IN NEWS : Hey, Steve Jobs, you didn't invent the iPod — I did.

So says Kane Kramer, a luckless Briton who claims he developed a portable digital music player way back in 1979.



Sketches posted on Kramer's Web site show a rectangular device, dubbed the PIXYS, with a large screen on the upper part of the face, a four-way directional pad below that and a headphone jack on the very top.




Accompanying the sketches is a PDF of an undated 9-page typewritten document proposing a data delivery system called IXI, whereby music stored on a centralized server would be transmitted over telephone lines to record shops.

At the shops, PIXYS owners would pay to have their devices refilled with new songs. Unfortunately, the PIXYS could hold only one four-minute song at a time, so customers would have to keep coming back an awful lot.

London's Daily Mail, always ready to wave the Union Jack in the face of boorish Americans, claims that Apple "admitted" Kane had "invented the iPod" when it had him testify about the PIXYS and IXI regarding an iTunes patent-infringement lawsuit from a third party.

The Daily Mail also said Kramer and his family had recently had to sell their home, and that he'd seen "not a penny" from the iPod's success.

But in fact Apple admitted nothing by having him testify on its behalf and paying him a consulting fee.

Demonstrating "prior art," or that an invention had been thought up before either the plaintiff or defendant got around to it, is the first line of defense in a patent-infringement case.

Apple, in fact, never claimed to have invented the portable MP3 player. There were plenty of other models, mostly made by small Asian companies, that had been on the market for years when the first iPod went on sale in late 2001.

And any chance Kramer would have of suing anyone is long gone — his British patent for the PIXYS and IXI expired in 1988.

TRUE, IN THE NEWS: OLYMPIC DREAMS- THE ELBOW LANE...

After staying offline for a while i thought of returning back to action with a stunning, horrific and uncensored video which shows what really happened to Janos Baranya....


I feel I wouldn't be able to erase the story of the 24 yr old hungarian weightlifter, Janos Baranya's elbow popping out of socket, while in his third lift in the men's 77kg division.

This was a his Olympic debut, one that he will never forget.

MICROSOFT CORP : BILL DECIDES TO PUT AN END....

REDMOND, Wash. — On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present.

Gates, who is stepping back to focus on his philanthropy, sat with CEO Ballmer in a Microsoft conference room and meandered through moments in Microsoft's history. They stopped to get in a few good digs at IBM Corp., whose first personal computers were loaded with Microsoft's DOS operating system before IBM adopted its own operating software and their relations strained.

"They went off with OS 2, we were left with good old Windows, and sure enough the David versus Goliath story came out with the right ending," said Gates, eliciting laughter from the crowd of 830 Microsoft employees.

Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, admitted that Microsoft has faltered along the way, and certainly isn't perfect today.

"When we miss a big change, when we don't get great people on it, that is the most dangerous thing for us," Gates said. "It has happened many times. It's OK, but the less the better."

Gates, who will remain Microsoft's chairman on a part-time basis, said he would still take on Microsoft projects picked by Ballmer and two other executives who have assumed most of his day-to-day tasks, Craig Mundie and Ray Ozzie.

One of those will be Web search, where Microsoft lags far behind Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in market share. With an acquisition of Yahoo now again apparently off the table, Gates threw his weight Friday behind a strategy of assembling a team of smart people and combining Microsoft's own breakthroughs with what competitors are already doing.

"Search is the place where people probably really think, will Microsoft ever do anything there? We'll be the very best," Gates said. "That is in full motion."

Gates also reinforced his intent to stay out of the company's day-to-day affairs.

"I do think with my not being here full time there is some opportunity that people will really step up. There's somewhat of a vacuum created there," he said. "I have got to get out of the way, and let that new thing step in there."

The most poignant moments came when Gates dropped out of technology prognostication mode — the coming switch to using ink, voice and gesture to interact with computers, for example — and shared candid and sometimes self-effacing banter about his early days with buddy Ballmer.

Freshman year at Harvard, Gates said, "I was in this dorm up at Radcliffe, where the anti-social math types hung out. I belonged there."

He was introduced to fellow freshman Ballmer by a mutual friend. On their first outing together, they went to the movies to see an unlikely back-to-back showing of "Singing in the Rain" and "A Clockwork Orange."

Ballmer, who has famously danced and jumped around stage at conferences, described a similarly silly and uninhibited Gates that evening.

"So we come back from the movie, we're kind of dancing, we're both kind of playing Gene Kelly, and some guy wrestles me to the ground in our dorm," Ballmer said. It fell to Gates, who hardly qualifies as burly, to fend off the fellow student.

Ballmer also gave Gates grief about leaving for vacation in the middle of Ballmer's job interview, and forgetting to pack a tie for their first meeting with IBM.

Gates, playing up his absent-minded professor side, cracked up the employees in attendance — they won a seat at the event in a lottery — when he said Microsoft was so central in his life that he often found himself driving to its campus even when he was supposed to be headed somewhere else, like delivering his kids to school.

When it came time for Ballmer to make his public farewell to Gates, he joked about the inevitable inadequacy of a thank-you gift, and presented him with a large scrapbook embossed with Gates' signature. Then, the tears came.

"We've been given an enormous, enormous opportunity. And Bill gave us that opportunity," Ballmer said, his face reddening. "I want to thank Bill for that."

As the employees rose to their feet, Gates swiped at tears of his own.



COURTESY : FOX NEWS

THE JAPANESE MAKES A LONG CHERISHED A DREAM COME TRUE

Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.

Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka recently, saying that a litre of any kind of water -- rain, river or sea -- was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km.

"The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time," Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.

"It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars," he added.

Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.

Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers in the future.

Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel.

PETS : LITTLE MR.HOPE

This tiny puppy may have been born without front legs but there's no way that is holding her back.
Hope, the appropriately named two-legged Maltese puppy gets around by using a specially-designed device which features wheels from a model aeroplane.
The energetic pup uses her hind legs to boost her body forward onto her chest and operate the wheeled prosthetic limbs.
The beloved pooch was born with only two legs and has small wriggling nubs where her front legs should be.
At first Hope moved around by hopping but experts said her her natural mode of moving eventually would damage her bones and spine.
The wheeled device was created by orthotist David Turnbill free of charge with makeshift shoulder joints connected to model airplane wheels.
Each of the device's 'arms' can move up or down independently of the other, allowing Hope to pivot and turn.
The spring-loaded prosthetic arms hook to a custom-fitted chest plate to allow Hope to lay down or sit up without removing the prosthetic.
The wheels she uses as front legs took some getting used to and at first the tiny lap dog would tip over to one side.

However practice made perfect and now the persistent puppy has mastered the art of wheeling herself around, there is no stopping her.
In fact she can bound across a room at a surprisingly break-neck pace.
'She gets around fine,' said the puppy's rehabilitation specialist Cassy Englert.
'She never knew anything other than hopping like she did. The hardest thing is teaching her a new way to get around that's going to actually be better for her,' he added.
Hope was taken in by Southern Comfort Maltese Rescue in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA when she was six weeks old.
When the puppy grows bigger she will need to have another device made for her.

HUMOUR, FUTURE PEEP : Don't Cheap Out On That New Gas Saving Incentie

With soaring gas prices, employees will get disgruntled when they find out how bad the companies new gas incentives suck!

I personally feel this is what is gonna happen in future offices...

Updated: Second Angle... This whole thing is probably bulsh, but it's still fun to watch.

SCI - TECH : CHEAPER i-PHONE

Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave the Apple faithful and the business community what they wanted Monday: a faster and much cheaper iPhone.

The new models will feature GPS satellite-tracking chips, third-generation (3G) cellular Internet access, better audio, longer battery life, metal buttons and a regular flush headphone jack.

The 8-gigabyte model will retail for $199 in the U.S., its 16-gigabyte sister for $299 — and the latter variation will also come in white.

It hits stores on July 11 in the U.S. and 21 other countries, including Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong and most of western Europe.

Third-generation Internet connectivity is crucial to the iPhone's success in Europe, Japan and Korea, where cheaper phones have had the feature for years.

It'll be like "going from dial-up to broadband" for iPhone users, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told USA Today in an article published Monday before Jobs' speech.

Admission of defeat

The price cut was in a way an admission of defeat for Apple. It had tried to buck the U.S. cellular-market model of discounted handsets heavily subsidized by the carriers, which make back the money on service charges and add-ons.

It was a "tacit acknowledgement ... that its previous sales strategy was not sustainable," the Financial Times said Friday in a story breaking the news of the price cut.

For the past year, Apple charged users full price for the iPhone, initially $499, and then $399 for a higher-capacity unit.

The trade-off was that AT&T offered relatively inexpensive voice and data plans to go with it.

And indeed, Jobs neglected to mention one little thing during his speech Monday -- AT&T's iPhone plans would be going up, with the base voice and unlimited data monthly plans starting at $70, up from $60.

Apple aims to sell 10 million iPhones worldwide by the end of 2008; it's sold only about 6 million since the device went on sale in the U.S. nearly a year ago.

That goal will be aided somewhat by a rapid overseas rollout.

By the end of the year, the iPhone 3G will be available in 70 countries, including almost all of Latin America, South Africa, Kenya, several West African countries, Egypt, Turkey, India and the Philippines.

Noticeably absent on the big iPhone map of the world behind Jobs during his announcement were two of the iPhone's biggest "gray markets" — China and Russia.

Both countries are full of iPhones bought elsewhere and "jailbroken" to work on networks other than the ones they were hard-wired for.

Dependable showmanship

Jobs, looking noticeably thinner than usual, bounded onto the stage of the Moscone Center in San Francisco just after 10 a.m. PDT Monday morning.

The online Apple Store had gone "dark" worldwide a few hours earlier, with variations on "We'll be back soon" greeting potential customers.

That wasn't news to anyone wanting an iPhone — Apple stores, both online and offline, ran out of the old-model devices more than six weeks ago.

Jobs began his keynote address at the start of the tech firm's Worldwide Developers Conference by listing the number of companies that had tried out the iPhone's enterprise software.

Apple hopes to take a big chunk of the giant, lucrative corporate smartphone market with the iPhone.

Right now, Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices dominate that market the way Apple's iPods dominate the MP3 player market — there simply isn't any worthy competition.

According to Jobs, 35 percent of Fortune 500 companies had tested the software, as had the U.S. Army.

After a jargon-heavy presentation detailing the technical achievements of Apple's software development kit for the iPhone, a brand new batch of third-party applications were debuted.

Several games, including Sega's "Super Monkey Ball," that used the iPhone's own motion sensor to substitute for a four-way joystick, were demonstrated.

"These graphics look unbelievable compared to anything we've seen on a cellphone before," commented Engadget's Ryan Block on his Web site's live event blog. "Seriously, these are [Nintendo] DS-quality graphics, easily."

Other applications were shown off — one that keeps track of your iPhone-toting friends in your general vicinity, another that updates baseball scores, a third specifically to bid and post on eBay, a musical-instrument emulator, a medical guide and even a mobile blogging application.

Existing third-party applications have to be downloaded via a PC or Mac from the Apple Web site, and all are free, but the new AppStore connects directly to iPhones wirelessly — and most of the applications will carry a purchase price.

A decade after "push" software briefly became the Next Big Internet Thing, and the next Internet bust, Jobs introduced push software updates, e-mail and calendar and contacts information — all tied into an overhaul of Apple's .Mac online service, to be retitled "MobileMe."

Computer can access the service at the easy-to-remember www.me.com, which Apple evidently bought from a smaller company. A visit to that site during Jobs' address brought up a note that the social-networking startup previously there had moved to a new URL.

MobileMe keeps each user's information on a central server, to be accessed via Mac, PC or iPhone — and any changes made will instantly be pushed out to all the user's devices.

Like .Mac, MobileMe costs $99 per year. Existing .Mac users will be upgraded for free.

All the software will be standard on the new iPhones, a free download for existing iPhone units and a $9.95 upgrade for existing iPod Touches.

source : Associated Press