annumoto.com

For example, to move left, the user would sound out the “ee” tone in “feet.” To go right, it would be the “aw” sound in “law.” Hitting the equivalent of the mouse button would be the “u” sound in “but.”

It might be tempting to think that only the most basic tasks are possible with this kind of software, but Malkin said that one artist who has used the Vocal Joystick had employed it to paint a picture of Mount Fuji that he then showed the audience.

Vocal Joystick is being developed by students and faculty in the electrical engineering, linguistics and computer science departments at the University of Washington. Users can move a cursor around by mouthing a series of vowel sounds that correspond to different directional movements.

SEATTLE–For many Iraq war veterans who have returned home with debilitating injuries that, for example, make it impossible to use their hands, doing anything on a computer is a hopeless task.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

An artist used a software program called Vocal Joystick to create this drawing of Mount Fuji. The software gives people with reduced or nonexistent use of their hands the ability to control a computer cursor by mouthing vowel sounds.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

“We can do a lot with that,” Malkin said. “Speech is a very complex signal.”

University of Washington graduate student Jon Malkin, who spoke at the Gnomedex conference here Saturday, described it is an extension of speech recognition technology.

Indeed, he explained that the software allows a user “four degrees of freedom,” meaning that the cursor can be moved up, down, left and right, all with different vowel sounds.

He said the artist had created the picture in just three hours.

Malkin also demonstrated the software in real-time, showing how it is used in conjunction with a simple game where a player controls a fish swimming around trying to catch other fish.

One simple manifestation of the project is this game in which a person controls a fish that must swim around to eat other fish.

But a research project under way in the University of Washington’s electrical engineering, linguistics and computer science departments could be the latest tool at such veterans’ disposal, as well as for anyone who lacks the full use of their hands.

He proceeded to sound out vowel after vowel, and sure enough, on-screen, his fish moved around dexterously, chomping up snack after snack. The Gnomedex crowd went wild.

The picture was very good, something that many people with full use of their hands would never have been able to create.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

The project, known as the Vocal Joystick, is designed to allow someone to control a computer cursor using nothing more than their voice.

It works by having a user train the Vocal Joystick software with his or her voice.

In a statement, DeFazio said that not only is cell phone use aloft an annoyance, but also that airlines should be stopped from using in-flight talking as a potential revenue source. “With airline customer satisfaction at an all time low, this is not the time to consider making airplane travel even more torturous,” he said. “Polls show the public overwhelmingly doesn’t want to be subjected to people talking on their cell phones on increasingly over-packed airplanes.” During the hearing, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) lodged a dissenting voice, saying, “You are trying to legislate courtesy, folks, and that just doesn’t work.”

CNET News poll Banning cell phone chatter at cruising altitude:

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The legislation, which now moves to the full House for consideration, would prohibit “voice communications using communications devices on scheduled flights,” with exceptions for flight crew members and a federal law enforcement officer acting in an official capacity. In-flight texting, Wi-Fi, and e-mail on airplanes would not be affected.

Quiet please: A House committee has moved to prohibit in-flight cell phone use.

In the past few years, the federal government has not looked kindly at in-flight calling. The Federal Communications Commissions, with support from the Federal Aviation Administration, already bans in-flight cell phone use, but the agency has the power to revisit the issue at any time. The Hang Up Act, however, would write the prohibition into federal law.

Good idea?
Bad idea?
Undecided

Industry reaction is mixed for now. Though the Airline Transport Association, the industry’s main lobbying arm, is not backing the bill, the Association of Flight Attendants, and some consumer groups are supporting a ban on sky-high cell chatting.

A House of Representatives committee threw another hurdle into the path of in-flight cell phone use Thursday, when it voted to ban the use permanently. By a voice vote, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed the Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace(or Hang Up) Act, which was introduced earlier this year by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.).

(Credit:
Kent German/CNET Networks)

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the European Union’s equivalent of the FAA is moving toward allowing cell phone use on intra-European flights. Air France has already conducted a study of in-flight cell use on one of its aircrafts, albeit to mixed results; Ryanair, Emirates, and Qantas are considering allowing cell phone use as well. Yet, those airlines could also be subject to the Hang Up Act on flights to the United States.

The Toshiba Qosmio G40 notebook will sport a SpursEngine SE1000 chip based on the Cell Broadband Engine, which is also used in the Sony PlayStation 3.

Samples of the SE1000 chip began shipping from Toshiba on April 8. Toshiba has said it expects sales of 6 million units within the first three years.

Toshiba also plans to release a TV with the Cell processor.

The SpursEngine can do high-definition video encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams, among other capabilities. The four processing elements inside the chip have a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while boasting a relatively low power envelope of 10 to 20 watts.

(Credit:
Toshiba)

The Cell Broadband Engine is a multi-core chip architecture jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. It is derived from IBM’s Power Architecture, which was once used in Apple notebooks and desktops. Today, IBM uses the Cell processor in a line of blade servers.

SpursEngine reference board

(Credit:
Toshiba)

Toshiba Qosmio G40

Some other features of the SpursEngine: Its multimedia engine can deliver up to 48 GFlops (billion Floating point operations per second) or 12GFlops per processing element. Every element has 256KB of integrated memory. The circuit board (photo) supports a PCI-Express Base Specification Revision 1.1.

UPDATE: Toshiba is expected to release a notebook PC this year that uses a chip based on the Cell processor, the same chip used in Sony’s
PlayStation.

The report, from our sister site ZDNet.de, is in German. I don’t speak German. Google’s translation service says “As part of an Intel-Events for the 40th Birthday semiconductor company BMW in Munich, Germany-World’s managing director Hannes Schwaderer today confirms what has long been a rumor on the Internet kursierte: namely, that there is an iPhone with Intel’s new nuclear-chip type.” Atom, in the German version, is spelled the same way as the English word, so I think it’s safe to assume that “nuclear-chip type” means Intel’s Atom processor. I sent an e-mail to the author of the report hoping to get an official English translation.

Rumors about Apple deciding to throw all of its eggs into Intel’s chip-making basket have been persistent ever since Intel started talking about its Silverthorne processor, which is now known as Atom. The problem is that the current generation of Atom is not quite right for smartphones like the iPhone: it gives off too much heat to be practical in a device the size of the iPhone.

The report says the Atom-based iPhone would be larger, and uses the reference design for a mobile Internet device that Intel created for its Fall Intel Developer Forum. That design was a mockup of what MIDs using the next-generation of Atom, code-named Moorestown, might resemble, rather than an actual product blueprint. A switch to Intel’s chips is certainly possible for an iPhone released around the 2009-2010 timeframe expected for Moorestown, and it’s also possible that Apple has an Atom-based tablet-like device in the works, but it’s far from clear.

In what might be a high-profile case of career suicide, an Intel Germany executive has reportedly confirmed that Apple plans to use Intel’s Atom processor in a future
iPhone.

An Intel representative said he was looking into the report, but doubted that the Intel executive had actually confirmed such a plan, or even whether the executive in question–who is head of Intel’s German operations–would even be aware of such a thing, assuming it existed. Throw another log on the iPhone rumor pile.

District Judge William Pauley said in dismissing the case that he didn’t have jurisdiction over Robertson in New York. As for the continuing fight his company faces against EMI, Robertson said “the case against MP3tunes will determine if it is permissible for consumers to store their music in online commercial services for everywhere access, directly analogous to the way they currently store documents, photos, and other personal data in cloud services.”

(Credit:
Michael Robertson)

The case, filed last November in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was brought by 14 record companies and music publishers affiliated with EMI.

A federal judge has dismissed a copyright-infringement lawsuit filed by EMI Group against Michael Robertson, founder of MP3tunes.

Few in Silicon Valley know their way around a courtroom as well as Robertson. After founding MP3.com, which also enabled users to upload songs into digital music lockers, the major labels and publishing company took him to court. What’s unique about EMI’s most recent suit is that the recording company went after him personally.

The bad news for Robertson, who also founded MP3.com and Linspire is that the judge allowed EMI, one of the four largest recording companies, to continue to pursue the copyright claims against MP3tunes, court documents show.

Michael Robertson, MP3tunes founder, got some good news from a judge. His company wasn't as lucky.

MP3tunes enables users to store music in the so-called cloud. The company’s 150,000 customers upload their music into “lockers.” They can then access the tunes from nearly any Web-enabled device.

“Suing CEOs personally is a nasty tactic media companies are engaging in to intimidate individuals,” Robertson said in an e-mail. The tactic forces them to “either enter into a settlement or face the possibility” of financial hardship.

EMI argues that MP3tunes doesn’t have authorization to exploit the company’s music this way. A representative from EMI couldn’t be reached for comment late Wednesday evening.

It’s been a long time since I was in school, but I remember those long lines to buy books in September and January. Contrast that with Kindle’s wireless service and the ability to download books off the Web from almost anyplace.

Students, on the other hand, do so much reading that they may be thankful for a device that can help save their backs. Instead of schlepping 10 pounds of textbooks, the Kindle can hold about 200 titles and it weighs only 10 ounces.

Princeton University has announced that it will start printing Kindle-edition textbooks this fall, according to a story in The Christian Science Monitor.

I wrote this week that I was putting off buying a Kindle until I learn whether I can read digital books on the
iPhone 3G, which goes on sale July 11. If the handheld enables me to read e-books well enough, I’ll probably pass on the Kindle. The reason is simple: the iPhone gives me much more for my money.

Update 12:45 p.m.:
I’ve learned that there’s a strong bond between Princeton and Amazon. The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is an alumnus of the university, class of 1986. I obtained the information from co-worker and former Tiger Caroline McCarthy (2006).

Instead of having to thumb through pages, students can find text instantly with Kindle’s search feature. It also allows a user to highlight text and make notes.

Tip: At Amazon, Kindles are advertised now for $359, but it might pay to check out eBay. Ina Fried, my colleague here at CNET News.com, paid $329 at the auction site this week and used Microsoft’s Live Search cashback offer to get an additional 20 percent off. Total cost: $264.

Back then, I would have been glad to buy a Kindle.

Another prestigious school is embracing Amazon’s Kindle e-reader.

But the Kindle should appeal to university students better than other demographics.

Princeton follows Yale, Oxford, and UC Berkeley in creating textbooks for the Kindle. In the United States, there are about 2,500 four-year universities, so Amazon still has a long way to go.

“Our history is based on rotating magnetic media. But as solid-state comes online, we’re embracing this new media type,” said Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development at the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company.

“IT managers tend to be conservative, so the qualification time will be quite long–nine months to a year, and early adopters will be Web 2.0 companies such as Google, Facebook,” Wong said.

Seagate will get the raw material for SSDs–NAND flash memory–from others. “We’re not going to make NAND. We are in discussion with all the premier NAND suppliers,” Vignes said.

“While for some companies, it’s a new market and a new product, for us, it’s an existing market, new product,” Vignes said.

Seagate will enter the market for solid-state drives in 2009, as it slowly embraces a technology that will, in some cases, replace its bread and butter: hard disks.

“SSDs have 100 times better random IOPS than HDDs,” Wong said, referring to the dramatic speed advantage SSDs have over HDDs in handling input-output operations per second. Samsung has said in the past that companies such as Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS.

“There isn’t really a clear way of describing endurance or life expectancy of a solid-state drive. So, we’re working on that as an industry standard,” through JEDEC, a large standard body, Vignes said.

Of course, it won’t be a cakewalk for Seagate. There is plenty of competition already. Intel has started shipping SSDs for both enterprise and consumer markets. And Samsung is a leading player in the consumer market–its drives are used by Dell and Apple–and it is now stepping up efforts to snag corporate customers. On Thursday, Samsung announced that its SSDs have been selected, after extensive testing, for use in the Hewlett-Packard ProLiant blade servers.

The presence of large players such as Seagate will allay fears, he believes. “As companies like Seagate start to demonstrate field-proven reliability and endurance in enterprise applications, we’ll overcome those (solid-state drive) endurance fears.”

Seagate, which will enter the SSD market in 2009, says there are challenges to make SSDs palatable to large corporate customers.

The largest hard-disk drive maker is going solid-state. Slowly.

(Original CNET report here.)

Analysts are bullish that, with time, SSDs will catch on. “SSDs offer much better MTBFs (mean time between failures) than HDDs, although the endurance is an issue that has to be addressed,” said Gregory Wong, an industry analyst at Forward Insights.

(Credit:
Seagate)

Fears aside, the lure of SSDs is speed–and this is what is driving Seagate into the market. “For SSDs, the play is performance, performance, performance. Did I mention performance?” Vignes said.

Seagate says it can tap into the decades of expertise it has in error correction. “Some of the skills we’ve picked up along the way, to deal with imperfect media, has applicability to dealing with imperfect media on NAND.” All solid-state drives use NAND flash memory as the storage medium.

Seagate’s first target market will be large enterprise customers. Consumer SSDs from Seagate will come later. The challenge is to convince large enterprise customers that SSDs are safe. Although hard-disk drives have endurance problems of their own, corporate customers must be convinced that a technology as new as solid-state storage is reliable.

If there is one thing that open source has taught us, it’s that there are “users,” and there are “customers.” Odds are that all of your customers will be users first, taking your software for a test-drive and then deciding if they want to pay for it. It’s all about getting people to consume your software.

In a statement, Frank Gibeau, EA game label president, said the company was “disappointed” by the misunderstanding around its digital rights management software and that it would expand the installation limit from three machines to five. He added that EA is also expediting the development of a system that will allow customers to “deauthorize” computers and move the game to new machines, without the need to call the company.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the game maker plans to expand the number of machines allowed under its digital rights management plan:

commentary

As such, EA really should be thinking differently, allowing unfettered access to the game itself for users–though likely in a crippled form–and then allowing customers to buy their way into the game to get enhanced functionality. This model has worked in open source. EA should be examining its applicability to gaming, too, rather than simply providing a bigger cage in which to imprison customers.

CNET’s Jennifer Guevin had noted that the Spore DRM provisions, instead of protecting against piracy, had actually encouraged it. Consumers rebelled against the restrictions. This new policy may relieve some of this piracy, but I concur with Dave Rosenberg’s argument that EA still needs to learn the difference between a user and a customer:

Applying a Band-Aid to a gaping head wound, Electronic Arts has decided to apply more liberal protections to its hit game Spore.

Icahn has received commitments from at least 12 potential board members to run for some or all of Yahoo’s 10 board seats, which are all up for re-election at the company’s July 3 annual shareholders meeting, according to Reuters.

Some are already gearing up for the fight, such as Jim Safka, chief executive of Yahoo rival Ask.com.

He’s had mixed results on those companies when he’s made a run for them through some sort of shareholder activist campaign.

( CNET News.com Stephen Shankland and Ina Fried contributed)

As the campaign to win the hearts and minds of Yahoo investors kicks in, don’t be surprised to watch a knock-down, drag-out fight between the two parties. Proxy solicitors note that proxy fights are often like watching a presidential campaign.

Icahn was expected to unveil his plans as early as Wednesday night, according to the report. The deadline for Yahoo or any shareholder to name a slate is by the end of the day Thursday.

Shares of Yahoo on Wednesday closed up 2 percent to $27.14 a share, spurred by expectations Icahn would move forward on a proxy fight, potentially paving the way for a sale of the Internet search pioneer.

Icahn’s record in proxy fights
In the past, when Icahn has waged a proxy fight, he has won more proxy challenges than he’s lost, according to research firm FactSet SharkWatch.

Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment on reports of Icahn’s proxy plans.

Folks who are familiar with Icahn’s efforts at these companies and others, where he has tried to gain board seats, acknowledge he comes with detailed ideas, versus vague suggestions on how to improve the operations of the companies.

Investor Carl Icahn keeps a close watch on the numbers.

At both biotech company ImClone Systems and video rental giant Blockbuster, Icahn was able to gain a board seat, but ImClone continues to post losses and Blockbuster shares have lost nearly half their value since the fall.

Less than two weeks ago, Microsoft withdrew its sweetened cash-stock offer for Yahoo, valued at $33 a share, after a three-month period in which its initial offer of $31 a share remained virtually comatose.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn is planning to wage a proxy fight against Yahoo, in a move that could ultimately kick out Yahoo’s entire board, according to a Reuters report.

Updated Thursday 1:00 AM PDT with further details of Icahn’s past proxy efforts.

Prior to Microsoft’s $31 offer, Yahoo’s stock was trading around $19 a share.

After Microsoft withdrew its offer on May 3, Yahoo’s stock took a hammering during the next trading day and has since bounced between a low of $24.20 to as high as $27.36 per share during intraday trading on Wednesday.

“I love it,” said Safka, whose company announced Wednesday plans to buy Lexico Publishing Group said. “Just when you thought Microsoft and Yahoo were going to get on with their lives, it’s going to paralyze them once again.”

Nonetheless, Icahn and the video rental giant have managed to persuade a reluctant electronics retailer Circuit City Stores to contemplate an acquisition. Earlier this month, Circuit City Stores agreed to open its financial books for Icahn to take a peek, after the shareholder activist said he would consider buying the electronics chain if Blockbuster’s offer fell through.

While desktops go missing at a much slower rate than laptops, that didn’t deter Hitachi from offering Bulk Data Encryption on the Deskstar 7K1000.B. This feature encrypts data as it is written to the drive and decrypts when it’s retrieved. This hard drive-level security is superior to software or system-level security measures, and it has no impact on system performance.

Hitachi was first to hit the terabyte mark when it announced the 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive in January 2007. Fast forward a year and a half, and the company is back with not a larger version of the drive but a more efficient model in the Deskstar 7K1000.B. Like its predecessor, the 7K1000.B is a 3.5-inch, 7,200rpm hard drive that serves up 1TB of storage space and a 32MB buffer. It hits that magic terabyte mark, however, by using only three disks–down from the five-disk design of the older 1TB drive. It also borrows from Hitachi’s 2.5-inch mobile drives and includes Bulk Data Encryption.

Hitachi says the new three-disk design improves idle power consumption up to 43 percent compared with last year’s model. Fewer platters should also mean improved reliability, acoustics, and seek times. The Deskstar 7K1000.B also matches Samsung’s Spinpoint F1, which was the first three-disk drive to offer 1TB of capacity.

(Credit:
Hitachi)

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B spreads 1TB of capacity over only three platters.

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B will sell for $239 when it starts shipping later this month. Hitachi will also ship the Deskstar E7K1000 this month for $279, an enterprise version of the drive designed for low-duty-cycle, 24×7 applications.