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SAN JOSE, Calif. - For nearly 40 years, scientists have speculated that basic electrical circuits have a natural ability to remember things even when the power is switched off. They just couldn’t find it.

Now researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. have proven them right, with a discovery they hope will lead to memory chips that store more data but consume far less power than those found in today’s personal computers and other digital devices.

The newly discovered circuit element — called a memristor — could enable cell phones that can go weeks or longer without a charge, PCs that start up instantly, and laptops that retain your session information long after the battery dies.

It also could challenge flash memory, which is now widely used in portable electronics because of its ability to retain information even when power is off. Chips incorporating the HP discovery would be faster, suck up less power and take up far less space than today’s flash.

“It certainly looks promising,” said Wolfgang Porod, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Notre Dame and director of the university’s Center for Nano Science and Technology. “However, if it’s going to be 100 times better or 1,000 times better (than today’s flash), it’s very hard to say at this point.”

Scientists have suspected since the 1970s that along with the three well-known elements of a basic circuit — the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor — a fourth fundamental building block is possible.

The memristor built by HP Labs researchers and reported Thursday in the scientific journal Nature is made with a layer of titanium dioxide sandwiched between two metal electrodes. The researchers discovered that the amount of resistance it exerts depends on how much electric charge had previously passed through it.

That characteristic gives the memristor an innate ability to remember the amount of charge that has flowed through it long after the power to it is turned off. That means the circuit itself can be built with a memory function baked in.

Otherwise, data have to be stored in power-hungry transistors configured for storage. That also takes up valuable real estate on microprocessors or requires separate memory chips.

Some outside researchers, however, said more study is required before the memristor upsets the memory business. The HP Labs team said commercial viability is at least “a few years” away.

“These structures are going to be very small. It’s obvious to me one could make very dense memory out of them, but how it could compete against other memory like flash remains to be seen,” said Porod, who was not involved in the HP research.

Leon Chua, a professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper in 1971 theorizing that it should be possible to build such a structure.

Over the years, researchers observed behavior that seemed to suggest circuits possessed this ability, but they either dismissed it as a fluke or didn’t realize the significance of the observation.

Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP Labs and one of the four researchers on the Nature paper, said his team was able to identify the behavior and build a structure to harness its power because the effect is more apparent — and gets stronger — as the wiring in the circuits gets smaller and smaller.

Chua, who wrote the first paper on the topic when he was a new professor at Berkeley, is now 71 years old and says he’s nearing retirement from the university.

“I never thought I’d live long enough to see this happen,” Chua said with a laugh. “I’m thrilled because it’s almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it’s fundamental.”

As Macintosh computers make some inroads into the enterprise, they are still behind in certain areas of corporate communications. On Tuesday, Microsoft took a step toward closing a bit of that gap by releasing its Messenger for Mac 7 with audio and video support, if users are connected via Office Communications Server 2007.

With Communications Server 2007 and the newest Messenger for Mac on a corporate system, users can have face-to-face instant messaging, audio/video meetings — and even multi-party conferencing — with others both inside and outside their office. This includes people using Windows PCs and users of the Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger services. It does not support communication with AOL Instant Messenger or people using .Mac accounts.

Supports Bonjour, Easy Searching

Messenger 7, which now supports the Bonjour service-discovery functionality that is built into the Mac operating system, is available as a free download. It requires Mac OS X 10.4.9, Windows Live ID for personal accounts, or Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 for enterprise users.

The new offering also makes it easier for enterprise workers to search a corporate address book from within Messenger, or to find internal contacts. A user can see which contacts are connected to a local network and, for example, if you have two contacts named Sam, you can assign nicknames. Contacts can be located in large buddy lists via a search-as-you-type box. The company also said that communications have increased security within the corporate network.

New “presence” enhancements in Messenger also allow users to add a personal message to contact information, so that you can let others know when you're available for chatting. Mac users with a Windows Live account can also share files and other communications through Messenger 7.

No Audio/Video When Stand-Alone

On officeformac.com, the blog for Microsoft's Office for Mac team, a team member named Anav noted that Messenger 7 has “more detailed presence information that is compatible with the presence model of Office Communications Server 2007.” This includes, for instance, the ability to automatically set a status to “in a call” when the user is on an audio or video call, or the ability to add a personal note about your current status.

David Mario Smith, a senior research analyst with industry research firm Gartner, noted that while this new version has audio/video support when used with Communications Server, it lacks that functionality when it is used as a stand-alone application.

On Mactopia, Anav noted that the Mac team was still “on track” for making audio and video available for the personal service, without Communications Server, but that the functionality was being delivered to the corporate market first.

In general, Smith added, the Mac is still not a big part of the push toward unified communications in the enterprise.

A federal court has dealt a body blow to the recording industry's efforts to sue people who use peer-to-peer software to download music from the Internet. In fact, says one copyright lawyer, the P2P decision could mean the end of the Recording Industry Association of America's litigation strategy.

In Atlantic Records v. Howell, U.S. District Court Judge Neil V. Wake rejected the RIAA's theory that the defendants distributed music files merely by making them publicly available through the Kazaa P2P application. Contrary to the music industry's theory, “Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution,” the judge wrote.

The facts of the case are fairly typical. MediaSentry, the private investigator that researches these matters for the RIAA, used Kazaa to identify 4,000 files available from the Howells' computer, with 54 of them copyrighted music files. MediaSentry took screenshots showing the files available and downloaded 12 of the songs.

'Gold Standard'

The defendants, Jeffrey and Pamela Howell, say they made legitimate copies of their CDs for personal use and they didn't know Kazaa was making them public. Asked in a deposition if he was sharing music files online, Jeffrey Howell said, “I was not, no. The computer was, but I was not. The computer in some form … made files that I did not know available on the Internet.”

“This case harmonizes everything. It sets the gold standard,” said Ray Beckerman, a copyright attorney with the New York firm of Vandenberg & Feliu and author of the Recording Industry v. The People blog, in a telephone interview. “Other district courts will follow it. Appeals courts will follow it.”

In the Howell case, the recording industry now has to “show he actually disseminated to members of the public — and that he did it, not someone else,” Beckerman said.

A Fatal Blow?

The decision will be devastating to the recording industry's litigation strategy, Beckerman said. “In cases where the person admittedly or clearly made unauthorized copies, those people will be held to have violated the reproduction right” — the copyright holder's exclusive right to reproduce content — Beckerman said. But the industry will lose when it comes to the right of distribution, he added. “I believe they won't be able to prove actual dissemination.”

The litigation strategy has made sense because of the statutory damages the Copyright Act allows for copyright infringement — starting at $750 per song for unintentional infringement and as high as $150,000 per song for willful infringement. That was the basis of the verdict against Jammie Thomas, who was ordered to pay $9,250 per song for total damages of $222,000 — based on the “making available” theory.

While Thomas has moved to set that verdict aside, the Howell decision strongly boosts her argument that the verdict was based on an erroneous jury instruction, Beckerman said. If the case eventually gets to appeal, “any appellate brief would come in firing on the Howell case,” Beckerman said. “If I were writing the brief, I now have four cases holding the jury instruction was improper, and this is the strongest one yet.”

Damages of $750 per song will also be held unconstitutional, Beckerman predicted, since the actual lost profit when a song is copied is about 40 cents. In cases where restaurants and bars have played music without paying royalties, damages have been limited to no more than four times actual damages, Beckerman said. At those rates litigation becomes impossible to justify.

“I'm pretty sure these P2P cases will be struck down,” Beckerman said, “but I expect this to go away before it's all resolved.” Shareholders will put a stop to the lawsuits before the courts do, he added.

NEW YORK - AOL made key mistakes that pushed down display-advertising sales and resulted in the Time Warner Inc. unit’s first quarter of flat ad revenue since it began staking its future on the boom in online ads, executives said Wednesday.

AOL’s troubles integrating $1 billion worth of corporate acquisitions into a single “Platform-A” should serve as a warning for Microsoft Corp. as it pursues an unsolicited bid for Yahoo Inc. now worth more than $40 billion.

“If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, a much larger company to digest (than the ones AOL has acquired), it will be many quarters” before the units operate tightly, said David Hallerman, a senior analyst with the research group eMarketer. “It’s so hard to make that kind of change, to really integrate, when there have been all these silos.”

Overall, AOL revenues fell 23 percent in the three months ending March 31, compared with the same period in 2007, according to Time Warner. With advertising making up only half of AOL’s revenue, the 1 percent growth in advertising was not enough to offset the 38 percent plunge in subscriptions.

The 1 percent increase at AOL also was low compared with its rivals. During the first quarter, Google Inc. saw a 40 percent increase in online ads, Microsoft a 39 percent jump and Yahoo 7 percent.

The company suffered from the loss of an exclusive partnership with a major advertising customer.

And even as AOL set audience records in March, display advertising on AOL-owned sites — historically its revenue staple apart from its plummeting Internet access business — declined 18 percent.

Time Warner blamed challenges merging Tacoda, Quigo and other acquisitions with its long-standing Advertising.com business.

“We didn’t integrate our Platform-A acquisitions fast enough,” said Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive. “That created a sales channel conflict.”

In recent weeks, AOL has extended Tacoda’s ad-targeting technologies across its entire platform, introduced more automated tools for advertisers and partner Web sites and reorganized its ad sales teams. Last month, AOL elevated Advertising.com president Lynda Clarizio to run the entire Platform-A business, ousting Tacoda’s former chief.

Bewkes said the changes should allow advertisers for the first time to buy ads on both AOL and partner sites at once, an option long available elsewhere.

“We’re executing these changes now, so we don’t expect to see the full benefits in the current quarter, but we’re optimistic that this dislocation is largely behind us,” Bewkes said during a conference call Wednesday.

AOL embarked in late 2004 on an ad-focused strategy, making most of its news articles, music videos and other features available free through ad-supported Web sites rather than exclusively to subscribers paying for AOL’s Internet access service. It accelerated the shift in 2006 when it gave away AOL.com e-mail accounts and software.

As expected, Internet access subscriptions have continued to decline — to 8.7 million as of March 31, down from a U.S. peak of nearly 27 million in September 2002. But the quarter’s 6 percent drop in subscribers was the smallest under the accelerated strategy, according to Associated Press calculations.

Bewkes said Time Warner expects to finish separating AOL’s advertising and access operations by June, allowing the parent “to enhance our strategic flexibility.” Although Bewkes did not elaborate, options include selling one or both businesses, most likely the access side first.

The first quarter saw the loss of an exclusive partnership with Apollo Group Inc., which owns for-profit University of Phoenix.

Although Apollo continues to buy ads, AOL lost $39 million in the quarter with the termination of exclusivity, more than offsetting a growth of $36 million in ads run on AOL’s network of third-party sites. That means the 25 percent growth in third-party ads mostly resulted from company acquisitions, which contributed $41 million in revenues.

Hallerman described Apollo’s influence as a classic case of “having so many eggs in one basket,” but said AOL should be able to withstand the decline as it continues emphasizing ad networks and the diversity of customers they can attract.

AOL also was helped by its minority owner, Google, which has been generating higher revenues by emphasizing quality over volume in its lucrative paid-search business. Search ads on AOL sites grew 4 percent during the quarter.

WASHINGTON - The NASA inspector general says the space agency is breaking the law by allowing conflicts of interest on a board overseeing the building of a new spaceship to return astronauts to the moon.

The board is set up to review NASA’s new Orion capsule. The panel is loaded with employees of the contractors it is supposed to scrutinize, the inspector general report says.

The report says the board chairman and five other members work for contractors hired by NASA for the multi-billion-dollar space shuttle replacement program. Four of the six are also stockholders in firms making money off the NASA project, the report says.

Enterprise search vendor Dieselpoint is behind a new open-source project centering on a document “pipeline”– or as the Chicago company's CEO, Chris Cleveland, puts it, “all the boring stuff you need to make enterprise search work.”

Enterprise search implementations often cover an array of document sources and components; pipelines allow companies to standardize the processing of information before it gets pushed into a search-engine indexer.

“We're connecting the crawler companies to the text analytic companies to the search engine companies,” Cleveland said.

Dieselpoint was having trouble integrating its own pipeline with third-party document analyzers and content connectors, and has open-sourced it as a basis for the project, which is dubbed OpenPipeline.

Its Web site is scheduled to open to the public on Monday, and a fully functional version of the software will be downloadable under the Apache 2.0 license. It is available under a commercial license as well, according to the site.

The software features a point-and-click user interface and provides a number of connectors, including Web and SQL crawlers. It also supports a number of commercial connectors for products such as SharePoint, Exchange and a number of portals.

Dieselpoint is pursuing the project both to make bigger, more complex implementations easier and in hopes that it will draw some customers to its search engine.

“The single biggest barrier to adoption of enterprise search is doing integration,” Cleveland said. “Of course, it means enormous consulting engagements, so it's a source of revenue for the industry, but it's a deterrent.”

While major search vendors have pipelines, they are “all proprietary and all closed,” he said.

A number of other vendors and consultants have signed on to the effort's advisory board. They include Alias-i, Applied Relevance and Raritan Technologies. Cleveland is anticipating more companies will join soon.

Conceptually, an open-source pipeline makes sense for the industry on the whole “because each component is worthless on its own,” he suggested.

Guy Creese, an analyst with Burton Group, compared OpenPipeline to an existing project.

“IBM attempted to fix this issue with UIMA [Unstructured Information Management Architecture], its framework for letting multiple vendors work together on a text analytics pipeline. However, UIMA has not done especially well in the market,” he said via e-mail. “It's unclear whether that's due to the complexity of UIMA or the fact that the market isn't quite there yet (I believe it's the latter).”

“In short, OpenPipeline is an interesting, open-source alternative to UIMA. However, its appeal will still remain small in the market, as many enterprises aren't at the point where they need to mix and match text analytics modules,” he added.

But Cleveland countered that even basic aspects of an enterprise search implementation can involve a lot of “drudgery,” which OpenPipeline can help alleviate: “It's the simple stuff. 'Can I get [data] out of the system, add security to it and send it to the search engine?'”

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A new, viral web site conceived by U.S. college students challenges stereotypes about who might be infected with HIV using a model pioneered by a campaign to raise awareness about Darfur.

The site, www.PosorNot.com, was unveiled on Wednesday by MTV, the Kaiser Family Foundation and POZ Magazine and presents viewers with photos of people of different ages, colors and genders, challenging them to guess whether the person has tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.

A number of celebrities are supporting the educational campaign including Wyclef Jean, Fall Out Boy, Will.i.am, Alyssa Milano, Say Anything, Angels & Airwaves, Atmosphere, The Spill Canvas, 30 Seconds to Mars, Aesop Rock, Motion City Soundtrack, All Time Low and Rise Against.

The site is considered viral because users can share it with everyone in their e-mail address books with a few clicks.

It was inspired by a nationwide competition asking college students to propgse a viral, web-based game on the topic.

“Pos or Not” follows “Darfur is Dying” (www.DarfurisDying.com), another MTV student-developed videogame that has been played more than three million times by 1.5 million people, the groups behind “Pos or Not” said in a news release.

When you release a game that celebrates beatings, shootings, carjackings and other forms of social mayhem, it had better work properly. If the official forums for Grand Theft Auto IV are any indication, the programmers at Take-Two and Rockstar North should avoid lingering in dark alleys for the foreseeable future.

Dozens of disappointed GTA IV players have reported that their gaming consoles have frozen at various points in the game. Most of the reports are from PlayStation 3 owners, but some Xbox 360 units have also been affected.

“GTA4 Freezes all the time., Heeeeelp” is the morose heading of the largest forum thread, with more than 45 separate messages and more than 6,000 views. The thread was started by an Australian gamer on Monday and offers a typical complaint: “I got GTA on Sunday and it freezes and I have to restart the console it happens every hour or so, I thought it may be a dodgy disc, so I took the disc back to the shop and got a new one and almost 40 mins into the game and it froze on me again.”

Damage Control

By all accounts, the Rockstar North support group is taking withering fire from angry and frustrated GTA IV buyers. Brian Crecente, a contributor to Australian gamer guide Kotaku, one of the first media outlets to report the freezing problems, spoke to an “obviously unhappy” company representative on Wednesday, but didn't learn anything substantive about possible fixes.

“He ended the call by saying that they really have no idea when a fix will be coming,” Crecente wrote, “because they can't figure out what is exactly causing the problem and then once more apologized. 'I feel terrible about this.'”

The challenge for Rockstar North's technical crew is that the problem is somewhat erratic. The bulk of the problems have been reported by owners of the 60GB PlayStation 3, but some 20GB PS3s and some Xbox 360s have also frozen.

Yani Clark, a contributor to the XBoxFamily site, suggested a different solution. “Rockstar, in their very finite wisdom designed the game to have no loading times. That's great, except for the fact that GTA IV now overloads the cache and causes a lock-up (freeze). So now, instead of saving load times and providing a seamless experience, Rockstar has forced some machines to crash while attempting to load from the cache.”

Clark said what Rockstar needs to do is release a patch that prevents overloading a game console's RAM. But he questioned whether the company could pull that off. “[Rockstar hasn't] managed to make a game that doesn't freeze in two years. Unless you count the mega epic 'Table Tennis.'”

Possible Share Price Impact?

The potential consequences for Rockstar North and its corporate parent, Take-Two, extend far beyond some frustrated gamers. Take-Two has publicly rejected a purchase offer from rival Electronic Arts, arguing that the offered per-share price was too low.

Although Take-Two clearly expected that the enormous sales success of GTA IV would bolster its case for a higher purchase price, lingering or unresolved technical issues could dent that strategy.

Fortune reports that AT&T expects to launch Apple's new 3G iPhone either on, or very near to, the June 27 anniversary of the original handset's 2007 launch. Citing an unnamed source familiar with the matter, the magazine said AT&T intends to heavily subsidize the new smartphone, giving anyone who signs up for a two-year contract a $200 discount on the iPhone's retail sticker price.

Currently the least expensive iPhone is the 8GB model for $399, which could make the price $199 with the subsidy.

AT&T's strategy, Fortune said, is to use a discounted 3G iPhone to entice subscribers away from rivals Verizon and Sprint. AT&T CFO Rick Lindner recently told investors that AT&T continues to see users flocking to the iPhone. “Over 40 percent of those customers are new to us,” he said.

Lindner also said AT&T had not seen any slowdown in demand for the original iPhone in advance of the carrier's impending release of a 3G version. “Through the first quarter, it was pretty stable,” he said.

A Potential Opening

According to Fortune, AT&T's introduction of a new 3G Blackberry from Research In Motion is being delayed by several months from its original June delivery date. This would appear to provide Apple with a potential opening to make inroads at AT&T in both the consumer and enterprise markets.

Still, some industry observers think Apple still has a long way to go before it can challenge the Blackberry's supremacy in the enterprise. “For enterprises, it's really about typing and the keyboard,” said Brownlee Thomas, a principal analyst with Forrester Research.

“The iPhone gives a wonderful user experience for viewing photos or looking up a phone number,” Thomas observed, but its touch-sensitive screen “is not something you can type a long e-mail on.” And it will probably take Apple “a couple more generations before that is refined,” she said.

The Blackberry is far more advanced right now than the iPhone in this respect, Thomas noted. “Having slightly raised keys gives users a lot of tactile feedback,” she said.

The Profitability Question

Enterprises are also very concerned about product reliability and longevity, Thomas noted. RIM conducts very extensive tests on its Blackberry units to ensure the highest level of quality control, she said.

On the other hand, sources told Fortune recently that AT&T had concerns about the call quality of RIM's 3G Blackberry. Moreover, Lindner says the iPhone “continues to be very popular with customers, and customer feedback on the device is very good.”

The iPhone's touch-sensitive screen may also be just the ticket for enterprise workers who are deaf or have a hearing or speech disability. AT&T recently announced a new text-accessibility plan that gives disabled subscribers unlimited text messaging, Web browsing and e-mail access for $40 a month.

Even better, AT&T has introduced a 'mobile magnifier' for enabling visually impaired subscribers to zoom in on the screen. AT&T also now offers a 'mobile speak' feature that will automatically read the handset's menu options out loud.

Some industry observers have questioned whether AT&T would find it profitable to offer the 3G iPhone at a steep $200 discount. However, the 3G iPhone is clearly part of AT&T's plan to drive its wireless revenue growth.

Wireless data now accounts for 21.5 percent of AT&T's wireless-service revenues “and it's still in the early part of its growth trajectory,” Lindner explained. “At this point we have only 11 million 3G devices in service and only 16 percent of AT&T's postpaid subscribers have integrated devices.”

Fans of the Windows XP operating system will have to wait for the latest — and possibly last — service pack update. Microsoft said Tuesday that further release of Service Pack 3, which had been made available through Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center the same day, was being delayed because of a recently revealed problem.

Microsoft cited a “compatibility issue” between SP3 and the Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System for small and midsize businesses.

'Best Possible Experience'

In a statement distributed to news outlets, Microsoft said it had “decided to delay releasing Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center” so that it could make sure “customers have the best possible experience.”

Microsoft said the delay will let it put up a filter, preventing XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1, which also has issues with Microsoft Dynamics RMS, from being downloaded to users with Dynamics. A fix for the Dynamics incompatibility is reportedly in the works.

The SP3 update includes a variety of bug fixes and minor enhancements to XP. Several Vista features are in SP3, including Network Access Protection, “black hole” router detection, the Microsoft Kernel Cryptographic Module, and other enhancements. Each successive service pack also includes all previous fixes.

The supported operating systems include Windows XP, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Home Edition N, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, Windows XP Professional N, Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows XP Starter Edition, and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. The download size, depending on selected components, is between 428KB and one megabyte.

XP's Planned Demise

Laura DiDio, an analyst with industry research firm Yankee Group, said there's no evidence that Microsoft rushed the new service pack into release without adequate testing. She pointed out that software can have bugs even when it's been adequately tested and, given an incompatibility issue with another Microsoft product, it had to be delayed.

But, she added, “XP is going to be with us for a while” because of the ongoing issues with Vista. In fact, she said she “wouldn't bet” that this will be XP's last service pack.

SP3 comes as the Windows XP nears its planned demise. Microsoft has repeatedly said it will end OEM and shrink-wrapped sales for XP after June 30, but there has been a groundswell of support for XP as reports of problems with the newer Vista OS continue. XP Home has been granted a pardon until 2010 on low-end computers such as the Asus Eee.

On Monday, news reports indicated that Dell, HP, and Lenovo will use loopholes in their Microsoft licenses to continue offering XP on at least some machines beyond June 30. The computer makers can offer XP under a “downgrade option” that allows the customer to downgrade to XP, although Microsoft still counts the sale as a Vista sale. In some cases, the computer maker, such as Dell, installs XP on the machine for the customer, even though it also provides Vista installation media.