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The Type Tray is available here for $100.

This Type Tray acts as a barrier between a hot laptop and your legs, which is great because up until now I’ve always used a pillow to protect myself from tech-related burns.

(Credit:
Veer)

Veer and Scribble Product Design configured the tray to allow heat to dissipate through its 3/4-inch layer of 100 percent industrial wool felt. The Type Tray also features an intricate typographic design laser-etched into the surface, courtesy of P22 Kilkenny and Cavetto. The product also does its part to help Mother Nature by only using recycled (and recyclable) materials.

Laptop tray beats the heat

If I were to stay within the Apple cocoon, I’d probably be fine. My wife has zero problems working between her
iPhone and Powerbook - they work great together.

All of which may demand a better paradigm for cross-platform, cross-application development. I like Firefox because it works pretty much the same across any platform (Linux, Windows, Mac). This is also why I increasingly love Zimbra. I don’t want to use an application that treats the Mac (or Linux) as a second-class citizen, because I think good product design often stems from a certain amount of independence from the vagaries of a given operating system.

It doesn’t, however, solve my biggest problems with my Macs right now: an inability to sync between Microsoft’s Entourage and iCal (which may be Microsoft’s problem or it may be Apple’s problem - both support teams point fingers at the other company when I’ve called on the issue) and it doesn’t remedy my inability to sync between my Blackberry and Entourage (which is a RIM/Microsoft problem, but both companies like to point fingers at each other on this issue, too).

In sum, my biggest problems on the Mac today have little to do with the Mac and everything to do with the Mac’s intersection with third-party software. This may be Microsoft’s big moment to yell out, “I told you so!”

Coming full circle to the Mac, is the Mac too tightly integrated with its kin to effectively socialize with third-party software? Any developers out there who could comment?

commentary

Apple recently released an update to
Leopard, version 10.5.2. If you read the list of goodies included, it’s a pretty compelling update. I’ve particularly enjoyed better WiFi connectivity with the update.

But I don’t live 100 percent within the Apple ecosystem. Because I like an office suite, I use NeoOffice (OpenOffice) and
Microsoft Office. Because I like an integrated email client (address book, tasks, calendar, email, etc. - all together under one roof), I use Microsoft’s Entourage suite. And so on. Apple doesn’t control these products and, just like in the Microsoft world, the more software complexity introduced into the Mac’s universe, I’m betting (because I’m experiencing it) that the “everything just works” logos of the Mac will start to break down.

In like manner, I wish applications were developed with open APIs and open standards so that plugging the two together would be a bit less guesswork and black magic and a bit more science and artistry.

I’m not a programmer, so I might be asking for the impossible. I’d like to think, however, that the principle of modularity that makes open source tick could be applied more generally to software. I think I’d prefer applications with loose, promiscuous affiliations to other applications than tightly wedded applications that rely on insider knowledge to make them work together properly. I’m sure I’d be giving something up in this loose-knit affiliation model but the greater pluggability might well make it worth it.

Given how Wall Street didn’t seemingly exercise any leadership whatsoever on the subprime mortgage debacles, it’s refreshing to see that they’re actually out in front (at least a little bit) on the climate change issue.

But apparently, the willingness of these utilities to participate in the process of developing The Carbon Principles doesn’t mean everyone in the energy sector is yet reading the writing on the wall regarding climate change. In the February 4 Wall Street Journal, reporter Jeffrey Ball quoted Jeffrey Holzschuh, vice chairman of institutional securities at Morgan Stanley, as saying, “We have to wake up some people who are asleep.”

The energy sector can’t claim they weren’t at the table. The principles were developed by the banks in consultation with a who’s-who of power industry giants: American Electric Power, CMS Energy, DTE Energy, NRG Energy, PSEG, Sempra Energy, and Southern Company.

Put another way, Wall Street sees federal carbon legislation as imminent, and doesn’t want power sector executives to try to “sneak in” any last coal plants before the legislation whose economics might be threatened in a carbon-constrained world. The banks’ interest is not necessarily environmentally motivated–they simply don’t want to see any more loans go bad–but the effect of this announcement is likely to be positive.

If a remarkable July 2006 letter (PDF) from Stanley Lewandowski, general manager of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association in Colorado is any indication, it would seem there’s still a number of Rip Van Winkels out there in the electric utility world.

Last week, three financial titans–Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley–announced “The Carbon Principles” to provide guidance to energy companies in managing carbon risks. The upshot of The Carbon Principles is that these big banks are stating explicitly that going forward, they will only provide debt financing to new power projects if proponents can prove that the proposed plants will remain economically viable under future climate change policies.

Rise and shine! Climate change is a real phenomenon, and carbon legislation is coming–let’s begin to deal with it!

“While we are disappointed with the decision of the BIS LITD 15 committee, we are encouraged by the support of IT industry players like Nasscom, TCS, Wipro, and Infosys, who voted in favor of Open XML becoming an ISO standard,” Microsoft India said in a statement.

IBM blogger Ed Brill responded to Capossela’s letter reiterating IBM’s opposition to Open XML because it is not truly open, too complex, and technically flawed.

According to local reports, India’s national standards-making body will not change its position in regards to Open XML, the document formats Microsoft and other companies have sought to standardize at the ISO (International Organization for Standardization).

The Bureau of Indian Standards has decided to vote against recommending Office Open XML as an ISO standard.

India and other countries that voted against Open XML last September attended a Ballot Resolution Meeting last month in Geneva to address technical issues that were raised. Now, countries have until March 29 to change their votes to “yes.”

Microsoft representatives told the Economic Times of India that the company is disappointed with the decision and that it goes against the wishes of many companies in the IT industry.

India’s vote against Open XML standardization is consistent with its decision from last year. And the country has heavily promoted standards software–Indian states, including Delhi, Kerala, and others, have already adopted the standard OpenDocument (ODF), according to the Business Standard.

By next Saturday, March 29, national standards organizations need to submit their judgment on whether Open XML should be an ISO standard through its accelerated process.

The United States has already indicated that he will recommend Open XML to be a standard.

Microsoft’s senior vice president of Office, Chris Capossela published an open letter on Sunday outlining the software giant’s rationale for standardizing Open XML. He cited a number of customers, including the U.S. Library of Congress and The British Library, which have contributed to the specification.

Lobbying on both sides of the debate is picking up, with only one week to go before votes are recast.

But the PackBot will still alleviate a lot of the time-consuming legwork leading up to that task by mapping out and identifying the contaminates in a given area, according to the Army report.

(Credit:
U.S. Army Alaska)

The new/old PackBot, called a Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Unmanned Ground Vehicle or CUGV for short, will be ready for field use this fall, according to the U.S. Army.

It’s also fitted with a video camera for live feeds that can be taped by the person controlling the robot back at operations for analysis at a later time.

Knowing what kind of contaminate is in the area would also help keep soldiers from needless donning of the Level A suit.

It’s been fitted with a lightweight chemical detector to sense nerve gas, among other things.

“The CUGV detects ammonia, chlorine, carbon monoxide, oxygen levels, lower explosive limits, volatile organic compounds, gamma radiation rate and dose rate, temperature, and humidity,” Herschel J. Deaton, CBRN programs technical staff for Concurrent Technologies Corp. at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., said in an Army News Service story.

In the absence of a CUGV, a soldier has to wear a Level A airtight suit and self-contained breathing apparatus akin to scuba gear when going into a suspected contaminated zone. Because of the heat and the oxygen limitations in such a suit, he or she only had about 45 minutes to get to the site, inspect it, and get back to a safe area.

Soldiers from the 95th Chemical Company set up a robot control station.

(Credit:
U.S. Army Alaska)

The iRobot PackBot can be sent in to a contamination zone for up to 4 hours if necessary, according to the Army report.

A CUGV PackBot at the 95th Chemical Company at Fort Richardson, Alaska.

The U.S. military has been working on a new use for old PackBots that will save soldiers time and aggravation, though not replace them completely, when it comes to chemical warfare.

The Department of Defense ordered that the older models be put to good use. Through a program towards that end, the 95th Chemical Company at Fort Richardson in Alaska has been testing out modded PackBots since 2005.

With new Foster-Miller Talon and 510 PackBot models being introduced, the old PackBot models will be rotated out of use in combat.

Unfortunately, the CUGV can not entirely replace the soldier. Since it cannot take a sample of water, dirt, or vegetation to be brought back to a lab, a human will still have to go in for that.

Don starts out the show talking with CNET’s Tom Merritt about Blu-ray, Yahoo and much more. After that, he sits down with James McQuivey of Forrester Research to discuss the future of the digital home. And in a final segment you won’t want to miss, Don tells the world why he won’t sell out. Listen now:

Download today’s podcast
EPISODE 14

TODAY’S LINKS: Tom’s Buzz Out Loud Podcast Stories we talked about. Thanks to James McQuivey!

Looks like the days of the triple-update are long gone as this week is another two-game showdown on the Virtual Console.

Harvest Moon (1997, SNES, 800
Wii points): What’s considered to be a relatively rare title is no longer scarce as Harvest Moon makes its way to the virtual console today. The game is basically a farm simulator in which you must raise livestock and grow crops in addition to turning a run-down farm into a thriving success.

Lords of Thunder (1993, Turbografx 16, 800 Wii points): Lords of Thunder is a side-scrolling shooter with a heavy-metal soundtrack. Blast through six stages of intense action as you try to revive “The Dark One.”

Critics will likely say it’s a cry for attention and money, quasi-analogous to how they perceived the legal action that the founders of ConnectU brought against social network Facebook, claiming that founder Mark Zuckerberg had stolen code and trade secrets from them. That suit appears to have finally petered out last month. As for the MySpace suit, the decision is in the judge’s hands now.

Greenspan is now at the helm of Live Universe, an entertainment holdings company that has acquired struggling dot-coms like Revver, whose troubles he blamed on policy at MySpace that blocked its ad-supported videos.

While Greenspan was at the helm of eUniverse, he oversaw the creation of MySpace, but it wasn’t until after his successor, Richard Rosenblatt, had taken over that MySpace gained mass appeal. Greenspan remained a shareholder, strongly opposed MySpace’s 2005 sale to News Corp. for $580 million, and has been targeting News Corp. and the Intermix executives who sold the company with legal action since 2006.

“It has been three years since I worked around the clock pleading with other MySpace-Intermix shareholders to vote against the sale of MySpace to News Corp. in 2005,” Greenspan said in a statement. “I knew that the value of the company was billions of dollars, however the deceptive practice of hiding MySpace financials by Intermix management robbed shareholders of their opportunity to adequately gauge the company’s value.”

A federal court ruled Thursday that a lawsuit against the executives who sold social network MySpace to News Corp. can go forward, as Judge George King in the Central District of California rejected a motion to dismiss the case.

The current class action shareholder suit, Jim Brown vs. Brett C. Brewer et al., targets Rosenblatt, former Intermix President Brett Brewer, and venture backer VantagePoint Venture Partners as defendants (among others), with “Jim Brown” a representation of Intermix common-stock shareholders whom Greenspan claims were defrauded of billions. The real value of MySpace, Greenspan argues, was much higher than $580 million and not all of the requisite financial information was disclosed.

The case was brought forth by Brad Greenspan, who founded a digital-entertainment company called eUniverse in 1998. Greenspan served as CEO and chairman of the publicly traded eUniverse until late 2003, when he resigned amid financial woes that saw the company’s stock delisted from the Nasdaq index.

Is four processing cores inside a laptop overkill? Probably not for gamers. Intel is expected to meet this insatiable need for speed when it rolls out it first mobile quad-core processor.

The quad-core QX9300 chip will be part of the Intel Extreme series of mobile processors. HP’s high-end Pavilion HDX gaming laptop line and Dell’s Alienware unit both offer laptops with Intel Extreme mobile processors such as the X9000.

To date, Falcon Northwest has used desktop quad-core processors and currently uses a Q9550 quad-core chip, which has a 95-watt thermal envelope–unsuitable for a standard-size laptop. But Falcon Northwest quad-core laptops are typically “big power-hungry beasts that weigh twelve pounds,” Reeves said. The upcoming mobile quad-core has half the power envelope of the Q9550.

An Intel executive is on the record stating an August roll-out.

And this may happen sooner in August than later. System vendors may go public with information about the quad-core mobile processor as soon as August 11, according to sources. This is when other processors, such as the Core 2 Quad Q9650 (3GHz), are expected to go public.

(Credit:
Falcon Northwest)

Last week, Intel announced the Intel Core 2 Extreme X9100, a dual-core mobile processor running at 3.06GHz.

Many of the details of the quad-core mobile processor are public already. At the roll-out for Centrino 2, Mooly Eden, an Intel senior vice president, said the quad-core mobile chip will have 800 million transistors and a 45-watt power envelope–10 watts higher than the 35-watt Intel mobile processors used today. “You’ll see gaming machines and (mobile) workstations with more compute power than servers two years ago,” Eden said.

So, is a quad-core mobile processor overkill? “Definitely not for our customers,” said Kelt Reeves, president of enthusiast PC maker Falcon Northwest. “We’ve been putting quad-processors in (laptops) for a long time.”

Falcon Northwest already uses quad-core processors in its laptops.

McAfee released on Tuesday the results of a monthlong spam experiment. The security company provided 50 people worldwide with a clean laptop armed only with antivirus protection (no anti-spam protection) and a brand new domain for e-mail. McAfee then asked them to surf the Net and blog about their experiences.

Within the first 24 hours, the individuals received their first spam e-mail in the S.P.A.M. (Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment.

I spoke with Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications for McAfee Avert Labs, about the experiment and the results. Listen now:

Download today’s podcast

Over the course of 30 days, McAfee’s test subjects accumulated 104,000 spam e-mails, or roughly 70 spam messages per day per recipient. Put another way, 87 percent of all the e-mail captured on the test laptops was considered to be spam.