitors to blog, keep tab of their fundraising contributions, make a list of events and so on. And there is a Facebook link on the bottom of his home page.

K. Daniel Glover, who edits National Journal's Technology Daily, said that for candidates, "it's all about using the Internet to connect to people," the same way candidates connect with the local precinct chairmen and state party officials. But Glover cautioned against expecting too much from the Internet, especially when it comes to younger voters. "I don't think anyone is going to be elected because he/she is all the rage on Facebook," he said.

Clinton has about the same number of sites as Obama, but the largest has only about 3,000 members, and many of the sites are maintained by opponents. For every group called "African-Americans for Hillary Rodham Clinton" (95 members), there is a group called "A second Bush was bad enough, don't give me a second Clinton" (55 members). Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has some presence on the site; a group called "John McCain in 2008" has 1,617 members. And though Obama himself has a few detractors -- a group that calls itself "Anybody That Would Support Barack Obama for President is a Moronic Liberal" has 424 members -- no one comes close to his overall popularity.

Jose Antonio Vargas
washingtonpost.com

The National Academy of Engineering announced Thursday that the 2007 Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability would go to Abul Hussam, a chemistry professor at George Mason University in Fairfax. Hussam's invention is already in use today, preventing serious health problems in residents of the professor's native Bangladesh.

After moving to the United States in 1978, Hussam got his citizenship and received a doctorate in analytical chemistry. He has spent much of this career trying to devise a solution to the arsenic problem, which was accidentally caused by international aid agencies that had funded a campaign to dig wells in Eastern India and Bangladesh.

The wells brought fresh groundwater to farmers and others who previously had been drinking from bacteria- and virus-laced ponds and mudholes. But the aid agencies were unaware that the groundwater also had naturally high concentrations of poisonous arsenic. As infectious diseases declined, arsenic-related skin ailments and fatal cancers began to increase — a problem that attracted much attention in the 1990s.

"I myself and all my brothers were drinking this water," Hussam told The Washington Post. He added that his family did not get sick — possibly because they had a good diet, which can help stem the effects of digesting arsenic.

Can’t taste it or smell it

Allan Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said arsenic poisoning affects millions of people worldwide and it has been difficult to convince people that what seems to be good water might be toxic.

"You can't see it or taste or smell it," Smith said. "The idea that crystal-clear drinking water would end up causing lung disease in 20 or 30 years is a little weird. It's unbelievable to people."

Hussam spent years testing hundreds of prototype filtration systems. His final innovation is a simple, maintenance-free system that uses sand, charcoal, bits of brick and shards of a type of cast iron. Each filter has 20 pounds of porous iron, which forms a chemical bond with arsenic.

The filter removes almost every trace of arsenic from well water.

Prize will purchase more filters

About 200 filtration systems are being made each week in Kushtia, Bangladesh, for about $40 each, Hussam said. More than 30,000 have been distributed.

Hussam said he plans to use 70 percent of his prize so the filters can be distributed to needy communities. He said 25 percent will be used for more research, and 5 percent will be donated to GMU.

The 2007 sustainability prize is funded by the Grainger Foundation of Lake Forest, Ill., and the contest was set up to target the arsenic problem. Among the criteria for winning was an affordable, reliable and environmentally friendly solution to the arsenic problem that did not require electricity.

Hussam's award will be presented Feb. 20 at Union Station in Washington.

www.ap.org

“Our data provide quantifiable evidence that attacks are happening all the time to computers with Internet connections,” study author Michel Cukier of the University of Maryland said. “The computers in our study were attacked, on average, 2,244 times a day.”

Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three computers that help manage global computer traffic on Tuesday.

To test how hackers break into computers, Cukier’s team set up weak security on four Linux computers connected to the Internet and monitored hacker attacks.

Unlike the sophisticated hackers portrayed on TV and in films, these hackers weren’t targeting specific computers.

“Most of these attacks employ automated scripts that indiscriminately seek out thousands of computers at a time, looking for vulnerabilities,” Cukier said.

The hackers used a type of software called a “dictionary script” that runs through lists of common usernames and passwords to break into the computer.

Some of the most commonly guessed usernames in the study were “root,” “admin,” “test,” “guest,” and “user." Cukier advises against using any of these as passwords.

When guessing passwords, the software tried to reenter or guess variations of the username. Following the password with the numbers “123,” guessing “password” or “123456” were also common guesses.

The study’s findings, presented at the 37th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, support the continual warnings of security experts to never use identical or related usernames and passwords.

After gaining access to the computers, hackers usually quickly changed passwords, checked hardware and software configurations, and downloaded, installed and ran a program.

These programs established the computer as part of a botnet, a collection of hacked computers that can be run by the hacker remotely to perpetrate fraud or identity theft, disrupt other computer networks, or damage computer files.

“The scripts return a list of ‘most likely prospect’ computers to the hacker, who then attempts to access and compromise as many as possible,” Cukier said. “Often they set up ‘back doors’ — undetected entrances into the computer that they control — so they can create ‘botnets,’ for profit or disreputable purposes.”

To protect against hackers, security experts advise choosing longer, more difficult passwords with combinations of upper and lowercase letters.

LiveScience.com

The worm hides in e-mails with subjects like: "Together You and I," "Til the End of Time Heart of Mine."

People who open an attached file such as postcard.exe can end up infecting their computers.

Security firm Symantec said it had detected "large-scale spamming" of e-mails including a Trojan horse, a program that contains or installs a malicious program.

Symantec said the malware was a new version of Trojan, Peacomm or the "Storm Trojan."

"With Valentine's Day approaching, this time around the authors are attempting to tug on the heartstrings of unsuspecting users with romantic subject lines such as 'My Heart belongs to you,' said Symantec's Orla Cox.

"The Trojan is much the same as we've seen before, the only difference being that the authors have used a modified packer in an (unsuccessful) effort to evade detection by antivirus vendors."

"As a general rule, don't open any suspicious e-mail, regardless of what is says it contains," said Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs.

"Instead of going on instincts, let a security solution decide whether it's safe to open it or not," he said, urging users to scan any suspicious messages with an antivirus program.

Corrons said events like Valentine's Day and Christmas are often exploited by cyber-criminals to try and spread their creations by disguising infected e-mails as e-greeting cards.

This use of "social engineering" was used in the LoveLetter virus, which caused one of the biggest epidemics in computer history.

www.afp.com

Konica Minolta Holding Inc said Thursday it made a net profit of 40 billion yen (331 million dollars), up 187.7 percent from the same period of last year, during the nine months to December.

The company maintained its full-year forecasts, which it raised in November to 46 billion yen after seeing strong sales of electronics goods.

For the nine-month period to December, Konica Minolta posted 70.35 billion yen in operating profit, up 6.5 percent, on total sales of 744.60 billion yen.

The company said that lower sales in the photo-imaging business were offset in the third quarter by a healthy performance in electronics products.

Despite falling prices, Konica Minolta said it was "able to offset that impact through such measures as groupwide cost reduction efforts as well as moves to increase the sales quality, primarily due to rises in sales of new products and high-added-value products."

A company statement pointed to robust sales in Europe of the Bizhub C series of high-end photocopiers.

But it said the company anticipated "considerable challenges" throughout its business segments in the rest of the financial year due to intensifying price competition.

Konica Minolta announced in January 2006 it would stop making all cameras -- selling off its high-end camera business to Sony -- and that it would slash 3,700 jobs or 11 percent of its global workforce.

www.afp.com

Default Search Settings Changed, New APIs

Windows Security Center, which looks like a dashboard, gives the user an overview of what security software is running on the system and the status of checks and upgrades of firewalls and antispyware protection.

Rival security software firms and the European Commission suspected this could give WSC an unfair advantage. Microsoft said it agreed to develop a new set of application programming interfaces for release in the first service pack, scheduled for later this year, which can be invoked by third-party security programs to turn off the alerts presented by WSC.

Similarly, PatchGuard--software that protects against the modification of the operating system kernel--has been added to Vista. Some security vendors have in the past made modifications to the kernel as part of the implementation of their security software.

PatchGuard prevents such modifications in the 64-bit version. Microsoft is now working with vendors to develop new kernel-level APIs that will provide access to the kernel to address this issue, Microsoft said.

The APIs will be available in Windows Vista 64 with the first service pack, scheduled for later this year.

Regarding search, Microsoft has changed the way default settings are made for Internet search within both Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7.

"These changes now ensure for users that they are able--through a series of windows and options--to make a clear, conscious, and open decision on their default search provider. Furthermore, users will retain at all times the ability to change this and all further defaults in the operating system at will," Microsoft said.

Changes Made to XPS Licensing

Microsoft's own fixed document format software is known as XPS. "In response to the Commission's concerns, the company has made fundamental changes to the licensing structure of the XPS fixed-format technology and has committed to submit the technology to an international standards body for adoption as an open industry standard," Microsoft said.

The XPS standard will be made available under licensing terms that do not exclude any industry or licensing model including the General Public License, it said.

"In response to Commissioner Kroes' letter of March 2006, Microsoft created a single application programming interface so that independent software developers can create applications to allow users to save documents in XPS or other formats, such as Adobe's PDF," Microsoft said.

Microsoft said it has also disclosed through a licensing program the relevant information to enable the implementation of XPS technology on competing client and server operating systems.

Microsoft has also responded to a further European Commission demand to submit XPS (as well as future extensions) to a standards setting body. Microsoft will submit XPS to the Ecma International.

Microsoft said it will also enable the implementation of XPS under an open-source business model (GPL) through use of a covenant not to sue--a model that Microsoft has applied to Web services and open XML document formats and that has, it said, "been welcomed by the Open Source community."

EU Gets Vista Sans Media Player

European customers and original equipment manufacturers will be able to buy a version of Vista that has Microsoft's Media Player stripped out. This unbundled version of the operating system complies with the 2004 European antitrust ruling, which ordered the company to offer two separate versions of both the home and professional versions of the operating system.

"In compliance with the European Commission's decision of March 2004, home and professional editions of Windows Vista without Media Player functionality will be released in Europe on the same schedule as the Windows Vista general availability launch," Microsoft said.

These are called the N versions--denoting "no media player," the company said.

Paul Meller, IDG News Service
www.pcworld.com

Current Analysis. Dell (DELL) shares fell 29% during his tenure.

Other problems included previous earnings misses. Dell last year lost the No. 1 PC spot to rival Hewlett-Packard, according to researcher Gartner. And the company announced a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting.

Now, Dell's board has finally acknowledged that investors "lost confidence in the guy in charge," says PC analyst Richard Shim at researcher IDC.

The news, released after market close, sent Dell shares up 4% to $25.24 in after-hours trading. Dell's board is still considering what kind of exit compensation to give Rollins, if any, spokesman Bob Pearson said.

In a statement, Michael Dell called Rollins, a 10-year company veteran, "a great business partner and friend." The two were so close they once linked their offices with a sliding glass door.

But board member Samuel Nunn said "Michael's vision and leadership are critical" to Dell's long-term health. Many tech analysts agree. "Michael Dell is an innovator," Bhavnani says. "Kevin Rollins is an operations guy."

A turnaround won't be easy, Gartner PC analyst Martin Reynolds says. Growth in Dell's core market, U.S. businesses, has slowed. Sales are up among consumers and in other countries. But Dell is weaker in those areas because it sells mainly via catalog and the Web. Many shoppers want to touch a PC before buying, Reynolds says.

The rising popularity of laptops creates a similar problem, Reynolds says. And Dell's low-cost ways of building PCs have been copied by HP and others. That means it can no longer compete on price alone, he says. Reynolds predicts that Michael Dell will eventually cede the CEO spot to an outsider who can help revamp the business model.

The leadership switch doesn't necessarily mean immediate changes in operations, Shim says. Dell is hugely profitable, and that is not expected to change.

And Michael Dell has remained very active in the company since relinquishing the CEO post in 2004. Back then, he told USA TODAY that he couldn't see himself retiring from the company he founded in his college dorm room. "I do go to the beach, but I get bored," he said.

Michelle Kessler,
www.usatoday.com

"The stock is down because it wasn't a blow-out quarter as many of us expected," said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst at Global Crown Capital. "They gained share relative to Yahoo in paid search revenue, but not by a wide margin."

Fourth-quarter net income nearly tripled to $1.03 billion, or $3.29 per share, from $372.2 million, or $1.22 per share, in the year-earlier quarter. That easily beat the average analyst estimate of $2.92 per share among analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Revenue, meanwhile, surged 67% to $3.21 billion, from $1.92 billion a year ago. Nearly two-thirds of Google's fourth-quarter revenue came from its own sites.

Google is venturing into new ad formats beyond its traditional pay-per-click text ad business, including radio, video, newspaper and corporate brand ads.

For the fiscal year, Google's revenue exceeded $10 billion, becoming the fastest dot-com public company to reach that mark, Pyykkonen says.

The Silicon Valley company has exceeded analysts' forecasts in all but one of its 10 quarters as a publicly held company.

The company's stock, which has been flirting with $500 a share, rose 9% in January, compared with a 1% increase for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index in the same period.

Google's market value of $153.5 billion is more than four times that of rival Yahoo. Web traffic to Google sites jumped 24% year-over-year, says Nielsen/NetRatings. About 3 billion searches were performed on the site in December - about twice as many as on Yahoo, says Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google's technology isn't considerably different from rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft, says Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land blog. "They simply have a good brand," he says.

"Google's biggest concern is simply getting too big," Sullivan says. "Everybody thinks of them as those wacky kids in Mountain View (Calif.), but they're not. They're a 6,000-person company."

Jon Swartz, www.usatoday.com
Contributing: Michelle Kessler, Reuters

"There is an ever-increasing demand for higher graphic processing power and crisper graphics for entertainment and applications alike," said David Cummings, director of marketing for AMD's Graphics Products Group, in a statement.

"Our answer to that demand is the X2300 GPU. This GPU utilizes patented technology to increase processing power and provide the user with smooth, realistic hi-resolution graphics."

The new laptop will also offer something Asus is calling Splendid Video Intelligence Technology that allows the A8Jr to integrate different multimedia data sources in order to reduce noise and conversion rate for a sharper display and better contrast when running video applications.

Asus says the notebooks will all come with high-definition support capability, allowing for HD video playback on the go, as well as built-in WLAN 802.11 a/b/g, a 14.1-inch widescreen display, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR—a pumped up data rate that transmits three times faster than the standard Bluetooth—and 5 USB ports, a S-video TV-out port, and express card slots for data transfer and storage options.

A representative for Asus said that pricing for the A8Jr will be around $1249, depending on configuration. The company expects the laptop to start shipping in late February.

Bryan Gardiner - ExtremeTech

Google said it would distribute advertising alongside videos from Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group (NYSE:WMG - news) over its AdSense online ad system to Web site publishers in a four-week test now underway.

"Over the past few months, we have run tests to figure out how we work with our partners and advertisers to combine high quality video content with ads and then distribute them (over) the Google AdSense network," Google said in statement.

The test with the two music labels follows an earlier public trial of Google's video advertising system with Viacom's (NYSE:VIA - news) MTV Networks, which provided music videos to run on a select number of Web sites running Google ads.

As part of the test, advertisements would be billed on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model, the traditional billing method for mass market advertising as opposed to the pay-per-click billing model Google popularized with text ads.

Google has been pushing ahead in recent months to expand beyond its hugely successful text-advertising system into new advertising formats including video, radio and mobile phones.

As a example, Warner Music has defined multiple video channels along themes like "rock music" or featuring the "Divas of Pop Music." A Web site owner can select a video channel and embed it on a section of the site dedicated to running Google AdSense ads. Visitors then can click to watch ad-supported videos within the video channel on sites running the ads.

The Google advertising system splits the resulting revenue three ways to the video content owner, the Web site publisher and Google. The exact revenue splits were not disclosed.

Mountain View, California-based Google said in a statement on its AdSense customer blog that only a limited number of Web site publishers had been asked to participate.

"Over the next few weeks we'll be testing AdSense video distribution and sponsorship with a small group of publishers," AdSense product manager Christian Oestlien said in his blog post.

Sony BMG is a joint venture of Japan's Sony Corp. (6758.T) and Germany's Bertelsmann (BERT.UL).

Shares of Google fell 1.8 percent to close at $480.84 on Nasdaq.

Eric Auchard
www.reuters.com

Intel, trying to reverse plunging profits and market-share losses to archrival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., will officially endorse Sun's Solaris operating system in return.

Analysts said Intel's backing will be crucial in Sun's effort to gain more widespread adoption of its servers and software.

And Sun's embrace of Intel chips marks a timely design win for Intel, whose processors were shunted aside by Sun several years ago in favor of chips from AMD.

Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, has lost about 5 percent of the overall chip market to AMD over the past year, with AMD posting dramatic gains in the high-margin markets for servers and laptop computers that Intel once enjoyed nearly alone.

But Intel has revamped its product line with a new chip design to boost performance while giving off less heat, and analysts said deals like the one with Sun reflect a growing demand for Intel's new offerings.

"We see '07 as the year of Intel — everything is working in their favor now," said Larry Cao, a semiconductor equity analyst with Morningstar. "They're back on top, their product line is strong, and they're gaining customers. This is one example — they finally penetrated this one account that was purely AMD. That's a major score for them."

The CEOs from both companies, Jonathan Schwartz with Sun and Paul Otellini with Intel, jointly announced the deal in San Francisco.

Both executives stressed the collaborative nature of the partnership and said the deal is about expanding market opportunities in areas where both companies have been weak.

Otellini said the two companies agreed to try to find common ground while negotiating the terms of the new partnership.

"This is not just a commercial endeavor," Otellini said in an interview with The Associated Press. "This is a deep, cooperative effort. If you look at both companies, they both have a strong legacy of technology innovation. We're now able to do that in a collaborative fashion."

The deal represents a dramatic about-face for Sun, which several years ago began relying exclusively on AMD to provide the processors for servers based on the popular x86 design. Intel used to provide chips to Sun for that type of server, but Sun phased them out over concern about their high energy consumption.

Under the new deal, Intel will again make chips for Sun for servers based on the x86 design, though Sun will continue to use AMD products as well.

Analysts said the competition is likely to bring down Sun's prices and help the company broaden its customer base.

"Sun's a company that has a strong will and oftentimes blazes its own trail," said Crawford Del Prete, a senior vice president with market research firm IDC. "This is a way for Sun to accomplish a number of things with one stroke. It broadens the product line, it attracts customers loyal to the Intel product line, and it also increases adoption of Solaris. Intel's backing is important to win the confidence of customers."

AMD said in a statement that Sun remains a "strong, strategic partner" and that the deal ultimately serves the market demand for choice by driving innovation, differentiation between competing products and increased value to customers.

Though AMD has been gaining share at Intel's expense, Intel has slashed prices and the pressure appears to have taken a toll on AMD.

AMD is scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday and has warned investors that plunging processor prices would "substantially" reduce operating income for the quarter.

Investors had a muted reaction to the news of the Sun-Intel partnership.

Intel's shares were down 3 cents to close at $20.79 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, while Sun shares slipped 2 cents to $5.75 on the Nasdaq.

Analysts said part of the ho-hum reaction was because of Sun's relatively small size in the global server market.

Sun is ranked fourth in terms of worldwide server sales revenue, commanding about 10 percent of the market behind larger rivals Hewlett-Packard Co., International Business Machines Corp. and Dell Inc., according to data from Gartner Inc.

However, analysts said the deal was nonetheless an important milestone in the semiconductor and server industries that could help both companies prosper.

Schwartz, the Sun CEO, said the partnership with Intel was about reaching developers who build applications on Intel microprocessors and in turn driving sales for Sun.

He also stressed the long-term technology development aspect of the deal, which he said will lead to innovations for both companies far out into the future.

"This is a tectonic shift in the marketplace," Schwartz told the AP. "This really is a landmark relationship that's about growing the market and not simply the customer-supplier relationship. This really does change the face of the industry."

JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer

Evidence Offered

During a one-day trial that ended Tuesday, prosecutors showed how at least 50,000 computers were infected by the two defendants, who are 20 and 28 years old. Police have not released their names. The pair used a malicious program called "Toxbot," a worm that can be used to gain remote control of a computer and log keystrokes, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also charge that the defendants threatened an advertising software maker, 180Solutions, now renamed Zango, with a denial-of-service attack after a dispute over payment. Zango settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in November for $3 million after concern that distributors of its software were installing it on peoples' computers without their consent, often by exploiting vulnerabilities in operating systems or Web browsers.

Prosecutors also allege the pair were involved in phishing schemes, where fraudulent Web sites are constructed to harvest personal information such as bank-account or credit-card details. The two used a Trojan horse called "Wayphisher", which on an infected machine can redirect a Web site request from a legitimate bank site to a phishing site.
Fines, Jail Sought

Prosecutors want a three-year sentence for the 20-year-old and two years for the 28-year-old and and each to pay $38,000 to the Dutch government, Leppens said. A judge will return a verdict in the case on January 30.

Four others involved in the ring who are facing lesser charges will go to trial later this year, Leppens said.

The various schemes caused at least $75,000 in losses to victims, through online purchases and other actions, Leppens said.

Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service
pcworld.com