Sci-Tech Today

Microsoft Says Battery Woes Not Caused By Windows 7

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:58:09 -0500

Battery problems on Windows 7 machines are not caused by the operating system. That's the position of Stephen Sinofsky, head of the Windows division, in a long posting Monday on the Windows engineering blog.

"At this time," he wrote, "we have no reason to believe there is any issue related to Windows 7 in this context." He acknowledged reports in the press and in forums about faulty battery warnings and batteries failing. "In every case we have been able to identify," Sinofsky added, "the battery being reported on was in fact in need of recommended replacement."

'Accurately Detected a Failing Battery'

Sinofsky said that the company has been contacting customers who report issues in forums, monitoring customer-service communications, keeping in touch with PC makers, and utilizing opt-in, anonymous "telemetry in Windows 7" to keep track of the situation. In all cases investigated, he wrote, "Windows 7 has simply accurately detected a failing battery."

One factor Sinofsky emphasized is that there is a new battery notification in Windows 7 not available in Vista or Windows XP. The notification, with a battery meter icon and the message "Consider replacing your battery," appears when the battery is performing at 40 percent of its designated capacity. He noted that some customers upgrading a PC to Windows 7 did not know the battery was degrading until 7 offered this new level of notification.

He pointed out that PC batteries, through the hardware and the BIOS firmware, offer several read-only fields of information about the battery, including manufacturer, serial number, design capacity, and last full charge capacity. Sinofsky added that this information "is read-only and there is no way for Windows 7 or any other OS to write, set or configure battery status information."

'The Answer Is RIGHT THERE!'

But user complaints continue to populate the Microsoft support forum, where the issue has...

Google's Nexus One 'Support' Mostly Passes the Buck

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:29:27 -0500

Need support for Google's Nexus One smartphone? You can finally call Google directly -- but you might not get all the answers you're looking for.

A month after launching its so-called "superphone," Google on Monday began offering a dedicated phone support line for Nexus One customers. Consumers can call 888-48NEXUS from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. PST to speak with a live support operator, but they may get directed elsewhere.

Google is giving directions on four types of questions via the old-fashioned telephone: Existing order status and shipping queries, technical support, repair and return issues, and T-Mobile service issues.

Customers seeking order status and shipping times need to have their 15-digit order number in hand and Google will dig up the information. However, Google is pointing customers in need of technical support or repairs and returns to phone maker HTC. And customers who have questions about their wireless service are being ushered to T-Mobile. So actually, the only service Google is providing is for status and shipping updates.

Customer Complaints Continue

Google is moving to address the negative publicity around its smartphone. Shortly after launch, customers began complaining about spotty reception and early cancellation fees. After hundreds of complaints on its forum, Google said it was aware of the issues that it said affected a small number of users and planned to fix the problem.

Google later came out with a fix and has lowered early termination fees from $350 to $150. But the memories remain and the complaints about lack of support continued. Google sells the Nexus One via an online store that, until Monday, only offered support through customer forums.

Those forums are still up and running and still still show problems ranging from spotty 3G coverage to touchscreen problems to missing audio on Bluetooth pairing to camera problems. The list goes...

Google May Add Facebook, Twitter Links to Gmail

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:58:34 -0500

E-mail is about communicating with friends, coworkers and the world at large. So why should users have to switch over to Facebook or Twitter to post a status update? That seems to be the thinking behind the news that Google will roll more social-networking features into Gmail, the fastest-growing e-mail service.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google will announce later this week a new Gmail feature that allows users to post ongoing streams of status updates while using the web-based e-mail service. A source told the Journal that Google will eventually seek to allow users to stream other Google services like YouTube videos and Picasa photos.

Twitter in Gmail?

In the short term, it's unlikely that having status updates in Gmail would cause much of a ripple at Facebook, which is a full-blown ecosystem of friends, advertising, third-party apps, groups and more.

The new feature sounds closer to Twitter, which is purely a status update service. There may be more room for Google to make some inroads there. A recent survey by RJMetrics found that the formerly torrid pace of new Twitter accounts has slowed to about 20 percent below the peak hit last July. These days, about 6.2 million new accounts are created every month.

But, it turns out, many of those accounts are vapor. Twenty-five percent of all Twitter accounts have no followers and 40 percent have never tweeted. "About 80 percent of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times," and "Only about 17 percent of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low," RJMetrics reported.

Not a Killer App

Twitter seems vulnerable to Google, while Facebook does not, exactly because tweets just go into the either while Facebook posts go to a (sometimes very broad) circle of friends. Just as interest in blogging has started to...

U.S. Is Forming New Climate-Change Agency

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:00:00 -0500

The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.

Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA's National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.

"Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat," Locke said Monday at a news conference.

Lubchenco added, "Climate change is real, it's happening now." She said climate information is vital to the wind power industry, coastal community planning, fishermen and fishery managers, farmers and public health officials.

NOAA recently reported that the decade of 2000-2009 was the warmest on record worldwide; the previous warmest decade was the 1990s. Most atmospheric scientists believe that warming is largely due to human actions, adding gases to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

Researchers and leaders from around the world met last month in Denmark to discuss ways to reduce climate-warming emissions, and a follow-up session is planned for later this year in Mexico.

"More and more people are asking for more and more information about climate and how it's going to affect them," Lubchenco explained. So officials decided to combine climate operations into a single unit.

Portions of the Weather Service that have been studying climate, as well as offices from some other NOAA agencies, will be transferred to the new NOAA Climate Service.

The new agency will initially be led by Thomas Karl, director of the current National Climatic Data Center. The Climate Service will be headquartered in Washington...

Haitian Earthquake Update: Relief Gaps Spread

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:02:14 -0500

After weeks of delays and bottlenecks, the international relief effort in Port-au-Prince is becoming somewhat routine. People line up for food and water daily, and roads are clogged with trucks and military vehicles.

An hour's drive north in the mountains, the picture is different.

"The aid hasn't gotten here," said Gillaine Warne, an agronomist with Partners in Health, which runs a hospital in Cange co-founded by Paul Farmer, now the United Nations' deputy special envoy to Haiti.

"There's been a huge influx of people, and they are growing short of food," Warne said. "We're seeing some really desperate farmers, and heaven forbid they have to eat their seed."

Nearly a month after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake Jan. 12, Port-au-Prince residents still complain about what to them seems chaotic and unfair aid distributions. Yet in interviews last week across the city and its suburbs, nearly all surveyed said they had benefited in some way from the help.

"The aid is not very well organized, but it's getting here," said Elibere Josef, a money-changer at a gas station. "The international community is doing what it can."

Flaws in Effort

There are gaps in the effort, however, and one is that relief supplies are not getting to rural areas where the United Nations estimates 482,000 refugees from Port-au-Prince have fled. Tens of thousands of people who were living in Port-au-Prince for jobs are returning to their impoverished home villages. Others left the capital in the hope of finding someplace better.

Many are finding that things are often no better in the country's outlying areas, even if there are buildings standing.

In Mirebalais, a town of about 115,000 people, Mayor Moise Ocxama says about 20,000 people have arrived. Most of them are sleeping with relatives, he said, but others are bedding down at a public school.

The only aid Mirebalais has seen is a single...

Top Tips for More Windows 7 Productivity

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:57:16 -0500

Speed, stability, compatibility -- these are the headline features for which Windows 7 has been praised. But Microsoft has also stuffed Windows 7 full of little productivity-enhancing features that few are aware of. Here's a rundown of some of the niftiest.

Access Projector Mode

Work in an office, and sooner or later you're going to need to hook your PC up to a projector. When you do this with older versions of Windows, you invariably end up in the Display Properties dialog box or hunting for key combinations on your notebook computer that allow you send an image to a projector, to your notebook screen, or both. With Windows 7's new Projector Mode, you'll have one less thing to worry about when you head to the conference room.

Just hold down the Windows key and tap the letter P on your keyboard. The Projector Mode window appears, allowing you to make a simple selection about where your monitor image should be projected. Just keep tapping Windows key-P to scroll through the options. Press Enter to activate the one currently selected.

Find the Application You Want

If you regularly end up with dozens of applications open at the same time, finding the one you want can be a real hassle. Say, for example, that you have five Windows Explorer sessions open, three copies of Word, nine Internet Explorer windows, and several instances of your image browser.

How can you get back quickly to the one open application you need? The traditional way is with the Alt-Tab keyboard shortcut, but cycling through dozens of open applications is neither easy nor productive. With Windows 7, you can hold down the Ctrl key and click the taskbar icon representing the open application you want to see. If you have several instances of the application open, each time you click the...

To Love or Not To Love: Apple iPad Pros and Cons

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:29:02 -0500

Now that the iPad has officially been announced, opinions are rolling in on this device that combines the features of an iPod, e-reader, and tablet PC. One common theme is that the device, available starting in late March, will turn fewer heads than the iPhone. Those hoping for a stylish replacement for a laptop are also probably feeling let down.

At just 13.4 millimeters at its widest, the iPad is thin. Weighing 680 grammes, it's also lighter than traditional mobile computers. It uses the same operating system (OS) as the iPhone. The iPad is controlled using a touch-sensitive 9.7-inch display with energy-saving LED backlighting.

Because Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch already enjoy a leading position in the world of touch-controlled devices, the iPad can reasonably be expected to provide an intuitive user interface. It comes equipped with WLAN and a UMTS option is also available. Customers have free choice of wireless data providers in countries that use UMTS cards.

Owners of the iPad can access videos and music on the iTunes Store and use the new iBookstore to load content onto the device. Apple's success is based on the close links between the software and hardware -- and this concept is continued on the iPad as well.

Yet therein lies a potential disadvantage, as well: the iPad, like so many of Apple's products, is proprietary inside and out. Owners cannot use any application from any source they want for their iPad. As with the iPhone, the App Store is the only game in town. That said, almost "all 140,000 programs in the App Store" will work on the iPad.

Mobile computers with touchscreens but without keyboards are not inherently new. Tablet PCs, as they are known, usually work with Windows as their OS. They've also tended to be niche products to date, "such as for...

Faster and Greener? Go Online and Save the Planet

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:02:42 -0500

This should make netizens feel better about themselves: being online and saving the environment can go hand in hand.

For example, shopping online, instead of traveling to the stores by car, means cutting back on gas consumption and associated emissions.

But there is a downside. Many online surfers are unaware of the enormous energy consumption that goes with running the Internet. Still, even though end users aren't the biggest consumers, they can still do a lot to keep energy consumption under control and even save a little money for good measure.

Online service providers run the computing centers that serve as the "hotspots of energy consumption," says Siegfried Behrendt of the IZT Institute for Future Studies and Technology Assessment in Berlin. About half the energy consumed goes just to cooling the centers. After all, a room full of mainframe computers needed to run these systems gives off incredible amounts of heat.

On top of that comes the energy consumption of normal consumers. "Altogether, that means that all information and communications technology devices in Germany had a consumption of 55 terawatt hours in 2007," says Behrendt. "That equals 10 per cent of all power consumption."

That also means carbon dioxide emissions linked to computer use rival those associated with the domestic German air travel market. "That is considerable and has some serious climate politics repercussions."

That doesn't make the Internet bad. It's still a good thing. But private users can become a part of the problem if they just surf without a goal, clicking randomly. Every Google search consumes energy, reports the UBA, a German environmental group -- perhaps not much individually, but it adds up.

Experts recommend targeted use of search engines for quicker access to desired information. "It's also a question of time use," says Behrendt.

There is no shortage of intelligent ways to put those computing...

Children of Older Mothers at More Autism Risk

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:03:51 -0500

A woman's chance of having a child with autism increase substantially as she ages, but the risk may be less for older dads than previously suggested, a new study analyzing more than 5 million births found.

"Although fathers' age can contribute risk, the risk is overwhelmed by maternal age," said University of California at Davis researcher Janie Shelton, the study's lead author.

Mothers older than 40 were about 50 percent more likely to have a child with autism than those in their 20s; the risk for fathers older than 40 was 36 percent higher than for men in their 20s.

Even at that, the study suggests the risk of a woman over 40 having an autistic child was still less than 4 in 1,000, one expert noted.

The new research suggests the father's age appears to make the most difference with young mothers. Among children whose mothers were younger than 25, autism was twice as common when fathers were older than 40 than when dads were in their 20s.

The findings contrast with recent research that suggested the father's age played a bigger role than the mother's. Researchers and other autism experts said the new study is more convincing, partly because it's larger. Older mothers are known to face increased risks for having children with genetic disorders, and genes are thought to play a role in autism.

The study was released Monday in the February issue of the journal Autism Research.

Maureen Durkin, a University of Wisconsin researcher who also has studied the influence of parents' age on autism, said it's important to note that the increased risks are small and that most babies born to older mothers do not develop autism.

Durkin said the overall low risk for autism "may be the most important take-home message," especially for prospective parents

The study was based on records of all...

New Zealand Student Auctions Virginity for Tuition

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:04:16 -0500

A New Zealand teenager who says she auctioned her virginity online for $32,000 to raise tuition money did not break any laws but it might be risky for her to follow through on the deal, police warned Wednesday.

The anonymous 19-year-old student offered her virginity to the highest bidder on the Web site http://www.ineed.co.nz under the name "Unigirl," saying she would use the money to pay for her tuition. She said in a post that more than 30,000 people had viewed her ad and more than 1,200 had made bids before she accepted an offer of more than New Zealand dollars 45,000 ($32,000).

Unlike similar New Zealand Web sites, bidding and correspondence between buyers and sellers on the ineed site is private so it is not known what bids Unigirl's offer received.

Web site owner Ross McKenzie said the site's policy was that as long as an ad was legal and did not offend the general standards of society, "it was OK." He confirmed Unigirl was a member on the site.

Prostitution is legal in New Zealand under laws considered more liberal than many countries. Prostitution among consenting adults is allowed in brothels and on the streets, and offering sexual services in print ads and online is also legal.

National police spokesman Jon Neilson said no law appeared to have been breached.

But "we would suggest it's not a safe practice," Neilson told The Associated Press. "There are definitely issues of personal safety" in using chat rooms, social dating networks and other Internet sites that can be used to arrange meetings between strangers.

Unigirl, in her initial post, described herself as attractive, fit and healthy. She did not post a photograph of herself, and bidders did not appear to have a way of confirming any of the details of her posts.

Unigirl said she was desperate for money...