Chilling Lessons from Ice Ages Past

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
19 February 2008

Researchers studying the effects of ancient climate patterns on Antarctic waters have reached an alarming conclusion: The inhabitants of those seas were able to cling to life by the thinnest of margins during past ice ages, but they might not be able to weather the temperature increases predicted for the next century. In particular danger are the birds and mammals occupying the top of the food chain, such as emperor penguins and sea lions.

Earth's climate may be warming at the moment, but 20 times over the past 2 million years, massive glaciers marching from both poles plunged the planet into a deep freeze. Despite the extreme conditions, the organisms and ecosystems of the poles survived and then sprang forth again during the interglacial periods. But how?

That's what evolutionary ecologist Sven Thatje of the University of Southampton, U.K., and colleagues wanted to find out. They studied detailed fossil evidence in sediment cores from the Southern Ocean floor and data published elsewhere about the physiological characteristics of Antarctic birds and mammals. Based on their findings, the researchers report in the March issue of Ecology, even the coldest periods in the past could not wipe out Antarctica's ecosystems. Mostly the polar creatures migrated to deeper and slightly warmer waters--or, in the case of penguins, traveled along with the expanding sea ice--and then returned to their ancestral habitats when conditions improved.

That's the good news. The bad news is that those ecosystems could be vulnerable to warming. Thatje describes Antarctic organisms as "the champions of cold adaptation." In the past, they endured more severe conditions than anything existing today, he says, but their adaptation came at a price: They cannot tolerate higher temperatures. Even a few degrees of temperature increase in the planet's polar zones could kill off some of the creatures that depend on the cold environment, Thatje says. "Antarctic life has nowhere to go if the warming continues," he says.

It's an important study because it reveals that certain predators, such as sharks and large crabs, are now moving into waters that formerly were too cold to support them, says deep-sea biologist Paul Tyler, who is also at the University of Southampton but was not involved in the research. Over long periods of time, local prey populations could adapt to the predators? presence and acquire defenses, he says, but the change might be too rapid for adaptation. So "the predators may reduce the prey populations significantly," he says, and further diminish the polar continent's biodiversity.

Related sites

More on Antarctic ecosystems

History of climate change

Spammers Go Old School as Gimmicks Fail

The battle against spam continues, with many of the trends that started in 2007 dying out in favor of older techniques that worked, according to a new report from Symantec Messaging and Web Security. One new trend, though, has been Europe surpassing the U.S. as the primary source of spam. For the longest time, it had been botnet-infected (define) computers in the U.S. that pumped out the bulk of offers for mortgages and herbal Viagra, which comprised a staggering 78.5 percent of all e-mail floating around on the Internet according to Symantec. During the last half of 2007 that changed, however. In August, the U.S. accounted for 46.5 percent of all spam, compared to 30.6 percent for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). By January, EMEA produced 44 percent while the U.S. was down to 35.1 percent. Doug Bowers, Executive Editor in Symantec's Antispam Engineering group and editor of the report, attributes the change to a two-part condition in Europe: the growth in broadband and a lack of installed security software. "The more prevalent broadband connections become, then the more potential targets you have to become botnets," he told InternetNews.com. "We've seen the adoption of security software lagging as broadband has exploded in Europe." The nature of spam has also changed, particularly when it comes to the use of attachments. Image-based spam started appearing in 2006 but has tapered off, as it have other attachments, like PDF and MP3s, which never really took off en masse. Bowers has theories on this trend as well. "I think they gave up %26#91;on image-based spam%26#93; as filters got better," he said. "Spammers are smart, they measure their results, they move around to find other holes they can exploit." Symantec found that only 8 percent of spam letters now use images, down from 52 percent a year ago. This decline in the use of graphics has resulted in the average spam letter getting smaller. Now the majority of letters (64 percent) are 2KB to 5KB in size, generally the size of a normal e-mail. In part, images have become pass%26#233; because many spammers are going back to the tried-and-true method of sending a link and counting on the recipient to click. A growing trend has been to embed Google links that trigger a search. When the user clicks on it, they are taken directly to a spammer's site. Another growth area in spam has been in scam-based letters. These are different from phishing attacks in that they aren't looking for banking information; instead, they attempt to get people involved in shady investment, real estate or loan deals. Perhaps not surprisingly, the news comes the same week as Symantec debuts its Mail Security 8300 Series Virtual Edition, a virtual appliance version of its e-mail filtering appliance for VMware Server and ESX environments. The Virtual Edition, introduced on Monday, runs on virtualized servers, so administrators can reprovision the resources as needed to add capacity to their infrastructure. So if a company expands, merges, grows suddenly or is subject to seasonal changes in business, the server can be expanded to provide greater filtering. "Going virtual means they can spin up virtual machines to meet their needs at a particular frame of time," Bowers said.

Outlook 2007 Goes it Alone

Up until now, if you wanted Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client (not the scaled down Express version), you had to buy the company's Office suite. However, the most recent release %26#150; Outlook 2007 with the Business Contact Manager contact management application, which comes as a component of Office 2007 %26#150; has been so popular with small businesses that Microsoft is now offering it as a standalone package. Demand for a standalone release grew out of small business needs for consolidating contact information from more than one application in a single place. The standalone version enables customers to track sales and marketing activities such as organizing contacts, and customer information, according to a Microsoft statement. %26#147;Currently, many small and home-based businesses keep their contacts in several different places %26#133; We understand the importance of good customer management and are providing simple and affordable solutions to help small businesses centralize their customer information so that keeping track of customers is more effective and less time-consuming,%26#148; Takeshi Numoto, general manager of Office 2007, said in the statement. Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager also provides synergies when combined with Microsoft Office Accounting 2008, which shipped in November. The combination of programs enables users to view customer financial history as well as billing for time and generating invoices directly from Outlook. The two products share the same database -- so any changes made to customer information in one application are automatically reflected in the other, according to Microsoft. The standalone version of Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager lists for $149.95. Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 costs $449.95. Meantime, the Express edition of Office Accounting 2007 is free, while Office Accounting Professional 2007 lists for $199.95.

Be Prepared to Pay More For Tech Expertise

IT organizations will pony up decent size pay raises this year, despite the past few shaky economic months, thanks to continuing business investment in networking initiatives and internal application development work. The move to boost IT compensation, while at the same time meeting company mandates to improve efficiency and cut costs, will remain a big challenge for IT leaders, say industry watchers. The 2008 IT Salary Report , released this week by Computer Economics, anticipates that US-based IT employees, as a whole, will be getting a median pay hike of about 3.7 percent in 2008. Tech professionals at larger-sized companies may even see a 4 to 4.5 percent salary increase. Higher pay increases will be doled out to those working on Web projects, database application builds and those working on voice-data network efforts. The reason is two fold, say experts, as those areas reflect where tech spending has already been expended and skills in those specialties are getting harder to find. "Salary compensation increases are still fairly healthy though the economy, overall, slowed a bit. What it shows is that IT jobs are holding up fairly well in the marketplace as is the IT segment of business," John Longwell, Computer Economics' research director, told InternetNews.com. "It's a reflection of the investment companies are making in technology and that they're seeing those investments are enabling them to increase productivity." The median 3.7 percent raise is a healthy figure given that the average salary increase was about 1 percent just three years ago, though it's not as high as last year's median 3.8 compensation increase. Networking gurus (and this includes administrators, Web masters and designers, telecom analysts, test engineers, security analysts and systems admins) are expected to get 3.9 percent while those in operations and management are expected to get closer to 3.5 percent raises. . One salary driver is the expansion of network management staff's responsibilities, say recruitment experts. The job now includes dealing with security, compliance and telecom issues "It's added complexity; it's added staff; it's a perfect storm," John Estes, VP of Robert Half Technology, an IT recruitment firm, stated in the report's release. While middle IT managers may not be getting bold salary spikes, leaders in certain leadership roles will. Those spearheading system development teams, for example, could see a 4.5 percent raise, according to the salary report. Job location also factors into compensation increases. The study says those working in the Pacific and South Atlantic areas will get more money than those anywhere else in the country.

How to Give a Gator Heartburn

By Elsa Youngsteadt
ScienceNOW Daily News
6 February 2008

The way to an alligator's stomach is through its heart--via the left aorta, to be precise. That's the upshot of a new study that may have finally explained the enigmatic crocodilian circulatory system. Crocs are able to send deoxygenated blood directly to their stomach, and researchers show that strategy comes in handy when the reptiles need to quickly digest enormous helpings of meat and bone.

Like birds and mammals, crocodilians--the group that includes alligators, caimans, and crocodiles--have a four-chambered heart. They can completely divide their blood flow in the same way we do: Deoxygenated blood returns to the heart from the body, heads straight to the lungs to pick up oxygen, returns to the heart, and then gets pumped to the rest of the body. Although the four-chambered system is considered more efficient, crocs still sometimes engage an alternative primitive flow pattern characteristic of other reptiles. They can bypass the pulmonary artery that carries blood to the lungs, sending spent blood straight back to the digestive system through the left aorta. Since the early 1800s, scientists have envisioned many functional explanations for this shunting architecture--from keeping CO₂ out of the lungs during dives to speeding digestion--but experimental data have remained scarce.

To test the digestion hypothesis, zoologist C. G. Farmer of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and colleagues performed a series of experiments on young American alligators. First, they implanted probes around the left aortas of five gators and found that the animals shunted more deoxygenated blood to their stomachs after eating. Then, the researchers operated on a group of nine gators, closing off the left aorta. The surgery prevented shunting and forced the animals' circulation to run in the fully divided mammalian pattern. (The gators appeared healthy despite the change.) A control group underwent only sham surgeries.

After they recovered, the 2-kilogram alligators feasted on chopped steak, and the researchers measured their gastric acid secretion. As the team reports in the March/April issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, the animals with intact shunting abilities produced more stomach acid than did the altered reptiles, especially when it was warm. In fact, they produced 10 times more than the greatest amount recorded in any animal, apparently using the CO₂-rich blood to supply stomach glands that use CO₂ to make gastric acid. The "acid secretion seemed ludicrous it was so high," Farmer says. All that stomach acid should be good for digesting large, bony meals. Indeed, x-rays showed that shunting gators with more acidic tummies finished digesting a bony ox tail days ahead of their nonshunting counterparts. Because alligators rely on external heat to warm their bodies, they can't always maintain the ideal temperature for digestion--so processing huge meals as quickly as possible is "like making hay while the sun shines," Farmer says.

Gordon Grigg, a zoologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, calls the study "fantastic" and says he is "in awe" of the technical challenges the researchers overcame. But he won't be completely convinced, he says, until researchers can show that blocking the left aorta doesn't decrease overall blood supply to the stomach, which might also slow digestion.

Related sites

The study

More on crocodilians from the University of Florida

Yahoo May be Considering Help From Google

Yahoo would consider a business alliance with Google as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, a source familiar with Yahoo's strategy said on Sunday. Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft's bid, that source said. At $31 a share, Yahoo believes the bid undervalues the company, two sources said. A second source close to Yahoo said it had received a procession of preliminary contacts by media, technology, telephone and financial companies. But the source said they were unaware whether any alternative bid was in the offing. In a memo to Yahoo employees on Friday, which was obtained by Reuters on Sunday, Yahoo leaders wrote: "We want to emphasize that absolutely no decisions have been made -- and, despite what some people have tried to suggest, there's certainly no integration process underway." Few natural bidders exist besides Google that could engage in a bidding war, and Google would be unlikely to win approval from antitrust regulators, some Wall Street analysts said on Friday. The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Sunday that Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo's chief executive Jerry Yang to offer his company's help in any effort to thwart Microsoft's bid. Spokesmen for Yahoo and Google declined comment. Google was not immediately available for comment on the WSJ story. Yahoo's efforts to find an alternative bidder could simply be a measure to pressure Microsoft to boost its bid, which valued Yahoo at $44.6 billion when first announced on Friday. Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay wrote in a research note that "the Microsoft bid of $31 is very astute" because it puts pressure on Yahoo management to take actions that could unlock the underlying value of Yahoo assets, which he estimates are worth upward of $39-$45 a share. The bid gave a boost to markets in Asia when they opened on Monday. Shares in Softbank Corp soared as much as 16 percent and Yahoo Japan was untraded due to a flood of buy orders on Monday, on hopes a potential deal between Microsoft and Yahoo would boost the Japanese firms' competitiveness. Softbank holds a 3.9 percent stake in Yahoo Inc in terms of voting rights. Competition concerns Separately, Google fired back on Sunday at Microsoft's bid to acquire Yahoo, accusing Microsoft of seeking to extend its computer software monopoly deeper into the Internet realm.

Amazon Profit Doubles in Q4

UPDATED: Oh, it was a very merry Christmas for Amazon, yet somehow investors still found coal in their stockings. Propelled by strong holiday sales, Amazon posted net income for the fourth quarter of $207 million, or 48 cents a share. That's a 112 percent increase from the same period last year, when the Web's largest retailer posted earnings of $98 million, or 23 cents a share. Amazon's earnings per share matched analysts' consensus, according to polling from Thomson Financial. "This quarter showed accelerated sales growth and record operating profits," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and CEO, in a statement. "In our view, these unusual financial results are driven by one thing: continuously improving the customer experience." Amazon reported total Q4 revenue of $5.67 billion, a 42 percent increase over last year's haul during the same period. Quarterly revenue also shot past analysts' consensus projection of $5.38 billion, as well as the high end of Amazon's own guidance of $5.45 billion. Looking ahead, Amazon is expecting first-quarter sales of between $3.95 billion and $4.15 billion, an increase of between 31 percent and 38 percent over the same period last year. Investors' consensus for Q1 gross revenue was $3.92 billion, well under the low end of Amazon's guidance range. Amazon finished the day up a fraction of a point to close at $74.21, but after the bell, shares fell more than 12 percent, despite reporting earnings that exceeded analyst expectations. The after-hours sell-off may have been the result of a constricting margin. Despite more than doubling last year's net earnings, Amazon's fourth-quarter gross margin dropped to 20.6 percent from 21.3 percent in 2006. Bezos deflected analysts' questions about slipping margins by emphasizing that the company viewed its free cash flow as a better yardstick of the company's health. In Q4, Amazon reported free cash flow of $1.18 billion, up 143 percent from the end of 2006. Still, Bezos did say that he expects Amazon to be able to improve its margins. Buoyed by the strong sales, Amazon will have a favorable bargaining position with its vendors to allow it to reduce overhead. Amazon experienced other mixed fortunes as well. Looking back on the quarter, the company hailed the success of its Kindle e-book reader, though Bezos acknowledged that demand outstripped supply, creating inventory shortages. "On the manufacturing side, it's causing us to scramble. We're working very hard to address that," Bezos said. "Our goal is to get to a situation where when you order a Kindle, we ship it immediately."

Ex-ETrade CEO Behind 'Multipersonality' Social Network

Moli, a new social network, will emerge from beta this week with its launch as a finished service after 100,000 users tested it since its prerelease last summer. The company is headed by CEO and founder Christos Cotsakos, the former CEO of ETrade and A.C. Nielsen. Cotsakos has invested $20 million of his own money into the venture. Today, Mainstream Holdings, also run by Cotsakos and the parent company of Moli, announced it's raised $29.6 million in private investment for Moli's expansion plans. Rather than take on the likes of MySpace and Facebook directly, Moli hopes to gain new converts to social networks with features designed for small- to medium-size businesses (SMBs), entrepreneurs as well as mainstream users concerned about the security of their information. The official rollout for Moli, short for Money and Living, is planned for this week at the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, Calif. Several former ETrade execs joined Cotsakos to start Moli, which has a strong financial and transactional underpinning, including e-commerce capabilities. The company thinks this will appeal to SMBs looking for a better Web presence and online revenue opportunities. Moli said that members will be able to add a fully functioning online store without any programming. This store will include a multimedia catalog of video, audio, or text, shopping cart, and a payment mechanism through PayPal or Google Checkout, for a flat fee of only $3.99 a month. The company is also making a strong push in several European countries where the beta is already being used and the market is more fragmented than in the U.S. Moli and Cotsakos' Mainstream Holdings, are based in West Palm Beach, Fla., a tech corridor first established by IBM, though Big Blue is no longer there. "We were able to build out as a global company from day one, not for a quick ROI but to build a sustainable brand," Cotsakos told InternetNews.com. "We have access to very talented programmers and developers without the intense competition of Silicon Valley. "I believe the trend of social networking is still in its very very early stages," Cotsakos added. "There are all kinds of lifestyle issues as you grow out of the existing social networks and want to have a more professional presence and monetize what you do." Moli features a number of e-commerce and analytic tools to help companies who want to sell products and services at the site. It's also established an animation and design studio to help members and build audience loyalty. "In my view professionally produced content will gain more appeal over time," Cotsakos said. Moli will feature both user-generated and professional videos. Moli View is a daily collection of articles written by freelance journalists and organized into categories such as Arts %26 Entertainment, Fashion %26 Design, Life %26 Love, and Sports %26 Fitness. Moli Video is a showcase of 2-minute magazine-style vignettes about Moli%26#146;s members. This section will also feature "offbeat episodic-based series," starting with one called "Park Bench." Unlike other social networking sites, Moli allows users to create multiple profiles as an alternative to, say, creating a casual presence on Facebook and a business profile on LinkedIn. "It's a lifestyle management tool," Judy Balint, president and chief operating officer of moli.com told InternetNews.com. "We give users privacy control with multiple profiles so they can separate out what they want to post for their family and friends as opposed to professionally." In addition to being able to have multiple profiles, Moli offers members three levels of permission -- public, private and hidden -- to determine who can and cannot access their profile information. IDC analyst Rachel Happe told InternetNews.com she was impressed by a lot of Moli's strategy but was concerned the company might be trying to do too much out the gate. "They have very ambitious goals in trying to appeal to consumers and business; that's not necessarily easy," Happe said. "The most interesting thing to me is that Moli is going after SMBs, which is a market that needs online infrastructure help." Happe also offered kudos to Moli for segmenting its network, letting users establish multiple profiles. "You can lose relevancy as the network gets bigger, which is a growing problem for Facebook," she said. "If Mom can find me there, do I want to be there?"

Punctuation Marks in Language Evolution?

By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
31 January 2008

Like a skyscraper skeleton that goes up overnight--but doesn't get windows for another decade--languages evolve in fits and starts, according to a new study.

The idea that languages evolve in bursts, rather than gradually, isn't new. When applied to species, it's called punctuated evolution. But the idea is controversial in both fields--and proof has been hard to come by.

Now, scientists in the United Kingdom say they've mustered the power of mathematics to demonstrate the phenomenon in the evolution of languages. The researchers, headed by evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson and mathematician Mark Pagel of the University of Reading, looked at related versions, or homologs, of common words in three of the world's major language families: Indo-European, Bantu, and Austronesian. Like species, changes in languages can be tracked through the fate of certain words, just as mutations in key genes can tell a species' history.

The words the researchers tracked are from the so-called Swadesh lists: compilations of heavily used words denoting things such as numbers or body parts that change little over time and are rarely borrowed, making them good clues about how one language relates to another. An example from the Indo-European language family is the words for "water" in English, German ("Wasser"), Hittite ("watar"), and Russian ("voda"). Despite many borrowings, English is much further from Latin languages such as French, according to the Swadesh lists. Consider, for example, the French for water--"eau."

The team used this vocabulary data to construct evolutionary trees showing how new languages sprouted from root languages. English, for example, notes Atkinson, arose when the Saxons moved to the British Isles from the European continent, separating themselves from their parent Germanic language.

The researchers applied the same mathematical models to language evolution that they previously used to show that biological speciation can occur in bursts (Science, 6 October 2006, p. 119). They concluded that lineages with many "nodes," or offshoots, change faster over time than language families that have few offshoots. Pagel says most of this speed-up comes about the time the new languages break off from their ancestral lines. For example, in their study--published in the 1 February issue of Science--the researchers estimate that 31%26#37; of the vocabulary differences among Bantu languages arose about the time they split from their parent languages.

Anthropologist Tecumseh Fitch of the University of St. Andrews in Fife, U.K., calls the study "a beautiful example of the potential for cross-pollination between evolutionary biology and ? linguistics." He says the work marks "the emergence of a new body of mathematics that applies to all evolutionary systems, whether the replicators are genes, words, or ideas."

Related sites

Introduction to the Indo-European languages

Family tree of Indo-European languages

Sifting the Genome for Clues to Cancer

By Jennifer Couzin
ScienceNOW Daily News
31 January 2008

Biologists have hunted for weak spots in cancer cells for years, hoping to find clues to the disease that can be exploited. That should get easier thanks to a mass-screening technique reported in the 1 February issue of Science that may provide a cost-effective and powerful way to pick out new drug targets against cancer.

As genetic technology has grown more sophisticated and cheaper, scientists have begun dissecting a cancer cell's arsenal on a massive scale. In 2005, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, launched The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a $1.5 billion search for genes that are mutated in a host of cancers (Science, 16 December 2005, p. 1751). Some scientists have criticized TCGA for focusing on gene sequencing while diverting funds from functional studies that can determine which of the hundreds of mutations are most important. One person with such concerns is geneticist Stephen Elledge of Harvard Medical School in Boston.

With molecular biologist Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, Elledge developed genetic tools that examine how genes function in human cancer cells. As they report in two new studies, the pair and their colleagues constructed viral vectors, each one containing an RNA molecule designed to shut down a gene with a complementary sequence. The vectors also contained DNA bar codes, sequences that the researchers could look for later to determine which small RNAs were having a big effect on a cell's behavior. The researchers inserted between 10,000 and 40,000 of these small RNAs at once into breast cancer, colon cancer, and normal human cells in the lab. The main analysis, of 10,000 short hairpin RNAs, targeted about 3000 different genes, says Elledge. Then they waited to see which small RNAs would blunt survival or growth of cancer cells without affecting normal ones. The theory is that those genes hit by RNAi are acting in concert with abnormalities in the cancer cell to cause out-of-control proliferation.

On this first pass, roughly two dozen genes fit the bill, says Elledge. "It looks like you can get a lethality signature," a pattern of genes that affect how tumor cells proliferate. Elledge cautions that this is just a start in determining which proteins might make good drug targets and that the technique won't pick up every one. The work cost about $30,000 to conduct once the tools were in place.

Other experts are hopeful that this approach will pay dividends. "I'm a very big fan," says cancer geneticist Ronald DePinho of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who also chairs TCGA?s advisory board. He believes that given cancer's complexity, it is necessary to both survey the genomes of tumor cell and examine how the cells respond when genes are silenced. If the two methods independently come up with genes that are interconnected, "it would be a much more powerful way of prioritizing" what to study next, says computational biologist Michael Bittner of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix, Arizona.

Related sites

The Cancer Genome Atlas

Findings from TCGA

Tool Use Is Just a Trick of the Mind

By Michael Balter
ScienceNOW Daily News
28 January 2008

Don't take that hammer for granted. Using tools may seem like second nature, but only a few animals can master the coordination and mental sophistication required. So how did primates learn to use tools in the first place? A new study in monkeys suggests that the brain's trick is to treat tools as just another body part.

Primates, with their four flexible fingers and opposable thumbs, have a highly evolved ability to grasp and manipulate objects. Previous research has shown that many of these actions are controlled by an area of the brain called F5. As the hand opens and closes to grasp an object, neurons in area F5 fire in a predictable sequence. In the parlance of neuroscientists, the neurons are "coded" to control the hand movements. When a primate learns to use a tool, its brain must code neurons not only to move the hand but also to make the tool manipulate an object, a much more cognitively complex task.

To investigate how the brain performs this sleight of hand, a team led by neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma in Italy recorded brain activity in two macaque monkeys. Each was trained for 6 to 8 months to grasp items of food with pliers. The team documented the activity of 113 neurons in F5 and in a brain area called F1, which has also been implicated in the manipulation of objects. The researchers first established the brain's firing sequence when the monkeys grasped only with their hands. The experiment was then repeated while the monkeys used normal pliers that required first opening the hand and then closing it to grasp the food. The same neurons fired in the same order. Remarkably, the same neurons also fired, in the same order, when the monkeys used "reverse pliers" that required them to close their fingers first and then open them to take the food, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rizzolatti and his co-workers conclude that when learning to use a tool, the pattern of neuronal activity is somehow transferred from the hand to the tool, "as if the tool were the hand of the monkey and its tips were the monkey's fingers." As for how the same neurons could affect both the opening and the closing of the hand, the team speculates that they may be connected with other sets of neurons that more directly control these movements. The authors also point out that area F5 is rich in so-called mirror neurons, a type of nerve cell discovered earlier by Rizzolatti that fires both when a primate performs an action and when it observes another individual doing the same thing (ScienceNOW, 13 July 2007). Mirror neurons in F5, the authors suggest, may be involved in this transfer process as a monkey learns how to use a tool by watching others.

The findings "fairly clearly show that monkey tool use involves the incorporation of tools into the body schema, literally as extensions of the body," says Dietrich Stout, an archaeologist specializing in tool use at University College London. Scott Frey, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, Eugene, says that in humans, this ability to represent tools in the brain, combined with a capacity for innovation, "was no doubt a fundamental step in the development of technology."

Related sites

The neural basis of tool use

Paper on mirror neurons

Judge Gives Microsoft Two More Years

Microsoft seems to have all the luck %26#150; not. The judge overseeing Microsoft's consent decree with the U.S. government on Tuesday extended that oversight for another two years instead of letting it expire as Microsoft had requested. The majority of Microsoft's settlement agreement was set to expire in November 2007, but two groups of states petitioned the court, asking that the monitoring continue for a second five-year term. The judge, with Microsoft and the states' consent, extended the case until this week so that she could examine all the arguments. However, instead of letting the consent decree lapse, Federal Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly reset the expiration date to November 12, 2009 %26#150; a two year extension of oversight. The reason? In a move remarkably similar to the European Commission's antitrust actions against Microsoft, the company took too long in setting up a program for providing communications protocols and other needed documentation to competitors. "The Court%26#146;s decision in this matter is based upon the extreme and unforeseen delay in the availability of complete, accurate, and usable technical documentation relating to the Communications Protocols that Microsoft is required to make available to licensees under %26#133; the Final Judgments," Judge Kollar-Kotelly said in an executive summary of her decision that she provided to the media. Microsoft was hoping that the 2002 consent decree would expire %26#150; with the exception of its protocol licensing program which the company had already agreed to extend until 2009. Under the new ruling, all of the oversight will expire at the same time. The company's legal chief tried to put the best face on this latest setback. "We will continue to comply fully with the consent decree," Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel, said in a statement e-mailed to InternetNews.com. "We built Windows Vista in compliance with these rules, and we will continue to adhere to the decree%26#146;s requirements." Microsoft is also pleased that the judge limited the extension to two years rather than the five years requested by the states. (The U.S. Department of Justice had sided with Microsoft in requesting that the oversight be allowed to lapse.) The company's executives have made a concerted attempt recently to get out from under as many of its long-standing legal weights as possible. Still, the news is not good because it leaves the company in the situation of being a sitting duck for competitors and others to claim further violations during the extension period. "%26#91;The additional oversight%26#93; puts them at a substantial disadvantage," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at researcher The Enderle Group, told InternetNews.com. "It can be a real drag on a company, making them substantially less agile than competitors," he said. "Two years is better than five, but they really need to get off this merry-go-round," Enderle added.

HP Launches Open Source Governance Initiative

HP is among the biggest backers of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the world. As such they've developed their own best practices and tools to help their customers understand what Open Source licenses their applications contain as well as helping to maintain compliance with the terms of the various licenses. In a set of new initiatives HP is now taking its experience and its open source license governance tools and open sourcing them in an effort to raise awareness and build a broader community for open source governance. "Open Source is unavoidable today and a lot of developers are bringing it into the enterprise in some cases without a lot of visibility from other folks that would normally evaluate a contract," Karl Paetzel, worldwide marketing manager for HP's Open Source and Linux Organization, told InternetNews.com. "So instead of doing something under the radar we're helping to institute a resource to help make sure development is in line with company guidelines." The new effort includes the FOSSology project which will help identify what open source licenses are being used and the FOSSBazaar community which will focus on best practices. Paetzel noted that among HP's own customers they've found that many typically have more open source applications in use then they thought and they also have more license obligations than they were aware of. "We've got a lot of experience in FOSS governance and started to get more questions," Paetzel said . "Things like 'I don't know how much open source I have' or 'we don't know what our license obligations are'. So we started offering services based on our own experience and we've had some interesting engagements." Paetzel noted that a key part of governance is first identifying what open source code is being used as well as identifying all the various licenses associated with it. As an example Paetzel commented that the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite primarily uses the LGPL license though there are numerous others as well including the MIT license. "It's difficult for our legal folks to figure it all out so we have tools to automatically identify what's included," Paetzel said. The FOSSology tools project Web site is the open source instance of HP's tools. The site itself was soft launched several weeks ago to allow HP's research partners access. Letting others work with HP's tools is a key goal of the effort. Paetzel explained that since the FOSSology project is about having an extensible framework, the fact that it's open will enable others to expand it in ways that HP itself had not thought off. The FOSSBazaar effort The second effort being launched by HP is the FOSSBazaar effort, which will actually be run as a workgroup within The Linux Foundation. HP has already solicited the participation of Coverity, DLA Piper, Google, Novell, Olliance Group, OpenLogic and SourceForge to join the effort. "FOSSBazaar we feel will house the discussion around policies and best practices," Paetzel said. "I think the discussion for this is going to be more business, legal and procurement people." The issue of Open Source compliance has become a hot one recently with the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) bringing legal suits on behalf of developers against a trio of companies including Verizon that were not in compliance. Paetzel noted that HP has had its share of compliance related issues and that's where their tools have helped them. "At HP when dealing with OEM development partners there have been cases where we comply but some partners haven't," Paetzel said. The GPL license changes made to the code are supposed to be contributed back to the community. In the case that Paetzel noted, the OEM partner had made modifications but had not contributed the changes back to the community as the license demands. "Our process uncovered the issue and we informed them," Paetzel. He added though that in one case a partner refused to contribute their changes back because they said the changes were proprietary. HP didn't end up using that particular partner's product and as such HP avoided a situation where it could have been out of compliance. The openness of the FOSSology and FOSSBazaar projects is also why Paetzel doesn't see any particular competitive threats. There are a few vendors including Black Duck and Palamida that currently offer services related to license governance and identification. Paetzel noted that anyone is able to get involved in FOSSology or FOSSBazaar if they want too. "They are more than welcome to contribute and really this is about raising awareness that will help everybody use open source, " Paetzel said.

Exchange Update Aims to Simplify Notes Migrations

Microsoft this week is updating a two-year-old toolset meant to smooth the migration for customers switching from Lotus Notes and Domino to its own competing products. Dubbed the Microsoft Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino, the free package provides tools designed to ease the transition to Exchange Server, Office SharePoint Server and the Office productivity applications suite from IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, according to company statements. Whereas the Transporter Suite previously enabled systems administrators to migrate as many as tens of thousands of users at a time, the most significant change in the update aims to greatly expand that. "The update enhances the suite's scalability so that organizations with hundreds of thousands of users can now easily migrate," Clint Patterson, a director in Microsoft's unified communications group, told InternetNews.com. While Microsoft's latest update may seem overly optimistic, that may not really be the case, says one analyst. "We continue to see active migration from Domino to Exchange, and we continue to see demand for tools which expedite the process," Matt Cain, research vice president and lead e-mail analyst at Gartner, told InternetNews.com in an e-mail interview. Indeed, according to Microsoft, migrations have risen dramatically just recently. "The thing that's driving us to expand Transporter Suite is we're seeing an increased volume of companies switching," Patterson said. That rhetoric is echoed by his boss. "In the last six months of 2007, in the enterprise customer segment alone, more than 300 firms representing 2.8 million people began the move to Exchange Server, Office SharePoint Server and the Office suite," Chris Capossela, corporate vice president in the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement. "That%26#146;s a 164% increase over the same period in 2006 %26#91;and%26#93; we%26#146;re already on track to exceed these numbers in 2008," he added. One of the factors driving customers to switch: the high cost of deploying and maintaining Notes/Domino users, mailboxes, applications, and groups. "Customers want a platform that works well together that doesn't require they hire a consultant," Patterson added. Meanwhile, Binary Tree announced it is launching CMT Inspector Express, an application analysis tool for Notes environments meant to enable customers to analyze assets in Notes databases prior to switching over to Microsoft collaboration solutions.

eBay CEO Whitman Near Retirement?

Top Internet auctioneer eBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman is preparing to retire and may announce her departure within weeks, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. The report, quoting people familiar with the matter, said the situation "remains fluid" but that the 51-year-old Whitman had recently begun delegating more daily responsibilities and was completing succession plans. eBay spokesman Hani Durzy declined to comment. The report also quoted its sources as saying John Donahoe, the 47-year-old president of eBay's auction business unit, was the leading candidate to succeed Whitman. Whitman, one of the most high-profile female executives in the country, joined eBay 10 years ago in March. At the time, she had said no chief executive should stay more than a decade in the job for the benefit of the executive and the company. Under her leadership, eBay has turned into one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, but the company's growth has slowed in recent years. In October, it admitted that its closely watched acquisition of Internet phone company Skype was not paying off, by announcing a $1.4 billion write-down of its investment. The company is due to announce fourth-quarter results on Wednesday.

Job Cuts Planned For Yahoo: Source

SAN FRANCISCO -- Yahoo is planning to announce cutbacks later this month that will likely lead to hundreds of job losses at the nearly 14,000 employee company, a source familiar with the plan said on Monday. Yahoo spokeswoman Diana Wong declined to comment on a report published on the Silicon Alley Insider blog, which is run by former dot-com analyst Henry Blodgett. On Saturday, it said Yahoo has created a list of "1,500-2,500 jobs that may be eliminated in the next two weeks." The source said the report significantly exaggerated the scale of the potential layoffs, the exact number of which is still being settled, but which will be announced around the time the company reports year-end results on January 29. "There will be some reductions in the workforce," the source told Reuters. "It would likely be in the hundreds." Yahoo's workforce stood at close to 14,000 at end-2007, up around 2,600, or 23 percent, from the 11,600 employed a year earlier, according to company filings. The company's headcount had grown 16 percent in 2006 and 29 percent in 2005. The source said Yahoo expects to end 2008 with the same number it had going into this year -- close to 14,000 -- which would suggest some selective hiring in focus areas offset by cutbacks in other businesses. Writing on Silicon Valley Insider, former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget said Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang was still deciding whether to go ahead with the layoffs -- and could pull out of the plan if the stock price rebounded. "We believe Yahoo should reduce headcount by at least a thousand people," Blodget said, noting that for months, Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay has called on Yahoo to make steep job cuts of 15-20 percent to reinvigorate the stock. The Internet media company has been seeking to refocus its business around three key themes in order to stoke its flagging growth in the face of competition from search rival Google Inc and fast-growing social networks such as Facebook. Yahoo has been struggling to recover from two years of competitive setbacks that has led revenue growth slow to around 12 percent or about one-third of its previous growth rate. Analysts expect revenue from the recent fourth quarter to grow around 15 percent, according to data from Reuters Estimates. As part a turnaround plan, the company elevated co-founder Yang to become CEO last June. Together with President Sue Decker, Yahoo has shed low-performing businesses while making several small-to medium-sized acquisitions. But to date, it has resisted calls by Wall Street analysts and some investors to take several more drastic steps including large-scale layoffs, outsourcing of its Web search business to Google or a potential merger with Microsoft Corp. Layoffs will focus on areas of the business that do not fit within the three main strategies the company has focused on under Yang. These are to make Yahoo.com the "starting point" for more Web users, to make its online ads a "must buy" for advertisers and to open up its sites to outside developers. The focus of the cuts will be on "anything that doesn't target the three Big Bets," the source said.

Google, Consumer Groups Fire Opening Salvos in EU Talks

Testy exchanges punctuated yesterday's debate over the relevance of privacy concerns in the European Commission's (EC) review of the proposed Google-DoubleClick merger. At yesterday's meeting in Brussels, consumer advocates appealed to European lawmakers and regulators to examine privacy concerns when evaluating Google's acquisition of the online advertising provider. The complaints came in spite of the Commission's previous statement that the review would only consider the impact on competition. "People %26#91;are%26#93; trying to take a privacy case and shoehorn it into a competition law review," Google's global privacy counsel Pete Fleischer said in response to attacks from U.S. and European privacy advocates, according to a Reuters report. Despite the criticism, Google expects the EC to follow the lead of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's -- which approved the merger -- in basing its decision solely on the issue of competition. "We need a common set of principles to guide the entire industry," Google spokesman Ben Novick told InternetNews.com. "It would be wrong and even counterproductive to single out one company." Neelie Kroes, an EU competition commissioner, had said in October that privacy would not factor into the Commission's review. However, that statement has not deterred the merger's opponents from pressing regulators to consider the privacy implications of the deal. Its critics, led by the BEUC, Europe's largest consumer group, have argued that because the combined company would have a far greater trove of consumer data at its disposal that the issues of privacy and competition were necessarily intertwined. Rebecca Arbogast, analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus and Co., said that for privacy advocates, the best outcome of yesterday's meeting would likely be to put political pressure on the EU's Directorate General of Competition, a regulatory body loosely parallel to the U.S. Department of Justice. Yesterday's session was a meeting of the European Parliament, rather than the EC itself, to discuss the privacy issue as it relates to online advertising in general. The Parliament does not rule on competition reviews of mergers. In that context, yesterday's meeting was similar to the "town hall" meeting on behavior-targeted online advertising held in fall by the FTC. That meeting examined privacy issues on an industry-wide basis, rather than just looking at Google and DoubleClick. Nevertheless, some groups at the FTC meeting seized the opportunity to challenge the Google/DoubleClick deal. One of those groups was the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), whose executive director, Marc Rotenberg, also spoke during yesterday's meeting. The EC review is the last major hurdle facing the $3.1 billion acquisition. In December, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission blessed the merger with unconditional approval by a 4-1 vote. The approving majority determined that privacy concerns were "not unique to Google and DoubleClick." As a companion to the ruling, the FTC issued a general list of principles for behavioral marketing throughout the industry. In his testimony yesterday, Google's Fleischer tried to frame the privacy discussion as an area of industry-wide concern that should be addressed in a global context. "Privacy practices on the Internet cannot stop or change at borders," he said. "In the area of online advertising, the industry cannot develop one set of self-regulatory principles in Washington and another in Brussels." Fleischer claimed that Google has taken numerous steps to limiting the information that it collects about consumers, including cutting the lifespan of its cookie from 30 years to two years. Yesterday's meeting was the first public discussion of the merger since the EC decided in November to move its review into the more rigorous phase two investigation. Pamela Harbour, the lone dissenting commissioner in the FTC vote, also spoke at the meeting yesterday. Harbour, who articulated her view that the FTC did not sufficiently address the privacy issue in its review of the merger, attended the meeting independently, not as a representative of the FTC. As of now, there are no more public meetings scheduled in Europe that could factor in the EC's decision. The deadline to rule on the merger is April 2.

IBM Teams Up With SAP on 'Atlantic'

IBM and SAP on Monday announced plans to release a jointly developed application that allows employees to access SAP's Business Suite applications through their Lotus Notes desktop client. Code-named Atlantic, the software will let users tap into SAP's applications for workflows, reporting and analytics through the Notes applications they're currently using to access e-mail, calendars and instant messaging from a Lotus Domino server. It's the same kind of functionality and convenience Microsoft Outlook and Exchange users have enjoyed with SAP for more than a year-and-a-half. The two companies made the announcement during IBM's Lotusphere conference in Orlando and executives claim thousands of customers using both application suites had been requesting this cross-platform functionality for years. IBM said the majority of its top 100 customers also using SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) (define) software. "Lotus has been an innovator in collaboration for 20 years," Vishal Sikka, SAP's CTO said in a release. "This agreement is a great example of how SAP enables our customers to empower their users by providing easy access to SAP business processes and data through productivity tools and user interfaces of their choice." IBM said more than 135 million people use its Lotus Notes software for unified communications and collaboration in the enterprise. While Atlantic will first provide support for SAP workflows, reporting and analytics, the two companies pan to include other tools in future releases that to extend and adapt these collaboration capabilities and leverage additional offline features found in the Notes and Domino product lines. In August, IBM began shipping Lotus Notes and Domino 8, the company's latest refresh of its flagship communications suite. Along with a snazzier user interface, Lotus Notes and Domino 8 included custom applications and Web 2.0 features such as mash-ups in the hopes of providing a more interactive user experience. "We've been doing integration with SAP for many years, going back into the early 90s," Sean Poulley, vice president of business development and strategy for IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino group, said in an interview with InternetNews.com. "We've always understood the need and the opportunity. What has really made it easy is the Notes 8 product. It's an open client that anyone can integrate with easily. It's somewhat of a landmark, in that this is the first time IBM has developed a joint software product with SAP," said Poulley. This latest version of Notes 8 included Lotus Expeditor, an application development platform that gives users and independent software vendors (ISV) (define) free reign to build, manage and deliver all kinds of business-friendly applications from their Notes dashboard. This expanded functionality, now integrated with SAP's Business Suite offering, could give IBM a boost in the unified communications and collaboration space, particularly against industry leader Microsoft and its Exchange/Outlook franchise. Eventually, IBM will likely transition many of its longtime Notes/Domino customers to its WebSphere Portal Server and software platform. Poulley said Notes users will, for example, be able to pull project reports or expense approval requests from their e-mail client and simply click on a name to initiate an instant messaging session with the appropriate colleagues to determine whether or not the request should be approved or denied. "A user wants to understand what the budget is on that project and make decisions in context using the Notes client," Poulley said. "Without it, people either accept things they shouldn't, which wastes money, or reject things they shouldn't reject, which wastes time. This gives them the ability to see information in context." Gartner analyst Matt Cain said there were a couple good reasons for IBM and SAP to work together to integrate Lotus collaboration services with SAP processes. "There are a lot of Domino/SAP shops and there is significant business value in integrating Notes and SAP from a user's perspective," he told InternetNews.com. "Being able to kick off SAP workflows and pull reports from Notes allows users to work more intuitively. And, Microsoft had a competitive advantage over IBM in the e-mail market because it had Duet, which is the integration of Outlook with SAP processes. "We would expect the SAP/Lotus collaboration work to continue, but we do believe that SAP will optimize its collaborative investments on Microsoft," he added. Atlantic, which is expected to be available to customers in the fourth quarter of this year, will be sold by both companies. Future iterations are expected to include applications for managing sales leads, budgeting for sales and marketing programs and various finance functions.

NTT's 'Killer' IPv6 App a Potential Lifesaver

With the older Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) nearing address space exhaustion, and the U.S. government's impending June deadline for IPv6 capability, there are certainly more drivers than ever for IPv6 adoption in 2008. Still, for some, there needs to be a killer app for IPv6 that shows why it's so much more capable than IPv4. NTT America, a division of Japanese telecom giant NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone,) may have a killer IPv6 application -- and it's one that could save lives too. In Japan, NTT is working with the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) on an emergency earthquake alert service built on IPv6. "When you talk about IPv6, there are nice features but there are no compelling reasons to move onto it yet, and everybody is talking about 'What is the killer app?'" NTT America Vice President Kazuhiro Gomi told InternetNews.com. "I'm not sure if this is killer for commercial enterprises but this is definitely a good example of how you can leverage all the good things about IPv6." The NTT-built system works using a myriad of sensors spread out through the countryside, all connected via IPv6. When the sensors detect an earthquake, they transmit the data to both government agencies and commercial utilities so appropriate action can be taken. "When an earthquake happens, if you know earlier you can do things faster, like turn off the gas or go to a safer place," Gomi said. "The system is trying to provide a solution to save lives and damage by alerting people and agencies 10 to 15 seconds before an earthquake arrives." IPv6 plays a critical role in the plan because of its built-in multicasting capabilities. Multicasting allows for one data stream to be sent to multiple recipients, as opposed to unicast -- one stream per recipient. Address space is also a key issue. Due to IPv4 address space exhaustion, it's common to use Network Address Translation, or NAT (define), which can sometimes cause difficulty getting one endpoint to connect to another in a seamless fashion. Gomi noted that with IPv6's abundant address space, network designers don't have to worry about NAT, so they can reach from a central server to client systems directly without issue. "From a technology point of view, it's quite difficult to create the same thing over IPv4 because of the difficultly with multicasting, and also the NAT issue that you have go over with IPv4," Gomi said. "You also need to have a lot of endpoints, and the Internet is a great connection medium to connect many endpoints to many end users." While the NTT system is currently in use in Japan, Gomi and his crew at NTT America will be demonstrating the system in the next few weeks to first responders in Washington, D.C. While NTT's earthquake detection system might be a needed wakeup call for IPv6, overall, there hasn't been a mad rush to IPv6 in North America outside of the federal government. Gomi said that while the government may have a mandate for IPv6-capable networks, commercial businesses do not. "The situation is a bit different in Japan and the rest of Asia, where the address exhaustion problem has been a focus for a number of years, and so Asia is a few steps ahead," Gomi said. "Since the U.S. was at the forefront of Internet development they benefited by receiving a lot more IP address, while other nations are now feeling the IP crunch sooner." Gomi noted that NTT has been providing IPv6 capabilities for a decade, and he see the present as the time for wider deployment. "With the address depletion issue and the U.S. government mandate, we want to bring more visible applications to the market and the earthquake detection system is one of them," he said. "We need to bring upper-layer applications to IPv6 so customers can really see the benefit of this technology."

Technical Analysis: It's A Bear's Market

The S%26P 500 (first chart below) says it all today, as the index broke down out of a 15-month trading range. That's bad news for the bulls %26#151; and opens up the possibility of a move as low as 1170, the 200-point range break projected to the downside. First, though, the index has to get through what should be very strong support at 1327 and 1280-1290. To the upside, the mission for the bulls is simple: get back above 1370 and back into that trading range. The Nasdaq (second chart) has support at 2331 %26#151; and then 2250. To the upside, a move back above 2386-2400 would be a start. The Dow (third chart) has the most obvious and important support, the 11,750-12,000 zone, one that should hold on first test. To the upside, a move above 12,500 would be a bare beginning. In short, the bears have seized control of the market for the first time in five years, but the indexes are deeply oversold, puts are piling up, and the cycles remain relatively positive. Don't count out the bulls yet, but they clearly have their work cut out for them. Paul Shread is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and member of the Market Technicians Association.

Microsoft Defends OOXML

KIRKLAND, WA--As a crucial global standards meeting looms next month regarding the future of Microsoft's Office XML-based file formats, the company is going all out to make sure it gets its message out. %26#9; On Wednesday, Microsoft held a briefing near its sprawling corporate campus for select members of the international press in a move to present its side of what has devolved into an extremely contentious debate over the standardization of file formats for productivity applications. On Monday, the group that's been shepherding the formats through the arduous standardization process, made its last major filing to the international standards body that has them under considerations. In addition, late last week, an analysis firm released what it says is an independently funded study of the issues surrounding the document formats%26#151;a study that tends to side with Microsoft. All of this is leading up to next month's meeting. That's when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) plans a week-long meeting at the end of February to review proposed resolutions to technical issues raised by voting nations during formal balloting regarding the proposed standard last September. At that time, Microsoft's formats %26#150; called Office Open XML (OOXML) %26#150; failed to receive enough votes to be ratified as an ISO standard. That set the shot clock ticking for Ecma International %26#150; the European standards body that is sponsoring OOXML to ISO %26#150; to provide resolutions to all of the more than 3,500 issues raised in the balloting. Ecma, which has already granted its own standards status to OOXML, and presumably Microsoft since it originated OOXML as the default file formats for its Office productivity suite, have been hard at work since September, coming up with resolutions for each of the technical issues identified by ISO members. Monday, Ecma's technical committee presented a report of its proposed resolutions to those comments to ISO. The next step is the February "Ballot Resolution Meeting" in Geneva, Switzerland, where the proposed resolutions will be examined. After that, voting nations will have 30 days to determine whether to switch their September votes or to stick with them. Depending on the outcome OOXML will either be granted standards ranking or not. Obviously, Microsoft is pushing hard to get enough votes changed in its favor to achieve ratification as an ISO standard. That was at least partly the motivation for holding the press briefing, which resulted in a rather eclectic group of attendees. "There were journalists from Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.S. in attendance," a Microsoft spokesperson told Internetnews.con in an e-mail. In the original balloting last September, OOXML came close to achieving ratification. The rules for voting and for how votes are tallied are complex and hard to describe. However, suffice to say that if several of the 87 voting nations flip to Microsoft's (Ecma's) side, OOXML could finally become and ISO standard. However, despite odds that the proposed resolution to OOXML's problems could fail to change enough votes, Microsoft officials declined to consider failure at Wednesday's international press briefing. "We are confident that won't happen," Nicos Tsilas, Microsoft senior director of interoperability and intellectual policy, told InternetNews.com. Meanwhile, ODF supporters insist there is no reason to have two standards for representing productivity application document file formats and that OOXML is too complex. Microsoft's supporters%26#151;and some independent observers%26#151;say that having only one standard is not necessarily appropriate. They cite limitations in how much formatting ODF can actually represent when dealing with anything other than the simplest documents. For instance, ODF only allows for a single table type in a spreadsheet, Peter O'Kelly, research director at analysis firm Burton Group, told the gathered press at Microsoft's briefing. It also doesn't support customized XML schemas, he added. In fact, whether OOXML achieves ISO standards status or not may not matter that much in the long run, according to an independently funded study by The Burton Group, which O'Kelly co-authored. "We think OOXML is going to be very successful due to the fact it %26#91;provides%26#93; the default formats in Office 2007," O'Kelly said. With as many as 500 million copies of various versions of Office in use worldwide, that constitutes a sizeable de facto standard on its own. "We don%26#146;t think OOXML goes away even if it %26#91;fails to win ISO approval%26#93;," O'Kelly said. Nor does it mean that success for OOXML means failure for ODF, however. "ODF is going to continue but, especially inside of large enterprises, it's going to play a relatively minor role," O'Kelly added. The Translator Project Also at the press briefing, Microsoft officials separately announced that they will start a project on open source development site SourceForge.net next month to produce tools to convert files in Office's binary formats--.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc. %26#150; directly into OOXML. Dubbed the Translator Project, the tools will be available under the open source Berkeley Software Distribution license, according to Brian Jones, senior program manager lead for Office as well as OOXML technical architect.

Human Embryos Cloned From Skin Cells

By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
17 January 2008

A California company reported today that it has, for the first time, cloned human embryos using DNA from adult skin cells. That's "an important first step" toward generating embryonic stem (ES) cell lines from such embryos, which can be used to study and treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's, says stem cell researcher George Daley of Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Scientists want to be able to clone early human embryos, using cells from patients with various diseases, so they can study the diseases in the lab and develop new treatments for them. A major breakthrough occurred last year when scientists figured out how to turn skin cells into ES-like cells that could serve the same purpose (Science, 23 November 2007, p. 1224). But they still want to be able to do cloning, otherwise know as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), because embryonic cells are the "gold standard" for pluripotent cells--cells that can become any cell type in the body. In addition, scientists want to learn more about how an oocyte can reprogram a mature cell back into an ES cell.

In the new study, a research team at Stemagen, a biotech company based in San Diego, California, started with skin cells donated by two men and 25 eggs, or oocytes, donated by women at a nearby fertility center. The scientists removed the DNA-containing nuclei from the eggs and replaced them with DNA from the donor skin cells. Two of the eggs became 5-day-old embryos, or blastocysts, that were clones of the male donors. That's an "unexpectedly high" success rate, the company said in a statement.

Study leader Andrew French says the key to the team's success was utilizing fresh, mature oocytes from females of proven fertility. "We wanted to access the best raw material," he says. The researchers have also worked with "fail-to-fertilize" eggs discarded from fertility clinics, French says, but these "don't develop--they basically fall apart eventually."

The advance, published online today in the journal Stem Cells, comes less than 2 months after researchers succeeded in generating ES cells from cloned monkey blastocysts--the first time this has been achieved with primates. Both papers mark something of a comeback for the field, which was shaken 2 years ago by revelations about fraudulent research by Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang (ScienceNOW, 30 October 2006). Mindful of suspicions remaining from the Hwang disaster, the group sent their blastocysts to a separate company to verify the genetic composition. DNA fingerprinting confirmed that two of the blastocysts had the DNA of the male donor cells. In another test, researchers verified that a third had the mitochondrial DNA but no nuclear DNA from the oocyte, indicating that that, too, was a clone. For technical reasons, the genetic makeup of the remaining two couldn't be verified, although the company believes that they are also clones.

Although scientists have welcomed the development, they say the real breakthrough will be when someone manages to extract ES cells from the inner cell mass of cloned blastocysts and generate a cell line from them. That's the only way to get ES cells with the genetic signatures of patients whose diseases they want to study.

Stemagen's team says that's next, but Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, doubts the researchers could do it with the embryos they have created so far. "There is a large body of data ... showing that [SCNT] leads to chromosomal abnormalities," he says. The blastocysts in the paper "look very unhealthy," says Lanza. "I would guess these clones are abnormal, too." French counters that the director of the clinic that provided the eggs "says she has got pregnancies from IVF [in vitro fertilization] embryos that look similar."

Meanwhile, another advance on the cloning front occurred yesterday in the United Kingdom, where two research teams have at long last gained permission from the government to culture "hybrid" embryos from injecting human DNA into cow or rabbit eggs. The researchers want to use these to study reprogramming without resorting to using hard-to-get human eggs (ScienceNOW, 5 September 2007).

Related site

The study

Another Microsoftie Bytes the Dust

In the wake of recent high-level departures from Microsoft's senior management team, another long-term corporate vice president has also left the company. Last week, Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division, announced he will leave the software maker after more than 25 years. Now, it's come out that Rob Short, corporate vice president of Windows Core Technology, also recently left the company. "We can confirm that Rob Short %26#133; left Microsoft in December 2007," a company spokesperson told InternetNews.com in an e-mail. Short, who has been with Microsoft for 19 years, most recently has been in charge of "design, development and testing of the core components of the Microsoft Windows operating system: the operating system core, virtual machine technology, input/output subsystems and the core device drivers," according to his bio on Microsoft's Web site. Given that virtualization is a key part of Microsoft's systems strategy going forward, that makes Short's role all the more important. He also has worked on improving driver quality for all Windows products, the bio says %26#150; a major pain point with many users of Windows Vista early on. Additionally, according to Microsoft's Channel 9 developers' site, Short was in charge of the team that "architects the foundation of Windows Vista." Short was initially brought on board Microsoft to work on Windows NT %26#150; the company's first important server product. "Since then he has led the development of setup, plug-and-play, clustering and other core features in Windows," his bio states. Previous to Microsoft, Short worked for Digital Equipment Corp. as a senior development manager.

Oracle Lowers Patch Count in January Update

Oracle users: you got off easy this time. As part of its January Critical Patch Update (CPU), Oracle has released updates for 26 different issues affecting its applications. The January tally is nearly half of what Oracle usually updates in its last CPU, which came out in October of 2007. The bulk of the fixes this time is related to Oracle's Database products. In total, Oracle is patching for eight different security fixes related to Oracle's Databases, though none is tagged with the "remotely exploitable without authentication" flaws. The "remotely exploitable without authentication" flaws are among the most dangerous because, as the title implies, they can be remotely exploited by an attacker without authentication. Oracle first began providing details on which flaws could be exploited this way in October of 2006 when it patched 101 flaws, over half of which were labeled as remotely exploitable. The January 2008 CPU also contains 7 new security fixes for the Oracle E-Business Suite, 3 of the vulnerabilities may be remotely exploited without authentication. Oracle Application Server gets 6 security fixes, 5 of them being remotely exploitable. Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise gets 4 security fixes with 1 remote exploit. Rounding out the list is 1 fix for the Oracle Collaboration Suite. While Oracle has managed to reduce the patch load with the January CPU, some have argued that Oracle users aren't paying as much attention to CPU's as they should. Database security vendor Sentrigo reported that most Oracle users don't actually patch their systems with the CPU. There are a number of different reasons why Oracle DBAs (database administrators) might be lax in updating with the Oracle's CPU's. Ryan Barnett, director of training with Breach Security told InternetNews.com that the biggest challenge to applying CPU patches sets seems to be the extensive regression testing that is involved. Barnett commented that many organizations have mission critical systems that employ many different technologies and versions of those technologies. "You would be hard pressed to find many organizations that run a heterogeneous Oracle shop - all running the exact same version- and without any custom code built around it," Barnett said. "While everything functionality-wise is working, it is a delicate balance when any code changes or updates are made." Barnett argued that if vendors were to put themselves into their customers' shoes and look at the issue of patches, they might have a different outlook. "Vendors need to understand that due to errors within their code, not only are they putting their customers at risk of compromise but that they are also costing them money when they have to expend resources to patch their systems," Barnett said. "With this in mind, vendors should be doing everything they can do to help provide options for their customers to remediate these issues with alternative workarounds. " On a year-over-year basis, Oracle has reduced its patch load by an even more significant margin of 68 percent. In its January 2007 CPU, Oracle fixed 82 flaws.

HP Fires Shot in Network Storage Battle

Enterprises shopping for high-end network attached storage (NAS) this year might want to wait until the fall, as vendor competition is heating up: HP is throwing down the gauntlet before Network Appliance (NetApp) about how it intends to grab customers and market traction. "We think we have the right ingredients such as industry-standard components and clustered software, making storage easy to manage and highly available for the high-end NAS customer," Michael Callahan, chief technologist of HP's StorageWorks NAS division, told InternetNews.com. "We're making deeper investments in our core technologies, and we plan to aggressively compete against NetApp," he added. HP said its acquisition of PolyServe, which it bought for a reported $200 million in February 2006, is the linchpin in its quest to be a major player in the high-end NAS space. This acquisition followed a partnership of two years, during which HP melded the technology into its StorageWorks EVA FileServices product. PolyServe's application consolidates and virtualizes NAS in Windows and Linux environments and works with industry standard hardware. The software lets file or database servers be consolidated into a single, shared storage pool. In addition to providing clustering applications, PolyServe also gives HP a high-performance consolidation platform for databases in the HP technology portfolio. Callahan points to HP's strong foothold in the lower end of the market and believes that its NAS strategy, which includes providing an all-in-one cluster storage box, makes the company an "up-and-coming competitor." "We're going to give %26#91;NetApp%26#93; a run for their money," Callahan said. The HP-PolyServe deal allowed HP to extend NAS technology to servers, creating the Enterprise File Services Clustered Gateway. HP then enhanced the software to support block as well file storage and began shipping the StorageWorks EVA File Services, which was bundled with the vendor's storage area network (SAN) array. Yet how much of the high-end NAS market HP can grab is more than a bit speculative at this point, according to one industry-watcher. The battle for customer base will be tied to customer needs and requirements, said John Webster, IT principle advisor at research firm Illuminata. "It will all depend on what problem the customer has to solve and the user environment," Webster told InternetNews.com, adding that "there's room enough %26#91;in the market%26#93; for both vendors." HP said its storage product line adheres to industry-standard components, and while that may prove alluring to some enterprises tethered to industry standards, "quite a few other factors" come into product choice and storage decision-making, Webster said. "One buyer may have gone with a standard environment, but that user could also say that while standards are important the features another vendor offers are more compelling," he said. According to HP, PolyServe's ability to cluster in the storage environment is a key element it provides. Clustering technology is nothing new, as it's been widely adopted in the server environments and it's set to take off in storage. Research firm Gartner predicted 40 percent of mid to high-end NAS revenue will be generated by cluster file systems by 2012. Yet Webster describes clustering as "fairly new" when it comes to storage adoption. "It's a proven technology and really hasn't shown up on the storage side, only because new technology adoption tends to be slow as storage administrators are notoriously adverse to risk," he said. "As the final custodians of data they're very focused on reliability and stability so there's been slower adoption of clustering and storage virtualization overall," he added. But that clearly isn't daunting to HP. The bigger trend, Callahan said, is that storage servers are proving to be valuable workhorses when it comes to handling mission-critical workloads. "The key point, as data loads increase in the enterprise, is that the enterprise needs a solution they can build out to deal with the vast quantity of data," he said. "Using separate boxes that have to be managed individually isn't efficient. Clustering allows for simplification and reduces the complexity in storage management." HP expects to announce new product options tied to its clustering solution by late summer, he added. "Clustering allows for simplification and reduces the complexity in storage management. We've proven how well it works for the server environment and believe it will have the same success on the storage side," Callahan said, adding HP storage products reflecting that strategy could be appearing by late summer. When the PolyServe acquisition was first announced, industry observers noted that the technology buy-up would not only make HP a competitor to NetApp but also to heavyweights such as EMS and Hitachi Data Systems. But it clearly won't be a quick or easy battle. According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker Q3 2007, NetApp grew nine times faster than the storage software market from the second to third quarter of last year, and maintained or gained share in each market segment in which it provides offerings. "Network Appliance's combination of a scalable, modular architecture; robust software offerings; and common management interface should allow the vendor to retain a leadership position in the NAS market, as well as move into the mainstream SAN environment," IDC research director William Roch wrote in a report last month. "Recent strong market share data confirms that this message is being well received by NetApp's customer base," he added. Yet HP's clustering/virtualization approach appears to be on target, according to IDC's storage predictions for this year. The research firm found virtual servers will emerge as the killer application for iSCSI, and vendors will be creating more-attractive, all-in-one solutions using an integrated server and storage approach, specifically in the SMB environment. What it all could boil down to for storage customers is better technology options and, very likely, competitive product pricing opportunities. "If storage buyers can hold off till the right time, usually at year's end, they'll see aggressive product discounts," Webster said.

Apple Fixes a Quartet of QuickTime Flaws

With all the hype surrounding Apple this week and its MacWorld event it's easy to forget that Apple is a company under a security siege. More specifically, Apple's QuickTime software has faced far more than its fair share of security woes over the past year. The software plays a critical role in Apple's ability to deliver multimedia content on its Mac and iTunes platforms. Though not quite as high-profile as Apple's launch of the new Mac Air notebook, QuickTime didn't go ignored by Apple this week, receiving an update to version 7.4. While the update fixed at least four known security vulnerabilities, it left at least one known hole still open. The first of the fixes in QuickTime 7.4 involves memory corruption with video files that have been compressed with the popular Sorenson 3 compression technology. The flaw could have led to arbitrary code execution or an application crash. QuickTime 7.4 also contains a fix for a memory corruption issue related to its handling of Macintosh Resource records in movie files. The third issued addressed in the QuickTime 7.4 update also relates to memory corruption -- this time in QuickTime's parsing of Image Descriptor (IDSC) atoms. For the first three memory corruption vulnerabilities fixed by QuickTime 7.4, Apple addresses each by performing additional validation to ensure files are not corrupt. The fourth fixed issue stems from QuickTime's handing of PICT images. Apple noted in its advisory that, "A buffer overflow may occur while processing a compressed PICT image." Apple's advisory explains that the fix for the PICT issue is to terminate the decoding of the PICT image when the result would extend beyond the end of the destination buffer. The QuickTime 7.4 release does not address a Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) problem with QuickTime, first reported last week. With the QuickTime 7.4 release, Apple has now issued five QuickTime updates for security issues since October. It's a dark trend that may not necessarily mean that QuickTime is less secure than it once was. Instead, it may just be a symptom of Apple's increasing popularity. "I think more researchers are investigating OS X software for vulnerabilities as their market share, especially among the information security community, is increasing," said Jeremiah Grossman, founder and CTO at WhiteHat Security. "This answer may sound overly simplistic, but I believe it to be accurate." Apple itself may be partially to blame -- especially with regard to how it deals with security research. Grossman suggested that the company could work better with researchers and the information security industry in general. "To contrast, Microsoft is a good example as a company %26#91;that%26#93; used to be highly abrasive in the area of vulnerability disclosure," Grossman told InternetNews.com."Then over the last several years, Microsoft really turned things around culturally with respect to security, and is now considered by most to be a model citizen in the community." Apple spokespeople were not available for comment by press time.

Clearwire to Offer Google Applications

Wireless service provider Clearwire said on Tuesday it would offer e-mail and calendar applications from Web search leader Google. Clearwire said the tools, including the Google Talk instant messaging service, would become available to its wireless Internet customers in the first half of this year. The company, founded by wireless pioneer Craig McCaw, said it also planned to provide Google's Web search services on future Clearwire Web portal applications. Clearwire shares were up 25 cents, or 1.8 percent, at $14.24 in morning NASDAQ trade. The stock has fallen from more than $18 after No. 3 U.S. mobile provider Sprint Nextel said in November that it was ending a previously announced collaboration with Clearwire. The companies had planned to let their customers roam on each other's networks. Both companies are using an emerging wireless network technology known as WiMax. Sprint also has an agreement with Google.

Big Blue Gives Stocks a Bounce

IBM surprised investors Monday by releasing preliminary financial results that were much higher than Wall Street analysts anticipated. Big Blue said its fourth-quarter sales rose 10% to $28.9 billion, beating $27.8 billion forecasts, and earnings of $2.60 a share were 20 cents ahead of estimates. IBM attributed the better than expected results to currency benefits and strength in Asia, Europe and emerging countries, benefiting from a falling U.S. dollar and global diversification even as the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of recession. "The broad scope of IBM's global business %26#151; led by strong operational performance in Asia, Europe and emerging countries %26#151; drove these outstanding results," IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano said in a statement. Six points of IBM's fourth-quarter sales gain came from currency benefits, and four points of its full-year 8% sales gain. IBM ended the year with $16 billion in cash on $98.8 billion sales. IBM will report full results late Thursday. The results were good news for an economy reeling from the subprime mortgage market meltdown, boosting IBM shares by 5% and sending the major stock indexes more than 1% higher. Intel, which reports its quarterly results tomorrow night, was a big beneficiary of IBM's announcement, gaining 5% ahead of its results. Analysts expect Intel to report a 12% sales gain to $10.84 billion, and earnings of 40 cents a share, according to Thomson Financial. AMD, which reports Thursday, was up 2.5%. Also tomorrow, investors will have to contend with wholesale inflation data, an important report two weeks ahead of the next Federal Reserve meeting, and Citigroup will report its closely watched results. Consumer inflation data will follow on Wednesday. Apple rose 3.5% ahead of the start of the Macworld conference. SAP, up 4%, also raised guidance, boosting Oracle shares too. NetSuite lost 5% on a Citigroup sell rating, and Harman International and Compuware fell on warnings. The Nasdaq rose 38 to 2478, the S%26amp;P gained 15 to 1416, and the Dow surged 171 to 12,778. Volume declined to 3.63 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.19 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 23-10 margin on the NYSE, and 18-12 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 71% on the NYSE, and 74% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 67-187 on the NYSE, and 56-224 on the Nasdaq.

Google Revamps iPhone Push

Google today made another mobile announcement, but it's related to Apple's iPhone, rather than the much-hyped Open Handset Alliance (OHA) it sponsors. The company introduced improvements to the suite of Web applications it offers for the device -- Search, Gmail, Calendar and Reader. Google began offering the suite only last month. As indicated by its latest iPhone efforts, Google still has ambitions to support mobile platforms beyond those it's leading. With the OHA, Google aims to create an open development platform for mobile devices, so applications can run without the complicated pre-qualification process developers have to go through today with most carriers. The first handsets by OHA partners and powered by Google's Android software aren't expected till later this year. Until then, the company seems content to support other vendors' mobile platforms, such as the Apple iPhone, of which it was an early supporter. In the improvements to its iPhone suite, Google said it has streamlined the user interface and sped up the applications, making them easier to activate using the iPhone's touch-screen interface. One example is Gmail. New e-mails now automatically show up in the inbox, just like the standard Web-based version of Gmail. Until now, iPhone users had to manually refresh to see new e-mails. Google also added auto-complete, making it easier to enter a recipient's name when composing an e-mail. Default tabs can now be customized, so Google users can place their favorite applications front-and-center on the Google.com menu bar. Also new is the ability for users to access their iGoogle gadgets on the iPhone. Consequently, the same gadgets users have selected to appear on their Web-based iGoogle page -- such as weather, stocks and news feeds -- can now appear on their iPhones. In addition to marking a move by Google to further its support for another mobile platform, the attention given to the iPhone by the online giant comes on the heels of surprising trends in user adoption. On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming visits from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data reported by The New York Times. Although the iPhone traffic -- ostensibly from holiday gifts -- trailed off a few days later to levels below devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system, the iPhone remains in the No. 2 spot, above other types of mobile devices. The traffic surge is especially impressive given the iPhone's tiny market share. According to IDC, the iPhone only has about 2 percent of the smartphone market worldwide, while Symbian-powered phones account for 63 of the market. Windows Mobile-based devices have 11 percent, followed by Research in Motion's Blackberry, with 10 percent. Analysts quoted by the Times credited the traffic boom to iPhone's browser, which they said is among the easiest for surfing the Web on a mobile device. Longer-term, Google said it plans to extend its newest software improvements to international versions of the iPhone and to other platforms that offer similar usability and browser capabilities. Presumably, that could include phones based on Android. In a statement, Google said one of its goals is to "support platforms that are fulfilling the promise of the mobile Web -- like the iPhone -- and to ultimately deliver unique and compelling mobile experiences that improve people's daily lives." Google's iPhone announcement coincides with start of the Macworld Expo this week in San Francisco, at which the search giant will be exhibiting. The iPhone, which Apple recently said would be opened to developers, has attracted a growing set of programmers interested in tapping its potential for serious business applications. More broadly, Google joins Microsoft, Yahoo and others looking to cash in on the burgeoning mobile marketplace. Just last week, Yahoo announced a major mobile initiative. One key way that online search and portal players expect to make money from mobile is through advertising-based services. According to a report released today by ABI Research, revenue for mobile marketing is set to jump from $1.8 billion in 2007 to a whopping $24 billion by 2013. The research firm attributed its bullish revenue forecast to wider consumer adoption of mobile messaging and the rise of new platforms for advertising-supported mobile search, video and gaming content services.

Subprime Woes Slam Stocks Again

After six months of turmoil in the financial markets, investors seem no closer to becoming immune to news of the subprime mortgage mess, as rising defaults at American Express and a lower than expected takeover price for Countrywide Financial sent stocks skidding once again on Friday. The major indexes lost nearly 2% on fears that more interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve may arrive too late for an economy that already appears to be sliding into recession. With earnings reports coming next week from major banks, Intel and IBM, along with wholesale and consumer inflation data, more volatility could be in store for investors. Amazon fell 4% on consumer spending worries, and RF Micro Devices, Interactive Intelligence and Opnext tumbled after lowering financial guidance. Research in Motion lost 7% on a downgrade, and Apple shed 3% ahead of next week's Macworld conference. Juniper fell 13% after its COO departed for Microsoft. AMD added another 5% on a New York antitrust probe of Intel, which lost 2.4%. The Nasdaq fell 48 to 2439, the S%26P lost 19 to 1401, and the Dow tumbled 246 to 12,606. Volume declined to 4.47 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.4 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 21-11 margin on the NYSE, and 21-8 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 73% on the NYSE, and 78% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 41-216 on the NYSE, and 55-301 on the Nasdaq.

Vista Sales – You Do the Math

During his final keynote at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on Sunday night, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates highlighted what he proudly pointed to as the commercial success of Windows Vista. "I'm pleased to say that we've got over 100 million people using Vista now, and that's a very significant milestone," Gates told the audience. What he didn't say was why there aren't more units of Vista in use. After all, Vista was for sale to consumers for 11 of the past year's 12 months. Additionally, in early December, researcher IDC forecast that nearly 270 million PCs would be sold worldwide during calendar 2007. While some of those PCs were sold either without an operating system pre-installed or with a version of Linux onboard, the vast majority shipped with Windows %26#150; either Vista or Windows XP. Since only 100 million units of Vista are out and in use, that strongly implies that more new PCs shipped with Microsoft's aging XP than Vista over the past year, which is somewhat of a shock for such a "bet the farm" product as Vista. Of course, Microsoft's numbers likely lag the actual market, given that the crucially important Christmas selling season is barely past and may not be reflected in Gates' figures. Officials also have repeatedly pointed out that it's difficult to know how many units of Vista are in use in large corporations since the licenses they buy allow them to deploy either Vista or XP. So significantly more copies of Vista may now be in use than when Microsoft's speech writers had to finalize Gates' speech. That said, however, the simple math makes it seem virtually impossible that Vista could have outsold XP on new PCs in 2007. Many analysts agree that sales of Vista have been slower than expected in its first year on the market, but point out that 100 million copies is not small change. Additionally, the arrival of Vista's Service Pack 1 (SP1) later this quarter promises to finally get many IT shops off the fence and onto the Vista deployment bandwagon. While Microsoft officials have repeatedly said Vista sales are on target, Microsoft has already had to extend the amount of time that PC vendors will be allowed to continue shipping XP on new machines by five months -- until June 30, 2008, the end of Microsoft's fiscal year. What's the hold up? Some of the reluctance to move to Vista on the part of consumers may have to do with the expense of buying new PCs with the high-end graphics capabilities and extra memory needed to run Vista's flashy Aero Glass user interface. It is perhaps the most noticeable of all the new features that arrived with Vista. "Vista has received a lukewarm response %26#91;partly because%26#93; Microsoft hasn't made a good case for upgrading," Richard Shim, research manager at analysis firm IDC, told InternetNews.com. For one thing, many PC gamers found that XP rendered a faster playing experience than Vista, which some reviewers have criticized as sluggish. Another point: A year after it shipped, very few applications actually take advantage of Vista's unique new capabilities, partly because some key features of Vista, such as the Windows Presentation Foundation, have been back-ported to XP. "%26#91;Even%26#93; Office 2007 only takes marginal advantage of Vista," Michael Cherry, lead analyst for operating systems at researcher Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. Asked whether all of the shortcomings may derail Microsoft's plans to make Vista dominant, however, both analysts scoffed. "The impact of Vista is still alive," Shim said. "It's not as influential as it was, but I wouldn't call it a failure," he added.