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The chip giant settled with AMD. But another rival is making noise about anticompetitive behavior.

After bumping along as low as $7 a share at the beginning of the year his stock is up near $14. Several months ago Apple (AAPL) began using his graphics chipset – a group of circuits designed to work together – across nearly its entire line of Macs, giving him a very high-profile endorsement. And in the white-hot netbook segment, his Ion processors have won raves for turning underpowered laptops into HD video machines.

Problem is, both of these acclaimed Nvidia (NVDA) products might be dead in the water.
Why? Huang blames chip giant Intel (INTC). Nvidia’s graphics chipsets, which Steve Jobs liked enough to buy by the boatload, aren’t allowed to work with Intel’s latest offering, code-named “Nehalem” – and in the computer world no Intel compatibility means no mainstream future.

Nvidia’s Ion chip is designed to work alongside the chip giant’s Atom processor, but lately it’s been priced out of the market by – you guessed it – Intel.

Feeling AMD's pain
All of this has piqued the interest of the Federal Trade Commission, which is looking into whether Intel has improperly used its power in the computer chip market to choke rivals. For those who are handicapping the chances that the FTC will bring charges, Nvidia’s gripes have recently taken on new importance: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which had been Intel’s main critic, recently settled its antitrust complaints with Intel for a tidy sum of $1.25 billion. That leaves Nvidia to bang the anti-Intel drum.

“I’m sympathetic to what AMD had to go through over the years,” Huang says.
Intel says it’s a tough but fair competitor, and that Nvidia has caused its own problems. To wit: The two companies signed a limited patent-sharing deal five years ago, and Intel says that if Nvidia had read the fine print, it would have noticed that designs like the current Nehalem chips weren’t covered in the agreement. And the Ion dispute? Well, Intel says it just lowered prices on its Atom chipsets to stay competitive. What’s wrong with that?

Nvidia tells a different story. Executives there say they’re a victim of the same kinds of tactics that got Intel into antitrust trouble in Europe and Asia. Nvidia believes it should be authorized to make Nehalem-compatible chipsets under the 2004 agreement; it claims Intel is just getting litigious to stop a competitive threat. And with Ion, Nvidia accuses Intel of unfair pricing that locks it out of the market. Intel says Nvidia just doesn’t understand the incentives it offers customers.

(The two companies are battling in court over the chipset agreement. Intel has asked a Delaware court to clarify whether Nvidia has the right to build Nehalem chipsets, and Nvidia has countersued for breach of contract.)

The courts will ultimately decide who’s right – that is, unless Intel decides to ink a settlement with Nvidia, too. Even then, that probably won’t be the end of Intel’s legal headaches. Maybe that’s the trouble with being a giant. There’s always some kid with a slingshotgunning for you.

Motorola targets young men with its most testosterone-heavy TV commercial yet

Droid. Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen? Or should it be fast? Racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast. We say the latter. So we built the phone that does. Does rip through the Web like a circular saw through a ripe banana. Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth? No. It's not a princess. It's a robot. A phone that trades hair-do for can-do.

The new Droid commercial that debuted in prime-time Thursday night (and is pasted below the fold) opened a new front in Motorola (MOT) and Verizon's (VZ) $100 million ad campaign to take market share from Apple's (AAPL) iPhone

Earlier commercials had appealed to the fragile male ego with icons of masculinity: stealth bombers, heavyweight fighters, rock-crushing machinery.

This one goes after the competition by painting it — and its users — as effeminate.


It's a strategy as old as the schoolyard, and it seems to be working — at least on one side of the yard. A new YouGov BrandIndex survey taken Thursday shows Motorola's buzz rising relative to Apple's and Research in Motion's (RIMM) among men 18 and older. And the company seems to be on track in its stated goal of selling 1 million Droids by New Years.

It remains to be seen whether it has burned its bridges to the other half of the market in the process.

Television housings, cathode ray tubes, computers, monitors, and other imported electronic waste items not salable at the Alaba Market in Lagos, Nigeria, are dumped in this nearby swamp.

Credit: Basel Action Network
A policy analysis published Thursday in the journal Science calls our attention to something it's much easier to turn away from: what happens to outdated computer monitors, cell phones that aren't smart enough, cables that once powered discarded laptops, even old calculators.

Much of this waste, which is largely a product of the developed world, ends up in the developing world, and the hazardous materials it contains accumulate in the food chain and in poor children's blood. In Africa, China, and India, markets for secondhand electronics are having a terrible impact. Children in Guiyu, China have high levels of lead in their blood and swamps in Nigeria overflow with discarded electronics.

So what can we do about it? The United States, one of the largest producers of electronic waste, is one of 23 member countries that has not ratified the United Nations' Basel Convention, which would regulate the movement of hazardous electronic materials across international borders.

A bill in the Senate (S. 1397) would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to award grant money for recycling research and ask the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create a database of green electronic materials. According to the authors of the Science article, the European Union and the state of California both have complex and inconsistent waste policies, but we can still learn from them:

For example, Californians are willing to pay extra for "green" electronics products (e.g., containing fewer toxic substances, capable of being economically recycled) and to drive up to 8 miles to drop-off products for environmentally sensitive recycling. In addition, political mandates and economic incentives are key tools for engaging manufacturers,who will need to assume greater responsibility for designing electronic products that contain safer materials and are easily managed after consumers no longer want them.

However, the long-term solution, the authors suggest, is to change the way electronics are made in the first place:

Apple's controversial software emporium gets a sympathetic hearing at the New York Times

Apple (AAPL) only opens its doors to reporters when it needs something from them — like glowing reviews for a glitzy new gadget.

What it needs right now, apparently, is a friendly account of what's going on at the iPhone App Store, a runaway hit galloping so fast that even Apple — a company that knows a thing or two about control — is having trouble holding on to the reins.

And a sympathetic ear is what it got from Jenna Wortham, a former Wired freelancer who joined the New York Times two years ago to cover Web start-ups and mobile communications for the paper's Bits blog.

Apple granted Wortham interviews with two senior vice presidents — Phil Schiller, who supervises the App Store approval process, and Eddie Cue, who runs iTunes — which she supplemented with material from Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty, Flurry's Peter Farago, a handful of developers, and Apple's major competitors.

Her 3,000 word piece is the lead story on the front page of the Sunday Business section, and Apple PR should be pleased. Among the highlights:

• Friendly quotes from Morgan Stanley's Huberty (a former Apple bear recently turned bullish), who calls the App Store "revolutionary" and compares it to both AOL's role in popularizing the Internet and Microsoft's domination of desktop computing.
  
• Friendly quotes from Farago, a mobile analytics guy, who talks about Apple eliminating "friction points" in software development and distribution.
• Self-serving quotes from Apple's Schiller, who is described — bizarrely — as "normally reserved," and who tries to reframe the complaints of frustrated developers with the message that the review process is "a necessary evil" and that Apple is doing the best it can.
• Success and horror stories from the developers of Flick Fishing,  Tap Tap Revenge, Trillian, Bump and FreedomVoice (still waiting for approval 396 days later).
• Divergent points of view from Research in Motion (RIMM), Palm (PALM), Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) and the jailbreaking catalog Rock Your iPhone.

Wortham comes back to her Schiller notes in an accompanying sidebar in Bits that lists some of the programs on the senior VP's own iPhone. The apps he plugs: Shazam, CNN’s app, Facebook, MLB.com, NBA Game Time, ESPN ScoreCenter, Eliminate, geoDefense and Best Camera.

Wortham's piece may serve Apple's interests, but for anyone who follows the mobile app scene, it's a must-read.

The MP5 Player Digital Camera NES Games FM Radio SD Slot – 8 GB is a device with an awful name but very familiar icons.

It has no real description so I’ll basically piecemeal this together…The 3.5″ MP5 player with digital camera and SD slot supports NES and Game Boy games, so it’s like having an emulator on the go.

It also features playback for various MP3 and movie formats for instance AVI, WMV, or WMA.

It comes in the colors Black / Yellow / Pink / Blue / Grey and supports many different languages. On top of all that, it sports icons that look very familiar to the iPhone.

MP5 Player Digital Camera NES Games FM Radio SD Slot – 8 GB retails for $75. However, getting the NES games on this device is for you to figure out.

Is Apple's iPhone-without-a-phone the McDonald's Happy Meal of mobile communications? 

Peter Farago of the mobile analytics firm Flurry uses data from its November report to make the case that Apple (AAPL) is quietly — and successfully — using the iPod touch to lock in a loyal base of under-age users who will eventually become the next generation of iPhone buyers.

"While it is clear that the iPhone has significant short-term revenue value for Apple," he writes in a report issued Sunday, "Flurry believes that the iPod Touch holds more long-term strategic value for Steve Jobs and team."

"In terms of Life Stage Marketing," Farago writes, "the practice of appealing to different age-based segments, Apple is using the iPod Touch to build loyalty with pre-teens and teens, even before they have their own phones (think: McDonalds' Happy Meal marketing strategy). When today's young iPod Touch users age by five years, they will already have iTunes accounts, saved personal contacts to their iPod Touch devices, purchased hundreds of apps and songs, and mastered the iPhone OS user interface." (link)

The evidence that Apple's strategy is working, Farago says, can be seen in a graph of end-user sessions recorded over the past six months.

Flurry, according to Farago, tracks 15 million end-user sessions every day from its "analytics solution" code embedded in 3,000 applications on 4 platforms: Apple's iPhone OS ( both iPhone and iPod Touch), Research in Motion's (RIMM) Blackberry, JavaME and Google (GOOG) Android.

The graph above shows that the iPod touch's share of those user sessions has grown 4 points over the past six months — the same as Android despite starting from a much larger user base. While the iPhone continues to grow in user sessions, its share in Flurry's data has dropped from 57% to 50%.

Even more significant, according to Farago, is that kind of things the kids are doing with their iPod touches.

"Anecdotally," he writes, "we know the 'iPod Touch Generation' is made up of heavy MySpace, Facebook and SMS users, who voraciously share their lives with, and influence their ever-expanding social graph. Importantly, this also includes promoting products they like. Empirically, Flurry compared how iPod Touch session usage has changed over the last six months across key application categories important to this demographic; namely, Social Networking and Games."

Farago's empirical evidence is displayed in the two charts below, which show the iPod Touch growing faster than both the iPhone and the Android devices in Flurry's Social Networking and Games categories.

Scientists infused donor lungs with an anti-inflammatory gene, a treatment that might increase the number of organs available for transplant. [Image courtesy of Science/AAAS].

A new gene therapy treatment designed to reduce inflammation can prevent damage in donor lungs, potentially making more organs available for transplant.

According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, about 1,800 people in the United States are currently waiting for a lung transplant.

Researchers from the McEwen Centre for Regenerative Medicine in Toronto had previously developed a novel system to improve the health of donor lungs, which mimics normal physiological conditions by continuously pumping oxygen, proteins and nutrients into the injured organs. In the new study, published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers infused the lungs with the gene for a molecule called Il-10, which reduces inflammation.

Both pig and human lungs given the treatment functioned better than untreated organs, with better blood flow and less swelling, an affect that lasted up to 30 days. And the treated lungs functioned better when transplanted into pigs.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times,

They then took human lungs that were considered too damaged for transplantation and subjected them to the same procedure. The treatment significantly improved blood flow through the lungs and improved their ability to take in fresh oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. The higher levels of IL-10 persisted in the lungs for 30 days, suggesting that the procedure could also reduce rejection of the organs. The lungs were not implanted in humans.

The procedure "not only may result in improved preservation of lungs [before transplantation] but also may repair lungs otherwise not suitable for transplantation," Dr. David S. Wilkes of the Indiana University School of Medicine wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.

But several questions remain, he said. Implanting lungs from a human donor might present more problems. And the use of adenoviruses has caused complications in some gene-therapy experiments when the virus inserted the added gene at an inappropriate location.

Keshavjee said the team hopes to begin human trials in a year or so.

When it comes to music-playing mirrors, they have been very few and far between. As a matter of fact, it has been quite a while since we wrote about one. Fortunately this new MP3 Shower Mirror, isn’t just practical, it’s also wireless and fog free.
 
The Sharper Image MP3 Wireless Speaker Fog Free Shower Mirror makes sure that you stay safe while listening to your Mp3 player’s tunes in the shower.

The way it works is that your Mp3 player docks itself in a transmitter which in turn transmits your music wirelessly to the fog free shower mirror up to 100 feet away.

The shower mirror comes with suction cups to attach to the bathroom wall and it also works as a digital clock. The system also comes with four built-in 2 watt speakers and operates on 4 AAA batteries. You can pick it up now from The Sharper Image for $69.99. Yes, the Sharper Image is back, believe it or not.

Let’s assume you have two computers at home and you want to connect them together so that you can easily share an internet connection between the two machines or transfer photos, music and other files from one computer to another. How do you do this?

Connect Two Computers Directly

There are two options – you can either buy a router or, if you are looking for something more simple and don’t want to spend money on new networking hardware, you can connect the two computers using a commonly-available cable. The latter method doesn’t involve any complicated network settings and you will still be able to share files, internet connection, and even printers between computers.

Things you need:
To set up this basic wired home network, all you need is an inexpensive Ethernet crossover cable and the other requirement is that network cards* (also known as LAN or Ethernet cards) should be installed on each of you computers.

This should not be an issue because network cards are available on most newer machines by default but if you are working with a very old computer, you can either attach an internal LAN card to your computer’s motherboard or go for a USB Network adapter that will turn a USB port into an Ethernet (RJ45) port.



An Ethernet crossover cable looks like a standard Ethernet cable but the internal wiring is a little different. You can purchase crossover cables at Amazon.com or from your local computer store. If you have trouble finding them, you can purchase an inexpensive crossover adaptor and that will let you use any standard Ethernet cable as a crossover cable.

Connect Computers with an Ethernet Crossover Cable

Before connecting the two computers with a physical cable, make sure that both machine are using the same workgroup*. Here is step-by-step guide that explains how you can change the workgroup of your computers.
Changing workgroup in Windows XP – From the Start menu, right-click “My Computer.” Select Properties in the drop-down menu, and then select the second tab that says “Computer Name” from the System Properties window. Now click the “Change…” button, enter a unique Workgroup name and reboot your computer.

Changing workgroup in Windows 7 or Vista – Open the Control Panel, type “Workgroup” in the search box, and select the entry that says “Change Workgroup Name.” Click the “Change…” button, enter a Workgroup name and restart the computer. Windows 7 users can skip one step; simply type “Workgroup” in the search box in the start menu, and select the first entry, then proceed as above.

Now that the workgroups are same for both computers, connect the two computers together using the Ethernet crossover cable. Simply plug-in one end of the crossover cable into the network adapter of Computer A and connect the other end of the cable to the network adapter of Computer B.
Windows will automatically recognize the new network, and you can now easily view files and folder that the other computer has shared. Simply open Networks from the Start Menu (or the Control Panel), and you should see the other computer by its name. You can then browse any shared files on the other computer, and can even utilize shared printers.

Troubleshooting – If you do not see the other computer under Networks, you probably have a prompt at the top of your Network window saying that Network discovery is turned off (screenshots below). Select “Turn on Network Discovery and File Sharing.”  In the next prompt, select “No, make the network I am connected to a private network.”  Now you should see the other computer on the home network.

While it is possible to share files between two computers connected with a crossover cable without making them part of the same workgroup, the method will only work if both computers have this network set as a private network, and may still cause problems. It is therefore advisable to have both computers on the same workgroup before sharing files and printers.

Share an Internet Connection Between Two Computers

There are scenarios where you may want to share the same internet connection between two computers. For instance:

Situation A - You have setup a Wi-Fi network at home but your old desktop computer doesn’t have a wireless network card. In that case, you can use the laptop to connect to the internet wirelessly and then share that same connection with the desktop over a crossover Ethernet cable.

Situation B – You have a netbook with a built-in cellular data connection. You can share that connection with any another computer at home through the crossover Ethernet cable.

Situation C – You use a (slow) Wireless USB modem with your laptop computer while your desktop is connected to an ADSL Broadband line and there’s no router at home. For any bandwidth intensive tasks, like when you want to backup photos from your laptop to an online service, you can connect the laptop to the desktop and things will happen much faster.

OK, let’s look at the steps required for sharing an Internet connection.
First, if you only wish to share internet connection and not files, both computers need not belong to the same workgroup. All you need to do is to connect the two computers with the Ethernet crossover cable, and then turn on Internet connection sharing in the computer that already has an Internet connection. The instructions vary for different versions of Windows:

For Windows XP – Select “Network and Internet Connections” from the Control Panel and click “Network Connections.”

Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (the one connected to the internet), select Properties, click on the “Advanced” tab, and then check the box that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.”  Click OK, and the second computer that you have connected to this computer with the Crossover Cable should have internet access now.

For Windows 7 and Vista – Open Control Panel, enter “network connections” in the search box on the top right and select “View Network Connections.”

Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (this must be the one connected to the internet) and select Properties. Select the "Sharing" tab and then check the option that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.” Click OK, and the other computer you have connected to this Windows 7 or Vista computer should have internet access now.

Smokers who regularly play a computer game that involves crushing virtual cigarettes could have a better chance of kicking the habit. At least, that's the implication of an experiment carried out by researchers at the University of Quebec in Canada and published in the latest issue of CyberPsychology and Behavior.

Good news for all iPhone users out there is that GeoHotz is all set and ready to release the new Blacksn0w Unlock Tool to the masses.

All the testing has been done and according to him, it will work with any iPhone on the Firmware 3.1.2, even those with the 05.11.07 baseband.

He will be releasing the tool in a couple of hours which will then be available through the Blackra1n.app. Below are some of the instructions posted by GeoHotz on his blog for users who want to use Blacksn0w to unlock the iPhone. Only those with a iPhone 3G or a 3GS should attempt.

1. Update the iPhone to Firmware 3.1.2 using iTunes.
2. Download Blackra1n RC3 through this link.
3. Run the app and click make it ra1n.
4. After the iPhone reboot, run the blackra1n.app, tap on Sn0w and install blacksn0w.

For those who already have the blackra1n.app:

You will see Icy replaced by an option "ra1n". Install this to upgrade your app. After upgrading, run blackra1n.app again. You will see "sn0w". Install this, and enjoy your unlocked iPhone.

Note: GeoHotz plans to release the new Blackra1n RC3 at Noon EST. Blacksn0w will also be available at Cydia shortly after it's official release.

New: iPhone 3G and 3GS users on baseband 05.11.07 can now unlock their iPhone using Blacksnow!