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The notebook market is now brimming with Intel Arrandale-based machines, and the latest is from MSI. First teased at CES, the company’s new X-Slim X360 is the first to use a low-voltage Core i5 processor.

With the stakes high in Microsoft’s bid to add its search engine to the iPhone, a few words of praise by the software giant’s CEO have drawn a considerable amount of attention.

“Apple’s done a very nice job that allows people to monetize and commercialize their intellectual property” in the App Store, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a University of Washington audience last week.

Playing Bing-o

Although Ballmer was stating the obvious, observers and analysts quickly surmised that he was trying to sweeten the waters in advance of Apple’s decision on whether to replace Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on the iPhone operating system.

Business Week reported in January that the two giants were in negotiations for that deal. Asked by Reuters about the prospects after unveiling the Windows 7 Phone Series last month, Ballmer said, “I hear the same rumors you do.”

The App Store has more than 130,000 products for sale or free, fueling the sale of iPods and iPhones and creating a user experience that other smartphone manufacturers have tried to emulate. Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile has less than 1,000 apps.

No Denying It

“It would appear that Microsoft is no longer in denial about what Apple has accomplished,” said Michael Gartenberg of the Altimeter Group, a technology consulting firm. “The question is, will Microsoft be able to drive a wedge between Apple and Google and find a new and unlikely ally in the mobile space?”

As Ballmer praised the App Store, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based nonprofit, launched a broadside against Apple by publishing the company’s 28-page developer licensing agreement on its web site.

Since NASA now has an iPhone app, the group cleverly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the agreement that the government agency signed with Apple.

‘Major Shift’

“The entire family of devices built…

A report by DigiTimes suggests that Asus may be on the verge of losing its top position in the motherboard market — a spot the company has held for quite some time. With its well-rounded feature-sets and aggressive pricing, Gigabyte has garnered much fanfare over the recent years. Industry sources say the company is now closing the gap with Asus in motherboard shipments.

The latest version of Final Fantasy, now in its 23rd year, has garnered rave reviews – and equally eager followers

Final Fantasy 13 review

Hundreds of UK gamers, many dressed as wizards and warriors, are expected in London tonight for the European launch of Final Fantasy XIII.

Fans at HMV’s Oxford Street store will be the first to get their hands on the latest instalment in the long-running, Japanese role-playing game franchise, which has sold more than 92m copies worldwide since its release in 1987.

The Japanese release of the new game in December saw eager gamers snap up more than 1m copies in the first 24 hours.

Final Fantasy XIII became the first title on Sony’s PlayStation 3 – the laggard in overall sales to Microsoft’s XBox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii – to sell more than 1m copies in Japan. Square Enix, the game’s creator, said then it hoped to sell at least 2m copies in the country.

The latest chapter promises improved graphics and a reworked battle system for complex chains of attacks. The Guardian’s review gives it a rare five stars.

The first 50 gamers to run the risk of ridicule on the tube and attend the launch in costume will win a free Final Fantasy XIII soundtrack, which includes Leona Lewis’s song My Hands from her second album, Echo.

The DJ and TV presenter Alex Zane will host the event and Yoshinori Kitase, Final Fantasy’s producer, is flying in from Japan to sign copies and meet the series’ dedicated fans.

Game launches are beginning to rival film premieres. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold 5m copies worldwide on its opening day, making it the biggest entertainment launch in history.

Sales of Final Fantasy XIII are expected to push total sales for the series over the 100m milestone.

Even though Microsoft has never formally announced when it expects to deliver the first service pack for Windows 7, for one reason or another many have been speculating about possible dates. The latest comes courtesy of TechARP.com, which claims that the company has ditched its original plan of a 22-month development schedule and is now aiming for a release in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Dell has announced an update to its line of business-oriented laptops that will bring new designs and improved performance. The new Vostro 3000 series is made up of four models: the 13.3-inch 3300, 14.0-inch 3400, 15.6-inch 3500 and the 17.3-inch 3700. All feature the latest processors technology from Intel, including several Core i3 or i5 dual-core options on all models and a Core i7 quad-core co…

Senior officers say site shirking its responsibilities in light of Peter Chapman’s conviction for murder of schoolgirl

Senior police officers clashed with the UK’s most-used social networking site today, accusing Facebook of ignoring worrying trends that it is providing a safe haven for predatory paedophiles by refusing to sign up to a “panic button” for children and young people.

Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit (Ceop), was joined by the country’s lead officer on homicide to tackle the site about its repeated refusal to sign up to a key safety practice adopted by many other similar websites.

The American-owned site has 23 million active users in the UK but refuses to display an official “panic button” that links users directly to Ceop to report suspected activities by predatory paedophiles.

The police officers spoke out after the conviction of Peter Chapman for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall.

Chapman, a convicted double rapist, posed as a young man called Peter Cartwright on Facebook and spent time grooming Ashleigh before the pair exchanged mobile phone numbers and agreed to meet. Ashleigh was raped and suffocated by Chapman, who dumped her body in a field near Sedgefield in County Durham last October.

Facebook has refused repeated requests by Ceop to include a panic button on its site. Information from the button is used to build intelligence reports on suspects which can become part of police investigations into paedophiles, rapists and violent individuals.

Ceop revealed today that nearly half of the reports received about Facebook last year involved individuals who were suspected of grooming young people on the site. But because Facebook does not have the Ceop button on its site, only one or two complaints came from Facebook itself.

Children use the button to make reports to Ceop’s specialist police teams about suspected abuse, grooming and severe bullying. More than 500 such reports are received each month, four a day involve cases where children are in immediate danger. Although Bebo and MSN have adopted the button, Facebook has refused.

Gamble said: “We have been asking social networking sites for too long to do the right thing.

“Since we launched the button in 2009, we have carried out careful analysis to look at varying sites who haven’t adopted our service and the trends are worrying.”

Last year 267 reports were received about suspicious activity on Facebook. Almost half – 43% – related to cases of suspected grooming. But in 81% of cases, the individuals who felt under threat had to seek out other sites to make their reports to Ceop because Facebook has not adopted the direct link button.

“This is just not good enough,” said Gamble. “Their argument for not putting our button into their environment, in my opinion, doesn’t hold water.”

Last year Ceop intelligence reports led to 334 people being arrested.

Jon Stoddart, the Association of Chief Police Officers’s lead officer for homicide supported Gamble’s call for Facebook to adopt the button. Facebook said it has yet to see any evidence that the Ceop reporting mechanism helps tackle the problem. A spokeswoman insisted the site was “one of the safest” places on the web.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesman, also called on Facebook to fix the “glaring failure” to include the Ceop button.

Alan Johnson, the home secretary, said the government was looking at ways to alert authorities when convicted sex offenders were online.

“What our people in the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) agency do is go online themselves to try and lure in these people,” he said.

“Whether we can get the technology to flag up when they’re [sex offenders] online is something we need to look at.”

Merseyside police, who should have been monitoring Chapman, today referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The force acted after revelations that it waited nine months before issuing a national wanted alert for Chapman, after realising last year that he had vanished from his home.

There was more controversy for Facebook today when a 27-year-old man, David Calvert, was wrongly identified as Jon Venables on Facebook, and some 2,370 people joined a group to discuss the “new identity” of one of the Bulger killers.

Calvert, originally from Liverpool, was the subject of similarly false rumours five years ago and has publicly described the hatred directed towards him, and fears for his family’s safety.

On the heels of the big 3-D television presence at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Sony and Samsung are joining Panasonic, LG Electronics, and others in promoting the new technology. On Tuesday, Sony said it is aiming for 10 percent of its TV sales within the next year to be 3-D models, and Samsung announced a range of HDTV sets and Blu-ray players will ship later this month.

At a press conference Tuesday in New York City, Samsung announced what it described as the “world’s first available full HD 3D LED TV,” as well as a variety of related 3-D home entertainment products.

‘World’s First HDTV App Store’

Under a new promotion, buyers of a Samsung 3-D TV and 3-D Blu-ray player or home theater system will get a “3-D starter kit” with two pairs of 3-D glasses and a 3-D version of DreamWorks Animation’s Monsters vs Aliens. The manufacturer also said it plans to make available a 3-D version of the studio’s popular Shrek film series.

Samsung’s 3-D offerings include 46- and 55-inch LED TVs being released this month, and others to be rolled out over the next several months. It also touted the 240-Hz refresh rate and Internet connectivity in the new models, as well as access to the “world’s first HDTV app store,” Samsung Apps.

On Wednesday, Panasonic will start selling its first 3-D TV in the U.S. in a partnership with Best Buy, while Samsung is also launching a 3-D TV and Blu-ray player offer with that retailer. LG said Tuesday it will begin offering its new 3-D sets in India.

Sony’s first sales will be in June in Japan, and the company hasn’t announced launch plans for the new products in the U.S. It has also said it will be releasing a software update for the PlayStation 3,…

Work going on in Hatfield could create robot home helps – or even one day robot girlfriends and boyfriends

On a weekday morning in a Hertfordshire street, people are knocking on the door of an ordinary-looking house. Inside, a living room hosts a sofa, bookshelves, coffee tables and a TV. Through an archway, the kitchen kettle is boiling up, ready for the first of many cups of tea.

So far, so normal – but there’s something different about this Hatfield home: it’s stuffed full of more technology than your average branch of PC World. Sprawled around its ground floor rooms are a family of robots belonging to the University of Hertfordshire’s school of computer science. This is probably the UK’s only robot home.

Companions

It’s part of a project that began in 2005, when Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial intelligence at Hertfordshire, was working on a European-wide piece of research called Cogniron. The aim was to create a “cognitive robot companion” for humans, and the team began building and modifying the machines. When they were ready for testing, the team invited people to their lab, where they were monitored while they interacted with the robots.

“It didn’t work well, because the participants didn’t feel very comfortable in such an artificial context,” Dautenhahn explains. She decided to take the project out of a campus setting and into the home, so the academics could investigate how robots work as personal companions in one of mankind’s most natural environments. The robotics faculty first decamped from their laboratory into a local flat, but that soon became too small.

“So, in 2008, the university bought a two-storey house with a large ground floor area, so our robots and participants have a lot of space to move around,” Dautenhahn says. “All the furniture makes the house look comfortable, giving research participants the feeling of visiting a friend – it’s not their home, but they could imagine living there.”

With the testers relaxed, the robotics team could carry out a range of experiments to develop their robots’ ability to work with – and for – humans. The projects differ depending on the particular issue the researchers are working on. In one, a person sits at a writing table, triggering a robot to fetch a pen. In another, robots try to negotiate rooms without crashing into moving humans. A further trial programmed a robot to persistently interrupt TV-watching participants to ask if they wanted a diet Coke. If the tester said no, the robot repeatedly returned to offer alternative drinks, checking what kind of robotic interruptions participants would bear.

Now Dautenhahn is working on a “proxemics system”, controlling how close robots should get to people when approaching them. Earlier research found that humans felt alarmed when robots approached head-on, so the robots now approach from the side. Trials suggest that people are often happy for robots to get nearer than humans.

Humanoid

Like people, the robots vary: Dautenhahn’s arsenal includes human-sized mobile machines and a humanoid, toddler-like robot called Kaspar, whose rubber face and realistic features are reminiscent of the characters of the animation film Up. Dautenhahn is using Kaspar for the Aurora project, which looks at how robots can become therapeutic toys for children with autism.

“The children generally respond very well to the robots, playing with them, and exploring their abilities and physical characteristics, for example, looking at our humanoid robots’ eyes,” says Dautenhahn. “Our goal is to help the children to interact and communicate with other people, so we’ve focused on using robots as social mediators: using a robot that encourages an autistic child to engage in interaction.” That, Dautenhahn says, is the ultimate target of all her social work on robots: she aims to develop machines that help people.

“It’s not about replacing people, it is about allowing robots to provide help in their homes. That’s especially important for elderly people – our work could allow them to stay in their own homes for longer. Robots can also help people to recover from injury, helping in their daily lives to allow them more independence and freedom.”

To that end, the research team busily records all the robot-human interaction in the Hatfield house, with the academics watching participants from a small control room on the ground floor. The tapes, plus the surveys the participants complete about their experience with the robots and their personal background, help the team work out how best to improve the robots and make them more like social animals.

Although other researchers, mainly in Japan, focus on robotic engineering, the Hertfordshire work is distinctive in its focus on how robots can adapt for social behaviour. Dautenhahn now has a team of 20 working with her, including PhD students, research assistants and post-doctoral students, with backgrounds ranging from robotics and engineering to psychology and computer science.

She thinks companion robots, with realistic human-like features and intelligent functions that allow them to speak and understand speech will be available within 100 years. She also expects robot girlfriends and boyfriends to be creatable, but worries of “a danger that people will then find it too hard to have real relationships, when it’s so much easier to have a robot that can be switched off when making annoying comments, and replaced so easily without arguments”.

In her own home, however, Dautenhahn gets a break from her metallic friends. “My house isn’t suitable for useful robots like robotic lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners,” she admits. “They can’t cope well with rooms cluttered with children’s toys and unusually shaped and uneven gardens, like mine.”

And as for the worry that robots will take over the world, Dautenhahn thinks we can relax. “The more you learn about robots, the more you appreciate what biological creatures, we and our fellow animals and other living organisms, achieve so easily. Basic issues of finding food, surviving, developing from a baby into an adult, or walking, talking, collaborating and negotiating with others are easy for us, but not for machines.”

The Secret Origin of Windows @ Technologizer

Business traveler Mike Monroe no longer rummages through his bag at the airline counter fishing for his flight ticket or confirmation number.

The consultant from Lakeland, Fla., has gone paperless, thanks to Continental Airlines’ electronic boarding passes. Once he checks in online, the carrier e-mails a bar code to his phone. That code is scanned at security checkpoints and gates instead of a boarding pass. “It takes away a lot of annoyances.”

Monroe also uses his BlackBerry for airlines’ flight-change alerts, routing all calls into one number provided by Google Voice, turn-by-turn driving directions when he’s behind the wheel and watching TV on Slingbox when he has downtime. He also carries an iPod Touch — like an iPhone but without the phone — to make international calls using Skype, get the latest sports scores and weather from Viigo and access Urbanspoon’s reviews of nearby restaurants. “Nothing really cutting edge,” Monroe says, “but I’m just trying every day to reduce the stress.”

Monroe is a member of a growing army of tech-savvy travelers whose smartphones are transforming their travel habits. Beyond online maps and travel guides, travelers are turning to their phones to look up aircraft seat configuration, track taxis, reply to early hotel check-in requests, order room service and locate nearby colleagues.

Few Americans remain untouched by the effects of the mobile Internet. But the tech industry’s core mission of getting people to lead untethered lives inevitably invites road warriors such as Monroe as early adopters of all their bells and whistles. The travel industry has responded with some of the most innovative applications available on smartphones. And more are coming.

Airlines and hotels are refining their mobile Web sites and creating applications, or “apps,” for downloading to popular phone models, such as iPhones, BlackBerrys and Google Android phones. Entrepreneurial software developers are rolling out…

Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the world’s No. 2 maker of computer microprocessors, reduced its CEO’s pay package 14 percent last year. The company cut executives’ pay in response to falling sales.

CEO Dirk Meyer received a package for the 2009 fiscal year that AMD valued at $4.5 million. That’s according to Associated Press calculations based on a regulatory filing late Friday. For 2008, his pay package was valued at $5.3 million.

In AMD’s 2009 fiscal year, which ended Dec. 26, Meyer received restricted stock and options of $3.7 million. In 2008, his stock-and-options package was $4.4 million.

Meyer, 48, has held AMD’s top job for the past year and a half. He became CEO after Hector Ruiz left to become chairman of the spinoff company made up of AMD’s chip-making plants.

In 2009, besides restricted stock and options of $3.7 million, Meyer received:

- A salary of $792,685.

- A bonus of $45,000 to restore his salary for three months of 2009 to its level before AMD cut salaries for its executives.

- Other compensation of $7,478, made up mainly of AMD’s matching contributions to Meyer’s 401(k) retirement account.

In 2009, $605,280 worth of Meyer’s stock also vested.

In February, AMD cut Meyer’s salary 20 percent in light of the sour economy. Other executives’ pay was cut 15 percent. No bonuses were paid in 2009 to executives because of what the company called the “challenging business environment.”

After customer demand and the company’s finances improved later in the year, the salary cuts were restored. All AMD employees whose salaries had been cut received one-time payments that restored their full salaries for the September-November 2009 period.

When Ruiz left AMD in March of last year to head AMD’s factory spinoff, GlobalFoundries, he received a retirement payment of $4.4 million. He also received $3 million for finishing the spinoff successfully.

In 2009, AMD’s revenue…

You may not know it, but your gadgets have a hidden agenda. Think about the electronics you own. No doubt there’s a digital music player such as an Apple iPod or a Microsoft Zune. Then there’s a smartphone — perhaps an iPhone or a Droid that sports the Google-inspired Android operating system. For games, your family may have an Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, or Nintendo Wii. For books, there’s the Kindle from Amazon, among others. When the iPad hits stores on Apr. 3, you’ll want that, too.

Each device contains its own widening universe of services and applications, many delivered via the Internet. They are designed to keep you wedded to a particular company’s ecosystem and set of products.

A battle looms, and it’s not about selling new gadgets — it’s about using devices to lock you into a content ecosystem. In an ironic evolution of the World Wide Web that once promised consistent access to all of the globe’s information, corporate giants are now striving to wall off sections of content and charge you for access.

Apple’s Issue with Adobe’s Flash

The Internet is splitting into a series of content portals. The front door is your iPod. Consider some of the current gadget trends:

– iPad versus Flash. When Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs unveiled his sexy tablet in January, it soon was clear that the iPad wouldn’t support Adobe Systems Flash software. That might seem a remarkable oversight, since Flash supports most videos on the Web — until you realize that Jobs might prefer you to pay for videos at his iTunes store.

– Kindle in Color. On its Lab126 career board, Amazon recently placed ads in search of engineers who have design expertise in color LCD screens and Wi-Fi. The listings suggest Amazon may be planning a color upgrade for…

Company working with satellite provider on feature that would let users search both TV content and web videos on set-top boxes

Once again, rumours are making their rounds that Google is going to make some sort of set-top box play. The latest: the Wall Street Journal reports that the company is working with Dish Network on a new feature that would let users search both TV content and web videos on set-top boxes “using elements of Google’s Android operating system”.

The tie-in direct with Dish Network, a broadcast satellite service provider, makes sense, since both companies already have a close relationship on the TV, where Google TV Ads counts Dish Network as one of its primary partners.

But there are some big caveats and unknowns: It’s unlikely that the service will come to market soon, since the WSJ makes a point of emphasising that the tests are limited for now to a “very small number” of Google employees.

Also, no set-top boxes that run on Android are currently on the market. But as far back as November 2007 there were rumours that Google was working to build an app platform for set-top boxes. Nothing has come of that, although that effort would presumably be related to this one in some way.

If Google did go ahead and launch some sort of “Google TV search”, competitors would include Clicker, the much-hyped (and funded) online video search engine which has deals with set-top boxes like Boxee and popbox, so that users can search Clicker from their TVs.

A Google spokesman said the company does not comment on rumour or speculation.

Related stories

• Clicker Gets $11 Million For Online Video Search Engine
• Google’s Android Is Moving Into The Digital Home

Video games publisher Ubisoft has apologised after thousands of players were locked out of its systems over the weekend.

PC users started reporting problems accessing some of the French company’s most popular games, including best-seller Assassin’s Creed 2, on Sunday afternoon. It later emerged that attackers had targeted the company’s controversial anti-piracy system, causing it to break down – which in turn left thousands of people unable to play.

The chaos was so widespread because of the way that Ubisoft’s copy protection system – which requires players who have bought the game to log in online and verify that they are not playing a pirated version – is designed. By flooding the anti-piracy servers with web traffic, the unknown attackers forced it to collapse and therefore locked out those players who tried to sign in.

This angered many gamers, who felt that they had been punished for buying legal copies of the company’s games – which cost as much as £50.

“We’ve had to agree to their draconian rules in order to play their game, however Ubisoft haven’t given a single thought to what happens when their servers screw up,” said one disgruntled user on the company’s web forums.

“[This] only penalises legitimate customers like myself who want to play your fantastic games but cannot,” said another.

The company initially blamed the problems on “exceptional demand” – but in a statement on Monday, Ubisoft admitted that it had been targeted.

“Ubisoft would like to apologise to anyone who could play Assassin’s Creed 2 or Silent Hunter 5 yesterday,” it said. “Servers were attacked and while the servers did not go down, service was limited from 2.30pm to 9.30pm Paris time.”

“Ninety-five percent of players were not affected, but a small group of players attempting to open a game session did receive denial of service errors.”

The attack itself brings into question the company’s decision to roll out its controversial digital rights management (DRM) to try and stop its games from being illegally copied.

Although the games themselves do not involve online play, the sign-in system is required for anybody playing titles like Assassin’s Creed 2, which has sold more than 8m copies worldwide since it was release in November.

The constant tension between publishers, consumers and pirates has caused problems in the past – such as when Electronic Arts released Spore, a highly-anticipated evolutionary simulator that required online validation before it could be played. After complaints from thousands of users, the company eventually relaxed the rules.

But Ubisoft’s system has caused extra irritation with players because it means that the titles cannot be used at all without a constant internet connection – a particularly drastic requirement given that the company says there are actually no cracked versions of the games in question in the wild.

The same denial of service technique employed by the Ubisoft attackers is often used by hackers and blackmailers to threaten online businesses, or by those protesting against web sites or companies.

And despite the company’s assurances that only a handful of players were affected, however, it appears that the problems may not yet be over.

On Monday some users reported similar difficulties, leading the company to confirm via Twitter that “our servers are under attack again” and that “we’re working on it”.