Brennon Slattery, PC World

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Published: May 21, 2010

2,246: And counting. As of Thursday, the number of Martian days (each of which, in Earth time, is 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds) that the NASA rover Opportunity had explored the surface of Mars, surpassing the record set by the Viking 1 lander in November 1982. The rover was designed for a three-month mission. “I thought we’d get six months,” said Steven W. Squyres, an astronomy professor at Cornell and principal investigator for the project. “Six years? No.” At last report, the Opportunity was on its way to a large crater, named Endeavour, that it will not reach for two more years. If it lasts that long.

The fact that Namco's Pac-Man has been around for 30 years can make you feel ancient.

One of the world’s biggest technology companies is working on plans to power its data centres using energy generated from cow manure.
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard (HP) want to build computer warehouses on dairy farms where they would be hooked up to power plants fuelled by waste.
Just one cow produces enough waste every day to power the televisions in three typical households. A large dairy farm, with about 10,000 cows, produces enough to run one of the firm’s typical data centres and meet the energy needs of the farmer, the HP scientists believe.
If it works, the scheme could potentially solve two of the world’s looming environmental problems at a stroke.
Cow manure has long been seen as a threat because of the methane gas it produces. Methane is about 20 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide. Global meat and dairy consumption is expected to soar in the next 10 years as countries such as China and India move towards a more western diet.
The amount of data stored online, meanwhile, is increasing and, to hold it, technology firms are building vast computer complexes that consume large quantities of power and generate heat. This heat can be piped away and used as an energy source.
Tom Christian, principal research scientist at HP, said: “The idea of using waste to generate energy has been around for centuries, with manure being used every day in remote villages to generate heat for cooking. The new idea that we are presenting in this research is to create a symbiotic relationship between farms and the IT ecosystem that can benefit the farm, the data centre and the environment.”
The HP plans were unveiled at a conference last week in Arizona. Initially, the research is focused on America, which has the biggest demand in the world for data centres as well as large-scale dairy farms.
HP believes a farmer who signed up to the scheme could earn as much as $2m (£1.4m) a year by selling waste-derived power to a data centre.
The world’s big technology firms are all working on plans to cut the environmental impact of their data centres.
Almost every item of data sent on the internet is stored in a server farm somewhere in the world. Demand for these data centres seems almost infinite.
An increasing number of data centres are being powered by solar panels and wind farms. The Icelandic government wants its tech firms to power their data centres using geothermal power.
Atlantis Power, a small Scottish firm, is building a data centre on Stroma, Orkney, that will be powered by tidal turbines generating electricity from the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth.

Matt Peckham, PC World

Should I buckle and buy an iPad? Snap up the reworked Civilization Revolution to laze for hours on the couch tapping out dispatches to my own personal Cleopatra, Bismarck, or Lincoln? Spring for the snazzier high definition iteration of Plants vs. Zombies to futz around with pole-vaulters, snorkelers, bobsledders, and this version's finger-tangling 11 simultaneous touch points? Hold the iPad up like a placard and induce vertigo, tilting it left and right to jockey muscle cars and exotic autos along sinuous forest tracks in Real Racing HD?
With an application library cruising at a comfortable sales altitude of well over six figures, it's getting harder to write the platform off as an iPod XL. I want to give EA's swipe-interface side-scroller Mirror's Edge a try, rekindle my Scrabble fetish with two-player tabletop (nothing to pull out or put away!), and clinch kickflips, ollies, and shuvits on a pair of nimble finger-legs with Touch Grind HD.
And now I'm reading the iPad's outselling the Mac nearly 2-to-1 and nipping at the iPhone's heels. Nothing like a bandwagon to jump on, right?
Before I do though, I have a few requests.
1. Take gaming seriously, Apple. Books a spot at trade shows like E3 and developer's conferences like GDC. Don't shove that responsibility off on the developers. You're just like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo--you've created a discrete platform. You're leading the way in mobile touch-based interfaces. Your sales are in the millions. Get out there and sell this puppy to gamers from a gaming standpoint. Your current muted live-and-let-someone-else-liven-things-up strategy just looks lazy.
2. Get off your self-serving anti-Flash high-horse, Steve Jobs. The number of web-based Flash games dwarves your App Store's library. The Android just got Flash player 10.1 and access to Kongregate's massive games library (starting with 120 that work off the mat growing to more than 28,000 once developers tweak their interfaces). Follow Android's lead, and make installing it a choice, not a requirement. Still don't like Flash? Tough. In a world where Flash's gaming audience alone may be twice the size of the console games market, it's called compromise. (The latter's why the internet works at all, frankly.)
3. Release a wireless gamepad for the iPad. No wires, no funky ports, no kludgy hybrid on-and-off-screen combos, just something sleek and simple. The iPad's direct input touch and tilt controls work gangbusters for some games, but clearly prohibit the adoption of others. One interface will not rule them all, especially when we're talking the increasing strata of gamer types.
4. Widescreen 1280 x 720 (i.e. 720p) support, and some sort of 'video out' adapter. (HDMI would be lovely!)
5. You're off the hook for this last one, Apple: Add the iPhone and iPad to your platform rosters, games press. No more apologetic one-off features because you're too busy (or lazy, or intimidated) to care. No more insincere cheerleading for the same 'top [insert number]' iPad games before you bury the story in PS3XboxWii battle news. Yes, the App Store's library can be overwhelming, but a lot of it's junk, and--now more than ever--Apple gamers would appreciate insightful critics who can spotlight the gems.
Follow me on Twitter (@game_on)

By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN

Published: May 21, 2010

The growing number of requests by the European countries, and Hong Kong, raised the possibility that Google might be required to disclose for the first time exactly what its employees collected in 33 countries while compiling Street View. And that in turn increased the likelihood that Google, the world’s largest search engine company, could face fines or other penalties.
The company said Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland had asked it to retain the data collected from their citizens. Google has described the data as fragments of Web pages and e-mail messages recorded by its roving fleet of specially equipped vehicles.
In a statement, Google said that it had received the multiple requests to retain the Wi-Fi data and that privacy officials in Denmark and Austria, by contrast, had joined Ireland, in asking the search engine to destroy data collected in their countries.
Google did not say in its statement whether it was prepared go a step further and turn over the data it had collected to individual regulators.
Peter Church, a privacy lawyer at Linklaters in London, said it was likely that the countries asking Google to refrain from destroying their data would eventually seek to inspect the data themselves.
“I would imagine that they would want to have a look at this information,” Mr. Church said. “Was Google just looking at the headers of the Wi-Fi information or were they looking at the content? I would imagine that the authorities in these jurisdictions will now look at the information. They will want to know whether or not it was tiny snippets of information, as Google has said, or something more.”
Hana Stepankova, a spokeswoman for the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection, confirmed that her office was investigating. She said it was too early to say whether regulators would ask to see the Czech data.
“In a country like the Czech Republic, which has had a history of secret surveillance before 1989, people are still very sensitive about anyone trying to listen in to their private business,” Ms. Stepankova said.
Google attributed its decision to withhold the data as a concession to “uncertainty” among privacy regulators, one of which, Google said, initially asked it to delete, and then retain, its data. Google did not identify the country.
“Following requests from the Irish, Danish and Austrian data protection authorities, we can confirm that we have deleted payload data identified as coming from those countries,” Google said Friday. “We can also confirm that, as requested, we are keeping data from Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. Given that there is some uncertainty about deletion generally, for example one data protection authority changed its instruction from delete to retain in the last 24 hours, we think it makes sense to keep the remaining country data while we work through these issues.”
Pressure from the German data supervisor in Hamburg, where Google Germany is based, prompted Google on May 14 to disclose that it had collected 600 gigabytes of data from unsecured Wi-FI networks in 33 countries and Hong Kong for Street View.
So far, only the data protection supervisor in Hamburg, Johannes Caspar, and the privacy commissioner in Hong Kong, Roderick B. Woo, have asked for copies of the data collected in their countries.
Google has said that it collected the data inadvertently through a programming error.
But fallout from the disclosure continued to reverberate. In the United States on Thursday, the chairman Federal Trade Commission said it would conduct an informal review of Google’s collection efforts. Regulators in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are also questioning the company.
In Portland, Ore., two computer users filed a class-action suit in United States District Court against Google on behalf of residents in Oregon and Washington.

CBS)  Astronauts Piers Sellers and Garrett Reisman, operating the International Space Station's robot arm, moved a cargo pallet loaded with old solar array batteries back to the shuttle Atlantis' cargo bay Saturday for a return to Earth.

Working at the robotics work station inside the station's multi-window cupola, Sellers and Reisman began moving the integrated cargo carrier back to the shuttle completed the operation at 5:50 a.m., writes CBS News space analyst Bill Harwood.

CBS News' Space Place: STS-132 Mission Update
Photos of Atlantis Launch

For launch, the shuttle was loaded with a backup Ku-band dish antenna, an 8-foot antenna boom, an equipment storage platform and six new batteries to replace outdated power packs in the station's far left solar array.

The antenna, its support boom and the equipment platform were moved to the space station during a spacewalk Monday. The new batteries were installed during spacewalks Wednesday and Friday and the old batteries were bolted to the ICC for return to Earth.

"The shuttle crew has mainly got all their eyes on the robotics and what's happening there," said space station Flight Director Scott Stover.

"Additionally, both shuttle and station crew will be cleaning up all the EVA tools and equipment. Some of that equipment has to come back on the shuttle, including some of the suits, so we're going to be transferring a lot of that from the space station airlock back over to Atlantis.

"At the same time, we've got some stage EVAs coming up, probably in July, so we have to make sure the space station airlock is in a good config, so whenever we go out the door in July, we're ready to go.

"Of course, the most important thing we do on the space station is all the science," he said. "So all of the space station crew members and a few of the shuttle crew members will be partaking in experiments and all kinds of activities, just to make sure we're keeping that science going."

After answering video questions from school kids at 7:40 a.m., the combined 12-member shuttle-station crew planned to share a joint meal at 8 a.m. The Atlantis astronauts looked forward to two-and-a-half hours of off-duty time starting at 11:05 a.m., with crew sleep on tap at 4:50 p.m.

Atlantis is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station around 11:22 a.m. ET Sunday.

For more smart takes on technology, visit Technologizer.com. Story copyright © 2010, Technologizer. All rights reserved.

An online tool will tell you how secure your settings are—does it work?

One wonders if Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Facebook executives are wishing they could declare a do-over right about now, dating back to late April. That’s when Facebook held its developer summit and unveiled plans to make the social network even more ubiquitous on the Web—and that also raised a number of serious privacy concerns among Facebook users. Since then, Facebook has been the subject of what seems like a daily drumbeat of headlines about its privacy policies, whether it’s users quitting the social network service or pundits advocating for improved privacy rules.
The optimist in me hopes that the public uproar inspires Facebook’s management to spend less effort on spin and more on unraveling the Gordian Knot that is managing your privacy settings on the social network site. (It’s an oft-quoted tidbit, but this New York Times report bears repeating: to completely manage your privacy on Facebook, you’ve got to manage 50 settings with more than 170 options. That seems… excessive.) Until Facebook lets up the requisite puff of white smoke to announce what came out of last week’s privacy summit, however, when it comes to making sure your Facebook information is only seen by the people you want to share it with, you’re still on your own.
Well, not entirely on your own—ReclaimPrivacy.org, a privacy awareness group, has developed a tool that scans your Facebook privacy settings to tell you how secure your data is. The tool is available in the form of a bookmarklet that you drag to the bookmarks bar of your Web browser. Then you head to Facebook’s privacy settings screen—ReclaimPrivacy.org helpfully provides a link—and click on the bookmark. After the tool scans your privacy settings in six areas—Facebook’s Instant Personalization feature; your personal data; contact information; friends, tags, and connections information; what your friends can share about you; and whether applications can leak your personal data—it tells you what areas are secure and where you may want to consider tweaking your settings.
Hold on a minute, the privacy-focused among you might be saying: How do I know that ReclaimPrivacy.org will respect my privacy. The Website says it never sees your Facebook data nor does it share your personal information. It also publishes the source code for its scanning tool in the name of transparency.

I used the ReclaimPrivacy.org tool on my own Facebook account to see how it worked, testing it both on Safari 4 and Firefox 3.6. Running the scanner takes just a few seconds, and I got a green Secure label for Instant Personalization, as well as preventing friends and applications from inadvertently sharing my data. Three areas were flagged with a yellow caution label—my personal information, contact information, and friends, tags, and connections data. (According to reports elsewhere on the Internet, there’s a third label—a red “insecure” flag. That one didn’t appear in my tests, which I guess is a sign that my paranoia and distrust of my fellow man is good for something.) The ReclaimPrivacy.org tool provides helpful links for adjusting any settings it flags as problematic. To secure my personal information, I clicked on the supplied link and altered my biographical info so that only my Facebook friends could see it. Hitting the rescan button brought up a green secure label for my personal information.
Securing my contact information and friends, tags, and connections data proved more problematic. I’ve set my Facebook preferences to allow anyone to add me as a friend or send me a message. That apparently raises a caution flag for ReclaimPrivacy.org, though it’s one I’m willing to live with. (What’s the point of being on a social network only to make it difficult for people to find you? Besides, I figure I can ignore any friend requests or messages that strike me as hinky.) As for friends, tags, and connections, I can only guess that ReclaimPrivacy is concerned that I’ve made my hometown, education, and work info visible to anyone. (No one must ever know that Philip Michaels is employed by Macworld!) While I can understand that some Facebook users may not want to share that specific data, I’m fine with having it out there just as I’m fine with ReclaimPrivacy.org letting me know that I may want to rethink that stance if I want to be completely secure.
There’s one thing about the ReclaimPrivacy.org tool that struck me as curious: When I scanned my Facebook settings in Firefox, I got the all clear on everything—even the categories still flagged with a yellow Caution label in Safari. My takeaway message? As helpful as the ReclaimPrivacy.org tool is—and it is very helpful—it’s not a silver bullet for every privacy concern you’ll have on Facebook. The best weapon you have is still your own common sense—though a little clarity from Facebook itself would be welcome, too.
[Macworld.com executive editor Philip Michaels requests that you keep his employment data under your hat.]

Dell Inc.: Kaufman Bros. equity analyst Shaw Wu maintained a hold rating on shares of Dell Inc. (DELL) on May 21. He raised a price target on the shares to $14 from $13.
On May 20, Dell, the world's third-largest personal-computer maker, reported first-quarter gross margins that missed some analysts' estimates after rising component costs eroded the benefit of a rebound in corporate demand.
Gross margin, excluding some items, was 17.6 percent, Dell said in a statement.
The higher costs of some components, such as memory chips, cut into profitability for the second-straight quarter even as Dell won new buyers for PCs, which account for more than half of revenue. Dell is working to lessen its dependence on PCs by expanding into services, adding smartphones and readying a tablet to take on Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ).
"The gross margin is somewhat concerning," said Wu in a May 20 interview on Bloomberg TV.
Dell reported that first-quarter sales rose 21 percent to $14.9 billion. Net income rose 52 percent to $441 million, or 22 cents a share, from $290 million, or 15 cents, a year earlier. Profit, minus some costs, was 30 cents a share. Analysts on average projected profit of 27 cents on sales of $14.2 billion.
In a May 21 note, Wu said that Dell had a "nice quarter," but the company's gross margin and quality of earnings were "disappointing". Wu said that Dell's gross margin of 17.6% was below expectations of 17.9%; "it looks like DELL got hit harder on rising component costs" than Apple and Hewlett-Packard. Dell "has a much less diverse business model and thus much less room to maneuver," Wu said.
"In addition, the quality of earnings continues to be poor where there is a 27% difference between GAAP and non-GAAP EPS compared to 39% and 26% over the previous two quarters," Wu wrote.
The analyst raised fiscal 2011 estimates for revenue to $61.5 billion from $58.5 billion, and for earnings per share (EPS) to $1.20 from $1.15. "[W]e are assuming higher revenue offset by a lower gross margin thus our EPS raise is more muted," he wrote.
Clean Harbors Inc.: Wunderlich Securities equity analyst Michael Hoffman maintained a hold rating on shares of Clean Harbors Inc. (CLH), which provides environmental cleanup services, on May 21. He raised a price target on the shares to $62 from $55.
In a note, Hoffman said the stabilization of the company's technical services and industrial services segments in the first quarter of 2010, combined with the potential for an improved second half of 2010 and a stronger fiscal 2011 as economic growth in the U.S. and Canada remains positive, "suggests that fundamentals alone should support a higher valuation in line with our new price target".
"In the short term, speculation over the Gulf oil spill's potential impact to CLH 2010 guidance is overshadowing fundamentals," he wrote. "We believe the ultimate valuation impact of the Gulf spill event will be less than $3.00 per share."
Clean Harbors has 600 workers in the Gulf of Mexico region, Chief Executive Officer Alan McKim said on CNBC on May 5.

By Ben Levisohn
--Editors: James Holloway, Gregory Storey
To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Levisohn in New York at blevisohn@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dave Liedtka at dliedtka@bloomberg.net

A JetBlue pilot turned over a gun before he was taken from Logan International Airport to a Boston hospital for evaluation Thursday, officials said. State Police were notified at 1:45 p.m. Thursday by a federal air marshal that a man had sent an “electronic communication’’ to an acquaintance that led her to believe he might harm himself, State Police spokesman David Procopio said. Procopio said he did not know exactly what the message said. State Police located the man in a JetBlue crew lounge, where they talked with him and he agreed to be taken to Massachusetts General Hospital for evaluation, Procopio said. The man turned over a gun to the marshals, Procopio said.

It's certainly making all the right prelaunch moves.
Late Thursday, Tesla announced it's teaming up with industry heavyweight Toyota Motor Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!tm/quotes/nls/tm (TM 75.59, +1.59, +2.15%) The deal includes a helpful $50 million cash injection from Toyota and gives Tesla the automotive clout critics have long claimed it lacks. Read more about Tesla teaming up with Toyota.
It also buys lots of local goodwill. The Tesla-Toyota team plans to reopen the old GM-Toyota plant in Fremont, right across San Francisco Bay from its headquarters, and hire about 1,000 workers -- laying the groundwork for what many hope will be the high-tech rebirth of the American auto industry.
All this news is getting a giddy reaction from an unusual alliance of environmentalists, car buffs and techies, all practically begging to be part of this new venture. They'll likely get their chance. Tesla applied to launch an initial public offering back in January; the company just hasn't set a date for when it will be. Read about Tesla's planned IPO.
Meanwhile, for cool-headed capitalists, Tesla's planned IPO is hardly a slam dunk. While there's plenty to love about the Tesla-Toyota partnership, it doesn't answer many of the vexing questions that have dogged the electric-car business for decades.
Are the cars reliable? What's their driving range? Do they require a network of recharging stations to keep them on the road? And do they offer the kind of basic, bottom-line transportation value needed to attract mainstream buyers in a tough market?

While there's plenty to love about the Tesla-Toyota deal, it doesn't answer many of the questions that dog the electric-car business.

What's more, the venture faces all sorts of problematic manufacturing and labor issues. Less than a day after the announcement, the United Auto Workers insisted Tesla-Toyota hire workers recently laid off at the old GM-Toyota plant.
Silicon Valley, meet Detroit. Talk about a mind-numbing culture clash.
Despite the pitfalls and the distinct possibility of failure, it's refreshing to see that a little of the old gold-rush mentality has survived these glum economic times, and that there are still people eager to jump on something innovative and untested.
American entrepreneurs aren't dead. They just need the right mix of incentives and imagination to lure them out of hiding.
-- Jim Jelter