cqxxw.net

That’s when Electronic Arts and Maxis plan to release the Spore Creature Creator, in both a free, downloadable demo version and a $9.99 retail version (or 9.99 euros, for buyers in much of Europe). The demo version will be available from Spore.com and also will be included with The SimCity, due to be released June 23.

When designing characters for Spore, players will have a wide selection of body parts to choose from.

In Spore, a long-awaited game from Sims creator Wil Wright, gamers will get a taste of evolution, taking their characters from primordial existence to civilization. (Wright has set a high standard for success–The Sims recently logged its 100 millionth sale.) Besides the individual characters, Spore-ophiles will be able to establish tribes and conjure up buildings and vehicles, including UFOs.

Spore for the PC and the
Mac is set to debut September 5 in Europe and then two days later in North America, and a version for the Nintendo DS is also due at that time. A version for the
Nintendo Wii will come sometime later–it’s still in the “early prototyping phase,” according to the Spore FAQ.

The retail edition provides access to all the creature-making parts for Spore, while the demo version is limited to 25 percent of those parts. Gamers will be able to share their creations with friends, via routes including uploads to YouTube.

(Credit:
Electronic Arts/Maxis)

Attention gamers: If you’re looking forward to the taking a hands-on role with the forthcoming Spore, you’ve got work to do starting June 17.

The hands-on work of shaping and painting fantastical critters with Creature Creator won’t be just a preliminary exercise, to be abandoned when Spore arrives in September. Gamers will be able to import their creations into the retail version of the game.

For more preview images of Spore, see this CNET News.com gallery: Images: Conjuring creatures in EA’s ‘Spore.’”

It’s not clear whether the museum Wi-Fi will also let visitors access the Web as a whole, or just the internal museum site. Requests for clarification were not immediately answered.

Additionally, MoMA has put its library of audio and video programming into podcast format for Apple’s iTunes Store’s iTunes U education section: current and past audio programs, content from panels and lectures, and video clips from exhibit installations and artist interviews.

MoMA announced Monday that it has installed a museum-wide Wi-Fi network so that visitors can access a mobile Web site on handheld devices with HTML browsers, which basically means Apple’s iPhone and
iPod Touch. They can then load up audio tours and commentary; content is available in eight languages as well as in specialized versions for children, teenagers, and the visually impaired.

The legendary Museum of Modern Art in midtown Manhattan just got a bit more…modernized.

Museum visitors who are particularly information-hungry can also now use “interactive kiosks” in the form of a number of Apple’s iMac computers stationed around MoMA, featuring detailed museum information, artist biographies, events listings, and e-card services.

(Credit:
Fring)

Previously, it only ran on “jailbroken” iPhones, severely limiting its audience.

Although all iPhone communication apps remain hobbled until background processing is available, Fring does appear to be the most capable voice and text chat app there is for the device, and it’s well worth installing.

Fring places calls on cellular or VoIP networks.

The
iPhone app Fring–which acts as a VoIP client for Skype and other Internet phone networks, as well as a voice and chat interface into IM networks like AIM and Yahoo–is now available for free to everyone.

On the iPhone, Fring can read both your IM and Skype buddy lists, as well as the contacts in your phone’s address book. And when you select a contact, you get the option of calling him or her by SIP call, Skype, or standard cellular. VoIP calls obviously don’t count against your cellular minutes, but you do need to have a Wi-Fi connection to make the calls.

Fring is also available for several other mobile platforms.

The biggest challenge for Fring users is that when the app is not actively running in the foreground on your phone, it can’t notify you of incoming calls or chats or indicate your presence to buddies. Apple has yet to provide background notification capability to iPhone developers, although we keep hearing it will be in an upcoming release.

See also: Palringo.

But Obama’s recent statements, as well as those from his advisers, indicate that energy remains a high priority. The idea is that an energy policy focused on clean technologies can address environmental problems while stimulating the economy.

Kroft: Why?

Obama: Well, because this has been our pattern. We go from shock to trance. You know, oil prices go up, gas prices at the pump go up, everybody goes into a flurry of activity. And then the prices go back down and suddenly we act like it’s not important, and we start, you know filling up our SUVs again.

Obama: It’s more important. It may be a little harder politically, but it’s more important.

And, as a consequence, we never make any progress. It’s part of the addiction, all right. That has to be broken. Now is the time to break it.

In addition to spending on energy infrastructure, Obama’s energy plan calls for incentives for energy efficiency, a national renewable energy mandate for utilities, a low-carbon biofuels standard, and a cap-and-trade system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Obama said a consensus exists among policymakers that a stimulus package is required to prop up the deteriorating economy.

Interviewer Steve Kroft asked whether cutting oil imports was less important now that the price of oil has plummeted from $147 a barrel earlier this year to under $60.

Addressing the question of a bailout for cash-strapped U.S. automakers, Obama said that giving them government money with conditions is the best policy.

The anxious auto and clean-energy industries have received positive signals from President-elect Barack Obama in the past two days.

So my hope is that over the course of the next week, between the White House and Congress, the discussions are shaped around providing assistance but making sure that that assistance is conditioned on labor, management, suppliers, lenders, all the stakeholders coming together with a plan (for) what does a sustainable U.S. auto industry look like? So that we are creating a bridge loan to somewhere as opposed to a bridge loan to nowhere.”

“The president-elect will move quickly on climate change,” Jason Grumet, a high-level Obama campaign’s lead energy and environment adviser, told a conference on carbon trading last week.

In an interview with 60 Minutes broadcast on Sunday, Obama said he intends to pursue a government stimulus package that includes investments to promote clean technologies, even though oil prices have fallen dramatically during 2008.

Meanwhile, in his weekly radio address on Saturday that was broadcast as a video online, Obama reaffirmed his plans for long-term investments on green energy.

“It means investing $150 billion to build an American green-energy economy that will create 5 million new jobs while freeing our nation from the tyranny of foreign oil and saving our planet for our children,” Obama said.

Energy and environmental policy were certainly not the top topic of the president-elect’s public statements, given the pressing nature of the economic crisis and executing the transition between administrations.

He said that allowing the U.S. automakers to collapse would be a disaster but that handing them a blank check won’t solve the problem. Instead, he said that the various stakeholders need to come up with a plan for a “sustainable auto industry.” From the interview:

The thing is, those cards were supposed to be backwards-compatible with older PCI Express standards. Many were irate that Apple appeared to be forcing them to buy a new Mac Pro to get the 8800 GT, but Nvidia said it would release an upgrade kit in due time. And it’s now available on Apple’s site for $279.

Apple and Nvidia are finally shipping a graphics card for owners of older
Mac Pros who felt left out in the cold in January.

When Apple introduced the newest version of the Mac Pro in January, it offered Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GT graphics card as an upgrade option on those systems. Owners of older Mac Pros, however, were miffed that Apple said the cards would only work with the latest Mac Pro generation, because firmware in the card could only support the PCI Express 2.0 standard unveiled with the new Mac Pros.

If convicted, Duann faces a maximum of 10 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

The indictment alleges that Danielle Duann, 50, illegally accessed and damaged LifeGift Organ Donation Center’s database in November 2005, shortly after she was fired as director of information technology for the company. She is alleged to have deleted organ donation database records and accounting invoice files from the network. LifeGift said that all of the records were restored from a backup and that no patients were put into jeopardy.

At the time of her dismissal, LifeGift revoked of all Duann’s passwords and privileges to the network. On November 7 and 8, 2005, she allegedly re-entered the network and deleted files containing organ donor information and other related organ and tissue recovery work, according to a Department of Justice press release.

On Tuesday, the FBI announced the indictment of a former technology director accused of hacking into the system at a Houston organ bank and deleting patient files.

First came Flickr video on Tuesday. Then came the anti-Flickr-video outcry on Wednesday. Now there’s the anti-anti-Flickr-video outcry.

(Credit:
Flickr)

This last movement takes the highly facetious form of Flickr’s new We Demand Donuts group. “If we get 20,000 people to join the group Flickr will be forced to give us free donuts!” the group’s manifesto states. “Join the group and invite all your contacts. We will make this the biggest protest group on Flickr and force them to give us free donuts!”

The We Demand Donuts group takes a jab at those who objected to Flickr's new video service.

There are some subtleties here, but given the timing, it’s pretty clear that this group’s raison d’etre can be translated as, “Give us a break, Flickr members who are signing petitions demanding that Flickr scrap its new video service.”

More than 550 have joined so far. The No Video on Flickr group has more than 9,700.

Update 8:08 a.m. April 11:
Flickr capitulated, at least on a geographically limited basis. “We at FlickrHQ have heard of your noble efforts and seek to answer your cries for justice,” said Matthew Rothenberg, a Flickr employee, in the group’s discussion board. He promised to buy doughnuts for Flickr members who meet up at a yet-to-be-determined San Francisco shop April 16.

Researchers Yuan Niu, Francis Hsu, and Hao Chen looked at the Mobile
Safari browser in
Apple iPhone, as well as the Opera browser included in the
Nintendo Wii and DS gaming systems. In general, they cited the reliance on screen typing as a deterrent to typing in known URLs. They said users are more likely to click on URLs presented in an e-mail.

On the Nintendo Wii, the researchers found that the URL bar disappears when the page is loaded.

On the iPhone, the researchers said a simple ScrollTo() JavaScript could knock the address bar off the Safari screen. In the paper, they gave an example in which JavaScript directs the page to load somewhere in the middle, forcing the address bar off the top of the page.

Even when the address bar is visible, the researchers were able to use JavaScript to overwrite the bogus address with a more legitimate address. The overwrite trick could also lead the user into thinking a site was Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-protected when it was not.

In a paper (PDF) presented at the Usability, Psyschology, and Security Conference 2008 in San Francisco, researchers from the University of California at Davis warned that browsers within popular electronic gadgets often eliminate important security features available on desktop browsers.

The researchers state that porting the traditional browser to a mobile device requires some foresight, and they suggest that even built-in features within browsers are ignored by users. They suggest instead that vendors use a proxy to filter out phishing before routing the pages to the devices.

They also said reduced screen sizes tend to force the address bar off the screen. On the Nintendo DS, only the first 22 characters display. They gave an example of a page called www.bankofamerica.com.phishydomain.com, which would be truncated to simply www.bankofamerica.com.

(Credit:
Vollee)

Demanding a better-than-average processor, a 1024×768 screen resolution, a boatload of RAM, and a strong video card just to take part, it’s hard to believe that Second Life, the virtual world developed by Linden Lab (download for Windows and Mac), could ever survive on a mobile phone.

In Second Life Mobile, users will be able to fly and teleport all over the virtual world, and chat when other friends are online.

We haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but we will soon. Watch this space for our first take of gameplay.

Talk about porting Second Life to cell phones began in February, and a private beta program of Second Life Mobile appeared shortly after.

'Second Life' avatars can fly and teleport from 40 mobile phones.

Yet on Tuesday, Vollee, a 3G streaming services provider, began offering the free, open beta version of Second Life for 40 Wi-Fi-enabled and 3G cell phones with more handset compatibility coming soon. That means you,
iPhone.

How does Vollee accomplish the gargantuan, scoffed-at task of hosting a huge, graphics-hungry PC game on such compact devices? They won’t spill much, except to say that Second Life Mobile is a thin client downloaded to the high-end cell phone that communicates with the full, unmodified game that’s hosted on Vollee’s servers. All the adaptation happens on Vollee’s end, with the mobile-friendly results streaming to each individual handset.

There is real money to be made by developing Web 2.0 products for enterprises. Harnessing collective intelligence can lead to the promised land of profits. (O’Reilly’s company recently started an enterprise consulting practice to take advantage of the trend, and he also shamelessly touted Wesabe, one of his investments, in his remarks.)

But O’Reilly also recognized that just making money on Web 2.0 or acknowledging the transformative powers of the Internet is insufficient. He challenged the audience of several thousand attendees to have big goals, such as making governments responsive to citizens and building a global immune system through Internet-based efforts. It’s not always about the money or augmenting human intelligence.

From the high-level view of the Internet revolution year, O’Reilly telescoped down to the exhibit floor, which is populated by more enterprise players, such as IBM and Oracle, than the previous year. It’s a sign that Web 2.0, with technologies such as wikis, blogs, tags, social networks, and collective intelligence, is maturing.

Web 2.0 evangelist Tim O'Reilly addresses the crowd at the Web 2.0 Expo.

However, the maturing of Web 2.0 and cloud computing, the move to the Internet as a platform, has problems, O’Reilly noted. The market values centralization and consolidation. It values big winners who can dominate a market. O’Reilly cautioned that this situation could lead us back to the world of large, centralized players like Oracle and Microsoft, which could stifle innovation and openness.

SAN FRANCISCO–Tim O’Reilly kicked off the keynote sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo here, pacing the stage and evangelizing the power of the Internet.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

So, the Internet is important and revolutionary, and harvesting collective intelligence is core to Web 2.0 and a way to make more money, according to the pied piper of Web 2.0.

We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. “We are in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 is all around us,” O’Reilly said. He got nods from the crowd of the converted, who were busy Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, and SMSing, practicing continuous partial attention.

“The Internet is becoming the global platform for everything,” he said, and it will make everyone in the world smarter. “It’s an amazing revolution in human augmentation akin to literacy or the formation of cities,” he continued. “It’s a huge change in the way the world works.”

The paradox is that applications built on open, decentralized networks are leading to new concentrations of power (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.), he said. He advocated building in an interoperability layer to reduce the harmful effects of having a few companies with enormous power and leverage.