Lenovo tablets, smartbooks delayed for Android

(Credit: Lenovo)

A pair of the most-anticipated mobile computers from this year's CES show were Lenovo's U1 Hybrid and Skylight smartbook. Both ran a custom widget-based Linux OS (sometimes also called Skylight), and were powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU. But since then, both devices seem to have fallen off the map, and now we think we know why. Both systems are getting a software overhaul, jumping to the Android platform in search of better performance and more usability.

We've been hearing for some time that both systems were being tweaked far beyond their original expected Spring 2010 debuts, and more recently, that Google's Android was being considered as a replacement OS. That now appears to be Lenovo's official line, as we've heard, and other news sites are also reporting, that the versions of the Skylight and U1 Hybrid we got our hands on at CES will never see the light of day. Our understanding is that the Skylight will almost definitely be reworked with Android, whereas the future of the U1 Hybrid, with its clever detachable tablet screen, is more up in the air.

The Lenovo U1 Hybrid. (Credit: CNET/Scott Stein)

Back in January, we got to use both devices, and though we liked the hardware and design, the software experience was definitely lacking. The interfaces looked great, but performance was slow and stuttered. A the time we chalked it up to the devices' early prototype status, but apparently Lenovo was never able to get them to work as smoothly as expected. And with the Apple iPad redefining consumer expectations of tablet and app-driven devices, the bar was set even higher.

What this means for the future of the consumer tablet market and the still largely hypothetical smartbook market remains to be seen. We still think both systems have a lot of potential, and if they need Android to complete the picture, we're all for it.

New York native Dan Ackerman, a former radio DJ turned journalist, has written about technology and music for publications including Spin, Blender, The Hollywood Reporter, and USA Today. He hosts the weekly Digital City podcast and the New York edition of Editors' Office Hours. Dan's new album, Tales Out of Night School, is available now. E-mail Dan.

Government relaxes visa norms for IT cos

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Indian governmenet relaxes visa norms for IT cos

NEW DELHI: In a major relief to over $60-billion IT industry, the Manmohan Singh government has relaxed employment visa norms for the sector allowing companies to hire foreign nationals as per their requirements. This effectively removes the ceiling of 20 such employees per company.

The ministry of external affairs has circulated new guidelines to all missions abroad informing them of the relaxation in procedures for IT and ITeS companies.

“It (the relaxation in norms) addresses concerns of the country’s IT and ITeS industry related to the employment visas,” said Raju Bhatnagar , vice president (BPO and government relations), Nasscom.

Technology companies that sponsor foreigners to work here will need to give a declaration that the skilled worker has been hired for and IT or ITeS company or to work in a Software Park of India or and special economic zone dedicated to information technology or an IT unit in a multi-product zone.

On the other hand, the foreign worker being sponsored will have to give a declaration to the effect that his annual salary is in excess of $25,000 per annum. The salary cap is being introduced to ensure only highly skilled workforce comes into the country, a government official said.

Last year, the labour ministry had, in consultation with the home ministry, introduced a number of changes in the visa rules after it found that there were thousands of Chinese workers, including low-skilled ones like cooks and masons, employed in power and steel projects being executed by Chinese contractors.

Do Facebook's new privacy settings let it off the hook?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage Wednesday morning at a high-profile press conference he called to talk about privacy controls.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

There was a distinct tension in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's rhetoric as he unveiled major changes to the massive social network's much-maligned member privacy controls in a press conference on Wednesday.
On one hand, he said that the demand was there from concerned members and lawmakers to do something about confusing privacy settings and changes to how members' data is used in the wake of its F8 developer conference. On the other, he repeatedly insisted that the social network's nearly 500 million users do, in fact, want to share information rather than keep things as private as possible.
Facebook's new privacy controls, which will be rolling out "over the next few days or weeks" according to Zuckerberg, may very well quell some of the fears that members have had about how the company handles the vast amount of personal data stored on its servers. A post on the Facebook blog details them in full: As expected, the centerpiece of the changes is a single page for setting Facebook information visible to just friends, friends of friends, or the Web at large.
Crucial to this is Facebook's acknowledgment that on a member's profile, not all information is equal with regard to sensitivity. "When we went through our December privacy transitions, we asked everyone to make all their information open to everyone," Zuckerberg said, referring to the last round of changes to its privacy policies late last year.
"There are really big buckets of information that should be available to each field (on the new privacy settings page)." For example, he said that personal contact information is something that members will probably want to restrict to their friends. Photographs would presumably be shared with friends of friends. Twitter-like status updates about eating cheeseburgers, meanwhile, could go out to the Web at large.

A screenshot of Facebook's new privacy controls page.

(Credit: Facebook)

By the numbers, a lot has been done. Previously, there were 50 settings that members would have to tweak in order to make all information private; now, it's more like 15. The number of Facebook "privacy center" pages has dropped from 13 to eight. There's even a way to opt out of all Facebook Platform third-party activities entirely (though, it should be said, not advertisers). It's unlikely that many members will do this, considering the fact that it would block so many of the services that have kept Facebook members addicted to the site (like the popular game Farmville) as well as Facebook-powered log-ins on third-party Web services. But it's a sign that the pressure really was mounting, and Facebook knew it had to do something.
But the announcement was nevertheless tinged with a hint of, "Are you sure?" Zuckerberg dropped all sorts of factoids that pointed to members' desire to share more information rather than be closed off; he claimed that members are more likely to be fearful of the persistent false rumor that Facebook will start charging for subscriptions than of privacy issues, and that a drop in its algorithm-calculated word-of-mouth reputation following F8 was actually due to a change in the News Feed that displayed fewer updates from Facebook's wildly popular games.

"We are really going to try to not have another backlash."

--Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Whether members do, in fact, want to be more public than private, there are a few issues that still may plague Facebook once the privacy changes have gone live. The first is that much of the hullabaloo surrounding Facebook's recent changes wasn't necessarily the changes themselves, but how easily and willfully the company could make a major turnaround in user experience. Some members still may not trust the company out of a concern that this could happen again all too easily. True, Zuckerberg assured in the press conference that "we are really going to try to not have another backlash" and that "this is the end of the overhaul that we're doing." But this may not thoroughly convince concerned users.

Second, though some privacy groups have already released statements to express their approval ("Facebook is finally friending privacy again," the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California cheerfully asserted in a press release, and the Progress and Freedom Foundation called the new tools "powerful" and said "Facebook has employed a potent weapon to deal with marketplace apprehensions: self-regulation"), there has not yet been word on whether D.C. lawmakers, like a coalition of concerned senators or the Federal Trade Commission, will agree with them. Some critics have said that rather than being opt-out, sharing data with third parties on Facebook should be opt-in in the first place. Considering how much this would undermine the power of Facebook's developer platform, it's unsurprising that Facebook doesn't want to do this.Third, Facebook has officially been thrown onto a big international stage with regard to privacy and security, and anything it does in the future that puts its integrity or safety in question will become a major story whether its privacy controls are a success or not. It was far more of a story than it would have been a year ago when Facebook investor Jim Breyer's account was compromised by a hacker, or when user data was sent to advertisers in what Facebook says was an accidental leak. What would have been a niche security-news story, particularly if Facebook patched the problem quickly, is now of global interest.
"I started Facebook when I was 19 and it's amazing to look back at how it has evolved," Zuckerberg, who recently turned 26, wrote on the company blog. "There have been a lot of changes over the years as we've continued to innovate, and I appreciate that you have all stuck with us. Each time we make a change we try to learn from past lessons, and each time we make new mistakes too. We are far from perfect, but we always try our hardest to build the best service for you and for the world."
At the very least, he seems to be well aware of the fact that he sure isn't in college anymore.

Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. 

New clue to anti-matter mystery

A US-based physics experiment has found a clue as to why the world around us is composed of normal matter and not its shadowy opposite: anti-matter.

Anti-matter is rare today; it can be produced in "atom smashers", in nuclear reactions or by cosmic rays.

But physicists think the Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and its opposite.

New results from the DZero exeriment at Fermilab in Illinois provide a clue to what happened to all the anti-matter.

Continue reading the main story

Many of us felt goose bumps when we saw the result

Stefan Soldner-Rembold DZero co-spokesperson

This is regarded by many researchers as one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology.

The data even offer hints of new physics beyond what can be explained by current theories.

For each basic particle of matter, there exists an anti-particle with the same mass but the opposite electric charge.

For example, the negatively charged electron has a positively charged anti-particle called the positron.

But when a particle and its anti-particle collide, they are "annihilated" in a flash of energy, yielding new particles and anti-particles.

Similar processes occurring at the beginning of the Universe should have left us with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter.

Yet, paradoxically, today we live in a Universe made up overwhelmingly of matter.

Unexplained result

Researchers working on the DZero experiment observed collisions of protons and anti-protons in Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator.

They found that these collisions produced pairs of matter particles slightly more often than they yielded anti-matter particles.

The results show a 1% difference in the production of pairs of muon (matter) particles and pairs of anti-muons (anti-matter particles) in these high-energy collisions.

"Many of us felt goose bumps when we saw the result," said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, one of the spokespeople for DZero.

"We knew we were seeing something beyond what we have seen before and beyond what current theories can explain."

The dominance of matter in the Universe is possible only if there are differences in the behaviour of particles and anti-particles. 

Physicists had already seen such differences - known as called "CP violation". But these known differences are much too small to explain why the Universe appears to prefer matter over anti-matter.
Indeed, these previous observations were fully consistent with the current theory, known as the Standard Model. This is the framework drawn up in the 1970s to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles.
Researchers say the new findings, submitted for publication in the journal Physical Review D, show much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter - beyond what can be explained by the Standard Model.
If the results are confirmed by other experiments, such as the Collider Detector (CDF) at Fermilab, the effect seen by the DZero team could move researchers along in their efforts to understand the dominance of matter in today's Universe.
The discovery presages results expected from another experiment, called LHCb, which is based at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva.
LHCb was specifically designed to shed light on this central question in particle physics.
Commenting on the latest findings, Dr Tara Shears, a particle physicist at the University of Liverpool who works on LHCb and CDF, said: "It's not yet at the stage of a discovery or an explanation, but it is a very tantalising hint of what might be."
Dr Shears, who is not a member of the DZero team, added: "It certainly means that LHCb will be eager to look for the same effect, to confirm whether it exists and if it does, to make a more precise measurement."

Yahoo acquires Associated Content to bolster local news

Yahoo has bought a user-generated news site, Associated Content, in a bid to better connect with its users.
The web giant hopes the deal will create "avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers".
Associated Content has more than 380,000 contributors who receive a market-determined fee for stories they write.
The deal means Yahoo may be able to bolster its traditional news content with independently produced material.
Crowd sourced news Luke Beatty, Associated Content founder, said: "Combining our crowd sourced content with Yahoo's distribution, world class editorial team and online marketing leadership will accelerate our growth".
The site, which calls itself "The people's media company", says it offers content on more than 60,000 topics, ranging from product reviews, through how-to advice, to very local news.
It has proved to be a popular destination for web surfers, with more than 16 million unique users per month, according to comScore.
Associated Content is one of a range of upstarts, such as rival Demand Media, which pay a share of revenue to contributors who produce content for which there is demand on the web.
Yahoo hopes the deal will help bring its advertisers together with relevant local news and information from Associated Content.
The portal has struggled in the last few years, losing advertising revenue to rivals including Facebook and Google.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but media reports indicate the price tag for Associated Content was around $100m (£70m).