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.

Can Google And Facebook be Friends After All?

Filling in two of the last major gaps in the drive toward easing the exchange of data across the social Web, Google and Facebook have announced their support of the DataPortability Workgroup. Also joining the group is the online address service Plaxo. The announcement could defuse talk of the emerging rivalry between Google and Facebook in the scramble to become the dominant standard for sharing user-generated content across social platforms. Speculation about Facebook's plans to compete with Google's OpenSocial renewed in December with the announcement that it would open the tools and tags underlying its platform architecture so that developers' applications could run seamlessly across any site that adopts the standard. Now that representatives from both companies will be sitting down at the same table, concerns over competing social standards may evaporate. "We have the same goal," a Google spokesman told InternetNews.com at the time of the Facebook announcement, noting to each company's expressed desire of making the Web more open and social. Accordingly, those desires may achieve greater traction thanks to both groups' participation in the DataPortability Workgroup. Led by Faraday Media co-founder and CEO Chris Saad, the group's major initiatives includes the development of the DataPortability Reference Design, a template for the implementation of open standards and protocols across the social Web, with the ultimate goal of breaking down the barriers between various social network and media sites. "Plaxo, Google and Facebook together represent the key players in the competing approaches to social networking platforms and data portability," Saad said in a blog post. "Their joint support of the DataPortability initiative presents a new opportunity for the next generation of software -- particularly in the fields of social software, user rights and interoperability," he wrote. In a practical sense, the collaboration means that a Facebook widget would (theoretically) be accessible on MySpace, which announced its support of OpenSocial in November. In the Workgroup vision, photos, videos and other user-generated content would be universally accessible regardless of the vendor or tools underlying the platform. Saad said the technology to implement platform interoperability already exists, but the challenge is bringing together the various stakeholders to hash out a common reference design that can be shared with the developer community. Google's delegate to the Workgroup will be LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick. Facebook will be represented by Benjamin Ling, perhaps best known as the project lead for Google's Checkout service before he defected to Facebook in October. Joseph Smarr will represent Plaxo. Part of the impetus behind the announcements could be the recent flap over Facebook shutting down the profile of prominent blogger Robert Scoble, after he ran a Plaxo script to scrape the e-mail addresses of his Facebook friends. Facebook has since restored Scoble's profile, but the incident set off a new wave of protests over Facebook's "go-it-alone" philosophy. While the creation of a pipeline between Google and Facebook might silence critics of the so-called "walled garden" of social networks, linking the two repositories of an immense volume of social data also may raise some privacy concerns. Facebook, having recently been scorched by the controversy over the data-sharing practices put in place through its Beacon advertising program, might understandably move with caution into an initiative that could again open the door to its databases. To Saad, however, the privacy issue is a dead letter. "Privacy is a very poor, outdated word," he wrote. "In a social world, privacy is less of a concern than complexity and information overload."

Otellini's Vision: Augmented Reality, Personal Internet

LAS VEGAS -- Donny and Marie Osmond aren't playing Vegas until this summer, but Intel Corp. President and CEO Paul Otellini's Monday keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show was a little bit country and a little bit rock 'n' roll. The country was China, as seen through Intel's vision of a new "proactive, predictive, context-aware Internet." The rock came from the band Smash Mouth, whose lead singer Steve Harwell joined Otellini on the Las Vegas stage to preview some virtual-reality garage-band boogie. Otellini defied keynote tradition by not giving a detailed plug for the Intel products announced Monday. Those included 16 notebook, desktop, and server processors created with the chipmaker's ultra-miniaturized 45-nanometer-process engineering and hafnium- rather than silicon-based transistor materials. Instead, he merely cited them as examples of Intel's drive to reduce CPUs' size and power consumption enough to enable products that will put the Internet into users' pockets. Otellini made a similar allusion to the "Menlow" mobile-device platform scheduled to ship later in the first half of 2008, which combines an ultra-low-voltage CPU dubbed "Silverthorne" and a chipset codenamed "Poulsbo." A demonstration highlighted a Toshiba prototype delivering a no-compromise Web experience, with rich browser-based applications courtesy of Adobe's Air development environment. Looking beyond Menlow, Otellini described Intel's "first system-on-a-chip %26#91;SoC%26#93; for consumer devices," codenamed "Canmore," which puts "both a CE %26#91;consumer electronics%26#93; system and an Internet computer on the same chip." Promised for the second half of this year, the chip will combine a PC processor core, 3D graphics unit for visual user interfaces and online games, broadcast TV tuner, and dedicated audio/video processing capable of playing 1080p HD video with 7.1-channel surround sound. In addition to sufficiently small processors, Otellini explained, another necessity for "the personal Internet" is a truly global wireless broadband infrastructure. Intel's preferred platform for this is WiMAX, for which the company is cooperating with wireless carriers to conduct commercial trials and test rollouts in 70 countries worldwide. A third challenge will be the development of more natural user interfaces, as seen in current work on voice and gesture computing.
A whole new Internet The last piece of the puzzle is perhaps the most ambitious of all: an end to what Otellini described as "the era of the go-to Internet." "If you want to find a piece of information you go to your PC," he said. "Then you go to a place that has Internet access, then you go to a search engine, then you go to %26#91;a linked page%26#93;. "Rather than us going to the Internet," he continued, "the Internet's going to come to us," at a level far beyond RSS news feeds or "push" computing. "The personal Internet of tomorrow will serve you -- delivering the information you want, when you want it, how you want it, wherever you are." By way of example, Otellini staged a dream scenario of an American visitor to China for this summer's Beijing Olympics, equipped with a handheld Internet device that could, when pointed at a street sign or at the name above and menu beside the door of a restaurant, show it in English rather than with Chinese characters. Such "augmented reality" might go beyond today's GPS navigation to guide a walker with real-time-rendered, panoramic point-of-view street scenes. Or it might offer everything from an audio tour guide to directions to the nearest restroom when visiting the Great Wall of China; or supply "Star Trek"'s universal translator -- the same device turning a spoken English sentence into both on-screen and audio Chinese. The massive database access of the demo, Otellini confessed, required the muscle of numerous Core 2 processor systems backstage. But with 45nm technology to keep Moore's Law in force for the next few years, he declared, "it's not going to be a blink before we make that into %26#91;handheld%26#93; reality."
All avatar Finally, Otellini welcomed both Smash Mouth frontman Harwell and a series of social-networking and virtual-reality vendor execs to the stage to show how broadband Internet connections and potent processors can deliver the "realest" virtual reality yet. First, Harwell and his bandmates put eJamming's Web-based AUDiiO service to the test, performing their hit "Walkin' on the Sun" from separate locations around Las Vegas. The effort aimed to show how the application both cuts latency and adds milliseconds of delay to keep jam-session partners or concert performers in time even when oceans apart. Next came a demonstration of Big Stage's personal avatar creator, scheduled to go live in the second quarter of the year. The process takes just three digital-camera shots of a player's face to generate a surprisingly realistic digital version of the user. The avatar then can be cartoonishly decorated with extras such as nose rings and a Mohawk or dropped into an e-mail, blog page, or other piece of content. The high point of the demo was Otellini's head replacing Harwell's in an MTV video. Last, Intel called on Virtual Heroes and Organic Motion for a virtually live performance of the band's hit "All Star". Harwell's avatar led the performance, moving in sync with his real self as captured by 16 video cameras, without the need for special stages and ping-pong-ball-studded motion-capture suits used by Hollywood to animate movie characters and by sports trainers to study an athlete's range of motion. "Some might think the consumer electronics industry has completed %26#91;its%26#93; transformation to the Internet," Otellini told attendees. "I believe we're just getting started ... Let's go forward and build something wonderful together."

Gene Therapy Cancers Prompt Design of Safer Virus

By Jocelyn Kaiser
ScienceNOW Daily News
10 January 2008

The announcement last month that a fifth child who received gene therapy for an immune system disease has developed leukemia was the latest blow to the field of gene therapy. But there's new hope: The U.K. team running the trial reports this week that a safer formulation of the treatment can cure the disease in mice and should also work in people.

Gene therapy's clearest success to date has been restoring the health of about 40 children with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), also known as "bubble boy" disease because patients cannot fight off infections and are often isolated to protect them from germs. The treatment had a down side, however: Since 2002, four of 10 children in a French trial for a form of SCID involving a defect on the X chromosome (X-SCID) have developed leukemia, apparently because the retrovirus used to insert a curative gene into patients' blood stem cells turned on a cancer gene (ScienceNOW, 7 March 2005). Researchers at the Institute of Child Health at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London were conducting a nearly identical X-SCID study without serious side effects, and some researchers suspected that their technique was somehow safer. But in mid-December, one of their patients also developed leukemia.

Now the U.K. team says it has found a better approach. The problem with the virus used in the U.K. and French studies seemed to be its powerful promoter, a stretch of DNA that regulates expression of the inserted gene, IL2RG. This promoter also apparently turned on a nearby cancer gene. To eliminate this problem, U.K. study leader Adrian Thrasher and colleagues replaced the promoter with one less likely to turn on other genes. This "self-inactivating" retrovirus also cannot make more copies of itself once it has stitched itself into the host genome. In vitro studies on self-inactivating vectors, including a recent paper by this group comparing the growth of cells treated with their new vector and the old one, are boosting confidence. "It's very reasonable to think the [self-inactivating] vectors are going to be safer," says Cynthia Dunbar of the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Although the new vector is less potent, it should be more than adequate, Thrasher notes. In a paper published online this week in the journal Molecular Therapy, Thrasher's team and collaborators in Germany and the United States report that the new vector restored immune system function in a mouse model of X-SCID. "It's probably going to work" in humans, says molecular virologist Frederic Bushman of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

Thrasher's group and collaborators now hope to start multisite trials in Europe and the United States with the new vector later this year. Donald Kohn of Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, California, who is thinking about participating, says he's optimistic that the safety issues will be solved and that gene therapy will eventually become the standard of care. If X-SCID can be cured with no serious side effects, that will ease concerns about the risks of using similar vectors to treat other blood diseases such as sickle cell disease, notes Dunbar.

Related sites

Information on severe combined immunodeficiency

Background on self-inactivating retroviral vectors

Supply an all new household appliance of stock level battery charger/stock level

The existing lot all new stock level battery charger is 10000, unit price:2.2 dollars.Can in the meantime paraquinones 1~2 sections on the 5th or the No.7 cell progress charge, be applicable to four get rid of car;Toy cell charge, aim at to consume t..
http://electronic.fz.tc/a/Supply_an_all_new_household_appliance_of_stock_level_battery_charger_stock_level_ilws8/

How to Make a Milky Way

By Govert Schilling
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 January 2008

AUSTIN, TEXAS--Looking 12 billion years back in time, astronomers have found the ancestors of spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way. They liken the discovery, presented here at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, to finding key fossils in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.

The very first galaxies--formed shortly after the big bang--were small and dim. Through mergers, they grew into the large galaxies we see today. Astronomers using the biggest telescopes can see these original building blocks at very large distances, where the universe appears as it did billions of years ago (ScienceNOW, 28 November 2007). But there's a snag: Astronomers have found such a stunning variety of early galaxies that they are unclear about which of these faint objects are the precursors of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way and which are the ancestors of other types of galaxies, such as giant ellipticals like M87 (ScienceNOW, 5 November 2001).

Now, astrophysicists Eric Gawiser of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Caryl Gronwall of Pennsylvania State University in State College say they've solved the puzzle. The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope, along with other ground- and space-based scopes, to analyze lightweight collections of stars known as Lyman alpha emitters, which are 10 times smaller and 20 to 40 times less massive than the Milky Way. Gawiser, Gronwall, and their colleagues showed that the starlight emitted from these star collections, and the way they are clustered in space, indicates that they must have been the building blocks for larger galaxies such as the Milky Way.

The new results will help astronomers better understand the origin and evolution of galaxies--one of the outstanding problems in cosmology, says astronomer Sandra Faber of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's like discovering embryonic cells: It starts to become interesting when you know what they will evolve into."

But there may be more than one way to build a galaxy. Faber's Santa Cruz colleague Elizabeth McGrath said at the meeting that not all big galaxies grew from small ones. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, McGrath discovered very massive, disklike galaxies in the early universe. She says there wasn?t enough time for these behemoths to form through mergers. Instead, they were probably born in one fell swoop through the rapid collapse of a very massive cloud of gas.

Related sites

Abstract of paper by Gawiser et al., with link to full text

The MUSYC project that found the Lyman alpha emitters

A primer on the formation of galaxies

You Must Not Remember This

By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 January 2008

The ability to suppress distracting or distressing memories helps people cope with everyday life, yet neuroscientists know little about how it works. Now researchers have gained some clues from a study that combined hypnosis and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate changes in brain activity as volunteers suppressed--and later recalled--memories of a recently viewed movie.

Some people can be made to suppress a particular memory by hypnotic suggestion, an effect called posthypnotic amnesia. Hoping to take advantage of this phenomenon, neuroscientist Yadin Dudai of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues had subjects watch a movie depicting a young woman going about her daily routine--making meals, talking on the phone, rollerblading with friends, and so on. A week later, the volunteers returned to the lab and, under hypnosis, were instructed to forget the movie until they heard the phrase "Now you can remember everything."

As the researchers had hoped, the hypnosis triggered memory suppression. After the subjects woke up, they took a quiz about the activities of the woman in the movie. They performed no better than chance, answering only half of the yes-no questions correctly. Immediately afterward, the volunteers heard the magic phrase and took the quiz again. This time they averaged about 80%26#37; correct, the same as a control group that wasn't susceptible to posthypnotic amnesia.

The fMRI scans, collected as subjects answered questions about the movie, revealed what was happening in the brain, the team reports in the 10 January issue of Neuron. Several regions, mostly in the occipital and temporal lobes, were unusually quiet when subjects suppressed memories. In contrast, activity in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex, which has been implicated in memory retrieval (Science, 13 July 2007, p. 215), was elevated during memory suppression. Dudai hypothesizes that this region may have vetoed retrieval of the movie memories in the volunteers.

"It's a clever idea ? and an intriguing result," says Michael Anderson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, U.K. He likes Dudai's team's hypothesis that the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex cuts off memory retrieval but adds that more work will be needed to clarify this region's role. Understanding the mechanisms of memory suppression is important, Anderson says, because it's a crucial part of maintaining emotional equilibrium. "We're often confronted with reminders of things we'd rather not think about."

Related site

A 2004 Science article about memory suppression

Microsoft to Office 2003 Users – 'Our Bad'

After a sudden and heated controversy arose last week over blocking older file formats in the latest service pack of Office 2003, Microsoft late Friday all but reversed itself. Along with apologies to both users and other software makers, Microsoft also provided automated tools for restoring access to those older files. The brouhaha began last week when a user whose online handle is time961 complained on tech gadfly site Slashdot that Office 2003 Service Pack 3 (SP3) defaults to blocking the opening or saving files in many older application file formats, including Office 97 and earlier, but also files created by CorelDraw, among others. The reasoning behind blocking access to those formats, according to a Microsoft knowledge base (KB) article published in December, is security -- the older formats are "less secure," the document stated. "They may pose a risk to you." Now, Microsoft has admitted those statements were in error. Although SP3 began shipping in September, this was the first outcry over the change in Office 2003's default settings %26#150; probably because most older files are to be found in customers' archives and aren't accessed frequently. Still, that could create big problems for users who have to access those archives at a much later date %26#150; for instance, as part of a multi-year audit. "Because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives," said the Slashdot posting. The affair also prompted an outcry from Corel. "Corel is not aware of any security issue related to the CorelDraw .CDR file format," Gerard Metrallier, director of graphics product management for Corel, said in a statement e-mailed to InternetNews.com. "Corel has unsuccessfully tried to figure out the basis for categorizing .CDR files as 'less secure.'" That prompted Microsoft to scramble %26#150; apologizing profusely to vendors and users alike %26#150; and to provide tools to make it much simpler for users to access the blocked file types. "In the KB article we stated that it was the file formats that were insecure, but this is actually not correct. A file format %26#133; isn't insecure %26#150; it's the code that reads the format that's more or less secure," David LeBlanc, senior software development engineer for Microsoft Office, said in a blog post Friday. That means the insecurity is in Office itself, and not in the file formats. LeBlanc went on to say that the files aren't blocked permanently either %26#150; just by default, which can be undone. In response to complaints that procedures described in the KB article require editing the Windows registry in order to re-enable access to the files, and are both complicated and risky, LeBlanc also posted links to work arounds that do the job automatically. "You click on the link %26#91;for the file type%26#93; and it brings up a dialog box that says 'Run,' %26#133; It's very easy," a Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com. Microsoft also has an Office Online help file that describes how to re-enable those file formats in Office 2007, which has blocked those files by default since it was first released in November 2006. Unlike Office 2003, Office 2007 lets users access those files by placing them in what the company refers to as "trusted locations" %26#150; that is, by placing the files in a location that Office 2007 believes it can trust in a manner similar to Internet Explorer's "Trusted Sites" zone.