Wolfram Alpha rolls out core updates

Today’s stories:

Unboxing: It’s New MacBook Day!

$700 for Nokia’s new phone. Are they nuts?

Sprint breaks its sales record with Palm Pre

Plus, it’s official: the Palm Pre’s a hit. Listen now:

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Video: Death of an analog TV

As the U.S. prepares to shift to digital television on June 12, environmental organizations are warning of a surge in e-waste. CNET News intern Dara Kerr talks to CNET News’ Erik Palm about the dangers of e-waste and how to make sure your TV is disposed of properly. He also talks about what he saw when he followed an analog TV in the last stages of its life.

Can Apple beat the too-expensive rap?

Juniper revs Ethernet to 100Gbps

Microsoft gets Bing bump, ComScore says

Yahoo plans to hold a developer launch party at its Sunnyvale, Calif., campus in coming weeks. It will launch a beta test program for a tool that developers can use to write applications that integrate Yahoo Search. Such applications use the structured data available through public APIs and in the Yahoo index, Amir Kumar, director of product management at Yahoo Search, wrote in a blog post.

For the true geeks: Yahoo initially plans to support microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN; will support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS; and will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Yahoo also will be supporting the OpenSearch specification.

This is all an extension to the open-search idea Yahoo began talking about a few weeks ago.

For the consumer, Yahoo’s move means more direct connections to Yahoo Search results, and a better overall search experience, on various Web applications.

“For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site,” Kumar writes. “With a richer understanding of LinkedIn’s structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site.”

(Credit:
Yahoo)

(Credit:
The CW)

But with the second season of Gossip Girl premiering September 1, this means that you’ll once again be able to get your Upper East Side baby billionaire fix from the comfort of your procrastination-friendly office cubicle.

But its ratings had been downright subpar, even as the show’s subject matter grew more and more guilty-pleasure-fantastic with sex, drugs, gambling, murder, and the exploits of rakish antihero Chuck Bass.

The CW had said all along that because of Gossip Girl’s young, tech-savvy audience–the title character is an anonymous blogger, after all–that traditional television ratings simply didn’t apply. Nielsen ratings, the longstanding measure of broadcast popularity, don’t measure episodes recorded on DVRs or watched on the Web, after all. But under pressure, the network pulled the show from its Web site to see if TV ratings would improve.

Chuck Bass would so approve.

You know you love it: The CW Television Network has decided to start streaming its teen show Gossip Girl online again.

According to The New York Times, free ad-supported episodes of the program will soon reappear on The CW’s Web site. They’d been taken down in April as an “experiment” to see how it affected viewership ratings.

Here’s what happened: The melodrama about upper-crust high schoolers in Manhattan, based on a best-selling young-adult book series, had been blessed with the greatest of hype–the star power of creator Josh Schwartz, better known as the guy who brought us The O.C.; regular mentions in Gawker and New York magazine; scandalous sightings of its young cast partying all over the city; and racy ad campaigns featuring taglines like “OMFG” and “Every Parent’s Nightmare.”

Disclosure: The CW is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS, parent company of CNET News.

It’s like beating your antlers against a brick wall.

Sure, some are still going to “fall off of a truck” in the Bronx every now and again and it might be possible to still get phones out of the store without a contract in other countries — all of which have different hardware and plan prices which the Macalope won’t go into because we’re just talking about the U.S. here — but if you are buying an iPhone 3G from Apple or AT&T in the U.S. it will be more expensive than its predecessor.

“Free?! Well, sure, honey! Have fun! And watch out for cell towers! Ha-ha! Kids!”

Todd starts by rightly dinging the horny one for failing to note that he did say Jobs did not actually go so far as to literally say iPhone purchasers were suckers, even though Todd put it in quotes. So the Macalope will agree he shouldn’t have bothered making an issue of that particular point.

“A zeppelin? I don’t know. Sounds expensive. How much is it?”

1st
iPhone came out and was priced for purchasers at $499. New iPhone comes out and I can buy it at $199. In Macland this is more expensive…

Also
Mac, what about the 1/4 to 1/3 of iPhones purchased that are eventually unlocked? Aren’t they stunningly cheaper, or are we just ignoring them because they do not fit our argument?

If you are not a heavy text user, the phone and its plan are CHEAPER.

Todd would have you ignore the total cost of the iPhone and focus solely on what you shell out to get the device in your hand. Who makes decisions like this? The Macalope can only imagine what life is like at the Sullivan house.

Actually, those would be cheaper, obviously… if you can actually get out of the door with one without being tasered by AT&T’s jack-booted thugs. See, Todd, AT&T has wised up and will be forcing customers to activate their phones before leaving the store.

No, not “may”, “will”. The data plan for the 3G starts at $10 more. You must buy a data plan to use the phone. OK, if you use no SMS, the Macalope supposes you don’t have a charge there, but even without that it’s still $40 more expensive after two years than the original iPhone.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s still $40 more. The math is not that hard here, Todd. Read Gizmodo’s chart.

Got it? You won’t be able to leave the store without a contract. A two-year contract. One you must pay for. Contractually. For two years. With money.

“It’s free! [With a $6,000 per month payment for five years. Some restrictions may apply. Void where prohibited by law. Adjustable rate loan, monthly payment may fluctuate as high as $9 bazillion.]“

You’re right, again, Todd. The iPhone 3G is cheaper… assuming you don’t want to actually use it. As a paperweight, it is $300 cheaper.

But depending on your data usage plan with AT&T, you may end up spending about the same or $100 or so more AFTER TWO YEARS.

The rest, however, is like getting sprayed in the face with a bottle full of carbonated stupid.

Or, better yet, please, for the love of God, just stop writing about the iPhone.

“Dad, can I get a zeppelin?”

Here is where he plays with facts. The phone IS $300 cheaper.

[Commenter colonelpanic points out that Todd is calculating off a different base by going back to the iPhone's original price, so his number don't jibe with Gizmodo's or the Macalope's. Some of this may be confusion over the Macalope's use of "original iPhone" to mean the original hardware at the May 2008 price. The Macalope has already conceded that the price drop from the iPhone's launch price to the price as of three weeks ago was necessary to stay competitive, the point is that Steve Jobs effectively announced no real price drop at WWDC, contrary to Sullivan's posts of last Monday. Todd's trying to reset the goal posts to justify his contention that the iPhone 3G is "cheaper". Sure, it's cheaper than it was last July, but it's not cheaper than it was three weeks ago.]

(See, that was all obviously ironic as opposed to not obviously ironic, so… oh, never mind.)

Love Spidey? Hate cancer? Of course you do.

(Credit:
Sony Pictures)

Other goodies going on the block in the next few weeks include lunch with Judd Apatow, who will also review your comedy script; a round of golf with Sugar Ray Leonard; and a visit to the set of the CBS Evening News (which is owned by CNET’s parent company CBS). Check out the Stand Up To Cancer eBay store for a list of all items in the auction.

All proceeds will go directly to Stand Up To Cancer; consult your tax adviser about tax-deductibility.

At the top of the list: a visit to the set of Spider-Man 4 to meet the cast and enjoy a walk-on role, plus a trip to the movie’s New York premiere, and designer duds to wear to the show. (At the time of writing, the bid to beat is $5,000.) Or, if you’d prefer, wait until September 5 to bid on a set visit, walk-on role, and tickets to the Los Angeles premiere of Iron Man 2.

Evers added that the Web is quickly becoming one of the most popular means to attack users. This is due in part to improvements made to e-mail security and filtering and also because Web vulnerabilities are a new frontier, he said.

Among some of the Web sites that have been attacked are USAToday.com, Target.com, ABCNews.com, Walmart.com, and several sites owned by CNET Networks, the publisher of News.com. A CNET employee confirmed that the attack had occurred but did not know to what extent it had affected site visitors.

The attack differs from other IFrame injection attacks in that the traps are being set in the search results and not on a Web site’s main pages, said Joris Evers, a spokesman for security firm McAfee.

Updated at 11:22 a.m. PDT Saturday to include a comment from Wal-Mart.

Representatives of CNET and USAToday could not be reached on Friday night. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Amy Colella on Saturday said the matter “has not impacted our site in any way,” adding, “We take these matters very seriously at Walmart.com, and continuously use measures to protect our customers from any fraudulent online activity.”

“This means that a Web user would need to do a search query using one of the terms picked by the attacker to hit a poisoned page,” Evers said. “This is in contrast to previously seen attacks where just visiting a site would launch an attack. This reduces the severity (of the most recent attack) somewhat.”

This is where the attackers attempt to install malware onto the victims’ computers.

A million search queries have been “poisoned” at dozens of well-known Web sites over the past several weeks, according to security analyst Dancho Danchev.

The 100 or so new words in M-W’s latest dictionary reflect societal trends beyond technology. For example, some stem from culinary arts, such as prosecco (a sparkling Italian wine), soju (a Korean vodka distilled from rice), edamame (immature green soybeans), and pescatarian (a vegetarian whose diet includes fish).

But my favorite new entry, by far, is mondegreen, defined as “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung.” According to M-W, the term was first coined by author Sylvia Wright in 1954, when Wright wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine confessing to a childhood misinterpretation of the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Moray.” “When she first heard the lyric, ‘they had slain the Earl of Moray and had laid him on the green,’ she felt terribly sorry for the ‘poor Lady Mondegreen,’” according to the press release.

That’s in line with Merriam-Webster’s choice of the term “wOOt”–with its roots in video game culture–as the word of the year for 2007.

M-W says it picks the new dictionary entries only after it starts to see the words used over time without explanation or translation. Here’s an Associated Press story with more details.

A more contemporary example is the bungling of the Jimi Hendrix “Purple Haze” line, “Scuse me, while I kiss the sky” as “Scuse me, while I kiss this guy.” My personal mondegreen example is the line from the Clash song “Rock the Casbah,” “The shareef don’t like it,” which I always thought was, “Shareeve don’t like it.” Who was this Shareeve character anyway, I wondered. You got one? M-W is asking the public to submit their own mondegreens by July 25, with favorites to be revealed and featured online beginning July 28.

Geek culture is once again showing its influence over the mainstream lexicon in the latest version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which includes word additions such as webinar, malware, netroots, pretexting (thank you Hewlett-Packard), and fanboy (thank you Apple).

I was…until I realized it was time to be an IT person again.

Believe it or not, my high-tech career began using punch cards and card readers to enter data into an IBM mainframe computer. When we got keyboards and monitors, we used them to enter what we called “card images.”

(Credit:
Oldcomputers.net)

Then came notebook computers. I had the groundbreaking DEC HiNote Ultra–the first thin and light notebook–in 1995. I don’t know how many times I dropped the thing, but it kept right on working. In 1998, I got Sony’s ultraslim Vaio 505 with the purple magnesium alloy chassis. It was really cool but more importantly, it never crashed.

Sure, computers and networks have come a long way in terms of complexity and ease-of-use. Now we have plug and play, USB ports, Windows Update, and wireless network wizards. Still, nothing is as easy as it’s supposed to be. Every time I buy a new computer, I’m invariably up late at night transferring files, cleaning up bloatware, and troubleshooting my home network.

Compaq Portable II, c. 1986

Try that with a mainframe.

On Tuesday, I received a new Sony Vaio SZ780 notebook. I spent months agonizing over which computer to buy, and now that FedEx has delivered it to my door, I should be really excited.

Sounds like I was living on easy street, doesn’t it? Not anymore.

As a chip designer in the ’80s, I used GE Calma, Apollo, Daisy, Valid, and Mentor workstations. I had to know a whole smorgasbord of platforms and operating systems. I don’t know how I did it. Guess I had a lot more brain cells back then.

The personal computer made life simpler–one platform, one operating system. It was a dream. We even got to take it on the road. I lugged a 26-pound Compaq Portable II to customer demos in 1986. A few years later, I could actually carry my Toshiba laptop on a plane. It tipped the scales at about 16 pounds, I think.

It’s been 20 years since I was an engineer. During that time, I worked with countless IT support people. That was a real luxury. Now, as a consultant who runs his own business out of his home, I’ve never missed those IT folks more. I seem to have lost the recipe for solving technical problems.

You might not be able to get Google-like profits, but at least you can treat your employees more like how Google treats its own employees. There’s a good lesson in there….
Most of the music on the iPods of UK youth has been pilfered. Surprising? No. There are two interesting factoids in the data, however:
“80% of those who admit to illegally file-sharing are prepared to engage with a legal file-sharing service, and place a considerable monetary value on it”; and
The older people get, the more they pay for music. 55 percent of youth aged 14 to 17 illegally download music, jumping to 60 percent when they’re aged 18 to 24, but dropping down to 39 percent when aged 25 and above.
Does this mean that “old fogey” music is more likely to be monetized than Britney Spears?
The next version of JBoss has been significantly delayed, but Red Hat insists the delay will be worth it as it invests heavily in updating and refactoring the code: “We are better off [than rivals] because we bit the bullet – everything will interoperate.”
Nokia suggests that the open-source community can learn from businesses, in particular how to take a conciliatory approach to resolving complex business problems (like DRM). Worth reading.
Michael Tiemann argues that user-generated innovation, a la open source, is a more sustainable model for software development than proprietary software. It’s a useful read if you’re prone to thinking that individuals qua individuals are weak.

So many good stories, so little time….Here are a few of the best posts today:

Using software and sonar the system can detect and differentiate between “malicious swimmers and divers” and other targets, such as marine life and debris, at up to 1000 meters, according to the British Columbia-based company. A processor “captures a wide acoustic swath” to positively identify and localize the threat, then notifies security (PDF).

The system is designed to protect commercial piers, government and military vessels, cruise ships, terminals, and other high-value assets, but it’ll work just as well for your hideaway surf break. You know it’s good if the oil sheiks buy it. Kongsberg installed an integrated system at a “High-Value Seaside resort” in the United Arab Emirates; the exact location is classified.

You can’t really say you have a private beach until you’ve installed a SM 2000 Underwater Surveillance System by Kongsberg to keep out the riffraff.

You’ll be relieved to know that the Coast Guard and the EPA have concluded that the system will not “adversely affect threatened or endangered species or critical habitat.” Whether a diver could do enough damage to justify the multimillion-dollar investment is open to debate.

The U.S. Coast Guard just picked up $2 million of Kongsberg gear to enhance its Integrated Anti-swimmer Systems (IAS) program at the nation’s ports. The purchase follows the initial IAS contract worth $3 million.

Someone poaching in your favorite abalone patch? A frogman can be warned that he is in a restricted area and should surface immediately by “underwater loudhailer.” If that doesn’t work, deploy the “nonlethal interdiction acoustic impulse,” an underwater shockwave emitter–which, despite its name, can be set on stun or kill.